Okay, I want to bitch about a small thing that bugs me a little. To begin, let's do a close reading of Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid that it realistically can't withstand.
A lot of the humour in this series comes from the disconnect between claims made in the diary and the ground truth. But how do you access the ground truth to make the comparison, when you are supposedly reading a diary? Well, the Doylist explanation is that Kinney cheats, and makes the doodles much more reflective of ground truth than the diary entries themself are.
The Last Straw, page 1
Reading this series as a kid, I saw nothing weird with this and took the disconnect at face value. I'd read the above page, and at ten years old what I'd get from it is that Greg thinks he's a good person, but in reality he's a twat. Actually, I'd sometimes get genuinely so steaming mad at Greg for his obliviousness and ragequit reading the book at hand because he pissed me off so bad.
But like, if you actually take the premise of the books (too) seriously, what Greg did was write down the words "it's not easy for me to think of ways to improve myself, because I'm already pretty much one of the best people I know." Then, after he wrote those words, he then drew a doodle of himself saying the words "I think you should work on chewing your potato chips more quietly" to his mom, who is clearly just chilling on the couch not bothering anyone.
So Greg might still be a twat, but the one thing that you actually can't accuse him of is obliviousness towards his own behaviour.
The Last Straw, page 40
Here's another example. Greg writes one thing (he's helping Rowley feel like he's contributing to the project) and means a shittier thing that you only get to understand via the illustration (he gets to be warm and toasty indoors while Rowley's tricked into staying outside in the freezing cold).
The text actively denies the interpretation that Greg is oblivious to his shittiness. He's chosen to draw certain drawings portraying himself being an ass to his family and friends! Taking the text at face value, Greg Heffley has an irony-tinged self awareness of his own shittiness.
Okay, so why did I subject you to this, especially since Jeff Kinney clearly did not write the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series intending for anyone to think this hard about Greg Heffley's characterization?
Well, in real life, every so often someone is made a main character of the internet against their will. In certain cases of this, in the backlash I'll see claims about said main character that are theoretically compatible with the text but quite incompatible with the metatext: with the accurate model of a person that would publish the text that contains the claims on the internet for the world to see.
As a concrete example, I remember Daniel Oppenheimer getting a lot of shit for his NYT article, "How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me". There were lots of dunkings along the lines of "yikes, he comes off so badly here". Well, yes! He deliberately wrote the piece such that he would come off badly:
The diagnosis comes after I relate the story of a tantrum I threw at my 48th birthday dinner. It involved me storming out of a restaurant, in front of our kids and friends, and coming back only after a solid 15-minute sulk.
I really don't think he's asking for the reader's sympathy or understanding here, you know?
I want to be precise here: I am not saying that people who write unflattering confessional posts on the internet actually all have perfect self awareness all the time or that it's unsophisticated to dunk on them.
Without commenting on whether or not I agree, I think it's perfectly fine to make claims that this is abuse apologism with DARVO characteristics, or aura farming, or that the marriage is NGMI. These are all very reasonable claims, in that both the text and the metatext can support such readings.
The text supports that Greg is an ass, the metatext does not support that Greg is oblivious about it. If you must dunk, please only make the first claim.
Anyways, this is one of those dynamics that I've noticed frequently enough that it's slightly annoying to not have a word or concept for it, so here you go.
Now go forth and stop reading confessional essays by sensitive men and going "wow this guy has no self-awareness" about them. I understand that the metatextually literate term these days is "performative male".