the way that certain shots or images, say, will crop up over and over again in a TV show
Or the way that TV shows do clever takes on classic movies (or TV shows), like (to use two "Person of Interest" examples since they're in my head) a long pan down a bank of mainframe computers that's much like the end of "Citizen Kane" or the referential scene in "Indiana Jones," or a gunfight set on a carousel a la "Third Man," a genre self-referencing that ends up being not quite so much like the communal holding and retelling of myths as like the use of quotations from Shakespeare, sometimes in and sometimes slightly out of context. I think fanfic does this too (I mean, it quotes from Shakespeare if I'm writing it, but more along the lines of being self-referential), but it also does the full-out mythology retelling-and-shifting.
But yeah, it is a PhD thesis. And I'm sure a number of people are out there writing those, but of course they all watch different shows or read different books than we do!
I agree with the whole plot-in-service-of-romance thing, generally, although it is always hard to compare specific examples. The Vorkosigan novels are such a sweeping saga with such a lot of plot that even if you just want to write romance, and you have any kind of duty to context at all, you're going to end up with a chunk of plot hanging on the romance anyway, even if it isn't actually in your story. Whereas Lewis is sadly episodic (I wish they would manage an overarching plot and continual snippets of backstory and such, but they don't) so whether you write a casefic or a character study or a domestic interlude, if you want to do romance that's where the focus will be; there's nothing else to grab. No matter how compelling a plot you come up with, it's going to feel like this week's episode or something that went on backstage of that.
Canon dictates form; form follows function; something like that. :)
I do like romance, too. I just sometimes feel like "so? Is that all there is?"
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Date: 2012-11-29 02:03 pm (UTC)Or the way that TV shows do clever takes on classic movies (or TV shows), like (to use two "Person of Interest" examples since they're in my head) a long pan down a bank of mainframe computers that's much like the end of "Citizen Kane" or the referential scene in "Indiana Jones," or a gunfight set on a carousel a la "Third Man," a genre self-referencing that ends up being not quite so much like the communal holding and retelling of myths as like the use of quotations from Shakespeare, sometimes in and sometimes slightly out of context. I think fanfic does this too (I mean, it quotes from Shakespeare if I'm writing it, but more along the lines of being self-referential), but it also does the full-out mythology retelling-and-shifting.
But yeah, it is a PhD thesis. And I'm sure a number of people are out there writing those, but of course they all watch different shows or read different books than we do!
I agree with the whole plot-in-service-of-romance thing, generally, although it is always hard to compare specific examples. The Vorkosigan novels are such a sweeping saga with such a lot of plot that even if you just want to write romance, and you have any kind of duty to context at all, you're going to end up with a chunk of plot hanging on the romance anyway, even if it isn't actually in your story. Whereas Lewis is sadly episodic (I wish they would manage an overarching plot and continual snippets of backstory and such, but they don't) so whether you write a casefic or a character study or a domestic interlude, if you want to do romance that's where the focus will be; there's nothing else to grab. No matter how compelling a plot you come up with, it's going to feel like this week's episode or something that went on backstage of that.
Canon dictates form; form follows function; something like that. :)
I do like romance, too. I just sometimes feel like "so? Is that all there is?"