Who is Doylist?

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

I need to know...

[Dante]

Are you actually asking for our personal inclinations, or are you looking for definitions of the terms? I'm not clear.

For anyone who doesn't know, Watsonian and Doylist are perspectives adopted in critical analysis of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. If a story contains an inconsistency or outright mistake, whose fault is it? Is it that of Watson, the character, who at the end of the day is human and may have slipped up in his understanding of the events that he documents? Or is it Doyle's mistake, the author, who is also only human? You might also think of them as in-universe (Watsonian) and out-of-universe (Doylist) perspectives.

For myself, I think it's almost always obvious whether a problem is one introduced unintentionally by a flawed author; but people sufficiently attached to the integrity of the fictional universe are free to conceive of an in-universe explanation, though I object strenuously to any assertion that such mistakes are deliberate - a practice which inevitably leads down the rabbit hole of madness where theorists tie themselves in knots over microscopically elaborate versions of events which lose all resemblance to the original work they claimed to enjoy.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Amazing Dante! Thanks so much! I felt like an idiot every time I was discussing a subject about ASOUE and someone used these terms ... (they don't appear in dictionaries English-Portuguese, so you can understand how I felt). I had come to imagine that they were two former ASOUE theorists who had different understandings of the books ... I was already thinking of going into conversation with them somehow. In any case, I can now say that I am a strong advocate (perhaps one of the strongest in history) defending a purely Watsonian interpretation of ASOUE's text. And basically, it's a discussion that will never end. And you know, I don't want it to end.

It's like I'm at one end and you're at the other end. Dante, isn't that it?
Thanks again.

Edit 1: Dante ,I realize that it is not entirely true what I said above. I reread some of my own texts, and I also give some Doylist explanations. They are just different from most. I wrot:  "Daniel Handler duplicates events to confuse you." I also wrote that Daniel Handler increased the difficulty of understanding the text because many readers said their books were repetitive and predictable. These are explanations involving our universe, not Lemony Snicket's universe. And I also claim that I refuse to accept that Daniel Handler made serious chronological errors in his own work, which means that I accept the fact that Daniel Handler made minor chronological errors in his work.

[Hermes]

One thing worth adding is that these terms are used because it was largely the Sherlock Holmes fandom that developed the game of working out 'what really happened'; they go to great lengths to make things in the books consistent, treating the events as real, even if they are likely in fact to be errors by the author. Many other fandoms have now taken this up, of course, but Sherlockians do it in professionally published books, which is rare elsewhere, I think.

I remember the first time I picked up a Sherlockian book, expecting a discussion of the stories, of the kind one normally gets in books about literature, and instead finding this strange detective enterprise; 'the first question that arises is the location of Watson's wound', and so on - all done on the assumption that the reader knew what was going on, and it needed no explanation.

So, inquiries of this kind are Watsonian, while more conventional literary studies which treat the books as having an author are Doylist.