Quote:
Originally Posted by DragoonKain3
I personally think that's the wrong way to go about it. For example, I've got a group of friends where we regularly hurl pretty insulting remarks to each other, usually pertaining to race (ex. paki, white trash, nazi, the 'n' word) as we're a mixed bag.
To outsiders, aka "ordinary reasonable 3rd party in the show"? We'd be probably be marked as a bunch of racists. But we all know its done in good fun, and there's no hard feelings at all.
As such, I personally don't find it useful imposing outside values into a group dynamic, and that using someone from within the group is actually best to develop a measuring stick.
So yes, IMO, Kodaka is actually the BEST person to guage whether it is bullying or not, considering he made a promise to do so. At the very least, better him than an outsider.
|
That ship has sailed long ago. There has already been extensive discussion over the last few pages about the approach I gave, and I've already explained why Kodaka is not the best person for us to look to in contemplating these issues. I'm not going to rehash everything I've said, but what I meant by an "ordinary reasonable 3rd party in the show" is not what you understand it to be because it has nothing to do with imposing outside values at all.
Let's consider the example you gave. Your friends are the story, and I'm the reader. The ordinary-reasonable-3rd-party-in-the-story approach would be to:
1. Interview everyone in the group and find out as much as I can from them.
2. Use information from everyone and try to formulate a conclusion based on what I believe a reasonable person would conclude from that information. (At this stage, I'm trying to cast aside my personal bias as much as possible. I could, for example, excessively hate the N word and the usage of those terms based on some possible personal historical trauma, but what I consider to be the reasonable person with access to the interview information (ie: the reasonable 3rd party in the story) would not suffer from that level of bias.)
3. The conclusion would be "I really hate the usage of such pejorative terms, but I can see how this entire group interacts in a manner that is
reasonably acceptable within their group even though I myself wouldn't like my friends doing that to me due to previous trauma."
Your approach, on the other hand, in saying that you're looking from Kodaka's perspective and his alone, would be equivalent to having me as the reader interviewing one member in the group alone, and only one, and taking his word for it without seeking the opinions of everyone else in the group. This would not be ideal because more information is available from everyone else in the group that I could and should have looked at. Of course, everyone else might end up saying the same thing, but that is something we have to confirm from the whole group rather than just looking at a single person.
In the same way, a reader should not be looking at issues from Kodaka's perspective alone because Kodaka is often an unreliable narrator and we can and should make use of the other clues provided by the author to come to a conclusion.
Graphic Designer
