#criticism

[galahadenough]

It’s interesting how, in creating a game with so much more and so much more unique interactions you can have with the environment, botw/totk managed to lose such an important aspect of interacting with the people in the games. You can do so much with the environment, with physics and fusions etc, but without the item buttons your interactions with npcs is wittled down to what they have to say to you.

You can’t shove random items into peoples faces and see how they react. You can’t pick up temporary items that you can interact with characters with. It feels oddly isolating for such an enriching environment.

[murkpomp]

11June2026 patty taxxon / gooseworx orbiters critique from a trans girl

(in a less nerdy term, a critique on some discussion around Controversial Transfemmes™. kinda painting a huge target on my back with this but it;s whateva It's tumblr bro. It's lit.) i've been asking a few of my friends recently about a really strange niche of people on the internet that i'm not a fan of. a kinda crass way to title them would be Bluesky's Pretentious Armchair Psychologists but i feel like that title itself is inadequate not just because of it being rude. it's a niche of people that crawled out of the woodwork which one of my friends notes as "[Accelerationists], but rather than pushing capitalism to its limits to broker in a preferred economic system, its pushing leftist and progressive ideals to its limits to usher in what I can Only call. Radical Queerness but Queer in the pejorative sense". TL:DR it's the rung of society that would benefit most from realising that the words they're saying wouldn't make sense to A Real Living Breathing Person That Goes Outside the main reason why i'm writing this is because due to one of these titular orbiters liking my agent 3 post, i'd like to note my distaste towards how they handle an issue that (to be a bit hypocritical) mainly resides within the internet, being how they handle the afformentioned Controversial Transfemmes™. namely gooseworx but this also extends to patricia taxxon allow me to cite 2 main examples. shouldnt go without saying but please do not harass these people (if theres even people that'll be reading this)

it's a specific genre of post that's been written like a blanket statement, but fails when taken outside of the vacuum of a single tumblr post and applied to real world context. this kinda allows for uncharitable readings or personal biases to show really blatantly in the face of reasonable comments about someones behaviour.

do they face transphobia, especially due to them being controversial and being large figures on the internet? YES! i won't doubt that. but this simultaneous Magnification of their trans identity and Minimization of them down to just A Successful TGirl or a Transfem With A Chequered Past arguably does more harm than good. it stifles proper discussion and allows people to view any point made against these people in the most uncharitable manner under the guise of these critiques being veiled transmisogyny.

there's also this element of... i dont want to say tokenism? cause it ISN'T tokenism. but it's this specific focus on their trans identity being used as a focal point in this discussion which really rubs me the wrong way as a transfem myself. I know that I'm going to be . for lack of a better term inherently more privileged and able to survive in a rougher society since I'm more comfortable with expressing myself more masculinely. I don't feel like that fact though makes me void from noting that the way these people just wave around being Trans (specifically transfem) is Odd regardless. I feel like when you focus on the trans identity we kinda lose very important nuance. they're putting in more effort into being worried about the potential of these trans creatives experiencing prejudice than actually doing any critical thinking, is what i'm trying to say with this latter point. i really don't know how to round this off at all. in an ideal world i'd have a conclusion in mind but theres still a feeling in me that there's more to say. oh well, i do this shit for a hobby

[thirdity]

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art — and in criticism — today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation"

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Frankly I think some misconceptions of things aren't based in a lack of "critical thinking", they're based in a lack of good faith. When some jackass decides that the purple clouds in Halo Evolved mean secret transgender signaling, it's not a lack of critical thinking, it's bad faith. When someone insists that the author is clearly using their work to spread hatred by having a villain say hateful things, it's not a lack of critical thinking, it's bad faith. No amount of intelligence or Literature classes or media analysis skills will help you read themes when you've already decided to interpret the work in the worst way possible.

[myfandomrambles]

Only what's on the page is Canon BTW. Like I just feel so annoyed with writers saying bullshit about their shows/books/movies and expecting me to consider it Canon. Like fuck you shut the fuck up. If it's not on the page of a canon piece of material its not fucking cannon its as valid as my headcanon.

[naomiknight-17]

Ok, look. I'm not a poet. I took high level communications courses in college, not creative writing or literature.

So take my opinion with a heaping tablespoon of salt but

This poem.... is fucking terrible. It reads like something I wrote when I was 13 and angsty and hadn't read enough books yet

And it's in a book that OP is trying to sell. And he put real money into blazing this post to make me look at (and suffer through) it

There are but 3 reviews on Amazon, all 5 star. At least he has 3 friends who are willing to lie to support him cuz yeeeeesh

[kurozu501]

I still remember getting around 50 or so hours into breath of the wild and just… feeling my interest drain away. Suddenly realizing that all the story is in the past, and the actual game is just running around checking things off of lists. It was the first time i realized the inherent flaws of an open world game design. Everything has to be optional because the designers have no clue when you'll do what, or if you'll even do something. Twilight Princess was able to write an entire character arc for Midna because they could build in every step of her growth along the linear path they knew the player would take. They could build in a mid game twist because the game was linear. Made Midna still one of the most iconic characters in the series. BOTW cant do that. The sum total of everything you can do in breath of the wild's big fancy open world amounts to "how much of our already easy and short final boss battle would you like to skip?"

idk. The zelda games i grew up playing had such a satisfying feeling of growth and journey to them. Being able to run right to the final boss from the start is not appealing to me. I was completely hooked for awhile, it took time for the game to lose its appeal. There was just this moment like 60-70 hours in when i realized that i couldn't actually do anything in botw to affect the story. I was running around a big pretty empty bowl checking things off of lists. All the important story happened 100 years ago and all i get to do is choose how long i take dragging my feet to bring it to an end. Suddenly the whole world felt so empty, and the spell botw had on me was broken.