Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Maybe from even your own mouth.
“Yeah the show seemed like it was well done, but I didn’t feel emotionally invested in it.”
Emotional investment, by nature of the words used in it, should be and is always a very personal thing, and yet the entertainment we read is supposed to do this for not just one person but many people.
This isn’t a topic that is terribly complex, the idea that people will enjoy shows that resonate with them better, but it always feels like such a dangerous thing to say that a show lacks that emotional connection. Is it your fault? Is it the fault of the show? Is it a fault at all? If not, how can any production compensate for something like this? Is this why in the end, art is art and science is science, and while there’s plenty of overlap some things are “just because?”
And then you have the other side, where people feel emotionally invested in a story. The setting, the characters, something about this piece of fiction you’re looking at strikes a chord deep down inside of you and you wonder how anyone could not like it. So when that story is attacked or trivialized by another, it feels like a personal slight, and saying that a show was unable to pull you in emotionally can sometimes sound like the ultimate insult to a show even if it isn’t meant to be.
There’s no real conclusion to this, no grand point I’m trying to make, I’m just using this post to collect my thoughts and record them as they are.
OGIUE MANIAX 
Very good points. I have definitely taken insults to shows personally, and explained to people insulting it how connected I feel to it. It’s like the infamous phrase from Megatokyo forums “I hate you! I hate the shows you like!”
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It is not a fault at all – shows have different audience. What one person hates, another might love.
If people wonder how anyone could not like a show and feel personally insulted when the story is attacked or trivialized, they need to grow up.
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There are moves a piece of fiction can make to increase the odds of user investment. I was just talking about this with friends last week, as we just watched both 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining (some, like me, for the first time). Stanley Kubrick was obviously brilliant, talented, and moving everything in his movies toward something, but there’s little emotional investment *in the movies themselves* The moves that would do that are absent, like some method of delivering internal thought and emotion or, given that it’s film, even certain camera tricks. We’re very much on the outside, looking in, with Kubrick’s films.
Some anime does this as well, though the stereotype is that anime personalizes even the most abstract and/or objective stuff. Akira, for example, though that may be less of a choice than Kubrick’s (specifically, I’ve heard the Akira manga is immense and it was hard enough to get the highlights stuffed into a movie-length piece). Ghost in the Shell is impersonal too, though not as badly. The characters are introspective at times, but most of the time they simply do their stuff in front of us. Except, interestingly enough, for the Tachikoma, which leads me to suspect the distance with the other characters might have been planned.
I, too, feel a little pang sometimes, when people don’t like my best-loved entertainments. However, I’ve never seen the point of doing anything more than feeling that and then immediately remembering that “like” and “dislike” are subjective. Moving on from that pang to feeling insulted seems like a waste of time; it’s not fun for anyone involved.
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Whenever I say that a show doesn’t provide that emotional connection with me, I usually put it on myself (“Well, there must be something wrong with me.” and so on), since it’s ultimately my interpretation of the show that determines how I feel about it. Communication is a two way street, and what the anime is trying to communicate to me won’t be the exact same as the communication that I’m receiving. And because the product that comes out usually can’t be changed from what it is, what can change is my perspective on it. That’s why it’s on me. :P
And it’s also why I tend not to feel too sad when people dislike a show that I really like, but I do get pissed when I feel like someone pans a show just because, if that makes sense.
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@thebign: While I entirely believe that, ultimately, the entire process of “reading” is subjective, that doesn’t leave very much to talk about. It’s like language, then — we share more or fewer of certain standards about what we want in our entertainment, and then we can talk about it together. Because it’s fun. Assuming we’re all going to be completely different, while essentially true, leaves us in the same place Sartre leaves us: wondering why we should even bother (damn Sartre).
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I’ve thought about this too, and while the easy answer is that ‘there’s a little bit of both’ it’s also the answer that makes the most sense to me.
Cuchlann gave good examples in Akira and Ghost in the Shell, I like those shows a lot though at the same time they aren’t among my favorites.
Perhaps a better example would be among a set of Ghibli films. Among the oeuvre of Studio Ghibli productions, my favorite is I can hear the sea. – which is not to say that Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke aren’t as good. There just may be a threshold for emotional connection. Once reached, it takes the kind of arbitrariness and subjectivity that TheBigN talks about in our process in assigning value to the anime.
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