#the default way to engage with canon material as a fan/writer

[alwaysbethewest]

I'm gonna say something that 90% of you will hate but it's what's on my heart—now that we've seen Pedro and Vanessa speak in every interview about how this couple is so passionately in love and dedicated to each other and have been married for decades—I wish we could let this be the ONE Pedro character whose fanfic isn't completely overwhelmed by x reader fic instead of even consiiiidering respecting and exploring his canon relationship 😔

[itsclydebitches]

(1) The issue of what is considered an in universe problem in media is complex and kinda subjective but I wanted to share my 2 cents about Pyrrha being chosen as a new Maiden. Basically, why was she chosen? We're told that she's strong and talented, but she's also a 1st year. Why not choose an older student with more training and experience? You could read it as an indictment on the teachers and Ozpin, or the CRWBY just invented this character for the express purpose of being Too Cool To Live.

I had actually planned to touch on this in a brief meta I’m hoping to do based on a conversation you were having last night (I eavesdrop via the email alerts lol), basically looking at the terminology we use to describe Pyrrha’s arc and Ozpin’s role in it: a “choice” vs. “manipulation” vs. an “ultimatum.” But this was more of a side note so it works to discuss it here instead. 

To provide the always necessary disclaimer: it’s all up to interpretation. You’re right that this problem is both complex and subjective. Based on what the canon has given us and what we know of RT’s writing style, there is no single correct answer here that we can prove if we just work at it enough. There’s no hidden solution to uncover with additional time spent pouring over the material, or watching interviews, or whatever active work we might engage in. Like most analysis, it comes down to what’s the most persuasive. 

Regarding the question “Why did Ozpin choose Pyrrha as the next Maiden?” we have two main answers: 

The Watsonian reading, formed by interpreting the text via the text and the text alone: Ozpin chose Pyrrha because he’s a horrible person, a manipulative headmaster, someone who chooses the easy route over the ethical one, etc. We know thanks to later volumes that older women such as Raven and Winter can become Maidens, ergo it was always possible for Ozpin to choose someone who was not a young, vulnerable student. He didn’t. That therefore says something about his character. This method prioritizes internal consistency above everything else. It doesn’t matter if Ozpin’s characterization doesn’t otherwise suit this manipulative persona, we need an in-world explanation for why he chose Pyrrha, it needs to be logical, and thus far this is the closest we can get to that. 

The Doyalist reading, formed by interpreting the text via the text and knowledge of the author: Ozpin chose Pyrrha because at the time of Volume 3 it’s unlikely that RT had thought ahead to future choices like Winter and Raven being Maidens. In Volume 3 there’s a heavy implication that the powers can only pass to much younger women (especially with Glynda standing there, unable to accept the powers herself), thereby justifying Ozpin’s choice. It has to go to someone of school-ish age, so pick the best option among your list of ethically horrible choices. This context is then contradicted later in the show with the decision to make Winter and Raven into Maidens. How do we explain this contradiction? Unlike the Watsonian reading, which emphasizes that in-world consistency - Ozpin must have been a bastard in that moment by choosing Pyrrha when we now know he didn’t have to - this method prioritizes acknowledging the “now” (stories change) and, by extension, author fallibility. There is no persuasive in-world explanation because the answer here is instead, “The authors fucked up. Their story is not internally consistent. It’s a problem in the text.” Ergo, this tells us about our authorship as opposed to our characters. 

Your interpretation (if I’m understanding you correctly!) is that Pyrrha was chosen as the Maiden because the authors had thematic plans. She’s the Too Cool to Live character whose name is literally a reference to a pyrrhic victory. She was always going to die. RT just needed to find a way for that to happen. Me, I subscribe to that along with other practical influences like, “The authors wanted to use a character we were already emotionally attached to, not a stranger who may have been more suitable from an in-world standpoint, but wouldn’t have been fulfilling for the viewer to interact with that much” and “The authors wrote a story focused on the students, so a student should go through such a major arc. Don’t take up so much time on an adult like Glynda or an older Beacon student who doesn’t have connections back to the rest of the main RWBYJNR cast.” As well as the simple, “I think there’s a TON of evidence to demonstrate that the RWBY universe has never been well planned out or internally consistent. We’ve run into this problem because our writers are not the type to think through the consequences of their choices: ‘If we make Pyrrha the next Maiden in a way that heavily implies she’s actually the best/only choice available, what does that tell us about who the magic can go to? If a 1st year is the best option, then clearly the power can’t go to a fully trained adult. Or there are other limitations that we need to introduce to the audience later on to explain why Pyrrha was saddled with this.’” None of this work occurred. 

Though our interpretation may diverge at times they’re both Doyalist readings. They both answer the question by looking at the author as well as the text, acknowledging that those motivations (should Pyrrha stick around as a character?) and those limitations (are the authors planning ahead?) need to be taken into account to answer this question. By focusing only on the text, a Watsonian reading must, by default, sacrifice other things - like Ozpin’s characterization - in order to explain the currently unexplainable. It’s the difference between coming up with an unprovable headcanon for why Blake never mentioned her parents (She doesn’t trust her team! She’s ashamed of her family! She fears that Weiss will turn on her if she learns about her dad being a former White Fang member!) that you then allow to color your reading of her whole character (It would make perfect sense for Blake to betray her parents. Remember how she didn’t even care about them enough to mention them to her team? I’m then going to come up with more unsubstantiated interpretations to explain the whole volume of them being a loving family together in order to maintain this characterization I’ve become attached to...), rather than just admitting, “I don’t think the writers had invented her parents in Volumes 1-3 yet.” Personally, I find the likelihood of authorial fallibility to be far more persuasive than the amount of headcanoning and outright rejection of other textual facts needed to conclude that Ozpin is this monstrous. 

In reality most viewers are a complicated mix of both types. The text itself is pulling from a complicated mix as well. But when it comes to RWBY I personally think that the fandom relies too heavily on a Watsonian perspective. A good chunk of the fanbase is desperate to explain everything from that in-world perspective, which wouldn’t be a bad thing (trying to come up with those explanations is fun!) if it didn’t so often require twisting their interpretation of other aspects to fit this new narrative. After a couple of years of this, I think that a good portion of the anti-Ozpin sentiment stems less from Ozpin himself and more from the desire to have a story that makes sense. Why did he choose Pyrrha as the Maiden when later canon tells us she was a bad pick? For many fans the answer that Ozpin is a horrific person is more satisfying than the answer that the writers are, to quote, “flying by the seat of their oversized clown pants.” The former just requires you to give up a character. The latter requires you to give up on RWBY as a cohesive, internally logical tale. For those who love RWBY, ditching Ozpin and using him as an on-going bandaid for these narrative problems is preferable to acknowledging that one of their favorite shows is, at times, very badly written. 

Which is why I personally hang out in the “RWBY is an absolute dumpster fire of a show but I love it anyway” corner lol 

[bevinbrand]

So, did you guys have any plans on rarijack before the show ended? Like we're you planning on making them explicit canon? If not, do you have more headcanons? Lol, i love hearing your ideias of what these two were up to!

Ahhh thanks! These two are loads of fun. @marvelandponder and I have bandied some ideas around recently, just for fun. I’ll talk about those here and then have a longer answer about ships and how the show worked in general on that subject under a cut ‘cause it got really long.

Okay, so extended headcanon with Rarijack after high school! So they’re both making a go of it in (EQG-equivalent) Paris, having their ups and downs, learning how to live away from home, in a new culture, learning that sometimes it’s not as perfect and romantic as they thought, or conversely that it’s not as terrible and totally alien as they thought (guess who’s who here). And living together for the first time, having to learn to cohabitate and share a space, learning to juggle very busy lives with their relationship, still keeping in touch with their friends from high school, meeting new people and making new friends, and in general being extremely busy. Far, far too busy to really think about plans after Rarity’s apprenticeship is done and AJ’s culinary education is done. Nothing really beyond moving back to Canterlot, at least until they figure out where to go from there. Paris is great but it’s not home and they both need to see friends and family for a while.

Well, nothing except moving back home and getting married.

So after they move back and have some down time, and after some light planning, they announce their engagement. Of course there’s a huge group party for this at the Apple family farm, and every girl who’s moved away absolutely makes sure they’re there for it. It’s basically a giant welcome home/reunion/engagement party.

After everyone’s recuperated from that, Rarity throws herself into opening her own online boutique with the hopes of being able to expand into a physical shop someday. She also throws herself into wedding planning with Pinkie; those two learning to collaborate would likely be trial and error at first but once they start really communicating and brainstorming, they start coming up with some incredible ideas.

Not much for party planning or understanding wedding decorations, AJ tries to settle back in at the farm but it’s running pretty well without her these days, so she has to figure out new ways to make herself useful. Ends up getting involved in a farm-to-table restaurant with her homemade pastries, which then leads to her helping to arrange for other farms in the area to get involved in similar endeavors with restaurants, schools, and local charities.

And I think that’s about as far as we got so far. So yeah! I dunno! Hope it’s fun! If not, feel free to ignore it! :D

Re: shipping

So, okay, firstly, there’s kind of a sticky situation in terms of canon couples in a show like this, especially when it’s been on for a while and lots of people have lots of preferences for ships and whatnot. In that if you make one of them official, you’re by default sort of taking away everyone else’s ship in terms of what might be canon. (Note: you can and should ship whatever you like, that is literally what fandom is FOR.) And to be honest, we’re not really in this to upset fans, even though sometimes we accidentally do, or it happens as a result of telling a story we feel is important. And since shipping is a very personal thing to a lot of people for a myriad of totally valid and important reasons, sometimes addressing this stuff can feel like walking into a minefield. Especially for me because I don’t really have any major shipping preferences, and I’m just out here sharing my personal ideas and headcanons and giving some info on what the intent (as I understand it) was with what we were doing on the show. Which, let me be clear, does not invalidate anybody’s shipping preference or headcanon; there was always some wiggle room to try and accommodate most possibilities and a bunch of different ways of reading things.

The thing of it is… the show can’t be all things to all people, it just isn’t possible to do. There’s not something wrong or deficient with anyone’s preferred ship, it just may or may not have been a direction things were going. And even then, we really only had one actual official couple that was explicitly written to be that way; everything else was either hinted at or just up for grabs by whomever liked it. Nobody who worked on the series can control what you ship, that’s not within our power, it’s not something most of us would desire. Your ships are yours, regardless of what happens in canon. (And yeah, that’s not a perfect situation either, believe me, I know.) Chances are very high that at least one person working on the show shipped the same thing a bunch of fans do, and a lot of people had multiple ships, and conflicting ships and like, we weren’t all one hive mind on the subject either, trust me.

Which brings me to point number two: the people at DHX, myself included, didn’t have any input into the story ideas or scripts we got (beyond the directors making minor suggestions on early drafts which may or may not have been implemented or rejected, depending). So as much as a lot of us might personally have wanted to make some couples canon, we really didn’t have a say in that. We could suggest things visually, like we did with Rarijack, and then try our best to keep that consistent with the subsequent material we were given, but we didn’t have the ability to be like, hey, let’s have them go on a date or declare their feelings openly. And to be fair, H*sburo really let us run with a lot of the stuff we wanted to do. So much of the Rarijack hinting in Rollercoaster of Friendship, we honestly thought would get called for revision, either by the company or by S&P, but somehow none of it did. “Surprised” is an understatement for the feeling of when we found out that none of it got called after we submitted it. And then again with the design for Ragamuffin– not a peep from anyone, nor any dissent on the whole bit the board artist added with everyone making the connection between his appearance and AJ’s. So, we never got any scripts where they’re explicitly dating, but they sure let us do a lot in terms of implying it. No clue what may have been pitched by the writers, all of that was totally removed from us and what our role in the process was.

(Also, onscreen kissing wasn’t a thing we could do at all. The TimberTwi date episode at the planetarium originally had a kiss at the very end that made it fairly far down the approvals process but eventually did get called and was changed. And that was the only truly “officially official” couple we had in the series, so. Yeah.)

So, all that to say that I really can’t answer any questions about what was planned or what was pitched for ideas, because I truly don’t know. I wish I did!

[dotthings]

If you think I should have to selectively withdraw all the same rules of meta and literary devices and lit analysis that I apply for platonic and general and found family themes on SPN because the second I apply it to Destiel—the same rules, same standards of literary analysis and interpretation—just because it’s Destiel and if I have sensible realized there is simply too much canon material by this point to shrug it off as not part of the canon, oh honey. No.

Destiel operates as a mixture of crafted subtext and some things that have already broken to surface text as a slow burn pining. I’ve been tracking this for umpteen seasons. I’ve noted ways that canon has changed in how it treats it narratively. It was more accidental in early days of Destiel, it transformed into a woven part of canon, albeit held mostly to subtext. This type of subtext, one that has consistent arcing of its own, that shadows the surface text, and consistently uses similar imagery and symbolism, combined with surface text emotional beats, plot, dialogue, and behavior that outright codes as spousal/significant other, isn’t the same as cute winks here and there or fans going a bit overboard with color metas.

I’m not reassuring you it will definitely be consummated and openly acknowledged. ftr, I have never claimed it will definitely get its moment in the sun. There are some complex factors at work here. Including some ponderous default societal biases.

Dean and Cas do things where on another show, with a male and female character, I would never deny it’s really there, even if they haven’t kissed or acknowledged it yet. I would assume slow burn and it may or may not go canon in the end, but I wouldn’t be telling myself I was imagining it. Why in hell would I do that with Dean and Cas?

It’s a risk to hope for full realization. My advice is try to enjoy the ride. If you ship it, enjoy the story and the emotions it evokes from you. Don’t put all your eggs on open consummation. There are assholes who will still scream it’s not real even if Dean and Cas full on have sex in the back of the Impala. And if Destiel is endgame and you’re waiting for the very last episode of SPN for realization...first of all you’re going to likely wait a long time on that one. Secondly, the writers may not get approval to do what canon seems to indicate they want to build towards. Not because they want to bait anybody. The canon speaks for itself—this is a story they want to tell. But as I said external factors can keep it from happening.

But like hell will I deny the material from canon. All I have seen in canon. The Dean and Cas story in canon. And I have no interest in further engaging with those who resort to simplistic false equivalency knee jerk condescension or more extreme accusations of “delusional.”

There aren’t one set of lit analysis rules for everything that isn’t about ships and one for ships. That’s absurd.

My meta doesn’t make predictions or promises.

Everything I have argued about Destiel is drawn from on-screen canon. Some is more sublte, some more overt. At times it’s been so overt even antis who claim we’re delusional start yelling it’s too obvious. Some is actually textual, and this is why I say the slow burn is already canon (but they are not a canon couple), some is subtext. No the meta writers who share my views aren’t basing this on Dean wore a certain color shirt, JFC fandom, your army of anti-destiel straw men is enough to storm the emerald city.

It’s there in the canon. It’s...right there. On the screen. In the story. Woven as part of the story.

I’ve seen this happen too with platonic bonds and general themes and story points too, btw, where people seem to think something has to be a FOCUS and an A-plot to count and be real and be important and be part of what SPN is about.

So. Ok on with it then.

[13eyond13]

8.21.19

I’m seeing a bit of stuff going around lately that suggests other fans are being condescending because they prefer the manga to the anime, and I’m not 100% sure because nobody’s talked to me about it directly, but I can’t help but wonder if some of my recent more opinionated posts about this might have contributed to that feeling in the fandom for some people. So I’m just going to explain myself a little better here, because I definitely don’t want to hurt feelings or make other fans feel bad about their enjoyment of Death Note or the anime or their personal interpretations of things!

I felt the need to specify more clearly that I prefer to usually go by the manga only for things now because I’ve been receiving an unusually large amount of meta asks on anon the past month or so, mostly about basic things in the series and straight-forward interpretations of events and characterizations. This led me to assume that there must be a lot of new fans trickling in who are not already immersed in the fandom. They probably aren't aware of the general consensus or inside jokes about most things, and they might not know what is actually canon and what is just fanon, nor what was changed when the manga was adapted to the anime. This makes me have to carefully consider which source to draw from when I am answering these questions and attempting to explain things to the best of my ability to a person who is genuinely asking me to give them insight into the source material and the fandom's views. When doing this I found that 98% of the time or more I was always defaulting to the manga for everything, not only because it's the original source but because I think it's the best version of the story and the characters. But I wasn’t sure if the people asking me questions would actually KNOW that I was basing my ideas of the characters and plot off the manga instead of the anime.

I imagine the anime is probably the most popular way for people to be introduced to Death Note, and that’s for a very good reason, it’s extremely good and I do love it very much! SO much of my idea of L is based around AJ’s voice acting, and it’s a super enjoyable watch that for the most part sticks pretty darn close to the events in the manga as well. I didn’t mean to come off like I was trashing it or trashing people who prefer it or who haven't read the manga by saying that I take issue with certain changes the anime made throughout to the themes or the characters or their interactions. I just have to make a lot of assumptions when getting asks from people whose identities I have no clue about, and sometimes this leads to me having to air my more opinionated thoughts publicly about everything in order to avoid having to clarify this stuff every time I answer an ask. Normally I wouldn’t want to split hairs like this at all, I really like them both, but I do think that there are significant enough differences between the two sources that it warrants me mentioning this for people who are genuinely new to things and trying to learn stuff from someone who has been nerding out about it for way too long already.

That’s all, and I do apologize if I came off short or condescending or made anyone feel bad at any point. I’ve been a bit overworked lately and I think this made me more blunt and impatient sometimes than I usually am as well. I do love the fandom a lot and all the creative takes and ways of engaging with it I see around, and my blog is a testament to that. I think DN is a wonderful sandbox to play in and extremely versatile for fans, and I don’t mean to imply everyone must stick to manga canon or else suffer the wrath of the uppity meta writer who is going through everything with a fine tooth comb, haha. I’ve made TONS of posts and writing and drawings and such myself that most definitely aren’t manga accurate whatsoever, and it would be silly to insist that it’s the only way to enjoy or interpret the series or the characters. I just want to be clear as possible when answering the more standard asks, and I think my interest in DN has mostly switched over to studying the manga very closely now as well. But I don’t think that’s what everyone else has to be doing by any means.

[irisbleufic]

Good afternoon, anon.  With regard to it coming to an end being different, I understand what you’re saying.  Once, I thought I’d be content to just add to it for the rest of my life; I’m such an end-goal driven writer 99% of the time that I thought, hey, it’s special that I have this one project in my life that’s been in progress for years and wants to stay in progress.  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on this blog, but I came very close to declaring #50: Garden Variety the end of it, when I saw how well that story snapped into place and rounded off the story as it was at that point.  But the thing with stories you live with for a long time is that they’re as mutable as you are.  As you change, your narrative goals will change; as you age, your characters age (especially the younger ones; having watched the four girls and Rob change in my mind’s eye has been as poignant as watching my younger siblings grow up).

I said this in a previous post, but I have quite a few reasons now for wanting this series to be complete before the first episode of the Amazon miniseries airs.  Almost nobody in the fandom believed there would ever actually be a visual adaptation; I was certainly in that number.  The volatile effect that a film or television adaptation has on any book fandom causes upheaval whether we like it or not, and it almost always becomes the first thing newcomers will reach for.  Many of them will be unaware that there’s a novel.  They’ll try to assume that existing stories have been influenced by the visual-media version, and that...is not a risk I am willing to take.  I’m uniquely poised to close this just before the show comes out.  The archival posting dates on AO3 will show that CoT, in its painstaking entirety, is a product of novel influence only.  I would like it to stay that way.  New fans drawn in by the show probably won’t have too much trouble reading it, but they might not like that the canon-present it starts from is the early 1990s, not the late 2010s as it will be in the miniseries.  CoT is a period piece whose internal present-day narrative covers 2005-2017 with dozens of historical flashbacks, falling from Eden to the 1990s to the early 2000s, as memories of those events become relevant.

Structurally, this final story/installment has been more of a challenge to set up than nearly anything else I’ve written in either my fandom or published career.  My cast, between canon characters and original characters I’ve built along the way, is so extensive that limiting this to just our two protagonists’ points of view would have been unthinkable.  Alongside those two, I targeted the four other players who I feel have come to form the emotional core of the narrative.  So that gave me six viewpoint characters to work with.  When I considered my target word-count, the best way to pace the action and let everyone have their say throughout was to break the story into six 3,000-4,000 word sections, each of these subtitled with epigraphs (those’ll be a surprise).  Each of those six sections, in turn, breaks down into six scenes.  The viewpoint rotation of six characters falls in the same pattern throughout the scenes of the first five sections, but breaks pattern for the sixth and final.  The pattern-break is almost entirely due to how “A Better Place” needs to somehow echo at the close.

As for writing about these two idiots once CoT’s finished?  Oh, I always planned to keep writing about them.  Even if I wrote nothing else GO-related for most of the year moving forward, there would always be a new story or several from me come GO Holiday Exchange time, because I’ve been a participant from the beginning (and happily serve as on-call pinch hitter).  That said, though, post-CoT?  I’m only just getting started.  You’ll see me do some things with the source material that I’ve never felt inclined to do before, but some of my more recent writing gambits in other fandoms have given me a taste for not just extending canon, but altering/reconfiguring canon events.  There are so many experiments left to run.  Almost 15 years on from first reading the book, I have yet to run out of ways to engage with the text.  That’s remarkable.

(Thanks for the heartfelt note, anon.  Because you’re one of the years-long regulars, I might have a guess at one of a few people you might be.  But that’s irrelevant given how much I love you all.)

theotheramf said: 6 viewpoints, 6 chapters, 6 sections. 666. Huh. Was that intentional? ;-p 

Would you even believe me if I said no?

(I hope so, because that’s the answer.  The reason for it being broken into six main sections is that the story has to cover six months; it’s one section for each month.  Two default protag PsOV + four crucial deuteragonist PsOV just happened to equal six, too.  And, well, six scenes in each section are just a product of there being six rotating PsOV.)

[circadianwolf-old]

realism in fiction

(in response to characterizing and dismissing a criticism of Fallout 3 as a silly concern about “scientific accuracy”)

I don't really want to talk about Fallout (I've done enough of that in the past), but on the topic in general with the various Fallout games as examples. I think the "inaccuracies" of Fallout 3's setting are incredibly relevant to the rhetorical/ideological work that the game is doing (knowingly or not). Presenting a world that seems to have existed in stasis since the bombs fell, which still lives in the junk and detritus of the Old World, is (obviously) a deliberate choice, commonly assigned to the "aesthetic" of post-apocalypse. But beyond this it serves the function of justifying a dioramic world of isolated scenes and disconnected characters, not a society but rather individual survivors and communities which form no larger network, produce nothing, and  whose labor, where it exists, is purely extractive (scavenging), mercantile, or violent. The notion of a post-apocalyptic world as a ruthless every-man-for-himself (gender deliberate) anti-society is common and dangerous; it is a fantasy of unrestrained masculine violence, in the same way zombie stories are by and large fantasies of racist genocide of thoughtless hordes by the imperiled white minorities. Fallout 3's world of tattered three-hundred-year-old clothing and squatting in three-hundred-year-old ruins and eating three-hundred-year-old canned food is one of total scarcity, in which the only gain possible is by taking from someone else.

That this is "inaccurate" is important for the reasons all stories are important: stories serve as life experiences by proxy. Our brain compiles our experiences over time into recurring patterns which become templates for our default reactions to future situations that register as similar - these are our "instincts", which are not programmed in our genetics but largely socially conditioned. Stories are a technology of information sharing, a way for humans to collectivize experiences so that we can react to experiences we have never faced ourselves with the knowledge of others' experiences. Stories are -always- didactic. But this technology opens up the opportunity for false experiences which can teach false reactions. All stories are, of course, "unreal" - even those based in reality are abstractions, even fiction set in the "real world" creates characters and situations, etc. So yes, to criticize "inaccuracies" is on a base level silly; but they are very relevant when these inaccuracies reinforce false patterns. Normally, false patterns are not promoted precisely because they teach false responses; but when culture is controlled by a minority, they can override the normal dynamics to promote stories that falsely justify power, exploitation, and oppression.

This is not just a theoretical or abstract process (as you might look at with Fallout), it is something governments and corporations actively and knowingly engage in. In the 1950s a major priority of the CIA was to promote "anti-communist" media. Perhaps the predominant example of this was the Iowa Writer's Workshop, a literary graduate program which became the model for many similar programs across the US. Its early funding included a grant from the CIA and its founder openly proclaimed his goal of creating "anti-communist" fiction, which meant the elision of "politics", relations of production, and similar structural forces and a rejection of "didacticism" in favor of a focus on individuals, psychological interiority divorced from material circumstances, and atomic social relationships. The epitome of this "anti-communist" fiction was the motto "show, don't tell". What this reflected in a larger sense was the conflict in philosophy between what is termed "idealism" and "materialism", the latter of which is fundamental to communist theory (Marx's theory is specifically termed "dialectical materialism" or "historical materialism").

Now in American culture, the interiority of "high" literature was matched by a false opposition of plot-heavy "low" culture, increasingly dominated across mediums by corporate-controlled franchises that become ever-more enmeshed within their own "canon" (a metaphor from the debates over which Christian scriptures are "true"). Alongside this was encouraged a cultural fixation of quantification, metrics, and consistency - but only of specific things. The early fan cultures which treated corporate fiction as any other mythology, as something to be interrogated, extended, transformed, and played with as people found it useful (and not coincidentally composed significantly of women) became the extensive but derided backwater of "fan fiction" while corporate media instead promoted a fan culture of obsessive cataloguing and collecting "approved" products. The only form of extra-canonical culture encouraged was/is the sort of "could a Star Destroyer beat the Enterprise" questions and "fanon" creating extensive and ridiculous justifications for existing canon - in other words, fan culture that was wholly secondary and subservient to corporate culture.

It is in response to this latter trend that we got to the modern rejection of "scientific accuracy", both in terms of complaints about a lack of accuracy and in false claims of accuracy as justification for pernicious fiction (e.g. "it's medieval Europe so of course everyone is white" which is both a false statement in itself and of course completely nonsensical when applied to fiction not even set in history). But both sides of this are largely unconcerned with "accuracy" in the sense of storytelling that does not promote harmful responses; both position themselves as "apolitical" and in so doing reify the capitalist logic underlying this entire spectrum of criticism. Complaints of "how are people feeding themselves? who is doing the work?" and similar are neither promoted by those invested in "accuracy" nor indirectly promoted by citing them when refuting the desire for such. Materialism remains by the wayside in favor of supremely individualist critiques isolated from any larger context or relevance. (As an aside: even I was surprised when I did a survey of what are today termed "simulationist" tabletop role-playing games and found that while they would spend dozens of pages on rules simulating the physics of gunshot injuries, rules for production relations and political structures were all but nonexistent in every single game. Surveying strategy video games with a global/regional setting for mechanics covering these topics is less fruitless but still incredibly rare.)

In recent years the derision of "accuracy", "realism", "plot holes", and similar has intensified as mainstream culture has become more and more, to borrow a metaphor from other criticism, pornographic. By this is not meant a proliferation of nudity and sex, but rather a structuring of fiction around crude emotional climaxes, with plot, characters, setting, tone, and other concerns set aside in order to achieve the desired climax, no matter how nonsensical. This is spectacle in the basest sense; absent the contextual girding of plot and characters, these climaxes can only move viewers (or players or w/e) to emotion by way of basic visual and audio cues: lurid violence, triumphant music, explosions. Previously this might have been derided even in mainstream criticism (look to the reception of Michael Bay's films), although there has always been exceptions; but, for example, the most recent season of Game of Thrones - which while always a white supremacist fairy tale dominated by a materially unsustainable by fascistically indulgent level of violence, at least at one point paid heed to concepts like "character motivation" and "distances of 1000 miles are significant obstacles" - seemed to deliberately give up on any pretense of its storytelling serving any function other than the delivery of "awesome moments" to be "shared" and discussed on social media the following day. Critics, beholden to the domination of the capitalist behemoth, at most offered tepid laments of the show moving too fast while continuing to celebrate it as an apex of television storytelling.

All of this is not to say that, for example, Game of Thrones would be better with context simply because context is good in itself. Rather, it is that context demands a logic and material basis; when a story undergirds itself with material logistics of how its characters eat, clothe themselves, travel, etc., even if those details are not centered or elaborated (but not if they are ignored for "dramatic purposes"), it forces the storyteller to engage with the processes and conflicts that actually drive human society, and that are therefore of import to us. One critic calculated that based on the stated land area of Game of Thrones' setting combined with the stated casualties in the various battles across the series and assumptions of medieval European population density and farm outputs, the entire continent would be suffering depopulation and famine (as a result of lack of farm laborers and devastated fields). Certainly, the assumptions based on medieval Europe are not "accurate" for the story, but they serve to demand an explanation of how -does- the continent still produce food? Why -do- the armies keep fighting rather than deserting, as many pre-modern armies did when wars stretched long and without result? Among many other unanswered questions.

The point is not that there can't be answers to these questions - c.f. "fanon" above - but that the canonical fiction bypasses them in order to tell the story it wants to tell - a story about endless violence, faceless armies, and nihilistic elites, without any interest in how such a society functions at all. That the values of a story should trump material logistics of the setting and plot is an absolute truism in American fiction and criticism, but this is not a neutral position; this is the CIA's project for anti-communist fiction having triumphed utterly, the idealist ideology of capitalism, of decontextualized individuals driven by abstract values and engaging with material reality only through the lens of violence, having been rendered so dominant that opposition is unthinkable. Similarly elevated is "show, don't tell" and its dismissal of didacticism, its explicit valorization of the elision of ideology. Lost in all this is, again, that if stories matter - and they do - then their ideology matters, and all stories teach ideology, and the rejection of materialism - the wholesale dismissal of "realism" and its ilk in favor of abstract ideals - is a pernicious ideology that works to justify capitalism and undermine anti-capitalist - which is to say, communist - education. We -need- stories about logistics and labor in order to teach ourselves how to survive and escape capitalism, to provide us with experiences we cannot yet have in reality.

[renmaru]

you know. sometimes i love something a lot so i need to scream about the things that piss me off about it. i don’t think this is a particularly negative post but it’s just like sheer frustration and if you dont get some satisfaction from articulating your frustration into tumbler dot coms longposts and destroying the capital of this website because you are not a gemini sun then like fair i guess feel free to disregard this. tonbokiris kiwame is cool go look at that.

now to the lukewarm tea ive been simmering for five years. the one thing i always think about all the time is that tkrb is a popular game despite itself. the piss poor gameplay with only the barest of bare QoL in the five years its been up, the seeming complete lack of direction and the frankly nonexistent worldbuilding is held up purely because of its attention to detail and reverence to the original culture and history of the swords combined with some very good character design and subtle but nuanced character writing that can be openly interpreted. just enough flavour to imply something larger but chickening out on actually making anything y’know. concrete. basically allowing the fans to draw their own conclusions. but even then a game like that would not survive cause there have been countless, hundreds of games with high quality and fervent attention to detail and respect for the source material that just died completely because they have such little to actually offer in terms of engagement. i think the main thing that bugs me about tkrb is that it has one of THE most creative, dedicated and strong fanbases of this genre of game who go out of their way to engage with any and all of the content and the devs seem kind of oblivious to this.

in comparison to modern gacha style games, touken ranbu releases barely any new content and frequently recycles content but somehow it’s still relatively popular with approx. 1mil active players daily but the maddening thing is that tkrb can reach much MUCH further. the fans are there, the curiosity is there, it’s just the game content is not fucking there. it does not put the effort into commissioning seasonal art, pushing new events with actual plotline/story content, creating promotional materials, tie-ins etc. but somehow its still in the top 5 comiket circles for nearly five fuckin years straight. here are your badley compiled receipts: c89(w2015), c90(s2016), c91(w2016), c92(s2017), c93(w2017), c94(s2018), c95(w2018), c96(s2019)

 it can launch itself from laughably low in the appstore ratings, hovering in the middle of the 200′s to TOP 30s in the appstore at the flick of a switch. what is this magic button that fucking quadruples revenue and skyrockets your app into the top 50 grossing apps? 3/4 of your characters getting static CGs that you cannot use at all anywhere in the game but will do a powerpoint transition and appear for 5 seconds at login. oh and like a few free mats i guess. and i kid you not it fuckin worked.

wanna know why that worked? it’s cause otherwise characters, especially fan favourites just don’t get anything at all. it’s like most characters outside of the very popular ones rarely get new art, new recollections, new anything outside of their kiwame upgrade which is more often than not years down the line and only recently, four years in, they decided to add alternate costumes but even then there’s a catch which has me feeling some kind of way.

and yes, i fully understand that tkrb is a multi-media franchise, i get that it’s got its fingers in so many pies like the stageplay, musicals, various manga anthologies, the animes, hell its even got live action but man, would it hurt to give some love in game? i’m not asking them to go full fgo route and commission the industry creme de la creme to make 6 full CE illustrations, lots of promo art and tonnes of new merch every single month. but the fact is for such a big franchise, reusing the same sprite art on nearly every piece of official merch, going so far as to add NEW costume art which is just the heads of the old default sprites edited onto new bodies? it screams cost cutting, it screams lazy, the path of minimum effort. it’s almost like the game itself and the original materials are an absolute afterthought at this point with only the most dedicated hanging on to it. i guarantee that the majority of people still playing tkrb are the committed day1 players and the actual rekijou cause it’s just painfully offputting to new fans, with other fans even going out of their way to specify the game is not integral to enjoying the series which sucks, but it’s true.

its a real damn shame to think that something you are so invested in is not particularly invested in itself. sometimes, just sometimes i wish they dev team for tkrb was more hands-on, more adventurous, more willing to listen to players, invest in the game and genuinely try and make the game the best it can be. i’m not asking for balls to the wall summer events, beautiful animated CMs from the likes of the industries best animators, i’m not asking for pages of supplemental lore compiled into books, character backstory novels or whatever i’m just asking for the lore and the characters that we love to sometimes occasionally be remembered in the actual game outside of like ... the two years between their kiwame and the vague possibility of a recollection. i want to feel like this game puts as much effort into itself as the fans do towards it.

it’s a painful truth but there’s one shining light which is that the fandom for tkrb is genuinely one of the most committed and transformative ones ive ever seen. i have never been involved with a fandom that varies so widely and puts in so much effort for these characters and this world. tkrb exists solely as a popular franchise due to the sheer legwork of the fans carrying it on their backs collaboratively. ultimately, tkrb is very very lore-light, there’s so much thats missing and the characters in-game rarely rarely interact with each other. the characters are contained solely in however many voice lines they get at implementation, their kiwame letters, and their updates kiwame lines and the only interaction they get with other swords is recollections or depending on the sword, the odd custom sparring lines.

but despite that there has been so much fan effort to explore everything in so many different varied ways, and amazingly there are certain tropes, relationships, lore etc. that have started off fanon and become canon. the fan community, especially the fanartists, doujins, writers, animators etc. being given a small indulgence by the anime is one of my favourite things about tkrbs relationship with its fanbase. that’s not to say that the fans dont give back in kind a hundred fold.

there’s so much i love about tkrb fans going out of their way to go SEE historical swords in japan, single-handedly reforging swords using crowdfunding and revitalising lots of small-town tourism having real world impact. shit makes me unbelievably happy. the stage plays and musicals are always met with warm reception and are always well attended and even though its hard to access, there are lots of western fans who have dived into a whole new MEDIUM that most of us arent really familiar with but out of their love for tkrb theyve done that. they have hosted the musical as far out as india and france, making tkrb a truly worldwide franchise and there theyve met full seats! as far out as india! then theres the fantranslators, who always have the drive the commitment and energy for the thankless work, the wiki always always is well maintained and they have new content up so fast, and there are so many people willing to help you out. even when crunchyr*ll got hanamaru s2 (i think) a week late and we were left without subs for the premier episode for a whole ass week, fantranslators who had never subbed before stepped up to translate a whole episode for FREE, encoding, subbing and timing it all despite never having done so just so others could understand the episode faster than cr*nchy themselves could. even, as well, it’s made so many history nerds out of a whole bunch of people, it’s created an appreciation for nihontou and japanese history that would otherwise probably never be in their orbit because of how inaccessible it is, especially in english. even on a personal note, i started learning japanese primarily so i could understand tkrb and the history behind it better and to read jp fanart/interact with fanartists.

 no matter what, i am forever warmed by how much i love tkrb and its fanbase and im glad that tkrb is still going strong, even despite itself sometimes and i hope that moving on tkrb tries new things, and becomes better for everyone.