I'm getting really tired of some people ignoring good faith media criticism by falling back on cries of "cut content would have fixed it!" We cannot critique media based on what *could* have been - we critique the final product that was published
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The issue with cut content is that people imagine it as great stuff that would improve the things, but in many cases it got cut because they realized it wasn't good or had issues.
This is maybe out of the scope of what you're talking about, but I feel like we are seeing so much resistance to thinking critically about a lot of things these days, very much including beloved media. And it's probably a timeless defensive impulse, but it really feels insidious in our culture now.
I think a lot of it links back to lowering education standards/defunding the arts. So many students aren't being introduced to critical analysis/logical fallacies because they're being taught to regurgitate exam questions for short term gain (i.e. test scores for school funding)
And I think that gets compounded by some people deeply tying their identity to specific works of media - a criticism against their favorite media can feel like a criticism against the self
Would Skyrim have been better if the Civil War was properly fleshed out or if the Windhelm Arena was included? Maybe. But we don't critique media based on what-ifs. A player is only engaging with what is put in front of them. We cannot judge media based on esoteric code embedded in the files
In other words, are there cases where cut content would have addressed criticisms of certain games? Yes. But, for whatever reason, that content is not present in the final product, and therefore it cannot be a remedy to said criticisms. If y'all wanna cling to death of the author, this is the time
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