It is subjective, but not useless. That is precisely the reason people read fiction!
Bullshit. "Emotional evocativeness" is merely one of many reasons people might read fiction. It is not even close to being a necessary one - let alone the only one. For one example, as a fan of "hard" science fiction, I greatly enjoy stories that exercise "scientific" acumen in elaborate and imaginatively speculative fictional settings - and to hell with characterizations and their "emotional evocativeness!" For another example, fiction may also be enjoyed for the sake of aesthetic appreciation of skillful prose composition, regardless of any "emotional evocativeness" (or lack thereof) of its characterizations or other elements. (Hell, some fiction doesn't even
have "characters" ...)
And in any case, none of this has
anything to do with what I was talking about. Your original claim - the claim to which I was responding - had
nothing to do with "why people read fiction." It had to do with "what is great fiction." I was addressing the attempt to distinguish "great" fiction on the basis of its "emotional evocativeness." That many people may read works of fiction primarily or even exclusively for the sake of their "emotional evocativeness" is irrelevant to the question of whether any of those works are actually "great" or not. What I tried to point out (but which you appear to have ignored) is the salient and incontrovertible fact that "trashy" or "popular" fiction can be quite "emotionally evocative," but is not therefore considered to be "great." And THAT is precisely why "emotional evocativeness" is indeed useless as a standard for judging a work's "greatness" (whatever that might actually mean) or lack thereof. QED.
Movies and performance arts are the same way. We don't normally go to the theater hoping for wooden dialogue, shoddy plots, and 2 dimensional characters.
The ascription of "woodenness" to dialogue, of "shoddiness" to plots, and of "two-dimensionality" to characters is itself often subjective. Besides which, while people may not be
hoping for those things, it does not follow that those factors are the only criteria by which such works can be judged and found (un)meritorious. For example, I absolutely love me some H.P. Lovecraft, and he can be found guilty of all the flaws you mentioned at one time or another (sometimes all of them in the same story). I don't adore Lovecraft for his scintillating dialogue or emotionally "deep" characters - he hasn't got any. I adore him for the delightfully and deliciously eldritch
weirdness of his stories - the characters be damned! (And in Lovecraft, they usually are ...)
That's for the realm of non-fiction.
"Wooden dialogue, shoddy plots, and 2 dimensional characters" are "for the realm of non-fiction?"
That makes no sense whatsoever ...
For one thing, non-fiction does not typically partake of dialogue, plots or characters. Those are generally the accoutrements of fiction.
For another thing, even when they do occur in non-fiction (such as for biography or "true crime" or the like), such "woodenness," "shoddines" and/or "two-dimensionality" ought to be every bit as deleterious as they are alleged to be for fiction. Why should they be less so for non-fiction? That just doesn't make any sense ...
If the audience feels no reason to care about the characters, they will just put the book down.
Again, bullshit. Audiences are NOT homogeneous. As already noted, there are MANY motivations for reading fiction OTHER than "caring about the characters." Of interest in this respect is the essay "The Little Tin God of Characterization" by Isaac Asimov - an incredibly popular and prolific author who was well-known for the shallowness and "two-dimensionality" of his characters (which was deliberate and intentional - emotionally "deep" characterizations would only "get in the way" of the kinds of stories he wanted to tell and his readers wanted to read).
I do not "care about the characters" in Asimov or Rand - yet I do not, as you have predicted I should, "just put the book
down". That is NOT why I read them. I read (and greatly enjoy) them for their invigorating and thought-provoking ideas and the larger speculative settings in which those ideas are presented. And if the size of the readership for the works of Asimov and Rand are any indication, a very large chunk of "the audience" agrees with me. These facts pretty much blow a gaping hole in your thesis ...
Zing! 
