Quote:
Originally Posted by Judoh
But I've never come across a meditation exercise where you create a fictional world in your head where imaginary persons exist. No such thing would help you "find yourself". Which is generally the purpose of such things.
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So writing a book on deeply personal things doesn't improve the writer's understanding of them?
Quote:
Originally Posted by chronotrig
Because Umineko does not fit into the normal mystery genre.
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It nevertheless has to be internally consistent if it wants to be a good story.
There are a few principles in literary criticism that largely remain undeniable as literary criticism evolves, because they are principles of reading itself:
- The world described is a world measurably, minimally different from the one available to us as an experience, to the limits of author's ability, that is. You can write a book about pet rocks, but unless you assign human-like personality to them it won't be comprehensible. You can write a book about spaceships and laser sword duels, but unless the reader already knows what those might be, even if they don't really exist, they cannot be imagined and the world cannot be completed. All reading of fiction starts with the assumption that the world described is as we know it, and it is author's responsibility to describe where it isn't to point us in the right direction.
- The text is a possibly inaccurate account of something that occurred in that world. Without assuming that, discussion of characters is simply meaningless.
The problem of Shkanon is not the concept of characters-within-characters, this has been done before, sometimes to great effect. The problem is that in this particular case, assuming that Shkanon exists necessarily involves lots of other things being possible - like perfect disguise, or puzzling acceptance by other characters, or twisting the established rules of red that are presented as a formal logical puzzle, or assuming that magic that can break the laws of physics does exist in the world. On the small list of assumed differences-from-world-as-experienced, Shkanon quickly becomes a cancerous growth which involves adding assumption after assumption just to make the whole thing internally consistent.
There has to be a smoother way for Kanon not to exist.
