Do you find yourself frustrated with fellow fans??
Do you read other people’s meta analyses and think…man, what show were they watching? Do you ever think to yourself, pfft, clearly x is the most important thing about y and anyone who disagrees—well, that’s just because they’re z?
Wellllll, buckle up folks, because I have a much less stressful, less conflict-ridden way of seeing the world of fandom!
Those people on the other side of the fandom who are concerning themselves with different aspects of said media?? Those scenes/characters/themes that you couldn’t give a hoot about?
They are probably simply viewing the text through a different literary lens!
Let’s talk about a couple of examples of literary criticism, shall we?
(Note: Criticism here doesn’t mean ‘the practice of finding the flaws in’. Literary criticism is basically the analysis and interpretation of pieces of literature (or media, of course!). Basically, we’re looking at—what do we pick apart in the texts we engage with in order to derive meaning?)
From the Purdue OWL document linked above, Feminist Criticism asks questions like:
What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters assuming male/female roles)?
How are male and female roles defined? What constitutes masculinity and femininity? How do characters embody these traits?
What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?
From the same document, if we approach media through the lens of Gender Studies and Queer Theory, we might ask:
What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the masculine/feminine binary? What happens to those elements/characters?
What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both?
How does the literary text illustrate…sexuality and sexual "identity," that is the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories…?
Other kinds of literary lenses include:
Post-colonial Criticsm: looking at the power dynamics between groups oppressed by colonialism and the oppressors
New Historicism: looking at a text as a product of its time
Post-structuralism: put simply, looking at how breaking conventions impact a work (“death of the author”)
Structuralism: put simply, looking at how genre or other “rules” of media impact a work
Reader Response Theory: looking at how the reader/viewer’s experiences shape their experience of the text
Marxist Criticism: looking at the power dynamics between different social/economic classes in a text
Psychoanalytic Criticism: looking at how a text deals with or is influenced by aspects of the psyche
Formalism: looking at how the form of the media itself impacts meaning
Moral Criticism: looking at the impact texts have on our morality as a society
There are certainly more, and the document I’m summarizing (again, linked above) is on the older side. In fact, you can decide your OWN questions you want to ask of the text too! Those questions might fall into one of the categories above, of course. It’s also likely that you might be drawn to a particular school of criticism that aligns particularly well with causes you care about or identify with. Consider: Could you broaden that horizon?
It’s important to note, too, that while some of these literary lenses may be more applicable to the show/book/movie/game you’re thinking about…you are not wrong for looking at the text through a different lens!
The next time you finding yourself shaking your head at someone’s hot take on the internet that you disagree with, consider before you rage or seethe or stew:
Are they simply looking at the text through a different lens?
