Hey folks!
What are books/movies/tv/etc that you absolutely love, but for some reason cannot recommend to anyone?
@vahnj What's up with Heavy Rain?
@starkatt It sexually objectifies (full nudity in shower) the female protagonist right as you start playing her, and has a lot of extreme violation of consent/harm to her if you play her storyline wrong.
@vahnj oof, yeah, okay.
@starkatt I really like [Atlantis: The Lost Empire] (the disney movie) for a lot of aesthetic reasons and Formative Childhood Experiences--
but going back and watching it within the last year with friends, I realize it really /reaaallly/ badly is tinged with White Foreigner Savior Out-Natives the Natives Syndrome, which is...disappointing, and makes it hard to suggest as an adult. x3
@starkatt These days, Star Control II. The music is great, there's a ton of tropes, and there's a pretty good story line about how the bad guys are the only survivors of the last Galactic Empire and the weaklings of the bunch who're acting out a collective trauma experience that you have to undo by breaking their tools rather than declaring them unpeople.
It's also completely rife with Planet of Hats syndrome and some pretty sexist stereotypes.
@starkatt The Magicians (the tv show – the books are terrible imo). Some things are actually great! But some are… not. So I try not to advertise it, but I am really excited about the shipping possibilities and the pacing and some of the plot stuff, and I really just genuinely enjoyed watching it, despite all the bullshit.
@maunzikation Heh, I actually found a lot to like in the first book, but yeah it definitely had some serious issues. Haven't seen the show :)
@maunzikation Things I liked about that book: one of the better portrayals of depression I've seen, slowly figuring out that the protagonist is a total asshole was kinda fun.
Things I didn't like: protagonist was a total asshole, treatment of women sucked, lots of problematic bits.
@starkatt For me it was mostly that it couldn't get me interested and that the characters and world seemed too superficial to me. There were things that I liked, but I felt a bit teased because none of them were explored as thoroughly as I had hoped.
The show pulled me right into the world and I watched all in one go. While also having its problematic aspects that I wasn't happy about, I felt like it took the story seriously, while the book felt a bit half hearted to me.
@starkatt Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I do recommend it to people all the damn time, but it's written in a very stylized style that most people just can not deal with. I don't think anybody I've tried to get to read it has made it all the way through the first book, let alone the series.
@vahnj @starkatt oh my gosh yay! :D all of 'em are in reprint these days, so they're not as impossible to find as they used to be. plus also get "Urth of the New Sun" which is the sequel to the quadrilogy, and is also heckin' good (and explains a lot about what the heck was going on in the first books!). my next investment is going to be Lexicon Urthus, because I've re-read all of them enough that I'm now frantically curious to look up the individual words, y'know? XD
well, not 'anyone', but I don't recommend It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia to many folks, because, I mean
don't want to have someone I consider a decent human being watching it and laughing for the wrong reasons
sadly, there's no unequivocal way to demonstrate that the entire Sunny gang is a pile of selfish, horrid awful to people who see "selfish, horrid awful" as 'just another way to live'
so
I guess I mostly don't recommend it to avoid potential disappointment on my end :\
@starkatt The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. They're a hard read, emotionally grueling, and the prose is rather more purple than most people want to deal with these days. The main character is an antihero for the first three books, determined to save his own hide rather than take responsibility. Terrible acts are performed. Beautiful things are destroyed.
But at the end, there's a kind of redemption, and always catharsis for the reader.
@Soreth I was wondering how long it'd be before someone responded to my post with those :)
@starkatt They were... incredibly formative for me. But oh, I cannot recommend them to very many people!
@starkatt Game of Thrones, really.
Heavy Rain's a good one for games.
going more old school, Phantasmagoria. It's impossible to know if someone would appreciate very gorey yet utterly cheesy horror the way it does it.
The Silmarillion's another good one. It reads like a dry history book so it's not something I ever recommend to people even though it's pretty rich with LOTR background.