Television isn't real: or why literalist interpretation of My Little Pony always leads to arguments · 3:37pm Feb 4th, 2014
I've been having conversations on and off, here and there, on various bits of MLP canon and their representation on screen and I always find myself bumping up against the same issue of literal interpretation of the events that take place. So of course I try to lay down my argument against literalism... the worst possible time for me to do this is in a chat; things tend to degenerate because people keep interrupting before I've finished making my point.
I don't take well to being interrupted. Makes my brain short-circuit.
But that's by the by and only relevant at all because it prompted me to make this blog, in order to lay out the arguments without someone popping up to contradict what they think I'm saying when I've not actually finished saying anything.
So, on to the issue at hand.
Literal Interpretation of Television
It's a common occurrence for fandoms to endlessly analyse their chosen object of enjoyment to depths that would make a post-modernist literary contextualist faint. Possibly taking Derrida to heart (perhaps without realising it) they immerse their minds in the world of their fandom, in order that they might pick it apart and learn every single secret about it. A popular conception of Canon is established, and all events of the text are interpreted and analysed in light of that.
So far so good.
This, however, tends to lead to a sort of absolutist literalism: the text is taken entirely at face value. To a certain extent that's necessary because the text is all you have - or so it appears - but a problem occurs if you take this face-value-acceptance as an absolute. Sooner or later something appears in the text that is limited by the medium in which that text is rendered, and the literal interpretation of that artefact falls short of the symbolic meaning it was attempting to portray.
A simple example is a painting. Paint on canvas produces an image that we perceive as representing something. We look at the Mona Lisa and see her, because da Vinci applied his paints to a lump of wood with that goal in mind. A literal interpretation of that painting, taken to its absolute, would claim that every detail we see there is taken from life. If you stand back that's true, but if you get too close you can see the brush strokes. Do you argue that the woman pictured had brush-stroke-textured skin as a result?
You don't. And at that point you accept that the painting - the text - is not literal, but representational. The response of artists to this issue of the unreality of their work is highly varied. One way to deal with it is to strive for absolute realism in art, working your brush-strokes down to such tiny levels that they're all but invisible - but they're still there. Others go in other directions. They might accept that their art is only a representation and strive to represent the ideal, the core, the essence, or the impression of the thing. They might go all the way off into pointillism - making the brush-strokes so obvious that they become an integral part of the piece. They might turn to cubism, mocking the literal visual interpretation with an abstract vision of the subject's essential nature. Or they might just huff their paint thinner and pee off the second floor of the Tate Modern as a representation of the constant stream of effluent that the modern media incessantly feeds the dithering masses.
The medium that the text is rendered in forms part of the text. When Derrida said "there is nothing outside the text", the medium itself was implicitly included - and the limitations of the medium, too, are included as a result.
As I mentioned near the start, fandoms interpret their chosen object - their text - in light of itself, in order to better understand it. However, in doing so they tend to literalism - ignoring the medium or assuming that the limitations imposed on the text by the medium are a deliberate choice, without considering the context of that choice.
One good example is Star Trek. A fairly obvious example of the limitations of the medium impacting the text is the Transporter, which has become a staple of Star Trek for its entire run (as well as being a huge headache for script-writers who had to contrive reasons for it not to work so they could have a story longer than 5 minutes). In The Original Series, the transporter was invented when it was realised that the budget for filming shuttlecraft landings would be prohibitive. The budget - one of the limitations of the medium at the time - forced a change in the text.
Interesting an example as that might be, however, it isn't exactly what I was aiming for. A better example of what I mean is the special effects.
For a long, long time, Star Trek planets were bright colours. Fans saw these marvelous worlds and tended to view their colourful atmospheres as intentional choices. The literal interpretation of on-screen events would be that each of those planets really did have that unique and brightly coloured atmosphere. Occasionally that was the case. Generally, however, it wasn't. In most cases the planets had those bright atmospheres for two reasons: the directors and producers wanted to make them look alien and strange, but also because the quality of television production media in the 60s and early 70s forced the use of brighter, starker colours in composited special effects so they could even be seen.
A similar issue can be seen in other SFX shot. Their movements were slow and clunky, and they weren't particularly detailed or particularly expressive. They were also very obviously composited. The limitations of the technology of the day restricted what the producers could achieve.
Now I know you will argue that these limitations don't limit the creativity of the artists involved - and I agree. They don't. A good artist can work around limitations, and a great artist can overcome them entirely. Star Trek is an enduring phenomenon despite all of its technological and budgetary handicaps and possibly even because of some of them. Those brightly coloured planets and sometimes cheesy special effects stuck in the mind, and became a powerful imaginative symbol of the adventures of the Enterprise and her crew. The producers overcame the limitations the medium pushed on them.
It must be remembered however, that they can only do that by acknowledging that those limitations exist - just as the impressionists and cubists and pointilists and expressionists and post-pre-pseudomodernist fascist-chic hyperrealists have to acknowledge the limitations of their media in order to work with and around them.
The limitations of media aren't just budgetary and technological, of course. In visual media especially, attention has to be paid to focus, perception and contextualisation.
To begin with there are various rules of thumb, like the rule of thirds, that inform how a particular shot will be framed - whether to conform to the rule, or to subvert the expectations of the viewer through breaking the rule. The precise intent of the text restricts and directs how the medium will be used - visual shot of a building for a news report will be framed very differently to a similar shot for an action film, for example, because the focus of the shot is different, the perception that the director wants to inculcate in the viewer is different, and the context of the text itself is different.
That's a very macro example of the issue but it does illustrate the point: these apparently simple directorial decisions have profound effects on how the imagery is received. How a shot is framed can completely alter how the viewer perceives the contents of that shot; a news report of a small flood can make the flood look like a life-threatening inundation by framing shots to ignore all the dry land around the water, or they can minimise the same by framing shots to include lots of dry land.
This is a direct response to a limitation of all visual media. The producer of the shot can't include all the information present, so they choose to create an impression of the information through framing. Through careful framing they create a symbolic representation of reality, at least partly in the expectation that the viewers of the piece will interpret it as an actual reality - that they will take it literally, at face value.
The framed shot creates a symbolic representation of reality that wants to be taken at face value. All media, to a greater or lesser extent, is designed to be taken at face value despite the fact that it is only symbolic and representational. It wants to be treated as the object it pictures, rather than the impression of the object, and the various limitations of the media are more often than not incorporated into that process.
By now you're probably wondering what this has to do with my little pony and fandom arguments.
The debate that sparked this whole train of thought to begin with took place at the start of season 4; specifically Celestia's statement that was interpreted to mean only one year had taken place in show-time (despite evidence to the contrary in-canon) and the flashback to Luna's transformation to Nightmare Moon.
The former gets into semiotics in a huge way and I haven't had to write on that subject in any meaningful way since I graduated in 2003, so I'm going to side-step it for this post. The latter, whilst it still deals with signs and symbolism, is a much easier proposition because it speaks directly to the core argument of this piece: that what takes place on screen should not be taken literally.
First we have to look at the series as a whole and identify how much representation imagery is being used. Even a cursory glance reveals quite a lot. The most obvious, most immediate example of something that is an impression of something is the city of Canterlot. Up close we see a grand, bustling metropolis filled with great old buildings, parks, statue gardens and streets aplenty, but in every single distant shot of the city we see a tower, a few buildings and a great deal of inconsistent scaling. Immediately we are forced to interpret the distant Canterlot as symbolic in some way; we unconsciously accept it as an intentional impression, because it would be impossible to be anything else.
This symbolic Canterlot exists as a limitation of the medium. In this case the limitation is not budgetary or technical, but stylistic - the world of Equestria portrayed on screen is highly stylised and unreal; it's a cartoon in the true meaning of the word. Canterlot can be turned into a near-parody of a fantasy city because it is part of that cartoon, and we accept that because we acknowledge the stylistic limitations present.
Another very potent example of this representational status in the show is Lesson 0. The sun and various objects moving as parts of a timepiece are definitely not meant to be taken literally, and are in fact artefacts of Twilight's increasingly deranged mind - shown to the viewer as part of an effort to demonstrate just how crazy she was going.
I could spend page after page detailing other similar examples of stylistic choices affecting how the show is portrayed, but I think that will do for that particular thread. I pointed this particular instance out to illustrate that "limitations of the medium" are not merely things imposed at a technical level, but are also the responses to those gross impositions and choices made entirely independent of them.
So we now have a nice list of limitations of the medium, not all of which are obvious when we think of the term.
The scene in question, when Luna transforms into Nightmare Moon, was just a few minutes long. The literal interpretation I mentioned right at the start seems to take the view that these few minutes were the entirety of Nightmare Moon's rebellion - that she went evil, battled Celestia and was banished to the moon in literally minutes.
Now you can imagine I have some major problems with this interpretation. It ignores everything I've just talked over and then some.
The first and most obvious thing it ignores is the use of time compression - which isn't a limitation, but a response to one: we don't have the time to sit and watch every second of every minute of the lives of the characters. We don't want to watch them sitting around staring at the wall for a couple of hours because they've nothing else to do. We don't want to watch the entirety of the three day road trip from London to Florence, because most of it would be dull.
Television can't portray that entire thing, and nor would it want to. Television does, however, offer a neat little solution: skips, cuts, scene breaks. Time compression. Events that would take place hours apart can take place within seconds of one another. Even in a single scene, events that would have a large amount of time between them can take place in quick succession. A literal interpretation of such scenes would require us to believe a great deal that is simply impossible - which is why we don't interpret them literally, but symbolically and impressionistically.
So on that basis alone the interpretation of this particular scene literally makes little sense.
But there's more! Apart from Twilight - who was incapable of interacting with anything and was merely an intangible consumer of the information presented - there were no other ponies than Celestia and Luna present during the entire scene. If we're supposed to take literally the idea that this rebellion and defeat of Nightmare Moon took place over the course of a few minutes, do we assume that there were no other ponies in the entire city for the entire time? The medium itself can answer us: the scene in question was of a very high quality and likely chewed up a significant chunk of the budget for the episode. Adding background ponies running around in a panic would have increased the cost. They were left out, but the viewer was meant to assume at some level that they must have been there somewhere.
I could go on, but I think these two examples will suffice.
Due to the limitations of the medium - technological, budgetary, stylistic, directorial - and the responses to those limitations, television is largely symbolic, representational and impressionistic. It strives to portray reality, but it cannot be reality; it can only simulate it.
And the fact is, the show itself pretty much tells us this. The potion Twilight swallows doesn't send her back in time, but rather shows her events from the past. She can't interact with them; they are not real or tangible to her. Instead they are simulations, and she is the viewer of those simulations, and as simulations they provide the impression of the events that took place in the past, framing them in a way that gives her understanding without having to see every dirty, bloody little moment of those events.
Much of what we see on screen, we don't take literally. We assume - rightly - that is only a representation of something bigger than the television. We don't assume that the train takes just a few seconds to get from Ponyville to Canterlot, nor do we assume that Twilight can read an entire book in just a few moments, or that inconsistencies of time or place mean that different areas of Equestria keep moving around. We don't assume that the map Hasbro gave us is an accurate one (it even says it's not to scale - it is symbolic, not literal) and we don't assume that Pinkie Pie... actually, lets just forget Pinkie Pie.
At some level or other we understand that television, as a limited visual medium, must resort to symbolism and limitation-responses in order to get its point across. The majority of the time, we accept the symbolic nature of My Little Pony. This one scene seems to be the exception, and I really can't work out why.
static1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120328212010/spongebob/images/a/a7/I_Love_You_Patrick.gif
How come I can't into big blog posts?
God I love you sometimes Arch. This irritates the hell out of when I see so little critical thinking skills, which seems especially prevalent in this fandom.
Like the other day, I saw someone analysing the expressions of the show to argue that a human couldn't understand them. It's a fucking children's cartoon with a defined art style! It's not realistic! It's not what 'actually' occurs!
I thot you were going to say that they don't have TVs in Equestria
>vission
>semiotics
??/
I agree with you completely on this.
+1 for all of this, as well as Pinkiegiraffe
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3literal5me
Also, this
derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/4/19/301938__safe_pinkie+pie_animated_image+macro_hub+logo_iron+will_putting+your+hoof+down_mythbusters_pinkie+physics.gif
Also, this
derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/11/4/464522__safe_solo_animated_derpy+hooves_cute_upvotes+galore_3d_sfm_chair_spinning.gif
I'm glad to have found an argument pertaining to literalistic interpretations of a cartoon show that wasn't just a simple "It's a fucking cartoon, not every damn thing that happens is meant to be taken literally. Take magic for example..."
If there was a like button for blogs then yours would have certainly been smashed repeatedly.
So the whole point of this long winded post was to basically state that a medium has limitations and that you shouldn't take everything literally? Shouldn't that be obvious? I mean come on of course the luna rebellion took longer and twilight's journey took roughly 8 years (if the show uses moons to mean months and not days.) time is one of the things the show has always struggled with.
1795287 True, but if hypothetically it wasn't a stylisation. we'd still be able to understand ponies (unless of course they speak a different language).
The treachery of images is all the stronger when the images can move, but it is critical to remember that show and world do not have a one-to-one relationship. Je n'est pas une poney.
One of the best examples of this is the tale of Hearth's Warming, which demonstrates the limitations of a narrative framework within the diegesis of the show itself. (Why yes, I do read My Little Po-Mo regularly, why do you ask?) Taken literally, the tale seems to imply a Noah's Ark-like situation wherein the leaders and advisors have to single-hoofedly rebuild the species after rebuffing the windigoes. That seems less than historically accurate.
As for Pinkie Pie, as the cartooniest character of all, she can exploit the limitations and conventions of the medium for her own purposes. (Actually, a part of my headcanon is that all earth ponies can potentially do this — see Granny Smith winking at the camera or Mr. Cake hanging a lampshade on his twins' genealogy — but at an ever greater cost of sanity.)
In any case, thank you for this blog, Arc. The only thing I love more overanalysis is meta-analysis.
Why are so many people making such impressive blog/essays?
This is great stuff, dude.
~Skeeter The Lurker
Here's a (maybe) interesting side story about text vs medium.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~wibbly wobbly lines~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I went to see Bernard Cumberflaps in the National Theatre's staging of Frankenstein a while back (I thought it was fantastic) but I was floored when one of my compadres said she 'just didn't get into it'.
"But why?" I cried, "Was the majesty of the 'flaps not the finest thing you have ever seen? Do you not feel a girding in your loins even now, all this time after the bowing and throwing of spring blooms has concluded?"
"Nah..." came the reply "I just kept trying to figure out why his dad was black and that Victor bloke was white."
Verily, my face did meet my palm that night.
1795406
Should be... but evidently isn't to most fans.
So, here's a non-obvious question: Do the ponies see the auras when unicorns cast spells, or is that just to clue in the audience as to what is happening?
Huh, I always assumed that the flashback potion only gave Twilight a summary of sorts of the events that transpired.
So, what is the official criteria for deciding what is literal and what is representational, then? Who established this criteria as official? How is this criteria superior when compared with competing criteria?
That's the problem with this message. Yes, what you've said is technically true, but since it is also quite vague and ambiguous, it is actually (if you'll forgive my bluntness) kind of useless. Since there is no consensus on where we should consider the divide to "literal" and" representational", it ultimately solves nothing, because it is all completely based on individual interpretation. What you consider "representational" others may consider "literal," and vice versa. And neither of you would necessarily be incorrect, since both are personal interpretations, not indisputable facts.
1795738 certainly an interesting question because it could be that the horns do glow or just visual short hand, I am going to say they do glow I cite magic duel the first few moments of twilights practice just as twilight horn glows fluttershy tells her to stop even though twilight barely exerts herself. Unless fluttershy saw a muscle tense in twilights head. Also before twilights mustache spell Trixie looks shocked at the beam of magic before it reaches her. What do you think?
1795879 I thought I made it pretty clear that the whole thing is representational. There is no line to be drawn. There's nothing to take literally; there are only increasing levels of abstraction and symbolism.
1795295 vission was a typo. Semiotics is the analysis and examination of signs and symbols in a work.
1795406 As 1795738 points out, the self-evident often isn't evident to a lot of people.
That aside, it's always useful to understand the reasons something appears self-evident. Consider dropping a rock from a tower. It always drops down, right? Of course, you'd say: rocks drop down. That's what they do. It's not like we really need to understand the laws of motion and gravity to know that, but having that knowledge sure is useful.
1795439 Wow. It's like they haven't heard of actors...
1795417 Yes! Hearths-warming eve is a brilliant example of what I'm talking about! I should have used that as well! Ah well, next time.
1795364 I think I shall indeed submit it. Just need to wait for the thread to appear...
Any time now...
Did you really have to make this blog that long? You repeated yourself quite a lot, and often sidetracked into things that hardly mattered at all.
Next time you do one of these, please stay on topic.
Other than that, I'd have to agree with you, and I realize that this sort of thing does need to be told to some people, but you should also mention that constant symbolic interpretation is equally fallacious. It's true that the aesthetic design of MLP is incredibly stylistic, even to the point of physics breaking under it's weight, but that's the way the entire world is portrayed. It's entirely possible that their world simply functions that way. We already know that their world has different physical laws than ours does, simply by the existence of magic.
There's no such thing as black or white. There's always a gradient, always a middle. The middle is usually correct.
1796101
Yes, those are very good points! I tend to agree that ponies see the auras but it's so common an occurrence that that none of them react to the sight except in extraordinary circumstances, like the ones you mentioned.
The opposite could certainly be argued, though. One question that arises is why Twilight didn't notice that Cadance's aura had turned from light blue to slime green in the wedding episode. But, again, that's falling into the representational trap that spurred Archonix's post in the first place!
1796241 hehe that's true like how "alicorn magic" used in season 4 episode 1 was the same as sombra's dark magic. i think the mis-colorings or changes to color are animation errors or the alicorn sombra magic which is re-used resources.
edit:btw twilight does see the green magic glow it's what tips her off to something fishy is going down, why she never mentions the color of the magic, because from what we see the color of magic is like a fingerprint it's unique (unless the show staff mess up).
1796114 well from a purely observational stand point anything that is "self-evident" must be based on previous experience as something you have seen before, taking your falling rock most people would infer that the rock would fall if dropped because we have seen it happen before and it is what we are taught, but say you were taught otherwise all your life never experiencing it, the rock falling would contradict what you thought was true and then the observer might have a mental breakdown as he realises his life is a lie etc.
and yes knowing the mechanics of a falling rock can be very useful.
1795879
My criteria is if it happens repeatedly in the show, is vital to the story, or is mentioned in much the same way by several different characters, it's probably canon. if it happens during a song and dance routine or Pinkie Pie does it, it may not be canon. And then I go from there.
I know it would take a supreme amount of time and effort, but it would be very interesting if someone made a mini-series about Luna's fall, now that we have the 3 minute summary. Too bad Hasbro would never do it, get the studio to produce it. A 90 minute movie covering everything from the resentment, to the rebellion and banishment of NMM. That would be the cats ass!
1795738 >Diaries Of A Madman
Bravo, good sir.
1797368
'k
Sweet essay. Reminds me of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. If you haven't read it, read it!
it talks about all of the things: symbolism, impression vs. photorealism... plus it's in a graphic novel format!
Can you come up with examples in literature where the written text abstracts, compresses, or alters what happened due to its limits?
Now I wonder whether some of the canon inconsistencies I attributed to sloppy writing are due to symbolic representation.
The comments on my latest story, "Moments", had a lot of complaints about the energy and momentum of meteors, but nobody picked up on the worst unrealistic element in the story: The implication that Twilight repeated a scenario hundreds of times without ever talking to her friends about it. That's not a failure of semiotics. It's a mismatch of reader priorities to my priorities.
1801375 It's a bit of a cop-out, but I'd say look at just about any written work and you'll see it happening sooner or later. Narrative that described every single thing would be as dull as a blunted knife made of wool.
Sex is a good example. Authors have to overcome the lack of, ah, stimuli through a process of abstraction from the actual act. It's easy enough to convey sex in visual media - just throw it up on the screen and let it rip - but for a written work the author will often resort to a great deal of metaphor and retreat into description of emotional states rather than pure physical description. They can't emulate the visual sensations directly without becoming repetitive and boring, so instead they'll drill down to odd little details and expand them right out, while ignoring other things entirely.
No specific examples come to mind right now.
Get?
Come?
Word choice matters!
1802646
It's forever a mystery!!!
1796101 On the other hand, Twilight sabotaging Fluttershy's runway show in Green Isn't Your Color makes no sense if the magic aura is visible. Or Applejack not realizing Twilight was magically animating the snowplow in Winter Wrap Up. Or Pinkie not seeing anything when Rarity magicked the blinds closed in MMMMystery on the Friendship Express.
I think most magic auras aren't visible. There are exceptions - using magic to create light is an obvious one.
1810730 that's true and it's most likely a flaw with having multiple writers, even though they probably discuss it seems that the writers just don't seem to have any consistency, and things tend to change between episodes. continuity wasn't that big of a thing (except m.a larson who made a point of it) season 4 has been better though it's still got little flaws here and there.
Appealing to symbolism and creator intent is just pure laziness and an escape from the effort of understanding the universe. It ignores living in the universe and thinking of the characters as distinct beings. You can rule out any char development by viewing characters merely as devices. You ignore all world-building by looking at the setting as only a device and not trying to make sense of it.
The things you have complained about can be explained if you try. The way Canterlot looks? Simple illusion spell.
Celestia saying 1 year? Either she's lying (something we already know she did, the legend in episode 1 lied about what NMM said, and Celestia wrote that legend) or seasons/holidays work differently.
If you have a problem with Twi's vision, and a brief NMM battle, you are not forced to take that view and don't have to come up with silly crud like 'time compression' or 'artsiness' to explain it. The vision could've been a lie (Celestia could have fed Zecora potion instructions) or it may have depicted subsequent NMM transformations, as we don't know if what we saw was the first or not.
Do you have proof that the NMM rebellion had to be longer than what Twi saw though? Why do you take issue with it?
The battle also clearly took place in the ruined 'castle of the 2 sisters' NOT in Canterlot itself. As for why there were no servants there: Luna may have told them to leave so she could fight her sister. Maybe she's not as evil as you think?
Why do you think we're supposed to assume ponies were around? You're just making it up.
1796672
Luna did not fall, she rebelled. Celestia fell by sinking to a moral low by trying to force her sister to do the B show when she didn't want to, and jailing her for refusal.