Not necessarily the whole story, no. I wasn't thinking that -- what I meant was that the emotional moments, when they occur, are more frequent and intense than they really have to be, given the characters and the situation. Post-Trinity fics in SGA fandom are the example that springs immediately to mind -- they're not all emotion all the time, but Rodney breaking down in tears over his ill-treatment can't really be anything but emoporn. *g*
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.
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timeasmymeasure
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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.