Further Cookie Run feelings

[yvannairie]

I follow my guildmaster on Tumblr so I'm obviously Hip With The Cookiecourse(tm) but it actually took me a while to get the two cookies -- Roguefort and Walnut -- that have caused all of the ship police to lose their minds... and even if my interest in them wasn't poisoned by the wank, I just don't see why they're so interesting to people, lmao.

Like, Roguefort Cookie, I kinda get -- NB characters are always fun -- and even though his gimmick annoys me, his trial is actually really fun, not too fast but not too easy either. I tend to not like the gimmicks that take you "out" of the actual stage b/c I'm always so fucking disoriented when I come out of them that I immediately make some dumb mistake which makes it less fun to run with them. The only exception to this is DJ Cookie, and that's because I love rhythm games, but I have this same problem with Milk Cookie (whose trial I also tragically enjoy) and Millenial Tree cookie.

Walnut, though? She's just a boring kawaiiko with a boring gimmick that stops the run dead for ten seconds, a boring trial and a boring design with too many shades of the same colour. Even Ginger Brave has better colour variety. I remain absolutely incomprehending about how the two of these got popular enough to start generating the kind of wank that reaches beyond the bubble of the fandom.

(J/K I know it's b/c they score high.)

That actually annoys me too, like... currently if I'm doing Trophy Runs for reasons other than grinding tickets, I'm pretty much always stuck using Millenial Tree although I find him boring to play just b/c otherwise I'm constantly losing points. It's really frustrating, I don't exactly mind the screen nuke but it's just really boring, because there's not a single threat associated with gaining points. Roguefort and Milk Cookie's gimmick also have this issue, you can effectively put the phone down while they're on b/c they hoover up all the jellies and then on top of that you get whatever you get from the minigame. It's seriously so easy to get a perfect score with Roguefort, and his magic candy even makes it give you more points.

My preferred gimmicks are the ones that let me go fast and force me to play better. Pistachio and Tiger Lily, my two favourite cookies, both have gimmicks that do this, as does the newly-buffed Knight. But these cookies don't score well, because distance doesn't automatically translate to points -- jellies do. And screen nuke gimmicks as well as point generators like Vanish and Milk Cookies shield have not threat associated with gaining points, while cookies like Avocado and White Choco that generate jellies when breaking obstacles score high as well, much higher than cookies that just break obstacles.

You can kinda offset this with some Treasures -- the Candy Cane of Darkness is a staple if I'm playing with Pistachio or Tiger Lily, Tiger Lily's candy is enchanted to give more destruction points -- but it seriously is not anywhere near enough. There are cookies that take way less skill to play well that score way higher, so there's no wonder nobody ever uses cookies whose gimmick is to Go Fast. It would be so easy to offset too, just give a bonus based on the distance covered with the cookie at the end of their run and scale that based on whether it was the first cookie or someone running relay. But no.

IDK, maybe it's asking too much for the game to be balanced better, but post level 29 I've had progressively less fun running Trophy Races. And Breakouts are so long I only pretty much do them once a week just to stay on the curve and not miss out on prizes that often. I'm mostly complaining about this b/c my favourite cookies get hit with this so hard they effectively stop being competitive and I am forced to play a more boring game in order to not suck, because the punishment for placing badly in Trophy Races is pretty awful.

What I'm saying is Devsys please buff dash abilities or adjust your scoring, I'm begging you. I don't want to have to keep maximising my energy on cookies I don't even like playing in order to keep playing ;~;)

Comments

[rhodanum]

I had to look up the fandom, since I wasn't familiar with it and then boggled. There's ship-wank over cookie-characters in a mobile game?

Who am I kidding, of course there's ship-wank over cookie-characters in a mobile game. Looking at it on Twitter, it seems Eastern artists made beautiful-looking human-sonas for the cookies, which naturally meant shipping. Which, in turn, was what probably pulled in the fandom-police, because they've got a natural allergy toward minding their own business and letting others have fun.

What on earth are they moaning about when it comes to these two particular characters you mentioned, Walnut and Roguefort. Age-gap? Hero/villain?

[yvannairie]

Ding ding ding! It's a "pedo ship" because Walnut called herself a "kid" one time. Explanation for why Roguefort is an adult is [footage not found] tho :))) Your prize for guessing right is to feel very, very tired. (Then again I'm a TF fan and we recently needed to collectively have a debate about whether a robot that is canonically somewhere in the millions of years old and serves in the military is a "minor" so at this point my mental state is just permanent beleaguered sighing.) There's also a lot of "this female character is LESBIAN, they're EXCLUSIVELY A LESBIAN, they're THE BIGGEST DYKE" in the fandom, which... like, I'm old enough where that no longer feels transgressive, y'know? so I'm just like "whatever" but when it's characters I like I become apprehensive of engaging b/c the radfems are always watching. Which sucks b/c I'm here for Best Girl Avocado content, I'm here for Pomegranate Cookie's redemption arc, I am fucking here for whatever the lore is gonna give me next b/c the lore has dragons now, hell yeah and also there's ageless god-cookies and it's all getting very anime and I am generally into things that are Very Anime. Like if they're gonna give me Flame Spirit/Pitaya Dragon content I'm gonna be slurping that up b/c it's just the kind of trope-riddled insanity I am into.

[rhodanum]

Feeling very, very Tired is pretty much my standard mode of operation these days in a lot of fandom spaces. I'm not at all surprised that this nonsense got extended to everything from anthropomorphic cookies all the way to bloody Transformers. It's the reason why I view the whole thing as a complete farce and just mute / block anyone who even remotely starts howling about some random character's Minor^TM status.

"this female character is LESBIAN, they're EXCLUSIVELY A LESBIAN, they're THE BIGGEST DYKE" in the fandom, which... like, I'm old enough where that no longer feels transgressive, y'know?

Exactly this. And it doesn't feel even remotely transgressive because it almost always relies to two asinine things. Shitting all over what headcanons are actually supposed to mean (a personal interpretation of a character or event in canon, that's not necessarily supported by canon and that no one else in fandom is automatically obligated to accept) and also shitting over the ability of other queer people (bi, pan, ace, aro, etc) to headcanon characters in any way they wish. It's another hallmnark of radical feminism's encroachment into transformative fandom, this notion that only Exclusive-Same-Gender-Attraction matters and everyone else had better make do with table-scraps.

Crossing my fingers for you and hoping the further lore developments are delicious and the fandom-policers easy to ignore. 'Trope-riddles insanity' and 'Very Anime' both sound right up my alley, but unfortunately, I don't really get along well with mobile games. Partly because phone screens are too small for my legal blindness, partly because my phone itself is so old and janky that it can't run much of anything. ^^;

[yvannairie]

Honestly the TF fandom is both the chillest fandom I've ever been in that moves with the gravity deserving of one of the Great Old Ones -- aaaaaaand it's kind of a trash fire of hip and modern Fandom Purity Wank. I don't even know who to blame and how to explain how both of those are possible at once but with the power of bad faith anything is possible, I guess.

I do kind of still get the vicious urge to go "all your faves are gay/trans", and I get why a lot of young fans do it -- I had that bit ten-ish years ago where there literally just wasn't anyone like me on TV or anywhere else and I felt 100% unseen and incomprehensible and inhuman, but I've learned to let go of that somewhat and I no longer really desire the mainstream recognition I did back then (mostly b/c I realised that mainstream recognition doesn't guarantee my humanity, it just makes me a target of marketing, lmao). That's what I was referring to when I said it no longer feels transgressive. Going "this character is like me" used to feel like a powerful statement of reclamation, and IDK what exactly changed other than I aged out of it but it no longer does. Everything else you said is right on the money, tho.

Honestly, I'm just hoping I'll find a few friends who are also into the thing the way I am and then I can just aaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA at them until the end of time. How's the saying go -- there are no good fandoms, only good friends? |D

[rhodanum]

I'm not in Transformers fandom, but I'd hazard a guess that it's a combination of it being an old fandom that has new material consistently added to it. So on the one hand you have the Old Guard in the fandom who probably are as you described them, moving with the gravity of the Great Old Ones. And on the other side you've got the people who came of age on Tumblr and who came into TF fandom through that particular pressure-cooker of an environment. This is the exact state YGO fandom is in right now -- the older series have (with a few exceptions) relatively chill, ship-and-let-ship fandoms, whereas the newer series are stuck with a whole bevy of harassers and fandom-policer types. They've also slowly started spreading into the older series, but the old guard is putting up resistance and more or less telling them to fuck right off.

Oh yeah, I very much get what you mean with "this character is like me." I used to find that transgressive and now no longer don't as well, probably because mainstream works all too often either completely botch things or tone them down / water them down so much that they're not particularly satisfying in the end. Far more than marketing, I end up disliking when mainstream media, still beholden to producers and conservative markets, delivers something that's more of a wet fart than anything else (the end of Voltron and how they treated Shiro's arc is the best example I can think of now). It's one of the reasons why mu faith for good queer content lies almost entirely with indie creators and people in transformative fandom, nowadays.

"there are no good fandoms, only good friends?"

That's exactly what I was told by a good friend, over a decade ago. Best advice I ever got.

[yvannairie]

God this is gonna sound like bragging but a few of the founders of Ao3 write TF fic on the reg so yeah that's on point at least but also the very well received run of the IDW comics that doubled down on Cybertron being homonormative and having no concept of gender just ended and most of the Tumblr fandom I know came in through that one or the Prime cartoon from 2012. TFP apparently had an early example of a Garbage Tumblr Fandom and considering how everyone who is into TF is into basically all of TF, I can believe it.

(Except me, I'm doggedly refusing to become a fan of the comics. Sue me, I get awful Hype Backlash and being told that the underwhelming-looking thing is actually zomgthebestever does it for me.)

IDK what it is. I guess it's just... people not being exposed to "fandom" before they start engaging with it because people find their ways into these communities through the thing they like, and not knowing how the fuck to behave themselves. I could see there having been some merit to the current backlash when it started because so much of the functionality of Tumblr has always relied on the people using it acting in good faith (and I saw my fair share of "lmao I'm not tagging anything for anyone, don't follow me if you don't wanna see my content" back when tags were the only way to find anything. Curiously people don't talk about how everything got worse when Tumblr moved to full text search, and how Twitter has always been a full-text search platform)

People just... don't form communities anymore, having only one-on-one friendships and then treating the shared idea of a thing as a community. And that means nobody has any fucking manners anymore.