Rose Tyler is ultimately a better person than Cas because she didn’t go through with baby trapping the doctor even though she like definitely thought about it.
You KNOW in bad wolf bay for like a split second she was like. I bet if I told him I was pregnant he’d like rip the universe apart for me resulting in catastrophic consequences. But then she was like ugh no he’ll be mad at me once he gets here and finds out I lied about it.
One thing about fandom culture is that it sort of trains you to interact with and analyze media in a very specific way. Not a BAD way, just a SPECIFIC way.
And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you’re supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.
Which is fine if you’re looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.
But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well… that’s how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.
I dont know what my point here is, really, except…like…I find it very funny when people are like “ugh. I hate Gatsby and Catcher because all the characters are shitty” which like….isnt….the point. Lololol you arent supposed to kin Gatsby.
I would definitely argue that it’s specifically a bad way….a very bad way.
Depending on the piece of media, it could be the intended way to interpret it and thus very effective. When I watch Sailor Moon, I know at the end of the day that Usagi is a hero. She is right, and her choices are good. She and the Sailor Scouts may make mistakes, and those mistakes can have consequences, but by presuming the goodness of the protagonists, I can accurately describe what actions and values the story is presenting as good. (Fighting evil by moonlight. Winning love by daylight. Never running from a real fight. Etc etc)
If I sit around and hem and haw about whether or not Usagi is actually the villain because she is destined to reinstate a magical absolute monarchy on Earth in the future, then I’m not interpreting it correctly. I can write a cool fanfic about it, but it wont be a successful analysis of the original work.
But like I said, that doesnt work for all pieces of media, and being able to assess how a piece of media should be analyzed is a skill in itself.
I was an English major. One of our required classes was Theory & Criticism, and I ended up hating it specifically because of the teacher and the way she taught it, but the actual T&C part of it was interesting. And one of the things we learned about was all the different ways of reading/interpreting/criticizing media - not just books, ANY form of media.
Specifically, I remember when we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. We had special editions of the book where the first half of it was the novel itself, and the last half was like five or six different critical analyses of the book from different schools of theory. The two I remember specifically were a Marxist interpretation and a feminist interpretation. I remember reading both of those and thinking “wow, these people are really reaching for some of this”, but the more I read into the analysis and the history of those schools of thought, the more I got it. So for my final paper for that class, I wrote an essay that basically had the thesis of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. If you have trained yourself to view every piece of media through a single specific critical lens - well, you’re going to be only viewing it through that lens, and that means you’re going to read or watch it in such a way that you’re looking for the themes you’ve trained yourself to look for.
My teacher didn’t like that, by the way; she’d wanted each of us to pick one of these schools of thought we’d been learning about and make it “our” school of thought. She wanted us to grab the a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a spanner, and carry that with us for the rest of our lives. She somehow didn’t expect me to pack a toolbox.
My point is: Like OP said, sometimes the tool you need is a hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you can make a hammer work where what you need is a screwdriver, but you’re going to end up stripping the screw; sometimes you can use a screwdriver in place of a hammer, but it’s going to take a lot more effort and brute force and you risk breaking the screwdriver. Sometimes you need a wrench and trying to use a hammer or screwdriver is going to make you declare that the bolt is problematic and should never be used by anyone. Sometimes what you really need is a hand saw, and trying to use any of the others…well, you can, but it’s going to make a mess and you might not be able to salvage the pieces left over.
These skills aren’t being taught in school anymore and you can see it in the way high school aged kids act about media and stuff.
They wouldn’t survive something like Lolita because I swear they’re being taught to turn their brains OFF and be spoon fed all their thoughts by someone else.
It’s really creepy.
I promise these skills are taught in school. I’m an English teacher. In a school. Who teaches them.
Now, Lolita is generally reserved for college classes. But a lot of the rationale behind continuing to teach the “classics” in high school (beyond the belief that a shared literary foundation promotes a better understanding of allusions and references) is that a lot of the classics are built on these kinds of complex readings and unreliable narrators and using historical and cultural context helps in their analysis. (I do think that we should be incorporating more diverse and modern lit into these classes, please understand)
Do all schools or individual teachers do this *well*? No, of course not. Do all students always really apply themselves to the development of deep critical thinking skills when their teacher pulls out A Tale of Two Cities? Also no.
But this isnt a “public school is failing / evil ” problem. Being able to engage in multiple forms and styles of analysis is a really high level skill, and my post was just about how a very common one doesnt always work well with different kinds of stories.
OP, why do you describe analyzing Sailor Moon in a different way than (you assume) the author intended as “hemming and hawing?” I would argue there’s a lot of value in approaching texts at a different angle.
Because ignoring context, tone, and intent when analyzing media is going to lead to conclusions are aren’t consistently supported by the text you are looking at.
“Usagi is a villain because she’s a queen and I think absolute monarchy is bad” ignores the way that Usagi, the moon kingdom, and basically all aspects of the lore are actually framed within the story. None of the characters’ actions or motivations make consistent sense if we start from the assumptions that “Usagi = monarchist=evil” and it would cause you to over look all the themes and interpretations that DO make consistent sense.
At some point you have to take a work at face value and see what it is trying to say.
Is the breakdown of monarchy actually relevant to the themes and messages presented in Sailor Moon? No, not really.
So focusing on the Moon Kingdom monarchy and the ethics there of is sort of… besides the point. The Moon Kingdom is a fairy tale, not a reflection of reality.
I’m not actually interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom, you know?
Now, is it *cool* to look at works in various ways? Sure! Are some people interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom and want to explore what that would look like? Sure! And honestly if you want to explore the ramifications of idyllic fairy tale monarchies on the real world, then that’s really cool too!
But if you are looking at a work to understand what it is trying to say with the text itself, then you need to take some of its premises at face value. Usagi and the Sailor Scouts being the Good Guys is one of those premises.
And really the “Usagi is secretly a princess from the moon” is just a part of the escapist fantasy for most little kids watching more than it has anything to do with actual themes of monarchy.
There is a lot of value in being able to look at a text from various angles. And it’s perfectly okay to use a text and concept as a jumping off point for other explorations.
But the problem comes when people say that Usagi was definitively a villain in Sailor Moon, or that say Steven Universe with themes of family and conflict resolution is excusing genocide by not destroying the Diamonds. It misses the point of the fantasy. It misses the important themes, the lessons and point of the show to look at it like that.
Basically: reinterpretations are cool, but you gotta know how to take a work on its own premises too.
Exactly. Like, magical princess that shows how monarchies (or the idea of princesses in general) is broken or toxic? Utena and Star vs The Forces of Evil are right there.
The idea of a cute talking cat granting girls magical powers to turn them into warriors against evil and getting them killed being evil? Not a good take on Luna, but Kyuubei in Madoka? Exactly this. That’s like, the point of Kyuubei- to riff on the trope that Luna, and Kero, and Mokona represent.
Media can raise all sorts of interesting conversations and discussions and ideas. But there’s a very real difference between trying to awkwardly force those readings on a work where the tone and framing and context don’t support it and acting like the media is actually supporting those messages, and using those ideas to explore it in a different work or to analyze the trope across the genre more broadly.
Moral and pure does not a protagonist make, and fandom is rife with that exclusive interpretation of storytelling. OP makes really good points; this thread is one of the best analyses I’ve read about lit crit on this site lately.
Stories aren’t made in a vacuum– every trope/theme/character archetype comes from somewhere and (general) you do yourself a disservice by viewing everything as whether it’s morally uncorrupted or not.
@red–thedragon ‘s tags also make a very good point
[id: a screenshot of tags reading (formatted for ease of reading):
I’d like to add something along the lines of like, “in-universe” and “out-of-universe” analysis are two different beasts, a lot of this is applying “out-of-universe” analysis to “in-universe” stuff I think. ie: x character is the protagonist =/= x character is good, and x element is meant to be good irl=/= x element is good to the people in the work for example - if we look at Usagi’s moon kingdom - out of universe we understand that the moon kingdom is a fairy tale, we understand it is meant to be part of a parable for kids to express moral lessons from, but in universe the moon kingdom is monarchy and a state with ultimate power concentrated in one person’s hands. I think we understand that irl that is bad. Analyzing it with an in-universe framework that you can come to that conclusion as well, but you miss the authorial intent and context of “Sailor Usagi is meant to be a positive example for children.” And if you take that analysis out of universe and attempt to claim that Usagi is the real villain you’re kind of misreading everything but then comes fandom! Transformative works! and writing Usagi as a monarchial villain who tries her best is not- like- that’s a perfectly solid way to engage with the text! anyway in conclusion Analysis Wacky
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I often find myself within nerd spaces recontextualizing arguments. I often find myself saying “to start with, we have to take it as a given that x is true.” You can criticize the inclusion of X, or the execution of X, but if you want to engage with the material in good faith, you have to acknowledge that within the insulated context of the story, e.g. all orcs are evil and killing orcs is a moral good. The protagonists of LOTR aren’t evil for killing orcs, because that’s not the way the world they live in is structured. If you don’t accept the premise, you’re not actually engaging with the work, you’re just looking for things to be mad about.
There ARE genres that encourage that kind of questioning, mind-screw stories and horror stories that ask you to decide for yourself what the message is, if any exists. But that’s also a matter of recognizing what tool is best for the specific puzzle in front of you.
Absolutely!
While it’s very interesting to think about the Orcs- JRR Tolkien himself went back and forth on the question of whether or not Orcs have souls, since either answer is morally and theologically troubling- Aragorn isn’t *evil* for killing them. They have a narrative purpose and contemplating the morality of killing them will get in the way of engaging with the work meaningfully.
One of the weaknesses of the new Star Wars trilogy, in my opinion, is that it DID question the morality of killing storm troopers in episode 7 with Finn’s defection. But then it never goes back and follows up on that in episode 8 or 9. So now we’ve established that the storm troopers are in fact, indoctrinated child solider who can (and should) be liberated… and then we watch our heroes kill them by the thousands without a thought and the narrative never goes back to acknowledge that.
Tumblr gifmakers are better than $1mil worth of marketing. I’ll see endless ads for a show and be like meh but I’ll see one good gifset and suddenly I’m on s2 ep10 finding blorbo from my gifs
ppl with really long queues amuse me, like, they will like your post and then you find out within 3-10 business days whether they also thought it worthy of reblogging
sorry for you but for me personally i could be BROWN, i could be BLUE, I COULD BE VIOLET SKY i could be HURTFUL, i could be PURPLE, i could be anything you like gotta be Green, gotta be Mean, gotta be everything more WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME, WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME? WHY DON’T YOU WALK OUT THE DOOR?
