Discussion YMMV / RiseOfTheTombRaider

For starters any entry should be kept free of your personal feelings. You may be sick and tired of it, but others might see Tropes Are Tools.

I don't mind the Corrupt Church when it plays the actual role in the story. But in this case it exists for the sake of it. That's why it's so annoying - it simply feels shoehorned, increasing further the heavy-handling of the religious themes.

Then there is the sentiment all characters in the game have toward religion: useful tool (Trinity, the "evil organisation of evil", but also the Prophet, the nominal good guy and Jesus Expy), superstition (Lara) or just some mumbo-jumbo added to Ancient Artifacts to better use them (the narrative of the story itself). Let's not forget about the remnant of local civ, who all are firm believes, until they've realised the only good their faith did to them was keeping them in some god-forsaken Siberian wasteland for entire generations. When they all learn about this and about the artifact being destroyed, they are basically aimless and contemplate leaving the place for good, since the only reason they've stayed and fought with ferocity against all outsiders was their faith.

And it's all handled with subtelity of a bull in a china shop.

Except Corrupt Church is very much part of the plot as the Greater-Scope Villain; Documents you recover during the game indicate that someone within the Vatican is behind Trinity.

Jacob's followers are also KNEW they were there to protect the Source. Once that is gone, their reason for remaining went with it.

It's still doesn't change how heavy-handed it is in the game itself. I'm not denying all those tropes and plot elements. I'm not sure myself how to even put it into words. The whole plot structure, at least on paper, sounds like a great premise. But then there is execution of all those elements, and it feels like playing through something made by a bunch of teens writing a script after watching Dawkins' videos for few hours.

And Trinity could operate without mentioning the Vatican connection at all. In fact, it makes them look silly rather than menacing due to that bit - turns out this multi-million operation is a secret order of secrets and of course it's run by Catholic Church. In 21st century. Because CC is such a world superpower respected by everyone. And it has this secret branch that still adheres to interpretation of Christianity from early medieval AND uses said interpretation to rule the world... and all of this is served 100% serious.

Which I think is part of the reason why it feels Anvilicious in the first place - it's a silly game with silly plot, but good God, it takes itself so serious like nothing else in past few years, while being Far Cry-tier wacky plot.

Except the game is not trying to send a "religion is evil" message at all, so your use of the trope is flat out incorrect. If this was a Family Guy episode you were talking about you might have a point, but it's not, AAA games in general don't try to preach morals, so I highly doubt the people behind this game were trying to say "all religion is pure evil"

Why is the original entry invalid? I don't claim to speak for anyone in the design team, but words still mean things, and I can take issue with what they wrote. This is why we have tropes like "Unfortunate Implications" and the like. Heck, maybe this even qualifies for that trope.

You might try to provide evidence for a counter-arguments to show how these elements of the story can be interpreted differently rather than insisting that there is no intended message. I would even suggest a bullet-point added as a counter-point to the original entry for that purpose.

Might that work?

To vexer

It doesn't really matter if this or that medium preaches morals. It's important how it handles own content. Also, you are GREATLY exaggerating the content of the Anvilicious entry, to the point where it feels like you don't even care what was the content of it, but instead are angry someone is saying "bad" things about the game.

I've checked history of your edits in YMMV sections of all sorts of works. It's hard to ignore you quite often get there, remove entries you don't like (even if it's YMMV and they come with perfectly fine reasoning why someone put them in the first place) and add a note to it which boils down to "No, you are wrong, and I'm right!". YMMV doesn't work that way. Just like Agathaumas pointed out, you can provide a counter-point to the trope and put the other side of the coin, explaining why the trope might be wrong or pushed.

Angry ranting and random gutting of a page doesn't exactly work well and is the very reason why I brought the whole issue to Ask The Tropers

To Agathaumas

Yeah, but Unfortunate Implications requires to have a quoted source with someone "established" as an authority pointing out this or that is controversial. It doesn't work for just saying "Yeah, this game has issues with X". You need to quote who said that.

For this reason the extremely problematic part of Tomb Raider III - the South Pacific - can't be put under Unfortunate Implications, even if the section of the game consists of gunning down natives, who are portrayed as Always Chaotic Evil tribe of cannibals, while Lara herself shoots at them just because she wants to steal their sacred artifact, killing in the process half of the tribe for no reason than wanting to rob them. Problematic? You bet it. Can it be under Unfortunate Implications? Nope, because you need quotation for it. Just check YMMV history for TR3, since it was there already, years ago, but quicky got removed, for this exact reason.

On the plus side, quoting a blog is enough to justify Unfortunate Implications

Reading the description of Anvilicious, " anvilicious describes a writer's and/or director's use of an artistic element, be it line of dialogue, visual motif, or plot point, to so obviously or unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head." Considering the "to", the question is if this was intentional. About Unfortunate Implications, recently the following was added in their description by Fighteer: " The citation should be in a reputable source. We'd prefer you cite something a bit more formal than someone's Tumblr blog. Anyone can write a blog post and then call it a "citation"."

Which is more or less what I've said. After all, a lot of critics, both professionals and semi-professionals, run blogs nowdays. Just don't use RandomJoe1982 as the source.

But it doesn't move the issue any step forward. Does Anvilicious need to be intentional or can it be accidental? I mean it's hard to treat it "accidental" to explicity list who is funding who and write an Alternate History background notes and trivia for the game, but still. I seriously doubt that anyone ever from the dev team in any interview outright said "yeah, we wanted to make the game extremely unsuble about religion existing only to manipulate people", but it doesn't change the fact it come off as conveying such message.