All being well, I'll have a review of Make Your Mark up here tomorrow.
Some while back, a friend made an interesting point to me. They mentioned that, in another of their interests outside My Little Pony, people held shows at which they demonstrated what they'd created. It would, said my friend, feel pretty weird if someone went around such a show giving star ratings (or something of the kind) to each person's creation. So why is it common for ponyfic to use rated reviews?
I think I have an answer to this, although it's not a perfect one. That answer is time. Consider this: you often get rated reviews for albums, but you hardly ever do for individual songs. It's common for art exhibitions, but rare for a single painting. Film and computer game reviews generally carry ratings, whereas you don't see this for adverts even if they're very popular (for the UK, think the John Lewis ads every Christmas).
All the things I've mentioned take a considerable investment of time on the part of the consumer. Although someone really into art would say that a good picture can repay many hours of study, most people will decide whether they like a drawing in a few seconds – and if not, they can move straight on to something else. But if you want to watch a film, that's going to mean spending a couple of hours of your time on that one thing.
The same applies to ponyfic. Sure, a very short story can be consumed in a few minutes – though even that's longer than it takes to glance at a photo – but at an average reading speed a medium-short fic of say 20,000 words is going to take you at least an hour to get through, and a 100,000-word novel will take five or six hours. That's a considerable investment on the reader's part, even if (as is likely) they're already well disposed towards the general subject of MLP.
If you're physically present at an exhibition on a theme you're interested in, then you can walk around and scan the displays, getting a good idea very fast of which ones you might want to take more time on, for example to speak to the creator. That's not nearly as easy for ponyfic, since you only have the description, genre tags and cover art to go on. Hence the extra help that ratings can give.
As an aside, this means that having several active reviewers is a particularly good thing, since you're not beholden to one person's opinion. With the smaller fandom these days there aren't many of us regular reviewers left, and so Mike Cartoon Pony's entry into the arena a few months ago was particularly welcome. Anyway, there you have it: a significant reason for ratings is that ponyfic is time-consuming, for readers as well as authors.
yep! :D
ReplyDeleteIndeedy. Reviews and ratings, while running the risk of simplifying something usually far more valuable than themselves, are desired for being an (ideally) fair and truthful evaluation of its quality. Long as a person knows not to rely on one reviewer, and gets a feel the style of those they like so they know which of their opinions is likely to align with one's, you're laughing.
ReplyDeleteMe, I do often check whether Present Perfect or PaulAsaran have rated/reviewed a fic (thank goodness for their review archives – need to make one of those myself), sometimes to decide whether to read it at all, otherwise out of curiosity after I've written my own review. A variety of opinions is good, innit?
Having just started in on a very long fic that I would have skipped based on the description, and finding it entirely wonderful, I absolutely agree with you. If not for multiple reviewers all giving The Silver Standard strong recommendations, I would have missed out.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, rather oddly, I find that one reviewer raving about a fic is less an indicator of whether or not I'll enjoy it than many reviewers giving it a solid second place.
I wold also add that giving a rating is just a more formalized way of doing something that already occurs naturally in many fora, the type of show your friend mentioned included. And that's consumer response. One manifestation of that is leaving comments on a story, on a DA art piece, or whatever. They may not give a rating explicitly, but it's in the same spirit. And so is just looking at how many people are crowded around a booth at an exhibition.
ReplyDelete