Darth Angelus
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2012
- Messages
- 477
I have been pondering various tropes that have been bothering me in speculative fiction, and I think I am getting to the point where I see the one trait that they all have in common. It may be very pretentious to call it a grand unified theory, but I think there is definitely something that can be fits most of them.
Let us just call it the topic title, "unjustified events".
Allow me to explain what I mean!
In any fictional story, we tend to expect a continuity. It is most satisfying when the events in a story follow naturally from what preceeds them. Ultimately, this is what makes it a story at all, rather than a meaningless randomly generated sequence of imaginary events. The less natural and believable this flow of events is, the harder it is to get attached to the story. This means, among other things, that a rather large dose of logical coherence is required to make it work, but it goes beyond that.
In my recent thread about how two tropes to solve insurmountable problems were really rather similar (of which this thread is partly a spinoff, admittedly), I talked about changing and/or adding something to alter the state of things in the story in order to make a previously impossible outcome possible. Because these tropes bring in something that has not been properly introduced into a story, but which often superceeds the established state of things, they do bring in a logical contradiction of sorts, even though it isn't clear enough to actually prove it a lot of the time (especially the strong as they need to be, which isn't really very hard to accept in mild cases, although personally I don't count cases that mild as belonging to the trope at all). Even when the reader can't prove those, they may still doubt the story, though, and merely stretching believability to far can detach the readers or audience.
This thread is not about repeating that thread under a new name, though. Rather, I would want to explain how I think it can be seen as a subset of a (much) larger group of tropes. I (and others) touched upon some of these points briefly there, but I would like to develop them further.
As I brought up in the other thread, there is a type of situations where new events in the story are disconnected from what preceeded them in the story. Don't get me wrong, some cause is presented to explain the effect, but because no justification is required, the cause is merely a placeholder for the will of the author or the need of the plot. Common cases of such causes in speculative fiction are...
- Luck or randomness.
- Unpredictability of magic.
- Fate or prophecy (especially self-fulfilling ditto in cases where the probability of prophecised event is rather trivial on its own).
I read on TV Tropes about suspension of disbelief a few months ago that you can ask the audience to believe the impossible, but not the improbable, which I think had to do with the first point above. The example of a ferocious carnivore (although when I think of the example, I think it applies to any kind of dengerous enemy) just happening to die of heart attack as it is about to attack the hero is brought up in that article.
It is fairly clear that both magic and fate/prophecy can be used in a fashion way to justify without further explanation (almost) any event the writer finds convenient for the plot.
Note that in all the cases above, no logical contradiction can really be found. This may sound like a good thing, but it really isn't when you think about it. Basically, we have these universal justifications, these causes that can basically create any effect/event that the writer desires. A universal justification ironically becomes no justification in this case.
The problem is that all those causes are really fake, merely serving as placeholders for the whims and needs of the writer and the plot. Everything that ever happens in any fictional story does so because the writer made it up that way, and everyone knows this, but we don't want to be reminded of this. Another thing we all know is that the only thing the writer can hide this from us is to create this coherent in-story chain of events, so that story flow seems to follow causality. This cannot happen when the cause presented for the desired outcome could have equally been used for (almost, as randomness does not allow for impossible events to happen, merely exceedingly unlikely ditto, which can be enough in a fictional world that allows things to happen that couldn't in our world) any other outcome.
Again, I think it would be beyond pretentious to equate my own theories about fiction with science, I think this concept I am getting at is fairly similar in logical structure to falsifiability. Basically, because (almost) no outcome could ever be shown to be a plot hole based on these universal justifications, they become weak justifications.
Back to the knowledge that fictional randomness is fake (as was brought up in the other thread), I think this is the reason why asking the reader or audience to believe the improbable is too much, even though they may have in real life. The difference is that in real life, in the unlikely event that the improbable occurs, the witness will know that it did happen by the authentic (no matter how low) probability as it was. In fiction, what is that "one in insert your own immense number here" chance in-story really is just that placeholder for the writer's needed outcome.
What I am getting at is that in addition to the known tropes where plot holes or logical contradictions arguably come up because justifications are lacking where they were needed, we also have these other universal "no further justification is needed" causes. I think that together, they can be said to make up "unjustified events" in fiction. There is no doubt in my mind that overused (or if key story elements hinge upon them), these can also severely jeopardize the integrity of the plot.
As a side note, only speculative fiction really suffers from magic, fate or prophecy serving this role. Other genres only have luck or randomness to worry about. I have only in the past year gotten increased interest in crime stories at the expense of speculative fiction, because even though it is less imaginative, it suffers less from this and consequently comes off as less childish. Yet, I cannot help thinking that even in a highly imaginative world, writers needn't make these shortcuts. Tolkien invented a fictional world (with relatively small role for magic, but still) with a rather strong, coherent plot.
I basically would be interested in a series that has the imagination of speclative fiction, but the plot integrity and logical strength and coherence of a good crime story (or at least, close to it). Does anyone have a recommendation?
Sorry about long post, and if I did come off as whining or preaching, or indeed too theoretical, I am sorry about that, too. I hope this is a somewhat interesting read to someone and doesn't just come off as a rant, which is not how it is intended. However, isn't overuse of these universal causes/justifications (that cannot be made into a plot hole) nearly as bad as plot holes themselves?
Cheers!
Let us just call it the topic title, "unjustified events".
Allow me to explain what I mean!
In any fictional story, we tend to expect a continuity. It is most satisfying when the events in a story follow naturally from what preceeds them. Ultimately, this is what makes it a story at all, rather than a meaningless randomly generated sequence of imaginary events. The less natural and believable this flow of events is, the harder it is to get attached to the story. This means, among other things, that a rather large dose of logical coherence is required to make it work, but it goes beyond that.
In my recent thread about how two tropes to solve insurmountable problems were really rather similar (of which this thread is partly a spinoff, admittedly), I talked about changing and/or adding something to alter the state of things in the story in order to make a previously impossible outcome possible. Because these tropes bring in something that has not been properly introduced into a story, but which often superceeds the established state of things, they do bring in a logical contradiction of sorts, even though it isn't clear enough to actually prove it a lot of the time (especially the strong as they need to be, which isn't really very hard to accept in mild cases, although personally I don't count cases that mild as belonging to the trope at all). Even when the reader can't prove those, they may still doubt the story, though, and merely stretching believability to far can detach the readers or audience.
This thread is not about repeating that thread under a new name, though. Rather, I would want to explain how I think it can be seen as a subset of a (much) larger group of tropes. I (and others) touched upon some of these points briefly there, but I would like to develop them further.
As I brought up in the other thread, there is a type of situations where new events in the story are disconnected from what preceeded them in the story. Don't get me wrong, some cause is presented to explain the effect, but because no justification is required, the cause is merely a placeholder for the will of the author or the need of the plot. Common cases of such causes in speculative fiction are...
- Luck or randomness.
- Unpredictability of magic.
- Fate or prophecy (especially self-fulfilling ditto in cases where the probability of prophecised event is rather trivial on its own).
I read on TV Tropes about suspension of disbelief a few months ago that you can ask the audience to believe the impossible, but not the improbable, which I think had to do with the first point above. The example of a ferocious carnivore (although when I think of the example, I think it applies to any kind of dengerous enemy) just happening to die of heart attack as it is about to attack the hero is brought up in that article.
It is fairly clear that both magic and fate/prophecy can be used in a fashion way to justify without further explanation (almost) any event the writer finds convenient for the plot.
Note that in all the cases above, no logical contradiction can really be found. This may sound like a good thing, but it really isn't when you think about it. Basically, we have these universal justifications, these causes that can basically create any effect/event that the writer desires. A universal justification ironically becomes no justification in this case.
The problem is that all those causes are really fake, merely serving as placeholders for the whims and needs of the writer and the plot. Everything that ever happens in any fictional story does so because the writer made it up that way, and everyone knows this, but we don't want to be reminded of this. Another thing we all know is that the only thing the writer can hide this from us is to create this coherent in-story chain of events, so that story flow seems to follow causality. This cannot happen when the cause presented for the desired outcome could have equally been used for (almost, as randomness does not allow for impossible events to happen, merely exceedingly unlikely ditto, which can be enough in a fictional world that allows things to happen that couldn't in our world) any other outcome.
Again, I think it would be beyond pretentious to equate my own theories about fiction with science, I think this concept I am getting at is fairly similar in logical structure to falsifiability. Basically, because (almost) no outcome could ever be shown to be a plot hole based on these universal justifications, they become weak justifications.
Back to the knowledge that fictional randomness is fake (as was brought up in the other thread), I think this is the reason why asking the reader or audience to believe the improbable is too much, even though they may have in real life. The difference is that in real life, in the unlikely event that the improbable occurs, the witness will know that it did happen by the authentic (no matter how low) probability as it was. In fiction, what is that "one in insert your own immense number here" chance in-story really is just that placeholder for the writer's needed outcome.
What I am getting at is that in addition to the known tropes where plot holes or logical contradictions arguably come up because justifications are lacking where they were needed, we also have these other universal "no further justification is needed" causes. I think that together, they can be said to make up "unjustified events" in fiction. There is no doubt in my mind that overused (or if key story elements hinge upon them), these can also severely jeopardize the integrity of the plot.
As a side note, only speculative fiction really suffers from magic, fate or prophecy serving this role. Other genres only have luck or randomness to worry about. I have only in the past year gotten increased interest in crime stories at the expense of speculative fiction, because even though it is less imaginative, it suffers less from this and consequently comes off as less childish. Yet, I cannot help thinking that even in a highly imaginative world, writers needn't make these shortcuts. Tolkien invented a fictional world (with relatively small role for magic, but still) with a rather strong, coherent plot.
I basically would be interested in a series that has the imagination of speclative fiction, but the plot integrity and logical strength and coherence of a good crime story (or at least, close to it). Does anyone have a recommendation?
Sorry about long post, and if I did come off as whining or preaching, or indeed too theoretical, I am sorry about that, too. I hope this is a somewhat interesting read to someone and doesn't just come off as a rant, which is not how it is intended. However, isn't overuse of these universal causes/justifications (that cannot be made into a plot hole) nearly as bad as plot holes themselves?
Cheers!
