You’re fabricating outrage at something that does not exist in the comic

The comment I was replying to was clearly talking about a pattern of behavior beyond what is in the comic.

The artist is making fun of the petty nonsense that people complain about.

Which is a pretty goddamn petty thing to complain about. How dare people express their opinions and dissatisfaction with anything that isn’t the end of the fucking world, right?

Yes, there are people who blow such things way out of proportion, but this comic does nothing to distinguish between reasonable responses to these issues and unreasonable ones, it just lumps them all together and tells everyone to shut the fuck up in the most condescending way possible.

It’s also being dismissive of real problems people face. It’s an excuse to not address problems here and now because bigger problems exist elsewhere. But you aren’t going to do a goddamn thing about those issues, so this implied triage is a lie. It’s just a way of trying to act morally superior while lacking empathy.

The whole first world problem concept implies everyone has it easy in first world countries. As though we don’t have poverty, mental health issues, crime, corruption, police brutality, abusive families, disease, loss of loved ones, and so on. There’s no shortage of problems anywhere.

And you know what, fuck this attitude of turning suffering into competition and mocking people for being bothered by things that aren’t life altering. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy expression of emotion when you are disappointed or irritated, as long as you aren’t taking it out on others. But being a snarky asshole to someone and judging them for having a bad day isn’t helping.

If you see someone frowning and your instinct is to tear them down rather than cheer them up, maybe you should take a good look at yourself and figure out what your fucking problem is.

Are the whales the ones complaining? Because the whole concept of a whale is that they are the exception. The vast majority of players pay only the minimum amount or slightly more, but the whales dump so much money in that they are still worth more to the devs than the other 99% of players combined.

Also pretty sure that creating a voter registration site that only appears to register voters in swing states (while gathering their data so you can follow up with only the ones you want to target) could also lead to criminal charges if the matter were to be pursued.

This argument just dismisses all criticism of the rules and implies that the “game” portion of the role-playing game is irrelevant. By that logic, the design of D&D 5e (and every single rule and mechanic in it) is no better or worse than any other game, including stuff like F.A.T.A.L.

If the rules don’t matter, why bother? Why buy books, learn a whole system, and go through the effort of trying to use a specific RPG instead of just doing free form role-play?

If they do matter, then they can and will impact the quality of your experience in positive and negative ways. They can be well designed, easy to understand, and effective at serving their purpose, or they can be poorly designed, incomplete, confusing or nonfunctional.

Sure, you can ignore rules when you don’t want to follow them, and you can do your own thing and homebrew it if you like. You can also ignore the ending of a book and write your own headcanon, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any point in criticizing bad writing.

To put this another way, why have rule books and a character sheet with all those numbers on it? Why not just flip a coin whenever you want uncertainty about an outcome? Would a game with only that mechanic be just as effective as D&D at providing the type of experience that D&D is trying to create? If not, then why not? What makes the big complicated mess of rules that is D&D better than my single rule RPG?

And then everyone making the criticism ignores that passing reference.

Superhero stories are usually well aware of how people might abuse super powers. Those people become supervillains. The only way this criticism makes sense is if you think that no one would ever try to use their powers for good.

Internet troll criticizes comic book fans with chart pointing out that women prefer comic book fans to internet trolls by a 3 to 1 margin.

This video is dumb. It’s making contradictory criticisms while having no alternative of its own to suggest.

The heroes don’t use their powers to radically alter the world because, first and foremost, then it wouldn’t be our world, it would be a very different one. Once you actually apply all the innovations that should be possible, the setting starts looking more like Star Trek, and it becomes a very different story. This is the same reason that Batman will never keep his villains off the street, whether he captures them or kills them. It’s the same reason the Doctor always makes his way back to current year earth somewhere in the UK. The status quo they are maintaining is the one that let’s us continue telling this kind of story.

Second, things like time travel and reality altering magic, things which can fundamentally change our world in an instant have to be kept limited, or we have no more stories. This goes beyond just the status quo of the setting and gets into the basics of storytelling and having tension. Make your heroes too powerful with no limitations, and you can’t maintain a conflict without gigantic plotholes.

Second and a half, fundamentally altering the world with time travel or super science or magic is a concept that should be terrifying in its implications. Maybe time travel could alter the timeline for the better, but who gets to decide what is better, and what trade offs are worth it? Who gets to decide that it’s worth unmaking millions of lives to alter history into something you think might be better? And how many ways can it go wrong? The world is a complicated place, you can’t make sudden drastic changes without inflicting a lot of harm, even if you think the good it does will outweigh the harm. And doing so with forces that we may not fully understand or control is reckless. I mean, fuck, Ultron is the example they give of something to change the world, and would you trust the people making AI today to put that in a self-aware army of iron man robots?

Third, what kind of message would it send if the heroes used some bullshit super science or magic solution that quickly and easily solved environmental issues or social problems? Is that really addressing the issues in a way that’s helpful for us in the real world? Is it setting an example for us to follow when they aren’t faced with any of the real difficulties that come with solving those problems? it seems like that would just be dismissing the problem and implicitly endorsing the kind of vaporware solutions that polluting industries often try to hype up to avoid real change.

Fourth, do you really think the world would end up better if a small group of super powered individuals tried to overthrow governments, destabilize economies, and transform civilization by force? We’re not just talking about intervening in a specific conflict like Ukraine or Palestine here, the video makes that clear. If at the end of the day, they aren’t radically altering society, they are just defending the status quo. But, how do you think that would actually play out, especially in a world where there are other super powered individuals who will oppose them? World domination by benevolent dictators imposing their will on society while tearing the current order down by force is not going to be pretty, it’s going to be a fucking nightmare. And let’s be honest, none of our heroes have shown the capacity for building back the world they would be destroying, which is the much harder part.

Well, actually, no, despite criticizing the heroes for not using their powers to single-handedly institute radical change the video goes on to argue that change would actually require larger movements lead by the public, and condemns the idea of an elite few hogging power (should iron man be flooding the streets with military hardware? And how the fuck is the hulk suppose to share his power?). So, what then is the right thing for them to do? I guess they should engage in peaceful activism and support the people when they aren’t called away to stop some murdering asshole from killing a bunch of innocent people. So, basically what we have now, but with a few more scenes of them making political statements and doing volunteer work that doesn’t actually contribute to the plot.

Fifth, the villains are sometimes given sympathetic motivations because we want some nuance and complexity. The world is complicated and most conflicts are not just black and white. The lesson isn’t that change is bad and evil, it’s that you can’t just view the world in such simplified terms. The alternative of making the villains all bad and the heroes all good is actually far more dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that we can just see the world in simple us vs them terms, with no need to understand other points of view or to question our own.

Sixth, they do fight the status quo, just not the parts that the video wants to address. Daredevil can’t solve all the world’s problems but he can and does fight both organized crime and corruption. Captain America isn’t going to overthrow the government, but he will fight SHIELD when it crosses the line. Iron Man changed his own company to address its role in the world, and uses it to innovate to make the world a better place, that’s just not the focus of the story.

The bad guy in black panther had a point, but was also a fascist trying to start a race war. And in the end, the hero acknowledges the issues that the villain had raised and does make changes to address them.

I’ve begun judging people that enjoy these movies… I believe the movies are trash.

…just because they don’t agree with your opinions, doesn’t make them inherently wrong.

It does indeed.

First character: A brooding loner with a tragic backstory, full of obvious parallels to my own life.

Second character: Yes these mechanics I’m combining are wildly mismatched, but my backstory explains it all.

Third character: A centaur that I play as a cab driver. Work in references to Taxi Driver, Cash Cab, Fake Taxi, etc. 100% dedication to the bit at all costs.

Fourth character: Mysterious backstory and ominous foreshadowing throughout the campaign, all leading up to the moment in the final session when I unleash the pun that the entire character was built around.

He talks about it in one of the interviews from the remastered VHS collection. During the fight on the second death star, the script just said “Luke gets angry” and he couldn’t figure out how to flesh that out until he came up with threatening Leia.

And Be Kind, Rewind.

Kind of how it feels stocking up on assorted beverages as a non-drinker. The booze section is full of cool bottles, crazy labels and just fun and interesting presentation. The pop section is mostly just plastic that was designed to be as cheap as humanly possible.

That same logic applies to everyone else too. If Batman has some obligation to play judge, jury and executioner, so does anyone else who gets the opportunity. By that reasoning, cops who see criminals getting back on the street again and again should take matters into their own hands and just kill suspects who they believe are too dangerous to entrust to a broken system.

Batman isn’t just trying to beat up every criminal in Gotham, night after night, one by one. He’s trying to clean up the city, take down organized crime, fight corruption, and help fix the system so that it can deal with crime. Killing people prevents him from being able to work with people like Jim Gordon. And it forces the authorities to redirect resources away from fighting other criminals and instead use them to hunt down Batman because he isn’t just a vigilante trying to help, he’s a mass murderer.

And while that may prevent his victims from coming back to commit new crimes, it won’t prevent new criminals from taking their place, something that’s going to happen when he creates a power vacuum by killing a major crime boss. Plus, the calculus changes for any criminal he faces, because they have far less to lose by doing something stupid or desperate when their lives are already on the line. It destabilizes every situation, and makes dangerous people even more desperate.

Any lasting solution for Gotham has to involve fixing its failed institutions. That’s a long term goal, and one which Batman can’t do by himself. He can make a difference, he can protect people on a daily basis, and fight corruption wherever he’s able to find it. And he can inspire others to act, coordinate with them, and support those who try to create a real change.

Now, will he ever actually clean up Gotham? No, because then we wouldn’t have a story. Of course, that would be just as true if he killed people. I mean, Frank Castle has been gunning down criminals for decades, and yet, that doesn’t seem to have eliminated violent crime either.

• enough money, highly qualified personnel, and connections (both legitimate and clandestine) to bring real change to a blighted city
• does none of the sort

He does use those resources to make change through charity and programs designed to improve the community. But that doesn’t instantly solve existing crime, particularly organized crime and corruption.

Plus, it will never actually fix Gotham because Gotham being shitty is part of the premise.

• brutalizes mentally ill people (but it’s okay because he doesn’t kill)

He beats up violent criminals, generally when they are in the middle of either attacking him, or attacking someone else, or otherwise doing something that would harm or endanger innocent people. That some of these people have varying degrees of mental illness is unfortunate, but they doesn’t mean they don’t have to be stopped.

• crime lords and terrorists walk free because of notoriously terrible corrections system and no-kill policy

Everyone of those criminals who walks free could have just as easily been murdered by any number of people during their time in custody. Why is it Batman’s responsibility to decide who lives and dies, and not any given cop or prison guard? And even if the system is broken, is it really better to have a masked vigilante killing people without trials (and appeals, and evidence, and oversight by some kind of authority)?

Also, let’s be real here, the reason they get out so predictably is not because of in-universe reasons, it’s because they want to keep bringing back villains. He could kill every supervillain in Gotham and most of them would be back in six months.

• main appeal is cool gadgets made by other, more qualified people

He’s the world’s greatest detective, a ninja, a world class martial artist, a scientist, an inventor, and one of the greatest strategists who ever lived. If he’s not qualified, who the fuck is?

Just what we need, more walled gardens and exclusivity deals. And of course, another way of monetizing your data, because we don’t have enough of that already.

Search results are already fucked enough as it is. We don’t need to start carving up the internet and and dividing it among different search engines.

Don’t knock it 'til you’ve tried. There’s nothing quite like feeling the breeze between your knees.