Improving the community's theorycrafting experience

[+Kolten]

I am proposing we create a space where advancing WoBs as evidence for or against a theory is discouraged.
For discussions with folks who have not read all the books, pulling in evidence from unread books would be similarly discouraged.

I have 3 major reasons why I think such a space would be beneficial to the community.

1. To create a better experience for new community members

I started reading Brandon's book around the time that well of ascension had just barely been published, and I remember how fun it was when I discovered the existence of the time wasters guide forum and all the different theories. At that time we did not have almost any input from Brandon besides a few questions people had managed to ask Brandon at a signing, and then you had to take their word that it had happened. The debates and ingenuity of picking apart the books and guessing how things worked was a big reason why I fell in love with the cosmere. 

I feel like newer members joining now would probably have harder time having that same experience. The sheer amount of reading just to be caught up on all the books is a lot, To get that far just to propose a theory and have it immediately shot down with a WoB can be discouraging. Especially since it seems like when that happens, people have a tendency to consider the discussion closed and move on to other topics. It leads to their being few members of the community with enough knowledge to really enjoy the theorycrafting and debating.

Sometimes I will see a post along the lines of "this is my first time reading and these are my thoughts and theories". Those are always fun to read, but usually the response I see to the theory portion of their post is something like "That is some good theorizing, keep reading!". Which is encouraging and fine, but a much different experience than those early theory debates that use to go on when the answers were not known.

I know there is not really a way to fully recapture that time. But being able to make a topic where you can say "I just finished mistborn, here are my theories" and then have a debate where everyone only uses the evidence that can be gleaned from the text of mistborn might rekindle a little bit of that excitement, especially for the newcomers to the cosmere.

2. WoB are not canon, and there is value to relying only on the text.

Towards the end of his life J.R.R. Tolkien began to receive a lot of letters from fans asking for details about the unexplained mysteries of Lord of the Rings. When he would respond, he would not just answer their questions, he would say something like "no one really knows what happened, but here is what I think", and then he would quote passages from the books to support his "theory". I always thought that form of interaction between an author and a fan was really cool, because it kept interpretations open and validated individual reading experiences.

Brandon is in a different situation since his books are unfinished and he often has to give answers off the cuff, so I don't begrudge him for being more straightforward in answering questions. But there is no reason we could not cultivate a space where different experiences could be had.

Literarily speaking this all ties back to the death of the author philosophy of reading texts, and while I don't want to start a debate about its merits, I think having a space where those who want to can have analysis and discussion within that framework is valuable.

3. This could breath some life into the community

Not that we aren't already lively! But especially for the theorycrafting side I think there is the sort of boom bust cycle where whenever we get some new content there is a bunch of rapid theorizing, but then everyone settles into their espoused theories and waits until the next drop of lore. A space like this can give the people who really like theorycrafting a way to interact with each other more consistently, and across more topics. 

I also think this space will present room for a lot more types of discussions too. Play devils advocate to a theory you know is disproved by later books or WoB and see how much evidence you can scrounge up for it in the text. Post a WoB as a theory and then defend or criticize it using only the text. Get the chance to rekindle a shipping debate from an older book that you couldn't be there for the first time. Constraints like this often breed creativity and I think conversations like what I just listed are hard to maintain in our current discussion spaces because people tend to stop putting effort into the conversation once you rub against canon as we currently understand it.

 

Now I am not trying to discourage or minimize the importance of WoBs in general. There are lot of cool things we learn from them that Brandon would probably never have been able to communicate to us otherwise. I think the spaces where we bring those to bear in our discussion are also important, and obviously some types of theorizing would be impossible without them. So this should not be read of a criticism of how the community uses WoBs currently, I just think the current culture around them can be a little limiting at times.

In my head this proposal is most easily realized with forum board and/or discord channel where we add a policy that WoBs and future reading should not be referenced as evidence except by the original poster (or I guess on discord it would have to be at all). But I am not particularly attached to any implementation details, and mostly want to get a read on if anyone else thinks this this a good idea and would be excited to participate in such a space. 

If nothing else putting all my reasoning in one place like this will give me something to link to if I want to make some trial topics on the forum where I ask people to follow these rules and see how it pans out.

[Frustration he/him]

This feels counterproductive, why artificially limit our knowledge? All discussion would basically be pointless, as the answers are already available.

While true more people might make theories, their theories will stay in that state, never progressing into the greater theories that require the use of the arcanum. The dedicated theorists will eventually read all of the material needed, whether or not they are given a space where WoB's are forbidden.

I can understand the appeal of bringing back the theory culture of the old days, everything I've heard about from that time is a blast. But we know too much now, I don't think we can go back.

Edited August 10, 2022 by Frustration

[+Kolten]

I guess I should clarify, I am not saying that this be a space where we ignore the existence of WoBs, just that we don't use them for analysis and evidence.

Nothing artificial about it. For those who have not read up on everything, they are actually limited in their knowledge and it would give them a chance at some cool interactions with the text and community they could not otherwise have. For someone who has read up on everything, it is a chance to engage in the death of the author style criticism and discussion. 

I disagree that there is some scale that we can rank all the theories on, or that all this theorizing is just some arbitrary competition to see who can match what is in Brandon's head most closely. There is fun in the process, and just the intellectual exercise of using solely the books could be fun even for someone who has read all the arcanum. 

[LewsTherinTelescope]

(Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts, not a staff-discussed opinion.)

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I do find this idea interesting, but I worry it would be absolute Damnation to enforce. Remembering what is WoB knowledge and what is book knowledge is hard when you've been discussing things for a while, and even people who aren't deep into WoBs but are around those who are absorb ambient info. Some examples of things I expect would be pain points (full Cosmere spoilers):

Spoiler

• Endowment is mentioned nowhere in Warbreaker (and in fact nowhere in the books at all until Rhythm of War), but good luck preventing people from mentioning her association with Nalthis in theories. (Nalthis being the Warbreaker planet is itself WoB-only, actually.)
• Heralds, Fused, and Returned being termed "Cognitive Shadows" is only known from WoBs, do we prevent anyone from using that term for anything besides shades because it's not an obvious connection to everyone?
• Vasher being Zahel is something you can guess with a reasonable degree of certainty, but is unconfirmed in the text alone, so do we stop people from referencing that when theorizing about later Stormlight books or theorizing about the Nightblood novel? (Or even more major, Thaidakar being Kelsier has massive implications for multiple series and is hard to ignore once you know it, but technically speaking it's only confirmed in WoBs and I've seen people who have only read the books disagree with the idea.)

My experience with the series-specific boards is that people are truly terrible at spoiler-tagging content, and other users are loath to report violations, meaning major cross-series spoilers regularly are out in the open unless a moderator happens to stumble across the post. So, to be blunt, I simply don't have any confidence whatsoever that such rules would be respected, nor that people would be willing to draw staff attention to violations.

Furthermore, even if people try their best not to mention those things, they influence your thinking and bias the way you theorize about related topics (which is why I personally strongly encourage people who have read the full Cosmere to theorize mainly in Cosmere spoiler areas, to avoid accidental knowledge leaks). So if by some act of Harmony people follow the policy to the T, I expect it still wouldn't be truly free of WoB influence, and theories would still revolve around information from them, just without any backing anyone can cite.

Which is unfortunate, because I do agree it would be fun to try theorizing with only the books and see what we can come up with, and having a space for people new to the fandom to post their ideas in peace would also be nice. I just don't see it realistically working well without a.) a serious shift in community attitude towards spoilers and b.) everyone being very careful to check everything they say can be cited back to the text (which is slow and difficult).

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That said, what you bring up with how people respond to new theories is in my mind a real problem (and unfortunately one I've contributed to before myself, though I've been trying to improve on that front). I think the solution there should be to, as a community, discourage people from just dumping a WoB on every theory they see, unless they've specifically asked to know if they're right or wrong rather than just theorizing for fun. On the other hand, people do sometimes appreciate knowing that stuff because it can also open up more doors and introduce new ideas, so... it's hard to balance sometimes. At the very least, there are more welcoming and encouraging ways to inform people of information they haven't seen than copy-pasting a quote or WoB with no other comment, and I think people need to work on that.

2 hours ago, Kolten said:

Those are always fun to read, but usually the response I see to the theory portion of their post is something like "That is some good theorizing, keep reading!". Which is encouraging and fine, but a much different experience than those early theory debates that use to go on when the answers were not known.

The issue is, people who have read the books engaging with theories from those who have not tends to lead to either lots of vaguespoiling and ruining things by giving away too much info, or trolling by intentionally saying something completely off-base, both of which can be problematic. So "nice theories, keep reading!" is pretty much the only guaranteed safe response.

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1 hour ago, Kolten said:

In my head this proposal is most easily realized with forum board and/or discord channel where we add a policy that WoBs and future reading should not be referenced as evidence except by the original poster (or I guess on discord it would have to be at all). But I am not particularly attached to any implementation details, and mostly want to get a read on if anyone else thinks this this a good idea and would be excited to participate in such a space. 

On Discord, there is a #tagged-spoilers-only channel where you can specify what you've read, and every message must be behind spoiler bars and labeled. Could be worth looking into an analogous  New Reader Corner section on the forums, that's something that we'll have to discuss internally and see if we can make it work (and if we'll be able to moderate it effectively; see above). Though, given that dedicated traditional forums have been falling out of style for a while now, I think most new readers would go to Reddit and/or Discord instead, so I'm not sure how much use it'd get.

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1 hour ago, Frustration said:

This feels counterproductive, why artificially limit our knowledge? All discussion would basically be pointless, as the answers are already available.

While true more people might make theories, their theories will stay in that state, never progressing into the greater theories that require the use of the arcanum.

While theorizing to work out what will happen in future books is very common, theorizing for fun is also pretty common. For a lot of people, talking about and dissecting their ideas in more depth than "nope, author said you were wrong in a YouTube livestream a year and a half ago" is enjoyable even if they're ultimately incorrect.

[+Kolten]

47 minutes ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

I do find this idea interesting, but I worry it would be absolute Damnation to enforce. Remembering what is WoB knowledge and what is book knowledge is hard when you've been discussing things for a while, and even people who aren't deep into WoBs but are around those who are absorb ambient info. Some examples of things I expect would be pain points (full Cosmere spoilers):

Yes, this is what I meant when I said that we would not ignore the existence of WoB. Terms like that, as well as indirect influence from prior knowledge of them would be fine. The only difference will be that you can't cite them as evidence when making a point. It would be more like if it comes out in the debate that a WoB was used as the source for some point made, it would be treated like a logical fallacy, or the opinion of "just a reader" instead of the the author. The current automatic response seems to be to shut down discussion, and hopefully it would not be to hard to make a space were we adjust our expectations in that case. 

Common terminology used by the community can be used without issue I think. And things like

Spoiler

Zahel being Vasher

would be okay to treat as fact if the original poster's theory relies on it, the same way you could start a topic that relies on another persons unconfirmed theory being true. I don't think that this in particular will be a major issue. Any debate that accepts death of the author as a premise has to accommodate for this to some degree, and yet it still works.

47 minutes ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

The issue is, people who have read the books engaging with theories from those who have not tends to lead to either lots of vaguespoiling and ruining things by giving away too much info, or trolling by intentionally saying something completely off-base, both of which can be problematic. So "nice theories, keep reading!" is pretty much the only guaranteed safe response.

Yeah this would be much trickier. The only way I could see it working is if enough of the community was able to play a convincing non trolling devils advocate so that the vaugespoilers could be drowned out in the noise (or we get enough new users to make it happen). But maybe in this space an expectation of slight vaguespoilers would be okay if clearly communicated. In any case I think there are ways to try it out that are not going to be catastrophic, and I think it might be fun to try

 

47 minutes ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

Though, given that dedicated traditional forums have been falling out of style for a while now, I think most new readers would go to Reddit and/or Discord instead, so I'm not sure how much use it'd get

It is too bad, because I much prefer the forum format for theorycrafting. However I don't think we should just give up or stop trying to make the forums better. New users still join pretty frequently. And maybe part of the problem is that right now that the forum is full of an old guard that intimidates newcomers by oneshotting their theories with WoBs and avoids engaging with them fully to avoid spoiling them. Out of all the various community sites, I definitely feel more gatekept here, and that is from someone fully read on the cosmere. Maybe this could be a step to reduce some of that?

Edited August 11, 2022 by Kolten
added spoiler tag, adjusted some vague wording, typos

[Frustration he/him]

27 minutes ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

While theorizing to work out what will happen in future books is very common, theorizing for fun is also pretty common. For a lot of people, talking about and dissecting their ideas in more depth than "nope, author said you were wrong in a YouTube livestream a year and a half ago" is enjoyable even if they're ultimately incorrect.

I don't disagree, I have a particular theory of mine that is incorrect in many of it's conclusions that I still consider to be my best work.

However, I think that intentionally disregarding information that disproves a theory takes all the fun out of it. It's one thing to go against information you don't know, it's quite another to ignore it entirely.

[+Kolten]

6 minutes ago, Frustration said:

However, I think that intentionally disregarding information that disproves a theory takes all the fun out of it. It's one thing to go against information you don't know, it's quite another to ignore it entirely.

I think this is the point were we just fundamentally disagree, at least with regards to WoBs. Using a death of the author framework, WoBs can't disprove a theory. They can be considered, but given no more weight than any other reading of the text. 

Ignoring future books for the sake of debating with newcomers is a seperate issue to that. If you don't find it fun that is fine, but other people might so I think there is room for that to exist as well. But given @LewsTherinTelescope point about spoiling I can acknowledge there are objective downsides to this as well, I just think that they can be worked around

[Frustration he/him]

4 minutes ago, Kolten said:

I think this is the point were we just fundamentally disagree, at least with regards to WoBs. Using a death of the author framework, WoBs can't disprove a theory. They can be considered, but given no more weight than any other reading of the text.

And what would make such a framework desirable?

[+Kolten]

If we want to get into a debate on the merits of the death of the author as a framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author  lets do it in another topic. I think for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to say that there are people who value it as a framework, and I think making a space for them should not be so controversial.

The TLDR of that article is that the author exists to produce the work, but not to explain it, and that to give undue weight to their interpretation or identity limits the ability to interpret the text. 

 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Kolten
added TLDR, added link to separate discussion topic to avoid tangent

[Lego Mistborn he/him]

I think there is an issue with the attitude around using WoB's, in that people will just post the WoB without any other discussion. I dislike Death of Author, but I think it would be a good idea for those who like it to have a safe space of their own.

[Frustration he/him]

1 hour ago, Kolten said:

If we want to get into a debate on the merits of the death of the author as a framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author  lets do it in another topic. I think for the purposes of this discussion it is enough to say that there are people who value it as a framework, and I think making a space for them should not be so controversial.

The TLDR of that article is that the author exists to produce the work, but not to explain it, and that to give undue weight to their interpretation or identity limits the ability to interpret the text. 

 

I don't have a problem with people having a "death of the author" mindset. But presenting it as an improvement to the community is a step too far in my mind. Brandon recently said that the Cosmere is meant to have the author/audience relationship that it does, and that "Death of the author" cannot be applied to it without losing part of the experience.

[NameIess he/him]

Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with using WoB's. As long as we accept that they are not fully canon, and could be changed when Brandon writes the books.

[+Kolten]

25 minutes ago, Frustration said:

I don't have a problem with people having a "death of the author" mindset. But presenting it as an improvement to the community is a step too far in my mind. Brandon recently said that the Cosmere is meant to have the author/audience relationship that it does, and that "Death of the author" cannot be applied to it without losing part of the experience.

Not an improvement, just another facet. What I have proposed here is not solely about death of the author. And I do not think what I have proposed here would have any impact on the author/audience relationship of the community as a whole. Nor would it effect current spaces or discussion. I wouldn't want it to, I like WoB speculations and the ensuing theorizing a lot! 

But Brandon has also mentioned that he is okay with us having "line item veto" with his works on our own readings, which is definitely a very death of the author style sentiment. I think it would be a bad take to say there is no room for discussion like that to take place in this community at all.

And I disagree that these things can't be applied without losing parts of the experiences. It is perfectly possible for a single person to have discussions both within and outside of any given literary framework. Sometimes working within a different framework can let you see a different point of view and have novel experiences. But that does not mean you have to burn the bridge behind you and swear off all discussions involving WoBs.

The driving goal behind this is to foster new kinds of discussions. Beginners being given a chance at real discussions while they progress along their cosmere journey, and experts being given a chance to shake things up a bit and break out of old ruts. 

9 minutes ago, Nameless said:

Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with using WoB's. As long as we accept that they are not fully canon, and could be changed when Brandon writes the books.

I really hope this is not coming across as an attack on WoB's or Brandon's relationship with his fandom. I agree with you 100% they are really an awesome and unique aspect of this community and they foster a lot of interesting discussions. I just feel like at times they are used as a tool to shut down discussion as well, and this proposal would be a way for those discussions to still happen without discouraging any of the ways they are currently used in other spaces. 

Another point that occurs to me is that it might be a good idea to help train everyone on how to deal with different levels and takes on cannonicity in this fandom, what with all the exciting adaptation news coming up. Something like this might be a way for us to practice not immediate falling back to appeals to the authority of the book or author when having discussions. 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Kolten
added point about adaptations

[NameIess he/him]

Just now, Kolten said:

I really hope this is not coming across as an attack on WoB's or Brandon's relationship with his fandom. I agree with you 100% they are really an awesome and unique aspect of this community and they foster a lot of interesting discussions. I just feel like at times they are used as a tool to shut down discussion as well, and this proposal would be a way for those discussions to still happen without discouraging any of the ways they are currently used in other spaces. 

I'm not against creating such a space, I just don't really see the point. Commenting on theories that I know are almost certainly correct/incorrect doesn't sound appealing to me.

[+Kolten]

2 hours ago, Nameless said:

I'm not against creating such a space, I just don't really see the point. Commenting on theories that I know are almost certainly correct/incorrect doesn't sound appealing to me.

This is the argument I have no rebuttal for. I will keep defending this proposals merits as I see them, but if I really am the only one interested in this then I will concede it is is not worth the hassle to setup just so I can go post theories to the void. 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Kolten
typo

[Honorless he/him]

A headcanon space isn't a bad idea, but I'm not sure it would work for this community, there's too much direct engagement with the author, so information & context from outside the published books is broadly available to the point that most members are gonna have trouble remembering what's from the books, what's from Brandon, what's popular theories