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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8508882" data-attributes="member: 85555">Again, see my other post, but I think getting more into real world issues is going to get thorny as we've had several mod warnings. Suffice to say I understand the racial and identity issue better than you might think. But I don't we can really spend more effort on that front here. In terms of subtext. Of course I believe subtext exists. I do however come from more of a history background and have always felt intent is an important consideration in reading subtext. Also whether something is an obvious message of a piece of media, versus a hidden one you have to tease out, I think matters a lot in terms of cultural importance (and believe me I love looking for esoteric meaning in films, literature, etc------I just don't think I put as much stock in the esoteric subtext as you might). Also I think some of these analytical lenses become self fulfilling. That is one reason why when it comes to the question of whether a work of art presents a problem, I think you need a much higher bar than 'it could be read this way'. And I do think there is a correlation to some of the kind of reasoning you see around certain types of media analysis and the stuff we saw in the 80s with concern over subliminal messages in music, the impact of heavy metal and rock n roll on culture, etc. Not only were a lot the ideas behind things like subliminal messaging completely wrong (both in terms of the subliminal messages being and in terms of the power such messages would have), but a lot of the analysis critics were doing of the music and its content stopped once they found the bad thing they wanted to find: they didn't examine the layers of meaning and put it into any kind of reasonable context that the listeners knew it had. So I am not against analysis or delving into subtext. I am wary of people who claim to decode media to find issues with it, and I am wary of just accepting their analysis (especially when it requires an advanced language and decoding system to even see the message that might be there).</blockquote>

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