#metanarratives

[bellshazes]

this close to writing myself into the argument that AFK farms constitute virtual reality in the sense that your non-game actions and time are now mediated by the game world. like, unironically.

#peter posts #kind of thinking that despite the physical emphasis of keogh's phenomenology he's very careful to indicate sight/sound #this is actually probably a statement about idle games as well. #i just think the idea of a cybernetic circuit without direct interface is worth turning over #mc meta #metanarratives

[dissolving-mansion]

I love Faulkner. He was destined to be a villain from his very conception. He dodged the arrow of fate in the season 1 finale because his fans loved him *so much* but it caught up to him in the end. He is doomed by the narrative but diving head first into his own tragedy because the alternative is not something he can bear. He has to be special and important even if being the chosen one is a death sentence.

#brother faulkner #metanarratives #the silt verses #tsv #doomed by the narrative

[qpjianghu]

My galaxy brained MLC meta-narrative take of the day comes from my rewatch of ep 39, when Li Lianhua smiles sadly and says "the Wangchuan (styx) flower is indeed a miracle cure," because what if it actually doesn't exist. Which is why he has that extra sad look in his eye whenever someone (Fang Duobing or Di Feisheng) mentions it, or bestows it upon him. He knows it's not real. It is a "miracle" cure in the same way he is a "miracle" doctor. Miracles don't exist. The Wangchuan flower doesn't exist. It is a literalized MacGuffin manifested by the meta-narrative to force Li Lianhua towards his Normative Happy Ending.

Because it makes no sense. Whenever it appears in the show, it appears sooo conveniently. We know Di Feisheng has people searching for it the whole time, but we never see how / where they found it. We see Shan Gudao emerge with it, but we don't know how either. And in 38, the drawer just happens to pop open during Di Feisheng's fight, revealing the flower... just in the nick of time. And then, later, Di Feisheng literally just walks over out of nowhere to put the box on the table where Li Lianhua and Fang Duobing are drinking outside Lotus Tower.

And we don't even see eventually Li Lianhua deliver it to the Emperor. All of that happens off-screen, which is totally wack. Unless... it never. actually. existed. (Btw, saving the emperor to preserve the status quo of his hierarchical / hegemonic rule.....I'm just saying!!! Classic normative narrative!!)

Li Lianhua knows this. And giving it away is his one final (succussful) attempt to break away from the narrative and forge his own life (...and death), and story, off the page.

#sorry I'm in a weird mood today #this is totally rabid and insane I know #mlc meta #metanarratives #li lianhua

[myrskytuuli]

I stumbled upon one of those characters react to their own books/movies/series fics again, and was lead on journey of contemplation about metanarratives so let me guide you to the same journey.

So, I’m genuinely fascinated with the concept, even if (as anyone who has ever bit the bullet and gonw to read these fics knows) they are almost all garbage. I think I can remember one or two fics in my history of fic reading that did anything interesting with the premise and the other was a fic that circulated as a torrentable pdf and nothing else, but I digress. Usually these stories start with the avatar author being some kind of meta-god and kidnapping the characters to show them their future and I always think what a huge shame it is that the most interesting part of the idea is never utilised, which is that the characters could find out about a parallel universe where their world is fictional and get to experience the media about them as...you know...media. In a way that they could complain about bad directors, why somebody gets the bad-ass theme song and others don’t, whether the bad cgi resembles the real thing at all or why the author decided to include this thing in the book but not something else. Just...the media they are interacting with being actual media that has been created in our world to tell the story of those characters, sometimes more or less succesfully.

But. Then I got hit with another thought that derailed me completely, and made me fell down a unhinged idea rabbit hole. If for example star wars characters found our parallel universe where they are fictional, what if this world was fictional in the star wars universe?

Just, you know. Everyone complaining how convoluted the WW1 prequel series was compared to the original WW2 series. Half of the runtime is spent on politics, almost all the action happens in one trench, and even the director doesn’t seem to understand why the war even started. Compared to the clear-cut heroes and villains of the WW2 series, it’s no wonder the original fans were frustrated. Even though the World War series has always been very anti-war and the original series wasn’t as simplistic as everyone makes it out to be, the allies were shown stooping to worse and worse war-crimes near the end, and that was the point, to show that there can be no good sides in war, Padmé rants angrily after seeing some dudebros miss the entire point of the series on message boards again.

Obi-Wan thinks the franchise has its moments, but on the whole relies way too much on the shock value of mass slaughter and sensless deaths. Ahsoka is always trying to rope people into reading the tie-in novel series the Cold War, which actually deviates from the open battlefield format and tries to engage with the loose plot threads and the implications that the original WW2 series and especially the divisive decision of pulling out deus ex nuclear weapons at the last minute left behind.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth about how uninclusive the series is, with only human characters, but it has also been pointed out that there is a valid metaphor being made about how irrational speciesim is, because even in a world that human-supremacists are always harping about, their utopia of a world with only humans existing, people would find other arbitary ways to be prejudiced against each other.

On the whole, there’s a shiton of complicated lore about how all these nations were formed and some of the ideas are really good and some really stupid, but what everybody agrees is that when the galaxy+ bought the franchise and started churning out soulless mini-series about the future of the World Wars universe, nobody was impressed. The Cold War novels at least tried to tell a story about grey morals and paranoia, the New Millenium sequels are just stupid. Suddenly people just want to be nazis? again? Every villain is simply the dumbest character you’ve ever met? Most of the conflicts rely on the leaders making the dumbest decisions possible? There’s plague and environmental catastrophies and new nazis? At the same time? What a cash-grab.

#I don't even know what to tag this #star wars #metanarratives #fanfiction

[hadesoftheladies]

A metanarrative is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a master idea, or an overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives meaning to their experiences.

The patriarchal metanarrative is one of the most powerful and ancient of all. It pervades entertainment, art, education, science, religion, and government.

And these are some of its core doctrines:

"Man is default. All things came from man, or the male."

"Dominance is the highest virtue, because it is the perfection of man. A man's perfection is found in his supremacy."

"Man must be allowed to participate and be aided in the pursuit of his perfection. His purpose, which is supremacy (supremacy being legacy) is his right."

"Because it is man's right to pursue his supremacy in a quest for his dignity (and thus his humanity in the eyes of society) as a man, an authoritative status can only be reserved for men."

"Leadership, kingship, authority and the respect afforded these stations is the territory of men. It cannot be the territory of women because this infringes on the man's identity and his right to pursue his purpose. "

"Additionally, because of man's physical strength, his authority and supremacy is the natural role for him. Strength is the confirmation that it is his purpose to dominate, for that is its use. That is the sacred natural order."

"Women's role is submission, obedience, and servility because that is their natural role. That is the sacred natural order."

"Rejecting/resisting the natural order is punishable by death."

And now look at the world, recall the news, last week's story. Who was killed and for what reason? The daughter who refused to be married? Who refused her brother's authority over her body? The woman who wouldn't cover her hair? The girls caught kissing at a mall? The boy who held hands with another boy? The girl who in an act of desperation ended the pregnancy her rapist started? The mother who didn't come to "automatically love" her child? Who resents motherhood? What's being banned and why? Who is being publicly ostracized and humiliated and why? Who is being mocked?

Who and what is your community policing? Girl's clothes? Boys with makeup? What justifies bullying in your community? Online or offline. Who does your community love to humiliate? "Why are girls being abused for speaking up about their suffering? Why are boys severely bullied for refusing to affirm themselves by sadistically humiliating others? Why are boys and girls who don't want to be part of it "corrected"? Whether violently or socially?

Where is the resistance to different human rights crises coming from? And WHY? What benign things are often villainized?

There is a reason these kinds of individuals are policed so severely, whether in church, mosque, school, work . . . your fathers and mothers know that resisting the "natural order" can get you killed, socially and economically castrated, and could be trying to stop that from happening. That, or they believe you deserve that punishment for resisting because it is the sacred "natural order" and resisting it is punishable by death.

The good news is this metanarrative has never before come under this much intense scrutiny and criticism. The bad news is that many more people whose identities and beliefs are built on the foundation of this metanarrative will react even more viciously and cruelly about it before that metanarrative dies. it is so deeply embedded in cultures across the world that many people, unfortunately, will defend it, even if it means killing people they claimed to love.

#homophobia #misogyny #patriarchy #metanarratives #feminism #radical feminism #radblr

[magicfeatherspecialist]

Welp I have inhaled all the webcomic chapters available of Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint. The only thing stopping me from kirby-eating the novel as well is the fact that a) my eyes hurt I have been reading for hours and b) the novel is...so long apparently

#orv #this is really a story for me! #metanarratives #protagonist who's just some guy who has something wrong with him #cunning and kindness working together instead of cancelling each other out

[181patheticpaperclips]

The adventures of postmodern Paul, again.

#my art #art #comic art #postmodernism #postmodern paul #metanarratives #warning: books being defaced #my post

[inamindfarfaraway]

I saw Hadestown recently and... the metanarrative aspects didn't need to go that hard. The entire cyclical structure with the story being acknowledged as an "old tale from way back when" that they tell again and again despite knowing the tragic ending, which is explored as precious proof of the enduring ability to hope? Orpheus and Eurydice falling in love so fast because they feel that they already know each other, they always have, and we know they're right? Hermes fluidly switching between character who emotionally invests in the doomed lovers and omniscient narrator who knows they're doomed, and the revelation in "Road to Hell (Reprise)" that he's genuinely been both from the beginning? The final song, a requiem for the living by the dead, with the cast out of character after the curtain call? When Orpheus toasts to "the world we dream about" but then also "the one we live in now" and everyone on stage looks straight at the audience for a moment of absolutely chilling silence? I was not prepared and I'm not okay.

#metanarrative my beloved #playing with the fourth wall my beloved #using live theatre to do so since it's the best medium for it my beloved #hadestown

[supernaturalsidepiece]

Credit to: @sodiumfreak @breha @stepdaddean @sundryvillains @autisticandroids @omniscientoranges

Metanatural part eight of ?

#supernatural #spn #destiel #deancas #casdean #dean winchester #castiel #sam winchester #supernatural meta #metanarrative #metanatural #mine #web weaving #spn meta

[lime-bloods]

a revelation that can easily fly under one's nose is that Jade's Grandpa's expedition to the Medium actually happened contemporaneously with the events of Homestuck's first four acts; Jake's mysterious appearance on the Land of Wind and Shade is the very same expedition on which he took one of Typheus' minions as a trophy.

so when Jade observes that her Grandpa got his fourth wall "years ago", what that actually means is that he'll pilfer it from a bureaucrat's office sometime today; and if we're lucky, we might even be able to spot the moment he gets his hands on it.

and as it happens, at the actual scene of the crime, the given time frame is a much cagier "some time ago." so when was it? when did Jake get the opportunity to pop over to Derse and take the fourth wall, so to speak?

the answer is literally two pages earlier when Andrew Hussie makes his first appearance as a character in his own webcomic. the fourth wall is stolen from Noir's office between panels, at the exact moment the fourth wall officially disappears from Homestuck the comic.

#homestuck #metanarrative #jack noir #jake

[bellshazes]

my first two jobs ever, in order, were "board game teacher" and "university library assistant," so tho I've never formally studied games (I have been dropping out of college on and off since 2015, and was a freshman in 2012 lmao) I've been casually exposed to games and the people who make and play them in a professional context, as well as having the research skills to help close the gaps. i actually kind of hate playing board games but i loved GM-ing the coop arkham horror and watching my players, which i did for seven years straight.

my current fixation is the result of several years' fucking around on YT watching all kinds of game content, from LPs to specific game dissection to video essayists. jacob geller and folding ideas are kind of gold standards, but this week I've been really enjoying errant signals in particular. Sometimes I'm introduced to concepts this way - ludonarrative dissonance, ergodic literature, the magic circle, etc. that, and getting recommendations from friends or accidentally stumbling into game studies via other research (such as the paper i wrote a few years ago on theater-as-games in prison contexts). most of it though is having thoughts and opinions on things and letting it percolate until i am dangerous enough to find someone who's already explained a concept better than I could, and then running with that. find something that cites its sources, and then chase the ones that seem interesting.

my syllabus post is very much not a reclist, though i do in varying ways recommend everything on that list and it might be of use. here's some stuff I think would be great starting points:

Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals, Salen and Zimmerman. This book is an excellent resource, as it introduces a wide variety of scholars who you can dive into as it is relevant to your interests as well as providing tons of useful frameworks and vocabulary to go hunting. It's an easy read with concise bullet-point summaries after each chapter, and the PDF is hyperlinked for easy navigation. I might have found this via Wikipedia, honestly.

A Play of Bodies: A Phenomenology of Video Game Experience, Keogh. What I'm currently liveblogging - it is firmly a literary/philosophical work, rather than by/for designers, and correspondingly it's a little more difficult without at least passing familiarity with cyborg theory or any brand or offshoot of post-modernism, but still fairly digestible and a great read so far.

My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, Nardi. Found this during my theater-and-games paper, and MMO anthropology is not really my thing, but it's a nice complement to the other books as an explicitly player-theorist perspective. Also provides a more approachable introduction to a variety of theorists and sources. (Open access on JSTOR!)

Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles. I'm biased because I discovered this book by accidentally attending an author event at my local museum, and the games portion is incidental, but if you can find it I think this analysis of the relationship between depictions of violence and violence itself is worth your time. Memorable re: games for its discussion of Press F To Pay Respects.

here are some videos which I offer as examples of channels you might enjoy diving into, looking for additional jumping-off points:

Playing as Anyone in Watch Dogs Legion, Errant Signal. I really appreciate Errant Signal's thoughtful, personal approach to analysis and especially his highlighting of buried gems in his Blips series as well as his non-self-deprecating reevaluation of some of his older analyses over his decade plus career making videos.

Controllers Control Everything, Game Makers Toolkit. Discovered via the Boss Keys series highlighting the souls games, and although I think his channel is (increasingly) geared toward devs, these are well-constructed, thoughtful videos about many aspects of game design. Even when I don't personally get what makes him enjoy Zelda dungeons in that specific way (I'm an outlier), I appreciate his analysis.

Mega Microvideos 2, Matthewmatosis. Perhaps better known for his extremely long-form essays, I love Matthewmatosis' series of microessays framed like Wario Ware minigames. They are brief but don't pull punches, and the format is uniquely delightful. (See also this microessay mixtape.)

Making Sense of Catherine Full Body, SuperButterBuns. She doesn't do much essay content, I guess, but I she loves Catherine and the Persona series, and this dissection of Catherine Full Body is an absolute treat.

Jon Bois. Okay, mostly not about games, but like - come on. 17776 and Breaking Madden, alongside everything else he's ever done, fit because I feel like they do. If nothing else, I think Pretty Good and his general use of Google Earth as a medium for storytelling have a lot of utility in talking about digital media. He's good for the soul.

The Future of Writing About Games, Jacob Geller. One of the gold standards for a reason - and especially if you're looking for further solid recommendations for other writing/creating about games. This video in particular discusses & links to some really great pieces, but his Big List of Other People's Video Essays is also a great way to spend the next month of your life. (You might notice some crossover between this list and his, only some of which is coincidental.)

if i have any conclusion, it's that my current fixation on digital literalism is me finally finding an outlet/academic match-up with a fascination i developed in 2015 when studying gonzo lit. i think the utility of academia and the long history of scholarship on a given topic, as a non-academic, is to help you express ideas or reinterpret beliefs or experiences you've had to others without having to reinvent the wheel. i always become most energized when i stop worrying about knowing all the bg and chase whatever is useful and affirming or enlightening to me. and you can get pretty far if you think about why you like what you do, and just - enthusiastically also consume non-academic stuff. maybe this is a note more for myself! but thank you for the opportunity to monologue.

#peter answers #metanarratives #rules of play #masterpost #i almost talked abt some Classics like huizinga & juul & piaget etc. but frankly. if you decide you want to read those you'll find citation #when someone inevitably (& frequently) references them & you can chase them if you like. i've read piaget it's not relevant MOST of the tim #and. man i do love monologuing but also!!! i think i could stand to be more plan language - i want to. #learning always happens in dialogue for me. even if it's ask-and-answer. so i'm always v grateful when people indulge me. #ANYWYA sorry i posted this and immediately privated it bc i meant to draft it during work yesterday. #long post

[mister13eyond]

Fans of Goncharov i am begging you to watch the Navidson Record next

#goncharov #navidson record #filmblr #filmbro #film recs #auteur films that deal with the most insane metanarrative psychosexual imagery you can imagine? please #also they both have way too few fans

[doomed-era]

thinking about the (probably) unintentional symbolism of the master sword's state often reflecting link's in the botw trilogy, swords being frequently described as an extension of yourself in popular media, the master sword as an extension of link and link an extension of it. he really is a living weapon if you think about it too hard

#botw #the legend of zelda #breath of the wild #i think about this WAY too much for my own good #botw link always wins the link most dehumanized by the narrative award #the 2d links dont have a lot of character yeah but at least they werent treated like a tool #ww/oot/tp/ss obviously toy with this idea and go 'hey this is actually kind of bad?' but botw is like 'lol' #'we're going to briefly criticize our own metanarrative and then actively say that the people suffering from it were actually in the wrong' #i say this as someone is has been obsessed with botw for the past...shit. like since it came out #my hyperfixation just causes me to criticize the media i like more because i literally eat it #and yet: we stay silly

[leletha-jann]

Favorite Footnotes of Girl Genius: An Appreciation (3/?)

The Professors Have Entered the Chat, Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg, page 141

Authorial voice of the self-insert characters who are writing the book you are reading, who can't resist commenting on their own presence in this story. We're several layers deep into the conceit and dropping. Love it.

#girl genius #favorite footnotes #girl genius novels #i love footnotes come along for the journey #metanarrative footnotes #shilling for books that don't exist and we can't buy #because the in-world characters would do it

[gallusrostromegalus]

Ehehe, I see that Josuke Araki has made his way into your script :P

Are there any other JoJo's floating around in Soul Society and beyond?

So I like to populate the background characters of my fic with characters from another series as just a fun reference, but I feel like some people are reading into it a little to much. It's like- well, there's a watsonian perspective on it and a doylist one and a sort of meta-watsonian one.

From the watsonian/in-narrative perspective? You know that line from that Stucky fic everyone loves about "we deserve a soft epilogue?" I like to imagine AUs for main characters where they still live in an animeverse, but are free from the burden of being The Main Character. Usuke Urameshi lives in Karakura town, but he was never The Spirit Detective. He's just some former punk with mild psychic abilities who runs the ramen shop Ichigo goes to sometimes. Josuke is just some guy that has enough power to be a shinigami, but he's just like, rank and file. You see him in crowd shots. They're alternate universe versions of their full powered, main character selves and probably happier than those versions.

From a doylist perspective, it's a fun game of reference tag to play with the reader. A sort of where's Waldo of random characters from related series. Sort of like putting Samuel L Jackson in a bit part in your movie and giving him a purple prop to fiddle with. He's not playing Mace Windu, but for sharp-eyed nerds, he is making a star wars reference. Sometimes it's just for fun, sometimes is a way to lay on some really subtle thematic context. Like overlaying a 8% opacity layer of yellow on a digital piece to give the impression of late afternoon. Nothing explicit. Nothing relevant to the plot. Just a bit of seasoning.

From a meta-watsonian perspective, a lot of how I write fic was influenced by the old Kids WB bumps where the voice actors would play their characters *as though they were actors hanging out on the warner studios lot* Batman was still Batman, but he was also a guy playing Batman on TV. Yugi moto still had the cosmic powers of the millennium puzzle but also complained about how much time he had to spend in hair and makeup. So when you see a character from another series in my fic, they're an alternate universe version of themselves that is Not Relevant To The Plot, and on another level they're like an actor famous on another show, coming in to do a bit part on their friend's show for funsies.

...but mostly I do it so I don't have to make up names for OCs I'm only using for four seconds.

To actually answer your question: Yuzu is a HUGE fan of this educational YouTube channel run by Marine Biologist Jotaro Kujo. He's the only guy who gives echinoderms their due. She shows Ukitake and Unohana and they like him a lot too. Unohana writes to him to put him in touch with Hanataro and the two put together a major survey of venomous marine life with potential medical applications. Ukitake just likes fish :).

#AEIWAM #An Elephant Is Warm And Mushy #bleach #bleach fanfic #metanarrative #the thing to remember is that i don't do intergated crossovers #but sometimes friends will do a bit on thier friend's show

[carlyraejepsans]

for real WHERE does the idea that [utdr humans] are nongendered so that "you can project on them" come from. their literal character arcs are about NOT being a blank slate to be filled in by the audience

i think i understand the assumption on some level for undertale, because there is a very intentional effort to make you identify with the "player character" in order to make your choices feel like your own (the beating heart of undertale's metanarrative lies in giving you an alternative path to violence against its enemies after all, and whether you're still willing to persue it for your own selfish reasons. YOUR agency is crucial).

of course, the cardinal plot twist of the main ending sweeps the rug from under your feet on that in every way, and frisk's individuality becomes, in turn, a tool to further UT's OTHER main theme: completionism as a form of diegetic violence within the story. replaying the game would steal frisk's life and happy ending from them for our own perverse sentimentality, emotionally forcing our hand away from the reset button.

i think their neutrality absolutely aids in that immersion. but also, there's this weird attitude by (mostly) cis fans where it being functional within the story makes it... somehow "editable" and "up to the player" as well? which is gross and shows their ass on how they approach gender neutrality in general lol.

but also like. there's plenty of neutral, non PCharacters in undertale and deltarune. even when undertale was just an earthbound fangame and the player immersion metanarrative was completely absent, toby still described frisk as a "young, androgynous person". sometimes characters are just neutral by design. it's not that hard to understand lol.

anyone who makes this argument for kris deltarune is braindead. nothing else to say about it.

#this is a very difficult topic to discuss imo because on Some level I don't completely disagree with people who make that argument for chara #in SPIRIT. if not in action. like my point still stands characters can just Be neutral. and if that level of customization had been intended #well Pokemon's been doing the ''are you a boy or a girl'' shtick for ages. no reason why that couldn't have been included as well #but i do feel that we're supposed to identify with chara within the story. not as in chara is us but as in we are chara #and i think someone playing the game without outside interferences and (wrongly) coming to the conclusion that chara IS literally #themselves in the story. and thus call them by their own name (the one they likely inputted at the start) and pronouns #will be someone who grasped undertale's metanarrative more than someone who went in already spoiled on the NM route who thinks of chara #(and on some level frisk as well) as completely separate from us with independent wills and personhoods at any time #who treats them as nonbinary. even if their approach is more ''appropriate'' to a gender neutral person #systematic error vs manually changing every measure to fit what you already think is going to be the correct result. ykwim? #of course this opens a whole new parentheses while discussing the game outside of your personal experience #because even if you DO see chara as a self insert then they are a self insert for EVERYONE. women men genderqueer people #i don't call chara ''biscia'' even though that's what i named the fallen human in my playthrough. neither do i use they because i also do #if you're describing the character/story objectively in how they are executed then you're going to talk about them neutrally #because you ain't the only sunovabitch who played the darn game sonny #so like. either way you turn it. even in the most self insert reading you'd STILL logically use they/them so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ git gud #answered asks