Illenarrative dissonance

**Illenarrative dissonance**, which can alternatively be referred to as **autonarrative dissonance** or **illeistic dissonance** is the tonal inconsistency of an author's detachment from written events and their involvement with them which creates a conflict between the need for the first person and desire for the third person. Illenarrative conflict occurs when an author neither wants to speak directly in the first person or refer to themselves in the third person.

The term originated from the fucked-up imagination of this wiki's author [hi] to describe the felt struggle of the author in writing about himself in a way modally consistent but not self-pretentious. It's derived from illeism (ILL-ay-izz-um / ILL-ee-izz-um) -- the act of referring to oneself in the third person -- and a popular, pre-existing kind of meta narrative conflict, ludonarrative dissonance.

## Illeism and self-reference in Goblipedia

Being both a prominent member of the community and the author of its wiki, the author frequently references [my]self in the recounting and description of events. At the beginning of the wiki's creation, this dissonance was not felt until after multiple third-person references to [my]self, prompting the realization that [I] would be referencing [my]self constantly in the wiki. To combat this, articles began including parenthetical comments from the author either in the form of direct but brief breaks of third person to signify the author's recognition of illeism [like this] or imposed over third-person references to [me] to maintain detachment from the narrative while recognizing [my own] self-reference.

Stylistically, in-text, illenarrative comments are always put into brackets as to differentiate them from use of appropriate parenthesis (such as actual rhetorical parenthesis to provide extra information). Contextually, illenarrative dissonance happens in Goblipedia out of an unspoken insecurity, an internalized lack of confidence which inhibits [me] from presenting [my]self as someone independent of [my] own internal interpretations of [my]self and the external world. Consistent with Goblipedia's comedic breaking of writing convention, illenarrative dissonance also, in spontaneity with the author's hyper-self-awareness, occurs as a form of absurd meta humor within the wiki, and is tactically broken or excessively reinforced for different effects.

While illenarrative dissonance is a unique result of this wiki being authored by only one person, it can also be applied to any writing environment in which the author is their creation's subject and most significant audience.

## Criticisms

There are no actual criticisms of illenarrative dissonance as a term or as a concept, but there are several self-deprecatory comments [I have] made about the phenomenon which [I am] presenting as having originated from outside sources as a preemptive dismissal of what [I have] perceived to be inevitable judgement from actual outside sources. According to one criticism, illenarrative dissonance describes a phenomenon which has already been defined and discussed. This criticism, however, does not provide evidence for such other definition's existence, as it is derived from an insubstantial and equally incontrovertible phobia of vanity held by [me]. The only tangible support for this critique is the possibility that a term describing illenarrative dissonance does already exist, in which case would be incredibly awkward for the author of this article.

Another criticism of illenarrative dissonance is the fact that there are no other criticisms of illenarrative dissonance that [I have], and that this whole section of the article was to acknowledge the fact that there is a very real possibility that what [I am] describing already has a name for it, just that [I] wanted to make up a fun word to describe the feeling I get when I have to talk about myself in the third person because frankly I think semantics is cool and think constructed semantics is even cooler. Proponents of this argument additionally offer that my love for making up words is no different than a desire to sound smart using big, fancy language, a contributing factor behind the hyperawareness driving the author's illenarrative dissonance.

## The horror of the captive dolphin

Illenarrative dissonance is more broadly related to the feedback loop of constant inward reflection and modification inherent to one's own evaluation of art, especially when an artist is the subject of their own work. Because of illeism's characteristic of being obsessively self-reflective and self-aware, it shares similarity with that of the parasocial relationship between creator and audience on social media, wherein the two roles most often clearly defined in traditional media are super-positioned onto and self-serving to one another. This, like illeistic hyperawareness, creates a nauseating cycle of self-performance, self-judgement, and ultimately a warping of one's perception of the self and their external environment. Comedian Stewart Lee likens this paradoxical self-audience to that of a dolphin in captivity:

> ... And they say you shouldn't keep dolphins in concrete tanks because the endless sound of their own sonar bouncing back at them eventually drives them mad. But someone locked inside an aluminum-lined cell, listening to an endless loop of every ill-considered, 2 AM tweet they ever sent out, that is you, you are the mental dolphins of now; inward-looking, self-obsessed people with no attention span, hurling yourselves fakely [sic] out of your tanks in the self-inflicted wounds of your imagined, democratic choices, and it's no surprise to me that you've all gone mad...
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1. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz9Nad0bxDU