As Stan Lee in the episode of ‘The Simpsons’, the review bombing It’s not that it’s back, it’s that it never left. About half a year ago, this ridiculous practice, consisting of negatively rating audiovisual products en masse —including series, films and videogames— for reasons unrelated to production and, generally, sociopolitical tintfound his last victim in ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’.
At that time, the Amazon Prime Video series saw its notes on platforms known as “aggregators” such as Metacritic or IMDb affected by users who, shouting “Tolkien is turning in his grave”awarded scores of zero or one out of ten using arguments like “Pathetic casting, zero emotion but lots of black/fat/transgender actors” or “When are these assholes going to realize WOKE SHIT DOESN’T SELL?”.
Unfortunately, we all knew that it was a matter of time before the review bombing again affect a title that, in general terms, is being praised by critics and the vast majority of the public. In this case, the ballot has touched a ‘The Last of Us’ whose wonderful third episode, entitled ‘A long, long time’, has left us one of the most romantic, emotional and best-narrated stories we’ve seen in a long season. The problem for some is that it stars a homosexual couple…
Of notes and demographics
This morning, while drinking my wake-up coffee, some sort of spider-sense kicked in in my brain and made me think: “Enter IMDb and Metacritic to see the scores of the three chapters of ‘The Last of US'”. I would like to say that what I discovered surprised me positively, but nothing could be further from the truth; instead of a logical evolution of the notes, I came across the umpteenth case in the line of what happened to ‘The rings of power’.
For sample, a button. On Metacritic, the first two episodes of the HBO series have scores of 8.7 and 8.8 respectively. The mean of ‘When you’re lost in the dark’ is drawn from 277 positive evaluations, 11 mixed and 19 negativewhile that of ‘Infected’ does so 277 positive, 11 mixed and 19 negative. The discordant note is struck, as expected, ‘A long, long time’.
The episode that narrates the idyll between Bill and Frank has a score of 4.3 —approximately half of its two predecessors—, drawn from 263 positive evaluations, 34 mixed… and 401 negative. If we look closely, the sum of positive and mixed is in line with the total of reviews of the two previous chapters; but to this one should add those of four hundred people who, strangely, they didn’t bother to score the other two weeks.
On IMDb the variation in terms of overall rating is much more subtle. ‘When you are lost in the dark’ and ‘Infected’ show two spectacular 9.2 and 9.3, while ‘Mucho, mucho tiempo’ drops to 8. It is when you see the score index that things change, showing an almost identical trend in the first two, in which the scores of 10, 9 and 8 move between 60%, 25% and 10%, relegating the worst grade to a tiny percentage of 1.5%. The chapter of contention, on the other hand, sees its evaluations completely polarized by having 51.6% of tens and 28.3 of ones.
What is striking is the demographic sheet from IMDb. While those of the first two chapters are quite homogeneouswith the only discordant scores being the users identified as women over 18 years of age, whose scores hover around 7 —the rest oscillate between 8.5 and 9.3, the third party’s record reveals that the average score is comfortably lower in the male sector.
Specifically, men and women shared practically the same average rating in previous weeks —between 9.1 and 9.2—, but ‘Mucho, mucho tiempo’ despite maintaining its good reception among the female public —who raised their average at 9.5—, has seen the average score among people identified as male drop by more than one point, which remains at 8.1%. The number of total votes, by the way, has increased by more than 40,000 for the occasion.
Don’t call it review bombing, call it LGTBIphobia
In case this was not very representative, nothing better than taking a look to some of the comments left by the alleged review bombers —which we then came out with the “what about the presumption of innocence?”— to confirm that we are dealing with a new case. A brief walk through Metacritic allows us to read pearls accompanying scores of 0 as “Enough of the LGBT agenda”, “Why LGBT? Why not teach a heterosexual couple?”, “Enough of propaganda and idiot woke culture”, “Another woke shit to make people soft”, “uncomfortable to watch” either “Disgusting Forced Inclusion Chapter”.
I could write paragraphs and paragraphs with countless homophobic examples culled solely from Metacritic, though It is not the only network in which they have proliferated. Without going any further, in a video that I have published on TikTok talking about the narrative of the episode they have written gems like “It’s just homosexual indoctrination, a mental disorder that they want to make us see as normal” [sic] either “If you want to see 2 bearded men kissing and creating their love story, go watch gay soap operas” [sic]. By the way, as a humorous note, in the video game Bill and Frank are already gay.
Although it is hard to believe, we are in the year 2023. At this point in our history, it would be logical to think that the “force” would be that all the characters in a series were heterosexual and white, but it seems that the coherent has no place in our reality. And it is difficult to understand that seeing two men kissing on a screen makes so many people so nervous and offends so deeply. Who is the “offended” now?