shitty reviews for shitty things

is it something terrible? we experienced it already. we're here so you don't have to torture yourself with it too.

[ididitsoyoudonthaveto]

i watched and transcribed president trump’s statement regarding charlottesville, so you don’t have to.

…But I thought I should put out a comment as to what’s going on in Charlottesville, so, again I want to thank everybody for being here - in particular I want to thank our incredible veterans, so thank you folks; let me shake your hand. [hand-shaking ensues] Great people, they’re great people. But we’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia. We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence - on many sides, on many sides*. It’s been going on for a long time in our country - not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama - this has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America; what is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives. No citizen should ever fear for their safety and security in our society, and no child should ever be afraid to go outside and play or be with their parents and have a good time. I just got off the phone with the Governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe, and we agreed that the hate and the division must stop, and must stop right now. We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation and - really, I say this so strongly - true affection for each other. Our country is doing so well in so many ways: we have record - just absolute record - employment. We have unemployment the lowest it’s been in almost seventeen years. We have companies pouring into our country - Foxconn and car companies and so many others - they’re coming back to our country. We’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker. We have so many incredible things happening in our country, so when I watch Charlottesville, to me it’s very, very sad. I want to salute the great work of the state and local police in Virginia - incredible people, law enforcement, incredible people - and also the National Guard - they’ve really been working smart and working hard; they’ve been doing a terrific job. Federal authorities are also providing tremendous support to the Governor - he thanked me for that* - and we are here to provide whatever other assistance is needed; we are ready, willing, and able. Above all else, we must remember this truth: no matter our color, creed, religion, or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country; we love our God*; we love our flag; we’re proud of our country; we’re proud of who we are. So, we want to get the situation - straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it, and we want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen. My administration is restoring the sacred bonds of loyalty between this nation and its citizens - but our citizens must also restore the bonds of trust and loyalty between one another. We must love each other, respect each other, and cherish our history and our future together - so important. We have to respect each other. Ideally, we have to love each other. And now to the Veterans Administration… --- *YIKES

[ididitsoyoudonthaveto]

Bates Motel

psychological horror is a thing i do, so i subjected myself to extreme levels of stress to watch this show's first season, and i intend to stick around for the second. it's better than psycho, which i actually found to be dull and loathsome. everything in town is FUCKED UP and i can dig that. so maybe this isn't quite a hateview, but the violence (sexual, psychological, physical) is off the charts, so i cannot in good faith recommend it. if you have seen american horror story, that is the first comparison that pops to mind. now whenever a character in any show or medium isn't raped[x] or turned into some terrible It's The Mother's Fault The Boy's A Serial Killer[x] [x] [x] [x] or Schizophrenia And DID[x] Are The Same[x] And All Unhappy People Are Murderers[x] trope, i consider the existence of a benevolent god. if you're triggered by extremely graphic and emotional depictions of things that would be triggering to most sentient creatures: don't watch it, for the love of god, GO HOME AND WEEP QUIETLY TO YOURSELF INSTEAD.

[ididitsoyoudonthaveto]

Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy

okay, I will be honest: I didn’t totally hate these books. they are vaguely fun dystopian ya novels with a lady protagonist. it is hard to completely hate a book like that. (especially since in my teenage years I had a massive boner for dystopian literature.) but there was enough to hate that it warrants a hateview to deter those who are not fans of good ideas that are totally warped into impenetrable bullshit that makes little sense.

really, there are at least two dystopias that can be clearly defined in these books. two. if you actually read veronica roth’s commentary in some of the extra bits she had released, it reveals that there really wasn’t much of a fucking plan going into this twisted mess. so, you get all these good ideas that just don’t mesh together into any sort of a cohesive whole. you have one dystopia in the first and second books where people are forced into small communities based out of certain desirable characteristics with a giant underclass of people who can’t cut it. and that would be a great dystopia by itself if it was better executed!

and then you have this really messy dystopia based off of genetics in the last book. and when I hit it, it was like, where did this bullshit come from. there are so many new characters. who are these people. why are you throwing all of this at me now. in the last book. this is a whole new world of young adult dystopia fuckery. what happened to your world building. it is atrocious. (seriously, seriously atrocious world building through the entire series. christ it is horrible.)

when you FINALLY know what the whole divergent thing means, it actually works out to be a sort of nice twist. but it comes so fucking late in the series it doesn’t feel worthwhile in the slightest. and it is about the only thing that keeps the second dystopia going.

and oh god. the characterization. I couldn’t figure out how tris, our heroine, identified herself at any given moment, and in a series of books where identity is a theme it can get a little annoying. she is sixteen, which, whatever, I can understand flitting through different labels. but we don’t get to see half of that thought process as different labels come into the picture. and she can shrug off labels so fucking easily.

tris is a perfect little super powered pixie of a character who makes about two mistakes in the entire series. it’s her near complete lack of weaknesses along with how easily she brushes off major life crushing events that bothers me. like, katniss in the hunger games is super talented, but she actually seems to have a significant emotional response to what is going on around her, rather than being ‘oh hey this happened holy fuck whatever I am just going to keep shooting this gun at people and deal with this emotionally devastating event in two sentences cool’.

tris is just a paragon of perfection and a super duper special snowflake that everyone loves. this is not a compelling character trait to carry through three fucking books of story.

now, if the series was about tris’s brother caleb (preferably gender swapped because I like lady YA protags), I probably would have eaten it up. caleb is a genuinely interesting character with genuine growth and change. but nope, he is just a supporting character through the entire thing.

if you want to read a series where good ideas go to die, divergent is your game.

[ididitsoyoudonthaveto]

Ga-Rei: Zero

i watched the first three episodes and i have never been more bored in my life. (this is amazing, because i am fairly accustomed to boredom.) i usually watch the first two episodes of something before i decide whether or not it's tolerable, and as far as i can tell there is no main character and nothing ever happens. weird demon-beasty things appear and are slain and sometimes not slain, and literally every character you are introduced to in the first episode is dead by the second episode. i'd have given you a spoiler alert if there were anything that could be spoiled: if the show weren't already rotten and fetid and dangerous to consume. go home. have sex with your partner. don't waste a single thought on ga-rei, because life is too short for boring anime.

[ididitsoyoudonthaveto]

The Garden of Words

japanese animated movie. a highschool boy meets an adult woman in some kind of public park. he's into shoes. she's into books, chocolate, beer. there is pretty much no dialogue, ever. they meet whenever it rains. he touches her feet a lot? romance blooms, or some shit. the art is beautiful. completely a joy to look at. unfortunately, it is forty-five minutes of nothing ever happening. seasons change. sometimes it rains a lot! sometimes it does not rain! when it does not rain, they are lonely! pretty scenery occurs! why feet! i think, with no small amount of discomfort, Someone Is Definitely Sitting At Home And Fapping To This Right Now. that's it. that's the movie.

[ididitsoyoudonthaveto]

"The Silence Of The Lambs" by Thomas Harris, or How to Tell a Trans Lady from a Serial Killer

i know i'm supposed to like this book. it's supposed to be a Good Book. i do not; it is not. i read it backwards so you wouldn't have to read it forwards. at first i was just looking for a particular bit that i remember from the movie. but since i'd never read it before, it was hard to find. so i kind of just read it backwards. i tried reading it from the first page, initially, but here is why i cannot: "She had grass in her hair and grass stains on her FBI Academy windbreaker from diving to the ground under fire in an arrest problem on the range." things that we know about our protagonist, three sentences in: something about grass. things that we know about our author, three sentences in: maybe he was eleven when he wrote this sentence. if you read the book backwards, it begins with a serial killer writing a love letter to an fbi profiler from the comfort of his hotel room. then threatening his former shrink. something about feeding instructions. the only notable differences between the book and its movie counterpart are that the book has more character descriptions & background (which i like!), but the movie is still better. tragically, harris writes like a preadolescent boy, but with fewer cootie jokes. if you hate trans women, however, please enjoy chapters twenty-five & twenty-eight. in chapter twenty-five we enjoy some funfacts about the "male transsexual". for instance, did you know that if you tell a trans lady to draw a tree, it'll be gorgeous and in full bloom, but some of it will go off the paper, which symbolizes castration? yes. obviously. this is true. in chapter twenty-eight, crawford valiantly seeks to extract client information from a Sex-Change Clinician (they call the johns hopkins gender identity clinic a "sex-change clinic"; i die and am reborn to write this crap so you don't have to). he basically throws a tantrum, and threatens to manipulate a senator into making medical transition procedures even less accessible. it's pretty gross. the author attempts to emphasize that our murderer is not actually transsexual, and that among Legitimate Transsexuals™ violence is quite rare. so we're looking for a fake-trans serial killer who draws a creepy tree and stays on the page. NOT REALLY TRANS DON'T WORRY YOU CAN TELL BY THE TREE. YOU CAN TELL. BY THE TREE. thomas harris, of course, fails to bother with getting a single pronoun right ever. and also seems to be laboring under the mistaken view that there's a magical tree-drawing test that differentiates between cis fakies and Legitimate Transsexuals™. silence of the lambs: watch the movie instead. unless you're interested in distinguishing murderers from trans women by their foliage. you're welcome.

[ididitsoyoudonthaveto]

The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

so, there's obviously better children's/ya fantasy out there, but this is so bad makes me fear for the state of the genre. this quickly became a hate read of epic proportions, as i lost all hope for a good story around book two of six. and i still finished the rest of the series. which is about 2400 pages of story taken all together. i spent precious time in my life reading this pile of fucking trash. now, i am not going to go into the details of the plot. no. it is an overcomplicated pile of magic and historical figures: machiavelli! nicholas flamel! joan of arc! billy the kid! and lots of random ass people you have never fucking heard of and have to dig through wikipedia to learn about! the first book, honestly, is sort of fun. and then oh fucking lord the plot starts to split off into two directions, one of which is boring as fuck (hey, let's lock one of our main characters on alcatraz with only a ghost for company! for almost two books! great move!), and then there are just so many fucking things to follow. and new characters keep getting introduced. it is a clusterfuck of ridiculous proportions. the detail that gets to me the most though? there is magic in this universe, which okay, whatever, who gives a flying fuck, it's essentially a globetrotting urban fantasy. magic is par for the course. now, when people do magic in this world, they produce a smell unique to themselves. which, you know, points for creativity. but you kind of stop taking it seriously when the book starts throwing around scents like 'burnt leaves' or 'snakes' or 'vanilla ice cream' whenever any given character starts doing magic. these are all actual scents that people have associated with their magic in the books. again, just to reiterate: there is a character whose magical fucking abilities produce the smell of snakes. not joking.

[ididitsoyoudonthaveto]

07-Ghost

i have a soft spot for fantasy shoujo and josei manga, and based on my shameful love of it, i should love 07-ghost. but oh god no no no no no 0/10 would not subject myself to this again

before i even get to the story, the art is horrible. the manga ka knows shit about drawing heads right, nevermind composing a page well, or drawing action scenes you might be able to follow. and the clothing design in the show/manga is horribleeeee.

now, i can barely summarize the premise. this is my best attempt at it. there is just way too much fucking bullshit going on.

our protagonist is a former slave who was a star pupil in a military school. he uses this magic fighting type horseshit called zaiphon and he’s really good at it and blah blah blah. (i have read the whole series and i still don’t fucking understand what zaiphon is.) some suppressed memories come back to him and oh hey this one scary military dude killed protag’s father. and protag’s father was the king of some other country or whatever. nbd.

he escapes the military school and he is found by a bunch of fucking priests and brought to a big ass church where there is some over complicated religious bullshit. like, there are seven ghosts and some big ass demon dude and exorcisms or something. i don’t fucking know. the author pretty much ignores the religion stuff in the back half of the manga.

that is just the first two episodes of the anime. there is a FUCK TON MORE that is involved.

AND GUESS WHAT? if you stick to the manga you don’t even get much of a reward because the series end plays out like it was cancelled before the author intended to finish it! which is always a great way to stop reading 90 chapters of a manga and get payback for all that time spent!

instead of watching or reading this, watch this. you’re going to see a lot more quality in those three minutes than you will in 90 chapters/25 episodes of this fucking piece of shit story.