Early examples of genres

metahacker asked,

Hmm.

A good man, pushed too far by the world's wickedness, decides takes up arms.
A woman of questionable virtue. She doesn't need saving, but he's going to try.
A lone knight, in a futile battle against the underbelly of society, armed only with his fists and his dogged determination.

...Is Don Quixote the first Noir flick?

My response was that Thomas Kyd's THE SPANISH TRAGEDY was almost twenty years earlier. I haven't actually read or seen Kyd's stuff, but I'm given to understand that it really is a brutal noir plot.

But I'm also thinking about some of the other stuff that was coming out around the same time as Don Quixote: I think DQ was something like 1605, and then you've got Middleton's REVENGER'S TRAGEDY in 1606. And I think of those as "fiasco" plots.

As many of you know, my favorite cooperative storytelling game is Bully Pulpit Games' FIASCO, so I call the genre of works that it is based on "fiasco movies". I see the fiasco genre as a spinoff of the noir and heist genres -- except inverted. Fiasco movies are what happens when you put unqualified, inept, or perhaps just plain unlucky people into noir and heist plots. Masters of the genre include the Coen Brothers and Guy Ritchie -- think FARGO, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS, ROCK N ROLLA...

But earlier works have elements... even the Ur-heist film, the genre-defining OCEAN'S ELEVEN (the 1960s Rat Pack one) takes a quick swerve and crashes into the brick wall of fiasco in the last scene, with what actually ends up happening to the money.

So, in effect, you've got people who grow up watching noir and heist films, and then create a comedic take on it creating the fiasco genre. And I think something similar was happening with DON QUIXOTE and REVENGER'S TRAGEDY. And maybe even KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE in 1607. They're shredding different genres: DON QUIXOTE is messing with courtly chivalrous romances, REVENGER'S TRAGEDY is taking down the revenge genre, and KNIGHT is -- well, I haven't seen it yet, but I'm told that it's basically screwing around with the entire idea of theater itself.

And, to me, they ALL seem like "fiasco-style" takes on their source genres.

New life goal:

Play FIASCO with Steven Brust.

... I think he was snowed in for an extra day to Boskone, but there are a LOT of people who he wants to hang out with, so I don't think it would be reasonable to try to pull him into a three-hour game, not when I don't actually KNOW him. However, if I ever find myself in Minneapolis/St Paul for a while, and actually hanging out and we happen to become friends, that would be hella fun. It seems like the sort of game he'd enjoy.