I admit I got sidetracked from your point of this post to reading the old LJ post you link to, and the one that that post links to, and the old blog posts I linked to, and remembering when people got in these fabulous rich discussions on LJs and blogs before everything deteriorated to Facebook/twitter microblogging.
This of course makes me really sad that I don't have anything in particular to offer as an example for you.
Hmm. Buffy, both the movie and the television series, were actually set up to do exactly what you are talking about, but you are supposed to figure it out in the first episode of the television show. This is not a horror movie in which the blonde girl named Buffy gets murdered.
Then there's the problem where it happens because of societal expectations about the creator and the medium, which changes the interpretation of the book. I can't even count how many people critiqued Bitterblue because it was a terrible romance. But it wasn't a romance. It was a girl-centered young adult fantasy in an era when most girl-centered young adult fantasies are romances, and where the previous two books by the author had had central romantic elements. And that was enough to make people read it as romance, and then get angry because--despite the presence of a romantic pairing--it was in no way a romance. I remember having a similar reaction when I read Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract. It is a non-romance novel that has a marriage pairing and love story at the center of it, but it is not a genre romance. But it's by Georgette Heyer, and most printings package it exactly like her Regencies. In these two cases the work itself is not doing what you are talking about, but the larger social construct changes the reading of the work.
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Date: 2017-03-14 04:41 pm (UTC)This of course makes me really sad that I don't have anything in particular to offer as an example for you.
Hmm. Buffy, both the movie and the television series, were actually set up to do exactly what you are talking about, but you are supposed to figure it out in the first episode of the television show. This is not a horror movie in which the blonde girl named Buffy gets murdered.
Then there's the problem where it happens because of societal expectations about the creator and the medium, which changes the interpretation of the book. I can't even count how many people critiqued Bitterblue because it was a terrible romance. But it wasn't a romance. It was a girl-centered young adult fantasy in an era when most girl-centered young adult fantasies are romances, and where the previous two books by the author had had central romantic elements. And that was enough to make people read it as romance, and then get angry because--despite the presence of a romantic pairing--it was in no way a romance. I remember having a similar reaction when I read Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract. It is a non-romance novel that has a marriage pairing and love story at the center of it, but it is not a genre romance. But it's by Georgette Heyer, and most printings package it exactly like her Regencies. In these two cases the work itself is not doing what you are talking about, but the larger social construct changes the reading of the work.