Matthew Resnick

9/18/16
ENC 2135-0025
Cole
Genre and the Fallen of the Second World War
Humans are scared creatures. Their fear of the unknown is an evolutionary trait
that has kept them around for so long. It may have boiled away since the time of
fighting wild animals in the wilderness, but that fear persists today and is embedded in
much of peoples everyday lives. In order to address the source of this fear, humans
employ tools to help them illuminate the darkness. These tools allow people to simply
and concisely understand an ostensibly complex obstacle. When it comes to works of
media, the most ubiquitous and perhaps most important of these tools is genre. The
bounds on genre are fuzzy, and often works overlap multiple genres, but the system
still stands as a viable way to wrap even the most complex of works under a neat bow.
When a similar concept is applied to humans, however, the results are quite different.
Fallen.io is a website that hosts and interactive video which depicts the results of such
tools, and others, by making an attempt to visualize the deaths from the Second World
War, by far the greatest conflict in the whole of human history. The work presents

itself as an unbiased informative piece, though through pacing, tone of voice of the
narrator, and visual cues, it does subtly inject a dramatic, even tragic, undertone that is
later juxtaposed with an optimistic conclusion.
Fallen.io consists mainly of informative charts and graphics presented with the
primary purpose of visualizing how many people died in the war, broken down by
battles and nationalities. Put best by the narrator, this project is not about individual
war stories. And its not about survivors. Were going to tally up the tens of millions
of people whose lives were cut short by [World War II]. In this endeavor, the artifact
is fairly successful, meeting some common expectations for the genre. According
to The Bedford Book of Genres, works of the informative genre that use charts
should design the charts in such a way that they are primarily easy for the readers to
absorb data quickly The whole point is to make information accessible and
digestible. The video does make a concerted effort to achieve this first by carefully
detailing how the charts will be presented, such as the 1000:1 casualty graphic, the
note about the operational definition of casualty for the project, and the breakdown of
different groups of casualties and theaters. It also redraws graphs a few times to show
the data in different lights, such as timelines of deaths, battle breakdowns, and even
proportional comparisons. If genre had as rigid guidelines as is commonly thought,
the successes of the project in terms of rhetorical devices would stop here. Fortunately
for the rhetorical integrity of Fallen.io, the lines on genre can be blurred substantially,

and what might have otherwise have been thought of as constraints now in many cases
enhances the impact of the project. The Bedford Book of Genres suggests that
authors of informational charts should use a neutral and objective tone, but the
narrator in the Fallen.io project on many occasions uses emotive inflections and
biased remarks. For instance, at one point in the video that narrator says, contrary to
official U.S. statements, these airstrikes were directed at civilian populations, not
military targets, which is a rather controversial statement not based in objective fact,
but rather scholarly opinion. This has the counter-intuitive effect of demonstrating
how the war had such a profound effect on the world that 70 years later it is difficult
to present basic statistics on it in an unbiased manner. Also, it is not uncommon
thought that informative works do not in their presentation of information use
characters (Duke & Bennett-Armistead, 2003). This project uses at least two
characters though; the narrator, who directs tone, mood, and the order of information
presentation, and the illustrator, who controls the information presented and the
pacing.
Even with its stretching of the conventional informative genre, Fallen.io goes even
another step further by branching out into other genres on the same platform. Through
the interactions between the narrator and the illustrations, there are many point in the
project where a particular mood is set by the pacing on the presentation of
information. As the video opens, an average human life span is presented as a white

line by the narrator, then, slowly at first and one-by-one, thousands of white lines
appear on the timeline beginning at different times before the start of the war but all
ending during while the narrator remains silent. This has the effect of humanizing
each statistic that will follow and also setting a dramatic and solemn mood. Later, as
the Russian military casualties are being tallied up the narrator again remains silent as
the rate of tallying stays the same despite the enormous numbers of Russian soldiers
that died compared to the casualties from any other country. This again creates a
bleak, heartbreaking mood while demonstrating the magnitude of the Russian
casualties. The narrator alone also moves the project to new genre territories with his
changing tone of voice and vocal inflections. These are subtle aspects of the project,
but apparently deliberately included. Often when he reaches the end of a significantly
sobering point, the narrators voice gets lower and he adds more pause between each
word for emphasis. There are quite a number of visual cues that add to these effects as
well. The illustrator will often use particular illustrations, animations or colorations to
set a tone in tandem with the narrator. One particularly poignant part of the video was
when the illustrator gradually reveals the Star of David along with the visual
representation of the individuals killed in the Holocaust. The Bedford Book of
Genres also mentions that an effective technique for chart illustrators to present a
point is to use color and shading to separate and highlight different pieces of
information and to lay out information and visuals in a way that shows readers what
is most important to glean. The Fallen.io illustrator executes both of these concepts

sufficiently in his colorations and labeling. In full tallies of multiple groups of

casualties, the illustrator colors the bar of deaths a blood red to hint at the gruesome
realities the charts cannot show. These aspects of the project, along with a partinstrumental, part-silent soundtrack, create a grim tone for most of the video, creating
a tragic view of the war and the outcome. However, both the narrator and the
illustrator change tone simultaneously near the end of the video to discuss what
happened after the war. They describe a time between the end of the war and modern
day that is not with war, but is, in comparison to the time before World War II,
relatively peaceful. As they show the clock of the current time clicking forward, the
narrator, in both words and tone of voice, seems optimistic for the future peace of the
world. The combination of both tragic and optimistic tones with each aspect that are
utilized to reach them branch the work from being within the informative genre out to
the dramatic genre as well.
Genre is a fluid and often variable concept that allows consumers of media to neatly
condense substantially complex works into more easily digestible packages. It is this
non-rigidity of genre that allows the Fallen.io project to exist within both the
informative and dramatic genres, and even stretch the limits on the conventional
structures of those genres. The project overstepped the traditionally neutral boundaries
of informative works and employed a number of different techniques to add a
dramatic effect to various parts, including conscious visual design choices, subtle

vocal changes in narration, and pace variation. The overall result was an intelligent
piece that effectively relays the gravity of the war and its outcomes while still
providing untampered factual information.

Works Cited
Braziller, Amy, and Elizabeth Kleinfeld. The Bedford Book of Genres: A
Guide &
Reader. Boston: Bedford, 2016. Print.

Duke, N.K & Bennett-Armistead, V.S. (2003). Reading and Writing

Informational
Text in the Primary Grades: Research Based Practices. New York:
Scholastic.