Written: 7/4/2023
Reader response theory is generally not a theory that I apply to my analyses and academic work since it's usually not the best fit. I tend to work with stuff that isn't niche but isn't a blockbuster either. Not pop culture, but subculture. Typically lenses like feminist theory, queer theory, or marxist theory are more applicable.
That said, I do find the concept of an affective experience which is key to pop culture theory, and part of reader response, to be incredibly interesting and key to how I approach reviews.
When I watch video essays and reviews, I notice my favorite ones trend towards an especially subjective analysis. It's not so much an evalutation of the work, but a persuasion to the viewer to see the reviewer's love or hate for a work and come to a similar conclusion. Not to say these types of reviews lack grounded or a more objective analysis, of course. Far from it. Rather, individual and affective responses to media are centered and key to the review.
A lot of what I like about reviewing (and what led to me deleting the old reviews that weren't up to my standards) is not expressing just why a piece of media is worth examining in terms of quality, academic value, or profundity. It's also about how it produced an affective response and the details of that response.
A really good concrete example of what I'm talking about is the Action Button Boku no Natsuyasumi review. So much of that video is about the specific emotional response Tim Rogers had to the game and his complicated feelings about nostalgia, aging, memory, and childhood. He's looking at the deeply personal experience of what this game made him feel and why it did. That includes a full section of more than an hour that I would qualify as creative nonfiction or a personal essay.
I don't think I'm an exceptionally interesting person. But I do think people, and by extent the deeply personal relationships we form with media, are interesting. It's something I want to hear more about and it's something I find myself coming back to in the reviews I've made so far. It's also what I feel distinguishes my academic writing from my reviews. In academic writing, you try to avoid being personal. Stick to objective analysis, no first or second person, try not to assert yourself within the text. This isn't always so rigid and there is a practical reason for it. There's no reason to state the text is your opinion or your thoughts. The audience already knows that by virtue of it being an article with your name on it. But it leads to a very different sort of text compared to this more personal approach when it comes to reading and writing reviews. It's the difference between trying to keep something at arm's length and pick it apart versus holding it close at every step and trying to see how and why it impacted you. Neither is necessarily better or worse, but they are different. And I think it's part of what I've been trying to articulate that draws me to reviewing and what I find valuable from reviewing.
I've been considering why I keep coming back to including a section in reviews about my personal reactions to a work. What value does describing how a piece of media related to my experiences with mental health and trauma have in context of a review? That's a personal experience which, by its very nature, only I can have. I think what I've said here more or less explains what I find valuable about it. An indicator of quality and value in media is its capability to touch people and produce these sort of affective experiences. Even if a text is horribly messy or flawed, producing intense emotion in readers is itself a massive accomplishment and worth lauding. Subjectivity is perhaps the most key element to a good review.