On Tragedy
Oct. 13th, 2009 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelNo, I don't pretend to be Aristotle. I think I'm older than a lot of my fellow FE-fic writers, but not that old. I was planning to write this a bit, and since sacae sent out a call for fictional love/hate quirks and specifically mentioned "Tragedy (when done well)," I figured this was as good a time as any to froth a bit about Tragedy.
Let me just throw down my ground rules. One rule, really.
Tragedy must be earned. Something sad or unpleasant is not necessarily tragic. And frothed-up "Diet Coke of Angst"-brand teenaged waaaah is not tragic either. I'm speaking here of tragedy in the classical sense, wherein a world that is "whole" at the outset of a drama is horribly fragmented by the end of the drama, often irretrievably so. Families are shattered, kingdoms fall, and men and women of noble or even heroic status come to grief through their own inherent flaws. That sort of thing. I'm talking Oedipus Rex and Antigone, not those bloody Lurlene McDaniel teen-death books that clutter the shelves of used paperback shops. Random and horrible death may be sad, but it does not by itself make a literary tragedy.
For my own part, I've categorized three of my (currently ten) 'fics as "Tragedy," specifically "The End of Love," "The Time Remaining," and "Forsaken." Whereas "Call Down the Rain" is specifically not tragic despite its subject matter, because a fragmented world is healed in at least one aspect by the end of the story (the drought ended). The number of dead bodies on the stage when the curtain drops is not necessarily a yardstick of how tragic the play was. While "The Golden Age" almost qualifies, given that a world that was at one point harmonious is now cracked into a dozen pieces, there's a cynical "tide of history" undercurrent going on there that puts it in a different box, IMO. I think that 'fic has the sense that maybe the world always was broken and it just looked whole for a little while.
I think "The Time Remaining" is arguably the most popular thing I've written, or at least it's the link people click on more than any other. Not bad for a 15,000 word one-shot. I also think its popularity is in part due to the fact that it is blatantly advertised as starring Marth. Put his name on the pixellated marquee, and fan interest spikes exponentially. I don't mean "twice as many hits," I mean eight or nine times as many. But, I digress. "The Time Remaining" is tragic not because of what happens to Marth in it[*], but because the Great Victory Over Evil that opens the story turns out to be so fleeting and hollow. The world should have been made whole, but clearly it isn't, and a lot of different factors are to blame-- human error, fate/the gods, and a fair amount of misunderstanding.
And then we have "Forsaken," my stab at the tragical tale of those mixed-up lovers Abel and Est. The scope of this is personal rather than epic, but the essence of it is texbook tragedy-- a brave and loyal man who is trying to do the right thing places love for his wife above his own honor and ends up losing both. Then, he compounds the intial error by essentially running away, convinced that he's going to reclaim his wife while hiding from the people he needs to face up to. Love mutates to obsession, a moment of weakness leads to a lifelong journey of delusion, and by the end of it Abel's lost everything that might have mattered to him.
I'm not saying any of this is Great Lit, not by any means. It's Fire Emblem fanfic! But it's an attempt to do something more than cheap-shot death fics or contrived "we can't be together 'cause the plot says so!" romantic angst. In both of the above cases, I feel the tragedy of the characters and their world has been earned and not slapped down for lulz. And if readers get some kind of "catharsis" from either story, then something I'm doing is working.
*Semi-hidden spoiler for those who want to ruin the ending: He was dying anyway, and Elice knew it.
Let me just throw down my ground rules. One rule, really.
Tragedy must be earned. Something sad or unpleasant is not necessarily tragic. And frothed-up "Diet Coke of Angst"-brand teenaged waaaah is not tragic either. I'm speaking here of tragedy in the classical sense, wherein a world that is "whole" at the outset of a drama is horribly fragmented by the end of the drama, often irretrievably so. Families are shattered, kingdoms fall, and men and women of noble or even heroic status come to grief through their own inherent flaws. That sort of thing. I'm talking Oedipus Rex and Antigone, not those bloody Lurlene McDaniel teen-death books that clutter the shelves of used paperback shops. Random and horrible death may be sad, but it does not by itself make a literary tragedy.
For my own part, I've categorized three of my (currently ten) 'fics as "Tragedy," specifically "The End of Love," "The Time Remaining," and "Forsaken." Whereas "Call Down the Rain" is specifically not tragic despite its subject matter, because a fragmented world is healed in at least one aspect by the end of the story (the drought ended). The number of dead bodies on the stage when the curtain drops is not necessarily a yardstick of how tragic the play was. While "The Golden Age" almost qualifies, given that a world that was at one point harmonious is now cracked into a dozen pieces, there's a cynical "tide of history" undercurrent going on there that puts it in a different box, IMO. I think that 'fic has the sense that maybe the world always was broken and it just looked whole for a little while.
I think "The Time Remaining" is arguably the most popular thing I've written, or at least it's the link people click on more than any other. Not bad for a 15,000 word one-shot. I also think its popularity is in part due to the fact that it is blatantly advertised as starring Marth. Put his name on the pixellated marquee, and fan interest spikes exponentially. I don't mean "twice as many hits," I mean eight or nine times as many. But, I digress. "The Time Remaining" is tragic not because of what happens to Marth in it[*], but because the Great Victory Over Evil that opens the story turns out to be so fleeting and hollow. The world should have been made whole, but clearly it isn't, and a lot of different factors are to blame-- human error, fate/the gods, and a fair amount of misunderstanding.
And then we have "Forsaken," my stab at the tragical tale of those mixed-up lovers Abel and Est. The scope of this is personal rather than epic, but the essence of it is texbook tragedy-- a brave and loyal man who is trying to do the right thing places love for his wife above his own honor and ends up losing both. Then, he compounds the intial error by essentially running away, convinced that he's going to reclaim his wife while hiding from the people he needs to face up to. Love mutates to obsession, a moment of weakness leads to a lifelong journey of delusion, and by the end of it Abel's lost everything that might have mattered to him.
I'm not saying any of this is Great Lit, not by any means. It's Fire Emblem fanfic! But it's an attempt to do something more than cheap-shot death fics or contrived "we can't be together 'cause the plot says so!" romantic angst. In both of the above cases, I feel the tragedy of the characters and their world has been earned and not slapped down for lulz. And if readers get some kind of "catharsis" from either story, then something I'm doing is working.
*Semi-hidden spoiler for those who want to ruin the ending: He was dying anyway, and Elice knew it.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-17 06:03 pm (UTC)1.) Marth is popular, so slapping his name in the summary means INSTANT HITS. I have no idea why Marth is so popular. I own FEDS, and I'll bet if I played it... Marth wouldn't be my favorite. I'd probably favorite the most umpopular/uncared about character. That'd be my luck. Hah!
2.) Tragedy! I'm so glad I'm not the only one who likes tragedy, and believes it to be more than one-dimensional. Tragedy can take many different forms, from romantic to general to friendship. Gotta love them all, but general tragedy is the best, sometimes, because when it's pulled off properly, it really leaves a powerful imprint on the reader(s).
After all, using war for an example...
War is tragic by itself. Showing one man and his family/wife/girlfriend/lover and their situation...is especially tragic. But when you paint the whole picture...not just that man, but his friends, their wives, their lovers, their very lives, then you see a mural of tragedy that just...goes in a big old circle.
Yeehaw~
no subject
Date: 2009-10-17 06:45 pm (UTC)Re: #1-- Marth is popular because Super Smash Brothers gave people the erroneous impression that he is a flamboyant, sexy, angstmuffin bishie. Sakurai and the other brains behind SSB must have been on crack, because there is no way in hell you can take FE3 and come up with the fanon characterization of Marth. He's a total "incorruptible innocent" who comes across like a twelve-year-old girl even though he is, at nineteen/twenty, one of the *older* FE Lords.
Mind you, his characterization in FEDS is very, very different. I have ranted about this elsewhere and likely will do so again. I genuinely like Marth in FEDS, instead of just being alternately amused and appalled by him.
Re: #2-- Yes, war itself ("the outcome of misunderstanding") is tragic. But when people take something like FE, which is saturated in ravaged landscapes, destroyed cultures, sacked villages, and broken families, and in some cases genocide, and then they slap some Romeo'n'Juliet nonsense on top and pretend *that* is the great tragedy, I get kind of annoyed. I try in my writing to keep a sense of context-- it's too bad for Palla that Abel doesn't love her back in "Love is Not a Victory March," but at least they're both alive after the war. It's too bad for the characters who die in "Call Down the Rain," but that's the cost of Saving the World. And while Abel is too obsessed with Est to notice the big picture in "Forsaken," that's part of his particular flaw and his problem.
And some times it pays to look at the "enemy" side. These guys... the Bernese, the manaketes, the people of Grado... they lose as much or more of their world than do the heroes, *and* they get the pleasure of being reconstructed by the winners afterward. That's never fun, even when you get a "good" outcome (post-WWII West Germany... as opposed to post-WWI Germany).
no subject
Date: 2009-10-23 06:24 pm (UTC)So sorry that I haven't responded to more of your entries. I've been busy (mostly sleeping). :/
Anyway, I like Marth in SSB, but he had no personality. Hell, he didn't do anything but swing a sword around. But I'll admit, it did give people the impression that he was a sword-slinging bishounen, and that's not...quite right. :|
I love how you put #2, by the way. It's so true. While a Romeo-and-Juliet type deal can be tragic in its own right, it's not the REAL tragedy there. (And actually, it'd be interesting to have characters come to that realization on their own, wouldn't you agree?) Like, you know, if they can't be together, or aren't loved back, at least they're alive (like you mentioned).
Also, yes! The enemy loses out, too. Which is sad. In FE7, the enemies aren't too bad off, all things considered. But they still have broken families because men died in battle. However, the other games, with full-fledged wars being fought...? Both sides lose a lot. And it's worth it to realize that. (Which I'm sure most /characters/ would realize, too, if they thought about it for even a second.)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-24 02:11 am (UTC)The real sin of SSB is that it implies Marth is an arrogant little SOB. Frex, of the three Fire Emblem reps, guess which one *doesn't* mention defense of family and/or friends as motivation to fight? I mean, even before I looked up what they were saying, I figured Roy was the hero of this "Fire Emblem" game and that Marth was the peer rival/antagonist. That's just how they came across... and the way the character bio was written ("and then the country got annihilated") didn't help to clarify any.
A subverted Romeo and Juliet wherein the characters wise up would be a nice change.
FE7 is interesting in that it doesn't involve the wholesale devastation of great swathes of a continent. Like, Archanea? Two of its seven kingdoms were completely trashed after the *first* war. After the second war, a measly three years later, I think the island of Talys and *maybe* Aurelis would be about all that's left standing. Nobody wins in a case like that. Just imagine the challenge of trying to feed and house people! FE8, at least, seems to evoke a great deal of sympathy for the people of Grado, who are pretty well hosed in between the war and the earthquake, and a lot of FE8 'fics do appear to take that aspect of tragedy into account. OK, at least the better wide-scope 'fics do. But it's still not terribly common in fandom overall.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-29 05:39 pm (UTC)Under the "comment" section when you upload your icon, you should give due credit to the person who made the icon if you know who made it. Like, for example, "Made by [Unknown site tag]" or "Made by Manna".
In order to insert the name as a link via LJ, you do this without the stars: <*lj user=*"screenname"*> with the space between "lj" and "user" intact. (I might edit this if it doesn't work, haha.)
I hate that SSB makes Marth look prissy. It's so aggravating.
Yeah, FE7 is a small-scale, like, "nobody even knows that you saved the world" type deal. Which is actually fascinating when you stop to think that Eliwood, Hector, and Lyn-- Lyn being the only exception to the following-- who all are inherited leaders of their country (with the death of Uther and Elbert), just UP AND LEAVE. Lyn's not much better off there, considering her grandfather's DYING and she just LEAVES. So there you have Caelin, Ostia, and Pherae without proper leaders for probably around a year's time. Who knows WHAT went on? (Especially in Caelin, but considering the crap in Lyn's Story Mode, that canton's messed up anyway.) Either way, the citizens of said cantons would surely frown upon that entire thing. And what are Hector and Eliwood (and maybe Lyn) going to say? LIEK OMG WE SAVED TEH WURLD!11one
Because nobody would believe it. :| I mean, sure Erik and Darin were jackasses and attacked Caelin. But that's all that Elibe really saw. They didn't see a dragon.
But like you said, in Archanea, 2/7 were trashed after ONE war. That's pretty crappy, and would leave everyone and everything pretty devastated. FE8 did pretty well, I thought, with Grado and pulling sympathy-- which is nice, for a change. The thing about 'fic is that most are centered around romance of some kind, and generally don't have to take everything else into account. (It's when longer 'fics fail to consider stuff like that that I really get annoyed. Honestly.)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 11:22 pm (UTC)Re: the underground nature of FE7-- Yeah, and with Ostia being the main canton, it's even more bizarre.
Re: long fics-- I don't expect a breakdown of a country's tax code or anything, but even some thought to where the revenue comes from is nice to see in 'fic. Who exports what, who imports what, who are the trade partners? How did the war screw up the economy?
I remember back in Gundam Wing fandom, a premiere ranter of the time said, "You know those stories where a colony drops on the Earth and 2/3 of the population die? Well, the remaining 1/3 is not going to care about making out. They're going to be concerned about food, and clean drinking water, and who buries all of the corpses." Something to that effect.