A Black and White Room
The World Beyond TVtropes
It’s common knowledge that there’s a massive amount of media (books, TV, games, plays) one can choose from today, even limiting yourself to one medium will not let you take in all of it. This means talking about media is a good way to get people interested in it, it’s a signal of quality if someone is invested enough to keep going on about it. But, what if you experience something purely through others talking about it, rather than the thing itself?
Like a good number of people in my generation with my sort of interests, I used to browse the website TVtropes excessively. For those unaware this is a website that catalogues tropes, meaning common repeated elements of stories, things as basic as having a main character. So people make pages for their favorite media and detail every element of it, and you can browse pages for tropes to find examples of it.
Naturally it’s easy to spend hours on TVtropes clicking on the thousands of links each page has to offer. And of course this would sometimes lead to pages for works I had no personal experience with. But I’d still read the whole page, spoilers included, and get a good idea of the work. Which is a bizarre way to experience something. But, reading TVtropes is easier and faster than reading a novel or playing a whole video game, you can get all the information on it with low investment.
You don’t need TVtropes to have this kind of relationship with something. Youtube plot summaries and reviews can fill this role just as well, or reddit posts. There are plenty of sources for someone who has never experienced a piece of media to cite when talking about it.
There’s a certain thought experiment that goes as follows:
“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on...What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?”
My answer is yes, she learns what it feels like to see the color of a ripe tomato, she forms opinions on which colors she likes to see, that is all information she only gains through experience of the color itself. Of course this isn’t getting into the whole philosophical discussion around the idea of qualia, but the relevance to the actual subject of this post should be clear.
If you experience a work of fiction solely through social media posts, plot summaries, TVtropes pages, or even fanfiction, you are Mary in her black and white room. You may have all the academic information about it, but you lack the sensation that comes from actually experiencing it. Complete knowledge of a novel can only be gained by reading it, a movie by watching it, and so on.
Except things don’t evolve in a way completely unsuited for their environment, without quickly going extinct at least. Much of the dreaded Discourse around works of fiction in our times is rarely about the actual work and sometimes it is only a pretext at best. Sometimes being only a conversation piece is the intent of the work, or at least the intent of the marketing team.
This means a plot summary or TVtropes page genuinely covers everything needed for the big Discourse, because again, the actual work is only a pretense. What good is knowing what it means to see red when debating in a world with no red?
There’s also the self referential nature of fandom, where at a certain level fandom becomes about itself rather than what it’s supposedly about. So once an established series or franchise goes on long enough, new entries start to matter to people more in terms of how they fit the fandom narratives rather than their actual qualities, especially if releases happen frequently. And the actual qualities of the original are ignored in favor of what fans project onto it.
On the other side of this, members of a fandom need to be aware of the new releases, and if someone is unable to get the work itself they may feel a need to seek out second hand sources to stay relevant with the current conversation. When someone’s main social scene is a Star Wars community they will have some level of exposure to any new Star Wars release of notoriety, willing or not.
There is little space in those environments for discussion of media that involve their actual qualities. Having a real conversation about something requires staying at the small scale and away from the large beasts known as Fandom and Discourse at the top of the food chain. Which is a much less exhausting and more vibrant existence.
The problem isn’t the plot summaries or websites like TVtropes, they’re not the black and white room, they’re the books inside it. Rather the flaw is in the culture, where things move so fast or become so self referential that there is no time for proper discussion, where waiting to gather your thoughts puts you at risk of them being deemed irrelevant by the time you speak. We need to slow down and let ourselves out of the loop.
Let’s leave our black and white rooms and look at colors for ourselves instead of listening to podcasts about them.