Quote:
Originally Posted by stray
I think a problem that you're overlooking here is that fandoms can be myopic and subject to a lot of groupthink where its decided that a work is "better" than its genre (harem, power fantasy, etc.) or maybe even more often its demographic (its dark so it can't be shonen!) even if that opinion is outside what the general anime community thinks. And I still think its on the more "knowledgeable" party to not take someone else's opinion personally, because once a stupid argument breaks out other people tune out. Case in point:
[...]
So I'm still of the opinion that a recommendation thread is not the place for someone's "perspective" no matter what the circumstances, and no one really owes anyone anything for a recommendation to begin with.
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On the contrary, a recommendation thread is
entirely about getting the perspectives of others. It's not like there's some sort of objective standard by which we can neatly place things into categories that everyone will agree with. As we clearly showed here, even asking "is this a harem anime or not?" or "is the protagonist overpowered or not?" can have different answers. Things that one party considers "black-and-white" another may consider a matter of degrees. When people have different perspectives you have misunderstandings. You can't engineer a circumstance in an open discussion where these kinds of different perspectives are just going to go away.
The important thing is for people to properly explain themselves. And yes, sometimes the person speaking maybe an extreme fan just parroting rhetoric and can't make a convincing argument -- you quickly learn whose opinions to ignore. But even "groupthink" is rarely as uniform as you think -- fans of a given work will themselves get into arguments about these sorts of things. It may be that the person asking does not want to get into a "debate" about the finer nuance and just want a clear-cut answer (or people may consider this kind of debate a "stupid argument"), but by knowing there is nuance here is a good lesson learned: it means you need to be more clear and precise to avoid misunderstandings and derailing.
In other words, if you ask fans of a work if it can accurately be given a label that some consider a sort of pejorative, you can expect pushback. So if you want a better answer, you need to ask a better question. They're the ones asking for the recommendation after all, so the onus is on them if they want to get a useful reply.
(To the point of this thread, did the thread starter consider the fact that maybe the people involved
weren't lying and were sincere in their beliefs due to a difference in perspective? Or is this just "go to another forum, bash anonymous fanboys elsewhere, and everyone has a good chuckle at how biased fanboys are"? If it's the latter, why the hell should we allow an attack thread like that on this site where we don't have any evidence and the accused can't speak for themselves? Absent all the evidence, you have to give people the benefit of the doubt. If we want to have a serious discussion about how groupthink can bias a fanbase, we certainly can, but I question the loaded premise here. Accusing someone of "blatantly lying" is flamebait, at the very least.)