My sinuses need to be boiled in vinegar or something
So I nagged villainny into running SiNtE again this year! Y'all should sign the fuck up.
Meme from Scott:
Pick a character I write, and I will give you the top five ideas/concepts/other I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting them accurately. This includes both original characters and characters about whom I write fanfic.
Today I went to a bar with Ruthi and I accidentally bought a couple more books while I was waiting for her and then alcohol and cake which was awesome; what was less awesome was that I was basically incapable of interacting outside of "in the manner of Grandpa Simpson", ie. RANT RANT RANT abrupt snooze RANT RANT RANT snooze RANT RANT. Wooziness and on-and-off nausea/lack of equilibrium is not cool, body/brain.
(Liza informs me that I have more than 5k on my ridiculous as-yet-untitled "fail fatale" thing, which is quite good. Er, for something which mostly consists of me squawking vaguely about a character based on a male model. Anyway)
So, I said, "Remind me I want to talk to you about bathos, and how conflicting emotions can underscore the primary feeling of a piece, please?" and people did so hurrah.
So, let me talk about bathos. I fucking love bathos. It is one of my favourite things in ever, and is the grand underlying literary concept behind PtP, besides what I already discussed here. I think the main reason I am so keen on it is that it is versatile; on the one hand bathos can be used to sell a joke - your expectations are subverted, which makes you laugh. It's at the very heart of humour. You are set up to believe X, but Y happens instead. Bathos is the literary name for the process which takes place when we laugh "THREAT/LARGE THING oh no wait not a threat."
On the other hand it's also really excellent for selling you on tragedy - wikipedia just whinged at me that "pathos" and "bathos" are not the same thing, which I am well aware of; the point is that just as the juxtaposition, chronologically, of something grand and something deeply mundane, or something vastly threatening and something comically unthreatening, can be hilarious, so can the consecutive use of the gigantic and impressive contrasted to the small and mundane be very tragic. The commonest use I think is the now-hackneyed explosion-followed-by-child's-toy-in-the-ashes; it seems to work best if I explain it in terms of cuts but it works in writing too ...
From bathos to conflicting emotions went my brain, because the way you can contrast laughter against tears to make the tears seem sadder, particularly if -
Oh fuck this, I really can't be bothered.
Meme from Scott:
Pick a character I write, and I will give you the top five ideas/concepts/other I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting them accurately. This includes both original characters and characters about whom I write fanfic.
Today I went to a bar with Ruthi and I accidentally bought a couple more books while I was waiting for her and then alcohol and cake which was awesome; what was less awesome was that I was basically incapable of interacting outside of "in the manner of Grandpa Simpson", ie. RANT RANT RANT abrupt snooze RANT RANT RANT snooze RANT RANT. Wooziness and on-and-off nausea/lack of equilibrium is not cool, body/brain.
(Liza informs me that I have more than 5k on my ridiculous as-yet-untitled "fail fatale" thing, which is quite good. Er, for something which mostly consists of me squawking vaguely about a character based on a male model. Anyway)
So, I said, "Remind me I want to talk to you about bathos, and how conflicting emotions can underscore the primary feeling of a piece, please?" and people did so hurrah.
So, let me talk about bathos. I fucking love bathos. It is one of my favourite things in ever, and is the grand underlying literary concept behind PtP, besides what I already discussed here. I think the main reason I am so keen on it is that it is versatile; on the one hand bathos can be used to sell a joke - your expectations are subverted, which makes you laugh. It's at the very heart of humour. You are set up to believe X, but Y happens instead. Bathos is the literary name for the process which takes place when we laugh "THREAT/LARGE THING oh no wait not a threat."
On the other hand it's also really excellent for selling you on tragedy - wikipedia just whinged at me that "pathos" and "bathos" are not the same thing, which I am well aware of; the point is that just as the juxtaposition, chronologically, of something grand and something deeply mundane, or something vastly threatening and something comically unthreatening, can be hilarious, so can the consecutive use of the gigantic and impressive contrasted to the small and mundane be very tragic. The commonest use I think is the now-hackneyed explosion-followed-by-child's-toy-in-the-ashes; it seems to work best if I explain it in terms of cuts but it works in writing too ...
From bathos to conflicting emotions went my brain, because the way you can contrast laughter against tears to make the tears seem sadder, particularly if -
Oh fuck this, I really can't be bothered.