Hell yeah I know about Sturgeon’s Law! And its corollaries!

I believe that taste is subjective, but quality is objective. That’s because I believe that quality is about how effective a work of art is at doing what it set out to do, to its intended audience. And if an aspect of a work of art distracts from that goal or brings the work down, it is of objectively lower quality. However, I want to be clear that I mean that about the audience statistically— individuals of course may be more or less affected or unaffected by individual choices in art.

Let me give an example for that last part. Most people don’t see anything wrong with many of the choices in Ace Attorney; but I find that series to be ugly, tasteless, and insulting (not to mention extremely autism-unfriendly). The extremely ugly faces for many characters, the bug-eye reactions, the intuition-unfriendly dumbness, the pedophilia, the low-brow, the sexism, the constant harsh flashing and shaking… I believe that if Ace Attorney didn’t make those choices, nobody who currently likes the series would like it less (okay, well, maybe some people in Japan would like it less if you took away their staples of sexism and glorious stupidity; but we can compromise)— instead you’d have a larger appreciative audience if those weren’t issues. So basically, you can make aspects of a work of art better without said aspects (or others) being worse or substantially less-liked.

Aside: As an autistic person, I really can’t shut off my observation, comparison, or thorough thinking— it’s always going. And one of the effects of that is that high standards come naturally to me. So because I’m always passionate and scrutinizing, I get more angry or more disappointed when things are bad— but also way more excited than most people when things are good. I feel like a lot of people don’t understand me, thinking that I just hate everything; but those people are focusing on when I’m negative and ignoring how giddy I get at other times.

But I digress. There’s a lot of crap out there; but that makes us who notice all the bad… just that much more appreciative of the things that are genuinely good.