Forbes' Paul Tassi Claims 'The Last Of Us' Is Getting Review Bombed, Ignores Evidence To The Contrary
Forbes’ writer Paul Tassi recently claimed that HBO’s The Last of Us Season 2 is being review bombed, but he notably completely ignores IMDb scores, which show the opposite to be the case.
In an article titled “HBO’s ‘ The Last Of Us’ Review Bombing Surpasses The Game’s Review Bombing,” Tassi claims that the show’s second season is being review-bombed given the audience score has declined to 45% on Rotten Tomatoes compared to the first season’s 87% audience score.
Tassi specifically blames the culture war writing, “The Anti-Woke War – There’s just no way around this. It’s a factor. Exceptionally mean critiques about Ramsey’s appearance. Hate based on the same-sex romance between Ellie and Dina, which bloomed in full last week. And more generally, covering entertainment for a living, I’ve simply seen this sort of thing escalate even over the last ~3 years since season 1, and wildly ramped up after the recent election. You can easily peruse the negative reviews and see these complaints.”
Tassi’s entire analysis is based on Rotten Tomatoes scores, which, as of writing, currently sits at a rotten 41% on the Popcornmeter, the renamed Audience Score. However, if one looks at scores on IMDb, it is apparent that review bombing is not happening for Season 2. In fact, it looks like at least one of the culture war episodes that Tassi cites received higher scores than other episodes.
The second episode where Joel is killed has a 9.3 out of 10 with 48,000 reviews. That’s 16,000 more reviews than the first episode.
If review bombing were happening as Tassi claims then one would expect the second episode to have a much lower score.
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What’s more likely is that much like the second video game, audiences do not like the story choices made for the second season and are clearly expressing it over on Rotten Tomatoes.
It also looks like people are expressing that on IMDb albeit not to the same extent and it appears there was a concerted effort to boost the score of the second episode, where Joel dies, compared to the other episodes.
In fact, the episode has over 32,000 10 out of 10 scores, which is 67.2% of all review scores.
What do you make of Tassi’s claim and the evidence that refutes it?
Tassi is a consistent shill for woke garbage. If he's crying then there's enough backlash to justify it.
In the old days, we used to just call these "reviews".