Speaking of idiosyncratic things that hit me -- I wasn't able to finish either Black Swan vid, they made me too nervous!
Anyway, I don't think I'd ever seen "Creep" -- it's very cool! Yeah, there are definitely different types of surprise that can happen in vids and not all would even be something that content notes would even suggest. The surprise in Creep is the POV switch, not anything that would show up in content notes, familiarity or no. Or, another example, This Be The Verse in this year's Festivids crop, which has a (IMO) delightful surprise, but not one that needs warnings for and not one that someone familiar with the Batman show could guess. thuviaptarth's Hey Ho also is surprising, a bit, in the second verse: it's set up to be a condemnation of Tony's compliancy in the military-industrial complex, which is a relatively common take on things, and then turns it around to the rest of the superhero world as well. So surprise is possible! I'm just not sure it's a good idea to rely on something in canon as the surprise & (by extension) rely on CNTW as a way of making sure it stays that way. Again, not even sure if that's what the vidder for the Life After Beth vid is doing: it was just something I started thinking about after watching the vid, because my experience of the vid was one of surprise, largely because it was CNTW. Though, thinking on it further, I think had there been content notes, I would have thought it was going somewhere entirely different -- I would not have expected what happened even if it said "sexual violence" or "gore" (perhaps *especially* if it said sexual violence). I definitely would have watched the vid differently (if I had watched it at all) and, I think, not liked it as well -- I would have expected the sexual violence and gore to look very different and have been bracing myself for that. My expectations would have been more serial killer-y and less genre.
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momijizukamori
Re: this is a total tangent: how best to elicit surprise?
Date: 2015-02-08 01:43 am (UTC)Anyway, I don't think I'd ever seen "Creep" -- it's very cool! Yeah, there are definitely different types of surprise that can happen in vids and not all would even be something that content notes would even suggest. The surprise in Creep is the POV switch, not anything that would show up in content notes, familiarity or no. Or, another example, This Be The Verse in this year's Festivids crop, which has a (IMO) delightful surprise, but not one that needs warnings for and not one that someone familiar with the Batman show could guess. thuviaptarth's Hey Ho also is surprising, a bit, in the second verse: it's set up to be a condemnation of Tony's compliancy in the military-industrial complex, which is a relatively common take on things, and then turns it around to the rest of the superhero world as well. So surprise is possible! I'm just not sure it's a good idea to rely on something in canon as the surprise & (by extension) rely on CNTW as a way of making sure it stays that way. Again, not even sure if that's what the vidder for the Life After Beth vid is doing: it was just something I started thinking about after watching the vid, because my experience of the vid was one of surprise, largely because it was CNTW. Though, thinking on it further, I think had there been content notes, I would have thought it was going somewhere entirely different -- I would not have expected what happened even if it said "sexual violence" or "gore" (perhaps *especially* if it said sexual violence). I definitely would have watched the vid differently (if I had watched it at all) and, I think, not liked it as well -- I would have expected the sexual violence and gore to look very different and have been bracing myself for that. My expectations would have been more serial killer-y and less genre.