Quality Versus Appeal

This is a somewhat abstract idea I’ve returned to multiple times and for various reasons: what are the differences between what makes things good and what makes me like things? Sometimes I have no problem separating my personal bias and appraising things by their own merits. Other times I stubbornly deny the merits (or demerits) of a thing and focus on what I think about it. I’ve found these tendencies to pervade many areas of my life including video games, films, psychotherapeutic theories and models, books, my own writing, politics, and foods. Most of the time—I’d like to think, anyway—I’m self-aware and can parse through my thinking to aim for an understanding of both objective and subjective factors before concluding what I ultimately think about a thing. In my past few blog posts I’ve included mixed reasons for evaluating games and films both with my opinion and facts about the things themselves. There are some areas I’d like to apply this idea in thinking-through-writing, some more than others, so that’s what I think I’ll do here. I’ll try to avoid being too philosophical about it, but this will definitely be wordy.

This can be contentious to discuss, particularly with political and certain leisure activities (e.g., favored candidates, sports), and I admit I feel nervous daring to touch on this topic when it can be taboo or offensive or whatnot. I could say I dislike Mexican food and piss off a good number of people. I could say I dislike Star Wars. I could say I dislike baseball and football. I could say I dislike Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Any one of these topics could strike a chord with someone, either good or bad. Maybe they did with you. That isn’t really my intention here, to stir emotions, as it is more to stir awareness of the fact it did (or didn’t as the case may be) give rise to certain emotions. While reductive, I consider that emotional response what makes up the appeal of something—in this case, me. If I were to say any of the aforementioned things, I imagine my appeal would be more or less than what it was before according to others. Fortunately my phrasing was noncommittal, hypothetical. From here on out I’ll be (mostly) honest about my thoughts on things since that is inherently critical to the point of this idea and post.

That somewhat demonstrated how I define appeal, but what about quality? I’ll try to think of something most people know. Consider an apple. Let’s say it’s a Granny Smith—that means it’s green and sour and has a particular phylogenetic background that goes beyond my knowledge but is factually true regardless of what I think. That would be the apple in general, so let’s consider more specifics. Let’s say it’s been bruised on one side and a chunk has been bitten off on another. Let’s also say it’s been left outside and has aged some number of weeks. It’d be more accurate than not to say the quality of the apple is degraded. A different Granny Smith, one that’s ripe, freshly picked, and without bruises or bites would be considered having the better quality. That sort of objectivity is how I define quality. And how I feel about the sourness of the apple, or the color (I like the color green), I’d describe as its appeal.

It’s interesting since both quality and appeal aren’t entirely separate. People talk about appeal objectively as well, and people talk about quality subjectively. I acknowledge these overlaps exist, but I’ll largely be using both terms with the meanings I’ve demonstrated and I don’t necessarily think these meanings preclude overlap or exceptions. So, then, what thing to make an example of first… How about stories?

There are many models and measures that would make a story objectively seen as good. The fundamental elements would be a character or multiple, a setting or multiple, and an event or multiple. A character in a vacuum doing nothing and nothing being done to him or her wouldn’t make for a very fun story; and a setting with an event happening affecting nothing and no one also wouldn’t make for a good story. If we took a character and grounded them in some particular place and attached them to some particular event, now we’ve got something from which progress can be made. To get a bit more nuanced, let’s make the character evil—or maybe good, since that has better appeal—and add more characters and let’s face them with an event that challenges the characters in some way. Now we have something along the lines of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. Both meet the mark for having these fundamental elements, but wait, both resemble each other. Maybe a princess needing to be rescued by true love’s kiss is unremarkable if it happens similarly in several stories. What if the characters weren’t all good and what if no single event completely resolved the conflict? Now we have something along the lines of The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. But wait, the hero’s journey might not be to my liking. What if the main character(s) wasn’t the good guy or the events weren’t life- or world-threatening? Now we have a variety of potential stories from Death Note to The Little Engine That Could to Macbeth to The Parent Trap.

I’ll leave off there since the more complex it gets the more likely subjectivity plays a role and I’m not really looking to teach the craft of storytelling. Broadly speaking, people gravitate towards certain kinds of stories that can be related to their genre or medium. Some people prefer stories told through songs as opposed to books or movies. Other people prefer mysteries to westerns or romances. What could be considered banal to one person could be a guilty pleasure for another. What could be considered incomprehensible and messy by one could be revolutionary and intelligent to another. Even then, the appeal of something can change across time—I may grow to dislike Granny Smiths. Anyway, quality and appeal both play a role. The majority of my written ramblings so far might amount to the basic idea that people have different tastes, but that idea might be hard for some to accept. I find it disagreeable that anyone could possibly dislike The Lord of the Rings (though I begrudgingly accept others’ opinions may differ). I think this contention created from quality versus appeal is important. It’s the reason there are heated debates about many things like which Star Wars movies were good and which were bad, whether pineapple should go on pizza or not, and if Kanye West should run for president. For me, thinking about these things is fun.

I’m not sure how much further to go on, but I think the extremes of quality and appeal should be considered—or where one overrides the other. Returning to The Lord of the Rings (specifically the films), much can be said of their quality; their depth of characters, scope of events, grandness of scenery, and brilliance of score all are of good (if not excellent) quality. Their quality is one reason why so many like them. But there are some flaws to be sure. For instance, there is one scene where Frodo and Gandalf are riding a cart through The Shire and hobbit children pursue them to see the wizard do something fascinating—it’s pretty much unnoticeable, but before Gandalf sets off fireworks behind the cart you can briefly see tire treads imprinted on the road. That’s hardly a mark against the film’s quality, though it objectively is a goof. There are a number of other “mistakes” that I put in quotes because I personally don’t care about them, and that’s where my own preference overrides what are objective flaws (that can also be argued to be objectively minor, but let’s focus on the appeal side). The films are so appealing to me that I don’t care about their flaws. Oftentimes I ignore them. This might not matter much for something overall objectively considered great, but it can get more interesting for things that are riddled with quality issues.

Politics has an abundance of examples to choose from, but… Yeah, it might be best not to poke that bear. Something less talked about is psychology, specifically the validity of much of its research. Without getting (much) into the nitty gritty, roughly a decade ago growing awareness of psychology research failing to replicate led to a replication crisis. A handful of widely known findings were found to be a tad more dubious than once thought (in terms of quality rather than appeal). For many, implicit bias is assumed to be useful in predicting discrimination, particularly in relation to race and ethnicity, despite IATs (implicit association tests) being poor predictors in meta-analyses. Further, it’s the key reason behind trainings provided by workplaces and educational institutions despite its scientific deficits and further evidence of such trainings showing little-to-no benefit beyond people learning the ideas about implicit bias—meaning implicit bias trainings have been shown to have no effect on discrimination and real-world outcome disparities. With the quality of the research behind implicit bias being flimsy at best, it’s interesting that it appeals to so many. It doesn’t appeal to me, though that’s because I don’t think how quickly I can press a keyboard key following a prompt indicates much of anything about my biases. Another concept with wide appeal is learning styles (e.g., verbal learner, visual learner, etc.), though the quality of its evidence base is lacking and insufficient to say the least. Learning styles, too, are nonetheless recommended to be kept in mind by teachers and implemented in educational programs. This one I can get more on board with personally, as thinking of myself as unique and having an aptitude for learning one way over another has more appeal (in an egotistic kind of way). But it, too, holds unwarranted appeal in spite of its real flaws.

This has been a big inundation of words and paragraphs. I guess to conclude this, I’ll name some other interesting cases of quality versus appeal: the appeal of the Harry Potter series has changed due to beliefs held by and actions done by its author J. K. Rowling though the series remains the same; the appeal of movies in their time were once mixed or negative (e.g., Hocus Pocus, Blade Runner, Donnie Darko) though over time gained cult followings; and vaping and smoking have their own appeal related to age, a “cool” and “mature” aesthetic, and potential for socializing alongside their health risks.