So... understandably, Twitter being Twitter, there are vast amounts of people commenting on this issue that I do not follow and have not seen commentary by. The tweet you included is one such tweet. I do agree that it's a very weird bunch of recommendations; as I said a little earlier in the thread, even people speaking about good VNs keep dismissing the genre/content people would want from this. And I'd say that tweet's list doesn't lean as far into "the good stuff is dark and serious" but it sure does lean into "here are some things which are entirely different when it comes to focus, genre, and structure, to the point of being irrelevant".
However... I feel like it would be wrong to not voice that what you describe is simply not true of the vast majority of the criticism of this I have seen on Twitter? Like I really cannot stress enough that a lot of what I've personally seen does not talk at all about the "reputation" of the genre as this thread positioned the issue as? Almost all of what I've seen has been about "sincerity"- focusing on how it's this ironic memey advertisement that exists so far away from what it's supposedly parodying, and that frustration exists in the context of a number of other recent games like it causing similar frustration. Seriously, I think people here may be assuming this is out of nowhere but it is not the first time I've seen people talk about this exact topic after such a game gets attention; this is absolutely not the first time this sentiment has come up in these communities and it won't be the last. And "sincere" is explicitly not about being "serious"; this is from translators/devs/fans who value those exact games you list for the reasons you gave.
Is there certainly that kind of shitty dismissive cricism out there? Sure, that absolutely tracks, I 100% agree that's happening and am not saying all the crit is what I describe here. But most of what I've seen is really not dismissive in that way, because the entire point of the crit is that they want that stuff! They want new devs breaking into the scene, they absolutely want stuff that's not created by/designed for cishet dudes, they want to see fresh new things attempted even if it's someone's extremely rough first project. And this isn't even really about whether or not this game is worth playing or should be played or if there's nothing of value there. What they're rejecting is just a company making a tropey advertisement (this isn't "sponsored") that's not only going to get a lot of write ups but is also going to bait a lot of streamers into playing it, and they're annoyed about how little attention those more sincere works (and reasonably, ones they worked on in particular) get in comparison. Yeah, Kotaku may never have written about their work to begin with; is it unfair for them to be frustrated by that, though?
