Since this topic never dies, here are some final thoughts on criticism.

for example, by using this picture of nanoha strikers, it says that 1) i am a pedophile, 2) i am a loser, and 3) i have bad taste in anime

First, critics don’t actually “hate everything” or “hate everything but high drama”. The reason that it may seem like critics hate everything is that a good critic who has been doing this criticism thing for a long time should have seen/read/whatever a ton of works. It’s this breadth and depth of knowledge that lets them know what’s “good” and “bad”.

Second, a good critic will review something based on an appropriate framework. Roger Ebert had a column a very years ago where he responded to an angry email from a reader because he listed Lars Von Trier’s Dogville as one of the worst movies of the year. (PS: I hate Lars Von Trier and Dogme 95) and Spider-Man 2 as one of the best. The reader said “How can you give it a 2 star review when you give Spider-Man 4 stars? Spider-Man is just a superhero movie!” Ebert’s response was that just because Dogville is a SRS BIZNESS SOCIAL COMMENTARY DRAMA doesn’t in any way make it intrinsically “better”. If the commentary is off, the characters are flat, the writing bad, and so on, that makes it a bad movie despite its pretensions. Meanwhile, Spider-Man is whimsical and exciting; in short exactly what a superhero movie should be.

Third, reviews should have an objective point of view, but there are different ways to go about this. If I write a review and very clearly state how it made me feel and why it made me feel this way, along with my personal knowledge or experience, this makes the review fairly objective rather than subjective. The reader can clearly see how the movie works on someone and weight how the different aspects of the writer’s self created this impression of the movie. Therefore, a review whch straight up says “I hate Nanoha because only disgusting otaku and pedophiles (but really, are the two any different? like this” is the much more objective one.

Finally, I feel that most of the problems with “critics” are with critics that act in bad faith. “Objectivity” does not mean you can say whatever you want. You are supposed to write an objective review; the review does not make what you are saying automatically “objective”. That said, “objectivity” does not grant any kind of authority, although it would appear that way as “objectivity” means that you are simply uttering something that is a fact, rather than an opinion which needs to be proven. The failure here is that an “objective” review also needs proof, whether it’s textual or extratextual or intertextual.

Oh, and speaking of haters…