It’s easy to forget how difficult it is to translate any kind of meaning through words; even in spite of how much of human history transpired before this method of communication was conceived, and the crazy amount of work we’ve collectively put into tweaking it—especially in the very exciting hundred years of boredom we’ve just been living through.
To describe anything is inherently to make a comparison. Every word is as much defined by what it means as by what it doesn’t mean. Sometimes the difference in meaning between words is only that one isn’t the other. It’s hard to define “left” and “right,” other than as the direction that you are facing when you turn one way, versus the direction you are facing when you turn the other way. How do you remember which one is “left,” and which one is “right,” though?
Understanding left from right necessitates a physical experience—witnessing the difference first-hand and assigning a label to each direction based on its contradicting the other. The fact that one is “left” and the other “right” is something you just have to memorize using experience in order to effectively communicate with others. Each word is so arbitrary in how it relates to the experience of the direction it represents (made even weirder by the fact that each word has other, completely unrelated meanings in English) that differentiating them really is one of the harder concepts to internalize without deliberate memorization through childhood.
Language being so complicated and imprecise is why art remains so necessary as a means of communication beyond what language has been able to achieve; but there is also an endless cloying desire on the part of people like me to keep throwing vocabulary at art and try to make the communication even clearer for those of us who want to connect as deeply with others as we can over the artistic expression.
In trying to discuss art, and to apply to it a medium which is so characterized by comparison, we inevitably use a lot of comparative language in how we discuss the arts. A significant amount of discourse on art really boils down to holistically attempting to rate and understand what is “good” or “bad” art (I suspect because most of the people talking about art have an obsession with trying to create it effectively themselves). We want to know why things are popular, successful, good, bad, and any combination of those (in spite of how they ought to seemingly contradict one-another).
It is easy to get lost in the weeds of trying to figure out a comparative standard by which to judge art as a means of discussing it. Art is a two-sided conversation, and our ability to talk about it relies heavily on characterizing an emotional reaction—on top of attempting just to understand and describe what is actually happening in the work to which we are witness.
Most “reviews” consist of some kind of description of a piece of work (often with an explanation for some of the context surrounding its creation) and then a combination of summarizing what the work is, along with what kind of effect it had in being the way that it is. Where I think a lot of reviews fail in their communication and begin to create an unnecessarily clouded discourse, is when they start to draw unnecessary qualifications about which effects are “good” or “bad,” as opposed to just observing and describing the effects themselves.
It is hard to qualify what is “good,” because everyone reacts differently to what they see in art. Some things are more technically complex (in a way that’s usually most-recognizable to people with some kind of technical know-how themselves), but there is not a linear correlation between the competency required to accomplish something and the effectiveness of that accomplishment in reaching the audience.
Critics often attempt to divine the intent of the author and what they were “going for,” versus how well they were able to pull that thing off as a way of judging quality—but this conversation becomes increasingly boring the more you understand how much art production is couched in circumstance, and how rare it is to find yourself in a circumstance that you have the means at your disposal to even approximate your intentions as an artist (not to mention how plenty of the time, having the means is not enough to pull it off). I think it takes a kind of zen toward the realization that not every artist can make something at the level of what another artist is capable of to realize that art is a lot less interesting for its ability to be as good as possible, than it is for its ability to communicate something specific.
I don’t think it’s worth the effort of trying to figure out what makes a thing “good,” but I think it’s incredibly worth our time to figure out what makes a thing “effective.” It is less interesting that the “effect” is “a satisfied audience,” than it is that a thing had any kind of major effect at all. I think the conversation around a show like Velma, for instance, is a lot less interesting if you’re trying to figure out if the show is ‘good’ or even ‘likable,’ and more interesting to examine why it has the intense emotional effect that it does on people—such that it sparked enough conversation to become HBO’s most-successful streaming series of all time. You can discuss this in terms of the creators “succeeding” at their intent, but even that could be giving them too much credit if you really think the show sucks. Again, it’s not about how much they got the effect they were ‘going for,’ as it is about examining the effect that there has been.
When you consume media, instead of asking yourselves if you did/didn’t like it and why, or in which ways it is/isn’t good, instead, look at the effect that it’s had on you, and try to examine how it created that effect. Instead of, “it made me mad because it wasn’t good,” break down what ‘wasn’t good’ in terms of what about it made you so upset. Sometimes it can be a story operating to its exact intent which incenses us, and other times it can be an apparent gap in the intent of the work against its execution, and sometimes it’s just the lack of effectiveness of the choices in having the intended effect on us. It isn’t as interesting (or as possible) to figure out whether the artist did what they were ‘trying to do,’ as it is to describe what you perceive to have happened, and the effect that it had on you.
It’s a shame as well that so much writing on media is immediate, when the most interesting effects of media can only be felt in the long term. Oftentimes the “story” of a work is only richer after it’s had time to effect the future.
This season I am keeping up with a lot of currently-airing anime for mine and Bird’s new podcast, We Watch Anime, and I can tell which shows are going to have the farthest-reaching effects already. Oshi no Ko has an immediate pop sensation with its exciting extra-long opening episode—very effective—but I doubt that the story will ever have as much of an emotional effect on its audience as in the beginning, and won’t be a hit with the tastemakers and gatekeepers in the long-term, making it a flash-in-the-pan sensation that dwindles out within half a decade. Heavenly Delusion may have the legs to go the distance as a cult-classic in the vein of Made In Abyss, assuming it gets any kind of marketing push and good word of mouth. It could be a surviving piece of shelf-candy for hardcore fans deep into the future if if doesn’t fuck things up. Hell’s Paradise will never be cited as a specific influence on anything, because it’s too similar to a rich genre of similar media, but it’s so effective as an aspect of its genre that I can see it still being thrown on in con halls in 20 years, because it will always go over well with action-violence audiences. Dr. Stone, Mashle and Pokemon have little reason to question the long-term potential of, and I think Dr. Stone is going to have the largest observable influence on other anime in the future, even if it will always be hard to know what to attribute to the show, and what to attribute to Minecraft, Log Horizon, and every other show anything like it lately. The rest of the shows will be lucky if they can push more copies of their source materials.
I don’t know why I ended up on this rant, but that’s all, thanks for reading, enjoy the podcast!