On fandom and dancing in the dark

[type_wild]

I swear to god I did not get out of bed this morning with any plans to write 3K words on Cat Blanc and authorial intent, but here we are, I guess. Might post to tumblr later. 

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What is the topic of Lady Gaga's "Dance in the Dark"?

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To me and a number of others, it's a song about emotional abuse. According to its creator, though, it's about women who don't like having sex with the lights on. I could write you an essay about why this song carries this meaning to me - and considering that I wasn't the only one (google it if you want evidence), this understanding of the text wasn't incidental. There are numerous elements in the song that opens up for this reading, and the fact that this text can in fact have this double meaning is explained by the concept of narrative gaps. 

 When we're talking serious studies in how stories work (*cracks knuckles*), "gaps" are the part of the stories that aren't told. They're the spaces the audience can fill with their OWN information. Gaps can be used for storytelling effects, and dense, lyrical texts often depend on the audience filling gaps to create meaning. On the surface, "Dance in the Dark" is in fact nonsensical, and at no point does Lady Gaga mention sex or nudity; instead, she relies on her audience to take the right clues from the surrounding elements and create the meaning she intended from the the things she doesn't say. And for me, who once lived with close family regularly telling me she's a mess, she's a mess, now the girl is stressed, the the words surrounding the things Lady Gaga leaves unsaid created a different image than they did for its author.

Narrative gaps is the field where fanfic grows. What does Nino and Adrien do when they're hanging out? When do they hang out? Do they even hang out, given that the one time was saw them do it required planning so complicated that Nino must've spent a good week on it? Is Adrien as good friends with the other guys as he is with Nino? Is Nino as close to the others as he is to Adrien? Does Adrien feel jealous about Nino having so many other friends, like he does with Ladybug? We just don't know, but this also means we're free to make it up as we please.

Some things we know: They don't hang out every day. In fact, the number of times we see Adrien out with friends is distressingly close to the number of times we see Adrien wishing he were out with his friends, but isn't allowed. We know that Adrien at least on occasion has snuck out of home or lied about where he's going, but we also know that this doesn't sit well with him because he feels a duty to his father and at least tries to rationalise the strictness. We know that Adrien is expected home straight after school, eats lunch at home but seemingly also has some degree of command of his own time at least early on - episodes like "Animan" show him making impromptu agreements to hang out with his friends, which seems strange indeed in light of episodes like "Glaciator" and "Desperada" where he either asks for permission and is denied, or has to rely on subterfuge because he knows that if he asked, the answer would be "no".

There are two ways we can explain this seeming inconsistency: By filling in gaps in the text based on the information we do get, or looking at the real world context of how the show was created.

If we choose to fill in gaps, then the difference between early S1 episodes and later events might simply be that Gabriel just got stricter after a while. He might've let Adrien go to school, but at some point discovered that that entire thing about "meeting other children than Chloé Bourgeois" means that Adrien now has a social life that is taking time away from his numerous other engagements. So where Adrien WAS free to just go over to Marinette's and practice for this video game tournament his first few months in school, Gabriel soon realised that he'd need to curate Adrien's time better.

This is entirely logical chain of events, but has one problem: There is absolutely nothing in the text suggesting it happened. We never see Gabriel order Nathalie to pen in some photoshoot only to be told that sorry, he's off being interpreter between a classmate and her uncle from China. The closest we've got to his opinions on Adrien spending time with friends is his telling Nino to get off his lawn with any ideas about Adrien having birthday parties, which checks out with Gabriel being a classist snob who doesn't like Adrien's "commoner" friends - and it checks out with the fact that Adrien is "allowed" the company of his perceived peers, the children of Gabriel's professional contacts. On the other hand, we might question if Gabriel even meant what he told Nino, or if he said it to make Nino ripe for akumatisation like he's done at least once later - "Lies" and "Desperada" both show us Adrien and Kagami struggling to spend time together thanks to their separately busy schedules, meaning that Adrien's "allowed" time with the likes of Kagami and Chloé is probably only when their parents have agreed on it. Until we get a retrospective making concrete suggestions that anything happened to actively make Gabriel change his mind about Adrien's social life, our theories are headcanon - not interpretation.

If we turn, then, to the show's conceptual history, I'd argue that we might find something closer to a real explanation: Namely that the entire first season was a pilot. It was produced to test the waters and check if the show would hit an audience that would bring in a profit and thus legitimise producing the rest of it. Seasons 2-5 were greenlit only after S1 had released and proven itself popular. Knowing this, we can theorise that S1 simply didn't introduce subplots they knew they might never be able to resolve. Making the point that Adrien has to actively disobey his father to be with his friends takes up screentime they could spend on other things, and would leave story threads dangling if the show was discontinued. Only when they knew that they'd get to explore the storyline about Adrien breaking free from his father did they pursue it in-story. But, again: This is me making assumptions about intentions based practical fact. For all that any of us know, they just didn't care.

The question of "how much do Nino and Adrien hang out" is pedestrian, but I hope it serves as an illustration of the point: namely that there is a difference between making assumptions implied by the explicit text, and making assumptions based on what would logically make sense but have no actual textual backing.

Sometimes, narrative gaps are simply irrelevant - this information has no impact on the story, and the reader can imagine anything they want. (again, headcanon) Sometimes, narrative gaps might be technically empty, but the story around them leaves obvious or lesser obvious clues about what the audiences is meant to fill them with. This is why we interpret poetry - because great poetry will be rich in meaning unspoken beneath the de fact written words. And this is why, while there's no "correct" way to read a poem, I can very much grade a student's interpretation of it: it's their ability to see the elements the author included in the text, and to explain in a convincing manner why this is how they pieced them together.

When adults turn their nose at children's media, it tends to take one of two forms: it's either because the topic itself is "childish" and hence not interesting, or it's because the narrative is "simple" and doesn't open for anything for the reader to explore. And while I firmly disagree both that this applies to all children's media and that even for the cases this applies, children's media should be uninteresting to adults, one fact remains: You can't depend on your average child picking up on subtle clues surrounding narrative gaps. The older they grow, the better they'll be able to do it, but in general: If you're writing for children, you cannot leave critical story points unspoken.

Non-critical story points, though? Oh, go wild. Write a story that entertains children on the surface, yet leaves enough hidden beneath that the adults watching finds something more, that’s the good shit.

That is the field on which ship wars are fought: where people who don’t read these stories casually scour them for any morsel of information that might support the meaning they want the text to have, and then lob it at the non-believers on the internet. You laugh, but I lived through a time and place where "thEIr HAnds form a heART" was a frequently regurgitated argument for how the writers were hinting that they were totally in love. Spoiler: it's been twenty-five years, and Jessie and James still aren't a couple. That one frame from that one episode wasn't a clue meant to fill a narrative gap; that meaning was wishful thinking, and after twenty years and counting on the internet, I can guarantee you that Pokémon fans weren't the only ones prone to convincing themselves they've found authorial intent where there in fact was none.

And with all that said, let's discuss "Miraculous Ladybug" and the curious case of the white cat we don't talk about.

Well, the fandom  sure did talk about it, and for obvious reasons: here is our monster-of-the-week rom-com with a magical re-set button, where no-one suffers even a broken ancle when Paris is regularly wrecked. And then they write an episode where one of the main characters has his face rubbed into severe trauma, and with his life falling to pieces around him, is turned into a deranged monster who unwittingly ends up killing the entire city and collapsing the tidal system, drowning the European continent while presumably leaving huge parts of the Pacific region dry. The story has time-travel and a magical re-set button, however, so all that ends up never happening - but we still saw it. No SHIT are we going to have expectations about how dark this show is willing to be from here on out, and no SHIT are we going to expect this to have consequences.

But here's the thing about "Miraculous Ladybug": It's a monster-of-the-week rom-com with a magical re-set button, whose writers have gone on twitter telling the audience to stop taking this so seriously, sis, it's a rom-com for kids. Who in fact wrote a meta episode with that very message ("Simpleman"), and who have a precedent of apocalyptic events causing no trauma ("Syren" and "Stormy Weather 2" both spring to mind). Who have a running gag of what IRL would be unquestionable emotional abuse (the Bourgeois family), who mean for the audience to laugh at Sabrina's victimhood to Chloé. Psychological realism might exist in some parts of the story, but it's so inconsistent that making assumptions about it is a fool's game. It is whatever the writers feel for that week, and honestly - for a children's comedy, that's totally okay. It just means that the rest of us need to keep this in mind when we approach the text. We're free to fill the gaps to our hearts' content and write all the fanfic in the world about non-profits dealing with the trauma of akuma victims, but fact is: in the text, there is absolutely nothing to indicate any lasting consequences, but of the opposite. In "Glaciator 2", the average citizens are so blasé about akuma attacks that they accost their OTP for autographs during it. This is a comedy for kids, remember; it's not that deep.

This isn't me "refusing to take the show seriously" or "not understanding it deeply enough". This is me pointing at the narrative tone, the genre, the hundred episodes and counting setting a clear presedent of how seriously I'm meant to take any danger. If you want me to go into psychological realism in supernatural stories written for the same audience, then I certainly can,

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but "Miraculous Ladybug" is a show with a wildly different concept and a wildly different modus operandi, and for all that it has left its little secrets around for the a keen-eyed audience to find, it has also made it more than clear that most of the time, we're just not meant to think too hard about what happens.

And I don't think Cat Blanc is the cause of The Ladynoir Conflict.

First and foremost, because the show has established a full explanation on-screen: Marinette suddenly has a lot of business that she never involved Cat Noir in anyway, and which he has stated he is completely fine not being let in on. Except now she's suddenly got a literal football team's worth of other heroes and is doing perfectly fine without him, and he is (for very understandable reasons to the audience who knows his civillian history) resentful for suddenly being no more important to her than any other of them. Then there's the entire thing where what was once a secret the two of them shared has now become the secret that Marinette And Alya Share, meaning that Cat Noir has in fact lost a special place in Ladybug's life, even if that was a place born out of tragedy and danger. This isn't "Marinette pulling away from Cat Noir", this is Marinette finding positive support elsewhere and having no basis for knowing that to Cat Noir, their partnership is immensely more important than it is to her (or she thinks it is to her; I deeply suspect she'll get a brutal wake-up call very soon).

There aren't really any gaps we need to fill for the story to make sense: All of this happened on screen. When a sub-group of the audience insists on filling in something extra, then I don't think it's incidental that it's so much more prevalent on tumblr than it is on reddit or youtube: we're the fanfic crowd. We're the ones who have read three thousand fic wherein Marinette pines for him in silence, remembering the consequences of that time his love went fulfilled. I'm not casting stones; I read them, utterly enjoy them, and have comitted one myself. The angst is certainly far more intersting and far more emotionally satisfying than what canon gave us. And realistically, it's only logical for us to assume that Marinette would carry scars after the episode that was in such a wildly different key than the rest of the series. But as previously stated: MLB is rarely consistent with how realistic the psychology of its cast is; the insistence of reading them in a realistic light is how Marinette becomes a creepy stalker. And Marinette's deteriorating mental state as S4 started was explicitly chalked up to secrecy and stress, with no whisper of white cats haunting her mind. This is a show for kids: if Cat Blanc was meant to explain anything about her choices regarding what she does and doesn't tell Cat Noir, that would be a vital story point, and they would have reminded the audience about him. They wouldn't rely on the six year olds reading the story like twentysomething veterans who have been writing fanfic since high school.

(if you want me to go into "Sentibubbler", I'll link you the prototype of this post where I read that scene in insufferable detail. Suffice it to say that either the directors were suddenly completely incompetent while making what would be a key scene of the season, or we were in fact not meant to take Marinette's nightmare any more seriously than Tikki and Alya did. And remember who turned out to be right in the end? not Marinette.)

"Cat Blanc", moreover, was originally conceived as a S2 episode, not a lead-up to S4, and that alone should be a clue about whether or not they meant for it to have consequences: if it happened in S2 and if Marinette was meant to have lasting mental scars from the experience, then the presumed effect (The Ladynoir Conflict) would've happened in S3 (yes, trauma response can be delayed. Narrative consequences in a serialised children's story? not so much). Obviously, it's entirely possible that they changed their minds when they had to move the episode anyway, but the fact that it clearly WAS at one point just meant as a grim "what if" with no story impact tells us one thing: it is entirely, entirely possible that even in S3, that is still how they meant it.

None of this is to say that it's impossible that Marinette has any Cat Blanc-related trauma, just that if she does, they haven't considered it something the audience needs to know yet; it has had no on-screen impact on the story. It's not to say that I don't think Cat Blanc might yet return, because holy hell, what a story point that would be - just that he very notably didn't in S4 episodes reminiscent of "Cat Blanc" in topic and theme, where you'd certainly expect it if we were meant to consider him a part of the larger story of the season.

And it sure as all hell isn't to say that any of us shouldn't be writing fic about Marinette carrying those memories far longer than we saw her do in canon. "Fanfic is about colouring outside the lines" was a motto we shouted back when big money made their first real attempt at monetizing us. But as much as that, I'd like to say that fanfic is about dancing in the dark - of expressing ourselves in the blank spaces of the canon text, of filling in the gaps the way we want to see them filled. Be that with sex, or emotional abuse, or the kind of lingering trauma that is completely logical IRL, and utterly disonnant with a canon where T-rexes were brought back to life and are just adorable puppies.

But simultaneously, do what H. Porter Abbott calls "intentional interpretation": To consider the text for what it is, and not what we'd like it to be - at least if we're claiming authorial intentent on our interpretation. And also, to quote: "When you're having trouble interpreting, one thing that can often help is to look for what is repeated". Correspondingly: to maybe not put too much weight on something that is studiously ignored.

(if you’re at all intersted, check out pages 84-95 in the second edition of The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, where you can learn all about how we construct authorial intent, underread and overread as we fill in gaps, and how all of this is just part of human nature)

Comments

[greghousesgf]

There are a ton of songs that don't sound at all to me like they're about what the people who performed them said they were about.

[type_wild]

That's definitely not uncommon! And that's what's make narratives "dynamic", according to the dear professor.

[trainsinanime]

I fully agree. I'd like to say more but I feel like you've covered all angles that there are to this. It's perfectly natural for fandoms to imagine things that may or may not be there, but at some point, when answering some questions, it becomes necessary to admit that something is more on the side of AU rather than foreshadowing.

[type_wild]

Nothing like a bit of thoroughly illustrated narratology to comment on fanon-so-widespread-it's-treated-as-canon, huh? Thank you for the encouraging words anyway :)