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shadowkatIn reading or attempting to read Farscape fanfic, I've come to the conclusion that if the characters actions seem out of character to me, I can't read the story. This is not by the way isolated to fanfic, it is true of just about any story. I'm fairly tolerant of crazy plots, but here's the thing - the plot must come from the characters. It must be something that the characters would choose to do and in effect explores them further. If the characters are mere puppets to the plot, as if the writer is basically playing with them as one might play with paper dolls or sock puppets or those little toy action figures - putting them all sorts of bizarre positions - I find myself leaving the story and arguing with the writer.
Yeah, sure I can do the what-if scenario, but even those need to be organic to the character.
Case in point - the IDW Angel comics - in which from a purely objective point of view, the editor, a Marjay Harjay (I know I mispelled the gal's name and am too lazy to google it and yes, google should do a better job of protecting their trademark because once you become a verb, you start to lose originality, just saying. Sorry, tangent.). MH spells out a pretty interesting plot in her recent interview on the Angel comics. Spike, a vampire who worked to get his soul and accomplished good deeds, even fell in love, without a soul, has managed without realizing it to lose his soul. The other characters didn't realize it either. And now, once they find out, that has all sorts of odd consequences. This story is interesting from a purely objective pov - in that it examines in depth what it means to have a conscience or "soul" or moral compass. How different people react with or without it. And what motivates us to do good deeds. So thematically it is interesting. It could also be interesting from a character perspective. And I've read "fanfic" and other tales, outside of Angel, that explored a similar idea. I think the ATPO Board wrote a lengthy S6 fanfic that explored what would happen if someone removed or tried to remove Spike's soul. (Unfortunately, for reasons I'll never understand, they chose to write it in teleplay format and I find teleplays head-ache inducing to read, so gave up early on.) At any rate - this story fails because I don't buy any of the characters voices or reactions, they sound and act like puppets whose strings are being pulled by people who don't quite get them. So while the plot itself is intriguing, particularly in how it effects Angel, the main character, the manner in which it is written is unreadable for me. Because - I find myself arguing with the writer, and can't lose myself in the story.
Another example - in the Farscape fic I was reading, it was a smut fic where Aeryn ties up John and has her way with him. This just does not work. It might have worked for me in S1, before he is tortured. But John has been tied up and tortured several times. Aeryn would never do that to him - he's traumatized. As is she. You don't have bondage sex with people who have been tied up and mentally tortured to the point of almost going insane. Not if you love them and want them to not go crazy on you.
Granted people see things differently, I get that. And part of the whole point of reading or watching a story is to escape into a perspective or pov outside your own, but it has to make sense to me.
In TV land, people call moments like this - "jump the shark" - when the tale being told somehow jumps off course and ceases making sense from a character perspective, to the point that the audience can almost envision the characters looking at them and saying "don't ask me, I've no clue what I'm doing, save me from this stupid writer now!" Soap operas and comic books are rather notorious for this sort of thing - which is why they get such a bad rap. So are
a lot of genre serials. The X-Files did it in their later seasons, as did a few other shows that ahem, lasted far too long.
I've seen it happen from time to time in a novel that I was reading, in which a character suddenly does something that makes me go, WTF??? I go back to re-read several chapters and yep, makes no sense. Agatha Christie, bless her heart, was a master at making a story work - each element fit into place, each character's motivation. Her masterpiece? Curtain. Even more so, if you'd read all the novels leading up to it. The book where she kills off Hercule Poirot, also the only one that I've not seen made into a film. My other favorite is the Miss Marple Mystery - Sleeping Murder. (Yes, I read all the Agatha Christie Mysteries between the ages of 13-14. Hey, it took a long time for me to figure out how to read, once I did - I devoured every book in sight.)
Even accomplished writers do this - they lose track of their characters in favor of whatever theme or message or wonky plot they got in their heads. George Lucas, Aaron Sorkin, JJ Abrahams, David E. Kelley, David Lynch, Shondra Rhimes, RTD, Ron Moore, Damon Lindenoff, and Joss Whedon, I'm looking at you! I call it cocky tv writer syndrom, even if Lucas isn't exactly a tv writer. It's more annoying when it happens with good writers. I tend to be more forgiving of daytime soap opera writers. Writing is hard work. It's solitary in nature.
And requires a great amount of discipline and revising. Also, you have to make sure each action comes from the character, is what that character who you so carefully created would choose to do. You got to build up to the character moment and it helps if the audience or reader is either a step ahead or at least on the same page, playing games tricking the reader, fooling them for that oh-so-crafty plot twist is tough to pull off organically. Few do it well.
Agatha Christie was a master at it - but she kept her plots simple. M Night Shalaman only really pulled it off with Sixth Sense. And Joss Whedon - who loves to do it, has often done so at the expense of his characters - which is a bad idea. Want to alienate a reader or audience, do a plot-twist that is at the expense of the characters and doesn't further theme or character in a new way. An example is Willow's arc in S6, where they do the odd mislead of magic as crack or Willow can get past her little "magic" addiction. When in reality it's never been magic that she was addicted to, but power. And that continues to be an issue in the comics. Or the mislead that Spike wants to remove his chip over getting a soul, which basically confused 85% of the audience - mostly because half the audience wasn't convinced he needed a soul or that he wouldn't have attempted to rape Buffy if he had one - they saw the attempted rape as a human crime not a soulless demon crime. (This was not helped by the fact that the whole attempted rape as plot-twist bit has been done to death by just about every serial tv series on the planet. So, ahem, cliche. And yes, I saw it coming a mile away.)
I can use other examples of course. There's Happy Days - where we have publicity shy Fonzie, who is the King of Cool, doing a weird stunt on water skis in Florida. They were attempting to get mileage out of the whole Evil Kenieval bit - also, I suspect parodying it. It did not work.
At any rate, nothing ruins a story for me quicker than when I find myself thinking, oh come on, that character would NEVER do that! Gimme a break! I do of course give the writer the chance to convince me, and sometimes they do. Willingham could have convinced me that Spike could lose his soul and not realize it - if Spike felt in character, or any of the characters did from the first issue forward. But they felt off. All of them. So I gave up before the story even really started. Whedon actually did a better job in Buffy - he managed to convince me that Willow would think magic was her addiction not power. Willow has never been that self-aware and loves to delude herself. So that worked. Unfortunately, the writer he hired to sell the Twilight bit, did not convince me that Buffy would boink Twangel after Twangel killed a lot of people in front of her very eyes. Be a bit like Buffy boinking Angelus after he murdered Jenny Calendar, I don't think so. Willow - I can see doing that. Heck, I can see Angel, Faith, Xander, and Spike doing that - and they all have, Xander tried to boink Faith after she murdered someone and had no problems with Anya. But not Buffy. She feels responsible for everyone's lives.
Just is out of character. They tried to set it up...but the set up didn't work - I felt like they were repeating themselves and telling not quite showing. I never bought the Buffy/Xander/Dawn triangle. Just didn't see Buffy going for Xander at this late date. They had such a strong brother/sister vibe. And it did not help that Buffy sleeps with and enjoys having sex with Satsu first. OR for that matter that Xander fell hard for Renee, who didn't die that long ago. Plus there was definitely an older brother/paternal vibe going on between Xander and Dawn that reminded me a bit of Giles/Buffy. So no, that didn't work either. As a result, I found myself questioning the story and unable to sit back and enjoy it. I'm not outraged about this, so much as merely disappointed. I wanted a good story. I got a lackluster mess and from a writer that I expected more from. Which goes to show you - you can't trust writers to always deliver the goods. Just because you loved so and so's last book or tv show, that does not mean you'll love their next one. Nine times out of ten, you'll probably be disappointed. Yet, for some weird reason we always pick up books from writers we loved in the past, hoping, I suppose that they'll give us more of the same.
It's why, I guess, that I look for fanfic after loving a great story and great characters. I want more of the characters. Particularly if there are gaps, unseen moments. TV shows are notorious for the unseen moments. Well, unless they are on HBO - HBO has a tendency to show us a bit too much. What is it with tv shows, books, and films - you either get too much or too little? You're either stuffed or hungry. I'm trying to remember the last tv show that left me completely satisfied, that I left not wanting any more or wanting less.
Buffy ended making me ache for more story. Same deal with Angel. I felt like I was missing something. Farscape actually did wrap up all their characters story arcs - but they did it so quickly and in such a short space of time (not their fault) that I ached for the bits that got skipped over. LOST - I felt cheated in a way, because everything was too neatly wrapped up and explained in a smulchy feel-good way. BSG - same problem. Endings, I get, are relatively hard to do. But why is it so many tv series screw them up? ER actually had a relatively good ending, even if it should have occurred two seasons earlier than it actually did.
Don't know. I'm just rambling now. Off to bed.
Yeah, sure I can do the what-if scenario, but even those need to be organic to the character.
Case in point - the IDW Angel comics - in which from a purely objective point of view, the editor, a Marjay Harjay (I know I mispelled the gal's name and am too lazy to google it and yes, google should do a better job of protecting their trademark because once you become a verb, you start to lose originality, just saying. Sorry, tangent.). MH spells out a pretty interesting plot in her recent interview on the Angel comics. Spike, a vampire who worked to get his soul and accomplished good deeds, even fell in love, without a soul, has managed without realizing it to lose his soul. The other characters didn't realize it either. And now, once they find out, that has all sorts of odd consequences. This story is interesting from a purely objective pov - in that it examines in depth what it means to have a conscience or "soul" or moral compass. How different people react with or without it. And what motivates us to do good deeds. So thematically it is interesting. It could also be interesting from a character perspective. And I've read "fanfic" and other tales, outside of Angel, that explored a similar idea. I think the ATPO Board wrote a lengthy S6 fanfic that explored what would happen if someone removed or tried to remove Spike's soul. (Unfortunately, for reasons I'll never understand, they chose to write it in teleplay format and I find teleplays head-ache inducing to read, so gave up early on.) At any rate - this story fails because I don't buy any of the characters voices or reactions, they sound and act like puppets whose strings are being pulled by people who don't quite get them. So while the plot itself is intriguing, particularly in how it effects Angel, the main character, the manner in which it is written is unreadable for me. Because - I find myself arguing with the writer, and can't lose myself in the story.
Another example - in the Farscape fic I was reading, it was a smut fic where Aeryn ties up John and has her way with him. This just does not work. It might have worked for me in S1, before he is tortured. But John has been tied up and tortured several times. Aeryn would never do that to him - he's traumatized. As is she. You don't have bondage sex with people who have been tied up and mentally tortured to the point of almost going insane. Not if you love them and want them to not go crazy on you.
Granted people see things differently, I get that. And part of the whole point of reading or watching a story is to escape into a perspective or pov outside your own, but it has to make sense to me.
In TV land, people call moments like this - "jump the shark" - when the tale being told somehow jumps off course and ceases making sense from a character perspective, to the point that the audience can almost envision the characters looking at them and saying "don't ask me, I've no clue what I'm doing, save me from this stupid writer now!" Soap operas and comic books are rather notorious for this sort of thing - which is why they get such a bad rap. So are
a lot of genre serials. The X-Files did it in their later seasons, as did a few other shows that ahem, lasted far too long.
I've seen it happen from time to time in a novel that I was reading, in which a character suddenly does something that makes me go, WTF??? I go back to re-read several chapters and yep, makes no sense. Agatha Christie, bless her heart, was a master at making a story work - each element fit into place, each character's motivation. Her masterpiece? Curtain. Even more so, if you'd read all the novels leading up to it. The book where she kills off Hercule Poirot, also the only one that I've not seen made into a film. My other favorite is the Miss Marple Mystery - Sleeping Murder. (Yes, I read all the Agatha Christie Mysteries between the ages of 13-14. Hey, it took a long time for me to figure out how to read, once I did - I devoured every book in sight.)
Even accomplished writers do this - they lose track of their characters in favor of whatever theme or message or wonky plot they got in their heads. George Lucas, Aaron Sorkin, JJ Abrahams, David E. Kelley, David Lynch, Shondra Rhimes, RTD, Ron Moore, Damon Lindenoff, and Joss Whedon, I'm looking at you! I call it cocky tv writer syndrom, even if Lucas isn't exactly a tv writer. It's more annoying when it happens with good writers. I tend to be more forgiving of daytime soap opera writers. Writing is hard work. It's solitary in nature.
And requires a great amount of discipline and revising. Also, you have to make sure each action comes from the character, is what that character who you so carefully created would choose to do. You got to build up to the character moment and it helps if the audience or reader is either a step ahead or at least on the same page, playing games tricking the reader, fooling them for that oh-so-crafty plot twist is tough to pull off organically. Few do it well.
Agatha Christie was a master at it - but she kept her plots simple. M Night Shalaman only really pulled it off with Sixth Sense. And Joss Whedon - who loves to do it, has often done so at the expense of his characters - which is a bad idea. Want to alienate a reader or audience, do a plot-twist that is at the expense of the characters and doesn't further theme or character in a new way. An example is Willow's arc in S6, where they do the odd mislead of magic as crack or Willow can get past her little "magic" addiction. When in reality it's never been magic that she was addicted to, but power. And that continues to be an issue in the comics. Or the mislead that Spike wants to remove his chip over getting a soul, which basically confused 85% of the audience - mostly because half the audience wasn't convinced he needed a soul or that he wouldn't have attempted to rape Buffy if he had one - they saw the attempted rape as a human crime not a soulless demon crime. (This was not helped by the fact that the whole attempted rape as plot-twist bit has been done to death by just about every serial tv series on the planet. So, ahem, cliche. And yes, I saw it coming a mile away.)
I can use other examples of course. There's Happy Days - where we have publicity shy Fonzie, who is the King of Cool, doing a weird stunt on water skis in Florida. They were attempting to get mileage out of the whole Evil Kenieval bit - also, I suspect parodying it. It did not work.
At any rate, nothing ruins a story for me quicker than when I find myself thinking, oh come on, that character would NEVER do that! Gimme a break! I do of course give the writer the chance to convince me, and sometimes they do. Willingham could have convinced me that Spike could lose his soul and not realize it - if Spike felt in character, or any of the characters did from the first issue forward. But they felt off. All of them. So I gave up before the story even really started. Whedon actually did a better job in Buffy - he managed to convince me that Willow would think magic was her addiction not power. Willow has never been that self-aware and loves to delude herself. So that worked. Unfortunately, the writer he hired to sell the Twilight bit, did not convince me that Buffy would boink Twangel after Twangel killed a lot of people in front of her very eyes. Be a bit like Buffy boinking Angelus after he murdered Jenny Calendar, I don't think so. Willow - I can see doing that. Heck, I can see Angel, Faith, Xander, and Spike doing that - and they all have, Xander tried to boink Faith after she murdered someone and had no problems with Anya. But not Buffy. She feels responsible for everyone's lives.
Just is out of character. They tried to set it up...but the set up didn't work - I felt like they were repeating themselves and telling not quite showing. I never bought the Buffy/Xander/Dawn triangle. Just didn't see Buffy going for Xander at this late date. They had such a strong brother/sister vibe. And it did not help that Buffy sleeps with and enjoys having sex with Satsu first. OR for that matter that Xander fell hard for Renee, who didn't die that long ago. Plus there was definitely an older brother/paternal vibe going on between Xander and Dawn that reminded me a bit of Giles/Buffy. So no, that didn't work either. As a result, I found myself questioning the story and unable to sit back and enjoy it. I'm not outraged about this, so much as merely disappointed. I wanted a good story. I got a lackluster mess and from a writer that I expected more from. Which goes to show you - you can't trust writers to always deliver the goods. Just because you loved so and so's last book or tv show, that does not mean you'll love their next one. Nine times out of ten, you'll probably be disappointed. Yet, for some weird reason we always pick up books from writers we loved in the past, hoping, I suppose that they'll give us more of the same.
It's why, I guess, that I look for fanfic after loving a great story and great characters. I want more of the characters. Particularly if there are gaps, unseen moments. TV shows are notorious for the unseen moments. Well, unless they are on HBO - HBO has a tendency to show us a bit too much. What is it with tv shows, books, and films - you either get too much or too little? You're either stuffed or hungry. I'm trying to remember the last tv show that left me completely satisfied, that I left not wanting any more or wanting less.
Buffy ended making me ache for more story. Same deal with Angel. I felt like I was missing something. Farscape actually did wrap up all their characters story arcs - but they did it so quickly and in such a short space of time (not their fault) that I ached for the bits that got skipped over. LOST - I felt cheated in a way, because everything was too neatly wrapped up and explained in a smulchy feel-good way. BSG - same problem. Endings, I get, are relatively hard to do. But why is it so many tv series screw them up? ER actually had a relatively good ending, even if it should have occurred two seasons earlier than it actually did.
Don't know. I'm just rambling now. Off to bed.
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Date: 2010-08-01 04:07 am (UTC)I think the ATPO Board wrote a lengthy S6 fanfic (...) Unfortunately, for reasons I'll never understand, they chose to write it in teleplay format and I find teleplays head-ache inducing to read, so gave up early on.
You'd have to ask Masq that for a definitive answer, but my understanding was that we were going to try to be the writers of the new season, and to keep it as much as possible the way we thought Mutant Enemy would have handled it in the real world. And TV or movie writers-- write scripts, they don't write stories in the conventional form and then hand that in to the showrunners.
I do recall that there was much discussion over the long haul as to how much the scripts should be embellished with additional descriptive commentary, or left as a "bare bones" form as scripts often are, with the idea that it is up to the director to decide on the fine details.
I strongly favored the highly embellished (and usually much longer because of it) scripts, because 1) some pro writers are very picky about the visual, sound or other details of their story, and include them in their work and 2) I hoped it would answer the objections of our readers who disliked the script format.
FWIW, I personally enjoy writing and have no trouble reading in script format. I have no idea why, but somehow it seems perfectly natural for me to do so. I'd be grateful if you could elaborate on why you get headachey reading them? Is it the physical nature of the script layout, the sometimes lack of detailed visualizations, or whatever?
Lastly, don't know at what chapter you stopped reading at, but if you missed cjl's Shakespearian based ep, you are missing a truly superb piece of work. Seriously. One of the best Buffyverse fics ever, and with real consequences that rolled on into the following stories, not just a "let's show off" ep.
And someday, I might even finish the damn S6 thing. Not this year, but-- someday. (~sigh~)