When a creator answers a question about their work, should they provide an In-Universe answer or a Real Life answer? The former is the Watsonian perspective, the latter Doylist.
The terms note reference Sherlock Holmes:
- Watsonian commentary relates to Dr. John Watson, Holmes' friend and supposed chronicler of his adventures in-universe.
- Doylist commentary relates to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Real Life author of the Holmes stories.
Simply put, if you were to ask a question about Sherlock Holmes, you would probably get a different answer depending on whether you asked Dr. Watson or Sir Arthur.
Watsonian or in-universe or diegetic explanations function within the logic of the narrative. Watsonian explanations are things like "Character X was lying", "He had plastic surgery over the summer", and "The main character fell off a cliff". Tropes which take a generally Watsonian perspective include:
- Anthropic Principle
- Author's Saving Throw
- Some forms of Death of the Author
- Fan Wank
- Fridge Brilliance
- Fridge Horror
- Hand Wave
- In-Universe
- Justified Trope
- The many justifications that follow Headscratchers.
- Retcon
- Wild Mass Guessing
Doylist or out-of-universe or exegetic commentary considers the work as a created object, and prefers exegetic explanations with particular attention to the author's intentions. Doylist explanations are things like "The author changed his mind" or "The actor died, so they had to retire the character" or "They didn't have the budget for an animatronic puppet, so they changed the character to an ordinary human". Doylist tropes include:
- Artistic License and all of its subtropes
- The Character Died with Him
- Depending on the Writer
- Died During Production
- Executive Meddling
- Enforced Trope
- Forgot About His Powers
- Idiot Ball and all its subtropes
- The Law of Conservation of Detail
- The Other Darrin
- Pandering to the Base and all of its subtropes.
- Plot Hole
- Real Life Writes the Plot and all of its subtropes
- Rule of Index and all its subtropes
A more modern example might be the proliferation of Rubber-Forehead Aliens in the Star Trek series. It is revealed in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that an ancient humanoid race "seeded" the galaxy with their genes, thereby causing humanoid intelligent life to evolve independently throughout the Milky Way. This is the Watsonian explanation. The Doylist explanation is that Rubber-Forehead Aliens are cheap to produce, require relatively little imagination to write for (Most Writers Are Human, after all) or design, allow the audience to easily read the emotions of alien characters, etc. (And budget was always a concern for Star Trek; when Klingons first exhibited the Rubber-Forehead Aliens trope it was an improvement on their previous make-up!)
Another example is the In-Universe example in Noises Off, where Freddie is such a method actor, he needs a motivation for everything
. The director and his co-stars initially tell him it's because the jokes later in the play will have no sense without certain things happening, and that he also plays the Sheik because it's part of a joke. But because Freddie's deeply depressed from a recent divorce, Lloyd gives up and gives him a Watsonian reason for why his character is doing anything and why he looks exactly like the Sheik.
Consistency plays a major role in whether a trope is Watsonian or Doylist. By default, Watsonian tropes are defined by Internal Consistency, and are susceptible to Excess of Internal Consistency in the hands of an author that doesn't know how to restrict information to focus on the narrative. Meanwhile, Doylist tropes are defined by External and Genre Consistency, and could suffer from Lack of Internal Consistency if the author doesn't have the ability (either by Executive Meddling or their own writing skills) to address the narrative oddities in their work. Tropes Are Tools, and neither explanation is more preferable than the other.
When Playing with a Trope, note that sometimes a Doylist explanation is interjected purposely into a narrative; for example, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail the Knights of the Round Table (or what is left of them) are chased by the Legendary Black Beast of "AAAAAAAARGH" in the common surreal Terry Gilliam style transitional animation, and are eventually cornered with no chance to escape. What saves them? The animator suffers from a fatal heart attack. Series with No Fourth Wall or as little of one as possible exaggerate this line of thought so that the Doylist answer is the Watsonian one; for instance, the titular The Unbelievable Gwenpool has many of her actions motivated by the knowledge that she'll be doomed to being C-List Fodder or trapped in Comic-Book Limbo if she fails to be an important enough character in the Marvel Universe for future out-of-universe writers to use.
On a less absurdist note, Direct Line to the Author is a way of smuggling Doylist explanations into a Watsonian paradigm by introducing a fictional author. And finally, most creators don't stick to strictly one interpretation, as the page quotes from PTerry suggest — it should be also noted that in Discworld, Watsonian and Doylist perspectives frequently overlap with each other, as "narrative causality" is a commonly accepted force in-universe...
Conversely, some authors acknowledge that they don't have complete hold over the characters they've created and allow them to operate on their own logic — which is an example of Watsonian perspective influencing Doylist one.
As a fun aside, in the German-speaking fandom of the Disney Ducks Comic Universe, the two ways of analyzing the stories are called Donaldismus literaricus (which treats the work of Carl Barks and others as works of art and literature) and Donaldismus archaeologicus (which treats them as factual reports from the Earth-like planet called Stella Anatium — the Star of the Ducks). In the D.O.N.A.L.D. (Deutsche Organisation Nichtkommerzieller Anhänger des lauteren Donaldismus = German Organization of Non-Commercial Adherents of True Donaldism) the latter tends to dominate. Donald Duck comics are Serious Business, definitely.
Compare and contrast Literary Agent Hypothesis, which tries to have it both ways by positing that Doyle was acting as Watson's literary agent by writing a fictionalized account of the real events that happened to Watson.
