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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 446032" data-attributes="member: 5990">Re: Tuerny vs alsih2oIn its basic sense, irony is a rhetorical device in which the speaker or author uses deception or dissemblence for some effect (without the actual intent to convey false information).  The simplest form of this is stating something not literally true, such as "that was so funny, I forgot to laugh", usually for humorous or sarcastic effect. It also occurs in the form of feigned ignorance, commonly used during argument to draw an opponent into elaborating on an absurd statement and to thereby demonstrate its absurdity.The most recent and derived sense of the word describes when an author sets up a situation within the context of the work and then introduces an incongruity (thus deceiving the audience in its expectations), usually for humorous though occasionally dramatic effect, especially to bring across the "moral of the story" (for example when an NPC who was assumed to be the bad guy turns out to be the good guy.)Simple contextless self-contradictions such as a spider caught in its own web are only irony in the same sense that "why did the chicken cross the road?" is wit.  If you haven't created an expectation in the audience and you simply dump an unexplained self-contradiction on them, that hardly qualifies.   It more qualifies as paradox, though even with paradox there should be more substance to it than simple self-contradiction.  The garden of petrified petrifiers is hardly even self-contradictory.  Maybe they just looked at each other.  There's no more irony there than if people armed with swords had killed each other with swords.A real irony in this last sense would be something like if the bard had gone to the tree seeking knowledge of music and gained a stilted academic knowledge that snuffed the creativity of his music (turning him lawful).  The plot plays on the audience's expectations (of the Tree of Knowledge) to deceive them about the true outcome, and it is done for some effect, in this case illustrating the difference between technique and art in music.An even more devious approach might  be to have the ring create situations which appeared to be ironic but in the end turned out not to be ironic at all.</blockquote>

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