"Blinded by Nostalgia"
Feb 16, 2018 19:26:26 GMT -5
Post by edmonddantes on Feb 16, 2018 19:26:26 GMT -5
So, question: Does anyone else just facepalm when they hear this argument, and/or instantly lose respect for the people making it?
Cuz it seems like, on the interwebs... any time you don't automatically prefer the sequel/remake/newest thing, you're "blinded by nostalgia"
Like, even when you make comparisons that are provably true or openly state its a taste preference (such as "I often prefer the fast paced 'tons of monsters in a room' style of Doom over the pace of something like Half-Life. Don't get me wrong, it works for Half-Life and games going for atmosphere, I'm just more of an action guy") its still "you're just nostalgic."
No joke, I once had a person accuse me of being nostalgia-blinded... for stating that Doom had deathmatch. Nostalgia can rewrite facts, apparently.
The most facepalming part to me is that it's not as powerful as people think it is, IE the "blinds you to flaws" thing.
Just for a personal example... well, I actually used to like Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And yet you all saw in my Zelda topic how I was ranting about how literally everything about that game annoys me these days and drowned out the nostalgia. FF7 is like that too--I have fond memories of the time when it came out but its hard to revisit in the flesh (EDIT: Altho, I actually didn't like FF7 when it was new, but I still played it just to say I had, so I still have memories/nostalgia for it).
But the kind of people who go around accusing others of wearing "rose-tinted glasses" tend to never acknowledge things like this. It actually leads me to believe that such an argument actually has no basis in reality, but keeps popping up simply because of how easy it makes it to dismiss opinions they can't properly argue with, similar to how certain members of the population will use mental disorders or simply playing video games as proof that you're a degenerate.
EDIT: The other idiotic part, is that sometimes it doesn't even matter if you even *could* have nostalgia. I personally didn't discover Doctor Who until a few years ago--either the old or the new. A library happened to have both. I wound up seeing both at the same time. Still wound up preferring the old (mostly because New Who started doing stupid things and over-glorifying the Doctor whereas the old treated him like a normal but highly-skilled person, and I never care for character shilling). The person I was talking to in this case had known this for years. Yet I'm somehow still "nostalgic" for Old Who.
This really ought to be the nerd equivalent of Godwin's Law: You accuse the other person of being blinded by nostalgia, you're automatically wrong, no matter what else you said.
Cuz it seems like, on the interwebs... any time you don't automatically prefer the sequel/remake/newest thing, you're "blinded by nostalgia"
Like, even when you make comparisons that are provably true or openly state its a taste preference (such as "I often prefer the fast paced 'tons of monsters in a room' style of Doom over the pace of something like Half-Life. Don't get me wrong, it works for Half-Life and games going for atmosphere, I'm just more of an action guy") its still "you're just nostalgic."
No joke, I once had a person accuse me of being nostalgia-blinded... for stating that Doom had deathmatch. Nostalgia can rewrite facts, apparently.
The most facepalming part to me is that it's not as powerful as people think it is, IE the "blinds you to flaws" thing.
Just for a personal example... well, I actually used to like Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And yet you all saw in my Zelda topic how I was ranting about how literally everything about that game annoys me these days and drowned out the nostalgia. FF7 is like that too--I have fond memories of the time when it came out but its hard to revisit in the flesh (EDIT: Altho, I actually didn't like FF7 when it was new, but I still played it just to say I had, so I still have memories/nostalgia for it).
But the kind of people who go around accusing others of wearing "rose-tinted glasses" tend to never acknowledge things like this. It actually leads me to believe that such an argument actually has no basis in reality, but keeps popping up simply because of how easy it makes it to dismiss opinions they can't properly argue with, similar to how certain members of the population will use mental disorders or simply playing video games as proof that you're a degenerate.
EDIT: The other idiotic part, is that sometimes it doesn't even matter if you even *could* have nostalgia. I personally didn't discover Doctor Who until a few years ago--either the old or the new. A library happened to have both. I wound up seeing both at the same time. Still wound up preferring the old (mostly because New Who started doing stupid things and over-glorifying the Doctor whereas the old treated him like a normal but highly-skilled person, and I never care for character shilling). The person I was talking to in this case had known this for years. Yet I'm somehow still "nostalgic" for Old Who.
This really ought to be the nerd equivalent of Godwin's Law: You accuse the other person of being blinded by nostalgia, you're automatically wrong, no matter what else you said.