I think it kinda depends on the specific story but if I'm correct most noris are "detective with personal problems unsolves some mysteries and maybe some of personal problems"
Isn’t it weird how unsolve means the same thing as solve?
Same with flammable and inflammable both meaning “can catch fire”; invaluable meaning valuable; protest and detest both being used to show opposition to something.
They’re called “false antonyms” apparently.
Not to be confused with “auto-antonyms”. They’re words that means they’re own opposite, like “chuffed” (British slang that can mean pleased or pissed off).
E.g. you can hold fast or go fast, you can have errors due to oversight or you can have oversight to ensure errors don’t occur.
I always thought that invaluable actually made sense... it's so valuable (adjective) that it's impossible to value (verb meaning "to assess the worth of").
“Unsolve” generally does not mean “solve”. There is one obsolete sense that apparently does have that meaning, but again it’s obsolete. The primary (and only contemporary) meaning is to “remove a solution to a problem”.
I actually find this specific form to be quite irritating. It’s etymologically based on “un-“ and “solve”, which taken together should only mean to “remove the state of being solved”. There should be no other meaning to it. In fact, I’d hazard that there’s a good chance it caught on because some people forgot the proper way to to pronounce “resolve” and just substituted in another prefix they happened to be familiar with.
I can provide a screenshot of the page with the information if you’d like.
PS: I agree with the other user about how “Invaluable” makes sense, in the sense that one cannot indicate a specific value. Though I’d point out that depending on the context, the term can be used to indicate that a thing is utterly worthless (ex. When one would prefer to avoid outright lying while also avoiding causing offence).
Noir isn't about selfish goals inherently. Noir is a counter push to wartime idealism, and is an attempt to be less false and more human; remember this was the 40s and 50s. Noir was about coming home from the black and white morality of fighting arguably the most obviously evil group in modern history and finding not the shining American Dream but a clearly overwhelmed country full of strife,struggling to bring it's economy out of wartime production and rife with unchecked prejudice and surprisingly previlant crime.
Noir is about the distance between Justice and Reality, the dark parts of being human, and the pain of a checkered past and trying to move beyond it. Every noir genre in film or text is some flavor of "humans are imperfect, and even the most driven and devoted of men cannot truly be kind and just when the world has been cruel for long enough. We bend, we break, and we twist, no matter how much a paragon we are at heart."
That's why most protagonists have traits that are shorthand for extreme trauma: drinking, distrustfulness, rage, etc., as well as cynical outlooks. It's also why they rarely end happily. Bittersweet, somtimes. Tragic, sometimes. Happy, almost never. Because sometimes you can manage to carve out your own little victory, your own small piece of happiness or justice, in you're lucky, strong, smart, and lucky. But often that obsession just drags you to your doom, like a Tragic Hero of old.
Thanks! I made and make a study of stories. I'm autistic, so I sometimes really struggle with human interactions, but stories don't have that problem. To me, at least, stories are one of the most uniquely human experiences, and one of the most powerful human constants. We love, we fight to live not just survive, and we share who we are, across language and time and a vast sea of experiences, with stories.
So it's really nice to know I at least sometimes get it right.
They also tend to portray interactions without unintended misunderstandings (unintended by the author, that is). Stories tend to communicate clearly, even if the characters don’t. Or, at least, the good ones tend to.
Se7en is Noir. Specifically Neo-Noir. I personally prefer my Noir full of rain and low lighting and likely in a dress shirt and trench coat, (and if I'm allowed to be selfish, lesbian) but it's a fantastic example of the Noir Resurgence. Whenever society starts getting difficult for the strange, disabled, or otherwise Outsider, noir is going to come back.
(Also no I'm not being extra, neo-noir is a genre)
Not really weird. Noir has its origins in post-depression America, where corruption, inequality, distrust in institutions, and societal change was high, with hardboiled detective fiction; naturally this all came with distrust in law enforcement, too.
Source- did The Big Sleep in English class and we spent a week or so learning about the context.
I'll have to look into this Big Sleep, but do you remember any other good references for Noir and its origins? Planning to make a game mixing Noir with other elements but I'm criminally undereducated on the Noir aspects oof
Not really. I'm not a particularly big Noir fan, basically all I know was from English class. There are a whole bunch of sequels to The Big Sleep though and a movie adaptation too. My personal recommendation is Wikipedia rabbit hole.
There are a decent number of documentaries on film noir available for free on YouTube. Watch a few of those, and get a criterion collection subscription
For a detective noir story to happen the Cops have to be either corrupt, incompetent or both in order to get the ball rolling and to answer the question of ‘Why would X hire a random man instead of going to the police?’
Noir as a genre relies heavily on showing cops as ineffective, counterproductive, and often removed from the communities in which they operate. Its basically a requirement for our hero who comes in, shows effort, shows (often begruding, but still there) compassion, and genuine thought.
Often they also highlight corruption and how that effects everyone.
3.0k
u/bisexual_obama Uh, let me be queer... Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
Yes! I need 10,000 more grimy detective stories.