On Dropping Plot Elements

 I am considering retiring the Book Diary after this year, as it seems as if it’s a large chunk of my posting on Facebook. I could very easily move it to Tumblr or something? I don’t know, I’m just getting more and more the impression that it is… not really getting anywhere.

But the bright side is that The Sandman is now on Netflix and so I have that to get through. 

There is a comment that should be here somewhere about the Everything-Killing Gun from Supernatural, but I couldn’t find a place, so here. That shouldn’t have been forgotten about.

On Dropping Plot Elements

I recently read The Price of Freedom, the tie-in novel to Pirates of the Caribbean, and having recently rewatched the movies (all except for number five because that one sucks) I started thinking about this again. And I feel as if I *have* written about this for a Saturday Note, but I don’t remember when, and I can’t find it in the archives of this blog, so that means it was over four years ago or so. So fair game!

There is a lot in Pirates of the Caribbean that is plainly forgotten about from one installment to the next. There is also a lot of important worldbuilding that is simply brought out of someone’s armpit, but after the first trilogy establishes a complex world, in which there are Pirate Lords, pagan deities, and an actual underworld (Davy Jones’ Locker), and when writing the sequels they promptly decided to do absolutely nothing will all of those elements that exist in the world, instead adapting an unrelated novel into their universe and then a story in which Jack Sparrow gives away his most valuable possession for a drink.

As I’ve said many times, I really like stories that feel interconnected and slowly built up over long periods of time (PotC was clearly never that, given how Plot is adjusted from movie two to three). I like deep continuity! And not just in a ‘Look, things are connected!’ sort of way that a lot of cinematic universes like. I like for it to actually go somewhere. And so it’s especially frustrating to me when I come across a series in which one installment clearly establishes one world-shaking element and then discard it in the next installment. The existence of Pirate Lords should be a very big deal–even if we don’t get much explanation as to how they work or why there is any kind of pirate government at all.

[The Price of Freedom doesn’t say in exposition, but it is implied and you can pick up from how Teague talks that the purpose of the Pirate Lords is to embody and enforce the Code–which itself is meant to limit pirate behavior along certain boundaries, like killing people who have already surrendered or breaking a parlay. Which isn’t, to be clear, necessarily out of the goodness of their hearts, as much as, “Hey, if we cause too much of a problem out there, the governments of England, Spain, France, and other world powers will get their shiz together and utterly mop the floor with us.”]

I understand that with movies, you want to give the viewers a cinematic experience, and part of that involves going to exciting new locations they haven’t seen before. I get that. And so you can’t rehash the Plot of previous films, and you want some new sets to show off. But there’s a difference between that and throwing out the Plot altogether. You can watch On Stranger Tides without any knowledge of the main Plot of the previous two movies, and I don’t think it would make much of a difference.

You can’t do the same with Dead Men Tell No Tales, but then again, why would you want to watch it?

Don’t do this! And no, you don’t get points if you acknowledge what happened before or an important previous Plot Element only to immediately discard it. PotC did this with the Kraken because they couldn’t work out how to beat it, so they had it killed off-screen without giving a clue as to how. Rick Riordan’s also abysmal about this: he’ll frequently introduce a cool magic object to save the day, like Percy’s shield, or the Scepter of Diocletian, and then begin the next book by rendering it useless or throwing it away. The Scepter was especially bad because getting it was the Plot of one book, only for the next installment to begin with it not working anymore because “It’s run out of power” (read: it would solve too many problems and we need the heroes to have struggles).

Te Riordan example is more egregious than the PotC one, as those serieses are designed as serieses–he was, in theory, planning the Plot Points ahead of time, so there’s not really an excuse for him to continually introduce Plot Devices and then thrown them away when they’re inconvenient. The only thing I can think of is that he was determined to do a book a year and so the deadlines made him a bit rushed.

I also don’t think you should get credit if you bring up the thing you dropped years down the line. There is a literal Plot Hole in season two of Daredevil, and it doesn’t get referenced or explained until Defenders much later. Likewise, Hellboy often forgets to bring up what should be important characters or ideas, only to bring them back in limited serieses several years later, and Mignola’s fanboys act as if this was brilliant planning and not turning every series into an obnoxious and constantly growing hydra.

No. You get awarded no points for that. It feels as if you’re patching a hole you didn’t notice until years of fans asking questions about it. Or as if you felt the need to try to pay some extra bills so you release more stories only tangentially related to the main one. Sure, in many cases, you must accept that hardcore fans are going to know your work better than you–that doesn’t give you a free pass to not know the things you set up.

In short, my message is this: if you introduce major Plot Elements in a series, they should be followed up on in a satisfying way. You should remember them. You shouldn’t write them off when you don’t know what to do with them. Otherwise it comes across as if you’re making it all up as you go along and don’t know what you’re doing.

—