Criticising Critics

So, as an aspiring author and potential future content creator, it’s pretty much premature career suicide to slander critics before I’ve even released anything. However, after the release of the Warcraft movie and the immense gap in opinion between critics’ reviews and reviews from those who simply watch movies for enjoyment, I thought it might be worth taking a bit of a closer look as to who critics are and why we value their opinions.

So firstly, I’ll admit two things – I’m biased towards thinking Warcraft is going to be good, and I’ve also not seen the movie yet. This is not a review of the movie. For all I know, the critics could be right, and the movie could be awful. This is also not a panic post, where I desperately try to justify to myself that the movie is amazing and that the critics, therefore, have to be wrong. Movies don’t mean that much to me. I’m sure Warcraft has plenty of flaws. But something about the way critics are treating this just rubs me the wrong way. It’s hard to believe that a movie can be a worthless piece of trash from 5 people when 500 more are arguing its merits, and I’m then told that those 500 people are wrong because they’re not the super special 5 critics who know if a movie is good or not.

Critics exist, I think, for two main reasons. They exist because people want to know if a movie is worth going to see before they spend their money, and they exist because whenever a creative mind produces a narrative, an academic mind becomes curious as to its workings, wants to deconstruct it and reconstruct under various different perspectives and fully comprehend the subtexts and intertexts woven throughout. I do not see the latter in most Warcraft reviews. I see someone who has been paid to sit down and watch a movie, and has gone into it believing that it’s one big advertisement (as they may believe all videogame movies are) and are on some level personally offended that another industry would use theirs as a platform off of which to propel themselves. With this in mind, then, I believe they’ve gone in to the movie with every intent of tearing that movie down, magnifying its weaknesses and refusing to believe that any sort of decent narrative exists within the movie in front of them.

Or maybe it just sucks. Maybe it’s a solid 5/10. But the amount of people who have left that movie singing its praises on social media is what’s caused me to eye these critics suspiciously in the first place. Fans of the franchise and newcomers alike call it a decent movie at the very least, and some critics response to this has been an elitist one. If you’d rather not give them the click, here’s about the sum of it:

“Warcraft” is currently quite rotten on critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, sporting a 22 percent rating. Just four of 18 reviews were considered “Fresh,” though even those were rather tempered. Maybe the most positive thing we actually read during this roundup process was: “‘Warcraft’ doesn’t suck.”

It would seem that if you don’t get paid to see a movie, your opinion on it isn’t justified. If you enjoyed the movie, and felt like saying that you enjoyed it without going into an extensive 700 word review about it, then critics hate you, because you’re the problem. Movies are no laughing matter. All you’re doing is encouraging directors like Duncan Jones to continue slandering the movie industry with thinly veiled attempts at marketing. I am, of course, embellishing here, for that is no direct quote, but I’ll give my left leg and the pinky toe on my right if that’s not the attitude that some critics currently have.

It’s an abuse of power. Trying to kill a movie with your influential ways for prejudiced or even completed misguided (more on that here) reasons completely discredits your opinion and calls in to question all other reviews that you produce, in my opinion. If there’s an ulterior motive behind your slandering then you’re no better than a politician… only now, it’s about killing a genre of movie that you don’t like instead of doing something significant like attempting to steer a parliamentary decision. Bravo.

Bloggin’ ‘Bout Vloggin’

I used to watch a lot of vloggers on Youtube. In fact, I think I watched them more than gaming videos, which is pretty much my go-to if I’m going to watch anything on Youtube. Over time, however, my tastes have changed, and I’ve mostly moved away from the genre. I’ve grown to find most vloggers to be self-obsessed or narcissistic, with clickbaitesque titles such “I ALMOST DIED!” when in reality they’ll briefly mention how they crossed the street and almost hit a parked car. But they’re not all bad.

TomSka has recently begun a weekly vlog series which documents his life as a comedy content creator on Youtube, and I personally find it interesting not just for his humour, but how he deals with issues such as low self-esteem and additionally, how independent his life is (which is sort of a niche interest to me right now given that I’m still yet to fly the nest). I’ve watched his comedy sketches and occasional topical vlogs (where he sits down at a desk and discusses a topic as opposed to documenting his daily life) for many years, and it’s great to see more of the guy.

Cory Williams (or SMPFilms, or DudeLikeHella) is another Youtuber who I’ve been following for many years. His philosophy and outlook on life is one that aligns quite closely with my own, and having stuck with him as a viewer through some turbulent years it’s legitimately gratifying to watch him fulfill goals of happiness within his life, from California to Alaska. I highly recommend giving his videos a watch, even if you’re not into vlogs.

These are pretty much the only vloggers I watch now, and whilst they’re not the only decent vloggers out there, they’re a breath of fresh air out from some of the narcissists and cash grabbers that are currently pumping out videos. People like Tom and Cory interest me from an autobiographical standpoint (and they make me laff, oh mah days), and from what I can tell, both of them seem to share this interest themselves.

However, I didn’t write this blog just to plug my lunchtime viewing habits. One of the reasons why I perhaps criticise vloggers so much is the fact that I used to do some vlogs myself, around late 2012 / early 2013, towards the end of my A-Levels. The idea was that I’d document the final days of my life as a student of my school, and whilst I certainly had fun shooting videos, I can retrospectively side with my absent viewership when I say that they certainly didn’t hold too much substance in an already over-saturated genre of entertainment. Whilst I’ll admit that my vlogs weren’t awful, or a baseless grab for attention like those I criticise, I can’t exactly justify the entertainment value of a burned out and often cynical student who lacked motivation in his studies and would often speak loudly over his friends.

Blogging, then, mightn’t be so different, except for the fact that you’re currently looking at a block of text instead of my overwhelmingly underwhelming face. (I know, that’s a lot of whelm.)  This is why I’ve always steered my blog away from being solely about me; in fact, up until recently, there have been hardly any blog posts about myself, and this spike of self-interest has mostly come about due to a period of transition in my own personal life (i.e leaving university). However, I also think it’s different in that I can conduct myself more in text than I can in conversation with a camera. In conversation, one cannot go back and restructure sentences, or lose readers based on manner of speech and quality of video. Regardless of this, though, I’ll probably keep things weighted more on the topical side of things than the personal. If there’s one thing I’ve discovered from my long-abandoned vlogging project from days of old, it’s that my personal life isn’t all that different from the other thousands of vloggers and bloggers, and I can far more enthusiastically write about my perspectives on certain topics than what I had for breakfast.

My First Week of Graduandism

According to my university (and, begrudgingly, a quick Google search), a ‘Graduand’ is somebody who has completed their university course and is about to receive their degree. As of last Thursday, that’s the category I fall under. (Unless you have to receive results first? I’m fairly sure I didn’t completely fail though.) So how did I cope with the obligatory post-course existential crisis?

Well… not terribly.

The first day of it was the worst. We submit our coursework via electronic submission, because we’re in the year 3000. (Sorry if that got Busted stuck in your head. I’ve had Uptown Girl rolling around my skull for a few days now thanks to my fam- wait, I should stop digressing in parentheses, it’s a terrible habit.) I handed in my final piece of coursework, clicked the button, watched it upload and then… I was done. Nothing had changed. I was still sat in my room, in front of my laptop, but I was now finished with my degree. I’d heard about people feeling intense relief when finishing their studies but mostly, I just felt like I’d forgotten something. It was very anticlimactic.

I soon got friends to distract me and the feeling passed, and now… I don’t feel much different to before. The problem with my course was that as it was Creative Writing, it was mostly based around our own ability to write and learn and improve upon ourselves, so we only ever had a very small amount of hours to attend university in the week. I’ve remarked many times before that it didn’t feel like a real university course due to this, and whilst I’m not undervaluing the workload we had, I have to admit that six hours of lectures a week lead to a loss of immersion. Immersion might be an odd word for it, seeing as this isn’t a game or an oceanic setting, but honestly, spending that long outside of your university made it sometimes easy to forget you were even on a course during the lull between deadlines. Or maybe I just didn’t do enough independent study. So now that I’m done, I can’t say much has really changed in my life. I have an extra six hours in my week, and the pressure to meet deadlines has been replaced with a pressure to make it seem like I’m doing something with my life other than sitting around and waiting for my job to start.

It’s not all crippling emptiness, though. I did go out with some friends to see Captain America: Civil War on Saturday, and I’ve definitely been socializing more again. I’ve not begun working on any personal writing projects yet (bar the ever present blogging, and a small daily project that I’ll reveal at the end of the year), but I certainly have some ideas that barged their way into my thinking space when I was trying to desperately concentrate on how my romanticist short story incorporated pantheistic subtext. I’ll get to work on them soon enough, but my life is still somewhat in the transitional stage from the lands of certainty to the realms of wary stability, and I’d rather go at my own pace than fall in to the river of overused geographical metaphors.

My Introverted Life

I vaguely remember hearing the term “introvert” in an English lesson and thinking, “Well shit, that’s me!”

So yes, I’m an introverted 20 year old student writer, really pushing the stereotype there, eh? But I wasn’t always this way. Let’s go back to an 11 year old Kristian. 11 year old Kristian here used to bark at people in the corridors. I was quite the attention seeker. I wasn’t the worst attention seeker out there, I could live without being the centerpiece of the room, but I was still pretty bad. It makes me cringe when I think back on how I used to act. But even as an attention seeker, I was still pretty introverted, and would often spend more time play console games than going out with friends.

Eventually, we moved house, and I ended up living a fair way away from my school. This, of course, meant that most of my friends lived almost inaccessibly far away, and to this day it’s still a pain in the ass to go and see them, as it takes me about an hour and two buses just to get there or back. This, of course, did not help my hermit lifestyle. However, as I grew up I also cooled off a little with the attention whoring, and as I turned my attention inwards I began to notice many things which I wasn’t a fan of, such as how I would always dump my problems on others.

What followed was somewhat of an over-correction.

I soon had the opportunity for the first time in years to introduce myself to a whole new social circle, in regards to my A-Level history class which I went to a different school for. This was my chance to re-imagine myself as nobody knew who I was, and of course as always happens in those situations nothing really changed and I still ended up being myself… which is a good thing, of course. However, one thing did change – I stopped telling everyone about my personal problems. To this day, the friends I made during my time at that school have heard next to nothing about my personal emotions, and even during the few times I had bouts of severe unhappiness during history lessons, I refused to open up and confide in my friends when they wanted to help.

At the time, I loved it. I had a separate group of friends who I could hang out with without discussing personal problems or with past emotional baggage weighing on our interactions with each other. (Douchey way of thinking, I know.) But I don’t really talk to any of them today aside from the odd social media interaction, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not because we don’t like each other. It’s because I never let them in, or game them a chance to talk to me about what was going on in their lives. And I regret that.

University, then, was another chance to re-imagine myself (which never works) and introduce myself to an entirely new group of people. This time, surely, I would strike the right balance of casual friendship and emotional interaction. But unfortunately, what actually happened was a more intensified version of my A-Level situation. I’ve made brilliant friends in university, and I don’t regret meeting a single one of them, but we’ve now approached the end of this course and I don’t feel like I’ve truly opened up to… well, anyone. And it’s really hard to say that without sounding ungrateful, so I want to stress that that was entirely my mental blockade. Not once did I make any attempt to meet anyone outside of the actual course, bar the occasional social gathering that wasn’t initiated by me. So… sorry about that, friends.

So, what happened here? Well, like I said, over-correction. It seems that after noting how personally whiney and attention-seeking I’d become, I wanted to squash that part of myself so much that I pushed myself to the other side of the spectrum and forgot how to interact with human beings entirely. I’ve even fallen into that pitfall with pre-existing friends, sometimes, who already know almost everything about me. Since the aforementioned over-correction, I’ve personally opened up emotionally to one friend (who I’m very lucky to have), and whilst I’m not saying that you should burden all of your friends with your problems, it’s hard to get by if you keep everything to yourself. In the next few years I’m going to have to work hard on emotionally investing in new people that I meet, lest I become a complete social outcast.

Now, to take the discussion away from my poor dear friendship issues for just a moment, I’d like to say that I’m sorry for the patchy last few weeks of blog posts. I’ve come to the end of my deadlines (mostly – last one is on Thursday), and while I’ve obviously not been focusing on my coursework for 100% of my waking moments, I’ve often spent so long trying to write academically on that day that the mere prospect of trying to write nonfiction exhausts me. The reason this blog post was so oriented on self-evaluation was because I haven’t really had too much going on that I can blog about! And if I have, I’ve not been sparing much thought process into thinking up blog post topics during the week. Things will get better from here on out, I promise.

This Isn’t Becoming a Habit

I’ve noticed that only now, when I need to reserve any writing ability I can muster for my coursework, has my mind suddenly started spouting all of these crazy ideas for short stories, novels and full-fledged book series. It’s funny what the brain can convince you of when it wants to distract itself from the matter at hand.

Well anyway, I’ve got lots to be doing. When I started writing this blog I was insistent that I’d never skip a week, no matter what, and it is with great shame that I must postpone this week’s blog post once again. Deadlines are deadlines, and whilst I could probably sit here for a good hour or so thinking up some grand topic to write about, chances are I’d fall flat on any ideas and be unable to do whatever I thought up justice when it came to actual reading value.

So without further ado, here’s this week’s blog post:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH GAME OF THRONES WAS AMAZINGGGGGGGGG

(I’ll allow my good friend Samuel Pepys to fill in for me this week.)