BLOG ENTRY LINKS TO OTHER BLOG ENTRY IN INTERNET SHOCKER
Being at the farm for a few days, I’ve been looking through my old links on the computer out here.
http://thegoddessblogs.com/index.php/2007/06/25/is-is-a-romance-if-theres-no-happily-ever-after/
I seem to recall that I ran across this little gem when Googling something along the lines of “romance heroine ends up alone” or some such. I was and remain curious as to how often romances end with one or both of the main characters ending the relationship; offhand, I can’t think of any (and isn’t it weird that movies set in New York City or Los Angeles or whatever, all fantastically populous places, seem to limit the very possibility of meaningful character interaction outside of a tight inner circle? I understand that it’s largely a practical matter for the narrative, but I always wonder why I never see a story where “the one” gets dropped for good and the lead just goes out with someone else). Anyway, that’s all a bit beside the point.
I was actually rather surprised when I read this. These readers know what they want and have no qualms about making sure that they get it. More interesting than that, though, were the comments by fellow authors in the genre. There are a couple in there relating how the writer had made the “mistake” of including something outside of genre expectations in their earlier work and paid for it in audience reception. Their readers, with significant exception, reacted as if they had been betrayed. I suppose my question here is whether or not they had been.
There are many ways to dissect the way creative works do whatever it is that they do. Right now, I’m interested in how their audiences take them in. It seems that one can describe this with a simple, poorly-named division: appreciation and utility. The appreciative approach evaluates the work in terms of how successfully it communicates, the quality of its craft, and so forth, while the utilitarian approach evaluates the work in terms of how effective it is at providing something the audience needs or wants. When you listen to music, for example, you might follow along with what a given instrument is doing, be impressed at a turn of phrase in the lyrics, or consider how well it represents a genre, but you will likely also be using this music to cheer yourself up or experience catharsis or just stay awake and distracted. I think that everybody likely experiences things at pretty much all points of the spectrum over time, but some people seem to consciously gravitate to one end or the other.
Rereading the comments on that entry made me think that these readers were expressing opinions pretty far to the utilitarian side of preferences. They want relatively safe escapism, fantasies that will always turn the trick and leave them feeling good at the end. This is hardly limited to their genre (which I should probably admit that I know very, very little about, as my encounters with it tend to irritate me for various reasons) or medium; most criticism that I read about things indicates that this carefully-guided escapism is seen as most of the point by many people and is therefore the standard by which the success of a work is to be judged (some people make video games, for instance, that aren’t really intended to be fun. These games do not do very well). I reacted to these commenters with surprise, as noted before, as I didn’t really think that people would actually want their money back if something had an ending they didn’t like. I need to pay more attention to the world. Having read this again now, though, I find myself wondering whether this division of approaches in my head makes all that much sense.
When I experience something, I tend to think of it in the terms I described above: I pay attention to how something is executed, but I’m generally there because I needed it for some reason. Is that “appreciative” feeling just there to fill another need, though? I like doing it; is that pleasure somehow seperate from the other pleasures that I use? This may all be an utterly false dichotomy.
Anyway. If anybody is still reading at this point, I’d be glad to know what you might think about all of this. How do you experience things?
