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Ben X

Didactic Thumbs (Pedantry Corner)

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I put spoiler culture in quotes because I want to know what people mean by that phrase when they say they hate it or it's dumb - particularly, is it a new phenomenon that they hate, or is it a long-running one that they hate the current state of? It seems SBM defines it as the latter. Do they think it's dumb for anyone to ever not want some aspect of a thing spoiled for them?

But I understand it to refer to the people avoiding the spoilers, yeah.

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 Do they think it's dumb for anyone to ever not want some aspect of a thing spoiled for them?

 

My frustration comes with the breadth of what "spoilers" encompasses. Saying something like "Oh that's a good episode" or "I didn't know (X) was in this!" is a spoiler to some people. I promise I am not making that up. It's dumb that virtually any piece of information about a work could be a spoiler to someone.

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If "spoiler culture" counts as those who don't want to have things spoiled for them then count me in as part of "spoiler culture" (god, what a stupid name).

 

For me it comes down to this: everyone has the the right to decide for themselves how much information about a work they want to know before consuming it. It's not for anyone else to decide how much is too much or too little. If you post spoilers without sufficient warning or in an inappropriate context then you're a dick imposing your will on others and potentially ruining an experience for them because... why?

 

I was also more than a little annoyed to hear the podcast hosts being flippantly dismissive of people wanting to avoid Star Wars spoilers on the most recent episode. As if just because Star Wars is frivolous nonsense that people have no right to avoid being spoiled on it.

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Yeah, I get the feeling that the most popular definition of "spoiler culture" is "people who have unreasonable demands about spoilers", so it is by definition a bad thing.

 

I think it's become more of an issue because it's so much easier for something to get utterly spoiled within seconds of it being publically available. On Twitter or Facebook? Someone's decided to talk about the big twist in the latest film. Google a show to see when the next episode is out? The results page has a featured news item with a massive spoiler in the title and picture. Reading a gaming news site? They have an article title and picture about a surprise YouTube celebrity cameo in a tv show that aired the night before which the whole episode revolved around. So the spoiler-averse have raised their sensitivity levels in response.

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I'll try to accommodate it but I feel like there is a certain number of years after which a piece is fair game. But it really depends on the type of film or tv show I guess.

I do tend to treat trailer content as fair game though, which has landed me in trouble with the odd person before.

I can be sensitive to the principle of it, especially when I know they want to keep away from spoilers. But my general ambivalence towards spoilers can sometimes mean I'll fail to treat something according to others expectations.

I do like watching things that've been spoiled for me in the same way as 90-3.

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For me it comes down to this: everyone has the the right to decide for themselves how much information about a work they want to know before consuming it. It's not for anyone else to decide how much is too much or too little. If you post spoilers without sufficient warning or in an inappropriate context then you're a dick imposing your will on others and potentially ruining an experience for them because... why?

 

I think, for me, the issue with "spoiler culture" in a nutshell is that you articulate this concept as a "right" (meaning, I think, that it's up to others not to transgress it with you) instead of a "freedom" (meaning that it's up to you not to let others transgress it). The frustrations that I often see expressed towards aggressively (rather than just preferentially) spoiler-adverse people is that others didn't properly protect them from the natural consequences of their own actions (for instance, reading a movie-themed thread on a forum or an article about a specific film after said film's release date), which they blame that on everyone but themselves. Very rarely do I see someone just bust out an out-of-nowhere spoiler that has no context in the discussion and, though it means nothing to me nine times out of ten, I can understand expressing some irritation about that. However, the usual situation, and the one for which I find it difficult to feel sympathy, is someone listening to an episode of Idle Thumbs where Metal Gear Solid V is explicitly listed about a topic of discussion and then complaining that they were spoiled about... well, anything from that game. Why did you listen if you weren't prepared to hear something? The reasonable series of actions to take, if you don't want to be spoiled on a work, is to avoid any potential source of spoilers, no matter how unlikely, and mark them down for consumption after you're done with the work itself. People who expect critics, fans, and the internet at large

 

To broaden my point a little, I don't think that "spoiler culture" as an ideal is particularly a problem, but the most fanatical members of any culture tend to be the ones that determine its public impact, and those people with "spoiler culture" are the ones who regularly wrote into the Quarter to Three movie podcast, which discusses one new movie in depth per week, complaining that they spoil the movie when they talk about it, prompting Tom Chick et al. to make ever-more-clear warnings that this podcast about Sicario will spoil Sicario. That is, the most vocal proponents of "spoiler culture" have taken an extreme position about what is a spoiler and expect critics, fans, bloggers, and the internet as a whole to cater to that position in any manner of discussion whatsoever. I find that immensely disheartening, just in itself, in addition to my problems with the theoretical premises of hardcore spoiler-adverse people that a state of total ignorance is the ideal state for artistic appreciation of a work and should be actively encouraged and that the fundamental action of the plot is what a work is "about."

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"Magic realism". What do you understand this term to mean?

 

I've always understood it to mean a setting in which magic is treated as mundane and everyday. If a kitchen sink drama was set in the Weasley household, it would count. It seems another definition is a work which includes both the magical and the mundane/realistic, such as a novel which has magic in it but characters with realistic feelings and having realistic conversations. This seems far too broad to be useful, including all but the most operatic of magical works.

 

I see it used seemingly at random quite often though. I haven't read the whole of this article but:

 

Quote

 

One of the things I loved seeing in my bit of London was the flocks of green parakeets who had made themselves at home in local parks. They were a weird splash of exotic colour which had made itself at home. Their screaming and screeching felt appropriate to the city’s abrasiveness and I’d watch them squabble in the trees near one of the playgrounds as winter drew in.

I saw them again the other day on a visit to Kew Gardens – that’s where the picture above is from – and it made me wonder whether I would find them an exciting oddity if I encountered them in a game set in a city or whether they would stick out too much, sending the game into some magical realist or dreamlike territory.

 

 

Having birds in a game is magic realism?!

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My understanding is more based on the history of the genre (like the writing of Allende, Marquez or Rushdie) than the meaning of those words put next to each other, I wouldn't say it's a setting where magic is everywhere and treated as mundane, such an overt presence of the supernatural just seems to take it into fantasy territory. For me it's more about a realist work, set in the a world that is almost exactly identical to the one we live in but for one small arcane element, which often isn't even the main point of the story, but a lens to examine the mundane part.

 

Say, the story of a bored office worker who discovers that pigeons have a secret language and are holding cabal meetings on the roof of their workplace. Or a coming of age story in which the protagonist discovers some utterly useless magic ability, like being able to change the color of their tongue. Or anything Magic Realism Bot tweets.

 

For me it's not "realist fiction set in a magic world" but "a story set in our world, with a small twist". At least, my impression is that magic realism wants its supernatural components to be noticeable, not feel like a normal part of the universe. It wants to make you think about the magic that could be hiding around you at all times, the secret lives of household objects when you are away, animals that seem to be observing you intently, strange patterns in the traffic that might have meaning...

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Interesting, thanks! Incidentally, I didn't just guess at those definitions, they're ones I found previously.

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More pedantry!

 

Someone just linked to an essay by Umberto Eco about Casablanca being a cult movie. The term seems to be used regularly as interchangeable with "very popular" these days, whereas I think it should really be defined as "with a small but devoted following". Eco has a definition close to that, saying "The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects to the fan's private sectarian world." He elaborates, but the gist of it is that if the film lends itself to a fanatical, obsessive, detailed appreciation, it's a cult movie. I don't think the term can be applied if that only applies to a small part of the fanbase. Christianity has fanatical elements, but it's not a cult.

 

Another quick one: uncanny valley. It's the feeling of revulsion a human has at a robot which approaches the point of looking exactly and convincingly human but has some small imperceptible differences. I see this get used a lot for CGI when the user simply means "bad" or "unconvincing". Someone here used it a fair amount in the Pixar thread, but I'm pretty sure they weren't repulsed by how Woody looks almost exactly like a real toy. I also saw it get used regarding Snoke in Force Awakens.

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My friend is actually writing a (totally subjective) book on the 100 greatest cult films of all time. There have been many writers who have covered cult films who have many varying definitions, and his first job was to find his own (totally subjective) definition. I'm not gonna copy and paste the unpublished first draft of his manuscript here, but the conclusion he came to was that a cult film must have these one of these three elements:

 

  1. A devoted following, particularly among those who consider themselves outsiders
  2. A challenge to mainstream sensibilities and ideas of good and bad taste
  3. A defiance of traditional notions of cinematic storytelling, and features outrageous characters or situations.

 

If you are interested in learning more about cult cinema, Danny Peary's Cult Movies is sort of the foundational book for the whole premise.

 

From Wiki:

 

Quote

Cult movies are defined by Peary as “special films which for one reason or another have been taken to heart by segments of the movie audience, cherished, protected, and most of all, enthusiastically championed.” He explains that “the typical Hollywood product” never attains cult status since all viewers perceive these average films in more or less the same way, with no real disagreement as to the film’s quality. But cult films “are born in controversy, in arguments over quality, theme, talent and other matters. Cultists believe they are among the blessed few who have discovered something in particular that the average moviegoer and critic have missed – the something that makes the pictures extraordinary.”

 

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I think you can absolutely level the claim of uncanny valley towards Rogue One but I'm struggling to remember where you'd apply that for Force Awakens.

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@Badfinger Yes, I agree. Rogue One's (returning character spoilers)

 

Tarkin and Leia

are absolutely uncanny valley, whereas Snoke (oops, corrected my mispelling in previous post), even if he were absolutely lifelike, would merely resemble a dude in prosthetics so it doesn't really apply.

 

@Patrick R I would possibly quibble a little with elements of those definitions out of context, but I think when you're writing an entire book on a certain genre or area it's fine to play with the definition as long as you acknowledge and delineate your version.

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For me I've pretty much thought of cult movies as movies where for whatever reason are very good at conveying something that will only resonate with a narrow group of people.  For example, Superbad is one of my favorite movies of all time.  The reason is that when it came out I was a senior in high school and the movie is pretty much an entirely accurate depiction of what my life was like at the time.  For people who weren't in high school around the same years (basically post-internet, post-social media, pre-smartphones) and in the same sort of setting (white Californian suburbs) I would assume the movie wouldn't really be that enjoyable and probably just seem like a much worse American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused (also cult films for the same reason), which it probably is. 

 

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Superbad was massively successful at the box office relative to its budget, though. For the time when it was out, it was one of those movies that you could assume most people to be familiar with, even if they hadn't seen it personally. It seems to me a cult movie is one that's in some way overlooked. Superbad may not be as universal as Star Wars or Harry Potter, but it was a Hollywood movie that essentially succeeded pretty straightforwardly on the terms it intended to, with a generally broad audience.

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To compare, a comedy from that year I would call a cult film would be Hot Rod. Bombed at the box office but it had a singular tone and the way it fit the SNL Digital Short sensibility (as it was written/directed by and starred members of Lonely Island) into a feature film lead to bizarre and unique comic sequences, like this:

 

 

It's fanbase has grown in the past 10 years, though it's small compared to their next film, MacGruber, which is one of the bigger cult films Hollywood has produced this century.

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Yeah looking at it that wasn't the best example, I was trying to think of something that I have a very specific and very strong reaction to, but Ghost World actually would have been a much better.

 

I actually didn't realize just how well Superbad did, I guess in my mind it was popular, but compared to Knocked Up it seemed way less successful. Also I guess then American Graffiti wouldn't really be a cult film, though now I'm conflicted about Easy Rider which was super successful, but I think of as being a cult film.  

 

Edit: Now I'm thinking about where Rocky Horror fits into all of this and am even more conflicted. 

 

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9 hours ago, Patrick R said:

To compare, a comedy from that year I would call a cult film would be Hot Rod. Bombed at the box office but it had a singular tone and the way it fit the SNL Digital Short sensibility (as it was written/directed by and starred members of Lonely Island) into a feature film lead to bizarre and unique comic sequences, like this:

 

 

Hot Rod was great. I haven't seen MacGruber but if, like me, you have a high tolerance for Andy Samberg's gurning face and the Lonely Island shtick, you will also find Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping to be very entertaining.

 

Apparently it bombed at the box office while maintaining a fanatical following in some quarters, so I think we can file that one under 'cult movies' as well.

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Religions are totally cults. Or there's a pedantic difference between a cult and a religion, mostly down to number of members?

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Yeah, basically a cult becomes a religion when a certain critical mass of people and societal acceptance occurs.

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I remember BBC 2 ads for The Simpsons that classified it as cult television back in the late '90s, so I think usage of the term has been pretty loose for some time now. I guess it has/had a core of devotees, but it was at that time an astronomically popular show. Maybe "cult" was a euphemism for "nerd bait".

 

On 2/17/2017 at 9:55 PM, Jutranjo said:

Religions are totally cults. Or there's a pedantic difference between a cult and a religion, mostly down to number of members?

Although I'd agree that both exist on a continuum, I'm pretty sure there are specific nefarious practices that set cults apart. For example, urging people to separate themselves from their family and existing social circles, or give up a huge portion of their money to the cause. I suppose you could argue that each of those – particularly the latter – can exist in religion to varying degrees, but I believe there is a meaningful distinction to be made, even if it is one of degrees. It may be the case that the softening of these edges is a function of size: the conspiratorial and highly-targeted mechanisms of control exerted on cult members are naturally harder and less necessary to enact in larger groups. I think age is also an important factor: in a larger and older group, there will be less focus on a single charismatic figurehead with the ability to exert specific control on their followers. Christianity has Jesus, and Catholicism in particular the Pope, but the former is so distant as to be an abstract concept onto which people can project their own ideas and feelings, and the latter is chosen bureaucratically and exists in a long line of stuffy old men who I don't think have anything close to the potential for devastating influence over individual followers' psyches and behaviour.

 

None of that's not to say that religions aren't capable of being a force for ill in the world; just that the kind of threat posed by cults is not something I can see in religions.

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Here's some true pedantry!

 

I really, really detest how the English call Resident Evil "resi". For years I thought they were saying Res E, which is fine. It's the same reason that calling your Ultimate in a LOMA an "ulti" is bad.

 

The reason is this - it's a shit job of abbreviating and it offends me as a genteel and sophisticated human being.

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42 minutes ago, Badfinger said:

Here's some true pedantry!

 

I really, really detest how the English call Resident Evil "resi". For years I thought they were saying Res E, which is fine. It's the same reason that calling your Ultimate in a LOMA an "ulti" is bad.

 

The reason is this - it's a shit job of abbreviating and it offends me as a genteel and sophisticated human being.

What about saying "ult"? Is it specifically the" i"? 

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