uanime5 said:
Ragsnstitches said:
OT: I'm glad you touched on the topic of Objectivity bob. For years I used to think that objective critique was the purest form of criticism, but recently I've found it to be a pipe dream. How can you be objective about something unless you are highly knowledgeable of the processes that came to create the piece being critiqued? You can't. The more comprehensive a review, the more it has to dip into subjectivity as the reviewer must use his own personal opinion to make calls on aspects that they don't understand.
Smud boy was able to make an objective review of Dragon Age 2 and the Mass Effect series without having to know anything about the processes used to make any of these games and didn't need to use subjectivity to explain things. He was able to do this by analysing each part of the story, then determining whether the actions each character took was logical based on what we knew about them. So it seems that you can be an objective critic if you're prepared to do a lot of analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/user/smudboy/videos
Even Mr Plinkett is able to be an objective critic, as he's able to provide valid reasons why the Star Trek and Star Wars movies either made no sense or involved characters acting completely out of character.
http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/
That's cute, you think Plinkett is objective.
Look, I love Redlettermedia and plinketts reviews and I agree with them pretty much completely. They are insightful and very entertaining. But they aren't objective. For the most part they do critically break down the problems the prequels and star trek films have. But they always do it while holding some other piece THEY prefer up for comparison.
They constantly go to and fro from prequels to Empire, since they cream their pants about empire. A lot of the major points they bring up is how differently they handle things between Prequels and Original Trilogy. Heck, the last half-hour of the Attack of the Clones review is based entirely around how they screwed the depiction of Yoda.
That is PURELY subjective, even if I feel as strongly as they do about it. They are using a subjective quality of one film, to guage the quality of another. PURE SUBJECTIVITY.
In the Star Trek reviews they constantly go back on the TNG series as their point of reference. Essentially, because the TNG movies weren't like the TNG series, the TNG movies are bad (there are other reasons why they are bad, but they mostly fall on subjective grounds). I forget which movie it was they reviewed, but they did the same thing with Picard as they did with Yoda, criticising the Picard from the movies, for not being like the Picard of the series. And while that is objectively true, that Picard was different in the movies, it's not an objective criticism of the movie. If you watched the movie but not the series and like that picard, then watched the series and didn't like that picard, would that mean that Picard of TNG is objectively worse then the movie Picard?
They do use objective analyses at points. The deconstruction of plot holes (episode 1 is full of them), the poorly written characters (like that sequence where Obi jumps out of the window after the drone when it would have made tons more sense for Anakin to do it) and the terrible narrative structure (having a dozen things happening at once in Phantom Menace towards the end). They are all, for the most part, objectively bad qualities. However, in their entirety, the reviews are unambiguously subjective, sometimes purely for the sake of humour.
I watched the first 15 minutes of Smudboys Bookend of Destruction analyses. Immediately I agree with him and what's more, he is definitely being objective. However it's not a review. It's an analyses. A review is an evaluation of the complete package, an analyses is the breakdown of a specific topic, in this case the narrative.
Heck he never calls his own stuff a review. How have you not noticed this?
