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 reference Sherlock Holmes:
- "Watsonian" commentary is named for Dr John Watson, Holmes' friend and colleague within the stories, who in-universe is also the chronicler of their adventures that we read.
- "Doylist" commentary is named for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the Real Life author of the Holmes stories.
Simply put, if you were to ask a question about Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson would probably give you a different answer than Sir Arthur would.
Watsonian, in-universe, or diegetic explanations function within the logic of the narrative. Watsonian explanations are things like "Bob was lying", "He had plastic surgery over the summer", and "Alice drank a magic potion that turned her into a human being". Tropes taking a generally Watsonian perspective include:
- Anthropic Principle
- 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, out-of-universe, or exegetic commentary considers the work as a created object, and prefers explanations based on the intent of the author(s) and real-life circumstances. Doylist explanations are things like "The authors changed their minds", "The actor died, so they had to recast the role" or "They didn't have the budget for an animatronic puppet, so they changed the character to an ordinary human". Tropes with a Doylist perspective include:
- Artistic License and its subtropes
- Author's Saving Throw
- The Character Died with Him
- Depending on the Writer
- Died During Production
- Executive Meddling
- Enforced Element
- Forgot About His Powers
- Idiot Ball and its subtropes
- Misapplication of "justified" in a Justifying Edit
- The Law of Conservation of Detail
- The Other Darrin
- Pandering to the Base and tropes used for it
- Plot Hole
- Events that fall under Real Life Writes the Plot
- Tropes applying to Rule of Index
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 (budget was always a concern for Star Trek: when Klingons debuted the Rubber-Forehead look it was an improvement on their previous makeup!), require relatively little imagination to write for (Most Writers Are Human, after all) or design, help the audience read the emotions of alien characters, etc.
An in-story example is in theatrical farce Noises Off, which features a play-within-a-play where one actor, Freddie, needs a motivation for everything
. The director and his co-stars initially tell him it's because scenes later in the play will have no sense without certain things happening, and that he also plays the Arab Oil Sheikh character because it's part of a joke — which are Doylist reasons. Freddie though is such a Method actor he can't find this enough to account for his character's actions. The director gives up and gives him a Watsonian reason for why his character is doing anything and why he looks exactly like the Sheikh, which works.
Consistency plays a major role in whether a trope is Watsonian or Doylist. By default, Watsonian tropes are defined by internal consistency. They can be susceptible to excess of internal consistency if used by an author who doesn't know how to restrict information to focus on the narrative. Meanwhile, Doylist tropes are defined by external and genre consistency. These could suffer from lack of internal consistency if the author is limited (by either Executive Meddling or their own writing skills) from addressing the narrative oddities in their work. Tropes Are Tools, and neither explanation is preferable to 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 (at least, those left of them) are chased by the Legendary Black Beast of "AAAAAAAARGH" in the typical surreal Terry Gilliam-style transitional animation and are eventually cornered with no chance to escape. What saves them? The animator suffers a fatal heart attack. Stories with No Fourth Wall or as little of one as possible exaggerate this line of thought to make the Doylist answer the Watsonian one; for instance, the titular The Unbelievable Gwenpool has many of her in-universe 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 important enough 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 (like Dr Watson himself), from whom the real-world creator of the work (in Holmes' case, Conan Doyle) is said to have merely got the story. The in-universe "author" can have both the perspective of a character within the tale and that of someone with a quasi-external overview who, we are meant to believe, wrote it down.
Compare and contrast Literary Agent Hypothesis, where fans try to have it both ways by positing that the real-world author was acting as the in-universe character's literary agent by writing a fictionalized account of real events that happened to the protagonists, even though there is no canonical support for this — i.e., the actual creator does not pretend this themselves, either within the work or elsewhere.
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 a Doylist one.
And finally, most creators don't stick strictly to one interpretation, as the page quotations from Terry Pratchett suggest. Indeed, in Discworld, Watsonian and Doylist perspectives frequently overlap with each other, as "narrative causality" is a commonly accepted law of nature in that universe…
It has been suggested the pair of terms was popularized on the Lois McMaster Bujold fan mailing list circa the early years of the 2000s, though references can be found to their being used on Usenet in the 1990s, and before that in the Sherlock Holmes-focused Baker Street Irregulars zine in the 1980s and likely much earlier.
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.