User blog:Xilinoc/Reviewing Style

Okay, well...here goes. The blog post I've been holding off on making for some time now.

So I'm sure many people have noticed a severe contrast between the tone of my reviews and the tone of a large portion of the comments on them. I'm also sure many people have wondered why exactly my reviews are almost always entirely positive while rarely criticizing anything. This blog is meant to explain the reasons behind the positive tone of my reviews.

Foreword
By doing this, I don't mean to assert that the way I review chapters is the only way to do so, nor do I intend to label the opinions of other as worthless because they're not the same as my own. That said, let's start with reason #1.

#1: Bleach is a Manga, not a Movie or Book
That may not make much sense right off the bat, so allow me to explain. A movie or book has a lot, and I mean A LOT of time put into it - usually at least a year. The end result is something that the producer usually got to put everything they wanted into. Bleach, however, is a weekly manga - Kubo has a week to decide what will be in the chapter and make it fit in there. On top of that, a movie or book can display an exceedingly large amount of content in one go because they have 120 minute/300 page to do so. The average Bleach chapter, on the other hand, is usually 17-20 pages, or about 8 minutes of an anime episode. That's not exactly a lot when you get down to it. It'd be great if we could go back to having 30-page chapters, but that's highly unlikely. My point of this reason is I don't criticize Kubo for not putting in something that I wanted to be in there because I'm well aware of the constraints of his work.

#2: This is Kubo's Story, not Mine
I'm sure you've heard this argument before, but this is my side of it. This is Kubo's story to tell, and while I'm aware he writes on the go and whatnot, the style of Bleach is his style. I can't really say "oh, this should have been done like this" because Kubo intentionally chose to make something go the way it does. Tying in with the above point, it's fair to criticize movies and books for not doing something or for doing something wrong because they had a lot of time and much more space to do so - and the critic usually knows how to make a good movie - but manga is different because it's a serialized, usually weekly story that can't get to everything it wants in each chapter. On top of that, I highly doubt I could make Bleach a better series than it currently is. Not to say it's perfect, but my storytelling skill is paltry and would probably wreck the series, hence why I don't say "I would've done this" and take what I can get.

#3. Hindsight is 20/20
My third and final reason that ties into the above two is that we can only really point out what actually went wrong in hindsight. When the series is over and all is said and done, that's when we can say "this should have been done/omitted" because we know there won't be any more content coming. In the present, however, Kubo has his own pace at which he reveals things, and while it's erratic, it's his own. Something that we wanted to see in one chapter might be put in the next because Kubo though it was more fitting there/had to deal with space constraints. For movies and books, all of the content the producer wanted to include is usually in there, so we can safely point out what should have been added/taken out. But, once again, Bleach is different because we're only getting weekly snippets of the story, so we don't know if what we want will be included next chapter or in 20 chapters.

Wrap-Up
I'd like to state once again that these are my personal reasons for the way I review - I'm not trying to assert that anyone else is wrong for not liking the content in a chapter or the current direction of the story. I just feel the need to explain why I rarely criticize the chapters in my reviews. Also, for those of you who may have though the positive tones of my reviews stemmed from people criticizing the exceedingly negative tones of Godisme's reviews...no, not at all. I welcome constructive criticism, especially on something like this.