User blog comment:RemidoDosol/Subjective Standpoints: The Raildex Animes/@comment-17714224-20140516155009

   I had an interesting thought the other day and it started wen I decided to read several different reviews online of the Raildex animes in an atttempt to see other people’s opinions of the Raildex animes. I had realized something that I thought was very interesting between all of them. (Keep in my that most of these reviews of to which I am referring to were made with the prior lack of reading the LNs and only seeing the first season of each series due to how long it took to get licensed) What I had noticed was that there seemed to be a rather big divide on the opinions of which is better, no big surprise but what was interesting was the nature of the reasonings. The people who said they liked Railgun better than Index and the people who liked Index over Railgun seemed to have the same reasons just for the other show. For example people who had reviewed and admitted to liking Railgun over Index made the argument that Railgun had a good, intriguing, and well thought out story. And Index had a boring, incoherent plot with no direction in the story. But the people who preferred Index said much of the same thing but in reverse Index had a good intriguing story with a well thought out plot. Railgun was boring, with no direction or purpose to keep it going, the exact opposite conclusion using the same reasoning for the other show.

Strangely enough, what was even more interesting was the sheer consistency behind this, almost everyone went into one of these two beliefs; generally different critics have different opinions and with different reasons behind them, with only a few stating the opposite opinions with the same reasoning. But the pattern was way too consistent, even the details behind the reasonings they would give seemed to be relatively the same. This was seriously sending mixed messages, especially for those who bothered to read more than one review trying to see rather or not they should watch it.

So I thought to myself why is that and is there more reasoning to these consistently contradictory points of view beyond personal preference? Is there something about the animes themselves that leave such completely different but yet completely consistent interpretations of the quality of writing? Is there something about only watching the first season of both animes and not knowing any source material and having no clue what the series is going for, outside of a prepackaged summery and the comparison to the other. And the more I thought about it the more I began to think there was indeed a lot more to it. There was in fact a few easily explained misconceptions of interpretation that could lead to such understandably different results. But what does everybody else think? What is it about the animes that can get people to create such a consistent gap in criticizing the show for the exact reasons that others have criticized the other anime?