u/Extension_Rest221

I know it's practically an unconscious impulse to give ANY non-nosferatu kindred some amount of either elegance or attractiveness, usually both. Your first instinct, as a creative, is to make them look fit for TV, one way or another- therefore, all your ventrue end up either an outdated Victorian image of the depraved count or a silicon valley parody specifically.

But what if you went in a different direction? What if you based a Ventrue off one of the other classes of actually existing parasite- the red-faced, suburbanite, yacht-owning Trump voter, the guy who makes sure that your city will never be walkable because it could potentially make it less hard for him to break traffic laws in his pickup truck. Frankly, I consider this class of leech even more dangerous than even the worst of Silicon Valley, so why does he never show up in any chronicles? Am I wrong about that? I would very much like to be.

https://x.com/capybaroness/status/2052096095912591487

I will be blunt- I have started skipping the SCUM sections, when I even listen to the podcast at all. I just do not think, on any level, it is a good or healthy way to view movies, judging complicated human art by, in essence, trying to find what you can, in essence, cancel it for, a little set of numbers to determine how much the film you're talking about has a right to exist or to be well regarded in any meaningful capacity.

It's not "critique" to say "this film is smarmy", it's just a crude, cruel takedown, one that's entirely incapable of dealing with depiction not equalling endorsement and one that turns the act of actually reviewing a piece of media into "how many things can I find wrong with this? What can I cynically wield to dismiss this entire movie as bigoted garbage?" If you looked up the definition of bad faith, you'd find the SCUM system in there, and if you think that it's somehow fair to think of art, actual art, in terms of "how high does this rank on the unprovoked violence scale, a thing you probably bought the fucking ticket for", let me ask you:

How do you think your favorite movie would rank on the SCUM scale? And if it's extremely low, is it a movie for adults?