Because sometimes depressing is just depressing

[shadesofmauve]

I've talked about depressing novels and grimdark games (and where the line is) with almost everyone on my f'list, it seems. You should all head over to read Elizabeth Bear's Dear Speculative Fiction, I'm glad we had this talk.

Personally, if I'm reading something novel length, I think there's no excuse for it to be entirely light or entirely dark. People argue about which is more realistic, but the world isn't endless suffering all the time, nor is it unicorn rainbow farts. If I'm reading a novel it may cover weeks or even years in a character's life; the unrealistic thing is to ask me to believe that they only experienced one half of the emotional spectrum in that time.

Comments

[sinvraal.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Real, to me, is a mix of experiences and a lot of stops on the emotional spectrum. Real is weirder than we tend to imagine, funny, stupid, frustrating, tragic and wonderful.

I had an odd thought about games like ME and DA- if you try to make every decision Virmire, everything grey and difficult, then they start to lose impact. Nothing stands out. It's the mix that works better. It was like when I tried to convince my GM that making every fight in our DnD game a nail-biting near party wipe wasn't fun. It's more fun if sometimes they're easy, and sometimes challenging, and sometimes really really tough. That preserves the genuine threat while also letting us feel badass sometimes.

Not every single question in life is gray.

[shadesofmauve]

Exactly. Even the gray questions aren't all the same shade of gray.

I still haven't finished ME3. Mostly it's because I started to emotionally disengage early (because Joker, EDI, and related metagame gut punches), and became more disengaged as things got bleaker. Especially if you *aren't* pursuing a romance, the grim becomes pretty unrelenting, leaving a 'why am I doing this again?' feeling. To be clear, I LIKE a lot of the horrors-of-war parts, especially the small tragic stories on the Citadel. But when the major decisions start to feel too forced in order to create more misery, it wears thin.

Legion is what finally pushed me right out (I'll get back to it, obv, but...). It felt like it was sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice rather than because it was necessary to the story, and as much as I like it when an author or work successfully tugs on various emotions, I'm not pleased when I can see the puppet strings. It's like "Okay, now you're just being grim to be grim. Stoppit." Legion's demise didn't pull my heart strings, it just pushed the "Wait. What?!" button.

If something is unrelentingly grim and subtle, I get depressed (and I actively avoid media that triggers the depression, thanks! Real life functionality is more important than reading The Right Things). If it's too self-consciously grim, I disengage. Lack of emotional engagement = less drive to continue, and pretty soon the gap is filled by doing other things.

The focus on darkness feels very sophomoric, and the defense of grim-dark is often very condescending.

I should point that out to DM, btw. An easy fight or two once in awhile is *good* for role-playing.

[sinvraal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Legion's "death" seemed really arbitrary, especially compared to Mordin's, which I thought hit an effective note of personal redemption, or even Thane's. It really did feel like the puppeteer's hand was a little too present, feeding us a really forced reason to kill off another character. (I also have issues with the whole "Reaper programming", but that's another argument.)

But the whole unrelenting misery thing is exactly why I checked out of DA2 emotionally. I actually laughed out loud when I hit the eventual fate of Hawke's mom, because at that it was just so hokey and forced. The game was hitting me on the head and screaming BE SAD NOW. Good grief. Then there was the fact that I saw Anders' lie a mile away but was never allowed to call him on it.

I do wonder if it's a side effect of a writing team as opposed to a single writer. Multiple writers might end up visiting the same misery well, especially if they get that direction from the lead, without realizing that the aggregate ends up being just too much.

[shadesofmauve]

Yes, Mordin's was excellent, both in that it made practical sense in context and was a fitting end for his character arc. I hadn't thought about the danger of multiple writers unintentionally pulling from the same bag of tricks, but that's certainly a possibility. You can't catch yourself with "Wait, I've used that arc before" if it was actually done by someone else.

Most of the geth bits don't make sense, but I can work with it up until legion's 'death.' Why die? Why not copy-paste yourself? If you're only software, you can do that! Of course, in that case, wouldn't either method just result in a legion of legions?

I think I may have said "You've got to be kidding me" with Hawke's mom. And a rather resigned "Shit, what's he going to blow up?" when I saw the salt peter sala petrae.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I find this kind of ironic, given that I was unable to finish her Jenny Casey trilogy because I found it too unrelentingly depressing :P

I do appreciate her point, tho. Even in things like 40K fiction (which is where the term "GrimDark" comes from originally), they manage to lighten it occasionally, and usually appropriately.

But plenty of other stuff people have been recommending to me? I just can't handle it. Game of Thrones hit me that way, and I have no intention of ever reading The Road.

And the more general concept that something is only meaningful to the extent that is involves pain and suffering has been bugging me for a while now.

[shadesofmauve]

Ha! I haven't read anything of hers, so I didn't have a comparison.

And as you know, I read the Game of Thrones, but draw the line at others. Every description I've read of The Road has me doing that "nope nope nope" speed back-up.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

My mom actually had a similar experience with Elizabeth Bear's stuff a few years back. It was when I was trying to get her to start reading Elizabeth Moon, and she got the name wrong, picked up one of Bear's, and had to put it back down.

I also just realized* I should have mentioned: How the ups and downs are mixed can make a big difference, too. That was my problem with that Robin Hobb series: Not the overall ratio of positive to negative, but where it fell within each book. Similar thing for those who had to wait between books 2 and 3 of The Deed of Paksennarion.

*I'm still a little below normal operating parameters after that weekend ;)

[stasia]

A co-worker recommended The Road and loaned me his copy. I tried, I really did, but honestly the idiotic grammar choices (seriously? No quotes around dialogue? No capitals? WTF - I don't read "literary" fiction because it's often pretentious; I certainly don't want that pretentiousness in my speculative fiction.) made me bail.

Well, that and the story just was stupid.

As for Elizabeth Bear, I have her LJ friended and I'm not sure I like who she is as a person. I like a couple of her books (A Companion to Wolves is good, but I haven't been able to read the sequel.), but overall, I ... I don't like the way reading her journal makes me feel - about her and about how she treats others.

I don't disagree with her point about specfic, though. Makes me want to go back to writing it.

*sigh*

Stasia

[shadesofmauve]

*googles Bear LJ*

ARGH, lack of quotes and capitals would drive me batshit. I set type as part of my JOB. Those rules are there to make it easier for the reader to follow your stuff, not because the man hates your poetry. I didn't even know that about the Road, so I'm SO glad you mentioned it -- just another reason to avoid it.

It even came up last night in conversation... but the friend who recommended it so highly admitted that he's never had a book make him depressed, so I just kinda ignored it.