The Validity of the Thermian Argument.

[Lt. Light Ark]

Oi, I never brought up Goblin Slayer.

In which case, GS is likely seen as offensive to people like feminists because it depicts the rape of women exclusively. Men just get killed and their suffering is ended. I can see why people would be offended by that.

Remember, just because the author doesn’t support the opinions he writes in fiction doesn’t mean that everyone will suddenly go “ok, he doesn’t support it, he means no harm”. It’s dumb but it’s true.

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And here is the problem. So right, angry because it shows the rape of women and not men.
Goblins rape women because in a way they intend to use them as baby factories. That is how the author justifies it.
Doylist approach say it is a fallacy and points solely to the author but I see the Doylist approach as a fallacy.

Why? It ignores the initial assumption to justify a fact in said fiction and instead direct it to the author. So like, the fact that uterus and ovaries allow reproduction are irrelevant. But here is the problem, we don't live in a vacuum. Reality is the basis we use to do anything at all. The idea of a species using rape against other species to bolster their numbers started with the Xenomorphs and the Xenomorphs in idea orginated from Parasitic Wasps.

The idea didn't came up solely by the author, the environment did influence him. Blaming the author for using that is the same as blaming what gave him that idea.

Don’t you put words in my mouth.

Well, technically I suppose it is true. I do live in a one party dictatorship after all.

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Sorry, I thought that you were arguing against freedom of speech. It is hard to assume otherwise in those times.

See above. It doesn’t matter whether or not the author means it. It only matters what the readers think. It’s dumb but it’s true. You may as well try to stop the sun from rising.

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Actually it matters what the author meant. If I write a historical fiction about the second world war in Asia I would obviously need to show what the Japanese did. If what the audience thinks is what matters, that may as well mean that the author was wrong into showing the historical fact that Japanese committed rape against the Chinese women.

Is it truly valid to feel offended because the author did show a fact?

If what you said was true then pornography would be just one more field of media instead of what it is right now.

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Pornography may be presented in a variety of media, including books, magazines, postcards, photographs, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, phone calls, writing, film, video, and video games.

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Well...technically it is a field of media that minors shouldn't in rule acess.

 

[Deleted member 8519]

Well yes. This is precisely why it elicits so much dislike from some people who read it. Because he amped up the horrific level. So I hope he knows that this is the reason why so many people don’t like it(not to say that no one likes it, plenty of other people like it).

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What I find amusing about the Goblin Slayer controversy is that Berserk did it years ago, literally freakin' 17 years ago, with those nasty trolls infesting Enoch Village.

At least the victims of goblins in GS could theoretically survive captivity. Those disgusting buggers went full chestburster and took the shortest path out of the uterus.

 

[Heliostorm]

It's not obfuscation.

If we agree that some-such idea about reality in one's head - like the fact that fire is hot or cars burn gasoline - is a mental fiction about reality produced by our senses (the empiricist position), then everything we experience is, in some sense, a fiction. If narrative fiction is a facsimile of reality - a fiction of fictions - then it stands to reason that there is no difference between Watsonian and Doylist interpretations of fiction. In-universe or out-universe, it's the same exact thing.

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No it isn't. Not even anti-realism fails to note that there are different types of unknowables. There is still a difference between the "fiction" of sensory input and the fiction of Harry Potter.

But the real reason why it's irrelevant is that all we need here is for both author and reader to agree 1. that there is a difference between fiction and non-fiction, and 2. that a particular book is fiction. What the true nature of reality here is irrelevant.

That's a very interesting argument, actually. I'm not sure it actually is a counterexample, though. Real-world rational agents - as neuroscience has shown - engage in activities automatically and then justify them after-the-fact as free will. The action precedes the choice in all events. If you shift these events temporally, the logic changes. Let's say Jones had no control over his body before and during the shooting, but justified it as free choice afterward. What then?

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Incorrect. What neuroscience has shown is that the choice is made before conscious awareness of the choice appears. Conscious awareness of the choice still precedes the action.

Dude. I'm a conlanger.

I would question the nature of language itself, and its ability to moderate or restrict or in some sense confine human thought to narrow categories of existence and certitude. That's the whole damn idea behind the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Language dictates what we can think about.

Linguistic relativity - Wikipedia

I once argued with someone about whether or not the word "Tree" actually represents trees in any fundamental sense, or if trees would have a different word for themselves if they could speak.

I would argue for the relativism of language.

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Congratulations, you've gone off on a yet another irrelevant tangent because of your incessant need to prove your grasp of the revelatory Truth. Being a linguistic relativist or speaking a constructed language has no bearing on the fact that the purpose of language is to convey information from one person to another. Even if all you did was repeat "bababababa" in different tones, you will still be attempting to convey information from yourself to whoever is listening. If I write, "*, you're a pseudo-intellectual moron", you might be offended, and this would be entirely appropriate because I am attempting to convey an insult to you. There is no sensible framework in which you can claim that offense never has any relation with authorial intent, because words exist to convey intent.

Look, I get it. You don't like that some people are criticizing your favorite works and you feel that Olsen is wrong somewhere, so you want to argue against it. But this is a really fucking stupid way of going about that, because the part that you actually object to is nowhere in the Thermian argument or its counterargument, and on some level you realize this because you've spent every post here arguing around the Thermian counterargument instead of actually against it.

 

[Lt. Light Ark]

No it isn't. Not even anti-realism fails to note that there are different types of unknowables. There is still a difference between the "fiction" of sensory input and the fiction of Harry Potter.

But the real reason why it's irrelevant is that all we need here is for both author and reader to agree 1. that there is a difference between fiction and non-fiction, and 2. that a particular book is fiction. What the true nature of reality here is irrelevant.

Incorrect. What neuroscience has shown is that the choice is made before conscious awareness of the choice appears. Conscious awareness of the choice still precedes the action.



Congratulations, you've gone off on a yet another irrelevant tangent because of your incessant need to prove your grasp of the revelatory Truth. Being a linguistic relativist or speaking a constructed language has no bearing on the fact that the purpose of language is to convey information from one person to another. Even if all you did was repeat "bababababa" in different tones, you will still be attempting to convey information from yourself to whoever is listening. If I write, "*, you're a pseudo-intellectual moron", you might be offended, and this would be entirely appropriate because I am attempting to convey an insult to you. There is no sensible framework in which you can claim that offense never has any relation with authorial intent, because words exist to convey intent.

Look, I get it. You don't like that some people are criticizing your favorite works and you feel that Olsen is wrong somewhere, so you want to argue against it. But this is a really fucking stupid way of going about that, because the part that you actually object to is nowhere in the Thermian argument or its counterargument, and on some level you realize this because you've spent every post here arguing around the Thermian counterargument instead of actually against it.

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Actually he is justifying it as me. He even said that he doesn't believe the Thermian argument go be a fallacy. Which who I agree.

 

[Mr Sheldon]

And here is the problem. So right, angry because it shows the rape of women and not men.
Goblins rape women because in a way they intend to use them as baby factories. That is how the author justifies it.
Doylist approach say it is a fallacy and points solely to the author but I see the Doylist approach as a fallacy.

Why? It ignores the initial assumption to justify a fact in said fiction and instead direct it to the author. So like, the fact that uterus and ovaries allow reproduction are irrelevant. But here is the problem, we don't live in a vacuum. Reality is the basis we use to do anything at all. The idea of a species using rape against other species to bolster their numbers started with the Xenomorphs and the Xenomorphs in idea orginated from Parasitic Wasps.

The idea didn't came up solely by the author, the environment did influence him. Blaming the author for using that is the same as blaming what gave him that idea.

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The problem is that the reason why the author chose to portray it as such is because he wants to go maximum squick. Therefore, he immediately went to the most horrifying idea he could think of that would elicit the most extreme responses. This then contributes to all the haters.

Nitpick: Parasitic wasps don’t care about gender, just like how Xenomorphs don’t care about gender. This is why less people hate Facehugger reproduction.

Actually it matters what the author meant. If I write a historical fiction about the second world war in Asia I would obviously need to show what the Japanese did. If what the audience thinks is what matters, that may as well mean that the author was wrong into showing the historical fact that Japanese committed rape against the Chinese women.

Is it truly valid to feel offended because the author did show a fact?

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That would then depend on the detail and depth you spent on portraying the rape of the Chinese women. An excessive amount of detail would definitely elicit dislike. An unbiased dissertation on the fact would not elicit such dislike.

Well...technically it is a field of media that minors shouldn't in rule acess.

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That is my point. If what you said is true, that since fiction is a lie no one should feel offended, then it would be perfectly acceptable for a child to go out in broad daylight and purchase pornography. After all, no one should be offended right?

What I find amusing about the Goblin Slayer controversy is that Berserk did it years ago, literally freakin' 17 years ago, with those nasty trolls infesting Enoch Village.

At least the victims of goblins in GS could theoretically survive captivity. Those disgusting buggers went full chestburster and took the shortest path out of the uterus.

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Before the trolls there were like 50 chapters dedicated to pure RIP AND TEAR. Goblin Slayer leaps straight into it in the very first chapter.

 

[Deleted member 8519]

No it isn't. Not even anti-realism fails to note that there are different types of unknowables. There is still a difference between the "fiction" of sensory input and the fiction of Harry Potter.

But the real reason why it's irrelevant is that all we need here is for both author and reader to agree 1. that there is a difference between fiction and non-fiction, and 2. that a particular book is fiction. What the true nature of reality here is irrelevant.

Incorrect. What neuroscience has shown is that the choice is made before conscious awareness of the choice appears. Conscious awareness of the choice still precedes the action.

Congratulations, you've gone off on a yet another irrelevant tangent because of your incessant need to prove your grasp of the revelatory Truth. Being a linguistic relativist or speaking a constructed language has no bearing on the fact that the purpose of language is to convey information from one person to another. Even if all you did was repeat "bababababa" in different tones, you will still be attempting to convey information from yourself to whoever is listening. If I write, "*, you're a pseudo-intellectual moron", you might be offended, and this would be entirely appropriate because I am attempting to convey an insult to you. There is no sensible framework in which you can claim that offense never has any relation with authorial intent, because words exist to convey intent.

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That's interesting the way you put it like that. You might not even realize the profundity of what you just said. You said emotions are information.

That's an interesting concept. Say, a baby might feel hungry, clearly, it'll protest and show its displeasure, but not necessarily in a verbal way. Emotions convey information.

If emotions convey information, then why even bother with language? I could grunt and bark at people and that would be clear enough in meaning and intent.

The thing is, emotions and cognitive content are often viewed almost like whole separate categories of information and communication.

Cognition and emotion - Scholarpedia

Speaking about a free-standing abstract concept is different in fundamental, epistemological character from expressing an emotional mind-state.

For instance, I might say "1 + 1 = 2", and that would be true under most circumstances, but it wouldn't relate to anything real unless we accept mathematical realism is true.

However, if I say "I am sad", I am attempting to convey an emotional state through the medium of language. Since I'm a materialist and monist, I would be saying something about my brain and body and what it's doing.

Language augments emotional states. I can express displeasure to someone by screaming "fuck you" at them, but the words are irrelevant. Screaming like an enraged gorilla would have been just as effective on its own.

Look, I get it. You don't like that some people are criticizing your favorite works and you feel that Olsen is wrong somewhere, so you want to argue against it. But this is a really fucking stupid way of going about that, because the part that you actually object to is nowhere in the Thermian argument or its counterargument, and on some level you realize this because you've spent every post here arguing around the Thermian counterargument instead of actually against it.

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Well, let's see what this one blogger had to say about it:

Creepy Garbage; or, Dan Olsen and the Importance of Believable Hypotheticals

The fundamental flaw in Olsen’s approach to diegesis is that he functionally doesn’t understand what a story is: a diegesis is not a pile of ideas, it is a construction of answers to questions. At its core, any fictive work is an extended Socratic exercise, constructed of “what ifs” and “thens.” Consider the table-top role-playing game, Pathfinder. Now, I happen to be dungeon-mastering a game currently in my own home, using Pathfinder’s publisher’s original game setting. Paizo (the publisher) constructed the setting in much the way that Dan Olsen described: multiple people getting together and bringing failed fantasy writing projects to life through collaboration. This setting also happens to have a lot of women getting ripped apart by orcs.

Why? Why do women get ripped apart by orcs? This is utterly objectionable and this diegesis does not need it! This is “creepy garbage!”

First, the writers asked themselves, “What if there were orcs?” The answer is then that there are orcs. What follows is another question, “What are the orcs like?” The answer that was decided was that the orcs were a brutal, savage people who destroyed, vandalized, raped, pillaged, and spread terror across the world of Golarion. “Why are orcs so savage?” Because of their biology, they’re hyper-aggressive humanoids with low intelligence and nasty tempers. “What if they could interbreed with humans?” Then the result would be half-human/half-orc. “How are half-orcs made?” The same way most other animals are, through sex. “Would most human women consent to sex with an orc?” No, so most half-orcs would be the product of rape. “Why would orcs rape human women in the first place?” Humans have a tendency to rape and pillage (as has been demonstrated in the history of the real world), so wouldn’t it stand to reason that the orcs, who are hypothetically more savage, do the same? “What advantage might there be to half-orc populations?” If humans are smarter than orcs, it leaves the possibility that half-orcs are also smarter than pure-blooded orcs, and so might be useful to orc tribes for any number of reasons related to higher brain functioning. “What if some orcs did this intentionally, swelling their tribes’ numbers with half-orcs?” Then that would pose not only a problem to non-orcs because it makes the orc enemy craftier through osmosis, but also cause ethnic strife with orc tribes too proud to breed with human slaves.

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Olsen implies in his argument that writers have an infinite grab bag of ideas and they're somehow morally-obligated to choose ones he doesn't find reprehensible. This is not necessarily the case. A writer's choices are largely informed by - and constrained by - the choices they have already made. Each choice is like a link in a chain. If you make one choice, then others logically follow from it, or else you get a huge non sequitur like Mass Effect 3's ending.

I'm writing a fanfic where some of the major themes are genocide, the use of WMDs, slavery, the trafficking of sapient life forms, the use of PMCs in warfare, drug use, trauma, suicidal thinking, et cetera. If I suddenly had the antagonists pull a 180 like "We were just kidding, we're not actually that evil!" and then hold a parade with confetti and hand out chocolates to their victims, unless this whole sequence was a hallucinatory episode brought on by a character's LSD use or something, the audience would balk. My choices as to future storytelling are constrained by the choices I made originally.

What Dan Olsen's critique implies is that I'm supposed to go all the way up the chain and remove the things that precipitate "problematic" events in the diegesis, because they might upset people. My answer to that is fuck off.

 

[Heliostorm]

emotions are information.

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That's not so much profound as it is obvious.

Language augments emotional states. I can express displeasure to someone by screaming "fuck you" at them, but the words are irrelevant. Screaming like an enraged gorilla would have been just as effective on its own.

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Language is merely a more precise and reliable method of conveying information than guttural screeching, they're not fundamentally different. You can draw a distinction between conscious intent, as conveyed by the words used, and unconscious intent, as conveyed by tone, body language, etc. Gutteral screeching is difficult to interpret without context, even if you are confident that the emotion being conveyed is anger you cannot be certain of what they are angry at with only the sound itself, whereas "Fuck you", directed towards an individual, is a clear expression of animosity towards that individual.

Olsen implies in his argument that writers have an infinite grab bag of ideas and they're somehow morally-obligated to choose ones he doesn't find reprehensible. This is not necessarily the case. A writer's choices are largely informed by - and constrained by - the choices they have already made. Each choice is like a link in a chain. If you make one choice, then others logically follow from it, or else you get a huge non sequitur like Mass Effect 3's ending.

I'm writing a fanfic where some of the major themes are genocide, the use of WMDs, slavery, the trafficking of sapient life forms, the use of PMCs in warfare, drug use, trauma, suicidal thinking, et cetera. If I suddenly had the antagonists pull a 180 like "We were just kidding, we're not actually that evil!" and then hold a parade with confetti and hand out chocolates to their victims, unless this whole sequence was a hallucinatory episode brought on by a character's LSD use or something, the audience would balk. My choices as to future storytelling are constrained by the choices I made originally.

What Dan Olsen's critique implies is that I'm supposed to go all the way up the chain and remove the things that precipitate "problematic" events in the diegesis, because they might upset people. My answer to that is fuck off.

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*clap clap clap*

Finally, progress. Yes, as many people in this thread have already pointed out, Olsen oversimplifies the process of writing by ignoring the fact that while fiction is indeed wholly constructed by the author and therefore infinitely mutable, good fiction has constraints it must obey in order to enjoyable. More importantly, there are limits to a writer's capacity to construct enjoyable fiction, and so in avoiding offense they may be forced to degrade how enjoyable the work is to the target audience. This is of course, why fiction even has target audiences, because it is impossible to write something equally enjoyable to everyone, and thus it is better to write something that maximizes the enjoyment to the target audiences even if it risks offending those outside of it.

However, this is still a Doylist approach to the problem, and thus while a critique of the associated arguments Olsen makes to go with the Thermian argument/counterargument, still acknowledges that Olsen is correct in asserting the Thermian argument is invalid. The internal consistency of a setting only matters insofar as it matters to the audience, even if that audience is limited to just the author themselves.

 

[Constant Dreamer]

Why am I not surprised a thread supposedly about the Thermian Argument has devolved into a bunch of pearl-clutching about "PC gone mad"? Olsen's argument does not imply showing bad stuff is wrong and should be avoided, only an idiot would come to that conclusion because they feel like their favorite animes are being criticized and thus they're being criticized. The specific example given in his video on the Thermian Argument is more about something deemed exploitative, which isn't synonymous with approving but is still considered negative by most people. It's not an objective measurement whether something goes so far as to be called exploitative, but not much in fiction is objective and you can't deny the phenomenon exists, much like the Uncanny Valley. Furthermore, nothing about that whole line of whining has anything to do with the concept of the Thermian Argument, it's just a bunch of fanboy complaining about your stuff being criticized and you guys not knowing how to defend it without either using a Thermian Argument or attacking a strawman. Pretty sure I've been over this in another thread, but not everyone who uses the term "Thermian Argument" is a PC crusader out to take away your animes.

 

[Orbotosh]

Why am I not surprised a thread supposedly about the Thermian Argument has devolved into a bunch of pearl-clutching about "PC gone mad"?

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Actually it's about the metaphysics of cognition and how humans don't actually live in a society because society is an illusion and so is the concept of living because this universe is just a bunch of platonic abstracts having a seizure until you die. I demand moderator attention.

 

[Deleted member 8519]

That's not so much profound as it is obvious.

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My point was that it's not really all that obvious. Like I said, cognitive content and emotional content are often treated as two entirely different categories in the philosophy of mind.

Moral non-cognitivism/emotivism is a perfect example of this. According to AJ Ayer's view, moral propositions have no truth-values (in other words, moral knowledge is impossible because there is no handheld meter you can use to detect the morality of a situation), but some other moral non-cognitivists assert an emotivist position, that moral statements represent emotional states, and others suggest that morals are imperatives. As in, saying "it's wrong to steal" is the same thing as saying "do not steal".

Language is merely a more precise and reliable method of conveying information than guttural screeching, they're not fundamentally different. You can draw a distinction between conscious intent, as conveyed by the words used, and unconscious intent, as conveyed by tone, body language, etc. Gutteral screeching is difficult to interpret without context, even if you are confident that the emotion being conveyed is anger you cannot be certain of what they are angry at with only the sound itself, whereas "Fuck you", directed towards an individual, is a clear expression of animosity towards that individual.

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There are animal species that convey animosity by a combination of screeching and body language. Language doesn't necessarily have to be verbal. All it has to do is communicate units of information in a way that the recipient can understand.

*clap clap clap*

Finally, progress. Yes, as many people in this thread have already pointed out, Olsen oversimplifies the process of writing by ignoring the fact that while fiction is indeed wholly constructed by the author and therefore infinitely mutable, good fiction has constraints it must obey in order to enjoyable. More importantly, there are limits to a writer's capacity to construct enjoyable fiction, and so in avoiding offense they may be forced to degrade how enjoyable the work is to the target audience. This is of course, why fiction even has target audiences, because it is impossible to write something equally enjoyable to everyone, and thus it is better to write something that maximizes the enjoyment to the target audiences even if it risks offending those outside of it.

However, this is still a Doylist approach to the problem, and thus while a critique of the associated arguments Olsen makes to go with the Thermian argument/counterargument, still acknowledges that Olsen is correct in asserting the Thermian argument is invalid. The internal consistency of a setting only matters insofar as it matters to the audience, even if that audience is limited to just the author themselves.

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Well, when someone makes a Thermian argument, they're trying to come up with a Watsonian excuse for something, and many of those Watsonian points actually follow from Doylist ones. In other words, if someone points out that a story had to be internally-consistent in a Watsonian sense, it was generally because an author was forced to make it that way because of their Doylist choices.

The implication of Olsen's argument is that authors have full agency over their work, but that's not necessarily the case. Once an author is invested in a certain plot, they can't just shuffle the deck and deal themselves a new hand of totally unrelated tropes. They're stuck with the hand they've already dealt themselves.

Why am I not surprised a thread supposedly about the Thermian Argument has devolved into a bunch of pearl-clutching about "PC gone mad"? Olsen's argument does not imply showing bad stuff is wrong and should be avoided, only an idiot would come to that conclusion because they feel like their favorite animes are being criticized and thus they're being criticized. The specific example given in his video on the Thermian Argument is more about something deemed exploitative, which isn't synonymous with approving but is still considered negative by most people. It's not an objective measurement whether something goes so far as to be called exploitative, but not much in fiction is objective and you can't deny the phenomenon exists, much like the Uncanny Valley. Furthermore, nothing about that whole line of whining has anything to do with the concept of the Thermian Argument, it's just a bunch of fanboy complaining about your stuff being criticized and you guys not knowing how to defend it without either using a Thermian Argument or attacking a strawman. Pretty sure I've been over this in another thread, but not everyone who uses the term "Thermian Argument" is a PC crusader out to take away your animes.

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Applying political correctness to fiction is a stupid concept to begin with. Who cares if we offend? Why is offense and tastefulness the measure by which fiction is judged, these days? Really, who gives a damn? I just kinda tune out these days when I hear people talking about how badly something triggered them. I have nothing in my heart but animosity for those who would bowdlerize a story or mutilate a manuscript because it offends them. It defeats the whole purpose of narrative fiction as an art form if one forces fiction to conform to political realities. Some of my favorite works of fiction were deliberately transgressive in nature.

Robocop has an extended scene of torturous murder, the villains are irredeemable and have no Freudian excuse for being evil, and it makes a statement on the nature of humanity and identity with its cyborg protagonist.

A Rebours has a protagonist who kills a tortoise by weighing it down with gold and jewels in a bizarre artistic exercise, and the very pointlessness of the act is, itself, the point.

Videodrome has a guy's hand mutate into some alien gun thing and shit and he shoots somebody and they mutate too and it's disgusting and gooey and everything, and the story is all about criticizing how vacuous and self-indulgent media can be.

When I hear that someone is offended by fiction, I want to make them watch Borat about fifty times until they're cured of that stupidity.

I hate the term "problematic". It's collectivizing. It implies that what is a problem for one person should be a problem for everyone, but is too cowardly to actually come out and say it. It's a way someone can whine and say "I don't like that" while claiming some form of authority over the text they're criticizing. Every time I hear someone say problematic, I picture an infant having a temper tantrum. "Waaaaaaah! Problematic! Waaaaaaah!"

There's no accounting for taste. If I like something that someone else finds distasteful, that's my prerogative.

If a critic wants to discuss how something in a story didn't work from a mechanical perspective, how it could've been better if the author used a different idea or a different theme in their work, then that's fine.

If all a critic has to say is "I was offended", then they're not really even saying anything. Their argument has no content. It's just a whine. They are whiners.

Actually it's about the metaphysics of cognition and how humans don't actually live in a society because society is an illusion and so is the concept of living because this universe is just a bunch of platonic abstracts having a seizure until you die. I demand moderator attention.

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Metaphysics and meta-ethics have a lot to do with the narrative form. If someone believes in Moral Error Theory, as I do, then strictly speaking, there's no reason why we would accept any moral argument regarding the content of fiction. I was laying a foundation for describing my worldview and how it relates to fictional narratives.

In short, if I believe morals are meaningless in real life, why would I think fiction needs morality either? Let's just ignore pesky morality and have more orcs ripping women to pieces and stuff, it's all in good fun. Fuck morality.

 

[Jeggetts2.0]

Speaking as someone who's been on the receiving end of it, on this very site in a fanfic I am writing, it is absolute sophistry and PC bullshit. I've been accused of supporting Ceasers Legion just because I wanted to make them an actually viable faction instead of the cartoonishily evil bastards we got in New Vegas. I was told in no uncertain terms that made me an apologist for them and for dictatorships in general despite my fucking NUMEROUS statements that I find them the worst part of NV because of how badly they were written IE, even in the purely pragmatic sense, they are a dogshit poor choice for long term survival, and I merely wanted them to to still be brutal, rapists and technophobes and all, but having it not be overtly and stupidly self destructive as in NV.

This made a supporter of dictatorships apparently and there must be something wrong with me... so yeah, fuck the Thermian argument in all it's new age pearl clutching. Jack Thompson lives on apparently.

 

[Irrelevant Passerby]

I think there is merit to the idea that the Thermian argument is fallacious, and I'll point to "The Birth of the Nation", or the novel it was adapted from, "The Clansman", as an example.

So, Birth of a Nation is notorious for portraying the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic organization, the movie depicting the organization as having formed to protect white southerners from corrupt Reconstruction policies that empowered malicious and undignified black people. Notably, among other things, the movie depicts the rise of black Americans into Southern government as the result of them stuffing ballots and disenfranchising whites. The KKK lynch a black man to avenge a white woman who killed herself in order to avoid being forced to marry him, violently take control of the town from an amoral mulatto governor who also attempts to marry a white woman by force, and "restore order" by threatening the black population into not voting on the next election day.

A fairly common criticism of the work is that it's blatantly racist in its positive portrayal of the KKK and their various hate crimes, and that the book/movie promotes hatred against black people as a result.

The Thermian argument, if applied to Birth of a Nation, would argue that the criticism is invalid due to the fact that the work portrays a South in which white southerners were actually persecuted by an inferior race. The black people depicted in the book/movie "are" genuinely unsuited for public office and predatory towards white women, and thus the KKK were justified in all their actions in the work of fiction. Therefore, the Thermian argument suggests that you can't criticize Birth of a Nation or its author for promoting racism through the whitewashing of the KKK, because the KKK were doing "good things" within the context of the work.

I'm sure everyone can see the issue with that logic? The fact that Birth of a Nation portrays a narrative in which the KKK are fully justified in their violent actions against the newly freed southern black population inherently makes it a work that promotes the discriminatory ideology that the real world group espouses. It did whitewash the hate group, it did promote racism against black Americans, and the inner logic of the narrative doesn't change that.

Saying that the KKK were written as being justified doesn't refute the argument that it is a bad thing that the KKK were written as being justified.

 

[Heliostorm]

My point was that it's not really all that obvious. Like I said, cognitive content and emotional content are often treated as two entirely different categories in the philosophy of mind.

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You're confusing cognition and information as being equivalent, but whatever.

There are animal species that convey animosity by a combination of screeching and body language. Language doesn't necessarily have to be verbal. All it has to do is communicate units of information in a way that the recipient can understand.

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*sigh* I was referring to human linguistic systems, which should have been obvious from context. Of course language in the general sense of "any system of communication" doesn't have to be verbal.

Well, when someone makes a Thermian argument, they're trying to come up with a Watsonian excuse for something, and many of those Watsonian points actually follow from Doylist ones. In other words, if someone points out that a story had to be internally-consistent in a Watsonian sense, it was generally because an author was forced to make it that way because of their Doylist choices.

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Which is rather his point, all authorial decisions are ultimately based on Doylist reasons, ergo the Thermian argument doesn't work.

The implication of Olsen's argument is that authors have full agency over their work, but that's not necessarily the case. Once an author is invested in a certain plot, they can't just shuffle the deck and deal themselves a new hand of totally unrelated tropes. They're stuck with the hand they've already dealt themselves.

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It's not that writers don't have full agency but that they have limited resources (time, creativity, skill, etc.) that they can be applied to writing. A limitation in resources means that all decisions involve tradeoffs. A writer has the agency to change their story to become anything they could want it to, but their limited resources means that the changes will always come with benefits and drawbacks. This is what Olsen is missing.

 

[Deleted member 8519]

You're confusing cognition and information as being equivalent, but whatever.

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That's... that's interesting.

The way I always saw it, if something is non-cognitive - if it is incapable of being cognized - it cannot contain valid information. Information is that which a mind can conceptualize. Feelings and emotions are like... extra-conceptual information. They're almost like a whole different category of information. Feelings versus facts.

In the process of exegesis, if a critic speaks of the relationships of facts in the work they describe, then their critique is valid, but feelings about a work often seem to lack informational content. I don't know. I guess that's always been my perspective. It might be different for other people, I will grant.

Usually, the way I view criticism of fiction, it's supposed to prepare a reader for their own reading. In other words, if a critic says a work is good and decent, that might be reason to seek out a copy for one's own perusal. Many critics these days are caught in their own personal philosophies of what constitutes an ideal fictional work, and they aren't thinking about the audience's desires at all. I see a lot of people chastising works for not meeting their personal standards for moral acceptability, but at the same time, not even once do they admit that some might take pleasure in what causes them pain; they simply assume that we should all share their tastes and point of view, with the further implication that perhaps we are reprobates for liking what they dislike.

It's not that writers don't have full agency but that they have limited resources (time, creativity, skill, etc.) that they can be applied to writing. A limitation in resources means that all decisions involve tradeoffs. A writer has the agency to change their story to become anything they could want it to, but their limited resources means that the changes will always come with benefits and drawbacks. This is what Olsen is missing.

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Well, it's not even that. A writer can have all the resources in the world, but if they've painted themselves into a corner, they'll have no choice but to walk on paint if they want to start changing things.

 

[Mr Sheldon]

Well, it's not even that. A writer can have all the resources in the world, but if they've painted themselves into a corner, they'll have no choice but to walk on paint if they want to start changing things.

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Remove the paint with thinner.

Translation: Find a way to get past previously established canon without destroying it.

 

[Doomsought]

Remove the paint with thinner.

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This is called a retcon, and it tends to annoy the audience.

 

[Deleted member 8519]

Remove the paint with thinner.

Translation: Find a way to get past previously established canon without destroying it.

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This is called a retcon, and it tends to annoy the audience.

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Retcons piss a lot of people off. Oh god, I still remember when 343i’s excuse for the Master Chief’s new suit was... *shudders*... nanomachines, son. And the Forward Unto Dawn changed into a completely different class of ship!

 

[Accelerator/onewayroad]

Speaking as someone who's been on the receiving end of it, on this very site in a fanfic I am writing, it is absolute sophistry and PC bullshit. I've been accused of supporting Ceasers Legion just because I wanted to make them an actually viable faction instead of the cartoonishily evil bastards we got in New Vegas. I was told in no uncertain terms that made me an apologist for them and for dictatorships in general despite my fucking NUMEROUS statements that I find them the worst part of NV because of how badly they were written IE, even in the purely pragmatic sense, they are a dogshit poor choice for long term survival, and I merely wanted them to to still be brutal, rapists and technophobes and all, but having it not be overtly and stupidly self destructive as in NV.

This made a supporter of dictatorships apparently and there must be something wrong with me... so yeah, fuck the Thermian argument in all it's new age pearl clutching. Jack Thompson lives on apparently.

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This may be annoying, but is it possible for you to post links or quotes?

I think we can all benefit from having examples of such behaviour.

 

[ScreenXSurfer]

The Thermian 'argument' sounds like a nonsequitur. Answering a question with something besides the point. Why isn&t it just called that? Besides the phrase doesn't communicate any further insight into the question asked, it's just signaling a disatisfaction with the answer received. Like any other time people miss the point of a question. Is there any deeper level to this than that?

I think this conversation stems from the fact that people shoehorn politics into everything. The reason for the bikini armor isn't a statement about gender politics, it's because hot boob armor is just fun.

 

[Orbotosh]

The Thermian 'argument' sounds like a nonsequitur.

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I think calling it THE *** ARGUMENT is a subtle way of strawmanning it. It's portrayed as a fallacy but for some reason this hive cluster wants to call it an argument, when it's more like a trope (unless this cluster means that the video itself is the thermian argument).

 

[ScreenXSurfer]

I think calling it THE *** ARGUMENT is a subtle way of strawmanning it. It's portrayed as a fallacy but for some reason this hive cluster wants to call it an argument, when it's more like a trope (unless this cluster means that the video itself is the thermian argument).

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Blame Dan Olsen for coining the term the way he did.

 

[Orbotosh]

Blame Dan Olsen for coining the term the way he did.

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A lot of coins get hideously deformed on their way out of the slang mill.

 

[ScreenXSurfer]

A lot of coins get hideously deformed on their way out of the slang mill.

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Is that a Thermian argument? /

 

[Nikkolas]

I am very much against the idea that simply writing about a thing is endorsement and that we can get any sort of accurate view of a creator from their work. I enjoy a lot of very...exotic erotica. I don't believe the people who write it or film it actually endorse these ideas. Sorry to be indelicate but Non-consensual is a very popular fantasy as are many other things that are pretty heinous if they were real. But they're not. We approve of this act of freedom and autonomy with regards to sexual matters but put rape in a "regular story" and suddenly it's a sign the creator is spreading misogyny. I've never understood this.

I was having this exact discussion the other day with regards to Neon Genesis Evangelion and specifically the character of Kaji. Apparently he's very sexist. Debate about if the show treats his sexism as a vice was ongoing but even if the show treated his attitude as perfectly fine, does that mean Hideaki Anno is a sexist pig? Absolutely not.

That all being said, I think things become murkier if there is a pattern of behavior. If you write 10 different stories and in each and every one of them a woman is raped or there is a black man as a villain, I might look at the writer with more suspicion.

 

[Constant Dreamer]

Applying political correctness to fiction is a stupid concept to begin with. Who cares if we offend? Why is offense and tastefulness the measure by which fiction is judged, these days? Really, who gives a damn? I just kinda tune out these days when I hear people talking about how badly something triggered them. I have nothing in my heart but animosity for those who would bowdlerize a story or mutilate a manuscript because it offends them. It defeats the whole purpose of narrative fiction as an art form if one forces fiction to conform to political realities. Some of my favorite works of fiction were deliberately transgressive in nature.

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Now that's one hell of a non-sequitur, I'd say you couldn't miss the point further if you tried, but I'm pretty sure you did try because you're one of those people who sees political correctness everywhere and thinks every criticism of a work you like is an attempt to censor it or shut it down. It's nonsense, it's not based on anything anyone in this thread has actually said, and it's clearly just posturing on your part.