Dan Olson, also known as Foldable Human, is a culture and media critic. Not long ago he created a video where he discusses what he calls the “Thermian Argument,” or “using in-universe justification for creepy garbage.”
The Thermian Argument is composed of two parts. In his own words:
1) Some element of a movie, anime, or videogame is criticized, usually for racism or sexism.
2) Fans defend it by citing in-universe reasons for why the world of the text is the way that it is.
Here’s the problem: fictional worlds aren’t real, and are eternally mutable by creators. They are the sum of a giant pile of creative decisions made by one, two, a dozen, a hundred different individuals who took it from blank page to finished product. The only reason anything is the way that it is, is because a writer chose to make it that way.
He continues to state his position more plainly immediately after:
“The diegetic argument seeks to dismiss criticism at its core, suggesting that there aren’t any problems with the text provided controversial elements are internally consistent with the rest of the story world.
In slang terms this can be referred to as the Thermian Argument.
In the Scifi classic, Galaxy Quest, the Thermians don’t understand fiction as a concept. It doesn’t exist in their language, and thus they see all texts as historical documents.
While not identical, the root figure of thought is similar here. The diegesis is given primacy over the text as a cultural product. The exact rationale behind a Thermian Argument may even be contradictory from one case to another. One medieval game with dragons and magic, but no one with brown skin is fine as is because ‘historical accuracy.’ In a different medieval game, a character wears a chainmail bikini to a warzone because it’s ‘just a fantasy, and that’s how her tribe dresses.’ You cannot criticize the world, because that’s just the way the world is.
This is a deeply flawed argument, because, once again, fictional worlds aren’t real, and are eternally mutable by creators. None of it actually exists. The only part that does exist is the finished text and the idea that it represents.”
Following this, he brings the audience back to the question he started with, “How do you kill a vampire?”
“It doesn’t matter what you wrote, the answer is irrelevant. Vampires aren’t real. While the rules for how to kill a vampire may be codified within any game, book, movie, or show, nothing exists to enforce the rules of a fictional space. Writers routinely alter the rules to suit their interests or the needs of their story.
So in the world outside the diegesis, our world, only the implications and impact of that fiction actually matter. That’s why this type of dismissal, using a diegetic justification to nullify criticism is ultimately a chump argument.
Unlike world history, where there is a theoretical objective truth we can seek to better and more accurately represent, fictional worlds are fiction. There is no truth to move towards. Arguments for purity or consistency miss the point entirely. The Thermian Argument, therefore, serves only to shut down discussion. Criticism of a creative work is, ultimately, criticism of the decisions that people made when they were putting it together.
If the sophistry above is not readily apparent, then it falls upon me to explain why this reasoning is anathema to the narrative arts: Dan Olsen is arguing that the internal facts of a work of fiction are irrelevant to how any internal element should be judged. Seeing as fiction is not real, an artist can and should change their work at any time to more closely fit with Dan Olsen’s sensibilities, and anyone who disagrees doesn’t understand how fiction works.
Before I dissect the meat of the argument, however, a serious elephant in the room needs to be addressed. The elephant is question is his hypothetical example of problematic media and strawman rebuttal that sets the parameters for the “Thermian Argument:”
Folding Ideas: Hi, I’m Folding Ideas. I recently watched the anime Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs, and was, y’know, disturbed by the seeming perverse glee the show takes in the way it frames the frequent and excessive dismemberment of its female cast members. In fact, the entire purpose of the show seems to be little more than showing women being brutally violated by orcs. Minor characters with little plot significance are often subjected to two- or three-minute sequences that focus an almost pornographic lens on their suffering, and the enjoyment the orcs take in the process.
Angry Gamesmasher: Dan Olsen is wrong to complain. If he thinks this is a big deal then he clearly wasn’t paying attention. The orcs were created by the Dread God who hates all light. The Dread God wanted an army that would rape and shred its way across the land of Thule. So the orcs aren’t violent for no reason. They are compelled to be violent. It all makes sense if you were paying attention to the backstory.
Take a careful look at this hypothetical. Have you finished going over it? Good.
I reject this hypothetical, wholesale.
No one is under any obligation to accept hypotheticals in an argument, especially if they lack internal consistency or a sense of verisimilitude. It is quite easy for someone to come up with a disingenuous hypothetical to support their argument, and obfuscate any weakness in their argument with the argumentative assumption of good faith. The world of fiction is littered with enough examples of anything that one need not resort to disingenuous hypotheticals, especially ones littered with weasel words like “seeming” and “almost.” These words are very telling, because he’s trying to present us with a hypothetical anime about women getting ripped apart by orcs that isn’t quite a porno.
I will end this right now: there is no way in Hell that Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs is not a porno. No diegetic argument need be made to defend the internal universe of a porno because the primary goal of pornography is to titillate, not to tell a well-reasoned story. While idiots abound in the market of narrative fiction, and many will make absurd arguments to defend their favorite products, this does not mean that his hypothetical is valid, as blatant pornography cannot be used as a stand-in for every other form of narrative art. It would be like claiming all dissident political action is morally equivalent to murder because some people murder as a political act!
Orc porn is a well-established form of hentai. So well established, in fact, that the monster-girl harem anime Monster Musume no iru Nichijou satirized the excesses of the genre by having a bunch of orc terrorists take hostages inside a bookstore and demand that all porn in Japan be turned into orc porn (Episode 7 of the anime, Ch. 11 of the manga). Many people, even those who do not watch anime, understand that orc and monster porn are a thing. Orc porn is at the extreme end of the hentai spectrum, along with (and overlapping) other grotesque genres like rape, bestiality, and guro. This is important, because even people who don’t have extensive knowledge of the subject may have seen a handful of images in their internet careers, and understand these to be among the greatest excesses of the pornographic end of anime.
The reason this is important to point out is because it’s a shaming tactic. First, Dan Olsen has presented something that evokes a visceral reaction of revulsion in many people due to impressions gained through cultural osmosis. He then tries to sell it as though in some reality this isn’t actually some kind of extreme porn, but is much closer to the controversial thing that you happen to like. He claims the “Thermian Argument” is an attempt at shutting down criticism, but his hypothetical is designed to do the very same thing by making you feel like some kind of idiot or pervert for disagreeing with him.
This is how he chose to open his argument: a disingenuous hypothetical designed to marginalize and impugn the character of any possible detractors.
He then presents his actual argument, that consistency and verisimilitude are irrelevant to narrative. Narrative isn’t actually a story to be engaged with, but rather a “pile of choices.” Anyone with an ounce of story-telling sense understands his entire argument really falls apart here. To Dan Olsen, the diegesis (the intellectual space of fiction) is a heap of intellectual garbage to rummage through so he can find things to smear the artists who created the text.
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.
To put the above into a “Thermian” format: Orcs have always been violent and rapacious, and commit every crime during war that humans do, the only difference being that their culture is built around such practices. Orcs are hyper-aggressive, low-intellect humanoids who are naturally prone to violence, so such a culture makes sense for them. Additionally, they’re capable of interbreeding with humans, and their offspring tend to have higher intelligence than the average orc, making them useful to the tribe in developing raiding strategies and tactics. Some tribes focus heavily on this interbreeding, and so (naturally) gather female human slaves and force themselves upon them. This is not a universal practice, and is the source of a lot of tensions between pureblood orc tribes and the tribes actively swelling their numbers with half-breeds.
So the diegetic argument, the “Thermian Argument,” is that it stands to reason that the orcs would rip women apart, figuratively and literally. Not a central focus of most stories, mind, but an important part of the setting. It grants the world verisimilitude, a sense of logical end-results for the non-real things we agree to accept when we sit down and play the game. It serves to justify the half-orcs throughout the game, and provide motive and grounding for character interactions with orcs (player character and non-player character alike). It informs how the human rogue who lost her family to orcs might seek the head of an orc warlord or the half-orc raised in a human society might seek the life of a criminal or ascetic just as much as it explains why the hobgoblin raiders to the north collect slaves to sell to orcs.
Returning to Dan Olsen, here’s where his argumentation gets really silly. He claims that there is nothing enforcing the rules of fiction, and that an artist may change their work at any time. While the latter is technically true, the reader still notices glaring, and in many cases even minor inconsistencies. The audience, for all its fallibility, will try to hold a work to the rules it sets for itself. Does anyone remember the outrage over Mass Effect 3? They ignored the rules for how Element Zero functioned in order to attempt an “artsy” ending, and it failed miserably! Glaring gaps in a fictive work stretch the audience’s credulity and may cause them to completely disengage, because such inconsistencies break the agreement the artist makes with the audience at the outset.
The agreement between the artist and the audience is paramount in storytelling. One cannot engage with the narrative of fiction if they do not agree to the basic assumptions of the story. Dan Olsen is arguing from the position of someone who refuses to be party to such an agreement in the first place, and therefore breaks the fundamental rules of how fiction is read. Dan Olsen is arguing that because a fictive work is fictive, and therefore not real, there is no demand that he approach the story on its own terms. This is an aberration, because the arguments this would justify are absolutely absurd.
To use his own example against him, Dan Olsen disagrees with the choice of the anime Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs to depict women getting ripped apart by orcs. It’s something in the title, something you agree to when you start watching. Of course you have to accept that this is the case! If I were to accept his reasoning, I could pose the argument that Star Trek is “problematic” because it takes place in space and not rural Mexico. We only really know what it’s like in space because of the petty showboating of the imperial powers of the Cold War, and Gene Roddenberry explicitly chose to set his story in space, thereby ignoring the socioeconomic problems of rural Mexico, making him a racist!
His absurdity, of course, does not end there. He goes on further to describe two “Thermian Arguments” concerning fantasy, and present them as being contradictory. To recap:
“The exact rationale behind a Thermian Argument may even be contradictory from one case to another. One medieval game with dragons and magic, but no one with brown skin is fine as is because ‘historical accuracy.’ In a different medieval game, a character wears a chainmail bikini to a warzone because it’s ‘just a fantasy, and that’s how her tribe dresses.’ You cannot criticize the world, because that’s just the way the world is.”
These arguments aren’t actually contradictory. They’re not contradictory at all, because they’re dealing with two separate and possibly radically different products. “Fantasy” is a catch-all term for swathes of fictive works with greater, lesser, and often non-equitable demands of suspension of disbelief.
I will refer to two real world examples of the very works of media he is discussing.
First, the demand of “historical accuracy:”
The Witcher franchise has next to no non-white people in it. Its primary influence is Slavic folklore, and the artists were trying to depict a fantasy version of medieval Poland. The developers set out to build a world that accurately represented that culture and region of the world with the additional fantastical elements of magic and monsters. It places a high standard for naturalistic representation, and the setting and story make demands of the narrative to be as close to a believable history as possible. It is entirely natural, then, that they don’t fill medieval-fantasy Poland with Peruvian alpaca herders and Malaysian rice farmers. This isn’t particularly difficult to understand. One would be in the wrong to demand that a game set in a fantastic central Africa include Inuit characters, and even the more believable demand of white traders from southern Europe need not be met if the artist chooses not to include them. An artist is under no moral obligation to include things you like in a story and take away things you don’t like, unless you have been sold a false bill of goods.
Then we come to the bikini armor issue. Much can be said about any given case of bikini armor and whether it has any artistic merit as a device (some instances it actually serves a communicative function to the audience, other times it is simply titillation). However, a work with bikini armor is liable to have very different demands than The Witcher. Let’s look at an actual example, Dragon’s Crown:
The Witcher
Dragon’s Crown
Look at both of these works. Do you see any differences? No? I’ll wait.
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…
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These games are clearly telling very different stories in very different ways. They are not equivalent works. The choices the artists have made and the stories they’re trying to tell are so disparate as to be non-comparable in this context. Yet Dan Olsen would have you believe they’re basically the same product on the grounds of “fantasy.”
Dan Olsen has created a false equivalency between all fantasy fiction, in order to present the arguments “historical accuracy” and “it’s just fantasy” between two separate products as though they are contradictory. If it were the same product, he might have a leg to stand on, but by his own words, they are not. He refuses to judge a work by the standards it sets for itself, and refuses to let other people do the same.
That said, there’s also an important fact to consider when looking at the arguments he’s putting forward here: neither of them are truly diegetic arguments.
The appeal to “historical accuracy,” while poorly articulated (and honestly, we can’t expect everyone in the world to be able to articulate all of their thoughts in perfect clarity), is in fact an appeal to authorial intent, and is not a diegetic argument. The artists are trying to depict a culture in a place and time accurately within the context of a fantastical yet naturalistic world. Even if there were a handful of non-white people in Poland during such a time (and I’m sure there were), one would have to heavily contextualize their presence as outsiders if the goal was accurate cultural depiction. This would end up with non-white people still being “othered,” and such representation could entail anything from humble merchant to rapacious invader (ex: the 13th century Mongol invasions of Poland). Not only does having a bunch of Africans in a polish fishing village in polish garb with polish mannerisms and nobody batting an eye seem to be insultingly pandering, but it also raises too many questions: Where did these people come from? Why are they still ethnically distinct? Why haven’t they bred into the population? How are they so culturally assimilated if they have segregated themselves through spouse selection? Why is no one addressing this?
And if they were to address this in-game and have people naturally be wary of the immigrants, I would be forced to ask, “When we’re dealing with racism against non-humans and the radicalism of elven terrorist groups like the Scoia’tael, is fantasy Poland the best venue to talk about the difficulties of integration for African immigrant populations into developed Western nations?” Frankly, the whole thing would be more trouble than it’s worth for the artists, because by that point it’s not the game they wanted to make in the first place.
Moving on, the defense “it’s just fantasy, and that’s just how her tribe dresses,” is an appeal to the demands of genre and the opening conceits one is forced to accept when engaging such a work. This is the only argument of the two to contain any diegetic justification, and only then after being couched in the meta-structure of the fantasy genre. As someone with an interest in ancient and medieval military technology, I am less perturbed by bikini armor than I am weapons clearly in excess of 20 lbs., poorly designed armor that makes it impossible for the person inside to move, the Hollywood concept of “leather armor,” and a million other practical considerations that tend to get thrown out the window, even when artists are attempting naturalistic representation. Fantasy weapons and armor in general are so over-designed and without a thought to practical use that focusing on bikini armor is like pissing on a house fire.
After all that, I’d be remiss if I did not actually put forth my own, somewhat more believable hypothetical, one that addresses both the absurdity of Dan Olsen’s position and the examples he chose:
Hypothetical Game Discussion
Hypothetical Folding Ideas position: You know, I just played the game Lioness, and was disturbed by the patriarchal cultural values put forth by the game, like its implicit promotion of polygamy. If anything, the main character of the game places the life of this authoritative male figure above her own. I’m also unsettled by the fact that as she heads north-east to get the medicine necessary to cure her husband of supernatural illness, she never puts on any armor. Armor is clearly available to her after her encounters with the slavers, but instead of putting on the chainmail or any of the other protective gear as is, she cuts it apart and attaches it to her bikini, forming bikini armor. None of that is practical, and it seems only to encourage the objectifying gaze of the presumed male player.
Someone who knows better than Folding Ideas: Dan Olsen is not in the right to be complaining about any of these things, as he clearly wasn’t paying attention. The game is a fantasy set in central Africa, and the main character comes from Lion Tribe, which models its family structure on that of a pride of lions. The men who do not pass the tribe’s rigorous testing do not get to stay with the tribe, and are expelled into the wilderness. To keep the tribe’s numbers up, and to produce the female warriors necessary to defend the men of the tribe, they live in a system of polygamy. It’s all in the codex entries.
We also see from the opening cinematic that the main character’s husband is not an oppressive figure, but loves and is loved by his three wives. All three (the huntress, the oracle, and the sorceress) take part in the journey to heal him, even if the huntress protagonist is the only one who physically leaves the village. The oracle consults the spirits to protect the huntress on her journey and the sorceress stabilizes the husband and grants magical boons to the huntress for accomplishments and artifact finds.
Our protagonist never puts on armor because of the conventional wisdom of her tribe. Like in real central Africa, wearing metal armor would be a death sentence, and “leather armor” is largely an invention of Hollywood so that’s out. It is said explicitly in the game that the main character, being a warrior, wears little clothing in order to reduce the chance of infection should she get cut. In fact, the primary reason that the main character is wearing a top at all is to keep her breasts out of the way. The reason she applies chainmail to her top after encountering the slavers from the north-east is because it is an exotic material that makes for a good trophy. Based on the invocations being cast by the sorceress wife, the trophy gives her an increased defense because it is invoking a correlation to armor, and since the spirits honor the strength and skill it took her to get the chainmail in the first place, they have granted her supernatural protection. So while the chainmail appears on her top, it is not in fact what is protecting her from harm. Anyone who was paying attention to the story (in this case, laid out in a cutscene) or had a grounding in anthropological understanding of ritual-magical reasoning could have told you this.
Sadly, Lioness isn’t a real game. I took pains to structure the hypothetical conversation on arguments I have witnessed and participated in, arguments including GTA, Dragon’s Crown, God of War, Bayonetta, and more.
Were Lioness an actual game, I would sincerely like to see Dan Olsen try to dismiss the argument above on the grounds that the mostly diegetic argument put forward has any sort of holes in it. I doubt he could. Indeed, if Lioness were real and he tried to apply his reasoning to the elements he didn’t care for in a direct manner I’m quite sure he would be torn apart by fans and laypeople alike.
This is why Dan Olsen used a totally-pornography-but-not-because-I-say-so hypothetical in order to make his argument. Most of the real world examples of fiction where a diegetic argument could be made are works that not only have strong fanbases with articulate defenders, but the works themselves can easily stand up to his destructive rhetoric on their own merits. In other words: they would prove Dan Olsen wrong.
I don’t buy that The Witcher is racist, I have yet to be convinced that Dragon’s Crown or any other game with bikini-clad women is sexist based solely on those grounds, yet Dan Olsen demands that I accept these arguments lest I be labelled a racist or a sexist. He’s saying I might as well be making diegetic arguments for the violent porno Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs!
In summary: Dan Olsen argues that if you are willing to defend choices in fiction he disagrees with then you are either an idiot or a pervert for letting the story be the story the artist wanted it to be. Diegetic justifications for things he doesn’t like in narrative fiction are a way of shutting down discussion and you’re a racist, a misogynist, or an idiot for disagreeing. You’re defending creepy garbage because you agree to the conceits of a story before you engage with it, making you morally reprehensible and you should be ashamed of yourself. Also it doesn’t matter that these things he’s talking about don’t fit the parameters he set for the discussion, if you disagree with him then you’re a chump.
Dan Olsen is a shining example of the YouTube charlatan.
It would be a shame for no one to acknowledge such a lengthy post, so here I am nearly a year late.
I disagree with your summary of Olsen’s argument. His point is basically that you shouldn’t try to counter a criticism of a fictional world through using the fictional context of that world. If he is complaining about a thing containing rapey orcs, you aren’t going to successfully counter it with “well, that’s just the orc’s nature”. But that also doesn’t mean his original complaint isn’t questionable, or that you can use an out-of-universe explanation to counter his complaint. I think you are jumping to the conclusion that because Olsen disagrees with “diagetic arguments” here, he must also assume that there is no possible alternative argument to make; that his opinion must automatically be correct. He never says this.
Also, to pick on your Witcher example (I’m just going to focus on that one only, for brevity), you start by stating the creators are basing the game on Slavic folk-law whilst trying to accurate representation of medieval Poland. Those ideas intrinsically don’t mesh; it can’t ever be an accurate representation of medieval Poland because Poland doesn’t have monsters in it. They clearly felt like they could make some stuff up for the sake of creating a fantasy setting, so with that in mind, what stops them making a non-white ethnic group for the setting? Further more, It’s wouldn’t even be an accurate representation of medieval Poland even if it didn’t have magic or dragons in, because medieval Poland would have had non-white ethnic minorities (unless we are to believe Poland had no ships or trade with the outside world).
You also argue that the creators have “no moral obligation” to put anything in their game, but that’s a red herring because we are still allowed to criticise what the creator does, regardless of any alleged moral duty. If the creators decided that in their game Geralt must spend the entire story bottomless, players might ridicule the game for it. Arguing that the creators have no obligation to make a Geralt wear underwear doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t make it look any less silly to the viewer. To use a genuine in-game example, the “collect sexy women like baseball cards” feature of the first game was seen as a daft feature. Arguing that the creators don’t have to do anything we ask and that its up to them if they want a woman card collectables, does absolutely nothing to contest the observation that it was a daft feature.
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Oh my! I honestly didn’t think anyone would ever respond! I really appreciate this feedback, thank you! I stand by my original statements, but I greatly appreciate that you took the time to read my work and disagree : )
Perhaps it’s because I’m a storyteller myself and Dan Olsen is not (yes, I have a *degree* in that field, argument from authority fallacy if you wish to frame it that way, I won’t blame you).
There’s still a major problem with your framing. My argument is that through rejection of diegesis, any reader is refusing to agree to terms with the work of fiction they’re engaging with. His complaint is a complaint of taste cloaked as artistic criticism. Art may be subjective, but there is a noticeable difference between matters of preference and valid critique. I had to sit through 16-20 units of this a quarter for two years, critiquing the work of other students, none of which was to my taste, and I had to divorce my personal tastes from the act of story structure analysis, consistency, use of literary devices. It was hammered into us that “I don’t like this or that this happens in this story is not a critique.” What he likes and does not like on moral grounds is an irrelevant complaint in the scope of artistic merit.
Whether he says this or not is irrelevant, it’s clearly present in his tone. Moreover, I can demonstrate this if you’ll entertain a hypothetical. As in my post you are under no obligation to accept m hypothetical, but I will endeavor to provide a valid substitute for his example. My example will be the fantasy manga/anime, Berserk.
And so on and so forth. The idea that diegesis can be ignored because “fiction is eternally mutable” is a very dangerous position for storytelling. If one accepts that fiction is eternally mutable is an argument against a work at all opens it up to all other levels of argumentation. There is no principle applied, no discipline that limits the parameters of the argument. There are broader implications to the argument than what Dan Olsen has presented, and what you are presenting as devil’s advocate.
To rephrase: is it valid critique to point out that story A is not a story that is not story A?
I disagree entirely. One can attempt to recreate the culture to as close to accurate as they can while incorporating beings from that culture’s folklore. People DID believe in these things, and their factual presence in the diegesis is addressed by the presence of cultural institutions like the witchers. To argue otherwise is to argue that Chinese folklore doesn’t accurately represent the culture and people because dwarves, dragons, and monkey-kings don’t exist.
Moreover, there ARE non-white people in The Witcher, you even fight one of them in the first game (Azar Javed). They exist in-setting, you just don’t see a lot of them because they’re not native to the region. Moreover, on the basis of having ports, the coastline of Poland only closely connects those traders from that time to the Scandanavian countries and Europe, making Chinese or Indian traders highly unlikely. I happen to know from my research on medieval technology that the Volga trade route was closed by the time real-world Poland was a the technological level of the people in the Witcher. And to my knowledge (I did some research on this around the time I wrote), Polish trade with the Middle East and Asia at large was done primarily through intermediate traders who were predominantly Armenian in ethnicity.
Allow me to share with you some personal experience regarding different cultures being represented in video games, and how distracting it can be:
I bought Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, a side-scrolling beat-em-up made by an African indie team to bring some African voices to the videogame market. I was expecting no masterpiece from the developers, but I was excited to see developers practicing what I have been preaching (independent of me of course), and putting their own cultural artifacts out into the market.
I found myself disappointed. The gameplay was what I expected, but the culture was only there in a vague sense. I signed up for a sort of Central-African techno-magic world, and among many other issues from exposition to out-of-place storytelling artifacts from different, incompatible genres, I had to deal with the fact that’s not what I got. I got a few vaguely alluded-to spiritual concepts of African origin, a lot of names in languages that I can’t pronounce, etc. While those things certainly WERE African, and the game was certainly MADE by people in Africa, it felt like something produced here by people who opened up a few Wikipedia pages and an online translator.
What does this have to do with non-white people in The Witcher? Because A:LKO, a game set in fantasy Africa and supposedly informed by Central-African cultures, is FULL OF WHITE PEOPLE!
I quite serious when I say that large numbers of non-token white people all over the place was ABSOLUTELY distracting. I didn’t agree to unexplained white people when I signed up to what was sold to me as one of the first culturally African games that wasn’t about Egypt. And yes, it was one of the reasons I ended up not finishing the game. Those white people just didn’t gel with anything else around them. They did not belong.
You are correct, however that wasn’t the argument that Dan Olsen was making. Because Dan Olsen couches his argument in the mutability of fiction, emphasizing that fiction can be changed by the creator at any time, it is clear he is putting pressure on content creators to not make things he finds distasteful, particularly when it is clear he is not the audience, and there is an audience that likes the product as is. Dan Olsen is clearly making a moral argument, both with his choice of his hypothetical and through his choice of words (as he clearly wrote a script, I must treat his word choice as deliberate).
When Raiden ran around naked in Metal Gear Solid 2, people laughed and criticized it, sure. But they didn’t pretend the diegesis was an irrelevancy to literary critique.
Just because someone can criticize another’s work doesn’t mean their criticism is valid, nor does it mean that the critic’s perspective is the most dominant viewpoint. Dan Olsen goes out of his way to strawman all diegetic arguments through the most inarticulate arguments put forward, as though diegetic arguments simply cannot be valid. The rejection of the diegesis on its own terms is a refusal to engage with the tale a storyteller is spinning. Darth Vader didn’t HAVE to throw Palpatine down that shaft (Return of the Jedi), Donald Fafrae didn’t HAVE to undermine Michael Henchard’s authority in front of the men that cold misty morning (The Mayor of Casterbridge), and Hannibal Lecter didn’t HAVE to tell Clarice Starling anything about Buffalo Bill (Silence of the Lambs).
But they did do those things in those stories. That it didn’t have to play out that way (taken as an argument on its own) doesn’t hold critical water.
And I agree the sexy women baseball cards feature was absurd, but it wasn’t part of the diegesis. It was a feature of the metagame, not something that actually existed in the story. Now THAT is a red herring.
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Even if at the end of all of this you still disagree with me, I really do appreciate you reading and responding. Responding to you has been an absolute joy and has helped me reacquaint myself with my critical lens, which I set aside for a while due to overstrain.
Sincerest thanks,
Divine Divisions
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Here’s the problem with your “Well this is how we did criticism in my college writing class” approach. *Of course* you only discussed raw mechanical technique in this class, because the goal for everyone involved is “learn the basic mechanical process of writing a story”. That doesn’t mean cultural criticism doesn’t get to be a thing. Suspension of disbelief is irrelevant to this. You can write a terrible story that *technically* makes internal sense, but it’s still a bad story. Diegesis is secondary to the way people actually engage with stories, which is generally on an emotional and thematic level.
Q: Why is Quiet naked all the time?
A: Because she breathes through her skin because she’s got superscience vocal parasites
Q: That’s stupid, aren’t you just making up a dumb excuse to have a woman running around in underpants?
A: No that’s just how the vocal parasites work
The author uses the in-universe laws (that they are in complete control of) in order to justify a design choice that otherwise has no storytelling purpose and actually undermines the themes that drive the character. What is the *thematic* purpose of Quiet being naked? What does it add to the narrative?
And making up a fictional conversation with Dan doesn’t help your argument. Your example of Berserk shows that you don’t seem to understand what his point is about and is a huge strawman argument. The gruesomeness of Griffith’s betrayal isn’t excused by diegetic rules. It is the culmination of numerous themes and is a key turning point in the emotional journey of the series. Berserk itself tends to keep the laws of its universe vague because it knows that the emotional and thematic journey is what is more important and should drive the plot. “The way demons would logically work” isn’t important here. What’s important is the magnitude of Griffith’s betrayal, the emotional trauma that has been thrust upon Guts and Casca, the lines Griffith is willing to cross in his obsession. The Thermian Argument has nothing to do with this.
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Rapey monsters are actually a huge mechanical problem in d&d 5e. Female characters near half their maximum HP suddenly find that the orcs attacking them are only hitting half as often as before. This is because trying to knock someone out without killing them imposes disadvantage, which effectively halved their hit chance, in 5e. It’s a logical assumption that an orc will always try to take a female prisoner, but it swings character balance a bit.
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I just want to say that, upon running into Dan Olsen’s video about this, and getting into an argument a year later in his comments section… It’s really sad to see you went to all this trouble to write out such a strong, well-argued, intelligent response, and have gotten such limited views and responses.
…On the other hand, as you’ve pointed out, I don’t expect that this is new information to anyone who knows what they’re talking about. Even I clued into a few of the problems in the argument. It occurs to me in hindsight that anyone who names their idea after a fictional race played for laughs in a fictional work is probably not taking this as seriously as they could be.
And, yes, Lioness would actually be a great idea.
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Hey, I watched Olsen’s video a while ago and have been going back and forth on it. I really loved your analysis here, and while I have a lot of thoughts on the matter, they’ve mostly been said already by you or the other commenters here, so I thought I’d just leave a more recent and brief conclusion I’ve come to on the matter.
I think at the core of Olsen’s argument there’s a fundamental assertion about the ways in which fiction is created that your analysis of his video not only rejects, but inverts. In your analysis you describe the process through which the creators of Pathfinder created and implemented orcs into their world; starting from a very basic question and working out the details in a very rigorous process that treats logic with the utmost priority. With such a world, as you’ve pointed out, criticizing an aspect of it and then calling the diegetic argument fallacious is unfair to the fiction, as fixing the issue would necessitate a total rewrite of basic assertions about the world from the ground up and a general destruction of the author’s artistic vision.
The problem I see though is the fact that outside the universes of roleplaying games and obscure fantasy novels, this level of attention to and priority of logic and logistics is staggeringly uncommon. In most fiction, fantastical elements like bikini armor, savage orc tribes, etc. are there either because they serve a narrative purpose, or because the author wanted them to be there, and any and all diegetic rationale for their presence is posterior justification or explanation. Lioness is a very intriguing and well-thought out idea for a game, but I have to say that it doesn’t sound like any game I’ve ever heard of. 99 times out of 100, if bikini armor is in a game, it’s because the creators just wanted there to be bikini armor because bikini armor is sexy, not because the existence of bikini armor is the perfectly-logical end result of the interaction of metric tons of other aspects of the world and backstory.
I think this is very important to Olsen’s idea, or at least the idea that he presents at the beginning of the video. His digression into historical accuracy or inspiration not being an excuse to have no brown people is utter shlock, but at its core, Olsen’s argument asserts that it is very apparent when something is present in fiction simply because of an uncritical and potentially problematic (I hate using that word, sorry) desire for it to be there, as opposed to it being the result of careful and considerate worldbuilding done from the ground up.
As an example of this I’d cite two works I’m somewhat familiar with; Bayonetta and Kill La Kill. Both of these works depict women whose usage of their magical powers results in them becoming progressively more unclothed. Stepping back from our discussion of authorial power, hypotheses and realism, I want you to watch Kill La Kill or play Bayonetta and then tell me with a straight face that these elements are present in these works not because the creators wanted to have some tits flopping about but rather as natural consequences of the perfectly logical and well-established rules of magic. While I understand that you differentiate works that are explicitly pornographic from others that are not and might be inclined to label these two works as pornographic to counter my argument here, I think that this is stretching the definition of pornography too far.
In conclusion I think everything you’ve said in your analysis is true and well-reasoned. I just think that you might be looking at the context of Olsen’s video in a slightly off angle.
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“Hey, I watched Olsen’s video a while ago and have been going back and forth on it. I really loved your analysis here, and while I have a lot of thoughts on the matter, they’ve mostly been said already by you or the other commenters here, so I thought I’d just leave a more recent and brief conclusion I’ve come to on the matter.”
Sorry I never got around to answering you! Another person replied recently and I had to answer them. As it turned out there were a number of comments that were pending that were buried in my email notifications (I rarely check my email).
I feel obliged to respond to your post, even if nearly a year has passed.
“I think at the core of Olsen’s argument there’s a fundamental assertion about the ways in which fiction is created that your analysis of his video not only rejects, but inverts. In your analysis you describe the process through which the creators of Pathfinder created and implemented orcs into their world; starting from a very basic question and working out the details in a very rigorous process that treats logic with the utmost priority. With such a world, as you’ve pointed out, criticizing an aspect of it and then calling the diegetic argument fallacious is unfair to the fiction, as fixing the issue would necessitate a total rewrite of basic assertions about the world from the ground up and a general destruction of the author’s artistic vision.”
This is an accurate assessment, yes. I’m glad someone got it!
“The problem I see though is the fact that outside the universes of roleplaying games and obscure fantasy novels, this level of attention to and priority of logic and logistics is staggeringly uncommon. In most fiction, fantastical elements like bikini armor, savage orc tribes, etc. are there either because they serve a narrative purpose, or because the author wanted them to be there, and any and all diegetic rationale for their presence is posterior justification or explanation. Lioness is a very intriguing and well-thought out idea for a game, but I have to say that it doesn’t sound like any game I’ve ever heard of. 99 times out of 100, if bikini armor is in a game, it’s because the creators just wanted there to be bikini armor because bikini armor is sexy, not because the existence of bikini armor is the perfectly-logical end result of the interaction of metric tons of other aspects of the world and backstory.”
I can, and did, in fact, point out an example where bikini armor has been used effectively as a narrative element: Dragon’s Crown. Maybe I should have gone into it deeper, but George Kamitani, lead artist for the game and head of Vanillaware, is a classically trained artist with a long record of gorgeous games with brilliant character designs, from being able to assess Gwendolyn’s narrative arc is loss of innocence through disillusionment with her father based on her design alone in Odin Sphere, to the inversion of necromancy into a fertility magic through the exaggerated classically feminine Sorceress in Dragon’s Crown. DC itself is a love letter to his many inspirations as an artist, with loving tributes to great Renaissance paintings littered throughout level designs, level backgrounds, and NPC characters. The man knows what he’s doing.
With the Amazon from Dragon’s Crown, to summarize, he used the near nudity of her bikini-armored form to emphasize her feminine outline *simultaneously* with her musculature. Couple that with her status as an Amazon (from the Amazonian perspective, warrior is the proper feminine role), we see that her warrior strength is not masculine, but feminine in nature, bypassing the common criticism that physically strong females in fiction are just men with boobs. It was a choice that worked with the exaggerated anatomical style of the game world, made her clearly distinguishable from the other characters (remember the original TMNT beat’em’up?), and communicated something that made her engaging as a character in a game genre where character development is functionally non-existent.
The bikini armor of the Amazon does not follow the strict logic of world-building, but follows the logic of the game’s (and the creator’s) sense of aesthetic, while also effectively communicating something about the character he wants you to engage with.
I will agree, though, that most times bikini armor is in a game it’s just because the creator thought it looked hot, or that other people thought it would look hot. That said, if you have any interest in real-world armors, the impracticality and the pursuit of “rule of cool” for fantasy armors in general is infuriating. On the one hand you have over-exposure of flesh and a lack of protection, on the other you have a ridiculous deathtrap that makes you really, *really* easy to grapple to the ground and stab in the eye.
“I think this is very important to Olsen’s idea, or at least the idea that he presents at the beginning of the video. His digression into historical accuracy or inspiration not being an excuse to have no brown people is utter shlock, but at its core, Olsen’s argument asserts that it is very apparent when something is present in fiction simply because of an uncritical and potentially problematic (I hate using that word, sorry) desire for it to be there, as opposed to it being the result of careful and considerate worldbuilding done from the ground up.”
The problem here is that it’s not as apparent as he’d like to present it. Jason Schrier of Kotaku ignored Kamitani’s history of similar and similarly well-thought-out female character design and painted him as a creep. In fact, you yourself make a similar mistake with your next two examples.
“As an example of this I’d cite two works I’m somewhat familiar with; Bayonetta and Kill La Kill. Both of these works depict women whose usage of their magical powers results in them becoming progressively more unclothed. Stepping back from our discussion of authorial power, hypotheses and realism, I want you to watch Kill La Kill or play Bayonetta and then tell me with a straight face that these elements are present in these works not because the creators wanted to have some tits flopping about but rather as natural consequences of the perfectly logical and well-established rules of magic.”
I wouldn’t be able to tell you that with a straight face because I know better, as I imagine I’m more familiar with both of these works than you are. In fact, Bayonetta is the game I know more about the actual production of than any other game I have ever played.
I’ll address Kill la Kill first. No, there is no meaningful diegetic argument to be made in defense of the stripping. The justification exists outside of the work as a broader social commentary on Japanese culture and its relationship with personal vulnerability. While not the most sophisticated example, it exists as part of a bigger specific cultural conversation, and is rather explicit about that fact. Its setting, as you pointed out, is not the result of a sequence of logical questions chained together into a living, breathing world. Where things happen is completely incidental to what is happening and who is doing it. Anyone making a diegetic argument for the nudity does not understand the work itself at a fundamental level.
Bayonetta is part of a completely different conversation, and that conversation is internal to a videogame sub-genre and the career of the man who invented that sub-genre: Hideki Kamiya. The man who gave us Dante and invented the Extreme Combat variant of the hack’n’slash genre with Devil May Cry, provided us with a complete inversion of what was expected.
Oh, it had balls-to-the-wall action, but it was Dante turned on his head. The sexuality of Bayonetta is the opposite of the power-fantasy of Dante: rather than us satisfying ourselves through accomplishing tasks, our role is to satisfy Bayonetta, who is more clearly alienated from the straight male player. She is sexually open and aggressive, but designed in such a way that it’s clear we could not satisfy her. We, the player, are rendered sex objects (inadequate ones at that!) that she will discard as soon as she’s done with them. I believe I’ve already gone over that on this blog, actually.
Bayonetta does not take place in a realized setting. There is no diegetic argument to be had in justifying her sexuality using the game’s story. Its justifications are wholly outside of the game, because the diegesis highlights the fact that it’s a self-satire of Kamiya’s previous work.
“While I understand that you differentiate works that are explicitly pornographic from others that are not and might be inclined to label these two works as pornographic to counter my argument here, I think that this is stretching the definition of pornography too far.”
I disagree entirely. Kill la Kill and Bayonetta, no matter how hype you might get watching or playing them (and I do get hype), are comedies. Titillating comedy in things designed as largely titillating comedy (no matter the message they are trying to convey), is not an issue of diegesis. The issue of diegesis exists in seriously considered worlds, like The Witcher, which you yourself agree is schlock on the part of Olsen.
“In conclusion I think everything you’ve said in your analysis is true and well-reasoned. I just think that you might be looking at the context of Olsen’s video in a slightly off angle.”
On the contrary, I am fully aware diegesis is not a shield from critical examination. I just think that Olsen’s perspective is completely insane, as he argues that diegetic rationale is wholly irrelevant to the validity of criticism. And I hold as my evidence Olsen’s agreed-on “schlock” position.
Again, sorry it took nearly a year to answer you, and thank you for reading!
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In case anyone is still here…
Honestly, this argument is way, way off. While Olson’s attitude towards the ‘infinite’ mutability of artistic works goes a little too far, for my tastes, you’re going to the opposite extreme and seem to be suggesting that no work can ever be subject to criticism unless it contains errors in internal consistency. You’re committing the Thermian fallacy yourself by arguing that every aspect of a story is decided on the basis of causal relationships that arise entirely organically, almost inevitably, following the insertion of an initial story element. Which ignores the fact that-especially in fantasy-those relationships are *not* inevitable logical outcomes stemming from the initial element, but *choices* that are made by the author themselves. You’ve actually admitted this in your essay, although you don’t seem to have realized it – you criticize Olson’s view of stories as a ‘pile of choices’ but then say the following (added my own caps for the relevant part):
“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.”
So, already, you’re admitting that the orcs being violent and savage is *a choice* that was *made* by the *author* of the story, and not the kind of immutable logical conclusion that you make it out to be. In fact, literally every ‘What if-Then’ construction that you use in this section is an example of you (or the hypothetical author) *making a decision*. The Orcs are savage because of their biology – not their culture, religion, environment, and so on. And, in fact, most of your ‘What if’ statements in are in no way necessary parts of the equation. Where does ‘What if orcs could interbreed with humans?” come from, here? Why is this supposition even raised in the first place? Why not ask ‘What if dogs could interbreed with humans?’ Or dragons? Or ghosts? Your argument seems to stem from the believe that there is a perfect chain of causal reasoning at play here, but already you’ve made a massive leap from ‘There are orcs’ to ‘Orcs actively kidnap women to rape because they want to create half-humans’, and, yes, it honestly is pretty creepy and gross. Orcs could just as equally be savage humanoids who are biologically incompatible with humans, or who find humans disgusting. But you – or this hypothetical author – are *choosing* to insert this element into the world.
So, why is that? This is Olson’s point – even if it is a necessary part of the world-building, why is your story set in this world in the first place? What are you trying to show us? Is there some message you’re trying to impart? Or is it just that you find these things exciting, or titillating, and that the world-building itself is simply the justification you use in order to portray these kinds of things in a story?
See, you’re also ignoring the fact that the creation of an artistic work doesn’t just equate to creating an internally consistent world and then allowing anything that’s theoretically possible within that world to become a part of the story. There are many, many other things to take into account besides internal consistency – like the consistency of the narrative, or the tone, or the characters, or the themes. Or even if these things aren’t ‘consistent’, then it should still serve some sort of aesthetic purpose. If not, then it begs the question ‘Why the hell are you showing us this?’ If I made a three-hour long movie showing a worm sleeping on the ground, am I immune from criticism on the grounds that ‘there are worms in my fictional universe’, and tell the audience that ‘it’s their responsibility to engage with my work of art’? No – it’s your JOB, as an artist, to give people a reason for devoting their time to watching, reading, playing or listening to your work of art. And sure, your world might be violent, but that doesn’t mean that we need to see the most extreme examples of that violence. In any number of fictional worlds – from LOTR to Harry Potter to Star Wars – we can assume the existence of various ugly aspects of human behavior, including misogynistic and/or sexual violence – but that doesn’t mean the story has to show us this. And, I would argue that the uglier the behavior is that you’re depicting, the better your justification – on both a narrative AND thematic level – needs to be. If you don’t have one, then you’re absolutely going to be criticized for it.
“The idea that diegesis can be ignored because “fiction is eternally mutable” is a very dangerous position for storytelling. If one accepts that fiction is eternally mutable is an argument against a work at all opens it up to all other levels of argumentation. There is no principle applied, no discipline that limits the parameters of the argument. There are broader implications to the argument than what Dan Olsen has presented”
How is it dangerous? What are the broader implications?
The principle that limits the parameters of the argument, first and foremost, is quality. Which can be broken down into themes, character, narrative, and so on – mainly, the things I mentioned above. As I’ve said, I don’t agree with the statement that the mutability of a piece is necessarily ‘infinite’ as Olson says, but I expect he’s aware of these parameters himself. He also, in the video, gives the parameter of the work’s status as a cultural artifact. The trouble with your argument is that you seem to value only one parameter – namely, the internal logic of the fictional world and nothing else.
The Thermian Argument might have some limited application in certain cases, usually on the level of minor creative decisions. But to buy into it wholesale – as you seem to have done – is to suggest that no work can be criticized for anything, ever, as long as there is an in-universe rationale for what is depicted on the page/screen. Which is basically Olson’s entire point. And that seems more harmful to art that anything he says in his video, honestly.
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“In case anyone is still here…”
I wasn’t but you’ve piqued my interest. I thought that interest in this was dead.
“Honestly, this argument is way, way off. While Olson’s attitude towards the ‘infinite’ mutability of artistic works goes a little too far, for my tastes, you’re going to the opposite extreme and seem to be suggesting that no work can ever be subject to criticism unless it contains errors in internal consistency.”
Not quite. The argument he is making is that diegesis is irrelevant in criticism because fiction is eternally mutable. There is plently of good criticism regarding artistic choices regardless of diegesis.
I’ll provide a real world example comparable to his own of Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs: Roger Corman’s sword-and-sorcery film Deathstalker.
Deathstalker begins with a woman about to be raped by a man in some savage, mystical setting. He is killed by some sort of goblin creature, who then attempts the same thing. That same goblin creature then gets killed by another man, and then we fade out on the knowledge that that third male succeeded in taking the woman against her will. And that’s how we’re introduced to our hero. In the context of the diegesis that is a Roger Corman sword-and-sorcery flick, the world any of those stories take place in is a dangerous, misogynistic, violent place.
It’s also schlock. It’s exploitative garbage. There are no greater philosophical themes. It’s literally just lowest-common-denominator filth. Even if the diegesis allows such a thing to happen, it also completely alienates us the audience from the character we’re supposed to be rooting for.
THAT is a valid criticism outside of diegesis.
“You’re committing the Thermian fallacy yourself by arguing that every aspect of a story is decided on the basis of causal relationships that arise entirely organically, almost inevitably, following the insertion of an initial story element. Which ignores the fact that-especially in fantasy-those relationships are *not* inevitable logical outcomes stemming from the initial element, but *choices* that are made by the author themselves. You’ve actually admitted this in your essay, although you don’t seem to have realized it – you criticize Olson’s view of stories as a ‘pile of choices’ but then say the following (added my own caps for the relevant part):”
And here you commit a grave error: you equate a sequence of choices and the branching questions and decisions that then stem from that with a “pile,” language Olsen uses to prop up his argument that diegesis is irrelevant by dismissing the setting itself and its construction brom being considered an important part of the work itself.
This is not an admission, but a recognition of craft that Olsen chooses to denigrate.
“So, already, you’re admitting that the orcs being violent and savage is *a choice* that was *made* by the *author* of the story, and not the kind of immutable logical conclusion that you make it out to be. In fact, literally every ‘What if-Then’ construction that you use in this section is an example of you (or the hypothetical author) *making a decision*. The Orcs are savage because of their biology – not their culture, religion, environment, and so on. And, in fact, most of your ‘What if’ statements in are in no way necessary parts of the equation. Where does ‘What if orcs could interbreed with humans?” come from, here? Why is this supposition even raised in the first place? Why not ask ‘What if dogs could interbreed with humans?’ Or dragons? Or ghosts? Your argument seems to stem from the believe that there is a perfect chain of causal reasoning at play here, but already you’ve made a massive leap from ‘There are orcs’ to ‘Orcs actively kidnap women to rape because they want to create half-humans’, and, yes, it honestly is pretty creepy and gross. Orcs could just as equally be savage humanoids who are biologically incompatible with humans, or who find humans disgusting. But you – or this hypothetical author – are *choosing* to insert this element into the world.”
I see someone doesn’t play Dungeons&Dragons.
I referenced Pathfinder specifically because the founders of Paizo, the company that made the game using the Dungeons&Dragons 3.5 Edition license. The setting of Golarion began as a D&D 3.5 module set, and expanded into a modified version of 3.5 (some call it “D&D 3.7”).
Why is all the above relevant? Because they were starting off using the same D&D standard rules with a few tweaks, and taking on all of its standard set, including the starting races: Human, Elf, Half-Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Gnome, and Half-Orc.
The supposition was raised in the first place, because Half-Orcs are a staple of Table Top RPGs, and in constructing their Pathfinder IP, they could either have chosen to do away with a beloved standard player character race, or they could incorporate it into their setting and figure out what that would mean.
“So, why is that? This is Olson’s point – even if it is a necessary part of the world-building, why is your story set in this world in the first place? What are you trying to show us? Is there some message you’re trying to impart? Or is it just that you find these things exciting, or titillating, and that the world-building itself is simply the justification you use in order to portray these kinds of things in a story?”
The problem is that this argument you’re making here in defense of Olsen hinges on me not understanding my own example, which you have neatly demonstrated you don’t understand yourself. I had assumed it would be obvious to others who have engaged in narrative games outside of the digital space.
Paizo chose to make a new setting based off of modified form of the standard D&D 3.5 ruleset and to use both the player races and much of the standard monster and monster-race fare that was covered under the license to make a new IP (and for a while they were pretty successful with it).
The setting of a TTRPG is a place for stories to happen in, and for players and DMs alike to make their own dramatic narratives. Official narratives in the setting (like modules or adventure paths) may contain their own themes, narrative sensibilities, etc. The purpose of the creators of Paizo, in establishing the IP of Golarion, was to provide a fantasy world for people to engage with, containing the full extent of positives and negatives that that choice would entail.
Using this particular example of mine to prop up your argument doesn’t actually help you, because “You chose to include Half-Orcs in your game setting,” and “You decided Orcs behave like savages,” aren’t exactly points of criticism, they’re simply observations.
“See, you’re also ignoring the fact that the creation of an artistic work doesn’t just equate to creating an internally consistent world and then allowing anything that’s theoretically possible within that world to become a part of the story.”
Again, you’re assuming all worlds serve the same function. In the case of a world like Paizo’s Golarion, that actually is the intended function of the setting: an internally consistent world where the players are allowed to do anything that’s theoretically possible within that world. Actually, that’s the role of Dungeons&Dragons and a number of other TTRPGs as well. You just have to deal with the narrative consequences that follow afterwards.
“There are many, many other things to take into account besides internal consistency – like the consistency of the narrative, or the tone, or the characters, or the themes. Or even if these things aren’t ‘consistent’, then it should still serve some sort of aesthetic purpose. If not, then it begs the question ‘Why the hell are you showing us this?’ “
And here, you completely missed my point in bringing up the Pathfinder game setting. Olsen’s example was “Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs.” I 1) broke down his disingenuous use of an extreme form of pornography to poison the well, and 2) demonstrated that those same horrific elements that he tries to convince his audience of objectively objectionable have been used constructively in storytelling media already in a non-pornographic and far less objectionable form.
“If I made a three-hour long movie showing a worm sleeping on the ground, am I immune from criticism on the grounds that ‘there are worms in my fictional universe’, and tell the audience that ‘it’s their responsibility to engage with my work of art’? No – it’s your JOB, as an artist, to give people a reason for devoting their time to watching, reading, playing or listening to your work of art.”
I see here you have missed the point of the entire post. You’re just chasing your own shadow here, because that’s not what my argument was. Of course it’s an artist’s job to make people invested in their work. But the audience does have obligations when they do engage that work.
I’ll use the original Star Wars as an example. At the outset we’re asked to 1) accept that the story takes place in space, and 2) accept that there is a war going on. It’s literally in the title. Second we are introduced to Darth Vader and Princess Leia, who represent the factions of the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance, respectively. So to engage the work we have to accept the broadest elements of the setting and the broadest elements of the story’s conflict as presented in the first few minutes.
If you watch the movie, to give valid criticism of its narrative you still have to accept these facts of the narrative. These are the first lines of the contract of suspension of disbelief. Would you consider “There shouldn’t have been a Galactic Empire, it should have instead been a movie about resolving multiple wars happening in space by means of diplomacy,” to be a valid criticism of Star Wars?
But, yes, you would be immune to the criticism, “This movie is bad because it’s about a worm, it should not have been about a worm.” You would not be immune to the criticism, “It is 3 hours of nothing happening, there is no narrative here.”
” And sure, your world might be violent, but that doesn’t mean that we need to see the most extreme examples of that violence. In any number of fictional worlds – from LOTR to Harry Potter to Star Wars – we can assume the existence of various ugly aspects of human behavior, including misogynistic and/or sexual violence – but that doesn’t mean the story has to show us this. And, I would argue that the uglier the behavior is that you’re depicting, the better your justification – on both a narrative AND thematic level – needs to be. If you don’t have one, then you’re absolutely going to be criticized for it.”
…and?
Like I showed before with the example of Deathstalker, diegesis is not an immutable shield to criticism. The movie asks us the impossible: to identify with a man whose first act after killing someone is to rape the woman he just rescued from two attempted rapes as our hero and to root for him.
No one playing a Pathfinder game in Golarion, even if they were playing in the region around the Hold of Belkzen (a land dominated by Orcs), needs to witness their worst atrocities in-session or even have their character witness them to have that be part of the context of their narrative engagement.
It’s all already there. It doesn’t even need to be shown or explicitly discussed to provide storytelling opportunities, because it’s been woven into the setting and all the hard questions about what that means in-setting have been answered by the devs at Paizo by how they chose to have that affect culture and history in-setting.
““The idea that diegesis can be ignored because “fiction is eternally mutable” is a very dangerous position for storytelling. If one accepts that fiction is eternally mutable is an argument against a work at all opens it up to all other levels of argumentation. There is no principle applied, no discipline that limits the parameters of the argument. There are broader implications to the argument than what Dan Olsen has presented”
How is it dangerous? What are the broader implications?”
Exactly the implications from the Star Wars example above. If diegesis is a complete non-factor in criticism, as Olsen argues, then any choice made in the construction of the narrative’s setting can be argued is morally wrong simply because it was a choice, and simply because the critic didn’t like it. A story can be criticized for not being a different story.
If me arguing that Huckleberry Finn is a bad story because it’s the story Samuel Clemens chose to tell and not a completely different story than it was, then there is no point in constructing narratives at all.
The principle that limits the parameters of the argument, first and foremost, is quality. Which can be broken down into themes, character, narrative, and so on – mainly, the things I mentioned above.
You seem to forget that the setting is a quality of the narrative.
“As I’ve said, I don’t agree with the statement that the mutability of a piece is necessarily ‘infinite’ as Olson says, but I expect he’s aware of these parameters himself. He also, in the video, gives the parameter of the work’s status as a cultural artifact. The trouble with your argument is that you seem to value only one parameter – namely, the internal logic of the fictional world and nothing else.”
Dan Olsen doesn’t take the internal logic of the world into account at all.
You may think I’m exaggerating, but his own jabs prove it. He holds that it is immoral that The Witcher franchise isn’t concerned with diverse representation of peoples, and that the narrative parameters they set for their own world (their diegesis) are irrelevant to his own sense of morality. It doesn’t matter that the way they built their world was modeled on late medieval Poland, including the technology, culture, and state of travel at that time. Olsen treats the world of The Witcher as fundamentally having the same functional and moral obligations as Bioware’s Dragon Age franchise, which does possess a widely diverse group of humans, ignoring that the settings are telling different stories by people who placed radically different parameters on their very different fictive worlds.
“The Thermian Argument might have some limited application in certain cases, usually on the level of minor creative decisions. But to buy into it wholesale – as you seem to have done – is to suggest that no work can be criticized for anything, ever, as long as there is an in-universe rationale for what is depicted on the page/screen. Which is basically Olson’s entire point. And that seems more harmful to art that anything he says in his video, honestly.”
As I have demonstrated, that was not Olsen’s point. You latched onto an example that you didn’t understand because it was from a collaborative narrative medium that you are clearly unfamiliar with (TTRPGs). You then ignored Olsen’s other examples such as setting decisions based around a certain level of realism, like in The Witcher, which he morally equates to violent monster rape pornography.
Olsen’s argument was that because a work of fiction is a work of fiction, all of its choices are mutable and therefore can be challenged, and that the diegesis cannot be used to justify any of those decisions.
If I were to write a fantasy novel in a world modelled on a land-locked African country under European colonial rule, with all of its associated trades, trade routes, culture-clashes, social attitudes, etc., would it be a fair criticism to say I am unfairly marginalizing Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest by not including them in the story, when they are not a parameter I chose to explore in the story? Hypothetically a few could have ended up there, but does deciding on not exploring that possibility make me an immoral person, on par with the creators of Women Ripped Apart by Orcs?
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