The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is "doormat".

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.

I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.

While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.

The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

For someone who is starting out on developing their critical skills, just being aware of its existence is great: it can make the difference between trying to write a story around a cliche or an original idea, and better still, studying it can eventually clue you in on how to breathe new life into tired tropes.