Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 2)

[Boredfrom]

Why even publish it a Gamespot? Like washing poetics to justify fetishes is an old essay tradition, but they are not usually published by a vidja website that is not hipster central. 


Is the website so desperate to publish shit like this:

Gamespot: “guys, we need to do articles celebrating Resident Evil anniversary. Any ideas?”

 : “I like seeing Leon getting hurt.”

Gamespot: “Perfect, kids will love it.” 

Other: “Rebecca and Jill are cute.”

Gamespot:

https://youtu.be/oHNtMumZdIg?si=V-FeWBIVRCdFkYZe

[wsippel]

"She creates for herself and for freaks like her" says a lot about Gamespot's current target demographic.

[Uncle]

new game for totally normal people who view 50% of the US population as fascist nazi chuds

"what do you mean, this game implies I want to kill you? it's about killing nazis! does that mean you consider yourself a nazi?" 

[Nintex]

Can't they all just admit that Forspoken was just Square Enix being Square Enix?

At this point the landfill of their flops is an environmental disaster by itself.

[Besticus Maximus]

Can't they all just admit that Forspoken was just Square Enix being Square Enix?

At this point the landfill of their flops is an environmental disaster by itself.

Forespoken was just the Jeremiah to Concord’s Herod.

[Uncle]

[HaughtyFrank]

Can't they all just admit that Forspoken was just Square Enix being Square Enix?

At this point the landfill of their flops is an environmental disaster by itself.

One might argue they're even doing diversity a disservice by claiming that it only failed because the protagonist is black. That it would have failed no matter the skin and gender of the main character seems most likely but instead they're basically telling people that having a black main character leads to a flop.

[Boredfrom]

new game for totally normal people who view 50% of the US population as fascist nazi chuds

"what do you mean, this game implies I want to kill you? it's about killing nazis! does that mean you consider yourself a nazi?" 

Thank you Uncle for giving them the attention they wanted.

[Boredfrom]

I just saw the trailer and:  what I’m supposed to see Uncle? Honest, what is supposed to be outside the random Tik Tok shit?

[Alpacx]

"She creates for herself and for freaks like her" says a lot about Gamespot's current target demographic.

Somebody who is good at culture writing please help me, my industry is dying.

[BIONIC]

Imagine the screaming outrage if this article were about women.

Imagine a critic writing, with a straight face, that one of a franchise's "sincere pleasures" is watching "beautiful women get hurt." Imagine them lingering over their bodies, their injuries, their helplessness, their sounds, their animations, their vulnerability, then dressing it up in the dead language of media theory so it sounds respectable. It would be torn to shreds, and rightly so. People would call it creepy, fetishistic, and pathetic.

But swap in men, and suddenly it is meant to pass for insight.

That is the real joke here. Not that the article notices horror has bodies in it, or that Resident Evil is interested in injury, mutation, and physical peril. Anyone with eyes could tell you that. The joke is that it mistakes its own thirsty projection for serious criticism. It takes a series built on body horror, contamination, dread, and survival, then reduces it to "what if getting mauled was sexy though?" That is not analysis. That is a kink wearing a lanyard.

The whole thing collapses under the most basic test imaginable: replace men with women. If the headline, framing, and tone would instantly sound sleazy and indefensible with female characters, then they are sleazy and indefensible here, too. Equality does not mean inventing new excuses for objectification because the target happens to be male. A double standard does not become sophisticated just because someone writes "homoerotic" and "permeability" a few times.

What makes it worse is the smugness. There is this exhausting modern-critic habit of treating the most obvious projection in the world as though it were a buried truth the rest of us were too unsophisticated to notice. Leon Kennedy, being an attractive character, is not a revelation. Horror mixing fear, gore, desire, and vulnerability is not a revelation. But deciding that Resident Evil is fundamentally about the pleasure of watching beautiful men suffer says far more about the writer's own fixation than it does about the games.

At a certain point, the article stops analysing the gaze and becomes the gaze itself. It is not critiquing objectification. It indulges in it, then congratulates itself for being clever enough to notice what it is doing. That is what makes it so irritating. It wants the thrill of voyeurism and the moral prestige of criticism at the same time.

And underneath all the pseudo-intellectual varnish, the argument is embarrassingly thin. Resident Evil is not "about" eroticised male suffering any more than Alien is "about" workplace flirtation because people sweat and gasp in confined spaces. It is a horror series obsessed with the instability of the body, the terror of infection, and the panic of trying to stay alive while flesh fails you. To flatten all that into a smirking catalogue of Leon grunting, coughing, being tied up, and looking good while doing it is less like criticism than a teenager discovering subtext for the first time and refusing to shut up about it.

And once again, because it deserves to be repeated: if this exact article were written about women, careers would be ending over it. There would be no indulgent applause for its "provocative reading." There would be no pretending it was saying something daring about genre. Everyone would recognise it instantly as the ugly little spectacle it is. The fact that some people cannot recognise that same ugliness when the subject is male says everything about the state of current criticism and nothing flattering about it.

This is not brave. It is not incisive. It is not even especially interesting. It is just the same old objectifying gaze, repackaged in academic wrapping paper and sold back as intelligence.

[Potato]

From constructive 

re: negativity

Forums have always had a notable share of posters who want to take the most uncharitable read of a post and attack it. Social media and the attention economy has only exacerbated that impulse in folks. "Don't feed the trolls" is the Golden Rule of internet interactions for a reason.

But this is where you turn things back on yourself. If you post in good faith, you should engage with posts made in good faith. Discipline is necessary on the individual posters' behalf, the staff cannot enforce and adjudicate every annoying or negative post. Quite frankly, I think the entire forum can do better about this.

The Costco CEO was brought up as an example of this, and why should anybody be surprised? "Fuck billionaires" is the second core identity of Era after "fuck AI." Why should any billionaire be spared from that rhetoric just because they post a quirky video and head up a well liked company? In order for mod staff to maintain any consistency, they have to allow those kinds of posts, because "eat the rich" and "bring back the guillotines" have no carve outs. Line the glizzy warrior up right next to Elon Musk. At that point, it's incumbent upon individual users how much they want to engage with that topic thread line, discretion we all reserve at all times.

So, just to be clear, the guillotine stuff is an actionable offense and has been for the life of the forum. Any sort of "let's murder people we don't like" is right out. Allowing that sort of shit will cause huge problems that would put the whole community at risk.

To me, posters defining Resetera's core identity as "Fuck X" and "Fuck Y" is a quite succinct summary of the negativity problem we're discussing. I really hope it's obvious what a clear devolution that is for a community, and to be honest and personally speaking, a general sad state for progressivism.

The context here being negative responses and drivebys. And I think the most powerful driving force to changing the culture is being the change you want to see on this forum. It can be annoying and exhausting to see negative posts, but you always have the choice to contribute to positive and constructive dialogue. Or even challenging the negativity in good faith.

Wanting the staff to pull the lever of punishment is perhaps the exact opposite way to handle the community meta, because negative opinions should not inherently be suppressed. We all grown and should be able to handle a range of human emotion.

Challenging the negativity every time you see negativity is just further derailment of the thread, as we've seen extensively with the threads that were given as examples. At the same time, trying to 'read around it' is depressing and frustrating without maxing out your ignore list, and honestly a whole group of people with maxed out ignore lists also isn't exactly the hallmark of a great community.

Being the change you want to see is all nice and I'm sure something everyone strives towards, but it also feels like a drop in the ocean and if it were up to each individual poster, sure, but the reason why it's being brought up here in this thread is because I, and maybe others, also feel the mods can play an active role in this. You call it the lever of punishment, but that's a very specific lens you're looking through. To make a gardening analogy, are the mods here only to pull out the weeds, or are they here to help shape the garden? It's a genuine question I don't expect an answer to but do hope they reflect on.

Their best tool in this matter is engaging through conversation, which is largely how the mod staff has been engaging negativity. Tone policing through bans and threadbans is playing with fire, because again going back to the Costco CEO a baseline accepted maxim on Era is that there's no ethical billionaires. To use your framing, ideal moderation would largely let the garden do whatever it does, weeds and all, but make sure plant killing mold didn't spread throughout. The vast majority of community shaping should be left up to the users.

This is a great post and I agree with my whole heart

This is such a thankless task that I'm not surprised that people just refrain from posting about certain topics or games altogether. I just don't think it works, especially when the topic is one that already has a popular consensus built up around it.

Case in point, the latest Shenmue 3 thread. I'm not saying that everybody has to like a game that I enjoyed and goodness knows that it had flaws, yet I often think about ignoring anything to do that game on here because seeing the same low effort "it's shit" and "polishing a turd" drivebys over and over again is genuinely exhausting. Thankfully there are usually a few people engaging in good faith but the noise from people treating it as another opportunity to repeatedly stick the boot tends to drown out any attempt at constructive conversation.

My thoughts on certain things being tied to the identity of the site is that I don't really think this site has a clear cut identity. There isn't really a good way of gauging the opinion of the whole userbase. Heated discussions will naturally attract people with the most extreme opinions, so they don't tell us much about the general userbase.

For example: based on discussions we are generally very anti AI and discussions about it are are very clear that it's never acceptable. But the community as a whole also voted a game that used AI during development and shipped with placeholde AI assets as our GOTY. By an overwhelming amount. And in a poll on how users feel about its AI use, around 75% said they don't care.

Gacha games are a similar example: post about them in general gaming and you will quickly have people flaming them for exploitative monetization practices. But based on OT activity they are some of the most popular games on this site to talk about.

I know this goes against a lot of people's idea of what Era should be, but bear with me: it could conceivably be possible that the majority of users on a video game forum don't really care to discuss political topics 24/7, and do sometimes just want to talk about things they enjoy. But the thing with negativity is that even just 10% of the forum being constantly negative very quickly wears down the other 90%.

Don't get me wrong: it's good to be able to talk about serious topics, and calling out genAI use and wealth inequality is a good thing. But should it happen everywhere, constantly? Or should we be allowed to have silly threads about (not even close to billionare) CEOs eating hot-dogs without them being derailed?

This is a question I can't answer. It needs to be based on what the community as a whole think, and like I said I have no idea what that is. This thread is actually also a really poor baromether, since it primarily attracts those dissatisfied with the current status of this site. Maybe most users are actually okay with the negativity.

But I think it is something we need to decide on. Or rather the staff needs to decide, since they are the only ones who can actually make a decision.

My hot take is that tone policing is not bad. I believe the lack of it has created an environment where posters are permitted to treat eachother terribly and that's okay if you can tie your bad behavior to some moral cause. And while this continues I think you will just see more people shy away from engaging all while this toxic posting style just takes over.

That's not to say the moral cause isn't a worthy one it's just that often people come at eachother with the energy that they are actually speaking to the people responsible for the bad things going on in the world. When in reality we are all rather powerless to effect change, especially on a niche videogame forum like this.

How can this keep happening???

Every single time they just have to glaze the mods when it's overwhelming clear that they are the problem. I mean, what the fuck even is that bolded bit?

[Alpacx]

Imagine the screaming outrage if this article were about women.

Get pauljeremiah a Bire account.

[Potato]

Imagine the screaming outrage if this article were about women.

Imagine a critic writing, with a straight face, that one of a franchise's "sincere pleasures" is watching "beautiful women get hurt." Imagine them lingering over their bodies, their injuries, their helplessness, their sounds, their animations, their vulnerability, then dressing it up in the dead language of media theory so it sounds respectable. It would be torn to shreds, and rightly so. People would call it creepy, fetishistic, and pathetic.

But swap in men, and suddenly it is meant to pass for insight.

That is the real joke here. Not that the article notices horror has bodies in it, or that Resident Evil is interested in injury, mutation, and physical peril. Anyone with eyes could tell you that. The joke is that it mistakes its own thirsty projection for serious criticism. It takes a series built on body horror, contamination, dread, and survival, then reduces it to "what if getting mauled was sexy though?" That is not analysis. That is a kink wearing a lanyard.

The whole thing collapses under the most basic test imaginable: replace men with women. If the headline, framing, and tone would instantly sound sleazy and indefensible with female characters, then they are sleazy and indefensible here, too. Equality does not mean inventing new excuses for objectification because the target happens to be male. A double standard does not become sophisticated just because someone writes "homoerotic" and "permeability" a few times.

What makes it worse is the smugness. There is this exhausting modern-critic habit of treating the most obvious projection in the world as though it were a buried truth the rest of us were too unsophisticated to notice. Leon Kennedy, being an attractive character, is not a revelation. Horror mixing fear, gore, desire, and vulnerability is not a revelation. But deciding that Resident Evil is fundamentally about the pleasure of watching beautiful men suffer says far more about the writer's own fixation than it does about the games.

At a certain point, the article stops analysing the gaze and becomes the gaze itself. It is not critiquing objectification. It indulges in it, then congratulates itself for being clever enough to notice what it is doing. That is what makes it so irritating. It wants the thrill of voyeurism and the moral prestige of criticism at the same time.

And underneath all the pseudo-intellectual varnish, the argument is embarrassingly thin. Resident Evil is not "about" eroticised male suffering any more than Alien is "about" workplace flirtation because people sweat and gasp in confined spaces. It is a horror series obsessed with the instability of the body, the terror of infection, and the panic of trying to stay alive while flesh fails you. To flatten all that into a smirking catalogue of Leon grunting, coughing, being tied up, and looking good while doing it is less like criticism than a teenager discovering subtext for the first time and refusing to shut up about it.

And once again, because it deserves to be repeated: if this exact article were written about women, careers would be ending over it. There would be no indulgent applause for its "provocative reading." There would be no pretending it was saying something daring about genre. Everyone would recognise it instantly as the ugly little spectacle it is. The fact that some people cannot recognise that same ugliness when the subject is male says everything about the state of current criticism and nothing flattering about it.

This is not brave. It is not incisive. It is not even especially interesting. It is just the same old objectifying gaze, repackaged in academic wrapping paper and sold back as intelligence.

Counterpoint

It's just true, and I was relieved to see Grace Benfell's name after clicking the link, she's the rare kind of game critic who knows how to tackle a subject like this. The series makes it especially clear in OG RE4, an immaculate angel-faced blue-eyed Leon model being subjected to exceptionally violent finishers, you may not like it but the idea to make gore sensual is definitely there.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/gamespot-one-of-resident-evils-fundamental-joys-is-watching-beautiful-men-get-hurt.1471633/#post-152966983

[Uncle]

bets on if it was worded well enough to avoid a ban, or if the liberal use of "swap in men and then you can see how shitty it is" triggers them enough to murder him

there's nothing they hate more than "you wouldn't say this if it was X instead"

[Hap Shaughnessy]

He's dead.

[Boredfrom]

she's the rare kind of game critic who knows how to tackle a subject like this.

Even if that was the case… why publish it in a mainstream vidja website?

[killamajig]

Yet Forspoken basically had its reputation destroyed before the game was even out for one single line.

I still fully believe to this day Forspoken wouldn't have been near as hated online if it was a white man instead of a black woman for a main character. Frey is, legitimately, one of my favorite characters and the fact that online racism essentially sent the game to die is so fucking sad.

I can guarantee you if it was a DMC Dante style character saying "is that a fucking dragon" you'd have the internet celebrating it instead of blasting it.

Fuck I hate gamers.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/gamespot-one-of-resident-evils-fundamental-joys-is-watching-beautiful-men-get-hurt.1471633/post-152967376

Every time Transistor speaks:

Jesus, talk about mod glazing

No lies detected.

This hurt so much because of how true it is.

DAMN. I love coming into threads and seeing Forspoken truth bombs being dropped.

Facts!

Funny enough, I've been thinking about playing Forspoken & you saying Frey is a good character is a good thing to know.

I'm playing Forspoken right now and I 100% agree with you. Frey's a normal-ass human being forced into a wacky fantasy world she clearly doesn't want any part in, her dialogue is extremely correct for that situation. I have other problems with the game (I think it is a great example of a AAA game that should've been AA, to put it in annoying terms), but Frey herself fuckin' rules.

Facts. Game was a very fun 7/10 mechanically (with good DLC too), and Frey was a pretty enjoyable and believable character to me. It was clear to me that racism was a huge factor in what happened to it.

I agree with everything you said

[Jansen]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/paul-tassi-marathon-sale-1-2-m-estimated-sales-70-pc-19-ps5-11-xbs-478k-daus-in-its-first-weekend-it%E2%80%99s-holding-345k-daus-380k-this-past-weekend.1472281/page-4#post-152987533

https://www.resetera.com/threads/paul-tassi-marathon-sale-1-2-m-estimated-sales-70-pc-19-ps5-11-xbs-478k-daus-in-its-first-weekend-it%E2%80%99s-holding-345k-daus-380k-this-past-weekend.1472281/page-5#post-152988103

https://www.resetera.com/threads/paul-tassi-marathon-sale-1-2-m-estimated-sales-70-pc-19-ps5-11-xbs-478k-daus-in-its-first-weekend-it%E2%80%99s-holding-345k-daus-380k-this-past-weekend.1472281/page-6#post-152989804

[Alpacx]

Counterpoint

It's just true, and I was relieved to see Grace Benfell's name after clicking the link, she's the rare kind of game critic who knows how to tackle a subject like this. The series makes it especially clear in OG RE4, an immaculate angel-faced blue-eyed Leon model being subjected to exceptionally violent finishers, you may not like it but the idea to make gore sensual is definitely there.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/gamespot-one-of-resident-evils-fundamental-joys-is-watching-beautiful-men-get-hurt.1471633/#post-152966983

Another one
https://www.resetera.com/threads/gamespot-one-of-resident-evils-fundamental-joys-is-watching-beautiful-men-get-hurt.1471633/page-3#post-152989456

"What about men???"

Yeah, what about them? 🙄

It's almost like these double standards exist for a reason. You don't have to like it, but if this is about objectification, the objectification of women just means something different - and has a different level of historical precedent - than the objectification of men.

Also, people are calling this article "creepy, fetishistic, and pathetic."

[DavidCroquet]

Imagine the screaming outrage if this article were about women.

Imagine a critic writing, with a straight face, that one of a franchise's "sincere pleasures" is watching "beautiful women get hurt." Imagine them lingering over their bodies, their injuries, their helplessness, their sounds, their animations, their vulnerability, then dressing it up in the dead language of media theory so it sounds respectable. It would be torn to shreds, and rightly so. People would call it creepy, fetishistic, and pathetic.

But swap in men, and suddenly it is meant to pass for insight.

That is the real joke here. Not that the article notices horror has bodies in it, or that Resident Evil is interested in injury, mutation, and physical peril. Anyone with eyes could tell you that. The joke is that it mistakes its own thirsty projection for serious criticism. It takes a series built on body horror, contamination, dread, and survival, then reduces it to "what if getting mauled was sexy though?" That is not analysis. That is a kink wearing a lanyard.

The whole thing collapses under the most basic test imaginable: replace men with women. If the headline, framing, and tone would instantly sound sleazy and indefensible with female characters, then they are sleazy and indefensible here, too. Equality does not mean inventing new excuses for objectification because the target happens to be male. A double standard does not become sophisticated just because someone writes "homoerotic" and "permeability" a few times.

What makes it worse is the smugness. There is this exhausting modern-critic habit of treating the most obvious projection in the world as though it were a buried truth the rest of us were too unsophisticated to notice. Leon Kennedy, being an attractive character, is not a revelation. Horror mixing fear, gore, desire, and vulnerability is not a revelation. But deciding that Resident Evil is fundamentally about the pleasure of watching beautiful men suffer says far more about the writer's own fixation than it does about the games.

At a certain point, the article stops analysing the gaze and becomes the gaze itself. It is not critiquing objectification. It indulges in it, then congratulates itself for being clever enough to notice what it is doing. That is what makes it so irritating. It wants the thrill of voyeurism and the moral prestige of criticism at the same time.

And underneath all the pseudo-intellectual varnish, the argument is embarrassingly thin. Resident Evil is not "about" eroticised male suffering any more than Alien is "about" workplace flirtation because people sweat and gasp in confined spaces. It is a horror series obsessed with the instability of the body, the terror of infection, and the panic of trying to stay alive while flesh fails you. To flatten all that into a smirking catalogue of Leon grunting, coughing, being tied up, and looking good while doing it is less like criticism than a teenager discovering subtext for the first time and refusing to shut up about it.

And once again, because it deserves to be repeated: if this exact article were written about women, careers would be ending over it. There would be no indulgent applause for its "provocative reading." There would be no pretending it was saying something daring about genre. Everyone would recognise it instantly as the ugly little spectacle it is. The fact that some people cannot recognise that same ugliness when the subject is male says everything about the state of current criticism and nothing flattering about it.

This is not brave. It is not incisive. It is not even especially interesting. It is just the same old objectifying gaze, repackaged in academic wrapping paper and sold back as intelligence.

 User Banned (Permanent): Display name contains bible names 

[Boredfrom]

But it was written by a transwoman. Someone that presumably was still following male instincts by half of her life. One that wrote fan fictions and says it like being proud of it. 

Also, ERA always bitchs about how women are different and how their smut is not the same as the males… but suddenly admitting that getting off by seeing someone getting hurt is totally okay because gender.

[Boredfrom]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/paul-tassi-marathon-sale-1-2-m-estimated-sales-70-pc-19-ps5-11-xbs-478k-daus-in-its-first-weekend-it%E2%80%99s-holding-345k-daus-380k-this-past-weekend.1472281/page-4#post-152987533

https://www.resetera.com/threads/paul-tassi-marathon-sale-1-2-m-estimated-sales-70-pc-19-ps5-11-xbs-478k-daus-in-its-first-weekend-it%E2%80%99s-holding-345k-daus-380k-this-past-weekend.1472281/page-5#post-152988103

70% PC.  

Holy shit, Sony.

[HaughtyFrank]

But it was written by a transwoman. Someone that presumably was still following male instincts by half of her life. One that wrote fan fictions and says it like being proud of it. 
Also, ERA always bitchs about how women are different and how their smut is not the same as the males… but suddenly admitting that getting off by seeing someone getting hurt is totally okay because gender.

It also just goes beyond objectification. Talking about how you think it's sexy how someone beautiful gets hurt is just all around weird. It's not suddenly a virtue because you're just talking about men

[Greatness Gone]

Forspoken fucking SUCKED. Why are they ignoring that it had a public demo where people could judge it for themselves free of charge?

[Besticus Maximus]

Sailing close to the wind, very clearly from chat gpt

This is not brave. It is not incisive. It is not even especially interesting. It is just the same old objectifying gaze, repackaged in academic wrapping paper and sold back as intelligence.

[DavidCroquet]

Alright fellas can we lighten up on the Forspoken shit talk? I'm gonna have to report this derail to Benji it if keeps up...because ya'll are hurting my feelings. 

[BIONIC]

Alright fellas can we lighten up on the Forspoken shit talk? I'm gonna have to report this derail to Benji it if keeps up...because ya'll are huring my feelings. 

Maybe you should report deez nuts you got in your mouth to benji lmao goteem

[DavidCroquet]

[malfoyking]

I enjoyed Forspoken. Its movement and combat were great. It had a nice summer movie blockbuster feel to it.