A crusade against easy/immediate/low-effort answers

[yvannairie]

So as much as a lot of the meta I write for TF tending towards relying on my knowledge of real-world topics and trying to bring some practically-minded thinking into a scifi scenario, hopefully everyone who reads my stuff also knows that I have a big beef with anthropocentrism in the TF fandom, and the media itself.

The big reason for it is that what with how much the themes of TF media tend towards the sociological, I tend to get very uncomfortable with Doylist explanations for why things in the TF franchises work the way they do, because often they veer into X-men-y Broken Aesops. The fact is that the basis of the franchise -- people turning into things humanity designed to fulfil a specific function, and the big structure vs freedom tension inherent in it -- will always leave a door open for relying too much on perfect narratives on the function and "purpose" of individual characters in-universe. What with how strong the themes of identity, individualism and change are with TF, it really wigs me out when they're inadvertedly reduced into affects through overrationalisting various physiological and social differences through an anthropocentric lens.

Even aside from the unfortunate implications, I also just cordially dislike allegory, and I think with how broadly applicable the allegory in TF is, I also just find it really uninspiring to recreate humanity's social issues with an alien species. Ultimately, if you want to use a fictional scenario as an allegory for a real scenario, the details of it don't really matter, while the emotional context of it does -- and in fact sticking to strictly human-recognisable circumstances underuses the malleability of allegory as well. Either way, that's leaving half the space unexplored by being overly concerned with the specificity of the emotions you want to evoke.

And on a petty-personal level -- it is just boring to me. It feels too easy. Human people have been studied for hundreds of thousands of years by ourselves, and the act of writing an analysis from an existant real-world perspective is just not creative to me the way meta writing ideally is. The choice of words in "worldbuilding" and "non-narrative fiction" is extremely deliberate on my part, to communicate an active desire to make something new, instead of pure interpretation.

(And to be fair -- of course my writing isn't free of some allegory, because every story is little bit a memoir. My opinion doesn't come from a place of feigning objectivity or the value of writing as a way to reflect on your own experiences, and if you're someone who genuinely enjoys finding ways to take your chosen fiction and make it a vessel for you to examine some very human issues, that's valid as hell, and I have enjoyed TF content that gets very specific with its allegory in the past.

But if you analyse a scenario involving mecha and arrive in the same conclusion as if you analyse a similar situation involving humans, that's not inherently anthropocentric. That's just applicability, or if you prefer, some facet of the universality of all stories. The key is that the analyses are separated, comparative -- not presumed identical, or subject to the same limitations. Because I, at least, find the task of being asked to relate to an experience that has been deliberately curtailed to have the same limitations as my own... frustrating, on a good day, and actively insulting to my intelligence and compassion on a bad one.)