Bad Review Stagnation
Reviews can be a lot harder to make than you might think. Good reviews can be incredibly in-depth, spanning hundreds of pages to acknowledge all facets of the work, its inspirations, and its legacy. Bad reviews can be incredibly dismissive, revelling in their purely negative cynicism and often coming across like little more than hatred no matter how much the reviewer tries to argue otherwise. Bad reviews can also lead to fear on the creator’s part, which is probably why everything seems like it’s stagnated so much these days.
People are afraid of bad reviews. Bad reviews mean bad thing, and it means less people are interested which means less money which means less ability to create other things. But in all the bad reviews I’ve seen, one thing’s remained really consistent: there’s always a call for a ‘return to form’ or just ‘doing what works’.
If something more outlandish gets tried in a work and doesn’t pay off, then the first thing bad reviews will say is “Why didn’t you just try doing this more stable, tried and true method instead?” Stories experimenting with different ideas for plots that don’t hit might get told to go back to the basics of filmmaking and the 5 act story or what not, games trying new mechanics will just get told to do what always works instead.
This, along with the rise of ‘fandom culture’ and tropism, has lead to a metric fuckton of fear. This fear manifests itself in every single work being generic and subversive, if not just an outright remake of something people already like. Because if you just do what you know people will like, then what’s the ish?
The ish is that it gets fucking boring. You can only see something so much before it gets tiring, and the past decade+ of creative output has leaned heavily towards trope-aware deconstructions of popular things. Because, you know, if we talk about how bad it is ahead of time then people will be more accepting of it being bad!
You can only really accept so much self-loathing before it becomes tiring. Deconstructionism and tropism has turned in on itself and now what gets parodied are deconstructed trope-aware works, because such things are the safest possible bet. It’s the only way to shrug off any sort of criticism your work gets, falling back to the ever tried and true “it was intentional all along!” crap. This is why I tend towards hating postmodernism.
It takes real effort to look at a beaten path and say “fuck that!” and tread a new one, because people will always ask you why you didn’t just take the beaten path to begin with. It was right there, why the fuck are you trying to cut through the forest? Because, who knows? Have you gone into the forest? Do you know what lies in it? There could be the chance for an entirely new path right here, even if there’s just as much chance that it’s a dud.
Reviewers don’t really have their hand on the pulse of innovation. By their very nature they can only spring into action when others do the work for them. If they did have such a sense for what would work, certainly they’d be doing the creative parts themselves rather than simply sitting on the sidelines whining about it.
People don’t really appreciate the work of the experimental unless the experiment succeeds, but that’s not really how experiments work. Failures are a natural part of the process, but such a thing is never cared for by the public. If something fails, if it’s proven that it simply just doesn’t work, then it’s not appreciated for having been tried but simply mocked and ignored.
Even in spite of this there still is value to experimentation, because when an experiment works, it really works. Anything that stands the test of time is part of an experiment that works, especially in the field of artistic expression. People remember Tarantino films for being these creative pieces that dared to do something different, and don’t exactly remember their 9000 copies that noticed people liked this crap and decided to blindly copy it.
The heroes of today are the ones who look straight in the face of mockery, groans, and rolling eyes and attempt to deliver an experience meant to pierce the heart of even the most obnoxiously emotionally absent viewers. It’s the entire point behind people calling things ‘based’, it’s this urge to have people deliver something that’s more true to their hearts than it is to answering the pleas of critics.
Really the Internet makes this quite difficult. You get criticism rolling in almost immediately when something is made, so people have become so sensitive to just about everything that individuals completely disconnected from corporations start acting like they have their own HR departments censoring everything ahead of time.
That’s why, in this era of unprecedented free speech, you’re still getting enraged misplaced criticism from morons desperate to show how good they are for the good thing. They’re just as much tied up in this as artists are.
It’s not about what is here, because that’s here. It’s about what’s there, beyond that horizon, within that dark cave. You could end up just getting stuck exploring, or you could discover untold natural beauties beyond your wildest dreams.
Don’t get stuck on stagnation because your peers insist that the correct way to do things is simply toeing the line as much as you can. Like hell most of them even know the basics of your creative endeavors, and those types were never the best judges of what their own tastes are anyways.
What’ll matter is the trendsetter of tomorrow that gets set today, and setting those trends can only be accomplished through the will to either ignore people’s bullshit or cut through their rhetoric masking and find out what they want underneath it all.