Top 5 Guilty Pleasures

A guilty pleasure is different from something that you think is good but is unpopular. A guilty pleasure is something you enjoy but recognize serious problems in. It's opposite is something that you dislike but respect, in my view. 

I don't...how to put this, if someone gives a principle of their enjoyment, a rule, and then says they dislike something I like because it follows or contradicts that rule then to me that's very understandable. 

However when someone says they don't like something I like for things I don't view as legitimate points about the work, I become irrationally annoyed. I also do with works I don't like. I do not like Revolutionary Girl Utena, but I have seen people criticize it for reasons that are irrational and similarly got highly annoyed. 

With that said, there are definite things that are "flaws" or otherwise points that people in general dislike that I simply don't mind very much that appear in some of my favorite works. Examples:

1: Corniness: Stuff like the power of love, the power of hope, the power of friendship or positive thinking or eating your vegetables...I really don't mind these kind of themes. If anything, I'm kind of a saccharine person, I like works with sweet awwwwww moments, that wallow in idealism and optimism. If you are the type to mentally gag at ultra-sweetness and cuteness then yeah I can understand not liking some of my favorite stuff. 

2: Preachyness: A lot of my favorite works I will completely admit are very heavy handed, and preach their message very directly and forcefully. I really don't mind this, and enjoy the intensity of the message. If you don't like my favorite works because they're all heavy handed and not subtle enough, then fair enough, my favorite works are usually not that subtle about their themes. 

3: Sexuality: If the above two makes me sound very family friendly due to lack of edginess well....sorta. I am not a very edgy person, and am not fond of excessive gore or irreverence, but the content I like can sometimes have heavy sexuality. I'm a rather sex-positive person and honestly just don't mind eroticism in art, even when it doesn't "appeal" to me. Fanservice at worst makes me shrug and sexual characters I often find fun and/or interesting. If you are not as sex-positive as me, then I imagine this might prove less comfortable for you. 

4: Exposition: I know logically "showing is better then telling" but honestly don't mind if a verse takes a quick exposition break to explain a bunch. Sure it's not that exciting but it seems very efficient a way of conveying information. That said I know most people dislike heavy exposition.

5: Repetitive/Unsurprising Plot Structure: This one is hard to explain why I don't mind it. A lot of my favorite series are on the predictable side and repeat a similar plot structure. I guess in general I prefer ht familiar to the unknown, so I don't mind having a smaller variance between what just happened and what is happening. If you really want a series to surprise you, I can understand not liking some of my favorite series.

All of these are perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike something that are in a lot of my favorite series that I don't mind personally but also would understand as perfectly acceptable reasons to dislike them.

I say all this to help explain why some of the below I enjoy even if they have relatively large problems. 

5: Papillon Rose

Papillon Rose is what Panty and Stocking probably seems like to moral prudes. Which is unfair, only 90% of P&S's jokes are about sex lol

Note this is specifically the OVA. The Anime afterwards was just depressingly boring. The OVA is just a bunch of sex jokes disguised as a magical girl parody (as well as a blatant sailor moon reference and a blatant cutie honey reference). I'm gonna be honest, I only really like it because I have a bit of an immature sense of humor when it comes to sex jokes. Otherwise it's pretty unremarkable. 

The characters are really flat, the plot was basically just an excuse to have girls in sexy attire fight, and there's also beastiality which was...unpleasant.

Regardless I thought it was pretty humorous.

That said the anime is really boring because it has everything the ova has but without the sex jokes.

4: Sailor Moon Abridged

Everyone has a favorite Abridged series. Most often it seems to be Yu-gi-oh! Abridged or DBZ Abridged. Sometimes it's One Piece Abridged or Hellsing Abridged or Sword Art Online Abridged (which is my favorite btw). SMA came out back when a new abridged series was being started for every mildly popular anime or anime-esque series to make an abridged series for. And like a whole 10% were good!

I like Megami33 and the SMA cast. They seem really cool and their bloopers are probably the funniest part of SMA....which leads to the biggest problem... namely that the bloopers are the funniest part of SMA. 

SMA is not a DBZA or a YGOA. It's a lot cruder constructed with characters that are even more of caricatures then most Abridged Series. That said maybe it's just because I like SM so much but I really do still enjoy SMA and some jokes are just classics for me. That said a lot of the jokes are really predictable due to the characters being kind of one-note. Regardless, SMA still holds a soft place in my heart.

 

3: Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose

An independently made comic series about the witch Tarot that has lots and lots of fanservice.

As I mentioned above, I don't really mind fanservice, even when it doesn't really make sense. People also seem to dislike the proportions of the bodies of the characters. That's understandable but to be honest I'm not really a sensory person, I'm more of an abstract thinker kind of person so something having not the best visuals is not a huge problem to me, and from what I can tell most of the art is perfectly fine, it's just the proportions and body movements people dislike.

Series also has really strong and heavy-handed themes about bigotry and all the sort of themes of neo-paganism like being environmentally unconscious and do no harm and stuff of the sort. Again as I mentioned above that's something that doesn't really bother me.

I like Tarot personally because I like magic and occult related things in general, I think the series has a lot of really cool moments (I mean one issue has Tarot having to fight a Dragon Sorcerer naked on a snowy mountaintop to protect her cat familiar, having to fight quickly or she'll freeze to death, and that's just a normal issue for her....that seems cool to me). I also generally agree with themes of the series and think it's neo-pagan inspirations are cool.

2: Tomorrowland

Oh Tomorrowland....here's a film that I really like, but I REALLY get the dislike for. You have to be REALLY open to sappy corny to get past that, I get it.

I get the film's problems, they are there. It's even for things I like very heavy-handed. It's very sappy. It has pretty glaring plot holes. All of these I understand but don't really trouble me at all. I don't like how the middle of the film turns into a road trip film where they just go from place to place a bunch of times but that ending...

I adore the ending quarter of this movie or so. The message is so heavy handed, but I enjoyed it so very much because it's exactly how I think. and I'm gonna be honest, for all the hate this movie gets, for reasons that are sometimes undeserved sometimes pretty deserved, Governor Nix's speech near the end of the film is probably one of my favorite speeches of any villain ever. 

Yes it's a very very corny family friendly Disney Live-Action Film and yes it has the exact problems you would imagine from that combination of words, but I really feel like there's something really good here.

1: DC Comic's The New 52

This is a bit of a weird one because it's not so much that I am saying I like what people don't like here, but more so there are good things to like that packaged in with the things you don't like.

When the New 52 was announced a lot of heavy DC fans were understandably upset because it seemed an erasure of legacy, which is bad and important to remember. That said now that the new 52 has been integrated with the prior continuity, can we stop sweeping everything that came out of DC for the entire 5 year New 52 Period with one big generalization. The New 52 has some really bad series, yes. It had a lot of continuity problems. But it did have some good series too. 

The first New 52 Wonder Woman arc is among my favorite Wonder Woman Arcs. The New 52 Justice League Dark was cool and had an amazing ending with Pralaya. The New 52 Aquaman was so good the recent movie was made by it. Geoff Johns was a pretty good writer and he wrote a bunch of this stuff in this period. I hear good things about Demon Knights and the Batman stories of this time period. The New 52 Starfire solo series was finally a Starfire solo series and it was exactly what I wanted for the character even if it was a massive continuity mess. 

Yes, the New 52 Superman stuff started out kind of awkward. Yes the New 52 Teen Titans and Superboy stuff was lackluster. Yes Red Hood and the Outlaws was pretty terrible and exploitative. The fact that I don't mind Starfire being even more sexual then she was in the Post-Crisis days doesn't change the fact that like everything else about her was wrong in that depiction. Yes integrating Wildstorm went terribly and messed with one of my favorite ships ie Apollo x Midnighter. 

A lot of things were not great but there was still some pretty good stuff and I would really like if people stopped making the sweeping claim that nothing good came out of DC for like 5 years. I'm gonna be honest, I prefer the New 52 to the Silver Age, although only just. 

So yeah, I have some guilty pleasures. I don't have many and it was honestly hard to find 5 of them, but yeah. These are some things I enjoy but recognize have like really big problems.