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We need mandatory media literacy classes.
(hexbear.net)
"So we're trying to be more serious, the satire comes from the viewers' appreciation of how ridiculous the situation is with the war machine. It's funny because 1930's style propaganda to us in 2024 seems like 'how could people fall for this, this is such a joke.' Trust your government and all that kind of thing. Propaganda only works when you're not aware that it's working… we have to be very strong in our community sentiment to be able to shut down those groups that will use this as a way to like push different agendas. We're not about that, our studio and the game stand for being inclusive."
I had someone in a tabletop RPG group say to me with a straight face that critical analysis is stupid. "Sometimes a story is just a story and there's no other meaning." Like, as if Dracula is just a story about a guy that bites people and that's it. Or Animal Farm is just about talking animals.
I got the impression that she had taken from her literature classes the idea that you have to "find" the "correct" meaning in the text. As in, it's there and you have to solve it like a puzzle, and there's only a small set of correct answers. That's kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of how it all works. You have the text, and any meaning you can explain and defend is there. Many popular texts already have a lot of stuff already written about it, but that doesn't mean those are the only possible answers. You can easily write an essay that examines Dracula through a feminist lens.
She really just seemed kind of sad and incurious overall. I think about this a lot. I think a lot of people are like her.
I don't really know how to fix this. Probably spending a lot more money on education would help.
I agree that even if an author claims there is no meaning in a story they wrote, and even if the story itself seems vapid, meaning can indeed be pulled out, or at the very least the story can serve as a data point in a meta analysis of cultural trends of the time, etc....while I agree with this, a ton of people really do just absorb stories at face value cause it's interesting to exist somewhere else for a bit or vicariously experience emotions through characters or just enjoy a series of thrilling events.
The way to fix this is by having people read. Not just like… “you, sit down and read the brothers karamazov” because it can be anything other than harboring disdain for the very act of reading itself.