[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by haguruma

Well no, that is not the point I was trying to make at all
What I was trying to say is that many people seem unable to seperate their personal taste and objective observations in this discussion. Both are equally valid but applicable at different points in a discussion.
Well, I'd say you got partly what I wanted to imply, which is that I think many people are trying to prove that Ryûkishi wrote a mystery the wrong way out of the wrong reasons, mainly because they didn't like his approach because of personal taste. There is nothing like a "precise will of an author", maybe an intended one, but because we are not one with the author we are bound to make up our own mind about any given text. That is the problem with contemporary criticism, it has to be valid and very well structured in order to be useful. A critic has to be very careful in making it clear where objective analysis ends and where personal taste ends. If a story fails to give a proper characterization for a bunch of characters for no given reason (like Umineko did) that can be objectively criticized, but if simply didn't like how a part of the plot turned out because of personal taste it has to be made clear because it is something that people will and are allowed to disagree on.

Well Haguruma, this begs an obvious question. How exactly you determined that the critics advanced by people like me and Renall are the result of personal tastes rather than being objective flaws?
If I say, for example, that "if there's no answer, you can't get any joy out of reading the book of riddles", on what basis you can claim that is my personal taste rather than an objective fact?

But I can go further and transpose this into a very broad level of narrative criticism.

How can you prove that the "checkov's gun" is an objective rule?
How can you prove that a "deus ex machina" is inherently wrong?
How can you prove that lack of character development is an objective flaw?

Note that these are and were frequently used by critics as a way to justify their opinions. And note that apart from the "deus ex machina" these aren't even universally agreed upon.

Originally Posted by haguruma

I'd say the two are hardly comparable, but let's try to compare them. This is my view so you're allowed to disagree.
Truth is a moral concept that is basically only accessible through language and is merely a fraction of an observation about reality reconstructed by language.
Racism is an ideology that tries to construct a social reality based on such a (though outdated) constructed truth. By todays standards the "truth" of being able to differentiate the value of people by their ethnicity has been proven false therefore racism is, by todays standards, objectively wrong.

For example you can construct the truth that "Tom was in his room from 9 to 5" because you were sitting in front of it the whole time. But it could be (though unlikely) that he went out through another way, so it is simply true for you, not necessarily reality.
The racist claim that "I am better than Tom, because I am white and he is black" relies on much more than that, because it is first linked to the necessity of constructing the socially accepted "truth" that white people are inherently better than black people. By todays standards that cannot be proven, therefore the idea falls flat from the beginning.

I say your analysis fails by the time you realize that the very reason you can detrmine that racist claims can be proved wrong is because you have access to the truth in the first place. And that makes truth an even higher value.

Racism has always been accompanied by propaganda meant to diffuse false informations on races, and if you were subjected to that propaganda and you didn't have any other source you couldn't possibly say now that racism is wrong.

At the very instant you claim that the manipulation of truth is justifiable, you create the ground for such abominations to exist. You can claim that there are different truths and some can be justifiably hidden and some cannot, but that means you are assuming that there is someone who has the right to decide what is wrong and what is right for other people. Which is by itself morally wrong.

Originally Posted by haguruma

But it can be, at least for the moment. There are definitive traits of what makes up storytelling as well as art, but again you have to differentiate between objective traits and personal taste.

I reject this notion. Human proportions done wrong can be considered a logical and valid flaw when judging a painting, and for a long time it was an uncontested rule. Then came Picasso.

There is always an inevitable degree of personal taste in judging art. Your objectivity ends where you stop stating a fact and you attribute to it a value.
"lack of realistic human proportions" for instance is an objective fact. Claiming that it's wrong or right it is not.
"Lack of character development" is an objective fact, claiming that it's wrong or right it is not.

However if a critic was limited to state the facts without attaching any value to them, critique alltogether would cease to exist.
Your claim that people are mixing personal tastes with objective facts, therefore, to me makes absolutely no sense, because it is inevitable for any critique to be based at least partially on personal tastes.

The only distinction you can make is how much "personal tastes" influenced a critic and then you can draw a line, but the place where that line should be drawn is also subjective.