I'm just gonna quote kiwi on the subject of why Blob's criticism of ANYTHING always fall flat.
jetpack said: As someone who likes to write fiction (publishing is another matter altogether), Bob's deconstruction of culture is frustrating because the man certainly can identify tropes the themes in storytelling, but has absolutely no clue as to how they work. He cannot, for the worthless life of his, actually put the damn thing back together. One reason for this is because Bob's narcissism and simplistic black-and-white worldview cripple his own understanding of the human psyche. As we have witnessed with The Last Jedi, he obsesses over "subversion of expectations" and believes that makes it a smart film. Fans are half-wits if they hate it as far as he's concerned.
The reason why the original trilogy as well as the Indiana Jones trilogy worked was because George Lucas wanted to recreate the excitement he felt when watching the old film serials of his youth. Thus he read Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and took inspiration from those serials and other films to (re)construct a film that many would agree is one of, if not THE defining film of the 20th century. Rian Johnson is postmodernist that believes that subverting the audience's expectations is somehow intelligent, which Bob agrees with because it fits with is ideology that the past must be torn down to make way for the Superior Future™.
No. There is a reason why works like the Iliad, Beowulf, and the works of Shakespeare are required reading in every university English program (and frankly, I would be surprised if Bob read any of them.) It's because they fulfilled a basic human need to look beyond this materialistic existence. Deconstruction and subversion are okay if the writer is skilled enough to put it back together. Alan Moore deconstructed and subverted the superhero genre with Miracleman and Watchmen, but was also able to reconstruct it with "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow," Supreme, and Tom Strong. Bob can't because he is too self-obsessed and motivated by instant gratification to look beyond the superficial.
Some kiwi said: I do a lot of writing too and you're spot on about all of this, especially the tropes part. See actual, good critics will delve into the substructures of storytelling and mythology and learn how they function. It's one of the ways you can tell if something has value. That's why Bob cannot talk about archetypes, or ancient themes, or why these stories get told over and over. He lives in the tropes hemisphere, where as long as anything is a throwback to anything it is cliche and derivative. They will sacrifice the value and history of a story structure for shitty twists and meta narratives. They don't want a story that resonates with the deepest emotions and archetypal echoes that fill our mind, he wants Deadpool to literally look at the audience and say "wow that's a little sexist, isn't it?" These idiots live to deconstruct and the height of media in their opinion is when it deconstructs itself.
Someone in this thread or another thread likened it to why video game critics don't like fighting games. Because they're actual games, they're the purest form of "video game," like a sports game. It takes skill, repetition, understanding a system, and becoming the best at it. They don't know what to do with that, it's too hard and alien. All these critics are the same, they don't actually care about any of this. Bob can't talk about why movies work, he would need to do a lot of reading and studying to figure out why stories MATTER. Not entertain, not distract, not deconstruct, but actually matter to people. He's just an MST3K character that takes himself extremely seriously.
That's a really good way to describe blob. Except you can't really overstate how much his shitty political bent and anti-"jawks" hateboner colors everything he does. He hates/hated Halo. Why? Because of his perception that jawks liked it back in the day. He hates call of duty because he thinks jawks like it and he believes it's some kind of conservative pipe dream storyline that nobody right-of-center would ever roll their eyes at or find silly.
Everything he likes is aligned with what he thinks is politically virtuous and everything he dislikes is aligned with what he believes is subhuman and fit only for the carbon monoxide trucks.
He can't even talk about something in terms of the mechanics, like a movie in terms of enduring themes/ideas or a game in terms of how it plays. It's all bullshit hyperbole about "muh personal vietnam" or the supposed eugenics and racism of the fucking Halo franchise.
Fighting games really are the perfect example of a genre to use to unmask hackfraud "games journalists." They can't say anything of merit about any of the games in the genre because that would require them to sit down and fucking PLAY VIDEO GAMES.
