Thread:Fire Eater/@comment-1037137-20140121052431/@comment-1037137-20140205163245

Well five-year olds deserve better and why expose them to this hateful garbage that seasons like All-Stars are dumping on us? Do you really want little kids to be watching this? I wouldn't. The show was not exactly for little kids to begin with despite what seems like a very blatant and unsuccessful effort to rebrand it as such.

I actually tolerated that episode for the most part, though I can agree with your criticisms to varying extents. For one, I agree that the circumstances of Heather's elimination were highly questionable. Second, you know full well I don't like Scottney, and only tolerated it because......I don't know, Scott was no longer a total jack***? Best not to think too hard on it for too long. The Camcody moments were only balanced out by Chris' commentary on just how nuts the girl had become, but that still made her antics no less grating. She was horrible to sit through. And Al's legs did get old after a while.

Yes I recognized some of the problems of it even as a fan of those characters, but again, is that the side of the fandom we want people to see? All the raving and such? And it gets way too ballistic and over-the-top for what it's actually "addressing", while not offering anything but more of the same. Long story short, it's nothing somehing I really need to get into again right now for the sheer unpleasantness of it.

Exactly. Drama should NEVER come at the total expense of character development. This is pretty much my shorthand way of summing up my primary issue with this whole show since Island ended. Again, it would've been forgivable if All-Stars had done what it should have done and redeemed most of these returning characters who were damaged in previous seasons, but it either didn't attempt that or completely abandoned it altogether by the end, and we have almost nothing to fondly remember almost anyone in the season by because they were made to look just as bad as they did in previous seasons, if not worse than before. And for what purpose? Again, these are characters we came to grow attached to in the show's better days, and we waited three years for the Island contestants to make a comeback, and THIS is how they repay us for our loyalties? Honestly, this is how we're thanked for standing by even after all the other bitter divides and such from before? And so many, many brilliant opportunities for good humor, great character development/redemption and engaging stories have been wasted due to their abuse of the regular returnees and near-total abandonment of those who have not been a major focus since their debut seasons.

Nobody wins here, nobody has anything to really feel good about, and these seasons just do not deliver with the nonsense they've become so enveloped in. The crappy "humor", the insanely out of control character derailment, and missed opportunities, and more recently factual inconsistencies are coming together to highlight just how much this show has lost its way.