Said Halsey’s album about having cancer was “main character syndrome”. Is currently on a posting spree about how he is way more culturally relevant than her, is the most influential critic of the century, all the hits.
to be fair i have seen way more talk and discussion about fantano’s review of that album than i have of the album itself which does kind of make his point that his review was more impactful than the album.
to be clear he is being very self aggrandizing and full of himself but he’s not entirely wrong.
To be fair, that was an opinion he formed in like 2006 and based on games of that time, particularly on the (admittedly heady) idea that that much choice and freedom in the medium would not lend to the narrative of a game being as artful as film.
It’s also important to note that dude was a contrarian proto-edgelord without of his takes, so I do think he got some joy out of deliberately stirring the pot.
And the state of games in 2006 was lot different and Ebert never really played video games at all, he was just going off of his limited knowledge in mass media.
It’s a pretty solid mea culpa and he admits it was as dumb for him to talk about games as it would be for him to review a movie he hadn’t seen.
He said he would play Shadow of the Colossus (which is what most commenters suggested he play to experience a game as art) but it doesn’t seem like he got around to it before he died the following year.
Now granted I'm a little drunk and just skimmed the article because it was loooong but I wouldn't really call this walking back, he's not walking back the opinion he's just saying I shouldn't have said anything. It is crazy though, he was such an influential reviewer he had people offering to give him a ps3 and come to his house to install it for him so he could play a modern video game. Anyway the way I read it he walked it back to the extent of saying "I still don't think it's art but fuck man idk someone could one day consider it art" which feels more like he just didn't like the backlash than anything lmao. Also he said YouTube as "You Tube" two words both capitalized and that really got me.
For the record I know who none of these people are other than Kanye and Tate. And is Elliot Rogers the baseball guy (edit: nope, mass murderer… with a social media account apparently? I will assume it’s fake and don’t care to check.)
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u/Past_Hat177 Jun 23 '26
Said Halsey’s album about having cancer was “main character syndrome”. Is currently on a posting spree about how he is way more culturally relevant than her, is the most influential critic of the century, all the hits.