The Nostalgia Critic cleanup

That's alright, I think I'll just take it to ATT.

Made a sandbox for the character page. I'm not done with the main page cleanup but the character pages are driving me a bit nuts for their length. Rather than tackle them all at once, I'll copy the contents and work on them here page by page, starting with Critic's first subpage(!).

Sooooo much squicky gushing and reboot wank on that page.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 18th 2020 at 12:10:55 PM

The Bad Dreams entry was removed for being misuse of the trope name.

There's multiple entries under Bad Dreams, most misused but some of them could fit Past Experience Nightmare, I think, and some could also be moved to that "Annoyance Nightmare" TLP.

Heavy Metal Hermit Crab removed the entries as seen here.

Edited by costanton11 on Oct 24th 2020 at 2:22:36 PM

Coming here from the discussion on the complaining cleanup thread:

• Became Their Own Antithesis:
  • Bullet 1: Very complain-y
  • Bullet 2: Slight complaining
  • Bullet 3: Complaining
  • Bullet 4: Quite complain-y
  • Bullet 5: Complaining
  • Bullet 6: Seems legit, I think it can stay
  • Bullet 7: Can probably stay, as it is In-Universe

I'll get to Character Check later

Remember you can add the thoughts to the character page cleanup too.

Not quite sure about the last bullet point as there's not enough context on how his values changed since he was a young critic. I added a bit more context but will have to fix it up later.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 29th 2020 at 3:36:38 PM

Ah, OK. I will add to the sandbox when I get to the next trope. Will add context to my last bullet point at that time as well.

Alright, so it seems Character Check has already been gone through. With that in mind, and since I'm relatively new here so I don't quite know how to add my thoughts to the sandbox if others have already added them, I will add my thoughts on the bullet points:

• Character Check:
  • Bullet 1 is all complaining. Cut.
  • Bullet 2 is a bit confusing. Maybe it can be rewritten so that someone who doesn't know what it is talking about can understand?
  • Bullet 3 is a bit complain-y and confusingly written. Rewrite or cut.
  • Bullet 4 is very complain-y. Cut.
  • I agree with the Sandbox that Bullet 5 is weirdly fetish-y, and needs either a rewrite or a cut.
  • Bullet 6 feels like it doesn't fit Character Check. The trope seems to be about characterization that disappears and is abruptly brought back once to make the character seem more like their older self. With that in mind, "the only reason why he started reviewing was because a long history of abuse made him desperate to be loved" does not seem like it could be construed as characterization. Maybe cut.
  • Bullet 7 doesn't seem true and doesn't fit the trope. I used to watch Critic and I don't recall him "being tired of always failing and wanting to do better." Since that, to my knowledge, isn't consistent characterization, it might be cuttable.
  • Bullet 8 doesn't seem like it fits the trope either. What about Critic's character changed? What was brought back? Not explained.

That's my interpretation. As for the previous trope, it appears it's been edited already, so I will not expand on what I said.

You have a good point that even the character traits listed here are not consistent. It's very much cherrypicked as specific aspects of Critic's personality tend to change based on Rule of Funny. So probably none of Character Check counts, as the only few actual instances of characterization are aspects that never went away (such as his love for Christmas).

This discussion on the Awesome.The Nostalgia Critic discussed whether the moment from the Blues Brothers 2000 entry when the Critic criticized the film for being inferior to the original by showing the statue of The Blues Brothers atop the Hollywood Blvd was valid because he didn't care that Tamara's character died of an overdose. Is this a valid removal, since the skit was Black Comedy, while the inferiority of the sequel and calling it out was Doug's actual opinion?

Given how he removed his jacket and everything, it was clear that the actual moment discussing the Blues Brothers' importance to Chicago culture was an opinion extending beyond the character. It is Black Comedy that Critic doesn't care that Tamara dying, and there's some ironic subtext that Critic cares more about stupid movies than somebody's death that takes some "awesome" factor away from the scene, but given the nature of the show treats bad movies as Serious Business, I doubt he didn't want that scene to come across as a little bit awesome in context.

Also, the medicine that was killing Tamara was medicine that made her not give a shit about the movie. So the message of that ad was clearly that watching bad sequels blindly not giving a shit about quality isn't a great thing, which seems to suggest we aren't supposed to not care about the movie, and Critic's/Doug's anger is justified.

So...it could be valid? It's YMMV, some people might not consider the moment effective due to the background, but in context it seems to be Doug trying to get a passionate point across. It's usually clear when he's exaggerating Critic's passion to stupid amounts and we shouldn't agree with his point; this doesn't seem to be one of those instances.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 30th 2020 at 6:16:19 AM

Just took a chainsaw to The Nostalgia Critic: The Critic: Tropes A-E, but it's still not fully resolved. Can anybody help me figure out some of the other questionable tropes listed there?

I'll crosspost in the complaining thread if this doesn't get attention, but are any of these Hypocrite examples from Characters.The Nostalgia Critic The Critic Tropes F To M not just sheer complaining? Not a lot of them have enough context to clarify if the hypocrisy is intentional in-universe.

• Hypocrite:
  • Demanding pure logic in the silliest of cartoons, but running on emotion himself.
  • Even though he has a ton of guilty pleasures, he never fully gets that people can like movies that he can't stand.
  • He's so unwilling to accept Ma-Ti's death that he'll try and find (or make Chester find) a supernatural book that would raise the dead, but even in the movie where the aforementioned dying happened, he never fought back when he thought he was about to be killed.
  • In The Odd Life of Timothy Green and the Twilight editorial, he makes rants about learning from your mistakes and growing up. The irony that this comes after To Boldly Flee but he's back to screaming and having psychotic breaks like he did years ago has not been lost on people.
  • He also jokes that the mother in The Odd Life of Timothy Green is “as unfruitful as her garden.” Remember when he called a similar joke in North “the worst thing uttered by humanity”?
  • Five minutes after a giant getting-up-on-his-high-horse rant about Bay showing the soldiers in a shitty light, he accuses Bay of "editing history" to make the soldiers look better. It's confusing.
  • When Real!Critic and the others give Ma-Ti a funeral in Suburban Knights, he calls them awful people for cremating him. Says the guy who screamed for Brain Bleach every single time one of the male reviewers had a fanservice moment.
  • He acts pretty high and mighty with the TMZ crew considering that he's bashed actors for sexuality and weight just because his creator told him not to.
    • In Eight Crazy Nights he even uses a TMZ-like picture of Adam Sandler being overweight on a beach because for whatever reason film!Sandler being trim pisses him off.
    • He's also disgusted by the head of TMZ slapping the crying Rachel character, but that's an awful lot like something he did a few episodes previously.
  • Doug put "Is It Right To Nitpick?" up on facebook noting the irony of Critic preaching about the subject.
  • Sage calls him right out on this new trait in The Guyver, telling him he has no right to bitch at other people (which he did) for enjoying something stupid and not letting anything go considering he does both things all the time.
  • Wanting to go back to his "nostalgic roots" in Dawn Of The Commercials after how proud he was of making Doug remove the cut-off date in The Review Must Go On.
  • Intentionally done at the end of "When Is A Movie Just A Movie", where after condescending that it's your own problem if you get hurt by a movie and playing the invoked MST3K Mantra song, saying that if he gets upset then that's allowed.
  • Sympathetic example at the end of Alice in Wonderland (2010), as he tells Burton that nothing good can come out of living in someone else's shadow, and when everyone finds out that he had a Burton shrine, Carrot Juice points out that Critic was living in Burton's shadow.
  • The guy who openly admitted on several occasions that's he's invoked Pandering to the Base and is Only in It for the Money with his own work preaches like mad to the focus group guys in The Lorax about how both of those things are wrong. This gets acknowledged at the end where the analysts are gone and he's with Black Willy Wonka being disappointed that he's not getting the secrets to money and happiness.
  • After years of pulverizing painfully pushed puns, he makes a really bad one in the Doom review.
  • For all his mocking of Linkara's clichés, he can't take it when Linkara trashes his screaming, invoked Fountain of Memes reputation and disrespect for his audience.^note should be noted that this is in-character, and doesn't apply to Doug/Lewis's poking fun at each other.
  • In the American Beauty editorial, he musters up disgust for the film making pedophilia “quirky”, but ends it thanking a sixteen year old Thora Birch for showing her breasts (who because she was a minor at the time, had to get her parents to approve).
  • In “Why Do We Holiday Too Early”, he gets that he's the last person who should be lecturing other people regarding getting fixated on holidays and associating them with happiness.
  • He absolutely hates children getting getting hurt or mistreated, but makes a child abuse joke in Cop and a Half, hits and insults Evillina when he's supposed to be babysitting her in The Cat in the Hat, and murders several kids during TMNT'14.
  • He apparently hates Pokémon for being a Cash-Cow Franchise, but is a huge fanboy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the original hugest Cash-Cow Franchise claiming he collecting all he could get, even some actually rather disgusting cookies. He even lampshades it once even so slightly.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 31st 2020 at 2:20:41 PM

Yeah that's all complaining. All of it can go.

EDIT: Except the one that says it was done intentionally. Thats In-Universe.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Nov 1st 2020 at 7:40:02 AM

I left three examples up that appeared to be deliberate (though one of them was about Word of God calling it ironic).

Just took a chainsaw to Characters.The Nostalgia Critic The Critic Tropes F To M. There's so many examples that amount to "Doug got skinny and unattractive in the reboot which makes it worse" and speculation of stuff like incest that isn't in the text at all. It's so fucking creepy.

My main issues are figuring out whether some entries are reading too much into things (like the stuff about his love life) or whether they're more plot tropes than character tropes.

Edited by mightymewtron on Nov 13th 2020 at 11:47:34 AM

Crossposting from the Critical Research Failure thread cleanup for extra visibility:

This huge section (and I mean huge, open the folder at your own peril) just got added to the YMMV section. It's trope-slashed which is already a problem, but we need to go through each example to see if it's valid for either item. Much of this isn't even from a NC episode but from spinoffs like Disneycember.

I think the reason it's a Wall of Text is because it's the exact same contents as the CowboyBeBopAtHisComputer.The Nostalgia Critic page that was cut over a year ago for complaining. I know because I recognize the entries I had originally added to the page.

Edited by mightymewtron on Dec 6th 2020 at 4:05:44 AM

You weren't kidding, that's a wall of text if I've ever seen one O_o

Where to start?

I did a bit of markup on the examples, some seem to be limited to fan knowledge (not CRF) but since I don't know a lot of these works he's discussing I can't really tell for sure what counts, and it's just....so much.

Does a legit error on his part regarding media even count as Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer or is it Dan Browned or something else? I know we had a sandbox for this somewhere, IDK what happened to it.

Edited by mightymewtron on Dec 6th 2020 at 4:02:41 AM

Thoughts on the Wham Episode page, since the show doesn't really have an ongoing narrative?

Edited by costanton11 on Dec 6th 2020 at 9:48:53 AM

I feel like we went over it before at some point but I'll look it over again now.

Edited by mightymewtron on Dec 6th 2020 at 11:15:12 AM

I think we did talk about it at least once before and determined that some episodes do mark a shift in the Critic's character development and the tone of the series.

Yeah, when we discussed the Breather Episode page. The problem is some people take certain episodes way too seriously so it becomes difficult to tell if these episodes are really that important.

I’d say delete the examples that clearly don’t count.