I am awake now, and ALL Y'ALL ARE GOING DOWN.
Time for some serious notes.
You guys? Down there in the comments? You suck. ..okay, so there's only one of you. But still, you suck. We all know you're a fictional character. You're a blogging personality made by alliterator.
"Wh... why would you say that, White Jester?" Because I hate fictional blogging. It pisses me off to all ends. Guys, blogging is not a video game. It's not supposed to be this story you can interact with. And if it is some bullshit story you can interact with, YOU SHOULD FUCKING WRITE IT SO YOU CAN INTERACT WITH IT.
Commenting and getting replies from the protagonist is not interacting with the story! That's playing pretend, essentially writing fanfiction. Interacting with the story would be something like a crossover, and crossovers are still done horribly wrong.
In order for something to work in the artistic medium of writing, it has to have precedent. It can't just unexpectedly show up in the middle of a story. It needs either warning, foreshadowing, or a precedent for it to call back to. Let's say you have a duck show up halfway through a story that suddenly eats the protagonist. A warning would be "A duck is going to show up and eat you." A foreshadowing would be basically that but much vaguer. A precedent would be the character being eaten earlier on by some other creature, to establish that being eaten is something that can feasibly happen to the protagonist.
In the best of works, events have both a precedent and either a warning or foreshadowing. In blogging? THERE IS RARELY EITHER.
One more thing. STOP WITH THE FUCKING LABELS, LABELS ARE THERE TO ORGANIZE YOUR BLOG, THEY ARE NOT A BONUS OUTLET FOR STORYTELLING. Furthermore, if you use them as a bonus outlet for storytelling, you need to tell your readers the labels are there to read! PRECEDENT. WARNING. LAMPSHADING. And furthermore, don't ever use labels that way if you're trying to be original.
WARNING: In this post, I will disagree with you.
ReplyDeletePRECEDENT: I have previously disagreed with you.
FORESHADOWING: So that's your opinion? Well, perhaps I have a different one.
IN CONCLUSION: I disagree with you. Not about warning/precedent/foreshadowing, but about the blog not being an interactive story. If you don't want an interactive story, turn off the comments; the comments are purely for interactivity, so that other characters can interact with your character. They are like semicrossovers - not actual crossovers, because neither character has to be affected by them, but they can cause changes in plot or affect the story. If you don't want them to affect plot or story, then, as before, you can turn off the comments or moderate the comments, so that only the ones you want will appear.
Also, I like it when people use labels for bonus things. It's like a footnote - you don't have to read it, but sometimes it's fun to do so.
Also, a duck ate my brother. Not cool, White Jester, not cool.
Actually, I can completely disprove that. Hello, I'm DJay32.
ReplyDeleteLet's look back at history: What was the precedent for comments? Well, comments. What were comments used for? Giving commentary on a story outside the context of it. Hence "comments." Blogs aren't magically different. The primary function of the comment section is still just to comment out of the context of any fiction, to make commentary on it. This whole "INTERACT WITH THE STORY" shtick came after that.
So yes, blogs can be interactive. ..if the writer so chooses. But it is not up to the reader to make a story interactive; it should be entirely the job of the writer.
Watch Pixels, the summer's biggest blockbuster of the year. In theaters during the impending apocalypse. "God Will Never forgive you for watching this film!" - Mark Singer of screen crush. " Better than Pixels Part 3" - Zach Galifinakas but from the future. " So good I got 12 erections within the first 3 minutes, maybe I'm just attracted to Peter Dinklage, or maybe my dick was hard Josh Gad or maybe Adam Sandler" - A Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich the was snuck into the theatre and left there by a rather large man, who weighs about 350 pounds, who shat his pants and had to leave immediately
ReplyDelete