You Can't Fact-Check a Casting: Id Fiction and the Socionarrative Self

1. The Id Examined

The blog Aqua Rusa has a post up called "The Id Unexamined" and it is good enough that I want to grapple with it at length. Its subject is id fiction, a term of art from fandom: fiction whose whole business is satisfying the id, "the literary equivalent of candy or junk food." Romance and romantasy, isekai, porn, the airport thriller, the gacha game, the cozy cooking show. Fiction that, in the post's nice phrase, "feels like the story is made for you."

The argument runs in three moves. First, id fiction is not itself the problem. Everyone enjoys it, and its problematic features (the ravishment plot, the harem, the villainess who gets what is coming to her) serve identifiable craft purposes that a mature reader can learn to see and appreciate for what they are without engaging the more problematic aspects.

Second, the danger arrives when people "look to reality to embody the soothing or intense feelings of id fiction," and the post's examples of that are mostly political and mostly on the right: the cuckold trope migrating out of porn into the vocabulary of the alt-right and from there into Great Replacement theory; Jordan Peterson mistaking a fetish video for a civilizational atrocity; the video game's guarantee of continual progress recast as a politics of something for nothing; the rage-farming YouTube channel whose actual product is the catharsis of righteous anger.

Third, the remedy: a cycle of id-examination, drawn deliberately in the shape of the Hero's Journey, in which the uncritical enjoyer is unsettled, learns to see the strings, and comes home with "the capability of separating emotional/iddy enjoyment from political enjoyment of art." The virtue this cultivates is media literacy, which the post files under epistemic virtue. The line between fiction and reality should be made brighter, not blurrier, so that people can "compartmentalize what they enjoy in fiction vs. their moral values."

Two responses on Bluesky mark out the range of reasonable reaction. Liam Kofi Bright (@lastpositivist) endorsed the post outright: the tendency to read idfic structures into reality is damaging, and people would be helped, a lot, by "the skills to better understand how fictional enjoyment of something is very distinct from real yearning." Shaun (@shaunc) liked the post but smelled something in its conclusion: "Kantian (?) presuppositions." What about national myths, one's relationship to loved ones, the romance of science, one's own project of personhood? Sealing off a formal self from one's actual person is impossible, he argued, and therefore not desirable, since trying to achieve the impossible is an intellectual trap. Better the modest goal of "distancing oneself from those constituent myths that threaten one's own ability to do the right thing." He reads this as virtue ethics: habits are patterns that must preclude judging each case, and a habit only sticks if it contains some pleasure, some iddy element of its own. The habit of separating fact from fiction, he observes, runs on the iddy feeling of self-control. We cannot distance ourselves from all such feelings. We can only cultivate the ones that lead to good ends. He has since replied to the thread version of this argument, and the reply is good enough to get a section of its own below.

Shaun is right, and I want to say why he is right in a way that goes a step past virtue ethics, into what I have elsewhere called the socionarrative structure of identity. The short version: the line between fiction and reality that the post wants to brighten does not run where the post thinks it runs. It does not run between two domains with a reader standing outside both, keeping the traffic orderly. It runs through the reader. And it is drawn by other people.

2. There Is No Examiner Who Isn't Also a Character

The theory, compressed, is to identify anything is to tell a story about it along three predicative strands: what it is, what it's like, and what it's not. Identity does not reside in the thing itself, nor in the Umwelt of the creature perceiving it, nor in the phenomenological state of affairs in which it is given. It resides in the role the thing plays in a narrative, and narrative is not a private act. A story has to be told to someone and taken up. A role has to be cast, and casting is done by a community. That is the socio- in socionarrative. Ricoeur saw that a person's selfhood, the ipse that keeps its word through change as distinct from the idem of mere sameness, is a narrative achievement: the discordant material of a life configured into a concordance in which someone is recognizable as a someone. MacIntyre saw that an action is unintelligible apart from the story it belongs to, so that practical reason begins with a prior question: of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

My claim is only that what they saw about persons is the general form of individuation. A nation has an identity because a story is told about it. So does a marriage, a court, a painting, a urinal on a pedestal. And, critically, the stories are not told by the things they are about. Even Dasein gets cast.

This is what makes Shaun's "Kantian presuppositions" precise. The post's remedy requires a reader who stands outside both fiction and reality and adjudicates what may pass between them: a transcendental subject of media literacy, not itself the product of any narrative, whose job is to keep the border orderly. There is no such reader. The self doing the compartmentalizing is itself a cast role, with a casting community of its own. A self is not a thing that consumes stories. It is a role in one. There is no examiner who isn't also a character.

One of the replies in Liam's thread (from @hugbee) put the point better than I am about to: the characteristic mistake of people with good media literacy is "projecting that healthy artist-audience dynamic onto politics—rather than recognizing that in real life we're all stuck being actors." I would take that literally rather than as a Goffman line. Goffman's dramaturgy keeps a backstage, the green room where the actor takes the mask off. The socionarrative view has no backstage. The one who takes the mask off is also a part somebody wrote.

The analytic tradition got close to this with Dennett's center of narrative gravity, and the way it fell short is instructive, because the post falls short in the same place. Dennett saw that the self is not a thing you find by opening the skull; it is the organizing focus of a narrative. But he could only cash that out as a useful fiction, real the way the equator is real, and so the ontology survived intact: the furniture of the universe is still atoms, and the self is relocated to the mezzanine of the merely instrumental. (I made this argument at more length in Case's Two Bodies.) The post inherits the same picture. On one side of the line, reality: atoms, census figures, actual sex, actual politics. On the other side, fiction: stories that are useful or pleasurable or dangerous depending on whether we keep them in their place. What the picture cannot accommodate is a story that is neither a fiction nor a report on the atoms. A story that constitutes. And constitution is not fiction. A self constituted in narrative is not a convenient story about something else that is more truly there. Neither is a nation, a currency, a border, or a marriage.

3. Bracketed and Constitutive

So the working distinction is not fiction versus reality. It is between narratives a community takes up as bracketed and narratives a community takes up as constitutive. I borrow the first word from Husserl on purpose (as I do so much of my philosophy). A bracketed narrative is one its casting community agrees to hold in suspension: to take up as play, to be cast in for the duration and then released. A constitutive narrative is one taken up as casting proper. People act on the roles it hands out, treat one another as those roles, and build institutions around them. The same content can be either. What decides is uptake, in something like Austin's sense: a story is bracketed or constitutive according to how it is received, and the reception is not up to any one receiver.

This is exactly what the post's own best example shows, if you look at what happened rather than at the individualist moral the post draws from it. Fandom did not defang the ravishment trope by each reader privately resolving to keep fiction and reality distinct. It developed, over twenty contentious years, a shared craft-story about the trope: the non-consent scenario forces proximity before intimacy has been earned; the woman socialized against desire outsources her libido to the man so that she can have the sex without having wanted it; taboo is erotic in nearly every kink there is, so this one is unremarkable. The post rehearses that craft-story beautifully. What it does not notice is that the craft-story is the bracket. The trope became safe to enjoy when a community agreed on a metanarrative that cast it as craft, and the anti/proship war was a war over whether any such bracket could hold. The antis said no: to write the thing is to be the thing, no bracket is possible, every author is her content. The proshippers built the bracket by talking, publicly and at enormous length, about why the tropes are there. Media literacy, on this reading, is a social achievement, not mental hygiene. Nobody drew a private line. A community drew a public one, and then individuals could stand on it.

The post concedes as much in its last sentence on the subject, though I doubt it meant to: "You create the world you want to see, and a world where porn is a fictional genre is a safer and better world." Just so. A world where porn is a fictional genre is a world in which a community has cast porn as fiction. That casting is a collective act. It is not the same thing as any individual compartmentalizing, it can succeed or fail, and it can fail for a whole population at once.

4. The Cuck and the Census

Consider the cuckold trope, which the post correctly identifies as the hinge between the world of porn and the world of the alt-right. In its bracketed uptake, the cuckold scenario is a kink: humiliation, defilement, low status and high status, enjoyed as such by people who would not enjoy the thing itself for a second. In the manosphere it received a different uptake. No bracket. It was taken up as diagnosis, and a narrative taken up as diagnosis casts: the humiliated man, the treacherous woman who sells out her race, the virile invader. The post calls Great Replacement "basically just a porn fantasy," a fantasy mistaken for a fact. I think we are overly dismissive if we call it "just a porn fantasy." It is that, but it is not only that, and by focusing only on one constitutive strand of identity we lose our ability to grapple with and ultimately displace it. Great Replacement is a casting that found a community. It offers roles, the roles are taken up, people act on them and treat one another as them, and institutions (parties, media, a certain kind of church) organize around them.

Which makes it real. Not true: real. As real as a border, a currency, a marriage, or a court, none of which you will find in the world absent their particular story, all of which are entirely real, and all of which you would be a fool to treat as fictions merely because they are constituted. This is the difference between a claim and a casting. You can fact-check a claim. You cannot fact-check a casting, because a casting is not a description of the world that might fail to match it. It is a role in a story that other people have agreed to tell.

The replacement theorist makes factual errors, and they are real errors. But they are downstream of the role. Argue him out of the census figures and he will find other figures, because the numbers were never what he was holding on to. He was cast as the last defender of something, and people took the casting up. Peterson and the milking video are the same case in miniature. The post reads the episode as a man confusing a highly stylized porn scenario with reality, and it was that, but the confusion had a shape. He had been cast, by a very large audience, as the man who sees the civilizational nightmare the rest of us are too comfortable to see. The video did not deceive him. It was recruited into a part he was already playing, and the audience that had cast him in the part took the recruitment up. A brighter line between fiction and reality would not have helped, because the story he was in was not on the fiction side of any line. It was constitutive of the man.

5. The Hero's Journey Home

This is the deeper reason Shaun is right that sealing off a formal self from one's actual person is impossible. Not only because habits need pleasure to stick, though they do, but because the self doing the sealing is a cast role. And the post half-knows it. It draws its remedy as a Hero's Journey and says so: the id-examiner leaves the ordinary world of uncritical enjoyment, is unsettled in the wilderness of guilt and squick, learns to see the strings, and returns home enlightened. The post even concedes that the Hero's Journey is itself a formula for id fiction. What it does not draw from the concession is the conclusion. The cure for iddy stories is itself an iddy story, and it works by casting its reader as the protagonist: the one who sees the strings, the discerning reader, the one who knows what fiction is for. That is not a gotcha. It is the condition of any remedy whatsoever. A remedy that did not cast its subject in a role would have no purchase on anyone.

Another reply in Liam's thread (from @goldstein) asked why the diagram is a circle rather than a spiral, since a spiral returns to the same place on the plane while arriving somewhere else altogether. The socionarrative answer is that it is a spiral, and the reason is that you come home as a different character. The reader who returns to the ravishment plot after the cycle is not the role she was cast in before it, and the community that recast her, the fandom that argued the trope into craft, is what made the difference. The pleasure Shaun identifies, the iddy feeling of self-control that makes the habit of discernment stick, is the pleasure of being cast well: as the one who sees. It is not a lesser id than the ravishment plot's. It is the same mechanism pointed at a better part.

Where I would push Shaun is on the version of virtue ethics. Not Aristotle's, exactly, but MacIntyre's, in which habits come already emplotted. The prior question is not which habits I should cultivate but of what story I find myself a part, because a practice is intelligible only inside a tradition, and a tradition is a narrative extended through time. A virtue, on this account, is a role taken up over time and ratified by others. That is why it cannot be installed by private resolution, and why it cannot be sealed off from the person who has it. It is also why the category the post files itself under, "renewed virtues for a secular time," is more apt than the post's own remedy. A virtue is not a technique you apply to your inputs. It is a part you grow into, with an audience.

6. Enjoyment, Yearning, and the Third Strand

Now Liam's endorsement, which I think is right about the phenomenon and wrong about its structure. Fictional enjoyment of something is distinct from real yearning for it; the distinction is real and important; the person who cannot make it is in trouble. But the distinction is produced, not given. Whether an iddy feeling counts as enjoyment or as yearning depends on the story you have been cast in. The same tightening in the chest at the same scene is enjoyment for the reader whose community has bracketed the scene as craft, and yearning for the reader whose community has taken it up as a picture of how things ought to be. The skill Liam wants people to acquire is less a technique than a membership.

This exposes the actual mechanism of the pipeline the post is worried about, the one that runs from isekai to the census. Id fiction feels like it was made for you because it offers you a role: the desired one, the competent one, the wronged one, the smartest man in the room. If the community you actually live in will cast you in none of those, the fiction is the only place you are cast well. The pull, then, is not toward believing the story. It is toward finding people who will take the casting up. The isekai reader who ends up a replacement theorist has not confused fiction with reality. He has found a community that will cast him, in reality, in the part the fiction offered. That is a social fact, and it wants a social remedy. A brighter line between fiction and reality is not one, because the man is not confused about which side of the line he is on. He has been given a side.

Which is why the danger concentrates in the third strand. What a thing is, what it's like, what it's not: the third is where différance lives, and it is where id fiction does its most characteristic work. The post notices, in its inventory of problematic elements, that idfic dehumanizes everyone who is not the main character: the harem, the NPC, the villainess, the invader whose only narrative function is to be repelled. Bracketed, that is a craft choice, and a defensible one; a power fantasy without instruments is not a fantasy. Constitutive, it is a politics. The same "what it's not" that makes the isekai hero legible as a hero makes, in its constitutive uptake, an actual population into the not. Fiction does not have to be mistaken for reality for this to happen. It only has to be taken up.

7. The Private Language of Virtue

Since I posted the thread version of this argument, Shaun has replied at length, and his reply is better than my slogans, so it gets a section. He agrees in general, and places the argument in the company of MacIntyre, Wojtyła, and Tischner: a virtue ethics in which "the constitutive function of virtues is acknowledged as social," so that "moral choice is choice of who we are, and 'who' is a social role." I will take the company gladly, Tischner in particular. The philosophy of drama already has the human being as a dramatic being, on a stage, in dramatic time, facing others who can be met or refused, which is most of the way to casting before anyone says the word.

He also offers an analogy I wish I had conceived. The claim that a virtue is a role taken up over time and ratified by others, he says, is Wittgenstein's argument against private language, transposed from meaning to practical action. Just so, and the transposition sharpens the claim rather than softening it. The private language argument does not deny that the diarist has his sensation. It denies that he can be the sole judge of whether he has named it correctly, because where whatever seems right is right, there is no such thing as right. Transposed: whatever seems virtuous to me is virtuous, and then there is no such thing as virtue. Ratification by others is not an accessory to a virtue. It is what makes "well" and "badly" applicable to the taking-up of a role at all.

Which brings me to Shaun's objection, and I want to state it in full, because it is the one a socionarrative theory most needs to answer. I draw too sharp a line, he says, in making virtues social and not private. Societies are not impervious to human agency. His own theory of himself is, he grants, a social role that needs confirmation before he can believe in it, but it is tied to his own person by a density and quality of observation that no one else has, and "society," being only an aggregate of other people's theories of self, can have a theory of him only in a fuzzy and indirect sense. Better, then, to treat the personal and the social as interacting poles. The material an individual builds himself from comes from a society, and has to stay in contact with one to keep its vital force (he cites the mass shooter posting his goals and the copycat who takes them up), but the creative processing and the production of new forms always happen in individuals. Media literacy, on this view, can be both a social achievement and mental hygiene. And though you cannot fact-check a casting, you can ends-check one, with the help of other potential castings, which is what the John Brown isekai does. But before it became a prototype casting, someone had to assemble it from raw-material castings.

I accept nearly all of this, and I think the acceptance leaves the theory standing, because the objection is aimed at a claim I did not quite make. The claim was never that persons lack agency, or that new roles do not originate in individuals. It was that identity is not solo-authored: that no one, however densely he observes himself, is the sole judge of who he is. Shaun concedes that himself in the sentence about confirmation. What remains between us is the density-of-observation point, and here the argument he handed me does the work. Wittgenstein's diarist has the densest possible observation of his sensation, and that is exactly what does not help him. Observation is not ratification. The density gives me privileged access to the idem, to the continuity of the body and its memories, the sameness that persists; it gives me no privileged access at all to the ipse, to the who, which is a matter of what I stand for and what I am held to. Anyone who has practiced law knows the shape of this. The client has the densest possible observation of his own conduct and is, for precisely that reason, the last person who should be allowed to narrate it to the jury.

Shaun adds that one can, a bit unfairly, loop the loop on me: "private" is itself an emergent social category, so the claim that certain roles are not private is not neutral either. It is not unfair at all. It is what the theory predicts. The private individual is a casting, and a fairly recent one; what a thing is not is the third strand, and the third strand is never neutral. But the loop does show where the theory owes Shaun an account, and that is an account of where new castings come from, if not from a private self underneath the roles.

One may escape this loop, in fact, by embracing it. Yes, the loop loops; so what? Heidegger's answer to the hermeneutic circle applies here: what is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way. Coming into it in the right way means saying of ourselves that we are unreliable narrators of our own socionarrative identity, and that this is no more a knock against narrative construction than an unreliable narrator is against narrative in a novel. Booth's unreliable narrator is not a flaw in the work. He is a device, and he works only because there is an implied author whose norms he departs from and a reader who reads him against them. Stevens's dignity in The Remains of the Day is constituted by everything he cannot say about Miss Kenton, and the reader who reconstructs it is doing the casting. Unreliability is a relation, and it needs the socio- as much as casting does; a narrator no one reads against any norms is not unreliable, only alone. Error sits only where a person ascribes a false or improper certitude to a proposition. We have spent much of the philosophy of the last three thousand years attempting to escape human frailty by means of some outward assurance of certitude, in logic or rationalism or empiricism, and never come close to escaping our own subjectivity, and thus our fallibility. Ricoeur's word for what the self can have instead is attestation: not the certitude of the cogito and not its Nietzschean forfeiture, but a trust, always exposed to suspicion, that one is the one acting and suffering in the story being told. Attestation is a kind of testimony, and testimony is given to others. To the extent that we recognize that we are in the loop, we are at least cognizant of how we fit, both as individuals and as constituent members of a society, within the flow. And the definition of error does one more piece of work. What is wrong with the replacement theorist is not that he narrates himself unreliably, since everyone does. It is that he has ascribed certitude to his casting and joined a community that will read him against no other..

My answer is that they come from the fact that no one is cast in only one story. MacIntyre's person enters the world already someone's child, a citizen of this city, a member of that guild, an heir of this tradition and that grudge, and Ricoeur's narrative identity is a concordance won out of discordance. The individual is the site where castings collide, and the collision is where recombination happens. That is not a private substrate under the roles. It is the friction between them. Whoever wrote the John Brown isekai was cast at once as a reader of isekai and as an heir of the American abolitionist story, and the collision produced the recasting. The origination was individual. The existence of the thing as a casting, rather than as a manuscript, was not. Shaun's own phrase concedes this: a prototype casting is a bid for uptake, and his shooter's manifesto is the same bid in its most malignant form. The creative act happens in the individual. The casting happens in the taking-up. So I will take his interacting poles, with one asymmetry marked. Origination can be individual. Being cannot.

On media literacy being both a social achievement and mental hygiene: agreed, and the order matters. Hygiene is the individual practice of a standard a community established; nobody arrived at handwashing privately. The reader who compartmentalizes is practicing a bracket that fandom spent twenty years building, and could not practice it if the bracket had not been built. And on ends-checking: Shaun's amendment is better than my slogan, and I adopt it. You cannot fact-check a casting, but you can ends-check one, by what it makes of the people cast in it and against the other castings on offer. That is what the rest of this essay tries to do, and Shaun is right that the checking is an act of individual agency. I would only add that it is agency exercised with materials only a community can supply. The other castings have to be there to check against. Where a community holds only one, there is nothing to ends-check with, and that is the condition of the replacement theorist: not a man who lacks the faculty, but a man whose community has stripped the shelf.

8. A Better Casting

The remedy, then, is not a brighter line but a better casting. The question the post asks, whether you can tell fiction from reality, is answerable only from a position no one occupies. The question that can actually be answered is this: who do you let cast you, and as what?

The post already has the example and does not know it. The John Brown isekai, which it loves, does not teach media literacy. It does not brighten any line. It recasts the hero: same genre, same portal, same hierarchy of masters and slaves at the bottom of it, and a protagonist whose principles dictate the abnegation of the power fantasy rather than its fulfillment. What makes it work is not that its readers learned to tell fiction from reality. It is that a community took the recasting up, enthusiastically, and in doing so cast its readers as people who would rather be John Brown than the harem king. That is the whole remedy in miniature. Nobody stopped enjoying isekai. The role on offer changed.

It is also my answer to Shaun's list. National myths, one's relationship to loved ones, the romance of science, one's own project of personhood: these are not exceptions the remedy has to be walled off from, awkward cases where a fiction-reality line would do damage if applied. They are the paradigm cases. They are constitutive stories, and they are what make nations, marriages, sciences, and persons real. Shaun's modest goal, distancing oneself from those constituent myths that threaten one's ability to do the right thing, is the right goal. But it cannot be reached by private distancing, for the same reason the sealed-off formal self cannot be reached. A constitutive myth is a casting, and you leave a casting by being recast, which takes other people. Apostasy is a social act. So is conversion. So was the fandom's twenty-year argument, and so is the parody that turns the harem king into an abolitionist.

The question was never whether to be cast. Only by whom, and as what. And that is not a question a firmer grip on the difference between fact and fiction can answer, because the answer is what makes the difference in the first place.