Whether something is a review or review bombing is purely rhetorical; the color of the dress is based on a bunch of stuff you believed before the thing in question ever happened. It's essentially a kind of intellectual pose, an inoculation against new information, the implementation of a kind of mental hygiene. At some level I think that dogmas exist to control the biological costs of cognition, but we don't have to trek all the way out there. It's not any more complex than this: people we don't like will sometimes be correct. Because we live in a world largely made of information now, we can curate ourselves utterly out of any functional mode of self-correction. It hasn't made us any smarter, and when we become aware of just how thoroughly we have invested ourselves in illusion it falls on you like a guillotine.

I remember when it was really bad to not like Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It wasn't even that long ago. I started following somebody on TikTok who had taken up the cause of defending the game against the dirty-faced interlopers who probably didn't even like Dragons, let alone Ages. Then she played it, and it didn't hit for her - she, who had held her blade so proudly aloft! I then had the "opportunity" to watch her come apart, coming to believe that there was something broadly wrong with our society's ability to create enduring, human narratives. It would have been better to have a ramp to these realizations. It hurts a lot less if you don't have to take all the poison at once.

So, it turns out that a lot of people don't like the "twist" in The Last of Us II now that it hit the show, and while no doubt some of them have simply ported their enmity from the gaming world, it can't exclusively be said to exist within chud parentheses. In an inversion, the Ori guy says his game No Rest For The Wicked is being review bombed when what actually happened is it got released to Early Access way too Early Access.

Jesus Christ, people. It's medicine. Of course you don't like the taste.

(CW)TB out.