BLUE SUN ROOM

River's dialogue analyzed

POSTED BY: MERRYK
UPDATED: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 23:20
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VIEWED: 7386
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Monday, October 22, 2007 3:29 PM

MERRYK


I am one of those fic writers who can't just write from instinct...I have to examine and reexamine and analyze until I'm sure I can do it right. Especially when it comes to idiosyncratic dialogue/behavior. When it comes to River, she's a wonderful mix of crazy and lucidity, of genuine disconnection from reality and simple eccentricity. Even more, this mixture varies from episode to episode to movie, because of outside influences on her psyche. To get a better idea of how she progresses, I went through all the scripts for the show and movie and categorized each one of River's lines, from most normal to most abnormal.

The first category was Lucid, those lines that any girl in that position would say. "You are such a boob" and "I didn't get you anything" fall under this category, plus her direction giving in Objects in Space.

The second category I named Oddly Phrased. These are those things she says that are slightly weird, but probably due more to her natural character than any mental troubles. For example, before anything happens to her, her lines in Safe about "The Independents attacked us with dinosaurs.....we'll have to resort to cannibalism" show that she doesn't think typically even under good circumstances. After her treatment, I categorized such lines as "Ruby doesn't talk anymore; her voice got scared away" "I wonder who's in there" and "My food is problematic" in this section.

Next come the purely literal and logical lines, the technical ones, that come randomly. Probably she said similar lines before the treatment, but they are also prompted by her schizophrenia. "The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given proper vacuuming technique" and "Mal—bad—in the Latin" are good examples.

The last category is the Crazy Talk, stuff that there is usually an explanation for if you understand how River talks, but clearly comes from her fragmented mind. There are the somewhat crazy lines like "We'll take care of each other...I'll knit" and "I walked on my feet, and I heard with my ears". And then there are the more bizarre ones, such as "Old men covered in blood, never touched them but their drowning in it" and "They took Christmas away". The range of weirdness varies, but I ended up putting them all in this category. I also put her pure mind-reading stuff in this area, such as her analysis of Badger.

Lastly, I marked down moments where River has a fit or act of random fear.

I gave points for lines from each category, approximately one point per line of dialogue, though long speeches (such as her speech to Badger, Early, Simon in War Stories, etc.) are never given more than three points no matter how many lines, and if there are a couple short lines that follow on to each other, they are only given one point.

And now, the analysis part.

Obviously, River has more points in episodes where she has more scenes, and she only got points for Our Mrs. Reynolds because I included the deleted scene (I did not include any other deleted scene except the two extensions from the movie Serenity, from the locker scene and on Lilac). But there is somewhat of a pattern of her dialogue. I'll do an episode by episode analysis, and share more general comments at the end.

In the first episode, we only see River fearful mostly, no crazy moments at all. She gets a Oddly Phrased point for her line after exiting the cryo box and a Lucid point for her couple lines to Simon at the end, including one of her most lucid lines: "I didn't think you'd come for me." In the Train Job, we get lines all across the board, from her random throwing things in the infirmary to her statement of Serenity's classification to her "Two by two, hands of blue". In Bushwacked, too, she's all over, though much more crazy and frightened than lucid/technical. She's not lucid at all in Shindig, and once again is having little crazy fits.

It is in Safe that she gives a hint that she can still be lucid in any way. She still has lots of crazy lines, as well as many oddly phrased ones, and a couple random fits, but she also has almost a normal conversation with Simon as she tells him that she knows something's wrong with her and how hard it is for him, and then jokes with him about the berries. This is a rare episode, though...we don't get anything really lucid out of her other than a couple lines in Ariel until Objects in Space. She doesn't have any fits after Ariel, probably thanks to her new meds, but for the handful of scenes in Our Mrs. Reynolds through Heart of Gold, she's mostly doing the crazy talk with a fair sprinkling of weirdly phrased and technical lines.

Objects in Space has very lucid parts, such as giving directions to all the crew, and also quite crazy and weird moments, but it also seems like the episode where she comes to grips with the fact that she can be crazy and lucid. By Serenity the movie, she seems more self-aware, though obviously after the Maidenhead scene and until the battle on Mr. Universe's moon she is mostly crazy, but certainly by the end of the movie she knows who and what she is and is definitely more lucid.

One of the most interesting things I found was that she doesn't have any random fits of violence or fear after Simon knows what meds to give her after Ariel. Also, about 1/2 her lines are really crazy, and, of the others, about 1/2 are just eccentric...she doesn't dispense purely literal stuff very often, only about 1 every 15 lines. And if you add together her crazy moments to her weirdly phrased but mostly eccentric moments, they outnumber all her lines exactly 2 to 1.

She only has 7 crazy points (out of 64 total) between Ariel and Objects in Space, and only 12 out of 40 lucid points are before she gets proper meds after Ariel. Her eccentric lines are the ones that don't change much no matter how her storyline goes...pretty much equal distribution through all the scenes.

--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown

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Monday, October 22, 2007 6:21 PM

SHINYSEVEN2


There's also the time delay you have to apply when someone is clairvoyant as well as telepathic--something that sounds completely batty on Tuesday in the desert makes perfect sense on Friday during the monsoon.

For a long time, I thought that Safe showed that although River is clairvoyant, she has ATROCIOUS judgment. But thinking it over more, she wasn't worried because she *knew* the Big Damn Heroes were going to turn up in time to save the day, so why shouldn't they get a chance to be really cool?

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Monday, October 22, 2007 8:57 PM

WYTCHCROFT


great post - one i'll come back to... i think River's 'abilities' are undisciplined and therefore random seeming, especially as she herself moves without effort between the present and memory... and not all her memories are her own.

what's difficult in a fic is that River's 'crazy talk' - third person refrerential 'knights move' schizo-logic and all - actually reads as clunky quite often in a genuine script... it takes a performance and a director to make it work...

fic writers got a tough job on that one!:)

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 4:22 AM

MERRYK


Yeah...one thing in a fic writer's favor, though, is that we all know very well what Summer Glau sounds like, so it's pretty easy to hear River if the words are right.

--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:16 AM

NBZ


wow!

Do we get a graph? (or a table?)

(clairvoyance is IMO not a part of her repertoire... When joss sais Psychic I choose to believe he only meant "reader"...)

EDIT - Does "Those Left Behind" fit into this?

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:19 AM

MERRYK


I could do that...but I'm not sure how to make that in a forum. Any ideas? I'd be happy to share if I can make it work.

No, I did not do Those Left Behind...probably should. I don't yet own it, though, so it might take a while.

I agree, it's not clairvoyance, she just reads things so that it seems like she's foretelling the future.

--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:26 AM

NBZ


Probably best to do it in a spreadsheet program and take a screenshot. (if you send me the data I can do it for you... )

And you need to get a hold of TLB. not because it is spectacular in any way, (you may be disappointed as well it lacks the skills of the actors - even with pictures you still have to imagine how the lines would be delivered.) but there is a River scene which IMO gives some insight into some of Rivers less than lucid moments.

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 6:12 AM

WYTCHCROFT


always give me a chance to go william burroughs (on a budget ha ha!)... mixing past and future memory can be quite hypnotic.

generally - river makes very powerful associations - which may or may not be pertinent to the crew - but they can be useful to give extra insight to a character or a theme... a 'bad' river characterisation will use her as an 'enigmatic' exposition machine only...*


*might be guilty of that myself!!

personal P.S.: entering a weird cuppla weeks where my net access will be snatched and random - if i miss anything meantime - i WILL catch up!!:)

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 6:29 AM

MERRYK


I went back and edited it a little but here it is. Oh, and when I put the number of scenes, it is the number of scenes she actually speaks in.




--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 6:31 AM

MERRYK


You're quite right about Those Left Behind...I forgot that there are important River scenes. I'll get to that as soon as possible, but until then I'll post what I have.

--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 7:19 AM

NBZ


Thanks for that!

Just put it in a chart to see if I could get anything "new". (the "she's getting worse" line by Mal in Ariel seemed a little random to me... her getting worse was something I did not see.)


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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 9:17 AM

MERRYK


Yes, I know where you're coming from. I did this partly to know how to balance how River speaks—not too much crazy or too much literal—but also to know what happens in between episodes. Mal does not think very critically, and a lot of his perceptions are not quite accurate, however, in cases where fear and wariness come in, he's very likely to know if there are more of those going on than before. Also, we only see little glimpses of the characters' lives, especially River's. So when Mal says that she's getting worse, he's probably right—Simon agrees, and we can safely assume that he's going to be in tune to her welfare. So there have to be more crazy episodes going on behind the scenes. In the Train Job, also, Simon talks about how River is cogent one moment and crazy the next...we don't see a lot of that, so it has to be going on behind the scenes. This graphing helped me not so much in what we see as much as what we don't see and should therefore see in fics, especially since I am writing one of those in-between episode fics.

--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 9:35 AM

MAL4PREZ


Yeah, I agree that we have to take Mal at his word. Joss doesn't have time to illustrate everything about the characters, so Mal's: "She's getting worse" and Simon's agreement have to stand for a lot of moments we didn't see.

MerryK, what I like about all this (besides that I'm a scientist and numbers and graphs tickle my brain LOL!) is that you're showing that River's not actually flat-out crazy; she doesn't speak pure nonsense often. (Possibly ever - it could be that we just know enough to understand her rants...) Your point about her being a little weird to start, from childhood... it's a nice insight.

-----------------------------------------------
hmm-burble-blah, blah-blah-blah, take a left

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 10:39 AM

NBZ


Quote:
Yeah, I agree that we have to take Mal at his word. Joss doesn't have time to illustrate everything about the characters, so Mal's: "She's getting worse" and Simon's agreement have to stand for a lot of moments we didn't see.


Yeah I agree.

It's just I had a "what? she is?" moment there during my first viewing.

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 2:00 PM

MERRYK


Quote:
MerryK, what I like about all this (besides that I'm a scientist and numbers and graphs tickle my brain LOL!) is that you're showing that River's not actually flat-out crazy; she doesn't speak pure nonsense often.


LOL! I know, I just love when people analyze things I love mathematically...even though I don't normally enjoy numbers. Eventually I'll probably go through all the characters' dialogue and do more things like these.

But yeah, River's not "crazy", she's schizophrenic (to give the simple explanation). Schizophrenics don't just spout nonsense, and if you look at everything through their eyes, nothing they say is not based in sense. Their problem is not with intellect, but with their perception of reality and how they express that perception. I see many people berate the Firefly characters for not listening to River and taking her seriously more often, but really, it is only because it is television and we can see a lot of her world that we as viewers know that what she says is not nonsense. It's highly unrealistic to expect the characters to make connections between the apparently random things she says and later things that happen, unless it's something more simple like immediate mind-reading.

And also, it really bugs me to see River written as a one-note character in fanfiction...she's crazy, or she's (post-Miranda) totally sane. I ache for well-rounded River...that's one of the things that makes me write. Not that I'm saying I succeed, though I try very hard to do so, but it's more therapeutic than criticizing other people's stories.

--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 2:38 PM

PLATONIST


I reviewed different types of sentences with my English students this week and it dawned on me that River relies on mostly declarative statements, "Reavers", or "the body can be drained...", she rarely uses interrogative (questions) phrases or imperatives (commands) phrases.

But if you look at her language pattern before the Academy, or during her transition period, she does, "can I still dance?"

Any one else notice this change in her cognition?

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 2:58 PM

PLATONIST


by the way LOVE THE CHART!

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 2:59 PM

WYTCHCROFT


Quote:
Originally posted by Platonist:


Any one else notice this change in her cognition?



um, yes!...
it really interested me!

i've tried to incorporate that in fics - to subtly reverse the arc - post BDM back to pre-academy(ish) but... can't say i've been toooo successful - and the plots get in the way!!

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 5:32 PM

MERRYK


Yes, I did notice that. I'm kind of obsessive with noticing style. She also seems to avoid using "I" or "me" and talking about herself.

--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007 11:20 PM

WYTCHCROFT


Quote:
Originally posted by MerryK:
Yes, I did notice that. I'm kind of obsessive with noticing style. She also seems to avoid using "I" or "me" and talking about herself.

--
"My way of being polite, or however...well, it's the only way I have of showing you that I like you. Of showing respect." Simon Tam, Jaynestown


yeah - and she uses the third person to describe herself on occasion... which is over used in fics sometimes.
i have to say Merry i envy your river writing a great deal! i... struggle.

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