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Courtesy of ponygirl2000 - Found these two lovely quotes from Mo Ryan's essay on Downton Abbey.

Dear television writers of the world, we care about your characters. Do not mess them up for the sake of storytelling expedience. Do not give incident pride of place over people.

We want the plots to make sense -- we want them to be exciting, moving or merely competent -- but our primary goal is to be more interested in your characters and their dilemmas every week. Even if we don't like them at times, we want to be compelled to watch what they do and what happens to them. The function of the plot should be to serve up opportunities to see what they're going through and how they respond to challenges.

So here's the deal: Don't take the trust we've placed in you for granted and mess with the characters because it makes your job easier. Go ahead and screw up characters because of an artistic vision you have. OK, don't do that, but we respect that you might have a creative vision that we might not ultimately agree with. If you change your characters and their relationships based on an artistic concept you really believe in, that's one thing. To mess them up because you just need to generate stories and you need certain things to happen in the plot? Do not do this. Please do not do this.

You will get a certain number of freebies on this front, if you're doing many, many other things right. But if you continually come up with storytelling contrivances that make your characters less interesting, smart or believable, and if you frequently introduce incidents and coincidences that mainly exist to fill out the hour, and if those developments detract from our understanding of your characters, you are playing a dangerous game. Over time, your audience will begin the process of detaching from the characters and their world. Even if we have some lingering affection for the show, we'll begin the process of drifting away from it (see also: My thoughts on the current season of "Supernatural").

So, TV writers, come up with cool plots. You should absolutely expend a lot of blood, sweat and tears on the mechanics of each episode and the structure of the season. But we shouldn't have the mechanics shoved in our face and have the characters suffer as a result. We shouldn't hear and see that creaking machinery, and those mechanical objects shouldn't fall on the characters' heads regularly. Whatever you do or don't do, please don't betray your characters just to make that week's story work. Your cast and your audience deserve better than that.

I actually think this applies to all writers of serialized fiction, including comic books, books, and films. Characters FIRST, Plot and Theme - SECOND.
What this means is simply this - if the plot and theme do not organically come from your characters, you are doing something wrong. If your story is Theme first, Characters second - you've written allegory, which is nice, but works better in short story form. Serialized allegories and satires fall apart.
They don't work. [See Glee for an example of why.]

The key here is building stories that spin from the character outwards into the world, instead of the world imposing stories upon its characters," Ryan McGee wrote in an essay on the AV Club site.

Exactly. That's it in a nutshell.

This applies to so many tv shows, films, books and graphic novels...that the list of the one's that don't do this and/or do it right is a lot shorter than the one's who don't.

My only quibble with Mo Ryan's review is Frank Durabont had nothing to do with the Second Season of Walking Dead. He was fired. So you can't blame him for it.

Quick Fannish Game - Favorite Episodes of Each Season of Your Favorite TV Show

Rules? Simple. Pick a show you are or have been fannish about. Fannish enough to remember the names of the episodes each season, preferably one that is over. Each season pick one episode that you would rewatch again and again and again - that you love. Off the top of your head. The first episode that comes to mind.


Mine? Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because regrettably really never been that fannish about anything else. I've no clue why.

( My answers for Buffy )

Religion/Gender Wars...US Constitution and the Debate over Religion

Finished Sweet Revenge by Nora Roberts - which was okay. I liked the two lead characters and the whole jewel thief storyline. What didn't work are two things: 1)e-books under $10 bucks for some reason have a lot of typos. "You're" in this book was "You've", and in one sentence "kiss" was "lass". There were others as well. And they were consistent, making me wonder if it was a translation to digital content issue. I know something about translating regular text to full text via ACII, it's not as easy as it looks and certain words can get garbled. I used to explain the process to journal publishers and ensure quality standards would be kept. Amazon tends to be a bit lax on the quality for less-expensive books. 2) Roberts depiction of the Muslim religion and Islam...furthers stereotypes and hatred of this often misunderstood culture and religion. This annoyed me. I know enough about it, to figure out where the cliche stereotypes fell into place. But other readers don't. And she made me hate Islam, if I didn't know what I did and didn't have a critical mind, I wouldn't have questioned it. Shame, Nora. Shame. Also not helped by the fact that the hero is a white, blond haired, Englishman. And the villain, a Arab sheik. This is also a cliche. But..that said it does follow the trope of a lot of these books - gender battle. Or battle of the sexes. All romance novels seem to be about women taming men or vice verse.

Reading the novel, Sweet Revenge and the recent controversy about contraception in the US Congress, reminded me of other religious controversies. Which makes me realize at the center of the culture wars is gender rights vs. religious rights. Which rights should govern when the two overlap? Your freedom to practice the religion of your choice in the manner you deem fit? Or equality of gender and sexual orientation? And to what degree does one right interfere with the other or which right should supersede the other?

It's an interesting question. And depending on what country you reside, may not be a question at all. I may be wrong - but I don't believe that the religious freedom is a right in many countries, its why so many people immigrated to the US - the right to practice the religion of their choice. It's part of the US's foundation. The Pilgrims, the French Protestants, Catholics from Ireland, and various others fled to the US in order to be free to practice their religion.

The US does have a separation of Church and State. In that the government does not tell people what religion they can practice or how they can practice it. This separation gets a bit complicated and thorny, when the government provides funding to organizations that happen to be affiliated to a religious institution. Such as hospitals, schools, and universities. That's where things start to get complicated.

The Same-Sex marriage bit was an issue with religions - when it became apparent that the government could pull funding from a Catholic Hospital, University, or other affiliated organization if it failed to recognize or perform a same-sex marriage. Ie. If a hospital refused to recognize a husband or wife of a same-sex partner for medical issues or for insurance, due to religious considerations.

Contraception has likewise become an issue in regards to affiliated Catholic organizations who do not want the government to force them to provide contraception or pay for it. The Catholic University does not want to pay for it's employees use of contraception. Or have the government force them too. It's fine if the employees go elsewhere, but not on the Catholic Church's dime. The government states - we won't fund you or give you a grant if you don't do this - under Obama's Health Care initiative. The Catholic Church argues this is a violation of our religious rights.

Here's what the First Amendment to The US Constitution States about Religious Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

[James] Madison's original proposal for a bill of rights provision concerning religion read: ''The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretence, infringed.'' 1 The language was altered in the House to read: ''Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.'' 2 In the Senate, the section adopted read: ''Congress shall make no law establishing articles of faith, or a mode of worship, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion, . . .'' 3 It was in the conference committee of the two bodies, chaired by Madison, that the present language was written with its some what more indefinite ''respecting'' phraseology. 4 Debate in Congress lends little assistance in interpreting the religion clauses; Madison's position, as well as that of Jefferson who influenced him, is fairly clear, 5 but the intent, insofar as there was one, of the others in Congress who voted for the language and those in the States who voted to ratify is subject to speculation.

Scholarly Commentary .--The explication of the religion clauses by the scholars has followed a restrained sense of their meaning. Story, who thought that ''the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons, who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice,'' 6 looked upon the prohibition simply as an exclusion from the Federal Government of all power to act upon the subject. ''The situation . . . of the different states equally proclaimed the policy, as well as the necessity of such an exclusion. In some of the states, episcopalians constituted the predominant sect; in others presbyterians; in others, congregationalists; in others, quakers; and in others again, there was a close numerical rivalry among contending sects. It was impossible, that there should not arise perpetual strife and perpetual jealousy on the subject of ecclesiastical ascendancy, if the national government were left free to create a religious establishment. The only security was in extirpating the power. But this alone would have been an imperfect security, if it had not been followed up by a declaration of the right of the free exercise of religion, and a prohibition (as we have seen) of all religious tests. Thus, the whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to the state governments, to be acted upon according to their own sense of justice, and the state constitutions; and the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Jew and the Infidel, may sit down at the common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into their faith, or mode of worship.'' 7



Herein lies the cultural difference between the United States and many other countries. [ETC: By many, I do not mean every country outside the US, it's meant as a general term because I didn't want to do a listing. But go here:http://www.religiousfreedom.com/ and here: http://www.uscirf.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3595 - Examples: IRan, Egypt, China, Japan, Vietnam, North Korea, Sudan and Saudia Arabia. ] ( Read more... )