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
Corporations have a term they use, cultivated identity, to describe a marketing and sales strategy for how you break through an environment like this.
Now this part of things I'm not an expert in. A lot of people make a lot of money figuring this shit out. But the outline of it isn't hard to understand.
If you're selling people a product, you're kind of a sucker. The buyer gets to evaluate whether that product is worth their money, and you have to convince them that it is, based on its quality, with consequences involved for lying or falling short.
But what if instead, you could convince someone that the product is part of their identity? You're not a customer, you're a blorbo! And you can't wait for blorb 13, the blorbening!
What does it matter if it's good? A blorbo blorbs. Duh.
Obviously, I made this sound as stupid as possible. And yet, how many people call themselves gamers? Hobbyists? Superfans? YouTubers? Even "nerd" and "leftist" can fall into this category.
This isn't like being a film buff, which has expectations of expertise involved. And it's not like an ordinary fandom or genre appreciator, e.g., a metalhead. This is merely a consumer category. You get in the club by being someone continually buying into something, regardless of quality or expertise.
It's pernicious, and it's a highly effective way to cut through all the noise.
Why buy the next thing? Because it's your identity. You could avoid it, if you wanted. But then you're back to that screaming void of attempting to parse through an ocean of stuff based on its quality, which no one else may even know about. Worse, the more people become like this, the less you can relate to them unless you become the same thing.
How many of you have read all of the Horus Heresy novels, all 60-something of them, even though you can count on your fingers which ones aren't complete dogshit?
I own all the Broken Realms books, and I sit and defend AoS on this sub all the time. Why? That shit is online somewhere for free, and I don't give a shit what redditors think about a game I enjoy playing.
It's because GW colonized our brains. In order to keep you onboard, they want you thinking about Warhammer all the fucking time. They want it to be the only thing you consume.
Have you ever looked at something in real life and said, "hey! That's just like Warhammer!" But no, it obviously isn't. That's their marketing with its hooks in you. That's the brainworm they inserted so you'll keep coming back.
And now that I've mentioned this, you probably see it everywhere. Video games that demand they be the only things you play. Endless manga and anime that never has a satisfactory conclusion. TV or books that go on forever and have spinoffs and sequels and tie ins and etc etc etc.
This differs from just making more content for things that are popular. The goal of these kinds of franchises is to be totaling. Warhammer, in particular, is so impenetrable that you can't know it all (even if it is a mile wide and an inch deep, which is actually intentional.)
Marvel of course is the clear juggernaut here. You could live your entire life in a Marvel bubble, if you wanted to. There's that much content.
Shit, even things like apps have the same strategy. Endlessly consuming your attention, refusing to let you go long past when you're getting any use out of it. How often do you even remember what memes you looked at an hour after you put your phone down?
How do they cast this spell on us? Why does this work?
Competitive identity and fandom
And now we return to D.E., and its role in this.
Real media criticism is like the product comparison we made before. Is this a good fiction? Are its themes coherent? What were the authors trying to say? Were the performances good? Etc etc.
You may notice, these are essentially subjective questions, which are the bane of both capital and the hopeless nerd.
If I judge something as bad, it's not easy to convince me otherwise. So you need to pull the conversation away from that, into something "objective."
Enter diegetic essentialism. The goal here is not to evaluate any substantive question. The goal is to establish canon. Quality and artistic merit are essentially irrelevant. And the author might as well be god himself. Aloof and unknowable.
In a deeply bitter form of irony, many DEckheads actually invoke death of the author as evidence for why a story can only mean what its "canon" implies it means. Symbolism? Allegory? Metaphor? These things don't exist. Only "details." Details established by fan arguments.
In this environment, it becomes very difficult to relate actual media criticism to the cultivated identity DEckhead. It tends to annoy them, or "spoil the fun." You're evaluating quality and artistry? That's not why we're here, bucko.
For you to fit into these properties, and therefore not be lost in the cultural wasteland, you begin to compete to be the biggest "fan." The best lore understander, the most details knower, the most hours logged on, the takes haver.
What becomes important is not actual construction of meaning, talent in performance, or even just having a good time, it's constructing the cultural justification for why it's worth it to stay in this identity.
I know you know what I mean.
How often have you been roped in to an argument about the Tau? How long have you spent memorizing the details of battles that did not happen and aren't even consistent? How many marketing names do you know for troops that have slightly different weapons?
When you're trapped in DE, all you can do is talk about the details. Everyone is in the walled garden. You're not a visitor here, you're trapped.
When we say 40k sucks, what we mean is the vast majority of it is zero effort reactionary garbage. Sure, some of it isn't, but that's the exception.
GW rarely or never credits their authors and artists anymore (their newest paint teacher is hands only lmao). They regularly shit can excellent story ideas if they can't connect to minis sales.
How can this dreck be worth thinking about? It's not just that it isn't real, that's obvious. It's not even really trying.
And yet that won't stop 40klore from furiously discussing the implications of bimchus boltbutt falling to chaos, all one paragraph written about it. And it won't stop someone else from spending two hours digging through wikis (which are like religious monuments dedicated to DE) to "prove" or "disprove" something that was never real and will be overwritten by the next book anyway.
Most of you are subconsciously aware of this. Be honest, when was the last time you really read any of the books? Compare that to how often you read a wiki instead, or, god help us, watched a "loretuber."
It's not your fault, it's because it's bad. It's not worth reading 80% of these things. Your brain rebels against it.
At one point, they existed to help you tell a cool story while you were playing a fun game.
Now? They exist to perpetuate a corporate juggernaut with a 30% profit margin. The game is deliberately designed to be miserable to incentivize new model purchases. And Black Library greases that engine.
Influencers and superfans consume and regurgitate "information" and "lore" to a series of people who've decided they "like" something that they literally don't like.
And you keep up with it because otherwise, you don't get to be in the "fandom." Hilariously, a lot of the arguments people make on here are incorrect even in DEckhead terms. Like it's obvious to someone who has read lore when someone else has not. But accuracy isn't even important to the DEckhead. Not really. Just that it exists to argue about.
And now we come to it. The conclusion that will piss a lot of you off.
""""""""""Leftist"""''"""""" Diegetic Essentialism
Leftist is essentially in this category too. Because it doesn't have a strict, coherent meaning like, say, Marxist-Leninist or Anarcho-Communist.
Despite being nominally anti capitalist, after the honeymoon period of escaping to the left, there is a lingering "what do I do now" that this same market mechanism is happy to latch onto.
"Breadtubers," shitty podcasts, awful electoral politics horseracing, they all fit into this same niche. An endless stream of content to deliberate on, but not act on or organize for.
Worse, since people falsely associate liberalism with the left, and liberals have increasingly become hysterical about the need to "improve" media, rather than improve material conditions, people start using diegetic essentialism to police their own fiction for elements that aren't in it.
How. Many. Fucking. Times. Have you read a thread, on this sub, from people who definitely should know better (and I do not exempt myself one bit) about how X faction is (fascist, capitalist, cringe, based, comrade, etc.) because of some snippet of their lore that clearly no author was trying to communicate, and that the story barely supports?
It's ok if you're just having fun, but we are so far past that point.
Stir made a joke a long time ago about how often the word "anarchy" is used in the Beasts of Chaos and Tzeentch battletomes in Age of Sigmar, and how it would be funny if someone thought that made them anarchist comrades instead of the clearly negative connotation GW puts on the word.
Only that's not a joke, that eventually did happen.
It's ironic that despite how saturated the internet is now with media analysis types with related degrees from universities, media literacy is probably worse than it's ever been.
The takeaway: Thematic/Material Analysis, vs diegetic essentialist problematic interpretations
Fuck, are we at the end yet? Thank God. The tl;dr is almost here.
When you make an argument like "Salamanders are comrades because in this book they did a thing that was nice, and that's like communism, so they're communists," you are doing the leftist version of DE to keep this consumer identity going. It is exactly the same as a shitty 40klore thread (redundant, I know).
It is the "leftist" version of "no female space marines."
Or, not to put this user on blast, but the recent "Chorfs are capitalist?!??" post is another great example. It would be one thing if we could examine the story and see their mode of production and, wow, look, the author included enclosure of the commons and theft of surplus value, I wonder if that was intentional? But no. The argument is "Chorfs are greedy industrialists. Capitalism has greedy industrialists. Chorfs capitalist?!??"
Lost in this kind of nonsense are basic critical questions. E.g., what was the author(s)' intent? What is the value of this criticism? Is this what the story is about, or is there only incidental interpretive evidence?
What's happening here, is leftists are using the Thermian Argument in reverse. They're using DE to say a story objectively has a message that it does not possess, and that no author intended. And, even worse, that even the interpretation is an idiotic stretch. All this to keep the fan content churning.
Do you see how foolish this exercise is? Do you see how the point isn't to critique or analyze or enjoy a work, but to create a competitive context to keep people trapped in these consumer categories?
It would be one thing if, like is the case with Krieg and Space Marines, people were deliberately misinterpreting lore as an endorsement of fascism (using an admittedly lazy and inconsistent framing where they're arguably not wrong). Especially since there's a material effect that misinterpretation(?) has on our lives.
But if we're just arguing about the fucking lore, the answer is that's it's just a bunch of shit designed by Tory adjacent Anglos to sell toys. That's it. Most Warhammer fluff isn't even worth analysis or critique, it's got nothing in it. Even the DEckhead has to scrape the bottom of the barrel most times. Sometimes literal sentences are their only "evidence."
If you want to break out of this hell, you have to start using actual tools of critical media analysis. And absolutely the first step of that is throwing Diegetic Essentialism out the window.
Don't think about lore as real, think of it as decoration for a product, made by tired authors and artists who largely aren't getting any credit.
When you want to have one of these silly takes, ask yourself instead, "what was the person writing this lore trying to accomplish?"
The answer typically, in Warhammer's case, is not much.
This is not to say there's nothing about it to discuss, far from it. We could talk all day about what Warhammer considers normal and what it says about Western values.
But there's no intelligent things to glean from the lore itself.
There is no canon. The lore is not real. It cannot mean or imply anything not expressed by the authors and artists, or so strongly evident in the assumptions of the story, that it's an inescapable facet of it (e.g. Imperium and fascism).
If you don't want to be a consumer brained moron, stop asking """''factual""""" questions about the lore, and ask instead, "what did the author mean?" "How was this work produced and for what reason?" "Who made it?" "How does it make me feel and what are its themes?" And, most importantly, "is this even good? Is it even worth my time or analysis?"
Otherwise, you're just trapping yourself into a series of pointless arguments to justify your consumption, forever. And you'll be polluting the sub, and dragging everyone else down with you.
Peace, thank you for reading this incredibly stupid essay.