Staff Writer- Hailey Hathaway-Oxley

Does every piece of media we consume need to be a masterpiece? Does every movie, show, or book have to hold a 95% certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, receive unanimous critical acclaim, or pass the high-brow test of “peak cinema”?

Or can we finally unburden ourselves from these arbitrary elitist standards and just let people, including ourselves, enjoy things?

Whenever I admit that I love the TV show Riverdale, someone invariably winces. The jokes start coming, and people mock the idea that anyone could derive genuine comfort or entertainment from a series where Archie Andrews solemnly delivers lines like, “That doesn’t mean you haven’t known the epic highs and lows of high school football,” without a trace of irony. But who is that actually hurting? Nobody.

Riverdale is not a case of separating the art from the artist, it is not a case of being unable to separate J.K. Rowling from her public transphobia and the tokenizing names of her characters. It is just a cheesy, poorly written show, but the glimmers of heartfelt writing and character work in Riverdale have always spoken to me, and the poetic dissonance of the characters and their relationships with each other have always hit home. For those who connected with it, the bad never completely erased the good.

Some say that the show went off the rails, and I’ll admit that it did. However, Riverdale knew exactly what it was doing. It leaned into its own absurdity, and if you really make fun of the few people who like it, I might not trust any media in your hands. You may or may not struggle with critical thinking. Ironically, Riverdale’s harshest critics were its own fans. We cared about the characters, which made watching the narrative derail feel like witnessing a car crash in slow motion: embarrassing, disorganized, but entirely impossible to look away from.

On X, formerly known as Twitter, there is a meme that goes around all the time:

“Twitter is the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say ‘I like pancakes’ and somebody will say ‘So you hate waffles?’”

This is wholly how I feel about the great Riverdale debate, but also about so many other things. Another prime example is the intense discourse surrounding Hanya Yanagihara’s 800-page novel A Little Life.

I love A Little Life, a sweeping epic spanning the entire lives, from childhood to adulthood and death, of four friends. It greatly focuses on the main character, Jude. I find the book fascinating, but many others would criticize its use and focus of many devices, calling it “trauma porn” and criticizing the author writing about– and even sexualizing and romanticizing– the suffering of gay males as a straight female. 

I picked up the book originally planning to hate-read it, as I have always hated the notion of “trauma porn” as a concept and believed it to be damaging to society. However, I found the book incredibly touching. Reading it changed my life. I didn’t cry like many others, though, because I had no attachment to the character of Jude. I viewed him as a literary allegory, one supposed to be a Christ-like figure, bearing all of the suffering of the world on his shoulders. 

Because Jude’s hardships are so unrealistically stacked one horrific event after another, the novel operates far more as a surreal exploration of suffering versus human grace than as a grounded depiction of real-life trauma and recovery. 

Most people who despise the book have never actually read it, preferring to dismiss it based on second-hand outlines, much like how people dismiss Riverdale after seeing a single out-of-context clip on TikTok.

Would I blindly recommend A Little Life to a general reader? Absolutely not. Do I understand its severe valid criticisms? Completely. But does that invalidation change how the text personally affected me? Not in the slightest.

Of course, “let people enjoy things” should never be used as a shield to shut down thoughtful critique or excuse genuine harm. “Don’t like it, don’t watch it” is a cop-out when applied to legitimate analysis that you don’t like to hear because you find comfort in a piece of media. However, when criticism devolves into elitist gatekeeping, where liking something “imperfect” is treated as an intellectual or even a moral failing when it isn’t, a clear boundary must be drawn.

We don’t need every story to be an unblemished masterpiece to find value in it. Media can be flawed, absurd, campy, or allegorically extreme, and still mean something profound to the person watching or reading. It’s time we stop apologizing for the art that comforts us and simply let the media be what it is: a diverse, chaotic landscape where entertainment and personal meaning take many different forms: even if it does have to do with the epic highs and lows of high school football.