The Problems of Tie-Ins

 National Novel Writing Month has begun! Which means every evening I’m rushing home to fill out my word count for the day, despite being absolutely terrible at writing a Plot. The difficulty is getting characters to do things I find interesting, without them being stupid. Which is harder than it looks! I often come up with Plot ideas and then say, “Wait a minute, the characters would have to be stupid for that to happen/to allow that to happen.” You can’t just string cool things together! That’s how you get a bad book, or maybe a hilarious one.

Anyhow Across the Spider-Verse should be on Netflix right now, and both Paolini’s Murtagh and Butcher’s Olympian Affair are going to be out in bookstores on Tuesday, which is quite exciting. And a week from now is YALLFest! I don’t know if I will have a Saturday Note up then.

The Problems of Tie-Ins & Continuity

When expanding a fictional world, sometimes people make tie-ins: books, comics, and games, and so on and so forth. These installments let the makers tell stories and explore characters that the main movie or show or what-have-you doesn’t have time to get into with its focus on the main storyline. It can lead to some great stories and character moments, and give fans more of what they want if certain things aren’t given their due in the main series/movie/book/whatever.

The problem, of course, is that tie-ins often don’t matter.

Star Wars has gotten a lot of flack for this recently. When the animated series Rebels re-introduced Ahsoka Tano, Lucasfilm had E.K. Johnson write a book explaining how Ahsoka got from the Clone Wars to the Galactic Civil War era. It didn’t go too in-detail about the Siege of Mandalore, but it touched on some things, as well as how Ahsoka fought her first Inquisitor. When it came time for the final season of The Clone Wars to create story arc for the Siege of Mandalore, and then Tales of the Jedi to tell more of Ahsoka’s story, it mostly ignored that book and the information there, except in very broad outlines. Likewise, The Bad Batch adapts only the bare bones of the Kanan comic in its first scene, depicting Order 66. And I’m willing to bet actual money that everything Timothy Zahn sets up in his newer Thrawn books is going to be ignored whenever Lucasfilm makes that live-action story arc.

In short, the information for that stories is there, but it’s being ignored for no discernible reason. Most people aren’t reading these tie-in books and comics, so the makers of movies and television shows, which more people will watch (in theory, at least), decide that they don’t actually need to worry too much about whether or not they contradict them. The Lucasfilm Story Group certainly doesn’t care about it, despite keeping continuity actually being their job.

Both Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios are currently having a few issues with this, though, not realizing that the tie-ins aren’t generally considered necessary watching. They’re making stories that require you to have to have seen all of the tie-ins to make any goshdarn sense, which is becoming problematic. You have to do homework in order to understand the story you’re being told–watching television serieses on their streaming service to figure out basic character motivations and Plot points. It’s annoying.

BIONICLE got kind of bad about this. There were comics, books, and web serials by the time the story ended, and it made a labyrinth of Plot that was hard for even the most hardcore fans to work through. It didn’t help that LEGO didn’t do much promotion for a lot of them, so you had tons of confused fans even before we go to the confusing bits. I remember fans on the LEGO forums trying to explain characters and getting it all hilariously wrong.

But it’s also really annoying when companies do the opposite–shunt off the stuff they don’t care about into a comic. Assassin’s Creed rather infamously declared that no one actually cared about the main Plot of the games, and decided that in order to draw in new players, they wouldn’t make it more accessible, but instead get rid of it. So the actual main villain of the story, Juno, was killed off in the tie-in comic which most fans don’t read, or even know about. It wasn’t a bad comic, but that doesn’t mean they should have done that with the main storyline.

The absolute worst tie-in comic I read, though, was for Arrow, and it was meant to be an exploration of Malcolm Merlyn’s character. That should have been a giveaway, seeing as Malcolm Merlyn is the most obnoxious character on the show and should have died at the end of the first season. This comic introduces his past lover (who was also Ra’s Al Ghul’s ex, and Nyssa’s mother), a secret son, and an ancient mystical civilization that spanned the glove. Of course, none of this is so much as mentioned in future Arrowverse installments.

What I’m getting at here is that there is a balance you must reach with tie-ins. You should not make them required reading for the audience to understand everything that’s going on with the characters or Plot. A work should stand on its own–I shouldn’t have to do homework to enjoy a movie, or have it make sense.

At the same time, I don’t want a tie-in to feel like it’s wasting my time. I shouldn’t read through the piece and say, “Wait, you just introduce a bajillion Plot Points or bits of worldbuilding that are going to go absolutely nowhere.” In the way that the movie should be entertaining in its own right, so should a tie-in. 

Just write stories that are good on their own. That’s not hard, is it?

—