Little Sapling is 2,325 words long and tagged [Sad] [Slice of Life] [Twilight] [Main 6]

Twilight Sparkle finds a small sapling, the offspring of the tree that had formed her original home in Ponyville.
She plants it, in hopes of eventually seeing it grown to adulthood.

This is a story about Alicorn Twilight coping with the loss of her friends.

I'm not fond of this premise. It is an old idea that has been done numerous times and which I find quite overused in this fandom, certainly for how hard it is to actually get right. Think about this: if you write about a Twilight which has outlived her friends, not only are you writing about someone much older than yourself, but you're writing about someone much older than yourself who doesn't physically age. So not only is this a perspective you don't have, it's a perspective no human being has had so far. And this is a problem, particularly when this eighty-year-old-Twilight goes on to have a mental breakdown the way her twenty-year-old-past-self might have believably had.

Thankfully, such is not the case here. This story isn't particularly ambitious, there are no grand revelations, it only includes two small scenes: one in the present, shortly after the destruction of the Golden Oak Library, and one after her friends have passed. The second chapter is titled "Inevitability" – Twilight always knew what was coming, and she does seem to have accepted it already. The story just chooses to retell those moments anyway. And that works, there doesn't need to be anything important happening for it to be emotional.

This brings me to my second point. The emotions in this story feel authentic, and that's its biggest strength. If there is one thing I see having a consistent, strong correlation with quality, then it is whether a story was born out of inspiration or obligation, and this is firmly in the former camp. In this case, the inspiration seems to have come from the idea of using the sapling as a symbol, which works well enough.

At the same time, though, nothing here is particularly memorable, nor does it lead to an interesting conclusion, nor was it particularly enjoyable to read. Then again, it was sad to read, and it has a sad-tag, so it does what it promises.

My biggest problem, which may seem like a nitpick to many, is what you can call "reducing background characters to their gimmicks." Rainbow Dash has exactly one line in this story:

Above them all, Rainbow Dash scoffed. “Tch. What’s so interesting about a sapling, anyway? Come on, let’s hurry up - I’ve got a new trick I wanna show you girls.”

The intention is probably to showcase that things are still normal, however I find this to be immersion breaking, because it is just not how life works. Real people, even if they have certain attributes, will talk way more about anything else than about that one thing they care most about, and so it just feels cheap that Dash happens to have a trick to show right at this very moment. I commonly have this complaint whenever each of a character's appearance is about their most typical attribute. People often complain when all speaking lines of female characters in a show are about boys, this I think falls in the same category.

Save for two minor parts where a minus is used in place of a proper en dash – even though en dashes are used at other parts, making it inconsistent – grammar and packaging is solid. There is both inspiration and effort put into this, it just... isn't very interesting.

For a score, I'd give this 56/100 – as everything above 50, this is (mildly) positive. If you like sadfics, this one is above average. If you also like the premise, then I can recommend it, it's one of the better ones and you'll probably enjoy it more than I did. Plus, it won't take much of your time.

Re-review: silverspawn's review of "Little Sapling"

The primary difference between an editorial and a review is that the former discusses how someone feels about a particular work, whereas the latter is focused on the work itself. In an editorial, the writer will talk about how they felt about something and why they felt that way. In a review, however, the writer will analyze the work by looking at it in the context of three questions: "What is this story trying to accomplish? Does it succeed or fail in reaching that goal? If it fails, then why did it fail, or if it succeeds, then how artfully is that success achieved?"

The primary problem with most reviews is that they conflate these two, liberally mixing an analysis of the work itself with the writer's feelings about the work. Unfortunately, silverspawn is no exception. While he does manage to focus on reviewing alongside editorializing, the instances where he makes it about how he feels about the story, rather than his opinion about the story itself, drag the quality of this review down considerably.

This is demonstrated in the review's opening paragraph, where silverspawn immediately begins talking about his personal feelings about the story's premise. Worse, he then talks about it being "overused in the fandom." That's a major red flag, indicating that the writer is focusing more on their personal fatigue with a particular concept than on judging the story for its execution of that concept. Worse, this comes dangerously close to falling into the "innovation equals excellence" trap, where an idea's quality is held to be tied to how original it is, rather than the skill with which that idea is written. But that's a minor point compared to what silverspawn says next:

Think about this: if you write about a Twilight which has outlived her friends, not only are you writing about someone much older than yourself, but you're writing about someone much older than yourself who doesn't physically age. So not only is this a perspective you don't have, it's a perspective no human being has had so far.

This is where the "review" goes completely off the rails. This idea – that you need to be able to personally relate to a character in order to write them, or at least to write them well – is one that's not only completely false, but is self-evidently contradicted by the vast bulk of stories written for this fandom. After all, none of the writers have ever been a magical talking pony before, which is a perspective that no human being has had so far, and yet we have plenty of quality stories about exactly that. Ultimately, presuming that certain viewpoints are more difficult to write about than others is not only another instance of silverspawn making this review about him rather than the story, but it's not even a viewpoint that survives scrutiny.

Luckily, that's the nadir of the review, and it manages to get better from there, although not enough to completely salvage its quality. After this, silverspawn does move on to talking about the story itself. There's an acknowledgment that the story is well-crafted in spite of silverspawn's admission of not liking the premises that it's built on, which is a good step towards judging the story based on its own merits. This admission comes across as begrudging, however; silverspawn admits that the emotions come across as genuine, and that the sad-tagged story is sad to read, and yet it's held to have a conclusion that's not interesting, and the story itself not being enjoyable. This despite conceding that the story succeeds in what it sets out to do.

Following this we have some minor critiques, where the largest is admitted to be a nitpick. Insofar as holding that Rainbow Dash is reduced to only her most notable "gimmick," silverspawn does make a valid point, but misapplies it. The "flanderization" (as TVTropes likes to call it) of characters is a problem that a lot of fanfiction falls prey to, but there's no critical examination of whether or not that's what we're seeing in this particular story. Instead, we get a brief diatribe against this as a concept, while very little is said as to how that impacts this story in particular. silverspawn tells us that it "just feels cheap" to have Rainbow Dash's only spoken line be her mentioning she has a new trick to use right when she mentions Twilight's sapling, but that doesn't tell us anything as to why that diminishes the quality of the story. Once again, liking or disliking a particular trope or cliche is the writer making it about themselves and not the story, since it overlooks that the salient judgment isn't whether a particular trope is used or not, but how well it's executed.

For a score, I'd give this review 33/100. silverspawn clearly understands what goes into a review, and is able to look past his personal feelings about various concepts and cliches, but at the same time is still bringing them to the table to begin with. The result is a "review" that tells me just as much (and possibly a bit more) about the writer than about the story they're reviewing. There's clearly potential here, but it just as clearly isn't being fully utilized.

Dayum.
Someone bring some aloe vera, because that was a sick burn.

5704891 Nice work! I looked through as well, and though I'd personally give it a bit higher score (I thoughtit pretty much completes the tags it set itself, and like you said, grammar's alright), I can totally see where you're coming from.

I saw you added a comment onto the author's fic as well, which is what we want to see.

The first of our new reviews! I think we'll be getting a new CC contributor soonish, so we might so one of those put out in the near future.

5704944 I, uh... didn't expect that post.

In my opinion, it's the reviewer's opinion at the end of the day, and analysing too-far might get a bit confusing.

But if you'd like to show a portfolio of one of your own reviews, you could totally do that. And, if you would like to, you could join the group as a contributor through that.
Just, uh... kickin' that idea around the ol' ball park.

5705006

I, uh... didn't expect that post.

Nopony expects the Spanish Inquisition!

In my opinion, it's the reviewer's opinion at the end of the day, and analysing too-far might get a bit confusing.

Insofar as "it's the reviewer's opinion at the end of the day" goes, I don't disagree.

The debate regarding reviews being "subject versus objective" is one that is, to my mind, a complete and utter canard. That's evident in how such debates virtually always end up invoking Descartes-style solipsism, wherein nothing is held to be truly objective, because the only knowledge that we can hold as being fundamentally true is cogito ergo sum and so therefore even the most basic instances of implicit mutual understanding are false and so nothing can truly be judged except insofar as how we feel about it and blah blah blah. It's a nonsense debate that ultimately doesn't go anywhere and doesn't solve anything.

Yes, at the end of the day a review is going to be based on what the reviewer is bringing to the table; that's a given. But it's not about what whether the reviewer is suspending their opinions or not. Rather, it's about what they're telling their audience. Specifically, if they're telling us about the work or about themselves. If I'm reading their review, the odds are good that I want to know about the work that they're reviewing, rather than about the reviewer themselves. Telling us how it made them feel, and why they felt that way, makes it all about them.

In terms of helping me decide if I should read the story or not, that isn't very valuable. What's valuable is telling me about the story itself, about its aspects that are strong or weak, and why they're strong or weak. Don't say that you didn't like a particular trope; say instead if that trope was executed well and made the story more engaging, or if it was dissonant and threw off the pacing and sense of immersion. Don't tell me why you did or didn't like it, but what the story was trying to accomplish and if it pulled it off or not.

We got some reviewing in this review, but we got more editorializing, and I think that's a shame.

Oh, and I do disagree with you insofar as "analyzing something too much might be confusing." Simply put, that presumes that either the writer is too unskilled to make their analysis engaging, or the audience is too stupid to understand it, neither of which is a view I subscribe to.

But if you'd like to show a portfolio of one of your own reviews, you could totally do that. And, if you would like to, you could join the group as a contributor through that.

Just, uh... kickin' that idea around the ol' ball park.

Thank you for the offer, but I'm really not interested in being a reviewer. I made my previous post because I thought that the first review of this group, now that it's reactivated, wasn't very good. I did so because, having my own story submitted for review, I'm hoping that this group's reviewers can step their game up. I recognize that it's highly imprudent to be so critical of the people whose opinions I'm soliciting, but I'm doing so because I want to receive a review – good or bad – that's insightful and well-formed. Based on this one, I'm dubious. I know that's blunt, but, well...that seems apropos for this group.

5704944
I'm quite flattered that you put in the time to review my review so thoroughly! I only really have one response. This is from the thread where I applied as a contributor:

All of my reviews are from the perspective of "this is what this story made me feel and here is why," rather than "here is what I think your story should have been" or "here is why your story is good/not good" because I myself only care for the first kind of comment. If that is incompatible with your group's ideology, you might not want to have me.

I don't care about any other sort of reviews, and I won't write any other sort of reviews. I put it as a disclaimer immediately, so that, if that's not what is desired in this group, they wouldn't take me in the first place.

5705218 So you did. To that end, I'll praise you for being forthright, even if I don't think that talking about yourself is very helpful, either to an author looking for feedback or to a potential reader trying to gain useful information about a story. "Here is why your story is good/not good" is exactly the sort of review that I'd want to read, instead. (Though I do agree that telling someone what you think their story should have been is, insofar as a review is concerned, not helpful at all.)

Certainly, saying why you personally like or don't like something is fine for a comment, as you noted, but then again reviewing is quite different from commenting.

5705256
While I am fine with leaving it as is, just to be clear, I don't remotely concede that there is a superior kind of reviewing and I'm just not willing to do it for whatever reason. On the contrary, I think there is one proper way to do reviews and that is to talk about what you feel, and everything else is inherently inferior, and indeed, less useful.

5705751 So...you don't think that there's any kind of "superior" reviewing, except you do think that there is only "one proper way" to do reviews. You've already contradicted yourself, in other words.

That's leaving aside the question of how talking about yourself could possibly be useful - or at least, more useful - to the author and/or readers than actually talking about the story. I shouldn't have to say that the "superiority" you're purporting here is not at all inherent; you need to actually make the case for why that is, since it's not at all self-evident.

Needless to say, I don't find your points here very convincing.

5705908
I did not contradict myself, however I admit that I phrased it poorly. What I meant was "I don't concede (A and B)" not "(I don't concede A) and (I don't concede B)", but the sentence I used can mean either. To be clear: i don't concede that my approach to reviewing is sub-optimal to what you propose, in fact I think it is the only way to do it properly and all other ways are inherently BS, or at the very least inferior.

Needless to say, I don't find your points here very convincing.

That's not surprising, because I wasn't making any. I was just stating that I don't agree with you without citing reasons.

I can explain why now.

The thing that actually matters about a piece of fiction – the only thing – is what others get out of reading it (meaning what they feel plus what information they gain). Every comment about a story needs to be about that, otherwise it is completely meaningless.

This is really already the full reason why attempting to talk about "the story itself" is BS. I'm going to say more, but only to make this point clearer, I'm not adding anything new. There is no talking about the story itself, unless you make statements like "the letter a appears 4023 times", which would be a property of the story, but an irrelevant one. You are always talking about what people get out of it – if you don't then, again, what you say is meaningless.

So the debate is not about whether you should talk about the story or your feelings. You never talk about the story. The true debate is about whether you should:

1. Talk about what you got out of the story
2. Talk about what you think that others will get out of the story.

And once you realize this, it becomes clearer that 1. is preferable to 2. And it's not like you don't know what others will get out of the story. The problem isn't that you have to guess (or, rather, that is a problem too, but not the main one). The problem is that there is no one thing that people will get out of a story. They get completely different things out of it, so it's not a question of "are you correct about your guess", but one of "for what set of people will what you said be accurate."

If you had only one review and lots of people had to make decisions based on reading that one review, then there would be an argument for why a reviewer should attempt to figure out how to make that set – the set of people for which what he said will be accurate – as large as possible. However, as soon as you have several ones, even just two, it becomes the better strategy to describe what you got out of it specifically. If both reviewers try to guess the most common reaction is, then they'll both say similar things, made different by how much their guesses are flawed. If both cover what they felt, you will naturally have a spreading range of experiences you covered, with no flaws because the reviewers didn't have to guess.

And if there are some things that are true for everyone who is reading a story, then you are already guaranteed to cover them if you talk about what you felt, because you are a part of everyone (in fact, there is such a thing, namely grammar, which is why that's the one thing you can always talk about, and about which giving advice makes sense). See, this is why there is no edge case in which only covering your experience isn't preferable. For each thing the reader might get out of the story, either you got it too, then only talking about your experiences is fine, or you didn't get it, which means only some people get it, which means you don't need to talk about it, which means only talking about your experiences is fine. And I don't care what anyone thinks are properties inherent to the story, because again, there is no such thing. You already accurately said that the subjectivity vs objectivity debate is gibberish, so I'm not sure if you disagree.

You can also think of it purely from the perspective of someone reading the review. If the reviewer described what he got out of a story, then the reader can read it, and if the reviewer did a good job and also explained why he got the things out of it that he got (which is the actual thing that determines the quality of a review), rather than just saying "I liked this, I didn't like this", then the reader will also get a sense of whether he'd care about it, too, and that way he receives information that is actually useful. What he doesn't get, and he shouldn't get, is a sense of the things the reviewer didn't care about – that is why we have different reviewers. If the reader pays attention, then he figures out which reviewers get similar things out of stories than him, and knows which ratings matter to him.

If reviewers try to guess stuff, though, then well... that doesn't work. Then it's just a matter of luck.

So yeah. A good review of a piece of art means stating what it made you feel and explaining why. Deviating from that is BS.

5706005 Okay, I'm going to go over your response one section at a time. You wrote a fair amount, and so I feel that warrants addressing each point in turn.

I did not contradict myself, however I admit that I phrased it poorly. What I meant was "I don't concede (A and B)" not "(I don't concede A) and (I don't concede B)", but the sentence I used can mean either. To be clear: i don't concede that my approach to reviewing is sub-optimal to what you propose, in fact I think it is the only way to do it properly and all other ways are inherently BS, or at the very least inferior.

The problem here is that it's plainly self-evident that, when reviewing a story, it's more insightful to talk about the story, rather than talking about yourself. If you want to propose the opposite, it's generally considered incumbent on you to explain why that is, since on a prima facie examination that's not going to survive scrutiny.

That's not surprising, because I wasn't making any. I was just stating that I don't agree with you without citing reasons.

I can explain why now.

As I noted above, simply saying that you don't agree isn't convincing. Hence why I'm glad that you're going into more detail about your take on reviewing here. A substantive debate needs to have more to it than the principals simply noting that they don't concur with each other.

The thing that actually matters about a piece of fiction – the only thing – is what others get out of reading it (meaning what they feel plus what information they gain). Every comment about a story needs to be about that, otherwise it is completely meaningless.

There are two major problems with this line of thinking. The first is that you note – very germanely – that this is imperative of comments, rather than reviews. This needs to be noted, because a comment and a review are different, and have different goals. A comment has no greater impetus than to provide feedback, which will typically be personal in nature. Simply stating what you thought of a story is more than enough to justify having bothered to comment in the first place.

What needs to be made clear is that this is different from a review. A review is not simply a type of comment, but is something else altogether. A review is an analysis of the story that looks to cogently examine the story, typically by way of its narrative cohesion, salient details, characterizations, etc. and then summarize its overall quality so as to not only provide feedback to the author, but to help other readers make an informed decision as to whether or not they want to spend their time reading the work in question. How you, the reviewer, personally feel about it is only indirectly touched upon at most under that scenario, as such a review won't be about your reactions, but rather the story itself, albeit as you read it.

This brings us to the second area where your philosophy falls flat: a review cannot judge a story based on "what others get out of it" (emphasis mine), because a "review" that's written based purely on your personal reactions to the story will not be about "others," but about yourself. This severely limits its usefulness to the wider community. While the author might be pleased to hear that their work was able to evoke a strong response in one of their readers, such a thing is of limited value to other potential readers, since it's axiomatic that people are different and so your own reactions are therefore no guarantee that they will necessarily derive the same level of satisfaction from the story. Making it about you doesn't help them.

Springing from this premise, it's little wonder that there's little merit to be found in subsequent points that you purport.

This is really already the full reason why attempting to talk about "the story itself" is BS. I'm going to say more, but only to make this point clearer, I'm not adding anything new. There is no talking about the story itself, unless you make statements like "the letter a appears 4023 times", which would be a property of the story, but an irrelevant one. You are always talking about what people get out of it – if you don't then, again, what you say is meaningless.

Your assertion here is a veiled allusion to the idea that "there is no objective metric by which quality can be judged; therefore, everything is subjective, and so I might as well just talk about my personal thoughts and reactions." I've explained previously why I find this to be a viewpoint that has no real value in the context of reviewing, but I'll summarize my points again here. While it's true that there's no inherent grade by which the quality of a story can be judged, the goal for a reviewer is not to try and utterly divorce their opinions from the process, as that's inherently not possible. Rather, what needs to be done is to talk about the story as they read it, and to keep the focus there. By talking about the goals the story has set for itself, whether or not it meets them, and the manner in which it succeeds or fails to do so, the spotlight is kept squarely on the work, allowing other readers to look at the aspects under examination and draw their own conclusions, which is extremely helpful if their personal take on a given part of the story is different from the reviewer's, since they'll immediately recognize that and realize that they might enjoy that, even if the reader didn't.

Your own review contained some of this, even if it was buried under personal reactions and viewpoints, which is why I didn't think that it was completely without merit. But there's only so much that can be gleaned when you make it all about you, and not about the story. Commenting might be useful to the author, but it's of very limited use to other readers, who are also among your audience (and in fact could very well be considered your primary audience).

So the debate is not about whether you should talk about the story or your feelings. You never talk about the story. The true debate is about whether you should:

1. Talk about what you got out of the story

2. Talk about what you think that others will get out of the story.

And once you realize this, it becomes clearer that 1. is preferable to 2. And it's not like you don't know what others will get out of the story. The problem isn't that you have to guess (or, rather, that is a problem too, but not the main one). The problem is that there is no one thing that people will get out of a story. They get completely different things out of it, so it's not a question of "are you correct about your guess", but one of "for what set of people will what you said be accurate."

This is where the faulty premise is beginning to lead to faulty conclusions. Because you're stuck in the "there is no objectivity, so go full into personal subjectivity" fallacy, you've now openly abandoned any semblance of trying to discuss the story itself, which despite your assertions is still an entirely valid context in which to review the story. Your realization that you can't adequately guess what others might take away from the story isn't wrong, but to say that this means that the only valid course of action is to therefore posit everything in terms of your own personal reactions is quite clearly wrongheaded. The far more valuable goal is to talk about the work, because that lets the readers come to their own conclusions as to whether or not investing in that story will be a worthwhile endeavor for them.

In other words, don't try to tell the readers "here's what this story will make you feel," but instead tell them "here's what you'll find in this story, take from that what you will." That isn't, of course, meant to suggest that a review should be a dry summary, but rather that it should be an examination of what the story does and why, and how that comes across. That you might have a different take on things is expected, and if you execute your review with sufficient skill, that will be clear to readers who have different opinions, and they'll be able to realize that they disagree and will likely enjoy what you didn't or vice versa, and so still derive useful information from your review.

If you had only one review and lots of people had to make decisions based on reading that one review, then there would be an argument for why a reviewer should attempt to figure out how to make that set – the set of people for which what he said will be accurate – as large as possible. However, as soon as you have several ones, even just two, it becomes the better strategy to describe what you got out of it specifically. If both reviewers try to guess the most common reaction is, then they'll both say similar things, made different by how much their guesses are flawed. If both cover what they felt, you will naturally have a spreading range of experiences you covered, with no flaws because the reviewers didn't have to guess.

There's a pernicious aspect to this paragraph, and it's found in the idea that "if you had only one review" is a line of reasoning that suggests that the substance of your review should be modified based on external factors such as how many reviews a story has already accrued. I call this pernicious because it alludes to having your take on a work be affected not (only) by the work itself, but by external factors. Worse, it smacks of suggesting that the goal of a review shouldn't be informative, but something else altogether, since an informative review will focus on the substance of the work in question and so have no need to alter its presentation based on how much or how little coverage a work has received. In other words, your stance here suggests that you're more concerned with having your take on the story look valid compared to other reviews rather than actually being useful to potential readers. The value of a review does not, in other words, have any bearing on how many other reviews a work has received.

And if there are some things that are true for everyone who is reading a story, then you are already guaranteed to cover them if you talk about what you felt, because you are a part of everyone (in fact, there is such a thing, namely grammar, which is why that's the one thing you can always talk about, and about which giving advice makes sense). See, this is why there is no edge case in which only covering your experience isn't preferable. For each thing the reader might get out of the story, either you got it too, then only talking about your experiences is fine, or you didn't get it, which means only some people get it, which means you don't need to talk about it, which means only talking about your experiences is fine. And I don't care what anyone thinks are properties inherent to the story, because again, there is no such thing. You already accurately said that the subjectivity vs objectivity debate is gibberish, so I'm not sure if you disagree.

The flaw in this line of thinking is that talking about why you reacted the way you did to something is necessarily going to be less useful than talking about the thing itself. If you tell someone how a story made you feel, that's not necessarily going to translate to what they get out of it because, as I noted previously, people are different. That's precisely why there's no cases where talking about your experiences is useful in a review, since if you talk about what it was that made you feel that way, the reader will therefore be able to examine the aspect of the story in question and come to their own conclusions as to whether or not that would be true for them as well. That you acknowledge the futility of arguing about subjectivity versus objectivity is useful only insofar as you've recognized that getting caught in that trap takes you nowhere, but that doesn't mean that you should therefore abandon anything beyond wallowing in your own reactions. The readers are best served not by hearing about how you felt, nor about why you felt that way, but about what parts of the story you found most notable. The operative part of a review (and, by extension, the only part that should be included) is on the "this" in "I like this," not on the "I like" aspect.

You can also think of it purely from the perspective of someone reading the review. If the reviewer described what he got out of a story, then the reader can read it, and if the reviewer did a good job and also explained why he got the things out of it that he got (which is the actual thing that determines the quality of a review), rather than just saying "I liked this, I didn't like this", then the reader will also get a sense of whether he'd care about it, too, and that way he receives information that is actually useful. What he doesn't get, and he shouldn't get, is a sense of the things the reviewer didn't care about – that is why we have different reviewers. If the reader pays attention, then he figures out which reviewers get similar things out of stories than him, and knows which ratings matter to him.

From the perspective of someone reading the review, this sounds cluttered at best, and useless at worst. If the reviewer is saying why they liked the things that they did, then perhaps they're talking about various aspects of the story itself, but this is by no means guaranteed. It's just as likely that the "why" of it is also based around their personal experiences. Saying "I didn't like this because I'm fatigued with this particular trope, and so I didn't like seeing it again" is absolutely useless to the reader, since all that informs them of is how the reviewer feels about a particular incidence of storytelling, rather than about this particular story. Now, if they do say why they did or didn't like something and make it about the actual story itself, then this can be useful, but that's only because the reviewer has (apparently inadvertently) stopped talking about themselves and focused back on the subject matter at hand, which is what they were supposed to be doing all along.

Most damning though is your assertion that readers will come to empathize with the reviewer, and become fans of the reviewer, which strikes me as unforgivably self-aggrandizing. It's not supposed to be about the reviewer; it's supposed to be about the work that's being reviewed. You should come away from a review with more insight as to whether or not you'd like a particular story, and perhaps even with some thoughts as to whether or not you'd like other works by that particular author. You should not come away from it with thoughts about how much that reviewer thinks like you. You're here to serve other readers, not yourself.

If reviewers try to guess stuff, though, then well... that doesn't work. Then it's just a matter of luck.

It's not about guessing; if you focus on the work, rather than what you think other people will get out of it, then guessing never enters the picture. A review is an analysis of the work in question; it's not supposed to try and say whether or not the readers will like it.

So yeah. A good review of a piece of art means stating what it made you feel and explaining why. Deviating from that is BS.

On the contrary, reviewing a piece of art by saying how it made you feel and why is not worth being called a review.

5706052

Very well said.

That attitude is mostly an outgrowth of post-modernist anti-intellectualism, the idea that objectivity is impossible, therefore only subjective things matter. But that completely ignores the fact that there are, in fact, a number of objective qualities on which writing can be judged, in addition to subjective impressions. A good review will concentrate on providing a view of the story with the filters through which the reviewer views it clearly elucidated so that the reader can have a reference point for evaluating the qualities of the story presented.

5706052
First this:

The first is that you note – very germanely – that this is imperative of comments, rather than reviews.

A review is a comment. A comment is everything you say about something. If you don't like the words because you want to associate "comment" with comments people post under stories on fimfiction, then think "statement" instead. Sentence. Claim. Anything and everything you say that is about the story, that is what "comment" stood for in that context. I was not making a distinction between comments on one hand and reviews on the other, I was speaking in absolute terms.

The rest: ... so, it is about objectivity after all. I was lured into thinking you wouldn't argue that there is such a thing, but such was not.

I don't think you needed to respond to the entire post if you disagree with the – well, let's say premise, the premise that there is no relevant property of the story you can talk about it isn't directly about how you feel. Because, sure, if there was then the rest wouldn't be true.

The objectivity debate is gibberish and the reason why it's gibberish is that people debate ambiguous questions. More generally, what people misunderstand about the world and about language is that there is no ambiguity in the world. the world is about very small particles forming larger things and that's that. you can ask questions about the state the world is in and those questions always have clear answers. Ambiguity only comes from language, from terms that aren't clear. The question "is this good", for instance, is ambiguous, because no-one knows what the hell "good" means. Real disagreements can only be about belief, because our knowledge of the state of the universe is lacking. If a disagreement is about something else, then you can reduce your words and describe what you really mean until you arrive at something that is a matter of belief or until you don't disagree anymore. If you think it's about preferences then there is no disagreement; you liking something is a fact of the universe like any other, someone else disliking it is another fact, they don't contradict.

Anyway, so you could say "everything is objective" and I wouldn't disagree. More accurate would be "every non-ambiguous question is objective;" but for the context of writing, you'd be better of pretending as if nothing is objective because almost everything is ambiguous -- statements about grammar aren't, at least at parts, hence why I talked about grammar.

The flaw in this line of thinking is that talking about why you reacted the way you did to something is necessarily going to be less useful than talking about the thing itself.

Show me, then, such a thing. Show me a relevant property of the story with no ambiguity, besides grammar.

[Update: Reviewer's totally fine with it, so I'll unlock this thread]

5706125 Thank you for saying so. I agree completely with your statement about the reviewer's filters being elucidated; that's an excellent summary of my main point.

5706131

A review is a comment. A comment is everything you say about something. If you don't like the words because you want to associate "comment" with comments people post under stories on fimfiction, then think "statement" instead. Sentence. Claim. Anything and everything you say that is about the story, that is what "comment" stood for in that context. I was not making a distinction between comments on one hand and reviews on the other, I was speaking in absolute terms.

It's this absolutism that is working against you. The semantic distinction you make as to whether you call it a comment or a statement or whatnot is largely meaningless. The point is that there's a difference between a simple statement of personal reaction and attempting to critically examine the story holistically so as to better inform other potential readers. The former is simply a communication between your self and the author (and/or other commenters), whereas the latter has a specific goal that you're trying to accomplish. To deny that there's any point at elucidating the story's successes and failures, let alone examining why it succeeded or failed, beyond "here's my personal feelings about it," is to ignore this distinction entirely, and in doing so do a disservice to the people who are trying to use your review to form an opinion about whether or not the story is worth investing their time in.

The rest: ... so, it is about objectivity after all. I was lured into thinking you wouldn't argue that there is such a thing, but such was not.

Your statement here is inaccurate due to being grossly oversimplified. I've stated more than once that trying to define a review in terms of subjectivity versus objectivity is a fool's errand, and that's still true now. The nature of a review isn't about the reviewer trying to put aside their opinions, but rather to showcase their critical examination of the story, as doing so necessarily but passively demonstrates the reviewer's opinion in terms of what they're looking at and how they analyze it. By "showing their work" to the readers, the readers can then compare the reviewer's methodology of valuing various parts of the story to their own, and so draw their own conclusions. All of which is done without the reviewer engaging in the futility of saying how they felt about the story.

I don't think you needed to respond to the entire post if you disagree with the – well, let's say premise, the premise that there is no relevant property of the story you can talk about it isn't directly about how you feel. Because, sure, if there was then the rest wouldn't be true.

I prefer to respond to the entirety of the argument presented, if for no other reason than because I believe that the remainder contained points that I disagreed with and therefore wanted to speak to. There were other points to be had in your post, and I felt that the conclusions that you drew deserved to be critiqued just as much as the premise, so as to better examine why the conclusions don't serve the readers' interests.

The objectivity debate is gibberish and the reason why it's gibberish is that people debate ambiguous questions. More generally, what people misunderstand about the world and about language is that there is no ambiguity in the world. the world is about very small particles forming larger things and that's that. you can ask questions about the state the world is in and those questions always have clear answers. Ambiguity only comes from language, from terms that aren't clear. The question "is this good", for instance, is ambiguous, because no-one knows what the hell "good" means. Real disagreements can only be about belief, because our knowledge of the state of the universe is lacking. If a disagreement is about something else, then you can reduce your words and describe what you really mean until you arrive at something that is a matter of belief or until you don't disagree anymore. If you think it's about preferences then there is no disagreement; you liking something is a fact of the universe like any other, someone else disliking it is another fact, they don't contradict.

You're getting lost in the quagmire of the subjectivity versus objectivity debate here, which simply isn't relevant to the debate at hand. Even if we leave aside the fact that there needs to be tacit agreement on basic terms and definitions in order to communicate at all – which isn't objectivity but serves the same purpose – as well as the fact that people can simply ask questions to determine a common understanding of what's being discussed, all of that is moot. Reviewing a story has nothing to do with trying to isolate and examine any "objective" qualities. It's about conducting a critical examination of the story in a way that lets the readers follow along on your examination so that they can determine where they agree or disagree with how you're looking at any given aspect. That way, they'll know when they'd come to a different conclusion that you, and so find that they might be interested in the story even where you weren't or vice versa. It's the process by which you reach your conclusion that's the most important aspect of the process. What conclusion you come to matters very little compared to that, to say nothing of what personal reactions you have to it. Personal reactions are ultimately meaningless because they're going to vary wildly between individuals, and so they act as no particular beacon of insight.

Anyway, so you could say "everything is objective" and I wouldn't disagree. More accurate would be "every non-ambiguous question is objective;" but for the context of writing, you'd be better of pretending as if nothing is objective because almost everything is ambiguous -- statements about grammar aren't, at least at parts, hence why I talked about grammar.

Within the context of a review, this matters not at all. The old axiom of "show, don't tell" applies to reviewing just as much as it does to crafting fiction. Show us what you're reviewing and how you're examining it, rather than telling us how you feel about it. The "why" of "how I feel and why" is slightly more valuable in this regard, but couching it in terms of personal opinion still minimizes that value, since it focuses on you and not the story, and so need not examine the story as its own thing (e.g. the previous example about not liking a particular trope due to overexposure, rather than its use within a specific story).

Show me, then, such a thing. Show me a relevant property of the story with no ambiguity, besides grammar.

You're asking the wrong question. This isn't about the properties of the story, it's about the properties of the story that you examine in the context of a review because you consider them relevant, and explain why that is. "Talking about the thing itself" in no way is indicative of "a relevant property with no ambiguity," and I'm honestly baffled as to why you'd think that it is.

5706358

You're asking the wrong question. This isn't about the properties of the story, it's about the properties of the story that you examine in the context of a review because you consider them relevant, and explain why that is. "Talking about the thing itself" in no way is indicative of "a relevant property with no ambiguity," and I'm honestly baffled as to why you'd think that it is.

I don't think this paragraph makes any reducible sense. "it's not about X, it's about a subgroup of X" is a contradiction. If you talk about "the thing itself" then you're talking about "properties of the thing itself" and because the thing itself is a story, you're talking about "properties of the story," and those are either relevant and unambiguous or they aren't.

It seems to me that we're at the point of lots of words with little meaning, and I don't think I can do more to clear up confusion. Continuing this discussion does not seem productive.

5706840
he's saying it's not about result it's about process. E.g. review should not necessarily say "the story has quality X" but show how he examines the story in order to conclude that the story has this quality.
The reader of the review may agree or disagree, but at the very least he'd see information about the story that allows him to see if author's conclusions are justified.

5706840 ChudoJogurt has the right of it. The statement of mine that you quoted wasn't saying "it's not about X, it's about a subgroup of X," it was saying "it's not about X, it's about showing us how you examine (the various aspects of) X." In other words, the operative part of what you quoted wasn't "the properties of the story," but was "that you examine."

That's because properties of the story unto itself is what the review examines, but that's not an assertion on the reviewer's part that those properties are ambiguous or not; indeed, that would be pointless. Rather, it's that the reviewer is asserting that various properties are there and are relevant – that is, relevant to the understanding and appreciation of the story unto itself – and then explaining why that is. That that's the reviewer's own personal point of view is necessarily understood, and that's why the readers can agree or disagree with their conclusions, while still having received useful information about the nature of the story.

In that regard, I don't agree with your characterization of this conversation. I understand completely what you're saying, but what you're saying seems to be a mischaracterization of my point. You keep saying that trying to examine the aspects of a story is pointless because what aspects are perceived to be there will vary for each reader; I'm saying that doesn't matter, since if you show the readers how you came to the conclusions you did, they'll be able to judge the story's quality for themselves depending on how much they agree or disagree with your analysis.