Opinions on Mal Reviews?

katsucats said:
That's the definition of a review: to convey an opinion about something in depth. If you don't like reading opinions, then why are you even reading reviews? It's like people who trash novels because they hate books, like, "Novels are meaningless because they're a bunch of pages stuck between two covers." lmao

Bhaskar_Singh said:


That's evidently not how we define a 'review'. At least not from where I am. Good reviews are summaries given after scrutinization of a product as objectively as possible.

Bhaskar_Singh said:
In order to tailor a review you need to experience the product in an unbiased manner and taking all sorts of consumers into consideration ,a try hard and a casual.

Bhaskar_Singh said:
Like I said before that the majority of the reviews given on this website are nothing but subjective insights about the product based on the reviewers experiences in this media and real world experiences. I'm not absolutely declining the existence of genuine critics but the mass multitudes essentially lack the discernment for the job. Also I'm not gonna pretend as if I am not one of those from majority that lacks the ability.

katsucats said:
That's what I call a 'summary'. A 'review' is precisely someone going over his experiences again for the audience, hence a re- (indicating again) view. I'm from the United States.

Experience is necessarily biased towards oneself. But it sounds like you think reviewers should somehow preempt the feelings of everyone else but himself using his own experience. Isn't that kind of arrogant on the reviewer's part? That he doesn't present his own opinions but try to present the opinions of everyone else...

You're free to hold whatever opinion you want I suppose, but what I'm saying is that reviews are nothing but subjective insights. If it doesn't have subjective insights, then it isn't a review. That's why people who try to be objective write such shitty reviews, in my view, because they purposefully limit their own ability to articulate what they actually felt, and nobody could relate to a shallow exposition. If the author hated an anime but failed to express his hate, then he either thinks we are mind readers with crystal balls or he sucks at writing.

It is not the job of a reviewer to guess what other people might like. It's the job of the reader to figure out what the author is saying and figure out whether he'd agree with his reasoning.

Bhaskar_Singh said:


Yeah I do agree that it's better to be subjective than pretending to be objective. But that just limits the audience who can relate to it. I personally prefer something universal, something which has conditioned rules and regulations, and judgement based on those rules. It's viewers job to interpret things but it's also the director's/writer's job to make things feasible enough to be interpreted positively by general audience. Even if our definition of review differs, still the fact that defines the credibility of a review remains the same. A subjective review will be flawed in multiple ways but it will be flawless in the eyes of the people who have interpreted things according to the reviewer.People have different experiences and hence different perception of things and they relate to things differently. You might abhor a show for a reason and another guy my love it for that particular reason.

So finally I'd like to say that I'm not disrespecting the reviewers in anyway. I'm not demanding the reviewer to present everyone's opinions, I'm asking them to consider everyone's viewpoints or at least have a conceptualization of how a general person will interpret things , not just neglect them.If someone is writing a review, he started from the bottom and it's unreasonable to say that he cant understand how general brain perceives things. Your writing a review not a symbolic and substextual piece of literature. Hence I'm saying that the subjective reviews are just open to multiple interpretations and that's which make them meaningless in general. I could pick up a random essay from the review section, rephrase and restructure it along with the necessary substitutions and finally make it feasible enough to be construed as a nitpicky trash talk/ praise talk for any show that has ever existed. Also I'm not the only one capable of this. There's just astounding amount of baselessness in the majority of reviews that renders them unless for me at least. Im sure I'm not the only one for that either.

katsucats said:
Right, and you're free to feel that way. I would just like to reiterate that the fact that defines the credibility is not the same here.

When a person goes into some detail to describe a tree that he saw, I have never seen that tree so I couldn't relate to the veracity of his description, but I could relate to the veracity of his experience, and how it aligns to my experience -- and how it doesn't. And from those differences I could abstract from his various reasoning how I might feel in his shoes, but only to the extent of completeness of his descriptions.

Suppose the person doesn't describe the tree in detail, but instead tries to describe the tree how he presumes someone else might experience it. Still, since I have never seen that tree, I could not relate to the veracity of his description, but, since his description of his experience is now decidedly inauthentic, I could neither relate to his experience. I could not relate to how he guesses that he might relate to mine, because he is not me and he could never be. So now I lack a reference point, which instead of being his experiences, is at some fictional state somewhere in the middle of his beliefs of other people's beliefs of his experience.

And therein lies why I think a subjective review is perfect, both in the authenticity of the author's experience, and the completeness by which I refer to it. I don't have to agree to everything he says to make use of it. Whereas, even if the author is clairvoyant and accurately guesses everything I like, his review becomes useless to me even if I agree with everything it says, because it not real. Because I still have not experienced the anime, so I cannot relate to the veracity of his description, nor his fake experience.

So in my view -- which you're free to disagree with -- a subjective review is perfect and any other kind of review is not even a review, and also useless.

The review better convey the symbolism and subtext, if there exists any that are relevant to his experience. It better read like literature. A reviewer is a writer first and foremost, and any writer that does not strive to produce a polished work is a writer that never gave himself a fair shot.

I am genuinely puzzled how one could expect someone to restructure his own experiences to relate to how he thinks someone else thinks and become more "objective" and not less. It would seem to me like double jeopardy: The first bout of subjectivity is when he considered his experiences, and the second when he subjectively determined what you might want to hear. To me, that's two levels of obfuscation, where one does not cancel out the other. Not only could there be multiple interpretations of his experiences (which is a good thing), there is now also multiple interpretations of his inauthentic presentation (which is superfluous and useless).

For example, instead of saying This character is bad because..., if he says, This character is bad because..., but also good because..., then you not only have to interpret whether his reasoning of the character being bad is relatable, but you also have to interpret whether he actually thinks the character is good or bad, or whether you yourself should think the character is good or bad. I don't see how that adds any information. More like it detracts information by adding noise.

It's like if we're wondering what the answer to 5+7 is, and someone says one of:

• 5+7=12
• 5+7=12, but 7-6=1

Which do you think is more clear? I think the first one, because it's concise and answers the question. The second provides more information, but useless information.

_cjessop19_ said:
The only good reviews are the meme reviews.

Shameless plug: https://myanimelist.net/reviews.php?id=357385

ShadowMonkey said:
Kinda like any other kind of review. If you're giving me a subjective and heartfelt rundown of what you could and couldn't appreciate, there's almost a 100% chance that I'll respect your review and get interested in whatever you're reviewing, if I haven't experienced it already.
However, if you're taking the lifeless, "objective" approach and shitting on something just because you couldn't appreciate it, therefore feeding into negative bias and affecting other users' opinions and interest, I'm gonna see you as a clown. Sorry.

lolYuko said:
most mal reviews suck because of how long they are no one wants to read a 10 paragraph essay on why you love or hate an anime

Bhaskar_Singh said:
1) I am not attacking a particular review here. Seems to me like you're implementing my statements on your personal reviews and I would implore you to refrain from doing such things as that never was my intention. I have no clue how your reviews look like.

Jonyeo said:
I doubt most of us here are professional critics in real life so don't expect unbiased appraisals in MAL reviews. There are guidelines as to how to write a review on MAL but the fact that the review feature is an unrestricted one means that everyone is free to try reviewing an anime. I'd say just respect the fact that opinions are subjective and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

This urgent material is obviously worthy of being given the filmic treatment, but as Roger Ebert famously wrote, it’s not what a film is about, but how it is about it. Naming this movie “Foster Boy” is as misleading as naming Peter Farrelly’s widely maligned Best Picture-winner “Green Book,” since both films fail to truly be about what their titles suggest. It’s reasonable to assume that the main character of Delara’s film would be Jamal (a woefully underutilized Shane Paul McGhie), a man wracked with PTSD from the years of abuse he endured in nightmarish foster homes that robbed him of his childhood. He intends on suing the social services corporation that willfully turned a blind eye to his suffering while lining their pockets in the process. Alas, Judge Taylor (Louis Gossett Jr.) deems Jamal unfit to represent himself in court, and decides on the spur of the moment to assign corporate lawyer Michael (Matthew Modine) to work for him pro bono. It’s not long before Michael’s scenes dominate the screen time, rendering Jamal’s wrenching backstory—glimpsed only in disjointed flashbacks—as an afterthought.

Yes, this is yet another contrived would-be crowdpleaser about an insufferable white man whose unlikely bond with a Black man inspires him to become a better person. Though I don’t recall the word “racist” being uttered once throughout the course of the picture, that is what Michael unmistakably is from the get-go, as he dismisses Jamal as a “thug” purely on the basis of his appearance, while condescending to a Black colleague, Keisha (Lex Scott Davis), after ignoring her for months. Michael also has a curious form of OCD he demonstrates in his first scene, as he adjusts four white cups on his kitchen counter, an illustration of white privilege worthy of a Wayans Brothers comedy. This becomes an inadvertently amusing running gag when we later see him adjusting a painting in his ex-wife’s home without being asked. Even more perplexing is Michael’s ineptitude as a lawyer, which makes one wonder how he obtained such high-powered corporate clients in the first place. He initially puts forth no effort to understand or empathize with Jamal, tossing him on the witness stand and badgering him with sensitive questions until the poor soul snaps. So spiteful and sloppy is his courtroom conduct that he even forgets to authenticate documents before introducing them as evidence.

And yet, we’re supposed to grow to like Michael because his prejudice is contrasted with that of the villains at social services, who are portrayed as broadly as the evil liberals in “God’s Not Dead.” Only when confronted by their sociopathic vice president of claims, Pamela (Julie Benz), does Michael abruptly change his tune, arguing that “kids aren’t products,” as if taking on this case will suddenly redeem him for all the soulless corporations he’s defended in the past, enabling him to amass his fortune. In light of the profound reckoning with our nation’s history of systemic racism that has characterized this year, triggered in part by a pandemic that has primarily impacted people of color, it’s especially dated to have a white lawyer deliver an Atticus Finch-style speech where he comforts his Black client by “wrapping him with” the U.S. Constitution, a document replete with loopholes that ensure racial subjugation. Rather than explore the complex challenges of being Black in America, the film spends far too much time focusing on the hackneyed plot developments that lead to Michael’s endangerment. In order to dissuade him from continuing with the case, Pamela and her sinister henchmen resort to the mischief of any run-of-the-mill shadow organization: they strip Michael of his corporate clients, jam his phone, try running him over with a car, etc. They even manage to stick Jamal in the same cell as his rapist, an eye-rolling twist that would’ve been more potent had either character been sufficiently developed in the script.

katsucats said:
I wonder, out of curiosity, if you think that's an example of an unbiased appraisal? For example, throughout the piece, Ebert inferred the racism of a character, used the complex and important backdrop of American politics in real life to highlight the shallowness of the movie's themes, complained that some characters do not appear on screen as frequently as he would have liked, and used adjectives such as "disjointed" or "eye-rolling" or "sloppy". He didn't write separate paragraphs for Story, Character, Sound, Visuals, and Enjoyment. He didn't try to balance aspects that he thinks are good with aspects he thinks are bad.

Jonyeo said:


I don't think an unbiased appraisal necessarily needs to always have a balance of good and bad aspects. If there is a show that you really can't find anything to like about, would you try to force yourself to think of any good aspects even if there are none that comes to mind off the top of your head? Conversely, for a show that you really enjoyed, would you scrutinise it repeatedly to try and elucidate flaws when you couldn't think of any initially?

Different people will expectedly have a different opinion of a show. The subjectiveness may come from for example, the way a romantic scene plays out. Some people may find it enjoyable or some may find it cringey, depending on their personal tastes. Hypothetically, for a romcom based around such scenes, I would expect these 2 groups of people to come up with highly positive and highly negative reviews respectively but I wouldn't call those biased even if they aren't balanced.

At the end of the day, reviews are but one person's opinion. If you are reading a review before watching a show and it is all negative, you wouldn't truly know if it is biased without comparing to other reviews or watching the show for yourself. As for Roger Ebert's review, I can't say for sure if he is entirely unbiased as I have neither seen the film nor read others' reviews on it. However, I will say he is unbiased for criticising elements of the movie like how some characters do not get their fair amount of screen time or how the actions of a certain character may garner disfavour from the viewer, both of which are fair arguments. If he didn't talk about the other aspects like enjoyment, that would make it an incomplete review more than anything in my opinion.

Bloomberry said:
Probably the most toxic part of MAL. All unpopular reviews have their profiles spammed with hate comments.

https://myanimelist.net/profile/slpless This guy here made a critical review against Spirited Away and his profile was spammed with hate comments. Quite possible he went offline forever because of this.

IrrelevantGuy said:

You can't write a comprehensive review in just 2-3 paragraphs

lolYuko said:

yes you can much less than that actually