Is it possible to be too meta?

Sometimes there are cases where a trope must be played straight and being meta aware can be annoying. Is it possible to be too meta? Doing the genre savvy thing, removing all conflict front he story.

It all has to do with talent. Order Of The Stick pulls of meta and 4th wall breaking stuff beautifully, but sometimes more subtle stuff just fails, just because of the person doing it..

^^ Yes. There's a reason why many of the best stories fell for things like having Genre Blind moments for villains. It made for good story.

Yes. It's the most insidious way in which TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life; focusing on tropes instead of the story they inhabit results in a — and I apologize, but I can think of no better way to say this — a self-indulgent, masturbatory piece of tripe. There is nothing wrong with Postmodernism in carefully controlled quantities; seeing an obvious mistake defied, for instance, can be extremely satisfying.

But a programmer cannot simply memorize every command their language of choice has. An artist is not renowned for knowing the precise names of every color and being able to differentiate heliotrope from orchid. A sculptor is not famed for being able to tell stones apart with the precision of a geologist. All of these skills I have mentioned are useful to their professions, and knowledge of tropes is likewise useful to a writer. But in all of these cases, they are but aids to a far greater cause: unifying these disparate pieces so that the ordinary man does not see them, but instead an elegant whole.

EDIT: An extra note regarding Mr AHR's post — I'd started before he made it. Webcomics, I've noticed, are expected to be meta. I think it's a result of Bob And George having such a strong influence upon the medium in its infancy. There's nothing wrong with this; people expect different things from different mediums. Just something worth noting.

edited 29th Jan '11 11:08:34 AM by KillerClowns

I've found that I'm often victim to a Meta Plot Tumor, so I've tried to keep meta out of my current serious project, with one exception (during flashbacks the writing style degrades to however the main character would have written at the age in question, despite it being a third-person narrator).

If you want your readers to experience suspense of disbelief, don't constantly remind the readers that your story isn't real.

To effectively use tropes, you only need to be aware of them. When a troper ineffectively uses tropes, 99 times out of 100 they are doing more than simply being aware of them and are hammering/forcing them into the story. Yes, it is entirely possible to be too meta.

Oh yes, especially in comedy. I'd say that fourth wall-breaking jokes can be done well, but that just encourages people to do it, and it generally just comes off as "Oh-ho, look how clever I am for knowing about this trope!".

My biggest fanfiction project ever died because I had a two chapter A Day at the Bizarro where the fourth wall broke down. It went away after that but it made me lose the will to write the fic.

I guess my thoughts on why people think some tropes are bad is a mixup between cause and effect-they read enough bad stories that happen to contain said tropes, and think that the trope itself is bad. In reality, I think it's just the current popularity of the trope causing it to be used in a large number of stories, 90% of which are crap; metafiction just happens to be extremely popular right now.

In the words of Andrew Hussie, "There's no such thing as too meta." Too bad the original quote is now unavailable...stupid formspring.

edited 30th Jan '11 9:36:31 AM by deathjavu

Painting the Fourth Wall is about as far as I'm willing to tolerate this kind of thing, really. Willing Suspension of Disbelief is pretty sacred to me, and breaking the fourth wall shatters it completely.

(For the record, the Order Of The Stick picture used for the Painting the Fourth Wall page is exactly the kind of thing I hate)

edited 30th Jan '11 9:43:14 AM by pagad

Upon thought, I realized that one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, is one of the most meta authors I know: he's the Trope Namer for Theory of Narrative Causality, and I think the Trope Codifier for using it in universe. But he's, first and foremost, a really good author. If you removed his meta-type things from his story, they'd still be decent, but nowhere near as much as they are. Damned if I know what he does that sets him apart from ninety percent of everyone else, though... I think I might start re-reading his books, though, paying a bit more attention to how he's telling the story this time around.

So I reckon Deathjavu was right: to repeat his sentiments, authors who fall victim to Sturgeon's Law, by and large, follow whatever artistic style is "in" at the time of writing, and being meta is "in."

edited 31st Jan '11 8:46:01 AM by KillerClowns