![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
So, I can't leave good enough alone. If someone says, 'don't push the shiny red button', well, I have to push it. So, today's question is: What is the difference between Smarm, Emo Porn and a Peak Moment or Money Scene?
So, the entry for Smarm is here:
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Smarm
It was about 1983 when I first used the term and it was based on a Star Wars zine I had been reading, where I came upon the word in a LoC column describing some nicely gooey scenes in a story from the previous issue. There had been all sorts of terrible torture and then extended bits of lovely comfort, and the letter writer said she thought those comfort scenes were a bit smarmy. I had never heard the word before and thought, gee, is that what zine pubbing fandom (to which I was just being introduced) calls that stuff I liked in the story, the gooey bits that gave me the spike in the stomach? Nice to finally know there is a word for it. It was not, of course, intended that way, but when I asked the person who'd loaned me the zine, she, apparently not willing to admit her own ignorance of the word, assured me that my interpretation was correct. Since she'd been buying and reading zines for a couple years before I even knew they existed, I had no reason not to assume she was right about this part of the whole fannish vocabulary I was just learning.
The definition of Emo Porn is here:
http://hth-the-first.livejournal.com/26700.html
So what, I asked myself, *is* emo porn, exactly? And the best I could do at defining it is that emo porn is a climactic moment of high-pitch emotion that is completely focused and unmixed, normally but not always focused on the purity of two characters' feelings for one another. You know it not by what's said but by how it's deployed, the kind of reaction it's intended to elicit from the audience: a breathles, riveted, completely absorbing moment of emotional response. Other kinds of writing tries to make you feel something, to be sure, but emo porn's goal is to make you feel that *whatever you are feeling is everything* -- at least for that moment. It goes straight for the spine, and when it's done well, there's a kind of disconnected elation that results, where you feel like you've been mainlining some powerful emotion in its purest form.
And a 'Peak Moment' is the emotional high point of a story, the gut-wrenching, heart-warming, peak emotional moment, the 'money scene'. Every entry on every story finders community mentions the money scene for a reader, whatever that may be; it's that moment we are trying to find.
I used to call myself an emotional junkie, because I was looking for my emotional fix. Is that something that needs to be documented too?
So, the entry for Smarm is here:
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Smarm
It was about 1983 when I first used the term and it was based on a Star Wars zine I had been reading, where I came upon the word in a LoC column describing some nicely gooey scenes in a story from the previous issue. There had been all sorts of terrible torture and then extended bits of lovely comfort, and the letter writer said she thought those comfort scenes were a bit smarmy. I had never heard the word before and thought, gee, is that what zine pubbing fandom (to which I was just being introduced) calls that stuff I liked in the story, the gooey bits that gave me the spike in the stomach? Nice to finally know there is a word for it. It was not, of course, intended that way, but when I asked the person who'd loaned me the zine, she, apparently not willing to admit her own ignorance of the word, assured me that my interpretation was correct. Since she'd been buying and reading zines for a couple years before I even knew they existed, I had no reason not to assume she was right about this part of the whole fannish vocabulary I was just learning.
The definition of Emo Porn is here:
http://hth-the-first.livejournal.com/26700.html
So what, I asked myself, *is* emo porn, exactly? And the best I could do at defining it is that emo porn is a climactic moment of high-pitch emotion that is completely focused and unmixed, normally but not always focused on the purity of two characters' feelings for one another. You know it not by what's said but by how it's deployed, the kind of reaction it's intended to elicit from the audience: a breathles, riveted, completely absorbing moment of emotional response. Other kinds of writing tries to make you feel something, to be sure, but emo porn's goal is to make you feel that *whatever you are feeling is everything* -- at least for that moment. It goes straight for the spine, and when it's done well, there's a kind of disconnected elation that results, where you feel like you've been mainlining some powerful emotion in its purest form.
And a 'Peak Moment' is the emotional high point of a story, the gut-wrenching, heart-warming, peak emotional moment, the 'money scene'. Every entry on every story finders community mentions the money scene for a reader, whatever that may be; it's that moment we are trying to find.
I used to call myself an emotional junkie, because I was looking for my emotional fix. Is that something that needs to be documented too?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 01:35 am (UTC)But if the difference between Smarm and Emo porn is just the occasional sex scene, is that really a difference? Hmm. You know, I had been trying to wrangle things together when I started my day. Right now, I'm thinking separate pages might be okay.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 11:39 am (UTC)Emoporn to me is any story where the emotional intense intimacy is the payoff (instead or on top of the sexual one)
So, I think the three terms are related, but are different categories, so to speak. Beaches is smarm; SPN's emoporn; Kirk and Spock through the glass is a peak moment. Y/N?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:44 am (UTC)P.S. GO TO FANLORE AND SET UP YOUR ACCOUNT. I mean it. Don't make me come after you.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:44 am (UTC)Emoporn is another name for that same emotional intensity, the goal of the smarm story; same with peak moment. For a H/c fan--one that likes some comfort that is--that's the hoped-for payoff of every story.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 10:19 pm (UTC)http://marythefan.livejournal.com/678139.html
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:27 am (UTC)And you should go mention your definition in the emoporn entry, if it hasn't been mentioned already. This is good stuff.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 06:00 am (UTC)If pressed, I suppose I could pull out half a dozen points from "And Fools Shine On" (which was the story in the forefront of my mind when we first started talking about source and stories as emporn, back then) and say they're the emo-porniest of the story, but the entire story is, as I say in that linked entry, a low-grade wallow of jacked-up emotion, and that makes the whole thing emporn for me. The way I conceived of and continue to use the term is closer to the way Cath and Ana use it both up- and down-thread (although I'd argue that the emotion, itself, doesn't have to be OTT): It's a certain quality and aesthetic, something about the way a story is written, neither a genre nor a particular action/moment, in itself. When I label something "emoporn," I'm not necessarily thinking of the money scene I'd use to describe it in a storyfinder community. I may be thinking of the overall emotional affect of the story. And ... I was going to say that was something a lot of fandoms seem to split off into a specific recs-request community, rather than storyfinders, but that's not entirely accurate, either, because I think recs-request searches tend more toward genre requests, and I don't think emoporn is a genre. It's more like ... a style. It's like noir. Sure, there's a visceral idea of what "noir" is, when someone brings up the term, but an awful lot of genres can actually be written in a noir style. And there's no specific moment that makes them noir (even if there are particularly strong signifiers) - the overall atmosphere is what does that.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:35 pm (UTC)All of this is tying back to a discussion that I once had with a lot of people about "cold pricklies" and "warm fuzzies", and what you are calling emoporn bears a lot of relationship to the warm fuzzies of the time.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 05:57 pm (UTC)I do think emporn is overwhelmingly a label used to describe stories that also can be describe as "warm fuzzy," but ... I'd have to go back and look at the warm-fuzzy/cold-prickly discussion again to be able to talk about that in any detail. I can tell you I worry about the connotations the words "warm fuzzy" are likely to bring to the table, though - besides romance, the other genre I can think of that lends itself really, really well to emporn is horror. And something in me balks at calling horror "warm fuzzy," you know? :g: Even though the differentiation - from what I remember - was the extent to which you make emotion text vs. keep it subtext in the story, I think people are likely to look at a story described as a "warm fuzzy" story and think those are specifically the kind of emotions it's supposed to evoke.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-06 11:12 pm (UTC)If the particular circumstances of an emoporn scene happens to hit your kinks, it's a straight shot to the gut; if it doesn't, it's anywhere from squirm-inducing to laughable.
And smarm, like others have said, is a more specific genre -- the meaning of "smarm" that I was introduced to, in the late '90s, is more general than how I see it used now (I used to think of smarm as, basically, the "c" in h/c). But emoporn can be anywhere, in any sort of story.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 12:22 am (UTC)Edit: And, hey, your icon? SiP is full of canon emoporn. *g*
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:36 am (UTC)And I think that emotional PWP is only one subset of emoporn anyway, because the element that really defines emoporn (for me) is its unchecked and over-the-top emotion, and that can occur in any kind of story, whether or not it's the ostensible point of the plot.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:45 am (UTC)And hmmm about your definiton of emoporn. For me, I am still thinking peak moments, but for you, the whole story has an elevated level of emotional language the "warm fuzzy" stuff. (though not always warm fuzzy.) But don't those stories with their language at heightened intensity all the time, read a little flat? There's got to be some emotional variation in there somewhere, right?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 05:10 am (UTC)Although, hmm, I wonder if one of the things that makes emoporn read as emoporn is not just the intensity of the emotional experiences, but also their frequency and duration? I wonder if reader fatigue is actually part of it? Not only does the writer maintain the emotional bar at a higher level than usual, but they have to keep pushing it higher and higher in order to score the emotional hit that we're all going for when we write. I think you mentioned this in another comment, and I'm not sure if this is exactly where you were going there, but I do think that reader fatigue is something we have to be aware of when we write. To use a canon example, Supernatural has basically emoporned its way to the point where it doesn't really give those payoffs anymore -- at least, I don't get them. I get more of an emotional high off a small touch or a fraught look in SGA than I do from a sobbing scene of manpain in SPN, because the overall emotional tone is more restrained in SGA. In SPN, the small gestures are getting lost in the emotional background noise, and previous seasons have raised the emotional bar so high that there's really not anywhere left to go.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 12:18 pm (UTC)Emo-porn, I believe, is not a question of pure 'watsonian' content (what happens in the story) but also a question of the stylistic treatment that these events receive at the hand of the author. So yes, a lot of post-trinity fic are emoporn and wallow in that, and of course, the people who like and seek emoporn are drawn to certain plot devices, to certain thematic choices, but it's still not the name of a genre like smarm or het or horror are genre names.
There are horror movies with a gore stylistic bent, and horror movies with a style a lot more sparse and with a lot less blood on the lense of the camera - they're both horror. In the same way, some smarm can be purple prose and some can be written in Hemingway's style - while oppositely, emoporn is the style in which the emotion is focused on, imo. Like you say, I'd say it's a question of "overall emotional tone", and not of the plot/events that drive use there.
So... yeah. Not a genre but a style, regardless of if the content matches across the stories that fall in the category. (of course you can gather all material with a stylistic common point and call that a 'genre' but imo that is a taxonomic mistake.)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 12:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 03:14 am (UTC)the money shot or peak of a story exist in pretty much story (every story has a climax), and can be wholly unrelated to either emotion, porn, or closeness of any stripe. it's a structural element of narration, and doens't predicate on genre or content, imo.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:11 am (UTC)So really, it looks like yeah. Smarm, emoporn and peak emotional moments are all ways people have used to descibe the same thing: that moment of emotional intensity of a story that gives you the payoff and maybe a high. We really are all looking for the next fix.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 11:49 am (UTC)Otherwise it's like you're putting in one article 'crime' as a genre, 'manierist' as a style, and 'suspense', the tension felt by spectators at certain key sequences. Notions that can meet and intersect but are not the same thing.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 04:02 am (UTC)Course, it works the other way around too. Some people don't build up the peak moment and just leave it at the same level as the rest of the text, and that's frustrating in it's own way.
But call it smarm, call it emoporn, call it a peak moment...it's still looking for the sweet spot.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 05:36 pm (UTC)(My personal one is muuuuch maligned and the start of a colossal fan war, but I am still stunned by the final porch scene in BTVS 5x07. Not just "I can't go through with the killing now" but a nervous "what's wrong?" tagged on the end of it :D )
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 10:42 pm (UTC)I'm not sure that I agree that smarm is a full-fledged genre, though. Gen is a genre, hurt/comfort is a genre, but I'd say that smarm, like emo-porn, is a style (or maybe a sub-genre of emo-porn?). And I wouldn't say that it necessarily always has to be gen, either. I've read slash that reads exactly like smarm with sex scenes added in.
If slash is what happens when you take away the glass, smarm is what happens when you have three paragraphs describing the crystal tears Kirk is weeping and his love for Spock. It's emo-porn taken one step further -- the intense emotion is not just focussed on, but verbally and physically expressed, openly and repeated, in narration if not in dialogue. It's not always quite the same thing as h/c, either, because the hurt is often incidental and usually only there as an excuse for the comfort, which is itself an excuse for the emo-porn/smarm moments. (Whereas regular h/c generally places an equal amount of emphasis on the hurt part of the equation -- my theory is that h/c's actually two kinks, one for hurt and one for comfort, rather than a single kink, and that not all fans have both of them).
It often reads like something that wants to be slash but didn't quite make it there, not so much because the smarmy bits are standing in for what would be sex scenes in slash, but because most modern-day men aren't given to falling upon one anothers' breasts and tearfully declaring their eternal platonic love anymore they way they did in Victorian novels. If I had to give a definition that didn't focus on the emotional intensity, I'd say that smarm is the trophes of romantic love applied to friendship, which produces... basically? romantic love with no sex.