Monthly Archives: April 2026

Minor Dissonance

Posted by natechen on

One of the most distracting things in storytelling is when an author takes the time to line up a vast swath of details for their story, fact checking them to make sure they all comport with reality, but misses one. There’s an excellent example of this in Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, which we’re going to use as our example for discussion today, so be warned that there will be spoilers for the movie. Most likely the book as well but this is a rare case where I haven’t read the source so I cannot say for certain.

That said, we will need to discuss some minor spoilers to make the case so if you haven’t had a chance to watch this film (or read the book) and you wish to engage with it fresh then I won’t mind if you come back later. I can wait. If you aren’t interested in the film, I will be covering the relevant details here.

Let me start by saying that I was pleased with Project Hail Mary and what we’re about to discuss here amounts to nothing more than a nitpick in the grand scheme of things. That said, there are still useful things to think about encapsulated here. So, the premise of Project Hail Mary is simple. An astronaut named Ryland Grace wakes up on a ship called the Hail Mary orbiting the star Tau Ceti with no memories of why he’s there and must figure out his purpose and complete it with no input other than that of the ship’s AI.

Project Hail Mary is a pretty tightly written and enjoyable romp that falls into the genre of hard scifi. The primary defining trait of hard scifi is that all the technological and scientific concepts discussed in it should be grounded in real scientific knowledge of the day. The Hail Mary, for example, is not a faster than light ship. It travels near the speed of light and uses a special fuel that is incredibly energy dense (one of only two speculative elements the story introduces) but it doesn’t use some kind of entirely theoretical system to go faster than light like a hyperdrive or warp drive. If we had the right fuel, we could build the Hail Mary now.

Everything else about Weir’s story is just as grounded. Its orbital mechanics, the environmental effects of the sun slowly darkening (which, it turns out, is the puzzle Grace is trying to solve) and even its brief jaunts into bacteriology. It’s a very solid story, except for one little detail.

See, Grace wakes up with no memories because he was put in a kind of rudimentary cryosleep. Since the Hail Mary is limited by the speed of light it takes a little over eleven years of travel for it to reach its destination and it doesn’t have nearly the carrying capacity to bring along enough food and water for Grace and the other two people on board. They have to be put into hibernation in order to make the trip practical, especially because they may have to spend months or years studying Tau Ceti to figure out what’s going on and why that star isn’t dimming like the sun is. All supplies need to be saved for that part of the trip… right?

Well, maybe not.

Without getting too deep into the weeds, the laws of relativistic physics state that when an object starts moving close to the speed of light the way it experiences time changes when compared to the rest of the universe. A particle moving at the full speed of light arrives at their destination near instantaneously. So how much time did Grace experience on the Hail Mary during his trip? The film doesn’t say. Which raises the question of whether he really needed to be put into cryosleep in the first place.

This is a relevant issue as the cryosleep procedure is integral to the plot. Grace is the only one of the Hail Mary’s three occupants that survives cryosleep and wakes up at Tau Ceti. It’s also integral to understanding his character development and motivations. If cryosleep isn’t necessary for him to survive the journey its use in the story begins to look like a contrivance intended to make the story function, since it’s necessary for the other elements of the plot to fall into place. Yet the movie never addresses this factor.

Now, based on a little research I’ve done it turns out that Grace and his companions probably did need to enter cryosleep. Even if they reached 99% of the speed of light for most of their trip they still would have experienced about a year of travel time on the Hail Mary and, given the realities of acceleration and deceleration it would certainly take longer than that. However, ignoring this issue in the script of the film raises questions and distracts the audience. It’s minorly dissonant. The audience shouldn’t have to do a google search and find a time dilation calculator to figure these things out.

It’s particularly glaring in this instance as the entire story is structured around the necessity of cryosleep where ideas that are less important to the story are explored in some detail. This omission did keep drawing my attention back to that particular story element. However, it didn’t do so in a way that underlined its importance to the plot but rather in a way that pulled me out of the plot and made me question its integrity. And it did it in no small part because so much of the rest of the film fit squarely into the expectations of the hard scifi genre.

It was a clear point of dissonance and it had an impact on the story. Again, not a big one but an impact none the less. It would have been nice to see it corrected. That’s the price of holding yourself to a standard, after all. The closer you get to it, the more glaring any deviation becomes. It’s a lesson in taking care with your stories, no matter what the standard may be.

“Media Literacy

Posted by natechen on

Ever heard of media literacy?

If not, you’re fortunate. The term is relatively new, although it apparently goes all the way back to some time in the 1930s. Part of the problem of figuring it out is that what it refers to is somewhat nebulous.

The casual observer might hear the term and assume that it refers to a collection of tools that help a person extract meaning from media. What makes media literacy so tricky is that the casual observer is correct. At the same time, they’re not.

Most people would break the phrase down to its constituent parts, beginning with “media”, which in this case clearly refers to entertainment in any medium, and “literacy,” which is the ability to understand and create the media in question.

Once upon a time it was thought that literacy developed in the same way one develops a facility for speech – through gradual exposure to writing over time. This theory is largely disproven at this point but its aftereffects are still felt. In the brief time this theory of mind existed an entire new theory of education was built on top of it and the way people were taught to read changed entirely.

At my age I remember the days of phonics. If you were like me, you were taught to read by looking at each letter in a word and assigning a sound to them. You probably said them out loud at first, to help you build the association. When you strung all the sounds together, voila! You’ve read a word.

That is not how reading is taught now.

These days, students are taught reading using a system known as “whole word comprehension” which we will refer to as the cuing method. When reading with this methodology, students look at the general shape of a group of letters. If they recognize the shape of the letters they can assign a meaning to it while if they don’t they look at the first letter of the word and guess.

This is not a joke. Here is Amanda Malone, the state literacy director of Mississippi explaining this “method” to a reporter:

Another method she mentions in this brief exchange is cuing students using pictures connected to words, which I have chosen as the term for this method overall. Neither of these methods is particularly good at creating actual literacy in students. Mississippi used to rank near the bottom of state literacy rates but, since reforms put in place by the state and carried out by Malone and her colleagues, Mississippi has shot up into the top ten states for student literacy.

All well and good, certainly, but the cuing method of teaching literacy has prevailed in schools for some time and it will take time for reforms (and the students educated by them) to spread into the broader culture. That leaves us with its shortcomings for quite some time. Assuming that the old, phonics driven method of education ever makes a complete return.

See, the cuing method is very seductive for teachers. It does something that phonics does not. When students are taught to read via cuing it makes the student entirely dependent on the teacher to figure out the meaning of every word. As Malone and the report discuss, even a simple three letter word that starts with “c” could have any number of meanings. It is teachers who shape the words. Not readers.

And they don’t just get to set the meanings of words. They can shape emotional reactions by always placing those meanings in specific contexts. This has the knock on effect of making the words feel meaningless in new contexts, even though human language is designed to be flexible enough to fit multiple contexts. However, if teachers never present specific framings of words they can make those frames feel alien and even offensive to their students.

Scale this back up to media literacy. What does it mean to be media literate?

A lot, actually.

Psychologically, people tend to structure their thoughts based on the last form of communication they’ve learned. Literacy, as previously noted, is not natural and thus tends to come very late in a person’s communication education. Unless you are a polyglot who learns numerous languages, you are probably going to construct thoughts using the literacy techniques you were taught in elementary school.

This means that modern media literacy is built on the cuing principle.

If you’ve ever tipped your toes into YouTube media criticism you’ll quickly discover that there are whole spheres of commentary that are designed to cue up framings for stories so people can understand them. We’ve actually spent the two previous weeks discussing the results of that. Yes, I believe the tendency to judge characters and stories by archetypes and genres is a direct result of the cuing principle that was used to educate readers.

This is how many people can look at two characters as radically different as Monkey D. Luffy and Rocks D. Xebec and say that they are the same. Readers are cued by the “D.” and the fact they are both pirates. So the readers lump these two characters into the same category, in spite of the massive differences in goals and methodology.

Media is a vast and expansive subject so no one group of teachers can cue audiences into how to interpret media. In fact, the aforementioned YouTube Media critics existed largely to help the cuing process. It is understanding this massive body of cues and expanding it as new media is created that makes one media literate. Not only must one know the cues, one must also know the orthodoxy. After all, cuing isn’t only done to inform the meaning of the media, it’s framed to provoke certain reactions to it. If you try to frame media in the wrong way it’s not a sign that the media may mean multiple things. It’s a sign you’re media illiterate.

It is an extremely narrow minded methodology.

That is the part that worries me the most about the cuing method of literacy. If there is a group of skills we might call “social literacy” that govern how we understand and think about the people and culture around us, and if we were to apply the cuing method in that sphere, we would not call the result enlightened thought. We would call it bigotry.

Is it a coincidence we are living in an era where this kind of short sighted prejudice, once thought a thing of the past, is making a sudden return? No, it’s not. Sadly, such things are very comforting to the heart of man. Neither is it directly a consequence of the way we are taught to read, although I am certain the cuing method of literacy doesn’t help.

By the same token, I don’t think simply taking up phonics and learning to break down words, stories and people piece by piece is a magical panacea that will counter this trend. There are evils that come about from going too far into the opposite direction as well. Ultimately, you must first start from a position of good will towards your fellow man, an understanding of the frailties of mankind and a heaping helping of divine grace before such fundamental flaws in human nature can be addressed.

However, if you’ve gotten that far and still find yourself jumping to these archetypes in all areas of life, a simple change in your method of literacy may help. At the least, it can slow down your leaping on cues long enough for you to analyze them. It will make you a better thinker and writer. Or so we can hope.

For purposes of full disclosure, my research into the literacy revolution in America is vastly incomplete. Currently I am working through a list of materials assembled by Hilary Lane. I give her full credit for assembling it and admit my own thoughts on this are influenced by hers. If you’re interested in a deeper dive into the history, methods and motives behind this change, I recommend looking through her article and picking up a few of the books she lists. It’s an enlightening experience. You can find it here:

https://www.hilarylayne.com/p/very-carefully-educated-to-be-idiots

A Question of Leadership

Posted by natechen on

It’s time to talk about One Piece again.

The magic of Eiichiro Oda’s pirate epic is something truly unique, as on the surface it appears to be a fun adventure story yet when studied carefully it reveals depths of character and morals missing from most modern narratives. It’s very tempting to put the entire opus under a microscope to see just how much scrutiny it can withstand. In this way the story itself is something of a treasure hunt. Very fitting, because the reality is that One Piece is not aiming to be a landmark work of literature with ironclad morals and legendary characters.

It is aiming to be a fun adventure story about pirates looking for treasure. The rest just happens along the way.

This is something I can personally attest to, as I’ve been following Monkey D. Luffy and his crew along their adventures for some twenty years now, and I’ve found a lot of treasure over that time. Like the rubber guy himself, I love to share it with my friends. So let’s talk a little bit about the tale of Captain Rocks D Xebec and King Harald of Elbaf.

If you’re not overly familiar with One Piece, don’t worry. The story of Rocks and Harald is fairly contained. What makes them interesting is the commentary they offer on what it means to be a leader, a topic that is at the core of One Piece. On their own, these two titans did a lot to shape the world of One Piece as we know it. That alone would make them interesting characters to study. However, when we consider them in contrast to the central character of Oda’s tale we start to see some very interesting contrasts that illuminate Luffy’s leadership style in fascinating ways.

Luffy’s often repeated dream is to become King of the Pirates by discovering the eponymous One Piece, the lost treasure of the previous Pirate King, Gold Rogers. The only clue he has to this goal is Rogers’ statement that anyone looking for this treasure will have to search the whole world. So Luffy sets out to the Grand Line, the only sea route that circles the globe, gathering members for his crew along the way.

Each member of Luffy’s crew is a fascinating character in their own right. He had to win them over individually, learning who they were and breaking down the barriers that keep them from committing to his cause. The crew have dreams and goals rooted in long histories, personal ambition and deep grief they are slowly moving past. Luffy understands and values each of these people and pushes them towards their own goals while pursuing his own. It speaks volumes of him and what he values.

In contrast, Rocks D Xebec is a very careless person. He doesn’t care about his crew or what they want so long as they do what they’re told and advance his goals. He seems vaguely aware that they have things they want but we never see him consider those wants at all. He certainly didn’t do much to win them over to his cause.

The Rocks Pirates were assembled using an ancient contest known as the Davy Back Fight, where crews compete to press gang members of the opposing crew into their own ranks. Rocks doesn’t have a crew of friends and allies. He has a crew of prizes. They’re all powerful but, as you might expect of people who have been forced into working together, they’re not very friendly towards each other.

There’s only one person who Rocks seems really friendly towards and that’s Harald, who isn’t even a member of his crew!

While it’s not readily apparent at first glance, in terms of dreams and ambitions Harald is the exact opposite of Rocks. Although he is the king of a nation of literal giants, Harald is a kindly man. In spite of a wild youth, Harald came to realize that Elbaf’s reputation as a nation of violent warmongers had limited their opportunities and stunted their growth. So he sets out to reform the nation and establish diplomatic ties with the rest of the world, hoping to earn Elbaf membership in the World Government.

It might seem odd that a king seeking membership in a worldwide government would form a friendship with a famous pirate wanted by that same government. In fairness, things didn’t start that way. Rocks and Harald met in passing and traded blows but Harald proved the first man who could match Rocks in any measure. Rocks immediately realized he would need Harald’s help to achieve his goals. Yet he could not force the giant king to go along with him the way he had with the rest of his crew. So Rocks attempts friendship, instead. 

Harald was never interested in joining forces with Rocks but he kept meeting Xebec when the pirate came to call. Like Rocks, Harald had no other equals of note. Perhaps he felt some kinship to the pirate captain as well. However, Harald’s dream was diplomatic in nature. The self centered behavior Rocks embodied was not something he could indulge if he hoped to achieve his own goals.

If Rocks embodies an entirely egocentric style of leadership, where he overwhelms his followers and drags them along towards his goals, Harald embodies a selfless kind of leadership. We don’t know much about how Harald went about forging his alliances with surrounding nations but he does form them. In many ways his own nature vanishes. Giants tower over others but Harald bent down to their level. Elbaf’s giants are known as warriors but Harald was a diplomat. Harald was a direct descendant of an ancient lineage that grows horns on their heads so he tore them off to distance himself from the violent reputation of that lineage.

Harald must do all this because he is entirely dependent on how others see him to achieve his own ends. Another way in which he is the opposite of Rocks.

These contrasting styles of leadership are repeatedly juxtaposed throughout Rocks’ and Harald’s story. Eventually they both spiral in ways that lead to the destruction of both characters. Rocks drags his crew to an island without explaining the dangers there and they fracture under intense pressure from the World Government. Rocks himself is killed and the others flee in disarray.

Harald never finds the reconciliation he hoped for, only ever greater demands from the World Government. Eventually, his son is forced to kill him to keep the whole nation from falling into slavery. Both endings are incredibly tragic.

What makes them interesting is that, in spite of the very different ways these two men lead, they both have the same flaw. They paid no attention to the people they led. 

For Rocks, his crew was all about himself, his own dreams and his ability to force them to work towards his own ends. By the time it collapsed he had been betrayed by one of his crewmates and the rest had been too busy fighting amongst themselves to help him in his darkest hour. For all of Harald’s diplomatic overtures to distant lands, his own nation had deep rifts between factions that led to constant infighting. A little of that peacemaking at home would have been nice. He spent so much time overseas that he neglected his two sons, creating every circumstance they could want to thrive in the future – except for his own love and attention.

After all was said and done, what we are left with is a much clearer picture of why Luffy is the hero of our tale. Many legendary figures have sailed the Grand Line before. However, we do not just need a leader who looks forward to a goal. Finding the One Piece demands a leader who will look behind him, to care for the people who follow in his footsteps as well.

The threefold contrast between Luffy, Rocks and Harald makes this clear. It’s a fascinating use of character writing to drive home a core theme of the larger story. At the same time, it is a strong story in its own right. It also shows the importance of not analyzing these characters as their tropes. Both Rocks and Harald fall into archetypes we’ve already seen in One Piece. Many people thought of Rocks as a predecessor to Luffy himself because he was a pirate who strove to be free of the World Government.

However, that ignores the details of Rocks’ story in favor of his trope. Rocks doesn’t trust his crew, he exploits them. He doesn’t seek his own dream in conjunction with others. He destroys things that get in his way and devours the rest, though not with any malice per se. He’s not typologically related to Luffy or Gold Rogers (who is largely a previous iteration of Luffy’s archetype). The closest character to Rocks’ type in the story is probably Crocodile, who is an unambiguous villain.

If you’re struggling with how to compare and contrast characters who are very similar to each other in a single narrative, I suggest studying One Piece. As Rocks, Harald and Luffy show I believe it’s very worthwhile.

The Right Tool for the Job

Posted by natechen on

I’ve noticed a growing tendency, when stories are analyzed on the World Wide Web, to talk about them from two angles: Genre and tropes.

Let me start by acknowledging the elephant in the room. I am one of the people who likes to think about genres and tropes, to the point where I once wrote a somewhat lengthy series of posts on this very blog which I titled Genrely Speaking. I enjoyed writing that series and several people have told me they enjoyed reading it. I haven’t added to it recently, largely because I’ve already written about all the genres I feel I know well enough to expound on. I still think having a reference for genre conventions helps more than harms discussions of fiction.

I haven’t delved as deeply into tropes in my own essays but I have read a great deal of that authoritative internet reference known as TV Tropes. I like tropes just as much as I like genres. They’re frequently more useful than not when discussing fiction and they make useful widgets to think about when working on stories or characters. In general, when used wisely, tropes are good storytelling tools.

However, when wisely used, tropes and genres are tools for discussion. Not analysis.

Tropes and genres are like colors. There are a lot of them, theoretically infinite numbers of them, but people have a general understanding of what is meant when they are invoked. No one pictures the same red in their mind’s eye when they hear the name of that color. Yet if I told you my car is red you wouldn’t expect my car to match the exact shade of red your mind’s eye defaults when you go looking for it. You realize that red is a spectrum in the truest sense of the word.

Tropes and genres have the same power. Everyone pictures a different movie in their mind’s eye when they hear of an adventure movie. At the same time, no one would really question you if you said you wanted to watch an adventure movie and you chose Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Or The Rescuers: Down Under. Or Jason and the Argonauts.

That is because these are all adventure stories, even though they come from different eras, are filmed in different mediums and feature wildly different protagonists with different goals. When we discuss them, we see the similarities that make them alike, even though they are wildly different. They take us to exotic locations. We go there with brave souls, seeking to fulfill grand and meaningful goals. We will see dangers there and our heroes will overcome them by virtue of their simple yet noble characters, with a decent side of hard work and daring do.

On the other hand, there are problems tropes become a tool for analysis rather than a term for discussion. Take, for example, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out. Knives Out, is a whodunnit murder mystery and one of the key witnesses in said mystery is Marta, a nurse who gets violently nauseous and vomits whenever she lies. These kinds of pronounced personality quirks are very common in a certain kind of mystery. They add spice and interest to the puzzle because they offer the audience testimony they know is true, something that can be leveraged to make the puzzle both easier and more difficult to accomplish.

However, at the climax of the mystery in Knives Out the culprit is cornered because Marta lies several times without apparent difficulty. This is “explained” by having her throw up after the scene is over. The problem is, this breaks the narrative by having the character do something we were repeatedly told she could not do without any clear explanation. There is nothing wrong with this twist inherently. Yet nothing is done earlier in the narrative to justify it so it feels more like a plothole with a postage stamp over it than a serious development of the narrative. This is typically justified as “subverting” the trope underpinning Marta’s character.

Johnson does something similar in Glass Onion, another whodunnit, when he introduces the character Helen Brand as the identical twin sister of the murder victim, Andi. He was praised for doing something innovative and new with the genre. Why? Because the murderer having an identical twin is a trope often associated with bad mysteries.

However, Andi and Helen being twins doesn’t have any impact on the plot, other than introducing plot holes. Andi is invited to a retreat for the tech startup she works for but she’s been murdered. So Helen accepts the invitation in her place, bringing the detective Benoit Blanc along with her in the hopes she can solve Andi’s murder. She isn’t discovered until she reveals herself and the murderer never reacts to her presence with a world famous detective in any way. In short, the twin murderers trope isn’t even subverted. It’s not in play. It’s not even really important to the plot. Andi could have simply survived the first murder attempt and the rest of the story could have played out as written, except with less exposition to explain how her twin sister pulled off impersonating her.

In spite of this, Johnson receives a lot of praise for this decision.

The problem is, subverting a trope is something that must be done with care, thought and careful setup in the narrative itself or it becomes arbitrary, dependent on the audience reading the story rather than the storytelling. These choices do not expand on the story’s theme, do not illuminate the characters, do not add intrigue. They just eat up screen time and appeal to the audience’s understanding of tropes and conventions to make… a joke? Do they even have a point? It’s hard to tell.

Overall it’s poor craftsmanship and worse communication. Yet Johnson has received a lot of praise for the way he plays with tropes because people are only looking at the tropes and not the way they fit together. It’s a bit like looking at a house built with cedar wood and praising it for its excellent construction, in spite of the cracked foundation and leaking roof. The building is more than its materials just as a story is more than its genre and tropes.

This problem can creep up in the reverse, as well. In the manga Freiren: Beyond Journey’s End, the character of Himmel is vitally important to understanding the world. He is a hero who spent a decade of his life fighting demons and eventually defeating the demon lord, ushering in a more peaceful era. One of his companions, Freiren, is an elf who ultimately outlives him. As the name implies, Freiren: Beyond Journey’s End focuses on what this elf does in the decades after their triumph over the demon lord. It’s a deep, introspective story about memory, identity and what it means to live for a really, really long time.

Himmel is a character who is vitally important to understanding Freiren’s emotional journey. Those that pay attention find him to be a rich, fascinating and nuanced man. However it’s common to see the general discourse online boil Himmel down to a flat, simple character who was “the hero.” He fought the demon lord because he was the hero. He won because he was the hero. He was a charitable man because he was the hero.

This ignores Himmel’s boundless ego, an ego that led to him personally posing for statues in dozens of cities across the north. It ignores how hard he pushed his companions to measure up to his standards. It overlooks his naivete in the face of demonic evil, which led him to spare his enemies early in his career and directly led to tragedy. Most of all it ignores the many questions Freiren’s relationship to Himmel raises about him.

Himmel was in love with Freiren. Yet in spite of the many opportunities he had to appeal to her he never offered her a relationship, even once their work was done. Why? Time was a chasm between them – Freiren is more than a millenia old – and Himmel was deeply aware of that. Was that enough to drown Himmel’s high opinion of himself?

There are hints part of his obsession with statues stems from that. Was Freiren the source of his craving for legendary status or did she just feed into something that already existed?

Was Freiren really unaware of Himmel’s feelings? If so, why did she find herself weeping at the graveside of a person she only knew for ten years?

These and other questions are a vein of deep, rich reflection on human nature encompassed in a charming, heartwarming story that plays out at an expert pace. Slapping a simple label on this central character and saying, “It’s because he’s the hero” is a grave disservice to the author, the characters and the audience. Yet when tropes become analytical tools, that’s exactly what happens.

I like tropes and genres. They’re very useful tools for summing up an idea when we start to explore it. Yet when they become the end goal of exploring an idea we’re locked into simple, shallow and ultimately flat considerations of those ideas. Stories suffer for it and so do we. To go back to an earlier analogy, it’s best to think of tropes as the materials we build our story from. They have strengths and weaknesses of themselves, sure. However, in an actual story they have to be shaped, fitted and attached to one another with purpose and skill or even the best trope will make for a poor story.

Focus on purpose and skill and we’ll see better stories overall, no matter what genres and tropes are used.