Half Stars are for Cowards

Recently, Goodreads announced that not only were they adding the much sought-after feature of half-stars, but also 0.25 stars, so you can effectively now rate all your books out of twenty. This seems like pure madness to me.

Great Comet of 1744, from A Popular Treatise on Comets (1861).

I have never had a problem with half-stars, in fact I've been happily using them on Letterboxd so that I almost never have to commit to the glorious shining endorsement of a full five star rating. I was not a star snob. But these events have changed me. I had heard, throughout the years, that the people craved these half-stars. That the Goodreads users clamoured for them. "Every other site implemented them years ago," cry the masses, teary-eyed. And I always thought, well, wouldn't that destroy all existing ratings? Wouldn't that actually, seriously, threaten the integrity of the site-wide rating system?

Announcement image from Goodreads' Instagram account.

If Goodreads makes the transition to half-stars, then doesn't that cast all existing ratings as not quite what they were? Isn't a four now a hideous eight? This is wrong, isn't it? This is sick.

I cast my eyes over the homepage. I see three 4.5 star ratings in a row. And I feel now that I have been wrong, all this time, to let the five star films elude my precious five star rating for so long. It is me who is broken. It is me who must change.

So I will be sticking to the five star system on Goodreads, as always. No book is a 3.5. But I will also be permanently adjusting to the strict five star system anywhere that I give ratings - most importantly, within my own mind.

My Letterboxd ratings, skewing alarmingly towards the negative.

There is a sense of sureness about this. No dilly-dallying, no weighing up whether a piece of media crosses the threshold of a complete number into the murky fragments of a fraction. A film is either a three or a four. A two or a satisfying one. I must choose.

★★★★★

It seems so obvious now that the half stars were holding me back, steering me away from more decisive assessment. Granted, star ratings are a simplistic and immediate measure of the quality of a thing, and so perhaps they don't need to be taken all that seriously - but if that's the case, if a star rating is only the most immediate and rudimentary representation of my assessment of a thing, then perhaps that's all the more reason to make myself choose between one, two, three, four, and five. The perfect amount of stars.