I think the writers pretty much admitted they had no plan for Trinity, seeing how their goal completely changed from immortality to apocalypse between Rise and Shadow. They were just the reason for Lara to track them across the world and stumble on ancient stuff.

I’m looking up the opening scene for Rise of the Tomb Raider and I can’t find the therapy session itself. Maybe it was only in the trailer and they cut it from the game, I remember people thought it was weird when they released that trailer because it was unexpected at the time that this was the direction they were taking? But the game does have you find tapes of Lara’s recorded sessions talking with the therapist, like how she’s having control issues and it turns out she has become a different person in a bad way.

The third game of the reboot trilogy starts with her tracking this evil organization that’s been screwing with her family, finding the item they’re trying to steal to trigger an appocalypse, stealing it first, and almost triggering that same apocalypse because she doesn’t know what she’s doing, thinking she’s doing good. Second game also started with her tracking the same organization to figure out what they’re doing, and from that, she stumbles into some archaeology. It’s a long character arc, she was looking for unrelated answers, but she learns that she can be good at figuring out ancient stuff, and she finds out the hard way that she can also fuck up badly when she doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s supposed to end at the point where she’s mature enough to do better. We just see all the “fucking up” parts.

The second game of the reboot trilogy starts with Lara in therapy session about how she became a thrill addict from her survivor’s guilt from the first game and how she’s liking it.

That was very clearly on purpose, she starts panicking about the first guys she kills to survive (and there’s a very obvious rape vibe when she gets ganged up on), and near the end she’s screaming I’m gonna kill you all. That is the narrative arc. Welcome to trauma stories?

Have you not seen those movies that end up saying “if we kill the big bad, we’re no better than them” after mowing down countless faceless mobs

The Greek trolley was not a car either. We came up with a big idea, we made something very limited and pretended that it was that idea, and we’ve only added a coat of paint since, is the analogy I prefer to make.

Your argument is literally that you don’t like the editorialized title, that’s it’s lazy and unprofessional, that the title alone is somehow distorting facts, that you think your version is better, and that the writer is a hack because of it, even though the point is correct, and you claim that parroting a press release can be the job of a good journalist. And you’re trying to wiggle out of it by pretending that it’s not the point you’re making, even though I am quoting you. I am telling you that this way of splicing quotes used to be correct even if you don’t like it, and what your argument leads to, and you still want to stick to it.

Exact quotes can be in the article. The title can be an editorialized summary that gets the point across as long as it’s a correct interpretation that you give your argument for in the article.

What you’re asking for is state propaganda, that’s where it goes, that’s where it is right now. It teaches politicians to spin longer phrases that clearly sound like promises and denouncing bad things so they can then deny everything the next day, because “that’s not what I said.” And on the other hand, it punishes those who make a short, blunt comment and then get hounded about the exact word they use, not allowing for any explanation - or any mistake. That’s how you get nations refusing to call something a genocide, and Nazis pretending to be upset at getting called Nazis, that’s how you get any left winger denigrated because they used a word you decided was not right, while denying the meaning of a word that a right winger said. You erase the importance of meaning by focusing on the importance of an exact quote while denying an interpretation. It teaches the media that asking questions and making editorial interpretations is forbidden because only the exact phrase from the press release is permitted, making it easier to manipulate the message being put out, because copy-pasting is easier than interpreting, and it reduces variations that expose the gaps and underline the problems.

You yourself right now are denying that this is really what she said because that’s not her exact words, leaving an opening to deny the entire comment - because that’s how it goes, not necessarily from you, but from anyone who comes after that. Hell, you’re already dismissing whoever wrote this as a hack because you don’t like that they didn’t use an exact quote, even though the meaning is absolutely right and you know it. Even your suggestion will be met with “but what was the exact quote” from people who will promptly ignore everything you say that’s longer than one sentence, and what you thought was more correct than this title will be deemed not correct enough. Like it or not, this is historically how journalism did things right, this absolutely was how quotes worked, until Fox News had to argue in court that only an idiot would believe they were news, and then nothing came out of it except Fox getting more power. This is how people keep moving toward more autoritarianism, that is what they have been doing, and that is what is happening now. Diversity in journalism is a good thing, and what you are defending only pushes toward uniformity.

Remember Covid, don’t report on things = they stop existing.

But the actual use of the word is a redefinition from the literal meaning, though. Democracy is power to the people, and states are the ones that keep adding conditions on who has the right to vote, starting with citizenship or criminal records - and deciding who gets to be a citizen as well as inventing new crimes that can lose you that right. This is a legal limitation that is decided by the state and it is always redefining the word. So no, modern and ancient states alike never really had a democracy, they just created a word and then decided that actually some people don’t have that right, beyond the literal definition of that word. Power to the people^not everyone is people^.

It seems like you don’t remember what regular journalism used to be, because it was absolutely proper journalism to splice together pieces of sentences that make a shorter version for a title, as long as it was clear that the original really did mean that - which is the case here. The only issue here is the quotes, it would typically be “we’re dealing with (…) a communist dictator” or “we’re dealing with” “a communist dictator.” Your nitpick that the exact sentence wasn’t sliced up this exact way is misplaced, you’re not advocating for precise quotes, you’re just advocating for plausible deniability, like someone’s going to say “I didn’t say that, you don’t have a soundbite of me saying Trump is a communist dictator.” That’s just legalese, and that’s denying the meaning of the job, because actual journalism isn’t supposed to be a parrot job, this is exactly what it should be. It is, in fact, what she literally said.

… To indiscriminately beat up anyone who’s not rich?

Git gud or leave but no complaining allowed okay bud. No, the difficulty being too high is not a different complaint, it’s exactly what we’re talking about. The AI, the room setups and somehow every bug being placed exactly where you’re jumping, the runbacks, getting killed in 3 hits half of the time even though you have 5 HP, getting juggled to death into a spike trap or lava as soon as the first hit despite requiring 3 hits to die despite having 5 HP, getting hit when you’re healing and losing all of it, every single stupidest bug requiring at least 2 or 3 hits to kill and somehow up to 6 or 8 for the bigger ones when they all dodge everything and you have garbage range, anything that flies especially, constant pixel perfect coordination in your jumps, the need to be alert 100% of the time between environment traps and enemies and always have the perfect speedrun strat, on top of the resource management, this is all one complaint. It’s artificially way too hard and there is zero learning curve and no way to tune it down, and it would be less of a problem if you didn’t lose all the resources you were collecting for an hour of doing that loop. Take off some of those or loosen some positioning and it’s already much less stressful - literally any one mod is a big help already (no 2HP damage, respawn near your coccoon…) It’s ruthless, it allows zero second of paying a little less attention, it’s on purpose, and it is not the player’s fault for not running back to a string station that is not marked anywhere. This is not a healthy game to play, and it shouldn’t be justified by saying it’s for players who want to get very good at every single screen of it and no one else.

You want to buy Shakra’s map? Too bad, that room is empty now for some reason, and you have no idea where to find the map now, you don’t know Shakra comes back to the shop area and can be called with that ring, and since you HAVE NO MAP you don’t even know where to go at all anyway. Benches and bellways, same, you CAN’T GO BACK or safely rest and create a checkpoint until you have the funds to even unlock them, at which point getting your beads stringed becomes useless because you just spent them. See that mask shard and/or the simple key and you think it’d be nice to buy in your first couple hours? Your fault for not wanting to keep going back and forth between the docks and the shop to make a string, on top of going back and forth to the farming room for an hour at 5 to 15 beads per run in lava for the Deep Docks, so that’s 500 rosaries gone the second time in a row some stupid bug won’t get out of the way but also reads your every input to dodge every single time you even look at them. And even the first time you die, if you had no bench close by and no map, good luck even getting your coccoon back. What I’ve learned is to completely ignore those big stashes and strings of free rosaries because it’s all bait that you’ll lose in a minute and then permanently the next minute (that Greymoor bird house trap and Moorwing are NOT in the refund window). And learning that didn’t make the experience any better. That’s the difficulty problem we’re talking about, these are not two separate things, it’s literally the whole game. On its own, dying repeatedly is not such a big deal if all you have to do is redo that one jump or even that one series of 15 perfect jumps (fucking Karnak), other Metroidvanias do that too and they’re not awful. It’s everything around it and the permanent pressure.

This game’s trap is that people who played the newer Metroid or Prince of Persia think dying repeatedly in a lengthy, very hard bounce-and-dash maze is not a huge deal breaker even if this one ramps it up to “every screen is a constant challenge”, but they don’t know they should also have played Dark Souls and some other roguelikes first.

Not a lot of those in a 5 screen run back, I just need one more try to kill that boss anyway, I swear. Oh shit, it has another move shit he’s juggling 3 HP off me at once aaaand I’m dead again.

And that’s not counting the unexpected “oops you’re locked now, fight these 5 waves of enemies, also your coccoon is locked in that room too, good luck getting your shit back” on your way to anywhere. If that’s your first time playing the game, it takes a bit to pick up on how cruel the game is and to start thinking about how to handle that. I’m not talking about people who already know the game here. That’s not on me, no.

Why drop rosaries when you get killed in 3 hits (for about all of act 1 at the very least) and come across a dozen enemies that bait and dodge every input you make and spike traps within a couple screens every time you die and you get killed a second time on your runback anyway

See: Israel, Hamas. Reuters: “this news camera is Hamas.”

What do you not understand about criminalizing anti-fascism as a concept?

Connecticut is Jewish?

They call him tennou actually (heavenly king) but then when they were forced to open up, they heard of Napoleon and they thought damn that’s cool, we’ll tell foreigners to use that too.

Tennou has been in use for over 1350 years, and in the late 19th c. they thought their governmental subdivision (provinces) more closely matched that of France under Napoleon III I think (departments).