Every Fallacy Game Purists Insult People With
There are 19 fallacies they use here: Ad Hoc, Ad Hominem, Anecdotal Fallacy, Affirming the Consequent, Denying the Antecedent, Anecdotal Fallacy, Appeal to Ridicule, Association Fallacy, Bulverism, Proof by Examples, Stolen Concept, The Strawman Fallacy, Toupee Fallacy, The False Dichotomy, The Broken Record, Converse Error, No True Scotsman, Red Herring, With Us or Against Us.
I'm just talking about the toxic purists here. These are really just about being a stan, which is an overly emotional immature egotist who can’t take people saying even one true criticism of what he likes and resorts to demonization and blocking – but how is it possible to be someone who thinks “ different = bad “ and rages about EVERY difference, and not be a stan for what you prefer which only results from being that level of emotional? They also fall under 45 of the tropes for self-righteous people, and that's later in this.
1: Ad Hoc: “ An explanation of why a particular thing may be the case is substituted for an argument as to why it IS, “ which can be detected by “ uses of the words “ might “ “ maybe “ “ probably “ “ possibly “ and “ could “ “ but an arrogant arguer will not even use those. Them assuming that everyone who makes adaptations must hate or at least not respect the source material falls under this, and them assuming any adaptation fan does.
Not to say any argument that falls under this can’t be right, that’d be Fallacy Fallacy, rather it is less likely to be right and the fallacy is insisting that it definitely is. Game purists do this in defense of the games because they’ll defend anything about them. “ Tails wasn’t egotistical in Lost World! He was only pretending to be when he was bragging about himself! “ At least I assume that’s why he said no he wasn’t, otherwise he has no argument. This was never proven true in the story.
It was never referred back to and this same argument could be applied to Sonic himself. They do this because the reason they hate other continuities so much is because they’re stans of the games, and that sensitivity causes them to perceive any adaptational difference as intentional criticism.
2: Ad Hominems: Game purists always deal in this when going out of their way to insult people who talk about other continuities positively online. “ You prefer an adaptational difference? You just hate the games! “ “ Anyone who likes Surge is obviously a simp for her because he’s a stan of the comic! “
They’ll see anyone compliment IDW and say to them, “Thanks for telling me you hate the games. “ which is always responded with, ” No I don’t, “ or best of all, “ Did anyone tell you that you can like different things for different reasons? “ Yeah like different franchises. The fallacy is the insult doesn’t refute the point they wanted to refute, the point the other person made about the difference or adaptation being good. It just conveniently avoids thinking about how perhaps it may be good.
Someone can hate the source material and still be right that an adaptation or its difference is good. So it’s an Irrelevant Thesis. Similarly, them just attacking the other continuities of a series saying they’re bad or garbage doesn’t prove their point. It doesn’t prove their point about being a Canon Fascist being the way to go either.
There are SO many fallacies associated with this, “ you must hate the games! “ “ any fan of any adaptation is no true fan “ or “ anyone who insults the games once isn’t a fan “ that I’m gonna have to put them all under this one category right here and count them all because it’d be repetitive otherwise.
Any fallacy listed after this that has nothing after its name is here because of one of those things they say: Ad Hoc, Ad Hominem, Anecdotal Fallacy, Bulverism, Proof by Examples, The Strawman Fallacy, Toupee Fallacy, The False Dichotomy, The Broken Record, Converse Error, Everything Except Most Things, the Undistributed Middle fallacy, No True Scotsman, Red Herring.
Anecdotal Fallacy: “ X happened to me/someone else so the statistics are wrong, it happens all the time. “ “ Bulverism is a logical fallacy in which one party simply assumes that the other party is wrong, and explains the other party’s reasons for wanting to believe it rather than addressing the argument itself. It combines Begging the Question with the Genetic Fallacy. Wikipedia expresses Bulverism as: You claim that A is true. Because of B you personally desire that A should be true. Therefore A is false. “
Proof by Examples: “ Also called an inappropriate or hasty generalization, this fallacy happens when someone takes one or more non-exhaustive examples from a group that have a property, and making a generalization that everything in that group has that property. “
“ The Strawman Fallacy happens when a debater constructs a more easily defeated version of their opponent’s position to attack. “ “ The Toupee Fallacy is when a debater claims that all examples of a subject conform to a specific quality because they’ve never seen one that hadn’t, ignoring that any examples they did see that didn’t have that quality they didn’t recognize as examples. “
The Broken Record: “ If you repeat the same point over and over again, you win — because obviously, the other side didn’t address it if you won’t shut up about it. Extra effective if you keep repeating a catchy soundbite or buzzword. “
Converse Error: “ (part of “Correlation does not imply causation.”) Concluding that a certain set of results can only come from one set of circumstances. “If A, then B. B, therefore A.” So if adaptation fan, then game hater. Now see how it comes off when you pretend they’re saying an Unacceptable Target in place of adaptation fan.
When told by someone who says twice that he loves SA2 that the Sonic 3 movie shouldn’t have been identical to SA2 because showing the characters going through all of the levels identically would’ve dragged on forever and been boring, a game purist didn’t address that point. Instead he accused him of saying that he thinks SA2 is bad and garbage, despite him saying he loved it twice in that post.
The point he actually made wasn’t refuted, because it can’t be. It’s so much easier to make up a blatant lie out of thin air to refute. They repeat this delusion Ad Nauseum hoping it’ll get convincing if they say it enough. On a side note you can always tell someone's childish by whether they wrongly think that they’re being strawmanned by people pointing out literally what they’ve said and what the accurate implications of that are.
“ However, it’s more often used to get the audience on one’s side than it is to confuse the opponent, especially when it’s coupled with an Ad Hominem implying that the opponent is immoral for ” holding” the strawmanned position. “
At one point the most extreme game purist DID admit that he doesn’t think every fan of adaptations hates the games, but still says most of them do. Saying most of a group is a certain way when that certain way isn’t mandatory and intrinsic to the very nature of being a part of that group is still bigoted. If you said that about any oppressed minority group it’d be seen as the bigotry it is. And yet he claims to want bigotry to end. Yet in other posts he said he hates anyone who likes the adaptations.
Also that’s only one game purist, it’d be the Anecdotal Fallacy to apply that to them all. Most of them might still hold this fallacy, but at least I said might. I could name another game purist who said that he doesn’t hate fans of the adaptations per se, he just hates that they say when they’re better than the games. And that logic itself is bad because when an adaptation does do better, who’s to say people should have their freedom of speech restricted when it comes to pointing that out or else lose face to you?
They should get to because it makes them happy and isn’t hurting anything. So what if a tiny amount can’t handle that? That even applies to if they’re wrong about a difference being good, but when they’re wrong it’s okay to be annoyed at that.
Red Herring: “ In logic, a fallacy of distraction where an irrelevant side-argument is introduced in an attempt to draw the opponent away from their main one. “
3: Affirming the Consequent: “ If A, then B. B is true. Therefore, A. “ If my car was a Ferrari it could travel at over 100 mph. It can do that. Therefore, it must be a Ferrari! “ The fallacy is that it’s never proven that A is the only possible cause of B being true. “ If Trip was the last of her kind she’d be like Knuckles. She’s like Knuckles by being the only guardian of a magical gem, therefore she must be the last of her kind. Never mind her official character bio not confirming that.
Never mind the manuals and wikis never confirming that, never mind the fact that it’s never the case that Classic Sonic levels show NPCs in them either way. By the same evidence you should assume Rouge’s the last of her kind, you could look at Amy and say that there’d never be any more hedgehogs after her and Sonic because these two used to be the only hedgehogs shown.
The assumption was also from Appeal to Ignorance; the games didn’t show other Sungazers, this must mean they don’t exist. The games don’t show Sonic going to the toilet. This must mean he doesn’t have to go.
Sega didn’t allow other echidnas to be in IDW but it allowed other sungazers. They know this would be told to them but keep believing this. By the same logic that Sega not allowing something in IDW means nothing, Chaos Shadow the original plan for how Shadow would fight the zombots by removing his bracelets is canon to the games because Sega didn’t allow it.
4: It’s also a result of Denying the Antecedent. “ If a person is wearing a hat they have a head. I am not wearing a hat. Therefore I do not have a head. “ If there’s other sungazers in the games Trip isn’t the last of her kind. There are not, Trip is the last of her kind. You can say the same thing about Vector. He has just as much evidence of it.
There could still be a possibility that Trip’s the last of her kind and Sega just doesn’t give a shit what IDW does with her probably because they never plan to use her again. But it’s extremely unlikely with all of the evidence and fallacies against it. Both this and Denying the Antecedent are Non Sequitur Fallacies. Saying a character's the last of her kind is an unlikely claim so the burden of proof is on them and they have none, nothing but the absence of proof that she's the other way around.
6: Appeal to Ridicule: “ It suggests the argument is false by presenting it in a way where it appears silly or trivial. This fallacy is a strawman or appeal to ignorance. “ According to quantum theory an electron can be in two places at once! Have you ever heard anything so stupid? “ “ Game purists type out, “ thE gaMEs hAvE alWayS bEen inconSiSTenT “ to mock people. How does that debunk it?
The games have gone from a world with Casino Night Zone where you just walk down to pinball flippers to get to a slot machine to a more realistic world where in Casinopolis that doesn’t happen. It went back for Heroes and back to the real world for Shadow and back again in Lost World. As usual the fallacy is when that’s the whole argument they’re using against that sentence.
“ This fallacy differs from reductio ad absurdum, where it’s demonstrated that an absurd conclusion naturally follows from the underlying logic of an opponent’s argument. “ I’ve used this before but any victims of this would erroneously claim they’re being strawmanned. “ A variation is argumentum ad lapidem, in which a statement’s dismissed as absurd but with no proof it’s absurd. “ See any game purist’s response to every argument I’m making here. They do this any time they’re proven wrong and respond to it.
“ There’s many fallacies that fall under Irrelevant Thesis where the arguer only thinks he refuted somebody’s opposing position; all Appeals to Consequences, all Appeals to Emotion, all Strawmen and Red Herrings, Ad Baculum, Ad Nauseum, and all Ad Hominems. “ Guess why I put some of them in bold.
7: Association Fallacy “Claiming “X is a Y. X is also a Z. Therefore, Y is a Z.” Incorporates Guilt / Honor by Association, where it is asserted that relation to a good or bad thing means the associated thing is also good or bad. “ They’ve thought, Trip the Sungazer is a guardian of a magical gem on an island. Knuckles is that too. Therefore, Trip is the last of her kind too.
9: Proof by Examples: " Another version of this fallacy is assuming that since having a little of something is good, having more must be better. " Game purists think that since having an Adaptation contain the core elements of its source material IS good, having it be almost nothing but stuff from the source material with nothing different must be better.
Therefore they publicly shame anyone who points out that nothing but Sonic vs Eggman would get stale, because that’s insulting the games, despite the common knowledge that eating enough of even your favorite food would get tiresome.
This wasn't in the game purism article since purism's actually about hatred of adaptations and the exclusion of anything that makes them special, not just about saying the more of something there is the better, but the less of something alien in it the better. Purists aren't about love for the source because they don't care if the source changes and downgrades, they're about trying to prove stuff OTHER than the source sucks.
This fallacy is used when it comes to arguing with people that stuff like SatAM should have no differences even though that includes good ones. There are so many more novels based on SatAM than UK novels based on only the games and it was popular enough to have picture books made of it too. And clearly Sega keeps Sonic around to make money, so it’s in its best interests to make as many fans happy as possible, which would also be the ideal thing because more people would be made happy which is going to look good to anyone with compassion for the average person.
10: Stolen Concept“ A fallacy in which one or more of the concepts (or premises) on which an argument depends are (usually implicitly) denied by the argument itself, thus meaning the arguer is taking two or more opposed positions at the same time. “ “ I personally think it’s completely fair to compare an adaptation to the source material-how dare he say this is better than the source material?! “ Game purists do this with their inherently unfair preferential treatment to source material, which makes them look like hypocrites for contradicting what they’ve SAID.
It’s really that they use double standards. I’ve made two articles on all of the different ways they tend to use this fallacy where they don’t care about the source material having problems the adaptations do but go ballistic at the adaptations for them without acknowledging that it’s not unique to them, or being deluded that it doesn’t apply to the source material at all.
And they mock fans of adaptations because they can’t take criticism but any time someone says an accurate criticism of what they like, they throw a hissy fit and block them, even if the ones they blocked agreed with most of what they had to say.
The truth is that they actually believed that anyone except themselves who can’t take criticism is pathetic. The root of most of the world’s evil is people acting like the rules of morality don’t apply to them. Hypocrisy is defined as claiming to have beliefs and values you don’t. TV Tropes calls it not practicing what you preach.
They would be hypocrites if they believed the exact words they said to justify purism. But it’s just making up excuses to sound persuasive. A better term is double standards or dishonesty because their beliefs are a lot more specific and far fewer in quantity than that. All of their beliefs boil down to, “ My opinions are the only ones that should be catered to and respected and anyone in conflict with that is dumb or evil or both. “
There’s many ways they reflect this in one of their actual beliefs, like their actual belief, “ Only the franchises I want to be just like the source material have to be to be good. “ They don’t just say that because that’s not persuasive. What do you say to justify that? Because I Said So. This is the same belief that encompasses both of the first two beliefs I already covered.
Then there’s their second actual belief, “ The source material of the specific franchises I like are the only ones that deserve praise, so only something I like can have new ideas that are good. Anything new in an adaptation is bad because it’s in one and I think it’s bad, like The Freedom Fighters. Anything unique is born out of spite or apathy for the source material, because I think it is. And even when an adaptation is using an idea from the source it’s bad, because I don’t like the adaptation. “ Like, “ Sonic shouldn’t smirk (like he does in Sonic 3) outside of the games! He'd never do that! “
Their argument sounds a lot less persuasive when you see it for what it really is. It’s no wonder they phrase things different than that because all they could do to justify their real belief is circular logic, another fallacy. It’s not an objective truth that only the source material should be praised and deserves open-mindedness.
They just think this because they think the world should revolve around them. When their argument rests on a subjective premise, “ because it’s good, “ you should know the argument is probably false. All they want to do is make reactionary outrage bait for fellow purists about adaptations when it comes to adaptations and so it's rare for them to admit anything's good about them even when they notice it. Isn't there pride in acknowledging both good and bad to fully expose the truth? Then the audience will know what the extremely bad stories are by when there suddenly is a near lack of compliments.
They look like hypocrites for implying that it’s unacceptable for someone to not do research by saying it’s unacceptable for someone making the story for an adaptation to not have every detail about the source material memorized. But, since they think it’s fine for THEM to make uneducated misinterpretations from a lack of knowledge, about stuff they don’t like, it’s clear what they believe is specifically,
“ The people making an adaptation should do research to have every detail on the source material memorized until they’re a walking human encyclopedia, and if they forget even one detail their work will become garbage, they’ll prove they suck and were doing it on purpose and their work will be dead to me. But it’s worth the effort of getting the source material memorized. “
Either this is from them not thinking it through enough to realize nobody has a good enough memory to be 100% accurate to the good material since the human memory’s infamously bad, which would mean not even anyone at Sega itself could, and even if they made mandates for this nobody would be able to remember all those mandates required, or they know this and don’t care. It’s impossible to not know that not everyone has a perfect memory.
Chewbacca Defense is really a whole class of fallacies which is why it wasn’t in that whole paragraph’s worth of them. “ Chewbacca Defense is using non-sequitur arguments to “prove” a point, relying on distracting and confusing the opposition. “Winning” a debate through methods other than logic and reasoned argument. “ That’s them when they jump to the conclusion that someone hates the games just because he likes an adaptation.
“ As such, the Chewbacca Defense commonly relies on Logical Fallacies and insane rhetorical techniques, like The False Dichotomy, The Ad Hominem, The Broken Record. “
13: The False Dichotomy: “ Claiming that only two (often conflicting) options exist. If the other side is wrong about anything, no matter how irrelevant, they’re wrong about everything — and you’re right about everything. “ Often their point when pointing out the problems with IDW is that because IDW stans are wrong about it being a perfect comic that’s well-written overall, and wrong about Flynn being perfect, that proves all adaptations are bad and no one should like them. “ It’s also called the black/white fallacy. “
And I’ve noticed that they think in black and white. You’re not supposed to do that as an adult. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackAndWhiteInsanity Despite the fact that they’d defend any time the games’ Sonic was harsh and don't hold anything Amy did against her, they don’t do the same for the characters that happen to not be by Sonic Team, just because of their country of origin.
They’ve called evil a canonically heroic Canon Foreigner in a position of power who doesn’t think a game character is perfect and infallible (like the non-game purists don’t) for being in a tough situation where both decisions have harsh outcomes, even though that’s inevitable for someone in a position of power and by that logic every single one would be evil.
They would call the character evil no matter which decision or judgement was made, even when her judgement is for preventing the destruction of the entire world, because that’s not agreeing with Sonic who was risking it. They see Sally as Non-Game Purists and view her every disagreement with a game character as her being uppity when they think she should know her place. But they think Amy can disagree with and hit Sonic with a hammer all she wants because of her country of origin.
Yet these same people call Flynn a racist for having Mazuri have a food shortage, not just saying he wasn’t creative, they went to the next level without having enough information. They insist that because Mazuri had jars and bridges it couldn’t possibly have its situation change with time even though time tends to do that. Even Ireland had a food shortage!
And in the same post they’ll ask why Spagonia couldn’t have had the food shortage when their same defense for why Mazuri couldn’t have had one applies there. It looks like nothing’s wrong in both places, but they take place before IDW.
I don’t know if they’re right or wrong but it’s easy for bigots to look innocent of that if they accuse someone else of it. Ben Shapiro accuses people of antisemiticness easily but is in most scenarios the opposite of someone regularly cries wolf of bigotry.
And these purists love to talk about Sonic online to demonize people outside of their group, calling them right-wing slang “ tourists “ for not knowing everything about the lore of the games. But they were surprised to hear from Sage that Tails knew Sonic most of his life. 8-4=4, and Classic SONIC is 4 years younger, and Classic Tails is just as much younger.
I figured this out before I saw any adaptations, but they’d insist this was just the writer making it like Archie, because Flynn wrote it and they haven’t thought enough about the games they claim to like but liking games for just the gameplay isn’t liking them as a whole, games consist of story and music too.
14: The Broken Record: One even admitted that he thinks all his problems with IDW boil down to, it’s not exactly like the games. Which isn’t even a true assessment of his complaining as a lot of their problems with it don’t just have to do with inaccuracy such as slow pacing. Or are they arguing that none of the stories in the games ever had any slow pacing?
16: No True Scotsman: Aside from the obvious way they use it, I’ve seen the most extreme one of them say “ the actual Sonic franchise “ to mean just the games, even though that ignores what franchise means; franchise 3: “ a series of related works (such as novels or films) each of which includes the same characters or different characters. “ By Cambridge dictionary: " a series of films that have the same or similar titles and are about the same characters. "
Sure not every character’s identical to how they are in the source material but the dictionary doesn’t say there’s an exception because of that and that it means they’re different characters. If the dictionary’s not enough for you, try profiting off a Sonic fan comic or fanfiction!
The fact that the fans trying to make Season 3 of SatAM had to go through the proper legal channels should make it irrefutable that it’d be illegal to profit off any alternate Sonic continuity which would not be the case if Sega didn’t see it as part of the franchise.
And Sega wants to make as much money as possible and thinks people thinking stuff is canon is good for business, and encouraged or at least let Aaron Webber tweet that “ Everything is canon. “ Copyright Sega and “ characters owned by Sega “ are always in these adaptations in the credits. It goes without saying it’s not just the games. Sonic is a multi-media franchise, and only 6% of it so far is just the games.
At that point it’s only a video game franchise because the games are the oldest and current continuity and make the most money so they probably won’t be cancelled. But to claim something’s only accurate because it’s old or new is both Appeal to Tradition and Appeal to Novelty. They need to resort to this fallacy to claim they’re still fans at all for keeping any chance of people listening to them.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fan “ fan noun (2) 1: an enthusiastic devotee (as of a sport or a performing art) usually as a spectator 2: an ardent admirer or enthusiast (as of a celebrity or a pursuit) “ That’s the opposite of someone who only likes a franchise for one aspect like the gameplay or hates 93% of a franchise and usually only talks about it to trash most of it and tends to compliment it just to use that as an excuse to trash other parts of it.
True the same applies to people who have almost nothing but complaints for the games’ main cast and worldbuilding and the way it handles stories to the point of being bitter about them overall, but you’re hardly gonna find any adult not like that due to their egregious problems so demonizing them isn’t fair when they didn’t make the games how they are and they can be admirers of other parts of the franchise in enough quantities to make up for that in Sega’s eyes for sure.
Sega loves everyone who regularly gives them money, anyone who truly cares for and understands Sega would know that. And liking an adaptation and discussing it online means either way I get to hear someone discuss Sonic! So there’s a reason they apply this fallacy to both the franchise and fans, because they can only be right that bitter fans are haters if everything not the games is outside of the franchise. But if Sonic is mostly not the games, then they're the haters, they're the anti-fans of Sonic.
18: With Us or Against Us: " A form of false dilemma. Assuming that not openly supporting one side means you oppose them (or vice-versa). " But does it count as opposing them if I don’t oppose them when it comes to the current bad continuities? They're almost the only people I ever find complain about them and how are they supposed to improve without anyone criticizing them?
They only piss me off with the well-written ones but those are usually dead or entirely dead. But it’s not even enough for them if you criticize an adaptation like IDW and put Likes/hearts on tons of their posts or videos that criticize the adaptations that are by normal people. You can’t prove game purists wrong without one blocking you.
Game purism is their religion, no that’s being generous. It’s just a conspiracy theory now after the debunking I did. How can you say a philosophy is correct if it’s got nothing but fallacies to support it? You have to be a game purist for game purists to see you as someone worth keeping around even as someone to give them likes, and then they wonder why they have less than 10 Notes on posts and have barely anyone following them.
And they wonder why none of them will ever become actually popular on Youtube and they see every SonicTuber in general as always wrong because they disagree with them and use their brains. Youtubers are artists too, to be a good creative you have to not be fascist or you’d like the status quo too much to do anything new, so naturally most creatives aren’t fascists. So there was no chance of most SonicTubers being canon fascists.
You can’t even compliment one of IDW’s best characters without one of them saying you’re a “ cultist “ and stan of it, KotyTang got called that and he reviewed most of the comic negatively. With THIS fallacy they’re the ones exhibiting cult-like behavior, as psyco-the-frog put it.
For someone who doesn’t like most of the modern adaptations starting with the 2000s era, it’s a little cathartic to see people who agree. Their problem is that they heavily overreact to game inaccuracy so even when you agree it starts being too grating to be worth it. A show should not be dead to you because of one minor detail that’s hardly even used in it. And they can’t keep their demonization of Archie out of their IDW posts sometimes.
Even when they aren’t mentioning anything specific about Archie. The two comics have completely different appeals and their fanbases mistreat each other. They have different characters and settings and history so it’s not hard to understand. But these people are dim enough to say the comics are the same. Because Sonic alone is similar that means “ I can’t see the difference. “
But the key difference in their appeal is Archie is creative and IDW isn’t usually. But with people who literally think creativity is bad, I should’ve expected them to be blind to what’s good about Archie.
Here’s every trope about self-righteousness they fall under. There’s 45! While a few of these applying to someone isn’t the end of the world, as it’s impossible to not count as any of these try reading that list, the point is the sheer amount they qualify as! 45 of them, including Fan Hater. This is at the end of this article because by this point I thoroughly proved why all of this applies to them. And here’s what a game purist would be thinking to try to justify all this, “ But it’s okay when I do it “ -said every criminal and bigot, and that falls under 2 of the tropes below.
Fan Dumb ((” Fan Dumb: We adore some work or genre of fiction (or some person or whatever else can be adored) to the exclusion of all else, and anyone who doesn’t do likewise is wrong! “ A group of fans who are unhealthily obsessed, entitled, intolerant, and make fandom difficult for everybody else. “)) The Fundamentalist (“ Our beliefs, whether they are religious, ideological, or academic, are top priority. “),
The Gadfly (“ If we’re the hedonistic variant, we just want self-enjoyment from provoking people’s reactions. “), Hate Dumb ((“We abhor some work or genre of fiction (or some person or whatever else can be abhorred) to the exclusion of all else, and (when we’re also Fan Haters) anyone who doesn’t do likewise is wrong! “)), Obsessively Normal (“Anything even the slightest bit unique is evil! “), Principles Zealot (“ A character who cares too much about their principles, often at the expense of caring about the results of their actions, “)
Single-Issue Wonk (“ We obsess over one issue. Even others that intersect don’t matter. “), He Who Fights Monsters (“ How dare you accuse us of being as fanatical and evil as those evil fanatics we’re fighting to destroy?! – A character becomes more and more like the evil that they pursue. “), Internet Jerk (“ We’re free to be assholes online thanks to the anonymity of the Internet! “ An online Jerkass that takes advantage of anonymity to harass people), Black-and-White Insanity (every adaptational difference and everything unique about an adaptation is treated the same minor or major),
Moral Guardians (“ Viewers that morally object to certain types of work and wish to see it banned or censored. “ See my entry on Appeal to Pity if you’re wondering why I include it despite the word morally), Necessarily Evil (“ We didn’t want to be evil, but the circumstances require us to be! “), Then Let Me Be Evil (“ You treat us like we’re evil? Fine, we’ll be evil, then “), Tautological Templar/ Moral Myopia (“ Evil acts aren’t evil when we do them, silly. We’re the good guys! “), Vocal Minority,
Aggressive Categorism, Because I Said So (“ We don’t need to explain to you ignoramuses why it’s right or wrong! If we say it’s right or wrong, then it is, without question, right or wrong, so accept it! “), Blatant Lies (two of them lied that the punishment Sonic was facing for treason in issue 40 was not banishment from Knothole but execution, when normally they can be so observant they find nitpicks that EVEN I didn't notice), Brutal Honesty, Can’t Take Criticism (“ How dare you call us “fanatics”? We are the purest, truest expression of what we believe and you are in no place to criticize us! “),
Circular Reasoning, The Complainer Is Always Wrong (“ How dare you think differently from us! “), Die for our Ship (against Sally, yes the same people who campaign against Sonic loving anybody admitted they’re SonAmy fans and like its Sonic X fanservice, which leads right to the next two), Double Standard, Double Think,
Enemies Equals Greatness (“ What defines us as the only righteous people is the antagonism from the many lowly pathetic people who know we’re better than them and can’t stand it! “), Everything is Racist/ Opinion Override (“ People who aren’t a part of group X react to an offensive comment or portrayal of that group. Members of group X don’t care. “),
False Dichotomy, Feeling Oppressed by their Existence, Hypocrite (“ One who doesn’t practice what he preaches. “ They lecture Flynn on writing like a cynic but act cynical of most of Sonic its fans and writers and Sega of America being the most bitter people talking about Sonic, while adaptation fans only complain about 6% of Sonic minimum and are usually just positive about adaptations),
Jerk Justifications, Logical Fallacies, No True Scotsman, Offended by an Inferior’s Success, Once Done Never Forgotten, Opinion Myopia (“ How can anyone feel differently about this than we do?! “),
Playing the Victim Card, The Power of Hate, “The Reason You Suck” Speech (“ A character delivers a harsh tirade to a second character that is designed to dissect that second character’s flaws, weaknesses or failures “) against adaptation fans,
Serious Business (“ Treating something more seriously than necessary. “), Twisting the Words, With Us or Against Us, You Are What You Hate, Obnoxious Entitled Housewife (for the female game purists; “ Despite the title, she may not be married, “ “ likes rules, structures, and hierarchies, and will frequently invoke their authority… This entitlement may even manifest as bigotry… “),
There’s some fallacies I could’ve stretched to include, like Soapbox Sadie, Undying Loyalty, Demonization, Propaganda Machine/Piece, Unsportsmanlike Gloating, Lawful Stupid (they defend mandates with Appeal to Authority so that can easily be mocked with hypothetical extremely bad mandates), but since it doesn’t fit the literal definition I won’t bother pointing them all out, there’s a lot.
Inaccuracyspotting is an easy shallow form of criticism that can be used to make any adaptation look bad through appealing to emotion alone. It’s like making a video just about criticizing any time a bald character is a villain across various works of fiction and nitpicking apart the heroic bald characters, and saying those works are bad for it.
The reason they had gotten on my nerves is that they do have good critical thinking skills but choose to only apply them negatively towards what they hate because they don’t wanna risk agreeing with a group they discriminate against, but defend those same problems to the death with the games proving that they don’t actually care about their quality, while I can’t turn my brain off with media so I notice when the writing is forced even when I’m casually watching a TV show for once.
What’s unsatisfying about criticism from a game purist is that their pointing out the bad writing is just an excuse that makes their game purism sound like a persuasive grift. The adaptations could be written like Citizen Kane and they’d still hate them.
They could be good in every major writing component thus being objectively good and they’d still call them garbage if they weren’t 99.9% like the games. The only reason I don’t say 100% is they still like Sonic 2 movie and a few of its differences, or at least the most extreme one I've seen does, anyways.
And the cognitive dissonance on that was so real that instead of realizing that hating differences on principle is stupid they had to say it was because the adaptational differences introduced were respectful while they only hate stories with ones that aren’t. But there are other changes that qualify, how do you define respectful if I’m sure they hate that Archie Sonic’s faster than Game Sonic?
Peach saying Mario’s not important isn’t a dealbreaker to them since they like the Mario movie, meaning they might find her being different in that movie respectful because she seems more competent and cooler than in the main games.
And by that logic The Wizard of Oz would be bad because it’s got one good witch instead of two like the book. That’s racist against witches so that’s disrespectful to what the source material and its writer wanted! I don’t know how any of them can like any changes because they usually never notice or accept any changes as good. So why would any game purist not hate that there was a recent war between echidnas and owls or the Emerald and Chaos Emeralds had been fused together?
By their logic that you can’t like a change without hating the source material or at least a part of it, that means either they don’t like the games or they hate that the echidnas were wiped out millennia ago, and that the two types of Emeralds aren’t fused.
Or, that logic is full of shit since it can’t only be true for some people, and being interested in alternate what-if scenarios doesn’t mean you hate the original. By that logic anyone who likes the What If… show for superhero fiction would hate the source material too.
I’ve found plenty of changes that had objectively nothing wrong with them that they still hate for being changes even if they have to make up excuses. Right, because being new alone is bad, nobody wants any artistic expression of creativity in art. Let’s look at the dictionary definition of write. “ to have the job of creating books, stories, or articles, to express an idea… “ This is from the cambridge dictionary. If you aren’t creating, because you’re just using others’ ideas, like if you just wrote exactly like the games, you’re not writing.
So being 1 to 1 is not writing very much. That’s why it should only be like the games in the major ways and the references that I outright love. References are forgivable though if they aren’t used in place of a new setting or better idea or aren't the characters quoting lines from earlier with no acknowledgement of it. Merely pointless imagery is neat but looks cynical if the story itself is bad.
Let’s see the dictionary’s definitions of a hack! From cambridge: “ hack: a journalist (= writer for newspapers or magazines) whose work is low in quality or does not have much imagination. “ How is it imagination to be 1 to 1 with the source material? They want writers to be hacks.
Ironically they keep calling the modern writers hacks, but only because they define it without that last part, and either are solely aware of or selectively only use the other dictionaries’ outdated ill-thought-out definitions which only involve bad writing and writing purely for a paycheck.
Of course outdated applies to the above definition insisting on specifying magazines and newspapers for no reason when we all know it's not specific to writers of those. But that nitpick doesn't change the rest of the definition's accuracy as it matches what the other definitions have to say.
Bad writing’s too vague to look objective enough for a definition. And a writer only writing for money is a hard assumption to prove to everyone that requires irrefutable evidence.
I'm tired of these people using the word Western entirely when they're about to demonize Westerners as being unable to write and localize. How can I not start to wonder if they have a bias against them after a while? What else can you say about the belief that no Westerner can write well or adapt well, and assuming the makers of SatAM were racists with no evidence? Even then it’s a False Dichotomy to say THAT would invalidate all of their original ideas.
So they’ve been grasping at straws for years. It would’ve helped if they didn’t dismiss out of hand every adaptation that IS like the games. They baselessly insist “ every fan of American Sonic “ is “ Japanophobic “ and will preemptively mock the idea of being told otherwise and compare them to the Confederates. The only one who brings up race is you, purist. Only the purists dismiss characters out of hand based on their country of origin, instead of going on a case by case basis with them.
How is it punching down to call out SoJ when the people working at Sega of Japan aren’t Japanese-Americans so they’re people at the same equivalent position as people like Flynn are where he lives? I never saw them complain about that popular OVA or the manga. It must be that the most extreme only complained about Sonic X because the Americans in 4Kids were involved.
The weird thing is, even the most extreme purist doesn’t have a huge amount of complaining about AoStH or Sonic Boom. It must be because game stans can’t stand adaptations taking Sonic seriously, but are fine with when the games do, including Shadow the Hedgehog. It calls into question whether they truly like when Sonic is dark or not because their amount of bias means they would never think back to any times adaptations did dark material tactfully and purposefully or wouldn’t bring it up if they did.
I’ve read two game purists saying that as long as you like the games and don’t put them down they don’t have a problem with you liking adaptations. It doesn’t make it okay to say you only like a member of a harmless group if they’re “ one of the good ones “ if you assume they’re rare. It still doesn't make adaptation fans feel safe to even talk to you.
If a lie gets repeated to someone enough it becomes harder to not believe it. Game purists are like Flat Earthers. Nothing convinces them they’re wrong not even this article because they’re so arrogant and emotional that they won’t engage with the facts against their views even when they prove they’re fallacious. There is literally nothing actually supporting game purism because its entire foundation is fallacies and opinions.
And yet they accuse Archie and SatAM fans of being like Flat Earthers because they don’t respect American companies and either haven’t learned that Sega of America’s why this series didn’t stay a tech demo and made it the most money or are one of the nutjobs that dismiss all of the info on what it did for Sonic as fake news because it doesn’t suit their agenda.
So someone ought to add to that entry on Sonic’s Misaimed Fandom page because it was by someone who despite saying Sonic was a joint venture only sees SoJ as valid, arguing that people should only care about what they think.
It’s rare that an adaptation won’t contain anything that people like about the games. If one were to hate all these things you would hate the games, and if one truly liked them they would also be happy seeing them in adaptations.
If you absolutely love these game elements one would expect just seeing them in anything to be enough to make you like stories that aren’t badly written in most of the components of writing, or even then, people who get giddy about something will like a bad plot just because it’s there. STC has Emerald Hill Zone and Metropolis as its main settings and Emerald Hill looks exactly like the games. It had a story about an extra life monitor!
But the game purists are still complaining about Flynn making references to the games while claiming to be the only ones who really like the games and treating the Pontaff games as above criticism.
They saw a few people give an impression of hatred and generalize due to confirmation bias. Even saying only most people are a certain way is still bigoted against that group. Imagine someone saying he doesn’t hate women because he only thinks MOST of them are annoying sorts of feminists that think that real women don’t wear dresses.
These people say a lot that Sonic lives by his own feelings by just doing what he wants and they love that and say that it’s just because Sonic’s implied to be like that in the games but since all their opinions are feelings-based entirely and they just do whatever they want with no regard for the feelings of the people they offend, they identify with Sonic there. You know who also only lives by his own feelings and just does what he wants with no interest in upholding moral principles?
Eggman. Eggman’s a fascist. Maybe Sonic’s philosophy isn’t good and only works out because he happens to be a good person. They even admit that it’s only through luck that Sonic happens to like being good instead. But whenever they see Sonic be too mean in adaptations specifically they have a lot of feelings about that. But he’s living by his own feelings and not caring about principles! I thought they liked that about him! They don’t. It’s just about having any excuse to demonize what they don’t like.
If you liked a game element you’d like seeing it everywhere. Next you’re gonna tell me they claimed the whole concept of Sonic fighting Eggman with a group of friends is bad and isn’t meant to be in Sonic. Oh wait they did say that about the Freedom Fighters even though Tails and him were a group since Sonic 2 and Sonic Heroes exists. So they should hate the whole concept of Tails going with him on adventures and Knuckles being in the game then.
Yet they defend Knuckles being in the game with no explanation because they’ll say anything to defend the games. But he has NO reason for being with Sonic, how is that better than the FFs? So that’s just an excuse for the real reason they don’t like them, Sonic Team didn’t make them.
They act like they think “ divergence from the norm is an aberration and not innovation “ even though art for millennia has always been about subverting expectations to surprise the audience and innovate.
