there was one about diegetic essentialism recently which was excellent - as the sub is currently locked i’ll post it below

There’s a specter haunting the sub… the specter of… Oh fuck, this bit is played out, isn’t it?

Hello everyone, it’s been a couple years since my piece asking people to chill about calling things fascist. Just long enough for everyone to forget it and the problem to come right back!

But that essay is a companion to today’s topic, as is this ever relevant video by FoldingIdeas about The Thermian Argument.

Today, I want to talk about diegetic essentialism, how it poisons discourse, and is a cynical ploy by corporations to get you to mindlessly consume their products. And, especially, how it’s managed to infect Warhammer and Sigmarxism in particular. Introduction: Don’t be a DEckhead

If you Google the term “Diegetic Essentialism,” the first result is…this sub? What the fuck? Did we make up this term? Shit, that can’t be right.

Ok, so there are actually a lot of other terms to describe this phenomenon, which has become pandemic over the past decade. Lore brain, Wookipediaism, the Thermian Argument, Cinema Sins-esque, Funko Pop Sunnism (ok, I made up that last one too).

But being the fucking insufferable, over educated losers that we are, we decided the best label was diegetic essentialism. The perfect academia poisoned definition. Exactly descriptive, but so wrapped up in jargon, it can’t be understood on its own. So what does it mean?

The diegesis is a work of fiction’s “universe.” It is the imaginary place where the story is unfolding. There’s a joke that’s common in movies that explains the concept perfectly. A soundtrack is played over the intro, and when the credits are finished, a character leans over and turns off the radio, cutting the song short. The joke being, you thought it was the film’s soundtrack, something the characters can’t hear, but it was actually diegetic sound, sound that existed “in that universe.” The joke being that there kind of isn’t a real difference (hyuk hyuk).

Essentialism just means the only valid thing. To be essentialist is to say that something has an underlying, a priori nature that cannot be denied.

Put em together? It means someone who thinks the only way to analyze, critique, or understand fiction is as though it were real. To the DEckhead (how I’ll be referring to the diegetic essentialist from now on), a work of fiction is like a keyhole into an alternate universe as real as ours.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s often how we enjoy something as a consumer. And the DEckhead is nothing if not a consoomer.

While we’re watching a movie or reading a book, we allow ourselves to pretend like it’s real. It’s fun.

But when a normal person returns to reality, they understand that fiction not only isn’t real, not only can’t be real, but isn’t intended to be, beyond the fun of enjoying it.

It is something which is produced by artists, authors, actors. It may or may not have clarity of purpose, themes, intended takeaways, cultural criticisms, etc. It might just be something someone thought was cool.

In a movie like, say, Scott Pilgrim (I know but it’s a good example here), when Scott punches someone they burst into coins. This is obviously not intended to be real. In the “universe” of Scott Pilgrim, people are not made of coins, it’s just a fun video game reference, an absurdist joke.

But this is true even in something like Superman. When Supe punches someone, he’s not really punching someone. The physics of that would be like being impaled by a telephone pole. No, the punch is essentially metaphorical. Evil is defeated by the strength of justice. A punch is the psychologically satisfying, “non violent” way to do that. IRL it actually very easily could kill the petty criminal the same way a knife or a gun could, but it’s something our brains can passively accept, it feels right.

This is a critical aspect of media comprehension. Most aspects of a story are thematic. They’re not meant to be understood as literally real, but rather meant to evoke the feeling of something real.

The DEckhead does not understand this, or, chooses not to, and gets angry at people who don’t follow along. To them, a fictional universe is a consistent, coherent place that exists beyond the boundaries of the text in question. And the only thing you’re allowed to do is contribute to “the canon.” A term which was literally invented as a joke that is now taken 100% seriously. Welcome to the internet, enjoy your signal decay.

Our sub’s eternal enemy, 40klore, is a perfect example of this.

Always are they searching for “evidence” of what something is “really” like, or who would win what fight. You know the type.

Which primarch has the biggest dick? What does Shadowsun eat for breakfast? Questions that, even if an author explicitly spells them out, do not have answers, because they are not real.

Let me give you some other examples to give you an idea how absurd this exercise is:

Does Gandalf have colon cancer? Does Pikachu like dubstep? Did Captain Ahab have imposter syndrome? Hopefully, you’re getting the idea. Characters exist to serve a story, they don’t have a reality independent of that.

And the only thing that determines what happens next in a story is what an author decides will happen next. That’s it. This is true even of historical fiction or works like The Martian, in which the original author went to great lengths to make it as “realistic” as possible. But “Realism” is essentially a genre trapping. It’s like a lightsaber color, it’s just there to help you enjoy the work. It can’t be real.

So here’s a great example from the sub that everyone isn’t sick to death of, female space marines!

What does the DEckhead say? There can’t be female marines because there’s no geneseed for them. What does the other DEckhead say? Cawl could totally do it if he did primaris!

These answers are categorically wrong. There were female marines, but they didn’t sell as well, and for logistical reasons, they were dropped. Lore was invented to justify this. And it stays that way because the cultivated identity of your marine consumer expects it to stay that way (we will talk about this term later), and would go Gamergate on GW if it changed. GW likes money, and not rocking the boat, so without a compelling reason to blow up their current fanbase, they maintain a piece of fluff so that it’s “impossible.” (“It’s an easy fix! One line of dialogue, thank God we invented the uhh… You know… Whatever, device.”)

This is the only coherent answer. “Lore” reasons are for idiots, and are literally wrong. It’s like thinking that Toucan Sam controls what goes into froot loops.

Of course, I’m not saying you can’t enjoy fiction on its own terms. But when criticizing it, you must think of it in material terms, as a production made by authors with intent. Lest you fall into this mental trap.

So how is this relevant to us, and why is it bad? Seems straightforward right? Can we be done here?

Well, unfortunately, DE is the tip of a very ugly cultural iceberg. We have a lot to talk about. About late capitalism, about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and about how one of capitalism’s new frontiers is our brains, and how they’ve been fully colonized.

Ugh, fuck, like my sister essay, this is way too long. We will break it up with memes and jokes. Bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this. Media saturation and the attention economy

Have you noticed recently that there’s just, like, way too much shit?

Pick any medium: TV, streaming, books, games, movies, music, fuck, even board and tabletop games.

The production and sale of entertainment products is more voluminous than ever. The sheer quantity of things released, even good things, is so large, that even if it were your full time job, you couldn’t keep up with just one of these mediums, let alone multiple.

Sometimes people in the same hobby, that like the same genre, maybe even the same property, won’t have anything in common with each other.

It did not used to be this way. For better or for worse, “pop culture” used to mean pretty much everyone had seen something. In 1991, 22 million people watched the season finale of Dallas. Now, something with a 2 million person fanbase is considered strong.

As more and more media is produced, it is competing with an ever shrinking attention span. You literally don’t have time for this shit.

What results is an alienated, fractured fan “community,” one in which you’re forced to seek out other atomized individuals to even know someone who’s experienced the same thing as you.

And this problem is only getting worse. With the proliferation of choices, not only is there an ocean of garbage to wade through, but a calculation has to be made whether that thing is even worth experiencing if you’ll never even meet someone else who has as well.

Ever scrolled through Netflix for hours and found nothing to watch? Ever paid good money for a game on steam and never once played it? How many books are you planning to eventually read, only to find that by the time you start, they’re not relevant anymore?

There used to be a thought experiment in philosophy like this: if you had a superpower where you could make any movie you want, but only you could see it, would you want it?

That’s not a thought experiment anymore, it is functionally true.

As a result, very few cultural properties have any lasting impact, and fewer still will even experience them. And so they become shallower as a result. They need to appeal to ever increasing crowds of people but still have nothing to say. How can you make a resonant cultural impact, when the culture is essentially a shattered mirror of little cultivated fandoms? How can you even know how to speak to people? This is, not coincidentally, why every show sounds like Twitter now. The walled garden, the cultivated consumer identity