3 Ways to Judge a Story

There are many ways to judge a show, but when it comes to the story there are 3 distinctive ways. Judging a show by its beginning, judging it by its ending, or judging it as a whole. Let’s analyze each one.

The first one is basically first impressions, where people judge a show by its early episodes. If they like it, they continue watching it, if they don’t they either drop it or ask others if it gets better later on. This makes sense on a superficial level, since it’s definitely helpful to be told if there is pay-off later on (or not). But it tends to be easily abused if there is a circlejerk going on. If a lot of people like the beginning, they will keep liking the show, regardless of how worse it becomes later on. If they don’t like it, they will dislike it regardless of if getting better.

Regarding the latter, I always say that a show never gets better, so to me it makes sense to gradually like something less the more it goes on, and not to gradually like it more. I mean, it may get more exciting, more complicating, more interesting, but it never gets better in terms of quality. When people suggest you to keep watching something because it gets better and better, what they usually mean is that you get used to the style of the show.

It didn’t really get better; you just got accustomed to how it plays out. You were attached to the characters, it became a weekly fix of escapism, or you found a topic generator. It’s plain fanboyism. This is further fueled by the misconception of the average scores increasing with every new season, when what really happens is less and less people still watching the show, who are of course scoring it high. Those who don’t like it anymore, will give a low score once and never bother again, leaving only the hardcores to inflate the averages as much as they want to.

Basically, a show cannot become better because its foundations are set in the very beginning. The story and the characters can progress as far as their establishment allows it. If no specific rules or personalities or world building are defined, there isn’t much to work with. I mean, you can expand stuff as you go along, but even that depends on how the show starts.

Every story begins preplanned up to a certain point and it is easy to have consistency and proper pacing while you know what you are doing. But the longer a show lasts, the easier it gets to lose track of what the heck the makers are doing. They eventually reach to a point where they don’t know how they should continue, or a point which leaves no room for further development of the themes and should be the ending, yet get greedy and head for a sequel. They keep adding stuff that do not seem to fit, becoming asspulls and retcons which damage consistency the more the show goes on. By default, that is what happens with every long-running series.

Moving to the second way of criticizing a story, which is by its ending. Arkada popularized the concept of the ending is paramount, in the sense of a pay-off. If the climax is terrible or doesn’t even exist, because the show is left incomplete, then the whole series feels bad because of it. The way a series wraps things up is vital, but the build-up is just as important. Ignoring that and paying attention only to the climax leads to some ridiculous cases where people are loving a series because of the way it ended and not of the way it reached to that ending.

Furthermore, even series with a solid ending are usually underwhelming. If the story writer does a proper job at wrapping up all its plot points without being messy or rushed, means that there isn’t anything left to show in the last episode because by then everything is already finished. It will feel predictable to the point of being boring. That’s why this method is faulty by inception.

The third and final way is by criticizing a story in its entirety, or seeing it as if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You basically place all the positives on one side, all the negatives on the other, and see which weight more. It sounds logical and more objective than the other two ways, but the problem lies in the allocation of positives and negatives. Is it fair to judge something that doesn’t represent the show in its entirety? What is the animation is bad in some arcs and good in others? What if some arcs are good and some are bad? What if you judge each arc separately when they are all connected somehow or vary significantly in style and length? What if the positives are all somewhere in the middle and the negatives are in the beginning and the end? How can you judge a show as a whole when the quality varies so much?

The most effective way is to make a graph that shows the ups and downs with each episode or arc, but by doing that it’s no longer about seeing the show as a whole. If you find a numerical average, it won’t be a just representation of the show and you can’t recommend scattered episodes out of a huge series. So again, the whole thing is a mess by inception. Thus, first impressions with the notion of nothing ever gets better is the best way to judge a story.