~ where cinders lie ~

Musing about the realism trend in fiction

I've found that as time goes on, the emphasis in our consumable cultural products tend to a particular idea of realism, and this push has many reasons and objectives:

first and foremost, it's a manifestation of a lack of understanding of fiction as a means of expression. as accumulation of capital increases and entertainment is bought and grown, fiction products tend to a low bar of expectation of the audience, and what better way than presenting something not too ficticious. it's a watered down experience, and reeks of planned obsolescence. you experience less, so you want more, or are trained to not look for more, so you want the same.

this leads to the second point. realism is 'expensive' to produce. i put expensive in quotes here to emphasize the complex relations of power and capital in our late stage capitalist world. we tend to understand expensive processess as more bound to money than anything else, as that is the most direct way we interact with systems of power. but power is multifaceted, and takes other forms, like coercion, which in turn manifests as modes of employment. if movies/games/etc. are expensive to make, and that expense expresses in work done, by workers bound by contract to an exploitative system that then makes it very hard or impossible for those workers to create fiction in their scarce leisure time, we get to the point were the bigger players in the media landscape influences the language of prefered fiction, so it can only be produced by them. and what is produced cannot take risks because it has, as a product, a responsibility to return revenue to investors. anything beyond the meekly acceptable is simply not an option.

the third and final point is the synthesis of the previous two: a monopoly of fiction products which are on a race to the bottom of cost per product floods the market and the spaces of fiction sharing (movie theaters, streaming services, videogame platforms) with works of shallow depth and subpar effort invested in them. and this produces, in turn, an *ever shrinking acceptable ceiling of fiction*, after which an audience is simply not trained by previous works to experience those after a certain point. with no way to analyze metaphor and the interplays between parts of a fictional work, or ways to develop a palate, their experience with the world narrows, as more and more works are left beyond reach, not because those works are pretentious or baroque, but because their toolbox is ever more empty, until there's only a hammer, waiting anxious for its next gray, sordid nail.

ps: i wish this diatribe not to be taken as a condemnation of the audience as a mindless consumer, too stupid to realize or care. on the contrary, in an ever more precarious world, it is everyday more difficult to make mental space for new experiences and broadening one's horizons. and this is no excuse to stop trying: capital aims to take our means of human expression, and we must fight hard everyday to fight back. and i have no doubt that we win in the end.