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An Analysis of Exacting Precision
Jul. 27th, 2021 11:08 pmI love reading meta where I feel like people are actually thinking about the text instead of just projecting whatever they want to see (or think they see) on it. And yeah, I write AU's pretty much exclusively, but that's for the same reason I enjoy reading this kind of meta--because I want to engage with and draw from some work, but get something more out of it than the canon alone can provide. Like, if I was just in it for the story in and of itself, I'd just read that same story again five million times. But I don't. And that doesn't appeal to me. And for the same reason I don't make my fanfiction a barefaced copy-paste of whole segments of the canon (one of my largest pet peeves in fanfiction is this kind of lack of originality), I don't enjoy reading meta that seems to be copy-pasted from whatever the most popular sentiments are. Sadly, I often have a lot of trouble articulating a lot of my own meta-analysis, which is why I tend to stick to fanfiction, but I have a particular interest in seeing meta-analysis from others that's really willing to dive deep into the backgrounds of characters and make inferences from things the story itself only implies.
A good meta-analysis will fit a story like a glove, even if it was never intended to by the author. It will outline and give context to the events of a story, and interpret them through some lens. It may be flattering to the author, or depict a character in a positive light, or it may not. It may be intimately related to one's own personal experiences, or it may not. But regardless of these other quantities, and regardless of what other, sometimes very different, interpretations can fit the canon, it will mesh with that canon precisely. It reminds me very much of a quote I read in The Grand Design (by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow) about different models being able to describe the same reality--that none of those models actually *are* the reality, so to the extent that they adequately explain the same results from that reality, they are actually all correct. This means that different models that look like they are describing very different things can actually describe the same reality, and by that same token, different meta that come to very different conclusions can be describing the same work with equal accuracy. However, at the same time, neither of these situations is a case where *all* explanations are equal. Just as there are models that do not describe the reality they purport to, there are meta that do not describe the works they claim to analyze.
Anyway, I dunno, just wanted to link up some of my Science Feelings and my Literature Feelings. I feel like no matter what, for me there's a link with what I get out of a thing and its exacting precision in describing its referent. But there's also, in all cases, the ability to choose between simplicity and complexity, and the inevitability that part of oneself is reflected in the process.
A good meta-analysis will fit a story like a glove, even if it was never intended to by the author. It will outline and give context to the events of a story, and interpret them through some lens. It may be flattering to the author, or depict a character in a positive light, or it may not. It may be intimately related to one's own personal experiences, or it may not. But regardless of these other quantities, and regardless of what other, sometimes very different, interpretations can fit the canon, it will mesh with that canon precisely. It reminds me very much of a quote I read in The Grand Design (by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow) about different models being able to describe the same reality--that none of those models actually *are* the reality, so to the extent that they adequately explain the same results from that reality, they are actually all correct. This means that different models that look like they are describing very different things can actually describe the same reality, and by that same token, different meta that come to very different conclusions can be describing the same work with equal accuracy. However, at the same time, neither of these situations is a case where *all* explanations are equal. Just as there are models that do not describe the reality they purport to, there are meta that do not describe the works they claim to analyze.
Anyway, I dunno, just wanted to link up some of my Science Feelings and my Literature Feelings. I feel like no matter what, for me there's a link with what I get out of a thing and its exacting precision in describing its referent. But there's also, in all cases, the ability to choose between simplicity and complexity, and the inevitability that part of oneself is reflected in the process.
