I. Critical Expression as a Problem: White, Hyouka, and the Commander

Aspires to be someone who gets people off.

A heads-up: the Chinese original runs to 8,300 characters. Set aside some time to read it.

In today’s Chinese-language online communities, popular anime criticism tends to share certain expressions. When we want to praise a work’s characterization, for instance, we often call its characters “vivid.” When we want to criticize a character’s inexplicable actions, we often call those actions “illogical.” When we want to praise the themes a work presents, we often call it “very profound” or “thought-provoking,” and so on. These are only expressions in the narrow sense. More broadly, critical expression need not mean particular words alone: it can also include ways of writing criticism, critical perspectives, evaluative standards, and much else.

Although critical expression in this latter sense sometimes comes closer to serious literary theory, my subject is, fortunately, popular anime criticism in online communities. I probably will not need to venture too far into these larger questions. Under the pretentiously intellectual title Anime Metacriticism, this article turns its attention to the texts of popular anime criticism themselves. In other words, it aims to make the language of these texts—especially their widely used terms—a subject of inquiry.

How Many Kinds of “Vivid” Are There?

Color terms have long attracted attention in fields including linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. To take a simple example, research into color terms might be framed as a question: just how many kinds of “white” are there? Some early anthropological studies claimed that Eskimo languages had dozens of words describing “white.” Although many flaws in these studies have recently been pointed out, they at least suggest a possibility: the Chinese word bai (“white”) and the English word “white” need not refer to the same color in the RGB color model. Nor is this just a problem of translation between languages. Even when you and I both say “white,” we may not be referring to the same RGB color—think of those discussions of lipstick shades that crop up on social media. We can even imagine a technology capable of making further distinctions within a single RGB color. Two designer friends might both choose #FFFFFF for their work, yet some ingenious technology could reveal that they had actually used different colors.

The point of this example is that the same situation can arise with the terms of anime criticism. Take “vivid,” mentioned at the beginning. When a critic writes, “This work creates very vivid characters,” how far does the critic’s understanding of “vivid” coincide with the reader’s? How does this particular writer understand the word? How is it generally understood within a loose community of anime critics? How does this writer’s readership generally understand it? How does a particular reader understand it? And how would it be understood in the most scrupulously precise kind of writing? In this sense, then, we can reasonably ask a similar question: how many kinds of “vivid” are there?

If this is indeed a reasonable question, it leads us into a difficulty. Since many expressions—if not all—have this vagueness, a critic and a reader are very likely to understand the same critical expression differently. We can readily imagine a critic writing, “This work/scene/shot creates a vivid character.” Without further clarification, the reader’s idea of what makes that character “vivid” may differ from the idea the critic has left unstated.

Yet in practice this difficulty does not seem to arise, at least as far as common sense tells us. If we do not want to abandon our common-sense confidence in anime criticism, we must answer the following question:

(P) When an anime critic writes, “This work/scene/shot creates a vivid character,” how can the reader understand what the critic means?

Agreement about Criticism’s Purpose

Before addressing P, we need to explain what our “common-sense confidence” in anime criticism actually means. This bears on a much-discussed question in anime metacriticism: what is criticism’s purpose or value? Different views of its purpose determine whether P really exists as a problem, and to what extent.

“Common-sense confidence” here does not mean confidence in any particular critic or piece of criticism. In everyday life, we often think a critic is biased, or that a review reveals its author’s shallowness and ignorance. We would put no trust at all in such critics or reviews. What I mean is that, generally speaking, we tend to think “anime criticism,” as a kind of creative work, has some value or function. It can offer normative descriptions, accounts, interpretations, and so forth of anime itself: that a work is a “masterpiece” or “shit anime,” that it displays brilliant animation, that it tells a good story, and so on. Rankings are probably the clearest example. When people defend a beloved anime on social media or seek agreement about it, they often appeal to one ranking or another. These might come from rating sites open to anyone who registers, small online communities, or even the collective opinion of a work’s core audience.

We may each have different views about the details of this normative function. Broadly speaking, some think criticism matters because it gives anime fans detailed guidance; some think its real value lies in helping people appreciate a work’s appeal more deeply; others think it should aim to persuade those who disagree. On a more specific level—identifying and defining a “good work,” for instance—some endorse “Trust the media when the score is high; trust yourself when it’s low.” Others lean toward “Anything that sells well must have something going for it.” Some even believe that “The low-rated works on such-and-such a site are the good ones.” In general, though, we agree that criticism can, under ideal conditions, perform this normative function. The constant appearance of all sorts of rating platforms bears witness to that tacit agreement.

From the critic’s perspective, acknowledging this normative function means making an assumption about purpose when writing criticism. It must be said, of course, that some critics write solely to amuse themselves. They do not seek, in any sense, to have their criticism accomplish anything beyond that amusement. For them, the difficulty raised by P does not exist: they do not even expect anyone to read their reviews. For the great majority of critics, however, there is an agreement about criticism’s purpose. To some degree, they hope to convey something about anime to their readers and thereby fulfill criticism’s normative function. The clearest example is the view that criticism should “test and evaluate” anime. Its advocates believe that, even if critics cannot be neutral and objective, they have a responsibility and a duty to approach anime as they would an electronic product under review: first provide a comprehensive, thorough account, then make qualitative judgments on that basis, offering viewers useful advice.

To show that this agreement about purpose also applies to less typical cases, I quote below from **Zhong Zimo—Teacher Zhong!—**and his Zhihu column essay “[A Digression] Some Thoughts and Clarifications on Anime and Manga Criticism.” I think the methodological position expressed here, though hardly mainstream among anime critics, still presupposes a fairly loose agreement:

My wish, then, is to work toward understanding how cultural products interact with the environments beyond them. My view of audiences and readers is (not) terribly pessimistic. Rather than seeking a structuralist analysis, I would prefer to work out how we respond. … There is also a hidden agreement in our discussion: we all share an unwavering commitment to cultural liberation. Even as we call viewers a “trash audience,” we still presuppose an “ideal viewer.” What matters especially is how to help people recognize this power, reflect on the circumstances they inhabit, and exercise their agency. Perhaps this requires us to rein in our use of critical theory for now and return to Weber’s “interpretive understanding” and an “ethnomethodology” of anime, manga, and game communities. Rather than simply catering to the public’s idea of “ideal anime criticism,” we would redefine criticism from within and establish a new paradigm for it.

In this passage, Zhong Zimo regards it as possible for anime criticism to pursue a normative function. His position is atypical because, unlike the “test and evaluate” approach, it largely does not focus on giving an account of anime itself from a particular perspective. It is more concerned with reflecting on the relationship between viewers’ circumstances and the work. Even here, however, his argument clearly accepts the agreement about purpose: anime criticism should “help people recognize this power, reflect on the circumstances they inhabit, and exercise their agency.”

3. The Problem of Metaphor in Critical Expression

This agreement about criticism’s purpose lets us agree that P is a problem. If we acknowledge together that criticism should fulfill its normative function by conveying something to readers, we must confront this problem of communicating meaning: P: How can readers understand what a critic expresses in words?

Any discussion of the communication of meaning inevitably touches on linguistic disputes that have run through the past several decades. Those disputes are best left to trouble the theorists. Here, I hope to clarify and explain these questions with anime criticism itself in view, showing how closely they bear on the writing of criticism. The important issue, then, is what standard we need to adopt in addressing the problem.

There are several possibilities:

1. A standard based on cognitive science. Setting the bar too high would effectively dissolve the problem. Suppose, for instance, that every time any reader understood the sentence “This character is vivid,” we required an explanation of the relevant correlations in terms of cognitive neuroscience. Addressing the problem would then be impossible, because we still lack agreement on how to locate the mind within the natural world.

2. An interpretive standard based on theories from the humanities and social sciences. This would be considerably more permissive, yet still seems too demanding. Most of the anime criticism discussed here consists of relatively informal writing by individuals on online platforms. Viewed through serious theory, these texts might either offer little worth discussing or invite excessively strained interpretations.

3. An empirical standard involving concrete methods such as statistical analysis and questionnaires. Yet, as with the difficulties confronting naturalized methodologies in the social sciences, this approach by itself usually cannot give us an effective understanding of “understanding.” This standard is also too demanding. Anime criticism, and the ways people understand it, are highly diverse; there is no need to disregard some of those aspects.

Author’s note 1. Not adopting these perspectives here does not mean they are unnecessary at the level of anime metacriticism. They are all highly valuable and important. Investigation from the perspective of cognitive science, in particular, could offer a possible naturalized foundation for anime criticism and even for anime creation itself.

I will therefore introduce metaphor as a theoretical tool. Metaphor and anime criticism share certain key features. Fundamentally, human language is metaphorical in a great many respects; in many areas, we would not even know how to speak without metaphor. As Ernst Cassirer writes in An Essay on Man: “Language is, by its very nature and essence, metaphorical.” He goes on to say that language cannot describe things directly and must instead describe them indirectly, using words with uncertain and multiple meanings.¹ The contemporary consensus is that metaphor is not merely a rhetorical device: it has long been inseparable from everyday language and performs an irreplaceable cognitive function. It is widely used even in scientific language, which strives for precision of description. Since anime criticism is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, expressed through language, it too is metaphorical at a fundamental level.

There are, of course, considerable difficulties in identifying and defining metaphor. But we can at least say that anime criticism, too, very often describes something through nonliteral expressions, without using explicit comparison markers such as “like,” “as if,” “as,” or “as though.” Metaphor does not reach things directly; nor does anime criticism give a direct account of anime itself. Each involves an implicit leap, and this is what creates the difficulty of communicating meaning.

Author’s note 2. I have not discussed how particular critical terms are metaphorical. That would require extensive etymological research, which I am not equipped to undertake. On the basis of many existing examples, however, we might conjecture that shengdong (“vivid”) is also metaphorical. Perhaps the word originally described only the postures of living things and was later extended to describe things “resembling living things,” thus incorporating a metaphor.

This allows us to set an extremely low threshold for addressing the problem: we assume that all anime criticism has already succeeded in its purpose. On the one hand, it has successfully used language to give some account of anime itself; on the other, it has successfully used language to convey that account to readers. Its formulations may, however, be abbreviated. The only things we can be certain of are these two successes. It is like a geometry exercise whose answer says “Proof omitted.” We know the proof is possible, but working out its actual steps requires effort on our part. Likewise, to discover how these reviews communicate meaning, we must try to “fill in” their “abbreviated” texts. Interpreting metaphor is, one might say, a very ancient methodological approach.

For convenience, let us focus on some of the most typical examples. In these, the critic wants an orderly argument to bring readers to agree with an opinion, particularly a judgment about whether a work, or some part of it, is good or bad.

Filling In Critical Expressions: Case Studies

Author’s note: To avoid causing unnecessary trouble for particular critics, I have rewritten some existing passages of anime criticism and have not identified their sources. I intend neither praise nor blame of these passages themselves, and express no approval or disapproval of any particular review. I offer these critics my respect, and apologize for any problems this may cause.

Having established our standard for addressing P, let us first consider criticism of works widely recognized as good. Hyouka is one such work, though its merits have received many different interpretations. Here I will sketch how we might “fill in” some of these reviews.

R1: Hyouka offers an almost perfect demonstration of how to tell a mystery story based entirely on “everyday life.” What we see in Hyouka consists solely of the small things that happen in everyday school life: an occasional announcement over the school speakers, stories from old issues of the Classics Club’s journal, even nothing more than a change in relationships within a small circle. These little things might seem unimportant to anyone. Yet Hyouka ingeniously incorporates them into a framework of deduction and puzzle-solving, revealing everyday life’s distinctive appeal.

R2: Hyouka holds its audience through the depth of its reflection. It concerns itself with little things, but as your thoughts follow the protagonists deeper into their encounters, you discover that the story beneath this unremarkable exterior is anything but dull. Stories from the era of student protests, the injustice of talent versus effort, the many concerns of youth: the stories under each theme leave as deep a mark on us as on the characters. Hyouka’s greatest achievement lies in characters such as Chitanda and Oreki. The more ordinary these characters seem at first, the more alive they are.

Both passages discuss Hyouka’s excellent portrayal of the everyday. The difference is that R1 emphasizes how the work discovers the appeal of everyday life, whereas R2 emphasizes the characters’ appeal: its depictions of everyday life create characters who feel “alive.” Each passage is only a short extract from its original review, but this is enough for our case studies.

How should we fill in R1? At its core is “the appeal of everyday life” as presented in Hyouka. The best way to explain that appeal may be a detailed shot-by-shot analysis, identifying exactly which parts of the anime convey it and how. Episode 19, “Does Anyone Have Any Idea?,” for example, is a relatively self-contained story and particularly well suited to this approach. We can enumerate its outstanding depictions of everyday life, then discuss how they are brought together within a relatively complete mystery-story framework. Finally, we can explain just how these features allow us to experience the work’s appeal.

The procedure for filling in R2 is similar. We might, for example, take Hotaro Oreki as our subject. From the beginning, “energy conservation” is his defining watchword. Drawing on our knowledge of the whole series, our aim would be to explain how Oreki comes to feel “alive” through repeatedly violating his own “energy-saving” principle, and how this gives him appeal as a character. We can examine every movement, expression, and line of dialogue, the various elements of his surroundings, and the ways he interacts with them. By analyzing and interpreting these in turn, we can explain what character traits emerge from them. Finally, we need to explain how these traits, when attributed to Hotaro Oreki, make his portrayal fit the description “alive,” and what sort of appeal that portrayal has.

We can also use this method of filling in to address criticism of controversial works. Take the famous death of Commander Orga in Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans:

R3: Commander Orga’s death feels extremely abrupt within the story. That is not to say a protagonist should never die like a nobody. Gai Daigoji dies just such a death in Martian Successor Nadesico, and that scene brings out life’s fragility and absurdity. Orga likewise dies a nobody’s death, but it bizarrely adds a long-winded speech at death’s door. Combined with the second season’s already brain-dead plot, the way the scene is directed makes it laugh-out-loud funny.

R3 discusses the comedy produced when Orga’s death, taken as a whole, fails to achieve a tragic effect. Our task in filling it in is therefore to analyze the characters, setting, events, and their relationships in this sequence, along with the disappointing aspects of the second season’s story. We would thereby explain clearly what this “laugh-out-loud” comedy is and how it arises and takes effect.

Following this line of thought, we can bridge the gap in communicating meaning, at least to some extent, by finding concrete details in the anime to flesh out the argument. We can thus give a clearer, more definite interpretation of the criticism itself, answering P: readers understand the meaning of “This work/scene/shot creates a vivid character” through a process of filling in concrete particulars. It makes no difference whether readers perform this process in their own minds or the author supplies it, or whether it is reflected upon in an explicit text or experienced as an intuition.

There are, however, two problems with this method. The first concerns breaking an anime down for analysis. Can we reduce the appeal of a whole episode to our understanding of its individual shots and the relationships between them? More generally: (p1) Is there some atomic basic unit such that discussing these units and their relationships can help clarify the view expressed in a piece of anime criticism? We can imagine arriving, through painstaking shot-by-shot analysis, at an understanding of the technical details of every shot: its handling, its presentation of information, the intention behind it. But is that already enough to understand a critic’s judgments of “good anime” and “shit anime”?

The other problem is: (p2) What does “appeal” actually mean to the reader of a review? This is unquestionably a highly context-dependent question. From certain well-known critics within small circles, we often hear that an anime’s appeal may lie in magnificent, startling direction, or in an engrossing story. This already acknowledges that the concept of “appeal” can be diverse. Yet a division into just two kinds remains too broad. The appeal of direction and the appeal of story can each be subdivided into countless further categories. Some like fight animation in which every punch lands with weight; others like effects that amount to “light pollution.” Some prefer ingeniously constructed mysteries; others prefer themes of world-spanning grandeur. Nor do these two areas exhaust what “appeal” means for an audience, as the proliferation of genre anime shows. Super Robot Wars players will weep nostalgic tears over old-school robot anime. Even in more ordinary circumstances, we hear of people dropping Accel World because they dislike its male lead.

Can Anime Criticism Be Naturalistic?

These case studies suggest that we should also discuss the deeper foundations of anime criticism as a literary genre. The first problem, p1, is actually a question of constitution. Similar questions arise wherever a discussion crosses levels: microscopic particles and macroscopic objects, cells and organisms, individuals and society. Unlike their scientific counterparts, the “basic units” of p1 are basic only from the critic’s perspective. Units that help clarify an opinion exist here solely at the methodological level. In audiovisual works such as anime, “basic units” that genuinely have a prior status comparable to microscopic particles are more likely to be the shots planned during production.

The second problem, p2, points to criticism’s dependence on context. This ought to be common sense, but is often overlooked. Some critics think a work’s “goodness” or “badness” is obvious; their reviews merely point out the fact clearly. Viewers who fail to see it can only be inexperienced or poor judges of anime. Even critics who are more tolerant of disagreement overlook this point, consciously or otherwise, in their formulations: under what circumstances can “This work/scene/shot creates a vivid character” be better explained?

Unfortunately, some critics do not recognize these two questions as legitimate. When opinion about a work is relatively uniform, their response is that dissenters merely “like/dislike this work”; this does not mean it is “actually” good or bad. These critics seem tacitly to treat “This work/scene/shot creates a vivid character” as a fact comparable to “Today’s temperature is 15°C.” Any anomalies can simply be attributed to “personal preference.” They even do this with anomalies in their own experience: “Although I really like this anime, in all fairness it’s very ordinary.” This is a very strange thing to say. If the point of the critical framework behind anime criticism is to explain a work’s appeal or lack of appeal, why, once someone has experienced its appeal, should they insist on using an evaluative framework that does nothing to explain it?

The commitments behind these two problems happen to resemble certain aspects of contemporary naturalism. In very broad terms, the naturalist program holds that the things recognized by the empirical sciences—including the humanities and social sciences—are the only things that truly exist, and that the answers these sciences offer are the best answers to all questions about the world. In explaining particular matters, naturalism often appeals to constitution: in principle, for example, the macroscopic world should be explained in terms of microscopic particles. In describing things, it appeals to the universality of descriptions: “Today’s temperature is 15°C,” for instance, is in principle the same for everyone. These two features resemble the commitments implicit in p1 and p2. Whether that resemblance is pure coincidence or reflects an underlying connection is something we do not yet know.

It would be very peculiar if anime criticism rested on a typically naturalistic foundation. As our discussion of its agreed purpose has shown, criticism is intrinsically committed to realizing some normative value, whereas normative facts are often regarded as an illusion within a naturalistic outlook. The empirical sciences can explain “Why is today’s temperature 15 degrees?” but cannot explain “Why is Hyouka a good work?” It is difficult to give “good work” an appropriate definition within the empirical sciences. Naturalizing anime criticism would therefore seem difficult.

This does not mean, however, that criticism cannot be reconciled with naturalism. One route would be to transform criticism. For empirical research, we could define a “good work” as “a work approved of by the great majority.” We could then explain “Hyouka is a good work” by saying “The great majority agree that Hyouka is a good work.” But “good work” would no longer mean what we currently take it to mean. “Approval by the great majority” may be correlated with “having the appeal to move people,” but the term would no longer necessarily mean that the work has an appeal capable of moving us. Another route would be to bring construction into the naturalistic framework. Clearly, “good work” can be anchored to a universalized standard. But that standard is not a measurable parameter possessed by a natural entity; it is the result of a process of construction in which viewers participate. John Searle’s theory of social construction offers excellent theoretical resources for putting this approach into practice. In this sense, we should instead understand “good work” as follows: critic R, in a particular context C, regards anime A as a good work. Naturalized anime criticism should then devote itself to plural, contextual interpretations and reconstructions of this “good work.”

6. Summary

Rather than reaching conclusions, this article has kept raising questions. Nor do these questions form a system. They simply show that, at the level of anime metacriticism, critical expression itself offers abundant subjects for discussion. Still, it is worth retracing the argument for the reader.

Section 1 discussed the possible ambiguity and vagueness of critical terms, leading to P: when an anime critic writes, “This work/scene/shot creates a vivid character,” how can the reader understand what the critic means? Section 2 discussed the agreement among critics about criticism’s purpose: it should convey something about anime to readers in order to fulfill its normative function. This agreement means that P exists as a problem for the great majority of critics. Section 3 considered possible standards for addressing P and introduced metaphor and “filling in” metaphor as a way to approach it. In section 4, I attempted to answer P by filling in two kinds of critical examples. These case studies raised two possible problems in the filling-in process, both of which arise in a great deal of anime criticism. Finally, section 5 briefly compared anime criticism with naturalistic positions and attempted to suggest possible theoretical approaches to a naturalized criticism.

Author’s note: For reasons of space, I have only briefly discussed the relationship between anime criticism and naturalism here. It is a fascinating question, however, and I will explore it in a separate article when the opportunity arises.

Editor’s Note

Typos and faulty sentences in the Zhihu version have been corrected. This article looks difficult to read at first glance, but it is not actually hard to understand.

Further Reading

Companion reading: How Is (Anime) Criticism Possible? A “Stranger’s” Perspective