[ 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)]

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.