Exploring Taste Shaming

"At the end of the day, who really decides what anime is good, bad, cringe, or not?"

No one. Stop caring about other people's opinions and just enjoy watching whatever you want.

Taste shaming is good. It's a natural thing to do.
"Taste shaming" shaming is what snowflakes do, because they desperately want to create a safe space for themselves in the internet. Pathetic.

@BigBoyAdvance Isn't cancel culture basically taste shaming? why would that be good

Taste shaming is good. It's a natural thing to do.
"Taste shaming" shaming is what snowflakes do, because they desperately want to create a safe space for themselves in the internet. Pathetic.

The only people who I shame for their taste are the one who declare with otter confidence stuff like "THESE ARE THE PEAK OF ANIME AND X SHOW I MID" and the shows are like 4/12 mega hit shounen titles, with the "mid" also being one of those 12 shows.

But the thing about them is, I would shame them because of their acts, the roast is a by product of their own actions.

Isekai fans are a different breed, cause I technically have no issues with them, I just hate the fact that their interest results in half the anime charts being generic fantasies and isekais.

but generally, to a lot of, no actually, to the vast majority of people, media is just entertainment with very little else to it, so they can enjoy whatever they want, there is no shame in liking trash. I love some trashy anime!!

on a side note:



1. this is way too simplified.

2. it's not objective and subjective, it's personal and critical. You can't objectively assess fiction, 12 different critics will have 12 different ideas of how good a show is, even if all of them are great at being critics.

You can be better or worse at being a critic, but it comes down to making an educated opinion, which is still ultimately subjective.

I'm going to slightly disagree on this one part. From my understanding there are certain technical aspects that can be objectively judged.

Animation

• The fluidity/quality of the animation.
  
• Consistency in the character design/background details within the animation
  
  
  Visuals
  
• Anatomical correctness, use of expressions, etc.
  
  
  Plot
  
  
• Coherence, for example, were there numerous and frequent plot holes? Were there contradictions? That sort of thing.
  

Overall these elements either are or are not (from my understanding.) I do agree that I was very simplified in my initial post. When it comes to the more technical aspects those can be objectively viewed. Although maybe I could be off with this as it is not anything I have explored in depth (from what point something shifts from objective to subjective.)

Another thread full of stupid opinions. Opinions, opinions, opinions... let's operate with facts and evidence instead.



Taste shaming is great because it allows people with bad taste understand that their taste is, in fact, bad, and familiarize themselves with better works.

Imagine watching shit works. They are so shit, nobody likes them. These works are hated by almost everyone universally, especially by more seasoned and smart veteran weebs, who are competent enough to understand what is great and what is not. One day, you see them reducing your favorite shit works to the atoms, and you feel offended. But to see what kind of works they like, you decide to follow their suggestions and watch something, which is, according to them, beyond your level. To your surprise, you find out that anime is not only One Piece and Sword Art Online, and things like Kara no Kyoukai and Ghost in the Shell also exist. You stop watching shit and start consuming more "advanced" titles, or, at least, simply start consuming more "elite" anime, just because you know there are works that may be beyond your level, and you should learn to appreciate them. This is the perfect scenario.

Or you may just get offended and go bitch around about "pretentious pseudo-intellectuals", who are generally really not exceptional in their intelligence and are easily filtered out by any intellectually complex work without reputation of being intellectually complex, but who are smart enough to have better taste than you. This is what happens most of the time.



Experience with medium must have very negligible impact on the perception of anime. There are enough people who watched thousands of titles and consider SAO to be the best anime anyway, and there are also people who are relatively inexperienced with anime but know some hidden gems that were absolutely beyond their time and era and even their target audience (check out my signature!). This is mostly not about experience. To be a competent viewer, you have to feel if something is good or not when watching it, and to predict it with reasonable accuracy even before watching it. This kind of intuition is impossible to learn, you can only develop it after getting accustomed to the medium, but, again, it is impossible to learn, and different people develop this skill at different speed and with different accuracy. Many can't develop it at all, which is why they watch randomly.



One of the most promising predictors I found when exploring this issue was intelligence of the audience. Take a look at this, for example:
https://flowingdata.com/2009/04/03/music-that-makes-you-dumb/



Take a closer look at this chart. You can see that this chart, generally, reflects the opinion of both the general public, the elitist crowd and the music critics regarding what music is good, and what music is bad. Even within one genre, bands and artists considered good have, on average, smarter audience (as measured by SAT score, which is a proxy for IQ), and those that are considered bad have duller audience. This measure is by no means perfect, but there is no other measure that reflects both public and critical opinion on what art is good and what art is bad. If you have read up to this point, reply to me with the word "potato". As you can see, there is less subjective in art than everyone wants to believe, and this annoying "different people like different things" mantra is better rephrased in a way like "there is art loved mostly by dumb people, art loved mostly by smart people, and the probability that a given person will enjoy some or another art, based on how smart they are".

This method is great for at least two reasons:

1) It does not measure the differences between works, but the differences between their audiences. So, even if you don't agree that it reflects some "quality of art", you can agree that it may be used to predict whether an individual consumer will like something or not, based on what kind of audience they are.
2) It allows both cross-artist, cross-genre, and even cross-medium comparison of this mysterious "quality of art". With this, you may measure, for example, if Mozart's music is perceived to be better than, for example, Minecraft. Or if Kanye West's works have more value than Aivazovsky's paintings.

Of course, there are also other factors beyond intelligence of the audience, which explains why artistic preferences can not be predicted with 100% accuracy, but a degree of probability - it depends on many factors, of which IQ of the consumers is the most significant one.

The data above suggests that, since critical opinion is very much related to this measure, we as a community would greatly benefit from existence of a group of exceptionally smart critics who would bring more hidden gems to our attention. But, of course, nobody will listen to their opinions, because they will be labeled as pretentious pseudo-intellectuals by envious people who can't cope with the fact someone may have taste better than them, and because the absolute most of people do not follow any reviews and recommendations and only watch what is currently popular. Which, sadly, explains why the best post-Madoka anime and one of the best anime ever made, the existence of which is almost a miracle given its ahead-of-time nature and creative background, is one of the least known in the community despite being among the recommendations for Madoka Magica for years - nobody gives a single fuck until it is something hyped.

Yes I am going to shame you for bad taste if you like soulless crap like isekai and fanservice/ecchi content

"Exploring Taste Shaming"

I mean, nothing wrong with enjoying Sword Art Online, Mushoku Tensei and Code Geass, personally I watch even trashier stuff, but when you start to hear "well written", "amazing characterization and character development" or "rich worldbuilding", you can't help it - you must go and mess with those guys for a little bit.



"The escapist nature of Isekai seems heavily looked down upon"

The OP is missing the point here. It's the quality which is bad here, not the themes (if we ignore the obsession with slavery, especially the buying little girls to "save" them part). There are decent isekai titles out here (Saga Of Tanya The Evil comes to mind), just most of the isekai writers can't be bothered, they are just exploiting the trend putting minimal creative effort.

@Anjuro Oh lol, yes, I tested my post in a thread of a private club I made, to get the quotes of the other user to not have gaps between them. The thread was originally for testing the update that changed the forum quoting to it's current state (hence the title "ass update test") and I was too lazy to make a new thread just for my post in this thread. I didn't think you would get a notification for that.

@-Indra, I'm curious what you think about my research on why taste shaming is great, what makes art to be perceived as better or worse, because it is an interesting (even controversial) topic, and since you've started this thread, you better participate, okay there? :3

@mazuchi



I am not.

There are no other predictors which I can ever think about that were as explored and studied as human intelligence. Of course, there are secondary factors such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, cultural background and even personal fetishes, but intelligence is the most predictive trait which is shared by all humans who possess all other traits with various predictive power, and it predicts outcomes even after controlling for these other traits. Taking gender as predictor for example, men generally enjoy action/adventure works more than women. But there are action/adventure works that are loved by smart and not very smart male viewers, for example, fandoms like Hunter x Hunter are perceived to be more elitist due to higher presence of smart people in their communities, while fandoms like My Hero Academia... well, you get my point.

And also, do you really believe that a measure that can compare works in two different genres and even in two different MEDIUMS is not amazing? Really, the method proposed by Virgil can be used to compare fucking Dwarf Fortress to Swan Lake. Isn't it just amazing?

1. People of lower intelligence benefit from consuming art that is unlikely to resonate with them at least by learning that there are things above their level and how these things look and feel, which may reduce the amount of incompetent opinions because more people will understand that some works are not bad and are just beyond their level.
   
2. There are people who are smart enough to enjoy some advanced art but not smart enough to discover it on their own - they just need a suggestion from a more competent viewer to convince them to watch something great.
   
3. My personal favorite. By giving some works creative reputation of being smart, the community achieves the effect known as expectancy bias - people start to actually enjoy them more even if they are not that great because they expect them to be good and are tricked, on the level of brain biology, to think that they are good.
   
   Remember how @ThatAnimeSnobRE made a fool out of himself by suggesting a theory for Neon Genesis Evangelion that was disproved by Gainax themselves, and how he gave Parasyte and Death Note a 8/10? You may accuse them in dishonesty but Snob was actually likely honest with himself and just fell victim to that bias that made him think that these works are better than they actually are. And here is me taste shaming you, it has happened to you too, Satoshi Kon is a hack and his works are idiotic nonsense, you would not like Millennial Actress if it was filmed by someone else, you're only making a fool out of yourself by placing it in your favorites alongside one of the worst part of Monogatari series.
   
   This kind of thing happens all the time in audiophile community with horribly sounding equipment - you really can buy good headphones for a ridiculous price (Koss Porta Pro) and AutoEQ them if needed to make them sound better, but no, there is a whole herd of idiots who believe that wasting money on unnecessary equipment will make it sound better, and they actually hear differences until their experiments are blinded! There were similar experiments with cheap and expensive alcohol that came to the same conclusion, and studies that explored how reputation of works of art influenced their popularity, they all basically concluded that reputation of a work is a determining factor in its critical and commercial success.
   
   We only need to give this reputation to the right works. I want to hope that if we can somehow influence the public opinion, many less known, great anime will gain the popularity they deserve, simply because people will start to believe that they are great, which would be simply impossible if they weren't told that they are. We NEED a council of actual experts, not clowns like Gigguk who are loved only for memes and confirmation bias and not people with IQ suboptimal to detach themselves from the expectation bias and rate everything honestly (>90% of this community), but actually smart and seasoned viewers who are not easily fooled with style over substance.
   

And here is my suggestion to you as from experienced viewer with measured IQ above 130, see my review for Black★Rock Shooter (TV) and (re)watch it alongside Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magica, this is a gift to the best viewers made by the best talents of the industry, most people hate this anime for being beyond their level and are unable to see the forest for its trees, but people like me are able to appreciate it and the creative genius behind this masterpiece, and you should too, even if you gave it a borderline rating because it was simply beyond you.