![]() It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. Or “none of the characters were likeable” becomes “all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying” which is literally how every book works? For instance, “none of the characters were unique” becomes “all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media”, which like… okay? That’s not really a critique. ![]() ![]() I think this is really important because a lot of “critiques” people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn’t do, actually read pretty nonsensical. I instead had to say, “the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot.” So, for instance, I couldn’t say “this book didn’t give its characters strong agency or goals”. ![]() I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people’s books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn’t do but only for what it did. ![]()
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