Tamar’s full answer (transcript of her voice note, more or less) (Schnee: hey! random question related to a video i'm making: how would you describe what beauty means in math? what type of idea/scenario in math would you call beautiful? what's beautiful about it?) Tamar: Hey this is a good question! Let me tell you some things that are not quite it, but are qualities of what’s a beautiful idea in math. I think that this is something anyone would agree with and then i’ll tell you something that's a little more like my personal take. I think that for an idea to be beautiful in math it has to be simple and surprising. Maybe this is not a shocking list of qualities, but if something is a very complicated idea,it's not really gonna strike people as beautiful. And if something is just sort of obvious deductive steps, that’s also not beautiful. It’s sort of like some sort of creative route to an idea or a surprising conclusion that comes about from something that’s simple to follow in some way. Like maybe soe sort of unexpected maneuver where someone spells out the steps, you can see it, and see how it works. I don’t think that’s the whole picture, but I think the reason those things are necessary is that it’s something that’s sort of perspective expanding. I guess that gets to what i think is beautiful in math, which are the ideas where you get a new perspective on the same idea. Like you have different paradigms in math, different ways that you can build up different kinds of mathematical objects and ways of thinking mathematically, and when someone can build a bridge where you can see that there’s these two different perspectives or these two different frameworks are actually different lenses on the same idea or or comparable lenses on the same idea, then that can be a really beautiful thing. Let me think of an analogy. Ok, this is not a great example, but imagine you were thinking about food and you were thinking about how certain cultures -- this is made up -- but like certain cultures use mushrooms in a certain way, and certain cultures use soy sauce, and some people use fish sauce, and some people use like, I don’t know, some kind of cheese, and you realize that there’s some sort of unifying idea that showed that these were all different approaches to the same achieving a certain kind of punch in your food. So certain ideas in math are like that where there's sort of some sort of like a unifying idea that brings together different kinds of ideas. And that's,I think, a really classic type of beautiful idea. And that's one of my favorite things. I don't think it's the only thing that people call beautiful in math, so I'll think about it a little bit more. Maybe there's something that could be a little bit more summarizable, but those are the thoughts off the top of my head.
Sad ending can be better than happy endings cause they are more impactful and hit the harder and stick with you longer than if evreything went happily e ver after
Okay, but did you ask your friend if the fact that you use light-mode on Discord is beautiful? It's simple and surprising after all. And also psychopathic. Time to unsubscribe. 😔
As a mathematician, she hit on exactly the points which I was going to raise. For me, I find the unification of seemingly utterly-separated things as an especially heightened form of beauty, although it is not necessary. Simplicity and simultaneous creativity are important features too, as described.
I think part of Beauty is silencing the noise of everything else. It drowns out other thoughts. If someone in math or physics discovers something, you think they are concerned about normal life things? If you stare at a sunset, are you thinking about sports? We like Arcane because it pulls us in to be more concerned for the characters than our own worries for a while. For me, I was driving at night, and some song from the 90s came on the radio and for a moment, I felt like I was a teenager again. That was a moment of beauty.
I think what made Jinx's rocket so powerful was that it was the most Devastating moment of her life. but simultaneously the most triumphant. the rocket is shot out of anger, regret, and sorrow. but also out empowerment, Pride, and Love. It's a beautiful moment for that reason. All of her emotions, anger, and Trauma all culminate into a missile of mass destruction. it's like the world will finally know and feel what she's experienced all her life. and will know that she's now truly become jinx.
during the rocket scene I sincerely can't not remember if we can actually hear Silco's line ''we will show them, we'll show them all'', the line he said for the first time when he takes Jinx on as his daughter but I can see it so distinctly
For me, beauty in storytelling comes from contrast. It’s one of the reasons why bittersweet tends to hit stronger than fluff or angst separately. And even in your answers you kind of hint to it in a sense: - Tenderness in strife - Simplicity from chaos Etc.
in that way, beauty is the complete juxtaposition of two ideas that unifies and completes each of them individually - we are FORCED to dramatically deepen our understanding of both (AND how they fit together) and that is beautiful
Such an amazing video. My thoughts is that tragedy is a way to make the characters feel human and like you said sad and emotional. Psychologically, tragedy draws us to what is itself tragic. Things that are beautiful because they are human or relatable, Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
The fact there was not a single mention of the 1997 masterpiece "Life is Beautiful" during this whole discussion on the meaning of beauty is very unfortunate and a missed opportunity. I'm usually not too emotional but the scene where the kid is watching his dad from his hiding place and the dad looks right at him and does the goofiest walk possible, knowing full well what his fate is and providing that moment of joy to his boy, that breaks me. It goes perfectly with the "tenderness in a world of strife" definition but takes it to the extreme.
Dude i ADORE ur analysis videos, they're all incredibly insightful n always give me a new perspective on how a story is written, it showed me the depth of storytelling when it's done right in a way i wasn't quite aware of bfr Amazing work dude!!!
chaos -> simplicity. “it has to be simple and surprising.” looking back at my own short stories, i think that perfectly summarizes exactly what i was doing without even realizing it.
I love how much effort you put in these videos. They're not just opinions coming out of nowhere, but you at least try to gather some different perspectives, facts, and points of view, even if they cab be subjective, such as what is beauty
Here's my theory on Beauty - The resolution from sadness to harmony is incredibly beautiful, as it takes the most discordant and terrible experience and resolves it to something that feels right, almost happy. The contrast between them is why it's felt so strongly. You could say beauty is a resolution to harmony, or to an ideal of what is right or perfect. You could also say it's the ideal itself, but it is the sacrifice, or nature of the resolution that creates beauty. Harmony I would describe more as peace of contentment, the beauty of a person is felt when you see them again after a long time, it's a return to happiness. from the first example (4:15) the novelty of harmony causes it to be felt more strongly, as you have not become jaded to the feeling. The cookies is a re-realization of that harmony, allowing you to perceive it again as if new, but it feels even more right, because you've felt it a thousand times, and the resolution is so familiar and comforting. from a mathematical perspective (4:40) it is the purity and simplicity of the resolution. Again, the surprise makes it more vivid and concentrated. Ben's idea (6:10) it is the sacrifice, the resolution that creates beauty. The fact that the goal is so small is beautiful because that sacrifice is purely because of a belief that it is right, for no real gain or change, but for the harmony itself. Set of ideals (6:24) this is more about the purity and simplicity of the harmony and resolution, like slowly falling to one place. The time spent in harmony makes it all the sweeter and familiar when you return, without distractions or dissonance to draw you away. (6:45) this scene is not beautiful, because it never resolves to harmony, it begins horribly dissonant and resolves to an equally dissonant place. It feels right, but there is no where to resolve to. The following scene from hunger games resolves grief in a form of harmony, her response feels right. It still leaves an off note, to resolve the anger, which is then resolved in the next scene. (7:04) this scene is a release of tension, towards harmony. If you listen to the music in the background it follows that resolution perfectly- descending to a place, waiting, descending again towards harmony. (but it doesn't reach harmony) The following scene from arcane is also a resolution to harmony, and the resolution itself also feels simple, and right, despite being tragic. (7:52) the necessity is the dissonance. You cannot resolve from harmony to harmony, as it's already at rest. There is no movement, and nothing is felt. It's like how you feel acceleration as speed. (8:08) the final scene from arcane feels the most beautiful because it's the most tragic. It is simultaneously resolving a terrible tragedy in the perfect way, and creating a new one at the same time. It's rather odd that that makes it more beautiful, but I think the perception of the movement as one harmony becomes tragedy and the other becomes harmony makes it seem bigger than it might be alone. (8:22) the last of us finally is interesting Joel is not only sacrificing the fate of humanity, but also perhaps when shred of decency he had left, why? maybe because he thought it was the right thing, or maybe because Ellie was more important to him than even his morals. Regardless, it's poignant because of the scale of the sacrifice, and because it is done to achieve harmony. The reason it's so strange, is because that harmony was previously the status quo. The harmony is almost not worth the sacrifice, but the beauty of it is that he sacrificed it all the same. (9:10) you could argue that humanity is the ability to sacrifice for the idea of harmony, the idea of what is right. beauty definition #1 It's almost vivacity you describe here, not beauty. Although you could describe beauty as any movement of emotion, I'm not sure that's correct. I would describe it more as caffeine, it makes you feel things, and feeling things makes you appreciate the beauty of life more. I don't think it's actually beauty in itself, even if it may make you feel beauty. I think the second half where you were talking about this definition fits very nicely with my definition. And end is harmony, that's what harmony is. beauty definition #2 you could argue this is beautiful because of resolution, again, but it's not actually the emotion that resolves, but the plot, the story as a whole. You could also argue that the larger the setup, the larger the resolution, the more complete the harmony, the more beauty. Regardless, it still fits with my definition. (16:42) that is harmony, not beauty. You can obviously conflate the two, but then you have two words that have overlapping meanings and that's yucky. I'm just going to stop now, as this is already a block text from hell. I hope you get the point I was trying to make. Have a good day. edit: I see your synthesized version is very similar to mine, noice. I would disagree that the other definitions were not actually the same theory. They just incorrectly understood what they were observing, or had an incorrect explanation.
What the fuck. How are you so smart. I've watched a few hours of these arcane videos you've made. You consolidate your thoughts so well. Organize. Communicate them so clearly. Wow. Do you have any influences/inspirations I can check out for more content like this?
Omg you referenced KIWI! Amazing pull. I’ve sometimes had a concept of perfection similar to what you articulated, I phrased it as “the story writes itself.” You feel as though the story could not exist in any other way.
I'm going to nerd out for a second, but this video made me think back to a literary theory class I took in college. While it does feel like a slippery undefinable topic, there's a whole discipline (philosophy of aesthetics) devoted to the inquiry of "what is beauty," as it relates to literature, art, math, etc. So it IS its own category in storytelling as you said! I imagine the most well known theory in this field is probably Aristotle's concept of emotional catharsis in tragedy, but there is a wide range of more modern ideas as well to explore, similar to the differing answers proposed in this video. In short, I think it's hard to reduce beauty to just 1 definition. Great video analysis.
I don't have money to comment stuffs in your Patreon, but if I did, I'd describe something I find beautiful, and I think about it a lot. I find beauty in taking care of myself. Not really the acts and rituals (e.g. brushing my teeth, showering, eating food), but more of the idea of it. I find beauty in the idea of taking care of myself. So, to use brushing my teeth as an example, I don't find brushing my teeth beautiful, but that fact that I'm doing it is beautiful. The fact that I'm taking time out of my day to do something that will benefit me and improve my general well-being is just so beautiful for a reason I can't seem to understand. Anyways...
To me. I specifically find a category of scenes beautiful for one reason: justice. Not justice with law, but justice for oneself. I'm thinking about the last scene from Arcane with Jinx firing the gun. The song really says it all. "What could have been" and in a certain sense, what isn't because of YOU. It would be wrong to stay Jinx has no fault at all for what is going on, she does. But not all of it, far from all of it. Basically saying "look what your actions have for consequences, instead of saying it's my fault because i pressed the trigger, look what you did to me, and in turn to everyone you care about". Because so many "evil deads" could be avoided if people sincerely cared a little more. There also the idea of "You've been labeling me a monster this whole time, without even trying to give any help or consideration, maybe the shadow of it but never true one, well see what a monster I can truly be." Its terrible, but to me there is beauty in this as a justice for oneself. What makes it further tragic however is that that moment of half justice, is not enough, and isn't repairing anything. That's why more and more bad deeds happen over and over again with bigger intensity, because the previous ones just weren't enough, not the real justice a person seeks.
There is a classical definition of tragedy as described in Aristotle's Poetics (it's described on Wikipedia along with other definitions like Shakespearean and Hegelian). if you haven't looked at it yet it may help your theories. It fits with your understanding of beauty as thematic coherence and inevitability - the tragic hero has a core fatal flaw (fatal as in 'fate') that leads to their downfall. For this character in these circumstances, it was always going to turn out this way.
For me the answer is a bit different. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So the beauty is just a resonance. To put it a bit more poetic, the author translates the feeling/phenomenon into some kind of a signal (audio-visual or text or performance or whatever), and when the beholder's soul (feelings/ambitions/personality) resonates with this signal it can create the feeling of beauty. And regarding Arcane-style tragedy, it's the mix of feeling of irrepairability and something hope-like. Everyone knows the feeling of when something important is beyond repair and you can't overcome the objective reality. You know that you can just "burn it all down" to at least make a statement, but you can't, because it'll be useless. And then you see it done in fiction and have a bit of resonance. IMHO
A show I think is the quintessential example of beautiful tragedy is Violet Evergarden. In each episode there is a new form of tragedy and how it impacts the characters is beautiful. I would love to see your take on the writing of that show.
Don't know how much this adds to the conversation but for a while now i've been looking at beauty from a Christian perspective. Defining beauty as what happens when we can see creation reflect the nature of God. Like looking at his shadow or finger prints. As if for a moment you just felt a giant pass by silently, carefully but with unimaginable power. Thats just one aspect tho. There is to much in God and to many ways his beauty reflects on to our world to sum up simply. but something i've noticed is beauty doesn't feel subjective it feels found, but only cause it wants you to see what its pointing towards, who its pointing towards. Beauty is perposed, its sent out, it calls. Beauty feels like a who, not a what. I never feel alone when I'm experiencing beauty. Sorry for the rambling im as much exploring this as i am righting it.
That’s been the case for me. Still friendless at age 25. Now I wish I tried to make friends more at school rather than having my nose in the books 24/7. It wasn’t worth it. Companies don’t give a shit about how much you know, they only care about how well you can communicate with people which I’m terrible at since I was always a loner.
I found beauty in episode 3 of Arcane in that we had always seen Silco as this emotionless and cruel warlord, yet he sat down in the rain and comforted this little girl in front of all his troops. He took a chance to seem weak in front of his men, which in turn showed strength.
I thought episode 3 was really beautiful and really tragic. Characters try to do the insurmountable by wanting to save a muscular kidnapped adult from others but the villain used this as a trap. But they fight to survive and protect themselves and the dynamic of the fight shows hope and the loss of hope as the episode continues. Powder disobeys Vi to prove she's worth it but botches everything causing a horrible tragedy, causing Vi to lose everyone. A friendship between Vi and Powder ends then with her father figure dead in front of her, making her mourn and be filled with regret. She gets angry and slaps her sister when she realizes it was her fault as she shows despite her love for her, she also loved everyone else similarly and could be carried away, but even after slapping her, she loved her and didn't want her taken away. The villain accepts her. We thought he would kill her, but he accepts her. I found it both horrifying and beautiful, how tragedy, hate, compassion and love, can all coincide in a very neat way in a horrifying event. That one person loving another don't always see each other eye to eye and that someone who we can fail to see friends can sometimes be more compassionate. I was left wanting to know more but I was entranced by both the emotions this left. Care, hope, distress, grief, remorse, regret, compassion and apathy. It was wrapped beautifully and cohesively without being melodramatic
Definitely, but when I'm infected with societal norms I find it difficult to write male characters in situations like that, wether the character is non imposing physically or an absolute unit, it's usually considered weakness when they are being tender, or caring regardless wether they are warmongers or a pacifist. So confusing
Schnee, you have a way of breaking down these extremely complex topics, in very accessible manners - which is not something everyone can do Keep it up!
Great analysis as always, but I was missing something that I'd like to contribute: the mention of the positive function of pain. No one will probably see this comment burried under the others, but let's try it anyways. So, what is pain? We like to think that pain is the cornerstone of suffering, it's something bad and something we need to avoid. But pain is actually the blessing of evolution. The feeling of pain signals us that we are about the lose something that is important to our survival in the most basic sense of the word. You cut your foot? If you live as an early hunter gatherer human, you might not be able to keep up with others and will be hunted down by predators or just die of thirst or hunger. Emotional pain is almost the same, even the brain areas involved are overlaping. When you lose something or are about to lose something you NEED, you feel pain. This is evolution's way of trying to nudge you to avoid the loss. But it's not always possible. So you lose someone in a tragic way, what happens? Pain comes to remind you that you are injured, something you NEEDED is lost. And at those dark and sad moments you are deeply and profoundly CONNECTED TO the VALUES you've just lost. When your garden is burnt down, you can't stop and smell the rose anymore, but suddenly you are FORCED to remember the smell, and it's not something you can ever forget. In those infinitely long and still so evanescent moments people are broken or remade. And sometimes it depens on whether or not you can realize THE REASON WHY you NEEDED those VALUES.
Strangely enough, I find Chernobyl to have some very beautiful scenes and most come from essentially honor in a corrupt world. For example, when the general says he'll go there himself or when the workers decide to volunteer.
My favourite scene was Valery and Boris sitting on a bench having an existentional conversation with Boris suddenly stopping to appreciate the beauty of a small catterpillar crawling by, just after admitting to Valery he has about a year to live. For the first time he really just stopped and smelled the roses and it´s such a bitter-sweet moment, it made me cry.
@@spoodergwen Pretty sure that some of Nietzsche's writing can be interpreted roughly thusly: If nothing else really matters, at least we can enjoy some of the beauty in this world.
@@notproductiveproductions3504that would be beauty in terms of recognizing the one that planted that in tony, closing the circle, reuniting in that realm
Beauty in a tragedy, to me, is a feeling: either “It didn’t have to end this way” or “it could only ever have ended this way.” And it was enhanced in arcane by Ella Purnell’s perfect delivery
Yes l, exactly. I think there's a ton of beauty in an ending that could've ended the complete opposite and be happy, but then at the last moment one tiny thing changes everything into a tragedy.
I think most of us will agree that ep 3 of TLOU is beautiful. I also love how it’s a summary of the entire season. It foreshadows everything and preps us for what’s to come.
I don't think the beauty of anger and fear should be set aside here. The scene you're talking about with Joel is inherently one of anger, no just sadness. I think I would define beauty in storytelling is an emotion being VISCERALLY VALIDATED. For example, the core urge/base of anger is justice. Joel is sad, but he's also angry, seeking to get justice for Ellie's death. Jinx is seeking justice for how the people of Zaun had been wronged, and how she had been wronged. I think fear is a little more complicated... What comes to mind first is that there are somethings that one may fear, but another find beautiful.
I think one beautiful aspect of fear is courage. Because there is the saying that "courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it." In a world where no one is safe and fear is everywhere, having someone act and try to change things and give people hope is beautiful. And we think that person is fearless, but they're often not. They're often just as scared as everyone else is but they decide to act in spite of their fear.
Beauty is too broad for me, but in terms of tragedy I think you clicked into the overall feeling but it's made up of two actually conflicting ideas 1 - This was inevitable (Emphasis on causality) 2 - This could have been avoided (Still emphasis on causality) So ultimately, whether it's me trying to make these two completely paradoxical ideas mesh together or it's a real thing going on here, I think tragedy often has this hyper focus on the causal chain of events leading up to whatever the moment is that causes the tragedy
Ooh, brilliant! I tend to not like the inevitability aspect of tragedy, because there are always other options, but that's an amazing way to think about it, it's inevitable and not inevitable at the same time, that's how all of our choices work, that's the paradox of free will. Tragedy isn't something that we have no control over, but also isn't something we have all the control over, it has to be this mix of both, and focusing in on the pain of that paradox via a terrible ending... wow, I might actually be able to write tragic endings to my stories now, thanks! I gotta think about this more.
@@cassiopeiasfire6457 Lol no problem, thanks to you too for the validation Free will kind of is like that. And topics like chaos, luck, etc. At some point it becomes hard to conceptualize because they blend together despite being concepts designed to create dichotomies. Maybe it's because we really just have monkey brains and we're not supposed to be thinking about these inherently cerebral concepts that are hard to grasp. But interesting to think about nonetheless.
@@secondeye1574 I think it's just the nature of concepts. The universe is one thing, but we have to divide it into concepts to think about it, but then it's hard to think in other concepts or transcend those categories. But we can do it tho! We're conscious blobs of cells, it's a miracle that we're able to understand anything, respectfully, fuck what we're not "supposed" to be thinking about :)
You hit the nail on the head with how I characterize tragedy. Take Arcane, for instance. Any number of single actions could've prevented the ending from going the way it did, but at the same time, you get the feeling that there's no other way the story could've ended.
For me, one of the most tragically beautiful scenes in all of media is the discussion between Kiritsugu and the holy grail about not being able to save all of humanity in Fate/Zero. The scene, of course, is very tragic and bitter, because we know that our hero essentially failed. But that's not all there is to it. The beauty COMES through the quiet island and contemplation that make up the scene. The palm trees and stars somehow also give us a sense of the unnatural and we stand before it in awe. My personal favorite anime for sure.
Part of it might be inevitability, too (if this is already mentioned my bad). But in tragic stories, it feels like there’s always a hope that things could have gone another way, either because of ignorance or circumstance, but from the very beginning of the story, it is clear that the “happy ending” that we may hope for the characters in the end is not, in some way, possible. Realistically, it never was and in some way the audience is subconsciously aware of it, too. On “Death of a Salesman”, Arthur Miller mentions how the only certain thing in his play was Willy’s undoing of himself, despite all else, for instance, which makes the ending dialogue from the characters have this sort of “beauty” effect. The “beauty” then may be a newer manifestation of that hope. It is not necessarily a spectacle of the actions/emotions by themselves that does this (although these are invaluable for resonating). The hope becomes a tainted hope that has adapted to the world around it, but it refuses to die, even if it must loose sight of itself in order to do so. edit; might also be that a character fulfills a part of themselves despite the consequences (Jinx coming into her own person / growing -> giant explosion, Joel showing he has finally connected to Ellie / found love and fulfillment -> murder hospital), maybe? Like a be careful what you wish for situation, almost
This essay is beautiful. At the beginning we are haphazardly dealing with a lot of definitions of beauty. We want to find it. We want to define it. Chaos. So schnee answers the call and begins on a quest. With the entire schnee patreon disc to back him up, he gathers opinions and knowledge from many other brilliant minds. With a canvas schnee brushes the first strokes: 4 ideas. Slowly but surely it formulates. Using the expanse of already amazing stories like Arcane, Last of Us, etc. we finally find it. From there we can define the power of tragedy. I don't know about others, but the sense of epiphany and "Yes! that's it!" connects to me on a deep level; since I can more fully define the beauty of the best stories I've seen/read (per animation, Bluey's Sleepytime, Flat Pack, Space, and Baby Race, and Hilda's The Witch, Fifty Year Night, and Deerfox come to mind). Thank you schnee and community, we need people like ya'll
Rarely can I sit through 25 minutes of unhalted lecture, but schnee makes it too easy. Anyway, rambling time ! It's funny because despite Arcane being one of my favorite stories, I did not find *beauty* in the same places than you. I've never seen this rocket ending as a satisfying accomplishment, but always as a terrifying turning point. Maybe it's the nature of the media, a show that is vowed to have a sequel, or maybe it is because I'm unconsciously stuck with a premade idea of Jinx as a LoL character. But after watching this ending, all I could think about was the consequences of her act, and it scared me way more than it saddened me. I was scared that her sister would not forgive her, that Pilltover/Zaun would never find peace, that the characters I loved would die in the explosion. I was left expecting more to the story and I could not find in episode 9 the beauty that struck me in episode 3 for comparison. The death of these characters really marked this episode as an end to Jinx's "child arc" to me, thus bringing that *absolute simplicity* from an intricate mess (in addition to the *tenderness in a strife-driven world* that I *surprisingly* found in the character of Silco) and that is what drew a beautiful scar in my mind, if that makes sense. I just think it's funny to see that I've come to fully agree with tis video's representations of beauty despite not having the exact same reference examples as you.
Interesting! Yeah, it does sound like the same idea, but we had different experiences as far as what emotional lacks captured our focus and prevented us from basking in the moment
6:23 I think both Tamar's and Ben's explonation fits why that scene is beutiful. Not just because of the tenderness, but because of how we see Rue pass away (in peace, tenderness again). But we experience it as her. From her point of view. We hear Katniss sing, we see the trees and the sky, and how they slowly shift out from focus. And presenting her death this way is surprising and novel. Also ties back to the first comment from how we REALLY see something. We saw characters die and pass away, but not like this. What I'm trying to say is, that overall, there can be more than one reason that makes something beautiful.
That is exactly what I felt towards the "Dark era" part of Bungo stray dogs. It's full of these tender moments of such extreme emotion to me. It's like characters are not speaking with a calm and somber tone in these moments, but screaming their lungs out: "I am in pain! Help me! Save me!" How perfect every little moment of it is, be it simple, like a character playing with children or eating curry or somebody dropping a depressing statement in the middle of a casual conversation, especially in retrospect, when you know how and when and why everything's going to go to shit, it's just... perfect. It doesn't help that one of the characters is an uncommon archetype I happened to relate to since childhood. It pains me just how underrated BSD is.
Beauty is heavily, heavily subjective but it really can just be described as awe and wonder that is so overwhelming you’re at a loss for words while having so many feelings about it. It’s captivating, off guard, and near a perfection we crave because it feels so powerful. Regardless of how imperfect it actually is it leaves the impression of something whole, deep, and nuanced. This nuance doesn’t have to be comfortable in order to leave an impact which is why so many people debate on what beauty is.
beauty is found in contrast there is beauty in simplicity, also in complexity The Absurd can both take it away or add to it it's where meaninglessness and meaning collide, where opposites can both exist harmoniously tragedy is beautiful because tho it is steeped in negativity, what we take away from it can lead to positivity in our lives, lessons learned a masterpiece, suddenly fiction is real.
To me and as subjective it is, Psychology is wonderful. The absolute wonder how we can feel different emotions when exposed to different kinds of scenarios. All the well known emotions if they are placed to build up to certain actions, can be magnificent to analyse the whole thing like flipping through a book. Real or fantasy tragedies that can make your skin crawl, the ones that can make you breakdown crying at the emptiness, ones that makes you feel lost for days afterwards. I never forget the wonder I felt answering the questions in a math exam with ease even though I dislike math with a passion, I felt invincible. And I won't forget my heart thumping to the loudspeakers standing in the front row of the first concert I ever experienced. Life itself is beauty for you to find behold.
When you spoke about the journey from chaos to order I noticed that's the opposite of the theory of entropy (that the universe becomes less ordered over time). A story that I consider to be one of the most beautiful ever told is Outer Wilds. Somewhat contradictively, Outer Wilds is about entropy. I think there's layers. You can have a story about chaos or about order and that's boring, or you can have a story about the transition from chaos to order and that's beautiful, or you can have a story about the relentless failure to transition chaos into order, and the eventual acceptance of disorder. And that's a higher beauty still.
wow thats is a really interesting theory, that means our attraction to beauty could be like a deep reaction formation to our fear of annihilation/death, gotta think on that one more!
Ok there's something here. I want to tie it to our fascination with apocalypse stories in recent years. Something interesting as that all your examples are, for lack of a better word, apocalypse... Adjacent? And I think that's because we see the parallel to our current experience (you know the whole world is boiling, animals are dying, ai is arguably becoming sentient, and corporations are exploiting us situation we find ourselves in). But even more interesting is how the apocalypse story has changed throughout the years. It used to be that the apocalypse stories were either about overcoming the chaos, finding the cure etc. (World war Z, hunger games, maze runner, etc) or about rebuilding after the apocalypse (the walking dead) But now, more often then not, the really good apocalypse stories are about accepting what it means to be mortal and small in something bigger than yourself -and reconsidering what's important in that frame of mind (the last of us, arcane, outer wilds)
@@sugarjoe8 Ooh very true! We may be onto something here! I wanted to share this other comment I got: "I just watched Puss in Boots the Last Wish yesterday and there was a moment when you completely understand Puss and where he's at in his fear and (while for me the fear wasn't there) I understood his fear because I could see myself in him. It's that heart-belief tie that I was connecting with in that moment. I would say that's even stronger than the survival catharsis. Now that I think about it, perhaps the bigger appeal is understanding the character in their heart-beliefs and as such, feeling understood yourself." To which I quoted you and replied: "there was this other great comment tying beauty to reversing entropy, which i speculated was seeing beauty as linked to an existential fear of annihilation -- SEEMS like it could fit with what you're saying, feeling understood, feeling validated is essentially feeling real, its like you're acknowledging and confirming your own existence in a time when you're feel most non-existent"
My thought that I'd like to add is not how tragedy is beautiful, but a part of why I think we value beauty in tragedy so much... Pain and ending are inevitable parts of life. Beauty comes easily to us in other parts, it's easy to feel happy about a happy ending. But being able to feel beauty about a painful ending, that's difficult, that takes artistry and perspective. And it makes us more connected to our own lives and others, it creates meaning in the pains in our lives that might otherwise feel meaningless. And I think this brings together both concepts you talked about: it integrates positive and negative emotions, and it also makes a coherent whole, not so much out of a particular story here, but out of LIFE. Life can so often feel divided into wonderful things and terrible things, but tragic beauty unifies the experience of life, finds beauty in the pain, connects us to parts of our lives we might like to write off and makes something meaningful out of them. And that's difficult to do, technically and emotionally, but it's something that feels incredibly important to an expansive experience of being human. And it's not confined to art, we can experience beautiful tragedy in real life, but like all difficult emotions and experiences, art is a powerful tool to help us experience those things.
Holy shit. This video is a goldmine! So many great ideas and concepts around writing and story telling that I have been trying to wrap my head around for years. Thank you so much for making this brilliant essay. I am so heavily inspired. You do great work!
Aaaa I adore your process in these videos. I get so much insight I never get otherwise. You make defining your terms into a whole journey! The nuance and the self critiques at the end keep me thinking. Idk Your uploads are like brain food lol
Ive asked myself this a lot. Personally i find tragic characters beautiful rather than situations/scenes/moments i still can’t really put words to it but this video certainly helps.
It’s interesting you mentioned the Hunger Games because I *would* describe the books and their tragedy as beautiful in a similar way to Arcane’s tragedy. I was thinking about them when you starting mentioning stuff in the category. But yeah definitely not the movies lol.
this is so much fun to think about i think maybe beauty (or a part of beauty) is contrast. A positive contrast married over a negative contrast. A sunset is a beautiful light on a broken world. Vi and Jinx being reunited is a contrast to the trauma that Jinx has gone through. Jinx's completion of identity is a contrast to Silco's death, as well as the death that's about to happen. And like your math friend said it can be simple and surprising in its simplicity contrasted to it's perceived complication. Thinking about some more moments with tragic beauty, and I feel like it can happen when certain things work out but others don't. When the goal and the thing that the characters really truly care about comes to fruition, but there is a cost to either them or those around them or other things they care about. Like when Romeo and Juliette are finally together, their goal is fulfilled, but it's in a really devastating way. Or when Jinx and Vi finally meet but it's a such a cost Jinx's mind, and I would consider the moment they hug beautiful., it's just not a long drawn out moment because they are immediately attacked and it goes into action again. I think that's another point that you had too, which is time. Time to be in the moment and feel the drawn out emotion that the whole story has been crafted and built up to. I also think it's interesting how in real life, we don't like experiencing this type of tragedy and probably don't find it beautiful in the moment. In the story, the characters don't appreciate how tragically beautiful it is. But we like to watch it. I wonder what that says about humanity. also lol i never use words like "perceived" and "fruition" normally, but every time i watch one of your videos my brain goes in to "schnee mode" and starts racing at a million miles per hour. it's so much fun
i think another form of beauty is the sense of relatability you get from something which sums up the story of your life to an almost scary degree of accuracy. i can name 2 examples of shows that do this: Ms. Marvel and Arcane. Ms. Marvel is a lot more optimistic and cheerful. here, it's relatable in such away that it's heartwarming and beautiful to see that these problems aren't my own. With Arcane, I get Jinx/Powder on a frighteningly similar level. it's a reality check done in the best way possible, "Oh crap. If i can see myself in Powder, what about Jinx" but then it made me stop to appreciate the effort it took to get that response from me, and that's beautiful.
Really interesting analysis of beautiful tragedy. Although I would argue against the inclusion of Romeo and Juliet as it is really a black comedy rather than a tragedy.
The drop in happiness is a work of art because it plays with your emotions. When something unexpectedly perfect happens, it can do a high spike upwards in awe, but the opposite is also true, a sudden leap can make your heart jump. The tragedy is beautiful because its not real, a real life tragedy is something to pity but a work of art becomes even more beautiful when it gets an emotion out of you.
I believe beauty has a lot to do with satifaction. No matter if it is a moment that just feels right, a person that looks exactly the way we feel attracted to or a character's death that seems to fulfill a purpose. Also artwork and music can be "defined" like that. When I talk about beautiful art (in general) then I'm normally talking about something that satisfies my personal taste in a very specific way. That is also what makes beauty so subjective, because satisfaction is always a very personal experience. Why does it feel beautiful when Frank and Bill die together at the end of their story? Because this is the only right outcome that could satisfy us. Why does everyone love Pedro Pascal? Because he and his story are what people like to see and/or hear (obviously exaggerating here, not everyone has to love him haha). And why do some scientific solutions just feel so elegant and beautiful? Because the way they are derived is so satisfying and maybe even surprising and gives us an answer to a question we might have been asking ourselves for a very long time. So yeah, I believe beauty is basically satisfaction which makes it so awesome and subjective. But this is surely an oversimplification of a much larger topic, though I think it is a pretty easy way to get an idea of what's actually behind it. :)
Since I'm currently fully back into the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom( the 2003 version specifically), I'll have to say there's a surprising amount of beauty to be found in both happy and sad moment of the show. Seeing Edward Elric obtaining his State Alchemist licence through changing the result of other people's dangerous transmutations into a crown of flowers, and realizing a crown of flowers is the last thing his mother asked of him before dying made that moment insanely precious. The scene where Edward talks to a war veteran who tells him he's okay with his lost leg because he finally found peace is honestly masterful as well. the show may not be as appreciated as its more recent counterpart, but it's still worth a lot of the praise it got at the time, imperfect show, but beautiful in all rights I think
One of the shows I've found beautiful since the first time I saw it was Anohana: the flower we saw that day. It deals with so much raw emotions to a group of childhood bestfriends who lost contact after one of them died in direct cause of something they set up. They all blame themselves heavily but they have to pretend everything is okay. But then they admit everything to each other and it's soul crushing, but so beautiful, especially with the scenes following and the end scene. I've watched the show around 5-7 times and there's hasn't been one time I didn't cry.
3:54 You're asking a question related to a question that even philosophers have failed to answer for over 2500 years: "What is beauty?" If you ask something relative to beauty, you're gonna smash head first in the wall of subjectivity 😅.
To me, as a physicist, beauty is the planets aligning. Complete chaos or just independent events, and then bam, simplicity. But a major major component is you have to be able to see it before the moment arrives. If the planets were just teleporting around chaotically, when they aligned, it wouldn’t feel beautiful. But as they move along their orbits, when they come close and you have that anticipation and that hope because you can see where there can be simplicity in the chaos, and when it finally happens, it’s beautiful.
i think the vagueness of the definition of beauty relates to the fact that people see different things beautiful as well. like you're using romeo and juliet as an example, i don't find that story particularly beautiful, more silly and quite boring, meanwhile some stories i do find beautiful you'd probably wouldn't care about at all. we can't agree on the common definition of beauty, because everyone calls different things beautiful. it's less diverse in science fields, but art really is a field of interpretation, even the most renown painting or music piece would have people completely unmoved by, and they're in their very right to be so. and as writers, we never will be able to write a story that everyone finds compelling, that's just not going to happen. i think we just need to focus on things that we personally find beautiful and hope that some other people would end up sharing our perspective. also the real tragedy is that sometimes things we used to find beautiful before, we can stop caring about or even start to actively dislike due to multiple different circumstances, it certainly happened to me multiple times. so it's a shaky ground all around
Really interesting analysis of how or why we find certain scenes beautiful. I LOVE all the different perspectives you brought in. For me personally, part of what makes tragedy beautiful is the emotions it evokes from me. I sometimes have this issue when watching TV/film and “sad” scenes come up. Part of me wants to cry. Wants to feel the sadness of the scene but for whatever reason something’s missing that makes me feel disconnected from it still. I know what I’m supposed to be feeling and I can try to conjure up that feeling in response to what’s happening in the story but it just doesn’t “hit” like it’s supposed to. Scenes I think are really truly beautiful are the ones that do give me that catharsis. The scenes where I can connect and go “yes I know this feeling. I understand.” And there is NO GREATER EXAMPLE than the tea party in Arcane ep. 9. For me the most beautiful moment is when Silco tells Jinx “don’t cry. You’re perfect.” The SOB that burst out of me when he said those lines. It was IMMEDIATE. It was VISCERAL. There have been very few TV/films that have been able to elicit THAT type of intense emotional response out of me. Normally only books can elicit that level of emotionality and even then it’s still not exactly the same. Watching that Arcane scene for the first time, my reaction was so sudden and involuntary. You would’ve thought that I just heard someone died. I think my reaction also just surprised me which I suppose connects back to what your math friend said about the result being surprising. It was surprising not in the actual content of the scene but in the way it was able to stab deep into my emotional core in the span of a few seconds without me realizing it until it happened.
You sound like an alternate reality Kermit the frog where Kermit is super smart and really good at explaining relatively complex subjects so that a smoothebrain like myself can enjoy. Big thanks ❤
This video is absolutely incredible. I’ve saved it so I can rewatch it, and I definitely feel I need to. It puts a finger on the magic underlying some of both my personal favorite moments in storytelling, and some of the best in history. In the book The Anatomy of Genre by John Truby, he says the tragedy in Shakespeare’s plays comes from the age of the characters: Romeo and Juliet are too young for the love they’re experiencing, King Lear suffers the hubris of old age, etc. I think that what you’ve done here is expand on this idea in a way that makes it universally applicable. Another way of saying what John Truby said is, “it could end no other way.” Everything clicks into place because of who the characters are, and when they are in their lives. I hope I’ve added to this idea somehow. I feel like I’ve only just begun thinking about this, and the results will hopefully show in my writing. I hope you make a follow up to this to continue exploring the idea! Thank you for this video, and all your other work. Truly insightful and powerful ideas here.
I think something that is missing in this theory is explaining why beauty exists from an evolutionary standpoint. We may have an idea of what beauty is and what causes us to feel that something is beautiful, but if we don't understand what survivalists benefit it provided during evolution (or perhaps if it's something new, why our brain "glitches out" and feels beauty,) then we won't be able to confirm if our theories are correct. A perfect theory about beauty could exist, but if we don't know why it exists then we can't confirm if it's true or just speculation.
That being said, I think beauty is simply satisfaction that our brain rewards us for basking in an emotion or many emotions. I would compare it to taking a bath. You can't take a bath without stopping and settling. If everything's rushing past you then that's just a shower, and that's what daily life is. And while you can take a bath, to make it more satisfying you have to make a mix. Maybe you make the water warm, add essential oils or a bath bomb, add petals or other things floating in the water, set the lighting with candles or another light source, but even just a tub of lukewarm water is still a bath, it's just that making it better, or making beauty better, makes it more beautiful, or more bath. I think beauty is either... A) When we have nothing else that our brain craves and we simply bask in the emotion, serving as a weird glitch that is only uncovered when our brain stops thinking and just feels. It's like peeling back the constantly working thoughts of our brain to reveal that the underlying emotions that precede our thoughts are so incredibly beautiful, like peeling the mundane bark of a tree off to reveal that it's wood is sparkling and magnificent. This means that emotions are more powerful than we realize but are masked by constant thought and observation. I guess it really is like peeling the bark off a tree because you're not really meant to do it because a tree is supposed to have bark but damn if it ain't satisfying. B) Beauty is our brain rewarding us for feeling raw emotion. It's like our brain is a constantly running car, but you can only check the gas when you stop. It's like your brain is the driver being like "good, good, thank you for checking that we have gas. That's important." It's like your brain giving you a cookie for doing a system diagnostics check on your emotions. This means beauty is either a mechanism to assist in the continued functioning of emotion, or otherwise a byproduct of your brain rewarding you for your continued emotions. C) It's a mix of the two somehow.
Lots to think about here! I'll start by commenting on what you DIDN'T address - whether intentionally or because it's not part of how you experience tragedies. The single word I expected but didn't hear (or missed! 😬) was CATHARSIS. There is a certain sense of release, or relief, or letting go, or letting be that I feel in the best of tragedies. Sometimes this occurs on the macro level (i.e. this is what it is to be human) and sometimes it occurs on the micro level (i.e. I thought this was a feeling that was unique to me, but now I see that it's shared by others). Although Mark Twain doesn't use that term, his following (posthumously published) review of a play called, "The Master of Palmyra" always stood out to me as an articulation of why I enjoy tragic movies. Here are the relevant excerpts. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. It's quite possible that this connects to your first theory of beauty, but because you expressed the idea in completely different terms, then I'd like to hear what you think: -------------------------------------- I know people who have seem it ten times; they know the most of it by heart; they do not tire of it; and they say they shall still be quite willing to go and sit under its spell whenever they get the opportunity … This piece is just one long, soulful, sardonic laugh at human life. Its title might properly be 'Is Life a Failure?' and leave the five acts to play with the answer. I am not at all sure that the author meant to laugh at life. I only notice that he has done it. Without putting into words any ungracious or discourteous things about life, the episodes in the piece seem to be saying all the time, inarticulately: 'Note what a silly poor thing human life is; how childish its ambitions, how ridiculous its pomps, how trivial its dignities, how cheap its heroisms, how capricious its course, how brief its flight, how stingy in happinesses, how opulent in miseries, how few its prides, how multitudinous its humiliations, how comic its tragedies, how tragic its comedies, how wearisome and monotonous its repetition of its stupid history through the ages, with never the introduction of a new detail; how hard it has tried, from the Creation down, to play itself upon its possessor as a boon and has never proved its case in a single instance!' … It is right and wholesome to have those light comedies and entertaining shows; and I shouldn't wish to see them diminished. But none of us is always in the comedy spirit; we have our graver moods; they come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape them. These moods have their appetites--healthy and legitimate appetites--and there ought to be some way of satisfying them. It seems to me that New York ought to have one theatre devoted to tragedy. With her three millions of population, and seventy outside millions to draw upon, she can afford it, she can support it. America devotes more time, labour, money and attention to distributing literary and musical culture among the general public than does any other nation, perhaps; yet here you find her neglecting what is possibly the most effective of all the breeders and nurses and disseminators of high literary taste and lofty emotion--the tragic stage. To leave that powerful agency out is to haul the culture-wagon with a crippled team … … with a tragedy-tonic once or twice a month, we shall enjoy the comedies all the better. Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my life: I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on vacation.
Yeah, I specifically avoided the word (for similar reasons I mentioned to you earlier about avoiding the word "irony"). But I wasn't completely happy leaving it out bc even though I did approximate the role catharsis plays pretty well imo from the different angles of the experience of completion and being suddenly free of other conflict to bask in the resolution, the "release" aspect you're mentioning was something I didn't quite feel I could address through my two ideas, and I also didn't feel like it was developed and distinct enough to be its own idea. There are experiences of catharsis within stories that are satisfying but I wouldn't call beautiful and there are experiences of catharsis that happen as a result of experiencing stories (but not IN stories), like with horror imo, which I also wouldn't call beautiful. So I couldn't figure out where to go from those steps to a fuller idea and decided to leave it for future development of the idea. But I'd welcome any thoughts you have on a more precise definition of what type of catharsis or where it does and doesn't fit in in beauty. Man that is a monster of a mark twain quote, attacking the subject from a completely different angle than I was thinking. Gonna have to sit with that one and think about it a bit 🧐🧐🧐
I think the challenge here was that there was an attempt to connect tragedy to beauty, and of course there is a connection as said in the video. However first ya gotta find out what beauty is. The topic was covered very good on what beauty is though. I just think that "what is beauty in storytelling" deserves its own...Universe.
The real beauty that I have found -- it is your videos. For me, they are that moments of serenity in my chaotic live. It is the moments when my own perspective expands because of how surprisingly simple you make this complex topics seem. The way you present information is the other kind of beauty I fully adore. Thank you for all the work you put in this videos and I wish the very best for you in your life journey and journey as a content creator, dear schnee!!
I feel like there is also more nuance in the difference between sadness and tragedy. In Arcane for example, the ending is tragic not just because Jinx decides to shoot the rocket, but also because it happens at the exact moment went the council decides to vote for peace. It is also tragic because of how given different circumstances, Vi and Jinx could have had a great relationship. In tragedy lies the death of a potential better futur (something you mentioned with Joel) To me, another nuance is like this: Sadness => Something bad happens Tragic => Something terrible happens but that could have been resolved, or that is highly unjust
Hi, Schnee! Idk if you've already made a video along these lines but what do you think of remembering things *wrong* as a minor theme in Arcane? There are only like, four different places where this comes up in the story, but three of them are pivotal moments and its really cool. The first one is episode 3 - it opens with the flashback to Vander drowning Silco, but then later in the episode we see the flashback again and it ends differently, with Silco escaping. It unclear to me watching that second flashback (just with the way its filmed, lit, etc) if Silco escaping actually happened or if that's him re-writing the memory as he finally gets revenge on Vander in present day. The second place this pops up is during Vi's parkour run after leaving Stillwater. She says something about Powder being "able to do that when she was seven" although we know from seeing it ourselves that she was in fact *not*. And then it shows up twice in the tea party scene. When Vi is telling Powder to "picture milo, claggor, vander, me" Powder is picturing them, but she's not picturing them as they were in life - her memories are monstrous. And then we have her at the end saying "I thought maybe you could love me like you used to, even though I'm different. But you changed to." When Vi is actually the only person who DIDNT change. The only change that happened was in Powder's memories. Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. This has been floating around in my head for days. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
The TH-cam channel "Like Stories of Old" has a great essay on the movie Cloud Atlas, and how beauty can save the world. Highly recommended (both the film and the video).
That's a great movie! I loved the book even more (and the author in general), as I think it had more room to explore a lot of the same ideas in without some of the controversy that the movie unfortunately received. The TV series Sense8 by the same directors gives me similar feels as Cloud Atlas in some ways, with the panglobal explorations of interconnectedness and empathy.
I love your dissection of words start with a little bit, of something peculiar, beautiful leading us on with why is he call all these bad decisions these break ups these miscommunications beautiful. then it hit me beauty doesn't last flowers wilt and the moments they are alive is the moment of the story and the story is over now. The story was beautiful. Now its 2 am where I'm at so I'll finish this in the morning I just thought I'll send a viewer perception just to make sure Schnee knows how great at speeches he is. thank you for the unmatched wordplay. I am only 1min 30 into the video and am curious as all hell, how much of the final conclusion is aligned with what he primed me with think and all the introspection for all the examples.
I like that the story went this way and I truly believe this was the best direction they could have gone in but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it.
You are talking about AWE with the expansion piece! Awe is a vastness that requires mental accommodation. The expansion happens when we have capacity to make that accommodation. I just finished my whole masters thesis on this about how awe and trauma are intertwined though expansion and contraction and what we have capacity for. In a lot of ways art is a modality that gives us more capacity to experience violence and hardship and theat far enough away that we feel, expansive.
This makes me think of A Silent Voice a LOT. Everytime something depressing or awful happens (Shoyo going to a bridge to jump off, Shoko doing the same on her balcony, the fight when they're younger where Shoyo is bullying Shoko), we're shown something beautiful to contrast and give us these complex emotions (beautiful flowers, kids playing with sparklers and fireworks, gentle sunlight through a classroom window). Interestingly, it combines more than one of the definitions for beautiful in these scenes.
I WANT TO GIVE YOU A QUESTION: (i have not seen the entire video yet so i dont know the conclusion yet, but thought of it and wanted to ask) Can a story/moment be good/beautiful without catharsis?
2 more things to consider. 1 is the evolutionary basis for our appreciation of beauty. Because we're human, and the human brain evolved to optimize survival and procreation, it is worthwhile to consider how identifying beauty could enhance our survival. Our capacity to appreciate physical beauty may be fundamentally different from our appreciation of narrative beauty. We are attracted to physical beauty because (evolutionarily speaking) those traits are indicative of superior fitness, and thus superior survivability for your prospective offspring. Narrative beauty may resonate with us because storytelling has been so vital to horizontal transmission of information across our species. The ability to convey complex ideas in simple and engaging stories would be an enormous advantage for survival. Because in prehistoric times, the stories around the campfire would be recounting their daily experiences - thus other humans can learn how to engage with danger without directly encountering it themselves. So both increased our chances of survival, and that's why we are drawn to these things, but it doesn't answer why we specifically use the word "beautiful" rather than any other term representing positive emotionality. Personally I think it boils down to my 2nd point - linguistic determinism and the imprecision of language (specifically English in this case). I'm confident that other languages exist with distinct words for what we consider under the umbrella of "beauty" in English To elaborate on linguistic determinism: the words we use to describe things often define their nature in our minds. For example, most people think of "red" and "dark red" as variations of a single color. But "orange" and "brown" we think of as entirely distinct colors, even though brown is literally just "dark orange." But since we have different words for orange and brown, we think of them as categorically distinct. All these different forms of beauty may be """"beauty""”" in the way that red, dark red, and light red are all red. But in another language, each form of beauty may have a distinct word just like orange and brown. Therefore, the entire premise of our question may be flawed. We are trying to figure out why so many different things evoke a sense of beauty, and why "beauty" is the word we use to describe all of them. But maybe it's just a natural consequence of the weaknesses of English as a language. Maybe our entire frame of thinking about this topic is flawed because we have too much faith in our ability to categorize reality into distinct boxes with labels on them. In reality our brains are fundamentally kludge-like and only had to be good enough to survive, our brains didn't evolve to be perfectly coherent and without contradiction. This kludge-like nature of our psyche means that we should exercise skepticism with concern our ability to label and categorize things. We can often label and categorize things in nonsensical or suboptimal ways, and throwing all these distinct concepts into a single box labeled "beauty" may just be one of the shortcomings of our language and psychology. It could be a bug rather than a feature.
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Tamar’s full answer (transcript of her voice note, more or less)
(Schnee: hey! random question related to a video i'm making: how would you describe what beauty means in math? what type of idea/scenario in math would you call beautiful? what's beautiful about it?)
Tamar: Hey this is a good question! Let me tell you some things that are not quite it, but are qualities of what’s a beautiful idea in math. I think that this is something anyone would agree with and then i’ll tell you something that's a little more like my personal take. I think that for an idea to be beautiful in math it has to be simple and surprising. Maybe this is not a shocking list of qualities, but if something is a very complicated idea,it's not really gonna strike people as beautiful. And if something is just sort of obvious deductive steps, that’s also not beautiful. It’s sort of like some sort of creative route to an idea or a surprising conclusion that comes about from something that’s simple to follow in some way. Like maybe soe sort of unexpected maneuver where someone spells out the steps, you can see it, and see how it works. I don’t think that’s the whole picture, but I think the reason those things are necessary is that it’s something that’s sort of perspective expanding.
I guess that gets to what i think is beautiful in math, which are the ideas where you get a new perspective on the same idea. Like you have different paradigms in math, different ways that you can build up different kinds of mathematical objects and ways of thinking mathematically, and when someone can build a bridge where you can see that there’s these two different perspectives or these two different frameworks are actually different lenses on the same idea or or comparable lenses on the same idea, then that can be a really beautiful thing.
Let me think of an analogy. Ok, this is not a great example, but imagine you were thinking about food and you were thinking about how certain cultures -- this is made up -- but like certain cultures use mushrooms in a certain way, and certain cultures use soy sauce, and some people use fish sauce, and some people use like, I don’t know, some kind of cheese, and you realize that there’s some sort of unifying idea that showed that these were all different approaches to the same achieving a certain kind of punch in your food. So certain ideas in math are like that where there's sort of some sort of like a unifying idea that brings together different kinds of ideas. And that's,I think, a really classic type of beautiful idea. And that's one of my favorite things. I don't think it's the only thing that people call beautiful in math, so I'll think about it a little bit more. Maybe there's something that could be a little bit more summarizable, but those are the thoughts off the top of my head.
Sad ending can be better than happy endings cause they are more impactful and hit the harder and stick with you longer than if evreything went happily e ver after
Okay, but did you ask your friend if the fact that you use light-mode on Discord is beautiful? It's simple and surprising after all. And also psychopathic. Time to unsubscribe. 😔
As a mathematician, she hit on exactly the points which I was going to raise. For me, I find the unification of seemingly utterly-separated things as an especially heightened form of beauty, although it is not necessary.
Simplicity and simultaneous creativity are important features too, as described.
I think part of Beauty is silencing the noise of everything else. It drowns out other thoughts. If someone in math or physics discovers something, you think they are concerned about normal life things? If you stare at a sunset, are you thinking about sports? We like Arcane because it pulls us in to be more concerned for the characters than our own worries for a while.
For me, I was driving at night, and some song from the 90s came on the radio and for a moment, I felt like I was a teenager again. That was a moment of beauty.
Talking about Tragedy, did you watch Cyberpunk Edge runners?
I think what made Jinx's rocket so powerful was that it was the most Devastating moment of her life. but simultaneously the most triumphant. the rocket is shot out of anger, regret, and sorrow. but also out empowerment, Pride, and Love. It's a beautiful moment for that reason. All of her emotions, anger, and Trauma all culminate into a missile of mass destruction. it's like the world will finally know and feel what she's experienced all her life. and will know that she's now truly become jinx.
You NAILED it
during the rocket scene I sincerely can't not remember if we can actually hear Silco's line ''we will show them, we'll show them all'', the line he said for the first time when he takes Jinx on as his daughter
but I can see it so distinctly
I think a lot of mass shooters feel the same way.
@@matheussanthiago9685 That line is very similar to what Ellie's mother tells her when she's born "you tell them Ellie"
That's it!
For me, beauty in storytelling comes from contrast. It’s one of the reasons why bittersweet tends to hit stronger than fluff or angst separately. And even in your answers you kind of hint to it in a sense:
- Tenderness in strife
- Simplicity from chaos
Etc.
in that way, beauty is the complete juxtaposition of two ideas that unifies and completes each of them individually - we are FORCED to dramatically deepen our understanding of both (AND how they fit together) and that is beautiful
Such an amazing video. My thoughts is that tragedy is a way to make the characters feel human and like you said sad and emotional. Psychologically, tragedy draws us to what is itself tragic. Things that are beautiful because they are human or relatable, Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
Also I know i used human twice sorry
The fact there was not a single mention of the 1997 masterpiece "Life is Beautiful" during this whole discussion on the meaning of beauty is very unfortunate and a missed opportunity. I'm usually not too emotional but the scene where the kid is watching his dad from his hiding place and the dad looks right at him and does the goofiest walk possible, knowing full well what his fate is and providing that moment of joy to his boy, that breaks me. It goes perfectly with the "tenderness in a world of strife" definition but takes it to the extreme.
Dude i ADORE ur analysis videos, they're all incredibly insightful n always give me a new perspective on how a story is written, it showed me the depth of storytelling when it's done right in a way i wasn't quite aware of bfr
Amazing work dude!!!
chaos -> simplicity. “it has to be simple and surprising.”
looking back at my own short stories, i think that perfectly summarizes exactly what i was doing without even realizing it.
BEAUTIFUL analysis. I took notes. Thanks for the post
I love how much effort you put in these videos. They're not just opinions coming out of nowhere, but you at least try to gather some different perspectives, facts, and points of view, even if they cab be subjective, such as what is beauty
Here's my theory on Beauty -
The resolution from sadness to harmony is incredibly beautiful, as it takes the most discordant and terrible experience and resolves it to something that feels right, almost happy. The contrast between them is why it's felt so strongly.
You could say beauty is a resolution to harmony, or to an ideal of what is right or perfect. You could also say it's the ideal itself, but it is the sacrifice, or nature of the resolution that creates beauty. Harmony I would describe more as peace of contentment, the beauty of a person is felt when you see them again after a long time, it's a return to happiness.
from the first example (4:15) the novelty of harmony causes it to be felt more strongly, as you have not become jaded to the feeling. The cookies is a re-realization of that harmony, allowing you to perceive it again as if new, but it feels even more right, because you've felt it a thousand times, and the resolution is so familiar and comforting.
from a mathematical perspective (4:40) it is the purity and simplicity of the resolution. Again, the surprise makes it more vivid and concentrated.
Ben's idea (6:10) it is the sacrifice, the resolution that creates beauty. The fact that the goal is so small is beautiful because that sacrifice is purely because of a belief that it is right, for no real gain or change, but for the harmony itself.
Set of ideals (6:24) this is more about the purity and simplicity of the harmony and resolution, like slowly falling to one place. The time spent in harmony makes it all the sweeter and familiar when you return, without distractions or dissonance to draw you away.
(6:45) this scene is not beautiful, because it never resolves to harmony, it begins horribly dissonant and resolves to an equally dissonant place. It feels right, but there is no where to resolve to. The following scene from hunger games resolves grief in a form of harmony, her response feels right. It still leaves an off note, to resolve the anger, which is then resolved in the next scene.
(7:04) this scene is a release of tension, towards harmony. If you listen to the music in the background it follows that resolution perfectly- descending to a place, waiting, descending again towards harmony. (but it doesn't reach harmony) The following scene from arcane is also a resolution to harmony, and the resolution itself also feels simple, and right, despite being tragic.
(7:52) the necessity is the dissonance. You cannot resolve from harmony to harmony, as it's already at rest. There is no movement, and nothing is felt. It's like how you feel acceleration as speed.
(8:08) the final scene from arcane feels the most beautiful because it's the most tragic. It is simultaneously resolving a terrible tragedy in the perfect way, and creating a new one at the same time. It's rather odd that that makes it more beautiful, but I think the perception of the movement as one harmony becomes tragedy and the other becomes harmony makes it seem bigger than it might be alone.
(8:22) the last of us finally is interesting Joel is not only sacrificing the fate of humanity, but also perhaps when shred of decency he had left, why? maybe because he thought it was the right thing, or maybe because Ellie was more important to him than even his morals. Regardless, it's poignant because of the scale of the sacrifice, and because it is done to achieve harmony. The reason it's so strange, is because that harmony was previously the status quo. The harmony is almost not worth the sacrifice, but the beauty of it is that he sacrificed it all the same.
(9:10) you could argue that humanity is the ability to sacrifice for the idea of harmony, the idea of what is right.
beauty definition #1 It's almost vivacity you describe here, not beauty. Although you could describe beauty as any movement of emotion, I'm not sure that's correct. I would describe it more as caffeine, it makes you feel things, and feeling things makes you appreciate the beauty of life more. I don't think it's actually beauty in itself, even if it may make you feel beauty.
I think the second half where you were talking about this definition fits very nicely with my definition. And end is harmony, that's what harmony is.
beauty definition #2 you could argue this is beautiful because of resolution, again, but it's not actually the emotion that resolves, but the plot, the story as a whole. You could also argue that the larger the setup, the larger the resolution, the more complete the harmony, the more beauty. Regardless, it still fits with my definition.
(16:42) that is harmony, not beauty. You can obviously conflate the two, but then you have two words that have overlapping meanings and that's yucky.
I'm just going to stop now, as this is already a block text from hell. I hope you get the point I was trying to make. Have a good day.
edit: I see your synthesized version is very similar to mine, noice. I would disagree that the other definitions were not actually the same theory. They just incorrectly understood what they were observing, or had an incorrect explanation.
Great video as always!
Amadeus came to my mind repeatedly througout this video. i think that movie unifies beauty and tragedy really well
beauty at its core is synchronisty hence for anything to be beautiful good or evil it must be relatable to us so as to sync
What the fuck. How are you so smart. I've watched a few hours of these arcane videos you've made. You consolidate your thoughts so well. Organize. Communicate them so clearly. Wow.
Do you have any influences/inspirations I can check out for more content like this?
Omg you referenced KIWI! Amazing pull.
I’ve sometimes had a concept of perfection similar to what you articulated, I phrased it as “the story writes itself.” You feel as though the story could not exist in any other way.
I'm going to nerd out for a second, but this video made me think back to a literary theory class I took in college. While it does feel like a slippery undefinable topic, there's a whole discipline (philosophy of aesthetics) devoted to the inquiry of "what is beauty," as it relates to literature, art, math, etc. So it IS its own category in storytelling as you said!
I imagine the most well known theory in this field is probably Aristotle's concept of emotional catharsis in tragedy, but there is a wide range of more modern ideas as well to explore, similar to the differing answers proposed in this video. In short, I think it's hard to reduce beauty to just 1 definition. Great video analysis.
Great take. Would love to hear more and from the sounds of it other like-minded.
How do I join the discord?
I find beauty in all your videos
Now I really want an analisys on the beauty of Heike Monogatari.
I don't have money to comment stuffs in your Patreon, but if I did, I'd describe something I find beautiful, and I think about it a lot. I find beauty in taking care of myself. Not really the acts and rituals (e.g. brushing my teeth, showering, eating food), but more of the idea of it. I find beauty in the idea of taking care of myself. So, to use brushing my teeth as an example, I don't find brushing my teeth beautiful, but that fact that I'm doing it is beautiful. The fact that I'm taking time out of my day to do something that will benefit me and improve my general well-being is just so beautiful for a reason I can't seem to understand. Anyways...
10:29 ruthlessness* + love
Did expect Ryujin to pop up in tragic beauty video
To me. I specifically find a category of scenes beautiful for one reason: justice. Not justice with law, but justice for oneself. I'm thinking about the last scene from Arcane with Jinx firing the gun. The song really says it all. "What could have been" and in a certain sense, what isn't because of YOU. It would be wrong to stay Jinx has no fault at all for what is going on, she does. But not all of it, far from all of it. Basically saying "look what your actions have for consequences, instead of saying it's my fault because i pressed the trigger, look what you did to me, and in turn to everyone you care about". Because so many "evil deads" could be avoided if people sincerely cared a little more. There also the idea of "You've been labeling me a monster this whole time, without even trying to give any help or consideration, maybe the shadow of it but never true one, well see what a monster I can truly be." Its terrible, but to me there is beauty in this as a justice for oneself. What makes it further tragic however is that that moment of half justice, is not enough, and isn't repairing anything. That's why more and more bad deeds happen over and over again with bigger intensity, because the previous ones just weren't enough, not the real justice a person seeks.
There is a classical definition of tragedy as described in Aristotle's Poetics (it's described on Wikipedia along with other definitions like Shakespearean and Hegelian). if you haven't looked at it yet it may help your theories. It fits with your understanding of beauty as thematic coherence and inevitability - the tragic hero has a core fatal flaw (fatal as in 'fate') that leads to their downfall. For this character in these circumstances, it was always going to turn out this way.
SIGNALIS is so beautifully tragic
For me the answer is a bit different.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So the beauty is just a resonance. To put it a bit more poetic, the author translates the feeling/phenomenon into some kind of a signal (audio-visual or text or performance or whatever), and when the beholder's soul (feelings/ambitions/personality) resonates with this signal it can create the feeling of beauty.
And regarding Arcane-style tragedy, it's the mix of feeling of irrepairability and something hope-like. Everyone knows the feeling of when something important is beyond repair and you can't overcome the objective reality. You know that you can just "burn it all down" to at least make a statement, but you can't, because it'll be useless. And then you see it done in fiction and have a bit of resonance. IMHO
A show I think is the quintessential example of beautiful tragedy is Violet Evergarden. In each episode there is a new form of tragedy and how it impacts the characters is beautiful. I would love to see your take on the writing of that show.
Man, where were you when I was studying this module in philosophy class?
Don't know how much this adds to the conversation but for a while now i've been looking at beauty from a Christian perspective. Defining beauty as what happens when we can see creation reflect the nature of God. Like looking at his shadow or finger prints. As if for a moment you just felt a giant pass by silently, carefully but with unimaginable power. Thats just one aspect tho. There is to much in God and to many ways his beauty reflects on to our world to sum up simply. but something i've noticed is beauty doesn't feel subjective it feels found, but only cause it wants you to see what its pointing towards, who its pointing towards. Beauty is perposed, its sent out, it calls. Beauty feels like a who, not a what. I never feel alone when I'm experiencing beauty. Sorry for the rambling im as much exploring this as i am righting it.
Maybe the real tragedy is the friends we didn't make along the way
Bruuuuuh XD
That’s been the case for me. Still friendless at age 25. Now I wish I tried to make friends more at school rather than having my nose in the books 24/7. It wasn’t worth it. Companies don’t give a shit about how much you know, they only care about how well you can communicate with people which I’m terrible at since I was always a loner.
@@HxH2011DRA HISOKA is so beautiful
this hit way too close to home
@@LuisSierra42 that he is my friend🤡
I found beauty in episode 3 of Arcane in that we had always seen Silco as this emotionless and cruel warlord, yet he sat down in the rain and comforted this little girl in front of all his troops. He took a chance to seem weak in front of his men, which in turn showed strength.
true, the moment of him showing tenderness def was beautiful as a moment
I thought episode 3 was really beautiful and really tragic. Characters try to do the insurmountable by wanting to save a muscular kidnapped adult from others but the villain used this as a trap. But they fight to survive and protect themselves and the dynamic of the fight shows hope and the loss of hope as the episode continues. Powder disobeys Vi to prove she's worth it but botches everything causing a horrible tragedy, causing Vi to lose everyone. A friendship between Vi and Powder ends then with her father figure dead in front of her, making her mourn and be filled with regret. She gets angry and slaps her sister when she realizes it was her fault as she shows despite her love for her, she also loved everyone else similarly and could be carried away, but even after slapping her, she loved her and didn't want her taken away. The villain accepts her. We thought he would kill her, but he accepts her. I found it both horrifying and beautiful, how tragedy, hate, compassion and love, can all coincide in a very neat way in a horrifying event. That one person loving another don't always see each other eye to eye and that someone who we can fail to see friends can sometimes be more compassionate. I was left wanting to know more but I was entranced by both the emotions this left. Care, hope, distress, grief, remorse, regret, compassion and apathy. It was wrapped beautifully and cohesively without being melodramatic
I found episode 3 to be one of the most beautiful episodes. It also had that perspective expanding moments where you realize anyone could die
@microdavid yeah, this episode really set the "Game of Thrones" type of tone for the series
..in that no one is really safe.
Definitely, but when I'm infected with societal norms I find it difficult to write male characters in situations like that, wether the character is non imposing physically or an absolute unit, it's usually considered weakness when they are being tender, or caring regardless wether they are warmongers or a pacifist. So confusing
Schnee, you have a way of breaking down these extremely complex topics, in very accessible manners - which is not something everyone can do
Keep it up!
thx, i appreciate it!!
Great analysis as always, but I was missing something that I'd like to contribute: the mention of the positive function of pain. No one will probably see this comment burried under the others, but let's try it anyways. So, what is pain?
We like to think that pain is the cornerstone of suffering, it's something bad and something we need to avoid. But pain is actually the blessing of evolution. The feeling of pain signals us that we are about the lose something that is important to our survival in the most basic sense of the word. You cut your foot? If you live as an early hunter gatherer human, you might not be able to keep up with others and will be hunted down by predators or just die of thirst or hunger. Emotional pain is almost the same, even the brain areas involved are overlaping. When you lose something or are about to lose something you NEED, you feel pain. This is evolution's way of trying to nudge you to avoid the loss. But it's not always possible.
So you lose someone in a tragic way, what happens? Pain comes to remind you that you are injured, something you NEEDED is lost. And at those dark and sad moments you are deeply and profoundly CONNECTED TO the VALUES you've just lost.
When your garden is burnt down, you can't stop and smell the rose anymore, but suddenly you are FORCED to remember the smell, and it's not something you can ever forget. In those infinitely long and still so evanescent moments people are broken or remade. And sometimes it depens on whether or not you can realize THE REASON WHY you NEEDED those VALUES.
wow beautifully said!
@@schnee1 thank you. :)
I'm not crying, you are crying! *sniff*
Strangely enough, I find Chernobyl to have some very beautiful scenes and most come from essentially honor in a corrupt world. For example, when the general says he'll go there himself or when the workers decide to volunteer.
My favourite scene was Valery and Boris sitting on a bench having an existentional conversation with Boris suddenly stopping to appreciate the beauty of a small catterpillar crawling by, just after admitting to Valery he has about a year to live. For the first time he really just stopped and smelled the roses and it´s such a bitter-sweet moment, it made me cry.
@@spoodergwen Pretty sure that some of Nietzsche's writing can be interpreted roughly thusly: If nothing else really matters, at least we can enjoy some of the beauty in this world.
In Iron Man, Yinsin telling Tony not to waste his second chance and that he was going to be with his dead family, that was pretty beautifully tragic.
true, good example
Imagine if Tony went to that pocket realm in the soul stone in Endgame and saw Yinsin’s ghost asking if he didn’t waste his second chance at life
@@notproductiveproductions3504that would be beauty in terms of recognizing the one that planted that in tony, closing the circle, reuniting in that realm
Beauty in a tragedy, to me, is a feeling: either “It didn’t have to end this way” or “it could only ever have ended this way.”
And it was enhanced in arcane by Ella Purnell’s perfect delivery
Yes l, exactly. I think there's a ton of beauty in an ending that could've ended the complete opposite and be happy, but then at the last moment one tiny thing changes everything into a tragedy.
I think most of us will agree that ep 3 of TLOU is beautiful. I also love how it’s a summary of the entire season. It foreshadows everything and preps us for what’s to come.
I don't think the beauty of anger and fear should be set aside here. The scene you're talking about with Joel is inherently one of anger, no just sadness.
I think I would define beauty in storytelling is an emotion being VISCERALLY VALIDATED. For example, the core urge/base of anger is justice. Joel is sad, but he's also angry, seeking to get justice for Ellie's death. Jinx is seeking justice for how the people of Zaun had been wronged, and how she had been wronged.
I think fear is a little more complicated... What comes to mind first is that there are somethings that one may fear, but another find beautiful.
I think one beautiful aspect of fear is courage. Because there is the saying that "courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it." In a world where no one is safe and fear is everywhere, having someone act and try to change things and give people hope is beautiful. And we think that person is fearless, but they're often not. They're often just as scared as everyone else is but they decide to act in spite of their fear.
Beauty is too broad for me, but in terms of tragedy I think you clicked into the overall feeling but it's made up of two actually conflicting ideas
1 - This was inevitable (Emphasis on causality)
2 - This could have been avoided (Still emphasis on causality)
So ultimately, whether it's me trying to make these two completely paradoxical ideas mesh together or it's a real thing going on here, I think tragedy often has this hyper focus on the causal chain of events leading up to whatever the moment is that causes the tragedy
Ooh, brilliant! I tend to not like the inevitability aspect of tragedy, because there are always other options, but that's an amazing way to think about it, it's inevitable and not inevitable at the same time, that's how all of our choices work, that's the paradox of free will. Tragedy isn't something that we have no control over, but also isn't something we have all the control over, it has to be this mix of both, and focusing in on the pain of that paradox via a terrible ending... wow, I might actually be able to write tragic endings to my stories now, thanks! I gotta think about this more.
@@cassiopeiasfire6457 Lol no problem, thanks to you too for the validation
Free will kind of is like that. And topics like chaos, luck, etc. At some point it becomes hard to conceptualize because they blend together despite being concepts designed to create dichotomies. Maybe it's because we really just have monkey brains and we're not supposed to be thinking about these inherently cerebral concepts that are hard to grasp. But interesting to think about nonetheless.
@@secondeye1574 I think it's just the nature of concepts. The universe is one thing, but we have to divide it into concepts to think about it, but then it's hard to think in other concepts or transcend those categories. But we can do it tho! We're conscious blobs of cells, it's a miracle that we're able to understand anything, respectfully, fuck what we're not "supposed" to be thinking about :)
You hit the nail on the head with how I characterize tragedy. Take Arcane, for instance. Any number of single actions could've prevented the ending from going the way it did, but at the same time, you get the feeling that there's no other way the story could've ended.
For me, one of the most tragically beautiful scenes in all of media is the discussion between Kiritsugu and the holy grail about not being able to save all of humanity in Fate/Zero. The scene, of course, is very tragic and bitter, because we know that our hero essentially failed. But that's not all there is to it. The beauty COMES through the quiet island and contemplation that make up the scene. The palm trees and stars somehow also give us a sense of the unnatural and we stand before it in awe. My personal favorite anime for sure.
YES, Fate/Zero is in my top three favorite anime. I liked it way more than Stay Night.
Part of it might be inevitability, too (if this is already mentioned my bad). But in tragic stories, it feels like there’s always a hope that things could have gone another way, either because of ignorance or circumstance, but from the very beginning of the story, it is clear that the “happy ending” that we may hope for the characters in the end is not, in some way, possible. Realistically, it never was and in some way the audience is subconsciously aware of it, too. On “Death of a Salesman”, Arthur Miller mentions how the only certain thing in his play was Willy’s undoing of himself, despite all else, for instance, which makes the ending dialogue from the characters have this sort of “beauty” effect. The “beauty” then may be a newer manifestation of that hope. It is not necessarily a spectacle of the actions/emotions by themselves that does this (although these are invaluable for resonating). The hope becomes a tainted hope that has adapted to the world around it, but it refuses to die, even if it must loose sight of itself in order to do so.
edit; might also be that a character fulfills a part of themselves despite the consequences (Jinx coming into her own person / growing -> giant explosion, Joel showing he has finally connected to Ellie / found love and fulfillment -> murder hospital), maybe? Like a be careful what you wish for situation, almost
This essay is beautiful.
At the beginning we are haphazardly dealing with a lot of definitions of beauty. We want to find it. We want to define it. Chaos. So schnee answers the call and begins on a quest. With the entire schnee patreon disc to back him up, he gathers opinions and knowledge from many other brilliant minds.
With a canvas schnee brushes the first strokes: 4 ideas.
Slowly but surely it formulates. Using the expanse of already amazing stories like Arcane, Last of Us, etc. we finally find it. From there we can define the power of tragedy.
I don't know about others, but the sense of epiphany and "Yes! that's it!" connects to me on a deep level; since I can more fully define the beauty of the best stories I've seen/read (per animation, Bluey's Sleepytime, Flat Pack, Space, and Baby Race, and Hilda's The Witch, Fifty Year Night, and Deerfox come to mind). Thank you schnee and community, we need people like ya'll
Rarely can I sit through 25 minutes of unhalted lecture, but schnee makes it too easy. Anyway, rambling time !
It's funny because despite Arcane being one of my favorite stories, I did not find *beauty* in the same places than you. I've never seen this rocket ending as a satisfying accomplishment, but always as a terrifying turning point. Maybe it's the nature of the media, a show that is vowed to have a sequel, or maybe it is because I'm unconsciously stuck with a premade idea of Jinx as a LoL character. But after watching this ending, all I could think about was the consequences of her act, and it scared me way more than it saddened me. I was scared that her sister would not forgive her, that Pilltover/Zaun would never find peace, that the characters I loved would die in the explosion. I was left expecting more to the story and I could not find in episode 9 the beauty that struck me in episode 3 for comparison. The death of these characters really marked this episode as an end to Jinx's "child arc" to me, thus bringing that *absolute simplicity* from an intricate mess (in addition to the *tenderness in a strife-driven world* that I *surprisingly* found in the character of Silco) and that is what drew a beautiful scar in my mind, if that makes sense.
I just think it's funny to see that I've come to fully agree with tis video's representations of beauty despite not having the exact same reference examples as you.
Interesting! Yeah, it does sound like the same idea, but we had different experiences as far as what emotional lacks captured our focus and prevented us from basking in the moment
6:23 I think both Tamar's and Ben's explonation fits why that scene is beutiful. Not just because of the tenderness, but because of how we see Rue pass away (in peace, tenderness again). But we experience it as her. From her point of view. We hear Katniss sing, we see the trees and the sky, and how they slowly shift out from focus. And presenting her death this way is surprising and novel. Also ties back to the first comment from how we REALLY see something. We saw characters die and pass away, but not like this.
What I'm trying to say is, that overall, there can be more than one reason that makes something beautiful.
That is exactly what I felt towards the "Dark era" part of Bungo stray dogs. It's full of these tender moments of such extreme emotion to me. It's like characters are not speaking with a calm and somber tone in these moments, but screaming their lungs out: "I am in pain! Help me! Save me!" How perfect every little moment of it is, be it simple, like a character playing with children or eating curry or somebody dropping a depressing statement in the middle of a casual conversation, especially in retrospect, when you know how and when and why everything's going to go to shit, it's just... perfect. It doesn't help that one of the characters is an uncommon archetype I happened to relate to since childhood.
It pains me just how underrated BSD is.
I completly agree!Thank u for saying something about BSD becouse this show is absolutly beautyful and more people should know about it.
Beauty is heavily, heavily subjective but it really can just be described as awe and wonder that is so overwhelming you’re at a loss for words while having so many feelings about it. It’s captivating, off guard, and near a perfection we crave because it feels so powerful. Regardless of how imperfect it actually is it leaves the impression of something whole, deep, and nuanced. This nuance doesn’t have to be comfortable in order to leave an impact which is why so many people debate on what beauty is.
beauty is found in contrast
there is beauty in simplicity, also in complexity
The Absurd can both take it away or add to it
it's where meaninglessness and meaning collide, where opposites can both exist harmoniously
tragedy is beautiful because tho it is steeped in negativity, what we take away from it can lead to positivity in our lives, lessons learned
a masterpiece, suddenly fiction is real.
My man really pulled a "let me define beauty" moment. And it worked
To me and as subjective it is, Psychology is wonderful. The absolute wonder how we can feel different emotions when exposed to different kinds of scenarios. All the well known emotions if they are placed to build up to certain actions, can be magnificent to analyse the whole thing like flipping through a book.
Real or fantasy tragedies that can make your skin crawl, the ones that can make you breakdown crying at the emptiness, ones that makes you feel lost for days afterwards. I never forget the wonder I felt answering the questions in a math exam with ease even though I dislike math with a passion, I felt invincible. And I won't forget my heart thumping to the loudspeakers standing in the front row of the first concert I ever experienced. Life itself is beauty for you to find behold.
When you spoke about the journey from chaos to order I noticed that's the opposite of the theory of entropy (that the universe becomes less ordered over time). A story that I consider to be one of the most beautiful ever told is Outer Wilds. Somewhat contradictively, Outer Wilds is about entropy. I think there's layers. You can have a story about chaos or about order and that's boring, or you can have a story about the transition from chaos to order and that's beautiful, or you can have a story about the relentless failure to transition chaos into order, and the eventual acceptance of disorder. And that's a higher beauty still.
wow thats is a really interesting theory, that means our attraction to beauty could be like a deep reaction formation to our fear of annihilation/death, gotta think on that one more!
Ok there's something here. I want to tie it to our fascination with apocalypse stories in recent years. Something interesting as that all your examples are, for lack of a better word, apocalypse... Adjacent? And I think that's because we see the parallel to our current experience (you know the whole world is boiling, animals are dying, ai is arguably becoming sentient, and corporations are exploiting us situation we find ourselves in). But even more interesting is how the apocalypse story has changed throughout the years. It used to be that the apocalypse stories were either about overcoming the chaos, finding the cure etc. (World war Z, hunger games, maze runner, etc) or about rebuilding after the apocalypse (the walking dead) But now, more often then not, the really good apocalypse stories are about accepting what it means to be mortal and small in something bigger than yourself -and reconsidering what's important in that frame of mind (the last of us, arcane, outer wilds)
To add to that final list, I'd also include station 11 in the list of acceptance stories
@@sugarjoe8 Ooh very true! We may be onto something here! I wanted to share this other comment I got:
"I just watched Puss in Boots the Last Wish yesterday and there was a moment when you completely understand Puss and where he's at in his fear and (while for me the fear wasn't there) I understood his fear because I could see myself in him. It's that heart-belief tie that I was connecting with in that moment. I would say that's even stronger than the survival catharsis. Now that I think about it, perhaps the bigger appeal is understanding the character in their heart-beliefs and as such, feeling understood yourself."
To which I quoted you and replied:
"there was this other great comment tying beauty to reversing entropy, which i speculated was seeing beauty as linked to an existential fear of annihilation -- SEEMS like it could fit with what you're saying, feeling understood, feeling validated is essentially feeling real, its like you're acknowledging and confirming your own existence in a time when you're feel most non-existent"
My thought that I'd like to add is not how tragedy is beautiful, but a part of why I think we value beauty in tragedy so much... Pain and ending are inevitable parts of life. Beauty comes easily to us in other parts, it's easy to feel happy about a happy ending. But being able to feel beauty about a painful ending, that's difficult, that takes artistry and perspective. And it makes us more connected to our own lives and others, it creates meaning in the pains in our lives that might otherwise feel meaningless. And I think this brings together both concepts you talked about: it integrates positive and negative emotions, and it also makes a coherent whole, not so much out of a particular story here, but out of LIFE. Life can so often feel divided into wonderful things and terrible things, but tragic beauty unifies the experience of life, finds beauty in the pain, connects us to parts of our lives we might like to write off and makes something meaningful out of them. And that's difficult to do, technically and emotionally, but it's something that feels incredibly important to an expansive experience of being human. And it's not confined to art, we can experience beautiful tragedy in real life, but like all difficult emotions and experiences, art is a powerful tool to help us experience those things.
Holy shit. This video is a goldmine! So many great ideas and concepts around writing and story telling that I have been trying to wrap my head around for years. Thank you so much for making this brilliant essay. I am so heavily inspired. You do great work!
Aaaa I adore your process in these videos. I get so much insight I never get otherwise. You make defining your terms into a whole journey! The nuance and the self critiques at the end keep me thinking. Idk Your uploads are like brain food lol
NEW SCHNEE VIDEO MY DAY IS SAVED
Ive asked myself this a lot. Personally i find tragic characters beautiful rather than situations/scenes/moments i still can’t really put words to it but this video certainly helps.
It’s interesting you mentioned the Hunger Games because I *would* describe the books and their tragedy as beautiful in a similar way to Arcane’s tragedy. I was thinking about them when you starting mentioning stuff in the category.
But yeah definitely not the movies lol.
this is so much fun to think about
i think maybe beauty (or a part of beauty) is contrast. A positive contrast married over a negative contrast. A sunset is a beautiful light on a broken world. Vi and Jinx being reunited is a contrast to the trauma that Jinx has gone through. Jinx's completion of identity is a contrast to Silco's death, as well as the death that's about to happen. And like your math friend said it can be simple and surprising in its simplicity contrasted to it's perceived complication.
Thinking about some more moments with tragic beauty, and I feel like it can happen when certain things work out but others don't. When the goal and the thing that the characters really truly care about comes to fruition, but there is a cost to either them or those around them or other things they care about. Like when Romeo and Juliette are finally together, their goal is fulfilled, but it's in a really devastating way. Or when Jinx and Vi finally meet but it's a such a cost Jinx's mind, and I would consider the moment they hug beautiful., it's just not a long drawn out moment because they are immediately attacked and it goes into action again. I think that's another point that you had too, which is time. Time to be in the moment and feel the drawn out emotion that the whole story has been crafted and built up to.
I also think it's interesting how in real life, we don't like experiencing this type of tragedy and probably don't find it beautiful in the moment. In the story, the characters don't appreciate how tragically beautiful it is. But we like to watch it. I wonder what that says about humanity.
also lol i never use words like "perceived" and "fruition" normally, but every time i watch one of your videos my brain goes in to "schnee mode" and starts racing at a million miles per hour. it's so much fun
i think another form of beauty is the sense of relatability you get from something which sums up the story of your life to an almost scary degree of accuracy. i can name 2 examples of shows that do this: Ms. Marvel and Arcane. Ms. Marvel is a lot more optimistic and cheerful. here, it's relatable in such away that it's heartwarming and beautiful to see that these problems aren't my own. With Arcane, I get Jinx/Powder on a frighteningly similar level. it's a reality check done in the best way possible, "Oh crap. If i can see myself in Powder, what about Jinx" but then it made me stop to appreciate the effort it took to get that response from me, and that's beautiful.
Really interesting analysis of beautiful tragedy. Although I would argue against the inclusion of Romeo and Juliet as it is really a black comedy rather than a tragedy.
The drop in happiness is a work of art because it plays with your emotions. When something unexpectedly perfect happens, it can do a high spike upwards in awe, but the opposite is also true, a sudden leap can make your heart jump. The tragedy is beautiful because its not real, a real life tragedy is something to pity but a work of art becomes even more beautiful when it gets an emotion out of you.
I believe beauty has a lot to do with satifaction.
No matter if it is a moment that just feels right, a person that looks exactly the way we feel attracted to or a character's death that seems to fulfill a purpose.
Also artwork and music can be "defined" like that. When I talk about beautiful art (in general) then I'm normally talking about something that satisfies my personal taste in a very specific way. That is also what makes beauty so subjective, because satisfaction is always a very personal experience.
Why does it feel beautiful when Frank and Bill die together at the end of their story? Because this is the only right outcome that could satisfy us.
Why does everyone love Pedro Pascal? Because he and his story are what people like to see and/or hear (obviously exaggerating here, not everyone has to love him haha).
And why do some scientific solutions just feel so elegant and beautiful? Because the way they are derived is so satisfying and maybe even surprising and gives us an answer to a question we might have been asking ourselves for a very long time.
So yeah, I believe beauty is basically satisfaction which makes it so awesome and subjective. But this is surely an oversimplification of a much larger topic, though I think it is a pretty easy way to get an idea of what's actually behind it. :)
Since I'm currently fully back into the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom( the 2003 version specifically), I'll have to say there's a surprising amount of beauty to be found in both happy and sad moment of the show. Seeing Edward Elric obtaining his State Alchemist licence through changing the result of other people's dangerous transmutations into a crown of flowers, and realizing a crown of flowers is the last thing his mother asked of him before dying made that moment insanely precious. The scene where Edward talks to a war veteran who tells him he's okay with his lost leg because he finally found peace is honestly masterful as well.
the show may not be as appreciated as its more recent counterpart, but it's still worth a lot of the praise it got at the time, imperfect show, but beautiful in all rights I think
Personally, I've always thought the root of Beauty comes from a Realization of Significance.
One of the shows I've found beautiful since the first time I saw it was Anohana: the flower we saw that day. It deals with so much raw emotions to a group of childhood bestfriends who lost contact after one of them died in direct cause of something they set up. They all blame themselves heavily but they have to pretend everything is okay. But then they admit everything to each other and it's soul crushing, but so beautiful, especially with the scenes following and the end scene. I've watched the show around 5-7 times and there's hasn't been one time I didn't cry.
3:54 You're asking a question related to a question that even philosophers have failed to answer for over 2500 years: "What is beauty?" If you ask something relative to beauty, you're gonna smash head first in the wall of subjectivity 😅.
To me, as a physicist, beauty is the planets aligning. Complete chaos or just independent events, and then bam, simplicity. But a major major component is you have to be able to see it before the moment arrives. If the planets were just teleporting around chaotically, when they aligned, it wouldn’t feel beautiful. But as they move along their orbits, when they come close and you have that anticipation and that hope because you can see where there can be simplicity in the chaos, and when it finally happens, it’s beautiful.
Is this whole video basically just 'beauty juxtaposed with tragedy creates strong contrast that emphasizes the beauty?' X-D
i think the vagueness of the definition of beauty relates to the fact that people see different things beautiful as well. like you're using romeo and juliet as an example, i don't find that story particularly beautiful, more silly and quite boring, meanwhile some stories i do find beautiful you'd probably wouldn't care about at all. we can't agree on the common definition of beauty, because everyone calls different things beautiful. it's less diverse in science fields, but art really is a field of interpretation, even the most renown painting or music piece would have people completely unmoved by, and they're in their very right to be so. and as writers, we never will be able to write a story that everyone finds compelling, that's just not going to happen. i think we just need to focus on things that we personally find beautiful and hope that some other people would end up sharing our perspective. also the real tragedy is that sometimes things we used to find beautiful before, we can stop caring about or even start to actively dislike due to multiple different circumstances, it certainly happened to me multiple times. so it's a shaky ground all around
You didn't want to put any sort of spoiler warning? Just gonna start by listing the ending to shows? Not everyone has seen everything yet.
Really interesting analysis of how or why we find certain scenes beautiful. I LOVE all the different perspectives you brought in.
For me personally, part of what makes tragedy beautiful is the emotions it evokes from me. I sometimes have this issue when watching TV/film and “sad” scenes come up. Part of me wants to cry. Wants to feel the sadness of the scene but for whatever reason something’s missing that makes me feel disconnected from it still. I know what I’m supposed to be feeling and I can try to conjure up that feeling in response to what’s happening in the story but it just doesn’t “hit” like it’s supposed to.
Scenes I think are really truly beautiful are the ones that do give me that catharsis. The scenes where I can connect and go “yes I know this feeling. I understand.”
And there is NO GREATER EXAMPLE than the tea party in Arcane ep. 9. For me the most beautiful moment is when Silco tells Jinx “don’t cry. You’re perfect.” The SOB that burst out of me when he said those lines. It was IMMEDIATE. It was VISCERAL. There have been very few TV/films that have been able to elicit THAT type of intense emotional response out of me. Normally only books can elicit that level of emotionality and even then it’s still not exactly the same. Watching that Arcane scene for the first time, my reaction was so sudden and involuntary. You would’ve thought that I just heard someone died. I think my reaction also just surprised me which I suppose connects back to what your math friend said about the result being surprising. It was surprising not in the actual content of the scene but in the way it was able to stab deep into my emotional core in the span of a few seconds without me realizing it until it happened.
You sound like an alternate reality Kermit the frog where Kermit is super smart and really good at explaining relatively complex subjects so that a smoothebrain like myself can enjoy. Big thanks ❤
As a mathematician and physicist, I want to know those answers.
[Edit: Lol, never mind]
"Beautiful" is a word with so many different meanings, we might need to expand the language just to handle it.
Bruh if we have Jinx as Harley Quinn then we have Shaco as joker 🎉😂
NO WAY RYUJIN IS MY FAV TOO
Kiwi is such a beautiful tragedy. So much so that people live in denial over it.
U use light mode on discord?!?!?! unsubscribe (jk jk)
This video is absolutely incredible. I’ve saved it so I can rewatch it, and I definitely feel I need to. It puts a finger on the magic underlying some of both my personal favorite moments in storytelling, and some of the best in history.
In the book The Anatomy of Genre by John Truby, he says the tragedy in Shakespeare’s plays comes from the age of the characters: Romeo and Juliet are too young for the love they’re experiencing, King Lear suffers the hubris of old age, etc. I think that what you’ve done here is expand on this idea in a way that makes it universally applicable. Another way of saying what John Truby said is, “it could end no other way.” Everything clicks into place because of who the characters are, and when they are in their lives.
I hope I’ve added to this idea somehow. I feel like I’ve only just begun thinking about this, and the results will hopefully show in my writing. I hope you make a follow up to this to continue exploring the idea! Thank you for this video, and all your other work. Truly insightful and powerful ideas here.
Even with your almost monotone voiceover, these scenes are so powerful I'm sitting here trying not to sob at most of them.
I want to see what you mean about him being nearly monotone, but when I play the video, I see his tone jumping around.
I think something that is missing in this theory is explaining why beauty exists from an evolutionary standpoint. We may have an idea of what beauty is and what causes us to feel that something is beautiful, but if we don't understand what survivalists benefit it provided during evolution (or perhaps if it's something new, why our brain "glitches out" and feels beauty,) then we won't be able to confirm if our theories are correct. A perfect theory about beauty could exist, but if we don't know why it exists then we can't confirm if it's true or just speculation.
That being said, I think beauty is simply satisfaction that our brain rewards us for basking in an emotion or many emotions. I would compare it to taking a bath.
You can't take a bath without stopping and settling. If everything's rushing past you then that's just a shower, and that's what daily life is. And while you can take a bath, to make it more satisfying you have to make a mix. Maybe you make the water warm, add essential oils or a bath bomb, add petals or other things floating in the water, set the lighting with candles or another light source, but even just a tub of lukewarm water is still a bath, it's just that making it better, or making beauty better, makes it more beautiful, or more bath.
I think beauty is either...
A) When we have nothing else that our brain craves and we simply bask in the emotion, serving as a weird glitch that is only uncovered when our brain stops thinking and just feels. It's like peeling back the constantly working thoughts of our brain to reveal that the underlying emotions that precede our thoughts are so incredibly beautiful, like peeling the mundane bark of a tree off to reveal that it's wood is sparkling and magnificent.
This means that emotions are more powerful than we realize but are masked by constant thought and observation. I guess it really is like peeling the bark off a tree because you're not really meant to do it because a tree is supposed to have bark but damn if it ain't satisfying.
B) Beauty is our brain rewarding us for feeling raw emotion. It's like our brain is a constantly running car, but you can only check the gas when you stop. It's like your brain is the driver being like "good, good, thank you for checking that we have gas. That's important." It's like your brain giving you a cookie for doing a system diagnostics check on your emotions.
This means beauty is either a mechanism to assist in the continued functioning of emotion, or otherwise a byproduct of your brain rewarding you for your continued emotions.
C) It's a mix of the two somehow.
Lots to think about here! I'll start by commenting on what you DIDN'T address - whether intentionally or because it's not part of how you experience tragedies. The single word I expected but didn't hear (or missed! 😬) was CATHARSIS. There is a certain sense of release, or relief, or letting go, or letting be that I feel in the best of tragedies. Sometimes this occurs on the macro level (i.e. this is what it is to be human) and sometimes it occurs on the micro level (i.e. I thought this was a feeling that was unique to me, but now I see that it's shared by others).
Although Mark Twain doesn't use that term, his following (posthumously published) review of a play called, "The Master of Palmyra" always stood out to me as an articulation of why I enjoy tragic movies. Here are the relevant excerpts. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. It's quite possible that this connects to your first theory of beauty, but because you expressed the idea in completely different terms, then I'd like to hear what you think:
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I know people who have seem it ten times; they know the most of it by heart; they do not tire of it; and they say they shall still be quite willing to go and sit under its spell whenever they get the opportunity …
This piece is just one long, soulful, sardonic laugh at human life. Its title might properly be 'Is Life a Failure?' and leave the five acts to play with the answer. I am not at all sure that the author meant to laugh at life. I only notice that he has done it. Without putting into words any ungracious or discourteous things about life, the episodes in the piece seem to be saying all the time, inarticulately: 'Note what a silly poor thing human life is; how childish its ambitions, how ridiculous its pomps, how trivial its dignities, how cheap its heroisms, how capricious its course, how brief its flight, how stingy in happinesses, how opulent in miseries, how few its prides, how multitudinous its humiliations, how comic its tragedies, how tragic its comedies, how wearisome and monotonous its repetition of its stupid history through the ages, with never the introduction of a new detail; how hard it has tried, from the Creation down, to play itself upon its possessor as a boon and has never proved its case in a single instance!' …
It is right and wholesome to have those light comedies and entertaining shows; and I shouldn't wish to see them diminished. But none of us is always in the comedy spirit; we have our graver moods; they come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape them. These moods have their appetites--healthy and legitimate appetites--and there ought to be some way of satisfying them. It seems to me that New York ought to have one theatre devoted to tragedy. With her three millions of population, and seventy outside millions to draw upon, she can afford it, she can support it. America devotes more time, labour, money and attention to distributing literary and musical culture among the general public than does any other nation, perhaps; yet here you find her neglecting what is possibly the most effective of all the breeders and nurses and disseminators of high literary taste and lofty emotion--the tragic stage. To leave that powerful agency out is to haul the culture-wagon with a crippled team …
… with a tragedy-tonic once or twice a month, we shall enjoy the comedies all the better. Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my life: I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on vacation.
Yeah, I specifically avoided the word (for similar reasons I mentioned to you earlier about avoiding the word "irony"). But I wasn't completely happy leaving it out bc even though I did approximate the role catharsis plays pretty well imo from the different angles of the experience of completion and being suddenly free of other conflict to bask in the resolution, the "release" aspect you're mentioning was something I didn't quite feel I could address through my two ideas, and I also didn't feel like it was developed and distinct enough to be its own idea. There are experiences of catharsis within stories that are satisfying but I wouldn't call beautiful and there are experiences of catharsis that happen as a result of experiencing stories (but not IN stories), like with horror imo, which I also wouldn't call beautiful. So I couldn't figure out where to go from those steps to a fuller idea and decided to leave it for future development of the idea. But I'd welcome any thoughts you have on a more precise definition of what type of catharsis or where it does and doesn't fit in in beauty.
Man that is a monster of a mark twain quote, attacking the subject from a completely different angle than I was thinking. Gonna have to sit with that one and think about it a bit 🧐🧐🧐
I honestly think your channel is beautiful
I think the challenge here was that there was an attempt to connect tragedy to beauty, and of course there is a connection as said in the video. However first ya gotta find out what beauty is. The topic was covered very good on what beauty is though. I just think that "what is beauty in storytelling" deserves its own...Universe.
The real beauty that I have found -- it is your videos. For me, they are that moments of serenity in my chaotic live. It is the moments when my own perspective expands because of how surprisingly simple you make this complex topics seem. The way you present information is the other kind of beauty I fully adore.
Thank you for all the work you put in this videos and I wish the very best for you in your life journey and journey as a content creator, dear schnee!!
the real tragedy is schnee using light mode on discord
I feel like there is also more nuance in the difference between sadness and tragedy. In Arcane for example, the ending is tragic not just because Jinx decides to shoot the rocket, but also because it happens at the exact moment went the council decides to vote for peace. It is also tragic because of how given different circumstances, Vi and Jinx could have had a great relationship. In tragedy lies the death of a potential better futur (something you mentioned with Joel)
To me, another nuance is like this:
Sadness => Something bad happens
Tragic => Something terrible happens but that could have been resolved, or that is highly unjust
I need an entire 5h video on this PLEASE
the real tragedy is the light mode discord at 3:18
Hi, Schnee! Idk if you've already made a video along these lines but what do you think of remembering things *wrong* as a minor theme in Arcane? There are only like, four different places where this comes up in the story, but three of them are pivotal moments and its really cool. The first one is episode 3 - it opens with the flashback to Vander drowning Silco, but then later in the episode we see the flashback again and it ends differently, with Silco escaping. It unclear to me watching that second flashback (just with the way its filmed, lit, etc) if Silco escaping actually happened or if that's him re-writing the memory as he finally gets revenge on Vander in present day. The second place this pops up is during Vi's parkour run after leaving Stillwater. She says something about Powder being "able to do that when she was seven" although we know from seeing it ourselves that she was in fact *not*. And then it shows up twice in the tea party scene. When Vi is telling Powder to "picture milo, claggor, vander, me" Powder is picturing them, but she's not picturing them as they were in life - her memories are monstrous. And then we have her at the end saying "I thought maybe you could love me like you used to, even though I'm different. But you changed to." When Vi is actually the only person who DIDNT change. The only change that happened was in Powder's memories. Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. This has been floating around in my head for days. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
You are my all time favorite video essay writer. Your videos are so good your getting through finals.
The TH-cam channel "Like Stories of Old" has a great essay on the movie Cloud Atlas, and how beauty can save the world. Highly recommended (both the film and the video).
love that movie
That's a great movie! I loved the book even more (and the author in general), as I think it had more room to explore a lot of the same ideas in without some of the controversy that the movie unfortunately received. The TV series Sense8 by the same directors gives me similar feels as Cloud Atlas in some ways, with the panglobal explorations of interconnectedness and empathy.
I love your dissection of words start with a little bit, of something peculiar, beautiful leading us on with why is he call all these bad decisions these break ups these miscommunications beautiful. then it hit me beauty doesn't last flowers wilt and the moments they are alive is the moment of the story and the story is over now. The story was beautiful.
Now its 2 am where I'm at so I'll finish this in the morning I just thought I'll send a viewer perception just to make sure Schnee knows how great at speeches he is. thank you for the unmatched wordplay. I am only 1min 30 into the video and am curious as all hell, how much of the final conclusion is aligned with what he primed me with think and all the introspection for all the examples.
“This world is cruel, and also very beautiful.” - Mikasa, Attack on Titan Season 1
I think that sums it up.
I like that the story went this way and I truly believe this was the best direction they could have gone in but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it.
You are talking about AWE with the expansion piece! Awe is a vastness that requires mental accommodation. The expansion happens when we have capacity to make that accommodation. I just finished my whole masters thesis on this about how awe and trauma are intertwined though expansion and contraction and what we have capacity for. In a lot of ways art is a modality that gives us more capacity to experience violence and hardship and theat far enough away that we feel, expansive.
Arcane is just amazing
This makes me think of A Silent Voice a LOT. Everytime something depressing or awful happens (Shoyo going to a bridge to jump off, Shoko doing the same on her balcony, the fight when they're younger where Shoyo is bullying Shoko), we're shown something beautiful to contrast and give us these complex emotions (beautiful flowers, kids playing with sparklers and fireworks, gentle sunlight through a classroom window). Interestingly, it combines more than one of the definitions for beautiful in these scenes.
AHH IM SO EARLY 😭
I WANT TO GIVE YOU A QUESTION: (i have not seen the entire video yet so i dont know the conclusion yet, but thought of it and wanted to ask)
Can a story/moment be good/beautiful without catharsis?
When elements comes together
2 more things to consider. 1 is the evolutionary basis for our appreciation of beauty. Because we're human, and the human brain evolved to optimize survival and procreation, it is worthwhile to consider how identifying beauty could enhance our survival.
Our capacity to appreciate physical beauty may be fundamentally different from our appreciation of narrative beauty. We are attracted to physical beauty because (evolutionarily speaking) those traits are indicative of superior fitness, and thus superior survivability for your prospective offspring. Narrative beauty may resonate with us because storytelling has been so vital to horizontal transmission of information across our species. The ability to convey complex ideas in simple and engaging stories would be an enormous advantage for survival. Because in prehistoric times, the stories around the campfire would be recounting their daily experiences - thus other humans can learn how to engage with danger without directly encountering it themselves.
So both increased our chances of survival, and that's why we are drawn to these things, but it doesn't answer why we specifically use the word "beautiful" rather than any other term representing positive emotionality.
Personally I think it boils down to my 2nd point - linguistic determinism and the imprecision of language (specifically English in this case). I'm confident that other languages exist with distinct words for what we consider under the umbrella of "beauty" in English
To elaborate on linguistic determinism: the words we use to describe things often define their nature in our minds. For example, most people think of "red" and "dark red" as variations of a single color. But "orange" and "brown" we think of as entirely distinct colors, even though brown is literally just "dark orange." But since we have different words for orange and brown, we think of them as categorically distinct.
All these different forms of beauty may be """"beauty""”" in the way that red, dark red, and light red are all red. But in another language, each form of beauty may have a distinct word just like orange and brown.
Therefore, the entire premise of our question may be flawed. We are trying to figure out why so many different things evoke a sense of beauty, and why "beauty" is the word we use to describe all of them. But maybe it's just a natural consequence of the weaknesses of English as a language. Maybe our entire frame of thinking about this topic is flawed because we have too much faith in our ability to categorize reality into distinct boxes with labels on them. In reality our brains are fundamentally kludge-like and only had to be good enough to survive, our brains didn't evolve to be perfectly coherent and without contradiction. This kludge-like nature of our psyche means that we should exercise skepticism with concern our ability to label and categorize things. We can often label and categorize things in nonsensical or suboptimal ways, and throwing all these distinct concepts into a single box labeled "beauty" may just be one of the shortcomings of our language and psychology. It could be a bug rather than a feature.