The incredible lack of literary or artistic understanding that this fucking meme causes and expresses makes me so angry. I've been fuming about it for years. First off, I strongly encourage anyone to check out Folding Ideas' 20 ish minute video about Annihilation. Watching that back in the day was a catalyst for self-examination on how I interpret art and media. Good stories are rarely about their literal events. Media literacy in this culture is genuinely on life support. Cinema Sins and Your Movie Sucks and countless knockoff channels make their living "denying art its capacity for meaning... and approach plot as a goddamn puzzle box to be unpacked and solved".
Stories are becoming so sterile, in part because that's what audiences want. No meaning, only lore. "Signs" sucked because lul why wouldn't aliens know that Earth is covered in water when water is bad for them? Ignore the almost shriekingly obvious subtext that the aliens are actually demons and it's a spiritual story. "Inside" (Defoe, not Burnham) was bad because it was slow. A story about a man learning to survive in the most harsh and basic elemental conditions while undergoing an almost alchemical process of transformation and ascension (he builds a fucking altar and finds a hidden tome of esoteric knowledge how much more obvious could this shit be)? Pass, it was bad because idk it took too long to get to the climax. Annihilation isn't about the beautiful terror of intimate relationships or the self-destruction caused by pain, it's about scientists being unsafe when examining weird mold.
I could go on and on and on and on. I want to make effort posts and videos and ramble and complain about the quantification of art. One day I will. Seriously, go watch that video. Sit with it and digest it. It's not too long and even if you haven't seen the movie it's really good at helping you examine art (or at least stories) under the surface.
It's weird. They want lore, but they aren't interested in studying history (ie real life lore). They want to study fictional lore that has no use or application in their lives. They want to consume something that's both sterile and useless. There are things that are sterile but are useful (instruction videos, many boring academic subjects), things that have emotional depth but are useless (many art), and things that are both (most great art, life-affirming activities like gardening).
I dunno, it's a strange phenomenon. It's like, what do you call someone who would rather read the starship specs on Wookiepedia than read a book on medieval warfare? They're basically reading an instructional manual of a thing that doesn't exist. At bare minimum, that time and energy could be spend on reading the instructional manual of their microwave or something. It's this bizarre space where they're reading something that's neither meaningfully fictional nor real. It's meaninglessly fictional, only a step higher than reading a fictional grocery list.
It's like, what do you call someone who would rather read the starship specs on Wookiepedia than read a book on medieval warfare?
An escapist, I suppose. I read an account from a POW kept for years in solitary confinement who said he kept himself sane by creating an entire fictional baseball league in his head and tracking the players stats and imagining their games. Prisoners retreat into worlds of imagination because those are the only ones where their interaction has any sort of meaning or relevance. Someone who spends their days in drudgery chipping away at the walls that hinder more powerful peoples dreams may want to spend their off time inhabiting and learning about a world that seems no less far fetched to them than being able to tell their boss to go fuck themselves and a good deal less soaked in vitriol.
To a slave being unproductive is rebellion, maybe the only kind of rebellion they consider realistic
They're basically reading an instructional manual of a thing that doesn't exist
Exactly! That or like a fictional encyclopedia. Literally in some cases. You can drill down into detailed family histories or muh hard magic systems or intricate details on some dude's sword handle engravings and it's all fictional. And more importantly, pointless to the overall story. It's actually baffling
Probably a weird reaction to seeing your comment but you've made me realize I was using "soft magic" as a term for when the author sees magic as nothing but a tool to make things look cool with no meaning behind it. I was trying to figure out what made magic hard/soft and why so many things I liked looked suspiciously like what people called "soft magic" and you finally made me realize it's bullshit and my gripe was something else. Thank you.
Could it be simply a safe environment to practice and perform specific human thought capacities? Makes me think of how some sports fans can get into serious deep debates with stats and shit. Maybe humans just like working and utilizing their innate functions to think and whatever.
Could it be that learning a fictional universe is actually "possible"? You can nail it down, put everything in it's right place, unlike actual reality, with all it's bias and ambiguity.
History doesn't perfectly conform to their bourgeois-defined tastes and is thus distasteful compared to their distilled make-believe lore-history. Might also just be an association with the unreal and fantastic with pleasurable leisure and not stressful/boring school or work.
" Ignore the almost shriekingly obvious subtext that the aliens are actually demons and it's a spiritual story."
I am switching teams. That is so stupid I am now team blue curtain. The subtext is that the plot is stupider than we realized and we are better off without it.
The incredible lack of literary or artistic understanding that this fucking meme causes and expresses makes me so angry. I've been fuming about it for years. First off, I strongly encourage anyone to check out Folding Ideas' 20 ish minute video about Annihilation. Watching that back in the day was a catalyst for self-examination on how I interpret art and media. Good stories are rarely about their literal events. Media literacy in this culture is genuinely on life support. Cinema Sins and Your Movie Sucks and countless knockoff channels make their living "denying art its capacity for meaning... and approach plot as a goddamn puzzle box to be unpacked and solved".
Stories are becoming so sterile, in part because that's what audiences want. No meaning, only lore. "Signs" sucked because lul why wouldn't aliens know that Earth is covered in water when water is bad for them? Ignore the almost shriekingly obvious subtext that the aliens are actually demons and it's a spiritual story. "Inside" (Defoe, not Burnham) was bad because it was slow. A story about a man learning to survive in the most harsh and basic elemental conditions while undergoing an almost alchemical process of transformation and ascension (he builds a fucking altar and finds a hidden tome of esoteric knowledge how much more obvious could this shit be)? Pass, it was bad because idk it took too long to get to the climax. Annihilation isn't about the beautiful terror of intimate relationships or the self-destruction caused by pain, it's about scientists being unsafe when examining weird mold.
I could go on and on and on and on. I want to make effort posts and videos and ramble and complain about the quantification of art. One day I will. Seriously, go watch that video. Sit with it and digest it. It's not too long and even if you haven't seen the movie it's really good at helping you examine art (or at least stories) under the surface.
It's weird. They want lore, but they aren't interested in studying history (ie real life lore). They want to study fictional lore that has no use or application in their lives. They want to consume something that's both sterile and useless. There are things that are sterile but are useful (instruction videos, many boring academic subjects), things that have emotional depth but are useless (many art), and things that are both (most great art, life-affirming activities like gardening).
I dunno, it's a strange phenomenon. It's like, what do you call someone who would rather read the starship specs on Wookiepedia than read a book on medieval warfare? They're basically reading an instructional manual of a thing that doesn't exist. At bare minimum, that time and energy could be spend on reading the instructional manual of their microwave or something. It's this bizarre space where they're reading something that's neither meaningfully fictional nor real. It's meaninglessly fictional, only a step higher than reading a fictional grocery list.
An escapist, I suppose. I read an account from a POW kept for years in solitary confinement who said he kept himself sane by creating an entire fictional baseball league in his head and tracking the players stats and imagining their games. Prisoners retreat into worlds of imagination because those are the only ones where their interaction has any sort of meaning or relevance. Someone who spends their days in drudgery chipping away at the walls that hinder more powerful peoples dreams may want to spend their off time inhabiting and learning about a world that seems no less far fetched to them than being able to tell their boss to go fuck themselves and a good deal less soaked in vitriol.
To a slave being unproductive is rebellion, maybe the only kind of rebellion they consider realistic
Exactly! That or like a fictional encyclopedia. Literally in some cases. You can drill down into detailed family histories or muh hard magic systems
or intricate details on some dude's sword handle engravings and it's all fictional. And more importantly, pointless to the overall story. It's actually baffling
Probably a weird reaction to seeing your comment but you've made me realize I was using "soft magic" as a term for when the author sees magic as nothing but a tool to make things look cool with no meaning behind it. I was trying to figure out what made magic hard/soft and why so many things I liked looked suspiciously like what people called "soft magic" and you finally made me realize it's bullshit and my gripe was something else. Thank you.
I wonder about this too.
Could it be simply a safe environment to practice and perform specific human thought capacities? Makes me think of how some sports fans can get into serious deep debates with stats and shit. Maybe humans just like working and utilizing their innate functions to think and whatever.
Could it be that learning a fictional universe is actually "possible"? You can nail it down, put everything in it's right place, unlike actual reality, with all it's bias and ambiguity.
Or... just escapism maybe? I like to escape, too.
History doesn't perfectly conform to their bourgeois-defined tastes and is thus distasteful compared to their distilled make-believe lore-history. Might also just be an association with the unreal and fantastic with pleasurable leisure and not stressful/boring school or work.
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Do it!
I think I will <3
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Its signifying time!
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" Ignore the almost shriekingly obvious subtext that the aliens are actually demons and it's a spiritual story."
I am switching teams. That is so stupid I am now team blue curtain. The subtext is that the plot is stupider than we realized and we are better off without it.
Great video! I could feel his pain when referencing the lore heavy, plot is a puzzle to be solved-type videos lol
If someone is ever upset at an ambiguous ending they are telling on themselves hard
A little off-topic, but I'm listening to Folding Ideas videos right now as background noise.
I really love Dan's video essays