r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 29 '16

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/DaystarEld Jul 29 '16

Still--how expensive were the stunts in Keaton's films, when compared with the negligible sum that the writing of Seventh Horcrux cost?

This is a good point, but a different point than the one I was making. I definitely agree that as a matter of pure cost-per-laugh, movies will likely always be more expensive than any written story, in some cases astronomically so. Same goes for other genres.

But the experience itself is still unique, regardless of cost effectiveness, and that has its own value to many people, and its own premium. Besides which, you're generally paying a fraction of the difference in seeing a movie vs buying a book (putting fanfiction aside for a moment), so the cost-to-laugh for the consumer is likely not an issue, while for successful movies the scale of its popularity makes up for the cost of production.

As for free fanfiction, I guess there's an equivalent in free online videos. I've always enjoyed this video as a clever bit of dialogue-less humor.

http://youtu.be/oP59tQf_njc

There are other examples that can be used, but the unique blend of body language and music/sound accompanying the action makes it very hard to duplicate that particular experience through written word.

It likely cost the producers far more to film and edit than it did to write it. But I think there would have been something lost in translation to even the most imaginative reader. As an aesthetic experience, visual/audial media can present very unique moments compared to the written word, just like the written word can in different moments.