Do you truly believe in having a "favourite"?

[Caveat Lector]

I'm wondering how many people around here truly believe in having a "favourite" movie/book/game/whatever. For me, it's too hard to really pick an all-time favourite. I have all-time favourites, but I can't really pick a single favourite above everything else. Because just when I think I've found something amazing that totally speaks to me, I come across something that's either just as good, or in some ways slightly better. I don't think I could ever compile a favourites list unless everything was in alphabetical order.

I always go, for example, "On the one hand, Frozen is such an excellently-told fairytale, but The Shawshank Redemption is such an amazing movie, too; is Frozen still just a fairytale, or something more? And even then is it fair to compare them since they're two entirely different things...". Or "This demo for Amnesia: The Dark Descent sure is fabulous, I'M FUCKING BUYING IT...but what about other good horror games, aren't they just as good or do they also have flaws...".

...Yeah. In case you couldn't tell, I overthink stuff. A lot. It's part of the fun of fangirling, but at the same time, yeah. Overthinking. Hurts brain. If I try to tell myself not to overthink it, I stop and overthink it some more.

The closest thing I can think of in terms of having a "favourite" of anything is if it's a favourite of certain books by an author, or games by studios, or movies by directors, or certain beloved movies having a theme. For example, I should probably play more free Japanese RPG horror games (played the more well-known ones--Ib, Mad Father, Misao, The Witch's House, and Yume Nikki), but so far my favourite of the ones I've played is Ib.

[Asceai]

Yes. Although I don't have a favourite book or movie or song, I have a favourite VN. I think you either do or you don't; it's not a matter of believing in the concept or not.

[MayPeX]

Yes and no.

It's a case of "This is my favourite!", then come sometime later something else appears that sways me over. It doesn't mean my previous favourite is now considered lesser, but there was just something else that made me click. I don't like to bog down on singular or few things, there's so much out there that's worth reading, watching, doing etc.

Of course you have your prized gem that can never be replaced, but there can be others that surpass it in certain aspects?

[peapodprincess]

I tend to categorize things and separate them out based on their similarities.

For example, I don't have a favorite general movie but my favorite Japanese animated movie is Spirited Away.

[kitsubasa]

Some mediums/genres/whatever I have favourites in, some I don't. My 'favourites' of anything tend to be whenever I find a bit of media that feels so perfectly designed to appeal to me, regardless of overall quality, that I feel obligated to shower endless love and adoration on them-- they're less based in objective quality and more based in how well I feel pandered to. Which is kind of silly and self-centered, but hey-- my favourites, my feelings!

So I always feel like the mediums and genres I don't have a favourite for yet, someday I may well do, because something might happen in them eventually that does hit that chord of 'did you just create something that encapsulates everything I've ever wanted out of your genre'. Shadow Hearts did that for me in gaming, so that's my favourite game. Chrono Crusade did that for me in manga, so that's my favourite manga. Film hasn't hit that chord yet, books haven't hit that chord yet, though both have come close, and someday I wouldn't be surprised if I get to see a film with a sentient zombie/lich/revenant/skeleton protagonist who must cope with undeath while also going on an exciting adventure to save the world and get the girl which is also a musical.* That would probably be my favourite film if it happened.

*Warm Bodies (the movie version) came down too hard on the romance side of this, also Warm Bodies was not a musical. Corpse Bride was too focused on Victor and didn't have enough adventure to meet my dream quota. The Nightmare Before Christmas is fantastic but lacks the right kind of existential pondering. But, if we combined all three of these things with a dash of world-traversing excitement and extremely high-stakes, then we would be close. We would also have a movie which no-one but me would ever want to watch because of the bizarrely specific checklist it'd be filling. Booyah.

[Samsam80]

Really interesting question. I think that rather than having one favourite of anything, I have collections of favourites. So I have a corpus of all-time favourite songs which aren't just fads, for instance. I don't think I could pick one of them out as my absolute favourite, because they're all suited to different moods, different situations, etc. So I guess ultimately I'd have to agree with peapodprincess - I have categories of favourites.

[Gospel]

It really depends on a variety of aspects.
Sometimes I can clearly tell what my favorite in a given category is, sometimes I absolutely can't. Sometimes I want to call something my favorite just because it's new, but once the novelty wears off, I realize I actually like something older a lot more.

If you name categories that stretch pretty wide like 'music', it's almost impossible.
The more you narrow it down, however, the easier it gets.
For instance, favorite music --> Soundtrack --> Videogame Soundtrack --> Super Nintendo Game Soundtrack --> Diddy's Kong Quest

A little while ago I tried making a top 10 list of my favorite videogame soundtracks and realized how hard that actually is. But in the end, it doesn't really matter anyway. If you like something a lot, you like it a lot. There isn't any need to put it into a certain order or have an absolute favorite above all others.

Still, despite knowing that, I can't help but think about stuff like this every now and then and keep asking myself 'among all these, which one do I actually like the most?'

[Mr. Diddlez]

It depends on the person imo. Personally my favourite activity is diddling.

[trooper6]

Do I have favorites? Certainly. But, the better I know a category, the smaller a subcategory I'm going to have to fit my favorite in...unless my favorite is so overwhelmingly overpowering for me.

For example, I am a professional scholar of music...so I know that category very well. So I could never answer the question: What's your favorite song? That is too much. My favorite 1930s female crooner song? "Ten Cents a Dance" by Ruth Etting. On the other hand, I'm not big into US sports, so you could ask me: What is you favorite US sports team and I'd say, San Francisco Giants. That is a really broad category. Other people might have a favorite minor league team from Ohio.

So...familiarity demands finer categorization of favorites for me.

[SundownKid]

An all time favorite? No, I haven't found anything perfect enough to warrant that classification. I doubt I will ever find a true "best video game ever", same with movies, books, etc.

[Kam]

I can never decide on a single favorite, I always go with unranked lists.

[Chocopyro]

I can never decide on a single favorite, I always go with unranked lists.

^
I
I___This.

I was in the midst of typing up paragraphs explaining it, but a single coherent sentence put it in a simplified manner that I couldn't.

[unknown5]

just hate everything. makes things simpler.

[Caveat Lector]

Yeah, but then how can you truly enjoy anything if all you see is the worst in everything? Then again, there's always favourite so-bad-it's-good movies ("Batman and Robin"), so...

[Chocopyro]

But hating everything is too mainstream! -puts on hipster glasses-