How I rate media
Hi! This is probably gonna be a short post. Recently I tweeted about my feeling on GTO and that inspired me to write about how I rate and think about media. Without further a do, let’s begin.
Every media starts at a 5/10 and get’s or looses points based on aspects I liked or not. Those aspects could be extremely based on personal opinion or based on more technical/factual aspects (e.g. junk animation in a fight scene). That’s the gist of it.
I really like this system because I feel it makes my overall idea of the media more consistent. I feel like by default we tend to not use the x/10 system very well, usually if something is decent it’s already above 6 for people, while something bad is a 1. This make us barely use the whole 10 numbers to really express or feelings on that piece of entertainment.
It’s worth noting that I don’t think scores can hold their-selves at all by themselves. All ratings should be together with an actual explanation of the why you liked or hated something, at least when you are sharing with someone else. This score system embraces the idea of every score being personal, while still helping to paint the picture of the general aspects of the media I’m talking about, so the listener/reader can come to their own conclusions.
There is a catch tho, it’s very easy to get criticized when people don’t know how you are rating, since you are bound to give lower scores than most people even when you didn’t hate the media. If you got interested and wanna try it, be warned.
There are a lot of aspects that I use and think of when rating, here are some of them:
- Originality
- This is usually time based, somethings will have generic plots but that were not generic at the time they were done.
- Technical aspects
- Camera angles, good shots, choreography, good animation etc anything about the media making aspect that comes from technique. Will usually depend on the time they give to the staff and the director.
- Message conveyed
- What the author/director wanted to communicate with this scene? And how well and fun he makes this communication (boils down to technical and writing)
- Knowing your audience
- How well the media knows it’s audience. You don’t make a story about the struggles of old people in retirement for a kids movie.
- subtle things
- I particularly love subtle details on media in general, and it can be conveyed in lots of different ways. A simple but nice example from a recent anime is frieren that contains a lot of moments that convey subtle but meaninful messages in it’s visuals.
A great subtle shot in Frieren is this famous one, where we can see frieren and himmel with a giant clock in the background, in the middle of them.
Got the memo? TIME is separating them! Such a simple, yet amazing detail.
Even if you don’t want to try the system, I believe you should at least try thinking of some of those aspects the next time you see a piece of media. It makes you have a more clear understanding of why and how much you like/hate something. Who knows, maybe you will appreciate them even more!
Credit where credit is do, I first learned about this idea of starting at 5/10 from YMS years ago. Check out his stuff, amazing channel.
That’s it for today folks,
See ya