#analysis 101

[grandwitchbird]

Sympathetic characters are not justified by sympathy.

Justified characters are not necessarily sympathetic just because you understand them.

This is how you fix about 85% of character misreadings.

[grandwitchbird]

I simply cannot take it anymore. I’m here to correct the egregious mistake and to sew the wound shut. I am here to correct what you’ve heard

Excerpt:

“The death of the author means we do not seek to “resolve” art through its creators. At the end of the day, the death of the author is about the consumer of the art. It’s about the consumption of art without ever stopping to ask the author what they want or what they wanted, at least not directly. The reader can ask themselves what they think the author may have intended, but such a reading or interpretation is still rigorously based on the art itself.”

—

The death of the author isn’t about ‘headcanon’. It’s not about eradicating authorial craft and labor. It’s about interrogating a text for what it is. It’s about resisting the parasocial drive to seek validation from artists. It’s about thwarting censorship and moralization. It’s about interrogating our own interpretive role. It’s meant to get us closer to the text itself while recognizing all the impediments in the way of any kind of ‘pure’ reading.

In a way, the death of the author leads inevitably to the death of the audience. We are not entitled to a position of authority just because we’ve dethroned the author. This is about centering the art itself and asking more intelligent and creative questions about that art.

[grandwitchbird]

Pro tip of the day as a break from the longer posts.

The object of critical analysis is understanding. Understanding of the text, the self, the world that produces and constitutes both. If you find yourself trying to be ‘right’ or to justify your feelings or stance on something, you’re not doing critical analysis.

[grandwitchbird]

This is as much as I’m going to say on the debacle at the moment.

Veilguard as a text worries the audience is at least a bit racist on the whole. It wants to somehow prevent this from playing out in gameplay this time and also avoid the whole issue altogether maybe thankyouverymuch. This is in no way an actual ethical shift from previous BioWare games. They’ve just finally said ‘oppression bad’ in the text instead of hoping you’d know that and added some extra weight and consequence just in case you really wanted to kill the black dude or side with the fascists for noreasonatall.

To contrast. Disco Elysium knows most people are quite racist. It has zero interest in the audience’s response to its approach. And its approach is to call racists clowns right out the gate.

I know which approach I prefer, and I know I prefer it because it’s ethically stronger and not built on a codependent relationship with the audience. I also know why Veilguard did things the way it did. If you’re mad about it, maybe just check in the mirror for greasepaint first. And at least consider acknowledging that BioWare’s audience holds stock in the clown shoe factory.

[grandwitchbird]

Media literacy is your ability to assess new/mass media for credibility, gang.

It’s not comprehension. Or genre literacy. Or regular literacy. Or critical thinking. It’s: can you spot a fake news site or stealth marketing; do you understand the narratives present in your news sources, etc...

[grandwitchbird]

Btw this should be obvious but. Taste in fiction doesn’t carry any moral weight. You can’t tell what kind of person someone is by a book or a game they like.

Fiction holds up a mirror to our hang ups and proclivities and weaknesses. It can prompt us to face ourselves and see the world in new ways. Weak fiction is usually bad at this. It’s a distorted mirror. That’s really all there is to it.

Two different things. Let’s not get it twisted.

[alexander-suggestions]

when you come off as arrogant for not listening to anyone but you're actually so anxious and insecure you need constant validation and any criticism will make you cry yourself to sleep

[daemonsandanalyses]

Analysis 101: Lesson 4: Animals Unable to be Analyzed

Lesson 3

There are endless animal species out there; probably more than the community itself will ever be able to analyze individually. But for every animals viable for analysis, there is always at least 2 animals not viable for analysis, and countless other forms that may seem viable, but are not. So what makes a form non-viable? How do we know what forms shouldn’t be look at for analysis? Well, a lot of it can be figured out through simple research; if you don’t have enough information on each major area of analysis outlined in Chapter 3, then the form can’t be considered viable. And other forms are just plain non-viable, no research required. Non-Viable Forms Well, what is a non-viable form? A non-viable form is a form that has little to no researched observable behaviors or are too anecdotal to be analyzable. There are all sorts of forms that fall into this category, including mythical animals and extinct animals. We’ll look at the different categories below.

Some animals, like humans, are incredibly intelligent, which causes giant swings not only in personality, but also behavior. This means that while these species are well-studied, they are almost too well-studied, with many anecdotal behaviors contradicting each other due to individuals having differing personalities and values. This causes these species to be really easily anthrpomorphised and misanalyzed simply due to contradicting information. Because of this high amount of variation in behavior and personality, these forms are considered non-viable. For some of these species too, there is the question of “non-human persons”, which would cause these species to be non-viable for the same reason that humans are; because each individual is just that, and it can’t be analyzed since the behavior and personality is too close and too hard to distinguish. There aren’t many of these species around, but for now the Great apes, Bottlenosed dolphins, Orcas, Baleen whales, and the Elephants are among the species too individualistic with too large a variation in personality to be properly analyzable.* *Note that some of these forms have been analyzed, and some may find them to be viable forms. It is a debated topic, but the consensus is still that these forms aren’t analyzed and seen on the same level as humans in regard to personality and personhood. Feral/Hybrid Animals These include animals like the coywolf, the liger, the tigon, and the mule. Also, feral cats and dogs are also not viable forms in analysis. This is because there’s too much personal bias that could get in the way, where someone may be able to “pick and choose” the traits they would like to see from each parent species. Another thing to take into account again is the fact that personality and behavior can vary wildly between populations, depending on the situation. There is also little observable behavior of these animals in the wild, which makes it difficult to pin them down in analysis. Mythical Animals This should seem like a no-brainer, but for a long time mythic forms were considered perfectly normal and that those individuals who were just “too different” or “so different from everyone else” would be seen as a mythical being. These would range from phoenixes to winged wolves to dragons from all sorts of cultures. However, the problem is that mythical forms, again, carry so much personal bias because there are no observable behaviors and they vary in mythology from culture to culture. There is no real way to be able to analyze mythic forms and get it right every time. Might as well make up an animal in your head and call yourself settled as that. Extinct Animals

The problem of most extinct species like dinosaurs or mastodons is the fact that most of their behavior is speculative and we will never know what their behaviors are naturally like, even if we managed to clone and bring them back from the dead. The only time a viable extinct form could be used is a form that was well-researched before its extinction. However, most behaviors are far too prone to personal bias interpretations, and are therefore non-viable. Low Complexity Animals While arthropods and mollusks are generally still considered viable forms, the lower the complexity of an animal, the harder it can become to translate its behavior to our own. Some of them are so small they live on a completely different plane of reality, where it is simply not feasible to take that animals as a form. Some animals are also so simple, they don’t have the same behaviors and may even be missing some core reactions that make an animal viable. Examples of these kinds of animals include cnidarians (jellyfish), tardigrades (water bears), corals, sponges, components of plankton, and the like. Again, every family may have it’s own individual animal that may still be viable, so research wisely. Domesticated Animals

Almost all domesticated animals have had, for the convenience of humanity, their wild behaviors either lessened or bred out entirely. These animals either don’t have behaviors different enough from their wild counterparts to warrant a separate analysis or they just don’t have enough observable behaviors period. Many domestic animals only exhibit unhealthy behaviors, which makes for an incomplete analysis at best. These include the majority of livestock animals, like goats, sheep, cattle, and camels. As one leaves livestock and food animals, however, things get more fuzzy, since some domestic animals have had their wild behaviors bred for and enhanced, so that they can complete different complex tasks. Many dogs, horses, and other work animals are able to be analyzed by their unique behaviors, but still as many others are non-viable due to anecdotal evidence, anthropomorphism or being bred simply for aesthetics. Take caution and do plenty of research for each domestic breed, since some may not be very different from one another, and only a handful of breeds in each group may be viable. Potentially viable domestic forms include cats, ferrets, rats, and horses. Don't Forget to Research!

Each species has the potential to be a non-viable form, and the trick to the difference between a viable and a non-viable form is research the crap out of it! Some good research websites for quickly seeing if an animal is viable are: Wikipedia, Animal Diversity Web, Encyclopedia of Life, and Arkive. Individual animals also have their own websites, like Big Cat Rescue or the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Book research is also important and great sources, so don’t forget to check online or at the library for books, scientific papers, or studies that may be harder to find but give a lot of detailed research on a single or multiple species. Documentaries are also readily available online in many cases; if you can find them, utilize them! Research is everywhere, don’t be afraid to go out and look for it. So What Now? Now that we know how to interpret, what to interpret, and where to interpret, we can move onto actual analysis and picking out the important puzzle pieces that makes an analysis possible! In the next section we can take everything we have learned so far and learn how to pick out and put together core traits for each form. Core traits are important because it makes the difference between looking for a form that is only kind of manipulative, confrontational, loyal, etc. between a form that has loyalty, confrontation, or manipulation be so important that it wouldn’t be the same form without it. It can be hard to figure out at first but it is possible! The analysis itself is just about within our interpreting grasp!

Next Analysis 101 Lesson: Core Traits! Finally Putting the Pieces Together