huh, yeah, i can see how that could be appealing. not my jam but i can see it. for me it feels like watching one of those 'frustration' gifs like or the one with the tetris or the slowly descending square, you know what i mean. speaking of unsatisfying, this video is honestly too funny to be truly frustrating: but yeah that's what the misunderstandings trope feels like to me. i don't mind if people occasionally misunderstand each other, or even if it becomes a plot element once in a while. but when the entire tension of the fic is based on Not Communicating, it's the Actual Worst.
I feel similarly [edit: to KingStarscream], I think. Specifically, the rule for me is that misunderstandings caused directly by the characters' own personalities/flaws = good, even great if the characters/dynamics are engaging enough. Misunderstandings caused by arbitrary plot contrivance on the part of the writer = bad, at least if you're expected to take them seriously.
As a passionate and fierce lover of romcoms I adore misunderstandings. A lot. There's a sort of art to using them to move the plot along though. They don't necessarily need to actually be logical if one sits down and thinks about it hard. But I do think there are two important reactions from the audience that one needs to achieve. Either, a, the audience themselves feels that the misunderstanding is reasonable (feeling and not thinking is very key to the romcom) or, b, the audience is hyperaware of the misunderstanding being one and possibly even being really stupid but like. It's Juicy Melodrama. It gets them on the edges of their seats and going oh fuck no when she finds out that she was wrong she's gonna feel real bad AND WHAT IF HE NEVER COMES BACK OH GOD NO. The misunderstanding, however it is working, should get me sitting there clutching my blankets to my chest as my heart goes dokidoki. It should fill me with rapt attention. PASSIONATE DESIRE. Like my favorite scene in a romcom and honestly anything at all film wise ever that isn't a horror film that happens to be Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the ending of The Bridget Jones Diary. Where she sees Darcy gone and her diary open and is like Oh No. OH NO. HE HATES ME AND THINKS THIS IS HOW I FEEL NOW AND HAS LEFT FOREVER. So she runs out into the cold winter night wearing only a light sweater, a thin shirt, her panties, and some trainers and she runs off to find him and she apologizes profusely and is like diaries are just dumb things and tries to like play it off as her being a dumb bitch and then he is just like. I was just getting you another diary. A new start you know. And I just. i die every time i see this And this works because in the logic of the film, which is very much based around these two shits being maladjusted idiots, it fits in terms of tone. And I mean he's gone and the diary is open to a page where she wrote that she hated him multiple times. Given the sort of woman she is and given the tension between the two of them it makes sense that she'd assume she hated him and was leaving forever now. It ratchets up the drama to a fever pitch that should leave the audience just clutching to their seats as she runs out the fucking house to a triumphant soundtrack and someone is like 'You go crazy lady' at her. You're like GO BRIDGET GO. PLEASE GODS GO AND FIX THIS AAAAAAAAA. And that fever pitch turns to EXTREME relief when the misunderstanding is cleared and that extreme relief then turns to an almost rapturous sort of joy when they start making out on the street corner in the freezing cold. It helps make the 'Nice boys don't kiss like that' 'Oh yes they fucking do' exchange just be very hnnnnnnnng.
ask me about how much I love Tales of the Abyss and its party of paranoid unhelpful assholes fucking everything up unnecessarily, in other words
Thank you for this, I'm way too delighted by the fact someone took the time to animate the world's least satisfying situations to be in. :D
the only times when i don't automatically analyze myself and my situation, just react on emotion, are the times when i'm in extreme distress or very overloaded. so the "why are you so out of control how do i make this stop??" reflex when i'm reading those fics isn't enjoyable. i don't mean to claim i'm Logical At All Times. just that being so Emotion that i can't think is a really terrifying situation for me, which i avoid as much as i possibly can. i wouldn't go so far as to say that fictional people being emotional dumbshits is triggering for me, and in fact sometimes it's really fun. but when it goes on too long it does start to creep into the same mushy edges of trigger territory that the Annoying Boss trope does. i don't know if i'm making sense. like, Annoying Boss is funny as hell most of the time, but when it starts getting a bit too real, or when it's just a bit too relentless, it starts to bring back feelings from times when authority figures abused their authority over me, and if i keep going it'll ruin my day. it's the same with characters not thinking for page after page, staying in the intense emotion zone -- especially the intense negative emotion zone, like those fics where someone kind of systematically ruins their relationship by refusing to believe they have a relationship -- while shit falls apart because of it. reminds me a little too much of the old days when i was basically kept in a state of autie meltdown all day every day. apologies if that's A Lot. i don't mean to do a tumblr and be like "this trope is Bad because it reminds me of abuse". just that i personally super dislike it and that's probably a big part of why.
Which is pretty fair, I think--for similar reasons, I cannot stand unhappy or ambiguous endings, especially if I've put a lot of time and investment into the story up to that point. It hits my brain in the Bad Place, and while I totally understand why some people want/need those kinds of endings, I'd generally prefer it if fic kept it far, far away from me.
i think, re misunderstandings, i'm talking about two different things. the one that's just frustrating, albeit sometimes hilariously so, is the harmless lighthearted ones. you know, the "that woman i thought he was dating is actually his sister??" type misunderstandings. i know it's going to work out just fine, but i'm still kind of waving my arms at the screen going JUST. ASK. FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. the one that's borderline triggering is the one aondeung was describing, with the Juicy Melodrama. when people are actually fucking up their lives or doing things they really should not do, based on being too overwhelmed with emotion to check themselves.
Oh no you're not coming off that way at all, honestly. I just took it as like a sincere inquiry as to how the fuck people could like them. And given that horrible romance is like My Special Interest fiction wise outside of horror I was like. It is my time to shine. Now I can share the beauty and wonder of how this fucking film with Renée Zelleweger works. For me it tends to be very much my jam because I exist in states of high emotion quite a bit. There's something intoxicating about that and it is nice to able to see a thing where I can exist at those emotional highs and not have it destroy me actual real life. I have to keep myself contained a lot of the time and bring myself down and while that is fine I really just kind of want to be able to just FEEL as much as I can feel. For a moment. And to be safe. So we funnily seem to exist on two opposite ends with this. I can get not liking it though and finding it triggering because holy shit do things like romcoms run on people ruining their lives or almost doing so. (though on this note i am again reminded of my very astute and entirely valid and totally important judgment that romance is just horror with a different kind of stabbing involved. though really to be serious romance, comedy, and horror all focus on purposefully manipulating the audience's feelings and often DO NOT want to be looked at logically and instead emotionally. so they end up sharing a lot of the same kinds of beats to get working.) As for like a fic gripe thing this talk has reminded of how much I really don't like targeted character hate fic towards the mentally ill. Especially very traumatized characters suffering from things that read like personality disorders or C-PTSD. There's just something very uncomfortable with how a lot of it can read to me, and it's hard to pull apart how people treat fictional traumatized people with how they treat real trauma. Though I do think that some of the responses people have had to characters like Edelgard reveal how poorly understood trauma is by a lot of people. But like whether or not people do get it there's just something uncomfy about seeing fic about people like her or Shinji Ikari or whoever in the shit else that is just based around hating these characters for being annoying or irredeemable. And I'm never sure whether or not my concern that a lot of the most controversial and heavily derided characters are the ones with realistic trauma shit is like valid or just my being paranoid since I am traumatized and some of the more notable examples of extremely vocal hatedoms in my sphere of the world (anime and japanese video games fandom) just happen to be people with PTSD who actually have realistic presentations.
The misunderstandings thing is a weirdly visceral squick for me, and I have no idea exactly what about it is the problem, but there's one story arc in the webcomic Penny and Aggie which was nails on a chalkboard for me - it involves four people running into each other in different pair combinations and events leading them to think each person is someone entirely different, and just... gaaaah. Maybe it's the autism-related "expected to act differently and socially punished for acting the way you naturally would" thing? I think @LadyNighteyes said ages ago that she had a similar reaction to the bit in Night Watch where Vimes doesn't realise he's been taken back in time and I agreed on that.
I was totally going to go on about exactly that when I should have been doing something else so thank you for sparing my productivity by bringing it up first
I've seen a thing which was 'most misunderstandings are terrible in drama, but misunderstandings can easily be fantastic for comedy" and offered the example of a boss telling a loyal employee they'd like a llama wool jacket but a loud noise obscured "wool jacket" so the employee got them a llama for their birthday, very confused as to why their boss wanted a llama but not questioning it because well, boss has a house with a decently large amount of land, they can keep a llama happily if they want!
this right here is why I can’t STAND infiltration/spying type plots where the character has to pretend to be someone else. the first time I read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets I had to put the book down for like a solid day when I hit the polyjuice scene.
Ouch. My thoughts are slightly different? If the character is trying to pass for another person and knows enough to do it, that's not a problem for me personally, but if they don't know they're being mistaken for another person it bothers me. Squick boundaries are weird, whaddyagonnado.
I do not like swearing added to fic where there was no swearing prior to the fic. The sole exception to this is Pearl can say fuck. Pearl must say fuck.
For me how weird noncanon swearing feels depends on a nebulous combination of factors relating to the canon, the characters, and the swearing. Like, my fandom drug of choice is an E10-rated game with no swearing heavier than "bastard." Since half the cast is soldiers, it would almost be weirder if they didn't have weapons-grade vocabularies in reserve somewhere, and consequently I would potentially be willing to allow them to say fuck if the right situation presented itself. But anything that's at all similar to a canon situation still has the profanity filter on, because, well, we've seen how those characters talk in those sorts of conversations, and that's just not their voice. But on the other hand, I would completely believe that Amethyst uses "fuck" as a comma the minute Steven is out of the room.
