I don't know how the Oscars work. Some of those quotes from the "voters" (again I have no idea how it works) are pretty disturbing though. Also, you may not be in a position to change this but the petition has a typo where it says "bribery wins voe rlegit talent".



Yeah, I have some serious questions about how creative expects players to view these worlds. I mean, do any of you know somebody who preferred the rebels over the gov't in Kaladesh? The creative team seemed pretty convinced we would all side that way, but I didn't know of any actual human beings who did so. I'm sure people did, but I suspect they were few in number and those few were proportionally less invested in the story. Like it was a Disney Star Wars level of creative miscalculation.

Considering some of the rebels were literally violently antisocial and a good chunk of them were about personal investment over harmony and concession, then it's really hard to not view them in the same light as the maliciously corrupt politicians and bureacrats.

And given that I saw more violent renegades than corrupt officials it's not hard to choose a side.
Honestly, Kaladesh struck me (as somebody who only read a couple Kaladesh stories) as a pretty awesome place to live. It was much more pleasent and much less corrupt than most fantasy settings and even most real world countries.

For me, I think the seeping pain of Kaladesh has been that there was potential for a good story acknowledging the problems of the rebels. In the story as it is, in "Renegade Prime", a story tied to Kaladesh and not even Aether Revolt, Pia talks to a crowd about the abuses of the Consulate, and she says this...



Emphasis Mine. The Maulfists featured on the cards in Kaladesh, specifically two of them: A gang of protection racket extortionists and a violent case of at least breaking and entering. They are depicted as violent criminals and menaces to society. What sane, loving, functional government wouldn't try to shut down their access to more heavy weapons? "Renegade Prime" wants us to feel sympathy for them as though they were mom and pop artificers wrongfully denied their livelihoods.

But, and here's what should have been the case, what if Pia did but the story didn't? What if, rather than being portrayed as a "reasonable" visonary of peace and freedom, the writing acknowledged that she's a bitter, hate-filled woman who can't let go of the personal wrongs done to her and is willing to use her charisma and technical skill to take disproportionate revenge on the entirety of the government for the crimes of Baral? And what if Chandra had to come to terms with it? Like she still has this Cathartic Reunion with a mother she loved and thought she'd lost forever, and doesn't want to accept, at first, that her mother really does probably need to be stopped. It would be a great chance for Chandra to show the leadership and reason she's supposed to have gained in order to be Jaya's successor, while also being emotionally effective. I would have eaten up the Kaladesh story if it was about Chandra's struggle between wanting to accept her mother as a person and wanting what's best for her homeworld, running through moments of cognative dissonance, hearing out Pia's rationalizations and watching them fall apart in the face of her actions, before finally moving into a place where Chandra has to choose whether to honor her blood ties or her oath to the principles the Gatewatch (supposedly) stands for, neither way looking to be easy? We could even still oust Tezzeret and Baral (though I'd probably spare Dovin the hell he took), because there are those corrupt elements, an abuser of power with deep personal ties to one of our heroes and an outsider manipulating the situation for a sinister ends... but the "happy ending" would be one in which Pia's revolution was largely foiled. Maybe she's arrested, or maybe she escapes, but either way she tries to cross a line and gets stopped, however much it pains Chandra to have to do so.

It wouldn't have taken much of a rewrite. The sets would still be Kaladesh (Inventor's Fair) and Aether Revolt. And it would have been more emotionally effective for our leads and solved the dissonance problem entirely.

Any group that goes by "the maulfists" probably needs to be put down. Mauling things with your fists is a crime people!

@Tevish and Razor: You guys still have my phone#?
I think I have yours Tevish, but not Razor's. Maybe it's under your actual name which I don't remember?

Hope you all stay safe from the phyrexian oil coronavirus and all that jazz

They also did Baral dirty by taking an obvious analogue for Javert and making him a violent bastard instead of a self hating person who truly believes in what is best for the world.

That might also be applicable to Dovin.
Actually feel substantially worse for Dovin, everything said and done.

Marvel has absolutely lost it and it's hilarious.

Can you elaborate?

The New Warriors are not being warmly received by the audience at large.

Oh yeah the team with a non binary hero named snowflake. Fantastic.

Are they warriors of social justice

Hell yeah, it's hilarious. When I first heard about it, I genuinely thought it was a great parody. When I realised that it is, in fact, not a parody (although let's face it, even the writer could barely keep a straight face when talking about it), I was really baffled at first, but now I find it even more hilarious.

New warriors!... of social justice.

Good lords, how tone deaf.

What I find amusing is that the people that this is supposed to appeal to seem to hate this even more than you do. Snowflake is supposed to be nonbinary, yet still plays into (by "attempting" to subvert) binary gender norms with their brother Safespace by switching the typical boy/girl color palette...except Snowflake doesn't identify as a girl so...grats?

They should hate it!
I'm not at all against diversity, but the only representation that gets dropped on people that need it are pathetic tokenizations or corruptions of existing characters. The characters entire identity can't be the representation, they need to be a character that just happens to represent.

The singular saving grace to this disaster is I will give them credit, they created a new character to do it rather than just tack an identity onto an established character.

So, Steven Universe is all the way over.
This last season has been a roller coaster in terms of writing. I feel like there was no middle ground of quality, no episodes that were just benignly ok. Now, of course, that's a subjective opinion, it's just that when the episodes were just meh, I felt they were meh for bad reasons.

The first few and the last few were great, the middle stuff was a bit odd and fanservicey. And not really the fan service I wanted. I hope we can get some canon comics or something though, but I doubt we will.

Rebecca already said there won't be.
Then again, there was also the statement to say they weren't necessarily done with the world, just Steven's story.

Just let me dream ok.