Poetic faith
In the spirit of being vast and containing multitudes, I'm starting to develop a really defensive reflex around snobbery regarding people's artistic tastes. It's wildly hypocritical of me, because I'm still driven mad on the regs by people thinking something is good when I think it is bad.
I will not apologise for any of this.
Inevitably, when I eventually get around to watching the latest yet another Spider-Man film, I will look at the various people who insisted the MCU was good again, actually, and flail about impotently crying why is everyone stupid except me and I will not consider that to be inconsistent with the thesis of this particular newsletter.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways to love something. Whether that thing is horror movies or musicals or cats or the colour green. You either love them selectively, or universally.
You're either a Cat Person™ and are, by default, devoted to every cat who has ever or will ever lived, or you're a fan of some specific cats because they're just particularly cool guys.
When it comes to fiction, whether film or theatre or literature or whatever, there are people who love a particular genre whatever it throws at them. People who'll watch any horror film that comes up and have a great time because they're just broadly there for it. And people who'll watch any horror film that comes up because they're always looking for great horror and they're willing to put time into a whole lot of bad horror to find it.
I am not a universal fan of anything. I hate more musicals than I love and I love musical theatre. I love it because when it's good it's fucking transcendent and it makes me so sad when something that can be genuinely, overwhelmingly wonderful is only mediocre.
This only occasionally upsets me. I think it's good to be discerning. But it's also a bummer being the only person on a girls' night out to Mamma Mia who isn't having a good time, for example. I can't even fake it! Despite being, honestly, a very good actor, I'm extremely bad at hiding my feelings in real life, so I ruin everyone's nice time without trying!
You can call this dichotomy differences of taste or expectation or attitude, but I think it comes down to what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called poetic faith or what is more commonly known as suspension of disbelief.