okay that post on dramatic irony
Dramatic irony. When the audiences knows something at least one of the characters doesn't.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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
Like you, I get super frustrated by prolonged, "I love her, but no way she loves me back!"
I realized this is tied to my love for emotionally brave characters. When somebody can pull their socks up, take a breath, and say out loud, "Hey. I'm attracted," that's really sexy and sometimes makes me all verklempt with proud mama bear feelings.
I've discovered something interesting about this type of dramatic irony: lots of stories still work without it. Like, I'm reading this fantastic WIP in which the characters had a conversation somewhere around chapter four that went, "I'm totally into you, but I can't date you for professional reasons for at least a year," (n.b. shockingly, this is not a student/teacher fic!), and the other guy says, "Oh, okay," AND THEN THE NOBLE ASSHOLES STICK TO IT! And the sexual tension is stupendous.
And I'm reading this other fantastic WIP in which our heroes go on one date, and then something ridiculous and overwhelming happens in A's life. So he says, "OMG I like you so much, but I'm not going to have time to BREATHE for the foreseeable, and new relationships take work, so..." And B goes, "Okay, yeah, let's put things on hold. But I don't want to just jettison this friendship we've found, so can I come over this weekend and paint your kitchen cabinets for you while you work on the breathing thing?" And I'm like, "LET ME LOVE YOU ALL."
Then again, I'm reading a third story with basically the same plot, and I love it for basically the same reasons, except I feel it doesn't have enough wombats*. So. It's a balance.
*Wombats: useful method of solving plot and writer's block problems: whenever you are stuck, hurl another flying disgruntled wombat, i.e. obstacle, at your hero. Coined by somebody. Probably
3) Do you like dramatic irony?
Sometimes! I don't care much about, "Little does he know there's a werewolf lurking in the bushes" -- your standard scary movie-style set-up. And I have a humiliation squick, so I don't like, "Little does she know her period came a day early and the mean girls are laughing at the spot on her white shorts."
But I love it when villains don't know about the hero's secret weapon. Or when somebody's about to get a happy surprise. Or accidental eavesdroppers hearing something nice about themselves. Or someone about to get their just deserts.
I like anticipation, but not dread, if that makes sense? Some people love dread, horror films and things, and that's awesome; it's just not how my own hormones work.
5) What are some profics/movies/tv/other media that make great use of dramatic irony? Was it nail-biting?
Have you read A.S. Byatt's Possession? It's split between two time periods: a pair of Victorian poets and the present-day scholars studying them. There's a really brilliant mystery clue about a familial link between the poets and one of the scholars, but it's only mentioned a few times over the course of a huge tome: they both have veryveryvery pale blond hair. Apparently it's too subtle for some folks: when they made the movie, they made one of them a voluptuous redhead! -_-
9) Do you consciously use canon knowledge to create dramatic irony? Or does it just happen?
I'm currently writing a story set post-S2 of a four-season show. Since I started writing (you know I'm geologically slow), a ton has happened to my characters, so I keep revisiting scenes to see what I am or could be foreshadowing. I'm not revising much, because I want to keep a light touch, no anvils, but I had one scene already written that took on a whole amazing subtext all by itself. That was neat.
But I'm also having trouble figuring out my climactic scene, because narrative convention/expectation demands a certain development and payoff by the end of this story, yet most of the obvious climaxes are tied to issues the characters canonically don't resolve until later.
That's one of my favourite kinds of DI, I think, despite my current writerly frustrations. Looking at a baaaaby!character and thinking, "You think you know who you are. You haven't even begun," and finding hints of that character's future in the habits and actions of the present.
8) What are your thoughts on fanfic as a genre?
I love this question! I want to hear what you've said about it already. The only descriptor I can nail down off the top of my head is, "Fanfic has an intimate relationship with an antecedent text." Because the tricksy (and cool) thing about fanfic as genre is that it's an umbrella that contains nearly everything else we think of as a genre. You can have scifi-fanfic and mystery-fanfic and bodice-ripper-fanfic and srsbzns-fanfic.... And each, or each of its subgenres (AMTDI, romance AU, undercover cops...), has its own set of conventions, but there's little that applies to fanfic as a whole.
no subject
True, but I think it's one of the easier shortcuts to prolonged UST, which is probably why we see it so much.
whenever you are stuck, hurl another flying disgruntled wombat, i.e. obstacle, at your hero.
I've read fic where Draco is a swan and Harry's a mermaid and then a volcano erupts and then one of them gets pregnant and then they travel in time and one of them turn into a wereswan. I thought it was weird. Then I've read fic where someone wakes up in the morning and gets coffee and goes to work and does work and talks to co-workers and has lunch and works some more and goes home and has dinner and does laundry and calls someone on the phone for 80,000 words. That's far weirder.
Or accidental eavesdroppers hearing something nice about themselves.
This is an unknink of mine. I wouldn't call it a squick, since it doesn't make me viscerally ill or anything, but I dislike it. I only mention it because I think it's interesting, the little things that we don't enjoy that other people do. I started a list of 101 Unkinks, but I could only think of 30 things.
Have you read A.S. Byatt's Possession?
I have! I thought it was weird that they didn't play up the family connection in the movie. Then again, I disliked the movie. (Though the book is excellent! Although I must say I found the Victorians more interesting than the modern scholars.)
because narrative convention/expectation demands a certain development and payoff by the end of this story, yet most of the obvious climaxes are tied to issues the characters canonically don't resolve until later.
What are your thoughts on making it AU?
Looking at a baaaaby!character and thinking, "You think you know who you are. You haven't even begun," and finding hints of that character's future in the habits and actions of the present.
This is interesting to me. I wrote this post speaking from an authorial perspective, even though I was talking about reading as well. Melannen mentioned another type of dramatic irony: spoilers. You don't really write novels with the intention of someone reading it over and over again, so if you do reread you're experiencing a dramatic irony the author didn't necessarily intend. But a good text will foreshadow things. I generally think of this as a tool to guide reader expectations, such that particular plot twists etc don't seem implausible, but it also provides a particular reward for those who reread. I must say that I've been doing this more and more--putting in tiny details that won't necessarily become clear unless someone reads the fic at least twice. It makes it more fun to write, too.
I do experience some frustration looking at baby!characters sometimes, because especially with tv it can just be so obvious that the creators didn't know where they were going with them. Sometimes it's totally fun to say, "Yes, they didn't know where this character was going, but isn't it neat how these things play into the overall picture anyway, even though it wasn't intentional?" But other times making all the pieces fit just feels like a frustrating chore.
Because the tricksy (and cool) thing about fanfic as genre is that it's an umbrella that contains nearly everything else we think of as a genre. You can have scifi-fanfic and mystery-fanfic and bodice-ripper-fanfic and srsbzns-fanfic.... And each, or each of its subgenres (AMTDI, romance AU, undercover cops...), has its own set of conventions, but there's little that applies to fanfic as a whole.
This is why I had not thought of fanfic as "genre" before
The other discussion I had about it started in a really different place.
I think that the other main factor playing into dramatic irony in fanfiction that doesn't work so well in mainstream fiction is expectations caused by fic itself - not by the genre "fanfiction" or the genre "slash fiction" or the genre "superhero femslash," for example, but rather by the particular conventions of a very specific subset of stories. So, lots of people write what's been called Issue Fic, where the fic addresses, in narrative, an issue within the fandom. When everyone in SGA was writing McKay/Sheppard "genderswap" fic, for a while it was alllll really heteronormative, about one guy turning into a woman, then they'd have a het romance and a baby etc., then they'd turn back. And I wanted to write one where they were both women, and got together as self-identified male lesbians (that fic is outdated and kind of crappy in retrospect, but it's just an example).
A better example is something like Helenish's Take Clothes Off As Directed, which took the BDSM AU and asked, okay, but what if it doesn't work for these people the way it's supposed to? There are plenty of fics that do this with common fic tropes - I remember one where Tony's soulbonded to Obadiah, which is all about how soulbonds are creepy and Tony needs to get away from his soulbonded lifemate and find a nice guy who isn't connected to him by a mystical bond. Every fic trope I can think of in a medium to large fandom has had those issue fics, that says, "Well, we've all read the one where Draco's part Veela, BUT" or "Well, we've all read the one where Gabrielle and Xena are having hot tub sex, BUT" . . .
So, fics like that depend on the reader knowing, not just who Bruce Wayne is or that Batman exists or that people are likely to kiss because it's a romance - they depend on people also being familiar with the sub-sub-sub-genre, the current tenor in the fandom, the other fics that used this trope, etc. There are jokes in some of my fics that only make sense if you were reading all the fic of a certain type going around at the time.
I feel like that sort of fic was how
The reason I object to that definition is that there is plenty of fic on AO3 (and elsewhere) that, like R&G, stands out and deals with other concerns than the majority of fanfic. And how it stands out or what those concerns are are diverse enough that the only reason those fics are different than R&G or Wide Sargasso Sea is that they are unpublished.
But anywhoodle, those are the conversations I've been having about fanfic and genre :o)
no subject
Ja. It's a formula. Probably some folks get off on the crush fantasy, too: shy, doubt-stricken, nobody-could-ever-love-me character gets his giant reward.
...for 80,000 words. That's far weirder.
Cackle. You put it so well.
I started a list of 101 Unkinks, but I could only think of 30 things.
I started a list of squicks, too, once, but I got tired of myself and withdrew the question.
Possession... I disliked the movie.
Me, too. My biggest gripe wasn't even the Americanization of Roland, but the same gripe I had with The Hobbit: the director didn't understand why the book was funny!
What are your thoughts on making it AU?
Not this time. Next time, totally.
a good text will foreshadow
things...
All this stuff is really smart and I approve.
Sometimes it's totally fun to say, "Yes, they didn't know where this character was going, but isn't it neat how these things play into the overall picture anyway, even though it wasn't intentional?" But other times making all the pieces fit just feels like a frustrating chore.
Haha. There was a moment there in Glee fandom when folks decided that the honest-to-god best possible explanation for Blaine Anderson's oddities was that he actually was Harry Potter on the lam.
most genres only have one (really broad!) descriptor that you can nail down, right? ...romance sci fi and mystery sci fi and "literary" sci fi etc. Ursula K LeGuin will cry if you say that sci fi can't be "literary", and I probably will too.
Me three. I do think it might be important to give fanfiction genre status, because as soon as you do that, it's easier to make people understand that it's its own thing, with its own rules, which aren't necessarily the same rules by which literary fiction gets judged.
Issue Fic... they depend on people also being familiar with the sub-sub-sub-genre, the current tenor in the fandom, the other fics that used this trope, etc. The reason I object to that definition is that there is plenty of fic on AO3 (and elsewhere) that, like R&G, stands out and deals with other concerns than the majority of fanfic. And how it stands out or what those concerns are are diverse enough that the only reason those fics are different than R&G or Wide Sargasso Sea is that they are unpublished.
Right. And how embedded in a time, a place, a culture and a community a story is can be harder to judge than it looks, even a couple years later. Like -- Bridget Jones' Diary? 100% Issue Fic.
I was just having this conversation offline, last weekend, about the "timelessness" of Jane Austen. JA is lousy with pop culture in-jokes that totally fly over the heads of most modern readers. She's in dialogue with her literary community every bit as much as "Take Clothes Off As Directed". A thought I personally find beautiful to contemplate.
no subject
I just read a published, pro novel -- overall a decent novel -- where the protagonist had a *secret origin*. The hint of the secret origin is given in chapter 2 or so, in a way that immediately made me go 'that was mentioned in such a way that this will CLEARLY turn out to be the main character's secret origin,' the whole book went by with nobody mentioning the possibility and then the CLIMAX of the book was the revelation of the character's secret identity. So basically I read *this whole novel* and the payoff was something I figured out 10 pages in. (This is literally the only payoff, because it's the first book of a trilogy, to get the rest of the mytharc or the romance you have to commit to the whole series, apparently.)
And I had to wonder, "Would the book actually be more interesting if we'd gotten a viewpoint of the character who KNOWS the secret from the start?" So then the tension would be "When will the character find out this luscious tidbit that the author has shared with us?" rather than "When will the author stop assuming that we're idiots and didn't figure this out on page 10?" In other words, the author thinks they've made the book more suspenseful by keeping the secret, but it might actually be better (I DON'T KNOW, I'VE NEVER WRITTEN A BOOK, I'M JUST THINKING) if dramatic irony was allowed to do some of the work here.
no subject
Because I'm thinking of a similar book, which would have been far less interesting had I guessed the protagonist's origin. But while I'm savvier than some readers, I'm pretty damn unsavvy, and things take me by surprise, which I like. And while I've always wanted the POV of the character who knew in this series, I would not give away that thrill of not-knowing-and-then-knowing for anything--but of course, this is from the perspective of an unwitting!reader, rather than a knowing one. If you're afraid of spoiling this book, pm me? Because I realized once I started writing this that revealing that the main character of the book I'm thinking of has a secret origin would probably ruin it for some people. (It would have for me!)
But anyway, thinking of that book and many others--I would think it would be such a hard call to make. That fic I mentioned in the original post, the one that was HP and Draco had a secret identity--I thought it was painfully obvious who Draco really was, and that I'd dropped rather too many hints. It made Harry (the POV character, who was not supposed to know what the reader knew) look like an idiot. But there were still readers taken by surprise, and readers who thought I had not let slip Draco's identity purposefully . . . versus readers who thought Harry was a dumbass for not figuring it out.
no subject
This whole conversation makes me think of a veteran mystery writer -- and I honestly don't remember who, but it's somebody who had a lot of books under their belt -- saying that, based on their experience with mystery readers, there would be somebody who figured it out RIGHT OFF THE BAT no matter what you did, so they found it important to make sure there was more to the book than whodunit. And I've definitely found that the mysteries I enjoy are ones where the process of investigating the mystery reveals interesting things about all of the characters no matter who is the eventual culprit. (Louise Penny, who I've been reading a lot lately, is extremely good at this.)
no subject
no subject
Or, again, maybe you just don't like mysteries! Fandom in all its infinite varieties, etc :)
no subject
It's cousin to other kinds of dramatic tension, such as, "Who's going to survive past the end of the book?" that can be nail-biters or duds depending on how much the author respects the reader's intelligence. I rambled about this one at length a few years ago after reading
The law for that would go something like, "If a certain key outcome (such as the survival of the protagonist, or the satisfaction of the romance) is obvious simply by virtue of genre convention, POV, or somesuch, then just acknowledge it, lampshade it, and find something else onto which to hitch your suspense."