41 replies to this topic

[Moogle]

Hmmm, as I was reading Wicked I thought maybe I would do a essay on Satires, just for fun...

But, as I thought about it, I realized I didn't really know whether Wicked was one or not, and if not what it would even be classified as.

And, as I thought about it more, I though about Alice as well, which I wasn't sure what it would be classified as either.

Any ideas? Just curious, and you seemed like one of the best people to ask.

If anybody elsse has any ideas feel free to say too.

Purely out of intrest.

[greywolf]

Well, I'm not entirely sure about Wicked, but I do know that the Wizard of Oz is a political allegory about the whole silver vs gold issue in the 1870s (80s? 90s? - I forget exactly). I guess you _could_ classify that as satire, but I'm not entirely sure.

[BeefontheBone]

I'd say Wicked was more of a spoof than a satire, and American McGee's Alice is probably more of a reinterpretation. Satire (in the modern sense at least) involves a degree of negativity about the subject, or some desire to point out its flaws and make a case against it.

[Blood-Pigggy]

Conker's Bad Fur Day is a better example of a parody game than Alice.

[Sinke]

It's not that I'm naive or anything like it, but I think it is quite sick to make "Alice in wonderland"  a horror game or a movie, as a matter of fact.

Satire? Sure, for people who have enough brains to understand that. And honestly, many people don't have it. And once we have another killing in school with a copy of "Alice" in killer's backpack, people will consider us violent maniacs. These games are an example where we really are maniacs, since no sane person would rebuild such masterpiece of writting with killing and slaughter.

Well, my two coins at least.

Peace.

[Blood-Pigggy]

No way you could take Alice that seriously dewd.

[Moogle]

W/e, made the thread to try and find out the right term for each, not start a debate over how its "twisted and sick" or w/e.

Anyways, yea I know beef, I looked up satire on wikipedia right before I posted (as, to be honest, I wasn't completely sure whatt he exact defintion was) and saw that. Didn't think it was a satire exactly, just mainly I like teh word =D and all that, and it was the closest thing I could think of besides just "twisted fairy tales" and all the like.

Hmmmm, anyways, personally, I LOVE the idea behind Alice, although it could be said its mainly just killing, one of the reasons I ike it is it actually is more than the average killing game. Now, I'm not saying its twisted, cause it is, thats the main point, but at least its better than some other game that just has one simple unified explanation, "Wonderland is evil / mirror world", instead it has an actual semi complicated expalation. Plus it manages to work in other Carol ideas, such as Jabberwocky.

Just my 2 cents also =D

(Mcgee is also making a Alice type Wizard of Oz game, entitled Oz, its gonna be a set of movies first, disney / bruckhemier (or however you spell it), as well as a Grimm's Fairy Tales game, which should be interesting in itself)

[A. J. Raffles]

Well, both of those examples aren't satires, really, because satires satirise issues rather than texts. If you want to do satire, I'd recommend Swift (especially some of the shorter stuff), but you'd need a bit of background reading to understand what he's on about. Or maybe Vanity Fair, if you like 19th century literature. But if you really want to write on Wicked, it would probably work fine for an essay on something like a shift in perspective defamiliarising the familiar story. Alice may be a bit more problematic, because you'd be comparing a book and a computer game. You'd have to take into account the change in genre as well as explain the principles of FPS games. And of course you'd have to have a convincing argument why somebody turned Carrol's Alice books into a FPS (why not a puzzle game or an adventure, for instance?), and that might be tricky. Writing a good essay on that one will probably be quite hard...

What do you want to write the essay for, by the way? School? Or just for fun?

[Havell]

Sinke, on Dec 9 2006, 04:23 AM, said:

since no sane person would rebuild such masterpiece of writting with killing and slaughter.

You thought Alice in Wonderland was innocent and non-weird?  Read it again.  Carefully.

As a side note, I've seen the original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland.  It's got little doodles up all the margins and lots of the words have little decorations and are wrapped around pictures.  It's fascinating.  It's in the British Library, btw.

[A. J. Raffles]

Havell, on Dec 9 2006, 04:32 PM, said:

You thought Alice in Wonderland was innocent and non-weird?  Read it again.  Carefully.

It's definitely non-violent, though. The red queen may be screaming "off with his head" all the time, but it doesn't actually happen.

[a1s]

Havell, on Dec 9 2006, 03:32 PM, said:

You thought Alice in Wonderland was innocent and non-weird?  Read it again.  Carefully.

what did you expect? Carol was a mathematician (a good one, we were even though about one of his discoveries ins school), and everyone who watched "beutiful mind" knows thesoe guys are crazy.

P.S. no, they really are, I know one personaly (though not  very well).

[Moogle]

That movie rocked =D

And ok, thanks for the advice raffles ^^ And, for fun.

Both of the storys / ideas are interesting, at least to me.

And hmmm, while I was looking on the forums for Mcgees blog for some more Oz info (being as Alice was interesting, so should be Oz) and it turns out there are actualyl quite alot of Wonderland / Wizard of Oz "twisted fairytales" out there, I was only aware of a few, how very interesting =D

Wheeee, I need to get a laptop. Over the summer I got bored on vacation and wrote a couple on how Animal Farm and Lord of the flies were bad books to read for summer reading due to how they're so well known thats its entirelly possible to not even look up sparknotes and still know enough to pass on a test, and tehre are multiple other examples of Utopia / Dystopia (the theme this year for english) but never got around to typing it up >>

And also, if anybody knows. Are the Grimm Fairy Tales original stories ore are they altered versions of others? Probabally some of bolth. I remember reading them a while ago but haven't looked at them for a long time so I forgot >> "Other adaptations have been done by Jim Henson's Muppets" thats a semi odd thought oO

[a1s]

If I remeber correctly the Grimms were collecting and systematizing folk tales, so those should be from german folklore. than again if the Grimms were anything like the modern linguistics students who collect folk tales, there's probably more than a few that are original   .

[A. J. Raffles]

The Grimms are said to have straightened out those tales a bit, so they fitted their idea of "folk tales". They may even have added some of their own. Sounds like cheating, but I don't think it was, actually. Writing down stories that have been passed on orally and vary with every telling, really, has to be problematic. After all, who is to tell which version is the "right" one? If you're telling a story, you can adapt it as you go, of course, depending on the situation and depending on who you're telling it to, but as soon as you write it down, you're forced to fix it and stick to this one version.

[Juni Ori]

I strongly agree with AJ.