FifthView
Vala
Maybe, for me when it comes to the romance genre it's not so much wonder. For me in them, it's about the characters, their drives and ambitions and the eventual romantic entanglement. Not sure it's wonder or not, just the want of a happy ending. At least for me. Then I've always kind of been more of a character focused sort.
I think I'm extremely keyed into the psychology, philosophy (both inaccurate and accurate) that characters hold, worldviews—their habits of thinking. For me, characters and the struggles they go through, what this reveals about them and about us, human beings, can be quite wondrous.
As a teen, I began reading Les Misérables, and I never made it through the whole book, only about half. But fairly early in the book, there's a scene where a bishop lies for Valjean. Just the build-up, then that happening, had me in tears. At the time, it was a wondrous thing.
This is odd, on one hand, because I'm not religious in the normal sense of the word and wouldn't consider myself to be a Christian. But I've had the experience many times. There's the character in the movie The Mission, a slaver who breaks down then seeks absolution (and/or punishment; repentance) through hauling all this massively heavy gear, bound together, up very steep inclines into the jungle. Just the struggle, what this effort signified, (and many other bits and pieces in the movie relating to the character) was wondrous for me.
There's the bit of Salieri in Amadeus, actually several bits, where he's...immersed, to borrow another word from the thread, in Mozart's music. That one scene in particular:
Of course, that also has the benefit of the music itself, heh, and also a character, Salieri, reacting with wonder. Incidentally, that a) a character's reaction plus b) something, the music, that I as viewer can judge for myself were used in conjunction.*
I can't count the number of times I've had a sense of wonder about what was happening inside a character, or the greater significance of what was implied simply by the conjunction of various factors in a story not strictly relating to the physical milieu or even, really, to anything particularly new.
*Edit: Then, also, there's the narration: Displace one note, and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase, and the structure would fall.
Edit#2: I suppose all this is just to say that catching a glimpse inside a person, of something unexpected and very human—something that broadens the view, a revelation of sorts—can be quite wonderful, for me.
Edit#3: Also, an act of extreme heroism, an unexpected sacrifice, some kind of awesome transformation of a character (mindset, trajectory) can be wondrous for me,
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