"But every real event has a past and a future, and this can move us."
...So...he was never moved by a fictional event? He never cried at the death of Bambi's mother, or cheered when the Death Star blew up? Or had any range of emotions that sympathized with the plight of a fictional character, wanting to see him triumph, and the plans of his enemies fail?
Conversely, he is able to be moved by every real-life event as deeply as those who experienced it? He's never felt too distant from a huge, horrible event to the point where it didn't feel real to him? Knowing something happens isn't the same as experiencing it. And when you're immersed in a story, you tend to feel more connected to what is happening than when you're reading a snapshot, list-of-facts news story about an event.
It's easier to be upset by the abstract concept of loss of life, what the world or a family may have lost from it, than it is to be upset by the death of a specific person when you never met them; never had any kind of connection with them. I don't know them at all, I don't know their story or what kind of person they where, and as such, they feel less real than somebody whose story I do know, even if that person is made up.
There's this one line at the end of the Joy Luck Club that always makes me tear up. And I always have a little smirk for the ending of Spy Game. That's leaving alone hundreds of other moments in literature and media and hell, MUSIC, that completely sucked me into the moment.
One of my favorite movies, both as a child and as an adult, was the Neverending Story. Even as a child, the "ordinary world vs. the book world both being 'real'" bits stuck with me, as well as the narration at the end: "Bastion made many other wishes, and had many other amazing adventures before he finally returned to the ordinary world. But that's another story."
Ie, "Just because this part is over doesn't mean that the whole story is. Outside of these walls, the character(s) continue on."
Silly me, I thought this could be applied to ALL stories, everywhere. Apparently if the author/narrator doesn't explicitly tell me that more happens, I've always been supposed to assume everybody dies and the world is swallowed up into a void as soon as the screen rolls black, as soon as I hit the final page? That nothing but a void existed and the players sprang to life exactly as they are before the curtain went up for the first time, with no rhyme or reason to why they act and think the way they do unless one is explicitly stated?
When a movie is over it often has a closure that, while not necessarily removing all of our wonder about what happens next with the characters, at least answers the questions the movie raised...but when a show is canceled, they often don't have time to do wrap up all the plot lines. And since I don't want to imagine characters I am attached to forever dangling over the proverbial cliff, that is when I am most likely to start wondering about the ways they might get themselves back on solid ground.
To say that when a show is canceled we should immediately lose all curiosity about characters that the creators and writers have spent X amount of seasons and time developing so that we will care about them enough to come back and spend an hour each week watching them seems a little, I don't know, counter-intuitive?
Why would anyone ever read, or write, a sequel if a story is over as soon as the book is done? Why would any studio ever bother to produce a spinoff?
to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction ...and what's wrong with that?
"There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends," to quote Schmendrick.
...So...he was never moved by a fictional event? He never cried at the death of Bambi's mother, or cheered when the Death Star blew up? Or had any range of emotions that sympathized with the plight of a fictional character, wanting to see him triumph, and the plans of his enemies fail?
Conversely, he is able to be moved by every real-life event as deeply as those who experienced it? He's never felt too distant from a huge, horrible event to the point where it didn't feel real to him? Knowing something happens isn't the same as experiencing it. And when you're immersed in a story, you tend to feel more connected to what is happening than when you're reading a snapshot, list-of-facts news story about an event.
It's easier to be upset by the abstract concept of loss of life, what the world or a family may have lost from it, than it is to be upset by the death of a specific person when you never met them; never had any kind of connection with them. I don't know them at all, I don't know their story or what kind of person they where, and as such, they feel less real than somebody whose story I do know, even if that person is made up.
There's this one line at the end of the Joy Luck Club that always makes me tear up. And I always have a little smirk for the ending of Spy Game. That's leaving alone hundreds of other moments in literature and media and hell, MUSIC, that completely sucked me into the moment.
One of my favorite movies, both as a child and as an adult, was the Neverending Story. Even as a child, the "ordinary world vs. the book world both being 'real'" bits stuck with me, as well as the narration at the end:
"Bastion made many other wishes, and had many other amazing adventures before he finally returned to the ordinary world. But that's another story."
Ie, "Just because this part is over doesn't mean that the whole story is. Outside of these walls, the character(s) continue on."
Silly me, I thought this could be applied to ALL stories, everywhere.
Apparently if the author/narrator doesn't explicitly tell me that more happens, I've always been supposed to assume everybody dies and the world is swallowed up into a void as soon as the screen rolls black, as soon as I hit the final page? That nothing but a void existed and the players sprang to life exactly as they are before the curtain went up for the first time, with no rhyme or reason to why they act and think the way they do unless one is explicitly stated?
When a movie is over it often has a closure that, while not necessarily removing all of our wonder about what happens next with the characters, at least answers the questions the movie raised...but when a show is canceled, they often don't have time to do wrap up all the plot lines. And since I don't want to imagine characters I am attached to forever dangling over the proverbial cliff, that is when I am most likely to start wondering about the ways they might get themselves back on solid ground.
To say that when a show is canceled we should immediately lose all curiosity about characters that the creators and writers have spent X amount of seasons and time developing so that we will care about them enough to come back and spend an hour each week watching them seems a little, I don't know, counter-intuitive?
Why would anyone ever read, or write, a sequel if a story is over as soon as the book is done? Why would any studio ever bother to produce a spinoff?
to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction
...and what's wrong with that?