You know what my favorite thing about the Pokemon TCG is? The attack names:
And my all-time favorite:
Pokemon Heritage Post
WAIT I HAVE SOMETHING TO SHOW
I collect fake pokemon cards, badly translated to Spanish… I have this excadrill card with the attack “straight slash”. Well. That’s the original name anyways.
always struck when the uk government says “there is no place for knife crime in our society” because then I start trying to think of a society fully oriented around knife crime
so you’ve got your twelve least favorite coworkers who you would dearly like to see die. fast forward three thousand years of extradimensional prison and you’re in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the only people you know are still your twelve least favorite coworkers. half of them are career academics.
and only one of you can be the universe’s next top model.
I feel like we need a refresher on Watsonian vs Doylist perspectives in media analysis. When you have a question about a piece of media - about a potential plot hole or error, about a dubious costuming decision, about a character suddenly acting out of character -
A Watsonian answer is one that positions itself within the fictional world.
A Doylist answer is one that positions itself within the real world.
Meaning: if Watson says something that isn’t true, one explanation is that Watson made a mistake. Another explanation is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a mistake.
Watsonian explanations are implicitly charitable. You are implicitly buying into the notion that there is a good in-world reason for what you’re seeing on screen or on the page. (“The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie all the time because they’re from a desert culture!”)
Doylist explanations are pragmatic. You are acknowledging that the fiction is shaped by real-world forces, like the creators’ personal taste, their biases, the pressures they might be under from managers or editors, or the limits of their expertise. (“The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie because somebody thought they’d sell more units that way.”)
Watsonian explanations tend to be imaginative but naive. Seeking a Watsonian explanation for a problem within a narrative is inherently pleasure-seeking: you don’t want your suspension of disbelief to be broken, and you’re willing to put in the leg work to prevent it. Looking for a Watsonian answer can make for a fun game! But it can quickly stray into making excuses for lazy or biased storytelling, or cynical and greedy executives.
Doylist explanations are very often accurate, but they’re not much fun. They should supersede efforts to provide a Watsonian explanation where actual harm is being done: “This character is being depicted in a racist way because the creators have a racist bias.’” Or: “The lore changed because management fired all of the writers from last season because they didn’t want to pay then residuals.”
Doylism also runs the risk of becoming trite, when applied to lower stakes discrepancies. Yes, it’s possible that this character acted strangely in this episode because this episode had a different writer, but that isn’t interesting, and it terminates conversation.
I think a lot of conversations about media would go a lot more smoothly, and everyone would have a lot more fun, if people were just clearer about whether they are looking to engage in Watsonian or Doylist analysis. How many arguments could be prevented by just saying, “No, Doylist you’re probably right, but it’s more fun to imagine there’s a Watsonian reason for this, so that’s what I’m doing.” Or, “From a Watsonian POV that explanation makes sense, but I’m going with the Doylist view here because the creator’s intentions leave a bad taste in my mouth that I can’t ignore.”
Idk, just keep those terms in your pocket? And if you start to get mad at somebody for their analysis, take a second to see if what they’re saying makes more sense from the other side of the Watsonian/Doylist divide.
I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that’s true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.
J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He’s also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that’s better than presents you open–failing to see that there’s a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.
You’ve got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with “trilogies” that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.
You’ve got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.
On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.
Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they’re unwilling to form their own expectations of what’s coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what’s in front of them! The media they’ve been consuming has trained them well.
bring. back. filler. episodes.
(my 11yo nephew asked me the other day if i thought “filler episodes” of the clones wars were CANON, and i was like “WHAT?” and apparently there are people on youtube saying that, like, christmas episodes and that sort of thing are NOT REAL???, because they don’t serve the story, and: that’s where we are. viewers can no longer accept CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT or general wackiness as part of the damn story.)
I approve of powerscaling discourse only in utterly senseless contexts. I don’t give a shit about which shōnen protagonists could beat up which other shōnen protagonists, but I will 100% read your five thousand word essay exploring the subtle nuances of establishing a tiered ranking of the Smurfs.
“Could Batman beat Captain America” trite, tedious, bullshit. “Could Deadpool beat Roger Rabbit” now you have my attention.
