truebug

"but this instinct to undercut your own material is a big part of what puts me off about this style of writing" thank you for finding the thing I haven't been able to articulate to myself when trying to figure out why this style annoys me. Like it's allergic to sincerity.

Thanks for sharing. Inspires me to be a bit more serious when I'm dming at the table, or writing a thing.

Really insightful and helps me clarify my own feelings on this style of writing. Thanks for posting

this is great! But it does make me wonder how much of this is because after gamergate and other... gamer moments, they're doing this because otherwise influencers will roast them for having too unbelievable of a world.

even and especially if it's not a game that would appeal to The Gamers.

this really helped me better understand why i find this kind of writing so frustrating. thanks for your thoughts.

Thanks for writing this. I definitely agree with you.

It feels to me like one of the other reasons we see so much of this style of snarky writing is that both the audience and the writers are tired of these kinds of worlds, tired of their subject matter... but they keep getting made anyway? And that ennui is leaking into what gets made.

I've listened to a relatively similar bit of discussion on this whole subject with, uh, Overly Sarcastic Production's video on Lampshading. And, reading all of this, yeah!!!! YEAH!!!! When the plot is being used, constantly, for jokes about how, wow, this fictional story is silly because it's taking itself seriously, that sucks.

It's all really encouraging for myself, to write something sincerely even if I absolutely and completely and utterly cringe at the crap I make pff. I really like the stuff I make!!! I love the sincere stuff other people make!!! But I'm still gonna cringe at my stuff!!! BUT LIKE........ letting other people know "just so you know, I'm embarrassed" reduces the effect of that sincerity, so much. It's telling the recipient to be embarrassed too, that nobody should like it.

Dunno if that's too much of a ramble, but anyway!!! Think about this stuff a lot!!! Thank you for this write-up; it's... ENCOURAGING!!!! And quite well-constructed!!!!

this instinct to undercut your own material is a big part of what puts me off about this style of writing

yes. exactly. yes

It feels like a fundamental lack of self-respect.

I find myself asking, "If you can't even respect your own material, why are you making it? And why should I care about it, if you don't?"

I did, thanks!

This piece really captures the heart of it, for me, which is that it ends up making it feel like the writers are afraid to take their own work seriously. It's the same kind of hedging that leads to people writing "it was all a dream/coma nightmare/VR simulation" endings. The sort of cynical reaction to protect yourself from the consequences of writing anything that could even be mistaken for sincerity.

It drives me nuts. Just commit to your fiction! I'm an adult, I know how it works, I'm willing to go along with whatever you throw at me. Hedging gets you nowhere, you'll never do enough to head off Cinema Sins-style critics, they're just gonna make shit up if they need to.

I remember playing through uncharted 3 and hearing Nathan Drake complain like "ah are you kidding me?? more guys to fight??" like BRO YOU MADE THE GAME!!! YOU'RE THE GAME!! Dont look at ME!!

and the first x-men movie going "what...were you expecting yellow spandex?" yes....?? I was?? Anyway I heard, (cant remember where) that they add the writing for uncharted setpieces in later, and connect it to the narrative post-facto. So they have some writer going in having Nathan complain about the game cause they assume you, in the audience, are tired of it too. Very small.

Nothing to add. just like, if you, the writer, wrote this to be cliched so you could have someone make fun of it (and its not even THAT cliched)...why would you do that??

a thing that's notable to me is the tone of this dialogue, too -- i've been thinking a lot about why at least the last year or two of isekai anime have so consistently bored me and the thing forspoken's dialogue and the tone of these shows have in common is that there's deep sense that the protagonist has already kind of won. like there's no feeling that she's meaningfully emotionally affected by any of this, that she's vulnerable in any way. she's above the world she's in, because she's too busy talking like a twenty first century american to actually accept that there's consequences for anything anyone says or does.

the second excerpt you posted is actually the strongest of the three for me because in spite of that detachment it does actually get at a kind of protagonist-y hero's ego that at least could set someone up for a fall later down the road. but that third one has me like, "please, god, the people you're talking to have lives beyond the fact that they sound funny." you can have comedy; "imagine if someone took this seriously" doesn't read as a particularly funny joke on its own.

Forspoken has really brought home for me how much of a miracle Stranger of Paradise is, writing and voice acting-wise. Yes, it's got some bits that are funny, irreverent, and poke fun at the serious nature of the proceedings, but they're all things that arise from the characters that have been put in this situation. Jack is the gruff, impatient guy who cares deeply about his friends and is tired of getting jerked around by powers outside of his control. It's funny when he punches Lich mid-monologue because he's absolutely had it with these nerds who keep popping up to lord it over him when he's trying to get shit done, and it's funny when Lich no-sells it and keeps talking because it lets you know that the universe takes that act seriously. It's writing that invites you in to enjoy the jokes with it, not writing that looks back at the rest of the story and says "damn, look at that shit, can you believe the asshole who wrote it?"

This really helped me sort out why I've felt so weird about this game. I actually wishlisted it after the very first teaser trailer. I like fantasy games on the darker side of things, and I was excited to play as a black woman in this type of game for once. But then once trailers with dialogue started coming out, I removed it.

I was excited to immerse myself in a fantasy world with cool-looking ominous sorceresses. I didn't want to play as a character who seemed to think half of that was lame. Like, in addition to the game not taking itself seriously, it felt like the protagonist was going "ew, nerd alert" at me for being the kind of person who was unironically into that stuff. What a killjoy.

Thanks for writing this, it was a good read.

Brilliant, spoke the words as clear as I wished to!

Loved this piece. Weirdly I finished it caring less about the dialogue itself and just wishing that Frey had another modern character to bounce off of. The thing that the Narnia series gets in every single book is that having different characters with different levels of investment in the fantasy world means that 1) you have a good excuse for constant info-dumping and 2) conflict between your characters about the status quo of the magic world lets you indulge the impulse to undercut yourself, but without inviting the audience to stop caring as you do.

for me it is both the need to make everything so absurdly tongue-in-cheek 'hahahahaha this is so unrealistic' dialogue, in conjunction with the fact that no, actually, I wouldn't say that in that situation, because when I'm confused and scared shitless I don't tend to just look them in the eye and make it clear I'm both bored and not scared of them. Also the idea that BW in general are just......so pissy and negative about the world doesn't help. Like yes I'm tired but if four women in four separate trenchcoats that I just met and have the power to rend my mind appear in front of me, I'm frankly trying to find the exit out because I want none of it.

The people who applaud this and think it's so clever and witty, and in turn go 'that is TOTALLY how I would respond, omg' are the same ones (as you pointed out in your post) who thrive on Marvel movies that go out of their way to say or do some shit that equates to 'look at how just like you I am, I'm saving the world but golly gosh I sure love shawarma slaps knee' and seem to forget that these are fictional worlds and it's......kinda OK to be over the top. Or hell, just focused on saving the fucking world.

You are not super special because in this world overrun by magic, where everyone speaks in rhyme or an accent you don't recognize, you go out of your way to make it clear 'I am not like everyone else here.' It's honestly just off-putting and would've been more engaging/engrossing if she WAS just genuinely confused.

A good articulation of this! Reminds me of the advice in art college critiques not to start talking about your work by listing all the things you don't like. Because then you're just telling people what to think and they're not going to do the legwork of contradicting how you've undercut yourself.

Also if no-one's mentioned, there's a line that doubled up on "that"s: "It's that that Frey herself is cringing"

Thanks for posting this; it put some words to feelings I've had for a while about this kind of attitude in writing.

Between this and High on Life, it's interesting to see the failed attempt of relating to a strange world by shattering the 4th wall with snark from one game with a serious tone and another game with a comedic tone, respectively. I kinda feel like Deadpool kicked off this trend and the Marvel boom amplified it, however I feel the root is unbridled cynicism confused for satire. It's a poison of thought and if unchecked by humility, it leads to the hollowing of the material.

This was great, I feel like thinking this way will really help my writing! Thank you!

Thank you for writing this! You hit the nail on the head completely!! And it makes me wonder why people create these big fantastical worlds or ideas and then just, willingly undercut them all the time. And I REALLY hope it's a trend that starts dying off sooner than later. I know sincerity/earnestness are seen as "cringe" and kiddy, but I feel like showing it just feels like a no-brainer.

yes!! great piece. another thing that bugs me about this kind of snark as humor is the unwillingness to commit to actually being a comedy. instead it presents not especially silly situations and points and says HAHAHA!! HOW ZANY!!! as though the wildest silliest thing they could think of is... "magical jewelry" or "a lady who says rhymes." they could have made it so the protagonist was thrust into a truly ridiculous world difficult to take seriously with like. idk big talking bananas with hats on or some shit. instead the thing that is presented as "difficult to take seriously" is not especially wild. it comes across as double self-conscious to me, that theyre too self-conscious to write sincere fantasy but also too self-conscious to write sincere comedy.

great piece. articulated a lot of what I felt.

Yeah, that's how I feel about this kind of dialogue. I already signed on for your story, why don't you have any confidence in telling it without winking at the audience like we're so above all this? Over the top-ness and sincerity are not mutually exclusive.

I wonder how much of the winking artifice is grating in a games context because your ground state is "starting out aware that you're holding a controller, picking out Forspoken from the menu" etc. Whereas movies and TV shows are consumed passively, games really start to soar when "what's on the screen" gets you to forget momentarily about the world outside the game.

I really enjoyed that article.

This is absolutely why I fell into My Hero Academia so hard when the anime adaptation came out. I was so tired of Marvel movies where the characters constantly muddle the tone and stakes of each scene. The characters in MHA are so earnest in their beliefs and the actions they take. They are not thinking about their world as though it was a constructed world that they need to critique as a fictional story. The fourth wall is effectively invisible instead of being a shroud I have to constantly process and discard in order to feel the emotions of the characters.

This feels like someone is finally putting into words the feelings I have when I encounter this sort of writing. I don't mind a few flippant comments here and there, but when it's all a character does it makes me feel stupid for being captivated by the story and the way it's being told. It's like being back in school and having a bully point at my fantasy book and laugh at me because "Elves aren't real you nerd!" while I try to read.

Like I said I don't mind this kind of writing in small doses, but having one character that's basically "too cool for this shit" all the time is exhausting to me.

This article is extremely good. I was looking at the provided tweets and reading the replies, and I noticed that people were saying things like "the writing isn't the problem, the world design is just boring." Which is certainly subjective, but the graphic/character design seems on par with industry standard, if not above. If I mute the clips and look at the characters and environments, there are some really stunning visuals.

Then I got to the end of your article where you say: "But when the protagonist rolls her eyes and laughs at one of these characters like she's faced with the clichés of yet-another-stock-standard-fantasy-world, it makes me doubt that the world does have anything unique to offer, and makes me instead wonder if I was wrong to ever imagine that it did." Which made me realize: the purposeful distancing of the viewer from the environment is probably to blame for why people are perceiving it as just "looking bad" even though it... doesn't. Very compelling stuff! Thank you for sharing.

re: the feelings people have about genre classification, i once fell deep into the ansible fanzine archive rabbit hole, and enjoyed the subset of "as others see us" entries documenting writers and critics unconvincingly claiming that various fantastical works must not be classified as science fiction or fantasy (a frequently recurring theme) https://news.ansible.uk/others.php

Saw a tweet earlier (idk if I can find it again) about how that kind of dialogue worked for Buffy because they're teenagers who have gotten used to supernatural bullshit happening, and so they start snarking about it, like you do when an annoyance is commonplace and unavoidable. It's in character. Of course Dave the Demon's behind me, he keeps doing that shit because he thinks it's funny.

But not very good writers don't realize that a character can't act like something is tired old hat when it has never happened to them before; because at that point that's not the character reacting, that's the writer making a punchline without bothering with a setup. They only remember the funny part of the joke, not that it took work to make it be funny.

Which then collapses into the impression that they don't take their world seriously. They might! But it's impossible to tell if they do or not when they don't know how jokes work or when they're appropriate.