#n:ef

[onionlostindaydreams]

My favorite love messages/quotes from the three fandoms I'm currently obsessing about:

"We may be seperated from now on, but whenever I think of you, my heart will be free." - Novoland: Eagle Flag.

"I'm not here to save you, I'm here to love you." - Global Examination.

"Everything in this world is fated... Only love is not fate." - Love Between Fairy and Devil.

[sol1056]

whiplash stakes

watching Dance of the Sky Empire (because hey I was bored and sadly Song of Glory looks like it’s going to be an incoherent plot wreck, sadly, and Love a Lifetime is devolving into barely better) -- and once again marveling at how a cdrama will go from utter ridiculous for the sake of humor to srs-drama levels of implied angst, and why I find it unsatisfying.

maybe it was because the ‘multiple races included winged’ keeps making me think of the various novoland stories, but I kept comparing DotSE to Eagle Flag. Both have their ruffian troublemakers, because that’s where some of the nose-thumbing humor comes from.

In DotSE, the ruffian not only gets away with it, he buries a prince up to his neck in the ground. In N:EF, there’s a distinct sense that if/when the princess-in-disguise gets caught by the noble asshats she’s scamming, there’ll be hell to pay -- and the asshat is just rich, not royal. Going so far as to trap and humiliate a member of the royal family... in N:EF, I would’ve expected banishment, imprisonment, if not simple torture and public execution.

Which means that when we get the threat of war in N:EF, or even the staged fights as part of joining the guards, we don’t expect it to go easy. It felt like a very real possibility of severe injury, possibly death, for the sake of an action.

In DotSE, the complete lack of any consequences for what are pretty extreme actions -- for the purposes of comedy -- set expectations such that when there are extreme actions where the consequences are severe... it feels like you don’t know whether to be in suspense (will they get out of this okay) or amused (of course they’ll get out okay, the question is how much humor they’ll find in it).

this is one thing I think Joy of Life really nails, that makes its comedy work -- because the stakes are always high. the fun isn’t solely in the protag's stunts, but also in how he evades the consequences of those stunts, carefully weaseling his way out through a combination of fast talking, some misdirection, and a few last-minute saves by more powerful people.

so even when there’s humor in whatever shenanigan he’s trying to pull off, the result is often an oh god he pulled it off sense of relief -- and that’s very much a reaction not to comedy but to suspense. iow, there’s tonal consistency even if the humor is situational.

for the first (flashback sections) third of Untamed, tonally it’s closer to DotSE than JoL or N:EF -- yet unlike DotSE, CQL has consequences. from a writer’s perspective, tU/CQL goes a lot of stories one better by not only having the consequences ramp up alongside the stakes, but having the consequences push the story forward.

in DotSE, the protag sleeps through classes, talks back to the teacher, and the closest he gets to suffering a consequence is that he’s kicked out of class (once) -- which in turn frees him to pull off his next antic. in tU/CQL, breaking the rules first gets a lecture, then the assignment of copying the rules a hundred times, and then finally gets the protag a significant corporeal punishment. and it’s the recovery from that punishment that put him in the right place at the right time to trigger (or experience) the breakthrough that shoves the story into a higher gear.

from there on, the consequences get steeper and steeper, as the story escalates into darker territory. we go from ‘getting caught’ means a stern lecture, to a whipping, to serious harm and/or psychological torture, to the complete destruction of one’s home and the death of the protag’s adopted parents. there’s no tonal whiplash because the shift is always incremental. the lights never go off suddenly, they dim slowly, until what started so light-hearted has become very, very, dark. 

in JoL and N:EF, the first part of the story, the protags are kids, and their age seems to shield them from the worst of the possible consequences. entering some resemblance of adulthood means all the withheld consequences now crash down on their heads, as the stakes shoot sky-high. but that’s not a tonal shift in the same way, I think, because the rest of the story (as usually typified by adults around the protags) indicates there are consequences, it’s just the children are temporarily protected from them. 

in tU/CQL, the stakes grow with the protag, because he’s in a world that’s changing (from relative peace to brink of war to all-out war to the aftermath). War is always foregrounded in N:EF, while it’s a constant background note in JoL -- and it’s little more than a dire warning in DotSE. That means while consequences are consistently high in N:EF and JoL, they can flex and grow with the protag in tU/CQL, as the scope of his interaction/influence expands to a larger and larger scale.

and that’s why, I think, that while i do find some of the antics amusing in DotSE, going from ‘who will win this dance tournament’ to ‘a powerful kirin on a murder spree’ is too much whiplash. it’s going from zero consequences to the implication of severe consequences, and that’s too big of a jump.