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wickedwordsSo, 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: 2008-10-07 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)