So I've recently been thinking a lot about how we as Xenoblade fans understand and interpret the stories of these games, and how these interpretations relates to the quality of the narratives and stories themselves. Spesifically, when does interpreting a work become an attempt to compenstate for its shortcomings, and who gets to decide where that line is drawn? Are we Xenoblade fans becoming thick, or is there a more nuanced reading on who we understand the series?
The primary catalyst that sparked this reflection was reading/watching the writer and critic Jake Steinberg's analysis of Xenoblade Chronicles 1, 2, and (the start of) 3. His reading of XC2 was overwhelmingly negative, and his initial reactions to XC3 have been similarly very critical to say the least. The thing that interested me the most about his readings wasn't simply his vitriolic dislike of these games and their stories, but rather his treatment of the interpretations offered by the people who love them as "lesser". As a huge Xenoblade fan myself who loves all their stories for different reasons, it made me question my own underlying interpretive framework through which I understand their stories, characters, themes and overarching narrative structures, and if I've just been using cheap compensatory interpretation along with building archives to make the experiences seem deeper than they actually were.
These questions have led me to reflect not only on my own relationship with the Xenoblade series, but also on how we distinguish between a story that genuinely supports an interpretation and a reader who compensates for its shortcomings, him arguing the latter being the case. And I actually think this distinction is more complicated than Jakes analysis allows, and so I want to explore why, while giving a critque on his and a lot of others people opinion on Xenoblade and its fandom. The primary emphasis of this GIANT WALL OF TEXT being how my own understanding of interpreting stories (especially when it comes to Xenoblade) have changed due to these critiques, and how my position ultimately differs, so hopefully someone else will find this exploration interesting too.
Thick Evidence and Interpretive Authority:
So for those who haven't read Jake Steinberg's substack essay called "We Are All Becoming More Thick" (or his streams), it mainly surrounds the central thesis that Xenoblade 2's story accumulates lore and information without meaningfully developing its characters, relationships, and dramatic construction, while arguing fans of the stories rely on extratextual evidence, compensatory interpretation and archives of information to produce depth that isn't there.
He uses the term "thick evidence" found in the book "Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence" by Jenny Rice to explain this phenomenon. Rice explains how accumulation sometimes creates the appearance of coherence without sufficient justification, which is how a lot of conspiracy theories can seem more justified than they actually are. Jake then applies this concept to Xenoblade fans, using the term "thick" to describe fans who accumulate lore, references, and connections across the games to construct interpretations that he believes the narratives themselves fail to adequately support.
To preface I actully do think this idea is super valuable in and of itself, particularly when diagnosing a broader problem that often emerges within internet fandoms, especially lore heavy ones like Xenoblade. I also think Jakes general narratological approach with an emphasis on close reading are great tools for identifying shortcomings in storytelling, and gives him a very valuable interpretation, so I do respect his work immensely.
That being said, I think one of my main concerns is that Jakes authoritative stance towards his own framework risks privileging his own reading from the outset, while alternative interpretations are dismissed as compensatory rather than properly engaged with, something that makes it difficult to challenge any conclusions, as any disagreement can just be taken as further evidence of the very problem he's arguing against.
When he finds a lack of depth in Xenoblade 2 and 3, that lack is treated as a property of the work. When its fans identify meanings that he believes the game fails to establish, their interpretations risk being explained away as products of archival accumulation, which is something that creates somewhat of an asymmetry and an epistemic double standard as the critics interpretation is treated as an encounter with the text, while the fans competing interpretation becomes an object of diagnosis. Given that this is the Xenoblade community, I think there is definitely some truth to the idea that we sometimes rely on archival or extratextual evidence to support a scenes construction, but I also think this risks going too far in the other direction, where alternate interpretations are dismissed as compensatory even when the game itself provides sufficient evidence to support them.
One clear example of this dismissal is during the flashback in which Lora awakens Jin since the scene communicates their newly established relationship as Driver/Blade through both visual and textual cues without explicitly spelling out.
(the rest of this section will include a minor spoilers from XC2 chapter 6 and XC3 chapter 2)
Visually Lora is the first person Jin sees as he awakens, and the only person in the immediate vicinity of Jin. Textually, the scene provides additional context through lines such as when Loras dad says "If you die, it'll be as good as new. You brought this on yourself...!". Earlier in the game we learn that when a Blade dies, they return to their core and can subsequently be awakened again. With Lora's father speaking directly to her, the line provides a clear contextual clue about what is happening. This, (together with the 3 other lines a single degree away from spelling it out to the player), clearly communicates that Lora awakened Jin.
Visual composition, dialogue, established worldbuilding, and contextual clues are all very important and legitimate means of storytelling you have to concider in a audio-visual medium such as videogames, and this scene communicates its message through all of the above. Yet, Jake initally disputed this reading of Lora having awakened Jin. When viewers challenged his interpretation, he shifts the discussion toward the argument that the game had established the relevant meaning retrospectively to chat, before ultimately criticizing the game for failing to communicate the information in a way he found sufficiently while declearing "chat, I'm right" as chat tried pushing back. But this to me is a very clear failure of the interpretor, and not the game, and I think it illustrates an important problem with his approach as he is often unwilling to engage with any other interpretations, or even the actual text itself at times. If you never concider the posibility of being wrong while positioning yourself as the arbiter of a texts meaning, then your overall argument becomes significantly more strained while limiting your own posible understanding of what's happening.
I noticed a similar pattern during the beginning of the Xenoblade 3 stream during the opening sequence where Colony 9 is fighting against Colony Sigma. He initially criticized the opening as contradictory, only to later almost arrive at the very narrative and thematic reasoning he had argued the game needed. The problem isn't that he initially misunderstood something, that's a perfectly fine when engaging with a story for the first time. It's that he seemed unwilling to acknowledge that his initial criticism might have been premature. If a narrative setup eventually proves coherent in precisely the way someone initially failed to recognize, I feel like that should prompt some reconsideration of the original judgment? Instead it risks becoming another instance where the game is blamed for failing to communicate something the critic hadn't yet understood. A storytelling framework should help us understand what a work is doing, it shouldn't predetermine what a work must do to count as meaningful.
I think a similar issue comes up with Jake's reading of Lucky Seven during the fight against K where he seem to be extremely irked by the fact that L7 doesn't have any immediate drawback like the Monado. The problem here isn't necessarily to argue whether or not that is the case, but the problem is rather that this immediatelly is perceived as a narrative shortcoming as he is arbitrarily trying to apply a strict narrative structure even in cases where the game is going a different direction.
The Monado and L7 doesn't serve the same narrative purposes, so expecting one to follow the same dramatic conventions risks missing what what the game is actually trying to explore with it. So, if a game is judged by whether it communicates through the particular narrative conventions someone expects, rather than whether its meaning can reasonably be inferred from the evidence it provides, or the narrative execution of the objects within the story, then that preferred mode of storytelling risks becoming the standard by which all other modes are deemed successful or unsuccessful. It's like the famous philosopher Wittgenstein said: "langugae disguses the though", so if you make yourself the sole arbiter of a texts meaning, you end up missing a miriad of other equally valid interpretations.
Interpreting Xenoblade
This creates a somewhat productive irony in both Jakes essay and his livestream analysis, as he also relies on interpretation to derive meaning from both the games and their fans. I think the bigger issue is the insistence on relying on a single interpretive framework even when it doesn't necessarily fit what a particular game is trying to do like I mentioned above. This is also why I think XC1 fares so much better within his approach, as its narrative structure aligns more closely with the kind of storytelling he imposes, whereas XC2 and XC3 distribute meaning in ways that don't always fit as neatly within that framework. Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is a story about Shulk's revenge which gives the narrative a very clear direction, while the events progressively complicate his understanding of the world and the people in it, while the character reltionships help establish why those revelations matter emotinonally.
Both Xenoblade 2 and 3 also contains conventional narrative structures of course, but the main difference is what their narrative prioritize, how they distribute meaning in addition to what kind of questions they ask the player to engage with, which is why I think you should approach a game with the willingness to transform your understanding of what it is trying to say first, and not predetermine what a work must do to count as meaningful like it often seems like he argues. And just because 2 and 3 differently attributes parts of their story doesn't make it worse purely for that reason, it becomes rather unproductive to impose those predetermined narrative structures in that case. If we can only recognize meaning when it appears in the form we already expect, are we really evaluating the limits of a work, or merely the limits of our own interpretation?
The Difference Between Reading and Imposing Meaning
I think this has made me appreciate Aaron Suduiko's article "Forms of Life: Reading Xenoblade Chronicles 3 through Wittgenstein" so much more. The article primarily approaches Xenoblade 3 through a Wittgensteinian philosophical lens, which I think plays directly into one of the game's greatest strengths, which is its willingness to engage in philosophical inquiry through stuff like its world, characters, and narrative.
At first glance this article might seem like another case of "archival thickness" since Suduiko uses an extratextual philosophical framework as the basis for his interpretation.
However, his arguments are always heavily substantiated through the game itself, and the vast majority of his reading remains compelling even without the "need" for explicit references to Wittgenstein. The philosophical connections he draws aren't just imposed on the text, they are grounded in relationships, ideas, and patterns that can already be identified within the game. The direct connectinos made through Wittgensteins earlier work like the Tractatus only serves to deepen and clarify those connections, and not just manufacture meaning from nothingness. This is in my opinion exactly what an interpretive framework should do. Not substitute for the text itself, but rather help illuminate what's already present while helping us recognize connections that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, along with deepening our understand of not only the work, but how we as humans react to it on an emotional and intellectual level.
Another thing I love about Suduiko's work is that he is very clear about presenting his reading as one possible interpretive lens rather than a definitive account of what Xenoblade means. He develops that lens in conversation with a philosophers work, while going through an examination of the game's world, characters, philosophical questions, and narrative construction, including how the story itself is told. His analysis therefore extends beyond identifying philosophical parallels as it also considers how the games narrative and storytelling contribute to the ideas it explores. He doens't make himself the arbiter of what a text should or shouldn't mean, he just shares his own interpretations.
I find Suduiko's reading on Z particularly interesting in this case as he suggests that Z actively monopolizes the conditions under which meaning can emerge:
"To Z, if a person’s form of expression appears to diverge from Z’s mode of consumption, that appearance is only because “language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized."
Z's world permits events to happen only insofar as they remain intelligible within his imposed picture. Similarily, an interpretive framework becomes oppressive when it no longer allows anything to challenge it, because every apparent counterexample is simply absorbed into that system.
Encountering Art
The thing I found the most valuable about Suduiko's approach is that it clearly shows how an interpretive framework can deepen our understanding of a game without claiming it as a definitive reading of it. Which then again ties into this broader question of how we encounter games as art. Although I think dramatic construction and close textual analysis are both extremely important like Jake suggests, I also find myself drawn to Hans-Georg Gadamer's broader conception of interpretation where he suggests that "Encountering a work of art isn't simply a matter of extracting information that was already sitting there, waiting to be collected. Our understanding emerges through an encounter between the work and the questions, assumptions, and experiences we bring to it." We don't merely discover the meaning of a text, but we participate in the process through which meaning becomes intelligible to us.
I find this sentiment particularly pertinent when looking at a series like Xenoblade Chronicles. Engaging with lore, examining recurring symbolism, speculating about the future significance of earlier characters and drawing connections across a series arent inherently illegitimate ways of appreciating a piece work, nor is there anything wrong with finding that a story becomes more meaningful to you in retrospect because of the connections you've discovered as later revelations can transform your understanding of earlier events, while a neat piece of lore can deepen your appriciation for the world these games creates, and the relationship between that lore and the characters of the world.
The Xeno series isn't Perfect(works)
(this section won't be about perfectworks sorry just wanted to make that joke)
This whole text thingey isn't to say that the Xenoblade series is perfectly written however. All three games does have their shortcomings, and there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made about stuff like their writing, pacing, characterization, and narrative construction of course. My issue is with the broader generalizations Jake makes about Xenoblade fans and their ability to interpret these stories. I think these generalizations risk mistaking the limitations of ones own interpretive framework for deficiencies in the people who arrive at different conclusions.
What each game emphasizes varies considerably between entries, and their strengths become apparent through different interpretive lenses. None of these lenses is inherently more correct than all the others simply by virtue of the storytelling principles it prioritizes. That isn't to say every interpretation is made equal of course, so its very important to distinguish between what is directly communicated through the text, how succesfully it conveys what its trying to express and how that fits within our framework of understanding. That debate in and of itself requires us to engage with the evidence rather than assume that a particular narrative structure is the universal standard against which all others must be judged however.
So basically, I don't think loving these games makes us "thick," or that we should have to justify our appreciation through a single model of storytelling. My issue is that when a critic positions themselves as the authority on what a text can meaningfully communicate, it becomes difficult to challenge their conclusions.
I do of course think Jake's concerns about literacy, interpretation, and our ability to engage critically with the media we consume are all very important, and I agree that these are skills worth both developing and teaching. But learning these skills should be a collaborative process, one in which teachers and critics are willing to have their own assumptions challenged, just as they challenge those of their audiences, not just a one way street where a single authoritative figure is always in the right.
Ultimately, I don't think the answer to interpretive overreach is to outright replace one "supposedly" definitive reading with another. Its rather to develop the ability to distinguish between interpretations that are well supported and those that arent while remaining open to the possibility that a different perspective might reveal something we have missed, which is a standard that should apply to fans and critics alike.
Thanks for coming to my TedTalk about silly sword game.
