Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Neurosis in Reading

Considering fantasy can be replete with armies and battles, and short stories add a lot of random deaths, I added this to my file to give my cumulative death toll some "meaningful" criteria:

For death toll, I’m only counting on-screen / described deaths or plot-related deaths that are given a specific number. For instance, in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, Grahame-Smith quotes a statistic about 204 murders, then shows a news report about one of those deaths. The 204 murders not being directly related to the plot, just color, they don’t add to the tally, but the news report does, for a total of one. A fantasy battle in which "hundreds" died would not get counted because it's not a specific number. I am not going to count non-fiction deaths, though ALVH gets a pass because I am too lazy to separate out the fictional characters from the historical ones.


Also, it's probably evil of me that I want to file ALVH on GoodReads on my Non-Fiction shelf and see who notices.

1 comment:

Angie said...

Hee-hee. You should totally put it on the non-fiction shelf.