Research Into Similar Products: The Tragedy genre

"Tragedy is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing."-Wiki

What Aristotle says:
Aristotle wrote in his work Poetics that tragedy is characterized by seriousness and involves a great person who experiences a reversal of fortune (Peripeteia). Aristotle's definition can include a change of fortune from bad to good as in the Eumenides, but he says that the change from good to bad as in Oedipus Rex is preferable because this induces pity and fear within the spectators. Tragedy results in a catharsis (emotional cleansing/purgation of emotion) or healing for the audience through their experience of these emotions in response to the suffering of the characters in the drama.

His direct definition of the Greek word 'tragedy':
Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete (composed of an introduction, a middle part and an ending), and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions.

New forms of social media and electronic publishing have expanded modern tragedy stories from static works of literature to dynamic, near real time stories inviting the audience to participate. An example is the WordPress blog icallyouluv, a 100 entry story of deeply personal emotions and intimate details of an anonymous couple that fate had determined would not be together.

For more information, click here.

A lot of my favourite (and most famous) tragedies are from Shakespeare himself;

*Antony and Cleopatra*
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Romeo and Juliet
and Macbeth

Just to name a few.

Shakespeare's Tragedies end in death, whereas his Comedies end in marriage!

I once described before how my trailer is a lot like 'Antony and Cleopatra':

And I do love a tragedy, they can be so inspiring, especially if it becomes a redemption story in which the stages of events turn from unfortunate to hopeful!