Things to be said

Some things have to be said. It doesn't matter who says them, or how.

On The Pointlessness Of Forced Categorization

Time in and time out, I see people trying to fit everything into an existing box or category rather than creating a new one. I know people don't like change, but some categories are entirely arbitrary, and most are ever changing. People love to pretend categories are important, and to some extent, I can see, why, it helps to make life a simpler experience, but most categories are entirely useless outside of abstract concepts. Unless we're discussing objective, provable facts, categories are functionally worthless. It's like people arguing about whether a hot-dog is a sandwich or not. Who the hell cares? Why should we care? Not everything has to have an arbitrary psychological distinction applied. Even Freud knew that. By extension, not everything has to have an arbitrary political, societal or other distinction applied. Certain things can exist on their own. Not everything has to be some kind of statement. The fact that I use an Xbox One controller on my PC isn't a political statement, I do it because my DualShock 3 stopped working on my PC, and the DualShock 4 lacked some rather important compatibilities with some of the games I needed to play for my other blog. Also, the fact that the controller was cheap helped. Likewise, eating macaroni and cheese with a spoon, rather than a fork isn't a political statement, but this is the level of absurdity we're operating on when people try to apply cultural, psychological or gender-based categories to arbitrary aspects of life. It's not useful, it's more effort than it could possibly be worth, and attempting to strictly categorize everything is folly, since ideas and attitudes change as quickly and frequently as the colors in the sky.

Minimums and Maximums

    For some reason, whenever I write a piece for an assignment with a minimum wordcount, my point is always conveyed in less words or paragraphs or pages, etc than was required, and I have to find some way to fluff the piece up to fit the count, and then it always comes across as underdeveloped, with loose threads of ideas. Yeah, because I was asked to stretch a topic out beyond its length. I like to punch the point hard, and convey as much meaning as possible in as little space as I can. I don't like being long-winded, but by that same token, whenever I have a maximum word-count, paragraph count, page-count, etc, I always wind up overrunning it by at least two pages. I don't know if that has to do with my writing, or if I somehow always wind up writing about things I don't care about in a place with a minimum, and wind up writing about things I can talk at length about and not exhaust my knowledge of the topic until I've well-exceeded upper limit, and ultimately have to cut things down. It doesn't help that my writing-style lends itself to brevity coupled with a bizarre level of detail. Plus, when I'm bored with something I feel less inclined to write at-length about a subject.

Meta-Narrative

I really don't like meta-narrative, especially when someone makes a movie about making a movie, or something to that effect. Making a movie about being a musician, or putting on a play, or writing a book, or something like that, that's fine, because you're working with different mediums and as such aren't treading into ouroboros territory. It's when people start making movies about making a movie, or plays about plays when it starts irritating me. Unless the story of the people making the movie, play, etc, is particularly interesting, most of the time I'd rather just be watching the movie within a movie. Take Tropic Thunder for instance. The meta-humor in that film is great, but I almost think the movie would have been funnier if they'd just made the movie within the movie and left the meta-narrative stuff as a twenty-minute epilogue to the actual film. This isn't so much an issue with music, because if a song about writing a song is particularly good, or even passable it can easily stand on its own, but can just as easily fall into the trap of thinking that simply being "meta" is enough to keep it alive. Movies about making movies, books about writing books, etc just seem self-indulgent, and that's part of why meta-narratives irritate me. Too much fourth-wall-breaking can destroy a work's appeal. It always irritates me when a song references itself as a song, and although it can work fairly well when used humorously, meta jokes are easier to mess up than just playing something straight. That's part of the reason I didn't like Thor Ragnarok, the comedy was botched meta-narrative nonsense for the most part and always made me wish they'd played it straight.

The Cycle Of Blame And Scapegoating

History appears to run in cycles. When a given group finds themselves at a disadvantage, the first instinct, for some reason, is not to look within and see if any faults can be fixed, but to attach all blame to some "other" group and claim that to punish, banish, exterminate, etc. that group will solve all their problems. It never does, and indeed, causes more. We still see this to this very day in politics and almost every societal interaction, and this reaction dates back probably literal millennia. People don't like taking responsibility, and thus find it far easier to pin the blame on someone or something else. Bad people in the world? Blame evil spirits and influences. Your area of the world getting kind of crappy? Blame some insular group that probably has nothing to do with what's going on, but whom people know so little about that they can be persuaded is responsible. If these accusations are exposed as the con-job that they are? You've got a ready-made point you can double-down on until the universe explodes, claiming the influence of the "enemy" goes deeper than you thought. Missing funds in your military budget? Pick the most widely (and unfairly) scapegoated group in the entire world and claim some guy along the military structure is a part of it and use that as an excuse to say he did it (As happened to Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes.) Lost an election? Well, the first accusation of almost any politician these days is to immediately accuse their opponents of cheating (Which, to be fair, would be a lot harder if we'd go back to paper ballots and actually followed the damn rules regarding the chain of custody every now and again but hey, I suppose convenience is more important than the results of our damn elections...) regardless of if those accusations have any legs to stand on whatsoever. It's becoming like a videogame, where Democrats and Republicans alike immediately accuse their opponents of rigging the election just to see if that tactic will work, because for some reason, that accusation has few if any consequences. Indeed, consequence is something we seem to be seeking to remove as a culture worldwide, regardless of if that actually improves human actions. Certain actions must have consequences, or at least the potential for consequences, otherwise people will just keep using the same failed tactics over and over again, content in the knowledge that they will not be punished for the attempt. While in some cases, this can make lives easier, in others, it makes life harder, and people seem to be on some kind of all-or-nothing pendulum, rather than looking at things from an objective angle and figuring out what works best when and where.

Marxism Is Useless (And Somewhat Dangerous) As a Critical Lense

Marxism is occasionally used as a lens with which to view fiction through, typically as a method of viewing class-struggle. But that's not necessary. One need not adopt the failed ideology of easily the worst regime of the last century to analyze a work from the perspective of a class struggle. That's like adopting a lens of Nazism for the same purpose, it's unnecessary, somewhat dangerous and ultimately pointless, as one need not take a COMMUNIST approach to a work to analyze something from the perspective of a class struggle. Class-struggle is not, and should not be exclusive to a Marxist reading of the work. To allow Marxism to dominate economic struggle and class struggle is unhelpful and somewhat dangerous. Again, it's equivalent to using Nazism for the same thing. Hell, it might be worse, as Nazis are far less likely to elicit a sympathetic response than their Russian brothers are. Somehow the Communists managed to convince the world they weren't as bad as the Nazis when they were objectively worse, and with as bad as the Nazis were, that's saying something!
Adopting Marxism as a critical lens normalizes viewing aspects of the world through the lens of one of the most dangerous and harmful ideologies the world has ever known. I cannot imagine how or why any right-minded human-being would even suggest such a thing. Critics need to broaden their viewpoints and realize that when they restrict themselves to critical lenses they ultimately cannot get a true view of the work. Indeed, no lens can give the whole truth about any work on its own, especially when one is not working with the correct terminology. In fact, one need not even use a specific lens to gain a full view of the work. Repeated readings of a book or viewings of a movie can unearth hidden themes that not even the creators know about, and a creative mind on the part of the critic can unearth far more than any lense possibly could. That's not to say that one cannot get any benefit out of a work when specifically searching for a given theme, but that it is far less useful than a less-specific, broadminded view of the work. When looking for themes, one may conjure up a theme that the work doesn't lend itself to in even the broadest of readings, as opposed to a less specific reading, which will likely put a better image of the messages conveyed to the average reader in one's mind. Looking at a work through a lens does not lend itself to anywhere near a realistic reading of the work, much in the way that going through one's life looking through binoculars does not lend itself to a realistic view of the world. The best lens to view anything through is no lens at all, entirely because one's viewpoint is not tainted. For instance, going into the movie Ender's Game looking for an anti-homosexual agenda is entirely pointless. No such themes exist in the movie, intended or otherwise, and all that lens does is diminish one's enjoyment of the film.

Argument Within A Framework

When one argues within a framework, one is not setting out to break the framework entirely by dismissing it out of hand. Rather, one is operating as if the framework of argumentation is reality, especially when discussing a piece of fiction. When discussing fiction, one must operate within the confines of that reality to argue points and ask questions as to why things are the way they are. One need not destroy the work from without, one can easily destroy it from within through the use and application of the story's own logic. External critique has a time and a place, mainly for the analysis of gaps in the story or figuring out why the author might have written something a certain way. Internal critique is how one takes apart a story to start with.