Ghost of a flea

The kind of geeks that argue about minutiae tend to look at a story from what I’m going to call a 'literalist' perspective. A magic ring is a magic ring. Superman is an alien. They most certainly are not metaphors for empowerment. The primary focus of engagement with the story is on a literal level. When we watch LOTR we are watching hobbits go on a journey to destroy a magic ring. We are not spending 11 hours watching a discussion on the effects of 20th century technological advancement on the rural communities of England. ...

On the other side of this are the 'symbolists': that strange breed to whom the worth of a story lies only in it's relation to the real world. Hobbits ARE the rural communities of Pre-Victorian England. The Architect IS the creator god. The purpose of a story is to comment upon the outside world. It has no reality of its own. So it's really not important if some detail is changed, as long as the metaphor holds. After all, the story is always ultimately just a shadow-play. None of it is real.

The literalists are children, incapable of looking deeper into a story or dealing with the real world, in extreme cases functionally indistinguishable from certain types of autism sufferers ... . The symbolists are cynics with no imagination and hearts made out of a bloody patchwork of all the tiny fairies' hearts that they refused to believe in.