#mdzs was really pivotal for me as a story in lotsa ways also so.

[skalidris]

i would absolutely love to hear more about your course on semiotic analysis in theatre and how it had influenced your opinions on mdzs/cql, when/if you have brain space to talk about it. 🧋

First, thank you for asking--I hadn't actually thought about how that course influenced my take on mdzs and the derivative canons, but in hindsight, it really super did.

Now that I have given it some thought, I should say first that it's been a while since I studied this, and also a while since I first read mdzs (I'm using 'mdzs' as a shorthand; I actually watched s1 of the donghua first, then s1 of the audio drama, and then I read the full novel. cql wasn't a thing back in those days yet, and neither were the later donghua seasons).

Read more as I'm longwinded! Content: Theatre Studies Semiotics, Why I Use This

Semiotics, even just for theatre, has a lot going on. I'll be simplifying! Very simply, semiotics is about a thing called signs. These signs are expressions of something; rather, they are vehicles of communication. Anything that communicates is a sign. Signs communicate some abstract idea, or carry a meaning--something like that.

It's absolutely irrelevant whether someone put a meaning into the sign, or why that sign came to exist. Intent doesn't matter. Since all material expressions (also, words, or sensory experiences--they're material compared to their meanings) are signs, and the duty of a sign is to carry a meaning, that meaning is what can be derived from the sign. Itself.

This dualistic definition is basically associated with a guy called Ferdinand de Saussure. In the semiotics of equally famous guy Charles Peirce, you get a third category. It's kind of complicated, but for these purposes, I'm gonna go ahead and call that third category the system for understanding the sign--the incoporation of the 'thought' of the sign back into a framework of ideas and concepts.

The essence of semiotics in theatre in so far as I mentioned it in that post is, everything on the stage is part of the performance. Our professors had real-life anecdotes for this, but it's basically this: If in the middle of a staged fight, an actor spits blood and collapses on the stage, some audiences might be empathically upset, others might laugh, someone else might go 'woah. how did they do that?'

But no matter what, all of those responses assume that this is acted--someone, several someones, costume and blood and light and acting, came together to portray 'death' in this way. But that actor actually just died for real, in real life. That's why, intent isn't important for semiotics. Although you can certainly discuss intent, ultimately, once you've agreed to the existence of signs and signification, intent is at most secondary.

Obviously, a novel isn't a play, and neither is a tv show, or a donghua, or an audio drama. Semiotics absolutely can be applied to anything, but I'm specifically talking about theatre here. I personally don't see this as an issue, first, because cql and the audio drama are recorded performance arts (they fall within theatre studies already). two, because I'm fundamentally regarding reading/watching/listening as unique, non-repeatable events in which i, the audience, and you, the audience, are never really passive at all. <<key concept in theatre studies, in particular the work of the theatre semiotician erika fischer-lichte.

I like this approach for mdzs, and it's definitely partly because I just liked JGY so much! And I was not really in a majority with that, and back then, people also didn't like xiyao as much as they do in this post-zzj&lhk era. I wanted to understand this, and I also wanted to know whether I was wrong to like him. Not because it would've made me stop, but because 'I've decided to ignore the author' and 'the author doesn't contradict me' are really different starting positions for thinking about something, and I wanted to know which I was in!

(If I want to stubbornly contradict something, I better make sure I haven't made up a strawman from misunderstanding first. That sort of idea)

Semiotics sort of.. side-steps this? The conclusion I came to is that the text creates its own framework for interpretation. It does this structurally, by what information is presented, omitted, changed, etc, when and how. It does this in how characters talk, in what cues they take from each other (or don't!), in what the narration comments on.

In other words, the conclusion is that, just as in theater, regardless of what intention is behind any individual sign of the story, regardless how it came to exist in the story, it's there, and part of the story. So I am obligated to consider as part of the total network of signs that make up the bigger-scale meanings, such as 'all kinds of intent result in destruction if the circumstances are bad enough' and 'what happens after the terrible thing happened' and so on and so forth

If something doesn't have a meaning, because the whole story is made up of signs and system, it becomes a sign with a meaning anyway. Due to peer pressure.

Luckily, Peircean semiotics allow for system interpretation, so signs like that, the ones whose meanings we can't incorporate well, it's possible to decide not to incoporate them in analysis or whatever ^^

And of course, your own framework might be lacking. Mdzs was my first webnovel, and my first danmei, so with this philosophy in mind I set out to read several more in order to give me more confidence in understanding the story. That is, in order to decide what 'counts' when creating an interpretation and 'what doesn't count' is made easier with a more suitable framework. However, I still think that the story itself gives you the correct cues anyway--they just might get distorted by your framework.

[was gonna put an example here, since I dunno if this makes sense, but I'm too tired. Mayb later.]