I and plenty of others enjoy pathos in our fiction, and do not need or want a happy ending. Nor do we necessarily use it for escapism.
Fred’s close enough to fit my definition. In the same episode she died in, she and Wesley torched a nest of demons. I don’t remember any specifics of Tara being violent, but she knew the risks by being involved with the Scoobies.
I have a similar relationship to Stephen King’s protagonists. I like his stuff, but it’s so goddamn depressing. I sometimes indulge in a stiff drink or 2 after finishing a book of his. Thinner, Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game… holymotherfuck. I still can’t work up the courage to read It.
Maybe I’ll tackle It this weekend… D:
J. Michael Straczynski.
When Babylon 5 hit its stride it (S2 - S4) was some of the best SF TV ever but he seems to have screwed up almost all of the follow-up/expanded stories.
Seriously, killing of Marcus in that way…cold.
I always picture him (and Patricia Cornwell and Dean Koontz) getting to the last quarter of a book, and just sitting in front of their computer, crying “What now? Do I have to finish it? Can’t I just give up?”
John Norman. He had this brilliant idea – combine softcore sex slavery porn with sword and sandal adventures set on another planet (ala Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series). It worked, beautifully.
Then he had to go and advocate that the sex slavery was the result of the natural order between the sexes, that maledom/femsub was what human being are all about, and that women were naturally the slaves of men.
And thus what could have been some delightful, fun romps in a fantasy land became this heavy, ideological crap. Just because Norman couldn’t figure out that his personal sexual predilections didn’t necessarily make for a good basis for ordering human society.
Fortunately, I and about 50,000 others rewrite the Gor novels daily in Second Life Gor, so all was not lost.
(To be fair, William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, had the same problem … both men seem unaccountably naive about sexual fantasy vs. reality by modern standards … but Moulton’s femdom/malesub and femdom/femsub fantasies were not so threatening, and MUCH better timed, socially speaking. Strange that these putatively adult, sophisticated men, one a professor of philosophy and the other a pyschologist, should have been so naive by modern standards. Products of their times, perhaps.)
As I understand it, Whedon had no creative control over the movie and absolutely hated it. One article I read described him sitting in the back of the theatre and crying during the premiere. The series was his chance to tell the story the way he wanted it to be told.
(In addition, he’d originally planned it as a series, but no one would buy a series from a newbie, so he rewrote it as a movie.)
Now, I liked the movie too. But it doesn’t sound as if you love and hate Whedon. It sounds as if you love the people who made the movie and hate Whedon.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I disagree because that’s the way death works in real life. 20 year old dudes with pregnant wives are more likely to get hit by some artillery fire than tough mentor figures who want one last shot at redemption for past failings are to go down in a blaze of glory surrounded by slain foes.
By making death more “realistic” Whedon makes it easier to relate to his characters dealing with death. One of the reasons I love Buffy is that despite being set in a ridiculous fantasy world, it is incredibly easy to relate to the characters and their struggles.
I feel similarly about Harry Potter. On the other hand, Rowling is an artist I can both love and hate. I love her stories for many of the same reasons I love Whedon’s, but on the other hand I hate them just a tiny little bit because Rowling overuses deus ex machina to resolve plots and she leaves some pretty giant glaring plot holes.
I’m going to roll out the Boss for this category - Bruce Springsteen.
Bruce invites superlatives that will be familiar to most people - he’s a truly superb songwriter, also a great singer IMO for his material. He’s a great performer and has had a fantastically durable and long-lived career. Artistically he’s had his ups and downs but he’s always tried to keep things moving forward with his music.
Never once taken the piss out of his audience that I’ve heard of - which is in dramatic counterpoint to his contemporaries who’ve been phoning it in for decades. He’s a legend, basically, and is a touchstone for authenticity in a way that no other mainstream US artist can match AFAICT.
What I hate about Bruce is his appallingly shite taste in music. The E-street band are a paradoxical bunch - it’s like listening to a pub band made up of technically outstanding musicians. Dishing up precisely flabby rock band arrangements that just suck the energy out of music. Sonic boredom incarnate. The sax it doth sux bad - sry Big Man (RIP).
I give the Boss some credit for just not giving a fuck about rock music - it’s clear he hasn’t listened to a contemporary rock record in 40 years, which is impressive in its own way. The results, however, speak for themselves. Bruce + guitar + just singing his songs and I’m feeling the love. Could anyone argue that Nebraska isn’t his best album? An album of Bruce-rock, though, and i’m feeling the hate.
Forget Marcus . . . . . . . .KOSH!!!
Speaking of artists you love/hate. Martin has killed off so many damn characters that I’m honestly a bit numb to the whole thing. Even more so if they weren’t actually killed and are revealed to still be alive later. The writing is solid and I enjoy the characters (when I’m not looking for their inevitable demise that is). He’s just removed the impact of the death of a character. Like that issue of Radioactive Man where he and Fallout Boy get killed on every page.
You mean my 8th grade English teacher lied to me?! :eek:
To all of you people saying “that’s how people in real life die”, great. I’m glad you enjoy those things, genuinely. I read fiction or watch shows to get away from real life, and I don’t particularly care for the same old stuff repeated in my escapist fantasy.
But the thing that makes serial fiction suck is that status quo is god. Continuing to milk the last drop out of the franchise is more important than anything, so characters are never in actual danger. I understand that you don’t want “reality” in your fiction, but it makes it too hard for me to suspend disbelief if I don’t actually believe characters are really in danger. If the characters aren’t really in danger there’s no tension, it’s just a roller coaster where everyone has their seatbelt firmly buckled. Watch the same characters on the same rollercoaster and you know that they don’t have seatbelts? Then you have real tension, even though it’s fake tension created by the writer, it’s real fake tension.
I strongly concur with Lemur on this one.
Anaamika, it’s totally cool that you view fiction as escapism (I know you were waiting with bated breath for my approval on your taste in fiction) but I don’t turn to fiction for escapism or to get away from my real life. I like fiction that makes me think about and examine real life. And that doesn’t always mean it has to be serious or dark or even 100 percent realistic. Fiction that is happy or humorous or absurd can, in many different ways, still have something to say about real life. Even if that something is “Isn’t it funny when X happens.”