GoKawiilMetatextual Literacy
14 Apr, 2026
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).
... continue reading