Yora
Maester
My great love for fiction is clearly fantasy. It's the one thing I want to write and where all my good ideas lie. But I have to admit, some 70% of my favorite works of fiction are all neo-noir movies or video-games. Neo-Noir is really the same as Noir, but from the 80s to the present. It's stuff like Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Drive, Inception, The Dark Knight, Leon, Heat, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Mirror's Edge, Mass Effect 2, and so on. It's a style that deals a lot with crime, but is also full of modern technology and cities, which makes it a rather unlikely source for influences on fantasy. The whole cyberpunk genre is all neo-noir front to back.
But there are two notable exceptions that make me believe that this is an option with huge potential. The first is Hellboy, which is a comic series about a demon who works as a paranormal investigator on contemporary Eart, that is under threat of annihilation by an ancient cosmic entity. It's great. The other one is the Witcher, a series of stories and novels set in a world that at the first glance is a completely straight generic standard fantasy setting, but one in which people see the supernatural and political world around them with 20th century mindsets. Which has some elements of caricature and satire about 20th century (Eastern) European culture and society, but never feels like parody and gives the world a unique yet very consistent and plausible tone. It also has an even more famous videogame adapatation that in my perception has even stronger neo-noir influences and elements. (The same developers now work on a cyberpunk game.)
I think there's some real potential here, and a lot of my preparation and "research" goes into exploring this direction. One thing I noticed is that visual neo-noir works make heavy use of lighting that feels somewhat unnatural to give the whole thing a somewhat surreal atmosphere. In my experience, neo-noir always puts you into a slightly foggy state of mind. This is done by using extreme shadows, as well as a lot of neon light and setting scenes at sunset and sunrise. This gave me the idea to set my stories on a world that has a large orange sun in the sky, and an even bigger moon permanently shrouded in blue clouds, as well as frequent striking polar lights, and regularly describing how they make environments look, as well as having things hidden in shadows, emerging from shadows, or disappearing into shadows, and mentioning complex patterns cast on walls and floors by shadows. I know a lot of people don't like putting a lot of descriptions of scenes into books, but I think this is a huge missed opportunity. You just have to keep it to two or three sentences for each scene, so you got to concentrate on the most striking elements that set the overall tone. The minor details can be left to the imaginations.
But I think probably the biggest aspects that can be lifted from these works are in characterization. I think noir in general takes almost entirely place in conversations between people who don't trust each other. Nobody ever trusts anyone. And even when characters trust others with their lives, they don't trust them with their feelings. All characters are always in a state of slightly weary caution around others. Sadly, this is as far as my pondering has taken me yet. Hopefully you can add some of your thoughts to this that might help illuminating it further.
But there are two notable exceptions that make me believe that this is an option with huge potential. The first is Hellboy, which is a comic series about a demon who works as a paranormal investigator on contemporary Eart, that is under threat of annihilation by an ancient cosmic entity. It's great. The other one is the Witcher, a series of stories and novels set in a world that at the first glance is a completely straight generic standard fantasy setting, but one in which people see the supernatural and political world around them with 20th century mindsets. Which has some elements of caricature and satire about 20th century (Eastern) European culture and society, but never feels like parody and gives the world a unique yet very consistent and plausible tone. It also has an even more famous videogame adapatation that in my perception has even stronger neo-noir influences and elements. (The same developers now work on a cyberpunk game.)
I think there's some real potential here, and a lot of my preparation and "research" goes into exploring this direction. One thing I noticed is that visual neo-noir works make heavy use of lighting that feels somewhat unnatural to give the whole thing a somewhat surreal atmosphere. In my experience, neo-noir always puts you into a slightly foggy state of mind. This is done by using extreme shadows, as well as a lot of neon light and setting scenes at sunset and sunrise. This gave me the idea to set my stories on a world that has a large orange sun in the sky, and an even bigger moon permanently shrouded in blue clouds, as well as frequent striking polar lights, and regularly describing how they make environments look, as well as having things hidden in shadows, emerging from shadows, or disappearing into shadows, and mentioning complex patterns cast on walls and floors by shadows. I know a lot of people don't like putting a lot of descriptions of scenes into books, but I think this is a huge missed opportunity. You just have to keep it to two or three sentences for each scene, so you got to concentrate on the most striking elements that set the overall tone. The minor details can be left to the imaginations.
But I think probably the biggest aspects that can be lifted from these works are in characterization. I think noir in general takes almost entirely place in conversations between people who don't trust each other. Nobody ever trusts anyone. And even when characters trust others with their lives, they don't trust them with their feelings. All characters are always in a state of slightly weary caution around others. Sadly, this is as far as my pondering has taken me yet. Hopefully you can add some of your thoughts to this that might help illuminating it further.
Myth Weaver
