and while there's definitely some bad writing he's done (some of the manuscript pages in the first game are ridiculous, and his spec script in control for his night springs application is not good in a funny way), i never really got the impression he was bad

just... under stressful conditions

and that definitely can fuck up the quality of your work

anyway, at someone who has looked back on their writing and seen it as very bad (and seen some of it as very good), one of my big worries is that I'm a horrible writer but no one will say that to my face

which is literally what happens to Alan in canon

anyway, i am just staring at these conversations like... what does this say about me...? since i don't see him as bad necessarily, but I'm also trying to write as him?

People are being dicks and also a lot of those criticisms are coming from people who don't write. 😤 I never thought he was bad? The Casey novels were a specific style, and the manuscript pages aren't bad, especially not..........under duress

(Also, you're a damn good writer. I may seem like I have bias but also I've been writing in your orbit for like a third of my life at this point and you've developed a lot)

well, one of the threads i was reading about it was actually from another game dev who was also saying all this from a game dev standpoint so it's not just a gamers who don't write moment this time

but thanks

Didn't see that thread, but point still stands.

/holds up the "personal taste doesn't mean something is categorically good or bad" sign

also reading over this guy's feed he thought Control was too incomplete a story

it wasn't???

hm. I don't like when people are like this about horror because horror is so personal

it's not necessarily shit horror, it's. Alan's personal horror. and it's meant to be tailored to him; we see this in the Alan Wake Escape Experience such as jacksepticeye participated in

what is horrifying to some is not horrifying to others, and basing whether or not a horror is bad based on "this horror doesn't personally scare me" instead of "this horror doesn't achieve the story it sets out to tell" has always rubbed me the wrong way

it's the same problem i have with some of the FNAF movie crit, a lot of it has been "this movie wasn't tailored specifically to my own sense of horror" instead of "this movie achieved what it set out to do, but it just didn't scare me personally

and i say this as lovingly as possible: being a game dev does not necessarily make someone's opinion more legitimate than others

yeah. one of the other things is they mention him being a shitty person because he got mad that Alice went behind his back to put him in psychiatric care when there's a bit in his background info that his mother was in and out of psychiatric care for an unknown psychological condition so i always saw it as a trauma response

uh

also

that's a violation of personal autonomy

that anyone would be perfectly fine to be mad about

yeah

but for example: the guy behind yanderedev exists and his opinions are jack and shit

this person has a clear sense of what THEY like to see in horror but that doesn't mean their opinion on horror as a genre is thorough