[ SECRET POST #3193 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3193 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Da Vinci's Demons]


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03. tb - please check sizes when using tinypic
[Harry Potter, general]


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04.
[Raffles by E.W. Hornung]


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05.
[Avengers: Age of Ultron]


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06.
[Star Trek: The Next Generation]


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07.
[Wreck It Ralph]


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08.
[Steven Universe]


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09.
[David Bowie]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 009 secrets from Secret Submission Post #456.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

man I hear you, anon. I thought of this yesterday when the muppet secret was met with "but they're just scraps of felt!!" This knee-jerk reaction to reduce every work of fiction to its component atoms, and claim it's "nothing but" words on a page, or brushstrokes on a canvas, lines uttered by an actor, line drawings with word balloons over the characters, etc sort of flies in the face of that which fiction is.

It's stories. Stories told in a hundred different ways, through different mediums (media?), but they're still stories. Stories to entertain but also communicate, to convey the human condition. To evoke empathy and sympathy as much as amusement, hatred and anger, joy, sorrow, nostalgia, and so on. To inform, also, which isn't a bad thing. To both reflect humanity as it was or is and to encourage humanity to what it will be or could be. To say that a character, whether well-rounded and complex or reduced to a stereotype, isn't meant to communicate something in some way, and evoke a reaction to the person seeing/hearing the story, is disingenuous. It's a way of shutting down any and all discussion of what the character, or the story, could mean, or what it's trying to communicate. Whether it's communicating accurately or could have been handled better.

Sure, above comments have hinted at the people who get hyper-invested in characters or story or tumblritis and can't see the forest for the trees, but this whole notion of saying "it's nothing but...!" is the complete opposite end. I'm kind of surprised that the pendulum swinging all the way back to the opposite side took so long, in terms of the history of fandom, and it's rather disturbing, but I suppose if we point this out now we can swing back into the middle ground sooner rather than later.

[(Anonymous)]

Why won't someone call the ASPCA about how cruelly those dragons are being treated on Game of Thrones?? Animal cruelty is a really important issue and it's not okay!

See, you can take something fictional seriously if you want to. Go ahead, have fun! But you can't insist that everyone treat it as seriously as you do, or claim that they're doing it wrong if they don't.

[(Anonymous)]

See, to me the "They're just felt!" was showing why they didn't take slapstick violence as seriously. The medium insisted that these were characters who couldn't feel pain, and so it's hard to go "But if they were real and they could feel pain... that would be bad."

In an interview about doing Moulin Rouge I remember someone saying that it was so much easier to do musicals with cartoon characters because there was already a built in suspension of disbelief. Of course everyone can randomly burst into song and choreography, it's a cartoon. So they tried hard to add in some over the top elements in the movie to generate the same sort of unreality where characters bursting into song wasn't so out of place.

So freaking out over Piggy karate-chopping people in a world where the characters can't be hurt is a bit like freaking out over how scared the people in Beauty in the Beast must be when all of a sudden someone starts singing and then everyone's singing along and you're singing too and how terrifying would that be?

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, this. The Muppets were pretty much cartoonish in nature. We see them regularly take abuse with no real or lasting harm (Beaker and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, anyone?) which is exactly why people don't get upset when something that would ordinarily be considered bad happens to a muppet. It's kind of like suspension of disbelief. If a bear appeared without warning onstage at a comedy club, people would freak the hell out because HOLY SHIT IT'S A BEAR.

But when it's Fozzie, we understand the rules are different, and therefore the standards and expectations of behavior are different as well.

[(Anonymous)]

And a big part of it (and what can be played around with) is how the characters react in universe. in LOTR Sauron doesn't do that much, but you have badass characters being terrified of him so he comes across as a menacing bad guy.

If Fozzie did appear and people were going "eek a bear!" in the show, it would be playing around with that because we expect the muppets to be treated as cartoon characters, not real animals.

And another example of the rules are different I forgot to list, The Grinch. One of the things that sucked about the live action was a cartoon Grinch being cruel to a cartoon dog was funny and non-threatening. A man in a mascot suit being cruel to a real dog was just sad and depressing.