Weirdness.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I made a comment over on the Commoner Campaign thread that I didn't consider the game weird enough for me.  Polycarp shot back with "Commoners of Cthulhu".  I replied saying that horror generally does not seem weird to me.  Since that was a discussion for another thread I am making it this thread.

So what does "weird" mean for me?  I consider "weird" to be "not of the ordinary".  The "ordinary" is "the common way of doing things".  So weird pretty much means something that defies the expected.

So that's why horror isn't "weird" to me: it delivers what's expected, it has to.  It can try to deliver it in a new way, but if it's not trying to provoke fear/terror then it's not horror, and so that element will always be predictable and ruin any weirdness.  To explain my point further take a look at this short comic:

WARNING: POSSIBLY DISGUSTING

As you can see it starts out looking horrifying but ends up being funny.  That's weird.

[Llum]

Weird for me is something unexpected like you said. Though for horror I would argue that its not it being scary that has to be unexpected, but *how* it scares you can be weird.

I'll also agree that weird tends to be funny for me (I'm a fan of surreal and absurd humor)

[dice]1d6+1d4+11[/dice]

[Seraph]

I took an English class last year: American Gothic, in which my teacher made the disctinction between "terror" and "horror."  Terror, by her definition was in the unseen threat:  the fear of something unknown, or that could not be seen.  Horror, by contrast, was the seen threat:  Something frightening perhaps, but an identified threat.  Lovecraft, with his creatures of impossible geometries and madness, is pretty firmly set on the horror side of the gothic.  When the mystery is taken away, it is the threat itself, exposed, that must to all the work in the attempt to cause fear.  This frequently results in a simple gore-fest, in the vein of the Zombie outbreak scenario.  The fear comes from the fact that they are everywhere, and if you slip up, you may die and become one of them, or in some scenarios, not die straitaway, but be slowly devoured by the disease that turns you into a Zombie.  The idea can be scary, but the action gets rather predictable.  After a while they just aren't scary anymore.

Perhaps what you are looking for is Terror.  Because terror is an unseen threat, you don't necessarily know what it is you're dealing with, and it's all about being surprised.  This is the root of the bait and switch, where you can make an assumption and have it turned on your head.  It can also be the scenario when, say in a movie, the lights go out, and you listen while you watch a black screen.  It's all the more frightening, because you can only imagine what's going on.

[SDragon]

Although I think Seraphine's post was unintentionally off-topic, I'd like to comment that, by those definitions, I do find Terror scarier then Horror. The product of an imagination forced to be overactive is very scary, in my opinion. Blood and guts is just something I could go to a local butcher shop to see. I'd also like to add that, while the product of an overactive imagination is scary in and of itself, it becomes even scarier when you stop to consider that products of your imagination are just as much products of you yourself; the Madman didn't swing his ax into Harry Hero's gut, you did.

Back on topic, though, I'm actually reading a book series that incorporates quite a bit of weirdness. Weirdness, in this case, seems to be something that seems like it should shatter verisimilitude, but somehow doesn't. Instead of finding yourself saying "that can't happen!", you find yourself saying "how is that happening?!" Something is fundamentally wrong, but it still seems to work. There's a hint that some sort of internal logic applies, but damned if you know what it is.

An example from the book series I'm reading (Everworld, by k.A. Applegate, in case anybody was wondering. It's really good):

Weird is when you're working your day job at Starbucks, serving up grande mochas to snotty ponytailed yuppies, only to wake up to being on a Viking warship headed off to Mexica, to fight against the blood thirsty Aztecs.

[Steerpike]

I'd link weirdness with wrongness to some extent, and that ties in with the unexpected.  Weird things are incongruous on some level.  I suppose that's why I find some - not all - horror/terror "weird" - it relies on a sense of the uncanny or wrong.

[blockquote=Seraphine_Harmonium]Lovecraft, with his creatures of impossible geometries and madness, is pretty firmly set on the horror side of the gothic. [/blockquote]Hmm, I'd always seen Lovecraft as being fascinated with the Unknown, only hinting at the specifics of his creatures - many of them seem to defy categorization or description (even Cthulu seems bigger than the mind can hold).  His stories all revolve around a sense of the unknowable - when you start to piece things together you go mad, as the human mind cannot contain the awesome sublimity of the truth.  I associate the word "unfathomable" with Lovecraft, and he seems very preoccupied with forbidden knowledge and thus mystery and terror...

[Seraph]

I don't think it was truly off-topic, although perhaps I did an inadequate job of tying it back to the OP.  I shall try again.

Anyway, it is hard for horror to be truly "weird" because of its nature.  The villains are pretty much out in the open.  What are you going to do?  Fight them, or run from them--run until you have to fight to get away.  Regardless of the villains and how "weird" they might be, it is difficult for horror to be truly weird overall when the structure is always the same.  A bloodbath or a story about college kids getting axed one by one can only get so weird.  At this point I am pretty much restating Silvercat's own point.  That's why I brought up Terror as an alternative.  In terror, where everything is unknown, you don't know what to expect.  If you think you know, you're wrong.  Even if you catch the gist, you've probably missed some detail in the dark.  Terror is all about defying expectations.  That's why I don't think it was really off topic.  


@Steerpike: *Shrug* I guess it's just my interpretation of what Lovecraft I have read, which is admittedly not all that much.  I suppose it was an unjustified claim, but the point I was making about Horror stands.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Terror isn't weird to me: if something is unseen/unknown then it's bland and thus fits under my umbrella of "expected".

Truthfully I never find anything frightening to be weird.  Perhaps it's because fear is most often about not understanding something, but weirdness requires that I understand the thing so I can compare it to expectations.  And when I understand something it's not all that frightening any more.

[Steerpike]

I guess we're just different people :)

For me in Alien (which I consider both a weird and a scary movie) two effects occur in the first half of the movie (to me the scarier half in some respects), one of which might be classified as terror, the other as horror.

The first is the scene on the huge alien ship where Kane gets attacked by the facehugger.  We don't know anything about the ship; it's unreal and sublimely huge and mysterious.  Nor do we know anything about the eggs, and though we perhaps suspect the worst, it's likely that no one predicts the facehugger itself latching onto Kane.  Once it's attached, we don't know what it's doing, either (unless we've had the movie spoiled for us).  This, I think, is fear of the unseen, terror.  When the facehugger drops off, we remain uneasy.  We know all isn't well, but we don't know what form it will take.  Suspense is created, as we have some expectation but the form of it remains unknown and thus terrifying.

The second effect is when the alien pupae bursts through Kane's chest.  While we expect something to happen, I doubt many people would have predicted this happening if they didn't know it was going to already (the cast themselves were only shakily informed by Ridley Scott, so that their reactions would be as genuine as possible).  Yet in that moment when the alien bursts through, we suddenly understand everything: aha!  The facehugger was laying an egg in Kane!  It died because its function was accomplished!  Etc.

But now our fear of the unknown is replaced by a fear of the known and understood.  We are disturbed: the human body has been used and transformed in a way it wasn't "intended."  The idea that to the aliens we're all potential incubators and that we could have something growing inside us ready to burst violently free is both uncannily familiar (birth) and grotesquely unfamiliar (it's a freakin' alien!).  To me, a creature with two jaws that hatched from an egg implanted in someone by a facehugging spider-thing and bursts through its host's chest is pretty freakin' weird.  It's not funny (except in a really dark sort of way, like when the alien sort of looks at them heheh...), but it is both frightening/disturbing.

If you watch the scene a second time, it does potentially lose some of its "weird" or unexpectedness.  Then you've go to turn to Spaceballs' singing, tapdancing alien pupae to get a new level of weird (that scene depends on the bursting alien being expected, though; if it hadn't been expected, the alien bursting through itself would be pretty darn weird).

Ash being revealed as an android also strikes me as weird.  It's unexpected and bizarre but after the initial shock we realize what he is and understand his mechanisms and we're disturbed at the idea that something that looks and acts so authentically human might actually be a simulacra.

Just my take.  I think the link between absurdism and weirdness is a valid one but I tend to think of weird as a broader concept potentially related to words like "strange," "grotesque," "unsettling," "uncanny," and "exotic."  Perhaps I just have a broader definition of weirdness.

[Seraph]

Terror isn't weird to me: if something is unseen/unknown then it's bland and thus fits under my umbrella of "expected".

Truthfully I never find anything frightening to be weird.  Perhaps it's because fear is most often about not understanding something, but weirdness requires that I understand the thing so I can compare it to expectations.  And when I understand something it's not all that frightening any more.

I personally don't see how you can say that something is bland when you don't know what it is, much less say it's bland BECAUSE you don't know what it is.  Because the unknown is the unknown, by definition you can't assign qualities to it.  Granted, terror doesn't always have to be "weird," but it certainly has a lot of potential to be, at least by the definition you gave in the OP.  Addressing you second point here, I think that in terror, even though you don't really understand what's going on, you naturally start to make assumptions and hold certain expectations.  The weirdness you speak of comes in the moment of revelation, when with a sudden understanding, you compare the truth with the expectations you have made.  

Or for your weird, are you thinking of a more random and simply surprising way of breaking expectations?  Because NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!!!!!

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I personally don't see how you can say that something is bland when you don't know what it is, much less say it's bland BECAUSE you don't know what it is.  Because the unknown is the unknown, by definition you can't assign qualities to it.

Actually you've already done that: unknown = unknown.  Unknown is a quality.  And for terror it's supposed to be the only quality, hence being the same all the time and being bland.

'¦'¦'¦'¦I think that in terror, even though you don't really understand what's going on, you naturally start to make assumptions and hold certain expectations.  The weirdness you speak of comes in the moment of revelation, when with a sudden understanding, you compare the truth with the expectations you have made.

Well as I said before those expectations have to be defied.  How weird is it when something meets what you were expecting?

Or for your weird, are you thinking of a more random and simply surprising way of breaking expectations?  Because NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!!!!!

It doesn't have to be that kind.  It's just that when people use that kind it works better than ways like terror.

Here's how I see it: for something to be "weird" it has to defy my expectations.  So I need to understand what the "something" is enough to have expectations that can be defied.  And once defied I need to understand how they were defied.  I don't have to understand the result just how it isn't what I was expecting.

So for terror there are only two qualities: scary and unknown.  Everything else is impossible to know and therefor impossible to understand.  I expect that the unknown will become known, so that doesn't contribute unless the thing remains unknown.  So the only other thing left is the scary: if that comes true then the terror has met all my expectations and is thus not "weird".

[Steerpike]

But if you didn't expect something to be scary, and then suddenly it was, defying your expectations - say a clown comes out (maybe a cliche example) to a kids party, starts doing tricks, and then abruptly devours the children - this might qualify as weird?  I'm feeling that your sense of weird has to be accompanied by a shift in tone rather than just an image/event/occurrence that was unexpected.

I'm not sure your definition of weird is a very common one.  To bring up my favorite fantasist - China Mieville - who writes "weird fiction": he has a race of women with scarab beetles for heads, the khepri, who create statues out of hardened spit.  He also has humanoid cacti.  Now I understand that this doesn't fit your particular conception of "weird" in the sense of unexpected but would you concede that neither of these creations are bland or ordinary?  Cacti aren't usually humanoid and women don't usually have bug heads: they're incongruous and bizarre, so aren't they on some level weird?

[Seraph]

I personally don't see how you can say that something is bland when you don't know what it is, much less say it's bland BECAUSE you don't know what it is.  Because the unknown is the unknown, by definition you can't assign qualities to it.

Actually you've already done that: unknown = unknown.  Unknown is a quality.  And for terror it's supposed to be the only quality, hence being the same all the time and being bland.
 [ic]Ok Mr. Socrates, wait a second.  By that logic, if the unknown is bland because unknown=unknown: a quality which it must always have, then weird is also bland because weird=weird: a quality IT must always have.  You aren't making a valid criticism of the unknown.  Just because in terror you are dealing with "the unknown" doesn't mean you never know anything about it until the end.  I mean, you usually get to see at least some clues as the story goes on from which to make conjectures.  [/ic]

'¦'¦'¦'¦I think that in terror, even though you don't really understand what's going on, you naturally start to make assumptions and hold certain expectations.  The weirdness you speak of comes in the moment of revelation, when with a sudden understanding, you compare the truth with the expectations you have made.

Well as I said before those expectations have to be defied.  How weird is it when something meets what you were expecting?
 [ic]Well of course this is possible, but don't treat it as a given that your expectations will be correct.[/ic]

Or for your weird, are you thinking of a more random and simply surprising way of breaking expectations?  Because NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!!!!!

It doesn't have to be that kind.  It's just that when people use that kind it works better than ways like terror.

Here's how I see it: for something to be "weird" it has to defy my expectations.  So I need to understand what the "something" is enough to have expectations that can be defied.  And once defied I need to understand how they were defied.  I don't have to understand the result just how it isn't what I was expecting.

So for terror there are only two qualities: scary and unknown.  Everything else is impossible to know and therefor impossible to understand.  I expect that the unknown will become known, so that doesn't contribute unless the thing remains unknown.  So the only other thing left is the scary: if that comes true then the terror has met all my expectations and is thus not "weird".
 [ic]They do not have to be the only qualities, although they are the only given qualities.  I suppose I can see what you mean about the unknown becoming known, although on the scary, it is possible, in a sense, to defy that expectation too.  Perhaps the thing you have been running from is not a threat at all--perhaps it is an ally keeping you safe from the REAL danger; one that may have been in plain sight all the time.  But I can see there is little chance of this going anywhere, and expect I shall drop the point before we get too bogged down in it.  One last thing before I go:  in ANY genre, there is always room for bits of weirdness.  There can be weirdness in puzzles and challenges; there can be weirdness in characters and the way they interact; there can be weirdness in the methods; weirdness in the situations people are placed in (be it in horror or terror or downright comedy).  Even escaping from Zombies can be weird if you have to go about it in a strange and creative way, such as by making a mold for a broken key out of dog crap and filling it with melted plastic from a toy cannon to make a key that can get you through that door.[/ic]

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

@Seraphine: "Weird = weird."
But the thing is you aren't expecting it to be weird.  If the thing is already weird it can have that quality always, but then it isn't really "weird" as it's been defined.

Also you mention about how the terror starts to become known.  Well, once it starts to become known it isn't unknown.

I'm feeling that your sense of weird has to be accompanied by a shift in tone rather than just an image/event/occurrence that was unexpected.

Not really.  It's just that so often if something doesn't shift tone it rarely goes on to defy expectations.

I'm not sure your definition of weird is a very common one.

I think it's like a lot of other peoples'.  We're just differing on what we consider about other qualities that contribute to it, such as unknownness.

To bring up my favorite fantasist - China Mieville - who writes "weird fiction": he has a race of women with scarab beetles for heads, the khepri, who create statues out of hardened spit.  He also has humanoid cacti.  Now I understand that this doesn't fit your particular conception of "weird" in the sense of unexpected but would you concede that neither of these creations are bland or ordinary?  Cacti aren't usually humanoid and women don't usually have bug heads: they're incongruous and bizarre, so aren't they on some level weird?

How is that expected?  I certainly hadn't thought of those ideas.  So to me they're weird.  Weird and very un-bland.

[Steerpike]

They aren't expected, but neither are they per se unexpected.  There is not expectation that gets confounded, the imagery itself is just bizarre.  This is why I find a lot of horror weird - because its creatures are strange, like the khepri or the catcacae.  Cthulu is a gargantuan squid-faced thing with bat-wings... is he really less weird than humanoid catci?

[Seraph]

I was just saying that since you can start to see clues and learn "things" about the Unknown, there are levels of known and unknown.  Seeing a pattern gives you some knowledge of the Unknown thing, but you still don't know what this unknown thing IS.  Therefore it is still unknown.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here.  It sounds like you're saying a weird thing can always be weird but then it isn't weird.  You seem to be speaking in paradoxes.  And for "you aren't expecting it to be weird" I suppose "it" means the thing which is weird.  So you aren't expecting A to be weird, but for the weirdness to be unexpected, you can't know that A is "weird."  If "weird" is the unexpected, obviously you can't know A, because if you knew A, you would expect A to be weird, but since you expected it to be weird, it would no longer BE weird.  So therefore, for something to be weird, it has to be unknown, doesn't it?