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Partheniad
@Partheniad

Y'all need to learn you can pump up the things you love without tearing down the things you hate. That critique is more than simply being critical.

If you aren't asking yourself why a project made the choice they did with curiosity, then you aren't doing critique.

You are being cinema sins. Here's a thing I don't like ding.

The best advice I have ever heard about critiquing art is to simply describe what it's doing and to ask why. But this requires curiosity. It requires being willing to give something the benefit of the doubt. And most of all it requires leaving your cynicism at the fucking door.

And that can be hard, I get it. Online media analysis has been ruled by the idea that it is something to be done angrily. It's how people have seen it done. More than that people are taught to write persuasively, to not use passive language. It can't simply be "I didn't like this" it has to be "this is bad".

This sort of sensationalism also leads to people trying to come up with takes instead of critique. The problem being so many people work in reverse. Instead of engaging with the work and then coming to an idea about it, its having an idea and then reverse engineering scaffolding to hold it up. And people are fucking vicious about protecting their takes because it's often seen as the end product of engaging with art. What do you have at the end? Your take.

And it's completely reductive. When I watch a movie I have thoughts on the different actors, the scenes, the shots, sound, and dialogue. They synthesize together and become my opinion. And the thing is that my opinion can shift overall or on smaller things inside of it that may shift the whole. But takes are a single, pithy opinion. They are, by their nature, easily repeatable and get in your head. That's the function of their design. And damningly it leads to people not engaging with the work at all because it's been replaced by the take. But it also becomes sacrosanct. It's a single line, one opinion, so it can't be changed less the whole thing crumble. And more than that it belongs to somebody, it's theirs- so they viciously hold onto it.

Here's the thing. I do this all the time. I truly wish I was kind and nice, but grew up clever and cruel because that's what made people laugh. I love that serotonin hit I get when I make someone laugh with a pithy insight. Even if it's mean. When I played We Know the Devil, I came away liking it but hating the "true ending". It felt monstrous to me and while I knew what it was going for it just didn't hit for me that way. I had friends try and explain it over and over, and again, I understood the message and themes- I just felt the finale wasn't successful. But I could feel myself starting to calcify around my opinion, my take that the ending of this game sucked actually and HERE'S WHY. Then one day I saw someone explaining their read on the game and I got it. But I still tried to fight it, to mentally hold onto my take. Because it was mine, so it has to be better than anyone else's. It was precious. But then I let it go and it all clicked for me. It wasn't due to someone else coming up with wittier retort, or trying to prove me wrong. They just spoke about how they read it and I realized oh that makes perfect sense. I got it know. The Grinch's heart grew three sizes that day. It's an amazing feeling and not one you can get if you don't leave yourself open to having your mind changed. Not open yourself up to the idea that maybe you are wrong about something. Or even the idea that maybe your opinion can change.

Anyway this was art analysis 101, come back next week where we discuss dialectics and that you can enjoy something while taking issue with it.


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in reply to @Partheniad's post:

Hey I'm just swinging in here to drop a chef's kiss of approval, I linked here from the dialectics piece and had to see the first part and the comments prompted this opinion from my ethics and semiotics study, here it is:

This piece "is a take", but it's not "a take" as it's frequently used: a pithy soundbite with only very tactical nuance for the sake of generating or displaying engagement, staying relevant or gathering Attention. It's a take through the frame I want to invoke when I ask a trusted friend "Hey, what's your take on [art, situation, statement]?" because I don't want to hear the attention-grabbing soundbite, I want to hear what it means to them. So no, I don't think you've generated a thought-terminating trump take to circumvent and quash all others: I think you're firmly delineating your viewpoint and your frames of reference.

Good take. But not in the sense of "morally pure, unproblematic and easy" take, but rather in the sense of "ooh! Oh, this one has some MEAT on it, I love that, it's SOLID". You know?

That last bit made me convulse a bit just because, I think about how much further we could get if we could divorce the dialogue around art from morality.

Like, my big example of this is "fridging". You can still go to Gail Simone's original website where she catalogued the trope and her reasoning for it. Which was to point out the trend and any meaning or relevance she might find therein. It was a discussion. Something that should lead people to go, "hey, do I want to kill/depower/assault this woman in the story". Because hey, they answer could be yes- that's the story you are telling. But you should do so with intent and the knowledge of it as a trend.

And I get it where its still so prevalent that people become exhausted and when they see an example, it can feel like just another body on the pile. But nowadays I see it as something that is considered de facto "BAD WRITING". People will just say "they were fridged" to explain why its inherently bad. (And it's fucking wild, because the trope itself keeps stretching to the point where like, I've seen folks honestly say they think Martha Wayne got fridged)

Like, I think it's good to have the conversation. I'm interested in why deaths/horrors happening to characters hit for some people or don't. But when you just treat it as a wholesale as a narrative sin- you destroy the possibility for nuance. (jesus i am gonna eject before this becomes a part 3)

Likewise, and in statements that I can only make around specific people: god, I just hate Morals so much sometimes. I know, they're culturally important, but so many people stop with simple surface level Morals (and Comfort) and never delve into Ethics and it shows... argh.