super secret special mission!!

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worlds slowest fanfic author tries really really hard

everyone in the notes we are all holding hands. everyone who hasnt worked on a wip in weeks or months or years, its okay. we are going slow but we are going

I feel like we need a refresher on Watsonian vs Doylist perspectives in media analysis. When you have a question about a piece of media - about a potential plot hole or error, about a dubious costuming decision, about a character suddenly acting out of character -

Meaning: if Watson says something that isn't true, one explanation is that Watson made a mistake. Another explanation is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a mistake.

Watsonian explanations are implicitly charitable. You are implicitly buying into the notion that there is a good in-world reason for what you're seeing on screen or on the page. ("The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie all the time because they're from a desert culture!")

Doylist explanations are pragmatic. You are acknowledging that the fiction is shaped by real-world forces, like the creators' personal taste, their biases, the pressures they might be under from managers or editors, or the limits of their expertise. ("The bunny girls in Final Fantasy wear lingerie because somebody thought they'd sell more units that way.")

Watsonian explanations tend to be imaginative but naive. Seeking a Watsonian explanation for a problem within a narrative is inherently pleasure-seeking: you don't want your suspension of disbelief to be broken, and you're willing to put in the leg work to prevent it. Looking for a Watsonian answer can make for a fun game! But it can quickly stray into making excuses for lazy or biased storytelling, or cynical and greedy executives.

Doylist explanations are very often accurate, but they're not much fun. They should supersede efforts to provide a Watsonian explanation where actual harm is being done: "This character is being depicted in a racist way because the creators have a racist bias.'" Or: "The lore changed because management fired all of the writers from last season because they didn't want to pay then residuals."

Doylism also runs the risk of becoming trite, when applied to lower stakes discrepancies. Yes, it's possible that this character acted strangely in this episode because this episode had a different writer, but that isn't interesting, and it terminates conversation.

I think a lot of conversations about media would go a lot more smoothly, and everyone would have a lot more fun, if people were just clearer about whether they are looking to engage in Watsonian or Doylist analysis. How many arguments could be prevented by just saying, "No, Doylist you're probably right, but it's more fun to imagine there's a Watsonian reason for this, so that's what I'm doing." Or, "From a Watsonian POV that explanation makes sense, but I'm going with the Doylist view here because the creator's intentions leave a bad taste in my mouth that I can't ignore."

Idk, just keep those terms in your pocket? And if you start to get mad at somebody for their analysis, take a second to see if what they're saying makes more sense from the other side of the Watsonian/Doylist divide.

While I do think that the Watsonian/Doylist distinction is important to keep in mind as a very basic theory-of-fiction-criticism framework thing, I think that there's a very important point missing from this discourse, a point which is often missing from this discourse. (The popular but godawful "Thermian Argument" is emblematic of this framing; it's just more condescending about it.)

Oftentimes, when there are two sides of a discourse, one offering a Watsonian explanation and one offering a Doylist explanation, the side framing their point in a Doylist way is actually incorrect. Not "correct but a stick in the mud about it" - simply wrong. They're prone to assuming that they're correct because they're using the Doylist lens, and they'll try to pattern-match the discourse to "one side is being frivolously charitable to the text, and the other is seriously analyzing it in realistic terms" because that narrative is flattering to them, but it doesn't actually mean that they're right.

If you want to know why a character did something, and Tumblr user #1 says "the text actually already explained why they did that", and provides sensible citations, and Tumblr user #2 says "they were acting out of character because the author was a moron with evil politics and hated his readers" and their case is just kind of incoherent, then Tumblr user #1 is acting as the Watsonian, and Tumblr user #2 is acting as the Doylist, but the former is certainly making a better argument. A correct Doylist explanation here would need to understand what the author even intended to convey on the Watsonian level.

Now, that said, Watsonian explanations that disregard the likelihood that the author actually intended them can certainly be lots of fun; I've spent a lot of time on them just as creative exercises. But I don't think that that means that a Watsonian lens is inherently less respectable than a Doylist one; if anything I think that the lower stakes of the Watsonian lens actually favor it. It takes a Doylist to have something banned as subversive literature.

There is always *a* Doylist explanation. This is a fsct that is objectively, self-evidently, logically true. If something is in the text, it got there *somehow*, even if the answer is "I got confused and made it up".

Unfortunately, because the Doylist framing involves statements about the real world, they have a very real truth value. And unless you literally personally know the author and/or were there, they'll often be wrong. Like, did the bunny girls wear bikinis as a ruthless sales strategy, or was it because the art team / someone in charge genuinely thought they looked better that way? Doylist speculation can be fun, and sometimes the answer is obvious ("that's a common typo"), but people often ascribe it a level of confidence that's just like... no, you don't and can't actually know that.

There's of course the broader "statements about the audience" and "statements about the culture" categories, and it's a lot easier to be right about those. Still non-trivial though: "video games cause violence" and "secular books corrupt children's minds and make them stupider" both belong to this category! No matter what, in Doylist analysis you can't just make up whatever makes sense in your head and assert it, you need some actual basis for your statements!

This is unlike Watsonian analysis, where if something makes sense in your head, it's as true as anything. Even if it doesn't match the actual text because you forgot or misunderstood something, in the imaginary world the text creates in your head, this is what is happening now. (Like the "the hobbits are woodland creatures to ME, sorry not sorry Tolkien" post that was going around a bit ago)

I feel like this is a mistake people make in literary analysis, especially those on the younger side. They get used to the "as long as it makes internal sense it's right" characteristic of in-universe statements, and apply the principle to real life statements and situations, too.

I don't want to derail this post into specifics of discourses I'm thinking of, but... this happens a lot, doesn't it?

what are you looking for?

think about your blorbos ON THE CLOCK

Nathalie when Adrien chose her as the winner of the custody battle

Hello, all!!

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Ring a ding ding its lunch time for ladynoir crumbs

Come get them

Give me time i will make a whole long text post about this scene

But in the meantime enough the ladynoir crumbs

I need to redraw this scene, SO bad. I didn't even finish my last scene re-draw. But... I need this 😂

Ever after

Okay so, I THINK the idea here is that Alya really wanted Marinette to fess up to the secret on her own terms, to tell Adrien herself without Alya forcing her hand, because Alya herself could not in good conscience lie or hide Gabriel being Monarch from Adrien. I'm not so sure that I have as much faith in Marinette being willing to tell the truth, to risk people being upset at her for justified reasons, though.

alya is potentially-friendship-ending levels of mad and marinette is experiencing extreme catholic-level guilt and adrien is over there like "yay 😘😘😋😋🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛ i love being a superhero 🫶🫶🤩🤩🥰🥰 i hope milady thinks i did a good job today 😝😝🥺🥺💕💕 can't wait to see marinette later 😍😍🎉🎉😁😁" he's such a loser i love him so much

Genuely OBSESSED with chat's new powers. I was so satisfized when he said "miraculous Chat Noir" like bro deserved it since season 1. and he can erase memories now?? That's SICK and visually it looks amazing and also a little scary

LUKAAAAA LUKA HONEY BABY YOU ARE BACK

the chat blanc parallels :((((

guys i have another

THIS EPISODE MY GOD

ok i have ONE more but its serious and its gonna take me a bit so like hold on guys i hope nobody takes the idea before me

how she looks at her catboy of infinite destruction when he gains the ability to destroy peoples memories after plunging the entire city into darkness (she’s very proud of him)

That's literally the look of pure unfiltered love btw