haute couture

[quarrel]

I found a link to Cow Boy the other day. It’s a Western comic about a 10-year-old boy who’s gone bounty hunter against his entire abusive law-breaking family. I enjoyed it. I liked the characters. I liked the build-up of backstory. I really liked the dialogue.

I won’t say it was good. It’s not that I don’t think it was good. It’s that I have no idea. Too many times have I had my ass handed to me for saying Game X or TV Show Y is good. Such a claim is a free access pass to a floodgate of information regarding all the glaring flaws, amateurish characteristics, and artistic shortcomings you overlooked.

I’m perfectly willing and able to like something despite it being bad (q.v. Doctor Who), but I want to know it’s bad. I don’t want to discover I’ve been ignorant, or worse, that I misattributed the nature of the qualities I admired. Did I like Cow Boy because it has redeeming qualities, or did I like it because I’m a guy and it had guys and shooting and attitude and testosterone-fueled posturing? When the plot introduces a character suffering from racial harassment, is that an honest dip into more mature subject matter or just something tacked on to give the story a phony veneer of respectability? Can we expect the aggressive hero to learn that you can’t attack every problem head-on (that’s a trope, you know) or will the browbeaten victim figure out that you have to fight back against oppression (that’s a trope, you know)?

Such potential boobytraps are everywhere. Fez introduces no new tricks and few clever uses of its one old trick past the first fifteen minutes, and features “puzzles” like “solve this cryptogram”, “take a picture of the screen with your iPhone’s QR reader”, and “look at this clue with an item you can only get by winning and starting over”. Settlers of Catan follows the stock-standard game formula of a resource accumulation race, neither inventing nor innovating much of anything. The Hunger Games boasts unmemorable characters, the mere beginnings of symbolism, and a heroine who does not develop (other than learning how to kiss up) and whose accomplishments are all due to accidents or the irrational kindness of others. And on and on and on. Did I get the impression that these works were good because they are or because I’ve only ever been exposed to stuff that’s even worse?