Do you see value in someone having a "different/unique" favorites list/3x3?

“When you hear the sound of hooves, think horses, not zebras.”
We're talking about "rules of thumb" and first impressions, not hard sciences. For what we know, someone can have the most unique fave list ever simply because he never watched anything famous, but statistically speaking we assume that to not be the case.


It does, my point is that we're most likely to assume that if it is paired side-by-side with more "uncommon" favorites than if it is paired with other "safe picks".


There is no "need", it's simply something that happens, same as having unique fingerprints.
At this point we're not even discussing anime anymore, but rather discussing the development of basic human individuality: To have watched a ton of anime, yet found nothing that you were able to "connect" more than the average viewer is far from impossible, but nonetheless quite rare.

I would never claim that there's anything "morally inferior" with being "fungible as a person", I just find people that aren't so way more interesting.


But can they explain those reasons? Are they aware of them?
Years ago I made a theory that "good and bad taste" aren't defined mainly by what someone likes, but rather how they can justify what they like of being worthy of their likeability: Such anime might be on MAL's top 100 or bottom 10.000, for all I care, as long as the person can adequately describe their goods and bads, I couldn't in my sound mind acuse them of having "bad taste".
You just assume that once someone gets to a certain level of "self-knowing", they would actively go out of their way to find things that SPECIFICALLY appeal to them deeper.

In that sense, we go back to the start: Yes, for all we know, such person might like "safe/normal" picks for the most "unsafe/abnormal" reasons imaginable and we wouldn't know unless we talked to them.
Hence why this is a "rule of thumb" and not a "law".

Edit: Come to think of it, this might be the reason for my logic: We call such picks "safe" because the person will never be asked to "justify them". Meanwhile, people with "unsafe picks" will most likely go through a "feedback loop" of being pressured into justifying their picks, which requires them to understand those as well as themselves better, which in turn makes them better at it.
So I would say that's the incidental correlation.

I put my favorite anime on my favorites list... people who put random garbage on their profiles are just pretending, you will never convince me that u actually believe Grisaia no Kajitsu is better than FMAB