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| A 10/10 anime by all standards |
Well, first of all, I didn't realize that Anime Blog Carnival can be abbreviated as ABC. Cool, huh?
Defining The "Value"
I was surprised by how obscure and unique my "value" scoring system is. For my reviews and scores, I've always wanted them to represent how much I would recommend a particular title to the anime's target audience. The term "target audience" is extremely important; like what I've discussed with many others, does this particular anime seeks to entertain you? For example, I'm plenty sick of all the gusto and sweltering hard work themes in sports anime. Is it fair for me to rate this particular sports anime lower because I didn't like that? The producers of this anime doesn't care about me; they seek to entertain fans of this genre, and those guys surely had no problems with these themes. I couldn't allow myself to judge this anime purely in terms of enjoyment because of how unfair it is, but I could judge it from the point of view of the target audience, hence the "value".
Ephemeral Dreamer's post helped me defined the difference between "Value" and "Quality", which is Purpose. Has the particular anime achieved the desired reaction from its audience? Does it successfully convey the message it had to the audience? And most importantly, has the show entertained whoever it seeks to entertain? I've discussed this with Kai that the execution of the story means practically everything to me; it's easy for us viewers to see the objective of the show, and the enjoyment level holds close to how well they've accomplished that objective.
And lastly, "Value" has helped me defined which titles I would want to rank it amongst my top-tier 10/10. Like what Mira said, a great show, or to me a perfect show, might only get a 9/10. A 10/10 title has to means something more to me. And in most cases, my 10/10 title is a perfect show with a little something extra. For example, Samurai Champloo has an incredibly unique story setup that seeks to entertain with the interaction and development of the characters while abandoning the usual modus operandi of storytelling. By having awesome characters that worked well with each other and the story setup, it earned that one last point that pushes it from a 9/10 to a 10/10. This little something extra might be subjective across different kinds of target audiences, but I know I'll see it no matter the genre.
This is going to look like a tl;dr to once again justify my carnival post, so I'll stop here.
Subjective vs Objective
One of the things I've learned about the carnival is that reviewers, or scorers, usually based their scores on a subjective or objective point of view. See draggle's roundup post for a breakdown on where each of the carnival participants belongs to. Subjective scorers, also Yumeka's heart score, is akin to my first scoring method based on enjoyment. It's not too rare that we see a subjective score that sharply contrasts with the public generated average, because in the end it still depends on the scorers' tastes. Objective scorers, also Yumeka's head score, is akin to my second scoring method based on quality. Objective scores are often quite close to the public generated average, because they tend to look from a general point of view. A quick look around the net tells me that reviewers often belongs to one of the two groups.
I find myself to be a blur of both group. As you can see, I've tried and abandoned both scoring methods and went with something that works for me. Scoring on "value" has many similarities to scoring on "quality" (objective), but the final score can be very different.
It's still just preferences, after all. A mix of opinions from the subjective reviewers, together with the average created by the objective reviewers, would in most cases still presents a score that well reflects the worth of an anime title.
In Conclusion...
There's quite a few unexpected benefits from the carnival. First of all, the carnival allow other bloggers to bring up the points that you've missed out yourself. Their opinions might also contribute and reinforce your own, to help form a stronger conclusion. The carnival also allows us to reiterate, clarify and reinforce our points in the discussion with other bloggers, and it's worth it if you had a solid interest in the subject.
Through sharing and discussing, I've learned quite a bit, and that led me to make a few minor tweaks in my reviewing/scoring method. While the score itself would not change much, I've learned that the reviews itself should be a personal thing and thus I would try to have more subjective input. The "heart score", or enjoyment factor, is better used as modifier to the score instead of a component or percentage; and in the end, "value" is still a very subjective thing.
Finally, I would like to thank fellow bloggers Marina, Sam, Marow, Nopy, Draggle, Mira, AceRailgun, Leap250, Yumeka, SnippetTee, Ephemeral Dreamer, Hoshiko, Yi , @fkeroge, Valence and Kai that helped make the first anime blog carnival a success. I haven't had any solid plans for a second carnival, but I've had some ideas I would like to try out in the future. Feedback is most welcome! Thank you everyone!
(Back to the carnival post, with links to all articles)
