Defend And Insult

There are very few perfect creations out there. I do believe they exist, but they are few and far between. For everything else, it's in the middle. You'll have goods and bads, and you need to acknowledge both of them.

No matter how glowing of a review you can give, if you judge something fairly, you will be able to find flaws. They may not be enough to make you stop loving a story, but you can admit they exist.

No matter how scathing of a review you can give, you can find something positive about it. If you don't believe me, look only to my review of Deathbed: The Bed That Eats.

We have been trained by our culture to become not fans, but fanatics. If you like something, you love it with all your heart and defend it to the death. If you dislike something, it is flaming excrement spawned by the devil himself and has zero redeeming qualities. Along with this, if you compliment a story, and criticize it in the next breath, you are at risk for being called any number of derisive terms.

In reality, you should not trust any person who cannot both defend and insult something. If they are one-sided, they're either blind or scamming you. Either way, beware.

I've talked before about the doubting game and the believing game, and to some degree, this is an extension of that. In this post, I mostly am stressing that not only is it a good idea to find the positives and negatives in things, but if you are giving any kind of review, your motives should be suspect if you don't.