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Blog / Guardian Acorn

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"Blog of Trans lesbian feminist, writer, activist, and gamer Annie Gallagher"
— The blog self-description

A blog run by a woman named Annie Gallagher, as the page quote states.

Largest section of her blog is devoted to reviews of video games, including "Nukige Septic Tank" and "Steam Greenlight Landfill"- reviews of god-awful games. Besides this, she also writes political pieces, poems, An Erotica story called "A Goddess Will" and a series of articles about Awesome Music in video games called Amazing VGM, plus couple of reviews of other stuff.

    List of Games reviewed by the Blog 

Since the blog contains NSFW material it will not be linked.

This blog provides examples of:

  • Accentuate the Negative: Averted, she will usually be fair in her criticism, exception being the "Nukige Septic Tank" and "Steam Greenlight Landfill" titled reviews, whose subjects do not have that much positive to say about them in first place.
  • Author Appeal:
  • Brown Note: Referenced by trope name in regards to the Sakura Spirit OST “Temptation,” and in regards to the recycled music in Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2.
  • Caustic Critic: Averted, unless a work is really bad. Hell, she even gave a fairly positive review of Duke Nukem Forever .
  • Compassionate Critic: She is often hesitant about being too harsh on games she dislikes because she knows fully well the developers may be reading, and she hopes to inspire devs to improve rather than tear them down and berate them. That’s not to say that some games aren’t bad enough to push her into caustic critic territory.
  • Content Warnings: she gives them before reviews of games containing potentially triggering content, and sometimes inside a review before sections of an article that discuss subjects that may be difficult for some readers
  • Conditioned to Accept Horror: Has fallen into this trope hard, to the point that she has become an outright Nightmare Fetishist.
  • Critic Breakdown: Taken up to eleven in her review of Starless: Nymphomaniac’s Paradise. While most of the review is fairly standard, at the end, she explains in detail that the trauma that came from playing it is very similar to rape trauma syndrome, and that finding images to use for the review triggered a mental breakdown. In later content, she claimed that her experience with the game made her suicidal.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Very frequently in her reviews.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • Her earlier political pieces are much more centrist than her later ones, and had her try her best to seek common ground with people like Blaire White and Meghan Murphy. She believes she was overly naive at the time and considers these pieces an old shame.
    • Some of her earlier reviews have references to review scores and follow a more formulaic layout, as opposed to the more free flowing direction of her later writing.
  • Feminist Fantasy: She wrote an extensive essay about how Porn with Plot Visual Novel called Euphoria is an example, and plans (as of march 2022) on making one for the spiritual successor Maggot Baits
  • Metaphorgotten: Her review of Clothing & Alterations opens with the following; “Of the many statements I’ve made in my writing career, if I was told I had to choose one specific hill to die on, I’d probably choose the statement that queer people are better at writing erotica than cishet people. And no, this isn’t because I consider it the most important. It’s actually because I don’t want to die on a hill, and anyone dumb enough to argue against me on this one probably isn’t in good enough shape to climb up one, much less get past my army of highly trained antifa catgirls… unless someone throws a ball of yarn. If that happens then I’m screwed.”
  • Moral Guardians: In her Maggot Baits review she states that she is against such behavior in leftist circles, citing the fact that childhood trauma is extremely common among target audience of reviewed game.
  • Nightmare Fetishist:
    • She admits in her Maggot Baits review that she is part of its target audience.
    • Her review of UnderParty lampshades this fact. "That’s what makes Guardian Acorn so special, it’s not just a game Review Blog, but it’s also a cry for help!"
  • Occidental Otaku: She described herself as weeb several times on the blog.
  • Permanently Missable Content: Some of her older stuff that she’s not proud of has been deleted, and is this trope unless she reuploads it.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: In her review of Magical Girl Site she references common criticism of bullies in anime, and points out that people in real life actually act this way.
  • Review Ironic Echo: She really likes this trope.
    • Her Mighty No. 9 review, not only has “Sadder than an Anime fan on Prom Night” as her review tagline, she also captions the line “Blast. I see no pattern whatsoever” as the game’s level design in a nutshell
    • Her review of Max: An Autistic Journey with“I see a crazy autistic idiot who's having another meltdown!! Again!!”
    • Blanc saying “I actually wrote this game’s entire scenario. Check the credits”In Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection prompts Annie to point out that it’s a running gag in the series that Blanc is terrible at writing.
    • Her review of Yooka-Laylee with “Rextro learn it okay to be old Fashioned. Even if bat make fun”
    • Her review of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa features an image of the quote “Because it’s not some kind of a contest. You should matter to at least somebody just because you were born” with her saying that, despite her criticisms, this could apply to the game itself.
    • She ended her review of DeadΩAegis (pronounced Dead End Aegis), with “This game was so close to greatness, but it hit a dead end on the way.”
    • Her review of Majikoi! Love Me Seriously! includes the infamous Chris “I did a terrible thing” image to signify her displeasure with her route.
    • The tagline to her Bayonetta review is "One of a Kind."
  • Shout-Out:
    • In her Parasite Eve review, she puts a picture of Joaquim Phoenix Joker with added captions entitled "Society", under a screenshot in which a character asks "why is it that humans kill".
    • In her Clothing&Alterations review she puts a caption under a screenshot of in game contract, stating that not even Phoenix Wright can get you out of this one.
    • Her UnderParty review has a gif of the main character getting beaten by a large muscular man captioned with "Standing here, I realize!" referencing the final boss theme from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: In her Doki Doki Literature Club! review, she says when talking about Yuri :
    In the second playthrough, she has gone full yandere, frequently cuts herself for sexual pleasure, and gives you a poem made of illegible gibberish marked with red and yellow stains that she says she “marked with her scent” while also admitting that she masturbated using the pen the MC dropped, stuff that I definitely have never done to anyone and has definitely not resulted in multiple restraining orders.
  • Take That!:
    • “Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, otherwise known as ‘the reason why Super Mario 3D All Stars looks so half-assed…’”
    • From her You and Me and Her review "For the most part, you can generally tell a game will be kinda fucked up in some way if the Nitro Plus is visible on it, similarly to how one can tell that a game will have anime tiddies and cryptic ending requirements if an Idea Factory logo is present, or that a game will be a microtransaction infested shit pile if it has an Electronic Arts logo on it."
    • “but there is a clear difference between Meltys Quest and the ones I liked. The difference is that just about every man in Meltys Quest, with a few exceptions, is uglier than Donald Trump’s hair.”
    • Also from Meltys Quest “So yes, it’s not exactly rape induced conversion therapy so it’s still better than Ladykiller in a Bind, but it’s pretty fucking close.”
    • Again, from Meltys Quest “It is nice to see an indie eroge RPG localized with legitimate effort when you have sixty seven assembly line “translations” that I’m convinced were created by copy pasting the entire Japanese script into Google translate, then pasting the transcribed English script into Russian, then back into Japanese, only they instead accidentally selected Javanese, then back into English, and the finishing touches are made by cutting out each individual word of said script, hanging them up on the wall, and having monkeys throw lawn darts at them. Then again, I’m convinced that the resulting script would still turn out better than anything localized by Sakura Game.”
  • Wise Beyond Their Years: She has stated on her about page, that she have been told that she writes as someone twice her age would.

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