This is my life

It comes from the actual Sherlock Holmes original stories, and has to do with the fact that Watson-as-narrator says shit in them that is just plain factually wrong.

So then the question becomes: is it wrong because Doyle was ignorant of the subject (aka is it authorfail), or is it wrong because while Doyle is quite well informed on the topic, Watson was ignorant and talking out of his ass (aka is it characterisation).

So Doylist refers to looking at issues of the text from outside, from the perspective of considering what the author does and doesn't know, or what their agenda might be, or so on.

Whereas Watsonian refers to looking at the text only in context of the text - ie in the case of the original, accepting the proposition that Watson is in fact a Victorian man of his background - and looking for explanation there.


So a Doylist approach to, say, figuring out why there are no characters with mentioned dark skin in LotR would focus on Tolkien and Tolkien's prejudices and inclinations and so on. Whereas a Watsonian one would focus on the fact that, in-world, LotR is an actual book (the Red Book) that was written by the hobbits and annotated by the Gondorians and is thus logically focused on the goings-on of their locale, and the people in those locales, and for in-world political reasons there's not a lot of traffic between the places with people with dark skin and the places where the hobbits etc were.