The problem is more dramatic in architecture. The latter is the point where the crisis of modern art moves from a bugbear of the chattering classes to a genuine problem. If someone insists that you just need to learn to appreciate some ear destroying extended technique violin piece, you have a difference of opinion. If someone insists that the solution to the residents of the new brutalist tower block wanting to kill themselves is to educate them on the finer points of architectural theory, then you have a civic problem.
(Incidentally, are there any other forms of art that require the destruction of old pieces?)
With food though, “just learn to like it” is absolutely good advice as, a childish aversion to, say, cabbage is an unnecessary barrier to eating arrangements that could be solved with a few meals. And because food is such a flexible art form, learning to appreciate new elements dramatically increases your enjoyment. Though I suppose these are really two sides of the same coin, like the OPs definition of art snobbery as insisting that art should not contain certain features that indicate the wrong culture: perspective, raw meat, any consideration for the surrounding space whatsoever, etc, etc.
The problem is that artists generally like to focus on reducing the number of features, partly because it makes it easier to compose but mostly, I suspect, because it makes it easier for other people to compare your compositions. This is most obvious in fashion (take one accessory off, even after accounting for the fact that you were going to have one accessory too many) but compare any home recipe to any cooks recipe, the former will have all sorts of pinches of this and that and the other added in which make it taste muddier, which is not necessarily worse but harder to analyses.
This is the blockbuster problem basically: if you want to appeal to a lot of people you have to do a lot of things, and then the quality of your work will just be an average of how each person thought you did on the stuff they cared about. So you insist that dance scenes aren’t serious and a real director doesn’t put dance scenes in their movie, and gradually the quality improves (from the artists POV) even as the appeal narrows.
There’s probably an economic paper treating this like a market with artist surplus and consumer surplus, with the artistic surplus narrowing to nothing as you reduce barriers to entry for artists.
If someone insists that the solution to the residents of the new brutalist tower block wanting to kill themselves is to educate them on the finer points of architectural theory, then you have a civic problem.
Is this hyperbole, or is people committing suicide because of ugly architecture actually a thing? Citation Needed.
Brutalist architecture & housing projects have been blamed, at least since Jacob’s Life and Death, for the disintegration of neighborhoods into ghettos and blighted areas. So I think the claim seems plausible.
Almost certainly hyperbole, but architects—especially of that era—do have a habit of making surprisingly grandiose estimates of their work’s social effects.
Of course, it’s unlikely that any successful architect not working in set design for vampire movies would deliberately set out to depress people into suicide.
This is the blockbuster problem basically: if you want to appeal to a lot of people you have to do a lot of things, and then the quality of your work will just be an average of how each person thought you did on the stuff they cared about.
This can backfire, even for general audiences. I have a real problem watching a lot of anime for related reasons: it’s conventional in much (not all, but probably a majority) of the format to jump promiscuously and without warning between slapstick, light slice-of-life cuteness, and serious drama, and it takes me a couple minutes to reassemble the scattered fragments of my suspension of disbelief whenever a particularly jarring transition happens. I can understand in theory that it’s supposed to broaden the work’s appeal, and any work will usually have a dominant mode, but despite the fact that I don’t see myself as a particularly sophisticated viewer it still comes off as a mess more often than not.
Robert Reed, the actor who played the father on The Brady Bunch, had similar complaints about that show, which he expressed in long memos that he wrote to the show’s producer.
I can understand in theory that it’s supposed to broaden the work’s appeal
I don’t think that’s always the purpose, or even the main purpose. Usually the purpose is a mix of trying to build rounded characters which the viewer can relate to such that one actually cares about the drama, and giving the viewer a chance to cope. Appeal-broadening sounds a bit odd to me—who watches Fullmetal Alchemist going ‘ho hum another death/battle to sit through, when are we going to get some more jokes about Ed’s height?‘? If someone wants pure comedy, there are plenty of ‘pure’ series which cater to that, they don’t need to watch a mixed series—and this applies to serious drama as well; that mixes keep happening suggest that there’s some synergy there.
You complain about your suspension of disbelief being broken by the transitions—for me, it can be the opposite: Saikano shattered my suspension by being so purely grim and dramatic without any real intervals in between dramatic moments, so that it was pure bathos; while series like Evangelion or Madoka space out the shattering moments so they actually do impact the viewer.
I don’t think that’s always the purpose, or even the main purpose. Usually the purpose is a mix of trying to build rounded characters which the viewer can relate to such that one actually cares about the drama, and giving the viewer a chance to cope. Appeal-broadening sounds a bit odd to me...
Maybe “broadening appeal” is the wrong phrase to use, but I don’t find it much more likely that the device is used to round out characters: do Ed’s comically violent reactions to short jokes really add something to his character that a more grounded reaction wouldn’t? Giving viewers a chance to cope sounds closer, but still not quite on target; the sense I get is that these transitions are included mainly as a sort of counterweight to the dominant mode, so as not to intimidate or overwhelm viewers (especially younger viewers) that might find the tone oppressive if more conventional emotional pacing was used. Note that they seem a lot more common in shows targeted at teenage audiences and younger.
I thought Madoka handled its emotional pacing fairly well, incidentally: it spaces out its intense moments, but the relief never struck me as jarring. I wasn’t able to sit all the way through Evangelion and I haven’t touched Saikano, so I can’t comment on either.
do Ed’s comically violent reactions to short jokes really add something to his character that a more grounded reaction wouldn’t?
For any reaction to serve character development, the reaction has to be funny; whether the humor must be over the top or more subtle depends on the particular work, creator, and audience but doesn’t change the basic point.
Giving viewers a chance to cope sounds closer, but still not quite on target; the sense I get is that these transitions are included mainly as a sort of counterweight to the dominant mode, so as not to intimidate or overwhelm viewers (especially younger viewers) that might find the tone oppressive if more conventional emotional pacing was used.
What is ‘conventional’? Otherwise, basically what I said...
Hm, not sure what I was thinking there. I’ll try again: teasing Ed about his height is intrinsically humorous, so any reaction which builds his character will be humorous, so the only question is how the humor will be treated and it’s pointless to criticize whether the humor is over the top or moderately broad or very subtle—which kind of humor is best will depend on the audience. That there will be humor must be the case for any decent author, as Arakawa most certainly is. (Notice Nornagest didn’t criticize all the other character-building repeated elements/motif/themes which range from humor to philosophical to tragic, like the watch, which suggests to me that he simply doesn’t like the jokes about height, not that he is making any real point about the general desirability or functionality of these mixed genres. And come to think of it, the height jokes are why any reader is paying attention to how tall Ed is, which ultimately pays off for the reader when, towards the end, he realizes Arakawa has been subtly drawing Ed taller and taller—he is a character who literally grows.)
Notice Nornagest didn’t criticize all the other character-building repeated elements/motif/themes which range from humor to philosophical to tragic, like the watch, which suggests to me that he simply doesn’t like the jokes about height, not that he is making any real point about the general desirability or functionality of these mixed genres.
Hey, that was your example, not mine. I was actually thinking of some of the silliness in Seras Victoria’s scenes in Hellsing when I wrote my original comment, although that particular style of comic relief is common in the genre and FMA isn’t terribly shy about using it. The other repeated motifs don’t bother me because they aren’t incongruent with the local tone of the series.
Comic relief also isn’t the only place this sort of thing shows up, although it’s probably the most common: a lot of anime takes a similar approach to erotic fanservice, for example. Although now that I think about it, that version does happen fairly often in Western media...
What is ‘conventional’? Otherwise, basically what I said...
By “conventional” I meant the kind of emotional pacing you see in most Western television, or in most anime aimed at adults: less abrupt changes in tone, more emotional consistency, and a slower pace overall. I don’t buy “coping space” as a complete explanation because that’s a basic element of competent emotional pacing no matter how it’s executed; the slapstick interludes in FMA et al. are a distinct (and fairly unusual) mode and need additional explanation. The demographic considerations in the grandparent are my best guess as to what that is.
The problem is more dramatic in architecture. The latter is the point where the crisis of modern art moves from a bugbear of the chattering classes to a genuine problem. If someone insists that you just need to learn to appreciate some ear destroying extended technique violin piece, you have a difference of opinion. If someone insists that the solution to the residents of the new brutalist tower block wanting to kill themselves is to educate them on the finer points of architectural theory, then you have a civic problem. (Incidentally, are there any other forms of art that require the destruction of old pieces?)
With food though, “just learn to like it” is absolutely good advice as, a childish aversion to, say, cabbage is an unnecessary barrier to eating arrangements that could be solved with a few meals. And because food is such a flexible art form, learning to appreciate new elements dramatically increases your enjoyment. Though I suppose these are really two sides of the same coin, like the OPs definition of art snobbery as insisting that art should not contain certain features that indicate the wrong culture: perspective, raw meat, any consideration for the surrounding space whatsoever, etc, etc.
The problem is that artists generally like to focus on reducing the number of features, partly because it makes it easier to compose but mostly, I suspect, because it makes it easier for other people to compare your compositions. This is most obvious in fashion (take one accessory off, even after accounting for the fact that you were going to have one accessory too many) but compare any home recipe to any cooks recipe, the former will have all sorts of pinches of this and that and the other added in which make it taste muddier, which is not necessarily worse but harder to analyses.
This is the blockbuster problem basically: if you want to appeal to a lot of people you have to do a lot of things, and then the quality of your work will just be an average of how each person thought you did on the stuff they cared about. So you insist that dance scenes aren’t serious and a real director doesn’t put dance scenes in their movie, and gradually the quality improves (from the artists POV) even as the appeal narrows.
There’s probably an economic paper treating this like a market with artist surplus and consumer surplus, with the artistic surplus narrowing to nothing as you reduce barriers to entry for artists.
Is this hyperbole, or is people committing suicide because of ugly architecture actually a thing? Citation Needed.
Brutalist architecture & housing projects have been blamed, at least since Jacob’s Life and Death, for the disintegration of neighborhoods into ghettos and blighted areas. So I think the claim seems plausible.
Almost certainly hyperbole, but architects—especially of that era—do have a habit of making surprisingly grandiose estimates of their work’s social effects.
Of course, it’s unlikely that any successful architect not working in set design for vampire movies would deliberately set out to depress people into suicide.
This can backfire, even for general audiences. I have a real problem watching a lot of anime for related reasons: it’s conventional in much (not all, but probably a majority) of the format to jump promiscuously and without warning between slapstick, light slice-of-life cuteness, and serious drama, and it takes me a couple minutes to reassemble the scattered fragments of my suspension of disbelief whenever a particularly jarring transition happens. I can understand in theory that it’s supposed to broaden the work’s appeal, and any work will usually have a dominant mode, but despite the fact that I don’t see myself as a particularly sophisticated viewer it still comes off as a mess more often than not.
Bollywood has similar problems for me.
Robert Reed, the actor who played the father on The Brady Bunch, had similar complaints about that show, which he expressed in long memos that he wrote to the show’s producer.
I don’t think that’s always the purpose, or even the main purpose. Usually the purpose is a mix of trying to build rounded characters which the viewer can relate to such that one actually cares about the drama, and giving the viewer a chance to cope. Appeal-broadening sounds a bit odd to me—who watches Fullmetal Alchemist going ‘ho hum another death/battle to sit through, when are we going to get some more jokes about Ed’s height?‘? If someone wants pure comedy, there are plenty of ‘pure’ series which cater to that, they don’t need to watch a mixed series—and this applies to serious drama as well; that mixes keep happening suggest that there’s some synergy there.
You complain about your suspension of disbelief being broken by the transitions—for me, it can be the opposite: Saikano shattered my suspension by being so purely grim and dramatic without any real intervals in between dramatic moments, so that it was pure bathos; while series like Evangelion or Madoka space out the shattering moments so they actually do impact the viewer.
Maybe “broadening appeal” is the wrong phrase to use, but I don’t find it much more likely that the device is used to round out characters: do Ed’s comically violent reactions to short jokes really add something to his character that a more grounded reaction wouldn’t? Giving viewers a chance to cope sounds closer, but still not quite on target; the sense I get is that these transitions are included mainly as a sort of counterweight to the dominant mode, so as not to intimidate or overwhelm viewers (especially younger viewers) that might find the tone oppressive if more conventional emotional pacing was used. Note that they seem a lot more common in shows targeted at teenage audiences and younger.
I thought Madoka handled its emotional pacing fairly well, incidentally: it spaces out its intense moments, but the relief never struck me as jarring. I wasn’t able to sit all the way through Evangelion and I haven’t touched Saikano, so I can’t comment on either.
For any reaction to serve character development, the reaction has to be funny; whether the humor must be over the top or more subtle depends on the particular work, creator, and audience but doesn’t change the basic point.
What is ‘conventional’? Otherwise, basically what I said...
Could you explain? This sounds false to me, both in general and with respect to Fullmetal Alchemist specifically.
Hm, not sure what I was thinking there. I’ll try again: teasing Ed about his height is intrinsically humorous, so any reaction which builds his character will be humorous, so the only question is how the humor will be treated and it’s pointless to criticize whether the humor is over the top or moderately broad or very subtle—which kind of humor is best will depend on the audience. That there will be humor must be the case for any decent author, as Arakawa most certainly is. (Notice Nornagest didn’t criticize all the other character-building repeated elements/motif/themes which range from humor to philosophical to tragic, like the watch, which suggests to me that he simply doesn’t like the jokes about height, not that he is making any real point about the general desirability or functionality of these mixed genres. And come to think of it, the height jokes are why any reader is paying attention to how tall Ed is, which ultimately pays off for the reader when, towards the end, he realizes Arakawa has been subtly drawing Ed taller and taller—he is a character who literally grows.)
Hey, that was your example, not mine. I was actually thinking of some of the silliness in Seras Victoria’s scenes in Hellsing when I wrote my original comment, although that particular style of comic relief is common in the genre and FMA isn’t terribly shy about using it. The other repeated motifs don’t bother me because they aren’t incongruent with the local tone of the series.
Comic relief also isn’t the only place this sort of thing shows up, although it’s probably the most common: a lot of anime takes a similar approach to erotic fanservice, for example. Although now that I think about it, that version does happen fairly often in Western media...
Yes, yes, think about it more...! :)
By “conventional” I meant the kind of emotional pacing you see in most Western television, or in most anime aimed at adults: less abrupt changes in tone, more emotional consistency, and a slower pace overall. I don’t buy “coping space” as a complete explanation because that’s a basic element of competent emotional pacing no matter how it’s executed; the slapstick interludes in FMA et al. are a distinct (and fairly unusual) mode and need additional explanation. The demographic considerations in the grandparent are my best guess as to what that is.
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