Denying Tragedy

My last blog was me talking about how I adore tragedy, but I'm gonna make this one the opposite on why there are instances where I find it incredibly annoying. Though of course before I do so I want to mention a few minor things as a tangent. I've started a rather large editing project where I went back to old RP Discords servers and redo those scenes in a new format to make it into an actual story, which has been on my mind for a while. Initially I thought it would be a simple editing job since a lot of the writing is actually done by other people, but instead, I found that due to the nature of RP people tend to write their characters as the main character which had me having to rewrite a large majority of the scenes to try and create a singular focus. This has been a bit of a challenge, but I'll likely post the finished product in a future blog post.

Anyhow, onto the main topic of tragedy.

As I mentioned before I often like tragedy because it allows me to view the characters to become their best selves through trial and tribulation, however, there is a subset of stories where when such tragedy occurs, the opposite happens. With anime one example is Rising of the Shield Hero where the main character straight up buys Slaves for his personal use. I actually really like this series, the first act of it anyways, as this tragedy is used to show the viewers an entirely perspective for an isekai and to highlight how its an entirely new world with a different common sense.

Now how does this lead into why I dislike tragedy in some cases? The answer is put into a simple word, excuses. Sometimes the author wants tragedy to happen to the main character to excuse them of the vile actions they plan to commit, to garner sympathy and understanding. If you look for it this trope is uncharacteristically common, if you want to look at anime again there's Redo of Healer, albeit, an extreme example and there are better ones like From the Red Fog which doesn't actually try to excuse the main character too much and doesn't really hide they are just insane. In that cases its treated closer to an explanation than an excuse, which I find more digestible even if I still don't care for it.

There is a third use case when it comes to tragedy that I absolutely loath above all else. A case which I do not believe can be set up to even be digestible for anyone, much less me. Forgotten Tragedy, when horrific things happen to hook the reader in and the ramifications for it are immediately forgotten, fixed within a single chapter. A character that experiences tragedy, something that is built up to be broken down by this specific thing they held so dear only for them to completely ignore it pisses me off to no end, and I know that's just textbook bad writing and not really worth complaining about but I hate it anyways. Tragedy means something dear to me, and to just blatantly deny it while I'm staring at it is insulting.

There are two stories I read, both novels you can read online, that did this that effectively live in my head rent free. Worth the Candle and The Novel's Extra. The first one is originally English so its actually quite competently written while the second was Machine Translated for all I know, but has a half decent plot that had spited me after a while similarly to how Worth the Candle spited me. What makes it worse for me is how these respective tragedies happen.

For Worth the Candle the main love interest dies right after breaking up their relationship with the main character, to be used and discarded. How she died was similarly stupid as she was poisoned secretly and just drops dead out of nowhere which is only revealed after she's dead. The author's only justification for the scene is that the story is grimdark. So the story moves on and she's forgotten.

The Novel's Extra follows a similar problem, but in the opposite way. The main character murders a girl's older brother and she has no idea why, there is a justification but she never learns it or has any reason to believe it anyways. She finds out and despises him, obviously, then there's a time skip where now she's in love with him...what the hell is this! She just...forgot?

I'm glad I got those off my chest, they bothered me for quite a while. This rant probably wasn't all that informative but its fine. I'll just pull something together for next time, might talk about She-Hulk and how that handles tragedy since I've been seeing a lot of discourse on it.