Leaving "Is it any good or not?" Behind

I've been taking deep looks at the stories I love for years, decades even. I do it almost by instinct, picking apart the pieces, finding the patterns, seeing how it all fits together. I won't say I'm the best there is at doing so. Honestly, I'm not even close to that. I've seen people review some of the same things I do and launch into literary, allegorical, theological and societal comparisons that leave mine far behind. My scholarly abilities are comparatively modest. But that doesn't change the fact that I enjoy it. I like to take a look at characters, plots, themes and examine why they work, or even why they don't work as well as they could have.

What I don't particularly enjoy is focusing on a question that a lot of people seem to: "Is it any good or not?"

A tremendous amount of the reviews of books, comics, television shows and movies that I see not only focus on that question but fixate on it to almost the exclusion of everything else. Nearly every bit of analysis is filtered through this lens as if the sole purpose of a review is to answer this question.

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that's an illegitimate way to do reviews. As mentioned, it's how a lot of them are done, arguably the majority.

No, what I'm saying is that I, personally, don't find "Is it any good or not?" to be a very interesting question.

Why not?

Well, there are several reasons.

First and foremost, as I mentioned in previous posts, I don't tend to spend a lot of my time seeking out stories I'm unlikely to enjoy. I don't go looking for rom-coms or sitcoms much and I only seek out horror when I'm in that particular "horror mood." If I'm not enjoying something, I don't tend to continue with it.

Does this mean everything I watch or read is a masterpiece? Hardly. Just as I have fairly eclectic tastes in stories, I also have a fairly eclectic way of enjoying them. Sometimes I take things seriously. Other times I enjoy things on a more cheesy level. Sometimes I want something deep and meaningful. Sometimes I want meaningless fluff. Sometimes I feel like a nut. Sometimes I feel like an omelet.

As I begin to explore Doctor Who and other things, you'll see that I don't universally love everything. (It'll become quickly obvious that I'm not a big fan of the character of Susan in Doctor Who, for instance.) But I do generally operate from a philosophy that if I'm going to examine something, while it may not be perfect, it's at least good enough to be worth exploring its themes and implications. I don't bother examining things that I think are downright awful and even when I look at things I don't think are great, I tend to look in terms of what can be salvaged from them.

My goal isn't cold objectivity, but enjoyment. I don't go in neutral. I go in hopeful. Neutrality is not an advantage when your goal is enjoyment. That doesn't mean I'm never disappointed, of course. I can still remember going into the theatre to see Highlander 2, sure I'd love it because the first one had been so good. That...didn't go so well. (But, to demonstrate the philosophy I mentioned above, my most vivid memories of Highlander 2 are the few brief moments of the film that I did think were done well...mostly visual imagery, as opposed to narrative.)

The second reason I don't like the "Is it any good or not?" approach is that it presumes a universality of what "good" means in a context where I don't really think it applies. Stories are an art form, not a science. There are rules to creating them, sure, but not the ironclad ones that apply to non-artistic endeavors.

To this day, I can distinctly recall a conversation I had with a college writing professor. I had written a story for her class and was talking to her about it. She liked some parts and not others and was giving me suggestions and I asked her about a specific section, stating that I wanted to construct a sentence in a certain way in order to achieve an effect I was going for, but I knew it wouldn't be grammatically correct. She responded that it didn't matter as long as it achieved the effect it was supposed to. Well, after countless years of English classes that were, in reality, grammar classes, this was a revelation.

The rules of language, of grammar, of filmmaking, of storytelling in general are there to facilitate the ability to communicate. The rules serve the story, not the other way around. It's important to know them, and to know why they exist, but that doesn't mean it's never ok to break them, as long as you're doing it for a reason. Will it always work? No. But that's not a good reason to obey they them blindly.

And if these universal rules are that flexible, that goes double for all the gazillions of subjective rules that reviewers apply to stories. We all have biases. I'm no exception to that. But I do endeavor not to pretend my biases represent anything more than my individual taste.

I mentioned, above, that I don't seek out sitcoms. This is because most sitcoms tend to have a tempo to their dialogue that bothers me, a cadence to the speech that tends to remind me that these are actors and they're waiting for the audience to react to what was just said (or allowing the audience to take in what the last person said so that their punchline lands well.) I don't like that speech cadence and hence, I tend not to enjoy most sitcoms. I do like comedy, mind you, just not that particular type.

But who the hell am I to tell other people they shouldn't like sitcoms just because that dialogue tempo happens to bug me? If they find those sitcoms enjoyable, more power to them. That tempo doesn’t represent some sort of failure on the part of those making the show. It just doesn’t fit into my tastes. The world's a better place if more people are happy, period, not just if they’re happy about the same things I am.

When I get to the ends of seasons (or other divisions) I will likely take a post or two to list off my favorites from that era, but you won't be seeing a list of "least favorites" at that time, because I honestly don't find much value in designating the "worst" of things because that's just "Is it any good or not?" (Whereas a list of favorites is more of a signpost to "This is why I think these things are so good.") I don't do "least favorite" lists for the same reasons I don't like the "skip lists" that some sites create. At the end of the day, I don't actually see much value in telling people they shouldn't enjoy something. I'm reasonably sure people can figure out how to not like something without my help and I'm entirely sure that I don't derive any pleasure out of someone else not liking something just because I don't happen to like it either.

And all that's before I even touch on biased reviews that start off with a specific intent of lambasting a work. My patience for those is...low.

I recall a bizarre chain of logic I saw in a review I read once that went as follows:

1: The reviewer watched a trailer for a film. The trailer featured a particular piece of music.

2: The reviewer had once watched the music video for that piece of music. The reviewer had done so during a time when they were about to have to put a sick pet down.

3: Because of this, the trailer reminded the reviewer of having to put their pet down.

4: The trailer (and thus the film, and thus the filmmaker) were therefore deliberately creating a work that evokes killing animals. How could the filmmaker do this in good conscience?

The irony is that I'm with the reviewer right up through step 3. Having a personal reaction to a story or a piece of art is fine. Indeed, it's pretty much the whole point of experiencing art, to feel that personal connection.

It's step 4 that makes it all fall down. First, it presumes a universality of experience and opinion, that because a work evokes a specific reaction in the reviewer, it will do so in everyone. Second it presumes that creator of the work was aiming for the precise interpretation the reviewer had and thus deliberately set out to create something to upset the reviewer (and, because of that first point, everyone.)

The first point bothers me a bit because all it takes is a moment's thought to recognize that we all see things in different ways, that our experience is not universal, particularly in regards to something as subjective as art and storytelling.

The second bothers me more because it presumes the thought processes of the creator, not simply leaving things at "This is the effect the work had on me" but escalating to "This is the effect the creator was deliberately going for. How dare they?!" It's the reviewer not just putting themselves in the position of "knowing" what the creator was thinking, but also judging those "known" thoughts.

Of course, these days, a review like the one above is actually pretty tame. The sheer amount of reviews I see these days that set out, not to actually examine, but methodically destroy a work and the creators behind it is staggering. Works are not examined in terms of their merits but rather by how they match up with social and political positions. It's like stories have become casualties in the "culture war."

Well, I'm a conscientious objector in that war.

If people want to complain endlessly about how modern stories have become too "woke" they can do so if they want. If they can't or won't separate issues of quality from issues of social justice and casting, then that's their schtick. If they want to act like casting one woman in a lead role after 12 male ones is the end of the world, they can run around telling everyone the sky is falling to their heart's content.

But they're not going to find any sympathy from me here. The sky is not falling. The world is not coming to an end just because the stories told today aren't the same ones we grew up with or because they feature people who look different from the protagonists of our youth. We're not owed a continuous status quo in the narratives we follow and an old story having a new interpretation isn't some sort of betrayal. To paraphrase a particularly crass euphemism, our childhoods have not been raped.

Change doesn't bother me. Change doesn't frighten me. Change is what stories do. Change is just something new to explore. Familiarity isn't the same thing as quality and the goal of telling stories today is not (and should not be) to just comfortably remind us of the stories of yesterday. That doesn't mean every new story is good, but it does mean that a new story isn't bad just because it doesn't take the same approach as an old one.

So, as I explore things, first Doctor Who, then on to other stories, I'm going to do my best to leapfrog right over "Is it any good or not?" I'm going to try to explore the ins and outs of the stories I find fascinating, to poke into the nooks and crannies of these works and find all the tasty bits. I will undoubtedly gush about the parts that I really like and mention the bits that don't particularly work for me (I'm only human) but, at the end of the day, I'm seeking the answers to more interesting questions than "Is it any good or not?"

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