Fandom and Fallacies
Jun. 13th, 2022 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerMostly focuses on arguments about Persona 4, but I also mention a lot of different fandoms in the process since this kind of bad argumentation exists. The tl;dr is: an 'Objectively Correct Reading' doesn't exist, only subjective readings based on your own knowledge and life experiences, and if your English teachers said there was I'm sorry: they lied to you. There's a reason why different literary critics and literary criticism styles exist--and they can be applied to any kind of arts, from art to film to comic books to TV shows. So stop claiming you have the One Definitive Reading of the text (particularly when you're just trying to gatekeep minorities out of fandoms). It just makes MIB and English Majors laugh at you.
(and also write ridiculously long essays showing how silly you are, and possibly swear because dear lord nobody's learning anything in English classes these days giles help i need some tea i joke about the state of American education in Shadowed Suspicion but really)
I enjoyed watching X-Files Jose Chung's from Outer Space while writing this though. I recommend it. MIB Alex Trebek is great.
Warning: covers sexism, lgbtq+ phobic writing/defense, racism (briefly) and other phobic writing/defense.
Readers, I committed one of the classic blunders. I read the youtube comments, specifically on this video about homophobia and transphobia in Persona 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7eFo1n-rUI. 99% of them were nothing but Thermian arguments (defined in this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxV8gAGmbtk), that is, blindly and unthinkingly accepting and parroting the in-universe explanation “The text says Kanji isn’t gay and Naoto isn’t trans, so they’re not! You must be blind or stupid or can’t have even watched the show/played the game if you don’t get that!” (The amusing bit here is that…I’m left wondering if they actually bothered to watch the video themselves, since she mentions and explains these in-universe explanations and why they’re not good enough in the video itself. It forces me to conclude that they’ll willingly engage with some texts but not others, which isn’t a good look for their argument.) They completely ignore the point of the video and downplay the whole writing process. The Thermian argument is a logical fallacy because it tries to sidetrack from the actual argument being made here.
It’s not just about the in-universe reasoning. Texts don’t spring fully-formed from their writer’s minds like Athena. Decisions were made during the process. Sure, excuses/justifications were given in-text as to why this is this way, but the question is, why bring up being gay or trans and use those themes only to turn them into a punchline? This is a decision the writers made. (The answer, by the way, seems to be that Hashino, the producer on multiple Atlus games, is sexist [doesn’t think men and women can be friends and mainly only interact for sexual reasons], homophobic [seems to think that gay people mainly exist to be predators or punchlines] , and transphobic [see homophobic], since these are common themes that exist in multiple of his games in a way that the writers on other Sega projects [Yakuza] decided to remove from earlier versions of their games rather than continuing to include it.)
And framing goes a long way—if every time a character shows up there’s scary music and the filmed shot is darker, and literally the only difference between that character and other characters is that they are gay or bi or trans, you are consciously or unconsciously implying that the characteristics of being gay or bi or trans is scary. If you want to avoid that, you have to include a character also with that characteristic who is treated completely normally, or remove [entirely, no gay or bi or trans coding] that trait entirely from the 'scary' character.
If you don’t avoid it or even think about your decision and it shows up in multiple works, the pattern is notable, and critics are within their rights to change their opinions from ‘that was a phobic choice’ to ‘this creator might be phobic intrinsically’. Either they consciously looked at their writing decisions and went ‘yup, this transphobic or homophobic or sexist or biphobic writing decision I made has my stamp of approval’, or it’s so internalized they didn’t even notice that was a decision they made. (This is completely separate from the ‘are they a good person’ discussion, by the way; a person might be good and not have done the work necessary to re-examine and interrogate their subconscious biases society has treated as ‘normal’.)
Even if the creator is not intending it, the weight of their creative decisions (the words on the page, the framing, sound design, visuals, dialogue, etc) can all combine to have an effect—and if that effect is unintended, further editing by the creator or editors should catch that if they are at all taking their craft seriously. (Alternatively, they might need a lot more practice/rewrites to convey their meaning effectively, or their writing ability is not good enough to convey their intended meaning.)
Could Kanji have played with the idea of being gay and decided he wasn’t actually? Could Naoto have played with the idea of being trans and decided she (in this context) wasn’t actually? Sure, but a good deal more work would have to be put into it, and honestly a great deal of the harm came from not treating the subject with respect and treating the ideas as valid. Many people would be highly offended in instances where the existence of straight white men is treated like a joke, yet feel that treating the lives of people less privileged than themselves as a joke is perfectly fine. A slow, respectful exploration of the ideas that concludes that Kanji is really straight and Naoto is really a woman, but that those were individual character choices and that other people, say, gay or bi and trans people in real life, can choose completely differently and that is perfectly valid would be one thing.
That is not what happened. Kanji begging a highly uncomfortable Naoto to be dressed up in a swimsuit and be ogled by him in order to prove he’s a man is what happened (“Clear up these doubts! Make me a man!”) Instantly changing pronouns upon learning what someone was assigned at birth without Naoto’s input is what happened. Claiming that sexual affirmation surgery is not enough to surpass the barrier of the sexes is what happened. Kanji's trying to force Naoto to dress in a way that makes him feel more comfortable suggests that one is allowed to rest all of your sexuality on a single other person (even if Naoto is not trans, this does not mean that Kanji might not be attracted to other men as well and be bisexual, even if they end up in a relationship together).
This suggests that being bisexual is impossible, because if you’re attracted to a single person of the opposite gender it is completely impossible for you to be attracted to people of your same gender. This suggests that what makes someone a man is perving on women, whether or not they even agree to that (sexism). This suggests that gay or bi men are not actually men at all (Tatsuya Suou, cool motorcycle aficionado, katana-wielding badass theme song playing “Being a man means” canonically bisexual king would like to have a word, or at least a glower). This suggests that essentialism, that people are what they are born and that cannot be changed, is correct. This basically suggests that trans people do not and cannot in fact exist. This is the framing that is being criticized. Not where Atlus went with it. The very, very phobic route they took to get there. Not individual choices, but framing it as ‘this isn’t even a choice anyway because being gay or being trans or being bi are not valid choices in the first place.’
Death of the Author comes into play here. It doesn’t mean that you should entirely disregard what the author says, but simply that author intention is not the last word and does not serve as a get out of jail free card. Intent does not erase impact. Say a person decides to play a prank involving clowns on a close friend who they do not know has an extreme fear of clowns. They might’ve intended to laugh along with their friend, not at them, but that doesn’t erase the psychological harm and panic attack it caused. A similar concept comes up in psychology. If someone is standing on your foot, and you tell them, “You’re standing on my foot and it hurts; could you please stop standing on my foot,” the only correct response is to immediately stop standing on their foot. It doesn’t matter even if they have a fetish and you mutually agreed (consent!) to have you stand on their foot; if they tell you it’s hurting them and ask you to stop, you stop (consent!!). You can then apologize and try to figure out how not to let it happen again.
Telling them “You’re not crying, so you must not be in pain” or “You’re crying too much; I can’t take you seriously unless you ask real, real nicely” or “Everyone else likes it when I stand on their feet so you’re too sensitive” are all incorrect choices. (The following examples are not the only mistakes the following writers made, by the way, and not even the most glaring ones--just trying to highlight a variety of different writing issues.) JK Rowling might not have intended to endorse slavery with her depiction of house elves, but she did it. Whedon might have thought he was writing empowering stories for women, and for many it might be true, but that doesn’t erase the fact that some of his writing choices were extremely problematic (see: the entire Wonder Woman script). David Cage might not have intended to mirror real-world slavery and racism with Detroit: Become Human, but he sure managed to do that in a problematic way.
People defending these decisions are not a shield, either. People can only speak from their perspective, so Minority From Affected Group Saying They Found It Unproblematic does not override the voices saying it’s problematic (although the converse is also true). Criticism will always occur, but if there’s more than a few voices complaining and they’re all saying similar things, that’s important to take into consideration. It means that consciously or unconsciously the particular approach managed to hit a hot button in some way. This is the point where the creator apologizes for stepping on their feet and asking them what they want the creator to do to fix it (add an author’s note at the beginning apologizing and explaining what they’ve learned, issue a public statement, reprint a corrected edition, improve in the next work). The creator doesn’t have to act the way they want, but definitely doesn’t inherently deserve a second chance to potentially step on their feet or is automatically owed forgiveness, either.
On the other hand, perfection does not exist. All of your favorites are flawed—in different ways, sure, but they’re still flawed. It is possible (and probably the only ethical way) to be a fan of something while simultaneously being critical of it, whether that be just “this is problematic but I still like it” to actually looking at its flaws deeper.
The next video I watched (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb4P17-hxN0), on how Yosuke was removed last minute as a romance option, had a much friendlier comments section. However, it and another video I won’t be linking brought up other arguments that drive me up the wall. I agree that the inclusion would have made the character make a lot more sense, especially since, when it was removed so late into the game as to have voice acting sitting unused in the game files (spoiler alert: you don’t tend to record lines you don’t intend to use because shit’s expensive yo), they probably didn’t have enough time to go back and rewrite other instances with the character to make Yosuke make more sense with the new direction they were taking the character. When you start writing the character with them being bi in mind from the very beginning, then reading the character in that way is not “wrong”. Given the evidence and writing history, it makes sense.
There’s an English illiteracy here that makes me sick, and no, it’s not the fact that the people arguing cannot read. It’s that they have no clue how literary criticism works. People read things differently. This is a fact of life. People who have never experienced abuse may not pick up on subtle clues that a character is abused; people who have never experienced or seen depression may not pick up on those clues, etc. Ambiguous clues or ones unintended by the author might be read differently by these two people. This does not make either reading wrong! (It says things about how I approach texts, both about my readings and me as a person, that I really like Yosuke and Xander, both well-meaning jerks with chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome, homophobic scenes, canon heterosexual love interests, and scrapped homosexual storylines. Mostly I’m pointing it out because if I had a dime for every time that happened, I’d only have twenty cents, but it’s weird that it happened twice.) Objective (“right” or “correct”) readings of a text do not exist (see https://dailycollegian.com/2016/04/theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-criticism/ and https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/teachersatwork/why-literary-analysis-is-subjective/). If it’s a science, it’s quantum physics, where different readings can all be true at the same time.
Literary criticism and English papers work like this: the strength of argument is proportional to the number of pieces of supporting evidence. That’s it. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you address textual counterevidence and refute it. The thing is, supporting evidence can mean a number of things. Do you claim it’s only the text itself? Sure, but claiming you have the One True Reading will just get you laughed out like the Spiderman meme. (And if your English teacher did not do that—yes, it used to be a school of literary criticism thought before the amount of diversity in English majors increased and we realized that people with different points of view do in fact read things differently. You had a bad teacher. I’m sorry.) Different readings are possible with the same text, or a lot of literary critics would be utterly irrelevant, because any interpretation of the work other than the Objective One (which, as we covered already, does not exist) would be Incorrect.
What about authorial statements and supplementary documents? A lot of what we know about the world of Middle Earth comes from Tolkien’s letters, secondary texts. But if you open it up to authorial statements, you can’t then throw a tantrum when people with a different reading also use that same type of evidence (or even other types of evidence than you used, because texts are complicated things!) An example would be a rerelease of a Yakuza game. A certain crowd was defending a sidequest as “But the authors said it was a joke!” and screamed loudly when the same authors said that they decided to change the text by removing the sidequest as they didn’t want the transphobia in their work anymore, claiming that despite an interview about the very subject in which the authors said it was their choice, they were lying about actually wanting to remove the content. Either they believe the Word of Creator or they don’t (or, more likely, they only believe it when it suits them in validating their transphobia).
And, of course, it gets yet more complicated in situations with multiple Creators, such as games or series. Who do you treat as the most important voice when it comes to interpreting the text? Someone removed the Yosuke romance option from the game, but obviously other writers wrote Yosuke with that storyline in mind and thought it was a good idea, or it wouldn’t have even been an option to get removed in the first place. Which of the various Buffy writers do you listen to? Because when it came to writing characters they could be very inconsistent.
Really bad takes also exist, like claiming Tatsuya is not canonically bisexual. Whether he ends up in a heterosexual relationship is up to the player, yes, but the fact that both are legitimate options the game treats as valid state that yes, he is bi, or at the very least is straight with one exception. Along these lines, I really like that they included Eikichi as the “joke” option—considering they butt heads more than P3MC (Minato) and Junpei, the two do not have romantic chemistry, but Jun and Tatsuya do, and that option is treated as completely valid in contrast to Eikichi and Tatsuya, as a personality rather than orientation incompatibility. One of the creators working on the game even said that he believes Jun and Tatsuya is the most likely pairing (out-of-textual evidence). Again, the way the text treats the topic is extremely relevant.
I also ran into two videos on the topic that I nopetopus’d out of fairly quickly, both complaining about criticism and “headcanon”, and both showing the same lack of literacy when it comes to criticism. Specifically, they were whining about how links to modding websites were the second link after an article about mods to add the Yosuke romance back into the game. “I don’t care what people have as headcanon, but I wish they wouldn’t force that on me!” was his main take. I realized today that this is the exact same energy as “I don’t care if they’re gay in private, but I wish they wouldn’t flaunt their lifestyle in my face”. It’s, you guessed it, homophobic. I’d understand more if they were simply against all displays of PDA, but in many cases they don’t care about the many heterosexual kisses they see on screen, heterosexual routes they take in games, or heterosexual couples merely existing in their line of sight in public. It’s just when non-heterosexual choices are an option discussed where they can’t ignore it that they start throwing a fit.
There was also some element of 'stop giving the writers feedback; it might hurt their feelings' to which I say 'they absolutely shouldn't have become a writer for money then because the only place they might avoid any kind of feedback is if they were posting on a blog or obscure fanfiction website, and even then, it's not a guarantee'. These are the same people who are like, 'well, capitalism, vote with your wallet' but also 'YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO WRITE REVIEWS TO WARN PEOPLE WHO MIGHT AGREE WITH YOU AND WANT TO AVOID THE SAME PROBLEMS, THAT'S AGAINST THE RULES ISN'T IT?!?' If they're a good writer, they'd want to know when they write something that helps their readers and when it hurts them. They'd want to improve their writing. If they're a bad writer, well. They've never made it through a writing workshop in their life. Can it be hard sometimes? Sure. Is it necessary? Absolutely. If you want to improve. If you want to ever have your writing get any better. If you're comfortable being praised by such thin-skinned fans who employ themselves as attack dogs and insulating yourself from all other feedback, then you're a bad writer.
To this I say, “Your lack of literary criticism literacy makes me shudder, and I wouldn’t flaunt your ignorance by making youtube videos about it. You have your interpretation, and you somehow brazenly declare that the way you see things is objective truth, when time and time again actual literary critics have proven that objective truth does not in fact exist. Using the word ‘headcanon’ is an intended way of dismissing readings other than your own, but the ‘canon’ you believe to exist is, in fact, only the planet Venus.” Seriously, canon is a lot smaller than these people would like to claim. Canon is the words on the page. The dialogue in a script. The actors chosen to play parts, the directing choices. Specific events that happen, including canon ‘ships’. The instant you start talking about what any of it means, that’s an interpretation, or a ‘headcanon’, so ‘all of my favorite characters are cishet because otherwise I can’t relate to them’ is also an interpretation. Perhaps a more common interpretation, but an interpretation nonetheless. Back it up with evidence if you want, but you do need evidence or proof for such statements, just as I do. Or be prepared for Men in Black to scoff at you. Your choice.
(and also write ridiculously long essays showing how silly you are, and possibly swear because dear lord nobody's learning anything in English classes these days giles help i need some tea i joke about the state of American education in Shadowed Suspicion but really)
I enjoyed watching X-Files Jose Chung's from Outer Space while writing this though. I recommend it. MIB Alex Trebek is great.
Warning: covers sexism, lgbtq+ phobic writing/defense, racism (briefly) and other phobic writing/defense.
Readers, I committed one of the classic blunders. I read the youtube comments, specifically on this video about homophobia and transphobia in Persona 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7eFo1n-rUI. 99% of them were nothing but Thermian arguments (defined in this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxV8gAGmbtk), that is, blindly and unthinkingly accepting and parroting the in-universe explanation “The text says Kanji isn’t gay and Naoto isn’t trans, so they’re not! You must be blind or stupid or can’t have even watched the show/played the game if you don’t get that!” (The amusing bit here is that…I’m left wondering if they actually bothered to watch the video themselves, since she mentions and explains these in-universe explanations and why they’re not good enough in the video itself. It forces me to conclude that they’ll willingly engage with some texts but not others, which isn’t a good look for their argument.) They completely ignore the point of the video and downplay the whole writing process. The Thermian argument is a logical fallacy because it tries to sidetrack from the actual argument being made here.
It’s not just about the in-universe reasoning. Texts don’t spring fully-formed from their writer’s minds like Athena. Decisions were made during the process. Sure, excuses/justifications were given in-text as to why this is this way, but the question is, why bring up being gay or trans and use those themes only to turn them into a punchline? This is a decision the writers made. (The answer, by the way, seems to be that Hashino, the producer on multiple Atlus games, is sexist [doesn’t think men and women can be friends and mainly only interact for sexual reasons], homophobic [seems to think that gay people mainly exist to be predators or punchlines] , and transphobic [see homophobic], since these are common themes that exist in multiple of his games in a way that the writers on other Sega projects [Yakuza] decided to remove from earlier versions of their games rather than continuing to include it.)
And framing goes a long way—if every time a character shows up there’s scary music and the filmed shot is darker, and literally the only difference between that character and other characters is that they are gay or bi or trans, you are consciously or unconsciously implying that the characteristics of being gay or bi or trans is scary. If you want to avoid that, you have to include a character also with that characteristic who is treated completely normally, or remove [entirely, no gay or bi or trans coding] that trait entirely from the 'scary' character.
If you don’t avoid it or even think about your decision and it shows up in multiple works, the pattern is notable, and critics are within their rights to change their opinions from ‘that was a phobic choice’ to ‘this creator might be phobic intrinsically’. Either they consciously looked at their writing decisions and went ‘yup, this transphobic or homophobic or sexist or biphobic writing decision I made has my stamp of approval’, or it’s so internalized they didn’t even notice that was a decision they made. (This is completely separate from the ‘are they a good person’ discussion, by the way; a person might be good and not have done the work necessary to re-examine and interrogate their subconscious biases society has treated as ‘normal’.)
Even if the creator is not intending it, the weight of their creative decisions (the words on the page, the framing, sound design, visuals, dialogue, etc) can all combine to have an effect—and if that effect is unintended, further editing by the creator or editors should catch that if they are at all taking their craft seriously. (Alternatively, they might need a lot more practice/rewrites to convey their meaning effectively, or their writing ability is not good enough to convey their intended meaning.)
Could Kanji have played with the idea of being gay and decided he wasn’t actually? Could Naoto have played with the idea of being trans and decided she (in this context) wasn’t actually? Sure, but a good deal more work would have to be put into it, and honestly a great deal of the harm came from not treating the subject with respect and treating the ideas as valid. Many people would be highly offended in instances where the existence of straight white men is treated like a joke, yet feel that treating the lives of people less privileged than themselves as a joke is perfectly fine. A slow, respectful exploration of the ideas that concludes that Kanji is really straight and Naoto is really a woman, but that those were individual character choices and that other people, say, gay or bi and trans people in real life, can choose completely differently and that is perfectly valid would be one thing.
That is not what happened. Kanji begging a highly uncomfortable Naoto to be dressed up in a swimsuit and be ogled by him in order to prove he’s a man is what happened (“Clear up these doubts! Make me a man!”) Instantly changing pronouns upon learning what someone was assigned at birth without Naoto’s input is what happened. Claiming that sexual affirmation surgery is not enough to surpass the barrier of the sexes is what happened. Kanji's trying to force Naoto to dress in a way that makes him feel more comfortable suggests that one is allowed to rest all of your sexuality on a single other person (even if Naoto is not trans, this does not mean that Kanji might not be attracted to other men as well and be bisexual, even if they end up in a relationship together).
This suggests that being bisexual is impossible, because if you’re attracted to a single person of the opposite gender it is completely impossible for you to be attracted to people of your same gender. This suggests that what makes someone a man is perving on women, whether or not they even agree to that (sexism). This suggests that gay or bi men are not actually men at all (Tatsuya Suou, cool motorcycle aficionado, katana-wielding badass theme song playing “Being a man means” canonically bisexual king would like to have a word, or at least a glower). This suggests that essentialism, that people are what they are born and that cannot be changed, is correct. This basically suggests that trans people do not and cannot in fact exist. This is the framing that is being criticized. Not where Atlus went with it. The very, very phobic route they took to get there. Not individual choices, but framing it as ‘this isn’t even a choice anyway because being gay or being trans or being bi are not valid choices in the first place.’
Death of the Author comes into play here. It doesn’t mean that you should entirely disregard what the author says, but simply that author intention is not the last word and does not serve as a get out of jail free card. Intent does not erase impact. Say a person decides to play a prank involving clowns on a close friend who they do not know has an extreme fear of clowns. They might’ve intended to laugh along with their friend, not at them, but that doesn’t erase the psychological harm and panic attack it caused. A similar concept comes up in psychology. If someone is standing on your foot, and you tell them, “You’re standing on my foot and it hurts; could you please stop standing on my foot,” the only correct response is to immediately stop standing on their foot. It doesn’t matter even if they have a fetish and you mutually agreed (consent!) to have you stand on their foot; if they tell you it’s hurting them and ask you to stop, you stop (consent!!). You can then apologize and try to figure out how not to let it happen again.
Telling them “You’re not crying, so you must not be in pain” or “You’re crying too much; I can’t take you seriously unless you ask real, real nicely” or “Everyone else likes it when I stand on their feet so you’re too sensitive” are all incorrect choices. (The following examples are not the only mistakes the following writers made, by the way, and not even the most glaring ones--just trying to highlight a variety of different writing issues.) JK Rowling might not have intended to endorse slavery with her depiction of house elves, but she did it. Whedon might have thought he was writing empowering stories for women, and for many it might be true, but that doesn’t erase the fact that some of his writing choices were extremely problematic (see: the entire Wonder Woman script). David Cage might not have intended to mirror real-world slavery and racism with Detroit: Become Human, but he sure managed to do that in a problematic way.
People defending these decisions are not a shield, either. People can only speak from their perspective, so Minority From Affected Group Saying They Found It Unproblematic does not override the voices saying it’s problematic (although the converse is also true). Criticism will always occur, but if there’s more than a few voices complaining and they’re all saying similar things, that’s important to take into consideration. It means that consciously or unconsciously the particular approach managed to hit a hot button in some way. This is the point where the creator apologizes for stepping on their feet and asking them what they want the creator to do to fix it (add an author’s note at the beginning apologizing and explaining what they’ve learned, issue a public statement, reprint a corrected edition, improve in the next work). The creator doesn’t have to act the way they want, but definitely doesn’t inherently deserve a second chance to potentially step on their feet or is automatically owed forgiveness, either.
On the other hand, perfection does not exist. All of your favorites are flawed—in different ways, sure, but they’re still flawed. It is possible (and probably the only ethical way) to be a fan of something while simultaneously being critical of it, whether that be just “this is problematic but I still like it” to actually looking at its flaws deeper.
The next video I watched (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb4P17-hxN0), on how Yosuke was removed last minute as a romance option, had a much friendlier comments section. However, it and another video I won’t be linking brought up other arguments that drive me up the wall. I agree that the inclusion would have made the character make a lot more sense, especially since, when it was removed so late into the game as to have voice acting sitting unused in the game files (spoiler alert: you don’t tend to record lines you don’t intend to use because shit’s expensive yo), they probably didn’t have enough time to go back and rewrite other instances with the character to make Yosuke make more sense with the new direction they were taking the character. When you start writing the character with them being bi in mind from the very beginning, then reading the character in that way is not “wrong”. Given the evidence and writing history, it makes sense.
There’s an English illiteracy here that makes me sick, and no, it’s not the fact that the people arguing cannot read. It’s that they have no clue how literary criticism works. People read things differently. This is a fact of life. People who have never experienced abuse may not pick up on subtle clues that a character is abused; people who have never experienced or seen depression may not pick up on those clues, etc. Ambiguous clues or ones unintended by the author might be read differently by these two people. This does not make either reading wrong! (It says things about how I approach texts, both about my readings and me as a person, that I really like Yosuke and Xander, both well-meaning jerks with chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome, homophobic scenes, canon heterosexual love interests, and scrapped homosexual storylines. Mostly I’m pointing it out because if I had a dime for every time that happened, I’d only have twenty cents, but it’s weird that it happened twice.) Objective (“right” or “correct”) readings of a text do not exist (see https://dailycollegian.com/2016/04/theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-criticism/ and https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/teachersatwork/why-literary-analysis-is-subjective/). If it’s a science, it’s quantum physics, where different readings can all be true at the same time.
Literary criticism and English papers work like this: the strength of argument is proportional to the number of pieces of supporting evidence. That’s it. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you address textual counterevidence and refute it. The thing is, supporting evidence can mean a number of things. Do you claim it’s only the text itself? Sure, but claiming you have the One True Reading will just get you laughed out like the Spiderman meme. (And if your English teacher did not do that—yes, it used to be a school of literary criticism thought before the amount of diversity in English majors increased and we realized that people with different points of view do in fact read things differently. You had a bad teacher. I’m sorry.) Different readings are possible with the same text, or a lot of literary critics would be utterly irrelevant, because any interpretation of the work other than the Objective One (which, as we covered already, does not exist) would be Incorrect.
What about authorial statements and supplementary documents? A lot of what we know about the world of Middle Earth comes from Tolkien’s letters, secondary texts. But if you open it up to authorial statements, you can’t then throw a tantrum when people with a different reading also use that same type of evidence (or even other types of evidence than you used, because texts are complicated things!) An example would be a rerelease of a Yakuza game. A certain crowd was defending a sidequest as “But the authors said it was a joke!” and screamed loudly when the same authors said that they decided to change the text by removing the sidequest as they didn’t want the transphobia in their work anymore, claiming that despite an interview about the very subject in which the authors said it was their choice, they were lying about actually wanting to remove the content. Either they believe the Word of Creator or they don’t (or, more likely, they only believe it when it suits them in validating their transphobia).
And, of course, it gets yet more complicated in situations with multiple Creators, such as games or series. Who do you treat as the most important voice when it comes to interpreting the text? Someone removed the Yosuke romance option from the game, but obviously other writers wrote Yosuke with that storyline in mind and thought it was a good idea, or it wouldn’t have even been an option to get removed in the first place. Which of the various Buffy writers do you listen to? Because when it came to writing characters they could be very inconsistent.
Really bad takes also exist, like claiming Tatsuya is not canonically bisexual. Whether he ends up in a heterosexual relationship is up to the player, yes, but the fact that both are legitimate options the game treats as valid state that yes, he is bi, or at the very least is straight with one exception. Along these lines, I really like that they included Eikichi as the “joke” option—considering they butt heads more than P3MC (Minato) and Junpei, the two do not have romantic chemistry, but Jun and Tatsuya do, and that option is treated as completely valid in contrast to Eikichi and Tatsuya, as a personality rather than orientation incompatibility. One of the creators working on the game even said that he believes Jun and Tatsuya is the most likely pairing (out-of-textual evidence). Again, the way the text treats the topic is extremely relevant.
I also ran into two videos on the topic that I nopetopus’d out of fairly quickly, both complaining about criticism and “headcanon”, and both showing the same lack of literacy when it comes to criticism. Specifically, they were whining about how links to modding websites were the second link after an article about mods to add the Yosuke romance back into the game. “I don’t care what people have as headcanon, but I wish they wouldn’t force that on me!” was his main take. I realized today that this is the exact same energy as “I don’t care if they’re gay in private, but I wish they wouldn’t flaunt their lifestyle in my face”. It’s, you guessed it, homophobic. I’d understand more if they were simply against all displays of PDA, but in many cases they don’t care about the many heterosexual kisses they see on screen, heterosexual routes they take in games, or heterosexual couples merely existing in their line of sight in public. It’s just when non-heterosexual choices are an option discussed where they can’t ignore it that they start throwing a fit.
There was also some element of 'stop giving the writers feedback; it might hurt their feelings' to which I say 'they absolutely shouldn't have become a writer for money then because the only place they might avoid any kind of feedback is if they were posting on a blog or obscure fanfiction website, and even then, it's not a guarantee'. These are the same people who are like, 'well, capitalism, vote with your wallet' but also 'YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO WRITE REVIEWS TO WARN PEOPLE WHO MIGHT AGREE WITH YOU AND WANT TO AVOID THE SAME PROBLEMS, THAT'S AGAINST THE RULES ISN'T IT?!?' If they're a good writer, they'd want to know when they write something that helps their readers and when it hurts them. They'd want to improve their writing. If they're a bad writer, well. They've never made it through a writing workshop in their life. Can it be hard sometimes? Sure. Is it necessary? Absolutely. If you want to improve. If you want to ever have your writing get any better. If you're comfortable being praised by such thin-skinned fans who employ themselves as attack dogs and insulating yourself from all other feedback, then you're a bad writer.
To this I say, “Your lack of literary criticism literacy makes me shudder, and I wouldn’t flaunt your ignorance by making youtube videos about it. You have your interpretation, and you somehow brazenly declare that the way you see things is objective truth, when time and time again actual literary critics have proven that objective truth does not in fact exist. Using the word ‘headcanon’ is an intended way of dismissing readings other than your own, but the ‘canon’ you believe to exist is, in fact, only the planet Venus.” Seriously, canon is a lot smaller than these people would like to claim. Canon is the words on the page. The dialogue in a script. The actors chosen to play parts, the directing choices. Specific events that happen, including canon ‘ships’. The instant you start talking about what any of it means, that’s an interpretation, or a ‘headcanon’, so ‘all of my favorite characters are cishet because otherwise I can’t relate to them’ is also an interpretation. Perhaps a more common interpretation, but an interpretation nonetheless. Back it up with evidence if you want, but you do need evidence or proof for such statements, just as I do. Or be prepared for Men in Black to scoff at you. Your choice.
