Love or Violence ???

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by Harper Kingsley

It just seems like every love triangle is a human girl with something special about her, a hot vampire, and a hot lycanthrope of some kind. And every single time, there's all this "I totally hate you, she's mine!" No one ever says, "Let's share her" or "Forget her. I know two chicks that are just as good and we won't be fighting over them," to which the other guy can respond "Awesome!"

That would be one short book. But oh so worth reading.

(If you ask me, the love triangle theme was over-done by the time someone sat down to write down that Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot legend. )

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Harper Kingsley

It just seems like every love triangle is a human girl with something special about her, a hot vampire, and a hot lycanthrope of some kind. And every single time, there's all this "I totally hate you, she's mine!" No one ever says, "Let's share her" or "Forget her. I know two chicks that are just as good and we won't be fighting over them," to which the other guy can respond "Awesome!"

And then spend the next 100 pages describing how they killed her.

[Namekuseijin]

Love, then violence, then love again. Isn't it the narrative frame of most Disney movies?

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

Love, then violence, then love again. Isn't it the narrative frame of most Disney movies?

Close. Love, conflict love. The don't do ugly at Disney

And violence should be ugly. If not, what's the point?

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by ScalyFreak

Close. Love, conflict love. The don't do ugly at Disney

And violence should be ugly. If not, what's the point?

They killed Bambi's mother and Simba's father!

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

They killed Bambi's mother and Simba's father!

Hints of violence off-screen don't count.

Disney movies are a great example of a lack of the tension that someone mentioned earlier in the thread. Do we ever doubt that Simba will survive and become king, and get the girl in the end? of course not. Disney don't do ugly, and they don't do unhappy endings either.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by ScalyFreak

Disney don't do ugly.

Little Mermaid: Ursula, evil mer-witch, gets impaled through the gut with a schooner.

Lion King: Scar is torn to shreds by hyenas.

Mulan: Shan-Yu is blown up by fireworks.

Tarzan: Clayton accidentally hangs himself on jungle vines.

Beauty and the Beast: Gaston falls from a high tower and is impaled at the bottom.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Frollo plunges into a lake of fire.

The Incredibles: Syndrome is sucked into a jet engine by his cape (my favorite).

There are others. Disney doesn't do ugly, huh?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I was just thinking: On one level, this thread dovetails nicely with the sex card thread... after all, the differences between erotica and pornography is often considered a difference between love and violence...

Personally, I'm okay with either, though I don't get into the ultra-violent stories of war. Conflict is fine, on a personal scale.

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

There are others. Disney doesn't do ugly, huh?

"Ugly" is about a lot more than someone getting killed in a creative manner.

Ugly is in the why of it, as much as anything else... in Disney movies, heroes kill dragons who are evil, and win the princess. Villains get what's coming to them, and good prevails. Justice is done.

No one would dream of suggesting that the reason Cinderella has a step mother is because her real one took off shortly after she was born (teenagers who get pregnant long before they're ready to be parents sometimes do that), or that the reason she's mistreated is because her father is has taken to drinking far too much every day and no longer notices what happens right under his nose.

No one wonders why the prince in Snow White falls in love with a corpse and wants to take her home, and then kisses said corpse's cold dead lips so passionately it has the same effect as a Heimlich maneuver. (Okay, this one has potential for some serious ugliness, if you start thinking about it.)

But my point is that even when Disney kills off their villains, they do it cleanly, and for all the right reasons. When Ursula was impaled, there was no blood or guts spilling, and we never actually get to see what the hyenas do with Scar. Gaston should have gone *splat*, or at least his head should. Falling from that kind of height does quite a number on a head.

This goes on and on. Violence in Disney is clean and bloodless, and has the rare ability to discriminate and take out only the ones who deserve to die, or at least the ones that need to die in order to follow the fairytale formula of "love conquers all and evil dies in the end".

So I still maintain that Disney doesn't do "ugly". Not real ugly, anyway.

[M T McGuire]

I think the nub of the ugly issue is the complication. Disney does easy, clearly deliniated, uncomplicated escapism.

Real life is complicated so I think that when you are drawing characters who are realistic some of them have to be grey or have done bad things. They have farty human motives etc. I think it's because the violence in Disney is easy that it doesn't really feel like violence.

Hmm... does that make any sense?

Cheers

MTM

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by M T McGuire

I think it's because the violence in Disney is easy that it doesn't really feel like violence.

Hmm... does that make any sense?

Makes perfect sense. It's a large part of the point I wanted to make.

[Nancy Fulda]

Another interesting thing about Disney is that it's almost never the good guy who does the slaying. The villain trips and falls off a tower, gets strangled in vines because of his own struggling, gets torn to shreds by his own minions, etc.

(Notable exceptions are Mulan and The Little Mermaid.)

I presume this is because Disney doesn't want to let the good guy get his hands dirty.

[ScalyFreak]

That's probably because in Disney's world, there are no shades of moral gray. If the good guy kills someone, even if that someone is evil in every way, he's no longer a good guy. Their heroes must be shining white, so they can't be the ones doing the killing.