Just curious, are you the guy in the video? I Googled "Thermian Argument examples" to try to get a better idea of what it means and there's not much discussion about it, and nearly all of it revolves around that video. What is the point of using such an obscure term? All it does it make your post less clear for the huge, huge majority of people who have never used the term.
No, I'm not. The reason I use the term is because this is the only place I've ever seen it actually defined into a solid term. I've always had the general argument in my head, the distinction between why something happens in universe vs why something happens in a story, but this video is the first place I've seen it defined. If you have a better or more well known definition of it, I'd like to hear it.
And I disagree that my post is difficult to comprehend. Obviously, I'm biased as I'm the one who wrote it, but it's literally one paragraph and a 3 minute followup video if you need an expansion. I'm not exactly throwing a wall of text on you.
The whole concept seems condescending and stupid, in this case anyway. Yes, in the end the park is depicted as it is because the writers chose to depict it that way. How is it wrong to give them the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately assuming they're out of touch or racist or whatever? Using other aspects of the writing to point out that this is obviously not true is not a fallacy.
There is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. As I wrote in another post, it's probable that they fell under the influence of a racial bias of white person's perspective when writing this. Again, this is not an insult towards them in particular. Everyone has racial bias within them, including you and including me. Plus, this is the same studio who greenlit (and now apparently quietly cancelled) the Confederacy, a show whose entire premise is predicated on falling prey to racial bias favoring the white person's perspective. It's a thing that exists and it happens to everyone, especially if they are not aware of it or indenial of it, and especially those who think saying so is a personal insult against them. It isn't, it's just a fact of life that you have bias and you ignore it at your own peril.
"I just read Lolita and it was disgusting! Nabokov was a pedophile!"
"Are you sure you read it? The narrator is a disgusting liar, the book doesn't condone their relationship at all."
"That's just a Thermian Argument! Your diegetic (or whatever the word is for the a book) examples of how the character is portrayed don't change the fact that the author likes to read about pedophilia!"
Not the same thing, because it's not about condonement or condemnation. It's about what you decide to show, what decisions as a creator you make. In this case, you could make that argument if the scene that doesn't make sense to have (narratively) except to sexualize Lolita as titillation for the viewer. That can be justified diegetically by the protagonist being a pedophile and therefore something he'd do, but not unless the writer has another reason to include it as part of the narration
besides titillating the audience with an underage child.
I haven't read Lolita (I know, I have a huge backlog), but a better comparison is the everpopular "But she's actually a 9000 year old dragon and just looks like a kid!" retort people have about how sexualized children somehow keep popping up in japanese media. The diegetic justification is just a pretense for the author's real reason for including it.
I guess I don't see the point of using the term in this context. In my MGS example above it's useful to have a name for the deflection of criticism. In this case, it seems like a valid explanation that the park does make sense as is and that we have no clue where the show is going from here.
I haven't dismissed any criticism, in fact I said I'd agree with the OP if at the end of the season we haven't seen any evidence of worlds that would appeal to non-white people. Clearly that wouldn't be necessary for the plot of the show to continue forward, but it would be interesting and show that the writers have put some thought into the park's operation instead of using the settings to characterize the hosts as cartoon villains. And again, the main thing I've been saying is just that it's too early to draw any conclusions about the writing staff based on this one park that was shown for a handful of scenes in the third episode of the season.
The point is that you are not justifying why showing a colonialist India would be preferable, as a writing decision, over, for example, a medieval India. What does it actually accomplish for us as the audience? It just confirms that the parks are about people living out their darkest fantasies of abusing others, something we already know, except in other settings as well. It signals that the Hosts are moving outside their programming not just in the Westworld Setting, but in other settings as well. And it offers a somewhat unique action situation by the fact that we have a huge Bengal Tiger chase the woman. That's about all I can think of.
Now, imagine if instead we had the medieval India that the OP mentioned. Everything they accomplished above could have still happened, but also, it would show that Delos isn't catering exclusively to the white demographic, but also the demographic of other nations and by doing so, the real life creators would be offering something to indian demographics to expand the real life audience of the show. Furthermore, it would make the established white audience cognizant that other cultures would not share their own fantasies and would have their own, unique desires if they were to have their own park, which gives them reason to pause and potentially introspect on what their own assumptions of what other cultures fantasies might have been or how it reflects on their own fantasies. The sheer fact that the writers would have taken the time to think "What would an indian fantasy park actually be?" would give the audience an impetus to ask the same question, potentially for other audiences as well. "What would a fantasy park be for germans? What would a fantasy park be for russians? For Tibetans? For Egyptians?" and so on. It's a worthy question because it is trying to get you to understand and empathize from a cultural perspective that is not your own. Lastly, and this is potentially the most important, it would provide the audience a vision of india that they might never have seen before, opening their eyes to a new kind of genre fiction that they were not previously aware of (Much like how Black Panther was many people's introduction to the genre of Afro-futurism). Up until this moment, I never heard of the medieval indian genre that the OP wrote about, and now that I have, I'm looking to see where I can find a copy of
Baahubali to watch, because all the stuff they described about it sounds really cool. Westworld could have done that much more effectively just by
showing that genre, and introducing us to Medieval India in all it's glory in a way that I've never seen before.
Those would have been much more worthy and interesting goals than what we got, which is...just another colonialist fantasy. There's nothing new there, there's nothing worth examining, exploring or reflecting on in that. It's literally just more of the same as Westworld, except Indian style. Put aside any thoughts on whether the writers are racist or whatever, and lets accept that I agree that a colonialist India is something Delos would do....you still haven't justified by this is a better showing of the Indian world. You've merely defended it as consistent, which it is, but this wasn't the only way to show that consistency.
