Clickbait title: Finally someone solved the the age-old question about what is good media and what isn’t? What do you mean the answer is subjective, how am I supposed to feel superior in my taste now.

Now obviously, quality is kind of a stupid concept if you look into it. It also obviously exists, but trying to measure or debate it only leads to misery. We still do of course, and this is how aggregated rating systems work etc. And these are of course never flawed (don’t look up why Youtube got rid of the star system).

Now there is of course the opposite position, that there is no quality we can meaningfully talk about so we should not even try. A piece of poop is just as “good” as a movie of a generation. Notably, this definition is basically always held as an excuse to just use “popularity” as a metric of how important something is, because that makes all the sad tricks to make things popular unassailable.

Getting to the point now, I think that it is really important for someone to have a conception of “this work is good” or “this work is bad” in their head and I do not think these kinds of feelings are always justifiable. Indeed often I think the explanations people give for what they like something are kinda non-sensical.

Because we are all cursed with YouTube “critics” now who try to do “objective media analysis”, what you will see most often are debates about “tropes” or “plot holes” and these are obviously objective. So the best piece of media uses no tropes (except for the ones that the author doesn’t see as “lazy tropes” but rather “good references to previous work”) and has no plot holes. Or maybe you just complain about these things when the movie features women as main characters, WHO KNOWS.

Now I dislike many of these crowds, but really I hate the “objectivists” the most and the definition I’ve crafted for myself is inherently subjective. Here it is:

A piece of media is good if it engaged you enough to still remember it fondly after a long amount of time.

Here’s some fun aspects of this definition:

It is obviously subjective and it is not built on some sort of explainability. Sure you can reason about why you remember something, but it allows for remembering things for things you can’t even put into words.

It allows space for uncomfortable art, it probably even prefers it. In this way it does not suffer from the problem where if you make something that 20% of people kinda are just uncomfortable with, you tank your score by getting a bunch of 1 star reviews.

You can change your mind on things and that retroactively changes your opinion of it, without you needing to justify it.

It bypasses a lot of the instantaneous feelings you may get from very cheap rewards like skinner-boxes or a global ranking or whatever.

Of course the definition is not perfect, for example you may remember something fondly because you’re addicted to gambling and you want to relapse. Thanks video games that we have to worry about this now, for us and our children.

What I really like about the definition is that it indirectly defines art as something that becomes part of you. The art that has affected your thinking the most (positively) is the thing that is the most part of you. I think we often turn to art due to wanting to be affected, emotionally.