Prejudice though…that’s hard to argue against. Something like not liking older anime just because they’re old, fair enough. But if something portrays neo-nazi ideals then it’s hard to honestly assess it without keeping your prejudice against nazi-idealism out of it.

Which of course all works against my theory ever working…

But, anyway, that common sense your talking about is everything but common. Regular people seem to think that something made in the 90’s is old and hence bad (which I find amusing, since my favorite movie is from 1926)… You, yourself admited to a certain prejudice against pre-youtube works in a article concerning Akira, if my memory isn’t failing me. That’s very indicative of the kind of audience that consumes nowadays. Audiences with extremely short memorys and attetion spams (which has less of a potential to affect anime as it ussualy is very short).
But anyway, all that is subjective. The point is, sadly (sadly because someone needs to tell twilight fans and narutards how stupid their opinions are) we cannot establish a objective “good” scale. The common sense of which you speak, is rather uncommon, and very unreliable.

“Truth is some­thing being artist­ic­ally “good” is bey­ond logical/rational analisis”

That’s the statement that bugs me. Leaving aside logic and taking the side of common sense, it’s clear that (since you’re not an anime fan, I’ll take two movies I’ve seen recently) 12 Angry Men is a way better movie than The Break Up. Why? Because everyone who watches the two movies says so and clearly rate it higher. Trying to convert that common sense into a logical all-encompasing theory hasn’t exactly worked though. As you said, subjective masses doesn’t turn into objective fact because it, amongst other things, suggests that anyone who goes against popular opinion is wrong.

You came back? I admit I didn’t expect that.

I ignored the non-sequitur statement because that is no more than a poncy way of saying you suck at formulating a point.

Right, so the part you have a problem with is that you don’t think that if everyone watches two movies and more people like the first than the second, then the first is a better movie, am I correct? I’m assuming in this post that everyone has seen both movies. You are saying that humans will get things wrong and they will prefer a movie that’s not as good? Now that’s where I disagree, well, up to a point. The quality of a movie is not something that can be defined without people watching it. It is whether the people who watch it think it is any good that decides whether it is good.

Since you came back last time I’m going to assume you’ll come back again. This time please take better care to explain more clearly where you disagree. Not a single commenter agreed with me, which has kinda showed me that I’m wrong with my conclusions I’ve drawn here, but they all formed their points with a bit more courtesy. Please follow their examples next time

Is Scamp your “real” name? What point will it make for me to give you mine, or either a random internet alias? No, I’m no blogger, in fact I barely even watch anime. My brother, who is a fan of you, told me about your post.

“when their favour­ite obscure piece isn’t adored by the masses.”

By no means, but using popularity to demonstrate the “goodness” of something is non-sequitur, a concept you must have not understood…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_%28logic%29

“You have, of course, missed the point where I poin­ted out that any real life applic­a­tion of this the­ory messes up when humans get involved because they are not the machines and do things like start cam­paigns to get Lord of the Rings up the charts”

No, I understood perfectly, your the one who clearly doesn’t quiet know what a non-sequitur argument is.

Neodarkness

Urgh…right, let me give this another go.

Mental masturbation is group form? I’m going to say yes, critique is nothing more than that. It can certainly increase your enjoyment of a show as you learn different insights about the show itself but the actual quality of the show itself remains the same. Discussing it will not change the show itself. In a way, discussing a show only fills in the gaps you weren’t intelligent enough to fill in yourself.

Objectivity and subjectivity sliding scale…I’m sorry but I’m going to have to give up. There’s an element of truth in what you’re saying but I do believe there is such a thing as true objectivity but whenever I tried to explain it I ended up in a web of contradictions.

To give you an idea of a thought process I went through: If someone says something is red, then that is fact and therefore an objective statement. They know it is red. But in the past saying the earth was flat was an objective statement since they ‘knew’ it was flat. By that logic, someone saying something a harem anime was original because they hadn’t seen any others was an objective statement, which went on until I ended up saying a subjective statement was objective and dividing the whole thing by zero and you get 42.

I still don’t entirely agree with you. It’s just I can’t play ball back because my legs have fallen off.

@flamer

Hurrah, my first flame! And it’s my favourite, one of those who get unhappy when their favourite obscure piece isn’t adored by the masses. You have, of course, missed the point where I pointed out that any real life application of this theory messes up when humans get involved because they are not the machines and do things like start campaigns to get Lord of the Rings up the charts, but I doubt you’re coming back. Seriously though, use your name next time. You’re obviously an anime blogger since there’s no other way to find this blog at the moment, so man up next time.

@Camario

Right, as you can see I’ve had to rethink my ideas on the post. Basically, I’ve had to throw out the idea of anything ever being objectivly ‘good’. Subjective en masse seems to be the closest you’ll get to definine the quality of the series.

‘Stand up to scrutiny’ is not a phrase I like because that therefore defines that you can judge a show by objective standerds. Sorry, I know I’m changing my tune here but there’s been some quite enlightening comments. While you can critque something, that does not change the view of the show one has. It’s like I said to Sorrow-kun, arguing about the show doesn’t change the quality of the show itself.

Also, popularity is not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about percentages. If 10 people watch something and 9 of them like it, then that’s better than 10000 people watching something and 5432 liking it.

Urgh…sorry folks, my own thoughts on this have been scrambled on the subject so sorry for incoherant comments

I think everyone is entitled to have a different opinion and popularity is an objective sign of something being considered “good” by the majority, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will stand up to further scrutinity or that it can be universally classifed as “good” period, particularly when comparisons to other works start being made.

At the same time, there are critics who are far too cynical and won’t appreciate this or that product on any level if it doesn’t meet their personal standards, which aren’t necessarily as objective as they’d like to pretend since personal tastes and expectations, which tend to be pretty subjective once you get past certain basics, also play a role.

While a critical analysis might be more detailed than the average fanboy rant (although sometimes that’s actually not the case and the results can be incredibly ironic…but nevermind), I think we shouldn’t focus on popularity and instead think about the specific arguments that are brought to the table at any given tiem. It doesn’t really matter if something is supposed to be “good” if your statements can’t properly back that up or vice versa. Studio Ghibli’s movies aren’t great just because they have mainstream popularity.