Last week, I wrote about how superlatives and the hype cycle are the enemy of good criticism, and in the long run the sustained enjoyment of things as well. What I didn't talk about completely enough, though, was how these things are twice as problematic for regular viewers as they are for people with a critical perspective.
Regular viewers — people who don't style themselves as critics or analysts — are all the more vulnerable to this sort of thing because it's generally not their business to analyze how something is presented to them. I do not mean this to sound dismissive or insulting, only to point out that the main distinction between lay viewers and critics is that the latter see it as part of their mission to analyze not only what they watch, but also examine their own reactions, to think as critically about them as they do the material itself. The minute a regular viewer stops taking their own reactions for granted and puzzles them over, they're looking with new eyes.
But until something like that happens, regular viewers face two kinds of problems with high praise for anime: being let down, and being led astray.
1. The big letdown
Barely a season goes by without a title arriving bathed in the glow of some aura or another — whether it be the imprimatur of some trusted critical authority, the reputation of a given studio or creative team, or the sheer dazzle of a trailer. Then the show itself arrives. Splat.
My current go-to example for such a splat remains Makoto Shinkai's ploddingly dull Children Who Chase Lost Voices. After that, I stopped trusting anyone's hype — my own included — whenever some up-and-comer was pitched as "the next Miyazaki", for a variety of reasons: The term's wrongheaded to begin with; no one could possibly live up to such hype; and even if they did, was it a good thing that the way they had achieved prominence was by way of explicit comparison to someone else's legacy, instead of by being appreciated on one's own terms? (I can't think of a faster way to let other people down than by trying to be the "next" anything.)
Even critics aren't immune to having their expectations raised, and then dropped with a stunning impact. With lay audiences, I imagine it's even worse, because their own expectations are far easier to raise to the point of unfulfillment. What real-world incarnation of anything can live up to the hype we create for ourselves?
2. The big betrayal
Hype kills in more ways than one. It not only breaks hearts, it destroys chances for us to see the thing as it actually is -- not as someone else has made it out to be. I believe this to be as true for regular audiences as it is for critical ones, maybe even more so.
We all develop expectations differently. What kind of hype I have for something may not be your kind of hype. The reasons you think something is the best ever may not actually map to anything I have in my own psyche. All the more reason to make our expectations public and to talk about them explicitly, rather than leave them on the shelf of emotional assumptions.
Two examples come to mind. When I wrote about Noir -- and, much earlier, Angel's Egg -- I knew I had to work twice as hard to explain what it was about each of those things that caught my attention. In the former case, I wound up making the whole dilemma of "how do I not raise peoples' expectations too much?" into a big part of the discussion itself. That way, there would be less of a chance (although not no chance at all; that's impossible) of people committing to it and feeling like they'd been had. With Angel's Egg, I didn't think for a minute even an outline of the material would sound exciting to most people, so I didn't try to mislabel that particular package. A project like that deserves to draw the right kind of audience, not just any old one.
i don't think lay fans have any intention to mislead others when they sell others on what they feel are the merits of a given show. From where I sit, it's always worth paying attention to what excites people, even if our first impulse is to feel they're being foolish with their affection. Sometimes you learn something. Naruto is far from being my favorite show, but paying attention to how the material has evolved hand-in-hand with its audience taught me a lot about how a franchise moves along with the people who enjoy it.
I also know I can't make this into an argument that only an Appointed Few ought to make the case, pro or con, for a given thing. That's elitism (and snobbism on top of that), and unenforceable besides. Perhaps the real duty falls on those who receive the advice rather than those who give it, to find a way to let such people look into their own reactions that much more with time. From that they can find out how to let their enthusiasm serve them best, to let it guide them towards things they can see are good in a way they can savor, rather than perfect in a way only someone else can rave about.
It's something we all deal with, I think. Someone says to us: Hey, I found this thing, I want you to watch it, I think you'll like it — but I don't want to oversell it. That's sincere, and useful. But when someone says You've got to see this thing, it's the best thing ever! -- that's when the alarms should go off. Who among us listens to them?
