Category:Causality in fiction ontology

This is a Category for the concept of how causality applies to narratives centering around individual lives, or specific spacetime-unique historical events that tightly connect themselves with the lives and experiences of individuals. (Example: Warriors book 1 chronicles the life of Firestar; Warriors: Dawn of the Clans chronicles unique historical events around the creation of ThunderClan and the life of Thunderstar.) This Category is mostly meant to be in reference to fiction, but in some cases it can include biographies and memoirs when the way they are told happens to follow the same broad rules of structure, framing, and kinds of contained events that will then inform how fictional narratives are made.

Biographies and "life lessons"[edit]

6038. Fiction doesn't teach us anything -> ... that's not what people usually mean by the statement "fiction teaches us". they are referring to a more abstract notion of learning by picking up general patterns and comparing analogies to the real world — a process of building ontological models through true or untrue scenarios using every scenario as a thought experiment. ...
6043. Non-fiction doesn't teach us anything
6039. Fiction is educational
618. Every novel is a thought experiment
6042. Why do narratives exist?
6041. Narratives exist to depict each possible kind of individual
6047. History is the progression of family units -> ... this came up in My Pride, the questionably-written show about the lions. and it caught me off guard because I immediately noticed that choosing to interpret tribal culture as a progression of family units instead of as history is an active choice you make ...
6040. Narratives exist to portray possible societies or situations

Fiction and social construction[edit]

6030. All arrangements of things begin as fictions -> kind of. ... don't connect this to Free Will, don't you dare do that, but ... many things about society and even causality inside society are "put together" as a designed or undesigned construct before they are actually realized. ...

1. [S2] (pronounced [S2]) Fictional events only happen because the author said so (Deltarune) 1:(-)1:(-)1

6110. An RPG world is a magic circle, and this means all of it is at least somewhat arbitrary
6111. fantasy war as cultural fabrication
6116. RPG progression as horror -> Undertale; Deltarune chapter 3; FNaF Security Breach & Gregory destroying not-so-scary artificial beings.
6044. fake historical period -> the motif of bad events in history being treated as a detour from "real" history. [Stalin's government, Confederacy, etc., depending on who's telling it] ...
6045. The only explanation of history is the defiance of history / The only explanation of historical patterns is the defiance of historical patterns -> this claim is inherently contradictory because it proposes an explanation of history, which is forbidden by the claim; the claim forbids itself. there is one way to fix it: cross out the word "defiance" and propose that Free Will and The Subject are material phenomena which can themselves be studied by historical materialism and reduced down to a number of partly-predictable patterns. this produces existential materialism.
6069. Deltarune is an example of historical existentialism -> the claim that Deltarune broadly (not necessarily super literally) embodies the concept of treating history as something that can always be defied; ... that Deltarune throwing around tropes about prophecies and narratives is significant because these tropes resonate with the way players intuitively want to understand history. you can see a similar thing going on in Wings of Fire: wars in a Europe-like "fantasy World War I" setting ... spun solely as a matter of Free Will. ...
6118. Novels about Communism can change everyone's minds
6088. The history of slavery doesn't belong in textbooks -> no need to spend much time on the actual reactionary arguments ... I'm much more interested in the potential arguments that teaching about the history of racism is theoretically unnecessary for anti-racists just because ... the hardships of the past should in theory be less relevant than the study of actively constructing the future. ...

Narratives and causality[edit]

6024. grayble -> ... has a theme in the sense of a writing prompt but is mistaken for having symbolism or lessons when [... they are actually foreshadowing]
6025. grayble foreshadowing -> when a lot of people in the audience mistake simple foreshadowing of a fictional historical event for meaningful symbolism ...
6027. bookman's bluff / scottcon -> ... when the story is unsolvable because it spontaneously makes up its own solutions rather than having clear processes or events-happening inside it.
6050. Biographies only have one ending -> ... the whole point of reading biographies is that different things happen in them, meaning they have different endings. ...
6051. Because all biographies have one ending, we can only reinterpret them -> ... is that how people created the underground railroad and slipped out of slavery? ...

1. [MX] (pronounced [MX])The life of a bisexual has at least two endings 1:(-)1:(-)1

6054. Boring relationships in Warriors happen due to psychohistorical biases -> if you think the story of an individual life has only one ending, it's awfully tempting to slot every single individual into the same trite, boring heterosexual romance. ...
6052. Biographies have many different endings -> ... before 1900 people in Russia and China had one kind of ending. after 1930 their stories had new kinds of endings. ...
6089. An ending amid slavery is a different outcome

Fictional histories and real history[edit]

6034. text claims to be bunch of senseless events, becomes discussion on history
6080. anachronistic technology
6083. 80 years before 2003, there were fast cars
6117. Game worlds are not cultural fabrications -> ... coding is to individuals as fictional material-history is to real history. ...

1. [S2] (pronounced [S2]) Fantasy is the best history test 1:(-)1:(-)1

6046. The only explanation of defying history is history -> funny how if you say almost the exact opposite of what Existentialists say it actually begins to make sense again.