What I mean by that is that Pepe was never intended to be a fascist/reactionary shibboleth, and was originally intended to be a college stoner that liked to pee with his pants fully down because it felt good, man. Attempts to steer Pepe back with additional comics, lawsuits, and attempts to regain control of the character by the original maker had mixed results and to this day Pepe (and Groyper and other mutations) is unfortunately still generally a fascist/reactionary shibboleth, especially when seen in the wild and presented by strangers.
There was some validity to the original usage of “the curtains were fucking blue” in its original context, especially when it came to the kind of “have a conclusion and look for evidence” sort of bad-faith analysis that was all too common in my upper division courses at university. Not every professor did that, of course, but those that did had a prepackaged expectation for what they wanted to find, everywhere, regardless of what the author or artist originally intended for any given work, or even if you subscribe to “death of the author” it was also regardless of what the viewing public or the class for that matter would have otherwise seen with it. A hammer-shaped ideology would see everything as a nail, so to speak.
Having said that, when I see “the curtains were fucking blue!” said online (or worse, in person, as has happened more times than I would have liked), it is used the same way as saying “shut up, I don’t want to think about that, reductionist evaluation of the thing with pretenses of objectivity only” but with less honesty. If a game (or movie, or show) has skeezy or otherwise questionable content or messaging, the curtains must be blue to that person.
The consequences of the proliferation of “the curtains were fucking blue” can be seen in the fairly common belief that the only good art is only photorealistic drawings, done with some specific medium for novelty’s sake, and typically done of pop culture characters that the viewer is already fond of, as is common on Reddit.
Yes, sometimes the curtains are indeed fucking blue. But other times, it is aggressive ignorance to say so. The most extreme example I can think of that I have personally experienced was a discussion on another site about the ideology of 80s television following Reagan-era deregulation of entertainment, news, and media in general, and the topic of GI Joe came up. I personally enjoyed that show as a kid, but as an adult, I could certainly see just how thick and heavy the messaging was from the introduction onward. “GI Joe is the code name for America’s highly trained special mission force. Its purpose: to protect human freedom against Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world.” I didn’t even have to look up that text; it’s burned into my memory, so successful was that messaging.
I heard those exact words, dropped like a bomb into the discussion: the curtains were fucking blue. That same person then said that GI Joe had NO political messaging whatsoever, that it was “nonpolitical” in his own words, and that saying otherwise was wishful thinking and, again in his own words, “having an agenda for your narrative.”
I truly believe it’s possible to enjoy (or have enjoyed) entertainment while both criticizing it and accepting criticism of it. But this wagon circling attitude when it comes to literary analysis is disturbingly common now. I still enjoy Tolkien’s works, for example, but for some fans, something like this: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/175 can and has been seen as a threat, somehow, to the continued enjoyment of the work.
The curtains are sometimes more than blue. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. :rat-salute:
My intention is just to discuss the concepts, I still don’t see what I said that was personal.
When you said that show don’t tell isn’t fundamental, I took that to mean that you don’t consider it good advice, except in a modern context, because of how it’s been pushed. If you agree that it’s generally good advice (in moderation) regardless of time and place, then we’re on the same page. Of course the specific phrase is relatively new, but as I showed, the fundamental concept has been around since ancient times.
As an aside, like, the CIA also funded Jackson Pollock and I don’t think his paint splatters are anti-communist. They also funded psychics and shit. They were just throwing shit at a wall to see what would stick, imo.
Starting off with a :jesse-wtf: and telling me I went off the rails isn’t exactly an invitation for anything but a defensive response.
“Show don’t tell” isn’t new, but the school of thought that started making it more mandatory as an expectation is. Especially if that’s taught in a sloppy and slapdash way, it leads to a lot of author intent failing to get delivered. That doesn’t mean that a bad classroom is necessary for intent getting lost in the “showing” and “not telling.” For example, Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” never actually was intended to be a direct criticism of the meat processing industry but instead a wider-reaching message that culminated in a happy ending with Sinclair himself as governor of California. As the well known quote goes, he aimed for the heart and hit the stomach, and we got the FDA as a result. Still a good thing, at least.
Yes, the CIA funded some slapdash things, but I still disagree about both the intent and success of “show don’t tell” academic reformations. A lot of Marxist theory is very wordy to the point of it being a meme even here (“read theory!”), while by contrast capitalist ideologies and liberalism are very easy to absorb and have been internalized for generations in the United States with very little contest. Simply showing something and only showing something to such people with no telling, students or audiences seeking entertainment, isn’t likely to get any message across even if one is intended unless that message is already supporting the status quo.
Since you started your replies with :jesse-wtf: I’ll use Breaking Bad as an example. It certainly shows a lot. It doesn’t tell all that much. It’s entertaining, and Brian Cranston is a fantastic actor. But in that relative void of literary messaging, how many people quote Walter White because he had all the cool lines and see him as some role model compared to those that see that he was enjoying being the bad guy all along and his path toward it (the “breaking” of the “bad”) was a self-justified exercise from the start of his cancer diagnosis?
I’m not even going to say that telling and not showing that would change minds after the fact. What I am saying is that when so much is left open to interpretation, both in the past and now, people are going to take from it what they were looking for. That’s fine I suppose, but if the author’s intentions were different, that may be disappointing to them.
I said that I agreed with your OP. I didn’t understand what the fuck you were talking about so I used the wtf emoji. I apologize if it came across as a personal insult, as that was not my intent.
I agree that it’s possible for the message to get lost this way, but for the record I’ll note that “The Jungle” predates the CIA and “show, don’t tell.” Language is an imperfect tool of communication, and the intended message can be lost just as easily through telling as through showing. If I write, “John was sad,” then I’m basically just hoping that the reader has the same feeling come to mind that I’m thinking of, because sadness can vary greatly in how it feels and in intensity. Furthermore, as words change in meaning over time and across languages, the meaning can easily become lost or changed. If I instead describe how John expressed his sadness, then the reader is much less dependent on shared understanding of specific words. If I write, “John could not be roused from his bed for three days,” then you can better understand what I’m trying to convey, and that meaning is more robust across language and culture.
It may be that the tell-iness of classic Marxist theory factored in to the promotion of show don’t tell. But this doesn’t mean that show don’t tell is an inherently anti-communist thing, as those works are only one way of expressing the underlying concepts.
Speaking personally, I was raised Catholic. In Catholicism, there is one, exact way to talk about certain things, such as the Trinity. This parody does a good job of satirizing it. The fact that the Trinity cannot really be expressed except by telling proves that it’s a weak, hollow concept, really just a series of words to recite. The nature of truth is that it has substance - when something is true, there are many different ways to show that it’s true, many different ways of expressing it. Showing is helpful because that sort of hollow dogma cannot be shown. As such, when a concept is shown, it is generally more compelling.