Tomorrow I am going to head to Seattle with my dad so that he can drop me off at school on Saturday, because of this, and the general zaniness that accompanies seeing all of my school buddies for the first time in a month I won’t be posting until I start classes next Tuesday. With that out of the way I’d like to talk to you about stories, more specifically, tragedies.
Everybody loves tragedies, the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, Lily Bart’s downfall, and any French or French Canadian movie for the past fifty years. I hate tragedies. Why would I want to see a tragedy, read a tragedy, hear about a tragedy? So I can be depressed? So I can see how a good of a writer the author is? So I can learn something about the world? No, all tragedies do is muck about in their own self-pity. “Oh look at me I’m so sad and look how sad my life is, isn’t it sad, now pity me wah, wah, wah.” This doesn’t mean I don’t respect tragedy, tragedy most definitely has its place in story, but it certainly isn’t the end. Everyone forgets that the end of Romeo and Juliet isn’t the death of the lovers; it’s the unification of the warring families.
I have no problems with tragic events, in fact, I say the more tragic the better. A good author should make the main characters demise or failure seem inevitable, but the great author saves that character, has them triumph, and the truly amazing author saves that character in a way that seems immediately apparent and simple as soon as it happens, but something the reader would never think of on their own. What I am saying is that a truly great story makes a tragedy, and then keeps going. That is why I can’t stand tragedies, or any films involving writers even remotely French.
P.S. The whole French thing is more of a stereotype, the French do make good films and books that aren’t tragedies, French Canadians on the other hand can bite me.
-Cory Ragsdale
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