![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Tricky Disagreement
Mar. 22nd, 2016 04:53 pmA short online manga about a fan whose enthusiasm for a franchise is crushed when an acquaintance goes on a tear complaining about its movie attracted a fair bit of attention, including my own. I did take some slight notice of some people appearing to resist the manga's conclusion, which could be taken as condemning criticism as a whole. At times, they seemed to insinuate "Japan" "doesn't have the stomach" for "necessary judgments." (I can at least contrast this particular facet of the English-speaking fandom against other, more "Japanophilic" insistences.) My own thoughts were more that the situation presented in the manga would be impolite in more than one culture, but I did wind up thinking past that to suppose that like all works of art, the manga arranged things to make the strongest possible case.
Beyond that in turn, though, I was pondering whether I've been relatively resistant for a while now to being "complained away" from things when I started wondering whether I had to admit to something else. There might be something after all to complaints that "some people just want 'criticism' to validate their own opinions " in contemplating how every so often I do manage to think some particular work "disagrees with me" without being told that ahead of time, only to then feel something an awful lot like annoyance when stumbling on certain more positive evaluations of it... A certain number of "reviews," I suppose, can seem to be just as much about something else, and holding up one thing as if just to put something else down doesn't seem very pleasant to me. Still, there's more than one way to "take things too personally." Whether this amounts to a work of art managing to point out an unexpected personal truth is a question in itself.
Beyond that in turn, though, I was pondering whether I've been relatively resistant for a while now to being "complained away" from things when I started wondering whether I had to admit to something else. There might be something after all to complaints that "some people just want 'criticism' to validate their own opinions " in contemplating how every so often I do manage to think some particular work "disagrees with me" without being told that ahead of time, only to then feel something an awful lot like annoyance when stumbling on certain more positive evaluations of it... A certain number of "reviews," I suppose, can seem to be just as much about something else, and holding up one thing as if just to put something else down doesn't seem very pleasant to me. Still, there's more than one way to "take things too personally." Whether this amounts to a work of art managing to point out an unexpected personal truth is a question in itself.