Saturday, January 7, 2023

On Info Dumps

First Saturday Note of 2023!

I have started Horizon Forbidden West and so far it’s great! The game is probably very difficult to get into if you haven’t played the first game, but I remember it fondly so it’s a nice little reunion-type thing.


I waffled a bit on the topic of this one because I had an idea about doing the “homage episodes” for television, but I decided against it because the only negative example I could think of (for what NOT to do) was one episode of Royal Pains that’s a shout-out to The Hangover, and I barely remember it. 


So not that.




On Info Dumps


[I’m sure I talked about this somewhere, but I can’t find it so we’re calling it fair game. I’ll try not to overlap too much with the ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Note.]


I posted my review of the Witcher: Blood Origins miniseries on the Movie Munchies blog, but to sum up: it’s pretty bad. Not the worst thing in the world, but it’s like an old school SyFy Original Movie, in that it’s got shallow characters, stupid monsters, weird leaps in logic, and loads of info dumps. Dear Lord, the info dumps.


Alright, so! The Witcher: Blood Origins, the prequel miniseries to the Netflix adaptation to The Witcher, was originally written and filmed as six episodes. Somewhere along the line, the series was cut back to four episodes, necessitating reshoots and some editing. The result is pretty messy. So much of character backstories, world events, and things going on are not shown to the audience, they’re told to the audience through conversations and narration.


These are textbook info dumps.


What is an info dump? Welp, it’s when the writers dump a bunch of information on your head without subtlety. Often the action has to stop for the narrator or the characters in the story to tell you about something–whether that’s why the world is the way it is, or what happened in their backstory, or how the mechanics of the constructed world work. It’s generally advised that to avoid this you weave exposition into the story in a way that the audience figures out what’s happened instead of putting it in big blocks of text or conversation.


And to be fair, info dumps are not always the worst thing! Sometimes you have to get a lot of unfamiliar information to your audience and there’s not a way to organically get that across without stopping the action. Some writers manage it by making it the opening narration of a movie or show or what-have-you–that way, it doesn’t stop the action because the action hasn’t started yet.


Or sometimes you’re in a world that is going to be very unfamiliar to the audience, and you can’t necessarily expect them to pick up the subtleties of what’s going on unless someone says so. There are ways to make this work too–especially if your character is also a newcomer to the magical world or whatever. In magic school? Have teachers explain things! On a starship? The engineer can be banging on about how the engine works to crew members who don’t understand what he needs to keep it running, much to his annoyance. Just joined a secret society? Have the recruiter tell the character about it! About to go on a mission? Their superior officers can give a briefing on the relevant subjects!


The problem with Blood Origin is that it does this every. Single. Time. We’re told about the history of the world. Every introduced character explains their backstory to us. Two characters meet and instantly hate each other because they happened to have met on the battlefield before. Almost every scene is like this. We don’t get time to know who these people are by things like hobbies or how they interact with each other, they explain it all.


And then there’s the narrator to give us even MOAR exposition.


No! Stop this! You don’t need to do this in order to get the audience to follow you! Not only was a lot of this information pointless, because we don’t have time to get to know and care about these characters, but it’s mostly irrelevant to the overall story. A lot of the backstory is to try to get us to see a group of misfits teaming up to stand against an evil empire, but most of them get so little screen time it’s hard to care or even remember what their deals are supposed to be. The time spent in info dumps would be better suited to little character moments. If I had an idea of who they were NOW, I wouldn’t necessarily need backstories.


Info dumps are not the worst thing you can do to exposit! But you can’t rely on them. You can’t use them as a substitute for character development! And you can’t keep shoving them into the narrative in a way that slows everything down!


In short, you can make info dumps work, as long as you don’t use them as a substitute for the story itself.


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