#critical response

What else did La'an do this season? Get involved with Spock? and thus get in the way of The Ship that is Spirk?

I've no proof because of course people wouldn't come out and say it but I'm terrible suspicious of this.

We don't consider results as a binary "successful" or "not successful" because that isn't a useful metric. Instead, we have targets and our success or failure is measured by how far away from the targets we hit. Thus, there are very different decisions made around a game that is just a bit below target and a game that misses the mark by a wide margin, even though both would be considered failures.

As you may imagine, critical success is absolutely a helpful mitigating factor that can factor into continuing a franchise that didn't miss the target by too much. No More Heroes and Bayonetta are both series that had disappointing sales for their initial games but managed to continue. However, there are also plenty of franchises where critical acclaim was insufficient to persuade publishers to continue funding their development - Square-Enix's Guardians of the Galaxy, Psychonauts (whose sequel was eventually crowdfunded), and Bioware's Jade Empire were all games that were critically well-received, but were too far from their sales target to continue.

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I agree about f/f pairings being swallowed up in m/m stories. It's a real problem. Years ago I read exclusively slash fiction but now I'm starting to read more het and femslash and it's 100% annoying when I browse a femslash ship tag on ao3 and most of the results are for m/m stories with the f/f pairing only in the background. "Enforce first pairing" feature is a lifesaver but it only comes so far and only on ao3. Please if the femslash in your ship doesn't have lots of scenes in your fic and it's only mentioned, you need to tag the ship in the additional tags as "background (ship name)" or "minor (ship name)", not in the main relationship field!

That said, op had to ruin it and complain about fujoshi being fujoshi. Stars, not this shit again.

I have seen female bashing in m/m stories. Making the Canon Female Love Interest behave in horrible ways that she never would. It's also a real problem. It's sickening. However a lot of the times when female characters/het/femslash fans complained that "CFLIs are erased in slash stories" there are 3 options they are referring to: 1 canon het pair never dated and are instead besties; 2 canon het pair broke up before or during the fic; 3 CFLI is shipped in "fake ships".

And I'm sorry but all of this seems so juvenile to me because those are not misogynistic?? Like, what do you want slash writers to do? Some do like to explore dynamics with CFLIs but most writers just write to make their faves kiss, because, shockingly, most people dislike love triangles. They don't want to create drama by adding a het relationship (and from experience, if they did add drama with infidelity and/or ugly break up you'd complain that they made the CFLI suffer). They just want to focus on the main romance. And the slash ship will get together regardless, so if they pair the CFLI with other characters that means that they actually like the idea of it. Yes, not as much as the gay ship, and yes, they still need to be taught about the tag issue, but none of the above things are inherently misogynistic; the real problem is the issue of ignorance of the tagging system and etiquette.

Also "it's weird that you only ship m/m" is so incredibly uncool. Nobody should make assumptions of anybody based on their fictional preferences. Slash shippers do not owe femslash shippers engagement (actually no fan owes other fans engagement of any kind) and they don't need to pass some female character loving test to qualify as a good fan or a good person. What you consume in fiction is not what you are in real life, and consuming only slash content doesn't make you weird. What is weird is to judge people for what they find compelling in fics.

Sorry for the long rant but if you made it to the end, thank you.