Sep
20th
2016
Tags · 2:59pm Sep 20th, 2016
Gut-check time: should I re-tag my Black Company crossover fic "Comedy"? I mean, I'm trying my best to not make it unleavened grimdark blood-and-mud-and-heretics-and-exterminatus-bleargh. I may be a terrible comedian, but at least a third of my chapters are attempts to tell jokes. Coal-black comedy, mind you, but jokes. And I use more stage-accents than a vaudeville revue practicing for a run in the Catskills.
SFaccountant, who I greatly respect as a writer of comedic/dark/gore crossover fanfic, has all of his stories tagged Comedy.
I mean, I just wrote a chapter dedicated almost entirely to ponified riffing on Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, with a little worldbuilding infodumping at the end as a chaser.
Is it a comedy or are these asides more of, well, an aside? The first few sections had humor in places but weren't themselves humor chapters. What's the overall intended emotional response you want to inflict on your readership?
I can see this having a comedy tag but for the super srs chapters where it was less humor and more a tragic tale of a retainer and his mad mistress or blood and glory. If it's more this and less that, sure.
4218805 Honestly, it depends on the day and the mood. Ideally, I'd like it to be funny and serious at the same time.
And I certainly don't want to write true tragedy. I'm not a fan of tragedy in pony stories. Luna will be redeemed, if nopony else is in the end, because this isn't alternate universe - we know how this ends, at least in part.
Ahhh, I think I see the point here. I'm not actually writing slapstick on the one hand, nor am I doing tragedy. There's already a tragedy tag, and a bit of humor isn't justification for a comedy tag - SFaccountant's stuff goes full slapstick at times, between his OC Tellis and his Grand Theft Dreadnaught version of Pinkie Pie.
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It doesn't need slapstick to be comedy but there are swathes here that are non-comedic - not really tragic so far but non-comedic nonetheless. But what's the end-goal - is it going to be comedic or is it going to be tragic? Or is going to be an admixture of the two? Usually, I try to tag based on my end goal. Admittedly, sometimes that goal shifts and my tags aren't representative of the whole but in general, the tags I stick on it are the end-goals to which I aspire.
Anyway, long story short-ish - yes.