I will remind everyone that the best thing to do at this point is simply not engage with this shit at all on social media. These people are used to being hated and they crave it because it feeds them attention.
What they can't handle is indifference. I guarantee you if the discourse on social media just stopped dead (as in people just stopped talking about the game whether negatively or positively), these people would have psychotic breakdowns.
Even their ball-washing supporters thrive on it now. They're in it more for the fight than the actual enjoyment of the Corporate Slop Product of the Week™ they're defending valiantly. I can't believe I'm still seeing people unironically use the word "incel" in describing even a milquetoast critique of a bland-looking game.
Just saying "the female lead is unappealing and I don't want to play as her" is enough to trigger that reaction. That's not a fan or even a fanatic. That's just an SJW still stinging from fucking Gamergate looking to carry on fighting. I don't believe any of these people will actually buy the game (at launch or a year later on sale), much less finish it. Even the ones insisting they will "to own the chuds" are lying.
I want some fucking gravitas when it comes to stories.
Modern writers (of all kinds, whether it's movies, TV shows, games, books, whatever) are fucking
allergic to making permanent changes in their works of fiction. They're terrified of losing "popular" elements (be it a character, a setting, a planet, a space station, etc.) they can never get back or replace, because it forces them to create something new (or work out plotlines and ways for the characters and story to move on without those elements), and of course there's the burning drive to create "universes" that can be milked for decades instead of standalone stories or self-contained series.
J. Michael Straczynski built an incredible universe with Babylon 5 (unmatched even today, IMHO, just in terms of writing quality overall, barring a few stinkers), but he had the balls to literally
blow the titular space station to pieces in the series finale and set it firmly in canon that yes, it was an iconic place that launched a million good stories and played a pivotal role in a galaxy-wide life-changing war, but ultimately it outlived its usefulness and became a relic whose demise was cemented for the banal reasoning of it being a simple "navigation hazard."
And they blew that fucker blew up good. No time warps to protect it or "throw it out of our time into the past/future" (that was Babylon 4's fate
), no last-minute save by an old general who comes out of retirement to demand Earthgov rescue it, no effort to "buy" it and turn it into a museum, nothing. Just "overload the reactor, set off the secondary charges and run like hell." Ivanova's closing voiceover even says "Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations. There would never be another." And you knew she (and by extension JMS) fucking meant it.
No modern writer would ever
dare do that. Everything's left "open ended" now by every god damn "IP." Mass Effect never destroyed the Citadel (and even Earth was "salvageable" after the reapers invaded). Stargate SG-1 was canceled and went out with a wet fart (the movies just killed off the Ori but the stargates, the SGC, and SG-1 themselves were all status-quo), Stargate Atlantis ostensibly ended with the titular city just ... fucking lifting off its home planet, flying through intergalactic space somehow and winding up fucking parked off the god damned coast of San Francisco overlooking the Golden Gate bridge and Stargate Universe ended with unceremonious cancellation on a dull cliffhanger.
I was never a Game of Thrones fan (that shit's dreadfully boring to me) but I was genuinely shocked when I saw people talking about the ending and I learned they actually
did kill off important people and actually
ended plotlines (apparently very poorly, but props to them for saying "yeah, this story is officially fucking
done now"). That took guts. Very rare today.
Kurtzman's flavor of Trek (like in the Kelvin timeline, for instance) is no better either -- everything's reversable and subject to the "grand reset button." In the three Kelvin timeline films the Enterprise gets its ass kicked in each one (and is destroyed within I think the first ten minutes of the third film) but it's always all patched up and shiny-new in the next installment (I'm pretty sure if there'd been demand for a fourth Kelvin timeline film they'd have just added a "-A" to the ship's registry and slapped it on a new one like they did for Star Trek V: The Voyage Home at the end).
They're terrified to stray from a working formula or creating anything new, so they cling so desperately to "what currently works," even if it's actively
not working so well anymore because it's turning into endless rehashes.
