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.

The Division of Culture Was Inevitable

As communication technology became better, inevitably it became easier to share full-length movies and TV series, either officially or unofficially, and prior to that, it facilitated original, viral content. This helped to individualize, and by extension, isolate the entertainment experience. Ultimately, this was always going to happen. Ever since the advent of home video formats, the entertainment experience has become more and more individual, and more isolated. Coupling this with the advent of miniature computers and handheld devices capable of storing and/or streaming high-quality video, and the isolation becomes greater. The printing press could be argued as the start of this phenomenon, as the widespread availability of printed materials, combined with increased literacy rates, means that reading becomes a solitary activity later in life. This combined with an increasing individualism in worldwide society and rising introversion means that this division of culture into subculture was inevitable.

All Religion Is Confucian?

    A topic that came to mind last week was that most religion is based in some worship of ancestors, akin to that of Confucianism's reverence of the elders and ancestors. All branches of the Abrahamic religions claim Jaweh as the Allfather. Greco-Roman mythology has all of the gods descended from the Allmother, even her own mate. From there, everything else came. Hinduism has the entirety of the universe born from one... Let's say "thing" from which all else came. Ultimately, all religion with any actual doctrine requires reverence of the past to the detriment of everything else. Decrees that were passed down based on opinions and whims get held up for centuries as the gospel truth. Passing words taken as absolute orders, and whatnot. Anyone who's familiar with Confucius should be feeling chills right about now.
    Even non-deistic religions, such as the various forms of Communism throughout the years, Nazism, most political dynasties, and many political systems, the way some revere public and political figures and loads of fandoms are heavily Confucian. They all hold an unhealthy reverence for those who came before, they all hold idealized versions of the past up over the reality of the situation, and they're all suspicious of new ideas, newcomers, and any change.

Cosmic Ret-Cons and nonsensical renaming.

The way the Romans adapted and adopted Greek myths as their own reminds me of what happened when Disney bought Star Wars. They renamed the characters, reorganized the entire history of the universe, and yet when everything's said and done, most of the same events happen, most of the characters are the same, but with slightly different names, and the order of events is slightly different. In fact, the Roman attitude toward Greek myths is also very similar to what happens with a lot of comic-book adaptations to any other medium. It's more akin to having read the original comics, then watching an animated adaptation. In fact, all of the the Greco-Roman mythological variations strike me as very similar to what happens when one story is adapted multiple times over centuries or decades, much like many comic book heroes, or indeed, other literary characters such as Robin Hood.