The only reasonable certainty behind the titular characters is that they are enigmatic--various problems obfuscate the act of psychoanalyzing them. The main problem is that a fictitious character's "true" nature (i.e., their nature according to the author), which is evidenced by incomprehensive, possibly unrealistic, and ultimately biased, narrative accounts, is even harder to know than the nature of real humans, which itself is not completely knowable because psychology, and, indeed, much of science, are imprecise. Furthermore, another problem is the possibility that the author did not intend a character to have a "true" or single nature--he might have wanted their nature to be hazy, to be decided on by the reader; or he might have been unsure or unconcerned about the character's nature, using them as pawns to achieve other goals, and attempting to find a "true" nature is reaching past the limits of the art.

It follows, then, that a reasonable analysis must make assumptions about the intentions of the author, upon which guesswork, composed of reasonable assumptions based on evidence, must stand. In many cases, the most satisfactory analysis results if the authors intended characters to be abstract, because it requires only internal evidence, and the other two intentions--intending a single "true" nature, or disregarding this nature completely--require extraneous evidence, such as a full explanation of his work by the author--evidence that is often impossible to attain. In this case, with a dearth of extraneous evidence, it must be assumed for the sake of progression that the author intended the abstract. And

And...?

The world may never know...

My god money, You are the most talented... anything.

Ever.

sigh

This looked more interesting when it was just a thread title.

Nah, I'm not the most talented anything ever. There are many members of Massassi, let alone anyone ever, who have shown the work to suggest they are more talented--Lord_Grismath, Gebohq, many level editors

I can't imagine your response if I posted something halfway deserving to cause this praise.

[QUOTE=Michael MacFarlane]This looked more interesting when it was just a thread title.[/QUOTE]Yeah, but that's not fair. Even a single tit is more fascinating than most things.

Anyway, the fact a thread with vague sexual references snared more replies than most ISB threads demonstrates that sex sells. I realized one solution to ISB inactivity would be to model it on 4chan, with walls of animated porn gifs and erotic fiction involving 80's characters like ALF and ET. That'd be kool

It's so true. I'm putting you in charge of ISB marketing now.

Here, let me help you out with that godawful piece of "writing." Clarity, obie. Clarity!

[quote=Lynch Guide to Grammar and Style]Don't use long words where short ones will do; it makes your writing dense and difficult to understand. Words ending in -ality, -ation, -ize, -ization, -ational, and so forth are often guilty of making sentences more complex than they need to be. Ask yourself if these suffixes can be removed without damaging the sense: if you can use a shorter form, you probably should; if you can take a big scary noun and make it a punchy and powerful verb, you probably should. For instance, "The chairman brought about the organization of the conference" can stand to trade that "brought about the organization of" for "organized" — "The chairman organized the conference." Much better.[/quote]



Characters are enigmatic because it's hard to understand them. [Everything after because is redundant.]



This is because they are harder to understand than real humans. Science doesn't know how the brain works.



Or the author made them enigmatic on purpose.



[This sentence says literally nothing. It is a tautology.]



It's easier to analyze characters without roles than if the author has a precise role for them because you can make up whatever you want about imprecise characters.



Er, you just wholly contradicted the sentence that came right before this one.

When you break these sentences down to their basic components, most of them don't even make sense. They are riddled with logical errors and contradictions. And that's not the worst part. They're pretentious and ungraceful.

<3

graceful language is one of my favorite things. its too bad a suck at writing it.

Hey cool someone finally critiqued my writing for once

The nonsense I posted at the top is a small excerpt from a larger incomplete document that is a few thousand years old and ****tily writ (no, not the Epic of Gilgamesh), and the only reason I posted it was because it was saved as "the only reasonable certainty behind the tit.txt" and I thought that was cool at 3:00 in the morning. That said, I have some explanations for this style of writing, and some exceptions with your critique.

The reason I'm verbose is because I'm intending my argumentation to be less formal than "formal logic" but just as accurate. I could easily summarize the parts like you suggested--it would make it more graceful and presentable, certainly--but it would also be less accurate in the sense that it'd have ambiguous meaning, uninformed logic, and less meaningful content.

That may be more concise, but it's less precise through ambiguous meaning: seeing "characters", one might assume, for example, I mean any character in any media, and seeing "enigmatic" one might assume I mean hard to understand, and seeing "understand" one might assume I mean empathize, all of which meanings I do not intend.

On the other hand, seeing "titular characters" one is more likely to assume that I mean the characters after whom the works being discussed are named, and seeing "psychoanalyzing" one is more likely to assume I mean analyze using a concrete psychological system, both of which meanings are intended.

Further, since your meaning is ambiguous, it is impossible to know whether subsequent evidence and logic supporting the claim "characters are enigmatic" are sound.

Here's an example of uninformed logic.

The statement "This is because they are harder to understand than real humans" lacks proof. Why are they harder to understand than real humans, and not equally hard, if the only provided proof is that science doesn't know how the brain works?

(A note: I didn't say science doesn't know how the brain works because that is irrelevant; even if the brain is understood, science is fundamentally imprecise because it is formed on assumptions.)

And an example where you truncated meaningful content.

The statement "the author [may have] made them enigmatic on purpose" is only partially reflective of my original statements. He may have made them enigmatic in different ways: he may have wanted readers to determine their nature, or he may have simply not cared, a distinction I think should be made because of the proclivity among some critics, especially amateur ones, who assume the author knows what he's doing.

I don't think removing statements that have a reasonable purpose to be included is necessarily a good move, especially when the topic of the essay is vague, as was the case here.

Anyway, that's all I'm going to write because I think I've covered the basic problems with your critique and I'm really ****ing bored of typing at this point.