universe is missing the point of fiction media!" then they’ll turn around and mock visionary shows like NCIS for scenes in which the detectives enhance the resolution of an image. Oh, computers can’t just do that? Who cares! Lock in! The point is not that the story makes internal sense, it’s what the story communicates!

  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    I think you might be writing a check with your mouth that your proverbial behind may not cash. If a piece of media stops being effective because it is reliant on self-consistency, and failure to be consistent undermines its effectiveness as a piece of art, then I think you’d actually find that any art that isn’t explicitly absurdist or minimalist would cease to be effective. Any attempt to portray reality is necessarily inconsistent because it will either fail to accurately portray reality, or it will accurately portray reality which is itself inconsistent and absurd. This is one of the themes of Synecdoche New York, which I think makes the rest of my argument for me.

    Anyway, I recommend you read out the rest of that essay when you have time and patience, it’s really good.

    • MizuTama [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek and don’t personally buy the argument fully myself and I’m partially just killing time between meetings and got tired of arguing on reddit-logo. The argument I was proposing wouldn’t be though that all media is reliant on that consistency (and I agree with your points about attempts at portrayal) but rather the argument is the particular thematics and aesthetics of the work being argued about at that moment. I was using a piece of media in a particular sense as opposed to the general. It is actually why my edit mentions the rationalists and HPMOR as due to how rationalists’ belief functions (from my admittedly hazy recollection) not attempting nigh-seamless consistency would undercut some of the rationalist messaging particularly about storytelling norms.

      Obviously, this check fails against broad-spectrum storytelling if someone has seen the word Aesop before. I am also assuming someone who is being a deckhead and isn’t just using it as a veil to prevent a change they don’t personally like (which then I ask you why are you arguing with them) and isn’t just yanking your chain to fuck with you, (I know, I’m really shifting goalposts here eliminating 90% of them) I presume they would try to either narrow their deck-headedness into a slimmer category to attempt to shore up their argument, especially since much of the consumerist identity culture mentioned in the Warhammer essay means they likely are not invested in whether their argument functions for art as a whole and only needs some form of it to hold for the things they like and are invested in.

      If you want my actual personal thoughts on this, the entire ideology can basically just be undermined with this section of your comment:

      or it will accurately portray reality which is itself inconsistent and absurd I used to have friends who would criticize media in such a fashion and I managed to convert one of them by obnoxiously noting such criticisms and then pointing them out every time I heard a story from reality that vaguely followed the same principles. I find the diegetic portion of fiction to be indispensable for many works and my enjoyment, but in a similar manner to like idk Game Theory (the YT), I find it to be insanely difficult to actually break those elements as if you genuinely are treating it as if it was a world (or anything vaguely approaching it) a lot of details can be handwaved and retconned in reasonable manners assuming the issue was anything short of the omniscient narrator contradicting itself (assuming that the diegetic element also is explicitly not supposed to be meta in nature either in the storytelling manner or in an internal metaphysical form, and about a dozen other reasons that I’ll probably think of later).