Well, that's quite a transformation. Just to be clear, there is no in-universe explanation for it? It's not something that is given a literal justification, or that is presumed to need one?
Well, that's quite a transformation. Just to be clear, there is no in-universe explanation for it? It's not something that is given a literal justification, or that is presumed to need one?
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
The justification is a narrative one. When Iggy is introduced, he's some weird fucking dog that eats coffee-flavored chewing gum. That later linked chapter serves to "humanize" him, giving him an adventure where he fights a bird Stand master and risk his life in doing so.
The justification is a narrative one. When Iggy is introduced, he's some weird fucking dog that eats coffee-flavored chewing gum. That later linked chapter serves to "humanize" him, giving him an adventure where he fights a bird Stand master and risk his life in doing so.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
And you hear his thoughts and his desires and how he attempts to communicate with other creatures, which is in direct contrast with his earlier portrayal as a non-sapient dog.
I don't think that's something that "just happens."
And you hear his thoughts and his desires and how he attempts to communicate with other creatures, which is in direct contrast with his earlier portrayal as a non-sapient dog.
I don't think that's something that "just happens."
OK, so we're talking about a development that happens in terms of how the character is presented to the reader. Not everything has to operate on the level of a literal reality, that's the beauty of fiction.
Actually, inconsistency within a given work or series of works is extremely good and owns
Care to elaborate?
i can accept that it's one of those rules that you can get some artistic mileage out of breaking, but i think maintaining consistency over a large body of work is itself quite an impressive thing with creative potential.
the first thing i would ask you to do, then, is ask yourself what consistency is for. yes, it may be impressive, and it may have 'creative potential', but creative potential to what end?
OK, so we're talking about a development that happens in terms of how the character is presented to the reader. Not everything has to operate on the level of a literal reality, that's the beauty of fiction.
Something similar happens in Part 4, where some characters who are a threat to the viewpoint character are initially portrayed as very tall, but they shrink down to his size when they're no longer a threat.
Actually, inconsistency within a given work or series of works is extremely good and owns
Care to elaborate?
i can accept that it's one of those rules that you can get some artistic mileage out of breaking, but i think maintaining consistency over a large body of work is itself quite an impressive thing with creative potential.
the first thing i would ask you to do, then, is ask yourself what consistency is for. yes, it may be impressive, and it may have 'creative potential', but creative potential to what end?
i can think of a few.
If the setting is the stage for a mystery or detective story, consistent worldbuilding means that any inconsistencies are important. This allows the author to hide clues in plain sight. This is good for crafting puzzle-box narratives, but it also gives the writer more leeway in terms of introducing surprising developments; what might otherwise have been open to accusations of deus ex machina can become, with subtle foreshadowing, much easier for a reader to accept. Hiding it in the inconsistencies in an otherwise consistent world is one way of doing this.
Another thing you can do with consistent worldbuilding is create and emphasize the illusion that events are taking place in a material world which follows a set of mechanistic rules. In a science fiction narrative, for instance, this could serve as a backdrop to make the extraordinary events more extraordinary, or be applied to the events themselves to create added verisimilitude. Alternatively, in a story with heavy symbolism or shocking emotional drama, the relatively mundane material underpinning can throw the dramatic or symbolic content into sharp relief. Yet another use for this kind of setting would be to explore "what if" scenarios, in the manner of alternate history.
Lastly, and probably most germane to complaints about comic books, there's the simple joy of, in escapist fiction, having an imaginary world to explore. If the world is built consistently, it raises the possibility that by exploring it, we can discover more about it. i think this is the case in Tolkien's Middle-Earth, for instance.
It is natural for our eyes to see objects as images and shapes. Any shape has a silhouette, an outline—but that’s not what we’re looking at under normal circumstances. It would be a bit weird of us to say that a table is actually a table-shaped outline filled with “table matter”. For crying out loud, it’s just a table.
We perceive time differently though. A boring history textbook often turns into a list of dates—here’s when this bill was passed, here’s when that war happened… It’s not the most engaging way of thinking about time, but it’s also natural. History is most easily understood as a succession of breaking points. An outline of an epoch filled this “and that’s what it looked like back then” matter.
Well, it seems like the Steppe tradition encourages its bearers to perceive space in the same fashion as we normally perceive time. To see circles filled with “circle matter” rather than disks. The thing itself is unimportant; the lines that separate things are—as are beginnings and ends. It’s not about places—it’s about roads that connect them and break them into parts.
This videogame Kickstarter has the weirdest updates
And i guess also, if we accept as an assumption that stories are normally consistent, give or take the odd goof, then it's more striking when they decide to break that rule.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
I'd say for long-runners like superhero comics, worldbuilding consistency is less important than emotional or character consistency. Which is something a lot of people don't realize.
"By taking this concept more literally than it is intended and to ridiculous extremes you can produce nonsense" is a fun exercise, but i don't see how it invalidates the concept altogether.
i mean the bottom line for me is that imaginary worlds are *fun*, and their being "silly" doesn't make them not fun. Nor does their being "Content", whatever that means.
"By taking this concept more literally than it is intended and to ridiculous extremes you can produce nonsense" is a fun exercise, but i don't see how it invalidates the concept altogether.
i mean the bottom line for me is that imaginary worlds are *fun*, and their being "silly" doesn't make them not fun. Nor does their being "Content", whatever that means.
It's just saying that strict interseries continuity leads to absurdity.
Actually, inconsistency within a given work or series of works is extremely good and owns
Care to elaborate?
i can accept that it's one of those rules that you can get some artistic mileage out of breaking, but i think maintaining consistency over a large body of work is itself quite an impressive thing with creative potential.
the first thing i would ask you to do, then, is ask yourself what consistency is for. yes, it may be impressive, and it may have 'creative potential', but creative potential to what end?
i can think of a few.
If the setting is the stage for a mystery or detective story, consistent worldbuilding means that any inconsistencies are important. This allows the author to hide clues in plain sight. This is good for crafting puzzle-box narratives, but it also gives the writer more leeway in terms of introducing surprising developments; what might otherwise have been open to accusations of deus ex machina can become, with subtle foreshadowing, much easier for a reader to accept. Hiding it in the inconsistencies in an otherwise consistent world is one way of doing this.
Another thing you can do with consistent worldbuilding is create and emphasize the illusion that events are taking place in a material world which follows a set of mechanistic rules. In a science fiction narrative, for instance, this could serve as a backdrop to make the extraordinary events more extraordinary, or be applied to the events themselves to create added verisimilitude. Alternatively, in a story with heavy symbolism or shocking emotional drama, the relatively mundane material underpinning can throw the dramatic or symbolic content into sharp relief. Yet another use for this kind of setting would be to explore "what if" scenarios, in the manner of alternate history.
Lastly, and probably most germane to complaints about comic books, there's the simple joy of, in escapist fiction, having an imaginary world to explore. If the world is built consistently, it raises the possibility that by exploring it, we can discover more about it. i think this is the case in Tolkien's Middle-Earth, for instance.
i find it interesting that all three of your examples hinge on what we might call "genre fiction"
there's a cool idea by a dude called Jauss which is that genre functions as a "horizon of expectation" - there are sets of codes behind each 'genre' which we have a prior idea of. so in our detective novel we have the expectation that when the perpetrator is revealed, we will be able to look back on the narrative and pick up the logical thread that leads to the truth. in our sci-fi novel we have an expectation of this future world which works to somehow ;scientific' principles. in our comic book 'universe' we have our preconceived notions of what that universe is and how it works, our world which we like escaping to
this comic book complaint is summed up pretty well by myr - if you try and keep everything perfectly consistent then it becomes absurd. can you imagine if superman hadn't changed at all since wwhenever it was the first superman comic was published? you see what i mean. but, especially with escapist fiction, especially with pre-established worlds, people don't like having their horizons of expectation move about. the 'world' has to be explorable and has to stay the same way, or the time they have put into 'escaping' into it seems hollow; it draws attention that they are basically engaging with an illusion. (another interesting thing is how the money making side of media nowadays focuses very heavily on this 'world' aspect - look at videogames, merchandising, theme parks, etc.: this escapist need is very efficiently exploited by capital.) but inconsistency is necessary to keep things interesting, and relevant, esp. over very long periods of time. sci-fi that isnt necessarily consistent is a thing and a lot of it is very interesting, for instance. now i am going to look at one specific line here you wrote:
"Another thing you can do with consistent worldbuilding is create and emphasize the illusion that events are taking place in a material world which follows a set of mechanistic rules."
so this is, one way or another, the problem of realism - which is, of course, that at the end of the day your illusion is an illusion. sucking people into your narrative is one thing but i think there are much wider and more interesting artistic possibilities from playing with how 'real' things are or acknowledging the 'unrealness' of the text. this, of course, is a spectrum, and there's no fixed boundary between real and unreal; the most interesting texts for me are the ones that neither present themselves as untrammeled truth nor totally disjointed and alienated but play around with things a bit, use the possibilities of the medium itself to do something cool. fiction has a very weird relationship with fact.
i'd recommend getting a hold of the book 'Elizabeth costello' by JM Coetzee and reading the first chapter called 'Realism', which is pretty cool and gets this sort of stuff across at the same time as actually doing it.
i just got back from dinner and typed all that out w/o really checking it so apologies if it makes no sense or all of my points were already made 20mins ago and i didnt see because im too lazy to refresh the page
I'm not really awake enough to get into this argument proper, but I think that if Marvel/DC put less focus on making everything consistent, writers wouldn't go completely hogwild whenever they get the chance to write an elseworlds.
I agree with everything Sunn said, but I think one of the fun aspects of comics is their attempts to wrangle a medium that has always been inconsistent into something coherent.
@ sunn wolf: Thank you for that thoughtful response. i will check out the Coetzee you mentioned as soon as i can.
i want to say there's a difference between inconsistency and development. Change is necessary to keep things interesting over a sustained period of time, but i'm not convinced that this needs to involve internal contradiction.
i think one thing that interests me is the interplay of the literal and the non-literal in a narrative, and the relationship between what the characters and the reader are experiencing and the implied wider universe. To deny that A=A is to make a departure from realism and throw that universe into question. Obviously there's no reason you can't do that, i guess what i was trying to do here is put forward a defence of *not* doing that. i think when we go about our lives we rarely encounter internal contradictions of the type that would be considered a "major continuity error" or "plot hole" in a work of fiction, and if we did this would be a strange occurrence, a mystery which we'd want to solve. If we take this as a basic assumption about the world we live in, though, that doesn't diminish the capacity of that world to make us feel things, to take us on emotional journeys or to derive meaning from our experiences. i feel like a good realist story should operate in the same way.
Of course i'm not out to defend the excesses of superhero comics.
i feel like when i visit this site lately i get like this constant barrage of snide posts about "Content consumption" which broadly condemns all genre fiction, comic books, theme parks, worldbuilding, video games, the whole spectrum of what i guess you could call geek entertainment, and if i seem defensive it's because frankly it makes me feel like shit.
It makes me feel like i am a horrible, petty, small-minded nerd, with no concept of art or wonder, and that i can never even hope to create anything worthwhile because my own conceptions of what is enjoyable are fundamentally, irrevocably wrong.
Comments
Well, that's quite a transformation. Just to be clear, there is no in-universe explanation for it? It's not something that is given a literal justification, or that is presumed to need one?
That Birb did not fuck around.
If the setting is the stage for a mystery or detective story, consistent worldbuilding means that any inconsistencies are important. This allows the author to hide clues in plain sight. This is good for crafting puzzle-box narratives, but it also gives the writer more leeway in terms of introducing surprising developments; what might otherwise have been open to accusations of deus ex machina can become, with subtle foreshadowing, much easier for a reader to accept. Hiding it in the inconsistencies in an otherwise consistent world is one way of doing this.
Another thing you can do with consistent worldbuilding is create and emphasize the illusion that events are taking place in a material world which follows a set of mechanistic rules. In a science fiction narrative, for instance, this could serve as a backdrop to make the extraordinary events more extraordinary, or be applied to the events themselves to create added verisimilitude. Alternatively, in a story with heavy symbolism or shocking emotional drama, the relatively mundane material underpinning can throw the dramatic or symbolic content into sharp relief. Yet another use for this kind of setting would be to explore "what if" scenarios, in the manner of alternate history.
Lastly, and probably most germane to complaints about comic books, there's the simple joy of, in escapist fiction, having an imaginary world to explore. If the world is built consistently, it raises the possibility that by exploring it, we can discover more about it. i think this is the case in Tolkien's Middle-Earth, for instance.
It is natural for our eyes to see objects as images and shapes. Any shape has a silhouette, an outline—but that’s not what we’re looking at under normal circumstances. It would be a bit weird of us to say that a table is actually a table-shaped outline filled with “table matter”. For crying out loud, it’s just a table.
We perceive time differently though. A boring history textbook often turns into a list of dates—here’s when this bill was passed, here’s when that war happened… It’s not the most engaging way of thinking about time, but it’s also natural. History is most easily understood as a succession of breaking points. An outline of an epoch filled this “and that’s what it looked like back then” matter.
Well, it seems like the Steppe tradition encourages its bearers to perceive space in the same fashion as we normally perceive time. To see circles filled with “circle matter” rather than disks. The thing itself is unimportant; the lines that separate things are—as are beginnings and ends. It’s not about places—it’s about roads that connect them and break them into parts.
This videogame Kickstarter has the weirdest updatesi mean the bottom line for me is that imaginary worlds are *fun*, and their being "silly" doesn't make them not fun. Nor does their being "Content", whatever that means.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
That doesn't mean the same thing can't be done better in the hands of more competent writers.
there's a cool idea by a dude called Jauss which is that genre functions as a "horizon of expectation" - there are sets of codes behind each 'genre' which we have a prior idea of. so in our detective novel we have the expectation that when the perpetrator is revealed, we will be able to look back on the narrative and pick up the logical thread that leads to the truth. in our sci-fi novel we have an expectation of this future world which works to somehow ;scientific' principles. in our comic book 'universe' we have our preconceived notions of what that universe is and how it works, our world which we like escaping to
this comic book complaint is summed up pretty well by myr - if you try and keep everything perfectly consistent then it becomes absurd. can you imagine if superman hadn't changed at all since wwhenever it was the first superman comic was published? you see what i mean. but, especially with escapist fiction, especially with pre-established worlds, people don't like having their horizons of expectation move about. the 'world' has to be explorable and has to stay the same way, or the time they have put into 'escaping' into it seems hollow; it draws attention that they are basically engaging with an illusion. (another interesting thing is how the money making side of media nowadays focuses very heavily on this 'world' aspect - look at videogames, merchandising, theme parks, etc.: this escapist need is very efficiently exploited by capital.) but inconsistency is necessary to keep things interesting, and relevant, esp. over very long periods of time. sci-fi that isnt necessarily consistent is a thing and a lot of it is very interesting, for instance. now i am going to look at one specific line here you wrote:
"Another thing you can do with consistent worldbuilding is create and
emphasize the illusion that events are taking place in a material world
which follows a set of mechanistic rules."
so this is, one way or another, the problem of realism - which is, of course, that at the end of the day your illusion is an illusion. sucking people into your narrative is one thing but i think there are much wider and more interesting artistic possibilities from playing with how 'real' things are or acknowledging the 'unrealness' of the text. this, of course, is a spectrum, and there's no fixed boundary between real and unreal; the most interesting texts for me are the ones that neither present themselves as untrammeled truth nor totally disjointed and alienated but play around with things a bit, use the possibilities of the medium itself to do something cool. fiction has a very weird relationship with fact.
i'd recommend getting a hold of the book 'Elizabeth costello' by JM Coetzee and reading the first chapter called 'Realism', which is pretty cool and gets this sort of stuff across at the same time as actually doing it.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
After that I discovered the mighty POMO and found that there are many other ways of being interesting in fiction
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is excellent.
though I liked the creative additions to scrooge more than the continuity. the continuity worked for me because it added to the biographical feel.
i want to say there's a difference between inconsistency and development. Change is necessary to keep things interesting over a sustained period of time, but i'm not convinced that this needs to involve internal contradiction.
i think one thing that interests me is the interplay of the literal and the non-literal in a narrative, and the relationship between what the characters and the reader are experiencing and the implied wider universe. To deny that A=A is to make a departure from realism and throw that universe into question. Obviously there's no reason you can't do that, i guess what i was trying to do here is put forward a defence of *not* doing that. i think when we go about our lives we rarely encounter internal contradictions of the type that would be considered a "major continuity error" or "plot hole" in a work of fiction, and if we did this would be a strange occurrence, a mystery which we'd want to solve. If we take this as a basic assumption about the world we live in, though, that doesn't diminish the capacity of that world to make us feel things, to take us on emotional journeys or to derive meaning from our experiences. i feel like a good realist story should operate in the same way.
comics, it's just nerd shit desires
It WAS his nerd desires.
IT just wasn't S***.
i feel like when i visit this site lately i get like this constant barrage of snide posts about "Content consumption" which broadly condemns all genre fiction, comic books, theme parks, worldbuilding, video games, the whole spectrum of what i guess you could call geek entertainment, and if i seem defensive it's because frankly it makes me feel like shit.
It makes me feel like i am a horrible, petty, small-minded nerd, with no concept of art or wonder, and that i can never even hope to create anything worthwhile because my own conceptions of what is enjoyable are fundamentally, irrevocably wrong.