My feelings are summed up nicely by a Sage Hyden / Just Write video that has unfortunately been taken down by the Anime company who makes Attack on Titan even though it was up for a few weeks.

It was about the tension of show v. tell.



Me as a writer and narrator is saying X, and that X is moral and correct.
Me as an artist and plotter is saying Y and that Y is moral and correct.

They were in tension and the end result was not cathartic. Hell I will go further and argue the product is problematic to the extreme, that the author may not have the intent to make a problematic work, but you lose control of intent when your work is in the space beyond your control and people can have opinions different from another person. Your art is an echo and response to previous pieces of culture that already occurred, and in turn other pieces of art that have not happened yet.

That previous sentence is confusing so let me use a metaphor and historical example to illustrate it. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the 2nd Austin Powers movie, The Spy Who Shagged Me both came out in 1999. These movies came out less than a month apart and Austin Powers came out after Star Wars. In Star Wars TPM we learned force powers come from midichlorians in the blood, and in Austin Powers 2 we learn Austin’s super powers come from something in his blood called Mojo. This was serendipity, this was was Jung called Synchronicity, two unrelated events yet the mind sees them as connected and it makes them connected even if there was no intent. Thus arguing it was not the artists intent to say X when you are showing Y means the artist is oblivious of the multiple ways his art can unfold.

The next part is my opinion, but it is a firmly held opinion. If you are an artist creating a story that blames all the evil in the world, where a group of people broke the axis mundi, the world pole that organizes the world, and then do a critique of this. Well that is not enough to be subtle, nor is it enough to say my intent is not to spread hate. You as the artist need to be clearer than crystal, to understand people will not get subtext or text and sometimes they stink at meaning. If you can not do that, make a story that a 10 year old can understand, then pick a different subject matter to tell your action story about. Do not birth evil and monsters into the world as an artist!

[ Same thing applies to other genres such as horror, do not make the world worse even by accident. And even if 99% of people get your message, 1% of people who are hateful are enough to spoil your story ]

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Good Riddance, this could have been a fun story but I lost all fun with it more than halfway through it.