| Garcian Smith said: There is nothing mature or thoughtful about Naruto or DBZ. Nor do either tell anything close to a great story. They're cartoon shows marketed to young teens and designed to sell action figures and other merch. Also, that comment about the value and merit of a story is bollocks. If I write a story with the intention that it be the worst story ever, and succeed, does my story have value on par with a Nabokov novel? |
Reductio ad absurdum arguments only work when you are taking the entirety of a statement into consideration. My original point is that stories can fill out different niches according to different intents and still be excellent undner a given set of criteria.
Let's ignore, for the moment, that there's no such thing as an objective standard of quality when it comes to the arts, and absolute statements of quality have to be taken as intrinsically absurd, following that. We can ignore that, right? I hope so, because we have been so far!
All right, let's take an example here... Hell, let's use Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball is a series made primarily for kids, taken as a (very) loose adaptation of The JOurney to the West. On the other hand, let's take another good TV show... we'll say The Wire.
Is Dragon Ball as good as The Wire? Probably not. But it is a much better children's show.
The same logic can be used for stories in almost any medium. Gears of War may not have a grand and meaningful narrative but it's a damn good romp about shooting things and also blowing things up.
