okay that post on dramatic irony
Dramatic irony. When the audiences knows something at least one of the characters doesn't.
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fox1013 pointed out, "It has a very different role in fic, where the reader is already familiar with canon, than with most other kinds of stories, and that would be fascinating to explore."
Which, yeah! Just for instance, the show Merlin. I've watched all of four eps of that show, but as I understand it, Merlin's magic is a secret from Arthur for a good portion, if not all, of the show. I imagine that if you're doing a fic from Arthur's POV, the audience knowledge that Merlin can do magic makes instant dramatic irony that can be quite satisfying.
There should be all kinds of fic like this! But when I try to come up with any, a lot of audience knowledge seems to be built just as much on genre expectations, or shared common knowledge of tropes, as it is on canon knowledge. And then I started thinking about how the distinction between "actual" dramatic irony (where the audience knows something characters don't) and audience expectation (where the audience expects something characters don't) is really blurry to me.
And then I started thinking about how fanfic itself creates canon (fanon), along with its own expectations, similar to genre, and it all went downhill from there. And I know I've talked about fanfic as genre to several of you (kestrelsparhawk?); it's probably a whole topic in and of itself.
So below are some random anecdotes and observations on a common theme. Then there are discussion questions.
*
Okay, to start, a list of things you can use to create dramatic irony:
a) POV. An omniscient narrator can show the audience all kinds of things the reader can't. If you're doing third person limited, you can switch between POVs. Only first person and third person limited-to-one-character don't offer dramatic irony solely by merit of POV.
b) Genre. E.g. The blonde going down to the basement at night to find out what that noise was doesn't know she's in a horror flick, so she's not that scared, but you know she's in a horror flick, so you know what is going to happen.
c) Narrative expectation. There might be a literary name for this, idk. It's related to genre but is more general. E.g. Checkov's gun. If there's a gun in the first act you know it's going to be fired by the third (or whatever). You know this because you know you're watching a play; however, you could hang a gun above your mantle irl and that doesn't mean it'll get fired before you die.
d) Common knowledge. Maybe there's a term for this too, but what I mean is commonly accepted physical, societal, and emotional truths. Sometimes this can be a blurry line between genre and narrative expectation. E.g. Character A is always staring at B. Character B doesn't know why, but we the audience know because a) this is a book!, b) this is a romance!, but also c) we have the knowledge that sometimes people stare at people they're in love with/sexually attracted to. Character B might not know this if she's an alien who was raised by wolves, but we know it.
Common knowledge is also important when it comes to establishing an unreliable narrator. The social norms surrounding pedophilia help establish that Humbert Humbert is not alright in the head, even though he appears to speak "rationally."
e) Canon. Canon can sometimes overlap with common knowledge. When Jesus Christ shows up in Ben-Hur we know who he is and everything that's happening with him, even though the narrative hasn't been following him. This is common knowledge, but a specific kind of common knowledge based on a certain narrative. That narrative can be historical or literary. If you're using canon for dramatic irony, you have to be certain your audience knows canon. Which provides very interesting opportunities for fanfic.
*
The reason I started thinking about this in the first place is that I read this fanfic that didn't unfold the way I expected it to unfold, and I was disappointed. I've changed the fandom to protect the identity of the author, but it went like this: Snape is Headmaster. His son should have started at Hogwarts 5 years ago, but never arrived. Meanwhile, Harry Potter lives in a farm in Norfolk. On the day the story starts, Harry gets this weird impulse to travel to Hogwarts, and it goes from there.
The reason I didn't like this story is that the part where the reader knows Harry is Snape's son, but Harry himself has no clue, didn't go on long enough. I wanted to possess knowledge of why everyone at Hogwarts looks at Harry strangely, while Harry himself didn't know. Instead, as soon as everyone starts looking at Harry strangely, he figures out they think he's Snape's son. Then there is a little dramatic irony, wherein Harry thinks he's not Snape's son, but we the readers know he is--but that tension wasn't really drawn out to my satisfaction either. Turns out the point of the story was the plot behind why Harry didn't arrive at Hogwarts as he should have, not to Harry having to discover and own his identity. Which is fine. Just not the story I wanted.
Okay, so when this story did not go how I expected, I realized how bizarre it was that I had these expectations in the first place. Let's catalogue what I knew, what I expected, and why:
1) Harry really belonged at Hogwarts, which I know due to canon
2) Harry was really Snape's son, which I know due to the tags (I have never read a Severitus fic in my life; again, this is a hypothetical example)
3) Harry wasn't going to know he was really Snape's son, and when he found out he was going to deny it, which I expected because this is a trope, and also maybe this is what I wanted from the trope.
#2 on this list suggests something interesting--that is that tags, warnings, titles, summaries can be a part of the construction of dramatic irony. These external trappings can be compared to book jackets, titles, and sales pitches of profic--which, in turn, can be tied to genre. The cover, title, font of the title are all going to contribute to what genre you think a book is, as is the shelf on which you find the book at the bookstore (this leads to all sorts of interesting questions about what online book sales do to genre expectation). Meanwhile, the shelf on which you find fanfic is a little corner of the internet--and usually, you expect to get a certain thing there, just like you expect to get a certain thing from the Romance corner of the book store.
And recently, I've been noticing that most fanfic I read draws on that type of reader knowledge and expectation more than canon knowledge. Which is darn weird? Since it's not like we have a solid definition of the definition of fanfic as a genre, and we do have solid definitions of canon (though let's not get into a discussion right now about whether the Buffy comics are canon, etc). I wondered if I was noticing this because I was reading a lot of AUs at the time--but then again, many AUs make extensive use of canon knowledge; it really depends.
For instance, take an AU of The Avengers, from Tony's POV; he's worked with Hulk before but doesn't know who he is. When Tony meets Bruce, we know Bruce is Hulk, so there's this cool tension where we know and we're wondering when Tony will find out, because of canon knowledge.
Okay, now take an AU from Tony's POV in which there is no Hulk, no super powers at all. We might still know that Tony, when he meets Bruce, will be interested in Bruce, because that's MCU canon--but it might also be because of the Tony/Bruce tag. And we might know that there's more to Bruce than the shy, shuffle-y guy that meets the eye, because that's canon too, but it might also be textual hints, such as his reluctance to meet people's eyes, or the way he flinches at things. We know that when General Ross shows up, he'll cause some kind of problem, because that's canon.
Okay, now take another AU, in which everyone's in highschool. If Loki shows up, and we were in one of the fics above, we might guess he was going to cause a problem, because that's canon. But now that we're in this highschool AU, we actually know that Loki is going to be an emo drama kid with eyeliner; we know that Steve is gonna be star quarterback, Tony's gonna be the most popular rich douche in school and head of the debate club, while Bruce is gonna be the nerdy kid in the A/V club. And we know they're all gonna interact somehow and Tony/Steve are gonna bicker and Tony/Bruce will be bff--and that's less because of canon and rather more because we just know how this fic works.
In some ways, fanfic can be much less what the audience knows about canon, and a lot more about what's gonna get tweaked or changed about canon. An AU is an extreme example, but everyone's interpretation of canon is different. So maybe part of the magic of fanfic is you come in with this set of expectations: Bruce is the Hulk, Tony is Iron Man, but your expectations are actually much, much denser than that, and what you're looking for is how those expectations will be met, thwarted, or shaped into a completely new view of canon itself.
*
The fact that the Severitus fic mentioned above didn't satisfy me probably has a lot less to do with "actual" dramatic irony than reader expectation set up by certain tropes. And because tropes can be handled in so many different ways, often we're not really dealing with "expectation" so much as the hope or desire that a trope will go a certain way.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, possibly due tobrown_betty's post about "tissue paper kink"--a trope/kink you really like, but only when it's done a certain way. For instance, if you love slave AUs, but only when both characters are former slaves and it's about dealing with trauma; you don't like it when one is a master and the other is a slave; you also don't like it when someone is going undercover to bust a slave trading ring, etc.
(Btw, if this interests you, she also did a call for recs of X for people who don't like X. So, for instance, if you don't like slave AUs, you could go look at the list and see whether there are any that leave out the stuff you hate about slave AUs but do some of the stuff you might like about slave AUs.)
*
Sometimes it's the trope you want, but it's just not done the way you want it. Other times, it's just done badly, and I find that this also happens a lot with dramatic irony. With that Severitus fic, I couldn't tell whether it just wasn't done the way I'd wanted it, or whether the writer had seriously just botched understanding reader expectation.
A classic example of badly handled dramatic irony is when Character A and Character B don't talk to each other. Character A loves B, but B doesn't know it. And B loves A, but A doesn't know it. You, the reader, know that A and B love each other and would live happily ever after if they only knew. You, the reader, have superior knowledge, because you're getting both A and B POV, so this is dramatic irony. But you also know you're reading a romance, which could be called dramatic irony sometimes, or maybe just genre trappings on other occasions.
This is a sweet set up, and I love it. But the absolute worst is when it drags on too long. The reader knows A loves B and B loves A and that they're meant to be, and after a while A and B just look like idiots because they can't figure it out! Ugh.
*
Random anecdote: I once wrote this Bruce Wayne/Gordon fic that really only works if you know that Bruce Wayne is also Batman. It was from Gordon's POV, which provided some excellent opportunities for tension; the audience knows why Wayne behaves the way he does, but Gordon doesn't. This tension took little to no work to create, because a) I didn't have to establish that Wayne is secretly Batman, because the reader should come into the fic knowing that, b) I didn't have to worry that much about Gordon appearing clueless, since it's canon that people don't recognize Batman's voice, jaw, mannerisms, etc.
Then, a couple years later, I wrote this Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy fic with a premise very loosely based on the Bruce Wayne/Gordon fic. Draco had a secret identity, Rabbit, but it was from Harry's POV. Harry interacts with both Draco and Rabbit; the reader is supposed to guess Draco is Rabbit, but Harry isn't. This is significantly more difficult to achieve, because I had to establish a) that Draco is secretly Rabbit, b) that Harry's not an idiot--i.e., there have to be enough clues for the reader to conclude that Rabbit is Draco, but not enough clues for Harry to figure it out; since it's from Harry's POV, this is hard, c) that Harry Potter is a world in which people have secret identities.
So, I couldn't rely on readers to know Draco's secret identity just because they knew canon, but I could rely on them to figure out Draco's secret identity because it was still fanfic. That is, the fic was labeled Harry/Draco. It was posted for a Harry/Draco exchange fest. While sometimes people pair Harry with other people in Harry/Draco fandom, it doesn't happen nearly as often as say, Peter/El in Peter/Neal fandom in White Collar. I even relied on the fact that Harry/other is often problematized in Harry/Draco fic; if Harry's with Ginny or someone else, whoever, there's something wrong with the relationship so we can easily see why he should be with Draco instead. This isn't the case with all Harry/Draco fic, but it's often the case.
Lastly, secret identity/mistaken identity/identity-fuckery is also a common trope in fanfic. Amnesia is not that common irl, but in fiction it's way more common, and in fanfic it's even more common. Same goes for identity tropes. So, I relied on all of these things put together, as well as some strong hints within the text itself, to help the reader come to a conclusion the character couldn't come to, in order not to make the character seem too clueless, and in order to give the reader a hit of the nice tension dramatic irony gives you. I don't think the fic was entirely successful; I'm just using it as an example.
In the Batman fic, dramatic irony is built off knowledge the reader absolutely should have that the characters don't. In the HP fic, dramatic irony is built off the text itself a little bit, but also genre, tropes, and reader expectation. Why did I tell you this story? I have no idea.
*
Two really great uses of dramatic irony, imo, were:
1) Tigana. So, all that shit with Dianora is fucked up, but omg, knowing who she is while Brandin doesn't killed me. There's also this other part where her brother is right there and neither of them know.
2) Gladiator. When Maximus faces Commodus and we know who he is and Maximus knows who he is but COMMODUS DOESN'T at first ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I don't think either of these are the most stellar pieces of literature, but when I think of dramatic irony, they're what I think of most. I was literally biting my nails during both.
*
Okay, so questions:
1) What are some fanfics that make good use of the reader's canon knowledge to create dramatic irony? (Links?)
2) What are some bad uses of dramatic irony that annoy you?
3) Do you like dramatic irony? Why is it so awesome? Is it because I'm just a know-it-all who really, really likes knowing things other people don't?
4) What are some other ways to create dramatic irony?
5) What are some profics/movies/tv/other media that make great use of dramatic irony? Was it nail-biting?
6) What are your thoughts on how to set up a narrator as unreliable?
7) Do AUs make more use of dramatic irony through canon knowledge, or genre expectation, or does it just depend on the AU?
8) What are your thoughts on fanfic as a genre?
9) Do you consciously use canon knowledge to create dramatic irony? Or does it just happen?
10) What are your thoughts on dramatic irony vs reader expectations? Is it useful to make a distinction? Is there a distinction, etc
idk guys I just wanna talk
*
fox1013 pointed out, "It has a very different role in fic, where the reader is already familiar with canon, than with most other kinds of stories, and that would be fascinating to explore."Which, yeah! Just for instance, the show Merlin. I've watched all of four eps of that show, but as I understand it, Merlin's magic is a secret from Arthur for a good portion, if not all, of the show. I imagine that if you're doing a fic from Arthur's POV, the audience knowledge that Merlin can do magic makes instant dramatic irony that can be quite satisfying.
There should be all kinds of fic like this! But when I try to come up with any, a lot of audience knowledge seems to be built just as much on genre expectations, or shared common knowledge of tropes, as it is on canon knowledge. And then I started thinking about how the distinction between "actual" dramatic irony (where the audience knows something characters don't) and audience expectation (where the audience expects something characters don't) is really blurry to me.
And then I started thinking about how fanfic itself creates canon (fanon), along with its own expectations, similar to genre, and it all went downhill from there. And I know I've talked about fanfic as genre to several of you (
kestrelsparhawk?); it's probably a whole topic in and of itself. So below are some random anecdotes and observations on a common theme. Then there are discussion questions.
*
Okay, to start, a list of things you can use to create dramatic irony:
a) POV. An omniscient narrator can show the audience all kinds of things the reader can't. If you're doing third person limited, you can switch between POVs. Only first person and third person limited-to-one-character don't offer dramatic irony solely by merit of POV.
b) Genre. E.g. The blonde going down to the basement at night to find out what that noise was doesn't know she's in a horror flick, so she's not that scared, but you know she's in a horror flick, so you know what is going to happen.
c) Narrative expectation. There might be a literary name for this, idk. It's related to genre but is more general. E.g. Checkov's gun. If there's a gun in the first act you know it's going to be fired by the third (or whatever). You know this because you know you're watching a play; however, you could hang a gun above your mantle irl and that doesn't mean it'll get fired before you die.
d) Common knowledge. Maybe there's a term for this too, but what I mean is commonly accepted physical, societal, and emotional truths. Sometimes this can be a blurry line between genre and narrative expectation. E.g. Character A is always staring at B. Character B doesn't know why, but we the audience know because a) this is a book!, b) this is a romance!, but also c) we have the knowledge that sometimes people stare at people they're in love with/sexually attracted to. Character B might not know this if she's an alien who was raised by wolves, but we know it.
Common knowledge is also important when it comes to establishing an unreliable narrator. The social norms surrounding pedophilia help establish that Humbert Humbert is not alright in the head, even though he appears to speak "rationally."
e) Canon. Canon can sometimes overlap with common knowledge. When Jesus Christ shows up in Ben-Hur we know who he is and everything that's happening with him, even though the narrative hasn't been following him. This is common knowledge, but a specific kind of common knowledge based on a certain narrative. That narrative can be historical or literary. If you're using canon for dramatic irony, you have to be certain your audience knows canon. Which provides very interesting opportunities for fanfic.
*
The reason I started thinking about this in the first place is that I read this fanfic that didn't unfold the way I expected it to unfold, and I was disappointed. I've changed the fandom to protect the identity of the author, but it went like this: Snape is Headmaster. His son should have started at Hogwarts 5 years ago, but never arrived. Meanwhile, Harry Potter lives in a farm in Norfolk. On the day the story starts, Harry gets this weird impulse to travel to Hogwarts, and it goes from there.
The reason I didn't like this story is that the part where the reader knows Harry is Snape's son, but Harry himself has no clue, didn't go on long enough. I wanted to possess knowledge of why everyone at Hogwarts looks at Harry strangely, while Harry himself didn't know. Instead, as soon as everyone starts looking at Harry strangely, he figures out they think he's Snape's son. Then there is a little dramatic irony, wherein Harry thinks he's not Snape's son, but we the readers know he is--but that tension wasn't really drawn out to my satisfaction either. Turns out the point of the story was the plot behind why Harry didn't arrive at Hogwarts as he should have, not to Harry having to discover and own his identity. Which is fine. Just not the story I wanted.
Okay, so when this story did not go how I expected, I realized how bizarre it was that I had these expectations in the first place. Let's catalogue what I knew, what I expected, and why:
1) Harry really belonged at Hogwarts, which I know due to canon
2) Harry was really Snape's son, which I know due to the tags (I have never read a Severitus fic in my life; again, this is a hypothetical example)
3) Harry wasn't going to know he was really Snape's son, and when he found out he was going to deny it, which I expected because this is a trope, and also maybe this is what I wanted from the trope.
#2 on this list suggests something interesting--that is that tags, warnings, titles, summaries can be a part of the construction of dramatic irony. These external trappings can be compared to book jackets, titles, and sales pitches of profic--which, in turn, can be tied to genre. The cover, title, font of the title are all going to contribute to what genre you think a book is, as is the shelf on which you find the book at the bookstore (this leads to all sorts of interesting questions about what online book sales do to genre expectation). Meanwhile, the shelf on which you find fanfic is a little corner of the internet--and usually, you expect to get a certain thing there, just like you expect to get a certain thing from the Romance corner of the book store.
And recently, I've been noticing that most fanfic I read draws on that type of reader knowledge and expectation more than canon knowledge. Which is darn weird? Since it's not like we have a solid definition of the definition of fanfic as a genre, and we do have solid definitions of canon (though let's not get into a discussion right now about whether the Buffy comics are canon, etc). I wondered if I was noticing this because I was reading a lot of AUs at the time--but then again, many AUs make extensive use of canon knowledge; it really depends.
For instance, take an AU of The Avengers, from Tony's POV; he's worked with Hulk before but doesn't know who he is. When Tony meets Bruce, we know Bruce is Hulk, so there's this cool tension where we know and we're wondering when Tony will find out, because of canon knowledge.
Okay, now take an AU from Tony's POV in which there is no Hulk, no super powers at all. We might still know that Tony, when he meets Bruce, will be interested in Bruce, because that's MCU canon--but it might also be because of the Tony/Bruce tag. And we might know that there's more to Bruce than the shy, shuffle-y guy that meets the eye, because that's canon too, but it might also be textual hints, such as his reluctance to meet people's eyes, or the way he flinches at things. We know that when General Ross shows up, he'll cause some kind of problem, because that's canon.
Okay, now take another AU, in which everyone's in highschool. If Loki shows up, and we were in one of the fics above, we might guess he was going to cause a problem, because that's canon. But now that we're in this highschool AU, we actually know that Loki is going to be an emo drama kid with eyeliner; we know that Steve is gonna be star quarterback, Tony's gonna be the most popular rich douche in school and head of the debate club, while Bruce is gonna be the nerdy kid in the A/V club. And we know they're all gonna interact somehow and Tony/Steve are gonna bicker and Tony/Bruce will be bff--and that's less because of canon and rather more because we just know how this fic works.
In some ways, fanfic can be much less what the audience knows about canon, and a lot more about what's gonna get tweaked or changed about canon. An AU is an extreme example, but everyone's interpretation of canon is different. So maybe part of the magic of fanfic is you come in with this set of expectations: Bruce is the Hulk, Tony is Iron Man, but your expectations are actually much, much denser than that, and what you're looking for is how those expectations will be met, thwarted, or shaped into a completely new view of canon itself.
*
The fact that the Severitus fic mentioned above didn't satisfy me probably has a lot less to do with "actual" dramatic irony than reader expectation set up by certain tropes. And because tropes can be handled in so many different ways, often we're not really dealing with "expectation" so much as the hope or desire that a trope will go a certain way.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, possibly due to
brown_betty's post about "tissue paper kink"--a trope/kink you really like, but only when it's done a certain way. For instance, if you love slave AUs, but only when both characters are former slaves and it's about dealing with trauma; you don't like it when one is a master and the other is a slave; you also don't like it when someone is going undercover to bust a slave trading ring, etc.(Btw, if this interests you, she also did a call for recs of X for people who don't like X. So, for instance, if you don't like slave AUs, you could go look at the list and see whether there are any that leave out the stuff you hate about slave AUs but do some of the stuff you might like about slave AUs.)
*
Sometimes it's the trope you want, but it's just not done the way you want it. Other times, it's just done badly, and I find that this also happens a lot with dramatic irony. With that Severitus fic, I couldn't tell whether it just wasn't done the way I'd wanted it, or whether the writer had seriously just botched understanding reader expectation.
A classic example of badly handled dramatic irony is when Character A and Character B don't talk to each other. Character A loves B, but B doesn't know it. And B loves A, but A doesn't know it. You, the reader, know that A and B love each other and would live happily ever after if they only knew. You, the reader, have superior knowledge, because you're getting both A and B POV, so this is dramatic irony. But you also know you're reading a romance, which could be called dramatic irony sometimes, or maybe just genre trappings on other occasions.
This is a sweet set up, and I love it. But the absolute worst is when it drags on too long. The reader knows A loves B and B loves A and that they're meant to be, and after a while A and B just look like idiots because they can't figure it out! Ugh.
*
Random anecdote: I once wrote this Bruce Wayne/Gordon fic that really only works if you know that Bruce Wayne is also Batman. It was from Gordon's POV, which provided some excellent opportunities for tension; the audience knows why Wayne behaves the way he does, but Gordon doesn't. This tension took little to no work to create, because a) I didn't have to establish that Wayne is secretly Batman, because the reader should come into the fic knowing that, b) I didn't have to worry that much about Gordon appearing clueless, since it's canon that people don't recognize Batman's voice, jaw, mannerisms, etc.
Then, a couple years later, I wrote this Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy fic with a premise very loosely based on the Bruce Wayne/Gordon fic. Draco had a secret identity, Rabbit, but it was from Harry's POV. Harry interacts with both Draco and Rabbit; the reader is supposed to guess Draco is Rabbit, but Harry isn't. This is significantly more difficult to achieve, because I had to establish a) that Draco is secretly Rabbit, b) that Harry's not an idiot--i.e., there have to be enough clues for the reader to conclude that Rabbit is Draco, but not enough clues for Harry to figure it out; since it's from Harry's POV, this is hard, c) that Harry Potter is a world in which people have secret identities.
So, I couldn't rely on readers to know Draco's secret identity just because they knew canon, but I could rely on them to figure out Draco's secret identity because it was still fanfic. That is, the fic was labeled Harry/Draco. It was posted for a Harry/Draco exchange fest. While sometimes people pair Harry with other people in Harry/Draco fandom, it doesn't happen nearly as often as say, Peter/El in Peter/Neal fandom in White Collar. I even relied on the fact that Harry/other is often problematized in Harry/Draco fic; if Harry's with Ginny or someone else, whoever, there's something wrong with the relationship so we can easily see why he should be with Draco instead. This isn't the case with all Harry/Draco fic, but it's often the case.
Lastly, secret identity/mistaken identity/identity-fuckery is also a common trope in fanfic. Amnesia is not that common irl, but in fiction it's way more common, and in fanfic it's even more common. Same goes for identity tropes. So, I relied on all of these things put together, as well as some strong hints within the text itself, to help the reader come to a conclusion the character couldn't come to, in order not to make the character seem too clueless, and in order to give the reader a hit of the nice tension dramatic irony gives you. I don't think the fic was entirely successful; I'm just using it as an example.
In the Batman fic, dramatic irony is built off knowledge the reader absolutely should have that the characters don't. In the HP fic, dramatic irony is built off the text itself a little bit, but also genre, tropes, and reader expectation. Why did I tell you this story? I have no idea.
*
Two really great uses of dramatic irony, imo, were:
1) Tigana. So, all that shit with Dianora is fucked up, but omg, knowing who she is while Brandin doesn't killed me. There's also this other part where her brother is right there and neither of them know.
2) Gladiator. When Maximus faces Commodus and we know who he is and Maximus knows who he is but COMMODUS DOESN'T at first ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I don't think either of these are the most stellar pieces of literature, but when I think of dramatic irony, they're what I think of most. I was literally biting my nails during both.
*
Okay, so questions:
1) What are some fanfics that make good use of the reader's canon knowledge to create dramatic irony? (Links?)
2) What are some bad uses of dramatic irony that annoy you?
3) Do you like dramatic irony? Why is it so awesome? Is it because I'm just a know-it-all who really, really likes knowing things other people don't?
4) What are some other ways to create dramatic irony?
5) What are some profics/movies/tv/other media that make great use of dramatic irony? Was it nail-biting?
6) What are your thoughts on how to set up a narrator as unreliable?
7) Do AUs make more use of dramatic irony through canon knowledge, or genre expectation, or does it just depend on the AU?
8) What are your thoughts on fanfic as a genre?
9) Do you consciously use canon knowledge to create dramatic irony? Or does it just happen?
10) What are your thoughts on dramatic irony vs reader expectations? Is it useful to make a distinction? Is there a distinction, etc
idk guys I just wanna talk
*
no subject
1) What are some fanfics that make good use of the reader's canon knowledge to create dramatic irony? (Links?)
...um, I'll have to get back to you on that!
2) What are some bad uses of dramatic irony that annoy you?
The main thing is when dramatic irony requires characters to miss things they should be able to figure out, or hide things from each other that they have no in-character reason to hide. (Especially when this involves what is supposed to be a loving and healthy relationship, being founded on deception, with no reason for it except STORY. I plowed through A Wizard On Mars when it came out despite a large part of the middle of the book being about People Keep Secrets For No Reason and then it turned out that they were acting OOC because MAGIC, which, at least she acknowledged the problem? But still...
Which is the other main thing that annoys me: when it's being lazy. When people are using dramatic irony as their main plot driver and don't bother building suspense/interest any other way.
3) Do you like dramatic irony? Why is it so awesome? Is it because I'm just a know-it-all who really, really likes knowing things other people don't?
I LOVE DRAMATIC IRONY. I'm sure it's partly the know-it-all thing! But also because it adds an extra layer to everything that's going on in the narrative, which makes it a richer reading experience (at least in the sense of rich desserts, if not philosophical depth...)
4) What are some other ways to create dramatic irony?
Here's one you left out: Spoilers! Since "well-spoiled" is my standard way of consuming media, it's something I'm used to, but even for people who avoid spoilers the first time through are likely to re-read or re-watch at some point, and then the narrative has to be compelling even when the reader already knows the ending, so it's a useful skill to be able to write as if the reader already knows everything, even when there's nothing yet in the narrative to give it away.
This is an especially useful skill when writing in serial forms (even as a book series) for publication - the author can't know if the reader will have access to previous parts of the story, so it's a mark of a really good series, at least for me, if every part of a story work for both new readers and old readers, but in different ways. (This is a pretty difficult skill, really, but I think a valuable one - and one fanwriters writing serially tend to get lazy about - on the internet, anybody can look up the earlier installations... but fanwriters are pulling on the same tensions when they write stories where "you don't need to know canon" or crossovers where people who only know one canon are encouraged to read.
To pull off sort of the same effect entirely within a narrative, there's writing-out-of-order - if you put the ending first and then skip back, and various tricks like that, you can have the reader know all sorts of things the POV character doesn't, while still staying in close POV. (And not just about what's going to happen next; if future character knows things about the past that past character doesn't, you get the same effect.) This does get used in fanworks; actually, I've seen several fics lately (and I have no idea if it's one small group doing this or part of a wider trend - see how poor my memory for that kind of thing is) where a fic consists of a bunch of short scenes told out of order, but each scene labeled with a number or a timestamp that tells where in the timeline it is. These can either work really well for me, or really badly.
5) What are some profics/movies/tv/other media that make great use of dramatic irony? Was it nail-biting?
...thinking about it, it's really really hard for me to separate out "this narrative used dramatic irony really well" from "external factors like spoilers and genre awareness made this work well for me as dramatic irony." Like I'm currently enjoying the dramatic irony in my first read of Les Miserables? But it's actually only dramatic irony because I'm spoiled, I think Victor Hugo actually thinks he's foreshadowing sudden plot twists, not writing dramatic irony.
6) What are your thoughts on how to set up a narrator as unreliable?
Write a really in-character, realistic narrator! Everybody's inner narrative is unreliable!
...or rather, I think there's a difference between "writing a good unreliable narrator" and "writing an unreliable narrator that the majority of your audience will notice is unreliable"...
7) Do AUs make more use of dramatic irony through canon knowledge, or genre expectation, or does it just depend on the AU?
I think it really depends on the AU - a lot of AUs depend heavily on genre tropes and on following canon closely, but AUs can also go wildly off those paths, and end up almost completely away from those sources of subtext.
8) What are your thoughts on fanfic as a genre?
I like it? :D
9) Do you consciously use canon knowledge to create dramatic irony? Or does it just happen?
Sort of in-between? Now that you've got me thinking about it.... I consciously play on the reader's canon knowledge, and genre knowledge, to add extra meaning and extra suspense to a story (And since I like peppering my stuff without outside references, when I'm feeling self-indulgence I draw on knowledge of an entirely different canon.) But I tend to not think about what I'm doing in terms of dramatic irony? When I'm consciously writing dramatic irony it tends to come out as identity porn, honestly...
10) What are your thoughts on dramatic irony vs reader expectations? Is it useful to make a distinction? Is there a distinction, etc
Okay kind of off-topic for the question, but: one interesting thing about fanfic/canon knowledge vs. dramatic irony in original work is that in fanwork, you don't actually have to put in the big reveal. I mean, I love reveal scenes, they are the best, but, for example, you can write a story about Batman and Bruce and Commissioner Gordon that is all about the Batman/Bruce identity divide, without ever putting anything in the story that explictly reveals (or even hints particularly strongly) that Batman is Bruce. And that works because you can assume all of your readers already know the basics of Bruce and Batman and Gordon. And that can let you write stories that are built on dramatic irony that are differently structured, and that have a very different flow, than any story you can write outside fandom, which almost has to confront things more directly in order to show that there's anything to confront.
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I started thinking about this over on lj because someone pointed out Shakespeare uses dramatic irony a lot. Which, he does, but there's a whole other level with Shakespeare, since everyone performing Shakespeare has got to know that the audience will come in knowing the play. So, spoilers for a novel, it's knowledge the audience has that the author hasn't prepared for the audience to have, but a play--the play isn't written as if the audience knows it, but it's performed as if it is. And a really good playwright will attempt to write to both things, I suppose, since plays are meant to be performed over and over in a way that novels aren't meant to be reread over and over.
As far as serial form goes, I'm not sure I'd say internet writers are lazy? Because if you're talking about a serial that is one work, like a WIP--chapters from serial books didn't necessarily stand alone in the 19th c, either. There were some attempts to make each chapter a bit of its own narrative, more so than in some WIPs online, but I mean, Les Mis is a serial, and imo it's pretty complicated; there are some parts that just definitely wouldn't make sense on their own. Maybe you think those serial writers were lazy too, by imo that's just a different form/medium of fiction, and adheres to different rules.
Though maybe we just differ on that opinion anyway, because even if you're not talking about single-work WIPs, but rather fic series--I'm not sure I agree that a series is "really good" if the books/stories can be consumed individually as well as separately. It is a great skill to be able to write that way, but so much about book lengths have to do with marketing. Some authors end up writing a trilogy at 250 pages each just because no publisher would buy their 600 page novel, or their two novels of 300 pages each, you know? And therefore the story is 150 pages longer than it needed to be just 'cause of money. I personally think that's a shame, though I suppose an argument could be made that "good writing" works within the parameters of the market.
where a fic consists of a bunch of short scenes told out of order, but each scene labeled with a number or a timestamp that tells where in the timeline it is.
HA. Well, I'm glad to hear there's a recent rash of it, because I was thinking of doing a story like this, and was hesitant. I fared very well writing non-linear, abstract things in Buffy fandom, but outside of that fandom I feel like people have looked at me funny for trying it. Which makes me sad! I sometimes find non-linear stories very frustrating if they don't make sense or if I can't figure out why the author wrote it non-linearly, but when done for a reason and done well, it can just be so amazing.
Les Mis
I read the book years and years ago because I loved (and still love, no shame) the Liam Neeson movie. The movie is very heavy on Valjean and Javert and very skimpy on revolutionaries and Thenardiers, so I was DEEPLY SURPRISED by many of the developments concerning Eponine and Marius etc. But so much of that stuff relies so heavily on coincidence, I feel like it might be better to read it spoiled. Then you're ready for it and gone way past the part where you're saying, "BUT THE ODDS OF THAT HAPPENING ARE NON-EXISTENT!" and you can just enjoy it.
I love that book deeply, though. Changed my life.
"writing a good unreliable narrator" and "writing an unreliable narrator that the majority of your audience will notice is unreliable".
I'm interested in this. Do you mean if you write it well, people won't notice? I'm curious about it partly because I agree with you--if you write it in-character, it's always gonna be unreliable. At least, if you're using a really limited third or first person. Because I almost always write in limited third, all of my narrators are unreliable, but I rarely actively think about them being unreliable. But I've had some weird moments with a series I'm writing now where people are like, "But this isn't true!" And I'm all, "Okay, but I don't understand why you think the narrator can be trusted?" And then they're like, "Oh! An unreliable narrator! I didn't know!" And it makes me wonder whether I should have done more to show he's unreliable, which is weird since I didn't make him purposely unreliable; I just wrote his thoughts how I thought they would be. /whining
When I'm consciously writing dramatic irony it tends to come out as identity porn, honestly...
And that is some of the best kind.
without ever putting anything in the story that explicitly reveals (or even hints particularly strongly) that Batman is Bruce.
Yeah! Exactly! The Batman story was much easier for me to write, because I knew everyone knew Batman was Bruce Wayne. When I tried to write a similar story for Harry Potter it was far more difficult, because no one had a canonical secret identity so I had to strongly hint what the secret identity was to get the reader on the same page. Lot more work than the Batman story was. And the Batman story was cooler, imo.
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As someone who was perpetually reading series out of order from the library, or picking up one Superman comic at a yard sale and never finding the rest, or catching one episode of a TV show but not having time to follow it every week, or etc., it's a skill I'm fairly passionate about and one that I do lament is being lost in this age of all-information-at-our-fingertips. (I could go on at length about What's Wrong With Modern Television And Comics or put in a Hugo-worthy digression about class and access to stories, but I'll be kind and refrain...)
But being able to rely on most of your audience knowing everything that came before has led to some brilliant new possibilities, too, it's definitely not all one way.
Les Mis actually wasn't a serial, unless you count a one-month wait between the first two volumes and the last three, even though it seems like it ought to have been - Hugo was apparently very insistent that it be published all in one go. Several of the major foriegn-language versions came out in one chunk at the same time, too. I've been actually thinking about that as I go - some of the structural choices he made, and how they would have worked the same/differently if it had been serialized the way Dickens was.
(I am reading it all the way for the first time right now! I dipped my toes in as a teenager but never went all the way, and am kind of regretting it, because it's amazing.)
As for unreliable narrators: No, I don't necessarily think those two things are opposites! Just that ... well, as you've experienced, if you write an unreliable narrator without constantly putting up blinky neon signs that say "UNRELIABLE! UNRELIABLE!" about them, a significant proportion of the audience will simply assume they're reliable.
But putting up giant blinky neon signs is not always the smoothest narrative choice. Sometimes it is, but not always. So I guess this sort of doubles back to what you were saying about reader expectations and about writing a double story depending on what the readers know as well as what the characters know? Or do you want to just write the story you want to write, and ignore the part of the audience that gets it "wrong"? Or can "unreliable audience" be an essential part of "unreliable narrator"? Some of the more effective unreliable narrators are meant to have a big Dramatic Irony reveal at the end, in which case you *want* to fool your audience... So basically I am still thinking about this, but mainly, if you're writing someone who you know is unreliable, audience expectations is something to keep in mind?
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Well, I for one would read it and enjoy it. Though I should probably just do a post about serial narrative. I totally thought Les Mis was a serial; I'm really surprised it wasn't. Personally, I'm really glad about the direction in which tv is moving. I can see arguments against it in favor of accessibility, but I feel like tv is still accessible because the story is still coming out in individual episodes. Though I suppose once we get to point where tv is obsolete and the shows we're enjoying now were all just made for DVD, we'd be back to the problem of the unserialized novel.
because it's amazing
I'm so happy! You're not the only one on my flist working their way through for the first time, and it just fills me with glee. I never really had anyone to talk to about it when I first read it. Sadly, now a lot of the details have gone out of my head, but it's still nice to hear people talk about it.
if you're writing someone who you know is unreliable, audience expectations is something to keep in mind?
Yes, you're right of course. I think maybe I'm just sort of confused and bummed out about the fact that when you're dealing with a really close third or first person, the audience doesn't just assume it's an unreliable narrator. As you said, POV is subjective; you're never gonna get an objective truth when you're inside someone's head. That audiences would have a different expectation is ridiculous, and yet I can't blame them, since I do think that many first and close third person narrators in lit are meant to be "true". I suppose I should just suck it up and deal with it!