Philosophical Research:MDem/5.1r/1018 only-some-darkfountain
"we can get lost in fiction but we need moderation" okay but is there even a strong distinction between reality and fiction to begin with?
this statement might sound insane at first if you don't think about the context in which it would be said surely fiction is not tangible? but whether fiction is tangible is not the same question as whether fiction is reality distinction between reality and Facticity; it gets more confusing when you realize every imagined reality has its own Facticity, but less confusing again when you realize it's still possible to distinguish imagined Facticities from the real Facticity.
let's take a glance at Deltarune how can Kris and Susie "have moderation" on getting lost in fiction if, speaking in the most literal sense, they are already entirely lost inside fiction? they don't exist within the real Facticity of earth. they are fully contained inside Deltarune, which is entirely made of fiction. if there were a character in Deltarune who could disconnect from the world of Deltarune — like, say, the literal player character represented by the Red Soul — this particular "character" could stop being an actor inside Deltarune and exercise moderation with their relationship to fiction. but Kris and Susie cannot do that. they are always inside fiction. they cannot exercise moderation with regard to their immediate physical reality. which brings up the question, can we even meaningfully speak of such characters having the ability to exercise moderation with regard to fiction?
is anime real? -
in Undertale, undyne asks, is anime real? the intended narrative purpose of this question is likely to somehow allude to Deltarune's concepts of the relationship between the Light World and the Dark World, how theoretically any object such as a TV or deck of playing cards, or any work of fiction can take on a certain reality in the Dark Fountains. if Kris exists in the universe of Deltarune and can create a Dark Fountain around anime or manga, there immediately come up questions of how this affects the reality of the fictional work, and whether this should cause Kris to ask if they have the same sense of unreality as some particular anime.
but what if we turned this question way around and began applying it to things that exist outside Undertale and Deltarune what if the characters of Dragon Ball were to ask if anime is real? what would that question mean in context? should somebody simply point to the existence of strange and unbelievable techniques and say the answer is yes, and the question is closed? arguably, no — there are many different ways to read this question.
one of the most obvious ways to read this question is to point to Gohan's story. in one episode Gohan observes a director shooting some kind of tokusatsu production to tell the legend of The Great Saiyaman. Gohan is the actual subject of the documentary. at the same time, the director has particular ideas about how the production needs to be presented to people, and when Gohan offers to help, the director questions whether Gohan actually has a proper understanding of the legend about him. the actual on-the-ground reality of what Gohan has been doing and the popular narrative that people have been constructing about him have become different things. if "anime" were to be used in the sense of Gohan's reality, one can begin to question whether if the director doesn't believe him "anime is real", or if "anime" were to be used in a similar sense to "tokusatsu show", one can question if when Gohan thinks the director's narrative is not accurate "anime is real". if we take things superficially Gohan's situation already runs somewhat parallel to Deltarune, as there are two layers of TV shows. however, the cause of this situation does ultimately come from each of two individuals, Gohan and the director, constructing models of the same reality differently. the popular narrative only actually exists the moment Gohan comes into contact with the director as an individual and has to interact with another individual's behavior, while Gohan's experience of reality exists the moment someone comes into contact with him. while it might appear on the surface that there are two nested realities, the two different realities actually just neatly collapse into spatially-localized regions of a single fictional geography of people. both narratives exist on the same level even though they do not want to acknowledge that they each exist.
this is also not the first time Gohan has broken or complicated the basic narrative of Dragon Ball. back at the moment Gohan first appears in child form, his story centers around the major theme in Dragon Ball and Journey to the West of adventure or discovery versus daily life. this theme is used and twisted in many different ways into many different meanings throughout Dragon Ball, but for Gohan, the main way it is used is that Gohan wants to go on adventures with his friends and family members to escape what could be a hard or depressing task of being one of his rural region's first educated specialists. this creates a very interesting narrative situation for Gohan. is Gohan escaping into fiction? is Gohan to be taken as an embodiment of how a lot of people probably relate to Dragon Ball? it is easy to read things this way. that although a few people may scold him for not being where he is supposed to be or perhaps giving him veiled statements that if any young readers wanted to exist in the world of Dragon Ball they should think about it a bit harder because this world is dangerous, it is not a bad thing for Gohan to try to involve himself in adventures and try to be something greater as a matter of being true to himself.
this is all fairly straightforward and easy to understand. however, things get a lot more complicated as soon as we start applying the Deltarune question to Gohan. if Gohan acts as a metaphor for escaping into fiction, is there actually any such thing as a distinction between Gohan being in fiction or not being in fiction? in Dragon Ball, Gohan does not even need to step into a separate Dark World to enter fiction. the two states of Gohan being "trapped" or having "escaped" both take place in the same world. and yet, it still certainly feels like there is a moment when Gohan leaves a certain form of reality and enters a certain form of fiction. one can even say that when Gohan later creates his superhero design, he is once again stepping from reality into a certain form of fiction he created. yet one can also say that if Gohan is trying to blend into everyday life and hiding that he really is The Great Saiyaman he is "inauthentic", and it's actually his everyday form that's the fiction he and society collectively made up. when is Gohan in fiction? is anime the fiction created by fiction, or is anime real?
one could get stuck in this conundrum basically endlessly, because a lot of abstract concepts like "fiction" and "authenticity" can be defined any number of ways, and without any surrounding context to enforce some particular use or meaning to each concept, there is no inherently correct answer on how to match concepts to their significances. different plural answers will simply keep springing up or retreading themselves, but if there is no particular thing to render any of the answers less valid, there is nothing that actually makes any of them the "objective" one, and given any particular arrangement of fictional objects or concepts "Gohan" and "the director" can just keep arguing about different perspectives on them forever.
but, there is at least one particular way we can cut this philosophical knot and find an answer to the question. for this, we only need to go back to the central themes of Journey to the West and Dragon Ball, and ask ourselves, what is the meaning of opposing adventure versus daily life?
if we ask ourselves what daily life is, Dragon Ball gives us a relatively simple answer. one of the top visual symbols Dragon Ball uses to represent daily life is food. Dragon Ball opens with imagery of animals in nature hunting other animals or seeking out food nearby, and illustrates the concept of animals, or lost Saiyans, having contentment when they have located food. even when the narrative wishes to illustrate people going through daily life, it chooses not to overcomplicate things and simply shows Goku being nudged into daily life as a peasant farmer — again, daily life is achieved when food is achieved. the second major way Dragon Ball represents daily life is in conflicts between separate civilizations. at various times, hostile empires and "evil emperor" characters attempt to take over other populations. in some story arcs, as with Cell, this violence is rather senseless. but with others, looking at what is happening more closely will start to shed light on how Dragon Ball's grand sci-fi imagery and theme of daily life are actually quite connected. if we look at Freeza and the events surrounding him, there is an entire twisted economy going on beneath all that. the Saiyan kingdom is hired to clear out planets, but the planets are sold to other empires, so presumably, empires buy planets and develop them, but likely some of the empires are going to later decide to eliminate each other and take each other's planets. Freeza will collect his money for a planet, but perhaps it will be him that eventually comes and eliminates the alien population he sold it to so he gets both ends of the deal; he certainly did not have any respect for the Saiyan kingdom despite doing transactions with them. the whole notion of empires buying planets would look rather strange viewed from a distance. for what purpose do these empires really need these planets so much if they are simply going to lose them again? the answer is simple: Dragon Ball villains believe that empire is simply another form of daily life. a space emperor buys planets simply out of the belief that empire is a living process similar to an organism and that there is nothing wrong with expanding it simply so there can be more of it and it can better eliminate its enemies. for these empires imperial territories can be seen as a kind of capital, where because populations are larger or more spread out they are inherently more powerful, so naturally an empire wants a greater area as a kind of inherently-useful building block of empire. [*na] at this point, however, heroes enter the narrative, and attempt out of whatever limited understandings they have of this historical process to defend existing populations and fight off empire. the rudimentary concepts of anti-imperialism in Dragon Ball are, in the end, just a wildly different form of the conflict between adventure and daily life. at small scales of society, Gohan may escape out his window because daily life is dragging him down. at huge scales of society, Goku and Gohan become celebrated for opposing daily life because after all the contradictions have piled up daily life has turned into horrific violence and almost nobody can defend it.
in one sense, Dragon Ball has a much stronger message to tell than Journey to the West because of the way it invokes entire large free-floating space empires, and inadvertently creates a situation where leaving daily life unexamined and refusing to undertake adventure and discovery does not merely bring a bit of mundane daily suffering but ultimately results in huge consequences that any reasonable person would find unconscionable. Dragon Ball, like Journey to the West, begins with simple scenes of animals being happy as they are in nature, yet eventually, Saiyans become shamed for not taking action to leave this original state, because as they are absorbed in what to them is daily life they end up creating empire and committing great atrocities. Dragon Ball is not entirely clear on exactly what steps are required for an alien population to turn around and examine itself in order to ultimately abandon the Evil of imperialism. however, various small hints are given throughout the text of what might be the difference between characters such as Goku and his counterparts like Raditz and Vegeta. Goku, even if the process of teaching him may be somewhat rocky, is shown to slowly learn how to form social connections. Vegeta, with relative consistency in this, never really gets good at forming social connections and seems to remain suspicious of most people. Dragon Ball overall either intentionally implies or concedes that in order for each of its planetary nations to become peaceful, their people must in some way become deliberately connected to build society, and to build society in such a way that individuals who might harm other self-aware people in the course of daily life ultimately do not do that. Dragon Ball tends to fall into the typical fictional trope of not properly distinguishing domestic criminals from imperialists, but in this "error", it actually only becomes more coherent, because it presents a clear hypothesis about where empire comes from: when individuals are poorly connected, as with individual Saiyans, bandit or robber characters, or the desperate people that get snapped up by the Red Ribbon Army, individuals may harm each other in the regular course of daily life, or they might stack up into larger empires without regard for the lives of other populations. in this sense, Dragon Ball recommends that populations undergo some form of examination of how well and in what ways individuals connect to each other in order to disrupt harmful patterns that form in the process of stacking up each different scale and level of daily life that may ultimately result in empire and genocide.
all of this is to say, if Gohan is to understand what reality is, he could simply ask himself what daily life is, and if he did ask that question, he would find that daily life is more or less the task of building society, and reality is anything that supports individual survival and society correctly. in this sense, Gohan would not be abandoning reality by trying to protect people from empire. whether he would be abandoning reality by walking away from his schoolwork is complicated, because in some sense individuals in early Artisanal production or early capitalism never know whether any of the effort they put into anything is actually useful to anyone, and as such, every time they put effort into something they risk walking away from reality in the attempt to participate in reality. Market Societies are frustrating to live in because they constantly tell people to push themselves and be useful and productive, and yet they never tell people when putting their effort into something will actually result in any kind of compensation and when it will have all been for nothing. people who correctly predict a lot of other people and successfully produce something that is adopted by much of society are celebrated like their effort was all toward a clear, definite plan all along, but people who fail to correctly predict others are often shamed like they always should have known they weren't good at the thing they were doing and they weren't actually putting in any effort. ultimately, coming to know reality within capitalism is all about the Vegeta effect. when you overcome the Vegeta effect, and manage to predict or persuade people despite the fact they can all turn away from you on a dime and you have no true way of ensuring any of them do what you want instead of something that is totally against what you want, only then are you allowed to comprehend reality. capitalism completely gatekeeps the concept of reality and doesn't let people understand the world around them. capitalism doesn't let people study reality in order to function in it better. understand reality? no, society is just a bunch of individuals, what are you even doing? there's no way to study individuals! they're all different! you don't study them, you just have to tolerate them! only, the contradictions in this model are almost uncountably many. first, when everybody begins from the model that society is made of stochastically-moving individuals with no real order, theories still do in fact pop up absolutely everywhere trying to better understand "The Individual" or "The Subject". the supposed statement that there is no predicting or understanding individuals produces stacks and stacks of Existentialist books all telling us about all the characteristics that are supposedly common to every single individual who was ever an individual. second, there is basically no other way things could be, because even if individuals are supposedly unpredictable, every individual still has to survive. even if capitalism is composed of a bunch of utterly unique, unpredictable, stochastically-moving individuals greeting everyone who tries to direct or control them with Vegeta effects, every one of those individuals will still desperately grasp at any possible way they could attempt to understand or explain the reality they've been thrust into in order to find any possible way to become more likely to survive it instead of not survive it. if capitalism is insanity and has no actual method of comprehension, our sheer faculties of survival and intelligence will still lead us to endlessly rack our brains over the question of how to understand it anyway. in some senses, capitalism is the problem of individuals. capitalism is the problem that individuals everywhere want Houses and Babies and they want a bunch of other people to spontaneously arrange into the shape of the exact structures and actions that will lead to them successfully obtaining Houses and Babies. but sometimes, asking any other people to do that diverts those people away from the shape that would lead to them obtaining Houses and Babies, or at the very least, diverts them far enough away from their own plans that they believe it would. capitalism is individuals making each other mad. capitalism is individuals wanting conflicting things at the level of their basic existence and trying to control each other at that basic level. there is nothing about individuals stochastically arranging themselves or the so-called process of "markets" that actually means people will end up happy — in fact, there is nothing about the process that means people won't simply get angrier and angrier at each other. capitalism is as if all the big space empires of Dragon Ball thoughtlessly fighting each other to exist in mutual exclusion have been scaled down into empires of one or a few individuals. in a sense, they all want to conquer each other. they all want to order each other in particular ways so that they can each exist, yet all of the ways conflict, leading to no understandable progress on building society and leaving everyone unhappy.
escaping into fiction really isn't something people choose to do or not do. for many people, walking away from reality is the only option because reality has become impossible to understand and there is simply no learning to better operate in reality nor operating in reality. and this is no fun analytic philosophy statement, where traditional philosophers can spout platitudes about "existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism" or "we'll never understand reality, but maybe it's more fun that way". when reality is incomprehensible, it produces shut-ins. it produces people who don't talk to anyone in their neighborhood and only interact with others on the internet. it produces people who waste over 10 years on education and training and never end up with a job, because everyone tells them that further specialized training will surely fix everything while it never does. it produces conspiracy theorists holed up in some dark corner with their favorite gun so they never have to interact with some nebulous but certainly bad "The Left". the longer capitalism runs, the more nobody wants to rebuild third-places for public interaction, because their favorite place to unwind wouldn't even contain any other physical people. and those, of course, are the dysfunctional states of the relatively good people. the people who don't care about being good simply band together into some arbitrary specified list of local "cultural values" that they think it would be simpler if everyone had, and become virulent reactionary nationalists. there are really two paths of escape: one leading into fiction, and one leading into a deeper, darker recess of reality. both directions lead away from people. both directions lead away from focusing on the real task of building society in an age when every individual is a potential new contradiction. what direction do we have to go in order to have "moderation" on escaping? straight toward the seemingly-impossible task of getting everyone to build the same society. straight in the direction of a destination nobody can find.
this isn't some arbitrary theme thrown in there. in the long run, daily life always wins. you can never fully defy the biological needs of The Subject as a material object in the short term, daily life frustratingly stops us from contemplating alchemical adventure to understand the universe [*jtw] if we dedicate ourselves to the task of undertaking alchemical adventure specifically to understand daily life itself, then we overcome the obstacles of daily life in order to guide daily life to overcome the naïve fallacies of morality-mandates and instead to assume the shape which is actually correct and no longer brings us suffering [that could be the LithoGRAPHica motto. quite honestly.]
[*na] here it's worth noting that the fictional example of alien empires buying or selling planets is not actually very different from real-life cases of global empires selling each other colonies. why did Russia bother to take over the territory of Alaska only to sell it to the United States? as we can see, the case of Freeza selling planets is not actually very different from the kinds of things that happen in real life.
[*jtw] Journey to the West, chapter 1 I think? the woodcutter is always stuck chopping wood and can't go on an adventure to ultimately try to understand the most powerful entities in Buddhist cosmology and how they got there. you can see this as either the conflict between adventure and daily life, in which the purpose of going on adventures is to overcome daily life and become great but sometimes daily life wins, or a very specific remark about the nature of "suffering" in which Buddhism says that people need religion because without it life is suffering but ironically people have no time to study religion because the suffering of daily life takes up all their time. which of these two readings will come to you more quickly depends on whether you know more about Buddhism or Dragon Ball. I actually like the modernized Dragon Ball reading more because it's far less specific to a given time period and "cultural context". it still applies just fine to the ancient setting of Journey to the West, yet it's more Materialist and less obsessed with the bullshit academic process of "cultural milieux" endlessly critiquing each other but never actually getting anywhere.