I’ve been seeing the term “media literacy” being thrown around against responses (mostly neutral-negative ones) of the TADC finale and I have to say…do some people know what media literacy actually is?
Media literacy is defined as a communicative ability to use critical thinking, reasoning, evaluation and analysis for a piece of media to understand what possible themes, stories, and ideas its attempting to tell, how it’s done and how that affects the overall narrative/audience.
Media literacy has nothing to do with whether you love or hate the finale. Media literacy has nothing to do with whether you love or hate the direction a character took. It’s about why you may feel that way and being open to different perspectives, analyses, literary criticisms, and understanding the differences between intention vs execution.
Media literacy has nothing to do with “Well, you didn’t like that and I did, so you’re media illiterate”. In fact, that’s the opposite of being media literate. What media literacy actually is an ability to critically think and analyze something in your own way, discuss it reasonably, and drawing out conclusions. If you hated the direction of the ending or characters, you are not media illiterate. If you loved the direction of the ending or characters, you are not media illiterate either. It’s not about blindly loving or hating something. It’s not about getting defensive due to different viewpoints of the finale. It’s not about what your opinions are but why and how you came to them- and discussing with others about it.

















