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Dan Olson, also known as Foldable Human, is a culture and media critic. Not long ago he created a video where he discusses what he calls the “Thermian Argument,” or “using in-universe justification for creepy garbage.”

The Thermian Argument is composed of two parts. In his own words:

1) Some element of a movie, anime, or videogame is criticized, usually for racism or sexism. 2) Fans defend it by citing in-universe reasons for why the world of the text is the way that it is. Here’s the problem: fictional worlds aren’t real, and are eternally mutable by creators. They are the sum of a giant pile of creative decisions made by one, two, a dozen, a hundred different individuals who took it from blank page to finished product. The only reason anything is the way that it is, is because a writer chose to make it that way.

He continues to state his position more plainly immediately after:

“The diegetic argument seeks to dismiss criticism at its core, suggesting that there aren’t any problems with the text provided controversial elements are internally consistent with the rest of the story world. In slang terms this can be referred to as the Thermian Argument. In the Scifi classic, Galaxy Quest, the Thermians don’t understand fiction as a concept. It doesn’t exist in their language, and thus they see all texts as historical documents. While not identical, the root figure of thought is similar here. The diegesis is given primacy over the text as a cultural product. The exact rationale behind a Thermian Argument may even be contradictory from one case to another. One medieval game with dragons and magic, but no one with brown skin is fine as is because ‘historical accuracy.’ In a different medieval game, a character wears a chainmail bikini to a warzone because it’s ‘just a fantasy, and that’s how her tribe dresses.’ You cannot criticize the world, because that’s just the way the world is. This is a deeply flawed argument, because, once again, fictional worlds aren’t real, and are eternally mutable by creators. None of it actually exists. The only part that does exist is the finished text and the idea that it represents.”

Following this, he brings the audience back to the question he started with, “How do you kill a vampire?”

“It doesn’t matter what you wrote, the answer is irrelevant. Vampires aren’t real. While the rules for how to kill a vampire may be codified within any game, book, movie, or show, nothing exists to enforce the rules of a fictional space. Writers routinely alter the rules to suit their interests or the needs of their story. So in the world outside the diegesis, our world, only the implications and impact of that fiction actually matter. That’s why this type of dismissal, using a diegetic justification to nullify criticism is ultimately a chump argument. Unlike world history, where there is a theoretical objective truth we can seek to better and more accurately represent, fictional worlds are fiction. There is no truth to move towards. Arguments for purity or consistency miss the point entirely. The Thermian Argument, therefore, serves only to shut down discussion. Criticism of a creative work is, ultimately, criticism of the decisions that people made when they were putting it together.

If the sophistry above is not readily apparent, then it falls upon me to explain why this reasoning is anathema to the narrative arts: Dan Olsen is arguing that the internal facts of a work of fiction are irrelevant to how any internal element should be judged. Seeing as fiction is not real, an artist can and should change their work at any time to more closely fit with Dan Olsen’s sensibilities, and anyone who disagrees doesn’t understand how fiction works.

Before I dissect the meat of the argument, however, a serious elephant in the room needs to be addressed. The elephant is question is his hypothetical example of problematic media and strawman rebuttal that sets the parameters for the “Thermian Argument:”

Folding Ideas: Hi, I’m Folding Ideas. I recently watched the anime Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs, and was, y’know, disturbed by the seeming perverse glee the show takes in the way it frames the frequent and excessive dismemberment of its female cast members. In fact, the entire purpose of the show seems to be little more than showing women being brutally violated by orcs. Minor characters with little plot significance are often subjected to two- or three-minute sequences that focus an almost pornographic lens on their suffering, and the enjoyment the orcs take in the process. Angry Gamesmasher: Dan Olsen is wrong to complain. If he thinks this is a big deal then he clearly wasn’t paying attention. The orcs were created by the Dread God who hates all light. The Dread God wanted an army that would rape and shred its way across the land of Thule. So the orcs aren’t violent for no reason. They are compelled to be violent. It all makes sense if you were paying attention to the backstory.

Take a careful look at this hypothetical. Have you finished going over it? Good.

I reject this hypothetical, wholesale.

No one is under any obligation to accept hypotheticals in an argument, especially if they lack internal consistency or a sense of verisimilitude. It is quite easy for someone to come up with a disingenuous hypothetical to support their argument, and obfuscate any weakness in their argument with the argumentative assumption of good faith. The world of fiction is littered with enough examples of anything that one need not resort to disingenuous hypotheticals, especially ones littered with weasel words like “seeming” and “almost.” These words are very telling, because he’s trying to present us with a hypothetical anime about women getting ripped apart by orcs that isn’t quite a porno.

I will end this right now: there is no way in Hell that Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs is not a porno. No diegetic argument need be made to defend the internal universe of a porno because the primary goal of pornography is to titillate, not to tell a well-reasoned story. While idiots abound in the market of narrative fiction, and many will make absurd arguments to defend their favorite products, this does not mean that his hypothetical is valid, as blatant pornography cannot be used as a stand-in for every other form of narrative art. It would be like claiming all dissident political action is morally equivalent to murder because some people murder as a political act!

Orc porn is a well-established form of hentai. So well established, in fact, that the monster-girl harem anime Monster Musume no iru Nichijou satirized the excesses of the genre by having a bunch of orc terrorists take hostages inside a bookstore and demand that all porn in Japan be turned into orc porn (Episode 7 of the anime, Ch. 11 of the manga). Many people, even those who do not watch anime, understand that orc and monster porn are a thing. Orc porn is at the extreme end of the hentai spectrum, along with (and overlapping) other grotesque genres like rape, bestiality, and guro. This is important, because even people who don’t have extensive knowledge of the subject may have seen a handful of images in their internet careers, and understand these to be among the greatest excesses of the pornographic end of anime.

The reason this is important to point out is because it’s a shaming tactic. First, Dan Olsen has presented something that evokes a visceral reaction of revulsion in many people due to impressions gained through cultural osmosis. He then tries to sell it as though in some reality this isn’t actually some kind of extreme porn, but is much closer to the controversial thing that you happen to like. He claims the “Thermian Argument” is an attempt at shutting down criticism, but his hypothetical is designed to do the very same thing by making you feel like some kind of idiot or pervert for disagreeing with him.

This is how he chose to open his argument: a disingenuous hypothetical designed to marginalize and impugn the character of any possible detractors.

He then presents his actual argument, that consistency and verisimilitude are irrelevant to narrative. Narrative isn’t actually a story to be engaged with, but rather a “pile of choices.” Anyone with an ounce of story-telling sense understands his entire argument really falls apart here. To Dan Olsen, the diegesis (the intellectual space of fiction) is a heap of intellectual garbage to rummage through so he can find things to smear the artists who created the text.

The fundamental flaw in Olsen’s approach to diegesis is that he functionally doesn’t understand what a story is: a diegesis is not a pile of ideas, it is a construction of answers to questions. At its core, any fictive work is an extended Socratic exercise, constructed of “what ifs” and “thens.”

Consider the table-top role-playing game, Pathfinder. Now, I happen to be dungeon-mastering a game currently in my own home, using Pathfinder’s publisher’s original game setting. Paizo (the publisher) constructed the setting in much the way that Dan Olsen described: multiple people getting together and bringing failed fantasy writing projects to life through collaboration.

This setting also happens to have a lot of women getting ripped apart by orcs.

Why? Why do women get ripped apart by orcs? This is utterly objectionable and this diegesis does not need it! This is “creepy garbage!”

First, the writers asked themselves, “What if there were orcs?” The answer is then that there are orcs. What follows is another question, “What are the orcs like?” The answer that was decided was that the orcs were a brutal, savage people who destroyed, vandalized, raped, pillaged, and spread terror across the world of Golarion. “Why are orcs so savage?” Because of their biology, they’re hyper-aggressive humanoids with low intelligence and nasty tempers. “What if they could interbreed with humans?” Then the result would be half-human/half-orc. “How are half-orcs made?” The same way most other animals are, through sex. “Would most human women consent to sex with an orc?” No, so most half-orcs would be the product of rape. “Why would orcs rape human women in the first place?” Humans have a tendency to rape and pillage (as has been demonstrated in the history of the real world), so wouldn’t it stand to reason that the orcs, who are hypothetically more savage, do the same? “What advantage might there be to half-orc populations?” If humans are smarter than orcs, it leaves the possibility that half-orcs are also smarter than pure-blooded orcs, and so might be useful to orc tribes for any number of reasons related to higher brain functioning. “What if some orcs did this intentionally, swelling their tribes’ numbers with half-orcs?” Then that would pose not only a problem to non-orcs because it makes the orc enemy craftier through osmosis, but also cause ethnic strife with orc tribes too proud to breed with human slaves.

To put the above into a “Thermian” format: Orcs have always been violent and rapacious, and commit every crime during war that humans do, the only difference being that their culture is built around such practices. Orcs are hyper-aggressive, low-intellect humanoids who are naturally prone to violence, so such a culture makes sense for them. Additionally, they’re capable of interbreeding with humans, and their offspring tend to have higher intelligence than the average orc, making them useful to the tribe in developing raiding strategies and tactics. Some tribes focus heavily on this interbreeding, and so (naturally) gather female human slaves and force themselves upon them. This is not a universal practice, and is the source of a lot of tensions between pureblood orc tribes and the tribes actively swelling their numbers with half-breeds.

So the diegetic argument, the “Thermian Argument,” is that it stands to reason that the orcs would rip women apart, figuratively and literally. Not a central focus of most stories, mind, but an important part of the setting. It grants the world verisimilitude, a sense of logical end-results for the non-real things we agree to accept when we sit down and play the game. It serves to justify the half-orcs throughout the game, and provide motive and grounding for character interactions with orcs (player character and non-player character alike). It informs how the human rogue who lost her family to orcs might seek the head of an orc warlord or the half-orc raised in a human society might seek the life of a criminal or ascetic just as much as it explains why the hobgoblin raiders to the north collect slaves to sell to orcs.

Returning to Dan Olsen, here’s where his argumentation gets really silly. He claims that there is nothing enforcing the rules of fiction, and that an artist may change their work at any time. While the latter is technically true, the reader still notices glaring, and in many cases even minor inconsistencies. The audience, for all its fallibility, will try to hold a work to the rules it sets for itself. Does anyone remember the outrage over Mass Effect 3? They ignored the rules for how Element Zero functioned in order to attempt an “artsy” ending, and it failed miserably! Glaring gaps in a fictive work stretch the audience’s credulity and may cause them to completely disengage, because such inconsistencies break the agreement the artist makes with the audience at the outset.

The agreement between the artist and the audience is paramount in storytelling. One cannot engage with the narrative of fiction if they do not agree to the basic assumptions of the story. Dan Olsen is arguing from the position of someone who refuses to be party to such an agreement in the first place, and therefore breaks the fundamental rules of how fiction is read. Dan Olsen is arguing that because a fictive work is fictive, and therefore not real, there is no demand that he approach the story on its own terms. This is an aberration, because the arguments this would justify are absolutely absurd.

To use his own example against him, Dan Olsen disagrees with the choice of the anime Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs to depict women getting ripped apart by orcs. It’s something in the title, something you agree to when you start watching. Of course you have to accept that this is the case! If I were to accept his reasoning, I could pose the argument that Star Trek is “problematic” because it takes place in space and not rural Mexico. We only really know what it’s like in space because of the petty showboating of the imperial powers of the Cold War, and Gene Roddenberry explicitly chose to set his story in space, thereby ignoring the socioeconomic problems of rural Mexico, making him a racist!

His absurdity, of course, does not end there. He goes on further to describe two “Thermian Arguments” concerning fantasy, and present them as being contradictory. To recap:

“The exact rationale behind a Thermian Argument may even be contradictory from one case to another. One medieval game with dragons and magic, but no one with brown skin is fine as is because ‘historical accuracy.’ In a different medieval game, a character wears a chainmail bikini to a warzone because it’s ‘just a fantasy, and that’s how her tribe dresses.’ You cannot criticize the world, because that’s just the way the world is.”

These arguments aren’t actually contradictory. They’re not contradictory at all, because they’re dealing with two separate and possibly radically different products. “Fantasy” is a catch-all term for swathes of fictive works with greater, lesser, and often non-equitable demands of suspension of disbelief.

I will refer to two real world examples of the very works of media he is discussing.

First, the demand of “historical accuracy:”

The Witcher franchise has next to no non-white people in it. Its primary influence is Slavic folklore, and the artists were trying to depict a fantasy version of medieval Poland. The developers set out to build a world that accurately represented that culture and region of the world with the additional fantastical elements of magic and monsters. It places a high standard for naturalistic representation, and the setting and story make demands of the narrative to be as close to a believable history as possible. It is entirely natural, then, that they don’t fill medieval-fantasy Poland with Peruvian alpaca herders and Malaysian rice farmers. This isn’t particularly difficult to understand. One would be in the wrong to demand that a game set in a fantastic central Africa include Inuit characters, and even the more believable demand of white traders from southern Europe need not be met if the artist chooses not to include them. An artist is under no moral obligation to include things you like in a story and take away things you don’t like, unless you have been sold a false bill of goods.

Then we come to the bikini armor issue. Much can be said about any given case of bikini armor and whether it has any artistic merit as a device (some instances it actually serves a communicative function to the audience, other times it is simply titillation). However, a work with bikini armor is liable to have very different demands than The Witcher. Let’s look at an actual example, Dragon’s Crown:

The Witcher

Dragon’s Crown

Look at both of these works. Do you see any differences? No? I’ll wait.

…

…

…

These games are clearly telling very different stories in very different ways. They are not equivalent works. The choices the artists have made and the stories they’re trying to tell are so disparate as to be non-comparable in this context. Yet Dan Olsen would have you believe they’re basically the same product on the grounds of “fantasy.”

Dan Olsen has created a false equivalency between all fantasy fiction, in order to present the arguments “historical accuracy” and “it’s just fantasy” between two separate products as though they are contradictory. If it were the same product, he might have a leg to stand on, but by his own words, they are not. He refuses to judge a work by the standards it sets for itself, and refuses to let other people do the same.

That said, there’s also an important fact to consider when looking at the arguments he’s putting forward here: neither of them are truly diegetic arguments.

The appeal to “historical accuracy,” while poorly articulated (and honestly, we can’t expect everyone in the world to be able to articulate all of their thoughts in perfect clarity), is in fact an appeal to authorial intent, and is not a diegetic argument. The artists are trying to depict a culture in a place and time accurately within the context of a fantastical yet naturalistic world. Even if there were a handful of non-white people in Poland during such a time (and I’m sure there were), one would have to heavily contextualize their presence as outsiders if the goal was accurate cultural depiction. This would end up with non-white people still being “othered,” and such representation could entail anything from humble merchant to rapacious invader (ex: the 13th century Mongol invasions of Poland). Not only does having a bunch of Africans in a polish fishing village in polish garb with polish mannerisms and nobody batting an eye seem to be insultingly pandering, but it also raises too many questions: Where did these people come from? Why are they still ethnically distinct? Why haven’t they bred into the population? How are they so culturally assimilated if they have segregated themselves through spouse selection? Why is no one addressing this?

And if they were to address this in-game and have people naturally be wary of the immigrants, I would be forced to ask, “When we’re dealing with racism against non-humans and the radicalism of elven terrorist groups like the Scoia’tael, is fantasy Poland the best venue to talk about the difficulties of integration for African immigrant populations into developed Western nations?” Frankly, the whole thing would be more trouble than it’s worth for the artists, because by that point it’s not the game they wanted to make in the first place.

Moving on, the defense “it’s just fantasy, and that’s just how her tribe dresses,” is an appeal to the demands of genre and the opening conceits one is forced to accept when engaging such a work. This is the only argument of the two to contain any diegetic justification, and only then after being couched in the meta-structure of the fantasy genre. As someone with an interest in ancient and medieval military technology, I am less perturbed by bikini armor than I am weapons clearly in excess of 20 lbs., poorly designed armor that makes it impossible for the person inside to move, the Hollywood concept of “leather armor,” and a million other practical considerations that tend to get thrown out the window, even when artists are attempting naturalistic representation. Fantasy weapons and armor in general are so over-designed and without a thought to practical use that focusing on bikini armor is like pissing on a house fire.

After all that, I’d be remiss if I did not actually put forth my own, somewhat more believable hypothetical, one that addresses both the absurdity of Dan Olsen’s position and the examples he chose:

Hypothetical Game Discussion

Hypothetical Folding Ideas position: You know, I just played the game Lioness, and was disturbed by the patriarchal cultural values put forth by the game, like its implicit promotion of polygamy. If anything, the main character of the game places the life of this authoritative male figure above her own. I’m also unsettled by the fact that as she heads north-east to get the medicine necessary to cure her husband of supernatural illness, she never puts on any armor. Armor is clearly available to her after her encounters with the slavers, but instead of putting on the chainmail or any of the other protective gear as is, she cuts it apart and attaches it to her bikini, forming bikini armor. None of that is practical, and it seems only to encourage the objectifying gaze of the presumed male player. Someone who knows better than Folding Ideas: Dan Olsen is not in the right to be complaining about any of these things, as he clearly wasn’t paying attention. The game is a fantasy set in central Africa, and the main character comes from Lion Tribe, which models its family structure on that of a pride of lions. The men who do not pass the tribe’s rigorous testing do not get to stay with the tribe, and are expelled into the wilderness. To keep the tribe’s numbers up, and to produce the female warriors necessary to defend the men of the tribe, they live in a system of polygamy. It’s all in the codex entries. We also see from the opening cinematic that the main character’s husband is not an oppressive figure, but loves and is loved by his three wives. All three (the huntress, the oracle, and the sorceress) take part in the journey to heal him, even if the huntress protagonist is the only one who physically leaves the village. The oracle consults the spirits to protect the huntress on her journey and the sorceress stabilizes the husband and grants magical boons to the huntress for accomplishments and artifact finds. Our protagonist never puts on armor because of the conventional wisdom of her tribe. Like in real central Africa, wearing metal armor would be a death sentence, and “leather armor” is largely an invention of Hollywood so that’s out. It is said explicitly in the game that the main character, being a warrior, wears little clothing in order to reduce the chance of infection should she get cut. In fact, the primary reason that the main character is wearing a top at all is to keep her breasts out of the way. The reason she applies chainmail to her top after encountering the slavers from the north-east is because it is an exotic material that makes for a good trophy. Based on the invocations being cast by the sorceress wife, the trophy gives her an increased defense because it is invoking a correlation to armor, and since the spirits honor the strength and skill it took her to get the chainmail in the first place, they have granted her supernatural protection. So while the chainmail appears on her top, it is not in fact what is protecting her from harm. Anyone who was paying attention to the story (in this case, laid out in a cutscene) or had a grounding in anthropological understanding of ritual-magical reasoning could have told you this.

Sadly, Lioness isn’t a real game. I took pains to structure the hypothetical conversation on arguments I have witnessed and participated in, arguments including GTA, Dragon’s Crown, God of War, Bayonetta, and more.

Were Lioness an actual game, I would sincerely like to see Dan Olsen try to dismiss the argument above on the grounds that the mostly diegetic argument put forward has any sort of holes in it. I doubt he could. Indeed, if Lioness were real and he tried to apply his reasoning to the elements he didn’t care for in a direct manner I’m quite sure he would be torn apart by fans and laypeople alike.

This is why Dan Olsen used a totally-pornography-but-not-because-I-say-so hypothetical in order to make his argument. Most of the real world examples of fiction where a diegetic argument could be made are works that not only have strong fanbases with articulate defenders, but the works themselves can easily stand up to his destructive rhetoric on their own merits. In other words: they would prove Dan Olsen wrong.

I don’t buy that The Witcher is racist, I have yet to be convinced that Dragon’s Crown or any other game with bikini-clad women is sexist based solely on those grounds, yet Dan Olsen demands that I accept these arguments lest I be labelled a racist or a sexist. He’s saying I might as well be making diegetic arguments for the violent porno Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs!

In summary: Dan Olsen argues that if you are willing to defend choices in fiction he disagrees with then you are either an idiot or a pervert for letting the story be the story the artist wanted it to be. Diegetic justifications for things he doesn’t like in narrative fiction are a way of shutting down discussion and you’re a racist, a misogynist, or an idiot for disagreeing. You’re defending creepy garbage because you agree to the conceits of a story before you engage with it, making you morally reprehensible and you should be ashamed of yourself. Also it doesn’t matter that these things he’s talking about don’t fit the parameters he set for the discussion, if you disagree with him then you’re a chump.

Dan Olsen is a shining example of the YouTube charlatan.

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