| It really pisses me off when people include the story summary when writing a review. This isn't about spoilers, I just feel the story has no business being put in a review, that's what the synopsis is for. It even says "Don't include story summaries" on the submit review page yet people still include snippets of the story in their reviews. I feel this issue pisses me off more than most because I prefer not to watch trailers or read the synopsis before watching an anime - I just like diving into an anime knowing nothing except the genre and how well it has been received by the audience. Imagine starting an anime like Attack on Titan without prior knowledge that there's going to be giants - you just can't beat that kind of experience. When I look at a review, all I want to know is what you think of the anime, how well your rate it, and why you chose that rating. You can add more shit like, it's predictability, the kind of person that you think will enjoy it... etc. Oh, and don't even get me started on people who start off their reviews with quotes from the anime, or people who give their entire life story on the events that lead up to them watching the anime. Thanks for taking my time to read my rant. |
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| Maybe they just want to have more texts in their review. |
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| It's part of the review format. Usually, you write a brief description of the product. Just look at a few reviews in a newspaper for novels and you will see the same thing, though more professional. |
  “If you live for yourself you’ve only got yourself to blame. So I can’t really blame anyone else and I don’t have any regrets.” list |
| It is a rant that I stand by. However, you can't bet on MAL people to avoid giving spoilers, not many genuinely care about stuff getting spoiled for others. My best options are to seek out Watch This! or [WT!] threads on reddit. I tend to pay more attention to non-spoiler reviews before trying out a new anime. MAL reviews could learn or improve by a metric fuckton by choosing to follow the format in those reddit threads. |
KreatorXAug 21, 2018 5:27 AM
 Truly a Divine Comedy  |
| It sounds retarded to read a review when you don't want to know anything about the plot. Even if the reviewer doesn't include a plot summary, there'll likely be a paragraph with some plot evaluation where some basic info is just neccessary. You can just look at the score to see how it was generally received, instead of reading reviews. |
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| If you don't want to know anything about a show u simply can't read reviews. I mean I also don't think a story summary is nessecary but writing a review without mentioning anything about the show is pretty hard. I mean otherwise so,some who hasn't watched the show simply won't understand what exactly the reviewer liked about it. It you just want to know whether or not people liked the show then look at the score or how friends rated it. |
| Yes I agree with you. Summary of a story has no business in a review section. |
| They should just briefly talk about it maybe 1 or 2 sentences. |
| Perhaps they're writing for a different site/their personal blog and copy-paste their reviews over to MAL? |
| "No, son, you may not have your body pillow at the dinner table!" |
| They may do it for no real reason other than because they were taught to write essays this way at school. They may also do it because they feel like the synopsis doesn't do the story justice or doesn't emphasize the right things. Most of the time, I agree that it is useless, but not always ; If you are going to discuss it extensively, it can be a good idea to include a summary of the story so that people who read the review will understand what you are talking about more easily. This kind of review is often not really aimed at helping people to make choices though, they are more like analysis. |
| Because they think that's how you write a proper review. |
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| Because its hard to write a review of something without giving away what it's about, duh |
| You know, one of the reasons I've never written reviews is that even before I start writing I start pondering whether I'll write this for people who've seen the show or for people who haven't seen it yet and want to know whether to check it out or not. And among those if I write it for those who want to get a glimpse of the show and plot or for those who want to be kept in the dark. Although how do you write something for people who haven't seen something and don't want to hear anything about it? Or how I could write it in a way that all the groups get something out of it? While pondering those questions I grow old, forget about writing the actual review, and die. The end. So yeah, what were we talking about again? |
| I probably regret this post by now. |
| Writing a synopsis as part of an analytic approach is not bad, to explain what are the purposes of the work and how the development goes, which is important to analyze characters and story, and to decide if the aesthetic approach is adequate or not. The issue comes when somebody just doesn't know what to write and rephrases the plot instead to make the text longer, resulting in a section of the review that lacks cohesion with the rest. @Pullman I solved this trouble long ago by writing reviews for myself xD |
| Because some users tend to write their reviews as if they were recommendation pieces. The current state of reviews on this site is abysmal, don't bother expecting most users to follow the guidelines when half of them can't even structure their pieces properly. If you're aiming to go in blind then it's best not to read reviews anyway. |
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jal90 said: Writing a synopsis as part of an analytic approach is not bad, to explain what are the purposes of the work and how the development goes, which is important to analyze characters and story, and to decide if the aesthetic approach is adequate or not. The issue comes when somebody just doesn't know what to write and rephrases the plot instead to make the text longer, resulting in a section of the review that lacks cohesion with the rest. @Pullman I solved this trouble long ago by writing reviews for myself xD Now that's just disingenious since you're releasing them to the public instead of just saving them as blogposts :P. Idk, I wouldn't want to deal with other people having opinions on my reviews and bringing them to me when I really just wrote them for myself and have no intention of dealing with their 'feedback'. In that case, why publish them in the first place? I feel like if I put something out there I have to be ready to deal with the feedback and engage with criticism, and I'm really not wanting to argue 'how should a review look like' with a million strangers on MAL. Do you get a lot of random comments or feedback for your reviews btw? Or does that only happen if you're Zerg and shit on Shelter? But maybe I'm just lazy and making excuses for myself. In any case I don't think I'll ever write reviews. I'm too inconsistent in even wanting to review shows, most of the time I'm fine moving on after I finished watching them. |
| I probably regret this post by now. |
Pullman said: Now that's just disingenious since you're releasing them to the public instead of just saving them as blogposts :P. But that's equally disingenious because blogposts are written and released to the public as well :P Pullman said: Idk, I wouldn't want to deal with other people having opinions on my reviews and bringing them to me when I really just wrote them for myself and have no intention of dealing with their 'feedback'. In that case, why publish them in the first place? I feel like if I put something out there I have to be ready to deal with the feedback and engage with criticism, and I'm really not wanting to argue 'how should a review look like' with a million strangers on MAL. Do you get a lot of random comments or feedback for your reviews btw? Or does that only happen if you're Zerg and shit on Shelter? Well, Zerg shitting on Shelter was a huge controversy Zerg himself wanted and happily embraced, even the timing was the absolute best for triggering people xD I don't get much feedback, and what I get is positive, maybe because I tend to write positive reviews, or maybe because I test their patience by writing absurdly long and poorly structured rambling and the only ones who get to the end are those who really like the anime and enjoy reading random talk about it. Most of the comments I have received (which are few) have been about my Spirited away review, the first I wrote and the most popular by a long shot. Which sort of bugs me because you know, the 2011 me was much worse at English expression and cohesion than I am right now. Pullman said: But maybe I'm just lazy and making excuses for myself. In any case I don't think I'll ever write reviews. I'm too inconsistent in even wanting to review shows, most of the time I'm fine moving on after I finished watching them. Oh, of course, write them only if you want. But I'd certainly like to see you reviewing stuff. |
jal90 said: Pullman said: Now that's just disingenious since you're releasing them to the public instead of just saving them as blogposts :P. But that's equally disingenious because blogposts are written and released to the public as well :P You can make them private tho, that's what I was talking about. But even the public ones noone reads, let's be honest here xD. As for the rest of the post, that doesn't sound that bad. But I think I just do better in a conversation then when I write on my own, even if it's not an actual conversation and I'm just writing a post vaguely addressing certain groups of people. I get kinda lost and unmotivated when I don't know who or what, if anyone, I'm addressing with something, even if in the end they don't even read it I kinda need that to give shape to my writing. Which leads back to my initial post about pondering who I should address with my reviews xD. |
| I probably regret this post by now. |
| So many reviews I read recently occupy the majority of their space with just a summary or variations thereof that it's becoming frustrating. Why waste the majority of the review just restating what happened in the story, usually in the form of an inferior explanation compared to the actual synopsis, just moving some details around and polluting so much of the review with that rehashed content? I find more and more reviews beginning and progressing something to the effect of "Here we see X start out on his quest. He comes to meet so and so. He is tasked with doing X and returning an artifact to the village, but little does he know..." etc. and drag that description through the whole review. A review isn't just summarizing what happened in the story. That's the point of a synopsis on the series' main page. This style I feel like is undermining the value and integrity of reviews because it makes so many of them indistinguishable; at least on the surface. Why keep reading if every other review is just a tepid, slightly jumbled restating of we already long since know to have happened? Either through reading the actual synopsis, watching the series ourselves, or both. Also, this isn't a jab at their language skills, but many of the reviewers are not native English speakers (and many of those often willingly disclose and are open about this fact), which is fine, but that drives home the point even more that just an all over the place summary isn't really that valuable or the best format for communicating the review when the much more coherent synopsis already exists. Why not just share your thoughts about the anime, how it made you feel or what it made you think about, its various attributes likes writing quality, directing quality, art and animation quality, voice acting quality, creativity or novelty, evident passion, etc.? I feel as if that would be a lot more valuable and interesting to a lot of readers than just reiterations and mangling of the same synopses spammed over and over again with little insightful quirk or deviation. |
WatchTillTandavaSep 23, 2021 12:52 AM
| Because virtually nobody has the decency of character to look at the guidelines and see that you're not meant to do that. That and just to pad space. What really irks me is those that seem long, only to be three paragraphs giving a play-by-play of the plot followed by "so the story is good and art is ok and music is good and that's everything bye," which an annoyingly large amount of reviews end up being. |
| Well I for one already loved Lain. |
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