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We know that for tropers everything is anime. So where in world culture do we find the dreaded trope of the "Tsundere"? In opera, for example! Tsundere: Opera posted:L'elisir D'amore: Adina might be an early, operatic version of this. Her merciless teasing of the hapless Nemorino is finally revealed to be a cover for the affection she feels for him. Adina even goes so far as to accept another man's marriage proposal just to annoy the poor boy. She doesn't admit her true feelings, even to herself, until she sees him surrounded by female admirers. Or in literature, helpfully divided into Type A, such as ... Type A posted:The rose from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The book turns a tsundere flower into a commentary on the pain that love can cause so hauntingly beautiful that it will drive you insane. quote:Aravis Tharkeena from C. S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy. Her Tsundere-ness is lampshaded at the end of the book, when it's mentioned that she and Shasta/Prince Cor got married because they were so used to their Slap-Slap-Kiss that they wanted to be comfier while fighting and then making out. (This one makes my head hurt with all the terrible trope names stacked up.) ...and Type B: Type B posted:Aglaya from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. Not only does the girl spend half the novel telling her love interest how stupid he is, the whole thing actually ends with a big girl fight-out over the guy. This is proto-anime writing at its best! Dostoevsky is the king of tsundere. So is Shakespeare, as we see when we turn to the theater section: Type A posted:Kate from Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew may count if you're one of those people who insist on believing that Shakespeare did everything first, although she was more of a Defrosting Ice Queen. Type B posted:Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing is more a Type B; she is friendly and amiable toward most people, except Benedick. Their "merry war" fails to hide their true affections from the rest of the cast. She defrosts to a certain extent, but her relationship with Benedick races up and down the temperature scale throughout. She's also fiercely protective of her cousin Hero, to the point of wanting to see Claudio dead when he wrongly accuses Hero of infidelity.
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 13:39 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:09 |
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TVTropes: Dostoevsky is proto-anime writing at its best!
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 15:33 |
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Tropers, and a lot of nerds in general, think that a deconstruction is just taking a work or genre and using a darker interpretation of the usual clichés. I guess you can blame watchmen for this, as these nerds tend to ignore the subtleties in the work and only get "It is a dark, gritty take on superhero stories that is called a deconstruction, therefore a deconstruction is a dark and gritty take on a thing". One other example of the nerd definition of "deconstruction" is what TVTRopes refers to as "Lampshade Hanging", the pointing out of a usual genre cliché by characters. Because by pointing out that a cliché exists, regardless of whether or not it is being used, characters break the fourth wall with genre awareness which totally deconstructs that genre, right? I loving hate nerds trying to act like they know more than they do. E: Romance thread quote:Anyway, in matters I have more interest, if not more of a clue in, today's the first day since she got married that I saw the girl from high school that nothing happened with because we took turns being the pragmatist. EE: Holy gently caress the tropers got an awful podcast. It's poo poo Namtab fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Sep 22, 2013 |
# ? Sep 22, 2013 17:46 |
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Namtab posted:Tropers, and a lot of nerds in general, think that a deconstruction is just taking a work or genre and using a darker interpretation of the usual clichés. It's not even so much "dark and gritty" as seeing works that attempt to be a somewhat more naturalistic/psychologically believable take on goofy ideas and assuming that's what deconstruction is. Watchmen is the favourite, if ""real"" people had super powers would they be like superman or would they become completely emotionally detached like Dr Manhattan? ""Real"" people dressing up in silly costumes to fight crime would probably be a huge grab bag of psychological hangups. Evangelion, ""real"" teenagers forced to pilot giant robots and save the world on a weekly basis would either retreat into depressed paralysis, emotional detachment or deranged overconfidence and psychological dependence on winning. Madoka, ""real"" magical girls would be hosed up miserable wrecks. And so on. Basically take a silly genre and add PTSD and anxiety disorders. It's a thing that's done and it can even be quite interesting, but in and of itself it's not deconstruction in the critical sense. Fatkraken fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Sep 22, 2013 |
# ? Sep 22, 2013 18:09 |
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It's safe to say that deconstruction in the Derrida sense and deconstruction in the troper sense are divorced enough that there isn't really much you can compare between the two of them. I've got no problem with the troper definition of 'showing inherent inconsistencies and/or flawed assumptions in a given genre'. Words can mean different things, that's fine. The problem is that tropers don't follow their own drat definitions of things. Take this guy, for instance, who describes a robot drone-turned-battlebots thing that is a deconstruction of Pokemon because...they're robots, and there's a military backstory. Belisaurius posted:So I want to know if this is a deconstruction of Pokemon or it's own thing. This guy seems to be trying to deconstruct blaxploitation using PTSD. X Ray posted:So basically, I have the basic idea that there's this Buddy Cop couple (Sam Jackson and Denzel Washington), one of whom has to go to a psychiatrist (Morgan Freeman) because he suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because of his time in the army (he's a veteran of the Iraq War). Similar to The Elements Of Crime, this movie is framed as Sam Jackson's character's explaining the events of the movie to the psychiatrist. Will Smith, meanwhile, is a local gang leader who is in conflict with the police, and Jackson and Washington's character, who are gang unit detectives, are trying to bring him down. Throw in Viola Davis as Jackson's wife maybe and Rosario Dawson as her opposite number as Will Smith's girl, we just have to get a blaxploitation spin on this to make it into a cataclysmic action movie which deconstructs the genre, but not to the point of parody. X Ray posted:
The way tropers deconstruct Family Guy is by making it into something a thirteen year old would think is edgy. Doomsday 524 posted:If the writers decided to make a shift to make it both Darker and Edgier and to play Family Guy completely straight, without any Rule of Funny. Tropers are so bad at understanding what their own definition of deconstruction means that other tropers made a page outlining what doesn't constitute a deconstruction. But even if it's written by smarter tropers, it's still written by tropers. Not A Deconstruction posted:If the kingdom is invaded by a brutal neighboring nation, the royal family's murder described in Gornful detail, and the princess repeatedly raped before being sold into slavery, this is Darker and Edgier but not a deconstruction. As an encore, have this, from their page on works that do both deconstruction and reconstruction. Decon Recon Switch posted:The Pony POV Series is a good example. It takes various aspects of the series, deconstructs them, and then reconstructs them. The best example is the basic premise of Reharmonized Ponies; that the World Healing Wave that accompanied Discord's defeat didn't heal the mental damage he caused...but friendship can still heal it. It also took the idea that Fluttershy's Discorded self was a split personality Discord created with the character of Fluttercruel, Fluttershy's Child By Mind Rape by Discord who at first tries to take over, but eventually is reconditioned by Fluttershy's parenting and becomes the mane cast's Sixth Ranger. Djeser fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Sep 22, 2013 |
# ? Sep 22, 2013 18:43 |
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quote:It's safe to say that deconstruction in the Derrida sense and deconstruction in the troper sense are divorced enough that there isn't really much you can compare between the two of them. I've got no problem with the troper definition of 'showing inherent inconsistencies and/or flawed assumptions in a given genre'. Words can mean different things, that's fine. That only flies if the people using the words acknowledge that there are two different meanings. That's not the case here. In their 'Deconstruction' page*, they say this: quote:While sometimes perceived as an aggressive attack on the meaning or enjoyableness of a work or text, deconstruction is not properly about passing judgement (and in fact, the term "deconstruction" was picked over the German term "Dekonstruktion" to suggest careful attention to the detail within a text over violently emptying the work of all meaning). ...which is cribbing Derrida. (Though I think they mean 'Destruktion', not 'Dekonstruktion'. ) In their Derrida page*, they begin by calling him 'a Jewish Frenchman who popularised the term Deconstruction.' ('Popularised' is the wrong word, of course, but tropers don't believe that anyone might pioneer, redefine or invent: all the ideas in world are just there and some dudes happen to get there first in documenting them.) They're not like people saying 'spicy' to describe an erotic novel while other people use it to describe a curry. They are using the kudos of definition A to put on intellectual swank while using the inane definition B to make things easier for themselves. They aren't so much creating an alternative as refusing to admit they don't understand something, and then confusing the issue with garbled 'defintions' invented by people who don't actually know what they're talking about. If the people defining a term don't understand it, it doesn't mean anything except 'You are listening to a wanker right now.' *http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Deconstruction *http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/JacquesDerrida
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 19:18 |
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None of this changes the fact that the tvtropes sense of deconstruction is still a useful descriptor for a work of fiction, going by their original definition of "a work that explores how the typical cliches of a genre or work would play out with a higher degree of reality imposed upon them", or in short, "in real life this wouldn't work at all". It isn't deconstruction in the Derrida sense, but that doesn't mean that tvtropes deconstruction isn't a real thing in media. vvvvv Sham bam bamina! posted:Then they shouldn't be equivocating the two. Not disagreeing. DStecks fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Sep 22, 2013 |
# ? Sep 22, 2013 19:50 |
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DStecks posted:None of this changes the fact that the tvtropes sense of deconstruction is still a useful descriptor for a work of fiction, going by their original definition of "a work that explores how the typical cliches of a genre or work would play out with a higher degree of reality imposed upon them", or in short, "in real life this wouldn't work at all".
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 21:19 |
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So I stumbled on this a while ago and have been looking for an excuse to share... They're talking about the show Bob's Burgers. Specifically the episode where the family keeps going on a gameshow to win a new mini-van and eventually the host gets so sick of them he rigs the game so they'll lose. I have no idea how the hell anarchy factors into this situation in any way so I'm just going to assume The Shop Soldier is using big words he doesn't understand to sound smart...
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 21:43 |
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"If it was an anime it wouldn't have ended as badly as it did." Content: That's so much worse. And yes, there is a full page about it.
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 21:57 |
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KingKalamari posted:They're talking about the show Bob's Burgers. Specifically the episode where the family keeps going on a gameshow to win a new mini-van and eventually the host gets so sick of them he rigs the game so they'll lose. I have no idea how the hell anarchy factors into this situation in any way so I'm just going to assume The Shop Soldier is using big words he doesn't understand to sound smart... It doesn't help that basically nobody knows what anarchy actually means any more. (Hint: it means literally the opposite of chaos. And while we're at it, absurdist doesn't mean "goofy". )
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 22:03 |
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Ah yes, 'lolis'. Another word in the TVTropes Newspeak lexicon. Normal English is so oddly lacking a word that means 'little girls you can lech at while being shocked, shocked if anyone calls you a pedophile in response.' quote:None of this changes the fact that the tvtropes sense of deconstruction is still a useful descriptor for a work of fiction, going by their original definition of "a work that explores how the typical cliches of a genre or work would play out with a higher degree of reality imposed upon them", or in short, "in real life this wouldn't work at all". Because goodness knows, 'a realistic look' or 'a critical take' or 'interrogation' or 'challenging reinterpretation' don't meet the case at all. No, we totally need a concept that pushes the tropiness to the foreground rather than talking about the storytelling or the realism. What are stories for if not to service tropes???
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 22:15 |
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WickedHate posted:"If it was an anime it wouldn't have ended as badly as it did." Uh, isn't that the super pedophile anime that the anime forum literally banned from being mentioned? And taking it from grade school to kindergarten is improving it, huh? Burn it all down.
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:14 |
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Apple Tree posted:Ah yes, 'lolis'. Another word in the TVTropes Newspeak lexicon. Normal English is so oddly lacking a word that means 'little girls you can lech at while being shocked, shocked if anyone calls you a pedophile in response.' "I'm not a paedophile, I'm a lolicon. It's accptable in Japan, you racist, so if you have so if you have a problem with it you're just a kink-shaming prude who obviously has a very vanilla sex life."
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:20 |
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Tatum Girlparts posted:Uh, isn't that the super pedophile anime that the anime forum literally banned from being mentioned? It is, yes. So much for their pedo purge. Lolita, a novel that basically says 'My sick fuckery ruined everyone's lives' gets the axe, while eyewateringly foul animes are allowed to stink up the wiki because removing them is too much like . Also the pedophilia is totally artistically justified and she's actually a five hundred year old demon trapped in the body of an eight year old. So it's not gross. Or something. Welcome to the strange and queasy unlogic of TVTropes.
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:31 |
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DStecks posted:None of this changes the fact that the tvtropes sense of deconstruction is still a useful descriptor for a work of fiction, going by their original definition of "a work that explores how the typical cliches of a genre or work would play out with a higher degree of reality imposed upon them", or in short, "in real life this wouldn't work at all". The word they want is 'analyzing'. Hell, it even has anal in it.
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:31 |
WickedHate posted:"If it was an anime it wouldn't have ended as badly as it did." I watched like one episode of that when it was new (years ago) and I don't remember it being anywhere near what that description makes it sound like. The tone of it was basically "aww lookit the little kids doing cutesy things " more than anything. Of course, I'm pretty much expecting to put my foot in my mouth because tropers like it, but still. e: Also the "better than it sounds" page is where they deliberately make things sound terrible so I think y'all might be misreading it just a little
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:35 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:e: Also the "better than it sounds" page is where they deliberately make things sound terrible so I think y'all might be misreading it just a little Granted, but it's still pretty baffling to use that phrasing at all. WickedHate fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Jun 26, 2014 |
# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:42 |
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Khazar-khum posted:The word they want is 'analyzing'. Hell, it even has anal in it. I'd argue that Deconstruction still has worth as a term, since it describes a very specific phenomenon that reoccurs in media, which occurs for a very specific purpose, which is the exact definition of a trope. It's something that does deserve a unique word, and "deconstruction" happens to be a fairly good metaphorical description of what's going on in the work.
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:45 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:I watched like one episode of that when it was new (years ago) and I don't remember it being anywhere near what that description makes it sound like. The tone of it was basically "aww lookit the little kids doing cutesy things " more than anything. Yeah the show they're talking about has nothing offensive about it in any way. It's definitely not like that one anime at all.
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:54 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:I watched like one episode of that when it was new (years ago) and I don't remember it being anywhere near what that description makes it sound like. The tone of it was basically "aww lookit the little kids doing cutesy things " more than anything. Yea if you mean the kindergarten one I think it's the one I saw an episode of when I was bored as poo poo on Crunchyroll and it was like, not a good anime or anything but most of it was basic 'oh yea she's a small child with a crush and her teacher's a huge sperglord who can't just say 'hey kid stop that that's not appropriate' so it's kinda funny'. Maybe it gets gross later on though.
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# ? Sep 22, 2013 23:54 |
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I'm curious about the anime about the guy who becomes famous for being punched in the face.Djeser posted:[Blaxploitation "Deconstruction"] His choice of actors for this is probably the most hilarious part.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 00:07 |
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Rhinoceraptor posted:His choice of actors for this is probably the most hilarious part. That doesn't even get into why the hell you would want to deconstruct blaxploitation. It's a dead genre universally recognized as silly. What exactly would that accomplish? It would be like writing a dark exploration of Busby Berkeley musicals.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 00:14 |
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DStecks posted:It would be like writing a dark exploration of Busby Berkeley musicals. I see somebody's been watching The Producers.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 00:21 |
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Troper wants to turn a Norse saga into a steampunk YA novel. Flails desperately when she realizes that she'll need a miracle for it to not be poo poo, fails to take the hint and abandon her worthless idea. Wait a minute... Morwen? Isn't she supposed to be one of "the good ones"? edit: ahahaha [modedit: fixed tables] (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 01:10 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Troper wants to turn a Norse saga into a steampunk YA novel. Flails desperately when she realizes that she'll need a miracle for it to not be poo poo, fails to take the hint and abandon her worthless idea. There are no good ones. Just ones that seem okay until you find out how terrible they are.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 01:16 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Troper wants to turn a Norse saga into a steampunk YA novel. You mean Too Human?
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 01:17 |
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Remember that we don't talk about That Anime That Shall Not Be Named here.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 02:10 |
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Metal Loaf posted:"I'm not a paedophile, I'm a lolicon. It's accptable in Japan, you racist, so if you have so if you have a problem with it you're just a kink-shaming prude who obviously has a very vanilla sex life." I have actually had people say this to me in real life, in a public space. Minus the mockery of my sex life, that's almost word for word what he said. On that note I actually know a few tropers in real life. They are just as insufferable spergs in person as they are onlineonline
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 02:40 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Wait a minute... Morwen? Isn't she supposed to be one of "the good ones"? Morven is the good one, actually. I'm not sure whether he's on TVT still or not, though. Usually people got banned the instant we mentioned we like them, but Morven was a mod so maybe that was protection against the goon purges.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 02:46 |
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WickedHate posted:There are no good ones. Just ones that seem okay until you find out how terrible they are. Yeah, I think in thread 2 we found out that if you call a Troper one of the good ones they've got two weeks before either: Fast Eddie screams that they're a Goon Agent and bans them, leading to them joining SA for whatever reason. or Finding out that the guy with the okay gender views hates all black people and has joined NAMBLA. Speaking of, I don't think their Tradgame forum was there the last time we were mocking Tropers. Exalted is a "favorite" in grognards.txt. Let's see what Tropers have to say about it. The loving OP posted:You know what this forum needs? An Exalted thread. Oh goddamnit did White Wolf leave the creepy child rape thing in there? quote:Its called "Child", but everyone is gonna use it to make themselves lolis. In a subversion, it is actually quite a crippling flaw. I can't post it on here, but just know that you will be much weaker and bad at socializing with adults, and that's just for young. Go very young, and just don't roll the character. Nope, these guys just can't think "child" in fiction without thinking "sexualized anime kid". TVTropes makes you a more diverse writer!
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 02:48 |
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:Morven is the good one, actually. I'm not sure whether he's on TVT still or not, though. Usually people got banned the instant we mentioned we like them, but Morven was a mod so maybe that was protection against the goon purges. (I'm deliberately ignoring the post above mine. )
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 02:51 |
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Razorwired posted:Yeah, I think in thread 2 we found out that if you call a Troper one of the good ones they've got two weeks before either: Oh poo poo, we're getting some grognard crossover
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 03:06 |
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So from my limited experience with both "1984" and "Brave New World", TV Tropes seems to be an unholy mismash of the two. Newspeak meant to obstinate the true meaning of their vile fetishes and obsessions while tropes are literally their stimulus to keep themselves oblivious to everything else. I have to wonder how terrible the respective trope pages are.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 03:48 |
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Alright, I was looking at the Writer's Block thread for poo poo to post, and I think I found it: The fourth thread down in the Writer's Block forum, at this time, is "The Constructive Criticism Thread". (It's one of their sticky threads.) Well, of course they have to append the word "constructive" to the beginning of the word "criticism" to get it by Fast Eddie. Actually exploring the thread, it seems they have a system where users post full-length "works", which go into a queue, and then, one at a time, groups of people critique it. This could hypothetically work, but it lends itself well to organizational problems, as we can see from the current page of the thread, where they're trying to figure out who's up next to be critiqued. I decided to look backwards to see who was critiqued last. I was initially ecstatic to discover that it was Jabrosky, he's always good for a laugh. However, Jabrosky apparently has more self-awareness than I'd given him credit for, and before anybody managed to critique his thing, he retracted it and said it needed more work. (So, so close to the critical realization that his stories are irredeemable fetishist poo poo.) So, I went a page back to see who actually was last critiqued. DA Student posted:Reminder to those coming in late and confused due to the organizational stuff we've been talking about that the current work under review is mine. My turn will end on the second of August at 9:32:10 AM if I have five reviews by then, on the sixteenth of August at the same time regardless of how many reviews I have, and at some point between the two if I get five reviews at some point between those two times. Hey, it's our old pal DA Student, the guy who makes terrible game synopsises with creepy implications about himself! Apparently we were wrong in our assessment that he did so because he's too lazy to actually write anything feature length. He's apparently written a three-act-play. (Safe to say it'll never be produced.) So, what's this play about? Izon posted:About half-way through. I'm at the part where Gene masturbates. By... filling out a form........ Izon posted:In Act 2... you really went to great lengths to make sure every well-known sex trope was conveyed using the metaphor of the yellow slips. And this makes me wonder - was that intentional? Since this strange world is meant to be a streamlined version of reality, it seemed like a LOT of time was spent covering the sexual escapades of the different characters. Of course, I can understand this being fundamental to the story, since sex(birth) and death are both a huge part of it (each one getting their own act in the story). But still, it seemed like Act 2 could've been cut down significantly. It was very, very clear early on that writing = sex; taking away the metaphor, Act 2 consists of what's basically just a long string of archetypal sex stories, as opposed to one original story like in Acts 1 and 3. DA Student posted:I don't think I'm cutting down Act Two because it just all flows together in my mind. I don't think there's really anything redundant or superfluous in there. I can see why you'd have the comments you do, and I considered that same issue when I was writing, but I ultimately disagree. De Marquis posted:Gene invents masturbation. On stage. Logically, that should have happened way earlier. De Marquis posted:Rape scene- that was uncomfortable. I... If anybody would like to look at this thing further in depth, be my guest. Maybe this is the next MCAC (probably not, not enough weeaboo). I note that I just picked out the most glaring highlights, and the overall troper assessment of this thing was neutral to positive. LaughMyselfTo fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Dec 21, 2013 |
# ? Sep 23, 2013 04:44 |
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LaughMyselfTo posted:I note that I just picked out the most glaring highlights, and the overall troper assessment of this thing was neutral to positive. Much like video game journalists, tropers operate on a narrow scale based on the high end of the normal scale. So what they call a 6/10, or neutral-to-positive, regular people would call a -5 or so.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 04:48 |
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Benny the Snake posted:So from my limited experience with both "1984" and "Brave New World", TV Tropes seems to be an unholy mismash of the two. Newspeak meant to obstinate the true meaning of their vile fetishes and obsessions while tropes are literally their stimulus to keep themselves oblivious to everything else. I have to wonder how terrible the respective trope pages are. Well, let's check it out! Nineteen Eighty-Four posted:This is the book. One of the most horrifying and depressing codifiers for the Dystopian genre, ever. The tone of the Nineteen Eighty-Four page is "you should totally read this book". The problem is, the description doesn't even tell us why, or even much about the book itself. It just assumes that you've read the book. Instead, it lazily says that "this book is a loose adaptation of We" and redirects to the page for We, which incidentally has at least a coarse summary of the book's plot. Apparently, linking to the plot of a different (and lesser known) book is close enough for tropers. The description also spends more time talking about the film versions and the controversies surrounding them. We're also told that the story has aged badly, but no reason is given to the hows or whys. Secondly, the page also describes Nineteen Eighty-Four as a codifier for Dystopian genre. Already, we can see that tropers have boiled it down way past the story itself: instead it's a "rulebook" for how to write dystopian fiction. Nevermind the fact that dystopian stories (and thus many of the tropes associated with the genre) were present in the English language, even if they were written by unknown authors like H.G. Wells and Jack London well before Orwell ever put pen to paper. quote:NOTE: Do not identify this book as being anti-communist or anti-fascist anywhere on this wiki. It's anti-totalitarianism. Orwell was personally a socialist, but thought that both extremes were bad and would inevitably lead to the same thing. The original political leaning of the Party is deliberately vague, and their sole concern is retaining power - no more, no less, as stated In-Universe by O'Brien near the end. Even the book's origins aren't immune to the hugbox. Incidentally, this strikes me as a somewhat totalitarian decree: "No discussion on the theme of the book! This is what it means, so you have no reason to talk about it." Because you can't discuss whether it's anti-communist or anti-fascist, you can't describe the book's origins in Orwell's observations of Stalinism. Seems...awfully Orwellian. I'm not even going to touch the trope list here. The description is terrible enough. Moving on... First note: what The first search result for "Brave New World" is pokemon fanfiction. Brave New World posted:A 1932 dystopian novel written by Aldous Huxley. Quite possibly the only serious Western Dystopia involving too much happiness... as provided by the totalitarian state. Well, it's certainly an improvement over the Nineteen Eighty-Four page. It's got a plot description, talks about some of the book's themes, and actually uses the structure of the book to describe a couple of tropes using less words than the trope pages themselves. Honestly, the description isn't all that bad. It could stand a little bit of rearranging ideas, like describing the plot, then the story's themes, but the writing here is fairly competent. It's masterful in comparison to the Nineteen Eighty-Four page. So, let's skip to the tropes. quote:Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny: John's fundamental conflict. His traditional values on things such as love and sex clash horribly with those of civilized society, and when he finally gives into his impulses, he becomes so guilt-ridden afterwards that he commits suicide. Tropers, it seems, aren't really comfortable with language, even if it's their own. The words of the trope make sense when applied here, but when I went to the trope page, I got the distinct feeling that the trope describes something completely different. Or maybe it isn't. The concept is so poorly worded I guess it can mean anything! Not a good thing when you're writing a dictionary of tropes! quote:We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: The lower (read: intentionally retarded) castes. Justified; they've got the technology to make a great deal of that work obsolete and in fact tried just that, only to find out that it made people unhappier. It's better to give the Epsilons somewhere to go and something to do for 8 hours, so labor-saving technology was intentionally dialed back to create more make-work. As for why they didn't just stop breeding/manufacturing the lower castes and let a society of free, intelligent humans operate the labor-saving devices themselves: they tried that too, and the island they tried it on collapsed into civil war within a couple of years; it turns out that the higher castes need someone to boss over and will not do anything that they feel is beneath them. So it's okay to breed intentionally retarded people to do manual labor, because if we use the technology to make them obsolete, they'll just be unhappy! Even the justification the troper gives wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to someone who never read the book: if we can intentionally manipulate emotions and select for traits, then why not breed out the reason we need Epsilons in the the higher castes? It makes even less sense when you look at a trope a little bit up the page: quote:Villains Never Lie: The protagonists all take Mustapha Mond's story about the Alpha society of Cyprus failing at face value, even though Mond is probably the most Unreliable Narrator imaginable for dictating why a free society of equals can't work. So maybe breeding Epsilons isn't necessary. Or is it? Venusian Weasel fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Sep 23, 2013 |
# ? Sep 23, 2013 04:51 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Troper wants to turn a Norse saga into a steampunk YA novel. Flails desperately when she realizes that she'll need a miracle for it to not be poo poo, fails to take the hint and abandon her worthless idea. quote:"In a future in which the world has been devastated by a nuclear war and genetic engineering has led to the creation of elves, dwarves and other fantasy races..." Edit: That thread was a single page long, and I didn't see very much "flailing." Did she delete a lot of stuff?
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 05:11 |
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Venusian Weasel posted:We're also told that the story has aged badly, but no reason is given to the hows or whys. I took a class on Science Fiction as Literature and one of the things I learned is that good sci-fi writers don't write to keep current with tech. If so, we'd have constant new versions of established books or we wouldn't have Science Fiction in the first place. The "fiction" part allows writers to create a narrative based loosley on current tech in order to make some kind of grand statement on the advancement of technology in relation to the progress of humanity. William Gibson's version of cyberspace in "Neuromancer" is antiquated and analog but it's not about the tech, it's about how the progression of technology has led to a regression in the human condition. Or in other words, Tropers sound exactly like the kind of people who think JJ Abrams' "Star Trek" films are far superior to the original series because the ships and tech are slick, shiny, and modern.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 06:37 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:09 |
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Benny the Snake posted:
Yeah but Tropers are the kind of authors who write to show their own intellectual superiority, and that includes sperging out about technology. It is ironic that they fail to see technology in SF as a storytelling tool rather than an end unto itself. How anyone can read 1984 and not draw certain parrellels to the War on Terror is beyond me. The Military-Industrial Complex is a huge deal in the book. The list goes on. It hasn't aged a day.
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# ? Sep 23, 2013 06:56 |