C.R.E.A.M

[coalcube]

Coal ruins exchanges around me - spitey spitey fic y'all. 

Sign-ups: Fri 15 Oct to Sat 23 Oct (Countdown)
Assignments out by: Mon 25 Oct
Default deadline: Sat 11 Dec
Assignment deadline: Sat 18 Dec
Reveals: Sat 25 Dec

Mini-Challenges:
Yuleporn | Make the Yuletide Gay | Jewltide | Three Turtle Doves 
YuleBuilding | Two for One | Crueltide | Yuletunes | Yule Be First
YuleSwaps | IF | Wrapping Paper | Yumadrin | MultiLingYule
....and a Partridge in a Pear Tree!

Yuletide Discord for Hippos & Exchanges After Dark Discords for Namespace drama 18+ discussion. Google Group for PHs.

yuletide | yuletide_admin | Writing Post
2021 Collection | 2021 App (bonus) | Letter Post

Flat / Recent | Top-Level (Last) | FAQ | Search

Comments

Re: DNW Workshop

[(Anonymous)]

But... live action media is never in tight 3rd. It can't be, because there's a camera. And JS&MN isn't even in loose 3rd most of the time.

Like, if you consider that fight Jonathan and Arabella have when he comes out of the King's Roads for the first time, that scene is not filmed from the POV of any of the characters in it. Jonathan is elated and then indignant, Arabella is worried and then irate, Grant wants to melt into the floor - but none of that is the mood of the scene itself, which is comedy. It's not in Clarke's voice exactly (I'd argue it's considerably better than her version of it), but it's much closer to being from her POV than it is to being from the tight 3rd POV of one of the characters.

If I wanted to write you something that actually matched the tone of miniseries canon I'd have to do a very loose third or third omniscient, not the fanficcy tight 3rd that you prefer. (Especially for a fic focusing on Norrell, because Norrell's interpretation of any given situation is almost always at 90° to whatever the camera/the viewer is meant to think of it.)

Re: DNW Workshop

[(Anonymous)]

Fic is converting live action into literature, coalie.

Re: DNW Workshop

[(Anonymous)]

It can be. (Sometimes it's converting literature into more literature.)

And at that point you need to pick a narrator, but in almost all cases if you're choosing 1st person or tight 3rd you're necessarily narrowing the POV, because unless it's a found footage canon the camera (or the audience, if it's live theatre or something) can see things that the individual characters can't. That's true even in something like Trainspotting where there's a strong narrative voice and it's very tight 3rd/a sort of pseudo-1st person, and it's much more true of an ensemble show like JS&MN which is filmed in 3rd omniscient or a very loose 3rd.

Re: DNW Workshop

[(Anonymous)]

If I wanted to write you something that actually matched the tone of miniseries canon I'd have to do a very loose third or third omniscient,

...no? Do you think that because there's a camera, all live action canons must be filmed from very loose third or third omniscient to match the "tone"? You were right when you said above that live action doesn't have a tight third POV, but there's a big difference between tone and POV! "Tight third" is not a tone. These things are on different axes.

You seem to be trying to make a direct translation of the idea of POV between two different media, and that just doesn't work, because they're different media.

Re: DNW Workshop

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, a lot of live action follows the characters' moods, so you can switch to a tight 3rd without changing the tone.

My point is that JS&MN, specifically, is not like this. It's a comedy of manners with wizards. For large parts of canon we're not meant to be feeling what the characters are feeling, we're meant to be a detached observer quietly laughing at their foibles. The miniseries changes some things, but not this; it basically mirrors the tone of the omniscient 3rd narration in the novel.

To capture that in a fic you'd either have to adopt 3rd omniscient yourself, in which case you can't write in OP's preferred fanficcy tight 3rd, or pick the POV of someone like Childermass who himself spends much of the story as a detached observer quietly laughing at the main characters' foibles.

(I've never thought about it before, but I wonder if that partially explains his popularity, along with Enzo Cilenti's unexpected hotness. People really dislike writing 3rd omniscient, and using Childermass is one of few ways to preserve the arch tone of canon in fic form if you're unwilling to do that.)