charmianland because random is good enough for most

This is tangential to the story, er, talk itself, but in a way which I have never been able to articulate well, I have always been suspicious about stories as forms of literary criticism (a la fanfic, or a la literary fiction responding to classical works). As stories themselves, fine, but I have always had this perhaps irrational suspicion that it was somehow not ‘true’ or ‘fair’ in some important way. Perhaps it’s because narrative is arguably more powerful than pure rhetoric?