Friday Forum Philosophy - Week 3

[Matt Larkin (author)]

Week 3 (August 14th, 2009)
Genre Conventions

Every genre, in film, fiction, and gaming, has certain assumptions, conventions, and tropes. By breaking these principles we can surprise our audience. But we can also alienate them.

In world design, it can be hard to get a grip on a truly alien world. To what degree do you like to exploit the expectations of genre? To what degree do you embrace them? Toss them out entirely?

Do you prefer reading in a setting with familiar elements or something radically different?

Tropes becomes tropes because they work, right? So which ones are most overdone? Which ones are so much staples of a genre that they don't offend?

Blending genres is another risky move. Risk can mean big payoff, or falling flat. How do you like blended genres (i.e. space western). Which genres would you never enjoy blended?

[ooc]For the record, the commonly accepted fiction genres are as follows. Each genre has common subgenres, also with their own conventions, but I'm only going to talk subgenres for speculative fiction.

*Historical
*Adventure
*Romance
*Thriller
*Comedy
*Western

And our favorite, speculative fiction genres:

Sci-Fi (hard sci-fi, space opera, military, dystopian, cyberpunk)

Fantasy (science fantasy, sword & sorcery, epic/high fantasy, dark fantasy, wuxia, historical/alternate history, comic, urban) (and many debatable others)

Horror (monster, ghost, survival, occult, slasher)

[/ooc]

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Going for the information overload, are we? :huh:

UPDATE:
"To what degree do you like to exploit the expectations of genre?"
"Exploit" is a good word for it.  My hope is often times I'll let people settle into comfort'¦'¦.and then WHAM!, hit them with something that doesn't quite fit their stereotypical view.  Teach them to be ready for it.

"To what degree do you embrace them?"
I try not to see it that way.  I want to use what I like and people can name it after I'm done.

"Toss them out entirely?"
Those bits that show a sentient and/or spiritually-dominated view of the cosmos and anything in it.

"Do you prefer reading in a setting with familiar elements or something radically different?"
Mid-ground.  Too much either way and the story suffers.

"Tropes becomes tropes because they work, right?"
No.  A trope is defined after it happens, not before and then used.

"So which ones are most overdone?"
Anything centered around sentience, spirituality, and especially humans in any form being the most (or at lest a very) important thing.  People should start acknowledging their material- and instinctive-ness.
But not by using it to terrorize people with it in some nihilistic or horror-moral message.  That's just reinforcing the wrong idea.

"Which ones are so much staples of a genre that they don't offend?"
I think anything can be offensive if done the wrong way.

 "How do you like blended genres (i.e. space western). Which genres would you never enjoy blended?"
Comedy's good with everything.  Horror isn't good at all.  For me the other genres don't matter, it's their tone that's important.

[Steerpike]

I don't like the boundries of the speculative fiction genres: I much prefer the philosophy of the old pulp writers back in the 20's and 30's, who wrote "weird fiction," blending horror, sci fi, and fantasy together.  I've tried to carry this over to the Cadaverous Earth somewhat - hence, its set in our own future, is full of lost technology, lots of people cast spells, and demonic horrors and the like swarm over the earth.  I don't see blending these genres as inherently risky: I separating them as contrived.

It's the seperation of weird fiction into three genres that led to the build-up of my least favorite and most overused tropes.  The standard Tolkienian array of races and their odd metamorphosis into the sacred cows of fantasy puzzles me to no end.  I occasionally see treatment of these races that refreshes them (heck I'm using some them myself in my Goblin Campaign) and I'm not so revolted by them that I think they can never be fun, but I prefer the impulse of wild invention and unrestricted freedom that speculative fiction is underlied by.

Tropes are there for a reason, sure.  But just as Tropes Are Not Bad, Tropes Are Not Good, either.  I prefer the thematic tropes like the lurking evil below (or sealed-in-a-can evil) and things like that; I dislike those tropes that apply to what I think of as "setting specifics," things like elves and dwarves or the dogged adherence to medieval stasis.  Because fantasy (or weird fiction) can be anything (and that's the single greatest strength of the genre), it seems incredibly perverse to always have it look the same.  That's not to say that all roleplaying in Faerun/Middle Earth/Vanilla Fantasy Land is worthless, just that in general I think creators should be looking to the lesser-used mythologies, or inventing their own, instead of returning to the same racial and technological tropes again and again.

Fortunately, the shift towards weird fiction is happening, in a big way.  This site alone has lots of wildly inventive settings (Clockwork Jungle, Broken Verge, Gloria, Knife's Edge, Divergence...) and several that while still use some of the old tropes also radically update them and mix them in with more original elements (Jade Stage comes to mind), or are simply so well-crafted and detailed (i.e. Celtrica) that they feel not like a carbon copy of ME but like a world in their own right.  But Eberron, with its focus on pulp, noir, and magic-as-technology is a lot closer to the old weird fiction tradition than Faerun or Greyhawk ever managed.  In literature we've still got Christopher Paolinis cranking out derivative, watered down quest narratives, but we've also got the incipient New Weird, and even more traditional fantasy is starting to change its shape (Westeros is a far cry from Middle Earth, at least in terms of onscreen grittiness).  The sacred cows are being culled.

[blockquote=Silvercat Moonpaw]But not by using it to terrorize people with it in some nihilistic or horror-moral message. That's just reinforcing the wrong idea.[/blockquote]Heheheheh... Lovecraft!

I still like him a lot, but that's because I enjoy being alienated... in other words, I can see why he wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea.

[blockquote=Silvercat Moonpaw]Comedy's good with everything. Horror isn't good at all. For me the other genres don't matter, it's their tone that's important.[/blockquote]It's funny (and shows again how different our tastes are) - Goblin is a very deliberate blend of horror and comedy.  I actually think these two are quite closely connected (see Amazing Screw-On Head - or, for that matter, the all-time best horror/comedy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).   Perhaps because laughter and screaming are both pre-linguistic instincts.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Heheheheh... Lovecraft!

I still like him a lot, but that's because I enjoy being alienated... in other words, I can see why he wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea.

Are those stories about the horrors of the non-spiritual world and the animal side of behavior?  I know very little, but I never got that impression.  I don't think I'm talking about stories like that: I mean dystopian stories about how something like technology will ruin humans or letting instinctive feelings out is dangerous.

And how does liking being alienated help you like a horror story about it?  It would make me feel mocked.

It's funny (and shows again how different our tastes are) - Goblin is a very deliberate blend of horror and comedy.  I actually think these two are quite closely connected.  Perhaps because laughter and screaming are both pre-linguistic instincts.

I hate being afraid of things.  If fear comes from not understanding something then I guess fear makes me feel stupid.  I don't want to feel stupid, I want to feel smart.  I like comedy (at least certain kinds of it) because getting the joke makes me feel smart.  I hate horror because it feels like it's teasing me because I can't get the "joke".

[beejazz]

I use recognisable fantasy content (I don't know that I'd call the Tolkein elves/dwarves/etc. tropes), equally recognisable historical content (I've taken the timeline further ahead than standard fantasy does, but it stays easy to grok), and a smattering of steampunk content (robots, airships, mechanical limbs), and swords and sorcery tropes to run a mystery game.

I use content that everybody knows or can pick up quickly.

I think swords and sorcery tropes are good for gaming. There's room to do a lot of things you just couldn't do in real, rigid, historical settings. There's room for violence and selfishness and heroism that borders on idiotic and so many awesome things you never get to try in real life. There's also the occasional drowning in a puddle or getting splattered all over the walls by an ogre or going crazy and having your character turn into the campaign's villains, but the bad stuff is its own kind of fun.

And I think mystery is also a great fit for an RPGs but I can't get into why 'cause my session at the library's about over.

[Steerpike]

[blockquote=Silvercat Moonpaw]I hate being afraid of things. If fear comes from not understanding something then I guess fear makes me feel stupid. I don't want to feel stupid, I want to feel smart. I like comedy (at least certain kinds of it) because getting the joke makes me feel smart. I hate horror because it feels like it's teasing me because I can't get the "joke".[/blockquote]That's what I mean by being alienated, I suppose - not understanding something.  Being confronted by something alien, unfathomable, opaque, ungraspable, sublime perhaps.  That's Lovecraft; and wrapped up in that (for him) is very much a "nihilistic horror-moral" that the universe is vast and lonely and non-anthropocentric, and that humans are maggots who are are nothing compared to the cosmic horrors of the outer dark.  This doesn't make us stupid so much as small and isignificant.

I like being afraid of things because I like the alienated feeling of not knowing - not knowing when the monster is going to appear, or what makes it tick; being cut off from it because it is occult, unseen, unknowable.  I don't feel mocked because I'm "in" on the alienation, I'm supposed to be alienated, I'm supposed to be frightened.  If I'm being frightened the material is doing its job and I'm doing mine: no one is being called stupid.  Likewise in Lovecraft you're supposed to be overwhelmed.

[blockquote=beejazz](I don't know that I'd call the Tolkein elves/dwarves/etc. tropes)[/blockquote]What would you call them?  I think of the gruff, subterannean dwarf, the effete, nature-loving elf, the bestial orc, etc as character tropes.  You can change all the characteristcis of a race and still call them elves or dwarves, I suppose, which is one way of playing with the tropes.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

That's what I mean by being alienated, I suppose - not understanding something.  Being confronted by something alien, unfathomable, opaque, ungraspable, sublime perhaps.  That's Lovecraft; and wrapped up in that (for him) is very much a "nihilistic horror-moral" that the universe is vast and lonely and non-anthropocentric, and that humans are maggots who are are nothing compared to the cosmic horrors of the outer dark.  This doesn't make us stupid so much as small and isignificant.

And I don't see why as much effort as he put in has to be put in unless people really are that stupid.  I would say they are, too wrapped up in seeing themselves as utmost significant.

Yet on the other side of the coin Lovecraft begs a question: "Yeah, so what?"  Being small and insignificant means nothing except inside the head.  If the universe doesn't care then the lesson doesn't need to be that it doesn't care, the lesson should be that people shouldn't care if the universe cares.

I like being afraid of things because I like the alienated feeling of not knowing - not knowing when the monster is going to appear, or what makes it tick; being cut off from it because it is occult, unseen, unknowable.  I don't feel mocked because I'm "in" on the alienation, I'm supposed to be alienated, I'm supposed to be frightened.  If I'm being frightened the material is doing its job and I'm doing mine: no one is being called stupid.  Likewise in Lovecraft you're supposed to be overwhelmed.

What does this get you when you're done?  What have you come out of the experience knowing that you didn't when you went in?  For me this is the crux of the matter: I don't see horror as informative.  Therefore it feels useless.

[Steerpike]

I'd say that horror isn't useful, it's fun.  It's the experience that matters, not the message.  Actually I'd say that's how I relate to comedy, as well, in general.  I don't watch or read comedy to educate myself or come away with new truths: I do so to laugh.  Likewise I watch horror to scream/feel alienated.

Both can be vehicles for certain messages, I suppose.  Horror could undermine anthropocentric assumptions about purpose, for example, as we've been discussing; or horror can function psychoallegorically, with the monsters representing, say, repressed parts of the psyche, with the piece functioning to showcase the consequences of that repression, or something.

But to me I enjoy horror and comedy by and large for the fun of them, for their affects, rather than their underlying messages.  As Oscar Wilde said, all art is completely useless.  Scary for scary's sake; weird for weird's sake.  It's about pleasure, not about enlightenment.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I'd say that horror isn't useful, it's fun.  It's the experience that matters, not the message.  Actually I'd say that's how I relate to comedy, as well, in general.  I don't watch or read comedy to educate myself or come away with new truths: I do so to laugh.  Likewise I watch horror to scream/feel alienated.

I don't watch comedy to come away with information either.  But this thing is I do, in a way: they show me a new way of thinking about something, because comedy is the twist of reality.  Whereas horror doesn't ever say anything new: I know everything it could ever say.  I somehow doubt there can ever be new things to be afraid of.

Besides comedy you can watch because all the lines in the middle might be worth it, whereas horror I just need to know how it ends.

Why would you want to scream/feel alienated, anyway?

[Lmns Crn]

This thread has about a bajillion topics in the opening post alone. Planning a gradual transition to Friday Forum Dissertation, are we?

That said, they're pretty good questions. I think that for us, as world-builders, they're complicated by the fact that we are not primarily storytellers.

To be sure, many of us have exhilarating and nuanced narratives lurking in worlds' histories and such, but conworlds are typically intended to be the support scaffolding for stories-to-be-told. If you use your world for gaming, the narrative gets assembled around the gametable; all we are writing here on this site is infrastructure.

This is important because it means that by the nature of our off-the-shelf literary product, we're generally lacking in what is traditionally a very compelling literary element for the the reader: plot. (Because we add the plot at the gametable, that is. We deliberately leave a big open space where the plot is going to go.) This throws the spotlight very strongly onto aspects of genre, because while literary products with very garden-variety genre elements are often successful, it is almost always because they have a strong plot to carry them through. That's a luxury we haven't got.

Therefore, it's my conjecture that so many of us mix-and-match or outright twist and subvert our genre elements because we can't rely on hypothetical to-be-written-in-the-future plots to distinguish our own examples of standard-genre conworlds from the myriad other examples that have come before. I'm not going to write you a straight-up fantasy world that plays to all the standard fantasy tropes, because there are hundreds of those out there already. If I write you a world that feels exactly like Middle-Earth (the prototypical straight-up fantasy genre conworld) but with a changed-around map and a different set of gobbledygook names, no one could blame you for finding my "new" world exceptionally boring.

We tweak genres because we have to. If we don't, we end up with a bunch of repetitive copies of the same few prototypes. That'd be fine, IF we had compelling, original plots to distinguish our work with, but in most cases, we don't (again, because we're deliberately leaving that up to the players around the game table.)

Some of the genre-mixing examples I find most interesting are the very simplest. Consider Pitch Black. Consider Star Wars: A New Hope. Both are movies with space ships and weird planets and weird aliens-- all that good stuff. But neither one is a science fiction movie. One is 100% thriller, the other is 100% fantasy. Both may have a coat of space-paint thrown on top of them, but any kind of examination of what makes them tick reveals them as obvious genre transplants-- they have all the important features of their "real" genres and none of sci-fi.

I think this sort of thing is informative because it can show us which trappings of a genre are "structural" and really contribute to what the genre is, and which are "cosmetic" and can be easily altered or discarded.

Edit: Could we perhaps not let this thread spiral down into a "Teach SCMP to Appreciate the Horror Genre" thread, please? I really think that whole back-and-forth is an unfortunate distraction from the discussion at hand. The original post asked about the subversion and mixing of genres, not about the individual merits and flaws of any genre in particular.

Thanks in advance! :yumm:

[Steerpike]

[blockquote=LC]Edit: Could we perhaps not let this thread spiral down into a "Teach SCMP to Appreciate the Horror Genre" thread, please? I really think that whole back-and-forth is an unfortunate distraction from the discussion at hand. The original post asked about the subversion and mixing of genres, not about the individual merits and flaws of any genre in particular.[/blockquote]Fair enough: here's my parting shot/final response.  I'm not trying to convert SCMP to horror - just explaining my own enjoyment of it.

[blockquote=Silvercat Moonpaw]Besides comedy you can watch because all the lines in the middle might be worth it, whereas horror I just need to know how it ends.

Why would you want to scream/feel alienated, anyway?[/blockquote]My favorite parts of all horror movies I've ever seen are the first half to two thirds.  In general horror movie endings are the worst parts for me: what I enjoy is the sense of gathering menace, of ominousness, of suspense - the build-up, followde by the reveal.  The defeat of the monster or whatever is rarely as fun.

I like watching horror or reading it because its a "safe" way of feeling horrifide/alienated/frightened - a vicarious sort of anti-escapism in which I can experience things I don't get to in real life without ever being in any real danger.  Call me weird, but this gives me a big thrill.

[blockquote=Silvercat Moonpaw]Whereas horror doesn't ever say anything new: I know everything it could ever say. I somehow doubt there can ever be new things to be afraid of.[/blockquote]So comedy twists reality and horror doesn't?!?  I'd say horror can twist reality pretty significantly.  Yeah horrifying things happen in everyday life, but so do funny things.  They're both distorted reflections.  And last I checked we don't have alien monstrosities running around laying eggs in people's chests.  That qualifies as a radical departure from reality as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not trying to convert you to horror, or telling you to give horror a chance or something, just trying to explain the reasons that I like it.

[blockquote=LC]Some of the genre-mixing examples I find most interesting are the very simplest. Consider Pitch Black. Consider Star Wars: A New Hope. Both are movies with space ships and weird planets and weird aliens-- all that good stuff. But neither one is a science fiction movie. One is 100% thriller, the other is 100% fantasy. Both may have a coat of space-paint thrown on top of them, but any kind of examination of what makes them tick reveals them as obvious genre transplants-- they have all the important features of their "real" genres and none of sci-fi.[/blockquote]Interesting.  I'd say that the coat of space-paint - the imagery - is just as valid a part of genre as its thematic dynamics.  Hence Star Wars is more in that nebulous category of "weird fiction" than securely in fantasy, or sci fi.  Is genre all about what lies underneath, or is it about surface, as well?  A big part of the reason I like Star Wars is its surface, rather than its story; certainly the surface is the only reason the first 3 episodes (ie not the original trilogy) are worth watching, in my opinion.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

This thread has about a bajillion topics in the opening post alone. Planning a gradual transition to Friday Forum Dissertation, are we?

Laugh it up kids. But remember, I'm giving you a week on this because it's 25% of your final grade.

[Lmns Crn]

Interesting. I'd say that the coat of space-paint - the imagery - is just as valid a part of genre as its thematic dynamics. Hence Star Wars is more in that nebulous category of "weird fiction" than securely in fantasy, or sci fi. Is genre all about what lies underneath, or is it about surface, as well? A big part of the reasonI like Star Wars is its surface.

A New Hope[/i], a young boy is drawn into an epic struggle between a really clearly-defined Good and a really clearly-defined Evil. He is guided by destiny, he must come to terms with his inherited supernatural power with the aid of his wizard mentor, he inherits his father's magic sword. He rescues the innocent princess from the evil fortress; he saves the world with the help of his mystic powers and his ghost-mentor from beyond the grave. This is all classic fantasy material.

[Steerpike]

I agree that the plot could easily be transposed into a fantasy setting, and even that the plot is more typical of fantasy than sci fi.  What I'm also saying is that just because Star Wars shares these plot elements with fantasy does not make it "100% Fantasy," or not a science fiction movie.  At the end of the day a lightsaber isn't a magic sword (even though it functions the same way plot-wise), it's a piece of advanced technology.  What I'm saying is that I don't see why genre shouldn't encompass the superficial, the "window-dressing."

I don't think its particularly useful to call Star Wars 50% Fantasy/50% Sci-Fi either (although if we were going to use those labels, that's how I'd describe it).  What I'm arguing for is the dissapation or deconstruction of those terms altogether.  I think that they create unecessary divisions and promote ideas of generic purity (not to be confused with genetic purity, heheh) that are potentially damaging to creativity.  I think that the three speculative fiction categories aren't really helpful terms: instead we should collapse those terms into each other and coalesce them.  I'm not advocating that all speculative fiction stories should include elements from all three genres, just that the distinctions between horror elements, sci fi elements, and fantasy elements don't need to be kept nearly as discrete as they traditionally have been.  The resulting stories won't feel mismatched so much as unworried about their mongrel generic natures, and I think that would promote more unihibited imaginative works.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

I agree with Steerpike: fantasy and sci-fi aren't completely separate, at least not all the time (sci-fi actually turns into fantasy a lot of the time), and horror isn't a unique genre but just a different way of doing a story.