Here’s an interesting phenomenon that has, for various reasons, been brought to my attention: people commenting on anime series and episodes they haven’t seen. It’s something that really makes no sense to me, for reasons that are (I would have thought) obvious. People claim they are able to get enough of an understanding of a given anime that they are able to form opinions of it purely from screenshots, blog reviews, episode summaries, Youtube clips and comments in episodes, but claiming this really dismisses the fact that almost all of the impact of anime is emotional, and I consider it disrespectful to anime as a story-telling medium that people think that the act of watching it can be substituted by reviews, interpretations and analyses.

A good anime really should be more than the sum of its parts, and the process of going over it with a checklist inevitably undersells it, as well as ignores pretty much the only reason I can see to watch anime in the first place. It’s one thing to read a synopsis to find a series with a good plot and characters and then check a clip on Youtube to see it has good animation, music and seiyuu work. It’s another thing altogether to actually watch the thing in its entirety, connect with the characters, be absorbed by the plot and atmosphere, laugh at the jokes and cry at the drama. I don’t think I’ll ever understand how the former could be a substitute for the latter, and if I ever got to the stage where that was no longer the case for me, whether it be due to anime losing its way as a storytelling medium, or just me no longer getting drawn into it and connecting with it (the good series anyway) the way I can now, I think I’d just stop watching it altogether. As far as I can see, there’d no longer be a point to watching it, since all I’d be seeing is moving pictures on a screen. At the moment anime is so much more than that (with the exception of the really bad series, but even they can be at times, still more than any external substitute).

Reviews, forum commentaries, blog posts and the rest work fine as recommendations, or as complements, information-wise, to the anime, as well as places for fans to congregate and discuss anime (which is also an interesting activity in its own right), but they’ll never be a substitute for actually watching the episodes and series. Another thing I don’t really understand is how people can form judgements on entire series from just the first few episodes. Admittedly, there are a few cases where it’s fairly obvious that the show will be a bomb from the first few eps, but I always shake my head when someone chimes in on a discussion about a completed or near-completed series with “I watched the first episode of this and it was total crap… how can anyone like this?” (Ignore momentarily that most of these types of comments generally come from trolls). It boggles the mind, since anime has a huge track record of series that have very noticeable shifts in mood and atmosphere between their first and last episodes (the anime in the OP pic being one of the most notorious examples). I think it’s fair enough to drop series after a few episodes, even though it’s something I don’t do myself (for this very reason, mind you), but recognize that when you go into a conversation about Narutaru and say “man this show sucked; how did anyone get past the first episode of this Pokemon crap,” all you’re doing is making yourself look like a fool. There’s a big difference between “this show sucked” and “the first episode sucked”, but people seem to conveniently ignore this fact whenever the argument suits them.

Which is why I’ll never understand why anime review sites publish reviews of incomplete anime. How can you form a complete, total judgement of something if you haven’t seen the whole thing? Partial judgements just don’t give the show a fair shake, if you ask me.

So, I made the foolish “promise” to the staff that I’d somehow write a soundtrack review for Death Note’s (awesome) OST. Soundtracks is a bizarre section we have on our site. It’s the most neglected and I’d say far and away the toughest section to maintain. The link between these two postulates is obvious. But, with most anime series seeing one, often two, sometimes even more complementary soundtracks released, a site of our size (which, I’d approximate, manages to cover six or seven anime each season within a few months of their release, which I’d say is pretty good coverage considering our size) would have to demand at least one soundtrack review a month out of every one of our staff before we could even think about covering the soundtrack industry with the same comprehensiveness with which we do with anime. That might not sound terribly difficult until one tries to sit down and actually write a soundtrack review. Man, they are not easy things to write.

For me, personally, there are lot of hurdles to overcome which add to the difficulty of writing soundtrack reviews. For one, The Nihon Review is close to the only anime soundtrack reviewing site I know of, and pretty much the only one I actually read. Which, sort of limits my sources and my exposure to the type of language used in standard soundtrack reviews. It’s a simple matter of fact that all writers base their style and formats to some extent on works they’ve been exposed to before. For anime reviews, we use a rather tried and true format that we’ve tweaked only very slightly to suit ourselves that we’re all familiar with and we’re all very comfortable with. But, with a general disinterest to actual critical analyses of anime soundtracks on the internet, there’s not much for someone like me to go by, as far as getting some actual exposure to the language is concerned. Second, my musical knowledge and training is rather limited. Sure, I know what I like as far as music is concerned. Saying “I like this” is easy. But, saying why I like it, in other words, separating the good in a piece of music from the bad and then articulating it is a completely different kettle of fish. In my younger days, I did study a few years of music classes in high school, and I did learn a musical instrument for a while (though I was never good at it), so I do have a foundation of music knowledge to base things on, but it’s been years since I’ve even thought of looking at music from an academic point of view, so my memory of technical terms and the like is very rusty to say the least.

I know for a fact that this is the sort of thing that can be remedied with a bit of time and effort. If I were to sit down and force myself to actually write some soundtrack reviews and force myself to read music reviews (and not just anime soundtracks) across the internet, eventually it will become significantly easier. I know this, because I was in the exact same position in regards to my knowledge of anime just a few years ago. I knew what I liked, but I struggled to express it. Reading anime review sites, hanging around on anime forums, exposing myself to anime-related literature and, of course, watching anime itself allowed me to learn the technical language as well as refine my taste and give me the ability to articulate my opinion so that the next step of actually sitting down and writing a review became a straightforward process. Arguably, learning how to write a soundtrack review (with ease) is much the same. The problem is that, people just aren’t talking about anime soundtracks as often or as much or to the same amount of depth as people talk about anime. And, for myself anyway, arguably the greater hurtle is the fact that, unlike watching anime, listening to music is a passive activity. You don’t have to think to enjoy music (although that’s not saying that brain-dead, inane music is just as enjoyable to listen as something with a given amount of complexity or uniqueness, since I certainly wouldn’t say that’s the case for myself… it’s just that such music doesn’t always require active thought to enjoy). However, a really outstanding anime with a compelling story or complicated themes will almost always demand some amount of active thought. This, I would say, is probably the greatest hurdle to overcome before I could even thinking about reaching a stage where writing about music is as easy as writing about anime. In the end, writing about anime at any stage, reviews or just general commentaries, is usually a case of just recalling the thoughts one has while actually watching the anime, and then sorting them into something coherent. Before I could do the same with music, I’d actually need to have thoughts to sort while listening to it, rather than being distracted by other things as I usually am while listening to music.

It’s been a rather inactive week as far as anime is concerned. Sure, we’ve had the big news of a Funi license rush (which included Mushishi, a must-buy in my mind, and Shuffle!, a must-avoid) and activity on asosbrigade.com, but the fansub circuit has been unusually quiet given this stage of a new season, and there haven’t been any major controversies taking the anime community by storm. Which leaves me with very little to talk about. So, what can I do in this situation? Flip through Answerman’s latest article, of course. Answerman has the unusual advantage of being always topical, but the disadvantage (or “privilege”) of having his readers decide his topics of discussion. So, in these situations where I’m too lazy to think of my own topic of discussion, I’ll just let his articles inspire me. It beats thinking of stuff.

So, it’s the concept of objectivity and bias in reviews that’s today’s topic of conversation, a theme I suspect I’ll be revisiting quite frequently over the course of this blog (I’m starting to hate this word, truth be told). It’s not really a new idea, and what I offer to this argument is only rehashed ideas of things people have said before. I do largely agree with Answerman’s stance on things (most of the time I do, except when it comes to the dreaded topic-of-debate of lolicon), i.e. there is no such thing as perfect objectivity and all reviewers have that oh-so human characteristic of bias, which simply differs from person to person. It all comes down to the idea that language determines meaning. While “bias” and “taste” are two sides of the same coin, the both carry differing connotations when discussing the opinions offered by a review. “Taste” immediately invokes a reference to opinion (which is what reviews are), while “bias” is used to dismiss a clear misinterpretation of what are obviously facts. The problem with “facts” is that they’re largely superfluous in reviews (particularly in the ones we write). Facts are what you look up on ANN or Wikipedia. They don’t serve as a recommendation, though. Opinions do a far better job at that, but it’s much easier to disagree with an opinion.

So, what position does that leave us, the reviewer in? A rather tricky one, truth be told. Many reviewers believe that the best approach is honesty. Call the review as one sees it and, if people disagree with it, so be it. That is probably the easiest approach to take, but it does make defending your opinion rather difficult. Then again, are reviews meant to be written to dissenters in the first place? Probably not. Reviews generally work best as recommendations to people who haven’t already seen the title in question. Many reviewers argue that it is the obligation of the reader to find a reviewer that shares a similar taste and follow their advice. I suppose that works in a sense, but I hate the idea that we have to put such a demand on our readers when the goal is to provide a service to them, not the other way around.

I suppose the other possible approach is to bring the idea of objectivity into the review. I think it is important in a given title as a reviewer to recognize its flaws and recognize a section of the audience that is going to be turned off by these given flaws and then describe your own impact to them. For example, in a recent review I wrote on Bokura ga Ita, I noted that the series is slow and minimalist, which probably won’t appeal to a lot of fans, but then noted that I didn’t really didn’t consider this a great flaw in the context of my own taste. In a sense the idea of objectivity comes back to the idea of intention of a title (a theme I was debating in a forum thread recently). It’s far easier to be objective when discussing a title’s execution (one only has to look at the walking controversy that is The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi), but as far as intention is concerned, whether one likes it or not will almost totally depend on their individual taste. When the intention of a series like Bokura ga Ita is to be slow-paced and tell a character-focused story with minimalist animation and low-impact plot-points, there will inevitably be a section of the audience that is unimpressed with such a concept. And then there will be people like me that couldn’t be happier with such an anime. Similarly, when the intention of an anime is to recount the entire series of Shuffle! in ultra-fast-forward with no consideration towards chronology or spoilers, I’m not going to be terribly enthralled. But some people dig that.

It is important to recognize intention. Many people critique their source material with the given criteria that goes something like “did the title execute itself in such a way that allowed it to succeed in reaching its intention”. Others think that the intention defines the maximum possible rating a title can give, and then give a rating which makes consideration of both intention and execution. In other words, since ones opinion of intention almost totally depends on taste, such reviewers don’t think objectivity is a great definer of how a review should be written. I’m somewhere in between, maybe leaning towards the latter. While I think it is important to recognize that different people have different tastes within a review and that such tastes need to be addressed as a sign of recognition to my readers, ultimately the final conclusion of the review will be largely determined by my own “biases”.