Squilookle said:
OK, let me just stop you right there- what the hell is purple prose? Are you going to back up that label with an explanation?
There's no clear cut definition of purple prose ... but typically it involves complex, overly ornate language that neither moves plot, nor illustrates character development. Rather it demands the reader's attentions, takes them hostage, and destroys pacing while providing nothing of substance. Fantasy suffers from it immensely ... which isn't inherently bad on its own... but it is an exercise in just how much tolerance you can have for exposition.
Like every fucking annoying Harry Potter fan ever. Fantasy is particularly annoying in this aspect. Sci-fi gets it in the neck as well. It's not so much that fantasy and sci-fi serials inherently create purple prose... but the attempt to make exposition of characters or environment, rather than 'mobility' and development of character and environment not fucking boring makes it
particularly fucking boring and noticeable a hell of a lot more.
Hence why fantasy and sci-fi novelists and media talent produce companion matetials stuff to their primary works.
Because the particularly stupid of their fanbases demand exposition, analytical clarity and ... Get the fuck off that
My Little Pony merch!! It's mine!!! Don't make me cut you... What was I saying? Oh, right ... none of this is particularly bad. Just recognize where it comes from. Be self-aware AF... Now what's the best way to dispose of a body?
Secondly- you give two examples of how it should be done, and neither of them are fantasy. They are both science-fiction, with a heavy focus on modern/futuristic technology used according to certain unbreakable laws of physics. Not always the same as our own, but laws nonetheless.
Star Wars is totally Science-Fantasy. It has magic it goes to
elaborate extents to describe as mystical, it draws inspiration from the past (including weapons and other fantasy works) to place it in a fictional setting that literally describes itself
in a galaxy far, far away. It explains nothing of the technological capabilities of that galaxy, requiring the viewer to shed their disbelief.
Not once in the primary reference materials are
lightsabers explained. And do you know how fundamentally awful, a cardinal literary sin, it would be to write a book that does so and expect it to be decent writing?
The criterion for 'not being fantasy' isn't merely that it 'looks techy'. It's about requiring a certain level of suspension of disbelief that a viewer/reader goes into a film/book prepared to make. Ditto, the qualities of good worldbuilding are not alien from one genre to another. Changeling: the Lost, singlehandedly best roleplaying eorld and systems around, is storytelling game of modern fairytales snd beautiful madness. How matrrial reality conflicts with dreams snf absurdities of thd Fair Folk of Arcadia and inbetween.
They are also both films, not literature, and it is a cardinal sin of films not to show instead of tell, so they both have that working for them already. Had LOTR first appeared as a film instead of a book, Tolkien himself would probably have been forced to Vonnegut the material, as other writers already had done for say, radio adaptations of their works. Moby Dick is another excellent example of the sort of change LOTR would have had to undertake.
Because it's the easiest to demonstrate without saying
read this book. And the literary criticism is the same, or more so
could have been the same if allowed to be so. And it would have been the worst for it. Tolkien inspired future literary genre into fantasy in a big way ... but it would be wrong to say fantasy wasn't being written. At the core you have two styles of fantasy writing,
sparse and mythic.
And there is a reason why I brought up
Mad Max because it's a clever example of fantasy characters done well and why it's arbitrary to put dividers between fantasy and other genres to begin with... or where you don't have to sacrifice mythmaking to be sparse, or sparse to be mythmaking.
Mad Max, and the character of Max Rockatansky, became a symbol of Joseph Campbell's 'monomyth theory' which really took George Miller by surprise. It grossed at the time the highest revenues from box offices of the two years it was showing through Europe, U.S., Asia and Australia. In France, Mad Max was billed as an 'Australian Modern Western' and Max Rocktansky described in a manner as if an Australian Clint Eastwood. In Japan
Mad Max and the character
Max Rockatansky was marketed as if a wandering swordsman of feudal Japan (imagery that he would borrow for later iterations) as per their own cinematic releasese. In Scandinavian countries (except in Sweden where the movie was banned) the reviewers talked about the character as if a
viking and their native mythologizing.
So you have all of these suspensions of disbelief and internal mythmaking being couched in terms of familiarity to character archetypes in your region. That ultimately delivering strange, fae-like villain in a strange, fae-like existence of a post-societal collapse Australia. And Max is an interesting example, or extension, or the idea of the
monomyth. Given Miller was not classically trained, he didn't have an artistic background. He was a general practitioner of medicine in Sydney.
If anything, Miller just wanted to make a movie with real subject matter (drunken violence and instances of horrific accidents) that did happen in Australia in a world lost to itself. And ultimately what was a minorly conservative-rhetoric'd film at the time og drunken Australian youth became a reality-breaking fantasy film of terrific proportions and exuberant characters.
Now what he discovered (by accident, and he will always say
by accident if people compliment him on it as if being intentional) is that if you merely want to communicate as if such a character; "Create a movie where it can be understood without subtitles in Japan." Which is an adage he borrows from Hitchcock.
The terse dialogue, and the environment he describes that is
perpetually in motion and never shot in the same way again, create a mechanic of illustrating the character as not only as a native of their world without overembellishment, but signify and underline every level of their development being this dance between the brutal reality they are confronted by, the colourful characters they meet, as well as the larger than life persona of Max Rockatansky himself. That is believably
somehow larger than life if only because of the fact that the director has
never made Max Rockatansky the star of any movie.
He's like the quintessential anti-Mary Sue ... because whatever qualities he does have are utterly paled in comparison by the flare, the colourful noise, of the world he is confronted by and the people within it. He's singular in his uniqueness by
saying nothing while everyone and everything else
screams alien. That such a character
naturally begins to take on elements of whatever fantastic and romantically embellished aspects of whatever cultural mythologies that a person had been raised up with simply by the common enough aspect of
surviving them.
You don't go into any Mad Max film without the
suspension of disbelief ... but the first movie was of such strange nature that no one had actually seen this type of genre of film done before that it
hammers it home that you become a spectator of a world
gone mad and fantastically unlike our own ... and you gel with it largely immediately, because it's
like Max Rockatansky seems both at home within it, as well as ordinary to our own existence.
So in an overly wordy reason why I insert it thoroughly into the 'fantasy' mix is precisely because
there is no way to describe it otherwise, and why it is insanely clever way of worldbuilding. The reason why Miller wrote
novels on his charaters, scrapped them, kept all the feel about them, and used that feel and symbolism to make them appear ridiculous and dense every second they're on screen. And because every character
barring Max Rockatansky looks that way, Max becomes the quintessential monomyth figure in a
fantastic world.
Accidentally brilliant fantasy writing and direction.
And ultimately the lessons you can learn from it are applicable
specifically to the fantasy genre.
Now ... you're right ... if Tolkien was writing for the big screen the nature of LotR would be
incredibly different. But do you know what's superior to the LotR books?
The Hobbit. It is simply more fun to read. The characters are better. The story is better.
Also... Kurt Vonnegut is a writer. Show, don't tell ... applies to literature no less. Applies to all storytelling. Don't tell the player that they're getting a negative modifier for being a catfolk in a racist human city. Show them by just in the corner of their eye they noticing a non-human npc get the shit kicked out of them in an alley, and the town guard just ignore it when they enter the city. Show them by how differently they talk to and interact with that PC in comparison to how they treat your human party members if they don't know they're travelling with them. How quickly that more favourable stance change if they realize as such.