canonically: mel is repeatedly described as being alone in ptmc and having no friends. we see santos completely disregarding mel's mother's death and mel in the nicest way possible saying that "bullying behavior has been linked to personality disorders" after interacting w her
Video games will never be taken seriously as an art form because neither the industry nor the audience treats them as art, and the audience is the larger part of the problem. Games are treated as products to be made fast, sold loud, consumed, discarded, and replaced. That is why Call of Duty and FIFA sell in the billions, not because they endure, but because they are disposable and familiar.
This has nothing to do with graphical fidelity, art style, music, voice acting, or budget, even though players insist otherwise. For most people, βartistic meritβ means how flashy, pretty, and expensive a game looks. Spectacle is mistaken for depth, and production value is confused with meaning.
Games are not built to be evergreen because the audience does not want evergreen. The people who revisit old titles, engage deeply with systems, or approach games patiently are a minority. Most want the new release, the hype cycle, and the spectacle, then move on as soon as something shinier appears. This is the same reason Avatar makes a billion dollars per film yet leaves almost no cultural footprint. Audiences want stimulation for a few hours, then the exit.
Art requires patience and trust, and games demand both. They ask players to learn systems, accept friction, and think. The audience rejects this. Anything slow, strange, or uncomfortable is dismissed as boring or pretentious, so risk is punished not just by publishers, but by players themselves.
Because of this, metrics replace meaning. Engagement time, retention, and monetisation become the measure of success, because that is what the audience rewards. Art asks what something is saying. Products ask how long you stayed logged in. Games suffer most here because their greatest strength, player agency, is treated as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity.
Legacy is impossible without permission to fail, and the audience does not allow failure. A bad novel does not kill literature. A bad film does not kill cinema. A bad game can kill a studio, because players demand perfection, constant novelty, and infinite support while rejecting experimentation.
So the ceiling stays low by choice. Not because games cannot be art, but because an audience trained on disposability, spectacle, and instant gratification will not tolerate sincerity, patience, or risk. What survives is not what lasts, but what sells loudly and disappears quietly.
There are people who fought for your right to exist. And many died for it. We wrote some books to give you history and arm you with skills. I am old and I am safe. By the time you really need me, I'll be dead. Use the work for your fandoms but know where it came from.
I bring a kind of "vampirism began as a manifestation of living's fear of death and disease in Eastern Europe and overtime has developed into a wide variety of allegories" vibe to the "there can be only one correct interpretation" party that some ppl don't fw
the mischaracterization of most aot characters comes from a lack of understanding of the impact that being child soldiers had on their lives WHO SAID THAT
men are a lot like deer. i cannot stop hitting them with my car. iβve actually hit so many with my car you would think im going out of my way to find them and hit them with my car. because iβve truly hit so many with my car
THE CONCEPT FOR MY ERURIHAN FIC:
Some people are connected through senses and dreams.
Intense Deja Vu-like moments where you feel as they feel, see as they see, breathe as they breathe.
Erwin, Levi, and Hange are three such people; searching for meaning in the absurd.