You need to learn to read between the lines and view the story not as a flowchart of variables, but rather a painting.
Normally, I’d agree. But to go from discussing lorewise how things might be possible and then come up against “oh it’s that way because the writers wanted it that way” . . . where do you go from there? There’s no way to actually argue against that, and it is by far one of the dirtier tricks of trying to debate game lore at all.
If you want to treat it as a game, then that’s fine. If you want to treat the story as its own entity, that’s fine. Please do not flip between the two because you want to “win”. It’s the equivalent of raising your hand in history class and going “but how do we know the people who wrote this stuff down didn’t lie or were just wrong?”. There may be a valid point, but it shifts the discussion entirely to a different line.
In other words, it’s not enough to simply take the story as a series of related events with concrete facts. You have to try and get inside the authors’ minds and figure out not just what you see, and not even only what they want you to see. But also what they are unwittingly giving away as pieces of their personality attach themselves to the story.
Mmm, I can see your point. However.
Trying to psychoanalyze the writers through their writing isn’t exactly fair, and I’ve actually run across authors who can write considerably heinous events . . . and it’s just not a personal matter to them. Some authors (Spider Robinson) are incredibly simple this way. Some others are not.
You’ve got to be careful trying to do this sort of thing you describe, because you are essentially trying to put together a puzzle from a box of pieces with no guide and there may be pieces of other puzzles mixed in there which fit together but don’t go together at all.
For instance, take Jeff Grubb.
I’d be interested in what you saw based on his other works, such as The Finder’s Stone Trilogy or Liberty’s Crusade. And how they fit into the thing you’re looking at in Guild Wars 2. Also I’d say there’s more of The Brothers’ War going on between Inquest and the rest of the asura. If my local libraries growing up had more of his work I’d be more familiar.
Instead I got Zelazny.
My point is, you can’t separate the author’s mind from the finished product.
No? You really should. While writers don’t write anything in a vacuum, it’s not always something personal to them. For instance, I’m relatively sure George R.R. Martin doesn’t have it in for blonde people but one could definitely construct a case he really thinks they’re not nice people at all. Let alone make a paper on what he thinks of women . . .
Saying that, I’m definitely sure there’s term papers being written (or been written) about either topic. But combing through all the stories he wrote, and analysis being turned on all of his “A Song of Ice and Fire” works . . . it’s too likely a conclusive view of his opinions on either matter would be made erroneously.
(Mostly because the people who are writing/ have written said papers are not Mr. Martin.)
And since there’s always little information on who exactly writes what parts, we have to try and gird what the author is trying to convey through what we experience. So no, I don’t see anything wrong with philosophizing on what the intentions of the story originally were, meta-gaming or not. It’s actually one of the best ways to try and get at the truth of a thing.
But you also can’t saddle any particular author with any single thing if you don’t know who did what or who contributed what. You can guess but unless they say outright “X was my work”, there’s no guarantee of getting that right. And even if so, trying to extend this for getting into their heads seems . . . like a ton of effort to arrive at a conclusion which is less likely to be correct than it is to be true.
Regardless of all this? Back to why I started in on this in the first place:
If someone responds to a topic with some even half-reasoned explanations about, for instance, why the norn do or don’t do X and a counter-argument is “because the game devs did it that way” . . . what’s the point in analyzing the lore at all if it can be basically swept aside?
