I'm sure we all know about the low audience scores given to The Acolyte. Rotten Tomatoes was sitting down at 14% since around the third episode, and was that low up until at least the last episode. Now that it's nearly a week out from the season finale, I figured I'd take another look.
The Rotten Tomatoes score has gone up to 17% and other review platforms have gone up a bit also.
So I decided to read through a few of the recent ones. Here are two examples:
The showrunners accuse fans of "review bombing" but are apparently just fine with artificial review boosting. I saw a bunch of these double reviews and nearly every single one talked about things like diversity, a "fresh take", production values, etc, all in that typical bland corporate-speech type of language.
Whereas the negative reviews are detailed and specific without ever getting into racism, bigotry, sexism, or other things fans are often accused of. If you read through the negative reviews they are often well thought out criticisms of the story itself and the quality of acting.
I just wanted to bring this fake review boosting to the community's attention. If you enjoyed the show, that's awesome. But it's dishonest to dilute honest and fair criticisms of a show.
While shady behavior to manipulate reviews is not okay, I'm hesitant to engage with the discussion. The reason being that jumping down into this topic results in unproductive slapfights where everyone calls everyone else shills/trolls/whatever. Bringing that discussion to this community changes the tone from talking about Star Wars, to talking about people who are talking about people who are talking about Star Wars.
There should be a space on the Internet to enjoy Star Wars, and to discuss and critique Star Wars content itself without being sidetracked by talking about how other people have wrong opinions.
E-celebs whip up mobs of idiots. Corporations whip up mobs of idiots. I just don't know if that's something we really need to put a magnifying glass on here. This topic is something I've been thinking about for a while now.
I agree that engaging is for the most part non-productive. It's like trying to explain gravity to a flat earther. I just want people to be aware of the manipulation.
I'd prefer people ignore the noise. Star Wars fandom is always on the precipice of exploding into another fan on fan knifefight with the smallest provocation. I had hoped to have a space where people talk about what they enjoy, rather than fight over review scores and Twitter nonsense. But I am hesitant as well to strike down the discussion that people want to engage in.
Absolutely agree.
My favourite thing about lemmy, compared to the other place, is how with much smaller communities the discussions are much less vitriolic and antagonistic.
I've missed being able to have discussions about star wars based on media and literary analysis, instead of "the main character is a woman and thus BAD".