Stan Lee was asked "Who would win in a fight between Superman and The Hulk?" The answer, of course, was "Whoever the writers wants, because that's who's writing it."
That's a good take and all, but allow me to retort, Mr: Lee: The Fights you're talking about are usually written for storytelling purposes, and they usually go in a way that would make a better story, which is perfectly fine, but here's the thing: This is not the kind of fighting people talk about in these cases. There exists a community of people who like to analyze fictional character's powers and abilities in a deliberately bland and contextless situation just to see who would win in a fight.
So: Watsonian explanations are explanations within the text for things happening in the text (i.e. internal consistency. If a character is lying, the Watson of the group will explain as such, probably with some kind of reason why they know) Doylist explanations are explanations with the author's intent for things happening in the text (i.e. author forgot their character's injuries and so the injury is internally inconsistent, but ultimately matters very little) Thermian Arguments are people using Watsonian Explanations for Doylist Questions or Critiques
Correct, except the authors intent is not required. You could just as easily use the thermian argument to defend something the writer never intended to be read in that way.
Its very convenient that not including such brash things in our fiction ended all crime everywhere. Before there was all that worry about m****rers and th****s but now the worst that will happen is someone unexpectedly doesnt give you a helping hand
@@jeice13 I think Lily was trying to be funny/light-hearted... How DARE you not applaud her young man! Where ARE your manners! If you won't applaud, then I will applaud for you! *Grows an extra set of arms, and starts clapping* now, time for your true punishment! *Starts slapping you with all 4 arms*
To be fair, only the first 10 minutes of the first episode. I watched the rest of it while skipping that part and it's an interesting study on how victims handle being victims. That first 10 minutes tho? B I G O O F
@discoandherpes i have, and the writing is good, it's a classic for a reason. However as a victim of sexual abuse/assault myself i found Goblin Slayer very interesting. Especially the Head Priestess character and her complicated relationship with feeling weak but having to be a beacon of strength. I guess what I'm trying to say is even tho something might have a scene that is difficult to watch, maybe even impossible for some, does not rob the show of any possible merits. Also see: A Clockwork Orange, Monster's Ball, and Requiem for a Dream.
@discoandherpes not saying it's a classic or on the same level. Just using those as example in saying it can be done. Not everyone thinks those are classics and it hits them just like G.S. hit some anime fans.
@@rroman1988 Nah, when they frame that scene as something you're supposed to jerk off to, it definitely robs the show of a fuck ton of value. Like, there's almost no difference between the first 10 minutes of Goblin Slayer and a Guro Doujin.
Four-five years later, brushing aside the Goblin Slayer references, I wonder if Dan ever read a blog called Slacktivist, by Fred Clark. The author, who is often very thoughtful about fictional worlds, said while discussing multiple versions of the word 'belief' that in a way people believed in vampires: if you ask them if vampires are real, they say no; but if you ask them how to kill a vampire, they'll be able to tell you. That's what came to mind here.
Yeah; the concept of "having a million dollars" is solid and clear in their mind, even though they don't. Here we have the concept of "vampires" solid and clear in the mind, even with shared ideas - a shared conception of what a vampire is - even though they're not.
@@dhruvtukadiya it says something that Dan was able to perfectly encapsulate the vibe of Goblin Slayer and Goblin Slayer discourse before Goblin Slayer even existed but I am an anime fan, so I am not going to think very hard about what that message is
So the Thermian Arhgument is basically giving an in-universe answer to an out-universe question? Is there also a name for the opposite? Giving an out-universe answer for an in-universe question? For example: Q: "Why did the character do such a stupid thing?" A: "Because we would not have a story if he acted smart."
A good story would either A) Give a compeling reason for the character to do such a thing (like implying he was actually stupid, acting under pressure or influence, etc) B) Don't base its entire existence on a single character's stupid decision (like the reason for the Suicide Squad to exist is the fact that Amanda Waller assembled them and it went wrong)
I've heard and used "The meta reason" as a framing mechanism for this type of exchange. As in: "I don't know why the he did the stupid thing, but the meta reason is..." I guess 'meta' is interchangable with 'extra-diegetic' in this context. Sometimes it's a useful tool, like when there really is no internally consistent explanation for a plot point but would be interesting to talk about why the decision was made regardless. I sunk a lot of time into Blizzard games and their lore, and let's just say the extra-diegetic reason is often the only satisfying answer you'll get with them, so that probably flavors my experience a bit. When someone uses external reasoning to nullify criticism against internal inconsistency, the basic mistake is essentially the same as what Dan describes. It's missing the point of the criticism and changing the subject. I don't know any catchy name for it (and I'm curious if someone knows of a fitting metaphor), but as the same mistake in the other direction, I guess you could call it a nega-thermian argument. More generally, they can both be described as "not wanting to think that hard about why you enjoy the things you do (and also getting annoyed that other people want to think about it)".
This happens a lot in Pacific Rim. "Why did they build giant robots instead of using existing, much more suitable technology?" "Because it's awesome" "Why didn't he use the sword sooner?" "Because the reveal was awesome" "Why do they require two pilots?" "Because it provides the opportunity to add character depth, which is awesome"
Not everything that somebody does have a logical reason. That is reality. Sometimes people do irrational things on a whim. When something in fiction is portrayed like that it's considered a plothole and harshly criticized despite the fact that it's often more likely than a complex multilayered conspiracy that the "good" fiction is often praised for. No I don't like this stupid argument.
@@theonlycatonice - This is just a prophecy, not a self-fulfilling one. The latter would be something that came true _because_ of the prophecy. Unless you mean the creator of Goblin Slayer literally got the idea for the show directly from this particular video.
This is like the art version of "My Guy Syndrome" from table top RPGs. Some one complains about a player's action because it's ruining the fun for others, and then the player defends their actions by saying "It's what my guy would do", trying to abdicate all of the player's own responsibility for what are ultimately their own actions rather than the character's.
I would disagree with that, to a point. Half your energy flows into creating a believable, fleshed out character. If youre just abandoning the characterisation you chose, you dilute them. The part where you are correct is that people should show restraint in things that ruin other peoples fun.
@@Squeaky_Ben But that's the whole point of being a responsible tabletop player, right? You have to be able to create a believable and consistent character while still being fun to play with. Similarly, authors have the responsibility to create stories that are both believeable and handle their subject matter with respect. The criticism of Thermian Arguments isn't an argument against consistent storytelling, it's an argument against lazy defenses of thoughtless storytelling.
@@ChunkyAppleCider thats not how he framed it tho. If you consider "its in the lore, so its allowed" to be on one end of the spectrum, then this thermian argument stuff is equally as bad. All I have seen this guy do is:"this stuff is bad, and you should not put it in your story, because then you are bad" and that is not a viewpoint I can agree with. Sure, handle things with respect, but this is going further than just that.
@@Squeaky_Ben But he never once says anything like 'You shouldn't put "X" in your story.' He makes an (Unnamed) reference to the anime Claymore and there are implications that he's critical of the way it handled some of its subjects, but he never says those subjects should never be included in any piece of media. The entire video is a counterargument to the Thermian Argument. Never once does he seem to say anything like "This stuff is bad and you should never put it in your story or else you are bad." If I'm wrong, please show me where, because I've watched the video three times now and I can't find a single instance of him saying that. I got work in the morning, so I gotta head out, but I'll check up tomorrow.
@@ChunkyAppleCider one: good luck at work. Two: what I mean is this: What you may call thoughtless storytelling, someone else might call normal or even good storytelling. This entire argument is just not objective. If he doesnt like something that happens, sure. If we then point out the thematical reasons and he makes this sort of argument against us, i see it as an insult. He is trying to paint a false picture of the average fan here.
@@austinwyant2928 A lot of form of analysis requires to know the author's intent to see if the writing is a success. If the author intended to write a story with a certain message and that the end result contradicts that message, it could be considered a failure. So asking an author "what was the purpose of X in your work?" allow to know that intent, at least for this specific element. Also, it's good for the author to improve. Having to think why you wrote something means you get a better understanding of what your tastes, preferences, and worldviews are because some are not immediately obvious. So readers asking you to justify your decision, some that you may have considered not worth analyzing but that may hold more meaning than you think. That's how I learned that I have a strong liking for down to earth, reasonable and methodical character because another player in a TTRPG asked me why all my character ended up doing the logistic and organization of the group.
I've heard the terms "Watsonian" and "Doylist" to separate the difference between critiquing the diegetic reasons for certain elements ("Watson's war wound is inconsistent because he has two, but one is only psychosomatic") and non-diegetic reasons ("Sir Doyle hated writing Sherlock Holmes and didn't give a fuck about inconsistencies"). These are the words I'd been using prior to this video and I'm happy to add "Thermian" to my lexicon for this :D
@@zephyr6927 To my memory, in the books, Watson has a limp despite his war scar not having anything to do with his leg. Watson, the character, says this is bc it's a psychosomatic limp. Sir Doyle, the real man, says this is because he forgot and doesn't care.
@@Pinkstarclan Just looked it up; first story, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes observes "His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner.", but the very next story, the Sign of the Four, has this from Watson "I made no remark, however, but sat nursing my wounded leg. I had a Jezail bullet through it some time before..."
It owns that Dan called for nothing to be banned in this video and yet somehow calling a show/game/anime/etc sexist or whatever is censorship. Criticism is also speech, free speech crowd
Yes, Criticism is Free Speech. But here's the problem we're all having here: At some point, this criticism of the story jumps to a criticism of its makers and audience, like so: "Why is X here?" "Because it is." (This part could go on and on in a loop... until...) "Why is X here?" "Because the author wanted X there." "So, Why did the author want X there?" And here's where our problems begin. Since, at some point for every story element, something in a story is there because the author wanted it there, then its presence can be construed as a comment on the author. And, if X is an evil thing, and the reason X is there isn't answered for or given a context (or at least one that the presumed critic will find satisfying), it can then be assumed that the author is X or supportive of X. Its already the case that we judge people in relation to the qualities we find in them, and treat them accordingly. And how do we treat X or those who support X, because they are X or support X? Also, how should we regard their work with X in it, and its fans, seeing as it came from an Author who is X? fill in the "X"s and you'll see why many people take this to be an argument for censorship. If i could put it a shorter way: Its kinda like reading the Bible *and judging absolutely everything in it as a prescriptive*. Its a pretty stupid, if not dishonest, way of reading it.
The Witcher is based on Polish folklore. That's why there's no black people. Poland is a white country, and they have every right to their history and their traditions the same way Ghana has a right to theirs. Criticizing The Witcher or Frozen for only have white people is a vapid, childish, predictable attempt to apply your one mode of criticism where it does not belong, and it is a criticism that has absolutely nothing to do with artistic expression or emotional validity. Get fukt.
@@jasonbelstone3427 "At some point, this criticism of the story jumps to a criticism of its makers and audience" Authorial intend is no new thing. It is only natural of a free society that people want to know and discuss what led someone to write and publish something, and what leads people to consume it. And internal logic as an attempt of an answer is just dishonestly begging the question, because it purposely ignores the simple logical fact that the writer *had a reason* to set the world up in a certain manner, and write certain things a certain the way, cause otherwise, they simply wouldn't have. And just because you question or infer intend, which is what you are bound to do anyways whenever you interpret the message a work conveys, it doesn't necessarily mean that you intend to make it illegal. Your whole comment could be summed up as "yeah it's free speech, but it has consequences" well, no shit, man.
@@streq9199 No, my issue is: why make supposedly Free Speech come with "consequences" (nothing more than a euphemism for punishment. and then its not actually "free" is it)? And why try to bridge a gap between authorial intent and story elements with moral propositions and prescriptions, the crossing of which then comes with penalties on a real person? And For what? Creating a *fictional* world that sucks, and making up a *fictional* character that would be a moral violator *if it had been real*?
@@jasonbelstone3427 "why make supposedly Free Speech come with "consequences" No one "made" free speech come with consequences: it naturally does. If I go down the street and I start profousely insulting some guy, and he insults me back, that's a consequence, and it didn't happen because someone forced him to insult me back: it happened because my actions, me chosing to freely speak my mind, had consequences. Trying to make a space with free speech but no consequences actually requires more effort than the opposite, because then you have to effectively shield everyone from the consequences of their actions.
@@h00pla434 It's cute you think this video's point to be too deep/intellectual to be seen for what it is. It shows that a couple fancy words and academic concepts are all it takes to confuse and subsequently fool some people. Of course, true believers don't need further fooling, er, convincing.
@@Zeburaman2005 I most certainly don't think this is a deep video. I think it's a very simple concept being taught, and that renders it all the more sad that so many couldn't grasp it
@@h00pla434 Ooh, careful when reaching, mate, that it doesn't come back to bite you in the arse. But at least we can agree that Dan is lecturing people.
This, I think, represents a smaller version of a larger problem: people believing certain things which are constructed and ultimately changeable to instead be immutable and essential; as if they were natural laws. This happens with larger parts of culture, economics, and societal structure, the production and persistence of which are ultimately up to people making conscious decisions to do so; the ol' "That's just the way the world is", a kind of Thermian Argument writ large.
exactly! This reminds me a lot of the concept brought up in innuendo studios' video "i hate mondays", that issues with the world are just fundamental and unchangeable as opposed to things to be changed.
Yeah, the line that jumped out to me rewatching this was "You cannot criticize the world, because that's just the way the world is." There is a noticeable absence of the word "fictional" in that statement.
But... I think he is incorrect to include "consistency" in his list of ultimately unimportant things. In fiction, consistency is indeed important. Even in high fantasy, most of the laws of physics are still followed because otherwise the world it portrays would be incomprehensible. At least a large degree of consistency is required for anything to make sense. That applies to the narratives we tell ourselves about the real world too. "The way things work" does matter and is a real, though not absolute in many, constraint. Though laws of physics are less mutable than socioeconomic systems, to put it mildly... Even those socioeconomic systems have real metaphorical inertia ;)
This goes way back to when Stan Lee responded to fan mail complaining about the Invisible Girl's lack of agency in the plot by acting like they were insulting her directly like she was a real person with feelings
That people confused character criticism for criticism against story issues. Kind of reminds me of a more recent example in Hasbro's MLP where in an episode that responded to external criticism of the show, you have a mix of the bad criticism and genuine criticism that was rectified years ago being lumped into the same bag e.g. "why do you have other characters have multiple topics to cover but Fluttershy is only allowed a rinse and repeat approach to confidence"?
Me: oh yeah this is a pretty basic and obvious observation, "fictional universes are made by real people and the question 'why did the person making this decide to write it like this' deserves to be asked and its answer critiqued." This isn't a controversial idea. This comment section:
@ When you want to have big boy discussions, it behooves you to have a clue what you're talking about. The video is four minutes long, you accepted a lie without the slightest effort to see if it was true. Stop being an angry baby and grow up.
@ There is no debate. You're completely wrong, and accepted an easily disproven lie without question. You are a giant fucking baby desperate to throw a tantrum no matter how dishonest you have to be.
This is giving me flashbacks to the fandom wars over Dragon Age 2 where people were screaming that Isabela being scantily clad makes diagetic sense and thus trying to shout down the people saying "yes but some thirsty sucker MADE her that way!"
@ Yes, women can choose to dress down in real life. But this isn't real life, Isabela is a collection of pixels who a group of people sat down to write. She didn't choose to dress down because someone designed her to dress down. Also, shouldn't you be wearing armor while you're fighting people to the death?
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@@loxyloafcake5184 Treating a bunch of ones and zeros and pixels like an opressed human being is so ridiculous as a concept, that I'm going to ask if you're feeling alright, and have not consumed an overdose of mind-altering drugs in the past 48 hours?
@ Nobody's concerned for the wellbeing of a fictional character, nice strawman though. People are questioning the design decisions, and the motivation behind those decisions, of the people who made the game. "it makes sense in-universe" does not answer those qustions.
But it makes sense for her character though. it's not like everyone in the world is like that, so criticizing the character who wants to appeal slutty, who wants to seduce people or at least look like she is, for doing so? That's disingenuous. There's a lot of game examples out there of characters, particularly female characters, who dress much sexier than they have to for no reason at all, with no given reason or explanation. And that's fine; it's fair to criticize this, but it is also an artistic choice and it is often made intentionally. But my point is, there's a lot of better candidates to pick than the relatively smaller field of characters who are at least designed around it. Isabela is built on a foundation that uses the physical and visual trappings of her design as a mask to disguise something of a genuine feeling, that's very relatable, and makes sense in context. There's a lot of characters out there who can't say as much.
This is how I felt when Kojima tried to justify Quiet's skimpy look and said that we would feel bad for her. He's still the one who created a scantily clad female character, he just also created a convoluted reason to justify it too.
@ it's fascinating how people opposing vaguely left-wing critiques always assume that they're done for the intent of calling for censorship. It's never to inform or analyse or discuss, or even just to entertain. It's ALWAYS to call for censorship.
@ the fact you started with needlessly bringing up "outright lies and hate such as toxic masculinity" kinda poisons the chance of good debate with needless tangents. Let me guess, you think it means to hate all men or all masculinity? Not that there is good masculinity and toxic kinds that cause harm. And you think talking about masculinity is inherently gender stereotypes, that can't be discussed? But hey, I'm a mgs fan, so op threw out the right bait, that I'll focus on instead. The criticism of quiet was not political or hypocritical, and also not inherently left wing. Asking why a purported soldier is dressed in a literal bikini in a warzone is valid, just as asking why snake is constantly wiggling his skin tight clad ass at the camera is valid, or asking how the boss could apparently know which chamber was loaded in ocelots russian roulette. There are thermian explanations for all of these, "she got horribly burned and needs to photosynthesize through her skin" and "sneaking suits are skin tight to reduce bleeding and boost resiliance" and "she's just that good". There are also actual answers, "because sexy" "because sexy" "because cool". This doesn't mean that sexy or cool things are bad or should be censored. But the degree to which they stretch suspension of disbelief matters, because sometimes you need more than a thermian argument to feel satisfied. And a big reason that many people were critical of the quiet thing was the coy "no there's a reason and you'll be really sorry for asking about it when you find out the reason why she's like that"...and no. The explanation was not just a convoluted in universe one, it actually just added more issues. The explanation presented did not root the character into reality or even realistically explain the odd choice She was seriously burned by being set on fire, scorching her lungs and burning her vocal chords, but she has visibly flawless exposed skin over her body, no burns? That's an unsatisfactory answer and really just confirmed that it was to show off her sexy body, because it's also the reason her extreme burns are invisible. If he'd shown off her back and it had a massive burn on it, he could have had a cool swirling design of the burn, maybe even in a symbolic shape, maybe talked about how the burn had damaged it from behind? It actually would have fit better for an explanation. The real answer would still have been because sexy, boys like boobs and because sexy figurines sell which is fineà, but the out of universe reasoning would then have been a more satisfying and coherent. Considering the snake like c section scar on the boss, it'd be up his alley. Incidentally, notice that no-one complained that the boss unzipped her whole outfit sexily to show that off? Kinds torpedos the idea that people were just complaining about the sexy character for the sake of it. Conversely Sniper wolf and Vulcan raven deservedly raised some eyebrows and caused some jokes though, on account of being in the Antarctic but looking like they wanted to risk frostbite. But then that was a unisex weirdness and relatively understated. But hell, even Eva didn't get much comment on her outfit choice, and hers was incredibly blatent. Because sexy femme fatale spy has a line of logic. To distract enemies, seduce information, to play up the old school James bond vibes that the game have off. It fits. Quiet didn't, and doubling down with "you'll be sorry when you get the explanation" was a bad move, when the explanation was so thin. "Sexy figures sell well" would probably have been better in that instance, and we know that one is true.
@ wow, didn't even bother to read, huh? You're arguing against a straw man of your own invention. If you don't want to deal with drivel like "all masculinity is bad", then don't say it. To repeat, Toxic masculinity doesn't mean masculinity is toxic. It is referring to a specific type or subset. There is masculinity. And there is the toxic kind. That is not a lie, or redefining anything. That was always what it meant, and there are many arguments on the internet that look hilarious to the ones that know that. Unless you're trying to argue that literally nothing that is rooted in masculinity was ever bad, it seems pretty self evident that it exists. Emotional repression, forcing men to take the brunt of physical or emotional violence, stopping male domestic abuse victims getting help, etc. Though this is about all I'll say on the matter, it's good to see I called it. Original comment talking about quiet, you bring up your own irrelevant issue. I slightly address it and call it out as being a tangent before going into detail on the Quiet thing... boy that sure is a good comment you did, entirely focused on the tangent you introduced. You even introduced a second tangent with the Jews thing that came out of nowhere. Nice bait mate. Go start a blog if you want to rant to yourself about how your feelings got hurt by deliberately misunderstanding something. 😂
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@@FFKonoko The key is in what I wrote: I'll have to simply reject the ideological drivel and any attempt to defend or redefine the drivel is wasted. To avoid this, stop lying by backing ideological drivel like 'toxic masculinity'. It's like argueing politics, but first I demand that you accept Donald Trump is a god who can do no wrong; it's pointless. And it would be great if sexists got that memo too.
I noticed that some people always answer questions about fictional stories in-universe and others always answer them out-of-universe. Like... "why are there different colors of lightsabers?" Person A: "The color of a lightsaber is determined by the cybercrystal. Red lightsabers are a special case, because they also need blood" Person B: "Basic color symbolism. Blue means good, red means evil. Samuel L. Jackson got a purple one, because he asked for it" The Thermian Argument appears when those two persons talk to each other without realizing how different they approach media.
Well, I agree partially, the Thermian Argument comes up when person B says that person A is wrong and that they aren't allowed to look at it like that. The Thermian Argument is looking at parts of a story and then looking at that in terms of out of universe arguments. I do agree that there is a miscommunication in how they approach the media, but the problem is the Thermian Argument inherently says one is wrong and that they are also stupid for thinking about it the way they do.
The issue is that Person A in your example isn't explaining anything, really, while Person B is (or at least has the possibility of doing it). The two aren't just dissimilar in perspective. They differ in the level of truth that it's possible to reach through them.
The Thermian argument is thus: The writer wanted the bad guy's light saber to be red, and the good guy's to be blue, because those are elemental colors that evoke strong feelings in humans and are universal color symbols. Blue is associated with sky and daylight. Red is a warning color in every human culture, because it is the color of blood. It's not ONLY that, but it is that. OMG, says the writer. I know how to make the bad guy's light saber red! I'll have him anoint it with blood! That will give the cool visual I want, and make the bad guy look extra bad because he had to murder someone just to make his life saber red! Thermian guy: You're both wrong, and I find your arguments unconvincing and colorist, and your designation of "good guys" and "bad guys" arbitrary and problematic.
@@girlwriteswhat In that case, the Thermian guy would be the first one. The last one is a strawman. Let me make a more apt example: Guild Wars 2. Just to pick a story you might also consider "SJW". The first bit of personal story was really bad. It involved fighting an Ancient Dragon god who was awakening and wanted to turn everyone into an undead and eat the entire world. No other motives, no subtlety, nothing, just a big dumb magical lizard that tries to eat everything. The whole story only had one conflict, and it was against this big dumb lizard and its minions. Was it evil? Sure! Was it interesting? No. No matter how evil you made it, fighting it always felt like no more than pest control. Sure, a really big and deadly pest, but still pest control. Since there wasn't much to relate to, there wasn't much to hate either. Add in that the side characters were flat and you understand why people didn't really care that much for GW2 original story. Now, the Thermian argument would be: "Nooo but you see the fact the Dragon God is indless is justified by the -so and so- lore and the rest of the story is justified by the threat of this Dragon." Which would technically be correct, but it wouldn't address the fact that people found this story boring.
@@RandomPerson-b1s Do you have data to lend credibility to your argument "people found it dumb" or are you just generalising your own reaction to make it look like you have a "gotcha" retort?
I feel like a discussion of intertextuality is missing from this video, probably for practical reasons and because it doesn't quite tip the scales one way or another. But it's worth remembering that texts exist within a continuum of other texts. "You kill a vampire with a stake through the heart" because that's how it's been in other vampire stories. You can subvert this expectation, dismiss it, or play it straight, but no matter what you do you as a creator you are in dialogue with other texts. Like I said, I don't think intertexuality excuses problematic content, but maybe it does contextualize it. If anything, a lot of genre work is in reaction to previous, problematic texts, possibly trying to keep the core of old stories appeal while subverting or discarding the problematic elements.
@@Speederzzz not really though, because what defines the Thermoan argument is justifying an aspect of the story by citing *the own story's* internal rules or justifications. If you answer "why is X like that" by citing other works, you aren't making a Thermian argument, and thus it's not relevant to the discussion at hand
also, I wanna say that the 'that's just the way the world is' as a reaction to someone criticizing the real world is also just... not a good argument (except when talking about laws of physics maybe). it's bleak and fatalisitc and implies that the forces that made the world this way are unknowable and immutable, which is just not the case. it's not because 'western'* society is by default racist, homophobic, sexist, etc that we can't do anything about it and are doomed to continue this way. *using this term for lack of a better one, although it has been argued by the likes of ContraPoints that western society is at best a nebulous concept from afar, but falls apart when looked at closer
It's very odd to pick at specifically western society for racism, homophobia, and sexism when it's easily the most progressive one (or at least in the top) of our world's (major) societies.
I think "that's just the way the world is" is a pretty lame and kind of shameful defense because it just very easily signals that the person using that line is completely unwilling to question the world around them. it's a type of willful ignorance, wishing to flatten the nuances of the real world and act as though our biases are natural and natural = just. people using this argument may agree that it's wrong that the world is "like this' but lack the compassion to even just imagine how we can be better people, but i think the uncomfortable majority of these people are very happily complacent in an unjust system, and that the ways in which the world is fucked up is actually good, and that any voice that challenges this order is a threat. i think this line can only be justified when it's used as a necessary acknowledgement, but hardly the end of an argument. it's terrible as a closing line, it doesnt work as a final assertion but it's a good stepping stone to more nuanced arguments of critiquing the way subconscious biases and tendencies rule our society and our culture/art.
@@joachimwalle3760 late reply, but colonialism (a basis of "Western" society) was the one that imposed a Christian, heteronormative, white supremacist system on many cultures around the world. Sure, some of those societies were not necessarily "progressive", but "Western" colonialism created the racial White->Brown->Black racial categories and hierarchy and imposed their brand of morality and religion on cultures where LGBT+ identities were normalized (this includes several indigenous cultures from the Americas and Africa). The extreme criminalization of homosexuality in countries like Uganda? Guess which country Uganda was a colony of. Not to mention that "progressive" is a fragile concept, considering how there's constant movements aiming to roll back that progress. "Western" society is relevant here, because the forms of racism, sexism, ableism, etc. that formed its basis, as well as their effects, have affected the rest of the world and persist globally even today. And also because OP is from a "Western" country, presumably.
I was gonna go with “deprive them of their food source”, which still works, since vampires are representative of the upper class that exploits the labor of lower classes whilst providing nothing in return. And this method of vampire slaying can be applied to the real world allegory, as well.
Recently I've heard of these two mindsets referred to as the "Watsonian (diagetic) explanation" and the "Doylian (non-diagetic) explanation," which I think works really well to explain the difference.
Actually, there is more to the imagined argument, than just a Thermian Argument. The hypothetical anime referenced doesn't just have the orcs raping/mutilating women (because the creator chose them to do so) and that alone wouldn't make it sexist or (near) pornographic. There is also the choice of *what* is shown, and *how* it is shown ...which is what truly makes that made up series, so problematic.
is that not a good defense though? im so late to this topic but like, if you have a character that /always lies/, and then there's a scenario where the entire team fails /if they lie/, and that character lies anyway, its still reasonable, its just annoying and unfair. at that point, a different character has to intervene, because that character will fail. it happens like that because it was written that way. its not incorrect or shallow to say "this is how i've written my character to act. sorry the scenario isn't what you wanted." am i missing something?
@@3u-n3ma_r1-c0 The difference is that the scenario you've put up is... Excusable. Its an excellent plot beat, and it lets your party intervene (the DM SHOULD allow the party to intervene in this scenario). But there are MANY other scenarios where this is NOT an acceptable excuse and you're using it as a shield to be an asshole to the other members of your party, such as being a kleptomaniac and stealing from your own party members or being a lecherous dickbag to your other party members or other NPCs. 'But is what my character would do' implies that you as a PLAYER have no agency over this character and what their actions are at the table.
The fundamental problem with the Thermian Argument to me is that there is no pure diagetic line of questions. You will always get back to the author if you just keep asking why. The reason is that fictional universes are actually created, so there is a God (the author). Eventually, any series of questions will end with "because God (the author) created it that way." People who want to make the Thermian Argument as a counter to non-diagetic issues with a text tend to fall into two camps, either they know this and try to shut down the argument before it reaches the inevitable "because God willed it" conclusion, or they don't know this and will inevitably be forced to acknowledge that God is the author for the story.
OK, so apparently there have been a lot of... GamerGate etc. types flooding this video, judging by the comments anyway. And a lot of you seem to be missing the point. This isn't a critique of your worldview; that's for another time; but Olson isn't arguing "racism/sexism/etc. in fiction is bad"; at least, not here. His point is: If you consider elements like that OK in fiction, that's an argument to make. A debate about that could be interesting, letting the participants understand each other a little better. However, if you use a "thermian argument", you're skipping that debate altogether. You're implying that those elements aren't there for a reason, they just are. That's not an argument - you're not defending the author's choices, you're claiming that they aren't choices at all.
The problem is that arguments like his are all to often used to discredit a person. It often goes like "this piece of fiction depicts woman overly sexualised, therfore it's author is a bad person" (I've obviously simplified it heavily, for clarity sake). Because this argument is heavily tainted by this judgemental mindset, it is quite understandable that people feel attacked.
@@argonaut999 OK sorry, I assumed you were rather reasonable and could be argued with, because your original comment seemed rather well formulated. I just tried to bring my point of view into this (although rather late, I'm sorry for that). Judging from you response however you only seem to be interested in your own opinions. Have a nice day
I love how great of an example Twilight is of fiction being a series of creative choices? Like, idk if that's where you were going with the vampire question, but Stephanie Meyer took "how do you recognize a vampire?" and went "make them sparkle," bc it's *her* fictional universe and she makes the rules.
Right. There was one fan fiction author who had their vampires ride through day and night, moon and the scorching sun. One reviewer said: Vampires die in sunlight. She answered: no, this is my artistic freedom. MY vampires don't die in the sunlight. And the reviewer answered: Yes, that WOULD be a good argument, if you hadn't insisted and emphasized how deadly the sun is to Vampires EVERY OTHER CHAPTER. Do they always sparkle? Fine by me. Silly, but not inconsistent.
it’s all about meaning. vampires are symbolic, you kill them with symbolic actions. sparkling is, well, it works for what Twilight is trying to do but what it’s trying to do is make a creepy monster sexy even when said monster is dating _well_ out of his acceptable range. it’s not the worst thing on the planet but it’s definitely something to be mindful of while reading, else you risk sliding into 50 Shades territory.
Playing NieR Automata and saying “this is all good and well and has a lot of complex themes, but why is the main character an android in a thong” and getting dozens of responses from “that’s just anime” to “she’s modeled off of a previous character who only wore lingerie bc she got her power from the sun” and I was like ?????
>why is the main character an android... Because the work is the story of the inheritors of mankind's will fighting against the inheritors of aliens' will (that is, neither actually had an initial quarrel with each other), and uses that as a springboard to explore multiple philosophical ideas via allegory. >why is the mian character... in a thong Because the creator wanted to show off robutt for sales and his own fetishes.
@@mastermarkus5307 That's just how it is just meant basically, the author did what they wanted. Also with that's just anime, the characters are made to be appealing to a certain masses. The author can think like that to be honest
tl;dr: when people critique a work for doing X, they aren't asking "what about this fiction's universe allows for X", but rather they are asking "why did the author choose to include X in the story."
@gotsda "You're assuming what they are actually asking." No, for the context of this video we KNOW what the person is asking, because if a person is genuinely asking "why does X" and you give them an in universe answer, they'll accept that. When someone is asking "why does author do X" that's an obvious distinction.
@fenrif >Why does the author do X? Because they thought it would make the story better. That's it, end of. Who cares. You don't think people are more interested in why the last season ( and especially last episode) of GOT was written so poorly by the author more than they are interested in "why x character did y action" in-universe? I.e more people are interested in knowing why an author thought this was good or was blinded sided to issues with writing the story this way than they are "what motivated a character to do this" in-universe, and no "because the author wanted it" isn't an answer, it's a cop-out suggesting that there isn't a bad way to implement conflict into a story. A well as why their desires for it to be presented in such a way ( burning down those normies cause I'm a nazi now I guess lol) isn't worth looking into. For example in the first season of 13 Reasons Why, near the end we got to see, on tv, how the mc female lead committed suicide, and I don't mean they cut the camera to another scene as she was doing it, we as the audience got to see a teenage girl not only cut her wrists while in a bathtub we got to see her bleed out in full and watch as the life left her body. Not questioning why the director thought this would be a good idea ( it wasn't it was heavily dismissed by therapist they were talking to that this scene should not exist as it will not help anybody who's suicidal only make it worse) would allow them to think this was somehow a good and appropriate use of conflict by depicting suicide in media and is not in any way harmful or problematic to the audience. >"why do you think you get to tell authors what they can or cannot put in their work?" like in the show above whos GOAL was to alert people of how suicide affects people, it literally inspired people to commit suicide for the sake of revenge by copying the method that was used by the mc female lead, this is the point we should be able to criticize how a person writes or produces smt because it can go against how they wanted people to see their work, I.E. you create smt to help people but it's actually insulting to those it targetted at and makes things worse.
Honestly, I don't really like Thermian arguments because I like seeing why writers and everyone in the production staff make the choices that they made. I swear, if this was made in other years, we'd be getting these questions. 2020: Why did they need to frame a character's struggle with Mental Illness as a villain arc? 2019: Why did the diamonds have to be crucial to gem life and not let the rest of the universe recover from their abuse without needing them to continue living? 2014: If Tenzin can be beaten up off screen with dignity, why're we really focusing on every detail of Korra's?
I think that an internal argument ("it is this way in the story because of that other thing in the story") is fine except that it is begging the question. "The orcs to horrible stuff because there's this blood god that wants them to" simply begs the question "why does the story have a blood god that wants them to?" I think it would be more productive to follow the argument back to its source than to dismiss it outright. "chainmail bikinis is just how her tribe dresses" is answered with "OK: why was the decision made to have a tribe that dresses in chain-mail bikinis". Eventually you may get to the real reason (be it good or bad) from which these others flow.
Jerry Love. agreed, and what the defenders are doing is actually self defeatist and perhaps shows that they do know they are wrong, or at least they believe they are wrong and cant justify what they are creating. they cant even throw up a bs argument about it being meaningful in some way and a legitimate expression of artistic merit. hell, suppose that the question isnt loaded with any sort of judgement and take it at face value. the answer "because I enjoy watching fictionalized exaggerated rape" is at least a legitimate answer
As someone who is a fan of many things that are judged as being offensive (videogames, pepe the frog, other dark humour, etc.) I believe in the prioritization of freedom in this particular situation. Within this context I would define this freedom as freedom to act, choose, and express, rather than freedom from the actions and offenses of others. For example many people criticize fighting games such as Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters and many others for having sexualized character designs. In this example I advocate for the artists as I don't believe in censorship of the content to avoid being offensive. If I want to play a videogame where sexy ladies throw fireballs, I don't care who gets offended. Fictionalized crime is exactly that FICTION. I understand the need for standards of conduct to prevent serious crimes in the real world, -for example: an old woman has her windows smashed in the middle of the night and can't afford to replace them. That would be awful. But if I'm not depriving anyone of their freedoms they shouldn't impede mine.
But noone is impeding on your freedoms by mere criticism. Now, if someone goes beyond criticism and actually try to censor, then I can agree with you. If someone says "sexualized characters in video games negatively affect young women, therefore we should ban such depictions", then you have a strong point. If someone merely talks about it, and tries to make people understand *why* they view it as problematic, they're not impeding on anyones freedoms anymore than I am impeding on your freedom to play such a game by not buying it myself (which, technically, I do, since if I *had* bought the game, that would have increased sales and incentivized video game studios to make more games with the same qualities). If someone uses criticism to convince others to boycott, then that's still not directly impeding on your freedom. A boycott may make companies more wary of making new products with similar qualities, or make some stores not sell the product, but does that directly impede on your freedom*? To claim otherwise could easily be countered with the claim that your claim then impedes on their freedom not to support a product they do not like. *It definitely indirectly impedes your freedom, and there's a positively *MASSIVE* philosophical discussion to be had on the rights and wrongs of this, but honestly, that discussion is too big for me to take here.
Thomas Ueland Torp I wasn't saying the criticisms were impediments to freedom. I had originally meant to convey that those criticisms should not become policy.
Then we probably agree. There just seem to be a lot of people, these days, who think that criticism = censorship, so I misread you to argue the same claim.
If you say "it seems pointless that there are dark themes being played up in a thing" and the answer is "there's a reason given," there's usually a disconnect in understanding between the parties involved over what is being discussed. I think it's completely legitimate to pull back to a meta level and question why something is being presented the way that it is, but if that's your interest, you need to make that clear to the audience. If violence or or other such things are being presented with perverse glee on the part of characters who revel in those things, that's one thing. If it's being presented to the audience as something that's meant to be reveled in too, that has deeper implications. If characters are murderous or cruel, but we're meant to sympathize with them or root for them as they engage in these behaviors, that has something worth considering as to why the story is written and presented in that way.
I'm here from Shaun and Harry Potter. I told someone many years ago that I didn't like cowboy western books because they're always settled by shooting someone. She said that the hero *had* to shoot the other person, and had no choice. I said that the author constructed the story that way solely because he wanted the shooting. It could have been written otherwise. Her eyes were opened. It was gratifying.
What a dumb piece of sophistry you vomited into the comments section, by that logic you can criticize any story. Why have fiction at all if you can just demonize anything you don't agree with, Beyond stupid.
I was forwarded this by a friend when discussing our distaste for SCP-231. This is one of the most prevalent arguments against any criticism of it. It was really satisfying seeing my thoughts on the matter so neatly summed up in the video.
@@Wishuponapancake To be honest, it's difficult to explain without sounding awful but I'll try. tl;dr The Foundation seemingly does some vaguely-defined (but heavily implied) heinous shit to children, all because apparently if they don't, based on some ancient writings, the world will be destroyed/live in eternal suffering. The worst part, other than the subject matter and its clumsy use, is that I genuinely can't tell what it's trying to argue for. The Foundation gives a "the ends justify the means" argument, but it's hard to tell what the story wants us to think. Is it with the Foundation? Is it against it? And if either of those, how much and to what degree? It's genuinely hard to tell where it stands ethically.
I actually don't mind SCP-231, at least from an artistic standpoint. I think it serves an important purpose in clearly characterizing the Foundation as amoral and extreme--and in demonstrating that Foundation members struggle with this--while also making good use of the diegetic censorship the wiki is famous for to avoid _actually_ portraying anything fucked-up. I want to be clear about this, because I know we're in the comments for a video about the Thermian argument. It's not that I think SCP-213 is justified by the internal mechanics of the SCP Wiki, or by the character of the Foundation. Rather, I don't think that the text of SCP-231 is genuinely exploitative in the first place, because it deliberately avoids defining or depicting Procedure 110-Montauk, preferring instead to maintain it as a loose approximation and symbol. Separately, I really _do_ think that SCP-231 improves the story being told by the SCP Wiki, though this is obviously a less important factor. To me, SCP-231 is almost like the functional inverse of the Orc Anime that Dan talks about in this video: while the Orc Anime contrives its plot in the service of maximizing its problematic content, SCP-231 contrives its _structure_ in the service of _minimizing_ its problematic content, while still using the abstract concept of a messed-up containment procedure as a narrative device.
Eh, I would say that "that scene" in Episode One of the Goblin Slayer show is much more properly handled than in the manga ie the way everyone/everything is posed and angled makes it very clear that the show wanted to go for genuine shock horror (whereas the manga clearly went for disturbing wank fodder)
Made me think of Quiet from MGSV. "Why is she naked all the time?" -"She has to. She breathes through her skin. It's like photosynthesis. It makes sense if you understand the lore." Etc, etc.
It still bothers me that she wears leather and fishnets then. Like she could just have easily have worn more conservative woven garments with lots of "airholes" or even just pasties. it seems less consistent that she would wear something fetishy. Also really bothers me that she is always kneeling but doesn't wear knee-pads.
@@DrIvoRobotnick That's all irrelevant because it's putting the horse before the cart, and arguing in such a way cedes to the ass-hole the key point - that the rules of the world are created by the author(s) for social, cultural, audience appeal or narrative reasons not because logic and natural laws dictate it must be that way. Quiet breathes through her skin because the designers wanted her to wear leather and fishnets not the other way round.
Only thing worse than the "She breathes through her skin" excuse is the fact that Kojima thinks pantyhose with bikini would be sexy. Like, it would be stupid enough if she was just running around in bikini, but pantyhose!?! Why Kojima? Why did you do that?
@@agilemind6241 So according to the premise of this very video. That the world is designed to the specifications of the author(s), leaves any moralistic contestation moot.
The Thermian Argument, a.k.a. "shut up, I'm breathing through my skin!" as Jim Sterling would put it. Just as a node though, I think the vampire example would have worked better if you hadn't rattled off the typical ways of killing a vampire in a story right after posing the question.
+chaosof99 Haha, yeah, I uploaded and scheduled this last night, then settled in for some League and getting caught up on Jimquisition, and, yeah, breathing through my skin.
I don't know. Giving possibly deceptive answers to put someone in the right frame of mind for the example is not a bad idea. It's just the part where he claims vampires aren't real that is. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go take off my pants so I can breathe.
+Dean Edwards The closest humans can get to "objectivity", even in the sciences, is amassing independently verifiable evidence and subject-neutral logical arguments. In the arts, that's nigh-impossible.
_this comment section is genuinely fucking insane. i had no idea that "stories are made by people & if those people write questionable elements in their stories, they should be questioned about those elements" was such a novel concept._
I'll be honest, I have the opposite reaction. This comment section has genuinely compelling and analytical comments in it, something which I haven't seen on youtube comment sections probably ever. I was expecting the witty comments and the dumb comments, but I didn't expect them to be matched by a comparable amount of well thought out comments.
The difference for some is whether something really matters or is even 'questionable'. While everything is questionable in that it is "open to being discussed and critiqued", it seems that most use the part of the definition where it is "of dubious morality or respectability". Because of that, when people approach saying that something is questionable and merits discussion, the fans have likely developed a reflexive assumption that the person is just here to do nothing but disparage their favorite work and them for liking it just because the other person just happens to not enjoy it. FI's example is a strawman (and I don't think even he would deny it as one), but a recent and similar example was that of people posting a couple of pages from the Berserk manga of a group of men carrying the impaled corpses (mostly women) of a village they had just pillaged, and were questioning why anyone would want to read it. The answer was that those are the bad guys of the arc, and they are shown doing something like that to have us hate them so we are happier when they are defeated, as well as showing why the king of the country did not release this band of prisoners for the task of hunting down the MCs despite being the actual strongest of his forces. That is, they were all criminals led by a demon (not hyperbole) who do things like that, but were so strong compared to his full-human companies that he kept them as a last-resort for times where he wants something done even if it meant sacrificing an entire village of people just because the group got bored on the way. Like it or hate it, Berserk is all about struggling against the worst the world has to throw at you, so even extreme violence such as that serves a purpose. Of course, the answer the people asking about the scene just inserted by default was that the author hated women and revelled in violence being done to them, because it was not a case of them wanting to actually engage with the media, they simply wanted to decry anyone who enjoyed something they didn't as misogynists. Ultimately, question anything you want. You really don't need anyone's permission to do so (least of all mine). But I would suggest that you actually listen to the answer and only then decide what the value of something is based on that answer. After all, just because there was a clear answer given about Berserk does not mean you have to find it entertaining and worth your time.
way i see it, questionable or not, it's still not problematic. despite ppl using that word to describe elements of a story that make them uncomfortable. i've been made uncomfortable by contents of a story before. but rather than ciriticize the story, i looked inward. instead of questioning why the problematic content was in the story, i questioned myself as to why it made me uncomfortable despite just being fiction. that's when i realize the "problematic" aspect of it was just an illusion that existed in my head at the time. i was projecting my own standards/insecurities onto the fiction and judging it for that. but nowadays, it doesn't bother me much when a story has content most would consider "questionable", or "problematic" though i suppose part of me thinks it's just that my standards on what is and is not questionable has merely shifted a bit.
Okay so there's this running theme in a few of the comment threads that I"m seeing and I'm just confused by it, because I don't think people understand what purpose criticism of a thing even has. There's this running thread of saying that "SJW critics" are somehow asking/demanding creators to change their work, which... they aren't, not directly. The purpose of criticism of a work is rarely a direct dialogue with the creator. That is what editors do. That is what first readers do. That is what the public does by supporting that creator's works- or choosing not to. A critic is someone who builds a rapport with the public by explaining their thoughts on Creative Work X and how they respond to it based on elements of Creative Work X. Their purpose is both to instruct the public in the structural flaws of Creative Work X, or what they perceive as such, as well as to let the public know if Creative Work X is worth their time and money. And if a segment of the public has views that align with the critic's, the public may well choose to use that critic's views as a guide to how and where they should spend. No more and no less. Criticism isn't a demand for reform. it's essentially a dialogue between consumers of entertainment, or between people who want to learn more about creative forms and more experienced individuals. So in our hypothetical example, I find it ludicrous to say that Folded Dan's criticism of Women Getting Torn Apart By Orcs is equivalent to him saying he didn't like it. Of course it is! It's also an explanation of the specific elements he found unpalatable, why they were unpalatable, and what it says about the potential mentality or competence, or general culture of the creator that those elements exist. It's a warning (or endorsement) for potential consumers who may be interested in Women Getting Torn Apart by Orcs, or who might want to seek out other opinions on what they just saw while putting their own thoughts together. You can dismiss any and all negative criticism by boiling it down to "Don't like, don't read" but that completely misunderstands why people criticize! Like, I don't read Jacob Chapman's anime reviews because I think I'm going to get some completely unbiased academic study of how Digimon Tri fits together. I read them because I think JO has good taste, generally hits on what elements do and do not work in shows, and has similar biases and tastes to my own. And that's okay! And wanting other people to share those tastes is okay! And directly challenging others to accept it is okay! Calling out Cute Girls Who Do Things shows for having a weirdly voyeuristic tone isn't the same thing as castigating all of society. It's an expression of personal distaste that can only register for a call to change behavior if and when an individual feels *stung* by it on some level- perhaps they just feel shamed for liking something that might have flaws, which is itself a completely new topic of discussion since it's perfectly possible to love "problematic" texts in spite of their flaws. What matters is how the viewer approaches, understands, and internalizes the text. I just... arrghhh.
the problem is, its not criticism, its demand for reform. He implies many times that these ideas are bad and should not be allowed to exist. Its also not real criticism. When you criticize a work you have to look at it objectively as possible. Is the writing good? Does everything in the story have a logical explanation? Does the story set out to do what it is trying to do? Does the plot stay consistent or do any detractions from the main plot have reasonable explanations? Say you're critiquing the 'Adventures of Huckleberryfin.' Its completely illegitimate to start your review with "this story is racist and therefore it is bad." That might be your opinion, but that certainly is not critique and it should never be defended as if its a legitimate review. A more legitimate line of reasoning would be "The themes of racism throughout the story are treated very maturely. The characters remain consistent in their beliefs and never detract from their way of thinking without proper intervention within the world of the story." This is the real complaint with SJW 'critics' they NEVER critique anything objectively. They always just say "this is racist" or "this is sexist" or "this needs more LGBT persons." That used to be called 'bitching' not ''critique.' We need to reclaim critique as an objective observation about art not this bullshit bitching and moaning that goes on all too often.
All critique is inherently tinged by a desire for reform, and not all critique needs to focus on the story. It's perfectly plausible to state both that Birth of a Nation is a film that created some of the conventions of film-making that exist to this day, and condemn its racist core in the same breath. Nobody who studies any form of art can argue that art is divorced from outside context, and exposing racist or sexist ideas at the core of art is itself a valid form of criticism. In fact, in the case of a story such as Birth of a Nation, what the story was "setting out to do" is inextricably linked to the racism pervading it. You can't call for "objective criticism" and then whinge when that objective criticism begins to try to examine the core concepts and ideas that make up the overall story. While I agree with you that criticisms of a text can and should focus on the inherent writing/film-making/design quality, I have no patience for the idea of a world where criticism is not allowed to ever question more than whether a story is "good" or "bad"- in fact, answering those questions is often the least interesting discussion you can have. I'd rather answer questions about how well a story executed upon its own core ideas, what that core is, where and how they were shaped, what elements of the story are in service to other elements. All of those end up, inexorably, leading to discussions about how well the story handles certain key elements. You can praise the animation quality and dark fantasy aesthetic and gripping soundtrack of Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs, but at the end of the day someone will, in fact, have to confront the fact that the story takes pornographic glee in showing women getting ripped apart by orcs. And like... Jesus Christ, for all your fears about SJWs, apparently you just skipped the videos on Dan Olson's channel where he talks about his love for The Chronicles of Riddick and 300. Neither of those seem like they're censored, pristine propaganda films for a feminist agenda, do they? But he explicitly praises elements of their design and conception because he *can* objectively criticize them. The only one diminishing the power of criticism here is you. EDIT: And to make a point- when I say a "desire for reform", I mean that on some level, most critics specifically want a work to be better than it is. I think all of us would rather watch shows or read books or play games that are good rather than otherwise. So structural criticism is itself an expression of "I wish this wasn't so bad", in addition to being a warning or endorsement to a potential audience.
Demosthenes6666 You are again conflating opinion with critique. You aren't critiquing racist ideals you are condeming them outright, that is not and will never be a form of critique. Again, we used to call that bitching but sjws seem to be coopting every kind of rational discussion. I condemn you ideas about what critique should be because frankly, they're wrong. Your ideals fall entirely outside of what critique should be and this "but muh feelings" bs needs to be stopped. You cannot objectively examine something or make valid criticism when you are comparing it to real world morals this is why that line if thinking is heavily condemned by professionals and rational thinkers, because it's simply wrong. You also dismiss the fact he's directly calling for censorship with "well isn't all criticism asking for reform?" no. No its not and he's advocating for direct censorship.
..."Professional and Rational Thinkers" tend to spend a lot of time trying to actually craft systems of real world morals, as I understand it. There are quite a few famous authors, in fact, who create texts entirely to support their particular view on morality, and thus whose morals are inexplicably tied to the text and its evaluation. Ayn Rand comes to mind as a particularly famous example, given how inextricable objectivism is from Atlas Shrugged. You can't start talking about Atlas Shrugged and not talk about objectivism, or you are limited to a much more boring and trite discussion of grammar and syntax. Useful to students of the English language, perhaps, but not particularly to readers unless you're specifically praising or damning particular skill in using language. Your short-sightedness just erased the most significant element of Atlas Shrugged from the critical lexicon. Likewise, it is impossible to read Watchmen and not discuss the impact of the Cold War on the story and tone, and the contrasting morality of the characters. It is impossible to read V for Vendetta and not talk about anarchy. It is impossible to watch Oldboy and not discussion taboo sexuality (which even the director discussed as being a key theme of the film). It is impossible to play Hotline Miami without being drawn into a discussion of how the game both celebrates and condemns ultraviolence through its use of abrupt mood shifts. What you are advocating is not a world where "feelings" don't come into play. In fact you have, rather childishly, dismissed the idea that critics can ever discuss core elements to a text that do not pertain directly to mechanical execution. I find that pathetic and sad, personally. But perhaps you are content to live in a world where discussions of art never progress, where art cannot be celebrated or condemned as much for its bold ideas as for its color composition. Such a world is anathema to the creation of new and bold art, however, and akin to censorship on a level no amount of imagined complaints motivated by nothing but "feelings" can ever produce. And frankly, if you think discussion of feelings has no place in art, I find that equally pathetic. Art exists to create an emotional response. There is much to be gained in discussing the precise emotional responses an audience had to a text. In fact, a common criticism of inept art is that it failed to elicit an emotional response, or evoked a different emotional response from the one the creator intended.
Demosthenes6666 so now you're conflating entertainment with philosophy to make your point because I so thoroughly destroyed the previous point. You idiots might not be able to tell the difference between entertainment and a political statement but the rest of the world can. "Art exists to create an emotional response." Then you're flat wrong. Art exists to do many things. Some exists solely as a coping mechanism for the damage, some are strictly entertainment, some are political statements where as others are mindless fun. You idiots can't tell the difference between these things. You'd like to think all art has some grand purpose in life to change the minds of all around when that couldn't be further from the truth and frankly, if you haven't figured that out by now you're honestly just too fucking ignorant to have this discussion. Of course your little bits of propaganda don't go unnoticed but you can keep them to yourself.
It seems to me that people have just generally gotten worse at telling reality and fiction apart for the past 10 years - and it's interesting to see that this was seemingly already as apparent 7 years ago. I've been casually present in some subreddits critical of the Star Wars sequel trilogy and GOT, and people there seemed to be split into three groups: Number one: your usual "women make everything worse" Gamergate remnants, i.e. people who use "SJW" unironically; number two: people with legitimate criticism / disappointment tied to writing/production/general enjoyment issues, i.e. "the fig leaf" of the community; and three: people who are mad that their headcanon escapism fan-fiction plot did not end up in the finished product because X fictional character "deserved better". Two of these groups just flat-out refuse to acknowledge that fictional works still exist in a real context - be it creative (i.e. they need to work as a story) or societal (i.e. they have the same responsibilities all acts of communication have - the topic of this video). I get that abstraction and subsumtion (= the application of abstract rules and concepts to real phenomena) is hard, but I find it really worrying that people have become so... outright hostile to the very concept of it.
People haven't been able to tell reality and fantasy apart for ever. Religions, cults, magical thinking, manifesting, horoscopes, auguries, good luck charms, just world fallacy, and also the belief that humans are fundamentally rational instead of emotional.
I think the people who suck at telling fiction from reality are the people who need to make videos about something that doesn't exist and uses bad faith justifications for his tism.
When I suggested this term, I wasn't thinking only about people who reject criticism, but also interpretation. I was specifically thinking about the people who will (aggressively) reject any claim of there being any sort of homosexuality in Steven Universe. The argument usually goes. Person A: "Ruby and Sapphire are codified as female characters that use the pronoun she. They are shown to be in some sort of romantic relationship. We can therefore say that they are codified as a female homosexual couple" Person B: "YOU CAN'T SAY THEY'RE GAY BECAUSE GEMS DON'T HAVE GENDER!!!!! STOP SAYING THEY'RE GAY!!!! HOW DARE YOU!!!!"
+quiroz923 Person B is correct. You made them seem comical with hyperbole, but I can still see that they are right, and I don't even watch the show. If gems don't have a gender, they cannot be gay, whether or not they are referred to with female pronouns, or if they have a female appearance. Person A is using unrelated facts about reality to try to prove their bias in a fictional world. To take it to the extreme would be to say that gems aren't even people, therefore they don't exist and are a figment of someone's imagination. That could spiral into one of those shitty "the whole show was a drug induced dream," interpretations. Unless the creator explicitly states that the gems are gay -- or at least, that they represent a gay couple, since it defies the established lore -- Person A is making an baseless claim.
+Stun Gee Okay, four things. 1) Not that it actually matters (it really doesn't) but some creators have been explicit about it. 2) You probably don't want to argue about a show that you haven't watched because then you don't really know what you're talking about, do you? 3) This is not exactly a subtle or ambiguous fact of the show. It's quite obvious. It's hard to read it as anything else, really, unless you prefer to use "queer" instead of homosexual, to broaden the ways this can resonate with, say, non binary people. 4) Every single point you make is based on the thermian argument. You say "unrelated facts about reality". But here's the thing, reality is not unrelated to the fiction that exists within reality, because fiction was made by and for people who actually exist in reality. As a result, narrative exists within a context, the context where both creators and consummers inhabit. This is not a controversial statment. This is not a radical new idea. This is a well known fact. So yes, these facts about reality are related because they are part of the context in which the text is created and consummed. BTW, your next comment is nonsense: "To take it to the extreme would be to say that gems aren't even people, therefore they don't exist and are a figment of someone's imagination." This is an OBJECTIVE FACT: Gems aren't people, they don't exist, they are figments of someone's imagination, becuase, again, THIS IS FICTION. WE ARE NOT THERMIANS WATCHING A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT. WE ARE WATCHING A FICTIONAL UNIVERSE CREATED BY A REAL PERSON FOR REAL PEOPLE THAT EXISTS IN REALITY. IT'S MADE UP. No, this is not the same as "one of those shitty "the whole show was a drug induced dream," interpretations". I am talking about the OBJECTIVE FACT that THIS IS FICTION withing OUR ACTUAL REAL REALITY. NOt within the diegesis, not within the universe. Because accepting that something is fiction does not lead to thinking "this is all a dream within the universe", because there is literally no reason it should. Your point doesn't make any sense. Look, I know it's hard to move away from a thermian interaction with stories, to try to see them as fiction and try to interpret them at all, but consider this, which might help you understand: Take the creation and consumption of fiction to its most basic necessities. What do I need to tell a story and for you to understand it? Well, we probably need to speak the same language, right? Let's take Steven Universe as an example. How is it possible that a story created inside its own fictional universe is understood by anyone? Well, it's written in English. HOw is it possible that it was written in English? Well, it was made by real people who speak English. It can be watched by people who also speak English (or through a translation, but let's focus in the English speaking part so that you'll understand the point). So real people who speak a real language tell this story in that language, and it is consumed by people who also speak that language. So what was needed? Pay attention to this: PEOPLE IN THE REAL WORLD, CREATOR AND CONSUMER, NEEDED A COMMON CODE. These are very obvious ideas, but here's the point: FOR STORIES TO BE POSSIBLE, THEY NEED TO BE TOLD IN A REAL WORLD, WHERE REAL PEOPLE HAVE COMMON CODES IN COMMON. And people are gonna have common codes in common only if they exist within a similar society. So here's the thing... Take the sentence "Steven woke up". It is made of signs, these little things we call "words". I know the meaning of these signs. So do you. That is how it is possible for you to be able to read this right now. Okay, here's another collection of symbols: "She is in a romantic relationsip with her". YOu understand what this means, so do I. Okay, take it one step further: what are the codes to write a woman in any story? You don't have to state "she is a woman. I will now describe what a woman is". NO, you say "She." You with me so far? Creator and consummer need to agree that "she" means "female", NOT AS AN INVENTION OF THE FICTIONAL WORLD, BUT AS SOMETHING THAT IS AGREED UPON KNOWLEDGE BEFORE THE STORY IS EVEN CREATED. STORIES DON'T EXIST OUTSIDE OF LANGUAGE. THEREFORE, STORIES DON'T EXIST OUTSIDE OF CODES. THEREFORE, A CREATOR AND A CONSUMMER, WHEN BOTH USING THE SAME CODES, ARE ABLE TO CONVEY THINGS WITHOUT BEING EXPLICIT ABOUT THEM IF THEY USE THE CORRECT CODES. OKay, now, it stands to reason that when creator and consummer, both agreeing that these characters are female OR AT LEAST female coded because of the pronoun "she", say "she is in a romantic relationship with her", they also agree on some codes about that. We would normally say that it means they are "gay", or "queer". SO we get to the conclussion that this is how they were codified. TL; DR: IN ORDER FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND ANY STORY AT ALL, THERE NEEDS TO BE IN THE REAL WORLD (NOT IN THE STORY) SOME GENERAL CODES, SIGNS AND SYMBOLS THAT YOU AND THE CREATOR BOTH HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF. Of course, this is obvious. Of course you need to speak English to consumme a story in English. But it is all to show you that these are things that NEED to exist in the real world, NOT HISTORICAL DOCUMMENTS. I had to go to the most basic of base assumptions because in order for you to understand, I needed to prove to you very obvious stuff that you are trying to ignore by sticking to the thermian attitude.
quiroz923 ["You probably don't want to argue about a show that you haven't watched because then you don't really know what you're talking about, do you?"] Why? Your entire argument is based on the idea of detaching yourself from the "reality" of fictional worlds. [" This is not exactly a subtle or ambiguous fact of the show. It's quite obvious. It's hard to read it as anything else, really, unless you prefer to use "queer" instead of homosexual, to broaden the ways this can resonate with, say, non binary people. "] Really? because I just did, based on the information that *you* gave me. ["Every single point you make is based on the thermian argument."] That is entirely the point. I don't see why you are pointing this out. I am trying to demonstrate to you that a "thermian argument" is legitimate, but you would rather use the term as some sort of insult to my argument. ["But here's the thing, reality is not unrelated to the fiction that exists within reality, because fiction was made by and for people who actually exist in reality."] So what? Just because something is made in reality doesn't mean it is accurate to reality, unless otherwise stated by the creators. It is impossible for anything to not be made in reality, so this also seems like a worthless thing to point out. What is gained by this observation? If I were the creator of Steven's Universe, would you still be saying that it has the same meaning, despite my perspective? It being created in reality means absolutely nothing, and the reality in which it was created has no bearing outside of what the creator himself says it does. There is no reason to discuss fiction in the way proposed by the creator of this video, outside of creating wicked (baseless) theories that might be interesting, but in the end lack any depth, or substance. With two exceptions, the fiction has a clear message or when the creator gives such insight, otherwise it is just speculation. ["As a result, narrative exists within a context, the context where both creators and consummers inhabit."] A context which is not the same for all people, not by a long shot, which makes it meaningless as well. Unless you wrote the biography on the creator, or are that creator. Tell me what the context is. is it English, like you state later in your mess of a response? No, because English is a language, and not everybody who speaks English sees life the same way. Is it culture, which you also state later on? What culture? There are many even in small communities. This is precisely why I lamented your bias use of reality, which you could argue is not the same for all people (as far as literature goes), and that is why it is unrelated. You do not know the outside -- in reality -- perspective that gave birth to the fiction, you can only assume, unless the creator tells you. Are you seeing a pattern? This is how repetitive your post was. ["This is an OBJECTIVE FACT: Gems aren't people, they don't exist, they are figments of someone's imagination, becuase, again, THIS IS FICTION. WE ARE NOT THERMIANS WATCHING A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT. WE ARE WATCHING A FICTIONAL UNIVERSE CREATED BY A REAL PERSON FOR REAL PEOPLE THAT EXISTS IN REALITY. IT'S MADE UP."] Then gems aren't gay! They can't be; they aren't real. How can something that doesn't exist be gay? ["Look, I know it's hard to move away from a thermian interaction with stories, to try to see them as fiction and try to interpret them at all, but consider this, which might help you understand:"] Clearly it must be, you think that rocks are gay, and these rocks don't even exist. I, on the other hand, haven't interacted with this story, so I'm having no trouble. ["PEOPLE IN THE REAL WORLD, CREATOR AND CONSUMER, NEEDED A COMMON CODE."] You mean English, or is it something else? You can speak English to me and the words can be interpreted in numerous ways-- watch this. "Steven woke up." 1. Steven stopped sleeping. 2. Steven came to a realization. 3. Steven was alarmed. Which one of these is the "common code," and who decided on it? [" ...'She is in a romantic relationsip with her'... "] Now you are ignoring context. Actual context -- from the story. If I said, "He went to the store." you would rightly assume that a boy or man went to the store. Now what if this is a sentence that is part of a story. Established in that story: 1. He is the name of a female character. or 2. He is a robot -- genderless -- simply referred to as he. or 3. He is a worm that is known for being of an ambiguous gender, but referred to as he. Now when you read that sentence and assume that a boy or man went to the market, you are wrong. Just like you are wrong to put a gender on gender-less characters, the gems in this case. Of course, with my normal exception -- unless the creator says otherwise. Do you see how much more productive it is to discuss a work of fiction by the context that you can actually qualify? ------ ["I needed to prove to you very obvious stuff that you are trying to ignore by sticking to the thermian attitude"] No, you didn't prove shit, you just stated a bunch of things that aren't true. Good try, though. By the way, I think you should lay a nice, cold, damp towel over your keyboard from all of that angry typing. Maybe just the caps lock button, I think it wants a break.
Look, you are right about one thing: My response truly was a mess. I apologize, it is late, I do not have the energy nor the concentration to give you the explanation you deserve. If I remember I may come back to this conversation, but for now, let me leave you with this: You are right, sometimes the creator and the consumer will have different contexts, and that will affect communication. You are right that messages may be interpreted in different ways and that signs will acquire new meaning according to context. BUT, despite all of that, it is still possible for me and you to be talking right at this instant, and more or less know what it is we mean. Communication is possible. We both speak English, we both share one code, and we more or less know what it is the other means. Maybe it is possible to know other codes besides verbal languages like English. Maybe, even if someone doesn't say something explicitely with words, I can know a different code and therefore interpret the message accordingly, even if it is not said in words, even if it is not outright stated to mean such. Maybe I can see someone waving their hand and understand they are greeting me, I can understand that message, even if they don't say something. Same applies to fiction: maybe I can understand a code that I know, and that I know that the creator knows, without needing it to be explicitely stated, and without needing the author to tell me himself.
quiroz923 ["My response truly was a mess. I apologize, it is late, I do not have the energy nor the concentration to give you the explanation you deserve."] I've been there, bud. No worries. I just like to add a bit of fun into my posts sometimes, you know? ["BUT, despite all of that, it is still possible for me and you to be talking right at this instant, and more or less know what it is we mean. "] Yes, but you and I are talking directly. I'm not telling you a story and expecting you to make an argument in response. ["Maybe it is possible to know other codes besides verbal languages like English. Maybe, even if someone doesn't say something explicitely with words, I can know a different code and therefore interpret the message accordingly, even if it is not said in words, even if it is not outright stated to mean such."] Yes, but these "codes" have been given definition by someone, or some group. There is no fiction-interpretation code. ["Same applies to fiction::] Not quite. ["maybe I can understand a code that I know, and that I know that the creator knows, without needing it to be explicitely stated, and without needing the author to tell me himself."] If you *know* that the creator is speaking in that code, it has been explicitly stated by them at some point in some way. Do not get too lost in your example, I'm speaking generally. I know that you are probably right about Steven's Universe: [" Not that it actually matters (it really doesn't) but some creators have been explicit about it."] because it does matter.
+KrimsonKyriarch I was able to find an anime where girls are raped by a orc but no one was killed and it was pretty standerd hentai from what I saw. I do recall a hentai/anime from way back when that looks like it was made around the same time as Akira (not bashing Akira but it does look dated) that had monsters that would rape and kill girls but the deaths were literally the most tame thing ever. The screen would flash red and they'd be lying on the ground, still all in one piece but with little red bruises on them (the general blood stain kinda thing). I could not for the life of me find any anime like he originally described tho.
Not from what I could find. Most likely, "Women Being Ripped Apart by Orcs" was just him being hyperbolic, not to mention generalizing to an almost insulting level. He might as well had just said "All anime is Chinese cartoon porn, and if you try to defend it then you are misogynistic scum".
@my name Well, I wanted to make it brief, but since you ask... There are many different ways a certain method of killing a vampire might "suck" (pun intended). For instance, it might be because the way you have devised is too easy, and the rest of the story hinges on the vampire being a big threat/an evil that doesn't go away that easily. If for some reason all it takes to kill a vampire is a bonk on the head, it might be wise to revise the setting before showing your work. It might also be very convoluted, and maybe halfway through writing about some character taking a strand of the vampire DNA, some hair form the person that vampire loves the most, some dirt from his grave, having everything blessed by a priest and then put in a particle accelerator, you might decide that all this work is as narratively interesting as a quest that tells you "go kill 10 rats". So you might decide to streamline things. Or it might not be fun: maybe the way you have devised to kill a vampire makes it so that the final showdown between the protagonist and the vampire is only a matter of who hits the hardest, or that the vampire is so hard to kill you have to come up with some equally boring powerups for the protagonist to win. It is true that none of this is objective. But here's the thing: there is no objective parameter that makes a story good. A story is good if it resonates with people, and there's nothing less subjective than that. What we can do is look at the stories of the past and find which ones people liked and what they have in common. Want a practical example? Take JoJo. During part 1 and 2, battles in the manga were fought using a form of energy known as Hamon, which while it had some quirks, in the end it wasn't all that different from what you'd see in Fist of the North Star or Dragonball. Araki got bored of it, so in part 3 he basically scrapped it and replaced with Stands, which allowed to write way more interesting battles that looked more like battles, with potentially infinite varieties, while also not having to worry about issues like power creep (because stands are so varied there is no way to tell which is stronger). The result? JoJo's Bizarre Adventures is now one of the oldest and most successful manga series which are still being published, while also being referenced by every other manga (that's where the JoJo reference meme comes from). Was there any objective metric which guaranteed him Stands were a better idea than Hamon? Not at all. Hell, if we talk about consistency, it should have been a bad idea. But there was clearly something in Stands which made it better than Hamon, and Araki chose them because he liked them subjectively.
@my name "Your answer is good, but it's just a much longer way of saying "as long as it's internally consistent and interesting." "Interesting", of course, is still subjective, which leaves us one metric to judge this by. Whether or not it makes sense in the story." Well, yes, in the end it's about making things interesting. But I believe it's also about delivering the right feel for the world and the characters (which is also highly subjective). Keeping on with the JoJo example, take Dio: I think we can all agree the reason he's such a delightful villain is because he is absolutely over the top to the point of being cartoonish. On one hand, this makes him incredibly fun to listen to, but on the other, it requires careful balancing on the kind of evil he does: it must be very evil, to make sure you understand he means business, but also not so evil that makes you feel creeped out (we have Kira for that). I think this is the reason why we see him kill people in extravagant ways, control them, suck their blood, create ghouls and so on, but we don't see him rape anyone, because that would be very impactful but not in an over the top way, and you'd also have to deal with the victims' psychological damage. It's implied he did that, but it's not shown, and IMHO is for the better, making the right blend of edginess, silliness and crazy JoJo is known for. About the stand thing, I agree Araki more or less managed to integrate Stand into the setting, but it wasn't easy. For instance, to my knowledge Araki never explained effectively why you never see people using Hamon after part 3, even though many stand users could have made use of that, like Joseph did in Stardust Crusaders. Plus the fact that there supposedly were as many users as the major arcanes of the tarot, but then Araki decided that he wanted more. Also, as a consequence of the transition to stands, we have some stand users that are natural-born, other that were pricked by an arrow, and the Joestars that awakened their stands when Dio did, but only the ones that were already born. Not saying Araki didn't manage to pull it off, but it sure required some work to keep everything internally consistant.
@my name Yes, we agree. Don't misunderstand me: I still like internal consistency. I was saying that what you do with it is also important... but I'm pretty sure you agree with that too.
I fail to see how people are fundamentally missing the point of this video. People have the right to create whatever fiction they want, and people have the right to criticize it. If the defence of that criticism, however, is solely based on that fiction itself, it is a recursive argument lacking in any sort of cohesive structure. "Why is this like this?" "Because it is" "But why is it "is"?" "BECAUSE IT IS" And around we go.
Thank you. Folding Ideas wasn't trying to say that it is necessarily wrong to have bikini mail for no reason (though I do think he doesn't like it). It's wrong to defend that because it's like that. "The author said they do that, so it's fine, you can't criticize it." Is just silly.
Christopher Janes To me, that's more a communication failure. (And if tl;dr: communication failures are a big problem I keep finding in critique everywhere and we'd all benefit from trying to fix that.) When a creator has a clear vision, and has spent a lot of time on something, they generally will know why they put specific details in. No guarantees they will remember, but an interview with the right questions can be quite informative. But if they can't remember, or they didn't have that kind of clear vision, or they don't understand what the questions are trying to get at, then the answers they give will be vague and "well, I suppose it just happened that way." And no one is happy with that answer. That brings us to the other side. In many creative fields, there's many many details to get down, and so, even with near perfect memory, when asked a question,that creator can only act as a database of his memory of his work, and he needs good search queries to lookup. Out of every little detail, what do you want to know? I am now considering more now that good critique is not so much having a certain mindset as much as it is being able to analyse your own thought process and being able to explain in detail your experience with something, including and especially mentioning your biases and precisely how they must or might have shaped your experience. And as it seems to be to me, being able to do that also tends to allow an ability to ask really good questions, which would be essential in an interview. If it's an essay or reveiw only, then a chance occurs to ask the general audience those questions to have them think about it, and clarify thier own thoughts. "This sucked." Versus "I did not appreciate when X trope occurred in this Y work of fiction. But on the other hand, I can't seem to appreciate X in most any work, and... thinking on it, perhaps it could at least be one of the better executed examples of X I've have seen so far. Unfortunately, once I saw it, it caught my attention and stayed in my mind the whole movie, and it wouldn't go, and I found the rest of Y affected very negatively for me. If I had been able to forget about it, maybe I would have come out feeling a lot better about my experience? I accept the concept someone not as concerned about X as I am might be exactly one of the people who enjoyed Y. Great for you if that's the case. On the other hand, for such a minor detail, this example of X being as attention grabbing as it is, and possibly ruining it for me, has to say something for it being a guinuine flaw, surely any of you who enjoyed this can look at that and find some agreement?" But of course, a good critic finds that, wether it's for print or for a video, they need good writing skills, and even if they can always write similar to this or even a lot better, this paragraph could likely be shortened down, another writing skill I'm still learning Myself.... Though in that case, some subjectivity for fiction can be acknowledged at the very least by stating: "I did not like Y, my experience with it sucked." And if need be add: "Sorry if you liked it, but I found I couldn't." If someone is adamant about making authoritive statements, then they have an entirely different problem, and I do not wish to follow them for thier critique. Even if they have a guinuine problem with someone liking something else for external reasons (nothing to do with in-universe consistentcy or anything with the work itself.), they could at least try to make the arguement for not consuming certain media appealing, rather then going after the fans agressively, as though someone will change thier mind, the nature of thier entire experience, because someone hated them for it. I went on a big tangent, but the point is that I feel that although there are many guinuine, heated, and long winded discussions that could and maybe should occur, my experience tells me that the vast majority of the flame wars that occur come from the results of communication failures, happening constantly. I'd like to see if that could be fixed, then we could avoid mud slinging for no good reason. If we have to use torch and pitchfork, couldn't it be at least for perfectly legitimate reasons? Instead of me weighing debates and frequently finding that both sides actually agree and they don't know it? It's quite frustrating.
The reason why it's recursive is because the counter is recursive. The counter to content is usually one of two things. Either 1. That's out of left field. 2. I don't like that (disgust). The "I don't like that" argument also happens to be recursive so the response will usually be as well. "That's out of left field" is mostly valid for sales which could be hurt by confusing content. "I don't like that" is almost always invalid except for situations where someone was actually hurt in reality like how the animals used to be treated badly by the film industry.
spacedoohicky spacedoohicky I’m not convinced it’s fair to reduce “I think element X in text Y is problematic” is necessarily reducible to “I don’t like X” for each X where the disliked content is only fantasy (I.E. doesn’t rely on a real world instance of suffering to have been created). To make that reduction, one would need need to accept (1) all communicative acts are reducible to their emotive content and (2) emotive acts about fantasy texts all have equal moral standing. While I have huge issues with emotivism in general, it seems super arbitrary to say that only depictions of questionable content that actually happened (snuff films, old animal abuse films like Milo and Otis, harmful prank videos, tapes of ISIS beheadings, etc) are subject to legitimate criticism. How is that kind of emotivism any more justified just because someone got hurt? The criticism laid out originally doesn’t rely on something actually happening for it to be criticizable, but in reducing criticism to emoting seems to be something you either have to do in all or no cases, unless you can give some criteria for why it only applies to “depictions of historic acts of suffering” and not “potential acts of suffering”. Basically one has to be able to defend why it’s okay to criticize a video of someone torturing an animal and NOT a video made to look exactly like someone torturing an animal (but no suffering occurs).
It's funny watching this in October 2018 after being linked here from an anime discussion, and having to double-check the upload date because your farcical example so closely resembles this season's controversial show.
@@8Rincewind Basically: "So what you are saying is that you can not respond to a [real world based] critique with a [in fictional setting] argument?" The names come from the names of the author of Sherlock Holmes and the expository companion of Sherlock Holmes. Watson must provide an in universe and 'what he knows' argument, but the author can literally say 'because I wrote it that way' and normally has a complex reasoning for that. Or outright admits something like "Because I need to eat and Sherlock Holmes being dead means no more books to sell."
@@andrewcleary9952 Or, perhaps, using terms that make sense to him? An important part of any discussion is when the listener actively engages to be sure they understand - and often, that boils down to “If I understand you correctly, you just said (x)” by rephrasing the point made into different terms that you understand. After all - any old schmuck can just repeat an argument verbatim - rewording, paraphrasing, and using different terms clarifies that you understand the point, at its source.
Guido Bos Oh, sorry. I meant because the avengers are a team-up of previously introduced characters ^^ So I was saying he'd use that video to comment on that.
Thank you *so much* for this. I am so tired of having every criticism of shitty representation deflected with "it's true to the setting" as if these fictional universes weren't created by people, who have complete and total control over the way people in it are treated.
Whenever diegetic explanations rise to explain an extra diegetic problem, my rebuttal is pretty straight foward:"does this improve the story in any way, shape or form? If this element of the story were to be removed or only implied, would the story be worse, or even different?"
@@AkiRa22084 "Isn't the central core of the story a nerd quiz?" Which is exactly why everyone has forgotten it even existed by now. Even by people who grew up in that time and loved the hints and nods. Well, I didn't, I liked it, but as a horror movie. No, not because of that Shining scene.
Always come back to watch this video, beause it is a great example of who to properly, exactly, and succintly define and discuss an idea. In other words, since I cannot explain it better, I usually point people to this video.
I wrote down "You can't kill vampires, because vampires don't exist". Do I get a cookie? :D But seriously, "Thermian argument" is a BRILLIANT term. I really hope it catches on, by Grabthar's hammer! I'd have *a lot* more respect for people defending the crap they like with this disingenuous line of reasoning, if they simply came out and admitted that "Yeah, I just like violent/sleazy shit". I mean, there's a lot of violent/sleazy/generally problematic shit _I_ like - yet somehow, I manage to never throw a hissy fit when I see criticisms of these works.
..... Is it weird that my follow-up question as to why they focus so much on ladies being raped so much by orcs, is to ask why the Orcs don't rape the men too? That is if they didn't want to be seen as sexist and misogynist towards women? After all, if the Orcs were really compelled to be forces of evil that do nothing but rape everything in their path, then it'd make perfect sense to have the human men be brutally raped too before being carved up, and have that be shown in excruciating pornographic detail. That would really highlight their evil, that they would literally rape ANYTHING. And thus the in-universe justification would really make sense... see, we're not being sexist towards the women, they're doing it to men too!
considering the top comments address all his arguments, most people did. I stopped at "this is the thermiam argument" because that's not a real thing so I already knew the basis of the argument was flawed. I eventually finished it to find his example used an anime that doesn't even exist. fake argument: check fake example: check pushing an agenda: check
Арсений Брилёв Except thats not what he said. In fact he claimed that someone had gotten in a specific argument over this particular anime. I also like how you ignored that the basis of his video, the "Thermiam Argument" was a complete load of horse shit that he made up on the spot.
I had this exact thought come up when the producers of FF XVI stated there weren't going to have any black characters due to "historical accuracy". There were many who were content with this answer while others like myself thought "but you are creating this story! You can craft it in any way possible!"
Also, their historical accuracy is shitty, because while it is definitely detailed and interesting politics and geography and the outcome of all those, it all flattens out to a strange mix of generic low fantasy, Game of Thrones, and Final Fantasy tropes.
@@durrnip Then don't say 'historical accuracy'. Say it is 'based on'. Even then, it's not a good excuse. Wakanda has no white people because the nation (theoretically) exists in real life Africa in real life Earth. The world of FF XVI isn't set in real life Europe, nor Earth for that matter.
@@tyrone687 It seems my comment got eaten but anyway... While that is an acceptable justification, it still begs the question: You have included dragons, magic and giant monsters in the game, but you can't include black people/other minorities? You even included the non-European-at-all Ifrit beast.
This video is about criticism, yet many of the comments in this comments section seem to be written under the mistaken impression that it was a call for censorship. Criticism is not censorship. I'm not even a fan of criticism, I don't enjoy reading reviews of things, but I can still see that a negative review is not the same thing as a "this work of fiction is now banned" law.
@Not Todd Howard Man, you really got lost when moving from whatever video you watched to the comment section. You keep saying things about this video that are just blatant lies.
While basically true, this kind of assumes a "single creator creating a work that they personally own and have control over", it kind of gets a lot more complicated in collaboratigve or licensced works where the a creator isnt neccessarily free to just alter the world as they see fit. Like... A text is a text, but in practice texts are often created and bound by various constraints. If you are writing Star Wars novels you are, to various extent bound by whatever the people at Lucasfilm/Disney lets you write, and part of that is shaped by what has previously been written.
I’d argue that makes this even worse - because MULTIPLE writers and creators signed off on the problematic content, and then consumers jump to the defense for completely unrelated reasons.
@@anna-flora999 I agree, it's still fundamentally the same concept, but it does open up for more interesting analysis of how the collaborative process and the structures of the production unit affects how the story is told. For example, an animator may draw something in a way they don't really like personally, but they think it is what the art director wants. The art director may in turn look at the art and think "Not really what I had in mind, but I think this is an interesting take on it and I trust my animators, let's go for it" and in that situation they have together created something that neither of them actually wanted to make due to a miscommunication/lack of familiarity with each other's artistic preferences. Small things like that are hard to pinpoint when they happen, but I think it's valid to consider a group project to be more than just a logical negotiation process between the team members. Group dyamics are funky like that.
Should I be proud or disappointed that I immediately knew what a thermian was when I saw it in the title. Like I forgot the word “walk” yesterday but I can remember the name of a fictional alien species from a comedy film. One day I will be old and senile and I won’t remember my own name but I’ll be great at pop culture trivia because my brain has decided that information is very important for some odd reason.
There's a lot of people that watch this and entirely miss the point. Criticism of a fictional work isn't erasure. No one can stop you from writing whatever you want to write. No one can stop you from saying whatever you want to say. This does not mean the work you create is immune from criticism. If you want to include - for instance - Asian stereotypes in your novel, that's your choice. That choice is worth interrogating from a critical perspective, regardless of the in-universe justification for using those stereotypes. Don't like it? Ignore the criticism and write what you want anyway. Nobody's going to stop you in the US, we might just think you're a douche if you write douche-y shit. Worst case, your publisher might think you're a douche too and drop you. Shocker.
@@allowableman2 The Thermian argument doesn't ignore context because the rebuttal to it does the exact same thing, it rejects the thermian exigetic perspective for an in universe justification which will fall flat on its face. You can say "oh this character is an Asian stereotype because his mom raised him like that" and it wouldn't make it ok, you have to bring in an exigetic response by illustrating how such a choice actually helps the story and/or how it's subverted in story.
Take a shot every time someone who disagrees is called a sexist, racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, islamaphobe etc in lieu of an actual argument.
Take a shot every time someone follows up a joke with a repeat of the same joke except in a more bitter and pissy "except it's on my side now!" format. :)
Art is fundamentally mimetic - it will always and can only tell us about the real world, no matter how it estranges us from that world whether through the device we have come to call fiction or any other device. Art reflects environment but equally, being presented with an image itself, the world changes to reflect the art. Its a conversation.
This is a very interesting topic and your premise seems to have a number of inherent flaws if read a certain way. So first, may I inquire by which definition of "mimetic", "real" and "fiction" you operate? I would be especially interested in your usage of "mimetic". Is it strictly Aristotelian or maybe even just Platonic? Or does it contain influences from Wordsworth, Vaihinger, Auerbach, Girard (or whoever I forgot to mention here)? The same goes for "fiction" to an extent. Though I of course am well aware of the difficulties in this regard given the long history of a search for and debate over definitions in this regard. Thus I'm just asking for a short statement if you fall within the Searle tradition of auctorial intent, go by the assumption of contextual or metacommunicative attributes like f.e Genette and Martinez postulate or smth different entirely like some spin on recipient categorization f.e.
@Jafar545 Thanks for your comment. It was a pretty random thought from me but glad you found it interesting. I've tried to write a reply below but I'm not sure it covers all of your questions but hopefully it will explain where i'm coming from. These are just the ideas I've put together myself. I'm not in academia at the moment. I'm open to constructive criticism. I'm starting at Auerbach who effectively said something like: 'mimesis is the linguistic representation of historical, social and intellectual reality'. I'm expanding 'linguistic' to include all sign-systems. Auerbach's work focuses on how the Western literary tradition reflects changing social relations. I view social relations as one aspect of a broader libidinal economy - the totality of all sign-systems. And I think this is the reality that art necessarily represents. Not just social relations but all expressions of desire. Essentially this is the same as Derrida's notion of différance - the idea that signs do not have external referents. They're just understood in relation to each other. So an arrangement of signs (a work of art) only carries meaning insofar as it relates to a greater body of sign-systems - the historical, continuous flow of desire. On fiction, I believe that fiction is just a narrative device - the works we describe as fiction are no more or less real in their content than any other work. Fiction is a method used to estrange the reader from the thing being depicted. I'm not sure if that puts me in Genette's camp? What's your opinion? Do you think art is representational?
@@iofish__ This is well thought out response, so I'll address it in detail aswell. I'm not quite certain if such a general sentiment can be inferred from Auerbach's work (on the matter) viewed as a whole. He himself had a position regarding the "general" and the "specific" (as best portrayed in the Epilegomena), which could very well be viewed as in stark opposition to such an all encapsulating definition. Especially the idea of something as limited as a "linguistic representation" doesn't quite sit all too well with my understanding of his modus operandi. I'm also rather confused by the inclusion of "all sign-systems" since Auerbach likely wouldn't have predicted f.e Barthes or Derrida and probably would have thought of the concept as something closer to Saussurean tradition (given the prominence of it during his times). I honestly am not sure what to make of this, I can't exactly figure out the precise connections between the different parts there. Bringing up Derrida only adds to my confusion here since to my knowledge (I must admit I'm at best moderately well read on poststructuralism and not so much on Derrida) as far as I remember a central element of différance is (as you said) relationality as a consequence of there merely being traces of traces instead of truly external (or transcendental) referents/signified elements. I fail to recognize this pattern in your model mostly because it has the desire component to it. Your entire construct appears to me to be more Freudian in nature rather than strictly falling within the (admittedly vague) outlines of deconstruction. One could even argue for it containing elements of broader hermeneutics like the assumption of a correct interpretation by basing an initial understanding on all art being "expressions of desire". The final notion from your initial post "It's a conversation" would also support such a reading of course. Obviously it's up for debate if deconstruction qualifies as a form of hermeneutic especially if we are taking Derrida's statements in the infamous debate between him and Gadamer into account, yet if I were put on the spot and asked to pick one or the other, which I think would better fit your description, I'd go with hermeneutics. This is a pretty difficult one. A lot here hinges on the usage of the word "narrative device", depending on your definition this could also put you into the Käte Hamburger tradition to an extent. On the other hand terms like "used" and "estranged" could be viewed as in line with Searle. To join Genette's camp I think you at least would need to consider (narrative) fiction being characterized by the author and the narrator differing from eachother, which is probably one of the more robust criteria that can largely be taken from "Fiction et Diction", if I'm not mistaken. I'm sorry, but I fear I have to be a buzzkill here and ask the annoying question of what you exactly mean by "representational"?
Did I miss something here? did he accidentally review game of thrones in the middle and say that everyone who enjoyed it is sexist?? Why the fuck is everyone throwing "sjw" around as if Folding just took a strong political stance??? I understand some of his other video have a social/political element to the critiques, but this is NOT one of those videos whatsoever. Chill out, ya'll
Well so far i scrolled through 3 pages of comments to find yours and didnt see a single comment calling Folding a SJW, so im not sure where you are seeing them because i sure am not. Maybe Folding is deleting comments? I mean, he already disabled ratings, seems like something he would do. Anyway, I dont know who he is nor i really care. I got linked to this video by a friend and i think Foldings argument is nonsensical. The entire point of fiction is to create worlds where INSIDE THAT WORLD the lore of the world is real and should be treated as such. He could have much easier went for another angle of begging the question of why the lore is that way, instead he chose to apply a nonsensical argument as an explanation. As a result, i wont be returning to his channel. Good day.
It's hard to recall from 2 months ago, but it may very well have been almost entirely replies I was referring to. It also may have just been the tone/phrasing of certain arguments, with "SJW" being implied more than stated. More on topic, dismissing any work as just being "fiction" is to be reductive; what we as a society and as artists create is a reflection of ourselves and our outlook on life, society, ect. He was encountering comments that dismissed his criticisms of texts using in-universe logic and refuted them as such in the video. He DID in fact do as you said, and questioned why the world was the way it was, in his original critiques where the comments he is responding to arose. This is a response, to a response, to a response, and if it's your first video it's only natural it seems a little nonsensical.
Hello, Strazdas, I believe you may have been scrolling through three pages of comments on the wrong video, because I gave my mouse wheel a single half-spin and hit three comments *on the same page* with some variant of "Dan is an SJW trying to destroy freeze peach!"
TH-cam is recommending this video around..... even though I've watched it, and it as my like recorded on it. Welp, any day is a good day for a minisode
@@Ixiah27 Comparing Goblin Slayer to Berserk is an insult to Kentaro Miura, and demonstrates you have actually no understanding of why Berserk is great.
"You cannot criticize the world because that's just the way the world is" Ugh, people use that nonsense about literal real life and I see it FAR more often there than when talking about fiction. It's just double speak for "Don't make things look worse, otherwise I'll have to try for once in my life" But also you make a good point more generally; It's as if the point is to nullify criticism and discussion, which is itself a terrible thing.
god thank you so much for explainign a thing that s been driving me crazy every time you try to engage with a vuideo game fandom and thank you for putting in into simple words so i can explain in to all these clowns
+Technodreamer I'm pretty sure that, since Fire Vampires are a thing from the Cthulhu Mythos, throwing it onto the sun would probably be a terrible idea because there's probably at least a few terrible-somethings stuck and/or sleeping in there its presence could release/wake up...
Nice take on the subject. Reminds me a lot of Anita Sarkeesian recently defending her criticism of Hitman Absolution. A "rebuttal" video went after her for complaining about being able to kill strippers, with the argument being you have to go out of your way to do that and you get penalized for it. Her response was essentially that the only reason you can do that at all is because the game developers made the conscious choice to put it in as a possibility in the first place.
+Morbos1000 I saw a pretty good argument about developer intent using farcry 2 as an example. The game isn't about killing the wildlife in the region, so they simply lay down and stop moving if you hit them accidentally or intentionally. It was a way for the developer to say "Don't do that, its not what you are here for." because they didn't react past sitting down.
+Morbos1000 With the HItman argument Anita says that the game encouraged and invited players to kill the strippers. Yet not only does the main path have you away from the room, the game punishes the player. How can Hitman be encouraging of the act when it discourages the player doing so?
+GForce4 The game puts the strippers in the dressing room and prevents your character from interacting with them in any way that doesn't involve violence. That in and of itself is an implicit encouragement to treat them violently. The inclusion of any option in a game is an implicit encouragement to take advantage of it.
+Sixy You do not regain the points. The point loss is *partially* mitigated by hiding the bodies, but every kill that is not explicitly demanded by the objective list reduces your score permanently, and cannot be recovered in any way. Not hiding the body is an additional penalty on top of killing them, hence you lose less points if you hide the body. In addition, the strippers are worth the same penalty as any male character - gender and occupation are not the issue of the game and it's rules, only the player themselves. The strippers are not treated any differently to any other non-major character, and remain clothed, at a level required by law to appear in public, at all times. The protagonist and his allies do not insult them or disparage their choice of profession. The strippers do not possess any unique status in the game. They are just normal people. You're correct that the game punishes sloppiness, and not killing, but not in the way you imply. As Agent 47, you are not paid to kill strippers, or bystanders of either gender, or homeless men, or whatever. As Agent 47, murder is not considered morally reprehensible. Interacting with the strippers is inherently sloppiness, just as it is for everyone else.
Correct me if I'm wrong. So this is more about asking why the author(s) write this way, and *NOT* the in-universe reason, right? So if someone asks why the android stood behind at the back of the bus in David Cage's Detroit, the answer isn't "it's how androids go from place to place" but "to make it feel oppressive based on real history as reference". Is this correct?
Yes, it's when someone asks a question about a work as a work that is being consumed by us, and they are answered with some internal justification treating the fictional world as sort-of-real. Your question about Detroit could be answered both ways because the question itself doesn't stipulate what perspective, diegetic or exegetic, that they're discussing the game from, but if they wanted an exegetic answer, pointing to something in the game about legislation that was passed would be a Thermian argument that doesn't actually answer the question they asked.
Complicated tangent, but the video made me think of a conversation I had with a friend. For the sake of not riling up enthusiastic fans, I will not mention specific character names, fictional universes, or properties, but we were talking about the difference between how one set of creators has a tendency to sexualize in objectifying kind of way, but another set, while prone to as much sexualization as the other, always gives the characters the illusion of agency, in so much as it's even possible for a fictional character to have agency. That is not to say that the first set never has a character who's sexually liberated, but the presentation, even of sex scenes between a female character and a male acquaintance in her own book, is such that you get the impression the creators expect you to cheer on the guy, not the girl, for their sexual success. At the risk of giving away the work in question, there was a long sequence of the character dressing from underwear up that never includes expression or often even head. So there's definitely a presentation difference, even when, diegetically, the characters are choosing sexual promiscuity, but, and here's where I started to struggle, can a character's agency even be weighed in these cases? Would Brutal Orc Rape: The Series, to use your hyperbolic stand-in, be redeemed if that were the 'victim's' kink? Can presentation, a sense that a character is in on it, remove the problematic nature of a work, or does it just earn it a spot as 'less problematic' than the series that don't.
Stan Lee was asked "Who would win in a fight between Superman and The Hulk?"
The answer, of course, was "Whoever the writers wants, because that's who's writing it."
And when the matchup finally happened, Supes realized Hulk was rage-powered...
...and stopped fighting back.
Interesting _AND_ internally consistent.
there is apparently a comic "Hulk vs Justice League" and now i want to read it.
This is why when superman got crossed with spiderman Venom beat them both up the entire comic.
I would.
I would win in a fight between Superman and The Hulk.
That's a good take and all, but allow me to retort, Mr: Lee:
The Fights you're talking about are usually written for storytelling purposes, and they usually go in a way that would make a better story, which is perfectly fine, but here's the thing: This is not the kind of fighting people talk about in these cases. There exists a community of people who like to analyze fictional character's powers and abilities in a deliberately bland and contextless situation just to see who would win in a fight.
when he was talking about the orcs i was like "this guy is obviously referring to goblin slayer" and then i realized this was uploaded in 2015
The original light novels hadn't even been written yet :fear:
He's talking aboot animu. That's consistent with animu.
Good thing this is the first comment.
_Goblin Slayer?_ I thought it would turn out to be _A Farewell to Arms._
@@nicholastosoni707 wait isn't a farewell to arms a book written by Hemmingway
So:
Watsonian explanations are explanations within the text for things happening in the text (i.e. internal consistency. If a character is lying, the Watson of the group will explain as such, probably with some kind of reason why they know)
Doylist explanations are explanations with the author's intent for things happening in the text (i.e. author forgot their character's injuries and so the injury is internally inconsistent, but ultimately matters very little)
Thermian Arguments are people using Watsonian Explanations for Doylist Questions or Critiques
Correct, except the authors intent is not required. You could just as easily use the thermian argument to defend something the writer never intended to be read in that way.
you kill a vampire same way you kill anyone else, you don't because its illegal and rude
Its very convenient that not including such brash things in our fiction ended all crime everywhere. Before there was all that worry about m****rers and th****s but now the worst that will happen is someone unexpectedly doesnt give you a helping hand
#VampireLivesMatter
@@jeice13 I think Lily was trying to be funny/light-hearted... How DARE you not applaud her young man! Where ARE your manners! If you won't applaud, then I will applaud for you! *Grows an extra set of arms, and starts clapping* now, time for your true punishment! *Starts slapping you with all 4 arms*
@@flyingturret208thecannon5 yep, i must have been tired or thrown into reading this wrong by the tone of the video. Oops
@@jeice13 yeah, the creator's video definitely sparked tons of duels in the comments. I have chipped in my own fair share to the debate.
When you asked "How to kill a vampire?" I literally said: "Well, It depends on the rules of the story"...
I just realized that Folding Ideas predicted Goblin Slayer.
To be fair, only the first 10 minutes of the first episode. I watched the rest of it while skipping that part and it's an interesting study on how victims handle being victims.
That first 10 minutes tho? B I G O O F
@discoandherpes i have, and the writing is good, it's a classic for a reason. However as a victim of sexual abuse/assault myself i found Goblin Slayer very interesting. Especially the Head Priestess character and her complicated relationship with feeling weak but having to be a beacon of strength.
I guess what I'm trying to say is even tho something might have a scene that is difficult to watch, maybe even impossible for some, does not rob the show of any possible merits. Also see: A Clockwork Orange, Monster's Ball, and Requiem for a Dream.
Beserk Horse > Goblins
@discoandherpes not saying it's a classic or on the same level. Just using those as example in saying it can be done. Not everyone thinks those are classics and it hits them just like G.S. hit some anime fans.
@@rroman1988 Nah, when they frame that scene as something you're supposed to jerk off to, it definitely robs the show of a fuck ton of value. Like, there's almost no difference between the first 10 minutes of Goblin Slayer and a Guro Doujin.
Four-five years later, brushing aside the Goblin Slayer references, I wonder if Dan ever read a blog called Slacktivist, by Fred Clark. The author, who is often very thoughtful about fictional worlds, said while discussing multiple versions of the word 'belief' that in a way people believed in vampires: if you ask them if vampires are real, they say no; but if you ask them how to kill a vampire, they'll be able to tell you. That's what came to mind here.
Point being? If you ask a poor person what they'd do with a million dollars, they will give you a pretty clear idea, too.
Yeah; the concept of "having a million dollars" is solid and clear in their mind, even though they don't. Here we have the concept of "vampires" solid and clear in the mind, even with shared ideas - a shared conception of what a vampire is - even though they're not.
I had a pause when I read Goblin Slayer references and checked this video's release date. This video is from 2015 (before Goblin Slayer).
@@dhruvtukadiya it says something that Dan was able to perfectly encapsulate the vibe of Goblin Slayer and Goblin Slayer discourse before Goblin Slayer even existed
but I am an anime fan, so I am not going to think very hard about what that message is
@@miauwuff3854 Difference being, money exists and has real world implications and applications. Vampires don't.
So the Thermian Arhgument is basically giving an in-universe answer to an out-universe question?
Is there also a name for the opposite? Giving an out-universe answer for an in-universe question? For example:
Q: "Why did the character do such a stupid thing?"
A: "Because we would not have a story if he acted smart."
A good story would either
A) Give a compeling reason for the character to do such a thing (like implying he was actually stupid, acting under pressure or influence, etc)
B) Don't base its entire existence on a single character's stupid decision (like the reason for the Suicide Squad to exist is the fact that Amanda Waller assembled them and it went wrong)
I've heard and used "The meta reason" as a framing mechanism for this type of exchange. As in: "I don't know why the he did the stupid thing, but the meta reason is..." I guess 'meta' is interchangable with 'extra-diegetic' in this context. Sometimes it's a useful tool, like when there really is no internally consistent explanation for a plot point but would be interesting to talk about why the decision was made regardless. I sunk a lot of time into Blizzard games and their lore, and let's just say the extra-diegetic reason is often the only satisfying answer you'll get with them, so that probably flavors my experience a bit.
When someone uses external reasoning to nullify criticism against internal inconsistency, the basic mistake is essentially the same as what Dan describes. It's missing the point of the criticism and changing the subject. I don't know any catchy name for it (and I'm curious if someone knows of a fitting metaphor), but as the same mistake in the other direction, I guess you could call it a nega-thermian argument. More generally, they can both be described as "not wanting to think that hard about why you enjoy the things you do (and also getting annoyed that other people want to think about it)".
This happens a lot in Pacific Rim.
"Why did they build giant robots instead of using existing, much more suitable technology?"
"Because it's awesome"
"Why didn't he use the sword sooner?"
"Because the reveal was awesome"
"Why do they require two pilots?"
"Because it provides the opportunity to add character depth, which is awesome"
Somehow it sound like that awesome (in this case) have something to do with lazy writing. ;-)
Not everything that somebody does have a logical reason. That is reality. Sometimes people do irrational things on a whim. When something in fiction is portrayed like that it's considered a plothole and harshly criticized despite the fact that it's often more likely than a complex multilayered conspiracy that the "good" fiction is often praised for. No I don't like this stupid argument.
several years ago, this video: parody of gorn anime
and then: goblin slayer
Holy shit I just noticed the date - a self-fulfilling prophecy!
And then: Redo of Healer.
@@borby4584 Funnily enough Red of Healer tends to draw in more female audiences.
@@theonlycatonice - This is just a prophecy, not a self-fulfilling one. The latter would be something that came true _because_ of the prophecy.
Unless you mean the creator of Goblin Slayer literally got the idea for the show directly from this particular video.
@@Sujad so?
This is like the art version of "My Guy Syndrome" from table top RPGs. Some one complains about a player's action because it's ruining the fun for others, and then the player defends their actions by saying "It's what my guy would do", trying to abdicate all of the player's own responsibility for what are ultimately their own actions rather than the character's.
I would disagree with that, to a point.
Half your energy flows into creating a believable, fleshed out character.
If youre just abandoning the characterisation you chose, you dilute them.
The part where you are correct is that people should show restraint in things that ruin other peoples fun.
@@Squeaky_Ben But that's the whole point of being a responsible tabletop player, right? You have to be able to create a believable and consistent character while still being fun to play with.
Similarly, authors have the responsibility to create stories that are both believeable and handle their subject matter with respect.
The criticism of Thermian Arguments isn't an argument against consistent storytelling, it's an argument against lazy defenses of thoughtless storytelling.
@@ChunkyAppleCider thats not how he framed it tho.
If you consider "its in the lore, so its allowed" to be on one end of the spectrum, then this thermian argument stuff is equally as bad.
All I have seen this guy do is:"this stuff is bad, and you should not put it in your story, because then you are bad" and that is not a viewpoint I can agree with.
Sure, handle things with respect, but this is going further than just that.
@@Squeaky_Ben But he never once says anything like 'You shouldn't put "X" in your story.' He makes an (Unnamed) reference to the anime Claymore and there are implications that he's critical of the way it handled some of its subjects, but he never says those subjects should never be included in any piece of media.
The entire video is a counterargument to the Thermian Argument. Never once does he seem to say anything like "This stuff is bad and you should never put it in your story or else you are bad."
If I'm wrong, please show me where, because I've watched the video three times now and I can't find a single instance of him saying that.
I got work in the morning, so I gotta head out, but I'll check up tomorrow.
@@ChunkyAppleCider one: good luck at work.
Two: what I mean is this:
What you may call thoughtless storytelling, someone else might call normal or even good storytelling.
This entire argument is just not objective.
If he doesnt like something that happens, sure. If we then point out the thematical reasons and he makes this sort of argument against us, i see it as an insult.
He is trying to paint a false picture of the average fan here.
When encountering this defense in the wild, you can dismiss the argument by saying "Then why did the creator make it this way?"
Because it is part of the universe that the creator envisioned.
@@KrasusDumat which is a non answer to be disregarded and the question always again
h00pla434
Why does it matter why the creator made it that way?
Style.
@@austinwyant2928 A lot of form of analysis requires to know the author's intent to see if the writing is a success. If the author intended to write a story with a certain message and that the end result contradicts that message, it could be considered a failure. So asking an author "what was the purpose of X in your work?" allow to know that intent, at least for this specific element.
Also, it's good for the author to improve. Having to think why you wrote something means you get a better understanding of what your tastes, preferences, and worldviews are because some are not immediately obvious. So readers asking you to justify your decision, some that you may have considered not worth analyzing but that may hold more meaning than you think. That's how I learned that I have a strong liking for down to earth, reasonable and methodical character because another player in a TTRPG asked me why all my character ended up doing the logistic and organization of the group.
ah man, I was expecting a THEREMIN argument...
ooooooooooooooooo
@@TheSugarRay ooooooooooOooooOOOOOOOooooooOooOOOOOO
Star Trek theme vs Doctor Who theme
I've heard the terms "Watsonian" and "Doylist" to separate the difference between critiquing the diegetic reasons for certain elements ("Watson's war wound is inconsistent because he has two, but one is only psychosomatic") and non-diegetic reasons ("Sir Doyle hated writing Sherlock Holmes and didn't give a fuck about inconsistencies"). These are the words I'd been using prior to this video and I'm happy to add "Thermian" to my lexicon for this :D
I know it's been years, but what's wrong with Watson's wounds? Also, I agree that Watsonian and Doylist are wonderfully succinct terms.
@@zephyr6927 To my memory, in the books, Watson has a limp despite his war scar not having anything to do with his leg. Watson, the character, says this is bc it's a psychosomatic limp. Sir Doyle, the real man, says this is because he forgot and doesn't care.
@@Pinkstarclan Ah, cool.
@@Pinkstarclan Just looked it up; first story, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes observes "His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner.", but the very next story, the Sign of the Four, has this from Watson "I made no remark, however, but sat nursing my wounded leg. I had a Jezail bullet through it some time before..."
@@darthbob88 Thank you~!
It owns that Dan called for nothing to be banned in this video and yet somehow calling a show/game/anime/etc sexist or whatever is censorship.
Criticism is also speech, free speech crowd
Yes, Criticism is Free Speech.
But here's the problem we're all having here:
At some point, this criticism of the story jumps to a criticism of its makers and audience, like so:
"Why is X here?"
"Because it is."
(This part could go on and on in a loop... until...)
"Why is X here?"
"Because the author wanted X there."
"So, Why did the author want X there?"
And here's where our problems begin. Since, at some point for every story element, something in a story is there because the author wanted it there, then its presence can be construed as a comment on the author. And, if X is an evil thing, and the reason X is there isn't answered for or given a context (or at least one that the presumed critic will find satisfying), it can then be assumed that the author is X or supportive of X. Its already the case that we judge people in relation to the qualities we find in them, and treat them accordingly.
And how do we treat X or those who support X, because they are X or support X? Also, how should we regard their work with X in it, and its fans, seeing as it came from an Author who is X?
fill in the "X"s and you'll see why many people take this to be an argument for censorship.
If i could put it a shorter way:
Its kinda like reading the Bible *and judging absolutely everything in it as a prescriptive*. Its a pretty stupid, if not dishonest, way of reading it.
The Witcher is based on Polish folklore. That's why there's no black people. Poland is a white country, and they have every right to their history and their traditions the same way Ghana has a right to theirs. Criticizing The Witcher or Frozen for only have white people is a vapid, childish, predictable attempt to apply your one mode of criticism where it does not belong, and it is a criticism that has absolutely nothing to do with artistic expression or emotional validity. Get fukt.
@@jasonbelstone3427 "At some point, this criticism of the story jumps to a criticism of its makers and audience"
Authorial intend is no new thing. It is only natural of a free society that people want to know and discuss what led someone to write and publish something, and what leads people to consume it.
And internal logic as an attempt of an answer is just dishonestly begging the question, because it purposely ignores the simple logical fact that the writer *had a reason* to set the world up in a certain manner, and write certain things a certain the way, cause otherwise, they simply wouldn't have.
And just because you question or infer intend, which is what you are bound to do anyways whenever you interpret the message a work conveys, it doesn't necessarily mean that you intend to make it illegal.
Your whole comment could be summed up as "yeah it's free speech, but it has consequences" well, no shit, man.
@@streq9199 No, my issue is: why make supposedly Free Speech come with "consequences" (nothing more than a euphemism for punishment. and then its not actually "free" is it)?
And why try to bridge a gap between authorial intent and story elements with moral propositions and prescriptions, the crossing of which then comes with penalties on a real person?
And For what? Creating a *fictional* world that sucks, and making up a *fictional* character that would be a moral violator *if it had been real*?
@@jasonbelstone3427 "why make supposedly Free Speech come with "consequences"
No one "made" free speech come with consequences: it naturally does. If I go down the street and I start profousely insulting some guy, and he insults me back, that's a consequence, and it didn't happen because someone forced him to insult me back: it happened because my actions, me chosing to freely speak my mind, had consequences.
Trying to make a space with free speech but no consequences actually requires more effort than the opposite, because then you have to effectively shield everyone from the consequences of their actions.
I’m shocked at the amount of people in the comments here who find ‘stories are made by people’ to be an objectionable concept
It's cute you think they understood the video and are attacking what it actually says.
@@h00pla434 Maybe the op is being optimistic?
@@h00pla434 It's cute you think this video's point to be too deep/intellectual to be seen for what it is. It shows that a couple fancy words and academic concepts are all it takes to confuse and subsequently fool some people. Of course, true believers don't need further fooling, er, convincing.
@@Zeburaman2005 I most certainly don't think this is a deep video. I think it's a very simple concept being taught, and that renders it all the more sad that so many couldn't grasp it
@@h00pla434 Ooh, careful when reaching, mate, that it doesn't come back to bite you in the arse. But at least we can agree that Dan is lecturing people.
This, I think, represents a smaller version of a larger problem: people believing certain things which are constructed and ultimately changeable to instead be immutable and essential; as if they were natural laws. This happens with larger parts of culture, economics, and societal structure, the production and persistence of which are ultimately up to people making conscious decisions to do so; the ol' "That's just the way the world is", a kind of Thermian Argument writ large.
Agreed. We're creating tomorrow's history.
exactly! This reminds me a lot of the concept brought up in innuendo studios' video "i hate mondays", that issues with the world are just fundamental and unchangeable as opposed to things to be changed.
Yeah, the line that jumped out to me rewatching this was "You cannot criticize the world, because that's just the way the world is." There is a noticeable absence of the word "fictional" in that statement.
This is basically my problem whenever I hear someone excuse obviously horrible behaviour or policies with "it's legal".
Because maybe it shouldnt be.
But... I think he is incorrect to include "consistency" in his list of ultimately unimportant things. In fiction, consistency is indeed important. Even in high fantasy, most of the laws of physics are still followed because otherwise the world it portrays would be incomprehensible. At least a large degree of consistency is required for anything to make sense.
That applies to the narratives we tell ourselves about the real world too. "The way things work" does matter and is a real, though not absolute in many, constraint. Though laws of physics are less mutable than socioeconomic systems, to put it mildly... Even those socioeconomic systems have real metaphorical inertia ;)
This goes way back to when Stan Lee responded to fan mail complaining about the Invisible Girl's lack of agency in the plot by acting like they were insulting her directly like she was a real person with feelings
That people confused character criticism for criticism against story issues.
Kind of reminds me of a more recent example in Hasbro's MLP where in an episode that responded to external criticism of the show, you have a mix of the bad criticism and genuine criticism that was rectified years ago being lumped into the same bag e.g. "why do you have other characters have multiple topics to cover but Fluttershy is only allowed a rinse and repeat approach to confidence"?
does fluttershy really have that shallow of a character? shame, my favorite pony when i was a kid
this “defense” is frustratingly common
Me: oh yeah this is a pretty basic and obvious observation, "fictional universes are made by real people and the question 'why did the person making this decide to write it like this' deserves to be asked and its answer critiqued." This isn't a controversial idea.
This comment section:
Pretty amazing how easy it is to lie to angry manchildren and they'll believe it without question.
@ When you want to have big boy discussions, it behooves you to have a clue what you're talking about. The video is four minutes long, you accepted a lie without the slightest effort to see if it was true. Stop being an angry baby and grow up.
@ There is no debate. You're completely wrong, and accepted an easily disproven lie without question. You are a giant fucking baby desperate to throw a tantrum no matter how dishonest you have to be.
@ Ah, you're just as dishonest a shitgibbon as teal deer. Welp, have fun throwing a tantrum att the figments of your own imagination, little baby.
@@h00pla434 Video aside, you sound like a bully
This is giving me flashbacks to the fandom wars over Dragon Age 2 where people were screaming that Isabela being scantily clad makes diagetic sense and thus trying to shout down the people saying "yes but some thirsty sucker MADE her that way!"
@ Yes, women can choose to dress down in real life. But this isn't real life, Isabela is a collection of pixels who a group of people sat down to write. She didn't choose to dress down because someone designed her to dress down.
Also, shouldn't you be wearing armor while you're fighting people to the death?
@@loxyloafcake5184
Treating a bunch of ones and zeros and pixels like an opressed human being is so ridiculous as a concept, that I'm going to ask if you're feeling alright, and have not consumed an overdose of mind-altering drugs in the past 48 hours?
@ Nobody's concerned for the wellbeing of a fictional character, nice strawman though. People are questioning the design decisions, and the motivation behind those decisions, of the people who made the game. "it makes sense in-universe" does not answer those qustions.
But it makes sense for her character though. it's not like everyone in the world is like that, so criticizing the character who wants to appeal slutty, who wants to seduce people or at least look like she is, for doing so? That's disingenuous.
There's a lot of game examples out there of characters, particularly female characters, who dress much sexier than they have to for no reason at all, with no given reason or explanation. And that's fine; it's fair to criticize this, but it is also an artistic choice and it is often made intentionally. But my point is, there's a lot of better candidates to pick than the relatively smaller field of characters who are at least designed around it.
Isabela is built on a foundation that uses the physical and visual trappings of her design as a mask to disguise something of a genuine feeling, that's very relatable, and makes sense in context. There's a lot of characters out there who can't say as much.
And it's still going on lmao
This is how I felt when Kojima tried to justify Quiet's skimpy look and said that we would feel bad for her. He's still the one who created a scantily clad female character, he just also created a convoluted reason to justify it too.
@ it's fascinating how people opposing vaguely left-wing critiques always assume that they're done for the intent of calling for censorship. It's never to inform or analyse or discuss, or even just to entertain. It's ALWAYS to call for censorship.
@
Funny how you focus on this ´´ censorship ´´ and ignore how the right constaly wants to censor the press and even attacks the press.
@ the fact you started with needlessly bringing up "outright lies and hate such as toxic masculinity" kinda poisons the chance of good debate with needless tangents.
Let me guess, you think it means to hate all men or all masculinity? Not that there is good masculinity and toxic kinds that cause harm. And you think talking about masculinity is inherently gender stereotypes, that can't be discussed?
But hey, I'm a mgs fan, so op threw out the right bait, that I'll focus on instead. The criticism of quiet was not political or hypocritical, and also not inherently left wing. Asking why a purported soldier is dressed in a literal bikini in a warzone is valid, just as asking why snake is constantly wiggling his skin tight clad ass at the camera is valid, or asking how the boss could apparently know which chamber was loaded in ocelots russian roulette. There are thermian explanations for all of these, "she got horribly burned and needs to photosynthesize through her skin" and "sneaking suits are skin tight to reduce bleeding and boost resiliance" and "she's just that good".
There are also actual answers, "because sexy" "because sexy" "because cool". This doesn't mean that sexy or cool things are bad or should be censored. But the degree to which they stretch suspension of disbelief matters, because sometimes you need more than a thermian argument to feel satisfied.
And a big reason that many people were critical of the quiet thing was the coy "no there's a reason and you'll be really sorry for asking about it when you find out the reason why she's like that"...and no. The explanation was not just a convoluted in universe one, it actually just added more issues. The explanation presented did not root the character into reality or even realistically explain the odd choice
She was seriously burned by being set on fire, scorching her lungs and burning her vocal chords, but she has visibly flawless exposed skin over her body, no burns? That's an unsatisfactory answer and really just confirmed that it was to show off her sexy body, because it's also the reason her extreme burns are invisible.
If he'd shown off her back and it had a massive burn on it, he could have had a cool swirling design of the burn, maybe even in a symbolic shape, maybe talked about how the burn had damaged it from behind? It actually would have fit better for an explanation. The real answer would still have been because sexy, boys like boobs and because sexy figurines sell which is fineà, but the out of universe reasoning would then have been a more satisfying and coherent.
Considering the snake like c section scar on the boss, it'd be up his alley. Incidentally, notice that no-one complained that the boss unzipped her whole outfit sexily to show that off? Kinds torpedos the idea that people were just complaining about the sexy character for the sake of it. Conversely Sniper wolf and Vulcan raven deservedly raised some eyebrows and caused some jokes though, on account of being in the Antarctic but looking like they wanted to risk frostbite. But then that was a unisex weirdness and relatively understated. But hell, even Eva didn't get much comment on her outfit choice, and hers was incredibly blatent. Because sexy femme fatale spy has a line of logic. To distract enemies, seduce information, to play up the old school James bond vibes that the game have off. It fits. Quiet didn't, and doubling down with "you'll be sorry when you get the explanation" was a bad move, when the explanation was so thin. "Sexy figures sell well" would probably have been better in that instance, and we know that one is true.
@ wow, didn't even bother to read, huh? You're arguing against a straw man of your own invention. If you don't want to deal with drivel like "all masculinity is bad", then don't say it.
To repeat, Toxic masculinity doesn't mean masculinity is toxic. It is referring to a specific type or subset. There is masculinity. And there is the toxic kind.
That is not a lie, or redefining anything. That was always what it meant, and there are many arguments on the internet that look hilarious to the ones that know that.
Unless you're trying to argue that literally nothing that is rooted in masculinity was ever bad, it seems pretty self evident that it exists. Emotional repression, forcing men to take the brunt of physical or emotional violence, stopping male domestic abuse victims getting help, etc.
Though this is about all I'll say on the matter, it's good to see I called it. Original comment talking about quiet, you bring up your own irrelevant issue. I slightly address it and call it out as being a tangent before going into detail on the Quiet thing... boy that sure is a good comment you did, entirely focused on the tangent you introduced. You even introduced a second tangent with the Jews thing that came out of nowhere. Nice bait mate. Go start a blog if you want to rant to yourself about how your feelings got hurt by deliberately misunderstanding something. 😂
@@FFKonoko
The key is in what I wrote: I'll have to simply reject the ideological drivel and any attempt to defend or redefine the drivel is wasted.
To avoid this, stop lying by backing ideological drivel like 'toxic masculinity'. It's like argueing politics, but first I demand that you accept Donald Trump is a god who can do no wrong; it's pointless.
And it would be great if sexists got that memo too.
I noticed that some people always answer questions about fictional stories in-universe and others always answer them out-of-universe.
Like... "why are there different colors of lightsabers?"
Person A: "The color of a lightsaber is determined by the cybercrystal. Red lightsabers are a special case, because they also need blood"
Person B: "Basic color symbolism. Blue means good, red means evil. Samuel L. Jackson got a purple one, because he asked for it"
The Thermian Argument appears when those two persons talk to each other without realizing how different they approach media.
Well, I agree partially, the Thermian Argument comes up when person B says that person A is wrong and that they aren't allowed to look at it like that. The Thermian Argument is looking at parts of a story and then looking at that in terms of out of universe arguments. I do agree that there is a miscommunication in how they approach the media, but the problem is the Thermian Argument inherently says one is wrong and that they are also stupid for thinking about it the way they do.
The issue is that Person A in your example isn't explaining anything, really, while Person B is (or at least has the possibility of doing it). The two aren't just dissimilar in perspective. They differ in the level of truth that it's possible to reach through them.
The Thermian argument is thus:
The writer wanted the bad guy's light saber to be red, and the good guy's to be blue, because those are elemental colors that evoke strong feelings in humans and are universal color symbols. Blue is associated with sky and daylight. Red is a warning color in every human culture, because it is the color of blood. It's not ONLY that, but it is that.
OMG, says the writer. I know how to make the bad guy's light saber red! I'll have him anoint it with blood! That will give the cool visual I want, and make the bad guy look extra bad because he had to murder someone just to make his life saber red!
Thermian guy: You're both wrong, and I find your arguments unconvincing and colorist, and your designation of "good guys" and "bad guys" arbitrary and problematic.
@@girlwriteswhat In that case, the Thermian guy would be the first one. The last one is a strawman.
Let me make a more apt example: Guild Wars 2. Just to pick a story you might also consider "SJW".
The first bit of personal story was really bad. It involved fighting an Ancient Dragon god who was awakening and wanted to turn everyone into an undead and eat the entire world. No other motives, no subtlety, nothing, just a big dumb magical lizard that tries to eat everything.
The whole story only had one conflict, and it was against this big dumb lizard and its minions. Was it evil? Sure! Was it interesting? No. No matter how evil you made it, fighting it always felt like no more than pest control. Sure, a really big and deadly pest, but still pest control. Since there wasn't much to relate to, there wasn't much to hate either. Add in that the side characters were flat and you understand why people didn't really care that much for GW2 original story.
Now, the Thermian argument would be: "Nooo but you see the fact the Dragon God is indless is justified by the -so and so- lore and the rest of the story is justified by the threat of this Dragon."
Which would technically be correct, but it wouldn't address the fact that people found this story boring.
@@RandomPerson-b1s Do you have data to lend credibility to your argument "people found it dumb" or are you just generalising your own reaction to make it look like you have a "gotcha" retort?
As someone who frequently goes far too deep into fictional worlds, this is a point that I could do to remember far more often
I feel like a discussion of intertextuality is missing from this video, probably for practical reasons and because it doesn't quite tip the scales one way or another. But it's worth remembering that texts exist within a continuum of other texts. "You kill a vampire with a stake through the heart" because that's how it's been in other vampire stories. You can subvert this expectation, dismiss it, or play it straight, but no matter what you do you as a creator you are in dialogue with other texts.
Like I said, I don't think intertexuality excuses problematic content, but maybe it does contextualize it. If anything, a lot of genre work is in reaction to previous, problematic texts, possibly trying to keep the core of old stories appeal while subverting or discarding the problematic elements.
Erik Bernhardt he'd probably agree here, intertextuality isn't a thermian argument so it isn't really relevant to this video though
Intertextuallity can be the response to "why is X like that" with this whole thermian thing
@@Speederzzz not really though, because what defines the Thermoan argument is justifying an aspect of the story by citing *the own story's* internal rules or justifications. If you answer "why is X like that" by citing other works, you aren't making a Thermian argument, and thus it's not relevant to the discussion at hand
@@jinxed7915 this discussion was 2 years ago, I don't remember this whole convo lol
also, I wanna say that the 'that's just the way the world is' as a reaction to someone criticizing the real world is also just... not a good argument (except when talking about laws of physics maybe). it's bleak and fatalisitc and implies that the forces that made the world this way are unknowable and immutable, which is just not the case. it's not because 'western'* society is by default racist, homophobic, sexist, etc that we can't do anything about it and are doomed to continue this way.
*using this term for lack of a better one, although it has been argued by the likes of ContraPoints that western society is at best a nebulous concept from afar, but falls apart when looked at closer
It's very odd to pick at specifically western society for racism, homophobia, and sexism when it's easily the most progressive one (or at least in the top) of our world's (major) societies.
I think "that's just the way the world is" is a pretty lame and kind of shameful defense because it just very easily signals that the person using that line is completely unwilling to question the world around them. it's a type of willful ignorance, wishing to flatten the nuances of the real world and act as though our biases are natural and natural = just. people using this argument may agree that it's wrong that the world is "like this' but lack the compassion to even just imagine how we can be better people, but i think the uncomfortable majority of these people are very happily complacent in an unjust system, and that the ways in which the world is fucked up is actually good, and that any voice that challenges this order is a threat.
i think this line can only be justified when it's used as a necessary acknowledgement, but hardly the end of an argument. it's terrible as a closing line, it doesnt work as a final assertion but it's a good stepping stone to more nuanced arguments of critiquing the way subconscious biases and tendencies rule our society and our culture/art.
@@joachimwalle3760 late reply, but colonialism (a basis of "Western" society) was the one that imposed a Christian, heteronormative, white supremacist system on many cultures around the world. Sure, some of those societies were not necessarily "progressive", but "Western" colonialism created the racial White->Brown->Black racial categories and hierarchy and imposed their brand of morality and religion on cultures where LGBT+ identities were normalized (this includes several indigenous cultures from the Americas and Africa). The extreme criminalization of homosexuality in countries like Uganda? Guess which country Uganda was a colony of. Not to mention that "progressive" is a fragile concept, considering how there's constant movements aiming to roll back that progress.
"Western" society is relevant here, because the forms of racism, sexism, ableism, etc. that formed its basis, as well as their effects, have affected the rest of the world and persist globally even today. And also because OP is from a "Western" country, presumably.
stake through the heart
edit: oh
I was gonna go with “deprive them of their food source”, which still works, since vampires are representative of the upper class that exploits the labor of lower classes whilst providing nothing in return. And this method of vampire slaying can be applied to the real world allegory, as well.
and you’re to blame, OP you give love a bad name
@@phastinemoon That is some incredible antisemitism there, my dude.
@@Sujad how is that antisemitic
@@BuildDestruction In the old black and white movie Nosferatu, it's heavily implied that the vampire is Jewish.
Recently I've heard of these two mindsets referred to as the "Watsonian (diagetic) explanation" and the "Doylian (non-diagetic) explanation," which I think works really well to explain the difference.
Actually, there is more to the imagined argument, than just a Thermian Argument.
The hypothetical anime referenced doesn't just have the orcs raping/mutilating women (because the creator chose them to do so) and that alone wouldn't make it sexist or (near) pornographic. There is also the choice of *what* is shown, and *how* it is shown ...which is what truly makes that made up series, so problematic.
Zing! On the mark!
And the "what and how they are shown" are why Goblin Slayer is a big "do not watch" for me.
@@Cheezmonka I watch/read/like it, despite that issue, but I definitely understand and respect your choice.
@@ZarlanTheGreen I respect yours as well. I'm just a really sensitive person, and I wouldn't put that on others' media choices.
@@Cheezmonka Frankly, your response is quite reasonable. (unlike the, completely unnecessary, choice of the creators)
Just realized... The roleplaying equivalent is "but it's what my character would do"
That is the exact same kind of mismatch between criticism and response, and I don't know how I didn't see that parallel before. Thanks!
is that not a good defense though? im so late to this topic but
like, if you have a character that /always lies/, and then there's a scenario where the entire team fails /if they lie/, and that character lies anyway, its still reasonable, its just annoying and unfair. at that point, a different character has to intervene, because that character will fail.
it happens like that because it was written that way. its not incorrect or shallow to say "this is how i've written my character to act. sorry the scenario isn't what you wanted."
am i missing something?
@@3u-n3ma_r1-c0 The difference is that the scenario you've put up is... Excusable. Its an excellent plot beat, and it lets your party intervene (the DM SHOULD allow the party to intervene in this scenario). But there are MANY other scenarios where this is NOT an acceptable excuse and you're using it as a shield to be an asshole to the other members of your party, such as being a kleptomaniac and stealing from your own party members or being a lecherous dickbag to your other party members or other NPCs. 'But is what my character would do' implies that you as a PLAYER have no agency over this character and what their actions are at the table.
The fundamental problem with the Thermian Argument to me is that there is no pure diagetic line of questions. You will always get back to the author if you just keep asking why. The reason is that fictional universes are actually created, so there is a God (the author). Eventually, any series of questions will end with "because God (the author) created it that way."
People who want to make the Thermian Argument as a counter to non-diagetic issues with a text tend to fall into two camps, either they know this and try to shut down the argument before it reaches the inevitable "because God willed it" conclusion, or they don't know this and will inevitably be forced to acknowledge that God is the author for the story.
OK, so apparently there have been a lot of... GamerGate etc. types flooding this video, judging by the comments anyway. And a lot of you seem to be missing the point. This isn't a critique of your worldview; that's for another time; but Olson isn't arguing "racism/sexism/etc. in fiction is bad"; at least, not here. His point is: If you consider elements like that OK in fiction, that's an argument to make. A debate about that could be interesting, letting the participants understand each other a little better. However, if you use a "thermian argument", you're skipping that debate altogether. You're implying that those elements aren't there for a reason, they just are. That's not an argument - you're not defending the author's choices, you're claiming that they aren't choices at all.
+TinyTachyon Too bad these guys are too busy looking for reasons to be offended to actually bother paying attention to the video.
His entire Argument is based on "I find X gross". This video is a joke.
The problem is that arguments like his are all to often used to discredit a person. It often goes like "this piece of fiction depicts woman overly sexualised, therfore it's author is a bad person" (I've obviously simplified it heavily, for clarity sake).
Because this argument is heavily tainted by this judgemental mindset, it is quite understandable that people feel attacked.
@@Cyliandre441 shut da fuck up
@@argonaut999 OK sorry, I assumed you were rather reasonable and could be argued with, because your original comment seemed rather well formulated.
I just tried to bring my point of view into this (although rather late, I'm sorry for that).
Judging from you response however you only seem to be interested in your own opinions.
Have a nice day
I love how great of an example Twilight is of fiction being a series of creative choices? Like, idk if that's where you were going with the vampire question, but Stephanie Meyer took "how do you recognize a vampire?" and went "make them sparkle," bc it's *her* fictional universe and she makes the rules.
Right. There was one fan fiction author who had their vampires ride through day and night, moon and the scorching sun. One reviewer said: Vampires die in sunlight. She answered: no, this is my artistic freedom. MY vampires don't die in the sunlight. And the reviewer answered: Yes, that WOULD be a good argument, if you hadn't insisted and emphasized how deadly the sun is to Vampires EVERY OTHER CHAPTER. Do they always sparkle? Fine by me. Silly, but not inconsistent.
I love how she didn't give a fuck. She's like "Ma boi is gonna be majestic and that's that." 😂
it’s all about meaning. vampires are symbolic, you kill them with symbolic actions.
sparkling is, well, it works for what Twilight is trying to do but what it’s trying to do is make a creepy monster sexy even when said monster is dating _well_ out of his acceptable range. it’s not the worst thing on the planet but it’s definitely something to be mindful of while reading, else you risk sliding into 50 Shades territory.
Playing NieR Automata and saying “this is all good and well and has a lot of complex themes, but why is the main character an android in a thong” and getting dozens of responses from “that’s just anime” to “she’s modeled off of a previous character who only wore lingerie bc she got her power from the sun” and I was like ?????
Yoko Taro is quite honest about the reason why the androids dress like that: he likes it that way.
@@felonyx5123 Which is an answer that I don't _love_ but I appreciate "I wanted to make her sexy" over excuses like "that's just how it is".
>why is the main character an android...
Because the work is the story of the inheritors of mankind's will fighting against the inheritors of aliens' will (that is, neither actually had an initial quarrel with each other), and uses that as a springboard to explore multiple philosophical ideas via allegory.
>why is the mian character... in a thong
Because the creator wanted to show off robutt for sales and his own fetishes.
@@mastermarkus5307 That's just how it is just meant basically, the author did what they wanted. Also with that's just anime, the characters are made to be appealing to a certain masses. The author can think like that to be honest
When they say" that's just anime". It mean the character is made to be appealing, and that basically meant the author is mostly the culprit 😂.
tl;dr: when people critique a work for doing X, they aren't asking "what about this fiction's universe allows for X", but rather they are asking "why did the author choose to include X in the story."
@Not Todd Howard No, you clearly missed the point just to have something to whine about. Typical.
@gotsda "You're assuming what they are actually asking." No, for the context of this video we KNOW what the person is asking, because if a person is genuinely asking "why does X" and you give them an in universe answer, they'll accept that. When someone is asking "why does author do X" that's an obvious distinction.
@fenrif >Why does the author do X? Because they thought it would make the story better. That's it, end of. Who cares.
You don't think people are more interested in why the last season ( and especially last episode) of GOT was written so poorly by the author more than they are interested in "why x character did y action" in-universe? I.e more people are interested in knowing why an author thought this was good or was blinded sided to issues with writing the story this way than they are "what motivated a character to do this" in-universe, and no "because the author wanted it" isn't an answer, it's a cop-out suggesting that there isn't a bad way to implement conflict into a story. A well as why their desires for it to be presented in such a way ( burning down those normies cause I'm a nazi now I guess lol) isn't worth looking into.
For example in the first season of 13 Reasons Why, near the end we got to see, on tv, how the mc female lead committed suicide, and I don't mean they cut the camera to another scene as she was doing it, we as the audience got to see a teenage girl not only cut her wrists while in a bathtub we got to see her bleed out in full and watch as the life left her body. Not questioning why the director thought this would be a good idea ( it wasn't it was heavily dismissed by therapist they were talking to that this scene should not exist as it will not help anybody who's suicidal only make it worse) would allow them to think this was somehow a good and appropriate use of conflict by depicting suicide in media and is not in any way harmful or problematic to the audience.
>"why do you think you get to tell authors what they can or cannot put in their work?"
like in the show above whos GOAL was to alert people of how suicide affects people, it literally inspired people to commit suicide for the sake of revenge by copying the method that was used by the mc female lead, this is the point we should be able to criticize how a person writes or produces smt because it can go against how they wanted people to see their work, I.E. you create smt to help people but it's actually insulting to those it targetted at and makes things worse.
Then they should present the argument like that.
And whats the "correct" answer to that ?
Thats what realy missing from this Video.
Honestly, I don't really like Thermian arguments because I like seeing why writers and everyone in the production staff make the choices that they made.
I swear, if this was made in other years, we'd be getting these questions.
2020: Why did they need to frame a character's struggle with Mental Illness as a villain arc?
2019: Why did the diamonds have to be crucial to gem life and not let the rest of the universe recover from their abuse without needing them to continue living?
2014: If Tenzin can be beaten up off screen with dignity, why're we really focusing on every detail of Korra's?
I think that an internal argument ("it is this way in the story because of that other thing in the story") is fine except that it is begging the question.
"The orcs to horrible stuff because there's this blood god that wants them to" simply begs the question "why does the story have a blood god that wants them to?"
I think it would be more productive to follow the argument back to its source than to dismiss it outright.
"chainmail bikinis is just how her tribe dresses" is answered with "OK: why was the decision made to have a tribe that dresses in chain-mail bikinis". Eventually you may get to the real reason (be it good or bad) from which these others flow.
Jerry Love. agreed, and what the defenders are doing is actually self defeatist and perhaps shows that they do know they are wrong, or at least they believe they are wrong and cant justify what they are creating.
they cant even throw up a bs argument about it being meaningful in some way and a legitimate expression of artistic merit.
hell, suppose that the question isnt loaded with any sort of judgement and take it at face value. the answer "because I enjoy watching fictionalized exaggerated rape" is at least a legitimate answer
As someone who is a fan of many things that are judged as being offensive (videogames, pepe the frog, other dark humour, etc.) I believe in the prioritization of freedom in this particular situation. Within this context I would define this freedom as freedom to act, choose, and express, rather than freedom from the actions and offenses of others.
For example many people criticize fighting games such as Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters and many others for having sexualized character designs. In this example I advocate for the artists as I don't believe in censorship of the content to avoid being offensive. If I want to play a videogame where sexy ladies throw fireballs, I don't care who gets offended. Fictionalized crime is exactly that FICTION.
I understand the need for standards of conduct to prevent serious crimes in the real world, -for example: an old woman has her windows smashed in the middle of the night and can't afford to replace them. That would be awful. But if I'm not depriving anyone of their freedoms they shouldn't impede mine.
But noone is impeding on your freedoms by mere criticism. Now, if someone goes beyond criticism and actually try to censor, then I can agree with you. If someone says "sexualized characters in video games negatively affect young women, therefore we should ban such depictions", then you have a strong point.
If someone merely talks about it, and tries to make people understand *why* they view it as problematic, they're not impeding on anyones freedoms anymore than I am impeding on your freedom to play such a game by not buying it myself (which, technically, I do, since if I *had* bought the game, that would have increased sales and incentivized video game studios to make more games with the same qualities).
If someone uses criticism to convince others to boycott, then that's still not directly impeding on your freedom. A boycott may make companies more wary of making new products with similar qualities, or make some stores not sell the product, but does that directly impede on your freedom*? To claim otherwise could easily be countered with the claim that your claim then impedes on their freedom not to support a product they do not like.
*It definitely indirectly impedes your freedom, and there's a positively *MASSIVE* philosophical discussion to be had on the rights and wrongs of this, but honestly, that discussion is too big for me to take here.
Thomas Ueland Torp I wasn't saying the criticisms were impediments to freedom. I had originally meant to convey that those criticisms should not become policy.
Then we probably agree. There just seem to be a lot of people, these days, who think that criticism = censorship, so I misread you to argue the same claim.
If you say "it seems pointless that there are dark themes being played up in a thing" and the answer is "there's a reason given," there's usually a disconnect in understanding between the parties involved over what is being discussed. I think it's completely legitimate to pull back to a meta level and question why something is being presented the way that it is, but if that's your interest, you need to make that clear to the audience.
If violence or or other such things are being presented with perverse glee on the part of characters who revel in those things, that's one thing. If it's being presented to the audience as something that's meant to be reveled in too, that has deeper implications. If characters are murderous or cruel, but we're meant to sympathize with them or root for them as they engage in these behaviors, that has something worth considering as to why the story is written and presented in that way.
I'm here from Shaun and Harry Potter. I told someone many years ago that I didn't like cowboy western books because they're always settled by shooting someone. She said that the hero *had* to shoot the other person, and had no choice. I said that the author constructed the story that way solely because he wanted the shooting. It could have been written otherwise. Her eyes were opened. It was gratifying.
She likely realized she was speaking to a retard.
@@seikanekasin 100%
What a dumb piece of sophistry you vomited into the comments section, by that logic you can criticize any story. Why have fiction at all if you can just demonize anything you don't agree with,
Beyond stupid.
I was forwarded this by a friend when discussing our distaste for SCP-231. This is one of the most prevalent arguments against any criticism of it. It was really satisfying seeing my thoughts on the matter so neatly summed up in the video.
yo can i get a tl;dr?
@@Wishuponapancake To be honest, it's difficult to explain without sounding awful but I'll try.
tl;dr The Foundation seemingly does some vaguely-defined (but heavily implied) heinous shit to children, all because apparently if they don't, based on some ancient writings, the world will be destroyed/live in eternal suffering.
The worst part, other than the subject matter and its clumsy use, is that I genuinely can't tell what it's trying to argue for. The Foundation gives a "the ends justify the means" argument, but it's hard to tell what the story wants us to think. Is it with the Foundation? Is it against it? And if either of those, how much and to what degree? It's genuinely hard to tell where it stands ethically.
@@itsraininghavoc817 lmao thanks! yeah i can totally understand where you're coming from, and how annoying people would be about it, yikes
I actually don't mind SCP-231, at least from an artistic standpoint. I think it serves an important purpose in clearly characterizing the Foundation as amoral and extreme--and in demonstrating that Foundation members struggle with this--while also making good use of the diegetic censorship the wiki is famous for to avoid _actually_ portraying anything fucked-up.
I want to be clear about this, because I know we're in the comments for a video about the Thermian argument. It's not that I think SCP-213 is justified by the internal mechanics of the SCP Wiki, or by the character of the Foundation. Rather, I don't think that the text of SCP-231 is genuinely exploitative in the first place, because it deliberately avoids defining or depicting Procedure 110-Montauk, preferring instead to maintain it as a loose approximation and symbol. Separately, I really _do_ think that SCP-231 improves the story being told by the SCP Wiki, though this is obviously a less important factor.
To me, SCP-231 is almost like the functional inverse of the Orc Anime that Dan talks about in this video: while the Orc Anime contrives its plot in the service of maximizing its problematic content, SCP-231 contrives its _structure_ in the service of _minimizing_ its problematic content, while still using the abstract concept of a messed-up containment procedure as a narrative device.
@@harrisonfackrell I think I agree with you
You pre-empted the Goblin Slayer backlash to the backlash.
Eh, I would say that "that scene" in Episode One of the Goblin Slayer show is much more properly handled than in the manga ie the way everyone/everything is posed and angled makes it very clear that the show wanted to go for genuine shock horror (whereas the manga clearly went for disturbing wank fodder)
@@billybill1270 I didn't fucking watch goblin Slayer and I don't care about the minutiae of rape scenes.
@@billybill1270 idk bro that scene was pretty sexually framed with her tits and ass bouncing around
@@highlion8998 the scene in the anime appears as sexual in intent as the manga just with a much less competent drawing.
@@jerdasaurusrex557 in the manga it was way more sexualized XD and none of that was there in the novel
watching the video: wow that fake goblin show sounds pretty messed up, im glad it's not real
reading the comments: what the fuuuuuuuuuu
Lol yep, Goblin Slayer is real and I’ve seen it. First episode is actually pretty good! But it all downhill from there…
Wildly it wasn't real when this video was made
Made me think of Quiet from MGSV.
"Why is she naked all the time?"
-"She has to. She breathes through her skin. It's like photosynthesis. It makes sense if you understand the lore." Etc, etc.
It still bothers me that she wears leather and fishnets then. Like she could just have easily have worn more conservative woven garments with lots of "airholes" or even just pasties. it seems less consistent that she would wear something fetishy. Also really bothers me that she is always kneeling but doesn't wear knee-pads.
"She's not naked she wears a bikini lol libtarde btfo"
@@DrIvoRobotnick That's all irrelevant because it's putting the horse before the cart, and arguing in such a way cedes to the ass-hole the key point - that the rules of the world are created by the author(s) for social, cultural, audience appeal or narrative reasons not because logic and natural laws dictate it must be that way. Quiet breathes through her skin because the designers wanted her to wear leather and fishnets not the other way round.
Only thing worse than the "She breathes through her skin" excuse is the fact that Kojima thinks pantyhose with bikini would be sexy. Like, it would be stupid enough if she was just running around in bikini, but pantyhose!?! Why Kojima? Why did you do that?
@@agilemind6241
So according to the premise of this very video. That the world is designed to the specifications of the author(s), leaves any moralistic contestation moot.
The Thermian Argument, a.k.a. "shut up, I'm breathing through my skin!" as Jim Sterling would put it.
Just as a node though, I think the vampire example would have worked better if you hadn't rattled off the typical ways of killing a vampire in a story right after posing the question.
+chaosof99 Haha, yeah, I uploaded and scheduled this last night, then settled in for some League and getting caught up on Jimquisition, and, yeah, breathing through my skin.
I don't know. Giving possibly deceptive answers to put someone in the right frame of mind for the example is not a bad idea. It's just the part where he claims vampires aren't real that is.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go take off my pants so I can breathe.
+Folding Ideas Can there be objective criticism of a piece of media outside of the medias diagesis?
+Dean Edwards Objective criticism isn't actually a thing.
+Dean Edwards The closest humans can get to "objectivity", even in the sciences, is amassing independently verifiable evidence and subject-neutral logical arguments. In the arts, that's nigh-impossible.
_this comment section is genuinely fucking insane. i had no idea that "stories are made by people & if those people write questionable elements in their stories, they should be questioned about those elements" was such a novel concept._
I'll be honest, I have the opposite reaction. This comment section has genuinely compelling and analytical comments in it, something which I haven't seen on youtube comment sections probably ever. I was expecting the witty comments and the dumb comments, but I didn't expect them to be matched by a comparable amount of well thought out comments.
The difference for some is whether something really matters or is even 'questionable'. While everything is questionable in that it is "open to being discussed and critiqued", it seems that most use the part of the definition where it is "of dubious morality or respectability". Because of that, when people approach saying that something is questionable and merits discussion, the fans have likely developed a reflexive assumption that the person is just here to do nothing but disparage their favorite work and them for liking it just because the other person just happens to not enjoy it.
FI's example is a strawman (and I don't think even he would deny it as one), but a recent and similar example was that of people posting a couple of pages from the Berserk manga of a group of men carrying the impaled corpses (mostly women) of a village they had just pillaged, and were questioning why anyone would want to read it.
The answer was that those are the bad guys of the arc, and they are shown doing something like that to have us hate them so we are happier when they are defeated, as well as showing why the king of the country did not release this band of prisoners for the task of hunting down the MCs despite being the actual strongest of his forces. That is, they were all criminals led by a demon (not hyperbole) who do things like that, but were so strong compared to his full-human companies that he kept them as a last-resort for times where he wants something done even if it meant sacrificing an entire village of people just because the group got bored on the way.
Like it or hate it, Berserk is all about struggling against the worst the world has to throw at you, so even extreme violence such as that serves a purpose.
Of course, the answer the people asking about the scene just inserted by default was that the author hated women and revelled in violence being done to them, because it was not a case of them wanting to actually engage with the media, they simply wanted to decry anyone who enjoyed something they didn't as misogynists.
Ultimately, question anything you want. You really don't need anyone's permission to do so (least of all mine). But I would suggest that you actually listen to the answer and only then decide what the value of something is based on that answer. After all, just because there was a clear answer given about Berserk does not mean you have to find it entertaining and worth your time.
way i see it, questionable or not, it's still not problematic. despite ppl using that word to describe elements of a story that make them uncomfortable. i've been made uncomfortable by contents of a story before. but rather than ciriticize the story, i looked inward. instead of questioning why the problematic content was in the story, i questioned myself as to why it made me uncomfortable despite just being fiction.
that's when i realize the "problematic" aspect of it was just an illusion that existed in my head at the time. i was projecting my own standards/insecurities onto the fiction and judging it for that. but nowadays, it doesn't bother me much when a story has content most would consider "questionable", or "problematic"
though i suppose part of me thinks it's just that my standards on what is and is not questionable has merely shifted a bit.
Okay so there's this running theme in a few of the comment threads that I"m seeing and I'm just confused by it, because I don't think people understand what purpose criticism of a thing even has. There's this running thread of saying that "SJW critics" are somehow asking/demanding creators to change their work, which... they aren't, not directly. The purpose of criticism of a work is rarely a direct dialogue with the creator. That is what editors do. That is what first readers do. That is what the public does by supporting that creator's works- or choosing not to. A critic is someone who builds a rapport with the public by explaining their thoughts on Creative Work X and how they respond to it based on elements of Creative Work X. Their purpose is both to instruct the public in the structural flaws of Creative Work X, or what they perceive as such, as well as to let the public know if Creative Work X is worth their time and money. And if a segment of the public has views that align with the critic's, the public may well choose to use that critic's views as a guide to how and where they should spend. No more and no less.
Criticism isn't a demand for reform. it's essentially a dialogue between consumers of entertainment, or between people who want to learn more about creative forms and more experienced individuals. So in our hypothetical example, I find it ludicrous to say that Folded Dan's criticism of Women Getting Torn Apart By Orcs is equivalent to him saying he didn't like it. Of course it is! It's also an explanation of the specific elements he found unpalatable, why they were unpalatable, and what it says about the potential mentality or competence, or general culture of the creator that those elements exist. It's a warning (or endorsement) for potential consumers who may be interested in Women Getting Torn Apart by Orcs, or who might want to seek out other opinions on what they just saw while putting their own thoughts together. You can dismiss any and all negative criticism by boiling it down to "Don't like, don't read" but that completely misunderstands why people criticize!
Like, I don't read Jacob Chapman's anime reviews because I think I'm going to get some completely unbiased academic study of how Digimon Tri fits together. I read them because I think JO has good taste, generally hits on what elements do and do not work in shows, and has similar biases and tastes to my own. And that's okay! And wanting other people to share those tastes is okay! And directly challenging others to accept it is okay! Calling out Cute Girls Who Do Things shows for having a weirdly voyeuristic tone isn't the same thing as castigating all of society. It's an expression of personal distaste that can only register for a call to change behavior if and when an individual feels *stung* by it on some level- perhaps they just feel shamed for liking something that might have flaws, which is itself a completely new topic of discussion since it's perfectly possible to love "problematic" texts in spite of their flaws. What matters is how the viewer approaches, understands, and internalizes the text. I just...
arrghhh.
the problem is, its not criticism, its demand for reform. He implies many times that these ideas are bad and should not be allowed to exist.
Its also not real criticism. When you criticize a work you have to look at it objectively as possible.
Is the writing good?
Does everything in the story have a logical explanation?
Does the story set out to do what it is trying to do?
Does the plot stay consistent or do any detractions from the main plot have reasonable explanations?
Say you're critiquing the 'Adventures of Huckleberryfin.' Its completely illegitimate to start your review with "this story is racist and therefore it is bad." That might be your opinion, but that certainly is not critique and it should never be defended as if its a legitimate review. A more legitimate line of reasoning would be "The themes of racism throughout the story are treated very maturely. The characters remain consistent in their beliefs and never detract from their way of thinking without proper intervention within the world of the story."
This is the real complaint with SJW 'critics' they NEVER critique anything objectively. They always just say "this is racist" or "this is sexist" or "this needs more LGBT persons." That used to be called 'bitching' not ''critique.'
We need to reclaim critique as an objective observation about art not this bullshit bitching and moaning that goes on all too often.
All critique is inherently tinged by a desire for reform, and not all critique needs to focus on the story. It's perfectly plausible to state both that Birth of a Nation is a film that created some of the conventions of film-making that exist to this day, and condemn its racist core in the same breath. Nobody who studies any form of art can argue that art is divorced from outside context, and exposing racist or sexist ideas at the core of art is itself a valid form of criticism. In fact, in the case of a story such as Birth of a Nation, what the story was "setting out to do" is inextricably linked to the racism pervading it. You can't call for "objective criticism" and then whinge when that objective criticism begins to try to examine the core concepts and ideas that make up the overall story.
While I agree with you that criticisms of a text can and should focus on the inherent writing/film-making/design quality, I have no patience for the idea of a world where criticism is not allowed to ever question more than whether a story is "good" or "bad"- in fact, answering those questions is often the least interesting discussion you can have. I'd rather answer questions about how well a story executed upon its own core ideas, what that core is, where and how they were shaped, what elements of the story are in service to other elements. All of those end up, inexorably, leading to discussions about how well the story handles certain key elements. You can praise the animation quality and dark fantasy aesthetic and gripping soundtrack of Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs, but at the end of the day someone will, in fact, have to confront the fact that the story takes pornographic glee in showing women getting ripped apart by orcs.
And like... Jesus Christ, for all your fears about SJWs, apparently you just skipped the videos on Dan Olson's channel where he talks about his love for The Chronicles of Riddick and 300. Neither of those seem like they're censored, pristine propaganda films for a feminist agenda, do they? But he explicitly praises elements of their design and conception because he *can* objectively criticize them. The only one diminishing the power of criticism here is you.
EDIT: And to make a point- when I say a "desire for reform", I mean that on some level, most critics specifically want a work to be better than it is. I think all of us would rather watch shows or read books or play games that are good rather than otherwise. So structural criticism is itself an expression of "I wish this wasn't so bad", in addition to being a warning or endorsement to a potential audience.
Demosthenes6666
You are again conflating opinion with critique. You aren't critiquing racist ideals you are condeming them outright, that is not and will never be a form of critique.
Again, we used to call that bitching but sjws seem to be coopting every kind of rational discussion.
I condemn you ideas about what critique should be because frankly, they're wrong. Your ideals fall entirely outside of what critique should be and this "but muh feelings" bs needs to be stopped.
You cannot objectively examine something or make valid criticism when you are comparing it to real world morals this is why that line if thinking is heavily condemned by professionals and rational thinkers, because it's simply wrong.
You also dismiss the fact he's directly calling for censorship with "well isn't all criticism asking for reform?" no. No its not and he's advocating for direct censorship.
..."Professional and Rational Thinkers" tend to spend a lot of time trying to actually craft systems of real world morals, as I understand it. There are quite a few famous authors, in fact, who create texts entirely to support their particular view on morality, and thus whose morals are inexplicably tied to the text and its evaluation. Ayn Rand comes to mind as a particularly famous example, given how inextricable objectivism is from Atlas Shrugged. You can't start talking about Atlas Shrugged and not talk about objectivism, or you are limited to a much more boring and trite discussion of grammar and syntax. Useful to students of the English language, perhaps, but not particularly to readers unless you're specifically praising or damning particular skill in using language. Your short-sightedness just erased the most significant element of Atlas Shrugged from the critical lexicon.
Likewise, it is impossible to read Watchmen and not discuss the impact of the Cold War on the story and tone, and the contrasting morality of the characters. It is impossible to read V for Vendetta and not talk about anarchy. It is impossible to watch Oldboy and not discussion taboo sexuality (which even the director discussed as being a key theme of the film). It is impossible to play Hotline Miami without being drawn into a discussion of how the game both celebrates and condemns ultraviolence through its use of abrupt mood shifts.
What you are advocating is not a world where "feelings" don't come into play. In fact you have, rather childishly, dismissed the idea that critics can ever discuss core elements to a text that do not pertain directly to mechanical execution. I find that pathetic and sad, personally. But perhaps you are content to live in a world where discussions of art never progress, where art cannot be celebrated or condemned as much for its bold ideas as for its color composition. Such a world is anathema to the creation of new and bold art, however, and akin to censorship on a level no amount of imagined complaints motivated by nothing but "feelings" can ever produce.
And frankly, if you think discussion of feelings has no place in art, I find that equally pathetic. Art exists to create an emotional response. There is much to be gained in discussing the precise emotional responses an audience had to a text. In fact, a common criticism of inept art is that it failed to elicit an emotional response, or evoked a different emotional response from the one the creator intended.
Demosthenes6666
so now you're conflating entertainment with philosophy to make your point because I so thoroughly destroyed the previous point.
You idiots might not be able to tell the difference between entertainment and a political statement but the rest of the world can.
"Art exists to create an emotional response."
Then you're flat wrong. Art exists to do many things. Some exists solely as a coping mechanism for the damage, some are strictly entertainment, some are political statements where as others are mindless fun.
You idiots can't tell the difference between these things. You'd like to think all art has some grand purpose in life to change the minds of all around when that couldn't be further from the truth and frankly, if you haven't figured that out by now you're honestly just too fucking ignorant to have this discussion.
Of course your little bits of propaganda don't go unnoticed but you can keep them to yourself.
It seems to me that people have just generally gotten worse at telling reality and fiction apart for the past 10 years - and it's interesting to see that this was seemingly already as apparent 7 years ago. I've been casually present in some subreddits critical of the Star Wars sequel trilogy and GOT, and people there seemed to be split into three groups: Number one: your usual "women make everything worse" Gamergate remnants, i.e. people who use "SJW" unironically; number two: people with legitimate criticism / disappointment tied to writing/production/general enjoyment issues, i.e. "the fig leaf" of the community; and three: people who are mad that their headcanon escapism fan-fiction plot did not end up in the finished product because X fictional character "deserved better".
Two of these groups just flat-out refuse to acknowledge that fictional works still exist in a real context - be it creative (i.e. they need to work as a story) or societal (i.e. they have the same responsibilities all acts of communication have - the topic of this video). I get that abstraction and subsumtion (= the application of abstract rules and concepts to real phenomena) is hard, but I find it really worrying that people have become so... outright hostile to the very concept of it.
People haven't been able to tell reality and fantasy apart for ever. Religions, cults, magical thinking, manifesting, horoscopes, auguries, good luck charms, just world fallacy, and also the belief that humans are fundamentally rational instead of emotional.
I think the people who suck at telling fiction from reality are the people who need to make videos about something that doesn't exist and uses bad faith justifications for his tism.
When I suggested this term, I wasn't thinking only about people who reject criticism, but also interpretation. I was specifically thinking about the people who will (aggressively) reject any claim of there being any sort of homosexuality in Steven Universe. The argument usually goes.
Person A: "Ruby and Sapphire are codified as female characters that use the pronoun she. They are shown to be in some sort of romantic relationship. We can therefore say that they are codified as a female homosexual couple"
Person B: "YOU CAN'T SAY THEY'RE GAY BECAUSE GEMS DON'T HAVE GENDER!!!!! STOP SAYING THEY'RE GAY!!!! HOW DARE YOU!!!!"
+quiroz923
Person B is correct. You made them seem comical with hyperbole, but I can still see that they are right, and I don't even watch the show.
If gems don't have a gender, they cannot be gay, whether or not they are referred to with female pronouns, or if they have a female appearance.
Person A is using unrelated facts about reality to try to prove their bias in a fictional world. To take it to the extreme would be to say that gems aren't even people, therefore they don't exist and are a figment of someone's imagination. That could spiral into one of those shitty "the whole show was a drug induced dream," interpretations.
Unless the creator explicitly states that the gems are gay -- or at least, that they represent a gay couple, since it defies the established lore -- Person A is making an baseless claim.
+Stun Gee
Okay, four things.
1) Not that it actually matters (it really doesn't) but some creators have been explicit about it.
2) You probably don't want to argue about a show that you haven't watched because then you don't really know what you're talking about, do you?
3) This is not exactly a subtle or ambiguous fact of the show. It's quite obvious. It's hard to read it as anything else, really, unless you prefer to use "queer" instead of homosexual, to broaden the ways this can resonate with, say, non binary people.
4) Every single point you make is based on the thermian argument. You say "unrelated facts about reality". But here's the thing, reality is not unrelated to the fiction that exists within reality, because fiction was made by and for people who actually exist in reality. As a result, narrative exists within a context, the context where both creators and consummers inhabit. This is not a controversial statment. This is not a radical new idea. This is a well known fact. So yes, these facts about reality are related because they are part of the context in which the text is created and consummed. BTW, your next comment is nonsense: "To take it to the extreme would be to say that gems aren't even people, therefore they don't exist and are a figment of someone's imagination."
This is an OBJECTIVE FACT: Gems aren't people, they don't exist, they are figments of someone's imagination, becuase, again, THIS IS FICTION. WE ARE NOT THERMIANS WATCHING A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT. WE ARE WATCHING A FICTIONAL UNIVERSE CREATED BY A REAL PERSON FOR REAL PEOPLE THAT EXISTS IN REALITY. IT'S MADE UP. No, this is not the same as "one of those shitty "the whole show was a drug induced dream," interpretations". I am talking about the OBJECTIVE FACT that THIS IS FICTION withing OUR ACTUAL REAL REALITY. NOt within the diegesis, not within the universe. Because accepting that something is fiction does not lead to thinking "this is all a dream within the universe", because there is literally no reason it should. Your point doesn't make any sense.
Look, I know it's hard to move away from a thermian interaction with stories, to try to see them as fiction and try to interpret them at all, but consider this, which might help you understand: Take the creation and consumption of fiction to its most basic necessities. What do I need to tell a story and for you to understand it? Well, we probably need to speak the same language, right? Let's take Steven Universe as an example. How is it possible that a story created inside its own fictional universe is understood by anyone? Well, it's written in English. HOw is it possible that it was written in English? Well, it was made by real people who speak English. It can be watched by people who also speak English (or through a translation, but let's focus in the English speaking part so that you'll understand the point). So real people who speak a real language tell this story in that language, and it is consumed by people who also speak that language. So what was needed? Pay attention to this: PEOPLE IN THE REAL WORLD, CREATOR AND CONSUMER, NEEDED A COMMON CODE.
These are very obvious ideas, but here's the point: FOR STORIES TO BE POSSIBLE, THEY NEED TO BE TOLD IN A REAL WORLD, WHERE REAL PEOPLE HAVE COMMON CODES IN COMMON. And people are gonna have common codes in common only if they exist within a similar society. So here's the thing... Take the sentence "Steven woke up". It is made of signs, these little things we call "words". I know the meaning of these signs. So do you. That is how it is possible for you to be able to read this right now. Okay, here's another collection of symbols: "She is in a romantic relationsip with her". YOu understand what this means, so do I. Okay, take it one step further: what are the codes to write a woman in any story? You don't have to state "she is a woman. I will now describe what a woman is". NO, you say "She."
You with me so far? Creator and consummer need to agree that "she" means "female", NOT AS AN INVENTION OF THE FICTIONAL WORLD, BUT AS SOMETHING THAT IS AGREED UPON KNOWLEDGE BEFORE THE STORY IS EVEN CREATED.
STORIES DON'T EXIST OUTSIDE OF LANGUAGE. THEREFORE, STORIES DON'T EXIST OUTSIDE OF CODES. THEREFORE, A CREATOR AND A CONSUMMER, WHEN BOTH USING THE SAME CODES, ARE ABLE TO CONVEY THINGS WITHOUT BEING EXPLICIT ABOUT THEM IF THEY USE THE CORRECT CODES.
OKay, now, it stands to reason that when creator and consummer, both agreeing that these characters are female OR AT LEAST female coded because of the pronoun "she", say "she is in a romantic relationship with her", they also agree on some codes about that. We would normally say that it means they are "gay", or "queer". SO we get to the conclussion that this is how they were codified.
TL; DR: IN ORDER FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND ANY STORY AT ALL, THERE NEEDS TO BE IN THE REAL WORLD (NOT IN THE STORY) SOME GENERAL CODES, SIGNS AND SYMBOLS THAT YOU AND THE CREATOR BOTH HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF.
Of course, this is obvious. Of course you need to speak English to consumme a story in English. But it is all to show you that these are things that NEED to exist in the real world, NOT HISTORICAL DOCUMMENTS. I had to go to the most basic of base assumptions because in order for you to understand, I needed to prove to you very obvious stuff that you are trying to ignore by sticking to the thermian attitude.
quiroz923
["You probably don't want to argue about a show that you haven't watched because then you don't really know what you're talking about, do you?"]
Why? Your entire argument is based on the idea of detaching yourself from the "reality" of fictional worlds.
[" This is not exactly a subtle or ambiguous fact of the show. It's quite obvious. It's hard to read it as anything else, really, unless you prefer to use "queer" instead of homosexual, to broaden the ways this can resonate with, say, non binary people. "]
Really? because I just did, based on the information that *you* gave me.
["Every single point you make is based on the thermian argument."]
That is entirely the point. I don't see why you are pointing this out. I am trying to demonstrate to you that a "thermian argument" is legitimate, but you would rather use the term as some sort of insult to my argument.
["But here's the thing, reality is not unrelated to the fiction that exists within reality, because fiction was made by and for people who actually exist in reality."]
So what? Just because something is made in reality doesn't mean it is accurate to reality, unless otherwise stated by the creators. It is impossible for anything to not be made in reality, so this also seems like a worthless thing to point out. What is gained by this observation?
If I were the creator of Steven's Universe, would you still be saying that it has the same meaning, despite my perspective? It being created in reality means absolutely nothing, and the reality in which it was created has no bearing outside of what the creator himself says it does. There is no reason to discuss fiction in the way proposed by the creator of this video, outside of creating wicked (baseless) theories that might be interesting, but in the end lack any depth, or substance. With two exceptions, the fiction has a clear message or when the creator gives such insight, otherwise it is just speculation.
["As a result, narrative exists within a context, the context where both creators and consummers inhabit."]
A context which is not the same for all people, not by a long shot, which makes it meaningless as well. Unless you wrote the biography on the creator, or are that creator.
Tell me what the context is. is it English, like you state later in your mess of a response? No, because English is a language, and not everybody who speaks English sees life the same way. Is it culture, which you also state later on? What culture? There are many even in small communities.
This is precisely why I lamented your bias use of reality, which you could argue is not the same for all people (as far as literature goes), and that is why it is unrelated. You do not know the outside -- in reality -- perspective that gave birth to the fiction, you can only assume, unless the creator tells you.
Are you seeing a pattern? This is how repetitive your post was.
["This is an OBJECTIVE FACT: Gems aren't people, they don't exist, they are figments of someone's imagination, becuase, again, THIS IS FICTION. WE ARE NOT THERMIANS WATCHING A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT. WE ARE WATCHING A FICTIONAL UNIVERSE CREATED BY A REAL PERSON FOR REAL PEOPLE THAT EXISTS IN REALITY. IT'S MADE UP."]
Then gems aren't gay! They can't be; they aren't real. How can something that doesn't exist be gay?
["Look, I know it's hard to move away from a thermian interaction with stories, to try to see them as fiction and try to interpret them at all, but consider this, which might help you understand:"]
Clearly it must be, you think that rocks are gay, and these rocks don't even exist. I, on the other hand, haven't interacted with this story, so I'm having no trouble.
["PEOPLE IN THE REAL WORLD, CREATOR AND CONSUMER, NEEDED A COMMON CODE."]
You mean English, or is it something else? You can speak English to me and the words can be interpreted in numerous ways-- watch this.
"Steven woke up."
1. Steven stopped sleeping.
2. Steven came to a realization.
3. Steven was alarmed.
Which one of these is the "common code," and who decided on it?
[" ...'She is in a romantic relationsip with her'... "]
Now you are ignoring context. Actual context -- from the story.
If I said, "He went to the store." you would rightly assume that a boy or man went to the store. Now what if this is a sentence that is part of a story.
Established in that story:
1. He is the name of a female character.
or
2. He is a robot -- genderless -- simply referred to as he.
or
3. He is a worm that is known for being of an ambiguous gender, but referred to as he.
Now when you read that sentence and assume that a boy or man went to the market, you are wrong. Just like you are wrong to put a gender on gender-less characters, the gems in this case. Of course, with my normal exception -- unless the creator says otherwise.
Do you see how much more productive it is to discuss a work of fiction by the context that you can actually qualify?
------
["I needed to prove to you very obvious stuff that you are trying to ignore by sticking to the thermian attitude"]
No, you didn't prove shit, you just stated a bunch of things that aren't true. Good try, though.
By the way, I think you should lay a nice, cold, damp towel over your keyboard from all of that angry typing. Maybe just the caps lock button, I think it wants a break.
Look, you are right about one thing: My response truly was a mess. I apologize, it is late, I do not have the energy nor the concentration to give you the explanation you deserve.
If I remember I may come back to this conversation, but for now, let me leave you with this:
You are right, sometimes the creator and the consumer will have different contexts, and that will affect communication. You are right that messages may be interpreted in different ways and that signs will acquire new meaning according to context.
BUT, despite all of that, it is still possible for me and you to be talking right at this instant, and more or less know what it is we mean. Communication is possible. We both speak English, we both share one code, and we more or less know what it is the other means.
Maybe it is possible to know other codes besides verbal languages like English. Maybe, even if someone doesn't say something explicitely with words, I can know a different code and therefore interpret the message accordingly, even if it is not said in words, even if it is not outright stated to mean such.
Maybe I can see someone waving their hand and understand they are greeting me, I can understand that message, even if they don't say something.
Same applies to fiction: maybe I can understand a code that I know, and that I know that the creator knows, without needing it to be explicitely stated, and without needing the author to tell me himself.
quiroz923
["My response truly was a mess. I apologize, it is late, I do not have the energy nor the concentration to give you the explanation you deserve."]
I've been there, bud. No worries. I just like to add a bit of fun into my posts sometimes, you know?
["BUT, despite all of that, it is still possible for me and you to be talking right at this instant, and more or less know what it is we mean. "]
Yes, but you and I are talking directly. I'm not telling you a story and expecting you to make an argument in response.
["Maybe it is possible to know other codes besides verbal languages like English. Maybe, even if someone doesn't say something explicitely with words, I can know a different code and therefore interpret the message accordingly, even if it is not said in words, even if it is not outright stated to mean such."]
Yes, but these "codes" have been given definition by someone, or some group. There is no fiction-interpretation code.
["Same applies to fiction::]
Not quite.
["maybe I can understand a code that I know, and that I know that the creator knows, without needing it to be explicitely stated, and without needing the author to tell me himself."]
If you *know* that the creator is speaking in that code, it has been explicitly stated by them at some point in some way. Do not get too lost in your example, I'm speaking generally. I know that you are probably right about Steven's Universe:
[" Not that it actually matters (it really doesn't) but some creators have been explicit about it."]
because it does matter.
Great.
Now 'Women Being Ripped Apart by Orcs episode 1' is in my search history.
THANKS.
+KrimsonKyriarch
I was able to find an anime where girls are raped by a orc but no one was killed and it was pretty standerd hentai from what I saw.
I do recall a hentai/anime from way back when that looks like it was made around the same time as Akira (not bashing Akira but it does look dated) that had monsters that would rape and kill girls but the deaths were literally the most tame thing ever. The screen would flash red and they'd be lying on the ground, still all in one piece but with little red bruises on them (the general blood stain kinda thing).
I could not for the life of me find any anime like he originally described tho.
+Mischievous Roze Kuroinu is pretty good for a lonely Friday night.
Drac0blade16 but does this other anime even exist? It's weird that when trying to talk about "sexism in anime" that he had to fake one.
Not from what I could find. Most likely, "Women Being Ripped Apart by Orcs" was just him being hyperbolic, not to mention generalizing to an almost insulting level. He might as well had just said "All anime is Chinese cartoon porn, and if you try to defend it then you are misogynistic scum".
Mischievous Roze But you're right, it is odd that he felt the need to try and make up a title.
The way to kill a vampire is with hamon, obviously. Great video btw
And if Hamon isn't available, it's for the vampire to piss Jotaro off
destroy the head, use the ripple, or subject them to sunlight
Be careful, as he could turn into an invisible ghost
Can’t be sure unless you use a stand.
Pedro Cordeiro Oh, definitely.
How do you kill a vampire? In a way which is thematically consistent with your world building.
Yes, but if it sucks, you can build the world differently, hoping you are not doing this mid-series.
@my name Well, I wanted to make it brief, but since you ask...
There are many different ways a certain method of killing a vampire might "suck" (pun intended).
For instance, it might be because the way you have devised is too easy, and the rest of the story hinges on the vampire being a big threat/an evil that doesn't go away that easily. If for some reason all it takes to kill a vampire is a bonk on the head, it might be wise to revise the setting before showing your work.
It might also be very convoluted, and maybe halfway through writing about some character taking a strand of the vampire DNA, some hair form the person that vampire loves the most, some dirt from his grave, having everything blessed by a priest and then put in a particle accelerator, you might decide that all this work is as narratively interesting as a quest that tells you "go kill 10 rats". So you might decide to streamline things.
Or it might not be fun: maybe the way you have devised to kill a vampire makes it so that the final showdown between the protagonist and the vampire is only a matter of who hits the hardest, or that the vampire is so hard to kill you have to come up with some equally boring powerups for the protagonist to win.
It is true that none of this is objective. But here's the thing: there is no objective parameter that makes a story good. A story is good if it resonates with people, and there's nothing less subjective than that. What we can do is look at the stories of the past and find which ones people liked and what they have in common.
Want a practical example? Take JoJo. During part 1 and 2, battles in the manga were fought using a form of energy known as Hamon, which while it had some quirks, in the end it wasn't all that different from what you'd see in Fist of the North Star or Dragonball.
Araki got bored of it, so in part 3 he basically scrapped it and replaced with Stands, which allowed to write way more interesting battles that looked more like battles, with potentially infinite varieties, while also not having to worry about issues like power creep (because stands are so varied there is no way to tell which is stronger).
The result? JoJo's Bizarre Adventures is now one of the oldest and most successful manga series which are still being published, while also being referenced by every other manga (that's where the JoJo reference meme comes from).
Was there any objective metric which guaranteed him Stands were a better idea than Hamon? Not at all. Hell, if we talk about consistency, it should have been a bad idea. But there was clearly something in Stands which made it better than Hamon, and Araki chose them because he liked them subjectively.
@my name
"Your answer is good, but it's just a much longer way of saying "as long as it's internally consistent and interesting." "Interesting", of course, is still subjective, which leaves us one metric to judge this by. Whether or not it makes sense in the story."
Well, yes, in the end it's about making things interesting. But I believe it's also about delivering the right feel for the world and the characters (which is also highly subjective).
Keeping on with the JoJo example, take Dio: I think we can all agree the reason he's such a delightful villain is because he is absolutely over the top to the point of being cartoonish.
On one hand, this makes him incredibly fun to listen to, but on the other, it requires careful balancing on the kind of evil he does: it must be very evil, to make sure you understand he means business, but also not so evil that makes you feel creeped out (we have Kira for that).
I think this is the reason why we see him kill people in extravagant ways, control them, suck their blood, create ghouls and so on, but we don't see him rape anyone, because that would be very impactful but not in an over the top way, and you'd also have to deal with the victims' psychological damage. It's implied he did that, but it's not shown, and IMHO is for the better, making the right blend of edginess, silliness and crazy JoJo is known for.
About the stand thing, I agree Araki more or less managed to integrate Stand into the setting, but it wasn't easy.
For instance, to my knowledge Araki never explained effectively why you never see people using Hamon after part 3, even though many stand users could have made use of that, like Joseph did in Stardust Crusaders.
Plus the fact that there supposedly were as many users as the major arcanes of the tarot, but then Araki decided that he wanted more.
Also, as a consequence of the transition to stands, we have some stand users that are natural-born, other that were pricked by an arrow, and the Joestars that awakened their stands when Dio did, but only the ones that were already born.
Not saying Araki didn't manage to pull it off, but it sure required some work to keep everything internally consistant.
@my name Yes, we agree. Don't misunderstand me: I still like internal consistency. I was saying that what you do with it is also important... but I'm pretty sure you agree with that too.
@my name To be fair, that also answer the question "How to kill a vampire"?
Nevermind other works: the best way to kill a vampire is with STANDO POWAH
I fail to see how people are fundamentally missing the point of this video.
People have the right to create whatever fiction they want, and people have the right to criticize it. If the defence of that criticism, however, is solely based on that fiction itself, it is a recursive argument lacking in any sort of cohesive structure.
"Why is this like this?"
"Because it is"
"But why is it "is"?"
"BECAUSE IT IS"
And around we go.
Thank you. Folding Ideas wasn't trying to say that it is necessarily wrong to have bikini mail for no reason (though I do think he doesn't like it). It's wrong to defend that because it's like that.
"The author said they do that, so it's fine, you can't criticize it." Is just silly.
Christopher Janes To me, that's more a communication failure.
(And if tl;dr: communication failures are a big problem I keep finding in critique everywhere and we'd all benefit from trying to fix that.)
When a creator has a clear vision, and has spent a lot of time on something, they generally will know why they put specific details in. No guarantees they will remember, but an interview with the right questions can be quite informative.
But if they can't remember, or they didn't have that kind of clear vision, or they don't understand what the questions are trying to get at, then the answers they give will be vague and "well, I suppose it just happened that way." And no one is happy with that answer.
That brings us to the other side.
In many creative fields, there's many many details to get down, and so, even with near perfect memory, when asked a question,that creator can only act as a database of his memory of his work, and he needs good search queries to lookup. Out of every little detail, what do you want to know?
I am now considering more now that good critique is not so much having a certain mindset as much as it is being able to analyse your own thought process and being able to explain in detail your experience with something, including and especially mentioning your biases and precisely how they must or might have shaped your experience. And as it seems to be to me, being able to do that also tends to allow an ability to ask really good questions, which would be essential in an interview. If it's an essay or reveiw only, then a chance occurs to ask the general audience those questions to have them think about it, and clarify thier own thoughts.
"This sucked." Versus
"I did not appreciate when X trope occurred in this Y work of fiction. But on the other hand, I can't seem to appreciate X in most any work, and... thinking on it, perhaps it could at least be one of the better executed examples of X I've have seen so far. Unfortunately, once I saw it, it caught my attention and stayed in my mind the whole movie, and it wouldn't go, and I found the rest of Y affected very negatively for me. If I had been able to forget about it, maybe I would have come out feeling a lot better about my experience? I accept the concept someone not as concerned about X as I am might be exactly one of the people who enjoyed Y. Great for you if that's the case.
On the other hand, for such a minor detail, this example of X being as attention grabbing as it is, and possibly ruining it for me, has to say something for it being a guinuine flaw, surely any of you who enjoyed this can look at that and find some agreement?"
But of course, a good critic finds that, wether it's for print or for a video, they need good writing skills, and even if they can always write similar to this or even a lot better, this paragraph could likely be shortened down, another writing skill I'm still learning Myself....
Though in that case, some subjectivity for fiction can be acknowledged at the very least by stating:
"I did not like Y, my experience with it sucked."
And if need be add: "Sorry if you liked it, but I found I couldn't."
If someone is adamant about making authoritive statements, then they have an entirely different problem, and I do not wish to follow them for thier critique.
Even if they have a guinuine problem with someone liking something else for external reasons (nothing to do with in-universe consistentcy or anything with the work itself.), they could at least try to make the arguement for not consuming certain media appealing, rather then going after the fans agressively, as though someone will change thier mind, the nature of thier entire experience, because someone hated them for it.
I went on a big tangent, but the point is that I feel that although there are many guinuine, heated, and long winded discussions that could and maybe should occur, my experience tells me that the vast majority of the flame wars that occur come from the results of communication failures, happening constantly. I'd like to see if that could be fixed, then we could avoid mud slinging for no good reason. If we have to use torch and pitchfork, couldn't it be at least for perfectly legitimate reasons? Instead of me weighing debates and frequently finding that both sides actually agree and they don't know it? It's quite frustrating.
Thank you for this analysis. It helped explain it better to me.
The reason why it's recursive is because the counter is recursive. The counter to content is usually one of two things. Either 1. That's out of left field. 2. I don't like that (disgust). The "I don't like that" argument also happens to be recursive so the response will usually be as well. "That's out of left field" is mostly valid for sales which could be hurt by confusing content. "I don't like that" is almost always invalid except for situations where someone was actually hurt in reality like how the animals used to be treated badly by the film industry.
spacedoohicky spacedoohicky I’m not convinced it’s fair to reduce “I think element X in text Y is problematic” is necessarily reducible to “I don’t like X” for each X where the disliked content is only fantasy (I.E. doesn’t rely on a real world instance of suffering to have been created). To make that reduction, one would need need to accept (1) all communicative acts are reducible to their emotive content and (2) emotive acts about fantasy texts all have equal moral standing.
While I have huge issues with emotivism in general, it seems super arbitrary to say that only depictions of questionable content that actually happened (snuff films, old animal abuse films like Milo and Otis, harmful prank videos, tapes of ISIS beheadings, etc) are subject to legitimate criticism. How is that kind of emotivism any more justified just because someone got hurt? The criticism laid out originally doesn’t rely on something actually happening for it to be criticizable, but in reducing criticism to emoting seems to be something you either have to do in all or no cases, unless you can give some criteria for why it only applies to “depictions of historic acts of suffering” and not “potential acts of suffering”. Basically one has to be able to defend why it’s okay to criticize a video of someone torturing an animal and NOT a video made to look exactly like someone torturing an animal (but no suffering occurs).
It's funny watching this in October 2018 after being linked here from an anime discussion, and having to double-check the upload date because your farcical example so closely resembles this season's controversial show.
So what you're saying is that you can't respond to a Doylist critique with a Watsonian argument?
What?
@@8Rincewind He's using big words to feel smart, because of course "Doylist and Watsonian" are much clearer terms than "Textual and Metatextual"
@@8Rincewind Basically: "So what you are saying is that you can not respond to a [real world based] critique with a [in fictional setting] argument?"
The names come from the names of the author of Sherlock Holmes and the expository companion of Sherlock Holmes. Watson must provide an in universe and 'what he knows' argument, but the author can literally say 'because I wrote it that way' and normally has a complex reasoning for that. Or outright admits something like "Because I need to eat and Sherlock Holmes being dead means no more books to sell."
@@andrewcleary9952 Or, perhaps, using terms that make sense to him?
An important part of any discussion is when the listener actively engages to be sure they understand - and often, that boils down to “If I understand you correctly, you just said (x)” by rephrasing the point made into different terms that you understand.
After all - any old schmuck can just repeat an argument verbatim - rewording, paraphrasing, and using different terms clarifies that you understand the point, at its source.
@@andrewcleary9952 Yeah, they are, actually. Prove me wrong.
Skull: check
British accent: check
Terrible argument: check
I hope we see The Angry Gamesmasher in future episodes.
+Guido Bos it's actually commentary on the team-up trope and the MCU
quiroz923 oh?
+Guido Bos It's a joke. I'm saying he'd make the video and it would actually be a video on the team up trope.
I'm not a commedian.
quiroz923 I'm not familiar with the MCU? Marvel Comic Universe?
That's the part to confuse me a bit, sorry. ^^;
Guido Bos Oh, sorry. I meant because the avengers are a team-up of previously introduced characters ^^ So I was saying he'd use that video to comment on that.
'who would win in a fight between hulk and wolverine? whoever the writer wanted to win!' - Stan Lee
Thank you *so much* for this. I am so tired of having every criticism of shitty representation deflected with "it's true to the setting" as if these fictional universes weren't created by people, who have complete and total control over the way people in it are treated.
I'm also fucking floored at how many people either didnt get it, or jumped straight into the comments to argue without watching.
But what if we want to write a story that is true to an already established setting ?
@@testacals then you're still making a deliberate choice to adhere to that setting
@@SpoopySquid Well, if you are trying to write a good story you must adhere to a setting. I just had to choose this specific setting.
Sunlight for high art, steak in the heart for horror, decapitation for action, garlic for comedy.
"THE ANGRY GAMESMASHER"
I'm _dead._
Women getting ripped apart by orcs became an actual anime gotta love it
Whenever diegetic explanations rise to explain an extra diegetic problem, my rebuttal is pretty straight foward:"does this improve the story in any way, shape or form? If this element of the story were to be removed or only implied, would the story be worse, or even different?"
It's like how people excuse Ready Player One's excessive/exhaustive 80s references and pointless nerd trivia are NECESSARY to the story.
Brave and true
Isn't the central core of the story a nerd quiz?
AkiRa22084 bang on point!!!
StanishStudios It was a good movie for people who grew up in that time and loved all the little hints and nods
@@AkiRa22084 "Isn't the central core of the story a nerd quiz?" Which is exactly why everyone has forgotten it even existed by now. Even by people who grew up in that time and loved the hints and nods.
Well, I didn't, I liked it, but as a horror movie. No, not because of that Shining scene.
You show your dishonestly by hiding likes/dislikes.
Its because the lying ass fucker knows there are going to be 3 times as many dislikes as likes.
@@fadedtiger3181 >implying only 3 times
Maybe that’s cause people come here just to throw hate and not listen but I digress.
@@makingitup5746 Listen to disingenuous postmodernist propaganda? You've seen the whole thing I'm assuming? Sure fam. "Hate" Sure, that.
Blackmagic I did the video makes sense. The mechanics of the story aren’t independent of their creator. Get it through your head it’s simple logic.
Always come back to watch this video, beause it is a great example of who to properly, exactly, and succintly define and discuss an idea.
In other words, since I cannot explain it better, I usually point people to this video.
I wrote down "You can't kill vampires, because vampires don't exist". Do I get a cookie? :D
But seriously, "Thermian argument" is a BRILLIANT term. I really hope it catches on, by Grabthar's hammer! I'd have *a lot* more respect for people defending the crap they like with this disingenuous line of reasoning, if they simply came out and admitted that "Yeah, I just like violent/sleazy shit".
I mean, there's a lot of violent/sleazy/generally problematic shit _I_ like - yet somehow, I manage to never throw a hissy fit when I see criticisms of these works.
+InnerPartisan
If vampires don't exist, you can't 'can't kill them'.
I think.
Jokes on you, Vampires are real.
Source: Am Vampire.
What about Lobbyists?
InnerPartisan Holy shit, it's that one German guy from all the 'Shaun' videos.
Silver bullet dipped in holy water.
did my man predict goblin slayer
it's okay, you can say Goblin Slay- wait... this video was posted when??
Way after the Gorn Comics.
Goblin slayer was made after this video actually
..... Is it weird that my follow-up question as to why they focus so much on ladies being raped so much by orcs, is to ask why the Orcs don't rape the men too? That is if they didn't want to be seen as sexist and misogynist towards women? After all, if the Orcs were really compelled to be forces of evil that do nothing but rape everything in their path, then it'd make perfect sense to have the human men be brutally raped too before being carved up, and have that be shown in excruciating pornographic detail. That would really highlight their evil, that they would literally rape ANYTHING. And thus the in-universe justification would really make sense... see, we're not being sexist towards the women, they're doing it to men too!
1:16 I like how you even did the guy using a persona with a machine talking.
Dan managed to own Teal Deer 4 years in the past
I wonder how many people fucking actually paid attention to the video before posting.
+OctopusDropkick not many
They are more worried if the video has the ratings visible
considering the top comments address all his arguments, most people did. I stopped at "this is the thermiam argument" because that's not a real thing so I already knew the basis of the argument was flawed. I eventually finished it to find his example used an anime that doesn't even exist.
fake argument: check
fake example: check
pushing an agenda: check
Mischievous Roze it's almost as if his example was an intentional hyperbole, used to explain the thing.
Арсений Брилёв
Except thats not what he said. In fact he claimed that someone had gotten in a specific argument over this particular anime.
I also like how you ignored that the basis of his video, the "Thermiam Argument" was a complete load of horse shit that he made up on the spot.
"no no guys trust me, in universe the n-word isn't a slur so it's okay that all my white characters use it so much"
Poisoning the well.
I had this exact thought come up when the producers of FF XVI stated there weren't going to have any black characters due to "historical accuracy". There were many who were content with this answer while others like myself thought "but you are creating this story! You can craft it in any way possible!"
I'm not sure if we should be looking for 'historical accuracy' in a game with giant monsters and magic and not being set in Earth.
Also, their historical accuracy is shitty, because while it is definitely detailed and interesting politics and geography and the outcome of all those, it all flattens out to a strange mix of generic low fantasy, Game of Thrones, and Final Fantasy tropes.
But they want it based on a specific culture/period in time. You wouldn't ask why there are no white people in Wakanda
@@durrnip
Then don't say 'historical accuracy'. Say it is 'based on'.
Even then, it's not a good excuse. Wakanda has no white people because the nation (theoretically) exists in real life Africa in real life Earth.
The world of FF XVI isn't set in real life Europe, nor Earth for that matter.
@@tyrone687
It seems my comment got eaten but anyway...
While that is an acceptable justification, it still begs the question: You have included dragons, magic and giant monsters in the game, but you can't include black people/other minorities? You even included the non-European-at-all Ifrit beast.
aaaand thermian argument is getting recommended to me again.
guess the algorithm has spoken
Outdated idea + championing cultural marxism and 'degenerate art' thinking = recommend again
@
´´ cultural marxism ´´ lol ok that is big drop of the mask there.
Great video, great interaction with the public. It's a shame you don't have milions of subscribers -yet
Its quite easy to kill a vampire. Here: "the vampire died"
This is basically what happened with Goblin Slayer. The defenders are exactly doing the same thing as skull boi.
I mean this is literally goblin slayer. He just got here too early.
Saying "Author put orc raping women in the show to make people hate orc' is not thelisium argument .
This is a delightfully clear and educational channel. Well done!
This video is about criticism, yet many of the comments in this comments section seem to be written under the mistaken impression that it was a call for censorship. Criticism is not censorship. I'm not even a fan of criticism, I don't enjoy reading reviews of things, but I can still see that a negative review is not the same thing as a "this work of fiction is now banned" law.
@Not Todd Howard Man, you really got lost when moving from whatever video you watched to the comment section. You keep saying things about this video that are just blatant lies.
While basically true, this kind of assumes a "single creator creating a work that they personally own and have control over", it kind of gets a lot more complicated in collaboratigve or licensced works where the a creator isnt neccessarily free to just alter the world as they see fit. Like... A text is a text, but in practice texts are often created and bound by various constraints. If you are writing Star Wars novels you are, to various extent bound by whatever the people at Lucasfilm/Disney lets you write, and part of that is shaped by what has previously been written.
I’d argue that makes this even worse - because MULTIPLE writers and creators signed off on the problematic content, and then consumers jump to the defense for completely unrelated reasons.
That doesn't really change anything, though
@@anna-flora999 I agree, it's still fundamentally the same concept, but it does open up for more interesting analysis of how the collaborative process and the structures of the production unit affects how the story is told.
For example, an animator may draw something in a way they don't really like personally, but they think it is what the art director wants. The art director may in turn look at the art and think "Not really what I had in mind, but I think this is an interesting take on it and I trust my animators, let's go for it" and in that situation they have together created something that neither of them actually wanted to make due to a miscommunication/lack of familiarity with each other's artistic preferences.
Small things like that are hard to pinpoint when they happen, but I think it's valid to consider a group project to be more than just a logical negotiation process between the team members. Group dyamics are funky like that.
*looks down at the sheet of paper where I wrote "ORAORAORAORAORAORAORA"*
Outrageous that the beautiful and noble culture of the Thermians would have this argument named after them.
Yay! Foldy is back.
I don't understand why you didn't just get Hbomberguy to record those lines.
I believe it's because it was Dan who first came up with The Angry Gamesmasher and Hbomb later asked him to use the moniker in his No Man's Sky video.
im sorry im not sure what youre talking about, he definitely did record those lines
I think you mean Hbomber-LIE
Should I be proud or disappointed that I immediately knew what a thermian was when I saw it in the title. Like I forgot the word “walk” yesterday but I can remember the name of a fictional alien species from a comedy film. One day I will be old and senile and I won’t remember my own name but I’ll be great at pop culture trivia because my brain has decided that information is very important for some odd reason.
There's a lot of people that watch this and entirely miss the point. Criticism of a fictional work isn't erasure. No one can stop you from writing whatever you want to write. No one can stop you from saying whatever you want to say. This does not mean the work you create is immune from criticism. If you want to include - for instance - Asian stereotypes in your novel, that's your choice. That choice is worth interrogating from a critical perspective, regardless of the in-universe justification for using those stereotypes. Don't like it? Ignore the criticism and write what you want anyway. Nobody's going to stop you in the US, we might just think you're a douche if you write douche-y shit. Worst case, your publisher might think you're a douche too and drop you. Shocker.
It's not good criticism if you have to ignore context in order to make your point
That's pretty much The Therminan Argument in practice
@@allowableman2 The Thermian argument doesn't ignore context because the rebuttal to it does the exact same thing, it rejects the thermian exigetic perspective for an in universe justification which will fall flat on its face. You can say "oh this character is an Asian stereotype because his mom raised him like that" and it wouldn't make it ok, you have to bring in an exigetic response by illustrating how such a choice actually helps the story and/or how it's subverted in story.
take a shot every time a dissenting comment says some variant of "sjw"
I've only scrolled halfway down and I'm already dead from alcohol poisoning.
I don't know why youtube commenters fanboy over the Wall Street Journal so much. It's a fine paper, but it's good to diversify your news sources.
i was just gonna comment that this is a pathetic SJW argument 9 out of 10 times
Take a shot every time someone who disagrees is called a sexist, racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, islamaphobe etc in lieu of an actual argument.
Take a shot every time someone follows up a joke with a repeat of the same joke except in a more bitter and pissy "except it's on my side now!" format. :)
you kill a vampire with hamon obviously although punching his soul's leg with your soul or yeeting him into space works in a pinch
Art is fundamentally mimetic - it will always and can only tell us about the real world, no matter how it estranges us from that world whether through the device we have come to call fiction or any other device. Art reflects environment but equally, being presented with an image itself, the world changes to reflect the art. Its a conversation.
This is a very interesting topic and your premise seems to have a number of inherent flaws if read a certain way.
So first, may I inquire by which definition of "mimetic", "real" and "fiction" you operate?
I would be especially interested in your usage of "mimetic".
Is it strictly Aristotelian or maybe even just Platonic?
Or does it contain influences from Wordsworth, Vaihinger, Auerbach, Girard (or whoever I forgot to mention here)?
The same goes for "fiction" to an extent. Though I of course am well aware of the difficulties in this regard given the long history of a search for and debate over definitions in this regard.
Thus I'm just asking for a short statement if you fall within the Searle tradition of auctorial intent, go by the assumption of contextual or metacommunicative attributes like f.e Genette and Martinez postulate or smth different entirely like some spin on recipient categorization f.e.
@Jafar545 Thanks for your comment. It was a pretty random thought from me but glad you found it interesting. I've tried to write a reply below but I'm not sure it covers all of your questions but hopefully it will explain where i'm coming from.
These are just the ideas I've put together myself. I'm not in academia at the moment. I'm open to constructive criticism. I'm starting at Auerbach who effectively said something like: 'mimesis is the linguistic representation of historical, social and intellectual reality'. I'm expanding 'linguistic' to include all sign-systems.
Auerbach's work focuses on how the Western literary tradition reflects changing social relations. I view social relations as one aspect of a broader libidinal economy - the totality of all sign-systems. And I think this is the reality that art necessarily represents. Not just social relations but all expressions of desire.
Essentially this is the same as Derrida's notion of différance - the idea that signs do not have external referents. They're just understood in relation to each other. So an arrangement of signs (a work of art) only carries meaning insofar as it relates to a greater body of sign-systems - the historical, continuous flow of desire.
On fiction, I believe that fiction is just a narrative device - the works we describe as fiction are no more or less real in their content than any other work. Fiction is a method used to estrange the reader from the thing being depicted. I'm not sure if that puts me in Genette's camp?
What's your opinion? Do you think art is representational?
@@iofish__ This is well thought out response, so I'll address it in detail aswell.
I'm not quite certain if such a general sentiment can be inferred from Auerbach's work (on the matter) viewed as a whole. He himself had a position regarding the "general" and the "specific" (as best portrayed in the Epilegomena), which could very well be viewed as in stark opposition to such an all encapsulating definition.
Especially the idea of something as limited as a "linguistic representation" doesn't quite sit all too well with my understanding of his modus operandi.
I'm also rather confused by the inclusion of "all sign-systems" since Auerbach likely wouldn't have predicted f.e Barthes or Derrida and probably would have thought of the concept as something closer to Saussurean tradition (given the prominence of it during his times).
I honestly am not sure what to make of this, I can't exactly figure out the precise connections between the different parts there.
Bringing up Derrida only adds to my confusion here since to my knowledge (I must admit I'm at best moderately well read on poststructuralism and not so much on Derrida) as far as I remember a central element of différance is (as you said) relationality as a consequence of there merely being traces of traces instead of truly external (or transcendental) referents/signified elements. I fail to recognize this pattern in your model mostly because it has the desire component to it.
Your entire construct appears to me to be more Freudian in nature rather than strictly falling within the (admittedly vague) outlines of deconstruction.
One could even argue for it containing elements of broader hermeneutics like the assumption of a correct interpretation by basing an initial understanding on all art being "expressions of desire". The final notion from your initial post "It's a conversation" would also support such a reading of course.
Obviously it's up for debate if deconstruction qualifies as a form of hermeneutic especially if we are taking Derrida's statements in the infamous debate between him and Gadamer into account, yet if I were put on the spot and asked to pick one or the other, which I think would better fit your description, I'd go with hermeneutics.
This is a pretty difficult one. A lot here hinges on the usage of the word "narrative device", depending on your definition this could also put you into the Käte Hamburger tradition to an extent. On the other hand terms like "used" and "estranged" could be viewed as in line with Searle. To join Genette's camp I think you at least would need to consider (narrative) fiction being characterized by the author and the narrator differing from eachother, which is probably one of the more robust criteria that can largely be taken from "Fiction et Diction", if I'm not mistaken.
I'm sorry, but I fear I have to be a buzzkill here and ask the annoying question of what you exactly mean by "representational"?
Did I miss something here? did he accidentally review game of thrones in the middle and say that everyone who enjoyed it is sexist?? Why the fuck is everyone throwing "sjw" around as if Folding just took a strong political stance??? I understand some of his other video have a social/political element to the critiques, but this is NOT one of those videos whatsoever. Chill out, ya'll
nvm found his gamergate video, ya'll still mad about that one, huh?
Well so far i scrolled through 3 pages of comments to find yours and didnt see a single comment calling Folding a SJW, so im not sure where you are seeing them because i sure am not. Maybe Folding is deleting comments? I mean, he already disabled ratings, seems like something he would do.
Anyway, I dont know who he is nor i really care. I got linked to this video by a friend and i think Foldings argument is nonsensical. The entire point of fiction is to create worlds where INSIDE THAT WORLD the lore of the world is real and should be treated as such. He could have much easier went for another angle of begging the question of why the lore is that way, instead he chose to apply a nonsensical argument as an explanation. As a result, i wont be returning to his channel.
Good day.
It's hard to recall from 2 months ago, but it may very well have been almost entirely replies I was referring to. It also may have just been the tone/phrasing of certain arguments, with "SJW" being implied more than stated.
More on topic, dismissing any work as just being "fiction" is to be reductive; what we as a society and as artists create is a reflection of ourselves and our outlook on life, society, ect. He was encountering comments that dismissed his criticisms of texts using in-universe logic and refuted them as such in the video. He DID in fact do as you said, and questioned why the world was the way it was, in his original critiques where the comments he is responding to arose.
This is a response, to a response, to a response, and if it's your first video it's only natural it seems a little nonsensical.
Hello, Strazdas, I believe you may have been scrolling through three pages of comments on the wrong video, because I gave my mouse wheel a single half-spin and hit three comments *on the same page* with some variant of "Dan is an SJW trying to destroy freeze peach!"
BY GRABTHAR'S HAMMER what an insightful look at the way certain critiques of media get derailed. Well done.
TH-cam is recommending this video around..... even though I've watched it, and it as my like recorded on it. Welp, any day is a good day for a minisode
Surprising that this was made before the show of Goblin Slayer.
Lets just hope this Baby never reads the 1st Volume of Berserk, he might actualy Die.
@@Ixiah27 Berzerk's portrayal of violence against women would make for a really interesting and healthy comparison with Goblin Slayer.
But not before Berserk.
@@Ixiah27 Comparing Goblin Slayer to Berserk is an insult to Kentaro Miura, and demonstrates you have actually no understanding of why Berserk is great.
@@nathandrake5544
Tell that to this Wanna be Critic snowflake :/
"You cannot criticize the world because that's just the way the world is" Ugh, people use that nonsense about literal real life and I see it FAR more often there than when talking about fiction. It's just double speak for "Don't make things look worse, otherwise I'll have to try for once in my life"
But also you make a good point more generally; It's as if the point is to nullify criticism and discussion, which is itself a terrible thing.
Sounds like: The Card Says Moops.
You kill the vampire by convincing the author not to write him or her.
god thank you so much for explainign a thing that s been driving me crazy every time you try to engage with a vuideo game fandom and thank you for putting in into simple words so i can explain in to all these clowns
Looking at these comments I can see there are plenty of people who don't understand the argument even if they watch the video.
How do you kill a vampire?
THROW IT INTO THE SUN!
+Technodreamer Unless it's a Fire Vampire.
+Frank Mitchell Or a mockingbird vampire.
Frank Mitchell Then it'll be a fire vampire on the sun, and too far away to pose any reasonable threat.
+Technodreamer I'm pretty sure that, since Fire Vampires are a thing from the Cthulhu Mythos, throwing it onto the sun would probably be a terrible idea because there's probably at least a few terrible-somethings stuck and/or sleeping in there its presence could release/wake up...
+Technodreamer
How do you kill a vampire?
Vampires aren't real.
Nice take on the subject. Reminds me a lot of Anita Sarkeesian recently defending her criticism of Hitman Absolution. A "rebuttal" video went after her for complaining about being able to kill strippers, with the argument being you have to go out of your way to do that and you get penalized for it. Her response was essentially that the only reason you can do that at all is because the game developers made the conscious choice to put it in as a possibility in the first place.
+Morbos1000 I saw a pretty good argument about developer intent using farcry 2 as an example. The game isn't about killing the wildlife in the region, so they simply lay down and stop moving if you hit them accidentally or intentionally. It was a way for the developer to say "Don't do that, its not what you are here for." because they didn't react past sitting down.
+Morbos1000 With the HItman argument Anita says that the game encouraged and invited players to kill the strippers. Yet not only does the main path have you away from the room, the game punishes the player. How can Hitman be encouraging of the act when it discourages the player doing so?
+GForce4 You regain the points if you hide the body. It punishes sloppiness, not the killing itself.
+GForce4 The game puts the strippers in the dressing room and prevents your character from interacting with them in any way that doesn't involve violence. That in and of itself is an implicit encouragement to treat them violently. The inclusion of any option in a game is an implicit encouragement to take advantage of it.
+Sixy You do not regain the points. The point loss is *partially* mitigated by hiding the bodies, but every kill that is not explicitly demanded by the objective list reduces your score permanently, and cannot be recovered in any way. Not hiding the body is an additional penalty on top of killing them, hence you lose less points if you hide the body. In addition, the strippers are worth the same penalty as any male character - gender and occupation are not the issue of the game and it's rules, only the player themselves.
The strippers are not treated any differently to any other non-major character, and remain clothed, at a level required by law to appear in public, at all times. The protagonist and his allies do not insult them or disparage their choice of profession. The strippers do not possess any unique status in the game. They are just normal people.
You're correct that the game punishes sloppiness, and not killing, but not in the way you imply. As Agent 47, you are not paid to kill strippers, or bystanders of either gender, or homeless men, or whatever. As Agent 47, murder is not considered morally reprehensible. Interacting with the strippers is inherently sloppiness, just as it is for everyone else.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
So this is more about asking why the author(s) write this way, and *NOT* the in-universe reason, right?
So if someone asks why the android stood behind at the back of the bus in David Cage's Detroit, the answer isn't "it's how androids go from place to place" but "to make it feel oppressive based on real history as reference". Is this correct?
Yes, it's when someone asks a question about a work as a work that is being consumed by us, and they are answered with some internal justification treating the fictional world as sort-of-real. Your question about Detroit could be answered both ways because the question itself doesn't stipulate what perspective, diegetic or exegetic, that they're discussing the game from, but if they wanted an exegetic answer, pointing to something in the game about legislation that was passed would be a Thermian argument that doesn't actually answer the question they asked.
Complicated tangent, but the video made me think of a conversation I had with a friend. For the sake of not riling up enthusiastic fans, I will not mention specific character names, fictional universes, or properties, but we were talking about the difference between how one set of creators has a tendency to sexualize in objectifying kind of way, but another set, while prone to as much sexualization as the other, always gives the characters the illusion of agency, in so much as it's even possible for a fictional character to have agency.
That is not to say that the first set never has a character who's sexually liberated, but the presentation, even of sex scenes between a female character and a male acquaintance in her own book, is such that you get the impression the creators expect you to cheer on the guy, not the girl, for their sexual success. At the risk of giving away the work in question, there was a long sequence of the character dressing from underwear up that never includes expression or often even head.
So there's definitely a presentation difference, even when, diegetically, the characters are choosing sexual promiscuity, but, and here's where I started to struggle, can a character's agency even be weighed in these cases? Would Brutal Orc Rape: The Series, to use your hyperbolic stand-in, be redeemed if that were the 'victim's' kink? Can presentation, a sense that a character is in on it, remove the problematic nature of a work, or does it just earn it a spot as 'less problematic' than the series that don't.
Man the amount of people responding to this that haven't understood it is amazing.
I think the issue is how many people *do* understand it and realize it's just a garbage argument.
Thermians don't even work how he describes them to us. Speaking of not understanding something.
Pray tell me, what exactly is the Point of this "Argument" ?
That Authors write the Story ?
Great, now what ?
@@spacejunk2186 Not the point at all.
@@jarrod752 Retard.
The real, ultimate Thermian Argument:
"Thermians are not real."
Thermians can't hurt you.