Yesterday was meant to be a lot happier than it ended up being. But work was the opposite of fun! I was furious for a good part of the day. And honestly, it doesn’t help that I was reading a book that’s…kind of trash? It’s the only thing I had with me to read on my break, though. I shouldn’t complain, because it was a free book, though the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s free for a reason.
Still starting up Dragon Age (playing as a Qunari mage, if you’re curious). Might have an adventure next weekend, for Labor Day Weekend. We’ll see!
Make Complete Installments
Maybe you’ve heard that The Acolyte was canceled. I haven’t seen it, as I don’t have Disney+ (and it doesn’t look like my thing regardless), so I can’t really judge it. Its cancellation led to several emotional articles and posts, both positive and negative, pointing out that the show built up several Plot points and ideas that seem like they’ll never be fully explained or resolved, because the show is canceled now. This is sadly the problem with a lot of serieses, on television, movies, books, comics, and video games that get discontinued (and I can’t say whether this applies to The Acolyte), and it’s a common enough issue: many writers and executives don’t realize that they need to tell a complete, satisfactory story the first time through.
Do you remember Galavant? I see plenty of people look at gifs on Tumblr and say, “Why was this canceled?” Because barely anyone watched it. And the first season had a glaring flaw in that nothing in the story was resolved. Our hero showed up at the villain’s castle, only for the villain to be upstaged by another new villain out of nowhere, our hero exiled, our hero’s new love interest captured, then the new villain murdered and usurped, replaced by existing characters. Nothing is resolved. It was infuriating, actually, given how unlikely it was to get renewed. It did get renewed, and the second season ended in a way that storylines were actually resolved.
Or hey, did you watch Madame Web? That’s okay, neither did I. A complaint many critics had was that the entire pull was that you had a team-up of several female spider-people, though at the end of the movie we don’t see any of them in costume except for a flash-forward. It ends with the hint that these people are going to become heroes, rather than as heroes themselves, hoping you’ll come back for more after that (and also with at least one of the stars not realizing that she wasn’t in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). The point was set up, not actual delivery.
I am not saying that a show’s first (or any) season, or a movie or a book or what-have-you, should not have any dangling Plot threads. And there are genres and types of stories in which unsolved mysteries are part of the point. It’s very good to leave things open for a follow-up! The story, though, has to stand on its own.
You don’t know if you’re going to get a sequel! In Hollywood, that’s hardly a guarantee! Executives often assume that a big enough name will ensure a franchise, but that doesn’t always happen. One of the things I love about Batman Begins is that it was made in a way that didn’t assume there was a sequel on the way. Christopher Nolan put the tease for Joker at the end as a way to suggest that things will go on, not because he needed to do that in a sequel.
Compare this to something like the final season of Legends of Tomorrow which ended with teasing Booster Gold and the crew going to Time Jail (the show was like that). They weren’t renewed, and they actually knew that it was a slim shot as CW was canceling left and right, they just hoped that putting such a big name character in the show would convince the network to be merciful. It was not.
Okay, yes, if you’re hoping for a series, or if you’ve been led to believe you’ll have a full run (comic/book deal, or been renewed for more than one season) you can plan things out to have it so that the story is necessarily part of a larger picture. And if you don’t, but hope to get another installment, you want to leave some things open to follow-up. You want to be able to come back to the story. That means you’ll have to put some stuff there so that your viewer or reader doesn’t say, “I have no reason to come back, everything was already resolved!”
Still, a story should feel complete. It’s part of why I hate two-part trilogies, where the second installment is just the first part of the final story, rather than a middle story all on its own. I should feel like I have watched or read a full story at the end, not that the story is being extended unnaturally as a bid for my money and attention.
It’s even more infuriating if you learn that the author didn’t actually plan anything for afterward, just left it there because they knew it would intrigue people. That’s the Mystery Box talk, though, and we’ve done that enough.
Finish the darn story! Have your Sequel Hook, fine, just make sure the story is complete, and not a vague promise that maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a solution to what the author was aiming at if you stick around for a few years. Many movies or television serieses do this because they assume they’ll get a franchise, even when they haven’t done anything to earn it.
If you can’t satisfy the audience with your first offering, why should we stick around for more? More what? More disappointment that you’ll lead us nowhere in particular while bleeding us for money and attention?
—
No comments:
Post a Comment