On Time Skips

 Hello! I am having a weird week. I’m less stressed about life in general and more stressed about Christmas shopping in particular, because without going out to places I have been shopping online and some things take a while to arrive! A couple of things have not arrived! And they should have! It’s not great!

I am a little behind on reading. I meant to watch Two Towers some time soon but my LotR schedule will take a backseat while I watch Christamas movies, I think. And some other things as well.

Also I watched a few episodes of Primal! That was cool.

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On Time Skips

I had this thought in the bathroom Friday morning. Which sounds weird, but I have a lot of thoughts in bathrooms, and the fact that I came up with an idea before Friday evening is, sometimes, very impressive. To me at least.

But time skips! That very useful thing to have between books in a series, or seasons of a show, or films in a film series, that let you pick up a little bit later and find out what the characters are doing. They’re great. I mean, sometimes. Sometimes they’re great. Sometimes they’re annoying as fudge. I know that there are people who absolutely hate them if they’re more than a week, but I don’t quite understand why.

See, contrary to any writing lessons you may have picked up from watching Once Upon a Time, we don’t actually need to know what happened in every minute of your main characters’ lives. Time skips between installments gives you the freedom to skip stuff that isn’t interesting, because most people’s lives aren’t nonstop action, or even particularly good stories. So say one installment of the story shows the beginning of a war, you don’t actually need to tell about every engagement or movement or whatever that happens in the conflict. You can skip to a key moment in the war.

The problem is when the time skip is used to cover basically everything interesting that might have happened. So if one installment starts the war, and the next one ends it years later? The audience is going to feel a bit jipped in that they don’t get to see what the war was actually like. I think the worst example of a time skip I can think of is the five year time skip between the first two seasons of Young Justice.

See, the first season of Young Justice ends with the Justice League realizing that while they were mind controlled by the villains, they have sixteen hours that are still unaccounted for, and they don’t actually know what the villains’ plan is. The second season picks up five years later, where members of the Team are no longer teenagers, there’s a new Team, a bunch of new Leaguers, and several of the character dynamics have changed. So this leads to having to awkwardly show the audience what the heck happened to everyone in the five years since, AND who the new characters are and what their backstories are, while ALSO trying to tell you the story of the alien infiltration and invasion of Earth. Like yes, I get that they wanted to introduce a bunch of new elements to the story without having to go and introduce it episode by episode, and considering everything they didn’t do that badly, but it’s still really annoying that so much happened and we have to play catchup instead of just letting the story happen.

Why are Miss Martian and Beast Boy siblings now? Why did she and Connor break up? How many of his teammates did Nightwing date? How did Tim become the new Robin? Wait, there was an in-between Robin who died? How did Jaime get alien technology attached to his spine? How does Wonder Woman have a protege with the same powers? Why is Aqualad evil? When did Artemis and Kid Flash retire? Why is Ocean Master out of the Light? Why not just tell us these stories, instead of skipping past them and then dropkicking us into an alien invasion story that also happens to have enough discussions about the rest of it so that we know what happened?

I think the makers of the show did figure this out. When the show got revived, and a third season got produced, there’s another timeskip, but it’s only two years, and a lot of the changes that happened feel more organic and easier to follow. New characters are introduced out of nowhere with little explanation, but they’re not main characters so it feels less egregious.

I remember that there was a bit of the Tumblr fandom for Legend of Korra that was shocked that between the first two seasons there was a six month time skip. And this baffled me because of Young Justice but also because that’s actually a good thing. Look, we don’t need to see Korra going around to everyone and restoring bending with her Avatar powers, we need to move to a new story and see where the characters go afterward. Again, and we don’t need every detail! We need to move to the part of the story where things happen again!

Sometimes there should be a time skip. If you pick up right where you left off, but feel like a lot of time has passed, or that a lot happened that doesn’t seem probably in such a short time frame? Probably should have had a time skip. If there wasn’t Luke and Rey’s Plot in The Last Jedi (because the previous movie ends on a cliffhanger there), I would say that movie needed a time skip, because the First Order gets over being exploded remarkably well. NO I WILL NOT GET OVER THAT! A time skip would explain how they can pull a dreadnought out of their butt to bomb the Resistance base from orbit right after they suffered a crippling loss and had to hastily evacuate their own planet.

I suppose that a good couple rules of thumb would be these: 

-Is the time skip being used to hop over all the good storytelling opportunities? If not, it’s fine. If it is, then maybe don’t do that. Your audience could feel like they missed something or they could wish that they were getting robbed of a much more interesting story featuring characters they care about.

-Are you picking up the next installment right afterward? If so, then think about what’s going on in the story, and if it makes more sense for there to have been some breathing room between installments. The audience is smart enough to understand that stuff happened in between in that time.

Like many storytelling elements, they serve a purpose. So think about why you’re applying or not applying it. Tell the most interesting story possible, and use a time skip to avoid the unimportant bits of the narrative (between installments, of course), or don’t use them to make sure you cover the important parts that the audience won’t want to miss.

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Why the Masquerade?

 You know, about a year ago when I was stuck I could always do a movie review or a Note about books I’ve been reading. But now that I have the Book Diary and Movie Munchies, I don’t know that there would be much point to those nowadays.

I also considered a Note about what books I would adapt into television or movies if I were a famous and powerful Hollywood person, but that would quickly devolve into “These books are good, go read them!” and again, we have my Book Diary for that.

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe! Reminder that the patron saint of the Americas made herself known to an indigenous person in his own language.

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Why the Masquerade?

TV Tropes has a thing they call “the Masquerade.” It’s when, in fiction, especially urban fantasy, there is a secret world of magic, or aliens, or vampires, or robots or whatever, and they don’t tell the normal people about it. After all, if the Muggles know about the Secret World, then--

Well, what, exactly? Why can’t the Muggles know about the Secret World? And in fantasy worlds, constructed worlds, the mages don’t have much reason to hide their powers. So why would they decide to do it in our world?

The very obvious answer is because it’s easier on the writer. If we lived in a world with magic, and monsters, and robots all out in the open, the world would look very different from the way it does now. But that requires crafting a brand new history of the world, but one that still has enough landmarks that it’s recognizable to the reader. If Rome had immortal wizards, chances are the landscape of the world would be very different, and trying to make a modern world with that premise in the background would make it very difficult to believably shape it into anything we would find familiar.

You could skip that, but it would feel cheap somehow. Lindsay Ellis’s video on the Netflix movie Bright talks about this--it’s a world in which orcs, elves, fairies, centaurs, and dwarves live alongside humans, but it’s still our world, our culture, and history, fashion, and technology have apparently been exactly the same as our world, with only some minor things, and the fact that somewhere in the past there was a Dark Lord that orcs sided with that tried to take over the world using magic.

But it certainly is possible. People have been doing alternate histories for ages. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud is a good fantasy example of this. The Hellboy comics also have the BPRD as a public agency, but how much the public knows about, like, monsters and demons is unclear until we get to the apocalypse storyline, where it’s hard not to notice the giant monsters overrunning the United States.

There is the very common notion that it isn’t safe for everyone to know about the Masquerade. And the Muggles aren’t the ones who have safety in question. As is pointed out in Dresden Files, while yes, individually a monster or mage could take on any human, or even a group of humans, there are quite a lot of us. As is pointed out, when humans get their stuff together, we can wreck most supernaturals with our guns and explosives. We do see monsters being dropped by conventional weapons. The reason the supernatural world keeps us in the dark is for their own safety.

Also it’s easier for monsters to eat us if we don’t know they exist.

[Harry Potter has the International Statute of Secrecy, but in that setting it is very unclear who would come out on top in a Wizard vs Muggle conflict, as we very rarely see the two sides get adequate preparation for the fights. There was a popular claim that bullets would beat wands every time, but this is unconfirmed, and we do see that actual wizards usually weren’t hurt much by the witch trials of Europe.]

There is also the idea that it’s safe for us. In some settings, influenced one way or another by Lovecraft, knowing the full extent of the supernatural is actually really bad and it hurts us. There are settings in which there are worlds upon worlds that humanity at large just isn’t ready to deal with, and the widespread panic of knowing about there being monsters everywhere isn’t worth risking by our heroes.

Maybe the Masquerade is enforced because of Rules. Maybe the gods don’t want people to know about them because it removes the need for faith if there’s proof of gods everywhere. Maybe it’s kept in mystery why the rules are there, but the authorities have it there and assure us there’s a good reason.

Here’s the thing though: a lot of urban fantasy doesn’t have any explanation whatsoever.

This came up in the discussion for the sporkings of The Iron Druid Chronicles, where one of my astute readers pointed out that there isn’t an explanation for why the supernaturals keep everything secret from the Muggles. There’s none! One could give the theory that they’re afraid of people being hostile, but our main character becomes immune to death in the second chapter, so I don’t think that’s it. And I think that this is one of those tropes that gets used all the time that people take it as part of the genre, and many times authors don’t question why.

Angelopolis was an even worse example. There’s apparently a secret world of angels that secretly runs the world, and the “good guys” (I put that in parentheses because they’re foul and have concentration camps but ANYWAY) have extensive documentation about this and Biblical history, and no one says anything. There’s also Supernatural, which by season five had entire towns being wiped off the map in the Apocalypse, and yet apparently no one in the government even realizes what’s going on? Even though they had an FBI agent on the Winchesters two years before who got mysteriously murdered?

Why do the characters not go public? In some cases, how could they not? I’m not saying don’t have the Masquerade in the story--by all means, do. I’m trying it myself in my writing. But give an explanation for it. There has to be a reason that the characters are adhering to it. You can’t just tell me that it’s because that’s what everyone else is doing. That’s not good fantasy writing. Write reasons for characters to act the way they do, for the rules to work the way that they do. That’s basic writing.

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Writing Powerful Protagonists (and Antagonists!)

 Sleep, sleep, what is sleep?

I came across this post recently, which has me… concerned about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, because it makes it seem as if you’re essentially playing as a whitewashed version of the villains from Secret of the Kells.

Also I want to write about Wheel of Time, but I feel that I’d be more insightful once I actually finish the series. 

So let’s talk about something else instead.

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Writing Powerful Protagonists (and Antagonists!)

[I may have written about this kind of thing before. If so, I’m sorry. But I’m on a tight deadline and didn’t sleep very well.]

I remember back when I was in middle school or so, all of the fantasy writing advice was about how you shouldn’t make your protagonists very powerful, to avoid making them Mary Sues. I don’t know if many of the fantasy authors I read today ever heard that advice, but I suspect they either haven’t or decided to ignore it. 

There is a noticeable trend in fantasy, especially urban fantasy, to write characters who are powerful. They are wizards, demigods, heroes of unmatched skill. And you know what? That’s okay. That’s fine. Having a powerful protagonist isn’t a bad thing. The trouble is when the story doesn’t serve to challenge that protagonist.

Let us take, for instance, Superman. I have heard it said very often that Superman is a very boring character because he is unkillable. And in a badly written story, this is true--the tension is gone because we know that Superman will not die. This was, in fact, the problem I had with the animated film Superman vs. the Elites--while the ideological conflict was interesting, the final battle was meant to be a tense duel where we were supposed to be concerned about Superman’s wellbeing in a fight where no one was wielding any of Superman’s weaknesses. I kept yelling ‘He’s SUPERMAN!’ at the screen the last twenty minutes of this film.

But a good Superman story pits him against powerful opponents. Now, a powerful opponent doesn’t necessary mean someone who has strength to match Superman, although it sometimes does. Lex Luthor can work as a perfect foil to Superman not because he can counter Supes blow for blow, but because he can arrange situations in which Superman’s powers will not save the day instantly. The comic Superman for All Seasons comes to mind. And even then, the issue isn’t “Will Superman die?” but “Will Superman be able to save everyone?”

Still, it is a very difficult balance to walk, and I don’t know if all authors can manage it. Dresden Files, for instance, does a pretty decent job, but by populating the world with characters who are just as powerful, if not more so, than the protagonist. He also spends a large chunk of several novels trying to figure out exactly who the antagonist is, as he’s an investigator by trade, so he can’t exactly just blast the bad guy when he first appears anyway. And when he does, they turn out to be powerful wizards or magical beings as well, so he has to use his wits. Yes, Harry Dresden is a powerful wizard, but he’s hardly the only one, and power doesn’t equal everything in the world Butcher has created. Battle Ground culminates with a battle against a Titan, in which Harry doesn’t have a hope of beating by himself.

Compare this to, say, Hounded, the first book in The Iron Druid Chronicles, in which when the main character finally fights the antagonist which has been apparently trying to kill him for centuries, he easily outfights and kills him. Also the main character becomes immune to death in the second chapter of the book. That is… precisely how not to write a powerful protagonist. 

Wheel of Time, which I’m reading now (so again, I could be completely butt-backwards--I haven’t finished the series yet), has some issues in this regard, and I have mixed feelings about how it handles it. Yes, Rand is powerful, and yes his main antagonists are the powerful Forsaken, who are around his level in magic. And many of them take disguises and make elaborate plots to lure Rand into a trap to kill him. AND Rand is also trying to navigate politics because everyone wants something from the Dragon Reborn, and this hinders his job significantly. Also he’s slowly going insane. And the other characters aren’t anywhere near as powerful, and have more of a challenging time defeating opponents. Yet when Rand actually gets to battling a Forsaken, it seems as if that in direct confrontation he curbstomps them one by one. 

And like I said, it takes a while to get there; very often he gets saved by one of his friends too, so it isn’t exactly like Rand shows up and hits the Win Button. But it is a bit frustrating to me, at least, that so many of the Forsaken just get one-shot’d with Balefire or stabbed. Then again, like I said, I am far from finished with the series, and I know that this series has a habit of bringing back characters that we think are dead.

One of the troubles I have with Trials of Apollo by Rick Riordan is that the new villains aren’t really that powerful, in comparison to past villains of previous serieses. They’re deified Roman emperors, with a powerful corporation. So they should be something like mythological Lex Luthors, but in essence they’re… not. Partially because they’re in a book series aimed at kids, I imagine, but aside from Nero, they tend to be very straightforward about their plans, challenging heroes straight on and stamping their company’s name on everything. When our heroes have conquered gods and primordial personifications, it’s a little bit of a downgrade to move to three guys who essentially have some superstrength, a lot of flunkies, and keep attacking the heroes who can summon lightning or floods or earthquakes or zombies head on, it’s a bit difficult to take seriously. Yet the narrative does.

Although again, I haven’t finished this series, and I want to reiterate that I’m way above this series’s target audience by this point in my life.

There is a balance you have to make. The easiest way to make this balance is to make a believable powerful protagonist work is to give him or her equally powerful antagonists. But if you don’t do that, you can make it work through adding enough complexity and making the villains smart enough that the heroes can’t just blast them on page ten. The key to making powerful protagonists is, quite simply, by writing competent antagonists.

[I suppose that also writing an interesting and well-developed protagonist is also key in this, but I’m tired and this has gone on long enough so far.]

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