i don’t like when reviews are framed through an assumed lens of cynicism. endless youtube clickbait titles like “your art is shit,” “why your music isn’t as good as you think,” and “i hate poetry” attached to some well-edited 3 hour rant about everything negative. maybe they include a few positive things – especially when leading the video – to give the illusion of a nuanced, well-informed take. it probably does have fairly deep analysis on all the aspects they find problematic.

i complain about things a lot. however, if you know me well enough, you’ll know that i actually complain more about things that i like – games, music, movies that i love are less safe around me than things that i genuinely don’t like. it’s a quirk of mine that has endlessly confounded family, friends, and partners. the reason i criticize the thing i love is because – while i do find that thing genuinely inspiring and worthy of praise – it’s not perfect and finding its flaws it genuinely not an easy task for me. i want to see nothing but good in it because it’s something i enjoy. but it also brings me closer to what i love to recognize it for what it is: flawed but still lovable.

conversely, i will try to find good in anything that i don’t like (provided i don’t find it ethically abhorrent. punch nazis). this is either equally or more difficult than the previous task. when something is more flaw than gem, it’s difficult to see what good it does have.

circling back to “criticizing fucking everything and being overwhelmingly negative”: it’s boring, its useless, and i think it makes the world a worse place. disliking something and listing all the things you don’t like about something is fine. even better when you can give alternatives to how that thing can be improved! i believe that’s called constructive criticism. but genuinely tearing something down for the sake of tearing it down sucks. assuming that it’s not harmful, art and creation should be celebrated in all its forms even if you dont like it. creating is hard and requires a lot of courage. it requires public vulnerability which, known by most of us who spend our lives on the internet, is fucking difficult and scary. criticism, on the other hand, is much less vulnerable. you don’t need to confess deeply held beliefs or fragile emotions.

i’m not saying criticism in general is bad, to be clear. i just don’t like when its framed as “your X sucks” or “why Y is terrible.”