AngelaRCox
Dreamer
Hey, Mythic Scribes! It's been a while because I've been working so hard on my research I haven't had much time for social stuff, but I FINISHED IT! (literally last night) And YOU ALL HELPED ME!
I can't tell you how grateful I am that you guys literally let me lurk for a year and just read all your stuff (well, all the stuff that was relevant to the research and not too personal). And here we are two years later, and the dissertation is being reviewed as I type this by my committee. I defend on November 22!
I want to tell you some of the cool things you guys helped me discover about genre.
Also I've got some really cool charts.
These are the most commonly attributed authors/texts/etc. It's pretty unsurprising to me, but Star Wars? That intrigues me. (keep in mind this data was collected 2 years ago)
These are the most commonly mentioned conventions or "tropes":
These are the most commonly expressed values, which is where I'm getting that "generative tensions" thing from (in combination with explicit definitions of fantasy). It's a really interesting chart:
I've got some other charts and data that I can offer if requested, but most of it takes a little more explanation of the method to make sense, so that will do for now.
Again, I love you guys. There was one other community involved in the study, but it was reading the Mythic Scribes posts that really got me motivated, and you guys made me smile almost every time I sat down to work on it, even when it seemed like awful work. You're a great community!
I can't tell you how grateful I am that you guys literally let me lurk for a year and just read all your stuff (well, all the stuff that was relevant to the research and not too personal). And here we are two years later, and the dissertation is being reviewed as I type this by my committee. I defend on November 22!
I want to tell you some of the cool things you guys helped me discover about genre.
I defined genre as a transmedial, mutable, associative, recognized system. There's a lot of really labyrinthine theory behind that, but it's also based on watching how you guys talk about fantasy and, I hope, describes your (our) processes fairly.
I'm calling it the "genre space model" because I argue that genre functions like a game. If you're familiar with Huizinga's concept of the "magic circle," it's based on that--the notion that everyone knows that there are different rules in the game space and follows them.
There's a thing at the core of each genre that I'm calling the "generative tension." This is a pair of paradoxical ideologically opposed values that makes the genre work by driving change and generating new texts and criticism. In Fantasy, it's a tension between escapism and a desire to make stuff allegorically parallel to the real world, which obviously don't work together logically but work together great in fantasy.
Also I've got some really cool charts.
These are the most commonly attributed authors/texts/etc. It's pretty unsurprising to me, but Star Wars? That intrigues me. (keep in mind this data was collected 2 years ago)
These are the most commonly mentioned conventions or "tropes":
These are the most commonly expressed values, which is where I'm getting that "generative tensions" thing from (in combination with explicit definitions of fantasy). It's a really interesting chart:
I've got some other charts and data that I can offer if requested, but most of it takes a little more explanation of the method to make sense, so that will do for now.
Again, I love you guys. There was one other community involved in the study, but it was reading the Mythic Scribes posts that really got me motivated, and you guys made me smile almost every time I sat down to work on it, even when it seemed like awful work. You're a great community!