Removing the P*rn

People often ask how can you tell if a show is quality material or not and the answer is very simple, as long as you have unbreakable gold standards as to what counts as good or bad, as well as not evaluating something purely on enjoyment. And this is the issue with all the non-critical thinkers out there. They evaluate something based on how much they like it instead of how actually good it is.

In fact, the only way for a tasteless casual to be critical is to not like something. Only then he starts nitpicking it in an attempt to explain why he doesn’t like it. Which is a mistake, since you should be able to criticize something regardless of how much you enjoy it.

So, a simple way for anyone to test his critical thinking, is to isolate enjoyment from his evaluation through a method I call “removing the porn”. What you are basically doing, is not paying attention to everything that is not serving the narrative. And since there is a huge amount of shit that is not doing that, here is a quick list of 20 things that are not vital for telling a story and have nothing to do with quality.

Ass and titties (Killing Bites)
Sakuga animation (Madoka Magica)
Moemoe kyun (K-On)
Food porn (Food Wars)
Misery porn (Rainbow)
Torture porn (Rezero)
Thought provoking (Psycho-Pass)
Justice porn (Inuyashiki)
Audio porn (.hack//sign)
GAR (Jojo)
Gore porn (Hellsing Ultimate)
Cool mecha (Dangaioh)
Gayshit (Yuri on Ice)
Queerbait (Sound Euphonium)
Gamer pandering (Sword Art Online)
Negative consequence erasure / time resets (Kimi no Nawa)
Otaku pandering (Chaos;Head)
Mystery bait (Rokka no Yuusha)
Referential comedy (Gintama)
Theory crafting (Dragonball)

I know what many of you will say, “but Snob, if we remove all that there is nothing left, because those were the only reasons we had for watching them in the first place”. Well, in that case that show was never quality material to begin with. There is nothing wrong in enjoying something, as long as you are aware it’s trash. What is wrong is making up shit for excusing all that crap as being vital to the narrative, when they are not.

Quality shows in the script, everything else is pretty colors and wish fulfillment. As impossible as it sounds for most of you, if the script is crap and the rest of it is some sort of empowerment fantasy, then it’s not a quality title. You can like the animation and the themes all you want, you can write a thousand pages of the thoughts and feels it gave you, and it’s still not going to be proof of quality.

This is an ever-growing problem in our community, since the actual quality of a show doesn’t matter anymore and everyone can only evaluate something based on how hyped they are for something they didn’t even see yet, how many thoughts they had about something, and how many feels they felt deep in their feels. What does any of that have to do with the show? Remove the porn, and then evaluate it. If you can’t do that, you have no critical thinking.