consensual genocide
The other day I had a conversation with my older brother [herein cited as FTL], that spiralled down to revealing the genocide of the fantastical.
[0307:1558.45]
FTL: I'm sure you've noticed that any time you have a kid not be just annoying and childish on-screen, but be at all mature, they mostly just come off creepy?
BMB: I blame Masahiro Mori:
FTL: Ahh- of course.
FTL: Can't really be blamed though. He more described the phenomenon, rather than causing it.
BMB: I wonder if that may be a false discrepancy.
FTL: The difference between describing and causing?
BMB: Nod
BMB: Here I may reference Danielewski [viz: Mark Z Danielewski, _House of Leaves_]
FTL: If it is indeed a false discrepancy, that would indicate that the belief sufficient to formulate and describe an idea is sufficient to cause said idea to come into being?
BMB: Or _Foucault's Pendulum_ [viz: Umberto Eco] for that matter.
FTL: Not unlike Neil Gaiman's idea in the Sandman that Marco Polo and other cartographers are the ones who set the world firmly in its current form, making the soft places and the timeless lands disappear (with a few exceptions), by the act of creating their maps.
BMB: I think any historian would agree that maps create nations.
FTL: True. But most wouldn't go so far as to say that they create the landforms which they map.
BMB: Reference here any number of older european maps for instance, which although grossly inaccurate sculpted the political mindset
FTL: True again, but you are only talking shaping nations. Oh- of course there is always the Northwest Passage.
BMB: It always existed, just needed a bit of help to manifest.
FTL: But it doesn't exist.
FTL: Never did.
FTL: Which runs counter to the hypothesis. It was believed in and mapped, but not real.
BMB: yet....
FTL: It's no longer believed in, so the impetus to exist has faded. The land did not match the beliefs of those who would have shaped it per our previous hypothesis.
BMB: Given sufficient warming cycles, it quite possibly may happen.
BMB: In fact last I heard one could virtually sail around the north pole.
FTL: I am in no way denying the possibility of it's coming into being. I just noted that it did not do so in response to beliefs, but rather in response to climatic cycles.
BMB: So perhaps its manifest destiny has shifted from the minds of explorers to the nightmares of bleeding hearts.
FTL: Possibly.
FTL: Maybe by the time it was being sought, enough others knew the coastlines in question to have them set in a manner in which the channel could not exist already.
FTL: It's all the Vinlanders fault.
BMB: Hm. Teleological race conditions.
BMB: That makes a lot of sense, actually.
BMB: There are 7 traditional continents
BMB: Allowing for a canonical three-bit grey shift.
FTL: The world in a local area is as the locals believe, provided that a larger overall populace doesn't believe different. In olden days that would allow for a notable variance in actuality between places, monsters, demons, elves, and the like, but now vast populaces 'know' that these things don't exist, and also 'know' about their traditional abodes sufficient that they no longer do.
BMB: Bureaucratic consensus - the genocide of the fantastical.
BMB: How depressing.
FTL: Bureaucratic consensus in the scientific age. The death of the fantastic (and of the noble and virtuous if you read Nietzsche).
BMB: I think I'll go drown my new-found despondancy in limeade and Eco.
[0307:1624.18]