Purely “cultural” movies in modern milieus are trivial to transpose. Usually what mucks it up is an element of technology or other accumulating strand of history that has western path dependence. It would be impossible to remake The Right Stuff in Bollywood.
Conversation
Key point that I think is unsustainable. Milieu-manners fiction that fetishizes a real culture that thought of itself as superior doesn’t really work unless you studiously maintain extreme historical ignorance.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
I work in women’s romance and I think the piece you’re missing is how compelling that kind of status romance is to mass market women, but also how woke mass market romance consumers are now. I don’t think all-white Victorian even gets a look now
1
18
I cringe even with non-transposed stuff I like when the bubble pops (eg moments in Christie or Wodehouse where veil of British normalcy thins). Even stuff like Downton Abbey that nice-washes class-relations within domestic UK culture is barely watchable if you know too much.
2
28
It is interesting that the OG status romance authors like Jane Austen and Edith Wharton are notable for sharp satire, but when transposed to TV, that seems to almost always get lost in unironic status romance fetishization. The dress-up and ballroom dancing overwhelms any satire.
3
4
46
If I had to make up 3 laws of “transposition fiction”, they’d be:
Rule 1: Only transpose between equiv-tech milieus unless it’s a purely cultural story
Eg: ancient to ancient, medieval to medieval, Western Europe to Japan/Korea
Exception that proves the rule: Wakanda
1
1
18
Rule 2: Only transpose status fiction about milieus that assume their own natural superiority between gradient-matched milieus
Eg: racist British royals —> racist Japanese royals
1
1
18
Rule 3: In SpecFic, strength of speculative conceit must be >>> strength of transpositional conceit
Eg: Foundation, Rings of Power
Bridgerton = vacuous counterfactual (Victorian England is DEIverse for no good reason)
Man in High Castle = substantive counterfactual (Nazis won)
2
20
Replying to
What counts as a ‘good reason’? I feel like this thinking—every element in art must have a logical reason—is part of the hypernerdification of art eg. taxonomizing all work through Tvtropes, giving every element backstory to ‘justify’ itself, & to make it inoffensively digestible
1
Replying to
You can have creative reasoning that isn’t “to make sense to an audience and their basic understanding of reality”. You could have an aesthetic reason, an emotional reason, etc. I think I’m just very tired of ‘logic’ in specfic bc it’s so unimaginative
1
Replying to
I’ll take all such creative premises. Doesn’t have to be logical.
But representation for the sake of representation isn’t a creative premise esp when you entirely ignore the tensions it entails.
Replying to
Yea, it all comes down to execution. mostly I find US SpecFics preoccupation with with fake diegetic logic a drag. Feel like we need a strong injection of magical realism to counteract this audience discomfort with a state of curiosity lol. Fight the urge to wikify everything!


