Tempokai
The Overworked One
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
- Messages
- 1,397
- Points
- 153
“Worlds aren’t found; they’re made.”
If I had to choose a suitably pretentious quote to summarize this symbolism thingy, that would be it. Before language existed as we know it today, mutual pattern-matching with symbols was the go-to for Grug and Ug. Grug could point at a club, say nothing—because Ug could plainly see it was a club—then point at a rock, call it a “tiger” in their “language,” smash the rock with the club, and laugh.
Ug, knowing that the rock was a stand-in for a tiger, could now interpret the scene in different ways.
Was Grug demonstrating that he had already defeated a tiger? Was it Grug’s delusion that he could smash a tiger? Or is it a metaphor for “Obey Grug, or he’ll smash you”? We don’t know, because we lack the context of what happened before Grug smashed the rock-as-tiger—but I digress.
What you can see here is that every story, however rudimentary, contains symbols. Not symbolism, because that’s a different beast entirely. Symbols are what early humans developed after consolidating pattern recognition into coherent social things you can point out to another person. Red berry with no spikes? Eat it. Black berry with spikes? Don’t eat—or else a bad spirit will eat you from the inside and you’ll die. Tiger roaring? You’ll be dinner unless you flight or fight. Symbols were complex systems that boosted a tribe’s survival chances by a huge margin.
Those symbols carry both social and instinctual connotations. The more primal they are, the more readily others recognize them. The more sophisticated and nuanced they become, the more likely they’ll be lost on someone else. Thus, symbols are heuristic patterns consolidated into coherent categories of being—nouns, adjectives, verbs, and so on, i.e. language.
These words by themselves don’t have meaning. Only through public use, within an agreed context, do they achieve an intended effect on another person. Symbols, likewise, have meaning only when they’re used. So why did I write five paragraphs explaining what a symbol is when the questions were about symbolism? Because symbolism is made of symbols that interact coherently, bruh.
Just think about it. If people didn’t have symbols, we couldn’t understand each other. Even if writing existed without symbols, it would still be mere scribbles—anything to anyone who looked at it. That’s why language exists: it’s a way of delivering information through coherent, agreed-upon symbols. And because of symbols, you can translate, for example, from Chinese to English without losing meaning (though with some loss of readability, because languages kinda suck at conveying intent).
So here’s the proposition: symbolism is made from symbols, which in turn come from pattern recognition, which stems from innate and learned instincts. Symbolism emerges when those patterns become communicative tools inside shared human cognition. It is symbolism when symbols interact without breaking pattern recognition—in other words, without breaking logic.
To be clear, everyone uses symbols. Even when you’re roasting symbolism, you’re employing symbolism through language. You don’t feel it, because your context involves a specific group that has over-analyzed symbolism to the point that no one trusts it—despite everyone from a three-year-old toddler who knows “hot + stove = bad” to an elderly person who also knows “hot + stove = bad,” because she know that no one’s using the stove and the toddler her daughter left in her care for a day could get hurt touching it.
Now that we know symbolism is made from symbols interacting with each other, how do we define that interaction in storytelling? What makes storytelling symbolism different from inherent human symbolism? What makes the symbolism present in the story both present and absent? The answer is authorial intent.
As I said, worlds are made, not found. Storytelling is inherently a temporal idea‑communication system that uses descriptions to make a reader learn something about life. The author chooses to write a story, selects what to emphasize, decides how to order it on the timeline, arranges what the reader needs to know based on patterns, and, in the end—when everything is done—shows what he or she, as a person, wanted to say. That's hard. Symbolism is often sacrificed for the plot because amateur storytellers want to tell a story, not stall on a chapter over the hard question of whether the curtains should be blue or red.
Symbolism, as defined by pretentious people who don't realize that symbolism is inherently about communication, is a sandbox where they play with meaning, connect everything in wonky ways, write 1,000‑word essays full of terms no sane person uses, and then stroke each other's egos in even longer essays. Sure, that's "communication," but it's so… "private" that I can't call it communication, because those people don't really want to talk to anyone who isn't like them. Their definition of "symbolism" leans so far toward the reader's side that, for them, the author is dead once those "critics" read a single sentence from the book.
True symbolism is what I've written about before. The author creates a coherent system of symbols interacting with each other, where each symbol has a specific role the reader—who has roughly the same symbolic framework from lived experience—can relate to and understand. Symbols can have multiple meanings. A mirror can be simply a mirror, or an alternate world, or an inner psyche, or whatever else our species has culturally agreed upon.
The author's job, to show that symbolism is present, is to ensure that the internal description of the mirror matches the external one. In other words, if it's an alternate world, show that the character can interact with it, entering inside it. If it's a psyche, show what the character has deep inside their mind by revealing horrors only inside mirrors. You get the gist. The meaning of symbolism is context‑dependent; if you fail to deliver context, the reader will apply every available context before choosing the meaning of the thing you've symbolized.
And judge they will when you deliberately show off that your story is "deep" or "symbolic" or "thematic," because those are signifiers that you know your stuff. How you present your symbolism matters.
So, now we know what symbolism is—the hell is a motif? A motif is the way an idea gets enforced during CCC cycles. It's an active symbol that migrates across the Context to subtly (or not so subtly) show up in real time for the Character to interact with. If you didn't catch the foreshadowing, I'll use Undertale as an example. It has two strong motifs that permeate the game: kill and mercy. Depending on the motif chosen, the story changes. That active symbol inherently changes the passive symbols each time the CCC is spun, affecting anything significant to the plot. Characters (active symbols) die because of Chara, and therefore the passive symbols around those characters (the world, their belongings, descriptions) shift into subdued or inverted versions. Conversely, in the pacifist route, befriending them changes the active symbols inside that character, and the passive symbols are reinforced or nuanced into something richer.
Theme, then, is a nuanced system of symbols the author chooses to emphasize to deliver a lesson, essentially in a "not in your face" way. Just like Grug and Ug in the first paragraph of this essay (which was a small post until I developed a lot of OPINIONS about symbolism over three days), a theme works only when a specific context is present. Context can be accumulated: the more connections the reader can make, the better the chances that the idea will survive the infernal reader‑interpretation gauntlet.
For example, in Inscryption every symbol is weaponized to make both the plot and the symbolic system coherent and interesting. Leshy embodies nature/sacrifice, that damn robot represents technology/energy, the necromancer lady stands for death/rebirth, and so on. Each of those symbols has boundaries and interacts in specific ways. Some pair naturally, such as sacrifice and rebirth, while others are antagonistic, such as technology and nature.
To build the symbolismic system—a symbolic plot layered above the actual plot—you must have the symbols interact over time and give them endpoints where they become passive symbols. An active symbol, for me, has not yet achieved the final nuance you want; passive symbols are those that will not change over time. There's a middle ground where a symbol changes a few times over CCC cycles because active symbols interact with it, but it's the active symbol that's changing, not the passive one.
These two cases (Undertale and Inscryption) are extreme and represent the pinnacle of symbolic storytelling. While we amateurs and mild professionals have thought about symbolism, it's hard to do because you need to plan a lot. You need to assign symbols to the characters, the world, the actions, repeat them long enough for the average reader to infer that they're symbolic without being told outright, and just SUFFER for art. To readers, the symbolic connections may look like a finished product that was easy to produce, but it wasn't.
As Daoists say, "When the best rulers achieve their purpose, their subjects claim the achievement as their own." When the best storytellers create a story full of symbolism, readers infer the nuanced meaning and then claim they found "their own," when the meaning was created by the writer all along. It was the hard work of the storyteller that produced that meaning, articulating it and making it interesting, subtle enough for anyone willing to follow. If your symbols are strong and you didn't intend symbolism, a symbolic story above the plot will emerge nonetheless, because you followed the standard of good symbolism: inject the symbols, contextualize them, emphasize them above other symbols, order them so they have the proper meaning you seek, and then deliver them persuasively to the reader. Hell, my two guides—Dao of Worldmaking and Dao of Rhetoric—under my signature explain how to display symbolism purposefully within all that meta‑storytelling. Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking and Languages of Art are great books for understanding what symbolism even is.
There's no magic in symbolism. There's no "feel" to symbolism. There's only the communication of symbols to make the other side understand what you want. Storytelling is communication of ideas, no matter how nuanced or difficult they may be. There's no failure of ideas (even if some ideas are horrible), only failure of delivery. If you fail to emphasize, readers will fail to infer, and they'll go on with their merry lives being wrong about your story and your ideas. Some of those readers will become writers and then try to persuade others with their CCC spinning, deliberately misinterpreting your story. That's the failure of storytelling: when everything is said, but nothing is understood. Symbols are the root of meaning, and symbolism is the root of understanding.
If I had to choose a suitably pretentious quote to summarize this symbolism thingy, that would be it. Before language existed as we know it today, mutual pattern-matching with symbols was the go-to for Grug and Ug. Grug could point at a club, say nothing—because Ug could plainly see it was a club—then point at a rock, call it a “tiger” in their “language,” smash the rock with the club, and laugh.
Ug, knowing that the rock was a stand-in for a tiger, could now interpret the scene in different ways.
Was Grug demonstrating that he had already defeated a tiger? Was it Grug’s delusion that he could smash a tiger? Or is it a metaphor for “Obey Grug, or he’ll smash you”? We don’t know, because we lack the context of what happened before Grug smashed the rock-as-tiger—but I digress.
What you can see here is that every story, however rudimentary, contains symbols. Not symbolism, because that’s a different beast entirely. Symbols are what early humans developed after consolidating pattern recognition into coherent social things you can point out to another person. Red berry with no spikes? Eat it. Black berry with spikes? Don’t eat—or else a bad spirit will eat you from the inside and you’ll die. Tiger roaring? You’ll be dinner unless you flight or fight. Symbols were complex systems that boosted a tribe’s survival chances by a huge margin.
Those symbols carry both social and instinctual connotations. The more primal they are, the more readily others recognize them. The more sophisticated and nuanced they become, the more likely they’ll be lost on someone else. Thus, symbols are heuristic patterns consolidated into coherent categories of being—nouns, adjectives, verbs, and so on, i.e. language.
These words by themselves don’t have meaning. Only through public use, within an agreed context, do they achieve an intended effect on another person. Symbols, likewise, have meaning only when they’re used. So why did I write five paragraphs explaining what a symbol is when the questions were about symbolism? Because symbolism is made of symbols that interact coherently, bruh.
Just think about it. If people didn’t have symbols, we couldn’t understand each other. Even if writing existed without symbols, it would still be mere scribbles—anything to anyone who looked at it. That’s why language exists: it’s a way of delivering information through coherent, agreed-upon symbols. And because of symbols, you can translate, for example, from Chinese to English without losing meaning (though with some loss of readability, because languages kinda suck at conveying intent).
So here’s the proposition: symbolism is made from symbols, which in turn come from pattern recognition, which stems from innate and learned instincts. Symbolism emerges when those patterns become communicative tools inside shared human cognition. It is symbolism when symbols interact without breaking pattern recognition—in other words, without breaking logic.
To be clear, everyone uses symbols. Even when you’re roasting symbolism, you’re employing symbolism through language. You don’t feel it, because your context involves a specific group that has over-analyzed symbolism to the point that no one trusts it—despite everyone from a three-year-old toddler who knows “hot + stove = bad” to an elderly person who also knows “hot + stove = bad,” because she know that no one’s using the stove and the toddler her daughter left in her care for a day could get hurt touching it.
Now that we know symbolism is made from symbols interacting with each other, how do we define that interaction in storytelling? What makes storytelling symbolism different from inherent human symbolism? What makes the symbolism present in the story both present and absent? The answer is authorial intent.
As I said, worlds are made, not found. Storytelling is inherently a temporal idea‑communication system that uses descriptions to make a reader learn something about life. The author chooses to write a story, selects what to emphasize, decides how to order it on the timeline, arranges what the reader needs to know based on patterns, and, in the end—when everything is done—shows what he or she, as a person, wanted to say. That's hard. Symbolism is often sacrificed for the plot because amateur storytellers want to tell a story, not stall on a chapter over the hard question of whether the curtains should be blue or red.
Symbolism, as defined by pretentious people who don't realize that symbolism is inherently about communication, is a sandbox where they play with meaning, connect everything in wonky ways, write 1,000‑word essays full of terms no sane person uses, and then stroke each other's egos in even longer essays. Sure, that's "communication," but it's so… "private" that I can't call it communication, because those people don't really want to talk to anyone who isn't like them. Their definition of "symbolism" leans so far toward the reader's side that, for them, the author is dead once those "critics" read a single sentence from the book.
True symbolism is what I've written about before. The author creates a coherent system of symbols interacting with each other, where each symbol has a specific role the reader—who has roughly the same symbolic framework from lived experience—can relate to and understand. Symbols can have multiple meanings. A mirror can be simply a mirror, or an alternate world, or an inner psyche, or whatever else our species has culturally agreed upon.
The author's job, to show that symbolism is present, is to ensure that the internal description of the mirror matches the external one. In other words, if it's an alternate world, show that the character can interact with it, entering inside it. If it's a psyche, show what the character has deep inside their mind by revealing horrors only inside mirrors. You get the gist. The meaning of symbolism is context‑dependent; if you fail to deliver context, the reader will apply every available context before choosing the meaning of the thing you've symbolized.
And judge they will when you deliberately show off that your story is "deep" or "symbolic" or "thematic," because those are signifiers that you know your stuff. How you present your symbolism matters.
So, now we know what symbolism is—the hell is a motif? A motif is the way an idea gets enforced during CCC cycles. It's an active symbol that migrates across the Context to subtly (or not so subtly) show up in real time for the Character to interact with. If you didn't catch the foreshadowing, I'll use Undertale as an example. It has two strong motifs that permeate the game: kill and mercy. Depending on the motif chosen, the story changes. That active symbol inherently changes the passive symbols each time the CCC is spun, affecting anything significant to the plot. Characters (active symbols) die because of Chara, and therefore the passive symbols around those characters (the world, their belongings, descriptions) shift into subdued or inverted versions. Conversely, in the pacifist route, befriending them changes the active symbols inside that character, and the passive symbols are reinforced or nuanced into something richer.
Theme, then, is a nuanced system of symbols the author chooses to emphasize to deliver a lesson, essentially in a "not in your face" way. Just like Grug and Ug in the first paragraph of this essay (which was a small post until I developed a lot of OPINIONS about symbolism over three days), a theme works only when a specific context is present. Context can be accumulated: the more connections the reader can make, the better the chances that the idea will survive the infernal reader‑interpretation gauntlet.
For example, in Inscryption every symbol is weaponized to make both the plot and the symbolic system coherent and interesting. Leshy embodies nature/sacrifice, that damn robot represents technology/energy, the necromancer lady stands for death/rebirth, and so on. Each of those symbols has boundaries and interacts in specific ways. Some pair naturally, such as sacrifice and rebirth, while others are antagonistic, such as technology and nature.
To build the symbolismic system—a symbolic plot layered above the actual plot—you must have the symbols interact over time and give them endpoints where they become passive symbols. An active symbol, for me, has not yet achieved the final nuance you want; passive symbols are those that will not change over time. There's a middle ground where a symbol changes a few times over CCC cycles because active symbols interact with it, but it's the active symbol that's changing, not the passive one.
These two cases (Undertale and Inscryption) are extreme and represent the pinnacle of symbolic storytelling. While we amateurs and mild professionals have thought about symbolism, it's hard to do because you need to plan a lot. You need to assign symbols to the characters, the world, the actions, repeat them long enough for the average reader to infer that they're symbolic without being told outright, and just SUFFER for art. To readers, the symbolic connections may look like a finished product that was easy to produce, but it wasn't.
As Daoists say, "When the best rulers achieve their purpose, their subjects claim the achievement as their own." When the best storytellers create a story full of symbolism, readers infer the nuanced meaning and then claim they found "their own," when the meaning was created by the writer all along. It was the hard work of the storyteller that produced that meaning, articulating it and making it interesting, subtle enough for anyone willing to follow. If your symbols are strong and you didn't intend symbolism, a symbolic story above the plot will emerge nonetheless, because you followed the standard of good symbolism: inject the symbols, contextualize them, emphasize them above other symbols, order them so they have the proper meaning you seek, and then deliver them persuasively to the reader. Hell, my two guides—Dao of Worldmaking and Dao of Rhetoric—under my signature explain how to display symbolism purposefully within all that meta‑storytelling. Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking and Languages of Art are great books for understanding what symbolism even is.
There's no magic in symbolism. There's no "feel" to symbolism. There's only the communication of symbols to make the other side understand what you want. Storytelling is communication of ideas, no matter how nuanced or difficult they may be. There's no failure of ideas (even if some ideas are horrible), only failure of delivery. If you fail to emphasize, readers will fail to infer, and they'll go on with their merry lives being wrong about your story and your ideas. Some of those readers will become writers and then try to persuade others with their CCC spinning, deliberately misinterpreting your story. That's the failure of storytelling: when everything is said, but nothing is understood. Symbols are the root of meaning, and symbolism is the root of understanding.
