"Perfect" writing

I got into a debate very recently about defining 'perfect' writing. It stemmed from a friend telling me fanboys are panning the new Watchmen movie, to which I replied that didn't matter, since I wasn't a fanboy. From there it got into a point where I stated a fan will acknowledge something as masterfully done, a fanboy will insist it is perfect.

To call anything done by humankind perfect is to do the word an injustice.

Perfection is an unattainable goal, one that should still be sought for by people attempting to create things, but still completely unattainable. Nothing will ever be perfect, and if I ever meet a writer who is willing to say they think a piece of writing they did was perfect and nothing they could do would ever improve upon it, I would say they are a lazy writer rather then an excellent one.

The Watchman comic (I refuse the use the term Graphic Novel, and if you ever catch me using it, feel free to give me a verbal backhander) is an amazing story. It is a psychological profile of a world outside of our own yet so intimately familiar. It's an incredible story of social mores and morals. It's an amazing glimpse of a history that never happened. But it is NOT a perfect story (I am so going to get mugged by some guy in a Rorshach mask later).

Perfection is at best a subjective interpretation of something. If I judged Watchmen as a perfect comic, I would be stamping a subjective label on it, something that cannot be objectively verified, but even then I believe I would be simply deluding myself, since the moment something is called perfect, it denies that improvements can be made on anything. Since interpretation of a narrative (or really any form of art) is subjective, this cannot be true since perfection for one individual is not perfection for another, and thus improvements can always be made.

Ok, I admit, that last paragraph didn't make much sense, think about it like this: Perfection is something that can be true in two ways.
1. Objectively. If you have a perfect 100ml container, it will hold 100ml of water perfectly. This is objective perfection, in that it cannot be improved upon. The moment this container holds 100ml perfectly there is no way in which it can be improved in the task of holding 100ml of liquid.
2. Subjectively. If something is subjectively perfect, it is judged as perfect by an individual. This means the individual has decreed in their own mind that there is absolutely NO way something can improve upon the design/substance of the item in question. In my view, this is entirely wrong.

Someone can discuss "the perfect car", but it negates the idea that it could be supplanted by another "perfect car" in the future. A story can be "perfect", but that states that nothing can ever outdo that story in what it is attempting to do.

The moment something is labelled as perfect, I believe people are being close-minded. This is one of the reasons I dislike fanboys, since they are closing their mind to the idea of improvement by describing something as perfect. This is also a reason I always go into movie adaptations of previous stories with a sense of hope, believe that even if the adaptation is DIFFERENT, it may still be good.

That is, of course, completely ignoring my inherent uneasiness of remakes, adaptations and sequels as "max profit min brainpower" factory-produced movies, but I've talked enough about that in the past.