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Tylaen said:
If your only argument for your opinion is, "It's my opinion" or "That's just your opinion" then don't be surprised when people don't take you seriously in a discussion. Expecting me to respect your opinion just because it exists Is not something I will stand by; at least try to justify yourself.

With that said, though, being objective is technically impossible; you can articulate reasonable arguments to support your opinion but saying it's objective is very arrogant In most cases. You could always be wrong about something and that's important to keep in mind in a discussion. Your personal feelings will influence your thoughts on a series and there is no way to avoid that, but trying to edge out what works and doesn't work for you in as much detail as you can Is a good first step. Also, just because someone provides reasonable arguments against one of your favorite anime, doesn't mean you have to like it any less; it can make you capable of recognizing the various vices and hopefully, the merits which make it special to you.

P.S Objectivity and subjectivity are pointless words that rarely has anything to do in a discussion about art, so don't throw it around like it's Exodia.

merryfistmas said:
Pretty much, you can't talk to those people, they have nothing interesting to say, and often come up with silly rhetoric like "you're watching the show the wrong way". Bitch, I'll watch your favorite show however I damn well please.

hentai_proxy said:
One of the arguments people are making is that MAL has clear interpretations in front of each number for what that number means. It provides a granular 10 point scale allowing greater freedom in expression (good versus very good, bad versus very bad, various inbetweens), plus by clearly interpreting the numbers, it allows everyone to get on the same page. If I find an anime very good, I click on the symbol that happens to be represented by the numeral 8. If I only find it just fine, I click on that symbol represented by the numeral 6. You can do the same, and then if we have the same score for an anime, it means we both interpret it as 'very good', or 'fine' or whatever. This enables some coherence in scoring and eases communication.

It is one thing to say that your average is 7 because you mostly watch shows you like, which is perfectly ok and may get the MAL average to 7, and another thing to ignore the meanings MAL gives to the various scores. The first represents the very logical idea that most people watch shows they like and filter out the bad ones. The second one creates an incoherent mess that may serve you individually, but as soon as you try to compare your preferences to other peoples', you find there is no real basis for comparison anymore. Of course, that affects only people who search for anime through comparisons and try to understand other people's opinions.

Pullman said:
That seems like a neutral assessment and not at all a salty stab at anyone who dares to not enjoy ecchi since pretty much all 5 'options' make it all the fault of the person who doesn't like ecchi who also ends up looking like an asshole in most of them. Well done in hiding your obvious bias ;)

Why are ecchi fans/people always like this? Dothey need to believer for their ego that people just dislike it because they are assholes or prudes or elitists? Why do they insist that worshipping ecchi is normal and avoiding it is being a prude or a hater instead of a fucking preference? I don't even know if the guy I quoted likes ecchi but he sure liked the classic labels ecchi fans use to discredit anyone who doesn't agree with them. They always have this illogical pride going on that watching ecchi is the only really normal thing to do and if you reject the genre there must be something wrong with you. (Hater, prude, elitist, asshole, etc...). Prudes or not, I definitely know which sides keeps coming off as more close-minded in these debates.

To me it's not normal to like ecchi. It never felt natural because I got into the medium because I love storytelling and animation, not because the cute anime girls enticed me or whatever. It's a very niche appeal for people who prefer catering to their penis over catering to pretty much anything else involved with storytelling or animation. Which is all fine and dandy if you're into it but whenever people imply that if you're not into ecchi something is wrong with you I find myself thinking whether those people saying that really are that delusional or if they're just using rhetorics to make ecchi seem more relevant than it ever wishes it could be.

Not wanting to drown yourself in ecchi all day long does not make someone a prude. That is ridiculous. There is a middle-ground between being non-stop horny and in the mood to watch softporn, and being a prude. And trust me, most people who don't like ecchi are in that middle ground where they just don't get how ecchi can ever be captivating for more than 5-10 minutes but who don't hate anything sexual per se.

Being open about sexuality and your own sexuality is very unrelated to wanting to watch very badly done fanservice shows with bad plots and bad characters all day long. Along the same lines watching ecchi doesn't make you a sexually enlightened human being although that does seem to be the go-to circlejerk of ecchi fans to pat themselves on their shoulder.But more realistically it just makes you a horny guy watching animated softcore porn and finding that hot. Which is okay, but not a basis on which to think of yourself as some kind of sexual savior of the prude masses who differentiate between fap time and storytelling time.

tl;dr:
I'm getting tired of ecchi fans sitting on their high horse and thinking of themselves as sexually enlightened compared to us 'prudes' just because they enjoy watching animated softporn multiple hours a day and we don't. Not liking ecchi is perfectly normal from most POVs so stop trying to make it seem like it can only be the case out of spite or because of being a sexual prude in general.

Cloud3514 said:
Now, a common response is "you just hate it because it's popular." No, I hate it because it sucks. I actively despise it because its popular. There's a distinct difference.

mahoganycow said:
I don't think "turning your brain off" is meant to suggest that you shouldn't think about a particular work. Rather, it suggests that you have already thought about it and arrived at a conclusion about how best to engage with that work.

All media criticism is an attempt to answer these questions:

1) What is a work trying to accomplish?
2) How well does it accomplish this?
3) Is this accomplishment worthwhile?

If Viewer A watches, say, the recently-aired Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress and says:

"It was bad because it wasn't realistic."

On its face, viewer A's criticism of the anime is flawed; the anime was never an attempt to imitate reality, and whether or not it would gain any traction toward its actual goal by being more realistic is an argument you'd have to make on your own (see point 2). Viewer A has ironically failed to achieve even the most basic, 101-level understanding of the very show that they're claiming is 2stupid4them.

Not every anime is attempting to do the same thing, and you as a viewer gain nothing by attempting to apply the same metric to all of them. Different shows have different goals, and you SHOULD attempt to engage with different shows in different ways and appreciate them from different angles. If what a show is trying to accomplish has nothing to do with realism, plot density, etc. then you can and should arrive at the conclusion that the lack thereof is not necessarily a flaw, and instead focus on what, y'know, the actual goal of the show seems to be and whether or not it's achieving that goal.

I've gladly given both Baccano! and Mushishi a score of 9. Does that mean that I think they function in exactly the same way and have exactly the same strengths? No. You could scarcely find two shows with more different goals and more different methods. It means that I identified what each was attempting to do, evaluated how well they live up to that goal, and concluded that the goal was worthwhile.

You still have every right to say that a show is bad. I've said it many times myself. See questions 2 and 3, they're good places to start down that path. However, saying that a show is bad because it doesn't reach some arbitrary goalpost that it was never attempting to reach in the first place is pretty much the most naive and inflexible line of reasoning possible, and if that's the line of reasoning you pursue, don't be surprised when nobody takes you seriously. Is that how you want to analyze things--always the same way, always with the same formula, never willing to meet the subject on its own terms or recognize something so basic as what it's pursuing and what steps it may take in that pursuit? If it is, congratulations; you aren't a critical thinker, you're a tape measure. There's a certain delicious irony in the idea that the people who are doggedly trying to claim that their own analytical skills never sleep were in fact bereft of same to begin with.

Yudina said:
My argument concerns not what people feel from a show, but whether they read deeply into it or not. I won't deny it's subjective, but I think in general it's fairly easy to ascertain what's the purpose of something and use that to determine how far you should read into it. I don't deny that intentionality is always clear, but intention exists within the essence of a work itself, and often times it is not particularly difficult for us to evaluate.

And above all, I think intention is way more important than what people make it out to be.

I'll just work from the ground up as to sort of clarify what I mean. Note that the genres that I use do not reflect my beliefs in what can or cannot be "read deeply" in these genres but rather illustrate a sort of steady rise in the ladder based on what I see are some common place things in said genres.

Let's start with something completely base. Pornography. Why does porn exist? It's a sexual fantasy, designed to get people horny, so they jack off. Sounds simple enough. In that case, I would argue the vast majority of people who watch a porn scene should not be watching it for intellectual purposes, that is to say, looking at the size of the man's dick and trying to showcase how that represents male dominance, and the woman's submissiveness and ultimate powerlessness to control her body's feelings are representative of the patriarchy and its domination over the world of woman.

Clearly, there's no social commentary in most porn. It's essentially there for eroticism and self-indulgence.

Let's move up a notch. Let's look at ecchi anime, and I want to say that let's look at an anime that is likely clearly designed to be ecchi. In other words, let's not look at anime where there are obviously ecchi qualities. TTGL, KLK, Monogatari. These all have ecchi qualities, but I wouldn't say that they are representative of the type, but rather use elements for some other purpose. If we take an ecchi anime or manga off the street like....Love Hina.

I have nothing against the show. I'm sure it's fun, entertaining, whatever.

Here, I think the purpose of Love Hina seems relatively simple. You have a main protagonist, with a bunch of girls, and they find themselves in comedic situations and there's a nice romance and drama that plays around it.

Okay, that's great, but is this an instance where you want to be analyzing the particular colors of the girl's clothing to a crazy degree? Is there some sort of motif of depth that emerges of some great insignificance, such as important reoccurring dreams, the importance of a particular object, the intentional fixture of a particular setting, repeated words that have weighed significance?

I will grant you, maybe? Maybe if you look really hard, you can formulate an argument. But on the whole, I'm going to argue that you can't do this with shows of this nature precisely because they aren't designed for that purpose, and that's okay.

Let's talk about something else. Purely action/adventure stories. Let's use Code Geass as an example, because it's such a popular anime, everyone should likely have an understanding of it. Code Geass is entertaining, action packed, filled with a great ensemble of characters, and it's got the explosions necessary to set your pants on fire. Great.

But again, let's talk about reading deeply into it. Note that in this case we have sets of characters that we might deem to be "intelligent" actors, that is to say that they have agency and seem to make actions of significance so that we may identify nuances and particularities about them that might give us more insight.

How much can you read into a particular match, where Lelouche makes an infamously illegal move? How far can you read into the ending of the first season? Now here's where you can draw some sort of a theme, that is to say Lelouche's inability to control his power, the sort of preeminence of a greater power unable to be properly understood by man. Okay, I'll give you that there's something to be had there, but is there a great sort of build up and development of that theme? Is it a recurring factor that isn't necessarily just used for the sake of convenience and twisting the plot to ensure the maximum entertaining outcome?

This is something a bit more worth discussing, but for me it's clear here that even if there's an obvious theme, the exposition, development, and aspects of that theme are not at a point where I can say that it fulfills a great depth to it. For that reason alone, I'd say there's no need to read into it way too deeply.

Let's then talk about one of the Miyazaki movies. Spirited Away. Here's where we start seeing some more meat, some more nuance that I think is likely missing from the others whereas Miyazaki attempts a much more subtler approach that requires a sort of "deeper" reading if you will. There's great deal more symbolism, albeit fairly obvious ones. Pigs for gluttony. Water as cleansing but also as a representation of memory, longing, and distance (hence the Sixth Station). The scene at the end, a flash of Chihiro's band, is of a much subtler detail that allows us to read more deeply into why Miyazaki emphasized that scene at a moment that is otherwise not particularly filled with substance.

So at this point, I think it's clear that we've approached a film that is much more open to interpretation and likely gives a much better platform to a deeper reading than others.

But I don't think we're done. Let's look at Ergo Proxy.

I'm going to use Ophelia as an example, because it demonstrates the difference in deep readings and cursory ones. Here we have an episode that's essentially almost all representational, and almost certainly requires a deep reading in order to understand. Re-Il's posture in the center of the episode recalls the famous painting of Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais. Ophelia represents many things in Shakespeare's Hamlet, but for the purposes of the episode, we remember her loneliness, rejection, and abandonment by Hamlet, a man, which corresponds to the doppelganger's isolation, rejection, and abandonment by not a man, but man himself.

The water is not just a simple representation of purity, cleansing, and nostalgia, but more deeply (in my opinion), a mirror which reflects a representation of ourselves: hence Vincent's constant inability to recognize the real from the surreal, as his placement within the pool of water forces him to confront the mirror, the representational, and himself, much like how he is initially incapable of seeing the real Re-il, but mistakes the doppelganger for her.

There's so much more I can talk about this episode (in fact I'm quite certain a ten page paper could easily be written on just how good Ophelia is), but I hope I've made my point.

I don't think I'm being too crazy here when I say that there is a very clear hierarchy, where certain series, precisely because of how they are made, lend themselves to deeper reading and deeper interpretations. That does not mean that one series is better than another because it affords itself to deeper reading. It could mean that, since I sort of think that, but that's not necessarily the case.

The point is that I do think people read too much into things. I don't as @jal90 seems to think, that it's condescending at all, but rather a rational decision that people make when they watch something. It doesn't have to be consistent across everybody, but nobody looks at every series and says "you can literally interpret all of this however you want." If that was actually the case, there'd be no meaning behind postmodernism, no meaning behind surrealism, no meaning behind romanticism, and no meaning behind the bizarre, which are all designed to stretch our interpretative forces beyond what is normal, and beyond what we normally understand, and to create from the classical understanding of the story as being very delineated, orderly, and properly sign posted, to something that is much more interpretative, difficult to grasp, and not entirely comprehensible.

And people may disagree. Maybe they'll look at this and say that Ergo Proxy is no deeper than Love Hina is. And you know what? I might think they're bollocks, but that doesn't mean we can't have a discussion on why he thinks Love Hina offers much more on a level of interpretation and deeper reading than something like EP does.

I'm right in the end, obviously (:P), but that's besides the point.

Yudina said:
I mean the question raised was whether people read too deeply into things. If you note from my stupidly long post, I offered examples and context, but as a more general and broad statement, I'm really not in a position to offer much argumentation in the form you're talking about. The reason, obviously, is because I'm not discussing whether someone, such as yourself or myself, is reading too deeply into something, but rather as a sort of general phenomenon, do I think people read too deeply into things.

I actually don't know what my precise take on things is, but I do know that plenty of people read too deeply into things that are unimportant and read too little into the things that are. That's my general observation that is really free from any one to one discussion with someone. It'd be much too tedious to actually list you the examples of everything I've seen where this has happened, and hence I have a general opinion on the matter.

This is an unconvincing argument because even excluding the author's direct quotations I think a work in and of itself speaks with intention of its authorial context. I don't argue that this can be universally accepted or understood, but a work in the way it is presented will almost always draw a consensus of opinions as to whether or not a work should be taken seriously or not, if it should be subject to a deep reading or not. Of course everyone reads into something differently and has his or her own interpretation, but that's a given. No one person in the same, thus it follows that nobody's interpretation is ever truly the same.

But that does not, under any circumstance, remove the fact that the work in question is, in and of itself, a work with intentions, that it comes into being completely separate other people's interpretations.

To draw a sort of diagram:

People ---- Interpretation A ---- Work A \
People ---- Interpretation B ---- Work A - Intention
People ---- Interpretation C ---- Work A /

In other words, I believe Work A has an intention, not determined by people who had absolutely no commitment to the creation of the work, that is completely separate and otherwise unrelated to whatever interpretation people have.

That does not preclude the possibility for someone's interpretation to be correct, but it is crucial that we understand that a work does not exist within a vacuum. That is to say, that while the work exists for its audience, it comes into being with a particular intentionality to it, even if that intention is to be interpreted differently by different people. It is not something that one necessarily just "makes his own" but rather something that is interacted with, engaged with, and communicated with. The acting of reading is an engagement with the work, not the assimilation of the work into your own sort of internal philosophy or understanding.

I mean, from your profile, you seem very well in tuned with Miyazaki, so let me posit a question:

Do you not think that a Miyazaki film breathes Miyazaki? That there are idiosyncrasies, quirks, methods, or styles specifically pertaining that seems to permeate from the edge of the screen? I think these fundamental stylistic components are intrinsically linked to what we know as intention, that the work intends to be a certain way. One cannot look at a Miyazaki film and say that it is not Miyazaki, in other words.

Or a more poignant question. Let us assume that the creative team does not matter. Let us erase their names and talk about Princess Kaguya (which is a Ghibli film so this example makes a little more sense).

If we erase the name of the creators and blind tested people, and people came to us and said that Kaguya was likely a Miyazaki film, that the emotions, stylistic intensity, themes, and strength of female characters were all representative of Miyazaki and thus they are convinced that Miyazaki made this film, would they be right? As you said, everyone interprets in their own way, but here we have a case where people have interpreted the film to be of a particular author's origin, and yet objectively we know this to be false.

Under what circumstances should we brand this as just subjective interpretation or, as I would probably say, a wrong interpretation?

merryfistmas said:
This makes more sense, but still has problems. If you argue that X ecchi/comedy show has more depth than Ergo Proxy or SEL I'll probably think your opinion is ridiculous, but I'll have to listen to why you think so in order to come to that conclusion, and who know, it might be based on something reasonable. This is the kind of thing you have to take on a case by case basis. But people typically don't argue that these shows are deep, this is all hypothetical, so I agree with jal90 because with very few exceptions (so few I can't even think of any) people tend to have the same understanding of your first three examples and even when they find something "deep" it's usually based on something within the show, but they often insult each other over the latter two. When it comes to shows that seem to have depth, there are always plenty of people ready to call anyone who thinks they do have depth pretentious (and the reverse is true as well).

Most people understand what Death Note (I'm replacing Code Geass because I've never seen it) is about, even though it's debatable how deep or intelligent it is, people don't have widely varying opinions on their content in a way they might about Texhnolyze of SEL.

The more contentious examples are the ones I think are worth talking about here. Shows like Bakemonogatari where there are people who think they're nothing more than pretty colors and tits as well as those who see symbolism and themes everywhere. I've heard people say Tex is artsy for the sake of being artsy with no depth and people who think it's the most intelligent show ever made. Telling somebody that didn't find value in Tex that they weren't watching it the "right way" is condescending because art doesn't have objective value. NGE isn't objectively about depression or anything else, it's about those themes because people watch it and think it did a good job of portraying them.

Also, I think you're overvaluing authorial intent. If an anime is created and the majority of the people who watch it think it's about the same theme, and it's something the author never intended, how can you say it isn't about that theme? Value only exists in the mind after all, and the viewers determine the value of a work, not the author. On the flip side, if a creator makes an anime intending to implement a theme and nobody picks up on it, then they failed. Intent does not exists within art, only within the author.

EDIT: I see he already answered.

merryfistmas said:
Ah, okay. In that case I agree, though I think I place more importance on interpretation than you, I will not deny anything you have said here.

Pullman said:
I don't think a show can 'make you' disregard its flaws IF you already realize them. Disregarding flaws it something that happens on your side, not the shows. It can be a conscious decision (just like nitpicking and looking for flaws can be) or a result of your personal bias making it easy to focus on the enjoyable aspect of shows of a certain type of genre. Don't credit shows too much for stuff that highly depends on the attitude of the viewer.

At the end of the day 'quality' is usually 'perceived quality' by whoever it is that's talking about it. It's not objective, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or is meaningless compared to enjoyment. To me it's natural to seperate this 'perceived quality' from sheer entertainment/enjoyment which is probably best defined as the simple absence of boredom.

A fail compilation on youtube, a cringe video, a really bad movie or your favorite anime can all be entertaining in the sense that you aren't bored while watching them, but most people will think of these things as being of different 'quality' nonetheless. The simple fact that a statement like 'I had a lot of fun laughing at that movie because of how bad it is' is valid should show that thinking of something as entertaining and thinking of something as good are two different things. If we take the 'enjoyment=quality' crowd seriously these cases would be something like 'this is good because it's bad' which is a contradiction in itself.

So I believe even the 'enjoyment/entertainment' hardliners tend to (subconsciously) perceive quality in what they watch, they are just less aware of it.

I emphasize again that what people think of as quality is still subjective at the end of the day, but to a much lesser degree than something as vague and personal as 'enjoyment'. Nobody will be willing to argue about whether the enjoyment they got from a show is 'right' or not, it just is how they feel about it period. But the quality judgments of any individual tend to be open for debate, or at least they should be. Criteria of quality can still vary from person to person but within similar criteria there can be something akin to objective debate. When everyone involved agrees that having A means B and you can make the argument that A exists in the show then B automatically does too. That's why people can argue about quality but not enjoyment despite both being, at the end of the day, subjective.

I don't get the aversion so many people seem to have to the word quality, or the existence of any other way of judging shows than sheer entertainment. What I feel about something is the enjoyment, what I think about it is the quality. I don't want to have to defend my feelings but I'm willing to defend my thought processes and criteria and so are most people.

Trying to set a false equivalency between the two to avoid having to defend your thought processes by equaling them to your feelings is just... weird, not to say cowardly. Same as trying to hide that you never think about shows (or potentially anything) in the first place so all you got are your feelings of enjoyment but you still want to participate in 'discussions' so you try to tell yourself and others that there is nothing aside from enjoyment just because you don't have access to discussions about the quality people perceive in shows. I always wonder what it IS these people want to discuss them. They probably just want to write down their feelings and have people agree with them and anything that is a bit more critical or cerebral than that gets discarded with the 'only enjoyment matters, everything is subjective so don't talk back to me'.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with not thinking about stuff you watch and not having any (conscious) opinions on the quality of what you've watched aside from your personal enjoyment, but if that is the case there is no room in any debate for you because those 'feelings' of enjoyment you have are usually not up to debate. The value that can be debated is quality and if you don't think about shows along those lines in addition to just the enjoyment there's really nothing you can contribute to these discussions.

There's no reason shows can't be evaluated from two or even more different perspectives, like in these cases feelings and thoughts. Both being subjective in their own ways but still fundamentally different. One relies on nothing but the 100% subjective experience of the viewer while the other uses commonly agreed upon standards as a plaform for debate where the subjective interpretations of the shows can confront each other under the rules of commo sense, basic logic and different but comparable methods of critical evaluation. Things don't need to be unified and simplified into one and only one criteria that is either 100% subjective or completely objective. That's why it's stupid to get hung up on scores because they by definition can't represent the full scale of what someone is thinking and feeling about a show. They are always a compromise depending on the person giving them.


INB4 noone reads this wall of text :(.

Pullman said:


That is also pretty much true. I mean theoretically someone can just get acquainted with the theory of literary criticism and then apply them to the first show they watch, but that scenario isn't very likely and usually it is the other way round. First you watch, then you extrapolate criteria from your experiences and maybe flesh them out with input from others.

Also thanks for reading my ramblings. They're usually longer than they need to be but after typing for an hour I usually lack the motivation or time to read through the whole thing again, combine paragraphs and make it more concise. At the end of the day I enjoy the process of writing down my thoughts as they happen and would also do it if noone read them but everyone who actually reads and appreciates them is a big bonus <3.



What you just described has nothing to do with criteria for good writing, directing, worldbuilding or finding any common ground whatsoever, it's just the kind of show you, and that other guy, prefer watching. If you straight-out reject certain types of shows without being willing to discuss them based on what they try to do, then no real discussion is possible, that much is true.

The common ground for a critical debate should at least be that both sides evaluate a show based on what it is trying to accomplish. That is usually one of the first things I try to establish when disagreeing with someone. Are we even talking about the same thing? People can talk about the same show but still talk about very different things.
If establishing some sort of common ground on that front is not possible it is best to abandon the discussion. It's not very fruitful to discuss whether apples taste more like apples or oranges taste more like oranges after all.

That being said even debating what it is a show tries to do can be very informative in terms of understanding someone else's position. It becomes so clear why someone hates a show when they take it seriously while you see it as an obvious parody of the type of show the other person thinks it is trying to seriously be, for example.



Well, yeah. If both sides (or even just one of them, really) have strong preferences in opposing directions AND are unable or unwilling to leave those positions aside to acknowledge or discuss why shows outside of their range can still be good (or bad) at what they do, then nothing will come out of it except that very basic topic of trying to explain to each other why you have those preferences. Which can also be interesting if you want to understand the other person better and vice versa, but which is unrelated to any potential discussion about individual shows.

Again though, I don't see preferring one type of show and rejecting another as 'criteria for critically evaluating the quality of works'. They are just preferences, biases. You can have those, be aware of them, and still discuss shows and their general quality critical. The bottomline will just be 'Even though K-On is a great slice of life moe show that does all the right things X, Y and Z for that genre I still can't enjoy it because it's not my type of show' or 'despite enjoying Fairy Tail because I love all kinds of battle shounen anime I have to admit that in terms of A and B and C it is one of the worse battle shounen out there and doesn't hold up critically to something like Naruto, One Piece or HxH, which didn't prevent me from enjoying the shit out of it for the most part tho.'
As long as both parties involved can agree that X, Y and Z or A, B and C are relevant criteria for their respective shows and are actually present in the shows that they talk about, their preferences don't prevent them from making proper statements about their quality. Trying to find those criteria, arguing in favor of why they are relevant or not, in general and in this anime in particular, is the meat of the discussion.



A couple of things.
1. Talking about something and discussing it critically are not the same things. If you just want to talk about why you like something with like-minded people I call that fanboying and I enjoy it a lot too. It's different from a discussion about quality tho since the main purpose isn't to come to some kind of understanding but just share different facets of the same views for mutual enjoyment.

2. In your examples the other person always completely dislikes the kind of show in which case the question 'why do you keep watching them' is kinda warranted. If that is a habit of theirs they are probably not the most pleasant person in the first place, watching stuff they dislike just to complain about it or make fun of its fans. I think those people can be neglected. And if they just realize that they don't seem to like that kind of show based on what they just watched it can be interesting to find out more about their reasons. Did they just dislike this particular show and try to trace it back to disliking the whole genre or are the things they disliked about it really representative of that type of show?

Still I think perhaps the most interesting and relevant and frequent examples are people who DO like the same kind of show but happen to like this one less or more than you. Or who do like it but for different reasons. Or people who only like a select few, say, romance anime who try to explain why his particular one did or didn't make the cut for them.

To put it like this, in general I expect people with at least a vague interest in that kind of show to be the ones watching it. The fringe cases that you based your whole post on can be neglected as exceptions and don't mean that the whole concept of having at least some common criteria for critically evaluation what you're watching is wrong. When your whole argument about why you think a show is bad is that it is not your type of show, then you probably belong to the category of people who don't actually want to discuss quality but just voice your feelings and let that be the end of it all. Those were never the kind of people I talked about in the first place.



Again, you're not talking about actual criteria just about different taste. And I think you underestimate how much people with similar taste can disagree when it comes to evaluation individual shows. Two people can love - or hate - the same exact show for completely different reasons because their criteria for critical evaluation can differ a lot. That can be something basic as valuing characters over story or vice versa or more complex and detailed kind of arguments depending on the specific context of the show in question.



But I never said anything like that. I just said that 'everything is subjective' and 'only enjoyment matters there is no quality' are completely useless starting points for any kind of critical discussion. Too many people have it as their default responses to shut off or ridicule any attempt at discussing quality on any level that isn't 100% reliant on enjoyment and subjectivity.

The fun and interesting thing about discussions is the process, not the outcome at the end. You try to find something you two can agree on and then base your argument on that to convince the other person or make him at least understand where you are coming from. Or point out inherent contradictions in someone's position, making them rethink their argument (and having the same be done to you resulting in 'better' opinions overall). The goal is to pinpoint where your differences in opinion come from.

Is it just a misunderstanding? Do the two of you talk about different things? Does one of you say quality but just mean enjoyment while the other one tries to take a more critical stance? Is one of you contradicting yourself? Do you have completely different criteria or expectations for the show? Or do your differences come from interpreting or valuing those criteria to different degrees in different shows? Ultimately the goal is to understand and be understood. If, at the end of that, there just lies a 'well, then we can agree to disagree on this' then so be it. In the process you usually get to learn a lot about the other guy, the show you're talking about and potentially even yourself and your preferences or way of thinking.

At the end of the day almost all differences in opinion are based on either a misunderstanding or subjective values or feelings. But shutting down any attempts of discussion, of trying to pinpoint the origin of your disagreement via critical debate by slapping people in the face with subjectivity and enjoyment from the very start, as if all those 'details' I mentioned that you can learn about don't even exist is just stupid and counterproductive. It's like saying 'I don't want to discuss things, I just want to fanboy and because I do you should too because I can't handle it when other people discuss and try to understand things on a level that I don't care about or that goes above my head'. It's not technically wrong because it's not technically a statement, just an expression of how they feel about it. But just because it's not technically wrong doesn't make it ignorant, arrogant, rude and meaningless.

If someone doesn't want to participate in the process that is called discussion than so be it. Everyone has a right to be silent. It is the contradiction of wanting to partcipate in the process that is called discussion byonly saying things that completely neglect the value of the process that is discussion that makes me think of them as either hypocritical or stupid.

mahoganycow said:
About "subjective" reviews. Click Mahoganycow's name to reach the post.

WatchTillTandava said:
In regards to the use of the word "pretentious", click the name to see the original message.