'Sleeper'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Why does it have to be?
It's just bad storytelling. It breaks a certain convent with the reader.
Of course there's no reason why any element is bad in itself, but historically it's been a refuge for shitty writers who don't commit to the story they're telling or just want to pull a cheap meta rug out from under the reader. So it's considered to be in bad taste, and is usually one the first things you're taught to not do in a writing class.
Careful. I've taken a lot of writing classes, and no one has ever told me there's something no one should do.
The thing that sets a lot of great writers apart is that they can get away with breaking all kinds of "rules" and make it compelling, believable, and page-turning.
Which one do you believe "it's just bad storytelling" or "there's no reason why any element is bad in itself"?
Would you write a story that ended, "...and it was all a dream."?
Which one do you believe "it's just bad storytelling" or "there's no reason why any element is bad in itself"?
They're not exclusive. I do believe it's bad storytelling and should be avoided.
That doesn't that you couldn't subvert the trope or do something with it.
Not just that way, no. But look at The Wizard of Oz. Essentially, it was all a dream, and I don't see a lot of people complaining that they feel cheated because of it.
I'm just saying there's an exception to every rule.
I always hated the ending of TWoO, ever since I was old enough to watch it all the way through without getting scared of the flying monkeys. Especially since I knew the book’s ending was different.
Which makes you the exception to the rule of no one complaining about it, I guess.
Upon contemplation, I think when the "it is all a dream" is at its most outrage-provoking for me is when the author does not leave sufficient clues or character development to lead to this conclusion. But I suppose that is true for anything I read. I hate when any shit is just dropped on me, seemingly from out of nowhere, if it is a conventional narrative. I hate that about murder mysteries, science fiction, etc. Hell, I lost my shit over deus ex machina in high school, so this is an old issue for me.
Wizard of Oz (the movie), is pretty straightforward with its indicators about WTF is going on. At least for an adult. For a kid, after we are so thoroughly traumatized by flying monkeys, I think we welcome a revelation that none of the shit was real.
Yes, obviously I meant the cheapest and most literal possible interpretation of "It was only a dream!" because I just don't know what good writing is. t /eyeroll forever