my tumblr mutual cogandstar (neocities, tumblr) made a vaguepost. i replied not fully aware of what ze was referring to, though after-the-fact deduction suggests the inciting post is this one from notorious power user derin. Click to transcription. This phrase has already entered my vocabulary re: media criticism where like. The viewer has a concrete view of what they expect a story to be based on the tropes and cliches they're used to seeing together, and when that doesn't happen, they judge it as a failed depiction of what they assumed it was going to be instead of judging it as what it actually is. "This show is problematic because the hero didn't kill the villain at the end": When does he steal the bread? "These two characters who were close friends throughout the series don't kiss at the end! What the fuck?": When does he steal the bread? "This feels like it's missing a conclusion! Like, the protagonist does bad stuff and because of a critical decision he makes as a result of his major character flaws, meets tragedy in the end! Where's the part where he learns better and brings is love back from the dead and becomes a good guy and gets a happy ending?": When does he steal the fucking bread??
anyway, you can clearly see the relevance to hir post.
there is a criticism of criticisms i've seen, most recently in a tumblr post that made a snappy phrase for it which i won't repeat here because i don't actually want to argue with them, that says that certain complaints about media are bad/invalid/should not be made because they are criticizing the media for not being what the criticizer wants/assumes it to be instead of for what it is.
and the thing is, this idea doesn't really make sense to me? it seems to me to essentially make any criticism phrased as "it's bad that Work X didn't do Thing Y" bad criticism. which is kinda absurd, right? "i think this work should have done this thing" is a pretty standard criticism to make, and even in the extreme case of someone saying “what Work X is doing in general is bad, it should do Thing Y instead” -- i mean, that's a pretty big claim, it'll take some solid argumentation to make it stand, but i don't think it's automatically an invalid criticism just because it's arguing against Work X's premise.
and i think especially when this criticism-of-criticism is, as in the tumblr post that inspired this, rendered into a snappy phrase, it's just a poor way to engage with criticism. and maybe you don't want to engage with criticism! have fun on computer, you don't need to engage with every criticism of media you see online and you probably shouldn't. but this snappy phrase, i think, is bad because it lets you think you are engaging with it, in a way, even though you're not.
to which I replied that i think this sounds absurd because ze took a reasonable statement to a logical extreme that strips it of all the specification which gave it meaning in the first place
to which ze responded graciously, asking for further elaboration. which finally prompted me to share my complete thoughts
imagine a story was meant to depict the horrors of war. now consider a collection of reactions to it:
- “no character close to the main character actually dies, which really weakens the impact of the war is bad message. they should have killed off members of the protagonist’s squad”
- “i was really depressed watching this, you’re just watching people struggle pointlessly in a world that sucks. they should have given the audience something to hope for”
- “i think it’s cowardly that the author doesn’t actually tell you what either nation is fighting for, leaving everything in this postmodern moral swamp. were they fighting for tyranny or against it? but i guess the ambiguity serves the author’s agenda well. war is alway bad, so stay docile little sheep.”
- “the logistics are vague and kind of incoherent? war isn’t just a series of random shootouts and marching through wastelands. where are they getting their supplies? what is the strategic objective of any of this?”
are these valid criticisms? it’s not truly possible to say, because not enough has been pinned down about our made up story. consider #1 — this feels like a pretty good critique of a story that wants to show bad things but pulls its punches. (rhetorically, that’s why i came up with it!)
except maybe it was deeper than that: there are horrors of war other than soldiers dying, after all. what if it was an exploration of how the experience traumatized them? (in which case this could actually undercut it; corpses have more honor and repose than a paranoid wreck) what if it’s about how civilians suffer? (in which case, focusing on the tragedy of soldiers would distract from what it’s focused on)
but still, that would make it inept criticism, not invalid criticism
#2 could be a much clearer illustration of missing the point. but, to make things confusing, we can game out scenarios where it’s actually an insightful thing to say: after all, your meditation on how war sucks is pretty ineffective if every viewer gets bored and turns it off. you need something to motivate them to keep watching. you can steelman this.
but generally speaking? “i was depressed” will meet “good, that’s the point” and this is not a good place for ostensible criticism of craft to find itself!
i’m going to cook up an elaborate analogy. i don’t know if this makes it more confusing, but imagine an arbitrary continuous mapping from a high dimensional space to real values — which is to say, it creates a graph with hills and valleys. higher points are better. we can thus loosely model critique as this sort of evaluation function
given a good “critique function”, you could follow its gradient and get a better story, find a local maxima.
but i digress, the point of this analogy is that like a lot of mathematical functions, there’s are certain requisites we would want an “admissible critique function” to adhere to
one of these axioms is that it should not be flat — a critique function should not say everything is equally good and no improvement is possible.
but another important property is that there must be multiple local maxima. our critique function should not collapse the space into a single point better than every other story. we want different stories to exist!
so, to finally arrive at the image i wanted to create, you can imagine partitioning this space into a “grid”. here, each story that has ever existed gets its own grid cell. certain revisions of the story nudge it around in that cell, and ideally you’d want to climb the gradient of a critique function and thus arrive at something good.
i feel like i’m getting very goofy with this analogy (thank you for bearing with me), but if there were a “fundamental theorem of critique calculus”, i think it would be about preserving the boundaries between cell partitions. admissible critique functions will never advise you to turn a story into a different story entirely, they will only point toward the nearest local maxima
of course, one of the faults in this model is that the space is very, very high dimensional. there are a lot of points — points that real, existing stories often occupy — which lie equidistant from several local maxima.
let’s loop back around to the example critiques i cooked up. it turns out, these nicely illustrate the principle of multiple axes. war stories can be brutal. war stories can be hopeful. war stories can appeal to national pride and absolute morality. war stories can have clever logistics and strategy.
if you lock in on one of these axes, you can look for a better story that achieves one of these aims. so to finally connect this to the subject at hand, a critic can want it to be that sort of story, and critique how it could do that better.
but if what the story is is a “war is bad” story, then it’s rather plausible that “brutal war story” is going to be a much nearer local maxima than “nationalist war story”
so if a critique function says, without any specification, that it should have been nationalist, then it is not an admissible critique function because it is not finding the nearest maxima.
so, to summarize, the initial claim made elsewhere is that you shouldn’t judge media for not being what you want, you should judge it for what it is. your logical generalization of this was that this means you can never say that a story should have done something it didn’t do, which is indeed absurd.
but “this war story should have killed characters” is nearer to what it is than “this war story should have given everyone superpowers”. i think the former is valid and the latter is not.
of course, it gets more complicated when you have critique of the local maxima themselves — i would probably object to the nationalist war story, and i think you should be allowed to critique that what it’s supposed to be is still bad.
and the logistical war story is probably not that close to what it’s meant to be — probably it wanted to be emotional rather than rational — but i think there’s an insightful case to be made in how cold calculations lead directly to horror. that could be a stronger story, it could be a taller maxima even if it isn’t local.
but i’m rambling. i spent the first hour of my day writing this post, i should probably start wrapping it up.
i think this is ultimately an question of awareness and sympathy. good critique understands where the author is coming from, is capable of acknowledging the merit even in things the critique doesn’t personally prefer
ultimately my take isn’t that it’s never admissible to critique on grounds of what you want instead of what you got, but when you do it, you have to demonstrate awareness that there’s a disconnect between your preferences and the author’s, and that it it’s more than just a skill issue.