Is it just me, or is there a particular... literary short-story story-structure? I can't say I'm fond of it, but it's a sort of thing that tends to end on a...nihilistic note? Doesn't commit to tragedy, doesn't commit to a happily ever after. Often uses a random accident as a reverse deus ex machina. Is this my imagination?
is this the literary version of the isekai truck??
on a more serious note, if you've written one of these, I'm very curious about the rationale of these kinds of endings. I love me an ambiguous ending, but mentally inventorying my short stories, they usually combine both happy and sad elements, whereas these seem to do neither.
social theory and critique
perhaps this is the reflection of "liberal nihilism" for lack of a better term---where you see that the world is shit but taking any action to improve it would require a rejection of the status quo that would push you further left. these stories mirror the listlessness and powerlessness of our institutions but also dare not imagine a solution to them.
I'm very sympathetic to this viewpoint, cuz I'm a nihilist too. But imagining solutions is fun! And it's not like we have anything better to do.
@nebulos NO Ur right it's the literary, probably iowa workshop, standard
@swanchime @nebulos Yes, that sounds about right to me.
It also seems like at least half of the science fiction short stories I read.
@nebulos Absolutely a real thing, and it’s definitely some combination of Iowa style plus whatever the New Yorker publishes. (and i actually enjoy New yorker stories a lot of the time!)
@nebulos yeah it's pretty dissatisfying lol at least for my unrefined tastes
social theory and critique, Legend of Korra crit
@nebulos This reminds me of the Kay and Skittles video series on the politics of Legend of Korra. The tl; dr is that the show presents potential alternatives to liberal capitalism--communism, anarchism, and fascism--only to shoot them all down (or rather, shooting down distorted caricatures of communism and anarchism, together with a willful omission of the tie between capitalism and fascism), leaving liberal capitalism as the only viable way forward.
LoK was really the show that took a whole four seasons and a mountain of money to uphold the status quo, which may seem massively pointless until you realize the point is to get people to accept the status quo and not take meaningful actions for change. To close off imaginings of a better world, so that escapism becomes a replacement for escape.
social theory and critique, Legend of Korra crit
@ljwrites yeaaah, it's probably basically impossible to set a show after the world has been saved from fascism within the liberal world view, like how the star wars sequels had the empire just remanifest itself lol.
that said, I still give LoK more props than I give the literary nihilists. something about the indulgence in despair and ennui just grinds my gears
social theory and critique, Legend of Korra crit
@nebulos Interestingly it's also like a meta-narrative parallel to the Allies' victory over the Axis in WWII. Arguably, "we beat the Nazis" was the single greatest moral and material foundation of the post-war order, together with the threat of Communism. Never mind that Nazism and U.S. racist-colonialist market liberalism were far from diametrically opposed systems and that Nazism as an ideology can't be destroyed militarily.
I see what you mean by giving LoK more props, though. At least it's an argument for doing SOMETHING against SOME kind of injustice and violence.
social theory and critique, Legend of Korra crit
@ljwrites can you imagine what the USA's national identity would be like without the nazis? I can't even imagine.
re LoK: Yes--and maybe this is why the MFA types like the nothing-endings so much---they can tell that the LoK-style endings are cartoonish and somehow lacking, but they throw the baby out with the bathwater and paint any kind of meaningful ending as "childish"
social theory and critique, Legend of Korra crit, Nazism & U.S. racism
@nebulos same. In Constitutional Law class, one of the reasons given for the success of cases challenging Jim Crow laws (laws that inspired Hitler btw) was a level of introspection after opposing the Third Reich. The U.S. was in that picture and they didn't like it lmao.
Oh, I think that makes sense! It's true many endings are unearned and hollow because of these fundamental flaws. I guess to a certain mindset it's more comfortable to do away with endings altogether than examine the deeper reasons why they suck.