(no subject)

[feotakahari]

In general, I’m probably going to dislike any story that breaks the fourth wall. I place a lot of value on the idea of a story as a world to itself, self-consistent and perfectly contained. If I’m suspending disbelief at all, I’m suspending it absolutely, and reminding me that it’s actually just a story feels like an insult to all the faith I’m putting in. If you get sufficiently experimental, you can create a story where our world is itself a part of the self-consistent universe (e.g. 1/0 by Tailsteak), but most of the time, asking me to believe in a story and then reminding me it’s a story feels like pointing at the ceiling and then flicking my face when I look.

You might think this is an Undertale post, and it is. But I don’t hate Undertale nearly as much as, say, The Order of the Stick.

Comments

[nodrog]

But what if it's a comedy and not meant to be taken seriously?  I'm thinking particularly of Smythe's comic strip Andy Capp, where the reader is assumed to be looking on (!) and is usually either looked towards sardonically or straight-out addressed in the final panel. ['And you thought your man was lazy, missus!' Florrie says, and Andy similarly remarks on the action to the reader directly.]  So far from suspending disbelief, this tends to draw the reader in:  You feel personally acquainted with the characters.

Note however that they never refer to themselves as comic-strip characters per se; the fourth wall is broken but their world is not.

[For the diametric opposite of that I'm reminded of the 1st-season SNL skit where Cap'n Kirk & the bridge crew are utterly defeated by the network canceling the show, and the bridge set being dismantled around them!  The fourth wall broke them…]


Edited to add:  It has been years since I last read OotS, so it might be helpful if you linked to an example of what bothers you - because I think the distinction here is important, between “the fourth wall” and “suspending disbelief.”  Andy Capp truly is a good example, wherein again, the reader is assumed to be present, and is often addressed directly by the characters ['I'm a miserable little swine,' Andy says; 'Poppycock,' Florrie answers, then she looks out and says, 'He's th' 'appiest little swine I know!']

- yet never do we get what I have seen elsewhere, characters making remarks about their place on the comics page, or playing with the panel borders, or otherwise, as you say, puncturing their own conceptual universe as if it wasn't real to them either.  That post-structural pretentiousness would indeed be a turn-off!

[feotakahari]

I’d probably like OOTS more if it were a pure comedy. What bugged me most about it was when it tried to have moral lessons, because even when it wasn’t breaking the fourth wall while doing so, the lack of a fourth wall in other aspects kept reminding me that I was being preached to by an author. In a story that feels more like a world to itself, even when the author is being preachy, it’s easier to convince myself not to notice or tell myself the author could mean any of multiple messages. I feel like I can grapple with the story on more of an equal level, and interpret its ideas in the way that makes sense to me, not whatever way the author wants me to think.

Then again, I vaguely recall not liking the fourth-wall gags in Shrek, and that was anything but preachy.

[lb_lee]

It depends. I DEFINITELY feel it's overused... but for me, it's a symptom of something bigger: the whole cynical self-aware nostalgia thing when a work is constantly referring and calling back to itself as a work of fiction. (This might be part of why the MCU has totally failed to get me invested, even though I fucking LOVE stupid superhero movies. I WATCHED THE GORDAN KORMAN FANTASTIC FOUR, for Chrissake!)

For me, I think it's because there's a sort of self-aware smirk that guts the story's own emotional resonance. Like the teenager who pretends they don't care to hide how much they DO care, except a teenager is young enough not to know better. But if THE CREATOR doesn't care about their work, why should I, a viewer?

If you're playing up how fictional and not real a story is, you are sometimes poking your audience and going, "It's not real, why do you care so much?" Which can be insulting.

That said, I totally sometimes try to play with the fourth wall in my NONFICTION comics. But that's in part because I want to call attention to the fact that I'm aware of my life as a narrative, and want to point out that the NARRATIVE and the REALITY are not exactly the same thing. My memory is painfully fallible, and my work has to recognize that I'm telling a story that I KNOW I don't remember clearly or correctly.

...and now I just realized another reason I stopped reading Deadpool.

[feotakahari]

I’ve found that classic tropes are often targeted to a very specific demographic, and the degree to which a story lionizes and enforces its tropes is also the frequency with which characters who do not fit those demographics are marginalized, humiliated, and unceremoniously killed off. Conversely, a story that examines its tropes is more likely to allow multiple demographics to be active and have agency.

If I may repost from Tumblr:

“Actual plot point from a book I don’t respect: the magic of narratives forces women to fall in love with men who rescue them. If you want a woman to be rescued, but don’t want her to fall in love, you should send another woman, because the magic of narratives doesn’t understand lesbianism and will never force a woman to fall in love with another woman.

“Actual plot point from a book I do respect (The Long Look): a man rescues a woman and expects her to have sex with him. The woman stabs him to death to prevent him from raping her.”

[nodrog]

Good ol’ Tumblr.  I wonder if they ever hear the laughter.

[entanglingbriars]

You definitely wouldn't like A Series of Unfortunate Events then. The relationship of reader to author is a significant theme of the books and the fourth wall isn't so much broken as smashed.

[feotakahari]

I have a vague memory of giving up on those books because it didn’t seem like the plot was progressing at all as the characters moved from one peril to another.

[entanglingbriars]

There isn't an overarching plot at all until the fifth book, and even then it's slow going. The last few books are really plot-heavy and also total mindfucks.