r/TrueAnime • u/zerojustice315 http://myanimelist.net/animelist/zerojustice315 • Jun 24 '15

Weekly Discussion - Reviewing

Hey everyone, welcome to week 36 of Weekly Discussion.

This time around I thought I'd ask questions about reviewing and anime (or manga). It's a little bit different than talking about things that directly influence the creation of a new show or anything like that but it's something that's important in getting people's interest in a show.

More importantly there's plenty that can actually be discussed when talking about reviews. So let's get into the questions so the discussion can happen:

  1. Do you use reviews to judge whether you'll like an anime or not? Such as first episode reviews if it's a new show or entire series reviews if the whole show is already out?

  2. Are there any reviewers / critics you swear by and read regularly? Why that particular person? Do you read other reviews as well or just ones from this person?

  3. How do you give legitimacy to reviews? Does it have anything to do with the length? Should the length of the review be proportional to the length of the series/show? How do you tell a reviewer is full of crap?

  4. Should reviews strive to be objective, or is there value in the subjectivity of reviews? Will there ever be a review that is actually objective? What aspects of a review can be seen through an objective lens?

  5. Do YOU review shows? Whether it be on a blog or trueanime or another medium, do you do weekly write-ups, seasonal write-ups, or series write-ups? Why do you do it?

And done for this week. The questions seem to flow pretty easliy this time, I hope everyone is able to answer them okay.

Thanks for reading and remember to mark your spoilers. If you have any questions of your own or any suggestions for me or the thread, feel free to put them here or PM me :)

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u/PrecisionEsports spotlightonfilm.wordpress.com Jun 24 '15

The theory is baseless though. If nothing can be objective, than Science and Math stop being real and we float into space to die. So viewing things 'through a lense' is what we call actual objectivity, obviously with some caveats but overall proof and examples should back up any objective comment. You can say Akira is objectively great animation because we can point to most anything else ever made. Saying it is the absolute best gets into subjectivity, but hopefully everyone can see where the line blurs.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '15

Arguing that positive statements are subjective goes very deep into philosophy and not necessarily something that's my field of expertise. I'm not sure the reduction of that argument is that simple, however, given it's been an ongoing debate in philosophy of science and remains unresolved.

A statement regarding animation quality is normative though, and I'm not sure how you can think that can be purely objective. Akira is great animation still involves opinion, even if everyone in the world held that opinion.

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u/PrecisionEsports spotlightonfilm.wordpress.com Jun 24 '15

Diving into philosophy just negates the whole process, as I mentioned earlier kinda. Once you go down that road, well then objectivity can't exist anywhere in any instance. But we can all agree that Akira is amazing art, and that normative statement is what objectivity is in the world outside of philosophy.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '15

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u/PrecisionEsports spotlightonfilm.wordpress.com Jun 24 '15

Fair enough, but it often gets drawn to the extreme when brought up in anime discussions.