Good morning. I’m here to tell you that I’m terrified. In other news, I didn’t sleep well Thursday night because I had a terrible dream (I woke up thinking that someone was screaming), but I’m hoping that it means I wake up to a more productive weekend? Maybe? Not sure how that would even work, but let’s stay optimistic, shall we?
Also I’m still open to suggestions for my ‘Stay At Home’ Masterpost so if you’ve got something you think people should check out.
This was originally going to be an essay about Corona-19, but I’m depressed enough as it is. In summary of the essay that would have been:
-This sux.
-I’m anxious.
-Don’t touch me.
-I’m allergic to pollen.
-Job market is garbage, thanks for asking.
-I’m tired of apocalyptic events.
Anyhow!
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“All a Dream” BS
So in case you don’t know, I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer since college because I’d never seen it before and I thought it was one of the most influential television shows ever made. I made a Tumblr blog for it (yetanotherbuffyblog, if you’re interested), though it’s not being updated right now because I’m off of Tumblr for Lent. And I’ll admit that watching has been slow, in part because I wasn’t very motivated, and then it got taken down from Netflix, and then I moved away from the library I used to get the DVD’s from.
But now it legally streams for free on Facebook so I started making an effort to keep going. And I’m currently on the tail end of Season Six.
There’s an episode towards the end of the sixth season in which, through [waves hands] magic shenanigans, Buffy is getting flashes of another life, in which it seems like she’s actually in a mental asylum and that all of her adventures as we’d seen them throughout the entire series, are actually a massive web of hallucinations that she’d built up. Obviously, she chooses to go forward with her life as the Slayer, because there’s another season and several sequel comics, but the episode actually leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not the other world was real.
Whedon himself refuses to give an answer to the audience, though one of the show’s producers (who didn’t write this episode, it should be noted) claims that of course it’s fake, because this show is all about female empowerment and the idea that this is all in Buffy’s head detracts from that theme.
Talking with my Whedon Consultant, we discussed our thoughts on this episode. He believed that it was way too late in the show’s run to pull the rug out from under us and make us seriously think that this was all a hallucination. I agreed, but I also thought that it was a really weird idea for a hallucination: in part because Buffy’s underlying character has always just wanted to be a normal person, not the Slayer, but mainly because most of the characters and events in her life had no counterparts in the asylum. All her friends, all her fights, all the drama, all the walking around--it’s apparently just something she dreamed up while being confined to a padded room? That doesn’t make that much sense to me? It’s not that she’s imagining her life is actually this big adventure, it’s that apparently it’s all a dream.
And okay, let me get to the point I set out to make: the whole idea of ending the story with a “It’s all a dream!” scenario is almost always an incredibly lazy cop-out. You shouldn’t use it.
Admittedly, I tend to be more lenient on examples where it isn’t clear whether or not it is a dream. The Buffy is egregious because we’re already five or six years into the show’s run, so handwaving it as a dream is… well, if it is a dream, we’d hardly care that much because we’re already invested in the story and characters. But in examples like El laberinto del fauno (YES I used the Spanish title for Pan’s Labyrinth, get over it) the movie doesn’t tell you it’s all in this little girl’s imagination: it’s up to you to interpret whether you think it is or not.
And if it happens partway through a story, that’s okay too! There’s a brilliant episode of Person of Interest that, partway through the episode, reveals that what we’ve seen is a simulation of what might happen being run by the Machine, who goes back and runs through it again. Or there’s the comic The Dreamer, in which Beatrice is going back and forth from life into the dreams where there are two continuous storylines: one in the modern day, the other in the American Revolution.
Then there’s that interesting episode of Batman: The Animated Series in which Bruce gets the life he’s always wanted, but it turns out to be a dream made by Mad Hatter. But in that case, we know from watching the episode that there’s something not quite right throughout the story, that something is off and we’re trying to figure out what it is. In that case, it makes sense that it’s a dream because it fits with the information we’ve already been presented.
But if at the end of a story, for the author to say, “Welp, actually none of it was real! It was a dream! Or a hallucination!” as a cheap twist ending, it devalues the story. The author didn’t commit to the story he or she was telling. It’s a trick to say, “All of that? Well it didn’t actually matter!” And it’s a bit difficult to not feel ripped off when the author is straight-up telling you that everything you cared about didn’t happen and didn’t matter.
This is, in large part, why I’m against the theory of Assassin’s Creed fans that everything that happened in-series was actually a simulation? The main story now seems to be leaning that direction, which I’m not a huge fan of, though I don’t quite know where they’re going with it, as the characters themselves seem to be becoming aware of it and that’s a whole ‘nother creature altogether.
[I’ve also seen this used as a sort of retcon; for instance, the much derided Highlander: The Source was declared by one of the actors as just a bad dream, which, okay fair, that movie sucked. But there’s also a line in one of the straight-to-home video American Tail movies that retcons the second one into just being a dream, and that earns a slap to whoever wrote that line. I’m not a huge fan of it as a retconning device, unless it’s to erase something absolutely terrible from the continuity.]
The story should make you feel satisfied at the end. I shouldn’t reach the end of a story and say, “Wow, I got really worked up about absolutely nothing!” Which is ultimately what you’ve done if you go with this twist. If the ending of the story is telling me that I shouldn’t have gotten invested… well, that’s not a great thing to do if you want an audience to care about what you’ve written!
So don’t do it!
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