When has something been too mean-spirited or cruel for you to enjoy?
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EvilQuest comes to mind, picked it up expecting a kind of tongue-in-cheek approach to playing the villain akin to Overlord but it's not. It takes itself 100% serious with very little fun to it's premise and that kind of killed my enthusiasm to continue playing it. Glad I got it on discount when I bought it.
But remember that GTA 5 is the way it is because GTA 4 was not as whacky and have crazy and varied missions as the the PS2 games. They were trying to hard to be realistic.Casual Shinji said:
And please 5 is not Cartoony like San Andreas and Vice City?!
Did we even played the same fucking games? Trevor was piloting a military class transpot aircraft ajnd he got shot down by fighters. And he tried to steal a nuclear weapon to sell the China or Korea.
Carl Johnson of San Andreas snuck into Area 51 to steal an experimental jet pack and he stole a Harrier class Jet from an Aircraft Carrier.
The shit you do in GTA San Andreas and 5 would make you enemies of the state and I am amazed that no military rainbox six like team did not bust through CJ and Trevor's door.
That seems like kind of a broad swath.Phasmal said:
It's likely going to depend from person to person, but mean-spriritedness isn't about whether you feel attacked for your ideals and opinions, but whether you can sense that certain ugliness permeating throughout a story. This doesn't even have to be anything deliberately controversial, it can something as simple as a scene in Jurassic World where someone dies in a way that makes you feel extremely uncomfortable eventhough there's no blood or gore whatsoever.
You can have a story about horrible people doing horrible things and still make it not mean-spirited, or even make the characters themselves relatable and likeable. The Witcher 3 has a drunken wife beater who you actually grow to symphatize with and even like. The Sopranos is filled with homophobic, racist, male chauvinists... And yet you like them, despite heavily disagreeing with them, because they're well-written and well-balanced characters.
It's not what's being said or who's being targeted, it's how it's being said.
You should really check out extra histories videos on the first crusade - one element of the Peoples Crusade couldn't wait to get to the holy land before killing people, so began slaughtering Jews along the way and looting their belongings.Hades said:
Not too bothered about what mean spirited media is or if something appears insulting. Just try reading the news and history every now and then to see that nothing can seem as pointless as the actions of many of our own species. It appears people only dislike mean spirited media if they feel personally attacked by it, or if it feels like the creator had no other motive other than to revel in offense. I get the impression with GTAV that a lot of US gamers didn't like a detailed mirror being held up to their society and took it personally, even if the message is not as harsh as they would assume. Some get too invested in the idea of hope and happy endings, of complete stories that end so you never have to worry about those characters ever again. Throw away characters, their services are no longer required for distraction so get happy and bugger off, or bugger off before things start getting bad again, that way we can remain happy and feel less guilty of our indulgences. Decay, entropy, chaos, confusion...we got it all, folks...now are we going to do something good with it or cry in the foetal position until someone comforts our shivering frame into a soft sleep? Wait, i cannot remember my original point, damnit! Heavy weekend, sorry!
Yes, it happened at times...
The latest example is BvS. I just couldn't take the whole cynicism and mopey of the entire movie. You have to give "credit" to something so miss developed as to make Superman and his extended family a bunch of nihilistic bastards... Batman I understand, he was never the most balanced and sane character to begin with, but here is Ma Kent hammering the point that he should tell everybody to "fuck off", even Perry White would be hard pressed to pass a EQ test.
The latest example is BvS. I just couldn't take the whole cynicism and mopey of the entire movie. You have to give "credit" to something so miss developed as to make Superman and his extended family a bunch of nihilistic bastards... Batman I understand, he was never the most balanced and sane character to begin with, but here is Ma Kent hammering the point that he should tell everybody to "fuck off", even Perry White would be hard pressed to pass a EQ test.
Knowing that he writes utter trash, I nonetheless read a few Peter F Hamilton books. They pass the time if you're not looking for something particularly complex.
There was a collection of short stories in which one of the characters killed another to get out from under something. Unfortunately the whole affair was handled with such a lack of intelligence and even basic decency by the characters that I just felt disgusted by the whole deal. Haven't read anything by him since.
I guess I just dislike bad things happening to people in an unfixable way. Like I get stories that occasionally have bad things in them, but happiness has to win in some form at the end. Can't be too close to torture porn.
There was a collection of short stories in which one of the characters killed another to get out from under something. Unfortunately the whole affair was handled with such a lack of intelligence and even basic decency by the characters that I just felt disgusted by the whole deal. Haven't read anything by him since.
I guess I just dislike bad things happening to people in an unfixable way. Like I get stories that occasionally have bad things in them, but happiness has to win in some form at the end. Can't be too close to torture porn.
I found Joe Abercrombie's First Law series ultimately too mean-spirited and cynical. I appreciated the inversion of the typical fantasy tropes, but it was three books of slogging misery that culminated in that misery being greatly reinforced. At almost every level, on every scale of the books, it was mean. It wasn't bad, in fact it was very good, but I wasn't able to enjoy the experience.
Who wonders that?RaikuFA said:
It doesn't help that he's less of a storyteller, and more of a depressive preacher.Nemmerle said:
That was a very, very tough movie but it was a serious adult movie. I don't recall women in the movies being particularly mean, making the men all the crueler by comparison.Ihateregistering1 said:
For me, I was truly shocked at "The Killing Joke".
I tried reading some recent Batman comics that were gross dark and stupid (Joker having his own face cut off) Stupid. But The Killing Joke is quality. Alan Moore writing it, Brian Boland doing the visuals.
It was terrific and that is the problem. This is Batman. Did it have to be that outrageously dark? I honestly had to ask myself back in the day if they went too far. I do appreciate that Moore stated this was an "Elseworlds" tale. Too bad it has largely been made cannon.
This?RaikuFA said:
I don't see "I look forward to the day when the internet collectively loses its hate boner for Tumblr. People disliking something because someone else likes it is a textbook example of being a child." as being an equivalent to, "Acting like no one on tumblr has ever done anything wrong."erttheking said:
Ryallen said:
It may interest you both that the video in question was being plastered all over the Internet with the intention of identifying the girl. It paid off, and she was eventually prosecuted for animal abuse.Spider RedNight said:
Jurassic part took me by surprise.
I mean, the original trilogy had some iconic deaths to characters. Unceremoniously to background characters (mostly park rangers or people with weapons who at least had a way of defending themselves) and then some of the more shocking ones, which are the films way of showing you how dangerous the dinosaurs are... From the kid with the sandwich in the river, to the lawyer on the toilet, to the specialist hunter being outsmarted by raptors, they are all memorable.
There was something about the death of the assisstant in Jurrassic World that really didn't sit well with me though. She was a defenceless character who was dicked to look after the 2 nephews, one of which was almost as old as she was. When she finds them missing she then spends hours of her life running around looking for them, probably panicking that she will lose her job if she doesn't find them. Imagine her relief when she finally finds the boys only to then be grabbed by some flying beasties, thrown around a bit, dropped in a water tank and then eaten whole by a massive beastie! The whole bit is so long that the trauma she experiences must be way beyond that of any other character's death.
This part stayed with me for a while, only for me to then realise that no other character mentions it... ever... for the rest of the film. She is the assisstant to a high ranking person at the park, so you can assume that she is doing well for herself, and the person she is assisstant to trusts her with her own nephews (notwithstanding the fact she failed to look after them herself) so you can assume that she is at least liked... but nope. Nothing. No one mentions it.
I always feel properly bad for her...
I mean, the original trilogy had some iconic deaths to characters. Unceremoniously to background characters (mostly park rangers or people with weapons who at least had a way of defending themselves) and then some of the more shocking ones, which are the films way of showing you how dangerous the dinosaurs are... From the kid with the sandwich in the river, to the lawyer on the toilet, to the specialist hunter being outsmarted by raptors, they are all memorable.
There was something about the death of the assisstant in Jurrassic World that really didn't sit well with me though. She was a defenceless character who was dicked to look after the 2 nephews, one of which was almost as old as she was. When she finds them missing she then spends hours of her life running around looking for them, probably panicking that she will lose her job if she doesn't find them. Imagine her relief when she finally finds the boys only to then be grabbed by some flying beasties, thrown around a bit, dropped in a water tank and then eaten whole by a massive beastie! The whole bit is so long that the trauma she experiences must be way beyond that of any other character's death.
This part stayed with me for a while, only for me to then realise that no other character mentions it... ever... for the rest of the film. She is the assisstant to a high ranking person at the park, so you can assume that she is doing well for herself, and the person she is assisstant to trusts her with her own nephews (notwithstanding the fact she failed to look after them herself) so you can assume that she is at least liked... but nope. Nothing. No one mentions it.
I always feel properly bad for her...
- Apr 1, 2009
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Im going to say call of duty modern warfare 3. There is a part in the campaign where you are attacking a russian open pit mine, you take control of a drone and missile the crap out of people there. At the end of it the drone missiles a door and you storm this area to save the president. There are a bunch of shell shocked guys stumbling around, instead of taking them prisoner or something you are expected to shoot them, if you don't your ai teammates will. At this point in the campaign I'm kinda feeling battle fatigue anyway so the killing of enemies who are unable to fight back just makes me feel unpleasant even if I'm not the one doing it.
Whats really interesting is that I've replayed the campaign a few times and things always end up the same at that point, and the last 20 min of the campaign just becomes a slog to finish up.
Whats really interesting is that I've replayed the campaign a few times and things always end up the same at that point, and the last 20 min of the campaign just becomes a slog to finish up.