Deep vs Pretentious

Just wondering: how do you separate a deep work and a pretentious work?

Deep: Has a message: Makes me think, question thinks and change my world view.

Pretentious: "I am not saying anything but Look at me I am deep!"

Forgiveness is beyond justice, faith is superior than hope, redemption is better than perfection and love is greater than them all.

I think what makes something pretentious is that it's TRYING to be deep. Depth comes from a creator exploring the fullness of their creation. It's exploring the depths of your characters and settings. It's exploring your themes and motifs. Depth can't be deliberate, but skillful creativity can, and that's the only way it can come about.

So, if you want depth, focus on exploring your creation as fully as you can. Keep asking yourself "why?" and keep answering until you run out of answers. And MAYBE, you'll discover depth. Overall, depth is a case of Your Mileage Varying, I think.

edited 20th Mar '15 5:27:55 PM by nekomoon14

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

Deep are ideas so powerful they insert themselves into your consciousness and imagination without conscious effort on your part. They stand on their own.

Pretentious makes itself look deep by casting disrespect on other, better known and more popular ideas. Take away the "this is better than that" aspect and there isnt very much left.

edited 20th Mar '15 5:30:52 PM by DeMarquis

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

And I'll just try to be funny and add that the difference between a deep and a pretentious work is similar to the difference between a cave system and a wall with a painting of a cave that you insist is a real cave.

Deep works don't try to be deep or to be profound. They just are, and as you explore them you find out that there is depth in them, that what you might have though to be just a small cave is a deep system of caves and tunnels.

Pretentious works, on the other hand, try to be deep and profound. Often to the point where the message that they are supposed to have is lost, and with no ability to explore nor time for it the only thing one can do is paint an image of a cave and insist it is real.

Generally, if you find bashing (as in, characters being treated as some sort of ultimate wrong just because they are treated that way), it is a good indication that the work is pretentious; after all, had that cave been real you wouldn't be bashing those people's heads into a wall that is supposed to be a cave.

And, going the other way, if you are given a chisel and a hammer when you start reading and are told that whatever your mind shapes of the story during the journey is going to be what they see, it is a good sign that the work might very well be deep, as a hammer and chisel combo is something quite useful when exploring caves.

Though, of course, you should always have the lamp that is your brain; a working lamp, I'll add. Otherwise you'll just hurt yourself when exploring, be it by walking into a wall or by falling down into some crevice in a deep cave.

I love your metaphors

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

Generally the deeper you are trying to be the less you will succeed at it.

That's deep, man.

But yes, the surest way to be pretentious is to consciously attempt to make a "deep" work.

And in less than six hours, this thread has already upturned my entire worldview.

Way to be meta, guys.

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

Jesu Otaku's review of Ergo Proxy I think defined pretentiousness really well, if only because she thinks the word is overused and kept not wanting to use it throughout the whole review. Basically, it takes on ideas that are bigger than it can handle gracefully. To her, Ergo Proxy wasn't offering an idea for audiences to think about to coming to their own conclusions, it was shoving conclusions down the audience's throats. If an audience member believes that it's wrong but isn't invited to argue it or mull it over in the relationship between audience and media, then the work is going to be judged as pretentious.

Well, pretentious is a work that acts like it's deep, but actually isn't.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

"Deep" works are a funny phenomenon. They can often be very short and brief, or they can be huge and sprawling epics. Either way, I've noticed the common point said above: True depth involves exploring the world, themes, characters, in minute detail. More importantly, I find that many deep works do their exploration very sensitively—they come from that weird, sometimes illogical, and very personal inner corner of your head, and good readers/writers can recognize it on a gut level.

You have to empty yourself out to make a truly deep work, and the way to do it is by exploring it as much as you can.

Pretentiousness, as said above, is when you actively try to be deep. Many people consider Christopher Paolini pretentious because he compares himself to Tolkien and many other landmark authors, but most people past thirteen years old are old enough to know that he's a mediocre to poor writer who's full of himself.

Tealdeer: Deep works ask questions, or make the audience start asking questions. Pretentious works claim to have answers.

edited 21st Mar '15 2:20:25 PM by Sharysa

And brilliant answers at that, because "lookit meeee, I'm so clevah".

That said, depth is often a matter of perspective. I used to drive English teachers crazy by saying that there is no such thing as depth, and while I don't necessarily think that's true, I do believe it's truer than most people—and most authors—want to admit. A work that someone else in this thread considers deep and meaningful and filled with important questions and answers, is a work that I might consider silly, pretentious, or even downright boring. Things have the depth that we, the audience, are willing to grant them.

Just as an example, I think this short story is very meaningful, but that's probably because it, to a large extent, reflects my world view. Someone else in the thread might consider it pretentious, boring, or simply an interesting exercise in world building, but not one that has any greater meaning. If anyone wants to test that theory, go ahead and read the story, then tell me what you think. For that matter, why not mention some works that you consider particularly deep, and see how the others react?

Here's a question: does a work have to be well-written (and therefore not boring) to be deep? Could a work be dull as a bowl of bricks and STILL have incredible depth (in the sense of being thought-provoking)?

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

In theory I suppose, but in practise, the deeper people think something is, the better written and more exciting they tend to think it is (at least in my experience).

The latter. Albeit if the work genuinely is as well-written as an average-grade fanfic and as interesting as watching paint dry (on that wall with the painted cave, maybe) then the likelihood of it being thought-provoking is quite low as the author might not be very skilled in their craft.

Still, flukes do happen. So an impossibility it is not.

I wouldn't count on it actually being the case if I tried to read a bad and boring book, anyway. Though, to be honest, the last book I'd read all the way through in spite of finding it boring had provoked my thoughts on the possible methods of book disposal and literature teacher smiting, so in that regard you could say that it was deep ... in a very twisted and not at all appropriate way.

edited 21st Mar '15 10:55:23 PM by Kazeto

If we define deep as thought-provoking, then truly poor work is often quite thought-provoking as you try to puzzle out just what the author was thinking and what attitudes produced a work of seemingly infinite repulsiveness.

Nous restons ici.

I've read works that provoke those kinds of thought. Another work caused me to question things I held to be true - because if what I believed about the publishing industry really were true, then how the hell did that ever get printed and distributed.

I'd roughly define "well-written" as "written in a way that lets the work accomplish what the writer had in mind for it". So if you want to write comedy and it makes people laugh, it's good, if it ends up making people unhappy, you messed up. If you're writing erotica and it titillates people, it's good, if the prose is so silly that it just makes them laugh, you messed up.

Based on that, if it's poorly written, but still ends up thought-provoking, it would mean that the author didn't really intend for it to be, which would make it a freak accident. ... Although given how a lot of people seem to like overanalyzing works that are only supposed to be entertaining to justify their enjoyment of it, that has probably happened often enough.

Although thinking about it... I don't know if just provoking people to think makes the work itself necessarily deep. Like, as Night said, the work could provoke thoughts about what a terrible place it must have come from. Chick Tracts, for instance, are pretty much the epitome of pretentiousness - a dumb person elevating themselves to a preacher of the word of god who gives answers about life to the common people. You can analyze the work as to what kind of a person Chick is and such, but that's on a meta layer above the work itself, which is shallow "this good, this bad" writing no matter how you twist it.

I'm really not sure anymore, actually. I know I could glean some pretty deep insights from Digimon Adventure many years ago - there's a surprising lot in there, like the concept of entelechy, or the concept of concepts as concrete entities, stuff like that. Does the fact that I saw these things in it mean that the series was deep, or was it pretentious, or was it just me interpreting things into it because death of the author and the fact that I saw these things says more about myself than the work itself...?

I guess it's probably a kind of depth. It didn't claim to be more than an adventure series, but there's smart stuff in the background because it was written by smart people who either put it there on purpose or by accident. I suppose.

edited 22nd Mar '15 4:49:33 AM by Fawriel

And this is the annoying part, that "deep" and "pretentious" are subjective and depend on a person's POV. What's worse, whether a work is even attempting to be deep or not is also subjective (unless the author himself makes clear his intentions), and some people too often seem too quick to assume a work is trying to be deep and label a work "pretentious", resulting in the word becoming somewhat of an overused cliche.

@Kazeto I'm dying

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

And that is different from other preachers how? It's not like other people who distribute the "word of god" have any more evidence for them. This is just a perfect illustration of how "pretentiousness" is subjective.

I also fail to see how intend should have any effect on the depth of a work. Why should a work that was intended to be deep not be so?

Is this sentence pretentious then? It gave an answer instead of asking questions after all.

How is discrediting ideas inherntly pretentious? That just sounds sounds like a dismissal of criticism in general.

Of course. Having brilliant or thought-provoking ideas and being a good writer aren't the same thing last I checked.

Can you provide a supporting example?

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