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Ota Clinic Episode 91 | A Heuristic System For (Self) Critique (Patreon)

Published:
2025-08-16 14:30:46
Edited:
2025-09-27 11:17:52
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

A long chat about exactly how to go about figuring out how much quality or lackthereof is present in a story without need to worry about 100

A long chat about exactly how to go about figuring out how much quality or lackthereof is present in a story without need to worry about 100% precision (this is crucial for being able to judge your own work).

Files

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Comments

CH

Great episode, it touches on many trains of thought that I've had to deal with before. For instance, I got into a disagreement recently because I expressed disdain for Look Back. It got me thinking that death is one of those sensitive plot beats that it's easy to abuse by using it to crudely shout certain themes, *especially* if you're writing a tearjerker. It's too easy to take in people with this because almost nobody has any consistent hermeneutic and they by default confuse qualia with objective information. I consider myself fortunate because one of the first lessons I learned by watching anime was that my appraisal of a work's quality does not correlate strongly with watchability. The commentary on anime storytelling I really agree with, having to work within a 22-ish minute limit per story segment enforces an impartial, nearly scientific approach to pacing and encourages good practices like consistency, encoding the whole of a work into every part; it lends itself well towards fractalized storytelling.

.

The dog example and reduction of possibilities discussion made me think, does writing have a distinction between virtual vs. actual concepts as you have with anime vs. simplified tooning approaches to anime? I’ve seen non based and otaku lit discussion people treat concepts like Jungian archetypes or hero’s journey stuff as a proxy for reality that every serious work has to be understood through to be seen as well written or as describing reality. Also the tachie and posters are looking great.

Howard Blast (Libido Kamen)

Ah yeah, lol, Look Back is the type of thing totally susceptable to that kind of thing. It's an extremely simple, pretty much Pixar type beat at its core (Pixars actually have a bit more happening tbh), which means anyone can feel smart for keeping up with it, and naturally a lot of people are going to want to believe a lot more is happening than there really is. (Personally, I found it way more interesting for the fact that a Jump mangaka was essentially awkwardly confessing the insecurity he feels toward serious artists, and also just the fact that Fujimoto pulled off a story to any extent whatsoever). Death is funny because I pretty much took any conventional use of it out of my personal vocabulary just because of exactly what you're saying. I'd rather just not even open the can of worms. I'm always amazed at when top writers use it the "obvious way" and still retain complete sophistication.

Howard Blast (Libido Kamen)

🙏🙏 Yeah, that actually goes back to the "confusing symbolism for substance" problem. Funny enough, I wrote something about this to someone recently, let me copy paste it. Metaphors and symbolism aren't actually functional in stories by default, even if they make it really fun to think about. Stories are 100% bound by function, so if something is a metaphor for something but it doesn't actually matter that it's a metaphor on a mood/plot/character level, it doesn't add substance to that element from a literary standpoint. This is probably one of the most confused things about storytelling in existence due to decades and decades of various factions boasting about media on the justification of it "having meaning" via metaphor (post-modern art being the most infamous culprit). eg. "This urinal someone splashed paint on is good art because it symbolizes [...]" All these ideas apply equally to any sort of Jordan Peterson type rant about archetypes and stuff.

ZXNova

I think another part is people try to use symbols without really realizing how they work. They get a very surface level impression of these archetypes, these MBTI types, these enneatypes or whatever, but the reality is if you actually dig deep and analyze them you can see the functions that make up those symbols, and what kind of story they're really meant to fit in. Like one piece of advice I often see in writing is the use of the "Hero's Journey" as a template, or how I remember someone saying that "many shounen story incorporate the hero's journey into kishotenketsu" but it's like, what does that even mean? A symbol is only given meaning when it's within a functional story. Those symbols themselves are made up functions that work with each other, and if you don't understand what they are or how they work, you're just ramming different shapes into each other and hoping they fit. It's ultimately just a form of instant gratification, I think.

Howard Blast (Libido Kamen)

Yeah, exactly. I wondered this type of thing for a while, like why do people do this, and it's completely because it's a low hanging fruit for speaking pseudo-fluently about it. You don't have to stop and say "sorry, I need time to really think about this," which is painful and gives you less easy street cred. People do similar things with "moral assessments" of stories, especially a lot these days. There's the social component of that, but it's also just an easy way to put on a voice of authority.

Harland

Great episode as usual. But why protondrive? NGL its kind of annoying to use.