Maze1125 said:
"Bad" is an inherently subjective word.
Something can never be "objectively bad" because that is a contradiction in terms.
All those arguments you talk about are nothing more than issues that are generally agreed to make a work less enjoyable. That is not the same as being "objectively bad".
A Deus Ex Machina is not factually bad. A plot hole is not factually bad. They are just things the people tend to agree are unenjoyable. They could very well be a culture of aliens whose literature is full of plot holes because the aliens enjoy making up their own story to fill the hole, and in that culture a story without such holes is considered awful and pointless.
Those aliens wouldn't be enjoying "objective bad" stories, they'd just have a different perspective on story telling.
"Bad" is not inherently a [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bad] subjective [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bad] word [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bad].
And "objective" is not necessarily a philosophical term. The word objective has plenty of [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/objective] other [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/objective] meanings [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/objective]. For instance, "not related to personal feelings," and "dealing with things external to the mind," "based on observable phenomena," etc.
So maybe I'm not being specific enough, for which I apologize.
When you're talking about critiquing something, you refer to something as "bad" when it fails to meet expectations. There is nothing subjective about this. If an artist, film maker, author, poet, developer, etc, sets out to accomplish X, and does not accomplish X, then they have failed. This would be considered "bad," and this could be considered "objectively bad," by simply looking at the facts, what the creator tried to do, how they failed to do that, and making an honest assessment. You could even say it is "objectively bad," because they failed to fulfill their objectives.
You say, "generally agreed," but you're argument hinges on this making it subjective. That's not true. The generally agreed upon conventions generally lead to to cohesive, intelligent story lines that provide adequate plot resolution, etc, and there is nothing subjective about this. In other words, we did not arbitrarily come to "generally agree" on what makes something "bad."
Regardless, having standards, even arbitrary standards, means you can now objectively measure how something matches those standards.
If someone says they're going to sing the national anthem of the United States, they're immediately setting a number of expectations. If they fail to meet these expectations, it can be agreed upon that they have done a bad job. If you sang in the wrong key, for instance, you would have done a bad job. Now someone may still enjoy your version of the national anthem in the wrong key, as this is their subjective opinion, but that doesn't mean that your singing was good. If someone says, "I'm going to intentionally sing the National Anthem out of key to achieve X," and they do so and achieve X, then it's no longer objectively bad because they have modified expectations. We could have a discussion about what measures its appropriate to judge that, and our criticisms might be different based on how we decide to measure that, but we can all agree that someone setting out to sing the anthem poorly is not the same as someone setting out to sing well and instead singing poorly.
A single Deus Ex Machina or a single Plot Hole is, in and of itself, certainly not "good." If you set out, from the beginning, to accomplish something with these devices, then you have set a different set of standards outside of the "generally agreed upon" standards, for which you are to be critiqued. Maybe you want to use these devices ironically or cynically to make a satire or some sort of statement or critique. Fine. But if you unintentionally commit these faux pas, then you have probably done a "bad" job, or certainly a "worse" job or "inferior" job than if you had not.
Your example of aliens who love plot holes is entirely irrelevant. They are not here. I do not care about the opinion of fictional aliens. And I think most human authors would find these alien artists to be "objectively bad."
Finally, lets bring it back to Mass Effect 3.
Mass Effect 3 is not bad because of 1 Deus Ex Machina. The plot is littered with Deus Ex Machina. The Crucible is a D.E.M., the Citadel becomes a D.E.M., the Catalyst is practically a literal god out of the machine.
Mass Effect 3 is not bad because of 1 plot hole. The plot would be unnavigable by land travel, due to the sheer number of holes and their enormous depth and circumference.
And, as I said, we can objectively say that this is true by simply examining the plot.
So Mass Effect 3 is full of Deus Ex Machina, its full of holes.
But that's not even the half of it.
You also have all sorts of other problems like genre shift, introducing characters and plot lines right at the end, undermining player agency, undermining the in game universe and the codex, undermining physics, ignoring details from earlier in the story, etc, etc, etc.
The ending post Harbinger Laser Hit is an incoherent mess. Stuff stops making sense. Characters become displaced from time and space, they appear randomly and inexplicably in impossible locations with no explanation for where they are, how they got there, what they were doing there in the first place. New characters and new plot lines are introduce, which negate existing themes and plot lines spanning the entire length of the franchise up until that point. New questions are introduced, and then not resolved.
The ending reminded me of surrealist films by David Lynch. Now, David Lynch films aren't "objectively bad," because he is intentionally making his films these way, so he can judged by a different set of standards(and if you don't want to, then you can objectively make an argument that surrealist films are bad regardless of artist intentions). Bioware was not trying to make a surrealist ending to Mass Effect 3. Hence they failed to deliver a cohesive narrative, hence they did a bad job. I can say this objectively by pointing to the criteria by which we judge such things.
BreakfastMan said:
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It doesn't much. I was presenting arguments against Dio's opinion that there are objective ways to know if things are good or bad, by directly attacking his examples of objectively bad films. Wasn't really talking about ME3's ending, his statement was just something that stuck out to me and I decided to respond to. I have no real interest in discussing the ending further. I did enough of that back in March and April when it was still topical and relevant to do so; so much in fact that I am sick of discussion about it.
...
That is all well and good (I don't agree, but I would rather not get into a discussion about the interpretation of plot holes), but, and here is the thing, having plot holes does not make something objectively bad. It just makes it flawed.
Being "flawed" is "objectively bad." It's bad because it fails to meet expectations and is therefore flawed. It is objective because you can use an evidential argument to support this. If you simply want to swap words and replace "objectively bad," with "flawed," then by all means, knock yourself out, but I'll understand that you agree with me here.
