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How original. Fucking Shakespeare over here.
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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Ahhh yes, the old idiot plot. Where would we even be as a culture without it
All scripts of Shakespeare's comedy category that I've read are idiot plots. The characters constantly explain to the audience, but never to each other. It enables all the hijinks to unfold. So, it's been around at least that long.
For example, twins separated at birth. If the twins in the Comedy of Errors explained who they were, or if the cast once questioned either of them on their strangeness, everything could be clarified.
It extends to outside comedies, even the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet could have been avoided if Romeo had confirmed Juliet and Friar's plan, or had checked to see if she was still alive before offing himself.
We would probably have a much higher (and more incorrect) opinion of ourselves. We're all fools, and recognizing our own foolishness reflected in art doesn't make it not so. Just makes it easier to think about.
Maybe? I don't think that's where I learned to introspect from. But maybe the stakes are lower learning to socialize from stories, there could be something helpful about that
A lot of narrative stories (fiction and non) are in the format "person in situation X makes decision Y and experiences consequences Z" with the moral being "if you are in a situation like X, doing Y will have Z consequences" ("moral" in the sense of being a generalizable life lesson). I think they're an important part of how we discuss life experiences as a community, both extraordinary and mundane. And it is a lot easier to learn from stories than to experience consequences in real life. The problem is that storytellers are all humans and sometimes bad at storytelling, so care must be taken when learning from stories, and they all have to be validated against real life experience.
And then before you know it, you've become an art critic.
You're probably right. I have grown up to be pretty pretentious about art, despite how little I understood it at formative years. Other people might be shaped by their experiences with it differently than I was
How the same art affects different people is an ongoing fascination of mine. I grew up using books to take my mind off of life, and I read voraciously. No one around me really had a high opinion of "art", and I didn't even really think of the books I read as art, at least not until I was an adult. As I get older I see more of the impact that art has had on my thinking and life, though it's still very much an ongoing project. Comparing my own experience of art to others' is why I love art criticism, especially "bad" earnest criticism. Even bad faith "criticism" is kind of interesting, in that it says something about the selfish worldview of the author, but I have limited stomach for it.