favourites

(this was originally written as a self-reblog on a question that asked me about favourite sci-fi novel)

“favourites are fake“ is a phrase I use a lot but I don’t think I’ve expanded on what it means before, which is “I am not especially confident I can make arbitrarily finely grained comparisons of things to rank them all in a line. I can often say that some things are better than others but on the high end of things I like it all muddles together into a category of ‘things that are really good’ and finer distinctions within them can at best be ‘this one is better for a particular mood’ or ‘was more meaningful at a particular time of my life’ or ‘accomplishes one specific thing really well’. Even if I could do that, it’s not how my brain natively stores that information and asking for favourites cannot return a result other than ‘something I thought was very good and is in the relevant category’ without a lot of extra work to compare it to other things, unless i’d for some reason spent a lot of time doing that work beforehand (hasn’t happened yet) or the category has very few examples I have experienced. most of the time if you ask me for a favourite and I reply, the answer is either the first result returned by my brain for that search or something I have ‘cached’ as my favourite for that category”

i know I’m not the only person whose brain works roughly like this yet questions about favourites are so common that either it is a relatively rare trait or there is an implicit assumption that you shouldn’t take ‘favourite’ questions literally I have missed, in which case oops but also someone should have mentioned that before.