Elmithian said:

New Weird is more in the faction of making you highly uncomfortable and maybe fearful in a way, but it doesn't try to play on *common* fears. It tries to innovate on the old weird that Cthulhu stories began... well atl that is my interpretation of it.

That's not a bad way to say.

One thing I've learned with fiction, especially speculative fiction, is that there are a lot of different interpretations of one genre. If I say "tell me about sword and sorcery" or "tell me about punk" then you get only one or two common agreements and a lot of disagreements. Weird fiction is a very much a mixed genre, so you can get a lot of varying opinion on what qualifies, and that's one of the things I find so fascinating about it.

In my opinion, one of new weird fiction's strengths/definitions is it doesn't agree to play by anyone's rules. It mixes genres and defies tropes at the risk of being absurd in exchange for being surprising and strange. Horror in particular lies in subtlety and presentation, and understanding the essence of tension. New weird sets up the tension and then takes off the mask halfway through to tell an entirely different story. It uses suspense as backdrop to help tell of impressive foes and brutal alien encounters, or to raise the stakes on an already dramatic and emotional moment. It might still have horror elements, but it is not the focus.

Take something like seeing Alma from Fear versus an anomaly from Stalker and how they are different. Both are modern action shooters where you are a soldier with a gun going into a dark building looking for trouble.

In Fear, Alma appears, the lights flicker, your HUD goes out, and she walks towards you slowly while blood drips from the ceiling, and then she disappears. That is tried and true horror. It sticks to the script and relishes in the tension before backing off and setting the next trap.

In Stalker, you find an anomaly you've never seen, you follow your radar towards an artifact, then suddenly you're being irradiated, lightning is shooting out of the ground, an invisible creature is hurling corpses at you, and you have to get out of there fast before you die fifty different ways at the same time. That is new weird. It starts as horror, but doesn't compromise its narrative to keep being horror, and instead breaks the script to switch to sci-fi action so it can keep on telling you about how desperate and deadly its world is.

Classic weird is even more different. It mixes mythic, noir, and horror with a focus on classical settings and planar travel as opposed to contemporary and punk. The works of Lovecraft come to mind easily enough, and the kind of tension invoked by works such as Fallen London or Alan Wake are very, very different from this story.

Blindga said:
- III -

I do agree with your points (and there is no but...). I sometimes feel like that normal horror fails the realism check for the sake of looking/feeling spooky. New Weird is, as you said, interesting mixture of weird, lighthearted (sometimes), life and death struggles, humour and so on. In short, it is complex and doesn't rely on a singular "genre".

New Weird, when done right, very often feels Lived in. A world you can believe exists, even if it is inexplicably odd, bizarre and so on.

I think a certain game, Zeno Clash I believe was its name? Is a game example of New Weird, though very light on the horror, everything just is... weird, in every fashion and form (I actually often got headaches if I played that game for too long). The world makes sense, while at the same time, it doesn't fully make sense from our perspective. And I believe that new anime (and older manga)Dorohedoro would also fit into the confine of New Weird? Neither are horrors, well, not in the classical sense. They have mixture of lightheartedness and comedy, but still give off that Weird and often dark vibe.

Elmithian said:

Lived in

Yes! That's it exactly! It is a very lively genre. It conveys something not quite realistic, but grittier and rougher than other stories.

Zeno Clash is an example of it, although the alien landscapes and truly hideous creatures are a bit more on the side of just absurd in my opinion, and it doesn't quite vibe as well as it could. The themes and overlap with weird fiction are definitely there though! Both Zeno Clash 1 and 2 played together actually makes some surprisingly serious and competent story moments despite being rather goofy looking.

I'll have to see if Dorohedoro is any good though. I've never heard of it.

Blindga said:

Yes! That's it exactly! It is a very lively genre. It conveys something not quite realistic, but grittier and rougher than other stories.

Zeno Clash is an example of it, although the alien landscapes and truly hideous creatures are a bit more on the side of just absurd in my opinion, and it doesn't quite vibe as well as it could. The themes and overlap with weird fiction are definitely there though! Both Zeno Clash 1 and 2 played together actually makes some surprisingly serious and competent story moments despite being rather goofy looking.

I'll have to see if Dorohedoro is any good though. I've never heard of it.

I won't argue that. Dorohedoro just had an anime, it is the anime that is 3d animated with the lizard man and has this acid trip of an intro. Now that you mention it, it might be in the line between absurdism and New Weird truth be told.

By the way, as a response to COVID quarantines, Book Walker is having a "I Couldn’t Go Outside, So I Just Stayed In and Read Light Novels All Day!" campaign where you can read books including Otherside Picnic for free for the month of April, only.

I heard this for the first time today, and now it's my headcanon that the music in the elevator sounds like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJgNpm8cTE8