AFashionableHat

@benwayne: You do not cut a blazer from Men's Wearhouse in half without really getting into your bit.

@goldrock: When he and his administration stop being active threats to people in and of Giant Bomb and their friends and families, I bet you'll stop hearing about him.

Sorry that it taxes you so that people dare allude to their lives outside of video games.

@zoofame: "Getting extreme" can be read safely as "caring about things or people who are not me, the white guy" without really losing any nuance. (I know you probably get that, from your posts, but I like having the cards on the table.)

And for really real, I gotta drop one hearty L-O-L at quoting GamerGate cheerleader Troy "it's a revolt against identity politics and totally not just harassing women into quitting the industry" Leavitt as meaningful or indicative unless your priors are already well in line with that abusive nonsense. Which, fortunately, GB and (most?) GB community members aren't and don't tend to be. 4chan would probably be more receptive, though. Or what's left of NeoGAF after the decent people all left. Go trawl that one if you want to see the gamer id in action, but be warned 'cause it's really ugly.

My Beastcast dudes, don't ever feel like you should hold back on what you believe because some folks who are used to not having to think about video games in a broader cultural context get salty about it. Use that platform for good and for awesome.

I would hope that it would remind you of how so many impressionable young people come away from Ayn Rand books thinking that they've run across something that they should consider formative. Or people who read Orwell going "hmm, fascism's kinda real bad, huh?".

South Park asserts political and social viewpoints. They are apathetic and bad ones, but it totally does. Comparing that to fears over Mortal Kombat strikes me as a little bit lost-the-plot.

Does Dan Harmon does not need to come down from On High every time there is a question of interpretation? Sometimes art can speak for itself. Issuing a direct challenge to nihilism and outlining that decency and humanity requires work (the entire speech by Wong at the end) is not the most subtle thing I've ever seen. (But it was sure missed by the Szechuan sauce screamers.)

Do you? Like, do you? 'Cause I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that no creative work ever made honestly, and possibly no creative work full stop, says only what the artist consciously "meant to say" or is what they "want to make". None of us decide that that's "what we want to make" without the use of the lens of the world around us, be it descriptive or prescriptive. We are not sui generis. We reflect the bundle of background radiation we generally catch-all as "society".

Not even J.D. "I stick my completed novels in a safe-deposit box" Salinger is creating artistic work separate from that. And so the relationship to the world around you that you choose, consciously and subconsciously, to make manifest to those who experience what you do is part of the analysis and, yes, the criticism of art.

There is power in what you make and release to the world. It says things you don't mean to say--but you own those things, too. Which makes taking precautions rather prerequisite.

I would, yeah. Like I said above: J.D. Salinger, a recluse, writing novels and stuffing them in a safe-deposit box is still not immune from the influences, positive or. The audience is, obviously, kept to a minimum--but any audience that did read the work would be doing so through the lens of the conditioning of the society in which they live, whether they read it today or five hundred years from now.

Even creating to reject the world around you is inescapably tied to your perception of the world around you. I wouldn't say this is "settled," but I also wouldn't say that anything I'm saying is particularly controversial outside of the responsibility-dodging new-media universe.

(That's the other thing, to me. I happened to get a free copy, and because I like hurting myself I gave it a go. I regret the time spent.)

Art exists as a reflection of the society around it. It exists either to depict what is or prescribe what should be. Omission is a failure of depiction; omission is a moral failure of prescription. Artists are totally "allowed" to misrepresent reality or prescribe a shitty one, I certainly would never say otherwise. But I am likewise "allowed" to rip them for doing so because I think it is a social ill itself to do so.

I don't seek life lessons from art. Well--not most art, and definitely nothing on TV However, I do look at the social consequences of art. South Park has a very large megaphone and addresses a largely memetic and largely impressionable audience (one that it has taught to not care about things, as it happens). What South Park says matters, even if I don't think it should. And what South Park says is, stripped of its artifice, "you are stupid if you care about things." Screw that, yeah?

This is made worse in 2017, because the audience that consumes pop media has also largely lost the ability to recognize certain kinds of criticism when they exist. South Park doesn't criticize, it just sits there and goes "caring is stupid." But Rick & Morty is an example of a show that does offer a critical perspective--which the fanbase completely misses because the fanbase wants to reify its awfulness. Like, "Pickle Rick" appears to be an attempt by the creators of the show to criticize the nihilistic self-centeredness of the character that the fanbase latched onto as great and cool. Instead of recognizing that criticism, the fanbase uncritically latched onto this new aspect as great-and-cool. The end of that episode isn't even subtle about trying to bash the watcher over the head with the message. But what was received? Ask the thirty billion "YEAAAAH, PICKLE RIIIICK!"s I encountered at DragonCon this year.

Chew on that for a sec: by trying to criticize their character and their fanbase, the R&M folks strengthened the deleterious misconception at hand.

Oops.

And don't get me wrong: South Park can totally make what they want to make. But as a critic, I can throw shade at them for it.

No, I get what makes art artistic. But art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Society matters. The world matters. "Death of the author" is horseshit, because an artist's intentions do matter, but art presents an argument separate from the creator, too, and that argument (colored and informed by the artist's intentions) can and should be contextualized and analyzed--and it is totally okay to do so both the world in which it was created and the world in which it was perceived. This means that most art eventually becomes problematic to a current context. That's to be expected. Art-in-the-context-of-its-creation and art-in-the-context-of-now are different things, and a critic can embrace it with regard to the former while recognize the problems posed by it with regard to the latter.

So while, yes of course, an artist has the right to do what they will, those "subjective boundaries" to which you refer can, and I think should and must be, examined and placed into critical context. But for real, let's not play around: the next time the South Park guys make themselves morally or ethically uncomfortable, as opposed to possibly financially uncomfortable, might legitimately be the first. The lack of challenge and lack of seeking-out their own discomfort is obvious when you watch the show. I would submit that that is why the show is popular: it rewards the ennui and the do-nothingism of its core audience with justification and implicit praise.

When you have a megaphone as big as South Park's, that stuff has consequences that impact other people, and that's where this stops being just "artistic presentation" but "social advocacy" and they are very, very bad at that--and in turn, my criticism becomes social advocacy, too, but I actually recognize that and treat it as such, which they need to do and don't and their refusal to do so is an abrogation of social responsibility that all of us have and cannot reject.

Actually talk to some of them? Gee, you mean like growing up in a profoundly right-wing area? You mean volunteering for Republican Congressional campaigns and building campaign infra? You mean like building a Republican 501c3 and then helping to burn it down when it became a platform for the earliest parts of the current reactionary movement? You mean like being in a meeting around 2008 with the head of the RNC to sell them on building shared campaign infrastructure for Republican interests? (Thank God we never did.)

The "PC movement of the 80s" was immediately seized upon by the American right wing as a way to discredit and otherize feminists, LGBT folks, and black people, and has gotten worse since. I happened to be paying attention there while the nascent white-supremacist parts of the right wing made jokes about how easy it was to circle the wagons in the 00's. I was there. I have the receipts. And so I am reasonably confident that I understand the topics at hand and the political views under question, but thank you for your concern.

It isn't that it doesn't provide context. It's that it thoughtlessly and maliciously weaponizes the efforts of people to make a better world against them. It asks "why can't we stop being so insane about X" where X is "anything that us extremely rich white dudes don't care about and thus can't possibly matter as much as other people think it does".

South Park wants you to feel bad for caring about stuff. That's what South Park thinks is "insane". Because ennui and the status quo are just fine--for them. Meanwhile, people are actually getting hurt and actually being attacked, and South Park says nothing because it can't come up with a bothsidesy argument-to-inaction out of it.

And, of course, this game does that, too--except without even the grounding of current events. It's the YouTube "prank video" of games. We should all be better.