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Dec. 26th, 2018 12:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunartulipAbout a year and a half ago, I finally read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. Previously I'd known some things about it through osmosis and through reading Silmarillion fanfic, but I'd never actually read through the whole thing myself. And, when I started, it felt like kind of a slog. Tolkien's writing style required me to read more slowly than usual in order to not miss anything, and the plot moved slowly even aside from stylistic concerns, and I kind of had to force myself to keep going with it at first.
That changed when I was midway through the second volume, not due to any change that I can recall in the story's style or pacing, but because of a thought I had: "this story's genre isn't actually fantasy in the modern sense; its actual genre is old-timey epic saga. It has more in common with the Iliad than with Mother of Learning." After thinking that, suddenly I enjoyed the story a lot more. Of course it had slow-to-read flowery language; that's how those old epics are, or at least how the translations of them that I've read are. Of course it had slower pacing than I'm used to; that's similarly part of the genre.
A couple years ago, I watched Star vs. the Forces of Evil for the first time. The show was midway through its second season, I think? Not that far in by current standards, but still a relatively substantial time commitment. And for the first couple episodes I had trouble with it, because like... there was no overarching plot, that early in? It set up an interesting premise in the first episode and then just turned into action/slice-of-life antics. But then I remembered a comment a friend of mine had made about the show earlier, that its major point of strength was in its very fun episode-level plots. And so I started viewing it that way, and proceeded to very much enjoy the show even before the metaplot showed up. (Although the episodes which advanced the metaplot were still generally my favorites, once I got to them.)
These two incidents point at a broader trend, I think: enjoyment of a given piece of media is dependent, not just on the combination of the media's content and the viewer's tastes, but also on how the viewer is looking at it. Changing one's model of What The Story Is Doing can change one's enjoyment of it, even given no further changes either to one's own tastes or to the content of the story itself.
This has two implications of note, I think. First, for someone consuming a highly-recommended bit of media and not finding it to click with them, it might be worth trying different framings of What It's Doing and seeing if any of those framings make it suddenly work. (Or just ask whoever recommended it to them what its points of particular quality are; that can be a useful shortcut a lot of the time.) Second, for someone making media recommendations, it can be worth going out of one's way to ensure that those recommendations convey how one views the recommended bit of media, at least to the extent that it can be conveyed to its target audience without unwanted spoilers; because that way the recommendee has a head start on finding the optimal framing as discussed earlier in this paragraph.
That changed when I was midway through the second volume, not due to any change that I can recall in the story's style or pacing, but because of a thought I had: "this story's genre isn't actually fantasy in the modern sense; its actual genre is old-timey epic saga. It has more in common with the Iliad than with Mother of Learning." After thinking that, suddenly I enjoyed the story a lot more. Of course it had slow-to-read flowery language; that's how those old epics are, or at least how the translations of them that I've read are. Of course it had slower pacing than I'm used to; that's similarly part of the genre.
A couple years ago, I watched Star vs. the Forces of Evil for the first time. The show was midway through its second season, I think? Not that far in by current standards, but still a relatively substantial time commitment. And for the first couple episodes I had trouble with it, because like... there was no overarching plot, that early in? It set up an interesting premise in the first episode and then just turned into action/slice-of-life antics. But then I remembered a comment a friend of mine had made about the show earlier, that its major point of strength was in its very fun episode-level plots. And so I started viewing it that way, and proceeded to very much enjoy the show even before the metaplot showed up. (Although the episodes which advanced the metaplot were still generally my favorites, once I got to them.)
These two incidents point at a broader trend, I think: enjoyment of a given piece of media is dependent, not just on the combination of the media's content and the viewer's tastes, but also on how the viewer is looking at it. Changing one's model of What The Story Is Doing can change one's enjoyment of it, even given no further changes either to one's own tastes or to the content of the story itself.
This has two implications of note, I think. First, for someone consuming a highly-recommended bit of media and not finding it to click with them, it might be worth trying different framings of What It's Doing and seeing if any of those framings make it suddenly work. (Or just ask whoever recommended it to them what its points of particular quality are; that can be a useful shortcut a lot of the time.) Second, for someone making media recommendations, it can be worth going out of one's way to ensure that those recommendations convey how one views the recommended bit of media, at least to the extent that it can be conveyed to its target audience without unwanted spoilers; because that way the recommendee has a head start on finding the optimal framing as discussed earlier in this paragraph.
