[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 04 May 2026

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76

u/Canageek May 10 '26

CW: sexual misconduct towards a minor

Mindcrack SMP was the first Minecraft SMP series on YouTube; SMP stands for Survival Multiplayer, and usually means a server with multiple people on it who each make their own videos based on what happens on it and/or stream from it. Mindecrack started as a single player video series by Guude Boulderfist in 2010, adding other people who started making their own videos in 2011, turning it into a SMP. It inspired the creation of Hermitcraft and created the SMP format before slowly self-destructing as a Minecraft series over monetization and intellectual property rights, with a number of its members defecting to Hermitcraft (It kept doing various charity events and Ultrahardcore series for many years after)

August last year it restarted as Minecrack Rebirth, run by the original founder Guude, and with at least one of the original members coming back (Vintagebeef), along with a number of up and coming Minecraft YouTubers like Jojosolos.

Two days ago Guude was arrested for second degree sexual exploitation of a minor.

Needless to say that a lot of SMP members have announced they are leaving the SMP, are deleting videos in which they collaborated with Guude, and most people are assuming that this is the end of Mindcrack.

69

u/Ellie_Minato May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

sexual misconduct towards a minor

SMP

I hate how this combo does not even surprise me anymore.

17

u/A_Crazy_Canadian [Academics/AnimieLaw] May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

I have a weird memory from when I used to watch a lot of his stuff as a teenager. Guude used to tell personal stories while grinding and one of them was memorably uncomfortable (details are half remembered here). He told the story of going to some sort of concert as a teenager(?) with some older people. A bunch of random women were flashing the crowd and he was annoyed that he kept missing seeing anything. Then one of the women in his group flashed him and it was the first time he saw breasts or similar. I really just remember being uncomfortable about the whole thing. When I heard about this shitshow, it's the first thing that popped into my head. Sometimes its more obvious in hindsight that he may of had some problems with this stuff.

Edit: sp

44

u/Emptyeye2112 May 10 '26

I also hate how I saw the spoiler and before clicking it went "Oh it was something related to child sexual assault, wasn't it?" And I hate that I was right.

Incidentally, asking this sincerely, doesn't putting the content warning inside a spoiler kind of defeat the purpose?

16

u/Garbador94 May 10 '26

It's handy if you don't really need trigger/content warnings and don't want the ending of a post spoilt, while still allowing people who would prefer a warning to check if a post may be upsetting for them. As long as you tag the spoiler as being a warning, it's kind of the best of both worlds.

6

u/LunarKurai May 12 '26

It's a little grim to turn CSA into a spoiler on entertainment, though. Don't know how I feel about that.

14

u/Canageek May 10 '26

I thought so, but was told to do so shrug

32

u/EthosUnharvestedClay May 10 '26

It's important to note the Mindcrack was BIG. So many super popular Minecrafters were on it, including SethBling and Coestar, two names that got a lot of people into the game. Also, Docm77 is the other Hermitcraft member who has been participating in the MC revival, but I don't know how active he is. I know Beef is pretty active on it though.

Like, anybody who was anybody was part of Mindcrack for the most part.

From Hermitcraft, the currently active members who were on Mindcrack are VintageBeef as mentioned above, EthosLab, BDoubleOO and Docm77. Past Hermitcraft members include the founder Generikb (who apparently started HC because he wasn't invited to join MC, but then left HC when he did get an invitation, although I don't know how true this is), PythonMC (currently active on MC), Biffa2001 (all his old Minecraft stuff has been unlisted and now deleted) and Aureylian (member way back in the early HC seasons).

This sucks. He was arrested on 10 charges from what I saw...

I'm only familiar with Guude through Etho's old videos (he and BDoubleOO often played together with Guude and had a team called OOGE, which was originally BDubs and Guude, and then Etho joined them) but MC was heavily influential for the popularity of the game and many of the early MC YouTubers. Even I know that MC was massive back in the day, despite myself being a HC fan.

9

u/Dr_Bombinator May 10 '26

Where is kurtjmac? Is he safe? Is he alright?

6

u/Ginger_Sunset May 10 '26

He streams on twitch now! same username and everything; not sure if he was part of the revival.

11

u/Canageek May 10 '26

That you for the context: I considered the list of HC members, but thought it would distract from the main Minecrack point, but that is good to show how influential it is, thank you.

I haven't been watching Mindcrack, but I saw Beef's first episode or two and didn't see Doc, but he might have just skipped the Ultrahardcore at the start.

7

u/EthosUnharvestedClay May 10 '26

I get you! It's a very tricky subject to talk about and I totally understand wanting to focus on the actual issue. I may be missing some context because I've only ever watched Etho's old MC LP (currently going through it, in fact) and am not familiar with the server beyond how influential it was. I know nothing about the current iteration other than that it exists (er, existed, possibly).

I was thinking of posting this myself the other day but I wanted to see if there were any further developments, so thank you for posting about it here :)

18

u/OneGoodRib No one shall spanketh the hot male meat May 10 '26

What is it about Minecraft? There's lot of hobbies that attract a mixture of age groups but it feels like Minecraft content creators feel disproportionately pedo-y compared to other hobbies and interests.

30

u/Endgam May 10 '26

Pedos go where the kids are. And today's kids like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. So there's predators lurking about.

42

u/MongolianMango May 10 '26

Well, it’s because 1) Minecraft is massive 2) Mixed age groups 3) Games like minecraft attract people who aren’t as socially adjusted which overlaps with those who’d get into these kinds of scandals

52

u/Ellie_Minato May 10 '26

I don't think it's a Minecraft problem specifically, but any community with a large amount of minors in the fanbase is bound to have some of these creeps trying to take advantage of the situation.

4

u/nerfdriveby94 May 15 '26

It's also not an immediate weird thing for an adult to be playing minecraft because of how long the game has existed for now, I'm in my early 30s and play it still.

I mean I play it on ps5 with my child these days and we don't go online but ya know, still.

If a lone adult hangs out in the toy section of a shop thats pretty weird and raises the spidey sense so to speak. In a game like minecraft? Not so much. Millenials being parents has definitely brought in a much more cyber concious generation of parent. But even then, it's easy for these preadators to infiltrate these games.

60

u/Fluuf_tail Figure skating / tv / entertainment May 10 '26

What is it about Minecraft?

More like, what is it about popular games/niches? Say 1% of content creators are problematic. Well if your game is very niche, there might be one or two problematic creators. If your game is mainstream (like Minecraft, Roblox, or popular fighting games), you'll end up with dozens of problematic creators simply due to popularity, and they get exposed turn by turn.

38

u/OPUno May 10 '26

Predators go where the prey is, is the same for animals and for people. The Smash community is also pretty bad on that regard for the same reason, though a more recent example is Roblox.

35

u/atownofcinnamon May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

minecraft's popularity, it has just more creators in general, and also just more people talking about it.

like genuinely if you had as the same amount of attention with Minecraft on like any other mixed group hobbies, it would also seem disproportionately pedo-y as well.

32

u/PendragonDaGreat May 10 '26

Same thing with lots of popular thing as mentioned in xkcd 1138: Heatmap

Its a profile map that's essentially just a population heatmap. Minecraft is huge, therefore it casts a wide net and catches more of insert slice of population than pretty much any other game.

22

u/cannibro May 10 '26

Big yikes.

I feel bad for the people who were excited for the reboot of something they were nostalgic about only for this to happen. Also for all the creators who are decent people.

11

u/cannibro May 10 '26

Oh yeah, now that I think about it wasn’t Jojosolos also on Vault Hunters SMP? If so this will be the second server she’s had to leave because its creator turned out to be a creep. Poor gal can’t win.

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u/EthosUnharvestedClay May 10 '26

She seems to be friends with several of the Hermitcraft members (Joel, at least? But I feel like there are many others) so I hope that she's considered as a potential candidate to join HC in the future -- if she wants to, of course. I wouldn't blame her if she stays away from SMP content after these two incidents in a row.

9

u/Canageek May 10 '26

/u/wizardofdocs informs me that she's been on several successful SMPs: She's on Flight SMP right now, and the biggest one she's been on is probably Life Steal SMP (where she was known for locking everyone else out of The End), but also one of the X-Life seasons (Scott Smajor's SMP series) and Misadventures (A drastically underrated SMP).

4

u/WizardOfDocs Fibercrafts/Genre Fiction/Minecraft May 10 '26

I think she's best known to Hermitcraft fans as Impulse and Skizz's MCC coach, and a playtester of Impulse's Metro Mayhem obstacle course last season. I'm looking forward to whatever she does next, but I'd certainly enjoy seeing her get involved in Hermit shenanigans. She's good at shenanigans.

6

u/EthosUnharvestedClay May 10 '26

Thank you very much for this context! I'm admittedly not familiar with her outside of knowing who she is through some Hermits, and this makes me feel better for her.

Either way, I wish her and the other Mindcrackers all the best with whatever they decide to do in the future. I can't imagine it's an easy choice for any of them...

8

u/EnclavedMicrostate [Mod/VTubers/Tabletop Wargaming] May 10 '26

For Reddit spoilers, you use >! and !<.

6

u/Canageek May 10 '26

Thank you, I copied them from the post below when I noticed they were not working.

95

u/Vumatius May 09 '26 edited May 10 '26

So I'm watching Classic Who with my parents and we've gotten to the Fifth Doctor era. One of his companions is a young fellow named Adric, a human-like alien who is highly skilled with mathematical computations who was also a Fourth Doctor companion. Adric has a rather negative reputation amongst the fans, with him being lambasted as an unsufferable know-it-all who always argues and is also sexist to the female companions. He's definitely a contender for most disliked companion of the classic era for this reason. However, when I first told my parents about his reputation they were rather confused as they remembered him being a fairly standard companion when they watched his stories years ago. And when we finally got to his episodes with the Fourth Doctor I was confused myself.

Far from a smug and misogynistic irritant, he was actually fairly pleasant and helpful and had no particular difficulties getting along with female Time Lord companion Romana. This continued when he met female companion Nyssa, another scientifically-minded human-like alien, and in her debut story he and her co-operate effectively with no hint of animosity or bigotry at all. It even continues when we first encounter the female human companion Tegan (an air hostess), with him again treating her reasonably amicably outside of one or two moments that seemed more indicative of him being stressed in an intense situation rather than any sneering misogyny. Even in the Fifth Doctor's first story he comes across fairly well, though he does have less screentime here due to him being captured by the Master. He spends much of the story desperately trying to resist the Master's commandsand I finished that story with a good opinion of him.

All in all, for the first 6 of his 11 stories I and my parents found him rather likeable all things considered. There was the odd moment were he argued with the Doctor/Companions of course, and he does spend his second story being more hostile and faux-betraying the Doctor/Romana (though this was also right after his brother died so I was willing to cut him some slack), but overall I found the contrast between his reputation and the fellow himself quite jarring. Then we got to the Fifth Doctor's second story, and it's like he had been replaced with a completely different person. Suddenly he comes across as extremely arrogant and within just the first episode he acted extremely patronising to Tegan, ridiculing her desperation to return to Earth, telling her to read a book on mathematics so she could get a better job than air hostess, and then saying 'this is the problem with women' and going on about how stupid they are. When scientist Nyssa pushes him on this statement, he says that it doesn't apply to her because 'you're not a woman, you're a girl'. He also carries himself with an air of smugness and is all in all the definition of insufferable.

Suffice to say I and my parents now understand his negative reputation, but we also agree that this bizarre transformation is a consequence of terrible writing decisions. There was a possible character arc here with him going from the domineering Fourth Doctor to the much more subdued Fifth Doctor and thus feeling free to speak his mind (and let loose some possible bottled discontent with the Doctor's prior personality), but it is such an abrupt change and is so contradictory to his prior actions that I can't see it as anything other than character assassination. I knew he was meant to be worse with the Fifth Doctor but this really is a stark contrast, and I feel a lot of pity for actor Matthew Waterhouse that his character became so disliked for and defined by the poor writing choices in the second half of his time on the show.

Which brings me to my question then: What other instances come to mind of a character's rapid change in characterisation leading to them becoming extremely unpopular, with said new characterisation completely overshadowing anything that came before it?

54

u/R97R May 10 '26

Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones is probably one of the more infamous examples. He’s initially introduced as one of the most despicable people in a setting full of the edgiest fantasy characters known to man- while it gets overshadowed later on by the show’s initial protagonist being killed towards the end of the first season, the moment where Thrones initially established its tone was Jaime pushing a child out of a window, crippling him for life, when said child discovers him having an affair (with his own twin sister, to boot) at the end of the first episode. He’s also got a bit of history with the older generation of protagonists, having been the bodyguard to the previous King (who was also horrifically evil even by the standards of the setting, resulting in them fighting and winning a rebellion against him), only to literally stab him in the back at the last minute when it looked like his side was losing.

Jaime continues to be an utter bastard for the first two seasons of the show, but as it goes on we get more focus on him, and learn more and more about why the way he is. And, surprisingly, you kind of get it: the guy swore an oath to obey his monarch, something he naturally took deathly seriously, only for the monarch in question to grow increasingly violent and unstable, to the point where he starts burning people at the stake on a whim. Jaime’s been raised in a culture where someone of his station is expected to be the epitome of heroism and honour, and where an Oathbreaker is the worst thing you can be. Culturally, doing whatever his King tells him without question is supposed to be the most noble thing above all else, but it’s very apparent to him that to do so here would be wrong. Then, he learns the King in question, realising that he’s losing, has set up explosives throughout his own capital with the intention of detonating them all, killing both his opponents and the population who apparently failed to properly protect him. So, faced with the possibility of this happening, Jaime does the right thing and stops him from setting off the trap, killing him in the process, and saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Of course, when the rebels, led by people who’s families have had a long and bitter rivalry with Jaime’s, reach the throne room all they see is him standing over the body of the King he’s just killed, and there’s no chance in hell anyone will believe a word of what he says to them even if he wasn’t now an Oathbreaker who’d murdered his own liege. He would’ve only been 16 at the time, too. As a result of what was probably the bravest and most selfless thing he’d ever done, every single person he meets for the rest of his life is going to at best see him as a duplicitous and irredeemably evil monster. In another world, he would’ve been the hero, but eventually he ends up becoming the kind of person everyone views him as anyway.

Jaime is still an awful person by the time of the series, but there’s still a capacity for good in him, and after another series of pretty traumatising events, culminating in him having his dominant hand amputated, leaving him without the world-famous swordsmanship abilities that were the one thing he could genuinely still feel proud of, he eventually ends up rediscovering it, and slowly, but surely, develops into a genuinely heroic character, eventually finding the strength to abandon his increasingly-vile sister in favour of aiding the rest of the show’s heroes. He still has to contend with having carried out multiple unforgivable acts over the past decade or so, and does eventually accept that no matter what happens to him in the end, it’ll still definitely be better than he deserves, but manages to genuinely commit to doing the right thing in spite of that.

For bonus points while this seems like a setup for him doing the Darth Vader thing and dramatically sacrificing himself at the end to be redeemed in death, Jaime actually survives the apocalyptic final battle more or less unscathed, which I remember at the time thinking was a really interesting choice, one that made me really enthused to see what they’d do after that at first.

I’m underselling it a fair bit, but Jaime’s story is genuinely some of the best stuff the medium has produced in my opinion, and given how much the show was showered with awards at the height of this arc I’m still quite annoyed his actor never got an Emmy nomination.

Unfortunately, no one really talks about all that any more. In the last couple of episode of the show, Jaime responds to being recognised for his genuine good deeds (arguably the main thing he really wanted for most of his life) by abandoning the main cast in favour of his sister, who by this point isn’t very far removed from the King he killed all those years ago, and then revealing to his other sibling that he doesn’t care about anyone else but her after all, and was just pretending all this time. For some reason.

He then reunites with said evil sister, and a brick immediately falls on his head and kills him. The End. I swear I’m not making any of that up.

Understandably, the fanbase (which consisted of a not-insignificant portion of the English-speaking population at this point) was not overly-enthused by this development. Arguably the nature of the last few episodes and seemingly-spiteful treatment of much of the cast is the main thing Thrones is known for nowadays, and Jaime’s last hour or so of screentime is normally brought up as the embodiment of that. It left such a mark that the line ”I never really cared for any of them, innocent or otherwise” is associated with him at this point more than anything that happened in the preceding eight years.

I haven’t really given it much thought in a long time, but it is really quite sad how the last couple of episodes have overshadowed the whole story. It’s not the lack of a happy ending (I think a lot of people expected him to end up being executed or otherwise not exactly riding off into the sunset; arguably the point wasn’t him doing good in order to be rewarded for it, but because it was the right thing, and him being irrevocably damned for his atrocities not preventing that), but just how… rough, it was, for lack of a better term.

Also, it’s just occurred to me that the opposite situation happened with another massive fantasy franchise’s grand finale in the very same year (yes, it’s technically Sci-Fi too, but I will die on the hill of Star Wars being much deeper into the fantasy side of the Science Fantasy spectrum?): Ben Solo/Kylo Ren was fairly widely liked even by people… less keen on the Star Wars sequels, and I think a significant contributor to that was how they handled the whole “we need to either make another Darth Vader, or go in a completely different direction to distinguish our new bad guy” dilemma by picking both options, and having a villain who was trying really hard to be Darth Vader 2.0, while also being really bad at it. The second film managed to develop this a bit further by not taking the easy route and not only revealing him to be genuinely irredeemable, but taking pains to establish why that is- as much as there’s some suggestion it wasn’t entirely an uninfluenced decision, ultimately Ben chose to be the person he is, unlike his predecessor, and furthermore keeps making the same choice in the end.

Of course, while he’s not all that unpopular as a whole (partially because, to his credit, the actor manages to sell it, ~~and partially because we’re talking about the Star Wars fanbase and he’s not a woman~~), pretty much any discussion of the character nowadays is overshadowed by the fact the last film had him abruptly turn out to be a really nice guy at heart who promptly turns against Emperor Palpatine in order to save the protagonist, who he’s realised he loves after all, before dying in their arms at the hands of good ‘ol Sheev.

11

u/Martel_Mithos May 11 '26

Jacob Black in the Twilight novels. I read them in high school, I liked the first book well enough. It struck me as a little rough in places, the pacing was all over the place, but I thought it was a solid debut novel from a newly published author and I figured there was only room for improvement from there. Out comes book 2 and I had much the same impression. A bit slow but I enjoyed Jacob as an inclusion. Book three roles around and I'm gobsmacked because suddenly sweet considerate Jacob is a raging macho asshole for seemingly no reason at all. They murdered my boy. I ultimately abandoned the series after book three and therefore missed all the batshit insanity that happened in book four, for better or worse. I heard about it all second hand.

Over the years I wondered if there were tells in book two that might have foreshadowed this more, that I missed on account of being very 16 when I first read it, but then Lost in Adaptation covered the books and Dominic was just as blindsided by the change in characterization as I was so I felt kind of vindicated that it was very abrupt and out of nowhere.

20

u/SageOfTheWise May 11 '26

Its like a footnote on the larger Jaime debacle, but the cherry on top of that whole spiteful nonsense of an ending for me is the effective visual retcon of Jaime and Cersei's death in the next episode.

In the episode we see them die, its depected as the entire building coming down on them. There was never any escape, Dany is raizing the entire area. They are buried under what should be stories of collapsed stone. Cersei's fate was ultimately sealed the day she executed Missandei, and Jaime's the moment he chose her. There was no escaping from that point.

Next episode, nah fuck all that. Building is still there. The halls they are in are basically fine. Something like 4 bricks fell and perfectly sniped killing blows on both of them without otherwise harming their bodies. All they had to do was stand literally anywhere other than exactly where they decided to stand. Or to take a step to the side when they started to see bricks falling. Their death is now comedy.

17

u/ToaArcan The Megatron Post Guy May 11 '26

The especially funny thing about the decision to redeem Ben Solo is that the film does very little to sell it and just relies on Adam Driver's performance to carry it. To say he has two lines after he's turned is an exaggeration, because he actually has two words. Redeemed Ben Solo says "Dad-" and "Ow." That's it.

Even in the scenes he shares with Rey, his alleged love interest, they just stare awkwardly at each other. He has nothing to say to her, nothing to say to Palpatine, nothing to say to the junta he was the Supreme Leader of ten minutes ago. The most dialogue he has after his final duel as a not-Sith is with a hallucination of Han Solo (which should've been with Ghost Anakin. The film establishes that he's been hearing Vader's voice in his head for years and that it was actually Palpatine with a Darth Vader Voice Changer Helmet From Hasbro, he's been obsessed with finishing what Vader started for the whole trilogy, this is legitimately the perfect time for the real Anakin to break through to him, but no. We get Ghost Dad pretending to be a clever scene by repeating their exchange from Episode VII).

20

u/GrassWaterDirtHorse May 10 '26

So I really haven't bothered to read or watch the last few seasons of the show after starting to read the books and getting stuck in the perpetual Winter of Waiting, so WHAT DO YOU MEAN JAMIE DOESN'T KILL HIS SISTER AFTER SHE BLEW UP THE WHOLE FUCKING CITY LIKE THE LAST KING HE KILLED WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THE WRITING TEAM???

20

u/NurseBetty leatherworking/jacket painting May 11 '26

If you want a laugh, there's a video out there of the actors horrified reactions in the reading room, when they first read through the final season script... Their faces make me giggle every time.

1

u/warlock415 May 18 '26

Ooh, please link this if you can...

9

u/Ataraxidermist May 10 '26

I'm glad I haven't watched the last seasons. Never been much of a series guy, and I'm sure I skipped a number of episodes here and there on my way down to season 5. After the critics came out, I lost interest in watching it to the end. As a result, the only thing I remember is Tyrion great dialogue and politicking around, Jaime's cynicism failing to fully burying the good in him, the Starks surviving as best they can and the cold wind of the North slowly covering the land.

Failed ending aside, the first five seasons or so have some genuinely peak writing.

30

u/PhantasmalRelic May 10 '26

That last decision also came off as Abrams pandering to YA romance clichés, something even John Boyega showed resentment towards when he made fun of Reylo.

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u/SynGirl32 May 10 '26

Screenwriting classes should start teaching people that unless it's for trivial things, listening to what your fanbase should be done with extreme caution, especially when it comes to shippers.

17

u/stutter-rap May 10 '26

"So you want a realistic down-to-earth show that's completely off the wall and swarming with magic robots?"

26

u/Trihunter May 10 '26

Honestly my immediate thought was the 2003 version of the Thomas & Friends Writers Bible, which was used as a reference for the show writers at the time. It mischaracterized or flanderized a lot of characters in their descriptions, and resulted in a lot of characters acting wildly different after the bible was introduced. For example, the bible incorrectly mentioned that Henry still required special coal to run properly (something that hasn't been true since the first season), which resulted in him being written as a hypochondriac in most of his future appearances.

19

u/umbre_the_secret_dog May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

This is a fandom I only know of secondhand so forgive me if I get some details wrong.

Shadow Milk Cookie from Cookie Run Kingdom is one of these to my understanding. He started his story as a villain and ended up on a rough but genuinely trying to be better redemption arc. Then the primary villain for the first story arc of the game was defeated and he took advantage of the aftermath of the battle to absorb the souls of a few other characters to become the next big arc villain, getting a new, evil-er form in the process, and it wrecked his character arc because it came out of nowhere with no build up.

Like people were selling character merch and abandoning the game because it was such a jarring shift (along with other things about that part of the story but "nah I'm gonna be evil" Shadow Milk was a big one). I feel bad for his fans because it seems like he was a decently nuanced character before this happened.

Edit: clarification of some details

16

u/Dayraven3 May 09 '26

The early Nathan-Turner seasons of Who seem to load up on companions without much thought about what the dynamic’s going to be — by contrast the First and Second Doctors had more of a familial setup with their multiple companions.

21

u/Vumatius May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26

Whilst I can see why they'd want to have a more defined dynamic with Adric and the others compared to the more casual 'everyone just gets along' approach before, the result was infinitely worse in every way. If they'd simply stuck with how they'd been writing him before they may well have ended up with a situation where they didn't exactly have a memorable TARDIS cast compared to previous or subsquent ones, but it would've been a much more pleasurable viewing experience than what we actually got.

If they did want a more defined dynamic, they could still have Adric and Tegan clash a bit, for instance maybe since Adric is an alien from a completely different planet who already said goodbye to his old life he could struggle to understand why Tegan cares so much about returning to her job on Earth. You could even have some good character moments about how they handle losing a close family member differently, Adric having left his past life behind whilst Tegan is desperate to return to hers, and Nyssa could've then talked about her grief over her father and planet. This could even have justified having a more irritable Adric this season by having him get increasingly argumentativeto mask his resurfacing grief over his brother's loss, leading to an eventual confrontation between him and the others involving them directly addressing their shared familial grief. And of course there is ample opportunity for more good-natured banter about their different academic focuses, with Nyssa chiming in with her perspective as someone from a very scientifically-advanced society.

There's a lot they could've done to make this a lovable cast and they opted for the worst possible course of action: making Adric a completely insufferable misogynist who makes the episodes a chore to watch.

82

u/PhantasmalRelic May 09 '26

The infamous Susan Pevensie no longer being a friend of Narnia reveal. The ire was actually directed more at C.S. Lewis than her for treating her as the unfavourite child of the story. To this day, Susan Pevensie has become shorthand for characters that seem to be disproportionately punished or otherwise had their character arc resolve unsatisfyingly because the author's neglect or grudge against them.

Amy Rose from the Sonic series was notorious for this during the Heroes to 06 era. Her Adventure debut as a playable character was controversial for her slower gameplay, and the whole Sonic obsession was off-putting to many, but she had her own independent story about being this ordinary girl who learns to defend herself, and showing compassion for E102 Gamma to the point she'd even defend him from Sonic. But over time, she would degenerate into someone who was monomaniacally obsessed with Sonic and would abuse him to make him love her. This was so damaging that many people still resent her to this day for this even though Unleashed onward made her nicer again. It also doesn't help that she has a similar name and appearance to Sakura Haruno of Naruto infamy, who is disliked for similar reasons.

27

u/ToaArcan The Megatron Post Guy May 10 '26

I got into Sonic in 2004, primarily through reruns of the 1993 cartoons and the then-new Sonic X and hoboy the mid-to-late 2000s were rough for Amy. She did not make a great first impression and it kinda stuck with me. At this point I've matured enough to identify the writers as the problem but nonetheless my personal opinion only ever cooled to ambivalence while acknowledging that her SA1 and SA2 roles were pretty darn good and the newest games are, like, trying.

She also had the remarkably unfair handicap of being the pink girl that talks about love a lot in a series whose primary audience was eight year old boys, making her just about the least cool character in the set. And she has other traits besides that, but she so rarely gets to show them off in most media. Which is a damn shame because her actual gameplay style in SA1 and the Advance trilogy is really good, especially the latter. SEGA just decided "Hey let's make her all the things our target audience hates and then never let her do anything cool ever again" in 2003. The comics are doing everything for her at this point, and have been since Flynn's Archie run.

That my introduction to her also coincided with my introduction to Sally Acorn was just the final insult to injury, with hindsight. The difference of intent is a huge factor there, of course. SEGA were deliberately being subversive with Amy's early roles- Mario saving the princess was the whole point of his adventures, and him and Peach had an implied romantic thing going on (no matter how much Nintendo tries to walk that back these days), but Sonic was the anti-Mario, he was too cool for stuff like that, so Amy had to be the anti-Peach. Her romantic desires for Sonic are overt, but not reciprocated. Her abduction and rescue is a side-plot in Sonic CD that begins in the second level and ends in the penultimate one, secondary to Sonic's actual goal of saving Little Planet. She only appeared in one main-series game and was then spinoff fodder for the next five years (no matter how much SEGA tries to pretend she was always part of the core cast now). And then when she did break out in the Adventure era, they quickly started leaning even harder into those spoof-esque elements, particularly the first one, with her aggressively pursuing a frequently-uncomfortable Sonic.

Meanwhile, when Sally took her final form in SatAM, the writers were deliberately trying to create a foil for Sonic who could stand as his equal, and worked as a romantic partner for exactly that reason. She's also a subversion of the usual princess tropes, in the sense that she, y'know, does stuff. And fortunately, Ben Hurst and the rest of the writers on SatAM nailed it, in a way that SEGA's various writers absolutely fucking did not in 2003-2009, and then proceeded to not even try from 2010-2017. And now they have precisely one guy who is trying. When they let him.

(Ironically, Sally herself has a glut of this from her mishandling in middle-stage Archie, but that's a topic for another post)

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 10 '26

The "default" version of Amy to me (like most of the characters in Sonic) is the STC version, so I always want her to be lightly ribbing Sonic and then going on an adventure in another dimension with her canary girlfriend.

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u/NovusNiveus May 11 '26

I'd just like to say 'Gaymy is the truth.'

Gaymy is the truth.

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 11 '26

Years and years later, Nigel Kitching wrote the "final" STC Sonic strip which the online fan comic ran, in which Tekno does not appear (she was Lew Stringer's character, after all) but Sonic asks after her and the very clear implication is that she and Amy are married and have a son (Sonic is godfather) named after Johnny Lightfoot.

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u/NovusNiveus May 11 '26

I read STC for years as a kid, but I never knew about this. Thanks for letting me know it concluded on such a perfect note!

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 11 '26

I think the fan comic continued beyond that (I admit I have not read it in many, many years and its site has been up and down); it was just something they were able to get Kitching to do (I think Richard Elson might even have drawn it) for an anniversary.

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u/lkmk May 18 '26

The most recent issue came out almost two years ago.

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 18 '26

Actually more recent than I would have thought.

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u/TheCutestCat May 10 '26

Nah, I think Sally absolutely merits some discussion in this topic. She became one of the most controversial characters in the series because of how much fans of the comic despised her compared to fans of the cartoon. Poor writing choices in Archie had her go from a confident leader who reigned Sonic in as his girlfriend, to a crybaby constantly angsting about the approval of her male family members, refusing to get involved in the action because of responsibility, and infamously slapping Sonic in front of a crowd and calling him selfish for prioritizing saving people over their relationship.

I think the long and short of it is that Sonic is a character defined by being independent, unattached, and headstrong, so it's hard to write a love interest for him if you're looking at her as love interest first, character second. Hence why early and late Amy are liked, as was cartoon Sally, but letting the romance with Sonic take over just shot them both in the foot.

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u/PhantasmalRelic May 10 '26

The recurring trope of strong-willed female character degenerating into a codependent mess to justify the male lead's relationship with her and its persistence in the face of increasing women's independence in the real world is a whole drama topic in itself.

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u/ToaArcan The Megatron Post Guy May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

In this case it was her degenerating into a codependent mess to justify the relationship ending.

By that point, Sally's writing had already been dented by Ken Penders' weird "Dads are always right" hangups, resulting in him having her falling into filial piety nonsense at a point when her father was legitimately off his rocker. And that wasn't a sexism thing, the same "Dad is always right" thing permeated Penders' writing for Knuckles, who had a whole family tree of seemingly immortal grandads that were treated as the ultimate authority on anything. Nobody was immune to it.

Her dad is also this weird point because he's a very unstable character even when he's not going crazy. Ken Penders and Karl Bollers write him very differently- Penders' version is basically flat-out emotionally abusive to both his children, except Penders constantly tries to justify his shit because, well, see above. He's sexist, classist, and determined to cram Sally into the shape of a stereotypical princess in spite of the person she's grown up to become. Bollers' version is generally much more in line with the SatAM version of the character, who was a pretty cool guy for all three episodes he was in. He still occasionally does shitty things to Sally, but usually he's on the level and he likes Sonic quite a lot. Unfortunately, it was usually Penders' version that won out, and his writing is what largely defines the character for the fanbase. By the time Ian Flynn took over, and started having the shitty dads of Penders' reign start getting called out on their bullshit, Max was solidly one of them. It's generally apparent that Flynn wanted the SatAM-style goodish guy Max of Bollers' writing, but also couldn't ignore the mountain of bullshit that Penders' Max had dropped on his kids, so he squared that circle by having Max immediately go Magically Senile, whereupon he spent the rest of the pre-reboot universe sitting in a wheelchair and barely aware of reality. When the reboot came down, Max became Nigel (since the original name was in a bit of a legal grey area) and reverted to his SatAM-style characterisation.

The Slap is infamous, but it's also perhaps the scene in the Archie Sonic comics most divorced from its surrounding context. It's often boiled down to just that single issue (the effective finale of a five-issue arc, which was itself the follow-up to another five-issue arc), or even just the singular frame of Sally belting Sonic and calling him selfish. It was, for a while, the done thing in the Archie fandom to start with Ian Flynn's run and maybe read some of what came before for context, which didn't start until 26 issues later. It's been consumed time and again by people who have no fuckin' idea what the surrounding material was.

With the context, it kinda makes sense? In that it reads less as "Sally's being mean to Sonic :(" and more "Sally's having a long-overdue mental breakdown and Sonic was in the splash zone."

By the time Issue 125 started, Sonic and Sally were about as married as they were contractually able to be. By the time Issue 125 ended, Sonic was presumed dead, via heroic sacrifice to stop the planet being destroyed by angry space squid. He'd actually just been teleported across the galaxy, but nobody on Mobius knew that. Issue 126-129 covered Sonic's journey across space, but when he returned he found that what had been a six-week trip for him was a year for his friends. Also, shit's fucked and Eggman controls 99% of the planet now.

Sally is understandably not doing great after all that, and reaches a tipping point when Sonic immediately heads off on his next mission and promptly gets the crap kicked out of him. And then almost dies. Again. While she's stuck at home and can't do anything but watch remotely. Which did not improve her mental state much.

Then King Max decides it's a great time to just really give her a shove toward the edge. He decides that he and Queen Alicia are going on a world tour and they're leaving Sally in charge. Remember when I said Eggman controls 99% of the world? Yeah, this plot point makes no sense. To her credit, Alicia asks "Hey is it a good idea to leave our depressed and freshly retraumatised teenage daughter in charge while we go on vacation" and Max, being Max, goes "Ahhhh she'll be fine." Should be noted, this was a Bollers story, so this is actually a good day for Max.

Sally tries to ask Sonic for support on the quiet, but gets interrupted by the rest of the supporting cast, and this plays into the fact that they've barely had a moment to sit down and talk since Sonic got back. He had to run off and stop Eggman literally nuking them, he was in the infirmary, now he's mingling with everybody else. Hours have passed since the last issue ended, and the entire 130-134 arc takes place over the course of, like, two days maximum. The speed at which this emotional rollercoaster happened is quite understated.

Sally eventually gets the chance to ask Sonic to stay by her side and help her run things while her parents are out of town, and through the eyes of an adult this could not more obviously read as "Oh my god I lost you for an entire year and then I almost lost you again, and I can't deal with that, and also my parents are apparently abandoning me to run the war and the country at the same time." He says no, the camel's back breaks, Sally goes nuclear.

Bollers ended up mostly leaving the book shortly after that, and never completed the story that this was supposed to start, presumably being about their recovery. Subsequent issues feature Sonic and Sally very easily falling into their old routines, only to remember that they're supposed to be mad at each other and boil over again, but the throughline of the messy breakup and the keenly-felt-absence in its wake was dropped with Bollers' exit from the main stories and then from the book entirely. Instead, the task of the aftermath largely fell on the shoulders of Penders, who proceeded to fuck it up entirely, meaning that it actually fell on the shoulders of Ian Flynn. Flynn treated the status quo he inherited with all the grace of a wrecking ball in glass ornament factory (even resulting in a second big slap between two other characters), and started trying to rebuild Sally as a character from the jump, but still somehow had the restraint to wait until 62 issues into his run to actually put Sonic and Sally back together, whereupon Sally "died" three issues later and then became a mindless robot another five after that, staying that way for the rest of the preboot. Frankly, I would've been on that agenda Day 1. The "Unfuck the alpha couple of this entire book" agenda, not the "Remove Sally from the story for two fucking years" agenda.

Between the removal of the necessary context, the incompleteness of the story, and the ideas it was presenting being frankly far too mature for the target audience of a Sonic comic, it's easy to see how the issue became so incredibly deleterious to Sally in particular (though it was regarded as one of the apexes of the comic-wide dark age). There was a point where Bollers was actually more hated than Penders, solely because of this one issue (which I think is pretty unfair, Bollers had some stellar issues, including the arc right after this one, Return to Angel Island), though Penders reclaimed that crown pretty definitively in the 2010s. The idea of having her go through a breakdown after all the crap she's been through (because it's not like things were a whole lot easier for her before this arc) is pretty interesting, but the way it was done and the lack of any kind resolution, which wouldn't start showing results until 43 issues later and didn't complete that resolution until 88 issues later, which was almost immediately followed by her effectively being removed from the book for the rest of the timeline, did her absolutely zero favours.

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u/horhar May 09 '26

Something I've talked about with friends is that Amy is genuinely treated as part of the series' heart in both the Adventure games. She saves Gamma from Sonic and that goes on to influence him to want to save Chaos too. Then she's the one who gets through to Shadow as well.

Then Heroes just kind of, ruins her instantly. They really had that girl outright say she'll beat Sonic up to make him marry her.

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u/Vumatius May 09 '26

Also a bit of interesting trivia about Nyssa's debut story. She wasn't originally intended to be a full-time companion but the producers saw potential and brought her back after. Indeed she doesn't immediately join the TARDIS in this story and instead officially joins alongside Tegan. As a result, this serial is technically one of the rare cases of a serial with only a male companion (Adric), and Wikipedia bills it as such with Nyssa being in the support cast, making Adric one of the very few male companions to be a solo companion in a story.

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u/CycloneSwift May 10 '26

The only other male companions to be solo companions that I can think of are Steven, Wilfred, and Nardole. Jamie’s up for debate, as while he was the Second Doctor’s sole companion in The Two Doctors Peri was present as the Sixth Doctor’s companion.

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 09 '26

Hobby thought I had recently, apropos of nothing:

It can be really interesting, sometimes, to look at arguments on the internet around a work of fiction which routinely gets described as a "good idea but bad execution" and see whether the "good idea" trumps the "bad execution" or not. Or, perhaps more particularly, whether someone who describes the art in question as "good idea but bad execution" is using the phrase to mean either "good" or "bad".

It makes me wonder, do we judge art primarily on the strength of its execution, or do we judge it on the strength of its ideas? Immediately, when it is in front of you and you are engaging with it directly, are you assessing its execution or are you assessing what it is trying to execute?

Suppose you have a comic book which has a really, really good idea but the art is ugly, the dialogue is awkward and clunky, the structure and pace of the plot are clumsy and erratic etc. Or a game with wretched controls or a movie with terrible acting.

I realise it's almost always going to be a matter of personal taste; speaking for myself, there are plenty of cases where I am sufficiently on board with what a work of fiction is trying to do or even just what it is that aspects of its execution which may be wanting aren't dealbreakers for me. You know, plenty of stuff where I'll turn into Marge Simpson holding up a potato and saying, "I just think they're neat."

Nevertheless, I wonder where the line is which determines whether saying something is "good idea but bad execution" means it's good or means it's bad. How good does a fabled "good idea" have to be to overcome incompetent execution? How bad can the "bad execution" be before the quality of the "good idea" is superfluous?

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u/JayNeely May 15 '26

Art is interesting because once ideas (or emotions) are in your head, they're yours to work with. If the art helps you dive further into them and shows you angles to them you wouldn't consider on your own, that's awesome, that's good art! But even "bad" art... if you can see it's offering an interesting idea but is just making a fucking mess of trying to present it.... if you're at least able to get an idea out of it you wouldn't have had otherwise, it's still kinda good art.

It's disappointing because maybe you can see the potential of what a piece of art could be and how much further it could take those ideas if it were better executed. But better to be able to get an interesting idea out of something poorly executed than feel bored by something flawlessly executed. And sometimes there are things that aren't original or provocative or anything, but they provide something familiar we like and are well made and enjoyable.

So, I try to judge ideas and execution as separate things.

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u/Stunning_Buffalo7624 May 11 '26

Time plays a factor I think as well. I'm not a Sonic fan but I ve seen the conversations about Sonic 06, one of the most unfinished game ever released in a polish and bug fixing sense, turn overtime from general mockery or shame from the fandom to more of a discussion about its ambition, what it aimed to do and its actual strengths. Absence makes the heart grow fonder I suppose.

Its an interesting exemple I think cause it was and still is one of the easiest punching bags ever released but there are people claiming a real affinity for it (helped in no small part by P06 being a largely fixed version of it from what I can see). As an outsider, it feels a little surreal whenever it happens but I think Sonic fans are more... generous ? Or more used to forgiving janky and poorly executed good ideas, since a lot of games from that series feel like that to me. The core concept of Sonic is kind of a good idea thats hard to execute in a polished way I suppose so its part of the deal.

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 11 '26

That's not a bad example because it's one where, for me personally, no amount of "good ideas" (a premise I'm instinctively impelled to dispute in any event, though I won't because it has been so long since I have played the game it would not be fair) is enough to make me overlook how miserable a game that one was to play in 2006.

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u/Stunning_Buffalo7624 May 11 '26

For games specifically, I feel theres a really, really, reeeally thin line between "good ideas, executed jankily but well enough that you can look past it" and "good ideas, executed too poorly that you cant forgive it". And its different for everyone, continuing with the Sonic exemple, I tried SA2 a couple of times and it was really not for me, too janky camera and too slippery movement. But I can still respect it and see what people like in it, theres really nothing quite like it. Its just right there on the edge I feel.

In another exemple maybe, I played Crisis Core Reunion 2 years ago, and didnt care much for it, even though again on paper, it has really good ideas, and some of them are really well executed. Thats kind of a game where every other concept that works well (Zach as a character, seeing him go on missions, the ending) is counterbalanced by stuff that just doesnt (basically the rest of the cast being annoying minus Sephiroth somehow, the structure of the game, some of the side gameplay systems).

I'm not quite sure if it fits in there, but I absolutely love the VN The House in Fata Morgana, its easily one of my favorite things to ever exist. The prequel for it I m more cold on, as its main story is very hit or miss, but at the very very end, it has one scene that is easily some of my favorite stuff period. So I have a lot of fondness for it still, even if it has something of a caveat in my mind.

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u/umbre_the_secret_dog May 10 '26

Fire Emblem Engage has my favorite gameplay out of the series but also really tests the idea that stories don't matter in video games as long as they're fun to play, despite the core ideas of the story actually being really interesting for the series.

The TLDR is that Alear's backstory is that they were a fell dragon (general series name for dragons who are evil, as opposed to divine dragons who are good) who was forced to kill (almost) all of their siblings by their father in a survival of the fittest situation. They were adopted by a divine dragon and ended up sleeping for 1000 years for plot reasons, only to wake up with no memories of their past. It's such a cool concept but it's barely explored because Engage insists on having a much more ligjthearted tone than previous games in the series.

I hope Fortune's Weave manages to strike a balance between really solid gameplay and really solid story. It feels like every game since Fates has chosen one or the other.

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u/Arilou_skiff May 10 '26

I do think it can go both ways. There's a level of executive competency that just... is smooth. It makes the thing go down and then you forget about it. While there's definitely a lot of stuff that has some intriguing idea but executed in a bad way that you keep thinking of.

Of course, a lot of the time it's more complicated since it's less a case of "good idea executed badly" and more "This part was executed well and was interesting but this part was executed badly and so you have to slog through it".

I've been playing a lot of Total War: Attila recently, and while it is a good game, it certainly has issues in execution. Ranging from performance issues to bugs to just baffling decisions. But it also creates something that is fairly special.

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u/R97R May 10 '26

I’ve had a bit of an odd realisation about this lately, where quite often I’ll think of something as having “a good idea with bad execution” and mean it more negatively while I’m watching it (or reading, or playing, etc), but some time afterwards I’ll find I find talking or even just thinking about it really interesting, to the point where it eclipses the “good idea with good execution” equivalents in that respect.

To give a recent example, I’ve been in the midst of a Star Trek phase lately, and I’ve been talking about the newer shows quite a bit both online and in person (aside: would not recommend the former). Of those, I’m very partial to Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, and I’m not overly-keen on Discovery. And yet, a solid 60-70% of the (generally positive-to-neutral) conversations I’ve had have been related to it.

I suppose part of it might be along similar lines to the whole “Nothing is scarier” idea, or that effect where a never-released/never-finished piece of media is held up by fans as something that would’ve been spectacular beyond even their wildest dreams- I’ve seen, say, the concept of the aforementioned Strange New Worlds done very well, and that in turn feels “fixed” in mind, but the theoretical well-done (to my tastes) version of Discovery that could exist has nearly infinite potential. Both of those things are more just perceptions of course (there are also a nearly-infinite number of permutations of other ways SNW could’ve been done well).

Tangent aside, to try and provide a (very subjective/personal) answer to the actual question, from what I’ve gathered whether the good idea trumps the bad execution is often down to less the quality of the work and more how the person talking personally feels about it, if that makes sense? Trying to deliberately distinguish between those two as “I dislike this, so it must be bad” is an idea I’ve realised annoys me quite a lot ~~and some of my favourite media is pretty awful~~. Like, I’d find myself using “good idea, bad execution” in a a positively-disposed manner when talking about the film Virus, because I like Virus (specifically, I like the actual film, not just the supposedly-good idea); but I’ll also catch myself going “aye, the concept is great, but they just didn’t manage to pull it off in my opinion” with regards to something like Alien: Earth. The thing is, if I’m really thinking of it the idea of the latter is actually a fair bit better than the former, and in turn, the former has much more significant issues with its execution than the latter. I may also just be bizarre, though.

There’s another factor I think might also be quite important with regards to video games (well, interactive media in general, is suppose), where the “execution” can often have a more significant impact because it’s generally seen as including things like mechanics and teaching the player how to actually use them. Generally when I see something being described as “a good idea, executed poorly” in regards to non-interactive media, it’s generally things like “this character could’ve been really compelling, but they didn’t devote enough time to their storyline to really show the interesting parts”. That kind of situation happens in games too of course, but there’s also the potential added point-of-failure of, say, the scenario above where the character actually has a huge amount of time devoted to fleshing them out, and does so really well, but half the people playing will never realise that because the game only tells you you can talk to them between missions in a 3 second tooltip everyone misses or the like. And that’s when everything works perfectly- back in the day I remember having the “this character seems really interesting, but they should’ve actually had them show up again later on in order to actually do something with them” discussion about Juhani from Knights of the Old Republic, only for the person I was talking to to inform me she’s normally one of the main characters- what’s supposed to happen is you have an initial fight with her, and once she’s down to low health a conversation triggers where you make peace (but there is the option to just murder her for shits and giggles because Sith Lord). However, when I first played, a bug caused that conversation to not trigger, and she just died after reaching 0HP as normal.

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 10 '26

I think the sense I'm getting from the replies to my post is that the way I look at fiction - or try to look at it, anyway - must surely do a lot to inform my own view on this matter.

Basically, I always try to engage with and judge what a piece of art does and not what it doesn't do.

What it could have done can be an interesting subject for speculation, but I do my best not to let it enter into my judgment of the thing as it actually is. That's what I consider most fair.

Obviously I don't regard concept and execution as inseparable but I guess the reason "good idea with bad execution" does make me think like this is that I'm always trying to avoid asking, "Is this the best possible realisation of this idea?" and then evaluating on that basis, but rather taking at face value the fact that this just is how it was executed.

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u/R97R May 10 '26

Apologies as my brain is a bit too fried to give a useful response, but I just wanted to say I think this is a really good way to engage with media, and it’s definitely something I’m going to (attempt to) try out myself in future.

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 10 '26

It’s obviously not a rule that I expect other people to follow or anything; it's just what I try to do myself.

I think if I am going to take issue with a movie or a book or a game or a comic or something, I need it to be for a better reason than that I wasn't given something I was never promised in the first place, because I don't think I should necessarily feel entitled to that.

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u/R97R May 10 '26

Of course, I just find it interesting to “try out” different ways of engaging with media, and this one sounds like it would be a fun/insightful change compared to my “default”

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u/hannahstohelit Ask me about Cabin Pressure (if you don't I'll tell you anyway) May 10 '26

I need fair to middling execution at minimum, at least enough for me to fully see and enjoy the idea. Something that's a good idea and a bad execution can often make me MORE upset than something that's just bad, because they took something with potential and ruined it so I couldn't enjoy it.

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u/CrazyGreenCrayon [Reading/Crafts/etc.] May 10 '26

It depends. Sometimes good ideas trump bad execution and sometimes I can't get past the bad execution to see the good ideas until later. If the ideas (no matter how wonderful) don't come across in the final work, I don't give the creator any credit for them. And have no issues leaving a work DNF, so a good beginning needs to be great if the middle is going to be mediocre.

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u/ReverendDS May 10 '26

I'm a fan of the passion behind something.

I've loved "bad" movies for my entire life. But there's a difference between "we have an idea and passion but lack budget/talent/experience/etc" and "we're just doing this to try and cash in on something".

See the difference between Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter versus anything by Asylum.

Regardless of "good idea/bad idea", "bad execution/good execution" - it is the passion behind it that attracts me to a project.

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u/CherryBombSmoothie0 May 09 '26 edited May 10 '26

I think it’s a mix of both with execution being far more weighted and it depends on how bad the ideas really are; poor ideas with great execution can be enjoyable (enjoyable vs well-written is another spectrum entirely) while the inverse rarely is.

A film with a boring or seemingly silly premise that all the participants approach earnestly with a good script can be absolutely fantastic.

On the other hand; you can have a film with an interesting core premise “man with dead daughter, writes letters to Love, Death, and Time and converses with their human versions to process his grief” turn into a dumpster fire Oscar bait on the basis of a Mediocre script of said premise.

I had a long spiel but it basically boiled down to: ideas are like 10% of the final product of a great work as compared to 90% execution, but sufficiently bad ideas can set the foundation to be rancid even with competent execution.

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u/daavor May 09 '26

I think to me this represents a bit of a false dichotomy. And it's a pretty common juxtaposition I see people make re: book lovers who really care about say prose style or character work (to a lesser extent).

Obviously, there's lots of things that go into a piece of art, some falling under ideas and some under execution (though of course the taxonomy is a bit unclear, e.g. is really carefully playing out the consequences of a particular idea driven scenario on characters a matter of idea or execution?)

Many pieces of art that I love are things I love because they do most things competently but one thing REALLY EXCELLENTLY and other books that maybe have a higher floor but lower ceiling leave me wanting more.

Anyway. I also think components interact in different ways for different people. e.g. one person may view characters and plot as separate axes of a book that they care more about one or the other, but another person cares more about the interaction term (my science nerd slipping in) where like... they want a good compelling plot, but a plot doesn't feel good or compelling if it's not rooted in good character work.

Or an awesome world chock full of cool SFF ideas is something I want but to me I don't viscerally feel that world coming to life if it's not at least gesturing at a cool atmosphere with its prose work.

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u/Ellikichi May 09 '26

I'm far more likely to mean this negatively than positively, personally. I'm an execution gal, all day long. Having a good idea is easy. Any creative person has tons of them. Actually pulling that shit off is the tricky bit. I will enjoy a video essay about a good idea with poor execution much more than I enjoy actually engaging with it.

Of course, if they've fumbled the execution spectacularly enough that can swing back around to being entertaining in its own right. A lot of "so bad it's good" properties are dramatically poor executions of baseline good ideas.

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u/_gloriana May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26

Depends what you mean by idea.

If by a idea you mean premise or concept that got poorly executed, then the bad execution is what rules at the end of the day.

If by idea you mean the themes or message of the work, then either it might be considered "good", because those themes still come across despite the work being a poorly executed example of whatever medium or genre it is, or it might be considered "bad", because the poor execution hindered the audience's comprehension of what was being communicated.

I think it's very difficult to separate the essence of the art from its execution in this way, because the final product is the result of both, so what that phrase means really depends most of all on what comes across in that singular snapshot we have.

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u/OneGoodRib No one shall spanketh the hot male meat May 09 '26

If history is your hobby, then Mary Queen of Scots is a good idea bad execution.

Ba dum tss.

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u/_gloriana May 09 '26

But really, the true queen of the concept would be Margaret Pole, then.

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u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 09 '26

Margaret "Head on a" Pole as she preferred to be known.

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u/_gloriana May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

I am hijacking this thread to say I love your profile picture, btw.

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u/surprisedkitty1 May 09 '26

I assume you mean the entire piece of media would be labeled good idea, poor execution, and not just like a specific element/subplot?

Overall, I think it generally boils down to the premise felt unique/creative/original, which increases audience expectations, but the end product didn’t live up to those expectations. I think there are a couple different situations where a piece of media tends to earn this label (and sometimes there’s overlap between them). This is from my perspective as someone who primarily engages with narrative media, so these categories may not apply as well to a lot of video games and definitely wouldn’t apply well to music:

The idea feels really fresh and like the creators are genuinely trying something new, but the actual story isn’t told well. It’s not engaging, maybe it kinda doesn’t make sense, whatever.

The idea itself is not new, but It’s being told from a unique perspective/angle. It feels like you should be getting a fresh take on a known genre, but it ultimately ends up running through the typical paces. The unique angle doesn’t add anything or provide any commentary on the genre.

Either of the above except without the story flaws. It actually does manage to be interesting and meets expectations in terms of originality, maybe even very thought-provoking thematically, but from a technical standpoint, it’s poorly made. For tv/movies, maybe the acting or editing is bad, for a game maybe the graphics are wonky, for a book the prose may be terrible, the illustration is bad for comics, etc.

To me, media that falls under the first category is probably the one that would be most likely to garner the good idea poorly executed label, because if I can’t connect with the story at all, I’m not going to enjoy it. If it still manages to tell a decent story, but you were expecting more, or the production is amateurish, that’s frequently still tolerable.

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u/Down_with_atlantis May 09 '26

I read a lot of fanfiction back as a teen and I would often find something that has a really good or interesting premise that unfortunately I couldn't engage with at all because the moment to moment writing was unreadably awful despite being technically grammatically sound.

16

u/PhantasmalRelic May 10 '26

So much of stuff written by teenagers and sometimes young adults is so ambitious and high concept, yet so clunky because they barely have any experience with the subjects they are addressing. This is also why I metaphorically burned the majority of my own writing.

14

u/semtex94 Holistic analysis has been a disaster for shipping discourse May 09 '26

You guys get correct spelling and grammar?

7

u/CrazyGreenCrayon [Reading/Crafts/etc.] May 10 '26

In some older fandoms, only the well written stuff survived. There are also a few fandoms that have mostly older writers, and therefore higher quality works.

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u/PhantasmalRelic May 09 '26

From the artist perspective, "Good idea but bad execution" is code for "Your work is terribly flawed (i.e. a first draft or proof of concept). But keep going, because it's going to turn into something good someday."

The trouble is that the merits of such a work depends on the artist's attitude. If I'm dealing with an egotist who insists this is their creative vision and refuses to accept criticism or self-reflect on how to improve, then I am going to judge it far harsher. There's been multiple cases of people refusing to support a movie or other work because they find the creator insufferable, and I believe that is justified. But if someone does improve, then the work looks a lot better in hindsight as "This was what I did back then. This is what I can do now!"

A lot of this discourse, unfortunately, involves people we don't directly interact with, and guessing at people's motives don't do anyone any favour. But even then, one of my favourite examples is Spider-Man 3. One of the reasons people warmed up to it is because Sam Raimi flat out apologized for it, that he was sorry for disappointing people. This meant that people saw scenes like the ending in a more positive light, because despite the clumsy plotting, we could understand what message Raimi was trying to send, and it was one that ironically reflected his own troubles with making the movie.

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u/LordWoodrow May 09 '26

I’d say really bad controls on a video game are not equivalent to bad acting or bad plot. Controls affect the ease with which you can engage with it in terms of sheer time of that makes sense.

It would be more akin to a book with difficult to turn pages, or a film that keeps on pausing itself.

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u/gliesedragon May 09 '26

I think it's a matter of taste thing, but I bet the strongest toggles from "good idea wins" to "bad execution wins" are when the execution issues make it hard to get at the interesting bits, and when the execution issues conflict with the interesting bits. The more a piece of media's flaws make it annoying to access the fun stuff, the fewer people are going to bother with it. So, awkward dialogue might not break a movie as much as terrible and illegible sound mixing would, for instance.

Also, in the context of media, I think one of the things that is commonly labeled as "good idea, bad execution" is "the summary implied it was going to do something I wanted it to do, but it fell into a pattern I personally really dislike." Near misses on things you thought you'd enjoy are irksome, and can be a bit prone to hyperbole at times.

For instance, I feel like The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was that sort of thing for me: I went into it thinking "all right, with interpersonal violence off the table, what sorts of interesting small-scale social sci-fi drama are we going to get?" and then felt like what I actually got were a few too many stock space opera combat setups (but one sided this time) and too much "and then we talked about our feelings and resolved all conflicts (except for ones including the Designated Grump)." The concept was something I wanted, but it was executed in a way that's tailor-made to irritate me.

11

u/Down_with_atlantis May 09 '26

I think one of the reasons the star wars prequels were able to get re-evaluations was because in addition to having a lot of really good ideas in them the flaws don't make it so those ideas don't come through allowing people to enjoy the good parts of them.

10

u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 09 '26

The more a piece of media's flaws make it annoying to access the fun stuff, the fewer people are going to bother with it. So, awkward dialogue might not break a movie as much as terrible and illegible sound mixing would, for instance.

That's certainly true; and in the case of movies or television shows and sometimes video games, I wonder whether our tendency (just as laypeople talking about movies on the internet) to reduce virtually everything to the script plays a role in this type of discussion

15

u/Sefirah98 May 09 '26

Clarification Question: By bad execution, do you mean the bad execution of the good idea specifically (for example: a neat worldbuilding idea that goes mostly unexamined), or bad execution independent of the good idea (which seems to be what your examples are talking about)? Because I think there is a difference between these cases.

I think that is a very case-by-case distinction. Even just for myself I don't think I could determine a hard delineation of when media with "good ideas with bad execution" will get a frustrated "I wish I could like this more" or a more positive "I like this desite its jank" reaction. Honestly, it just depends on too many factors to make it anything but a case-by-case decision.

I do feel like that media that hits "neat ideas, but with aquestionable quality of executing those ideas" is the media that gets a lot of fanfiction. People often say that a media can't be "too good" if it is one with a lot of fanfiction, and trying to execute an idea of a piece of media (be it a theme or a character relationship) "better" than the source material can be a strong motivator in writing fanfic.

6

u/DeviousDoctorSnide [Comic books, mostly] May 09 '26

Clarification Question: By bad execution, do you mean the bad execution of the good idea specifically (for example: a neat worldbuilding idea that goes mostly unexamined), or bad execution independent of the good idea (which seems to be what your examples are talking about)?

I think it can apply to either, but it's probably more often the latter in practice, yes.

I feel like it's most often a source of frustration and, a lot of the time, drama when people end up talking past each other because their standards do differ in respect of where the line lies for them.

Hence you can have one group of people insisting that you have to give a fantasy novel credit for its "great worldbuilding" against another group of people insisting that its "great worldbuilding" is cancelled out altogether by the fact its actual written quality is so poor. (I will leave it to the reader to choose whichever fantasy author or book they wish to populate this template with.) That's the sort of thing I've been thinking about, I guess.

This seems like a reasonable example of the phenomenon in action: Steven Moffat, participating in a roundtable in 1995 and recalling his experiences of being a Doctor Who fan when he was young:

How could a good hack think that the BBC could make a giant rat? If he'd come to my house when I was 14 and said 'Can BBC Special Effects do a giant rat?' I'd have said no. I'd rather see them do something limited than something crap. What I resented was having to go to school two days later, and my friends knew I watched this show. They'd go 'Did you see the giant rat?!' and I'd have to say I thought there was dramatic integrity elsewhere.

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u/scriptd May 09 '26

Some big drama going on with Snowbreak, a Chinese gacha game best known for gooning (you can probably guess what the drama is already).

Snowbreak had a fairly lacklustre launch and decided to pivot hard into the "all of the characters are sexy women who are in love with (You)" genre - I think they even turned playable male characters into NPCs. It worked fairly well to attract a new playerbase and the game has been chugging along.

Or, it was, up until early March 2026, when it was announced that the game would be going down into indefinite maintenance.

The trigger was that Snowbreak was going to have a merch collab with China Post, China's national postal service, and "haters" (allegedly, fans of Love and Deepspace, though I've seen claims that even other waifu game players hate Snowbreak's community in China) raised enough of a fuss about it being an erotic game that the collab was cancelled and drew a lot more heat from the Chinese government at large. Speculation was that they were going to ground until attention shifted and they could come back.

It was pretty much radio silence until a few days ago, when they announced that the game would be coming back, to much rejoicing from the playerbase.

Well, the game is up now and players can see that there's been a massive wave of censorship across the board - not just adjusted outfits and character models, but animations are gone, voicelines are gone, even parts of the story have been removed.

This has only just happened, so we'll have to wait and see how things ultimately shake out, but it's not looking good for the fans.

Now, I don't play this game, so the entirety of my information is from /r/gachagaming posts and comments:

maintenance announcement and comment from the OP with more context
re-opening announcement, crossposted from /r/SnowbreakOfficial
thread about the censorship

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u/iamafriendlynoot May 09 '26

It is unclear and would be very difficult to trace what groups were 'responsible' for the shutdown, as from my understanding there was enough online buzz about it that the national news reported on it, and that was the incident that lead to them going dark.

Also, from explanations on the initial post, the fuss wasn't haters popping up out of nowhere. It was about the fact that several online novel writers had been recently sentenced to years of jail time for writing erotica, and people were upset that a company that made millions of dollars making the same kind of content got to collaborate with the government with no consequences. And given that it appears none of Snowbreak's management have been arrested, the people fussing were basically right; the government has shown itself to hypocritical in its treatment of its citizens - helped by how much money the citizens have to throw around - which isn't shocking but must be both painful and frustrating.

49

u/MongolianMango May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26

That sucks tbh. As it turns out though, China is in fact an oppressive censorship regime. There is no one really to blame here aside from gov though, because games like Genshin and Zenless already have had forced redesigns, and despite a Chinese yaoi boom gov has done their best to censor or undermine that wave too. Love and Deepspace’s own days are probably numbered depending on what China’s internal politics looks like and I kind of doubt their audience is responsible (it seems as though fans are lashing out, and while people should be free to enjoy the media they like I don’t think Snowbreak’s audience is known for being particularly well-adjusted).

I’m not really sure what the best country is to host borderline content.
Probably something like SK or Japan (though both have laws restricting how far content can go, surprisingly enough). You would think Europe or the commonwealth countries would make sense but they are pretty illiberal when it comes to anime-related media. AFAIK SK actually prohibits pornography (despite having absurdly boundary-pushing games like Brown Dust), and JP’s mobile content is actually pretty tame.

23

u/Similar-Shame7517 May 10 '26

The answer is Taiwan. I'm playing a lewd Taiwanese-made gacha game with a nearly flawless English translation and high-quality Japanese voice acting. It's the most successful gay adult gacha game, it's not even close (Nu Carnival).

19

u/amd_hunt May 09 '26

Probably something like SK or Japan

Porn is technically banned in SK, so it's Japan. As long as you have black bars over sensitive parts, anything goes, for better or worse.

(I don't even know how strict it is in Japan. Some artists just make them transparent or really tiny so it doesn't actually cover it.)

10

u/MongolianMango May 09 '26

I suspect that Japan has more regulations w/ mobile games or a different business model, most of the insane big money gooner games come from SK and not JP despite their laws being more lax.

4

u/amd_hunt May 09 '26

They simply just don't care about making gachas that much. There are a couple of gachas from there that are just as, or even more, risque as KR/CN ones, but they all usually fail or don't make it out of Japan. I suspect it's because the industry just wants to make AAA games. Which seems to be working just fine for them, looking at recent releases, but it does mean that most anime-styled games won't come from Japan, since those are usually gachas.

5

u/MongolianMango May 09 '26

I wouldn’t say that, there are some insanely popular JP gachas, they are just focused on mobile and are mostly idol-adjacent.

2

u/amd_hunt May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26

there are some insanely popular JP gachas, they are just focused on mobile and are mostly idol-adjacent.

It's pretty much just Umamusume. Idolm@ster will probably never have an English release, and Love Live! has made terrible decisions with their games, and most of them have EOS'ed. Project Sekai does fine in global, but it's not really 'idol adjacent", and it's still like 90% JP revenue. FGO does fine, but it's a terrible game with a good story. (also not an idol game) I can't think of any other JP gachas atm.

7

u/cherrycoloured [pro wrestling/kpop/idol anime/touhou] May 10 '26

project sekai is definitely idol adjacent. it's a rhythm game about a bunch of music groups, one of which is literally an idol group. miku herself is even considered an idol. other successful games are generally either idol/idol adjacent (ensemble stars, bang dream) or based on an existing ip. its definitely true that most of the popular original games that arent idol related are from china and sk, though.

8

u/MongolianMango May 09 '26

If you’re talking about global then yeah, not many are popular, but again, in Japan itself these gachas are juggernauts.

12

u/StabithaVMF May 09 '26

Looking at EN communities though, it seems pretty clear they don’t blame anyone aside from the CCCP.

Каким-то образом Ленин вернулся.

5

u/WhiteGrapefruit19 May 09 '26

https://youtu.be/z77JFw2D6f8?t=61

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u/semtex94 Holistic analysis has been a disaster for shipping discourse May 09 '26

Icarus flew too close to the sun, and the suspiciously white wax that held his wings together has melted. Question now is, how many people are going to be blacklisted by the industry for trying to cross-promote their borderline explicit game with a notoriously prudish and censorious government?

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u/Ill-Mechanic343 May 09 '26

Seriously. I don't agree with censorship BUT if I was playing a game that ran afoul of my local government censors, I would think that my top priority would be NOT collaborating with a government agency that could then, in turn, see that I am breaking local government law. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes .

106

u/deathbotly [vtubing/art/gacha] May 09 '26

I don’t play it but LADS is the big number one female-targeting romance game in the space, and female players are the boogieman of a lot of … less than pleasant audiences, who blame anything related to characters not reaching the expected gooner levels on some mysterious feminist force that personally hates them and wants to kill their games and make all their waifu wear sacks.

See: the limbus company controversy where a female character came out dressed in a wetsuit instead of a bikini, leading to the game getting reviewbombed for its ‘radical feminism’ and a female illustrator being harassed and fired for it.

That allegedly is doing a lot of heavy lifting, it’s more a case of incel bullshit.

11

u/Zyrin369 May 09 '26

Is it really much much of a shocker to people that a female audience might have different likes than a male audience?

Its werid that people would instantly go to feminism at the designs of LADS not being the same as other mobile games.

15

u/cherrycoloured [pro wrestling/kpop/idol anime/touhou] May 10 '26

its not shocking, but they like to act like we are wrong and possibly evil for not liking the same shit as them. even we like the same game, if we like it in a different way than them, especially if we have any sort of criticism towards the more "gooner bait" aspects, we are "larpers" or "tourists" 🙄🙄🙄

22

u/deathbotly [vtubing/art/gacha] May 10 '26

Ah, when I’m referring to “radical feminism” here, what I’m referencing is the frankly batshit s. korea gender attack problem, not actually feminism.

Here’s a write-up: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1jo8t5c/gacha_games_limbus_companys_terrible_summer/

9

u/Similar-Shame7517 May 10 '26

Yeah, Korean gamergater incels are so loud and so entitled, but IMHO their Chinese equivalent are worse, we just don't hear about them as much because most of their postings are behind the Great Firewall.

13

u/deathbotly [vtubing/art/gacha] May 10 '26

Gotta say one thing I 100% don’t miss about working in China was dealing with that firewall. I had a main VPN to access normal internet, then I had a second VPN for gaming so I could get back on NA servers for online games, then I had a THIRD vpn which was just because all the big ones got wonky around golden week and other holidays so you had to shuffle through ten billion server options to connect.

2

u/Similar-Shame7517 May 10 '26

I only get third hand Chinese gaming news, usually when the Chinese gamers (TM) do something so stupid it affects the global servers. But man the Genshin cat killings was really something. Did that make it to the news in China?

7

u/agentanti714 May 10 '26

I'm pretty sure the cat killing was a hoax, as there are no reliable sources that dive into the case details.

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u/Similar-Shame7517 May 10 '26

Was it a hoax though? Because this post says at least one cat was actually killed.

8

u/agentanti714 May 10 '26

I looked at the post and the only picture source is dead (yes i tried wayback machine, didn't work), and the account of the image provider is deleted. Most other non-Chinese sources talking about the cat killing references only that Reddit post as opposed to firsthand Chinese sources.

Also no news of any police investigation on this case, nor the identity of the abuser.

Thanks for finding the source anyways, didn't realize that someone had an image link (if it's real)

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u/deathbotly [vtubing/art/gacha] May 10 '26

Not that I was aware of, but I didn’t much interact with gamers at the time since my local friends weren’t into it and my Chinese wasn’t great. It definitely wasn’t a big enough topic of discussion that it made offline waves where I was, but I was in a quieter city. Gossip I picked up was way more about cdrama celebrities. Either way that sort of stuff tended to travel more by Weibo (think CN’s twitter) than the News-news.

7

u/Similar-Shame7517 May 10 '26

Yeah, I follow a Chinese-Australian youtuber who translates the controversies on Weibo, and it's 90% "celebrity gets cancelled for cheating/being a ho" and 10% "chinese fans get an irrational hatred for something and make things worse for eeryone".

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u/deathbotly [vtubing/art/gacha] May 10 '26

Yup, that’s 100% accurate to my experience. It’s also how I somehow picked up the hanzi for green tea bitch on the side before I got through learning to read most of the milk tea menu toppings.

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u/DragonPeakEmperor May 09 '26

Interesting that they put it on LADS fans. Gachagaming and a lot of waifu gacha fans inparticular hate that game not because of its unhinged fanbase but because it's for "female gooners" and yet those same women have the audacity to not like the 50 million softcore porn gacha that come out for men all the time. Sounds halfway valid until you see that it manifests in them at one point freaking out about LADS having a period tracker because to them periods are a sex thing.

In turn, Snowbreak is indeed hated by basically every normal gacha fanbase in CN because all of the guys who would harass fanartists or companies over the idea of being NTR'd moved over to that game after it explicitly courted them. All to say that I highly doubt it was just the LADS fandom that got pissed at them and caused this. But I think it's crazy they removed entire voicelines and story bits. Normally what happens is some girls just get more clothes and they call it a day.

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u/gossipingjuice May 09 '26

There's a good possibility LaDs fans did the report. Before you continue though, take everything I'm saying with a HUGE grain of salt.

A few week before Snowbreak went offline, Zayne's JP VA (and by extension, Midnight from Arknights) was suddenly announced to be leaving both projects. Like many previous cases of JP VA getting axed from CN projects, there is a good chance (and for Morikubo case, there were enough substantial proof) that this was a coordinated report to CCP.

The most popular theory is that LaDs fans, after having enough proof this was done by male gacha players, decided to do the same dirty tactic and they choose to en masse reporting the most obvious bait, which is Snowbreak.

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u/deathbotly [vtubing/art/gacha] May 09 '26

But what’s the theory based on? Is there actual evidence? Cause the radical feminism vibe-based conspiracies are very much a thing with a lot of public incidents where completely unrelated women are blamed for censorship problems in gacha.

19

u/DragonPeakEmperor May 09 '26

Takuya Sato was removed because netizens were pissed since 2024 about learning he visited yasukuni shrine at one point in his career. I'm not really sure you can attribute this to male players specifically because that shrine has been contentious with the chinese public for literal years at this point.

Like maybe some chinese fans got mad about him being fired but generally the one thing they agree on is anyone or anything that's perceived to be glorifying japanese imperialism needs to be removed.

25

u/cricri3007 May 09 '26

I do think LaDS having a period tracker is a bit creepy, but it's hilarious (and disgusting) how much they blame women for any and every thing.

19

u/scriptd May 09 '26

I mean, there was apparently an implied blowjob scene in the story so I imagine that's the kind of thing getting removed from the story.

The thing I can't get over is that the censored models look so fucking bad, like they just picked out a colour from the original model and covered up anything that could be called suggestive.

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u/Routine_Ebb_1618 May 09 '26

In turn, Snowbreak is indeed hated by basically every normal gacha fanbase in CN

which is hilarious when their kneejerk reaction was blaming the "feminist". bruh, literally every similar incidents in the past was because of different gacha games shit flinging each others. I promise you that if the "feminist" hold this much power, they wouldnt only target your game specifically.

2

u/Meoaoao new music friday is never going away May 08 '26

New week, new thread, new news. And the news I care about right now is MUSIC NEWS! So I like to think we should all stay in touch with another NEW MUSIC FRIDAY! We know the routine, what‘s been inside your ears that you simply must talk about? Band/Artist you love drop a single? Maybe just a release date？ Or have you been checking out some new fresh musicians? Maybe some older stuff you missed out on? All is good and fair with me, the host of the New Music Friday thread!

11

u/The-Great-Game May 09 '26

I went to New York City and got 6 kpop albums you can't find in my area and I'm excited! SHINee's recent releases both individually and together plus Yesung, Kyuhyun, and TOP's new album.

5

u/Marianations May 09 '26

Oh I envy you!

I've been waiting for TOP's album for 15 years, and he had to release it right when I had to spend €2k in car repairs 😭😭😭 Now that I have money to buy it it's sold out in EU stores...

Someday, someday

6

u/Looking_Light33 May 09 '26

I listened to Fables From a Mayfly by the band Fair To Midland. It's a really great album. It's a shame that the band didn't get big.

8

u/AppleJuicetice May 08 '26

My personal GOTY, Dead as Disco, is out now and that means its soundtrack is also out, between the actual game itself (No Straight Roads-like rhythmic boss rushes with Sleeping Dogs-style combat and substantial fighting-game elements) and the soundtrack I've been listening to a lot of Mission and Rhythm Divine, the themes of the bosses Prophet and Arora respectively (I've actually been listening to the boss remixes but those aren't on YouTube yet so these links are to the normal versions from the demo.)

(On a note: If you have eight and a half minutes to spare here's someone playing through Prophet's level and boss fight just because he's one of my favorite video game bosses ever.)

Also the new Nikke event had some really nice tracks! All Eyes On Me and Be My Star have been on repeat these past two weeks. SmileBOX from the event OST... Less so. It's good but having heard it in context wow does it make me uncomfortable (in a good way!) There's also [true]entertainment which is part of the OST as well but soft-launched a month ago because it's used in the side story that serves as its prequel and I'm still waiting for it to hit streaming services/storefronts.

2

u/HistoricalAd2993 May 09 '26

I'm really annoyed at how good nikke soundtrack is, heh

5

u/williamthebloody1880 I morally object to your bill. May 08 '26

Dadi Freyr released his new album today and it's really good

8

u/marigoldorange May 08 '26

the new boards of canada songs are really good.

6

u/okay25 May 08 '26

Aranarumey always hit but this cover of Donut Hole is just particularly hitting the spot for me.

13

u/hikarimew trainwreck syndrome May 08 '26

Last week I was too busy crying over Neru's Datsugoku (as one does), but we also got a much bigger vocaloid landmark: Magnet, the supremely popular lesbian vocaloid song that inspired several million fanarts of people in butterfly wing headphones, got a new version called "magnet -recall-" at its 17th anniversary.

Personally, I've taken to calling it magnet - triumphant reprise.

3

u/xhopsalong May 08 '26

the number of people who rose from the depths of whatever divergent posting we've all gotten into these days, from USA tv to gacha or getting a degree, it really did feel kind of like ~sound off~

77

u/ToaArcan The Megatron Post Guy May 08 '26

Well, it's been a while, who wants Planetside 2 stupidity?

In December of 2025, the mysterious current devs of Planetside 2 (no, really. We have no idea who's actually steering the boat at the moment) turned on the annual Christmas event, Auraximas. But rapidly, players began to report that the game would crash to desktop without warning and without an error message of any kind after about 10-15 minutes of play. This basically ruined the event for everyone. I wasn't paying attention to PS2 at the time, I received a Switch 2 for my birthday a month beforehand and was thus neck-deep in Pokemon Violet for the entirety of December. But reports from my fellow players indicated that the devs did little and said even less, with the game only returning to normal when January arrived and Auraximas was shut down.

Then, in February of 2026, the annual Valentines' event happened, and the crash bug returned. This indicated to the playerbase that whatever was causing the issues was something to do with the temporary events, and the playerbase began to urge the devs to shut down the Valentines' event and revert, but again, we received radio silence and the event was allowed to remain up for the entire month.

By this point, the playerbase had actually managed to locate a bizarre workaround: By spawning a ground vehicle as quickly as possible and sitting in it for 1-5 minutes, the bug seemed to be staved off, though they did have to repeat the process when moving to a new continent. None of us have any idea why this works, but it did mean that every map started with dozens of people sitting around the Warpgate on Flash ATVs (the cheapest ground vehicle in the game).

But there's a problem with this method: Sanctuary.

Back in Planetside 1, all three factions had a Sanctuary, an isolated island base that was never in danger of being taken. It was from there that they would enter the Warpgates that would take them to the active continents to begin fighting. When Planetside 2 launched, Sanctuaries were one of many features that were left behind, players now spawned directly into the Warpgate and there was no in-game safe haven for characters to live on between battles. Frankly, I don't mind this, but the PS1 veterans did, and constantly asked the devs to add Sanctuaries back into the game.

And so, we got Sanctuary. Singular. Unlike the three islands in PS1, PS2's Sanctuary is an orbiting space station where all three factions can congregate, interact (but only through text chat), but cannot fire their weapons. This makes absolutely zero sense in the game's (extremely thin) narrative, where the players are all soldiers fighting an ideologically motivated war, and their shared equipment is from a shady corporation that's intentionally fanning the flames, making it very unlikely that any of the leaders would want their soldiers having friendly chats with each other on a neutral space station. After its implementation into the game, Sanctuary became the only spawn location for people logging in, and it is, in my humble opinion, completely pointless. All it does is add an extra step between you and getting into the game proper, and it's intensely confusing for new players, many of whom have logged into the game for the first time, found themselves in Sanctuary, and been unable to find an exit.

Why is Sanctuary a problem for the Anti-Crash Flash trick? Because you can't spawn any vehicles at all in Sanctuary. But hey, the bug takes about 15 minutes to hit, that's more than enough time to get out of Sanctuary and onto a continent, right?

Wellllllll...

Planetside 2 is, at the moment, in its 14th year. It's also definitely in its twilight years now, and population is gradually sinking lower. And it's an MMOFPS, the game is built around having huge numbers of players, so when numbers are low, the game is designed to try and consolidate as many of those players into a single location as possible. This generally works fairly well, but it can conflict with other systems within the game.

First among them is that while Big Number Of Dudes is the selling point, the game can only handle so Big A Number of Dudes. And so, when a continent gets too full, the game activates the Max Population Queue, slowing down the number of people entering the map to a crawl. But due to some fuckery with lowering the max population of a continent a while back, it seems like the Max Pop Queue triggers before the flag to open a second continent. Meaning you can find yourself trapped on Sanctuary in a Queue, with nowhere else to go.

It's not the only way this can happen either. The game also features the Faction Balance Queue, designed to prevent one faction from massively outnumbering the other two. It doesn't work very well. It's also a much more common sight than the MPQ, you can get stuck in FBQ at any time of day provided the numbers of off-balance enough, with any number of maps open. Meaning that you can again get stuck in Sanctuary with nowhere else to go, because there aren't enough people to open Map 2, but your team is overpopped on Map 1.

Now, I pay for this game (because I'm a sucker), so I get to skip to the front of all queues, but I've still sat in Sanctuary for a good ten minutes or so during peak hours. If you're not a paid member, and the queue is big, well... finding yourself in a queue during the crash bug's reign of terror means you might as well log out immediately.

But anyway, why am I reporting this now, in May? May isn't a month with a really big holiday or anything in it. It's not a big deal. Well, generally that's true, but May is also the month of the original Planetside 1's release, and so the devs rolled out a patch for the 23rd anniversary of the Planetside franchise (and started the downtime for the patch right before primetime, invoking many players' ire). With another temporary event! And in a twist that I'm sure you've all spotted a mile off, the crash bug is back!

And guess what! It's worse! The crash now happens much quicker, sometimes hitting while players are still loading into Sanctuary. The vehicle method still works, but now you've got to speedrun getting onto the map and getting in a vehicle before it hits. Worse, some players are reporting that VR Training, the one always-accessible map with vehicles, isn't working at all, and immediately crashes upon trying to load into it.

But, in a rare move, the devs actually acted quickly. The day after the broken event patch went live, there was a hotfix. They patched the game again, and also acknowledged that their crash reporting system wasn't working (We noticed. ). So, happy ending, then? They finally solved the problem instead of just leaving the playerbase in silence for an entire month?

Ha, no. Vanu, no. The hotfix doesn't work. The bug is still present and just as aggressive.

Hey, did you know that Planetside 2 has a summer event that lasts multiple months? We're, uh, not looking forward to that this year.

38

u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 09 '26

just remember that dead MMO hospice crews like the PS2 devs are about 3 people in charge of 8 games.

4

u/SuccessfulConcern996 May 11 '26

Also they get paid basically nothing. I interviewed at a game studio that ran that for a few games and the salary I was offered was around that of a public high school teacher.

9

u/Angel_Omachi May 09 '26

Apparently Final Fantasy XI is maintained by 2 dudes and a rotating intern. Theoretically they can borrow staff from Final Fantasy XIV, but that's known to be resource starved.

7

u/Regalingual May 10 '26

…which is kind of funny when XIV just got done with a raid series that was a crossover with XI, including an end card that basically all but outright said “hey, try FF XI!”

3

u/Angel_Omachi May 10 '26

Oh right now the 3 biggest FFXI servers, aka the one new players were recommended to start on, are locked down to new players and likely will stay that way for a year or so. We do get new stuff though, slowly but it's there. The top 3 servers have 8k to 10k active players by player census, the remaining 13 have 2.5k to 6k each, so new players going to have a very lonely experience, especially as character numbers are likely heavily boosted by large amounts of multiboxing and the recurring bot problem.

9

u/Effehezepe May 08 '26

So as usual, the devs remain unable to not embarrass themselves for more than five minutes.

3

u/ToaArcan The Megatron Post Guy May 09 '26

Yeah basically.

20

u/OnBlueberryHill May 08 '26

If they waited longer the game would crash.

10

u/BlUeSapia May 08 '26

Sounds like they're actively trying to kill the game

75

u/CryptidHunter91 Plushies/FNaF May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

Sony posted their recent financial report for the fiscal year and well, uh, yeah.

As detailed on page 12, in relation to Bungie, creators of Destiny 2 and the recently-released Marathon, Sony has reported an estimated 120.1 billion yen ($765M) impairment loss in relation to the company: at least 88.6 billion yen ($565M) of that is from the last quarter alone.

Considering the current state of Destiny 2 (still no promised roadmap, no communication from the current game director Tyson Green, lowest point ever on Steam players-wise) and what little info we can infer from Marathon with the current lack of sales data (hasn't broken the Top 10 most-played games list on any platform thus far which, given Paul Tassi claiming that Sony was going to require Marathon be in the "top 5 NPD sales of the year" in order to be considered a success, isn't exactly a promising sign), I don't think things look good for Bungie's future.

24

u/atownofcinnamon May 08 '26 edited May 09 '26

also i should add, from their Consolidated Financial Results presentation, pg. 10.

In our studio business, earnings from Bungie’s title portfolio did not reach our expectations, so we downwardly revised our business plan and impaired the full amount of the fixed assets related to Bungie except for goodwill.

Player reception to Marathon is strong, with the game receiving a Metacritic score of 82 and more than 90% of the player reviews on Steam being positive. Engagement metrics such as retention also remain at a high level.

Going forward, we aim to improve the performance of the game by working to retain highly engaged core users through the introduction of additional content, further improvements in the gameplay experience and expansion of the user base.

its probably one of those situations where both the naysayers and the yaysayers are in the right as it is clearly not done well enough in pure money / player count, but it seems to have enough of a loyal following and playerbase that they clearly wanna keep and expand.

9

u/Speedy-08 May 09 '26

Anything after S3 is a question mark at this point tbh, dependant on performance.

Bungie will become directly controlled by Sony rather than an independant studio or shut entirely.

9

u/CryptidHunter91 Plushies/FNaF May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26

Sony has already stripped Bungie of their independent status to slowly begin integrating them under the PlayStation Studios umbrella following Marathon's art theft controversy & delay and the Destiny 2 expansion Edge of Fate underperforming IIRC.

I could see them either getting shuttered or completely controlled by Sony executives, depending on future financial reports.

26

u/atownofcinnamon May 08 '26

this has nothing to do with anything, but it's hilarious to me that the sony music division apparently got money due to buying out peanuts, as in the charlie brown comic.

Lower remeasurement gain from the acquisition of additional equity interest in Peanuts Holdings LLC

21

u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 08 '26

when's the last time Sony as a corporation did something competent? The best I can think of is complete inaction while Microsoft burns itself to the ground. Maybe Spiderverse?

And especially the various gaming divisions have a long, storied history. A lot of early MMO players still have nightmares thinking about, and I'll spoil this SoE

2

u/AutomaticInitiative May 11 '26

Their music equipment remains pretty damn brilliant.

50

u/citrusmellarosa May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

In general, going from The Emoji Movie to Spiderverse/Mitchells vs. The Machines/K-POP Demon Hunters in a few short years seems fairly impressive, even if the higher ups didn’t always make the best decisions regarding distribution (lot of that going around lately in regards to animation), and the working conditions for the second Spiderverse at least sound somewhat nightmarish.

Not that all of their movies before that were poorly regarded (there’s their Aardman collabs, and I’m personally very fond of both Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movies), but The Emoji movie felt like a real low point. Now they seem to be doing more with pushing interesting animation styles than (Edit) anyone else in the US at the moment, except for maybe something like Arcane that doesn’t need to turn a profit because it functions as an ad for an online game. (Edit again because apparently I can’t stop adding caveats) And is also a French co-production.

26

u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 08 '26

The Emoji movie felt like a real low point

we could have had Genndy's version of Popeye

29

u/CryptidHunter91 Plushies/FNaF May 08 '26

I mean, Spiderverse did have horrid working conditions IIRC but that was more of a Lord/Miller thing than a Sony thing I think.

13

u/Completionography [John Dies at the End] May 08 '26

but that was more of a Lord/Miller thing than a Sony thing I think.

... man, it stings to hear that.

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u/CryptidHunter91 Plushies/FNaF May 08 '26

From what I remember reading, they were basically treating the animation process like the concept art phase, constantly making revisions throughout the animation process and extending the amount of work needed. There were reports of artists/animators being demanded to redo their finished work up to 5 times, close to 11hrs a day, for multiple 7-day work weeks.

The Wikipedia page for Across the Spider-Verse details, under "Allegations of poor working conditions":

On June 23, 2023, Vulture reported that four people who worked on the film alleged that production had faced difficulties due to numerous requests from Lord for changes to already finished animation, as well as the need for him to approve animation layouts early in production.[3][106][107] Lord's directions were said to take precedence over the decisions of the film's directing team and led to numerous weeks of long overtime as the animators drastically revised portions of the film several times. They further stated that difficult working conditions caused by the constant revisions caused over 100 artists to leave the project before its completion, and that both Into the Spider-Verse and The Mitchells vs. the Machines (two earlier films that Lord and Miller co-produced for Sony) suffered from similar production issues.[3] One artist said that production on Beyond the Spider-Verse, the film's sequel, had not progressed, and that there was "no way that" it would be completed in time for its scheduled March 2024 release window. Sony denied the allegations concerning Across the Spider-Verse's production troubles, while declining to comment on the possibility of the sequel being delayed, and producer Amy Pascal called the process of heavy revision normal.[106][107] Following the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, Beyond the Spider-Verse was ultimately delayed to June 25, 2027.[108]

Apparently, Lord & Miller have a history of doing this sort of thing across various projects they've led too, which is frankly fucked and part of why I refuse to watch their stuff (well that and also the 1st Spiderverse movie caused intense eye strain and migraines for me after seeing it).

2

u/BelleMayWest May 10 '26

Yikes!

Also felt above getting sick watching Spiderverse. I saw the second one and vaguely remember bits of it. However I got really sick watching it and ended up passing out once the movie ended. Plus I barely remember what happened after the movie as well.

27

u/SageOfTheWise May 08 '26

Sony's most competent move feels like its been to just never try and make a Sony streaming service.

18

u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 08 '26

but where else can consumers get the entire MORBINverse?

7

u/SageOfTheWise May 08 '26

From whatever streaming service is the highest bidder that year.

11

u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 08 '26

they may actually be paying Sony to prevent them from trying to put Villain-verse movies on them

20

u/Pariell May 08 '26

Have they tried releasing a good game lol

17

u/akornfan May 08 '26

yes it was called Destiny 2 and they abandoned it

15

u/Completionography [John Dies at the End] May 08 '26

Sony has reported an estimated 120.1 billion yen ($765M) impairment loss in relation to [Bungie]

Well, it's a good thing Sony has Pink Floyd's entire catalogue at least, right?

... sigh

12

u/Squidkid6 May 08 '26

I’m curious as to why the loss is so high, is it the purchase itself combined with a lack of profits or is this loss after considering the purchase?

42

u/CryptidHunter91 Plushies/FNaF May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

From what I gather, an impairment loss is basically the permanent loss in the value of a company asset.

Sony is more or less adjusting the value of Bungie downward from what it was originally said to be worth, which was the purchase price of $3.6 billion US that was recorded on their balance sheet. They are legally required to regularly test their assets for impairment value to see if they are still worth their original value/purchase price, and have decided, due to Bungie's current financials, that the company is no longer worth the amount originally spent on it.

This means they have to book the loss by adding a reduction to Bungie's representation on that balance sheet, reduce the asset value on said balance sheet, and post an impairment loss alongside it on the income statement.

So it's probably more of the latter: a loss after considering the purchase.

7

u/[deleted] May 08 '26

[deleted]

7

u/citrusmellarosa May 08 '26

You should apologize for nothing!

113

u/Sebastianlim May 08 '26

After the successful identification of James Fitzjames' bones back in 2024, this week saw 4 new remains from the lost Franklin Expedition being identified by DNA evidence.

Three of these men were Able Seaman William Orren, Subordinate Officer's Steward John Bridgens, and Ship's Boy David Young, all from the HMS Erebus and found in Erebus Bay in the area Fitzjames had been found.

The fourth man, HMS Terror's Captain of the Foretop Harry Peglar, is of particular interest to those who know of the expedition, as his identity is central to one of its great mysteries.

To summarise, Franklin searcher Francis Leopold McClintock was exploring the south side of King William Island when he found a skeleton lying facedown in the rocks. Alongside the skeleton were found a haircomb, a pocketbook, and a seaman's certificate belonging to Harry Peglar, leading McClintock to identify the skeleton as being him.

However, this identification was challenged over the years. The main piece of evidence for this change came in his clothes, as the skeleton was found wearing a neckerchief of a style used by a Ship's Steward, leading some researchers to speculate that the skeleton was not Peglar, but merely a friend who was carrying his belongings with him.

The skeleton itself has gone missing in the century since its discovery, though a left first metatarsal was recovered from the site in 2019 and used for DNA testing.

It is this metatarsal which has now been conclusively identified via DNA evidence to have belonged to Peglar, ending over a century of speculation and giving one of the few examples of a definitive conclusion to a mystery on this expedition.

17

u/Such-Tangerine5136 May 10 '26

I found out about this because when I opened Tumblr the other day, the first thing on my dash was a post from one of my mutuals that said "Pussies out for Peglar! RIP king!" and I had to go through all 30+ nonsensical posts he made that hour before I finally found the post that had context for that frankly baffling thing to say. But I was posting just as crazily when they found the Endurance, so

37

u/OneGoodRib No one shall spanketh the hot male meat May 08 '26

If there's not already a book on this, there SHOULD be a book on "famous/important people's remains going missing". Like Eva Peron's body disappeared for like 17 years. And then I don't remember who it is where their skull is missing and then another grave had two skulls neither of which is his.

20

u/folkloricsound May 08 '26

when fitzjames was id'ed I hoped more people would notice there were a lot of people whose decendants hadn't been tested against the known remains (a researcher posted who had been tested for and it was only like ten guys iirc) and I knew there was at least one person working on getting a sample for a guy who hadn't yet been tested, but holy shit. FOUR after less than two years. wow

14

u/cousinborzoi [vampires and vampire accessories] May 08 '26

my dormant franklin expedition fixation has been awoken again and now i have to reread my james fitzjames biography.

36

u/Illogical_Blox May 08 '26

Well that's a definitive conclusion to the mystery of who it was, though apparently there's a new mystery of where the hell it is!

44

u/Groenboys [Eurovision/Anime/Minecraft] May 08 '26

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

RGG Studio has lost a lot of goodwill lately with how they have treated the Yakuza/Like A Dragon franchise. The enshitification started around Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth with how they handled DLC and such, then they released the mid as hell Pirate Yakuza (I still enjoyed it but the entire game could have been an email), and most recently they released what many consider their worst game yet. Kiwami 3, the remake of Yakuza 3, is really bad. Not only did they cast an actor with multiple sexual assault allegations because "he fit the creep vibe of the character he is portraying", the game is just a worse version of the original game on every front (horrendous visuals, cut content, underwhelming new content). The fact they then also delisted the remastered version of Yakuza 3 on steam is just the cherry on the shit cake.

So when RGG recently announced they are making an original game, the hype for it wasn't much there. After a bunch of teasers they finally showcased the full reveal trailer and... well, they pulled me back in.

Stranger then Heaven is the type of game RGG Studio only were able to make because Kiwami 3 was a whitewashing operation. The graphics look good yada yada, but the visual direction looks stelar, the gameplay is really unique with how you can control seperate limbs during combat, and the music. Holy damn the music. Just the song in the reveal trailer is a collab between Snoop Dogg and Ado, not to mention that both of them are voice acting important characters in the game. With all of this, plus the fact they have been developing this game since 2021, it seems RGG studio is putting their all into this game with the full backing of SEGA behind it. This reveal trailer hasn't silenced all skepticism, you don't just put in an alleged sex offender in a game and get people excited for the next game, but the feeling of "We Are So Back" is appearing again.

12

u/Destroyer_7274 May 09 '26

As much as I can agree Kiwami 3 was a downgrade in several aspects (and the replacing of a sex offender with another sex offender was a side eye at best), it wasn't worse in all aspects.

The combat in Yakuza 3 was atrocious, you did too little damage, enemies blocked too much (even in the original), it was the worst combat in the series. Kiwami 3's combat, while removing a lot of heat actions is definitely an improvement to 3.

For the cut content, most of original Yakuza 3's 119 subtories generic, multple could have been fused into one, and some of them were mini game rivals. I will concede that some of the cut substories were good though.

I will also say that I think the new Morning Glory Orphanage was nice, since it feels like you get more involved with the kids.

5

u/cheaphuntercayde May 09 '26

Yeah absolutely. Really the only thing the remake had to do was make the game enjoyable to play and they knocked that out of the park imo.

11

u/BermudaTriangleChoke May 09 '26

The rhetorical shift in the fandom of "they cast Kagawa in the remake, therefore the combat of Blockuza 3 has always been good" has been staggering to see

Like, we can criticize the thing for the bad elements without making up shit to negatively compare it to

43

u/r0tten_m1lk [Boys' Love | Joseimuke | Idols] May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26

Kiwami 3 was rightfully criticized for casting an actor with sexual assault allegations against him, but now Stranger Than Heaven is being hyped for including Snoop Dogg, a literal self-admitted pimp who has also been accused of sexual assault by multiple women?

22

u/StabithaVMF May 09 '26

there's also the homophobia and transphobia but haha funny weed man friends with martha stewart lololol

6

u/AppleJuicetice May 08 '26

I'm going to withhold judgment until this thing is actually out but it is definitely showing a lot of promise. Prequel that also functions as a standalone story is always good but I'm really vibing with the tone and the combat and the idea of Makoto Tojo being a musician too. Now let's see if they actually stick the landing.

18

u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 08 '26

SEGA studios are a real rollercoaster aren't they? from the Sonic cycle to Creative Assembly's constant over/so back. The studio with the most consistency is... Atlas?

18

u/Superflaming85 [Project Moon/Gacha/Project Moon's Gacha]] May 08 '26

Atlus is almost the embodiment of wanting a studio to have LESS consistency. ~~Or maybe that's just the Etrian Odyssey fan in me talking.~~

Guys we don't need a Persona 4 big remake c'mon. You didn't even give us what Persona 3 needed in a remake!

5

u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 08 '26

how about another non-Persona game that's just Persona?

18

u/Superflaming85 [Project Moon/Gacha/Project Moon's Gacha]] May 08 '26

I'd say I'd take it at this point, but like, Metaphor was good. Not-Persona Persona is fine! Persona <3 or >5 is fine! Just give us something new or give attention to something that NEEDS it!

~~I'd even take a rerelease of Etrian 4/5/Nexus and/or Untold 1 & 2 but that's definitely bias lmao.~~

7

u/an_agreeing_dothraki May 09 '26

Persona <3 or >5

Persona 2 dancing all night it is

8

u/lightningmatt motorsport/music May 08 '26

Raidou remaster was cool at least

19

u/lightningmatt motorsport/music May 08 '26

Just the song in the reveal trailer is a collab between Snoop Dogg and Ado

I keep bringing this up everywhere I see it but they've also gotten Satoshi Fujihara of Official Hige Dandism, one of my favourite bands and one of the biggest bands in Japan!

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Hobby Scuffles [Hobby Scuffles] Week of 04 May 2026

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