Homework for Serious Readers

Pale offers a series of exercises for the reader, which are too tempting to resist taking a crack at. Spoilers (of a sort) follow, naturally, for both Pale and the related Pact. At the time of writing, I’ve read further in Pale than this but not completed it. Quoted exercises in emphasis as there’s a lot of them.

A review of the first three arcs of A. Wales’ Thresholder

So Worth the Candle was incredible and This Used To Be About Dungeons achieved its goals and then some – what next? Thresholder is arguably the most Alexander Wales-iest work yet, combining portal fantasy-progression fantasy-battle royale with two dozen minor “bad anime tropes” and hammering something brilliant out of them. Now, historically I tend to let things finish before reviewing, but I want to try something different and record my thoughts now, then see if they change later. Spoilers below the cut.

A Burial for the Worst Era of Posting?

Today in “posts on newer, fresher websites that annoyed me, so I am posting about it on my old-fashioned blog”: this one. Good grief, did I miss a memo for Pretend It’s 2015 Day or something? I’m not going to go into the details of what’s blatantly untrue and what’s merely a lack of understanding in this take; suffice to say that as with other cases it seems like an expression more of someone’s personal psychology. Nevertheless, unavoidable spoilers for the adaptation of Sousou no Frieren follow when discussing the one part that interested me:

Peak woke must really be over if this could take me by surprise before I heard reams of discourse about it.

It is very tempting to just say “good.” But wait, what is “peak woke”? If we’re to understand that the general discourse sphere not melting down over a cartoon is bad because everyone has moved rightward politically since 2015, I think that’s not well-supported by any actual evidence, though I understand if it’s the driving fear behind such a strong reaction. Maybe it’s meant more narrowly or even positively, though: thankfully, we no longer consider arguing about TV shows to be peak political engagement?

Blockheadedness

Today I saw this post and I think it’s time I put together a cogent summary of what I find so incredibly annoying about this kind of analysis.

Firstly, the things we won’t dwell on long. The presumptiveness of saying “any analysis of minecraft needs to reckon with” these half-baked Poe’s-law-sounding ideas. Bearing in mind, of course, that a certain kind of internet personality will tell you alongside such remarks that everyone needs to “think critically” about their media, and you can imagine that at least some people expect every comment about liking or disliking the latest update to cave vine generation to be prefaced with a kind of “this post was typed on stolen land 😔” remark about how Bad the game is.

And the flagrant reaching, of course. Why are golems so problematic? Is it because the original golem of Prague was a jewish myth, and, uh, since that’s associated, it’s kind of like antisemitism if you squint very hard and completely forget what words mean? That’s frankly a disgusting misuse of genuine oppression to try and score points in some imaginary internet argument over who is playing Minecraft wrong. Not to mention, the original myth may have been related, but ‘golem’ has been used in games to mean a magically-animated rock or metal creature for a long time. Was it originally Bad to use the word that way? I don’t much care.

No, the real issue here is what discoursedrome gets started towards: this is one kind of optimal playstyle in a game where you the player set the goals (excepting possibly the dragon which is at least loosely decorated with the paraphernalia of a Win Condition but is “optimally” (in the sense of most quickly) reached with very little in the way of ‘yikes’ behaviour unless you’re here to speak for the poor innocent hell monsters). It is therefore not possible for Minecraft to not be a Problematic Game! The bad-faith internet Critical Analyzer could always have selected a “goal” and a strategy for pursuing it that would be Bad Optics! It is therefore a meaningless comment to make. This is the real problem: the dishonesty about what is and isn’t an optimal strategy.

Let’s pick a counterexample… Portal. In Portal, you can pretty clearly argue that the optimal strategy is to kill the robot lady and that it’s a deliberate design choice, on account of 1) it is the only way to beat the game, which you know is beaten because the game stops after that point and does not continue, and 2) see 1. If you want to argue that that’s problematic, fine, I don’t respect you as a person for it but whatever floats your boat. But to do the same for Minecraft, you have to first pick a goal, a means of achieving that goal, and then baldfacedly claim that that is the goal and the optimal strategy and therefore worthy of special consideration. And then, on top of what is already a wobbly case, you have to build the case that your interpretation of this strategy as metaphor with problematic implications is correct! I can barely stand such “if I let my pareidolia run wild I can see a bad thing” analysis in the first place, and now you want to put it on top of a tower of other shaky assertions?

There are some outs, but they aren’t very good. You can point to the fact that other people build mob-grinders and villager-pens and so forth, but this is a rather weak argument. “People use this sandbox in ways I don’t like, therefore sand is evil”? Sentiment worthy of Anakin, I suppose.

Alternatively, you can argue that there’s instrumental convergence, perhaps, say that while Minecraft allows many divergent terminal values, a lot of them would start with accumulating resources for building materials, so that strategies for accumulating resources are worthy of attention; and then you could argue that automation is inherently powerful as a means to force-multiply without needing to recruit other players to your world, and therefore strategies for automation are particularly of note. This seems sound, but something’s deeply wrong with this line of reasoning: it applies to the real world! You’ve not merely developed a line of thinking as to why Minecraft’s problematic strategies are worthy of note, you’ve also drawn to attention that the very foundation of your case – that these strategies are bad because they reproduce (in some metaphor, see above) real-world dynamics – is empty of actual substance. If you disallow the reasoning about instrumental values, you might imagine that Minecraft was subconsciously derived from problematic elements in the surrounding culture (oh how I hate this ‘subconscious’ nonsense, ohhhh), and that players then reproduce these elements for the same reasons. But, that can’t be the case if you also need to argue that the systems are the inexorable result of certain kinds of optimisation applied to any sort of verisimilar world. At that point, the logic unravels. They’re forced back to the tower:

“But actually it’s that very logic, ie trying to optimise a world, especially one devoid of other agents on the level of the player, towards personal goals, which is settler-colonialist and problematic.”

Well, why even bother talking to such a person? But suppose you have to, what then? I think you have to start asking how would we should fix it, and if the answer is that the sandbox genre is unfixable from the get-go, how many other genres could we, by applying similar logic, demand the non-existence (or at least universal prefacing condemnation) of? And if we’re forced into being miserable haters by our logic, couldn’t we just… choose a less clearly terrible logic? Perhaps then we go back to the tower’s tower, the final redoubt:

“I just enjoy talking about these things, having a discussion, examining critically, […]”

Well, so do I 🙂

Exit Strategy

In an interview, qntm asks for writing on a way out of cyberpunk:

I would like to see more written about the possible exits from cyberpunk. Dystopias are fun and easy to write. Power accretes upwards to the largest, most already-powerful entities; as computers get smaller and more powerful, the exploitative things we can do at immense scale multiply—these were great observations, and cyberpunk was incredibly prescient. We’re living in it now. But these books don’t give us tools for dismantling it again. “Yes,” readers thought at the time. “That scenario sure would be terrible.” Well, it is terrible! Now what? The book just ended, but we’re all still here!

First of all, yeah, same buddy. Second, and briefly, alright, let’s acknowledge that we didn’t write our way into this mess of a society and it seems unlikely we’ll write our way out. Which just leaves, you know, the actual question: can you write a way out of cyberpunk?

The problem I foresee is that cyberpunk is a downhill dystopia. That is, it doesn’t require anyone to be evil for the sake of evil, to seize power in a dramatic coup, etc. It’s simply hyper-corporatism, the logical end state of existing social trends; each person in such a world follows their incentives. Now, characters going against incentives is good, from the perspective of literary satisfaction! It can show their virtue or their depravity, it can indicate that their character is deeper than mere rational self-interest, it can just add some spice and texture to the story. But the problem is that getting a character out of cyberpunk is easy. You use this mystical device known as “a car.” You can even walk if you want! There’s usually a sewer level.

But getting a whole world out of cyberpunk would require everyone to act outside their self-interest, or at least a huge number of people. You need something that makes mass action plausible, otherwise it’s too nakedly daydreaming about how nice it would be if everyone went along with your pet political project. But what? Let’s look at some ideas about exits from dystopia – exits to better places, I mean, Peter Watts writes a plausible exit from cyberpunk by finding ways to say “and then it got worse,” which is impressive in its own right but we want to avoid that.

The End of the World – here including the Rapture, the Glorious People’s Revolution, and the Supertech Singularity. A classic example might be Akira, or Mistborn. Pretty much the easiest way out of any dystopia; everything that happened up to this point in the story is crossed out and burned, and the following world is unrecognizable. This needn’t be unsatisfying, if it feels like the action of the characters rather than the will of the author. However, for that to be the case, it needs to happen at the end of the story and the rest of the story needs to be interesting enough to hold it. Ultimately, though, it’s not a focus of the story but merely a conclusion; it’s an answer to the question cyberpunk asks, but not a very good one.

The Fix-It Scooter – Not to be confused with the Fix-It-Button, which would be a form of the above. An example would be Monsters, Inc. The conditions of the physical universe just so happen to work out that some new discovery or invention makes being nice better than being awful, so now the incentive gradient tilts the other way and everything can get better. The issue here is plausibility, but it’s a cynic’s issue – and anyway, it would certainly be pretty funny if after all the moralist language about fixing the world by all spontaneously adopting better Ways of Living, it were just fixed by some unpresumtuous but indispensible piece of technology, like how modern agriculture and birth control quietly dragged Malthusian handwringing out of common discourse, leaving such a void that people now think it was an obvious outcome all along.

The Off-Screen Option – here including both We’ll Work On It and We’ll Hope For It. Examples include TTGL and the previously-mentioned-here The Golden Enclaves. Building is difficult and complicated, so let’s just say in the epilogue that they’re doing that. This can still be quite nuanced! But fundamentally it’s a tell-don’t-show nuance. The character reports that it sure is a lot of work building utopia. Well it sure is! Tell me more…? Ah. The problem.

The Better World Next Door – The Longest Journey, for example, or, oh, there are some others. The tricky part here might seem like getting it to be more than just an alternative to the aforementioned “just leave bro” solution, which only helps the protagonist. Certainly most examples take that approach. But fundamentally, if you could write that other world, you wouldn’t need it, right? You could just apply it to the primary.

The Retvrnpost – incorporating Steampunk and Atompunk and all those other the-future-as-it-ought-to-have-been’s. The basic idea seems simple: if things have gotten bad, that means we know at least one way things could be better. The problem is likewise obvious: clearly we tried that already, and clearly we are here now, so trying a second time would seem to invite the same outcome. Retvrnposter answers to cyberpunk often overlap with others, above – for example, an apocalyptic scenario at the start of the story leading into a depopulated pastoralism.

One final example that I really enjoy – the Mortal Engines quartet features a different flavour of exit in each book! End of the World (or, at least, of the city) in the first; Just Leave/Better World Next Door in the second; and the Fix-It Scooter (with End of the World elements) in books three and four (which only really count as one). You’ve gotta admire that! And I want to be clear – those are great books! Using the above approaches is not bad – they merely raise further questions, which can be to the benefit of the story.

Overall, there is a vague shape I would suggest for an attempt to write an exit for cyberpunk. Firstly, it should be controversial and specific. This is to avoid the temptation to off-screen something vaguely nice that everyone would be behind. Your version of post-cyberpunk has to be your vision first, and that’s going to mean losing some people. That’s fine; there are plenty where they came from. Second, it needs to be a history, at least in part, rather than a parable. The Scouring of the Shire is there for a reason, although it’s not quite an exit from cyberpunk (and arguably falls into the Retvrnposting category, though. Arguable). You need to make this a world story, even if you’ll only ever see it from a limited view, and this helps to avoid the temptation to start crossing everything out with end-of-the-world scenarios.

But lastly, it’s worth remembering that any actual escape from cyberpunk will surely be narratively unsatisfying. Therefore, don’t let reality constrain too tightly. It does so enough by itself.

Omelas Is Not About Utilitarianism, or, Reviews: The Golden Enclaves; The Golden City of the Scorching Sun

Today’s theme is Gold. Spoilers for all of the works in the title, naturally.

When I thought Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” was a diatribe against utilitarianism, I hated it. And it’s a very easy thing to think! All the emotional weight of the story is in the second half, where the town of Omelas is said to make a grisly – and diegetically completely mechanism-less – choice to torment one innocent to achieve the happiness of all:

Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

Yikes. Bad look utilitarians. Rethink this.

But, uh. Are we supposed to want to be one of the ones who does not understand why this is necessary, so long as we manage to be one of those that walk away at the end? I’m not sure. After all, the story takes the time to tell us. The thesis of the work is stated plainly:

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas?

And:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

The rhetoric here is clear. Can you believe in happiness, can you feel an emotional weight to a simple and beautiful scene? No, you can’t, it asserts via rhetorical question. But can you not much more easily believe in magic, so long as that magic makes a dreadful trade-off…? Ah, now we’re talking. Not even any need to specify how it works! Something like the Just World Fallacy does all the work, quietly revising our thoughts to make the “balanced” world seem more plausible. So much more plausible that the very fact that we’re supposed to be holding this in our mind as one of two hypotheticals gets lost, and very many people instead believe that the more plausible trolley problem is the entire point. But we must be clear: the only mechanism requiring there to be a forsaken child in Omelas is our own belief in the narrative.

But the idea is too compelling. So we come to the review section, though really it’s more pulling out two recent examples. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Norvik, third book in the Scholomance series, and Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, by Tsukushi & adapted by Kinema Citrus. They both take the second hypothetical of Omelas and apply their settings’ magic to make it work. Cities built, quite entirely literally, on the suffering of one. Some would say this was completely unnecesaary for the Scholomance series, which had already spelled out that capitalism colonialism magical society relies on the suffering of those outside the imperial core enclaves to sustain itself. But set that aside.

You immediately start running into problems, if we take it as given that Omelas is about utilitarianism and so these stories must be too. Certainly the stories themselves seem to think so – TGE mentions the trolley problem by name at one point, giving me a brief “wait, did she call up Muir for advice? It would explain some other stuff…” moment. TGotSS has its Wazukyan making similar lever-pulling decisions. But, to pick on TGE in particular: if it’s so terrible to build Omelas, why is the seer’s choice to put the weight of the shining future on El’s suffering shoulders any better? I think it tries to grapple with this, but ultimately can’t find an answer. There are no differences of kind among lever-pullers, only differences of degree. If you accept that differences of degree matter, and you should, then you’re already a utilitarian at heart.

But here’s the thing: The Golden Enclaves leans pretty hard into my own interpretation of Omelas, too! It repeats many times that the enclaves are in some sense fictional. Not part of reality. Sustained in large part by belief. You might even take the wizards to be a metaphor for writers – LeGuin’s treasonous artists, building on the easy and endlessly available emotional fuel of suffering. It’s a very elegant story in that reading.

Made in Abyss takes things the other way. We’re told to contrast Wazukyan with Bondrewd, and the logic there is clear too: how much better the monster sacrificing one for the many, than the one sacrificing many only for himself. A cruel and dismal choice, that makes you long for a third way, but the Abyss only offers one way: down, through the ruin and destruction of both. That’s the kind of story it is.

That brings us to the obvious question, then: what of the titular ones who walk away? How do they fit in? Certainly LeGuin’s story considers them important. In most stories that offer trolley problems, there will be some third option available, usually revealed at the last minute. But here. Well, look:

Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

The use of the “credible” is interesting. “Incredible” means, usually, just “very good.” English is like that. But literally, it means not credible, not believable, and using “credible” in the opposite sense immediately prior reinforces this. What are we to make of the narrator telling us this is something completely not believable, when it is in fact one of the few things everyone remembers, and in fact finds so believable that they often flatter themselves that they’d be among that select number? Is it merely another part of the second hypothetical’s illusion? Is it a commentary on stories again, telling us that a believable story needs not merely suffering, but hope, if not clearly of what? Is it just a cooler way to end than a smug “yeah, see, that’s way more believable for you, isn’t it?” I’m not sure.

Deep Reading

Bret Devereaux writes another excellent piece in his series examining the historical… reasonability? of Tolkien, this time discussing Amazon’s The Rings of Power which I haven’t watched but I mean. Apparently isn’t even bad enough to justify hate-watching? Everything I hear just sounds sorta okay. Devereaux makes the case that Cool Scene Syndrome is at fault, and I can believe it.

However, such criticism is, I think fair to say, at least adjacent to being “uncool.” It’s far from just a series of historical and worldbuilding-nerdogical nitpicks, but I can see a reader saying so. It feels like there is a default response to this kind of criticism: that it’s “doing the CinemaSins thing,” fisking a work. Real criticism would consist in something else, in some great Insight into the True Soul of a piece.

As you can tell from the Sarcasm Capitals, I don’t think much of this. Although I do enjoy deeper discussion more than shallow nitpicking, I don’t think one can call Devereaux’s criticism shallow! It goes into depth on many points where the internal logic of the story diverges from the consistent internal logic of a secondary world, and therefore loses the audience’s secondary belief (to borrow Tolkien’s terminology.

As tsarina-anadyomene points out in their long post on things that are annoying (“leftism is correct, it’s leftists I can’t stand,” eh?):

Art Criticism as Analysis of Political Implication. This is another aspect of normative narrowing. There is skepticism about the (procedural or robust) reality of the moral that is minimized by the faith in the reality or pertinence of the political. Similarly, there is skepticism about the (procedural or robust) reality of the objects of aesthetic judgment, which includes judgment of artistic quality, beauty, ugliness, the sublime, as well as a plethora of thicker aesthetic predicates that philosophers and art theorists have gone to task on. As such, a sort of relativism goes into place that does not treat art discussion as such as worth having, because there is no space of reasons to enter into; the aesthetic is sub-rational and non-assertoric. In order to fill in that gap that art discussion fills in our social life, we move to “deep readings” of the “text” that are more or less paraphrases of the work into its political content. The quality of some piece of media, then, becomes entirely determined by the correctness of the political content.

Emphasis added. If I understand this complicated paragraph correctly, they share my concern that (for all that I dislike Postmodernism), left-wing media “takes” have merely created a new grand narrative through which to approach all art. Though in their defense, Marxism has always been a grand narrative, so maybe it’s a good thing.

The ‘good’ form of media critique – that is, rephrasing the plot of a work with politically-pertinent terminology – inspires, I think, a ‘good’ form of media creation. The role is simply inverted – you want trade unions, so you include trade unions and call them “guilds,” for example. Then people can “discover” your “real story” by reversing the substitution, post it as a 1:40:27 video, and lo! You are a Good Writer.

This doesn’t even meet the level of allegory regarding which Tolkien’s opinions are already known. Of course.

But that aside, I don’t want to just attack video essayist media analysis. As I said, I usually enjoy that kind of analysis! Rather, I want to defend nerdy detail-combing as its own form of discussion of a work. Devereaux goes to some lengths on this:

One may easily contrast a story set in a world unbounded by rules of logical consequences, like a dream. Anything can happen in a dream, unrelated to what came before or after. Dreams can break their own rules and they can exist in unreal or surreal spaces. And they also, famously, make for extremely boring stories. Nothing is quite so tedious as having someone narrate a dream to you, because nothing in the dream actually matters for anything that comes before or after. Of course nothing in a fictional story necessarily matters in the real world, but nothing in a dream actually matters even in the dream world. Thus the consistency of the rules and the setting are essential for allowing the audience to engage their emotions with the characters and story because they make the events in the story matter by making them feel less arbitrary.

In some ways this seems circular – events not being arbitrary is important because it makes events feel less arbitrary. But that’s to be expected: we are stepping into a different “space of reasons” and do not need to justify the assumptions of that space within it. Outside it, as usual, subjectivity may be straightforwardly implied, inferred, and generally given as the background to any aesthetic discourse (cf making a change-of-basis operation: you define your old basis vectors in terms of the new, but what would you gain by elaborating your new î and ĵ in their own terms?).

Why then does most discussion of the detail-extrapolating framework center around the idea that it’s “annoying nitpicking”? Certainly I think there is a lot of nitpicking, which makes it look like the whole approach has nothing to offer but negativity. But there is also a lot of positive, wow-look-at-that detail-extrapolation out there! What I think is lacking, then, is a broad language of expression for this positive worldbuilding discussion. Too often the only thing to say is that “the worldbuilding is good.” It sounds, to someone not already occupying the framework themselves, uninteresting, lacking in the apparenty internal complexity of (eg) the “political themes” framework.

Now I’m just not sure how to go about constructing such a language.

Sympathy with the Machine

AI Art! Everyone’s mad about it, one way or another. I really like Alexander Wales’ essay on the topic, I think it really explores some of the more interesting and serious issues this raises about-

oh for pity’s sake.

okay! The current discussion around AI image generation has coalesced entirely around the stupid semantic issue of what constitutes “theft” and whether the AI is doing it. That was predictable. Anyway, the consensus model of how AI creates images, as understood by artists, is that it cuts pieces of various images together, like a collage, not really “creating” anything. This is factually incorrect, but also… I think there’s a bigger separation here, and it’s why some people – even some technically-literate people who understand how modern neural network code operates – really feel an objection to the practice, and others don’t.

So. Creativity. What is it? Where does it come from? Who is responsible for it and can they be stopped? Someone needs to answer these questions. I’m not that person! I can only explain it like so: I think people have surprisingly different subjective experiences of creating things. For me, it feels like I only really have Memory and Connection-Finding. I can remember, and recombine into new words, a lot of stuff, maybe drawing new connections between existing ideas. But there’s no subjective experience of “divine spark” inspiration from outer space. Is it surprising, then, that I find myself defending the “creativity” of AI? When people say that such pattern-matching and recombination is “soulless,” am I not under attack too?

But I do not wish to take the hardline view the other way. Rather, I believe other people when they say they feel something different when they create, some “extra” secret ingredient that takes it from a task a machine could do to something transcendent. I wouldn’t claim to be able to identify which works of art were made by people with this subjective experience and I doubt that’s possible even in theory, but I don’t claim that the experience itself isn’t real. If you do have such an experience when creating, it would certainly seem like there’s something to art that no amount of looking at existing art and applying linalg would replicate.

The primary driver of the Discourse around AI art is of course material concern – people worried that their jobs are in danger and trying to make a moral case for their livelihoods in the court of public opinion. Understandable and good, though it would be indescribably better if it weren’t necessary. However, I think there is a secondary divide that the AI is revealing between people with very different subjective experiences of creativity.

What Does Art Mean?

In her video “Is Art Meaningless?”, Abigail Thorn discusses the various things that a piece of art might mean. As with most PhilosophyTube videos, it doesn’t quite come to a conclusion per se, but does leave off on the suggestion that interpretation of art is a matter of utility. This raises a question that I hope she might cover in a future video: utility to whom? I think there are three possible answers, all bad:

• Utility to the artist: this goes back to the question of the significance of authorial intent, which is in theory distinct from the value to the artist but functionally very similar. You’re free to invoke as much of it as you like, of course, but most serious critics would agree you don’t have to; that interpretations that discard or contradict authorial intent are Valid (whatever that means).
• Utility to the audience: this goes back to the point raised throughout the video, referring to Pale Fire (or to The Beginner’s Guide, since this is a Gamer Blog): what if the audience gets the most utility out of interpretations that are just… obviously wrong?
• Utility to society: well, this defers the question. There are numerous ways to measure utility to society! One approach would be economic – “everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it” – which is also covered in the video. The other would be to say that there is cultural value beyond that, but this becomes perilous. There are some comparisons one can make regarding those who would try to determine what “cultural value to society” art has!

So, if all theories of the meaning of art are wrong, what’s right? Well, the question seems unanswerable, but highly soluble. The kind of question you’d lose half of if you dipped it in tea. One approach is to ask “why do we think art has meaning?” This leads into a discussion of the human tendency to see agency everywhere. Art is then “agentic” in the mind even when the real agent (the artist) is absent; I recall an argument that this was the point of The Beginner’s Guide. But that’s a bit meta even for me. Nevertheless, this approach puts the question roughly in the same category as “what is the meaning of a sunrise” or “what is the meaning of life” – questions that can’t be answered because they arise from the human tendency to see things in terms of other human-like beings acting in the world even when there’s no such being. Of course, there is a creative intent behind art (…usually?), so in some senses this passes back to authorial intent; this merely helps to address why we continue to look for “agency” even after we disregard the actual agent (or so we claim).

Another approach would be to say that asking “what’s this piece about” is a question that needs to be substituted. What are you really asking? The reason for the confusion is that the “meaning” node on a blegg graph combines objective and subjective exterior nodes, like:

• What’s a brief summary of the plot, or the inciting elements thereof, eg what would the blurb be if it were a book?
• What tropes or database elements does it contain? What would the ingredients list be if it were a food, with special note to common “allergens”?
• How does it make you personally feel?
• What are some of the things it commonly makes people feel? What has been said about it by critics and by the wider audience?
• What were the real creator’s ideas and goals in creating it?
• What’s the creator’s life story? What parts of that seem relevant to you? What parts of that have been claimed to be relevant by others?
• What techniques of creation were applied? Do you think they were used well?
• What history has the piece had during and after creation?

And likely others that I’ve missed, too (though “what are the themes of the work” is deliberately absent, as it just passes the buck to the question of what a theme is and how you determine them, which itself requires dissolving). In this case, the question goes in the category with “what is the meaning of ‘[any contentious word here]'” – questions that can be answered in various ways depending on what sub-questions are relevant, either locally or in broader political scope.

The power of this approach really shines when you turn it on questions that shouldn’t, in some sense, be answerable. Alright, fine, I’ll bring up the meme: what is Goncharov (1973) about? In such a broken-down framework, we can say that while some parts of the question are truly unanswerable (eg what were the creator’s ideas and goals – well, there isn’t one, so there aren’t any), other parts do have a loosely-agreed-upon answer. You’d be “wrong” to say it’s a story about a zombie apocalypse – that’s not an element of its plot; even if that plot is in some senses fictitious, it’s not (any longer) much more fictitious than the plot of, say, Jaws. Or you could ask, what are the lyrics to Penkin’s “Old Stories” about? We’re told they’re invented, not even in the same conlang as other songs from the same soundtrack. They sound linguistic, which is a testament to the skill of the creator, and that’s the kind of question we can answer. But in the inverse of Goncharov, we can’t really say what the plot is or what elements it contains. It likely has none!

The lesson is the same old good one: if you find yourself in arguments over what something was “about,” there are a lot of things you might actually be disagreeing over. Remove the word, and try to find those things instead.

Is K-On fascist?

(Note: this is somewhat tongue in cheek – for those not familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, the answer is:

don’t be stupid, of course not,

nevertheless, this post is as dumb as it is inflammatory. Though interestingly, reading it through, Betteridge’s Law seems to actually not hold at all)

A year ago, I’d have had to have a whole section justifying the question as being only 99% pointless. But the “you can tell a nazi by their Yui avi” meme became very popular this last year – while there have always been both “wouldn’t it be funny if the cute anime girl was a dictator” memes and “I can tell this person is Bad from their anime girl avatar” memes, and we could discuss both of those some other time, nevertheless the focus on this one show as the locus of far-right anime watchers seems more recent. So, why? Let’s take a look at some arguments:

The most likely argument: That’s just a meme
Sure it is. We all know that jokes never mean anything, after all. Look, if it helps, remember that this post is just a meme. Don’t take it too seriously.

The moderately good argument: K-On is class-collaborationist
To make a long and boring story short, class-collaborationism is when you argue that the rich and poor of a country have more in common with each other by virtue of being fellow countrymen than they do with those of similar economic class in other countries. K-On does sort of do this – Mugi and Ritsu share a club together and this makes them closer than their economic class makes them distant. But this requires viewing the club as a metaphor for the state in way that just. Isn’t supported? Furthermore, if you’re reaching this far, I don’t see how you could refute the claim that it does have Mugi steal that strawberry. The rich get richer at the expense of the rest! Class warfare!

It’s also worth noting that this is part of fascism, but it’s also part of all other nationalist ideologies. In fact it’s a very common sentiment! Contrary to what some on the left would like to be true, it is not overly-nuanced to distinguish fascism from liberalism.

I should note that I’ve never actually seen anyone make this argument, probably because doing so requires watching the show and the kind of person who argues this unironically (or “ironically”) hasn’t done that. I’m making it here because it’s the strongest I can think of.

A funny argument: Fascism is when you have a cult of action, and Yui joins the LMC just to Do Something, and those are the same basically.
Yeah yeah, okay. Tell me more about that Yoda and his “Do or Do Not, there is no Try.” Little green fascist scum.

The rhetorical-minefield argument: K-On has poor minority representation
What, an entirely-lesbian cast not good enough or something yeah no. Minefield, remember. So, I think there is validity to this in some senses, but it’s really tough for me to say what an anime in this setting with good representation should look like! Is it colourist? The darkest skin tone seems to be a background character, who is still paler than tanned Azusa. Is counting Mugi as an immigrant meaningful, or a naked deflection? I really don’t know! It’s worth noting that when they visit London in the movie, we see a wider range of people, but I’m not sure this really counts – the idea of representation is not necessarily to merely reflect reality.

A really stupid argument: It’s the fanbase that’s fascist, actually
No it isn’t? What’s meant is “I saw some annoying people on twitter dot com and think confirmation bias is something only other people have.” Try coping.

The absolutely insane argument: K-On is fascist because it’s cheerful
This one goes like: since the characters in the show face no serious hardship – especially along the lines of identity – this must be because their world has been purged of Undesirables, which is then supposed to lead to utopia (it’s not clear if it’s the author or the audience who is imagined to think like this). A lot of it seems to be based on this one post. I must emphasise that I have seen people make this argument! It’s surprisingly common!

There is also a closely related argument that K-On is nostalgic, and fascism is about an imagined idyllic past, and that makes them the same if you squint really hard. I’m sorry to say I know people make this argument because I used to do so myself, in broader all-CGDCT-is-inherently-trash terms.

So, a proper rebuttal must bring up that this is nonsense. None of what’s being said relates to the show or to fascism! K-On isn’t about purifying the ethnostate, and it uses “nostalgia” as part of pointing towards temporality – the passing-ness of things, and not actually a prelapsarian position. That we only have the word “nostalgia” to cover two different emotional states is a flaw of language, nothing more. Contrariwise, fascism is about an eternal state of struggle to prove one’s strength (and masculinity), hence cult-of-action not cult-of-teatime. It’s hard to argue against such an incoherent position.

But… look at that one 4chan post again. Does it sound like the reasoning of a stable mind, to you? Likewise, do you think someone would read that and go “yeah, checks out, that must be why I don’t like K-On, I’m picking up the Fashy Vibes” if they were in the best place, mentally? Frankly, I don’t. When I read anon’s post, I’m struck by a terrible sense of pity. When he describes the CGDCT world, he describes it in positive social terms – “safety, security, happy homes.” Is it not heartbreaking that such simple wishes are so often so far away? Is it really so surprising that someone like this would be sold on any ideology that claims to offer that, even if blatantly only as a front that has no logical connection to what it demands be done to achieve such? Is it not damning that the left, one would hope the political wing of Material Conditions, was not able to make such an offer more convincingly?

And likewise, to say that good politics means reifying one’s depression, that you can’t imagine yourself being represented in a work if the characters in it are happy, is a needless and foolish concession to evil. I speak from the heart here: when I held that cute girls doing cute things was not merely not to my taste but actively Bad Fiction, it was not because I was happy. It was because I was unhappy, and wanted to vindicate my suffering as at least being noble, being art. But never forget: we’re in this to make the world better. To do that, we must be able to imagine it. We must remember what we’re building.

Fun things are fun.