I read and finished this week The Letter for the King by Tonky and I thought it was pretty good! More memorable than the Netflix adaptation of it (not that it was bad, but not particularly memorable), and a good book for kids about knights and stuff.
Currently I am watching too many shows. I am a bit close to finishing Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, I think? I’m giving up on Oddballs because it’s not actually funny. Still working on Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Leverage, though.
It was considered to do a Note on political discourse in fiction, but I’m pretty sure I’ve done that one. A lot of it would have been me ragging on the CW Supergirl though, if you’re curious.
On Hiding Easter Eggs & Secrets
This week while building a LEGO set I watched a short documentary video about the hunt for the final secret in Shadow of the Colossus. It got me thinking about Easter eggs and secrets in the media we consume, which is becoming more and more common. Very famously James Gunn declared that there’s still one secret in the original Guardians of the Galaxy film that hasn’t been uncovered, and every so often one of the developers from CD Projekt Red pipe in to mention some other secret in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt that hasn’t made Internet headlines (until this one YouTuber goes and finds it a week later).
This is an odd thing to become a trend. I suppose it’s not so odd in the sense that serialized media, the importance of continuity, and intertextuality through adaptation are big things in the media we consume, but if you had told me that twenty years ago most mainstream movies and games were concerned with making sure to hide Easter eggs in the background props, then I would have been immensely surprised.
Overall, I think this is a really cool thing to include in works. My favorite book ever of all time is Here, There Be Dragons by James A. Owen, which runs on this trope. The setting is a mashup of classic fantasy/science-fiction and different mythologies, and there is a LOT you’re going to miss if you’re not read up on these topics. There might be a lot you miss if you are read up on these topics! And I really enjoy video games that include random details for you to discover when you explore–such as the shoutouts to the mythos you’ll find throughout the Batman: Arkham games if you poke around.
However, I think there are some pitfalls you can fall into while using them.
I mentioned in a previous Note about a blog post I found talking about “the Mystery Box” that put everything the author found as a gimmick or hard to understand (including Easter eggs!) under the label “Mystery Box”, and that’s wrong because words have meanings, yo. The author did make a good point about the idea that audiences find themselves sort of ranked on whether or not they caught references or noticed certain details. You’re a “good” Marvel fan if you catch these things in movies. I don’t think the problem is as bad as this blogger thinks, but it is annoying that instead of it being a little bonus, there’s now something of an industry that’s turned up out of making videos or articles to explain what every little detail means.
And more problematically is that these little things jump from being Easter eggs to being part of the narrative. The original Thor film has the Infinity Gauntlet in Odin’s armory as a nice little wink; then Thor: Ragnarok felt the need to have a line explaining the item as a fake (and apparently most of the weapons present are, which makes no sense), when really there’s no reason they could have skipped it entirely. Most viewers didn’t know it was there to begin with, or what it even is.
It’s also very frustrating that these things are sometimes used instead of showing us what we actually want to see. Many times we’re shown Easter eggs or shoutouts as a substitute–okay, yeah, we don’t have time to put this character in the movie or game, but this little hint shows that they’re out there somewhere! It’s fine. Well no, it’s not; it just means you know what it is we want to see, you just don’t have the intention (or budget) to actually show us. I understand that sometimes there are limitations to what you can put in a story, but if you repeatedly fall on the idea of using Easter eggs to tell us that something cool is going on just over there, off screen, then you’re better off just using that effort to tell the story in front of you.
Marvel, I’m begging you, stop using the 90’s X-Men theme. Just use the X-Men if you want to use the X-Men, but don’t keep putting the music in to screw with us. Likewise, Assassin’s Creed kept having allusions to pasts storylines that have been dropped without developing them, as if it made it all okay, or that it was a promise they hadn’t forgotten–even when those allusions don’t go anywhere.
[I’m reminded of a story I saw about a cut storyline from The Witcher III, which would have brought back an important character from the previous game. Basically, the entire thing couldn’t be worked in, so it was cut, and they had the option of putting the character into the game in an unsatisfying way, or leaving him out of the action. They chose the latter.]
I suppose then, it amounts to this: does the Easter egg enrich the world that the story is set in? Does it make a nice little nod to the audience? Then it’s fine. But if you decide this little thing that was only ever meant to be an Easter egg into something that’s now a huge part of the story, that’s a bit of a problem. If you use it to avoid doing what should be an important part of the story, that’s also a problem.
Easter eggs are meant to be fun to find. That’s why they’re called that! If you make them a chore, something necessary, or something you use instead of the fun parts of the story, then you’re doing it wrong. Stop doing that.
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