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feotakahariA lot of my thoughts on intent in fiction come down to You Don’t Fucking Know That.
There was this short cartoon called Lava where the two volcanoes in love with each other were modeled on the voice actors. People thought the male volcano was ugly, and they argued that this reinforced how fiction keeps pairing ugly men with pretty women. Then other people pointed out “no, the voice actor just looks that way.” The people who thought it was sexism Didn’t Fucking Know That.
And honestly, I seem to be really bad at Knowing That. I’ve been repeatedly informed that I completely misinterpreted what the author was trying to say. So unless something is, like, Turner Diaries level of obviously bigoted, I’d rather approach it in terms of the setting and characters. I can Know That about the story, even if I can’t Know That about the author.
You could call this willful ignorance, but to some extent it’s willful disrespect. If the author said something stupid, I don’t want to give them the dignity of acknowledging it. I just want to salvage what parts I can, because I think authors die best when they’re murdered. After all, “that is not dead which can eternal lie,” and I think modern authors have done a decent job of murdering Lovecraft.
This is why I keep referencing Zootopia, because it refuses to let you Know That. Most of the characters don’t consistently map to a single out-of-universe demographic (mafia stereotypes notwithstanding), so you usually have to take it from an in-universe perspective and evaluate it without considering what you already Know about some real-world issue. So obviously, Tumblr decided it was trying to be about anti-black racism, and judged it as a failure because it didn’t map to that. Even when I’m writing about something inspired by a real issue, I want it to be defined by the events within the story itself, because I think it’s better writing when you don’t want or expect readers to Know That.
There was this short cartoon called Lava where the two volcanoes in love with each other were modeled on the voice actors. People thought the male volcano was ugly, and they argued that this reinforced how fiction keeps pairing ugly men with pretty women. Then other people pointed out “no, the voice actor just looks that way.” The people who thought it was sexism Didn’t Fucking Know That.
And honestly, I seem to be really bad at Knowing That. I’ve been repeatedly informed that I completely misinterpreted what the author was trying to say. So unless something is, like, Turner Diaries level of obviously bigoted, I’d rather approach it in terms of the setting and characters. I can Know That about the story, even if I can’t Know That about the author.
You could call this willful ignorance, but to some extent it’s willful disrespect. If the author said something stupid, I don’t want to give them the dignity of acknowledging it. I just want to salvage what parts I can, because I think authors die best when they’re murdered. After all, “that is not dead which can eternal lie,” and I think modern authors have done a decent job of murdering Lovecraft.
This is why I keep referencing Zootopia, because it refuses to let you Know That. Most of the characters don’t consistently map to a single out-of-universe demographic (mafia stereotypes notwithstanding), so you usually have to take it from an in-universe perspective and evaluate it without considering what you already Know about some real-world issue. So obviously, Tumblr decided it was trying to be about anti-black racism, and judged it as a failure because it didn’t map to that. Even when I’m writing about something inspired by a real issue, I want it to be defined by the events within the story itself, because I think it’s better writing when you don’t want or expect readers to Know That.
