A place to talk about anything Fantasy related. Really it can be anything from books, video games, artwork to film!
Writing Fantasy Moments - Dramatic Irony
Ya wonder how storytellers use Dramatic Irony to make your jaw drop? Set-up. All it takes is the reader knowing one more fact than a character. That stirs up a whole hornet's nest of emotion in the reader.
Writers, do you use Dramatic Irony? How and why?
Curtis, the M.C. of a story I wrote, tracks villains using a type of telepathy. Curtis hears people speaking from miles away, and he tries to warn police officers when the villian plans to bomb a target. Dramatic Irony comes in when officers doubt Curtis's telepathy, and early on when Curtis first developed it.




So not really about writing. But I was watching a Star Trek Voyager episode yesterday and was wondering if it was dramatic irony. The gist of it was the EMH (Emergency Medical Hologram) knew the cure for the engineer who programmed/created him. But the engineer refused to believe that one of his first EMH's could possibly know how to cure him. So a struggle ensued where he refused to be treated by the EMH but the EMH knew he could cute him because he treated the disease before.
That definitely counts as Dramatic Irony. If the reader/viewer knows something that one or many characters do not know, then it counts. If the engineer refuses to believe the EMH, then the engineer's personal choice is making the Dramatic Irony happen.
And hey, gotta love Trek. That episode sounds like it was written by either Asimov or Lovecraft.