Probably only coherent to my future self, and that's perfectly okay.

It's not selling out; it's helping other people to buy in.

Besides, you can't be disruptive within a place you're not allowed into. (The point of graduate school was to get commit access to the academic culture repository so that you could use and share it for Great Awesome, so go get it.)

There are different ways to say the same thing I want to say. Sort of. Yes, the medium is the message, but all the alternative-format things I have -- specifically, the ones that look like theatre dialogues -- could easily be reworded into more "conventional" academic prose. "Hamlet said... (blah blah blah), to which Laertes replied (blah blah). In contrast, Polonius..."

The literature review is not meant to prove how smart I am or how much I have read.
The literature review is not meant to prove how smart I am or how much I have read.
The literature review is not meant to prove how smart I am or how much I have read.

The literature review is supposed to put the things the reader needs into their knapsack. I only need enough to explain what I'm doing and why.

You can do great things with words once you've written them. You simply need to write them.

Just write.
Just write.
Just sit down and write.

(And yes. This is hard.)