More Blog Posts437

• Today

  Did Harper Lee write "Go Set a Watchman"?

  

  21 comments · 194 views

• Tuesday

  Brooks & Warren on Showing & Telling

  I say 1 A.M. Tuesday still counts as Monday.  

  I think I’m going to post part of the introduction to each chapter of Understanding Fiction by Brooks & Warren, 3rd edition (1979), to summarize their main ideas about fiction.  This one is a digression, so you get it out of order.  In the intro to chapter 3, “What Character Reveals”, they talk about showing versus telling while talking about characters.

  (BTW, this intro to chapter 3 is completely new in the third edition (5 pages, vs. 1 in the 1st ed.)  They revised everything in the 3rd edition, even the discussions of the same stories, although those generally make the same points.)

          Warning:  They use the term “indirect” to mean “showing” and “direct” to mean “telling” when they talk about describing a character, and “direct” to mean “showing” and “indirect” to mean “telling” when they talk about dialogue. It makes some sense, since they use “indirectly describing” as a double-negative. They mean “indirectly summarizing”, which means “indirectly not directly depicting”, or “directly depicting”.

  How shall the author present his character? Directly, with a summary of his traits and characteristics [telling], or indirectly (that is, through dialogue and action [showing])?  The very nature of fiction suggests that the second method is its characteristic means, yet direct presentation is constantly used in fiction, often effectively.  Much depends upon the underlying purpose of the story and much depends upon matters of scope and scale.  If the author made every presentation of character indirectly, insisting that each character gradually unfold himself through natural talk and gesture and action, the procedure might become intolerably boring.  “The Necklace” indicates how direct presentation—and even summary presentation—can be properly and effectively used.  (Look back at the first three paragraphs of this story on page 66.)  But when he comes to the significant scenes of the story, the author of “The Necklace” discards summary in favor of dramatic presentation.

  The danger of direct presentation is that it tends to forfeit the vividness of drama and the reader’s imaginative participation. Direct, descriptive presentation works best, therefore, with rather flat and typical characters, or as a means to get rapidly over more perfunctory materials.  When direct presentation of character becomes also direct comment on a character, the author may find himself “telling” us what to feel and think rather than “rendering” a scene for our imaginative participation.  In “The Furnished Room,” for example, O. Henry tends to “editorialize” on the hero’s motives and beliefs, and constant plucking at the reader’s sleeve and nudging him to sympathize with the hero’s plight may become so irritating that the whole scene seems falsified.  Yet in D. H. Lawrence’s “Tickets, Please,” we shall see that direct commentary--and even explicit interpretation of the characters’ motives--can on occasion be effectively used by an author.

  …

  An author’s selection of modes of character presentation will depend upon a number of things. His decision on when to summarize traits or events, on when to describe directly, and on when to allow the character to express his feelings through dialogue and action, will depend upon the general end of the story and upon the way in which the action of the story is to be developed…

  Indirect discourse [telling], like [“direct”] character summary and description, is a quicker way of getting over the ground, and in fiction has its very important uses.  Notice, for example, in “War” that the husband’s explanation of why his wife is to be pitied is indirect discourse: “And he felt it his duty to explain… that the poor woman was to be pitied, for the war was taking away her only son.” But the speeches of the old man who argues for the sublimity of sacrificing one’s son for one’s country are given as direct discourse. The importance of the old man’s speeches to the story, the need for dramatic vividness, the very pace of the story--all call for direct discourse.

  7 comments · 162 views

• Sunday

  THE THING IS HERE! Reading of "Whom the Princesses Would Destroy" by obabscribbler

  The Thing That May Not be Named may now be named!

  Remember this post back in October of last year?  Called Something Not Safe for Ghost?

  That was when we raised $300 for Scribbler, to help her pay her dog Suki's medical expenses and to do a reading of GhostOfHeraclitus' story "Whom the Princesses Would Destroy".

  I imagined that she'd read the story a few times, come up with some voices, then sit down and record it.

  But things got a little out of hoof.

  I think at 20 or 30 people have worked on this now.  Here is chapter 1in all its glory:

  Thanks to Scribbler, the cast, and everyone who worked on this.  And thanks to those who raised the money!  I think that's yamgoth, Arcshod, RBDash47, Super Trampoline, Horse Voice, horizon, Bradel, RandomString, toafan, Augie Dog, Skywriter, and me.  If I don't have you on that list, it's because you contributed under one of those funny human names that are so hard to remember.

  14 comments · 262 views

• 1w, 13h

  The triple con: Trotcon, Capclave, Bronycon

  I told myself I wouldn't drive out to Columbus for another convention, but I'm doing it again this weekend, going to Trotcon.  And after that, Capclave in Pittsburgh.  And after that, Bronycon.  When it rains, it pours.

  I might be on ROBCakeran53's 7pm Friday writing panel, if I get there in time.

  6 comments · 115 views

• 1w, 15h

  A note about the thing

  Remember the thing we can't talk about?  From way back last year?

  ...yeah.  That thing.

  We still can't talk about it.  It... escalated.  But it is coming.  Yea, verily, it cometh, like a pony in the night.  Or so I'm told.

  (Except not in the night.  More likely in the early morning.  I think it's on London time.)

  20 comments · 247 views

• 1w, 15h

  Neighrator Pony reads "Beauty and the Beast"

  Neighrator Pony is back again with a reading of Chapter 3 of Bedtime Stories, "Beauty and the Beast"!  This one's a little sad.  The Ponytrician says, "If your aim was to make me laugh, and then feel bad about laughing: mission accomplished! "

  Actually it's been up for, like, a month.  He did all 3 chapters in a few days.  I thought I'd space out the announcements.

  ... maybe I overdid it.

  What do I know?  I'm just a bidoofershy.

  2 comments · 84 views

• 1w, 3d

  On the value of higher education

  I've been posting something every Monday and Thursday evening for a few weeks now.  Are you more likely to read my posts if they come out on a regular schedule?  Did anybody even notice?

  ---

  When I was in college, I routinely took 6 or 7 courses a semester, and I was a full-time student for 15 years.  I have degrees in math, computer science, and bioinformatics, and minors in writing, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science.  I also studied a lot of molecular biology.

  These degrees led to jobs in math, computer science, and bioinformatics.  Yet, by a series of coincidences, I never used anything that I learned in a college class except for Unix.  Which I didn't actually learn in any class.  I had to teach it to myself for classes.  I don't know if that counts.

  After maybe 15 years of working, this week for the first time, I used something I might have learned in a college class.  The financial software I was working on needed to figure out which transactions from a single user had been added together to get a total, or as near to it as they can get.

  This is the 0/1 knapsack problem.  I studied that!  Maybe.  Okay, I don't remember studying it, but it seems like something I would have studied.  I knew what it was, anyway.

  I knew they teach a slick dynamic programming method for it in college.  But it was a memory hog, so I hacked something up that was mostly brute-force but optimized away permutations when there were duplicate values, and cut the run-time to the square root of the naive algorithm by splitting the input set in half, finding the sums of subsets in each half, and looking for pairs that added up to the desired sum.  It performed great!  Everybody was happy.

  Then I thought, I really should do the slick dynamic programming algorithm to prove that I learned something in college.  So I spent a day coding it up and tried it out.

  It was useless.  It requires time and space proportional to the input set size times the sum you're looking for, which must be expressed as an integer.  I thought it would be mostly useless; I didn't realize it would be almost completely useless, as any time the sum you're looking for is small enough to use the dynamic programming approach, the input set size is probably small enough to use brute force.  I experimented with a lot of different problems, and found few cases where the dynamic programming approach was as fast as my pseudo-brute-force approach and didn't run out of memory.

  So, basically, what I got from 15 years of college was one day of my time wasted.

  EDIT:  I lied.  To be strictly truthful, these were courses I forgot about but did use: Discrete math, differential equations, numerical approximation.  I also took a statistics course, but forgot everything in it by the time I needed it years later.

  ---

  In other news, a few months ago a doctor told me I should have a test, an angiogram, just to be safe.  How much would it cost?  The doctor had no idea.  Nobody had any idea.  If I wanted I could call up my insurance and be put on call waiting for half an hour to finally be told they had no idea.  But, hey!  Everybody wants to be safe, right?

  Today I got the bill.  Turns out it cost $7300.  Who knew?

  I'm not complaining that the test is too expensive.  They had a big room with bright lights and computer monitors and machines going "ping!"  Machines that go "ping!" cost money.  I am complaining that I would have had to file a subpoena to get a ballpark figure for what it would cost.  I was like, "Is it over $1000?  Is it bigger than a breadbox?"  Nobody knew.

  How do they not know this stuff?  Do they just make the numbers up afterwards?

  97 comments · 822 views

• 2w, 21h

  Signature errors: What are they?

  I've never had a signature error.  I feel left out.  

  15 comments · 279 views

• 2w, 1d

  Review of Mortality Report by Chris

  Chris does thoughtful, extended reviews on his blog, One Man's Pony Ramblings.  He finally reviewed one of my stories at length:  Ramblings on Mortality Report.  So what happens when Minnesota Nice meets Bad Horse?

  Well, he didn't like it very much:

  Mortality Report is, in a lot of ways, a very limited fic; its one that has little beyond, perhaps, a mild enjoyment of the "twist" to offer a distracted or lightly invested reader, and the wheels on the vehicle which drives it are rather too obvious for a more attentive one.

  There's some truth to that, depending on your taste.  I think the issue there is that highbrow literature has lately demanded a more slice-of-life approach.  But this is not a slice-of-life story; it's an end-of-life story, and to my thinking it's natural for lots of big thoughts, secrets, and summarizations to come out when facing the end of your life.

  I responded to Chris' comments, and said what I think are some of the key things the story does, on his blog, which is the proper place to talk about his blog post.  My own assessment of the story's problem are that:

  1. It is too slow and boring, with too much talking.  That was an unavoidable trade-off I chose to make in order to tell the story I wanted to tell.

  2. The mood is sad, and many, many readers reasoned like this:  "Celestia is immortal.  Celestia is sad.  Therefore, immortality is sad."  That's rotten logic, but that's how emotions work.  The story's emotions thus act against a message that the story contains.

  73 comments · 347 views

• 2w, 3d

  Monday Musings: Pixar's Inside Out

  

  31 comments · 277 views

• 2w, 5d

  Relentlessly Optimistic Minuette

  I don't cross-post much, but Aquaman's post Relentlessly Optimistic Minuette Ruins Your Dramatic Fanfic Plots will take about 2 minutes to read and may be the most fun thing you'll do today.  Don't read the comments until you've tried to pick out the stories yourself; they've all been figured out.

  The fake Minuette quotes remind me of my mom.  Once I sent her a Grumpy Cat meme, and all she said was, "I've always thought green eyes were pretty!"

  6 comments · 212 views

• 2w, 6d

  Story tag results simplified

  I did a terrible job of explaining how to interpret the results I presented in my last blog post.  Let me try again, without so much math.  There's an easier way to interpret the results for the binary independent variables.  (The tags. 'Binary independent variables' = 'tags'.)

  But first, snu-snu math!  (You can skip to the end if you hate math and understanding things.)

  The most important difference between using the equation

          Eq. 1: views = b1 * Adventure + b2 * Comedy + b3 * Romance

  and

          Eq. 2: ln(views) = b1 * Adventure + b2 * Comedy + b3 * Romance [1]

  is that equation 1 says that each different independent variable (things like tags) adds a constant to the number of expected views, while equation 2 says it multiplies the prediction by a constant.  Equation 1 doesn't work for fimfiction because if MarySue3235 puts a 'Romance' tag on her story, and Pen Stroke puts a 'Romance' tag on his story, the number of additional viewers drawn in by adding that tag will be larger for Pen Stroke's story.

  ---

  [1] I used b1, b2,... instead of a1, a2, ... this time because these coefficients are usually called beta coefficients, and represented by a beta, which is the Greek letter 'b'.  'ln' means the same thing as 'log', it's just more specifically saying "logarithm base 2.718".

  ---

  That works like this:

          ln(views) = b1 * Adventure + b2 * Comedy + b3 * Romance

          e^ln(views) = e^[ b1 * Adventure + b2 * Comedy + b3 * Romance ]

  "ln(views)" means "the number you have to raise e to the power of to get views", so e^ln(views) = views.  e^[a + b + c] = (e^a)*(e^b)*(e^c).  So

          views = e^(b1 * Adventure) * e^(b2 * Comedy) * e^(b3 * Romance)

  For tags, like Romance, the value is either 0 or 1.  If it's 0, e^(b3 * 0) = e^0 = 1, so there's no effect on views.  If it's 1, the predicted number of views gets multiplied by e^(b3 * 1) = e^b3.

  So.  Take that table of regression beta coefficients (the bi variables) from my last post, and change each of the binary ones to the multiplying factor e^bi :

  TAG              BETA    e^BETA
  _______________________________
  Ad              -0.260   0.77
  Co               0.192   1.21
  Ro               0.306   1.36
  Hu               0.465   1.59
  Tr              -0.115   0.89
  celestia         0.100   1.10
  chrysalis        0.803   2.23   (this was shortly after her introduction)
  cmc              0.125   1.13
  daring_do        0.243   1.28   (not long after her introduction)
  dinky            0.374   1.45
  discord         -0.043   0.96
  main_6           0.182   1.20
  oc              -0.477   0.62
  twilight         0.211   1.24
  completed        0.215   1.24
  oneshot         -0.085   0.92
  

  Now we have a simple interpretation for each of these tags:  

  - The Comedy tag multiplies expected views by 1.21

  - The OC tag multiplies expected views by 0.62

  and so on.

  22 comments · 189 views

• 3w, 14h

  What tags correlate with popularity on Fimfiction

  

  27 comments · 309 views

• 3w, 2d

  NSFGhost: Accidental artwork for "Twenty Minutes" everywhere

  

  10 comments · 328 views

• 3w, 3d

  Twenty Minutes read by Illya Leonov

  Found this in my inbox last Friday:

  I mean no impertinence....

  ...but if you will excuse my forwardness, I am recording one of your stories. I hope you are okay with that. It is "Twenty Minutes." It seems to suit my voice and style. I am recording it solo with no additional actors. Since there is only one female voice and it is a short piece I elected to do it myself. I will advise you when it is posted. Thank you for writing it and thanks in advance for allowing me to record it.   -Illya Leonov

  This is like Francis Ford Coppola calling on the phone and saying, "Terribly sorry, but that book you wrote, I'd like to make it into a movie."  You know those lists some folks have on their user pages with their pony-goals?  If I had one, the aching empty unchecked box would've been "Have a story read by Illya Leonov."

  
  

  Check!

  mp3 download (turn off your sound if you're at work, then click through and download)

  
  
  
  

  He also sent me a review, but modesty forbids--aw, who am I kidding?

  This is quite a little masterpiece. I generally never know how good they really are until the final edit. Usually when I am recording and even before, I mostly pay attention to the mechanics of the story, phrasing, intonation and the like. At the very end I finally listen to the story itself and this is a true gem. Such wondrous sentiments. I found myself wishing I had a little foal of my own, just to keep it safe.  You have done well.

  17 comments · 264 views

• 4w, 17h

  Thursday thoughts: My Princeton interview

  That Princeton fan-fiction course that covered "The Magician and the Detective" finally posted my interview on their blog… 2 weeks after the course ended, so nobody read it.  But you can!  It was posted here, but no point going there.  You can’t leave comments there, and the slightly-improved version is right here:

  AN INTERVIEW WITH BAD HORSE

  by Evan Cole, Cara Hedlund, A. J. Ohiwerei, and Chet Reyen

  Thank you very much for agreeing to interview us! We’re fans of your work – the “The Magician and the Detective” was assigned in our class as required reading, and we thoroughly enjoyed it – and we were looking to get your perspective on both the FiM [My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic] fandom and fanfiction writing in general.

  Cara: What is your process for writing fanfiction?

  Sometimes my starting idea is something one character and no one else would do (“It’s a Trap!”, “No Regrets”, “The Quiet One”, “Fluttershy’s Night Out”). Sometimes they’re character-independent propositions or “high concepts” (“Interior Design Alicorn”, the central analogy in “Keepers”). Sometimes they’re just moods (“All the Pretty Pony Princesses”) or plots (“The Mailmare,” stolen from David Brin). “Pony Play” began with the mood that Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body left me in. “Elpis” was a reaction against Harlan Ellison’s “The Deathbird.”

  I think the best ideas are two or more of these things simultaneously, inextricably. “Experience” is a concept that applies to only one character (the one pony who loves sunrises the most can never really experience them herself). “Corpse Bride” is a plot that hinges on Twilight’s arrogance. “Bedtime Stories” is a subversion gimmick, but also a character. “Moments” began with a mood of desperate tenacity that’s half heroism and half Twilight’s obsessive-compulsive neuroticism.

  For long stories I write an outline. For tricky stories I may start at the end and write backwards to the beginning.  When I start, I know the plot, but usually not the themes.  If I’m lucky, a theme emerges.  “Moments” turned out to be about Twilight believing she couldn’t be a princess or a mother. “Magician and Detective” turned out to be about pride, racism, and self-loathing. “Mailmare” turned out to be partly about pragmatism versus morality. “Alicorn Cider” turned out to be about… feudalism, I think.

  I do want my stories to be about something. Very old-fashioned of me. My opinions on what makes something a story, as opposed to just a narrative or something published in The Atlantic Monthly, are like those expressed by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their excellent (really, you should read them instead of this) books Understanding Fiction and An Approach to Literature: Fiction is an imaginative enactment of life which increases our knowledge of the possibilities of the self. A piece of fiction represents the writer’s ideas and feelings about life and its meaning. A short story should usually have a plot and a theme, where parts of the plot symbolize parts of the theme. We inhabit the characters, feel the plot as they push on and are pushed by it, and through the plot, we feel the theme that it symbolizes. (Some good stories don’t fit this pattern. Many bad ones don’t.)

  Tony Earley said it more simply: “A story is about a thing, and another thing.” See “The story isn’t over when you wrap up the plot.”

  When I finish the “first draft” (after rewriting most sentences several times), I send it to a few people and hope one of them can tell me what it’s about. Once I know, I rewrite it. I may set it aside for weeks until I figure out what it’s missing, or how to fix some structural problem. Sometimes I never do.

  Between stories, the idea that I could type interesting words about fake people seems absurd. Samuel Johnson and Robert Heinlein said that anyone who writes for anything but money is a fool. But nowadays, the person who writes for money is also a fool. Ipso facto, writers are fools.  I know writing is impossible; I try not to write; somehow, like a wino waking up in the gutter, I always find myself doing it again.

  I never sit down to a blank page with no idea what to write. The story has to make me write it. I don’t get writer’s block. I get writer’s fork, when I have to choose one story path and set aside all the others.  I'm always either knitting or unravelling.  If you're lost in the woods and don't know how to go forward, you did something wrong; go backwards.  (Unless you're actually and not metaphorically lost in the woods; then you should probably sit down and wait for someone to find you.)

  I don’t “write for myself”. The last time I did that, I ended up with three pages of Celestia lecturing Twilight on the connections between deism, Buddhism, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Christianity, and BDSM.  In fan-fiction, it’s just you and the readers, and you know how many read your work and what they think of it. It forced me to admit that I want a lot of people to like my stories. I want it enough to choose ideas they might like over ideas they won’t. I’m a popular writer now on fimfiction, but only because I once sat down and asked, “What can I write that people will read?”, and came up with “Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy” and “The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn”. I prostituted myself for popularity, and it was a lot of fun, and afterwards some people hung around to read my other stories.

  (I said that I don’t write for myself, and that the story has to make me write it. These sound contradictory, but it doesn’t feel that way.  I’ve internalized my goal to write for others enough that stories compel me more when others might like them.)

  Evan: Despite mostly being based in the FiM universe, your works display a diversity of writing styles. Do you edit your works to specifically fit certain modes of writing after completion, or do you find yourself able to channel your style of choice even while working on the initial draft?

  I check afterwards  that my style is consistent, just as I check each character’s voice, but I need to find the style early on. Sometimes the style guides the story more than its seed idea does (Moments, Pony Play, Old Friends, Bedtime Stories, Elpis).

  Having a personal style is overrated. Nobody read Charles Dickens or Henry James for their style. Having a personal style only became a big deal in prose in the early 20th century, when modernists decided reality was unknowable, and so art should be about art, not about the world. Becoming famous became a matter of contributing not great art, but a new style. (This began earlier in painting, probably because of photography.)

  Ironically, this focus on art itself made it hard for art to progress, because any style distinctive enough to make one famous is too idiosyncratic to learn from. If you borrowed Van Gogh’s or Hemingway’s style, people would say “Nice Van Gogh parody” or “Nice Hemingway pastiche” without being able to notice whether your painting or story was good or bad. If it was un-ironically good, that would make it bad.

  As a result, the true importance of style is underrated. You do need the right style for the story. Different stories require different characters with different voices. Style is the voice of the story itself. The prose writer who has only one style can tell only one kind of story. Think Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. They’re great stories, but there’s a sameness to them. The more distinctive the style, the less that can be done with it. I love Lovecraft’s mythos, but you only need to read one Lovecraft story. They’re all basically the same.

  The fetishizing of style has conspired with the agendas of literary critics and publishers to focus our attention on writers with narrowly-constrained minds, like Hemingway, [1] Thomas Pynchon, Charles Bukowski, or Philip K. Dick, who wrote beautiful stories but circled obsessively around the same few themes over and over. They can be more easily summarized, shelved, and sold than Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, or Karen Joy Fowler.

  Bruce Lee allegedly said of martial arts, “The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all,” meaning he knows and can use many styles at will. The architect Bjarke Ingels said that your style is the sum of your inhibitions.

  Cara: Is there any writing you’ve produced that you’ve been disappointed with stylistically, or that you wish you could edit now that it’s up publicly?

  Maybe “Friends, With Occasional Magic.” “Mailmare” has some flat, sparse sections. “Happy Ending” is dry. But those bother me only because the story and the style sag in the same place.

  I often do edit my old stories. Sometimes I incorporate suggestions from readers.

  Chet: When you decide to write a work of fanfiction, do you generally create a narrative scenario based on the world you want to write about, or do you instead pick a particular facet of the source material to focus on? For instance, in The Magician and the Detective, I found the discussion of ‘cutie marks’ as they related to Holmes, as well as his interaction with magic, to be particularly interesting consequences of the existence of the character within the world of FiM. Do concepts such as these motivate you to write specific stories, or are they simply natural functions of transposing characters into alternate universes?

  More the latter for me. They’re the things that mold themselves around the story once I’ve cast it in the FiM universe. I’ve asked some authors to de-ponify their stories for a non-pony anthology, and it turns out that the better a story is, the more tightly everything in it holds together, and the harder it is to de-ponify.

  Evan: Have you noticed any particular trends within the themes, style, or content of FiM fanfiction as the years have passed and the fandom has evolved? What about fanfiction in general? Do you tend to adapt your own writing to match these trends, or has your artistic vision remained largely constant?

  I can’t think of any definite trends. I don’t read in other fandoms because I don’t know how to find the good stuff in the slush pile. I don’t think I have an artistic vision beyond wanting to make my readers cry the sweet, sweet brony tears that I feed on.

  A.J: In your blog post about Fallout: Equestria, you mention that published books are required to endorse certain lies and omit certain truths while also abiding by a set of rules about plot structure that can never be broken. In your own fanfiction writing, do you find yourself defying these conventions in the way that Fallout: Equestria does? If so, in what ways and why? Do you think that fanfiction is a medium that generally abides by these conventions or subverts them?

  I tried to in “Mortality Report”, in which Celestia’s immortality forces her to see how being nice to today’s ponies is cruel to their descendants, but most readers subverted my subversion. In “Mailmare”, the good (save the world) and the just (punish the guilty) turn out to be mutually exclusive. But usually, just writing a good conventional story is hard enough for me.

  But if you choose to either observe or subvert a convention, you’ve already yielded to it.  You’re still bound by its assumptions.  Few people can escape these chains of thought intentionally; it almost has to be done out of ignorance.

  For example, Tolkien said, “A fantasy world is one in which moral and magical law have the force of physical law.” (See my post “Fantasy as deontology”.) If you act virtuously, a fantasy world’s karmic forces will conspire to give you victory in the end. That’s the point of classic fantasy. They’re all about that one scene near the end where Frodo lets Gollum go, or Luke switches off his targeting computer, and the virtuous fool defeats the pragmatist.

  Contemporary writers may subvert that trope, writing gritty fantasies where awful things happen to good guys, or everything is shades of grey. But to do so they must assume that the world should have karmic justice, and so their subversions are cynical, bitter, and post-modern.

  Fallout: Equestria never invoked that logocentric expectation of the world, and so went beyond modernism in a way that post-modernism never could, just by honestly not caring about its concerns. Many fan-fiction writers would say, if they thought about it, that the two-thousand year old artistic tradition of seeking the logos, and the one-hundred year old tradition of angsting about its disappearance, are equally silly. They never expected there to be a logos in the first place.

  Fan-fiction writers aren’t just writing outside the box. They may not know there is a box. They’re re-inventing literature almost from the ground up, not by theory, but often blindly, by Darwinian evolution. They birth hundreds of thousands of hopeful monsters, some few of which crawl, swim, or fly in strange new ways.

  Evan: As a fanfiction writer who writes primarily in the FiM fandom, why do you think that the franchise has succeeded to such a great extent in an age group that was not meant as its target market? Typical reasons given for FiM’s success with older fans focus on its intelligent writing and mature themes, as well as Hasbro’s healthy relationship with and encouragement of the “brony” community. Do you agree that these aspects of FiM are what has made the series so popular among adults?

  I wouldn’t call the show’s themes “mature” if that means “too complex for children to understand.”  But I wouldn’t call shows made for adults mature, either. There’s a very limited market for mature stories, maybe not enough to support a TV show. We sacrificed the word “mature” years ago just to have a shorthand for sex and violence, and nobody complained. [2]

  My post “Why the New My Little Pony is 20% Cooler” suggests some story-based reasons for its popularity. These include:

  – not wasting (much) time fighting villains, who suck up screen time without developing anybody’s character

  – characters who each have lives, goals, careers, and problems of their own

  – rejecting the Aristotelian idea that characters have “strengths” and “flaws”, in favor of the idea that characters fit or fail to fit their qualities into a social context

  Another reason is that adult shows today are edgy, ironic, and full of derisive humor. It’s hard to find something nice. Sometimes South Park just isn’t funny enough to make up for the pain of watching it. Sometimes a guy gets back from his third tour in Iraq and just wants to watch ponies for a while.

  I think anime paved the way for MLP. Japanese culture lets men appreciate cuteness. It’s given us a weird blend of cuteness and violence for years, in anime like Pokemon, One Piece, or Madoka Magica (an anime about schoolgirls who giggle, wear frilly clothes, angst about their crushes, and die horribly in magical fights to the death).

  Thanks for getting this far!

  ---

  [1] I originally included Flannery O’Connor in this list because nearly all of her stories that I’ve read are about some person who acts very foolishly and then either dies or causes someone else’s death at the end, in a sudden final orgasm of despair.  I took her off the list because her reputation is very high and she’s written a lot of things I haven’t read.  Your thoughts?

  [2] I didn’t want to get into the question of whether Hasbro’s relationship with bronies is “healthy”.

  18 comments · 297 views

• 4w, 3d

  Monday musings: Raymond Carver on art

  Art isn't self-expression.  Art is communication.

                                                                - Raymond Carver

  35 comments · 231 views

• 5w, 17h

  Computers now better surrealists than Frenchmen

  

  25 comments · 493 views

• 5w, 18h

  Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion

  I said I'd post something every Thursday, didn't I?  Fortunately I sneakily wrote this ahead of time in case I put it off until the last moment.

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  No cow is too sacred for me to tip.  I’ve insulted Shakespeare, Hemingway, Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Philip K. Dick.  Now I’ve finally worked up the courage to take on

  Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion

  There are a lot of things to like about this movie!  The animation is continually fresh and compelling, maybe even more so than in the TV series.  The characters aren’t developed any more from the original, and the main character (Homura, not Madoka) is even taken down a notch and made into more of a plot device, but they’re still good characters.  The plot builds on the fine structure of Madoka Magica, and it has three nice twists. In fact, this movie has everything going for it, except for the climax which everything else in the movie exists only to support. That part sucks.

  But it sucks in an interesting and illustrative way.

  You can write a story, like a computer program, top-down or bottom-up.  Top-down means starting with the big picture:  the themes, the character arc, the target audience demographics.  Bottom-up means starting on the ground, with little pieces:  a lamppost in a forest (the image CS Lewis claimed began the Narnia chronicles), a hobbit-hole.

  The top is where ideas have significance. The ground is where the concrete events that inspire emotions in monkeys happen.  Writers call the top-down writers “plotters” and the bottom-up writers “pantsers” (writing by the seat of their pants). (They probably call them something different in England.)

  Stories written bottom-up have characters and story that develop naturally and feel real, but they often wander without focus and might not seem to have much of a point.  Stories written top-down have a tight plot structure, and a theme, if the author wants one, but their characters are often wooden and their events feel plotted.

  Animators are visually-oriented people.  They think of scenes, or even of exactly how somebody turns his head when startled or jumps when she’s happy.  They’re trained to think this way; Walt Disney said every movement by every character must convey that character’s personality.

  That’s why films made entirely by animators, like Double Rainboom or the short films of the Quay brothers, are beautiful and suck.  They start at the bottom and never look up.

  If you start at the top, you’ve gotta connect to real, believable situations and events at the bottom. And that’s where PMMMtMPIII makes its epic, face-grinding fail.

  The climax, where the story reaches out and grabs you, has to connect the top and the bottom.  Hamlet’s long-brooded rage bursts out in a sudden bloodbath, re-asking the question whether ‘tis nobler to suffer outrageous fortune, or by opposing end it.  Aslan is crucified killed, then resurrected, conveying Lewis’ theme that the Bible is true.  Darth Vader is what, you don’t know?.  The plotter can studiously tie together scenes and plot points according to the advice of Jack Bickham, but it won’t make anybody feel anything unless somewhere among the things on the bottom being connected together is a beating, bleeding heart.

  PMMMtMPIII didn’t have that.

  I know it didn’t have that because the climax was obviously written entirely, 100% top-down. The writer said, “At the climax, Homura has to die because it’s the only way to save Madoka, and Madoka has to die because it’s the only way to save Homura, and then the Power of Friendship will overcome all of the anybody having to die for anybody, because that is the most-emotional thing possible!” Then he spun out a bunch of Trekkish technobabble to pretend that was a coherent plot instead of three mutually-inconsistent statements.

  The problem isn’t the technobabble or the logic.  The problem is the climax was planned entirely in the abstract and has no connection to real events or necessities. The abstract conditions the climax was supposed to meet were not even theoretically possible of being realized in any concrete reality, but even if they had been possible, the climax still would have sucked, because there was no blood in it.  There was no concrete image or event that inspired the climax.  Only the abstract idea that these girls really really loved each other.

  That’s not a story.  That’s a mission statement.  It didn’t make sense because there was no ‘there’ there, in the same way that an action scene description might make no sense if the author never bothered to figure out where everybody was standing.

  If you’re a huge anime nerd, you’re probably already in the comment box typing furiously: “... but the exact wording of Homura’s wish in episode 10 means that…”  Just stop. I don’t give a shit.  I don’t care if you can cobble up a post-hoc logical explanation.  I’m not even going to talk about the third plot twist where Homura becomes a demon (which the writer complained bitterly about being forced to write), because the movie had already crashed and burned by that point.  Nobody in the world watched that movie, followed the logic of your brilliant explanation and understood as a consequence the true tragedy of PMMMtMPIII.  No; they followed the tears and shouting of the magical girls and understood the only thing that the writer had understood:  These girls are all willing to die for each other.

  And then they cried.

  Or not.

  14 comments · 192 views

• 5w, 3d

  Monday musings: Pony typewriters

  

  46 comments · 628 views