On Orson Scott Card, Superman, and Idiot Fanboys

Posted by MCM Zevin on February 16, 2013
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments
Adventures of Superman #1

Adventures of Superman #1

So, my Linkara article is taking its damn time getting finished but in the meantime there is something vastly more important to talk about concerning comics and stupid people on the Internet. I’m talking about the ongoing debacle of DC Comic’s digital first Adventures of Superman comic, which will open with a story by Orson Scott Card. Card has come under fire in recent years due his staunch opposition of gay rights as a member of National Organization for Marriage (NOM). While he has long since been public about his beliefs concerning homosexuality as the result of sexual abuse or “disturbing seduction.” His views didn’t come to the forefront until 2008 when Card described court judges in California and Massachusetts giving legal recognition to gay marriage as “the end of democracy in America” and said that “the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.”

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card

As a result, several retailers have announced that they will not carry Card’s issues of Adventures of Superman. Much has been said about Card’s own beliefs at this point and how buying the book (and thus encouraging DC Comics to continue their relationship with him) directly contributes to Card’s work with NOM. I’m not here to talk so much about that, I’m here to talk about the piss poor level of discourse that is on display from the comic fandom. Most notably the constant cries of censorship whenever the thought of an organized boycott is even remotely entertained.

It’s not censorship to refuse to buy a book we don’t like for whatever reason. I listen to people bitch and moan about why they won’t buy such and such new book for the pettiest of reasons and the first time someone refuses to buy a book for some reason that is bigger than comics the fans cry that we’re “the real bigots.”  If this was just people refusing to buy a Chuck Austen penned Superman book because Chuck Austen is teh sux none of you would so much as bat an eyelash. We have to keep the comics scene from talking about anything bigger than how much the newest issues sucks more than the last issue sucked and trying to figure out who can and can’t lift Thor’s hammer! We have to keep the fandom totally stagnant and vapid so that these people can immerse themselves forehead deep into it and pretend that the worst thing in the world is that Brian Michael Bendis is writing X-Men now! Right guys!?

It’s also a sad attempt to shame the boycotters by using their own language against them. We’re not bigots for refusing to buy something whose creator will likely turn around and use the money gained from the project to support an organization that forwards the cause of bigoty.

We’re not denying Card any work because, as it’s been pointed out before, it’s no huge task for him to find work. He could walk into almost any publisher in the country and get his book to the press because he’s a very well established Science Fiction writer with a large enough fanbase. His work is even going to be adapted into a major motion picture later this year. Any work DC Comics wouldn’t give him is just work someone else will give him.

It’s not censorship; you’ll still be able to buy the book if you want. Even if you’re someone like me who only has one local comic shop nearby and your shop refuses to carry it, it’s still a digital first book, so you’ll be able to get it before any of those shops have the opportunity to not put it on their shelves. Not to mention that none of the large scale online retailers have announced a refusal to stock it. If you want to buy it, fine, have at it, but we don’t have to and don’t want to and if that somehow changes DC’s mind on publishing future stories under Card’s pen, tough luck, that’s how the free market works. Even if the organized boycott is too small to make any meaningful difference, we still have a personal choice to buy or not to buy something for whatever reasons we choose.

And please understand that when you’re talking about this issue, you’re talking about something that exceeds comics. For the love of God, I don’t want to see this shit anymore.

Okay guys, human rights issues, enough of that, lets get down to business and talk about Crossovers!

Okay guys, civil rights issues, enough of that, lets get down to business and talk about crossovers!

Nobody in the real world gives a damn if you don’t want to buy Age of Ultron or still have your underwear in a bunch because Superman has a high collar now, so stop bringing your whiny BS into the discussion.

This is pathetic, disgusting, and shameful people. Most of these people are grown adults but can’t process thoughts beyond stupid adolescent garbage. I have never been more embarrassed to be a member of the comics fandom than I have been these last few weeks, and I was into this shit when I went public high school. Grow up already.

On a side note, I hope none of the individuals whose tweets I used mind me doing so, and I encourage you to follow all of those guys, comics fan or not, because they all have some pretty enjoyable tweets.

Doug Walker’s Birthday Gift to Man-Child Messiah

Posted by MCM Zevin on January 27, 2013
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , . 4 comments

1/22/13 was the one year anniversary of Man-Child Messiah, well, it’s when I registered the blog, the first posted content went up a few days later, but I digress, we don’t celebrate a baby’s birthday based on when it first spoke, so screw you guys.

Anyway, as you may remember, some months back I wrote an article reflecting on the end of the Nostalgia Critic and pondering where it all fell apart. Later I wrote a second article discussing the trailer for Doug Walker’s future project, Demo Reel and promised an article about that series in the near future that I never got around to writing. Now, as though part of some sick bizzaro birthday gift, this happened on our one year anniversary…

Doug has announced that he is ending Demo Reel a mere 3  months after its launch and reviving the Nostalgia Critic, albeit with some stipulations, namely that the series will try to rely less on repetitive memes, update only every two weeks as opposed to weekly, and throw out the cut off date so that any material is fair game for a review. What I found most amusing about the video is that pretty much every word of my original article is addressed in some form or another, right down to the comparisons to Lindsay Ellis. At most, Doug has seen my article; at the very least this video serves as more or less a confirmation that I was right.

If Doug does somehow ever read this, I’d like to pass along this one piece of advice; branch out. I know in this video you talk a lot about your love of film, but film is only one of a multitude of mediums and none of these exist in a vacuum. The tropes and conventions of film influence and are influenced by the world around it and by putting something other than film under the microscope you’ll expand your show’s frame of reference and open the doors to a more interesting discussion of your subject matter, film included.

I know your typical output is far less substantial than what I’m suggesting but if you’re going to take longer between videos so that you don’t have to rely on tired jokes and forced memes, then why not make your show more informative so that you don’t have to be constantly pushing out jokes in the first place. Hell, if anything the failure of Demo Reel proves that your popularity isn’t necessarily because your fans think of you of you as a comic genius. You claim to love film so why not show that off a little more instead of trying to fit as many memes into a 30 minute long plot synopsis of a movie most people never cared about.

The thing I’ve always found most infuriating about your material is that you’ve consistently shown that you can do all of that but you’ve also shown that you’re either too lazy or too strapped for time to really commit to it, which is worse than outright incompetence in my book. Red Letter Media has proven you can have jokes in a serious film review, so why not, right?

Feel free to prove me wrong but I seriously doubt any of that will happen though. I can’t see this resulting anything more than a more polished version of the turd we were getting for the last four years. To go full comic geek on you here; To Boldly Flee is Onslaught to Demo Reel’s Heroes Reborn but I somehow I doubt that we’ll be getting something comparable to Kurt Busiek’s run Avengers out of all this nonsense…

Gamer Rants #1: Greatest Shits

Posted by MCM Zevin on January 13, 2013
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , . 5 comments

So, when I was writing my Fanboy May Cry article, I forwarded the link to the video the article was built around to a friend for a laugh who responded within seconds with “That AlphaOmegaSin guy makes really bad videos.” Realizing that I could very well have stumbled upon a material goldmine, I quickly began digging through his back catalogue to see where I could take this. Sure enough one video in particular caught my eye…

Oh man, where do I start!? Most people don’t realize this because they have a life, but a lot of videogame collectors do not like having Greatest Hits/Players Choice/Platinum Hits copies of games in their collection, largely because the “black label” copies tend to be harder to obtain and therefore more valuable/desirable from a collector’s standpoint. All that is fine, buy what you want, I collect video games too, so I get it, at least this far I do. However AlphaOmegaSin takes it all a step further declaring that IT SHOULDN’T EXIST BECAUSE IT LOOKS DIFFERENT ON MY SHELF AND MY OCD DOESN’T HAVE TO TAKE THIS FUCKIN’ BULLSHIT! I’M A SERIOUS COLLECTOR DAMMIT! YOU CAN SUCK MY DICK!

I’ll get to the big reasons why pretty much everything he’s saying is total dog shit in a bit but first I need to point out that this is not an isolated occurrence, it’s a pretty common sentiment amongst my fellow collectors that because they don’t want a greatest hits copy of a game, that the line shouldn’t exist at all. Hell, AlphaOmegaSin isn’t even the only person who posted a video about it; he’s just the most competent one. Don’t believe me?

“I’m a perfectionist” he says as he uploads a video where he spends the entire 2:25 running time not looking at the camera instead of just taking the time out of his life to rerecord it. Also the comments reveals this gem!

HAHA, what a laugh riot! The biological functions of women are a mystery to me!

LOL, what a laugh riot! The biological functions of women are a mystery to me!

I love this guy’s dramatic reenactment of the meeting in which the greatest hits packaging is conceived. Apparently the console wars are just a conspiracy perpetuated by greedy men of ambiguous ethnicity. Mass Effect and Resistance were developed by the same people! In all fairness though, the rest of this guy’s videos aren’t that bad.

GREATEST HITS! THE TERROR OF ALL! BTW CHECK OUT MY SKYRIM COLLECTORS EDITION!

Why does this matter this much? Gamers are the most entitled bunch of whiny brats ever and this instance is no exception. If it is not made for them, the TRUE HARD CORE GAMERZ, then why fucking bother making it!? A common complaint being leveled at the packaging is that it “looks different” that it “sicks out like a sore thumb” or that “you can see it from a mile away.”

NO SHIT SHERLOCK!

The whole point of the packaging is to stick out and give visual cues to less dedicated gamers that the game they’re looking at is:
1.) Popular enough to have sold X number of copies
2.) Generally cheaper than the rest of the games on the shelf.

It’s an entry level line of games people; they’re not made for you. The lines exist for new and casual gamers to find good games at cheap prices without having to put a whole lot of research into it. Back when I finally went Sony, I cut my teeth on a ton of PS1 games like Xenogears and Metal Gear Solid, which were readily available thanks to the greatest hits line and will likely always be easy to get for future generations of entry level retro gamers because people like you treat them as some sort of abomination.

Furthermore, the existence of a Greatest Hits copy of the game does not somehow deny you a standard release copy of the same game. Sure, you can say it makes the standard release copies harder to find, but guess what…

WELCOME TO THE THRILLING WORLD OF A COLLECTOR’S HOBBY!

There is no reason to collect things if you only ever have to put zero effort into it. Part of the thrill of the hobby being able to have things most people won’t have. A standard release copy of whatever is still out there and just because your local Game Stop or Walmart doesn’t have them anymore doesn’t mean you can’t hit up a few pawn shops and flea markets and find them with a little patience. Sure you might have to pay a little more but if that bothers you I’ll direct you to bold, underlined text above (which I’m sure bothered you because it’s not uniform with the rest of the article) and also add that if you insist on partaking in a hobby that you can’t actually afford, you probably have bigger self-control problems going on in your life than a fucking green label on a PS1 game could ever hope to match.

Like I said earlier, it’s okay if you want the black label copies but stop acting like the industry has to bend over backwards to accommodate people like your niche when most people don’t give two shits either way about the packaging and will just buy the game either way it comes to them.

(Alternative title for this article: “Black Label Society”)

What Happens at MAGFest, Stays at MAGFest (Unless You Streamed It.)

Posted by MCM Zevin on January 6, 2013
Posted in: Articles. 2 comments

Something went down at MAGFest this year.

What was it and how is it going to be dealt with? Are the people involved going to be held responsible? Who the fuck really knows because pretty much everyone with room to talk about it have decided that mum’s the word, to what I would say is the detriment of their community.

To my understanding, piecing information from numerous tweets together, several content producers from the website Reviewtopia were having a party, the party was being streamed as part of one producer’s live stream called “Sinner Radio.” The party had apparently got a little rowdy, a drunk girl’s top came off and she was felt up and made out with by another male content producer, all for the Sinner Radio viewing audience to see.

Again, this information is gleaned almost mostly from he said she said sources. What I do know is this; many members of the audience were offended, several of Reviewtopia’s content producers have stepped down because they no longer want to be associated with the site, and that Reviewtopia’s official Twitter/Facebook page says the following…

Who was doing the tweets again?

Whoever was in control of their twitter account at the time was sober enough to know what was going on and didn’t do anything.

Followed by…

Boobs and Booz3

As of writing this I've seen no official statement and it's almost been a full day. As of writing this I’ve seen no official statement and it’s almost been a full day.

And then the host of Sinner Radio says this…

Damage control in 140-characters or less!

Damage control in 140-characters or less!

Listen, I’m not asking that we drag names into this but what I am saying is that the Internet reviewing community, especially the folks at Reviewtopia, have found themselves in a very adult situation where they have an opportunity to talk about what their community deems suitable and what sort of material and people they as a community are willing to tolerate.

I don’t know how it’s going to be handled, but I think it’s time to have a bit of honest, respectful, dialogue about the situation, don’t just be hush hush about where things are going, issue your little 140-character-or-less apologies, and hope the whole thing blows over in time for your next round of convention appearances. It’s time to engage you community and take responsibility for what happened on your site and how it made members of your audience feel. Take real, tangible action for once.

And yes, this is an issue for the community. If this was something that had occurred in private between two adults then it should stay private, but this occurred on a livestream associated with Reviewtopia and offended member’s of their audience and should be handled in a way that reflects the desires of that audience.

P.S. Yes, I know that the name of the “male content producer” in question is well known at this point, but if you’re really interested, it’s not that hard to find. I’m not naming names here.

Fanboy May Cry

Posted by MCM Zevin on December 31, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments
Apparently this is SRS FUKIN BZNZ

Apparently this is SRS FUKIN BZNZ

Not too long ago the demo for DmC, the newest entry in Capcom’s Devil May Cry series, was released. DmC has been on my radar for some time as developer Ninja Theory gave us what I consider to be one of my favorite action games of the current console generation, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. However, I quickly learned that excitement for a game based on its developers impressive previous work was going to make me the laughingstock of all the Gamestops in the land. See, what matters most in game design and life is how much the protagonist of your game resembles a character design from 11 years ago. In the time since its reveal, DmC has spawned one of the most idiotic shitstorms in the history of gamerdom’s petulant whining, stemming almost entirely from a series of complaints concerning the reinvention of series protagonist Dante. Myself, I’m not partial to either character design, though I enjoyed the original games and look forward to this one, but scant few things rub me the wrong way more than a bunch of fanboys propping up their disapproval of something like it’s some kind of video game vigilante justice.

So I was originally going to just run down a list of generic complaints leveled at the game and address them one by one but I wanted to put a video in the article to illustrate how whiny this shit was, then I found this video and holy fucking shit, how could I not scrap 1,000+ words and start over?

First I want you to realize something; the men in this video are grown adults. These aren’t teenagers using some AV equipment they checked out from their high school, these guys are grown ass men doing this shit. The first three minutes and some change are occupied by a hilariously ill-conceived music video for metal song about how awful the NuDante is. It’s true “must see to believe” caliber shit if I ever saw it. I love how half the time this jackoff moves around you see a faint, green glow around him. BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE GREEN FLAME! TREMBLE IN FEAR CRAPCOM AND NINJA THEORY, YOUR CRIMES AGAINST DANTE WILL NOT GO UNPUNISHED! Seriously though, if you can’t be bothered to do your green screen right, why bother? Why not just record this in your garage or in front of you video game shelf to assert your gamer cred, God knows you’ll need to whatever cred you can get after uploading this video.

What’s even better is that you can download the song on New Grounds!

This touches me deeply, DanJohansen-sama!

Once the three minute mark rolls around the video shifts to a rant from a guy who calls himself AlphaOmegaSin. AlphaOmegaSin’s channel describes his content as “Nerd Rage at Its F*ckin Finest” which is what I call “d*mning with faint praise”, but whatever.

I may hate his video, but his collection is pretty nice...

I may hate his video, but his collection is pretty sweet…

In the first few seconds of his portion of the video he claims that there is “a lot of fucking shit” he could say that “hasn’t already been said already” a bold claim considering that this video came out before the demo so there is a significantly smaller pool of topics he could talk about. Okay, hit us!

Just kidding! He’s full of shit! Most of the video is just him calling NuDante an emo faggot. He makes some jokes about NuDante slitting his wrists because, hey, that was clever back in 2004 and that was a great year for video games, so it must be a great year for jokes too! He also complains that the creative director at Ninja Theory doesn’t like the same things as him so fuck that guy and then goes on to call Ninja Theory a “cluster fuck of faggots” who “need to be destroyed” and claims that he doesn’t “give a fuck if you have to drop a fucking bomb on them” because he’s a fucking dipshit who lacks perspective. Finally he claims Ninja Theory has only made “half-assed fucking efforts” because, you know, the reviews for Enslaved weren’t overwhelmingly positive or anything, but I guess that game didn’t have the requisite amount of skull fucking or some shit. (I imagine he or his viewers would tell me that fucking video game reviews are all written by fucking faggots and are bought and fucking paid for just because they’re so fucking edgy and fuck the fucking system man, but I would in turn ask him why Namco didn’t bother funneling money into the reviews of their other big release that year, Splatter House, which fared much worse critically.)

However, if you dig through all the homophobia, bitching about emo scene bullshit that hasn’t been relevant in at least 5 years/isn’t present in the game despite what this dumb ass wants you to think, and calling for the death of the developer via airstrike there is a single thread that runs through his entire rant. Around the six minute mark he gives the game away when he says “Quite fucking frankly, I cannot stand the fact that they’re ruining shit like this, that I’ve grown up with, that I’ve loved over the years.” There is it kids, it’s not that NuDante is bad, it’s that NuDante isn’t the old Dante that he “grew up” (debatable) with. I FUCKING HATE IT WHEN THINGS ARE NEW AND DIFFERENT!

He closes out by saying that if you like this game you’re not a TRUE FAN which is about as low a bar as you can set for games commentary. It’s a petty attempt to denigrate people’s enjoyment of something and will only matter to complete jack offs who care about the most trivial nerd culture bullshit anyway. Who gives a fuck if I’m a TRUE FAN or not? I never really considered myself a Devil May Cry fan to begin with despite me enjoying two of them. I certainly don’t see myself writing “TRUE Devil May Cry FAN” on a job application and then not getting the job when the interviewer asks me if I liked DmC, so go ahead dumb ass, take my TRUE FAN card, I don’t want it anyway. Seriously, grow up.

Listen, I’m not saying that you have to like NuDante, I’m just saying this shit doesn’t matter. If DmC has moved the series in a direction you don’t like, okay, move on. Shit likes that happens all the time. There is life after Devil May Cry guys. You don’t have to cling to it like a child. You got a few good games that you enjoyed out of it, be happy you got that much, new franchises will come along and fill the void.

The Problem with “Gangnam Style” Parodies.

Posted by MCM Zevin on December 16, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment

Okay, we all know what “Gangnam Style” is, right? Jordan Hass already did and article on it and he said he was late to the party then. That was almost a month ago, so I’m doing this only because I can make some broader point about Internet memes and YouTube content. “Gangnam Style” is already old hat for a lot of people but nevertheless it persists. I still see it posted on my Facebook feed every day, new parody videos, videos of various television broadcasters doing the dance on air because that’s what the people demand, all that shit.

In case you’ve not seen the original, here it is…

This has been the big thing to go out and parody this year, remember “Friday”? “Gangnam Style” is this year’s “Friday”, but magnified because I think “Friday” took a hell of a lot longer to start showing up on my TV and I sure as shit never heard it on my radio.

Now there are parody videos everywhere about every topic; Gundams, condoms, Mitt Romney, everything. Hell, there is even “Spartan Highschool Style” which is basically the best thing ever. I hope to see more high quality shit from Spartan Highschool.

Here is the problem with these parodies though; “Gangnam Style” is already a joke. I imagine people looked at the video, with the funny Asian man doing all these strange things and just assume it’s all just another weird artifact of Asian culture, like Japanese game shows and Anime, but those people are probably missing the point.

Gangnam is an actual place in South Korea with a reputation for being incredibly rich and high class. The reason the video is so silly and weird is because it’s supposed to be setting up a contrast between the low class, crude humor of the video and the high class lifestyle the song discusses. It’s already a joke guys, and it probably carries a bit more weight to it than most of parody videos it spawned (which isn’t much, but certainly more than any of the videos it spawned.)

I never miss an opportunity to rip on the works of directing duo Seltzer and Friedberg of Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans infamy. There are a lot of reasons to dislike their directorial work but I think the fatal flaw of any of their films is that they have an adolescent, baseline understanding of parody. Parody at its best reveals something about the original work, but the Seltzer and Friedberg school of parody seems to be as follows;

1. Select a popular film, or handful of popular films.
2. Have worse actors reenact scenes from those movies while injecting pop culture references in the place of jokes. (i.e. Having a Liam Neason stand-in save his daughter thanks to an app on his iPhone 5, with the Apple logo prominently featured.)

It’s a simple enough tactic and some people have made it work, but in the hands of Seltzer and Friedberg it falls flat. That’s what I see happening with a lot of the “Gangnam Style” parodies and Internet parodies in general for that matter (Suburban Knights anyone?) the joke isn’t some kind of statement on the work in question, it’s “hey, wouldn’t you get some sweet LOLs if we took something you know about and put it in this other, unrelated thing you know about?”

But like I said before, “Gangnam Style” is already a joke. So not only are the parodies lazily built around the joke that things exist in the same universe as “Gangnam Style”, but they get to coast on the humor already present in the original “Gangnam Style” video. The reason you are laughing at these parody videos is because the original video is funny, not the parody.

This brings me back to “Spartan High School Style” and why I think it is unironically brilliant. However unintentional it may be, “Spartan High School Style” is the dark reflection of every “Gangnam Style” parody ever made. The video shows exactly how stupid you look when you try to get famous with a shitty parody of whatever new viral video has hit big on the web; you look like “Spartan High School Style”.