![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI think I may have figured out why so many people are boggled by fanfiction. It is because they think like this:
I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don't care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet's friends are coping with his death because these friends don't exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction. But every real event has a past and a future, and this can move us. It is easy enough to think about the families of those people whom O.J. Simpson was accused of murdering.
That is an excerpt from The Pleasures of Imagination, an article by Paul Bloom. (Emphasis is mine.)
It's a very interesting article, mostly to do with why telling and experiencing fictional stories is such a hugely common human activity, and why 'playing pretend' in all its varied forms is so important to us that even babies have the mental capacity to do so (at least to some degree). I found myself agreeing with most of it, but that paragraph stopped me cold.
Because while I know perfectly well that fictional characters are fictional, I do wonder what happens to them before, during, and after their stories. I do wonder about the implications of their actions. I don't think that is in any way more difficult or unusual than wondering about nonfictional people -- in fact, I think it's easier, partly because we can know fictional people in ways we can never know real people, which means we have a much richer basis for speculation, and partly because, well, they're fictional. Telling myself stories about fictional people lacks a certain sense of voyeurism I feel when reading human interest articles about real people. (Obviously YMMV on that last point, as the popularity of RPF shows!)
Yet apparently this instinct to see stories as 'closed' -- as if they have no continuing existence in readers' minds once we reach the words "The End" -- runs very deep in Paul Bloom's mind, since he cannot conceive of considering fictional people as if they and their worlds continue beyond the boundaries of the particular time-and-place in which he encounters them.
I don't understand that mindset at all.
...
Thoughts, anyone?
I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don't care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet's friends are coping with his death because these friends don't exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction. But every real event has a past and a future, and this can move us. It is easy enough to think about the families of those people whom O.J. Simpson was accused of murdering.
That is an excerpt from The Pleasures of Imagination, an article by Paul Bloom. (Emphasis is mine.)
It's a very interesting article, mostly to do with why telling and experiencing fictional stories is such a hugely common human activity, and why 'playing pretend' in all its varied forms is so important to us that even babies have the mental capacity to do so (at least to some degree). I found myself agreeing with most of it, but that paragraph stopped me cold.
Because while I know perfectly well that fictional characters are fictional, I do wonder what happens to them before, during, and after their stories. I do wonder about the implications of their actions. I don't think that is in any way more difficult or unusual than wondering about nonfictional people -- in fact, I think it's easier, partly because we can know fictional people in ways we can never know real people, which means we have a much richer basis for speculation, and partly because, well, they're fictional. Telling myself stories about fictional people lacks a certain sense of voyeurism I feel when reading human interest articles about real people. (Obviously YMMV on that last point, as the popularity of RPF shows!)
Yet apparently this instinct to see stories as 'closed' -- as if they have no continuing existence in readers' minds once we reach the words "The End" -- runs very deep in Paul Bloom's mind, since he cannot conceive of considering fictional people as if they and their worlds continue beyond the boundaries of the particular time-and-place in which he encounters them.
I don't understand that mindset at all.
...
Thoughts, anyone?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
"There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends," to quote Schmendrick.
Date: 2010-06-19 10:31 am (UTC)...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?
Re: "There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends," to quote Schmendrick.
Date: 2010-06-20 04:39 am (UTC)I really am baffled at the idea that a story stops and its world disintegrates just because the movie ends or the book closes. The story isn't in the book, after all. The book is only the vehicle to transmit the story into readers' minds; after that, it lives in us. I think revivals of old stories (whether trying to breathe new life into movie franchises, or things like the new Doctor Who series) prove quite conclusively that people don't stop caring about stories just because they reach the words "The End" or some equivalent thereof.
to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction
...and what's wrong with that?
Nothing whatsoever. :-D