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A Wizard of Goatse posted:This thread was created because some guy ran to the mods because GBS briefly described some events from a 5+ year old, commonly read fantasy novel in a thread about the TV remake, and another guy got really Mad when nobody important took this tragedy very seriously. It's a douche move to go around yelling out spoilers to thriller movies or other things whose actual purpose is shocking twists (a tiny percentage of media) but it's easy, predictable guilt-free laughs for internet nerds because the spoilers people are also douches and loving mental to boot, and are guaranteed to start raving about how people who talk about the contents of movie trailers are sociopaths who torture small animals to get off and their lives are ruined forever. It's the exact same impulse that drives people to seek out tumblr snowflakes who are literally triggered by apples and furiously police everyone else's speech for mentions of such and harass them, even after that stopped really being funny a long time ago. i realize this is a really hard concept for SA in particular but actually having preferences in how you consume media is not weird or douchey, and deliberately provoking other people because you think their harmless preferences are wrong is weird and douchey it's not sociopathic but if you think you're coming off any better than the guy who said that by talking about how "mental" they are you lack introspection Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Jun 25, 2015 |
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Jun 25, 2015 09:23
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anyways i would never describe spoiling a movie's plot as "ruining" it, but at the same time surprise is a good and interesting part of the human experience and by extension of the arts. there's nothing immature or broken about valuing it, or anything inherently bad about a director or writer tapping into it to create the experience they want
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Jun 25, 2015 09:44
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Just change 'being spoiled' to 'knowing things' in a given sentence. To what end? It doesn't mean the same thing, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt if you had something less trivial in mind.
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Jul 27, 2015 14:26
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Basebf555 posted:Nah, don't worry, its trivial. I'm not interested in taking shortcuts around conversation because the forums think it's cool. I am pretty interested in the difference between knowing and experiencing, though.
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Jul 27, 2015 14:42
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You're seriously undervaluing the experiential / participatory side of fiction because, by your own admission, you don't get it. I'm sympathetic to a degree because it's not really my preferred mode either, but it's not a barrier to narrative literacy and it's not any more "cultish" than the set of shared assumptions you need to talk about stories in terms of ideology or technique. Like, at the most basic level, fiction works because it hooks into the way we think about actual people and events. Uncertainty about the future is how people experience most of the events in their life, and being able to invoke that uncertainty in fiction can make it more powerful. If you're comfortable enough with artifice (probably because you've thought about and been exposed to it so many times) to skip that step that's great, but at the same time, without that experiential, emotional component fiction wouldn't have any advantage over other forms of communication. Being told "pop culture is predatory and alien" would be just as good as watching They Live. "MY IMMERSION" is a joke not because immersion is wrong, but because you shouldn't be so weak- and narrow-minded as for it to be broken by the little things.
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Jul 28, 2015 04:14
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Hbomberguy posted:You may wish to think critically about what you've written here, and how it proves my point. It's a rant about how I've failed to 'fully understand' the 'experience' of being uncertain about the future...as part of a group with others. If someone talks about the problems with Scientology do you tell them they're undervaluing the participatory side of religion? No, but if someone uses Scientology as an example of what's wrong with all religion, then I might be concerned with how facile that is... even though I'm an atheist. That's where I'm coming from. Hbomberguy posted:I said I don't get it because I don't see the point in it, and you haven't done anything to demonstrate what the point may be beyond vague fantasies of being 'immersed' in a made-up story and a group that feels like they're in on something. Which was exactly what I described. I never said anything about being "in on" something, in fact that's specifically what I was reacting against. It's not about being in on something, it's about how you and me and someone who cares more about spoilers are all looking for and enjoying the same thing, which is to say, a property of fiction which can't be reduced to just information. If it sounds like I agree with you or I'm proving your point, then it's probably because we both think that if something can't be reduced to just information, then it shouldn't be affected by "just information" i.e. spoilers. But the ability to separate those two is a by-product of literacy, possibly not even a guaranteed one, and certainly not a prerequisite. Hbomberguy posted:By the way, 'my immersion' is a joke because immersion shouldn't be the priority at all, since you cannot immerse yourself in a film or show. There is nothing beneath the screen. It's the same as the 'muh x' joke: The hypothetical person you're paraphrasing is complaining about something unimportant in the face of a larger issue. One moment you're saying immersion doesn't exist, the next you give it a definition of something which does exist. I'm not 100% sure about your definition, but you do see the problem here, right? The perfect integrity of the illusion isn't the important thing, and I agree that to think otherwise is to miss the point, but we enjoy fiction and give it cultural and personal significance because at some point, we embrace the illusion. Oblivion might not be significantly diminished because a character gets snagged on geometry, but even the notion that they're "characters" is part of the illusion. An Oblivion entirely populated by abstract geometric shapes while still obeying the same mechanical rules would mean something very different. It's not even possible to talk about a film or a book or a narrative game (coherently) without reference to things that don't actually exist, as if they do. Hbomberguy posted:In real life, since so many things are uncertain, no-one (sane) ever talks about how immersed they are in the real world. Because, frankly, we aren't. That's completely backwards. No one talks about it because we so obviously are -- not being "immersed" in the world would imply you're somehow aware that it's artifice, meaning either you're in a state of genuine religious epiphany, or you're a solipsist.
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Jul 28, 2015 14:36
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Hbomberguy posted:Immersion is impossible, but a sense of immersion is achieved and violated regardless. It's an abstract, subjective experience. There's no difference between the sense of it and the thing itself. e: Immersion is "experiencing something as if it were real." It can be by degrees -- a necessity for fiction, because it would be really weird and dysfunctional if it were 100% or 0% -- and barring extreme mental states, we experience our life as if it were fully real. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Jul 28, 2015 |
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Jul 28, 2015 17:16
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The Time Dissolver posted:They claim to have discerned the border between emotion and intellect and that is a delusion. Here I am writing pages about this poo poo and this guy does a better job in one sentence.
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Jul 28, 2015 17:44
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Hbomberguy posted:There's a massive difference between feeling a certain way and actually being it. One isn't real. What's the difference between feeling sad and being sad? This is a linguistic trick, but it's also perfectly illustrative.
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Jul 28, 2015 17:53
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Hbomberguy posted:They are both describing the same thing - there is a difference between emotions and 'immersion', a wholly abstract sense that is never actually achieved. Immersion is an emotional state, or a combination of them. It's not a question of knowledge, and there's no physical analogue to test against, like butter or clay or skin. We do not have access to a platonic ideal of immersion, any more than we do to one of sadness. Your analogies aren't appropriate. e: A drug could both create the subjective experience that your skin is made of clay, and also the conviction that your skin is made of clay. The conviction contradicts reality, but the experience just is, and it's the experience that I'm talking about. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jul 28, 2015 |
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Jul 28, 2015 20:13
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Hbomberguy posted:Being immersed and feeling immersed aren't the same thing. One of them is impossible. "Experiencing something as if it were real, to a limited or partial degree" and the experience which makes fiction possible are the same thing. If you want me to use a different word for that, I'll do so as a courtesy. But they are the same thing, and neither are impossible.
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Jul 28, 2015 20:42
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Hbomberguy posted:Exactly. It feels real but is not. I have been using "immersion," from the start, to describe the feeling. Your objection is a non sequitur. SuperMechagodzilla posted:'Immersion' is a concept wholly distinct from 'suspension of disbelief'. Before I even respond to this, which term (if either) would you assign to the subject I've been talking about?
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Jul 28, 2015 21:08
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Basebf555 posted:Apparently that difference is like, all in our heads or something. Or there is no true reality, therefore to know something is the same as to not know it. Or something. I'm dumb. You're not dumb, I'm just not very good at expressing myself clearly. You know that fiction isn't real, but the ability to imagine it is helps. Some things make imagining so easier, or harder. It's a good talent, and something worth working at, to be able to treat any fiction that way, no matter how unfamiliar it is. But some people have more difficulty with it than others, and the way CineD sometimes treats that like a sin instead of just a very minor shortcoming is stupid; especially because someone like that can still have rational/intellectual insight into a film anyways. Also I said earlier that going into a film unspoiled might be one of the things that helps, but that was an intuitive leap and I'm more likely to be wrong about that than anything else I've said.
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Jul 28, 2015 21:30
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I was thinking to myself "maybe I should reread 'On Fairy Stories' and decide if I agree with it or not" but, of course, a Zizek works too.
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Jul 28, 2015 21:58
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Hbomberguy posted:But feeling immersed and being immersed are different things, and one of them is impossible. "There is nothing beneath the screen" is not an insightful or meaningful statement. If the viewer is being immersed in anything, it's a simulation they create by interpreting what they see on the screen. You build it out of what you see, personal experiences, and cultural expectations, and it fills the gaps left by artifice -- lets you mentally replace "actors, props, and sets" with "people, things, and objects." If you suspend disbelief easily, or if the fiction goes to great lengths to disguise itself -- or the two meet in the middle -- then it's easier to be affected, and more strongly affected, by this simulation. You are, in my admittedly haphazard use of the word, immersed. I think SMG would call the process and the end state "suspension of disbelief" and means something else by immersion, but I don't know what that something else would be. When people complain about lack of immersion, it always seemed to me that this was what they were talking about.
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Jul 28, 2015 23:56
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Hbomberguy posted:Fictional Films aren't documentaries about events that happened in a fictional Universe, because the telling is indistinguishable from the thing being told. Even documentaries are partially fictional, in that they are a product of a specific perspective. A cut happens; time is distorted. Information is given to you by the execution of the plot, shaping it and your reaction. Of course they aren't. But they mimic recognizable events like those that happen in a real universe because that familiarity has emotional power. The artifice, in most cases, emphasizes parts of the illusion that are more important, more central to what it's trying to communicate. But some of its power to influence us still comes from the illusion -- there's a balance between the two. Hbomberguy posted:There's a fairly large correlation between people who don't like certain films (prometheus, man of steel, the SW PT) while only rigidly talking about them in terms of plot, and an unwillingness (or inability) to read the images in the films. In much the same way, books are more fun when you can read the words. I know! I spent pages and pages arguing against people with exactly that kind of viewpoint in the Prometheus thread. But I wouldn't have cared in the first place if the disintegration of Shaw's faith, or David's alienation and confusion towards human beings didn't speak to me... almost as if they were people.
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Jul 29, 2015 00:06
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Hbomberguy posted:Like, in the Prometheus thread, at best they'd talk about how pretty things were, like the landscapes. Very rarely, if at all, was there a discussion of shots, cuts, visual storytelling, the camera placement, blocking, et cetera. Consciously noticing those things is a skill, in addition to being a decision. It's not quite the same as literacy, though. To an illiterate, a book is just scribbles. They aren't going to absorb its meaning by osmosis. But that's exactly what happens when someone with no formal knowledge of film watches a movie. Sure, they're going to be very conscious of the plot, but generally speaking, they're also going to be at least subconsciously aware of the message. Some of the most common complaints against Prometheus were along the lines of "a scientist would never do something so stupid" or "the wealthiest man alive would never screw up an expedition so badly." These are both wrong, but they aren't the errors of illiteracy -- they're ideological mistakes. These people understood the message of the film, and it made them angry because they don't agree with it. And that happens partly, and ironically, because Prometheus is a well-constructed film. Basebf555 posted:To be honest I didn't realize the term "spoiler" only referred to plot. I mean, practically that's what most people are talking about when they say they had something spoiled for them, but I'd feel the same way if I saw a particularly beautiful shot posted somewhere vs. a plot synopsis. Its something that I'd rather have discovered for myself with the full intended context. There's no reason what you're describing shouldn't count. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Jul 29, 2015 |
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Jul 29, 2015 00:23
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