How to like art

October 14th, 2025

Diabolik Lovers (2013)

In my time reading what other media critics have to say, one fundamental aspect of media is often missing from their analysis. Critics get so caught up in the pursuit of determining what the most compelling art is that they forget to stop and think about how people engage with art. What do people care about when they are looking for an anime to watch, for instance? It might be easy for a critic to think people simply don't care about quality, but the fact is that even critics are subject to the same whims of the average audience member. My thesis is that there are two ways to like art, and that understanding these two differences is necessary for any critic to be fully versed in a work.

Quality vs. Appeal

The role of a critic is to determine the overall quality of a work. A well-versed critic will use their knowledge of a medium to determine and argue for how a piece of media compares to its contemporaries. The nature of this work presents a problem, however. Due to this desire to determine the quality of art, critics already place themselves firmly into a single way of thinking. The art a critic likes is that which is the most compelling in its medium, the art that can be staunchly argued for as raising the bar. For anime, this would be in terms of animation, directing, storytelling, etc.

When these critics encounter an anime that has become incredibly popular despite its shortcomings and lack of depth, this contradicts their entire mission. Why don't all viewers like the most compelling anime? Why do so many viewers seem to prefer anime that doesn't measure up to others in its genre or time period? The obvious answer is appeal. The reason I bring up anime in particular is that anime thrives on marketing to a niche. Creators often heavily rely on tropes to appeal to potential audience members who are looking for more iterations on their favorite ideas. Oftentimes this can result in incredibly low-quality projects, with stories that say very little and are built entirely to satisfy a particular kind of person.

This highlights two general factors in why people choose to engage with art. Is it good, and does it appeal to me? Appeal is a very broad term, encompassing a number of potential feelings. Relatability, interest, and fantasy all play a factor. Diabolik Lovers is an anime adaptation of the otome game series of the same name. It features a young female protagonist named Yui who arrives in a mansion inhabited by a number of vampire brothers. In the anime, this manifests as a reverse harem, where every route of the visual novel is combined into one so the viewer can see Yui's interactions with every boy in the cast. The plot is only serviceable, the animation is simple and reused, the art is nothing to write home about, and the entire conceit of the show is a thinly-veiled excuse to shove fanservice of your favorite characters into every episode. It's also one of my favorite shoujo series of all time.

The reason for this is easy for me to explain. As a young woman who is often down on her luck, I can relate to Yui and how she tries to deal with her outrageous and often terrifying circumstances. Gothic horror and vampires are certainly interests of mine. Finally, the fantasy of being surrounded by a bunch of people who know exactly how to fluster me and confront me with it constantly is so appealing to me that I can't lie about it. All of these factors and the situation in which I found the show far outweigh any argument about the quality of the production. It so strongly targeted the specific appeal of people like me that it would have to be produced so badly I could hardly look at it for me to care about its quality.

Synthesis

Appeal is just as important of a factor in someone's enjoyment of a work as its quality, and it's imperative to examine why a work appeals to so many people despite its quality. This can bring up far more interesting conversations about a work such as the context of the time and place in which it exists. I see this as the endgame of media criticism and analysis, where we can fully understand not just a piece of art in isolation, but also the context surrounding it and the people who enjoy it. Additionally, bringing more attention to the personal appeal of art can introduce us to bigger questions, such as what we should be choosing to include in our art as a society. As a woman who has to look harder for relatable female perspectives in media, I'm all too familiar with this idea. What an artist decides to portray in their art is just as important as how well they produce it.

With this knowledge, perhaps critics could also begin to examine why they uphold certain works over others.