Lady, EVOLVED 
a metaphor is…
• when something in a story is made to stand in for something in real life?
• a figure of speech which equates a thing with something else which has similar qualities?
strongly disagree with preliminary results here
@Lady the furmer is the more interesting device but idk that i’d call it a metaphor
@aescling so when you think people are speaking metaphorically that means they are saying “her smile was a sunrise” a bunch
@aescling when someone says “X is a metaphor” that means X is a figure of speech like “the mountains were a great maw rising towards the stars”
@Lady if i were feeling very pedantic about it that is what i would say, yes
@aescling you would be wrong since “X is a metaphor” takes a prepositional phrase, “for Y”, which makes no fucking sense with your definition
@Lady i disagree that it necessarily takes a puurepositional phrase
@aescling but you agree it does take one
@aescling surely you are not arguing “Zelda is a metaphor for how trauma provides an opportunity for white women to confront how the forces which oppress them are necessarily implicated in their own whiteness” is nonsensical or ungrammatical
@Lady i feel like that's not really the best example because X can stand in fur Y in the case where X just is Y lol
@aescling it’s a perfectly fine example because interpreting “metaphor” as “a figure of speech” is clearly nonsensical (Zelda is not a figure of speech), yet the sentence is sensical, therefore that interpretation of metaphor must be the wrong one
@Lady i wouldn't call it a metaphor???? zelda is just About that?????? it's a diffurent thing?????????
@aescling zelda the character not zelda the series
@aescling zelda, the character, is a storytelling device wherein a fictional sequence of events (her character development) stands in for something real, the way in which trauma provides an opportunity for white women to confront how the forces which oppress them are necessarily implicated in their own whiteness
@aescling “a storytelling device wherein something fictional stands in for something real” is what i am arguing a metaphor is
@aescling whiteness per se isn’t a concept in Hyrule. there is obvious Hylian supremacy but Hylians come in all shapes and colours. but whiteness is a concept in the real world, and Zelda evokes it so strongly that it's not possible for us to not read her that way. consequently we are able to map things said about the fictional attitudes of Hylian supremacy onto real attitudes of white supremacy. thus one stands as a metaphor for the other.
regardless of whether you agree with the above, my point is that it is a perfectly grammatical thing to say, and, descriptively, provides strong evidence for an argument that a definition of metaphor as “storytelling device” is a correct one
i do not think such strong arguments exist for metaphor as “figure of speech”; i think that definition is, in fact, mostly useless (as “simile” fulfills exactly the same role)
