this is almost certainly a post ive made before but when a character’s grief is so strong it fully alters the form of the narrative itself… moby dick being so much longer than strictly necessary because ishmael’s grief made him stall for time in the telling of the tragedy… harrow the ninth being in second person because harrow was so grief-stricken that she herself was not capable of making narrative sense of the events of the novel and so someone else had to do it…. do u know what i mean
ok WAIT. SO TRUE
omfg
HELP as the game progresses and more and more people die the display is slowly changing from full color to black and white
Act 5 Act 2 in Homestuck is also I think very similar to how Ishmael in drags out the telling of the story because the grief is too horrible to bear. The trolls killing each other on the meteor happens in the span of a few minutes but takes hundreds of pages to be be told because it is constantly derailed bc the characters cannot process what is happening to them.
Karkat starts another memo he knows is pointless and ends up arguing with Gamzee and past Eridan. Terezi goes through her legislacerator roleplay complete with plush scalemates to avoid confronting Vriska. Even the narrative itself derails itself with a joke about Rufio and then cutting away from that to John to get away from the meteor, because the reality of terrified, hopeless children murdering each other alone in space is too grim to be faced head on.