I’m starting to think that some of you aren’t communists, you’re contrarians. Pan’s Labyrinth is magical realism, go sit in a corner.
wat no really what gave you that idea
spoiler
A massive ammount of Latin-American story telling especially Mexican story telling is magical realism, so this kinda pings my "goddamn mayos again"
First time I ran in to the genre was "Bless me Ultima" and which I remember nothing about except that I liked it and that it involved Mexican-Americans somehow.
….do I have to say I also watched Espina del Diablo and that one mission in red dead redemption?
I’m starting to think that some of you aren’t communists, you’re contrarians.
yeah that's a bit of a thing around here
Captain Vidal scares the shit out of me to this day. It's an amazing movie but I don't really want to watch it, solely bc of Vidal.
Yeah, and Bono is one of the great poets of our time.
:liberalism:
I like del Toro's taste in media and fiction, we share some of the same favorite creators, I absolutely despise his works. I think he's one of the biggest hacks running around Hollywood. I'd rather watch a Zack Snyder movie, or a Ruben Fleischer movie, or an Uwe Boll movie. Uwe Boll's Postal > anything Del Toro. Every single time I try to keep an open mind, and every single time I end up bored and disappointed. He's like mexican Kevin Smith, just worse. I thought his best movie was Pacific Rim, and only because it was so dumb.
This is why Stalin shot the old Bolsheviks, revolutionary lack of taste
I thought magical realism was when you're a not-white author wanting to talk about how banally intrusive Capitalism is in everyday life, but you don't want your book to be review bombed by :lmayo: for being "tOo pOliTiCaL" so you turn it into a metaphor that your characters just have to deal with, because that's how it is in real life?
I dunno my woke SJW Postmodern Neo-Marxists College Professors forced me to read Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and now the force-ghost of Jordan Peterson is haunting me.
I'm shitposting, but Beloved is kinda about that. Although racism rather than capitalism, I guess.
when a mexican writer sees a fairy, that's magical realism
"Eres un mago, Harry."
Nobel prize committee: "Oh shit, oh fuck."
Because you're at best a middling intellect with a shallow imagination, who is fearful of, and thus hateful of, the prospect of the world not being reducible to pat explanations.
It's big in south american lit. Like 100
daysyears of Solitude uses it a lot - honestly worth a read even if you hate magical realism, it's one of the world greats up there with War and Peace and shit. Maybe you don't like the more modern magical realism like What We Do In The Shadows (or fucking harry potter lol)? Where there's a masquerade keeping everything secret?Not to nitpick but it’s 100 years of solitude, 100 años de Soledad, not days. The book takes place over about a hundred years and follows seven generations of a family in a fictional rural town in Colombia. It’s one of my all time favorite books and I’m even really excited for the Netflix adaptation (mini series, hopefully they’re still making it as I haven’t heard anything in years and I hope it doesn’t suck when it does finally come out).
the Netflix adaptation
:NOOOOO: NETFLIX LEAVE GARCIA MARQUEZ ALONE NOOOO
Understandable sentiment, and not sure if Gabo ever would have gone for it himself, but his wife/son who manage his estate did and gave their reasoning.
Basically, they say the reason Garcia Marquez never granted movie rights to his works was two-fold: one, the stories are too long to be squeezed into a feature length film and done justice and two: every time Warner Bros or whoever would come knocking they wanted to make a movie in English.
Netflix was able to show that they could do extended storytelling in Spanish for a global audience with shows like Narcos etc, so the estate agreed. Gabo’s son will be involved with the production, I’m cautiously optimistic that it could be a good adaptation.
I'm really excited for the next chapter in Gabo Thrones' story. I'm glad Netflix is picking up where HBO fell short.
100 Years of Solitude
Hell yeah. Seriously loved this book. It's the only one I can remember finishing and being completely blown away by. I've gifted it several times even though I don't think anyone I've gifted it to has actually read it.
It was the first full length book I read in Spanish after learning it as a second language (years into learning Spanish after already being fluent in speaking, I decided to start reading novels to continue improving), and yeah it is absolutely incredible. Definitely can be a bit confusing at parts with how many characters have similar or the same names etc but it’s a hundred percent worth it.
Yeah magical realism has the element where supernatural shit happens and it never gets acknowledged as something crazy. Like in 100 years where a ghost shows up and it’s played as a major annoyance and not horror.
a ghost shows up and it’s played as a major annoyance and not horror.
I feel like treating random ass ghosts as a horror thing is very :lmayo:
:lmayo: "Oh no! Something that might not be entirely possible to process into useful resources! I'm scared!"
might not be entirely possible to process into useful resources
Laughs in ghost busters :porky-happy:
And just the assumption that anything strange and unusual is automatically hostile. So many cultures view ghosts as a positive, often helpful phenomena but in white america it's always supposed to be scary.
I feel like it starts out that way in the muggle world, but otherwise I'd consider it full fantasy (lib and boring, but fantasy nevertheless)
You're talking about something very broad. It spans from Pans Labyrinth and Hundred Years of Solitude to a good chunk of Urban Fantasy via things like Over the Garden Wall and Ian Bank's non-SF novels.
Heck, you could say Disco Elysium is Magical Realism. You could say The Secret Garden is Magical Realism. What are you complaining about specifically?
Yeah now that I think about it with the Pale and the cryptid and such Disco Elysium totally is magical realism
I feel like this thread from earlier (and my response) is a good response to this one https://hexbear.net/post/217485/comment/2768512
Well so one big hang-up for me is the blurring of science/technology and magic, both sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and its converse. But I am just being a nerd there so let’s skip that.This is such a huge thing though. So many people today don’t want Magic to be Magic. They want a setting that is Magic-Punk. Magic as a technology, as a science, and as a resource.
What is the point of magic if not an exploration of a reality that is not our own? Why in the hell would mages be content to slave away under the shackles of capitalism? (speaking here of setting where mages are often just more efficient labors, in some settings replacing able-bodied people as the proletarian class entirely!) If these mages are so powerful and common they can constitute an entire working class, then at least be realistic an interesting; the cities would devolve into gang warfare and lawlessness almost immediately. the average worker has guns for hands!!
I tend to be into fae-wildy, Kind Of Other Dimensions But Incomprehensible To Us, Chaos Magick-y type stuff.
I think they are talking about authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and such
fuck yes, this! if there exists a shimmer of another possible world, why doesn't it rupture everything in this fantasy? why the fuck would you write a story that takes new possibilities and shackles them to the horizon of our neo-liberal world??
i know that's the concept, but i think it's an apt name for the genre known as "magical realism". except smug liberals would hate to admit to themselves that their ideology has a choke point
I'm thinking the OP is getting the genre mixed up
Maybe they meant like gritty fantasy or something lol
Seems like they're ranting about George RR Martin more than Gabo
Stuff like The Dresden Files or Vampire: the Masquerade is usually called Urban Fantasy, tho, and we still call Gambo Thrones fantasy.
Magical realism has a certain literary, postmodernist bent that's kinda distinctive from that, even if the category is too broad to be useful.
The Mighty Boosh might be considered magical realism, but either way, my take is I can handle magic being commonplace in fiction as long as it isn't excessively gamified and especially if it isn't metagamified.
Capitalist realism is bleak enough. Turning magic into an exploitable resource with predictable returns has a similar bleakness for me and I generally don't enjoy fiction with too much of that.
on the other hand if Magic is Magic you have to justify why nobody made an attempt at rigorous study of it and how anybody has learned to do anything with it.
Often it's as simple as magic doesn't have consistent rules that can be rigorously studied, and you just have to rely on vibes and stuff an old dude told you and hope for the best. Also having to ask nature spirits and gods for help and kind of just hoping they like your offering of cigarettes and whisky enough to help you.
Often it’s as simple as magic doesn’t have consistent rules that can be rigorously studied, and you just have to rely on vibes and stuff an old dude told you and hope for the best
huh i thought we decided deus ex machina sorts of plot contrivances were bad.
Why should I automatically think plot contrivance/god from the machine are always bad? They can exist in a story and be okay if the story overall is good/entertaining (though I'll give you that when they're bad, they're pretty bad - e.g. any movie set in the era of telephones that bores you into being aware that major plot points can be solved with a phone call ).
well for one thing we already called it a contrivance.
god from the machine is bad because it's nakedly from the machine. it's low-effort it's not clever. it's non-s equitur
like, taste is subjective or whatever, but our hegemonic culture I think rightly disapproves of a writer solving a plot problem by having somebody show up who had nothing to do with the whole rest of the story or having some random event happen.... unless it's carefully done as a subversion of expectations like having some family drama and then they all die in an earthquake and there's some point being made.
I do like it when "Hard-Magic" books do engage with this (this is yet another opportunity for me to plug the Commonweal series for making godlike eldritch magic from beyond hell mostly a branch of Civil/Military Engineering for a revolutionary Socialist state)
Gabriel Garcia Márquez was a comrade. I've read and loved many of his books.
Was The Mighty Boosh magical realism?
I liked The Mighty Boosh, so that's not a rhetorical question.
Leaving too much magical garbage behind Naboo the Enigma's shop having the consequence of luring the Crack Fox to nest there seemed the closest thing to the idea.
