I've watched Dominic Noble's video on Starship Troopers and honestly he brings up a point. People thought Heimlen was into the ideas being proposed in Starship Troopers. But he'd also written in a story titled Space Cadet (published shortly before ST) that passionately pleads ideas that are the opposite of those in ST. So whether or not he was portraying his own honest opinions or getting really into his work to a really thorough degree is up for debate
"Controversial take, I don't like Pratchett. Wait, no, he's Discworld. Nevermind. I like Discworld." Remember guys, put the torch *out* before you put it and the pitchfork down. We wouldn't want to accidentally start any fires.
Best evil marketing tactic: write 9 endings, put them to publish at various rarities, tell no one, wait for the war over which way it ended to die down, come clean and say you released 10.
Even better, actually release 10 endings, but have the 10th one be in a single book, and have that be given as a gift to someone you know won't read it.
I think one of my favorite examples of a Fully Omnicient Narrator is The Princess Bride. The Narrator is the old man who reads the story. He is literally narrating the book and adding his own flaire every now and then.
I am so glad you're finally doing Trope talks. I actually found you because you were covering sarcastic Productions how it made me follow you as well. So I really can't wait to see you react to all the different tropes she's already covered. Also a funny thing she actually has covered Stranger in a Strange Land
'Oh, Batman!' (I don't know why I can't type quotation marks all of a sudden). Arthur Dent is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. DC has Arthur Curry, who is Aquaman, and Harvey Dent, who is TwoFace, but no Arthur Dent (except, perhaps, for in-universe copies of Hitchhiker's Guide).
You know how important understanding the meaning of words is? Some of my classmates at a bilingual school couldn't be bothered to use the words "disturb" or "annoy" when talking to teachers so they'd use *molest* to mean the same thing.
my favorite omniscient narrator is the narrator of kaguya-sama: love is war, specifically the english dub one because he uses his powers of "knowing what everyone in the scene is thinking about right now" for *chaos*. he feels like a friend sitting next to you and commentating on the love life of these anime teenagers like it's some sports match and he's watched it several times to know exactly what everything means but also he's still really invested in it and gets really upset when they act stupid.
@@HBHaga yeah but in this it is really noticeable. At least the others were more originals so it's easier to implement your own style. Avatar was already popular and had it's own style so there is an expectation there and it is an action adventure which just doesn't fit his style at all.
@@LukasJampen I don't even think it's a matter of style. Shyamalan tried to cram a 20 episode first season of an animated show into a 103 minute live action film, which I have never seen done well even within the same medium. He had a lot to adapt, very little time to do it in, and tried to make do with lengthy exposition to fill in the gaps. That movie was arguably Shyamalan's single greatest failure in execution.
@@HBHaga sure but even if he paced it out more his style of directing is very limited and in basically every of his movies characters are very flat and unemotional either because the actors aren't trying or because it's what he wants from them (not sure which) that just doesn't work for a fairly lighthearted comedic and emotional show. It can (emphisis on can) work in thrillers and other movies if you want to create a feeling of wrongness or want to intentionaly create the uncanny valley effect. It worked in the village (at least for me) but not much else. Even if there was less exposition his movie would have been awfull and his style just doesn't mesh with with epic fantasy.
Also Ciaphas Cain from 40k is an excellent example of an inattentive narrator. The books are his memoirs he wrote decades after the fact and what he remembers is all the times he almost got eaten by tyranids but he nver writes how the overall war or battle is going because he only cared about not dying. This leads to the inquisiror that is compiling them (to read for other inquisitor) to have to add additional context.
One of the most interesting cases I've ever seen for an unreliable narrator was the epilogue for Homestuck (which was functionally more like a sequel than an epilogue, but this is Andrew Hussie we're talking about, he build Homestuck on defying the expectation that come with the name of certain story pieces). A massive chunk of the epilogue is written as a fairly traditional story format (minus the singular branch in events that technically creates two stories, but this is Andrew Hussie and Homestuck, so it's also still one story... shit's weird man), with what appeared to be a completely normal narrator. But then a ways into things, it's revealed that the narrator has actually been one of the characters the whole time, who's in-world canonical powers have grown and expanded in such a way that they're aware of being in a story and can now literally narrate their reality, influencing the actions of their friends by narrating thoughts into their heads, and seemingly even feelings to an extent.
ok, loads of comments here; first I'm glad you're getting into the tropes talks. second, the "dream within a dream" scene at around 38:00 is from Event Horizon, good movie. Also, the reason Red went into detail on Stranger in a Strange Land is cause she did a great summary of it that I HIGHLY encourage you to watch. She's also done tropes on idiot plots, magical otherworlds and a bunch of other topics.
24:35 is a reference to anoter trope, The noodle incident, some thing (usually a weird one) happened and the character just mention it but never get into details, letting the audience to fill in the blanc on even how it happened. ''are you sure you dont want some of Heuy's Special Pizza?'' ''Nah, last time I took some I ended up in a fist fight with a ninja Crocodile in the sewers.''
Yep, that was Shyamalan's Avatar movie ... that thing had an amazing number of problems straight from the movie's conception. Trope Talks are some of Red's best material along with her mythology deep dives. I think my fave Trope Talk is about plot twists.
32:14 just because most people don't know how to use them, dosn't mean they are bad, you don't say cake is a horrible tasting food just because there is no one in your family that knows how to do it right.
12:19 personally I disagree with the idea of using emojis more, partly due to the 'words matter' concept very much carrying over to emojis. There is surprisingly common occurrences of people not understanding how a emoji is typically used and choosing it cause the picture seems related ( i.e. a text from a relative saying that a more distant relative has died followed by a skull emoji). Alternatively, you get the people that do know what those emoji mean and still decides to tack them onto the end of a sentence that completely clashes in tone.
The "Reading from a perspective of someone watching everything go down" perspective is something I think can be interesting, mostly because if you write it well enough, you can add in tiny bits of information that the writer may find to be worthless (yet wrote in what he noticed anyways) and that could tell you of what truth had been hiding under this one character's perspective. Or the best part of this format, the sudden narrator swap. "Why are we suddenly following a first-person perspective from the MC when it's always been a third-person perspective from his 'fan boy'." - asked the reader who read further to see if the fanboy had really ended up meeting his end in this adventure that suddenly started reading like an autobiography.
One interesting take on “it was all a dream” trope is “ it was all a dream but the dream is an actual place with actual consequences “ so the character wakes up from what ever scenario they were in only later to end up in the dream world after the fact but awak
The Trope Talk series is so fun! As someone who enjoys writing and storytelling, it can be cool to look into certain tropes I see a lot in media or like using in my own writing, how they came about and how they can be played with. Been really enjoying watching your reactions to OSP's other videos, so looking forward to when you get back into doing more of the Trope Talk vids!
26:52 Battlefield 1 does this with the Fighter Pilot story in the campaign. He's introduced at the very start as a con-artist etc, and at the veyr end he reminds us that he's a lier, then immediately asks essentially "Would I lie to you?".
Jumping in with a tip that you really should watch Red's Stranger in a Strange Land video, because Deep Thoughts with Heinlein is a Thing. as a bonus, I agree with the person who suggested watching the Trope Talks in order, as they do build on each other over time. My kids and I have been watching OSP for several years now and I love them forever because they made my kids fans of The Odyssey as *middle schoolers*. It's so fun to watch someone enjoy this for the first time!
18:39 There are a few games where you're told the narrator's instructions are untrustworthy...but then you're told they might not be. So the "Unreliable Narrator" idea is used as an active element.
One thing I find funny that I don't see too often is when the someone is narrating a backstory but the narration and scene don't match. An example is Meet the Robinsons, the villain is talking about his past how everyone hated him but the scene shows kids being cool about him. Both funny and tragic how it shows the villain not moving forward.
About the subject of Narrator biases and opinions. The Light Novel series Ascendance of a bookworm handles this really interesting. The main parts of each volume are from the pov of the main character Mine and she is basically the narrator as well and she has sometimes a very biased view on events and how she thinks others will interpret them. This is mainly because of 2 reasons. On one hand she was a 22-23 year old Japanese woman that ended up as a 5 year old girl in a fantasy world and then drastically shifts social environments every couple of years. This leaves her with basic understandings of those environments but also a mess of social norms and expectations and a way of doing things nobody else would. She goes in the span of 5-7 years from being a poor commoner to merchant to priestess to high noblility with enough influence to interact with royalty. This leaves her very knowledgable (including knowledge from earth) but also creates major blindspots and weaknesses. At the beginning of most volumes we get a chapter from the pov of other characters. Either how they see the events at the end of the last volume or what they are doing in between. The end is similar but there we get multiple chapters all with different characters as well. They can be simple stories of characters that didn't appear much in this Volume and either add more info about the world, characters or even from the enemies pov tokeep us interested until the next Volume. It also creates a lot of context for biased the mc actually is and how different or bad the situation actually is. Overall I like this style a lot and it works fantastic if the normal pov is very biased. For example she thinks she worked hard and will get praise for how she dealt with things but her guardians read the reports and just want to pass out and facepalm.
For your fix of unreliable autobiography narration, find Blue's History Hijinks: Renaissance Antics. The last segment is on Lorenzo Ghiberti, who is the walking embodiment of the trope.
Deep Thoughts with Heimlen is a running gag from her summarizing Stranger in a Strange Land, along with "Heimlen, did you have your (male character) be assaulted and treat it like a good thing?" Red has summarized classics both old and modern, as well as a good number of Shakespeare. Trope Talks is far more analytical than the Legends and Myth videos, and Red avoids saying if a trope is bad or not (with one exception) and instead focuses on the trope and how it is used, and possibly where the name/trope came from. She has a few favorite examples that she pulls from a lot: AtLA for a good examples, while her favorite punching bags are Sherlock and the MCU, particularly those after Age of Ultron.
I'm writing in a third person omniscient style in one of my fanfics to mimic the style of an anime where the perspective shifts on a dime, but I always try to make it clear whose perspective I'm writing in wherever it changes or even separate the writing into sections, each one narrated from the pov of a different character.
As for Tolkien's Giant Eagles, their King is a Lesser Tier God that even though Gandalf as the incarnation of a Mid Tier God that technically out ranks them in the Celestial Hierarchy; Gandalf still needs the Giant Eagle King's freely given permission to use the services of the Tribe/Race of Giant Eagles.
14:08, “Who’s the guy whose books are full of fluff and talking in circles and did nothing?” Victor Hugo is my particular pet peeve when it comes to such writing, but most writers are guilty of this. People use the justification that the writers were being deep as an excuse not to emphasize pre-writing stories. 🤷
I personally have a fondness for second person thanks to Homestuck, but part of why it works there I think is the main place i see it and like it: in video games. In visual novels for example, second person can be amazing for sucking you into the protagonist's pov in a way i honestly *don't* a lot of the time. (I very much do not treat the Player Character as a self insert in most games, I'm the removed voice floating over the character's shoulder) But said visual novels can very viscerally plant me with the character, I especially like it for horror scenes for how close it makes me engage with the scene. And Homestuck is many things, but the ways it treats itself like a game for the reader too vs the in story game, is one of it's strengths. I've also read stories with second person and enjoyed them, but I prob wouldn't have given it the same shot without Homestuck.
God damn it Airier. Ok, I take that back. That's an unreasonable reaction. But still, I would prefer if you started from the beginning (earlier/first episodes of trope talks) rather than from the most recent. Partially because later episodes sometimes reference earlier episodes and also because generally OSP has been improving over time and it would probably be better to see them improve over time while going through the videos rather than vice versa.
OSP has a podcast every other week and Red mentioned being so happy she didn’t have to use footage from Fight Club because there are enough other examples.
The only novel I know that is in 2nd person and 1st is a web novel called Worm, with its chapters on forms to get the perspectives of citizens dealing with Taylor Herbert (Skitter/Weaver) and her swarms of arthropods (insects, arachnids, and crustaceans). Would recommend the story if into superheroes, the breakdown of characters, comedy (Regent/Asha), grimdark, drama, and trauma. Yeah, Taylor earns her title of "Queen of Escalations." Otherwise, the spinoffs/fanfic.
14:35 You dodged a bullet there, a particular _painful_ bullet. Thanks for this ;) . Along with the 'dream' trope, you might like the '4th wall' video for similar reasons, it went back the Greek theatre. Far from the best example, but what hooked me on Warframe's lore (back when I played) was that pretty much everything is unreliable, for different reasons and I hadn't seen that in a game before. Edit: actually, DSW summarised Raziel's journey as _"Everyone who though they knew the truth and were choosing to hide part of it from me, actually knew less that I did 3 games ago!."_ Moebius: _"Oh my god, I thought you were lying about my god being an Elder squid."_
watch the myth videos the early ones are short so you can burn through them but the later ones goes through a massive length to explain the myth on both the in-universe sense and the real life sense.
The teacher was trying to not to die reading my second perspective essay in the perspective of Alexander Hamilton. (a 6th grade school project for social studies.)
I remember reding a book series where the narration completely took me out of it. Basically most of the second book is a character telling their story, but the 1p parts were written exactly the same as the 3p parts, no influence from the POV character's views or personality at all, author just changed "she" to "I". It felt very unnatural and very uncomfortable considering the context of why she was telling the story in the first place 😶
If you want a really good example of how to competently use narrators, you should read Umineko. It jumps from first-person to third-person to a narrator telling the story to a metafictional look at everything going on in the story. It lies to you, it tells the truth, it shows things that never happened. It's SO GOOD.
If you want more tts content, there is a number of tts adjacent content by individual members if the Alfabusa crew, like Stringstorm, Karl the Deranged, Eliphas the Inheritor, 40k Theories, ThunderPsyker, Zorin the Bear, and Vindicare Assassin, among others. And if you want more Warhammer content checkout Five(ish) minute lore and Mistakes of the Emperor, both by Old Man, as well as anything by PancreasNoWork, MajorKill, and Arch. They all four make great content that is both informative and entertaining.
interesting bit at the start my book was planing on writing was going to start in First person but end in 3rd person as the Narator is a descendant of the main character in the Story and that the narator was reading the book he wrote to his child.
For me personally, Taylor Hebert from Worm is one of the best unreliable narrators i've ever seen. I don't want to spoil too much, but seeing horrible things being done from the pov of the person doing those things is....amazing. I found myself agreeing with her actions a lot of the time, only realizing how unreliable she was as a narrator near the very end. Do mind that it is a superhero story, and the begining arcs can feel a little slow. Bear with it, arc 8 and onwards is when the really good shit happens.
28:16 whit the character having an alter perception of reality you also know what they are telling is what they see it as, you just don't know how much of what they see is actually real
Sorry What's small group about you calling at the canon batman. But REALLY The one where batman and Barbara Gordon had an implicit relationship? Sorry y'all really like to forget that part.
yeah. ordinarily I"d have a problem with that, but honestly I don't mind it here. There's other reaction channels where they spend more time talking about themselves and running into stupid tangents than talking about the actual video.
Using a character based unreliable narrator can be used to create an interesting type of psychology horror, by suddenly pretending like big important pieces of information are different or nonexistent, and maybe changing the way the characters act in strong ways yet still keeping the core. Through this you hopefully slowly tell the audience, that there is something that can manipulate the characters thoughts. Shadow Slave (quite bad title for a good novel) does that quite successfully. An interesting version might be to only slightly change thing, gaslighting the audience and later revealing that. If done right that should make an interesting experience.
Red didn't use Fight Club because she hasn't seen it and doesn't want to, so she desperately looked for other ones to use. She knew it would work for it, but doesn't like using examples from things she hasn't seen.
A danish arthor who writes in objective narration name is Helle Helle and goddamit her's stories can be so annoying! As you don't know when something is a metafo, not real or is real. Like in a story of her's name "One chair lost chair" danish name En stol for lidt. It about two married people that is about to get the last thing ready for a party they are throwing for their friends. The husband don't want to do it and keeps on breaking into tears but the wife is steadfast and cold about that they are doing this no matter what. At some point the wife ask the husband to get the chairs from the basement, and he tells her that they are missing one chair. It ends by the wife just leaving and later it rings on the door. I have had to analyse this story 3 times over some years because off diffents teachers, and I don't fully think I know what its about. Some off my classmate think the husband cheated because that comes up in other off the short stories in the book. Me I just think the husband has a mental break down and she just got enough
This is completely unrelated to the matter at hand but I've just noticed your lower canines are very sharp. You must therefore be a werewolf, therefore I will be watching out for the next full moon. If you're not a werewolf, post something you've recorded that day. The people must know the truth, Airier! ... No, I don't have a problem jumping to conclusions.
Red did a literary analysis of "Stranger in a Strange Land" and had very strong opinions on Heimlen's writing.
I agree with her, he's a creep
I've watched Dominic Noble's video on Starship Troopers and honestly he brings up a point.
People thought Heimlen was into the ideas being proposed in Starship Troopers.
But he'd also written in a story titled Space Cadet (published shortly before ST) that passionately pleads ideas that are the opposite of those in ST.
So whether or not he was portraying his own honest opinions or getting really into his work to a really thorough degree is up for debate
Dont let this guy watch "Stranger in a Strange Land" ... he going to go nuts over how the story being told
Isn't watching him go nuts over it the entire point?
"It's time for another Deep Thoughts with Heimlen..."
@@lilyinthedark3159 Exactly, we need to get him to watch it.
"Controversial take, I don't like Pratchett. Wait, no, he's Discworld. Nevermind. I like Discworld."
Remember guys, put the torch *out* before you put it and the pitchfork down. We wouldn't want to accidentally start any fires.
I was like "Oh.. that is controversial. I don't mind, to each there own, but.. oh.. okay never mind he actually likes Discworld. Boring."
Best evil marketing tactic: write 9 endings, put them to publish at various rarities, tell no one, wait for the war over which way it ended to die down, come clean and say you released 10.
Even better, actually release 10 endings, but have the 10th one be in a single book, and have that be given as a gift to someone you know won't read it.
Like the Clue movie?
@Bezaliel13 yes but crazier
TROPE TALK, YEAH!!!
I think one of my favorite examples of a Fully Omnicient Narrator is The Princess Bride.
The Narrator is the old man who reads the story. He is literally narrating the book and adding his own flaire every now and then.
I am so glad you're finally doing Trope talks. I actually found you because you were covering sarcastic Productions how it made me follow you as well. So I really can't wait to see you react to all the different tropes she's already covered. Also a funny thing she actually has covered Stranger in a Strange Land
'Oh, Batman!' (I don't know why I can't type quotation marks all of a sudden). Arthur Dent is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. DC has Arthur Curry, who is Aquaman, and Harvey Dent, who is TwoFace, but no Arthur Dent (except, perhaps, for in-universe copies of Hitchhiker's Guide).
I was about to say it was Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, but you already said it. Thanks for saving me from a rant
You know how important understanding the meaning of words is? Some of my classmates at a bilingual school couldn't be bothered to use the words "disturb" or "annoy" when talking to teachers so they'd use *molest* to mean the same thing.
my favorite omniscient narrator is the narrator of kaguya-sama: love is war, specifically the english dub one because he uses his powers of "knowing what everyone in the scene is thinking about right now" for *chaos*. he feels like a friend sitting next to you and commentating on the love life of these anime teenagers like it's some sports match and he's watched it several times to know exactly what everything means but also he's still really invested in it and gets really upset when they act stupid.
And yes that visual was from the avatar movie and that was 95% expostion. Even dialog was mostly expostion instead of actual human interaction.
That crops up often in Shyamalan's movies, I'm not sure how many actual human beings he observes in the wild.
@@HBHaga yeah but in this it is really noticeable. At least the others were more originals so it's easier to implement your own style. Avatar was already popular and had it's own style so there is an expectation there and it is an action adventure which just doesn't fit his style at all.
@@LukasJampen I don't even think it's a matter of style. Shyamalan tried to cram a 20 episode first season of an animated show into a 103 minute live action film, which I have never seen done well even within the same medium. He had a lot to adapt, very little time to do it in, and tried to make do with lengthy exposition to fill in the gaps. That movie was arguably Shyamalan's single greatest failure in execution.
@@HBHaga sure but even if he paced it out more his style of directing is very limited and in basically every of his movies characters are very flat and unemotional either because the actors aren't trying or because it's what he wants from them (not sure which) that just doesn't work for a fairly lighthearted comedic and emotional show. It can (emphisis on can) work in thrillers and other movies if you want to create a feeling of wrongness or want to intentionaly create the uncanny valley effect. It worked in the village (at least for me) but not much else. Even if there was less exposition his movie would have been awfull and his style just doesn't mesh with with epic fantasy.
Also Ciaphas Cain from 40k is an excellent example of an inattentive narrator. The books are his memoirs he wrote decades after the fact and what he remembers is all the times he almost got eaten by tyranids but he nver writes how the overall war or battle is going because he only cared about not dying. This leads to the inquisiror that is compiling them (to read for other inquisitor) to have to add additional context.
And both of them are so delightfully snarky.
@@Ajehy yes the snark is real and delightfull
"I have opinions and all of them seem based on my own hatred of stupid" this quote should be on a mug
One of the most interesting cases I've ever seen for an unreliable narrator was the epilogue for Homestuck (which was functionally more like a sequel than an epilogue, but this is Andrew Hussie we're talking about, he build Homestuck on defying the expectation that come with the name of certain story pieces). A massive chunk of the epilogue is written as a fairly traditional story format (minus the singular branch in events that technically creates two stories, but this is Andrew Hussie and Homestuck, so it's also still one story... shit's weird man), with what appeared to be a completely normal narrator. But then a ways into things, it's revealed that the narrator has actually been one of the characters the whole time, who's in-world canonical powers have grown and expanded in such a way that they're aware of being in a story and can now literally narrate their reality, influencing the actions of their friends by narrating thoughts into their heads, and seemingly even feelings to an extent.
Let’s go! Finally! I totally want more trope talk reactions! So excited to watch this! Wooohhhh!
ok, loads of comments here; first I'm glad you're getting into the tropes talks. second, the "dream within a dream" scene at around 38:00 is from Event Horizon, good movie. Also, the reason Red went into detail on Stranger in a Strange Land is cause she did a great summary of it that I HIGHLY encourage you to watch. She's also done tropes on idiot plots, magical otherworlds and a bunch of other topics.
24:35 is a reference to anoter trope, The noodle incident, some thing (usually a weird one) happened and the character just mention it but never get into details, letting the audience to fill in the blanc on even how it happened. ''are you sure you dont want some of Heuy's Special Pizza?'' ''Nah, last time I took some I ended up in a fist fight with a ninja Crocodile in the sewers.''
OMG, the samurai and the short dude were literally an illustration of a "noodle incident". xD
Yep, that was Shyamalan's Avatar movie ... that thing had an amazing number of problems straight from the movie's conception.
Trope Talks are some of Red's best material along with her mythology deep dives. I think my fave Trope Talk is about plot twists.
you forgot journey to the west. wait technically its mythology.
32:14 just because most people don't know how to use them, dosn't mean they are bad, you don't say cake is a horrible tasting food just because there is no one in your family that knows how to do it right.
Masters in Fiction... hm? "Arthur Dent... Oh BATMAN!"
😎
12:19 personally I disagree with the idea of using emojis more, partly due to the 'words matter' concept very much carrying over to emojis.
There is surprisingly common occurrences of people not understanding how a emoji is typically used and choosing it cause the picture seems related ( i.e. a text from a relative saying that a more distant relative has died followed by a skull emoji). Alternatively, you get the people that do know what those emoji mean and still decides to tack them onto the end of a sentence that completely clashes in tone.
🎉😱🐔🎯
... Okay, I see you're point.
5:56 yup. She did that. Trope talks : Bathos. You're welcome
The "Reading from a perspective of someone watching everything go down" perspective is something I think can be interesting, mostly because if you write it well enough, you can add in tiny bits of information that the writer may find to be worthless (yet wrote in what he noticed anyways) and that could tell you of what truth had been hiding under this one character's perspective.
Or the best part of this format, the sudden narrator swap.
"Why are we suddenly following a first-person perspective from the MC when it's always been a third-person perspective from his 'fan boy'." - asked the reader who read further to see if the fanboy had really ended up meeting his end in this adventure that suddenly started reading like an autobiography.
One interesting take on “it was all a dream” trope is “ it was all a dream but the dream is an actual place with actual consequences “ so the character wakes up from what ever scenario they were in only later to end up in the dream world after the fact but awak
I'd recommend watching the Trope Talk series in order.
She references previously covered material and concepts.
Oh hey nice, glad I am not alone in having that opinion.
The Trope Talk series is so fun! As someone who enjoys writing and storytelling, it can be cool to look into certain tropes I see a lot in media or like using in my own writing, how they came about and how they can be played with. Been really enjoying watching your reactions to OSP's other videos, so looking forward to when you get back into doing more of the Trope Talk vids!
26:52 Battlefield 1 does this with the Fighter Pilot story in the campaign. He's introduced at the very start as a con-artist etc, and at the veyr end he reminds us that he's a lier, then immediately asks essentially "Would I lie to you?".
Jumping in with a tip that you really should watch Red's Stranger in a Strange Land video, because Deep Thoughts with Heinlein is a Thing.
as a bonus, I agree with the person who suggested watching the Trope Talks in order, as they do build on each other over time.
My kids and I have been watching OSP for several years now and I love them forever because they made my kids fans of The Odyssey as *middle schoolers*. It's so fun to watch someone enjoy this for the first time!
18:39 There are a few games where you're told the narrator's instructions are untrustworthy...but then you're told they might not be. So the "Unreliable Narrator" idea is used as an active element.
One thing I find funny that I don't see too often is when the someone is narrating a backstory but the narration and scene don't match. An example is Meet the Robinsons, the villain is talking about his past how everyone hated him but the scene shows kids being cool about him. Both funny and tragic how it shows the villain not moving forward.
About the subject of Narrator biases and opinions. The Light Novel series Ascendance of a bookworm handles this really interesting. The main parts of each volume are from the pov of the main character Mine and she is basically the narrator as well and she has sometimes a very biased view on events and how she thinks others will interpret them. This is mainly because of 2 reasons. On one hand she was a 22-23 year old Japanese woman that ended up as a 5 year old girl in a fantasy world and then drastically shifts social environments every couple of years. This leaves her with basic understandings of those environments but also a mess of social norms and expectations and a way of doing things nobody else would. She goes in the span of 5-7 years from being a poor commoner to merchant to priestess to high noblility with enough influence to interact with royalty. This leaves her very knowledgable (including knowledge from earth) but also creates major blindspots and weaknesses.
At the beginning of most volumes we get a chapter from the pov of other characters. Either how they see the events at the end of the last volume or what they are doing in between. The end is similar but there we get multiple chapters all with different characters as well. They can be simple stories of characters that didn't appear much in this Volume and either add more info about the world, characters or even from the enemies pov tokeep us interested until the next Volume. It also creates a lot of context for biased the mc actually is and how different or bad the situation actually is.
Overall I like this style a lot and it works fantastic if the normal pov is very biased. For example she thinks she worked hard and will get praise for how she dealt with things but her guardians read the reports and just want to pass out and facepalm.
For your fix of unreliable autobiography narration, find Blue's History Hijinks: Renaissance Antics. The last segment is on Lorenzo Ghiberti, who is the walking embodiment of the trope.
yes his funny history is really good. alcibiades toout he is very redicilous and history maker is interesting.
Yeah trope talks are awesome you should see the one about dragons next!
Deep Thoughts with Heimlen is a running gag from her summarizing Stranger in a Strange Land, along with "Heimlen, did you have your (male character) be assaulted and treat it like a good thing?" Red has summarized classics both old and modern, as well as a good number of Shakespeare.
Trope Talks is far more analytical than the Legends and Myth videos, and Red avoids saying if a trope is bad or not (with one exception) and instead focuses on the trope and how it is used, and possibly where the name/trope came from. She has a few favorite examples that she pulls from a lot: AtLA for a good examples, while her favorite punching bags are Sherlock and the MCU, particularly those after Age of Ultron.
Its also how she talked how to talk about that heimlein stuff and came up with dp thoughts with heinlein to let the mens words speak on its own.
I'm writing in a third person omniscient style in one of my fanfics to mimic the style of an anime where the perspective shifts on a dime, but I always try to make it clear whose perspective I'm writing in wherever it changes or even separate the writing into sections, each one narrated from the pov of a different character.
Well, since were in the trope talk territory, i feel like i could say that the next trope talk should be dragons.
yeees, the start of the tropes talks. this is going to be fun.
btw red did cover stranger in a strange land
14:03 here you are thinking Terry Goodkind the Sword of Truth series. I assumed this based on the Terry mix-up and the story described.
Makes sense that randian high on his, and being and awful,... Ok tht ,makes sense
if your interested in others' thoughts on video game story telling, I recommend Timothy Cains's video on non-linear game design
As for Tolkien's Giant Eagles, their King is a Lesser Tier God that even though Gandalf as the incarnation of a Mid Tier God that technically out ranks them in the Celestial Hierarchy; Gandalf still needs the Giant Eagle King's freely given permission to use the services of the Tribe/Race of Giant Eagles.
Personal favorite Trope Talks: Tournament Arcs, The Powerhouse, Plot Twists, and Those Darn Phones.
14:08, “Who’s the guy whose books are full of fluff and talking in circles and did nothing?” Victor Hugo is my particular pet peeve when it comes to such writing, but most writers are guilty of this. People use the justification that the writers were being deep as an excuse not to emphasize pre-writing stories. 🤷
I personally have a fondness for second person thanks to Homestuck, but part of why it works there I think is the main place i see it and like it: in video games. In visual novels for example, second person can be amazing for sucking you into the protagonist's pov in a way i honestly *don't* a lot of the time. (I very much do not treat the Player Character as a self insert in most games, I'm the removed voice floating over the character's shoulder)
But said visual novels can very viscerally plant me with the character, I especially like it for horror scenes for how close it makes me engage with the scene. And Homestuck is many things, but the ways it treats itself like a game for the reader too vs the in story game, is one of it's strengths.
I've also read stories with second person and enjoyed them, but I prob wouldn't have given it the same shot without Homestuck.
God damn it Airier.
Ok, I take that back. That's an unreasonable reaction. But still, I would prefer if you started from the beginning (earlier/first episodes of trope talks) rather than from the most recent. Partially because later episodes sometimes reference earlier episodes and also because generally OSP has been improving over time and it would probably be better to see them improve over time while going through the videos rather than vice versa.
😁
On one hand, Unreliable Narrators are cool in Fiction. In History tho, FFFFFFFFFFS
FINALLY HES DOING TROPE TALKS *WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*
OSP has a podcast every other week and Red mentioned being so happy she didn’t have to use footage from Fight Club because there are enough other examples.
My first exposure to a story written in 1st Person was Maximum Ride. It's great, because Max is constantly being snarky about things in her own head.
The only novel I know that is in 2nd person and 1st is a web novel called Worm, with its chapters on forms to get the perspectives of citizens dealing with Taylor Herbert (Skitter/Weaver) and her swarms of arthropods (insects, arachnids, and crustaceans).
Would recommend the story if into superheroes, the breakdown of characters, comedy (Regent/Asha), grimdark, drama, and trauma. Yeah, Taylor earns her title of "Queen of Escalations." Otherwise, the spinoffs/fanfic.
14:35 You dodged a bullet there, a particular _painful_ bullet. Thanks for this ;) .
Along with the 'dream' trope, you might like the '4th wall' video for similar reasons, it went back the Greek theatre.
Far from the best example, but what hooked me on Warframe's lore (back when I played) was that pretty much everything is unreliable, for different reasons and I hadn't seen that in a game before. Edit: actually, DSW summarised Raziel's journey as _"Everyone who though they knew the truth and were choosing to hide part of it from me, actually knew less that I did 3 games ago!."_
Moebius: _"Oh my god, I thought you were lying about my god being an Elder squid."_
watch the myth videos the early ones are short so you can burn through them but the later ones goes through a massive length to explain the myth on both the in-universe sense and the real life sense.
these trope talks I am sure will be wild mr english man, I am here for it.
Hey so Alfa Busa just released a new thing I'm not sure how exactly to define but I would recommend it
Haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I'm definitely checking it out. 😁
I like to see you do a research to vita carnis
"Let the Hate Flow Through you"!
My editor hops on anything that looks like an omniscient narrator and stabs it with a red pen. I write romance novels in very close 3rd person.
You have a VERY good editor. I'm more than a bit jealous. 😁👍
The teacher was trying to not to die reading my second perspective essay in the perspective of Alexander Hamilton. (a 6th grade school project for social studies.)
Arthur Dent is Hitchiker's Guide. the Batman Dent is named Harvey Dent.
HOLY SHIT YOU CHECKED OUT TROPE TALK WHY DIDN’T I GET A NOTIFICATION!!!??
UA-cam.
I'm amazed anyone gets notifications. 😅
the trope talk videos are all good; I think you'll enjoy them
There is a Narrator in Edens Zero that also is an Omniscient (atleast that's being how she is introduced) in the story.
I remember reding a book series where the narration completely took me out of it. Basically most of the second book is a character telling their story, but the 1p parts were written exactly the same as the 3p parts, no influence from the POV character's views or personality at all, author just changed "she" to "I".
It felt very unnatural and very uncomfortable considering the context of why she was telling the story in the first place 😶
35:23 It's Captain Marvel.
I'm sorry, you think Arthur Dent is Batman?? Arthur Dent is the protagonist of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
If you want a really good example of how to competently use narrators, you should read Umineko.
It jumps from first-person to third-person to a narrator telling the story to a metafictional look at everything going on in the story. It lies to you, it tells the truth, it shows things that never happened. It's SO GOOD.
34:50 Just to let you know, that scene was from Captain Marvel. You should watch it sometime.
If you want more tts content, there is a number of tts adjacent content by individual members if the Alfabusa crew, like Stringstorm, Karl the Deranged, Eliphas the Inheritor, 40k Theories, ThunderPsyker, Zorin the Bear, and Vindicare Assassin, among others.
And if you want more Warhammer content checkout Five(ish) minute lore and Mistakes of the Emperor, both by Old Man, as well as anything by PancreasNoWork, MajorKill, and Arch. They all four make great content that is both informative and entertaining.
Two-Face's name is Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Ohhhhh boi this will be fun
Alpharius primarch novel begins with: “I am Alpharius. This is a lie” and it works because it is telling about the alpha legion.
The Sixth Sense did not have a twist he was obviously dead in the opening scean.
interesting bit at the start my book was planing on writing was going to start in First person but end in 3rd person as the Narator is a descendant of the main character in the Story and that the narator was reading the book he wrote to his child.
That could be a neat premise if done well because the only example I can think of right now is the video game "What remains of Edith Finch"
34:33 It's from Captain Marvel
It's easy to make mistakes no matter which style you use. The author still has to be good even if they use your favorite technique.
Terry Goodkind?
In the mood does that fake end multiple times, so much that you don't expect the actual end, so well as a song.
A D&D campaign is in 2nd person
Like the narrator in Pokémon?
PLEASE DO THE TROPE TALK FOR DRAGONS ITS SO GOOD
You should have picked Trope Talk Dragons.
For me personally, Taylor Hebert from Worm is one of the best unreliable narrators i've ever seen. I don't want to spoil too much, but seeing horrible things being done from the pov of the person doing those things is....amazing. I found myself agreeing with her actions a lot of the time, only realizing how unreliable she was as a narrator near the very end.
Do mind that it is a superhero story, and the begining arcs can feel a little slow. Bear with it, arc 8 and onwards is when the really good shit happens.
Just watched this video a second ago, never saw any other videos from that channel xD.
Wasn't expecting it but it's nice surprise.
Choose your own adventure Books are written in second person
The unreliable narrator is the best litmus test to see if the audience has critical thinking skills.
Woohoo,I almost finished binging the trope talks
I think I've listened to the whole playlist like 5 times as I use it to get basic ideas for my book lol
28:16 whit the character having an alter perception of reality you also know what they are telling is what they see it as, you just don't know how much of what they see is actually real
38:46 Eternal Waking
novel you say "50 shades of gray" comes to mind @Airier
😨
This is a cool video thank you
Sorry What's small group about you calling at the canon batman. But REALLY The one where batman and Barbara Gordon had an implicit relationship? Sorry y'all really like to forget that part.
Video is 14:11
Reaction is 46:28
Hm.
yeah. ordinarily I"d have a problem with that, but honestly I don't mind it here. There's other reaction channels where they spend more time talking about themselves and running into stupid tangents than talking about the actual video.
Using a character based unreliable narrator can be used to create an interesting type of psychology horror, by suddenly pretending like big important pieces of information are different or nonexistent, and maybe changing the way the characters act in strong ways yet still keeping the core. Through this you hopefully slowly tell the audience, that there is something that can manipulate the characters thoughts. Shadow Slave (quite bad title for a good novel) does that quite successfully.
An interesting version might be to only slightly change thing, gaslighting the audience and later revealing that. If done right that should make an interesting experience.
Red didn't use Fight Club because she hasn't seen it and doesn't want to, so she desperately looked for other ones to use. She knew it would work for it, but doesn't like using examples from things she hasn't seen.
This is the official reason, but it’s very obvious that she really doesn’t like film bros and their opinions about Fight Club.
A hame, its good movie, if it made tyler durden too cool, as great as brad pittis and ilike him , but it really nailed bob. and good movie.
A danish arthor who writes in objective narration name is Helle Helle and goddamit her's stories can be so annoying! As you don't know when something is a metafo, not real or is real. Like in a story of her's name "One chair lost chair" danish name En stol for lidt. It about two married people that is about to get the last thing ready for a party they are throwing for their friends. The husband don't want to do it and keeps on breaking into tears but the wife is steadfast and cold about that they are doing this no matter what. At some point the wife ask the husband to get the chairs from the basement, and he tells her that they are missing one chair. It ends by the wife just leaving and later it rings on the door. I have had to analyse this story 3 times over some years because off diffents teachers, and I don't fully think I know what its about. Some off my classmate think the husband cheated because that comes up in other off the short stories in the book. Me I just think the husband has a mental break down and she just got enough
Most second person narratives are games
Nice episode.
This is completely unrelated to the matter at hand but I've just noticed your lower canines are very sharp. You must therefore be a werewolf, therefore I will be watching out for the next full moon. If you're not a werewolf, post something you've recorded that day. The people must know the truth, Airier!
... No, I don't have a problem jumping to conclusions.
Nowadays even emojis are open for interpretation and bias