While a staunch intellectual, Bennett has said and done a few things that demonstrate the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
Keep in mind:
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Dethroning Moment of Suck. - No ALLCAPS, no bold, and no italics unless it's the title of a work. We are not yelling the DMoSs out loud.
- Please no He Panned It, Now He Sucks!. Someone having a different opinion than you is not nearly a good enough justification for something being seen as stupid or offensive.
- Creator's works only. No moments on the author themselves or personal experience with them.
- Ares 101: During his Fist of the North Star review, Bennett commented that Ken's desire to rescue Yuria was essentially selfish, and further went on to say that heroes who strive to maintain a healthy romantic life, such as Superman and Spider-Man, should be condemned for doing so. This is just a monumentally stupid thing to say on several levels. First up, rescuing Yuria would require defeating Shin and destroying his army, which would save everyone else Shin is currently threatening. Second, and most importantly, heroes are people and not machines. They need things like rest, love, companionship, etc. Saying that there's something selfish or wrong with wanting love and wanting to protect the people you love is just asinine. Furthermore, in many instances, it was the love for their significant others that have given heroes the strength to keep going in the face of overwhelming odds. Bennett is one of the only people I've seen who seems to agree with Dan DiDio's statement that heroes should not have happy personal lives and shouldn't be allowed to be in love.
- fluffything: Normally, I like Bennett The Sage's Anime Abandon series and it's interesting to see his views on hilariously bad Anime from the late 80s-early 90s. But, I just pretty much said "Fuck it" after the first few minutes of this Vampire Wars review. Why, you may ask? Because of his "I hate vampires" rant. Now, it's not the fact that he doesn't like vampires that bothers me. What I found to be a DMOS was his reasoning for hating vampires. It pretty much boiled down to "because I don't like the fandom" and "vampires are popular", and then he acts all smug and hip stating how he was hating vampires before it was "cool to like vampires". Again, apart from bashing the fandom, he gives no other reason to hate vampire fiction. Look, if you don't like something, fine. But, for Alucard's sake, give a more legitimate reason to dislike vampires (IE: The mythos, the various media portrayals, etc.) themselves rather than just whine about the fandom.
- X Spectre Grey X: While I don't think Sage is a good game reviewer at all, his review of Halo 4 is completely horrible. At the beginning, he made it perfectly clear that he did not care for the series, so of course he wouldn't know what's going on. He never mentions this during his review, instead he's just being deadpan and bored. His complete lack of enthusiasm for the game is so obvious and overpowering, that it makes it impossible to take him seriously. It felt like he went into this game not liking it because, well, it's Halo. It also doesn't help that he actually says that he dislikes modern shooters, so he's already going in biased. He goes as far as to say that the weapons are mere reskins of each other, which is an outright lie. It's not even hard to determine the difference between most of the guns (even those in the same type, e.g the rifles). Sage just didn't care enough to look deeper. Halo 4 was made for Halo fans, and really, can only be appreciated fully by them, or at the bare minimum, someone's who's played a few games in the series.
- Misfit 119: The above Halo review was actually what made me stop watching Sage altogether after suffering through many of his game reviews. He pushes himself as a "No lies, all facts" type of reviewer and then spouts over-opinionated garbage that shows a clear slant towards very specific games, notably PS3 games. He will rag on Halo 4 for doing things that it never actually does (ie. weapons being simple reskins) and then praise PS stuff like Killzone even though it has the things he hates in Halo (that, once again, Halo doesn't actually have). It's like he sucks up all the crappy from generally good Playstation games so he can ignore them and then projects them violently onto any non-Playstation games in sight regardless of quality. One of the best things that ever happened to video gaming is when he stopped passing himself off as a reviewer. It's one thing to be biased and gleeful in it, like a console exclusive reviewer might be, it's another to be biased and ignorant and call yourself an honest reviewer. It actually ran so counter to his usual image of an intellectual to almost border on performance art but definitely not a review.
- Calamity 2007: One day, I decided to check out this guy, seeing him guest on other shows on the site, and I decided to watch his review on Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie. And I was not prepared to see the sheer Bias Steamroller that this shit review had. Probably the breaking point for me was when he got a guy who "represented the fanbase" to say that "no Sonic fan" liked the movie or acknowledge its existance, even listing games like the infamous Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) as having happened and this movie not. Yeah...seeing how this movie is quoted by fans and that it is listed as a Cult Classic, I really don't think that random guy knows really what the fanbase thinks. And I won't try to represent the people who watched this, but from me, personally, who loves the OVA and knows people who love it as well, I'd like to tell Sage that he should go fuck himself and that he lost a potential fan.
- Fauxlosophe: I'm going to keep following Sage for a bit but if I give up on him, I'm tracing it to this so I'm putting it up. His Inuyasha review has him go into bad boys at length; rather than focus on unfortunate implications or express some personal discomfort with the trope, he ranted about how women needed to stop being interested in bad boys. This coming from the guy who coined the term "Valkyrie Bitch" and affectionately referred to one as "ball crushing". The hypocrisy from this hurt. It didn't help that there were some interesting ideas in the Collar/BDSM metaphor for their relation dynamic but he doesn't explore it enough and so it seems shaky; if he'd not wasted time ranting to grown women to shame them for their attraction, he might have fleshed out what makes an interesting premise for a dynamic (if one the show never really explores).
- TCgamerboy2002: His crossover review of the Speed Racer movie with The Nostalgia Critic. First and foremost, this review isn't bad by any means, as Speed Racer is a hideous movie and they made good points about it. My complaint mostly comes from the Nostalgia Critic's side of the review. At one point, the Critic bashes the fact that everyone is awkwardly/lazily named. The worst offenders being the Racer parents and Inspector Detector, with the latter he mentions in such an annoyed way. Throughout the video, I was actually expecting him to say that certain names that came from a 60's anime don't translate very well in a 21st century movie (which, by the way, is true to some extent). But no, he just complains about how lame the names are, as if they were lazily made up for the movie. For a man who's a fan of nostalgia, he certainly doesn't show it with this moment.
- TimeLord103: As a fan of the Speed Racer movie, this review was just horrendous all around, especially on Nostalgia Critic's sides of the argument. He complains about Chim Chim being in the movie and says it "breaks the illusion..." What the hell was Critic smoking? Since when does a pet chimp (who actually was in the anime, by the way, so this argument makes even less sense) break the illusion of a universe where a bunch of colorful cars crash into each other like Mario Kart on steroids? And it doesn't stop there. Later on, Bennet and NC complain about not being able to tell the Mach 5 and Mach 6 apart from each other, even though anyone with a functioning pair of eyes could differentiate Machs 5 and 6 apart from each other, even at first glance. Aside from the color scheme, they look nothing alike! But what especially pisses me off about this sorry excuse for a review is how it was painfully obvious that NC had never even seen the source material at all, otherwise he would have understood that the movie was pretty much embracing the cheesiness of the original and literally making a live action anime. I know Critic is known for being ignorant when it comes to films (coughcoughThe Wallcoughcough), but this review was just painful to watch.
- knightofbalance : In his Top 20 Giant Robots in Fiction, he put Gurren Lagann at number 15. Why? Not because of its over the top nature or overuse of size escalation or the fact that it could accidentally end the universe like a logical person would. No, he puts it so low, despite he himself saying the series breathed new life into the mecha genre and saying it has much more positives than negatives, because Kyle Hebert voices Kamina... That's it. That's his only reason. Some personal grudge he has against a dub voice actor. There are other mechas on the list he dislikes more and have more disadvantages (one of which isn't even half machine) he puts above this one because he has a personal grudge against someone. When he gets around to reviewing Gurren Lagann, this better not be a factor...
- Wally Weeb: In his review of the cult classic influential hit anime film, AKIRA, he complains about a line that was spoken by one of the characters in a scene where two people are stuck in a cell discussing the mysterious power that the antagonist uses to cause chaos to the city. One of the two people uses an amoeba as a example of how dangerous the power that the antagonist possesses could have on a normal human being. However, Bennett, for some reason, actually took the metaphor seriously and thought that it was a plot hole, instead of, well... A metaphor.
- Bearded Troper: I was never a big fan of Bennett, but his review of the anime movie Metropolis... Throughout the film, he complains about the film's plot and misunderstands it. Throughout the review, he made it sound like the film never explained why the working class citizens would not like robots to take their jobs despite the fact the film had plenty of moments, dialogue and set pieces that he ignored. It culminated in a full-on rant claiming the movie does not understand its own plot when in reality, Bennett clearly does not understand subtlety. What’s worse is that he claims the movie did not deserve its praises because he didn’t understand the plot so it must be bad.
- RNotte: When he’s not talking about “cute” anime, Bennett the Sage is very entertaining. When he is, however, he’s insufferable. And I knew that he will never have an open mind about “cute” anime after merely watching the intro of his Devil Hunter Yohko review, where he almost vomits at the sight of Konata from Lucky Star and expresses how confused he is that boys and men could enjoy shows like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, even calling them “evil”. He was probably joking with that one, but I couldn’t watch any further for 3 reasons. First of all, the last time I saw someone get this repulsed by something sweet and adorable was on Fox News. Second, who says boys can’t enjoy magical girls? Third, this moment is also personal to me, because Sage in this review reminds me of me when I was in high school. I hated anime, my family’s dogs, being called “cute”, and even the whole concept of love at the time. But I’ve grown up, I’ve matured, my tastes have expanded, and now both Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura are 2 of my favorite cartoons (not just anime, cartoons in general) of all time. I look forward to the day when Sage can expand his tastes like me, and accept that cute moments in anime is not something to be repulsed by. But maybe he won’t. I can always dream, can I?
