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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2856 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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You have a very unconventional definition that your argument rests on that you failed to introduce when you made the argument. To reduce tone to believable characterization, or your immersion based on characterization, you have to ignore most of the ways the word tone is commonly used, which is generally as the entire structured mood in a film, touching on its genre and its "point-of-view", influenced by all aspects of its storytelling, including cinematography, soundtrack, and genre expectations. Imagine the early scenes of a horror movie where everyone is happy. Is the tone a happy cheerful one? Most people would say no, the tone is still horror, or a kind of tension, just by virtue of knowing what's next. Even if people said the tone is happy, just add some tense violins to the score and its now definitely horror no matter what the characters are doing. That's dramatic irony which most people would argue is an important part of tone, but is completely missing from your definition because it is entirely based on what the characters of the movie are feeling/doing.

To reduce it to immersion also robs it of its variations. Tone isn't just on a spectrum of effectiveness. It can be horror, it can be lighthearted, it can be romantic, cynical, and yes, ambivalent. And a break in tone is commonly seen to mean just shifting from one to another, not as an automatic failure. If something "ruins" the tone, people are generally identifying that the movie shifted tones unskillfully, although some people seem to think that shifting whatsoever is unskillful, which I would strongly disagree with.

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