1. notleia says:

    Continuing our previous week’s rambling discussion: if you are more okay with uncertainty than I guessed you were (it has to do with tickey boxes on the authoritarian follower list), then I wonder why you even bother with being a literalist. Nearly all the literalists I’ve come across also ping on my radar for anxiety patterns. (Which is what influenced my guess on your grimbright preference, re anxiety response, like if you didn’t have an external anxiety, you’d invent one all for yourself? But if anxiety isn’t your particular bugbear, then maybe it’s a preference for concrete vs abstract goals and ends?)

    • Travis Perry says:

      It seems the drive to psychoanalyze me in public coincides with the effect of downplaying anything I have to say as representing an opinion worth listening to. No, I am not saying your public attempts at explaining me show your intent is to explain me away, so that nobody would listen to me. There’s reason to believe you are just speaking your mind. Though I think the effect is there nonetheless–your comments on my posts don’t really do me any favors in terms of helping get my message across. You know, just saying–because I don’t really expect you to change.

      Though in fact my responses to what you say may downplay anything I have to say as much or more as anything you say. Yeah, sometimes I lose perspective. Sigh.

      So while I don’t think it’s in my own interest to give this comment a long and detailed response (hey, look, I’m actually paying attention to my own interests for once 🙂 ), I think it’s worthwhile to fight the embedded notion in your comment that there is some pathology required to explain literalism. No, actually, literalism is the standard and most important means of communication for almost all human beings at almost all times. Sure, being figurative or engaging in wordplay or using double entendre, etc can be interesting, but even the most poetic of people want a literal cup of coffee when they order coffee, much more often than not.

      It is rather the belief that the Bible is somehow better if it is seen as completely non-literal that’s a pathology that requires explanation. I think I know how to explain it in you, at least in part. My hypothesis is that you were never taught the Bible very well from a historical and grammatical perspecitve that really studies it in depth and also takes it seriously–which means taking non-poetic parts literally.

      When you did finally formally study the Bible, it was from people not only more experienced than you, it was from people smarter and more experienced than the literalists you knew. You concluded the non-literalists must be right. You experienced a massive paradigm shift and you flipped over to adopting the new perspective you were exposed to pretty much entirely. Hook, line, and sinker, as the saying goes. To the degree you think any other view is pathological.

      I on the other hand knew some smart literalists and did some real study on my own before running headlong into modern skeptical scholarship. So while I was able to immediately think of reasons to counter certain claims about the Bible–for example the idea of the evolution of the Gospels becoming more legendary over time is shown false by Mark having the most miracles per page of any Gospel (and John having the fewest miracles)–I did not reject every new thing I heard. I analyzed, thought about things, adopted some ideas but not others. I went through many paradigm shits, including one away from Young Earth Creationism–yet I still believe there was a literal creation of the universe by God and a literal Adam and Eve and a literal Garden of Eden. Many other passages take those accounts literally–but just because I see accounts as literal, doesn’t mean I think traditional explanations are necessarily adequate to explain these passages (nor to do I think new explanations are automatically better). I’m willing to be non-standard about such things.

      I believe I study the Bible (and the universe) for what it is, to the best of my ability, by the grace of God. You could do the same–if you could divorce yourself from the notion you’ve already got things figured out…which is how I perceive you feel about yourself, that you are clearly right, with no doubts, and you have no need to question your own certainty.

      • E. Stephen Burnett says:

        “I think it’s worthwhile to fight the embedded notion in your comment that there is some pathology required to explain literalism.”

        I just point out that such attempts at explaining Travis’s pathology must themselves be read literally, in which case, the critique quickly deflects upon the critic. Also: if anyone insists on misreading this approach to the Bible as “a wooden literal view,” etc., etc., this is both cornball nonsense and a basic failure to echo the other person’s belief to the extent that the other person can say, “Yes, we disagree, but you stated my position well.”

  2. Yeah, over the last few years I’ve really learned to be a lot less critical. Not in the sense of ignoring flaws, but in the sense of learning how to assess and react to them differently, whether those flaws occur in shows or in other people.

    Fate Zero and Fate Stay Night are kind of an example of what you’re talking about. Fate Zero’s a truly amazing show that has a well written exploration/commentary on things like war, heroism, tragedy, etc. At first it might seem kind of slow, but it’s dark and gritty and if a person pays attention to the story then they might get pretty attached to it and start to see how deep it really is. And even if the scenes in the first few episodes don’t seem like much at first, there’s actually a ton buried in there, which people often notice upon watching the series a second time. And then those first episodes are more likely to hit them with greater emotional impact. Like, here’s the first scene of Fate Zero:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbOMgfZvymk&t

    As the series progresses, we see exactly how much guilt and pain Kiritsugu carries, and it’s not just the fact that he knows his wife will die in the Holy Grail War. There’s so much more that he’s done and will do and the weight of it all makes him feel so horrifically tainted that he doesn’t even think he deserves to be happy, let alone hold his innocent newborn child. And when he does start to feel happy, he feels guilty and somewhat even avoids that happiness. And as time goes on the audience gets to see and experience his heartache with him. And that’s just one tiny example. At another point in the episode, one of Kiritsugu’s opponents was talking about how ruthless he was by saying Kiritsugu shot down a whole jetliner just because his target was on it. That almost seemed like a passing comment that a viewer would feel safe forgetting (until they rewatch the series). But way later in the second season, there were two entire episodes leading up to WHY he shot that plane down…and it ended up being one of the most painful and pivotal moments in Kiritsugu’s life. We see similar things with all the other chars, too. Irisviel’s outlook on the whole situation is far more complicated than being the stereotypical supportive wife, for example. She has her own reasons for acting the way she does and things she’s had to grapple with. And as much as she loves her husband, she doesn’t always agree with him.

    Not long after I saw Fate Zero, I looked at a clip from the first episode of Fate Stay Night, the show that sorta kicked off the Fate series. And…to me it just didn’t look nearly as awesome as Fate Zero, at least not at first glance. I wasn’t the only one that thought so. Someone in the comments of that Fate Stay clip said Fate Zero sent them there to see its retarded older brother. My initial reaction to the Fate Stay clip wasn’t that mocking, but seeing that comment still made me snicker. Yet Fate Zero probably wouldn’t have existed without Fate Stay Night, which means I would have missed out on one of my favorite shows, which would have made me lose out on something that influenced me for the better. Same goes for other people.

    Over time I’ve kinda learned to really appreciate shows for their flaws, too, even though I’m still willing to point out and criticize those flaws. I hardly ever watch a show unless I feel there’s something in it worth seeing (so it’s rare for me to appreciate a show in an ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ kinda way). But other than that, flaws are a part of a show’s identity, and maybe it’d be harder to remember the show without them. They provide examples of how NOT to write, and/or give fans things to discuss. And they can be good practice for fanfic writers that decide to break the writing problems down and figure out how to fix them, that way they have a better idea of how to handle their own original stories.

    And then I used to be harder on stories for not being as close to perfect as possible, and told myself I’d never publish a story that committed so many mistakes. In some ways I still hold myself to a pretty high storytelling standard, but even though I had a pretty decent amount of writing/worldbuilding experience at that point, that experience doesn’t compare to what I have now.

    A series like, say, Naruto, spans one or more decades, and the writers/artists are often working under intense deadlines and a myriad of (contradicting) expectations from their fans and publishers. Franchises/stories like that are going to have a very hard time staying consistent with plot and quality level over that span of time, even just from the sheer amount of information the author has to work with.

    I’m seeing how hard that can be now, considering how many chars, storyworlds and universes I’m writing. Plus, long term memory is one of the greatest weaknesses someone with my personality type has. Even though I’ve learned to write stuff down in a way that more or less works for me, that doesn’t usually account for the way those bits of information interact with each other. Even if an author manages to remember 1000 ways that info should interact with/affect the story, they might still overlook some small yet important detail.

    With all that, it’s important to have understanding and cut people a lot of slack, but also learn from mistakes and have high personal standards for one’s self. Not in an unhealthy way where we beat ourselves up over every little thing, but in a way that has an eye on learning and self improvement. And, like…I dunno, we should also spend more time learning from other people’s mistakes than we do mocking them. Or something like that.

  3. T-1, I appreciated a culture moment you refer to, something that I wonder if we’ve lost in the age of streaming: You had to go to a friend’s house to watch something. Just reading that brought back so many memories of times in the 80’s that I, a farm kid outside the broadcast zones with limited options and before VHS, did exactly that: had a sleepover with my friends in town who had cable, according to a schedule because it might only be available at a certain time, to watch something. Fragglerock comes to mind, but there were definitely others. Honestly, I kind of miss those days and the sense of anticipation that would rise through the week: “I’ll be over at Jimmy and Allen’s on Friday night and we’ll get to watch [something or another] that I can’t at my house!”

What do you think?