When you have a medium that has so many different titles and series as the anime/manga does that is both easily accessible and quickly consumed, it becomes a real dilemma trying to figure out what to read or watch. No one wants to waste their time reading a bad or even mediocre manga when there are so many amazing reads out there to find. This is why people love to watch reviews and recommendations for different series, so that they can know what to read or watch without having to deal with the hassle of finding things themselves. And it's become of this reason that we find ourselves with the problem of works being 'good' and works being 'enjoyable'. These are the two golden standards that are brought out whenever anyone talks about any piece of media, whether it be books, movies, art or music. We find these things out really quickly in any typical English class: we're always told books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations or Of Mice and Men are 'good' books, but I doubt everyone thought of them as enjoyable as they read them. So what's the difference between good and enjoyable? Do they always have to be different? How should we be recommending manga and anime that we've seen to others?
Honestly, it's all up to personal taste at the end of the day. But that being said, we need to be able to see both sides of the story to get a good idea of the positives of each. I personally really enjoy learning and talking about the things that make a manga good. This probably comes from the fact that I've been really into movie reviews recently which look at movies through a critical lens. That means that I enjoy talking about plot devices, character growth and development, overall plot and themes and the like. For me, what drew me in to these types of analyses was trying to explain why I felt certain pieces of work just felt better in a sense than others. Why did something like Hunter x Hunter feel so much better than something like Shaman King. And there was no way to do this except through a more critical look at the story at large. Now that doesn't mean that I don't enjoy the things that I read or that I read just to analyze good stories, in fact, I find it super taxing to just read a good story that I don't like.
And now with that out of the way we can segue into the other camp, those that talk about series based on pure enjoyment value. This to me feels like a more base level of analysis just because it is so subjective. Many people will enjoy the things I don't and I'm gonna enjoy a lot of things other people don't. People have different tastes, so by that vein people are going to enjoy different things differently. That being said though, enjoyment is the biggest factor for why people continue to consume a certain media. I'm going to keep on listening to a band as long as I keep on enjoying their music. Rating things on enjoyment is actually not that bad of an idea either, so long as you are consistent in it. If you can develop your taste sufficiently, then people can tell whether or not they will like a series that you like based on your previous experiences with similar titles. It's a similar argument to what videogamedunkey said on his video on game reviews if you want to check that out.
When I started reading manga/watching anime I'd always heard of certain series talked about as being really well done or really interesting. Until recently though, I never really took time to take a look at older series since there was so much new stuff coming out that caught my eye. And when I finally came around to reading some of the classics, I found myself slightly disappointed at a decent amount of them, hence why I started the whole "are the classics worth watching" series. In a lot of them though, I can appreciate what made them good and why people like them. But that doesn't mean that I necessarily liked them. I had to force myself to read things like Vagabond or Spirit Circle, and shows like Gurren Lagann weren't too fun to watch either. I tend to really enjoy lighter things like slice of life romcoms, but because I wanted to learn more about the history of the medium and to be more well rounded I subjected myself to a lot of random stuff, which I kinda regret doing after the fact. It's draining and makes it difficult to start anything new after.
So then what should you do? Do you read only what you enjoy and have fun, but not learn about the medium as a whole or do you forsake enjoyment to just be more well rounded and competent? I think my balance is to read one or two 'good' manga for every few enjoyable ones I find. That way I find time to rest and relax between heavy reads. For other people it's going to be different, but in the end, you need to encompass both parts to have a full experience with anime and manga.
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