my pet theory is that there is a fairly significant percentage of people with brains primed for analysis of one kind or another but who lack the necessary framework to do so in a productive and meaningful way. maybe they grew up in an area with little educational opportunities or struggled in the conventional modern school system. no shame in any of that since no one is born with an innate understanding of ontology and epistemology but it does mean that a lot of people are the equivalent of an understimulated border collie in a studio apartment, brainpower-wise. and sometimes you see someone neck deep in meaningless internet discourse and it’s like please pick up a philosophy textbook you will love it i promise
I think this might also be one of the causal factor in what I call the “taxonomical fandom impulse.” The desire to analyze is there, but the tools aren’t, which results fans using the only epistemic tool they really have at their disposal: meaningless categorization. Shared western epistemic frameworks are built around creating and maintaining categories (often! Violently!) and we are immersed in these frameworks from the moment we’re born. The impulse to taxonomize comes naturally to us and thus there is a strong strain in fandom that exists to categorize elements of a narrative or artwork. This produces wikis (which are often a genuinely useful resource!) but it also results in truly mind meltingly inane discourse about things like which character belongs to which category. And because violence is so often a tool for the creation and maintenance of categories, it quickly becomes an acceptable means of creating and maintaining categories in fandom spaces. Hence, gestures vaguely at the rest of this website.
Anyway, I agree that more people should pick up a philosophy book.
