I follow enough people of such wildly different political persuasions that I see stuff about current events constantly but never know what of it is true
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but lately it feels like white noise. I have no idea what's actually happening but am very knowledgeable about what various sects think is happening
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there's this spectacular essay I read years ago ostensibly about worldbuilding that informs a lot of how I think about writing, and communication in general https://web.archive.org/web/20080410181840/https://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/very-afraid/ …
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the author draws a distinction between what he calls "worldbuilding" and "writing" picking for instance tolkein and chekhov as respective exemplars
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the former is a view of storytelling about constructing a thing fully and knowably and attempting to transfer knowledge of it with as much fidelity as possible
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the reader is a passive receptacle for information, any mismatch between the author's and reader's vision is a mistake on the part of the author in not imparting detail in enough granularity
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the latter, storytelling is a collaborative act between reader and writer. the writer's role is to create space for the reader to interpret, to construct their own version of a thing
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it understands that communicating is inherently lossy, that it's not possible to copy brainstate between people, doesn't even see it as desirable and doesn't try
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it occurred to me a few years ago this dichotomy shows up in how people interact with media just as it does in how creators assemble it
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canon-orientation is about cataloging the facts of a universe, ranking them in terms of precedence, establishing a repository of truth that reflects the best understanding at that point in time
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fandom-orientation is about taking the "official" work as a basis for further creation/interpretation. fanart, fanfiction, shipping, and so forth
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the former has "fan theories," interpretation of evidence to try to arrive at as-yet unstated truths, which the march of canon may in time justify or invalidate
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the latter has "headcannons," which are more feelings about a thing, understood as not making a truth claim and thus not subject to debate over veracity
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the fan wiki embodies the former mindset, the fan shrine the latter
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canon is objective, hierarchical, competitive. fandom is subjective, flat, collaborative
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in other words masculine- and feminine-coded. and the two styles of fan communities do tend to attract more men and women respectively
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back on politics, it's interesting to me the author of the piece closes by attacking this very view of the world as the worst of postmodern excess
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explicitly rejecting the idea "that there are no facts, only competing stories about the world" and tying this back into his worldbuilding dichotomy
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I like to refer to the mindset of viewing consumption/manipulation of storylines as equivalent to understanding/controlling reality as narrative poisoning
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but at the same time the world only really seems legible through the prism of narrative, there is of course an underlying "reality" but it isn't directly accessible
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and the fact that most people take their narratives to be reality means while reality-as-competing-narratives may not help describe reality it does help describe people
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and while you cannot control reality directly through narrative, you can control it through people by the instrument of narrative. what reality actually is maybe is academic
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anyway the competing political narratives that purport to describe the reality of current events can probably be better thought of as fandoms that believe they're canons
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End of conversation
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