Pseudonym said:
But this sort of equalising 'everything is equally valid' does nothing but make everything equally unvalid, unshared and not worth discussing.
Well, God knows I do like bitching about things I like. And bitching about things I don't like.
Okay, here's an example: my sister hauled me onto the couch next to her to watch some show she'd dredged up out of Netflix called
Maximum Ride. She said it was "like X-Men," and I was on board with that. It turned out to be hot garbage; the CGI was awful, every character had wings for some reason, the bad guy was an emo werewolf, and the whole thing was based off a legendarily crappy series of young adult novels.
And, y'know, I told her all of this. I'm talking about it while we're watching the show, though I bailed halfway through, and she's getting annoyed because she likes it and I'm tearing it apart and that makes her feel insecure about what she likes. And I can kinda sense that - I've done this dance with my sister and some piece of crappy television like
Grimm or
The Vampire Diaries a dozen times before - so I have to watch where I step.
I think that kind of situation is the tight-rope we're all walking on when we deal with some piece of trash that a friend of ours is weirdly in love with. On the one side, there's "It's all a matter of taste, so all things are equally valid." On the other, there's "Your show sucks and you suck for liking it." And somewhere in the middle, there's talking about what we do like and don't like and why we do or don't like it and what would make our tastes change.
That's the line I try to walk on. I don't want to shame people or tell them they suck because they like a show that I think is a hot turd wrapped in piss-soaked toilet paper. But I'm not going to refrain from telling them that it sucks, because that'd be dishonest. You have to separate the criticism of the show from the criticism of the person for liking the show, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
So I welcome guys like this who say that Game of Thrones sucks monkey taint. I like the show, and I'll recommend it, and if the people I recommend it to don't like it, I'll live. Not everything is for everyone. That doesn't have to mean that "good" and "bad" stories don't exist. It just means that there's a fuzzy grey area in the borderline where we disagree about whether something falls on the good or bad side.
tl;dr - I hate broccoli, my sister likes broccoli, but we both like ice cream and we both hate turds. Ice cream is good; turds are bad; broccoli is a matter of taste.
Arnoxthe1 said:
Honestly, I don't know how Game of Thrones is even a thing in a universe with the Kingkiller Chronicles in it. Patrick Rothfuss does a grimdark fantasy universe incredibly right but also does it without feeling the need to stab you in the heart every bloody chapter. It also has beauty in it to beautifully contrast the dark it shows.
For realsies: I'm not gonna judge you for what you do or don't like - you like reading about a superhuman ginger running around sexing ladies left and right, I like reading about a superhuman albino [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher] running around sexing ladies left and right - but I will say that I am not at all confused as to why Game of Thrones is more popular in comparison.