[ SECRET POST #3771 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3771 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #540.
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)]

It's not up to JLaw's character, because JLaw's character is not a real person. It's up to the person writing the story how they chose to tell it, and the specific choice made was a bad one to make especially in the context of a movie that was certainly marketed as a romance. I agree with the importance of empathy and forgiveness but they become really weird constructs when you apply them to works of fiction. And I think giving those characters that ending does - in the specific context of the movie - minimize what he did, just inevitably.

[(Anonymous)]

" It's up to the person writing the story how they chose to tell it".

I hate this argument. By this logic ANY female character written by a man should not be praised for whatever feminist reason or another. That praise should go to male writers.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure how that follows, and it seems to me you might be conflating different ways of talking about characters

Like, you can still talk about the Jennifer Lawrence character *as a character* but you do have to keep in mind that she's a fictional construct. and that's a really significant distinction when you're talking about something like the choices the character makes. Which is one of the reasons that I think OP is wrong - it's hard to say whether the choice the character made in real life would be right or wrong, but that's not really the right question to ask, because we're discussing a fictional narrative.

I'm not sure what that has to do with calling characters feminists. Like... I'm honestly kind of confused on what you even mean when you talk about praising female characters for feminist reasons as distinct from praising their creators. Would you mind elaborating?

[(Anonymous)]

yes? if a man writes a female character in a genuinely feminist way (instead of ~sexy empowerment~ that's actually fanservice) then they should get the kudos for that? It doesn't make the characters less cool from an in-universe perspective but they still aren't real?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm shocked that this such a foreign concept...

[(Anonymous)]

By that reasoning though, no character male OR female has any agency whatsoever? I don't think that argument really works.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I entirely agree that no fictional characters have actual moral agency. This seems like a fairly obvious thing to say. I'm not really sure where the disagreement is.

They might have in-story agency, but that's not at all the same thing as having actual moral agency, and treating them as if they're equivalent makes no sense.

[feotakahari]

But then why do we care about fiction in the first place? If we don't pretend they're real people, what's the point of consuming fiction at all?

[(Anonymous)]

da

I've... never in my life pretended that characters are real people. Like, I get attached to the characters, of course, and I love a good story, but... what? They're not real. I genuinely can't understand that leap of logic. The point of consuming fiction is being entertained.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean

I'm not going to outline an entire theory of aesthetics and storytelling here, but I guess I would say in general that human brains are really great at engaging with representations and narratives, and that we don't need to think that works of imagination are true to think they're great, and that they're basically structures of human meaning even without being literally truth-like

[(Anonymous)]

to put it another way: the ability to engage with something as if it was real does not mean that you actually do believe it was real

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, but if you're engaging in it as IF it were real, then are we not watching pretending it that these are real people making real decisions?

Like, it doesn't absolve the writers of bad writing, but realistic choices from a character's perspective (ie being alone for a year and finally coming to the decision to wake someone else) might be a poor decision, but I don't see it as bad writing when intense loneliness might lead to poor decisions.

[(Anonymous)]

Acting as though they're real implies that you're able to step back and realize that they're not real. It's an attitude that we adopt and discard at will, and analyzing a work solely from that perspective is just necessarily limited and flawed.

In this case, we can see that it might be a realistic choice from the character's perspective. But we can also see the genre and the other fictional narrative conventions in the story, and how those artistic conventions shape the way that we approach the character, and the kind of emotional realism you're talking about is one stylistic and narrative choice among many. It's not an intrinsically correct style, and I think basically the core of my argument is that specific kind of realism is a weird, inappropriate fit with the genre and narrative around it, and it has unfortunate implications. I think it's bad writing, not because it's unrealistic, but because it's realistic in a way that doesn't really fit what's around it. And I think approaching things that way is a pretty instinctive part of how we approach narrative - maybe not in such an explicit way, but it's part of the language of story.

SA

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, but I was just thinking about it and I realized that the third sentence should probably read: "they become really weird constructs when you apply them to fictional characters as though they're real human beings".

[(Anonymous)]

Every time I hear "it's not up to the character", I always know that person isn't a writer.

[(Anonymous)]

are you one of those writers who likes to pretend they're a shaman who's communing with their characters, or whatever

[(Anonymous)]

Please tell me you're not one of those people who thinks that "headspace" is a real thing and your "muses" run around inside it.

Signed, an actual published author.

[(Anonymous)]

Every time I hear someone ramble about how their characters call the shots, I know to smile and nod and start looking for the nearest exit.

[(Anonymous)]

Hahahahahahaha no.

It wasn't until I actually stopped thinking of my stories as being unchangeable because they were the "true" stories of actual people that lived in my head and started listening to feedback that I started actually selling fiction.

[(Anonymous)]

I've noticed that people who do that whole "the characters really exist, I'm just the stenographer who writes what they tell me to" thing tend to be the most rabidly crit-averse people around--Anne Rice, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Stephenie Meyer, I'm looking at you!

[raspberryrain]

Was it marketed as a romance, or as a science fiction movie with some sex in it? That's not really the same thing.

[(Anonymous)]

Its marketing was all over the place - it was a little bit of a shitshow. But that was definitely one of the ways it was advertised. As see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BWWWQzTpNU

[raspberryrain]

That doesn't seem like an unreasonable trailer. I think some people are a little spoiled in their expectations of cinema.

[(Anonymous)]

This is a very meta approach, though. Oftentimes people prefer to look at characters and stories within the context of those stories. Sure Aurora is a fictional person, but we are asked to assume she's real. What is the point of storytelling at all if you're going to pick apart the construction instead of absorb the tale?