On Operational Information

My computer took two days to update…

I finished Dragon Pilot on Netflix; it inspired this Note. After that, I think I’ll get to watching the seasons of Brooklyn 99 that Netflix just put up. Book-wise… not sure! Probably an art book.

I had a completely different topic in mind! I wrote some notes! But this one pulled on my brain and I realized I had more original thoughts on this one.

On Operational Info

I’m about to spoil Dragon Pilot for you guys. Cheers!

Dragon Pilot is an anime in which our protagonist, working on a Japanese airbase, stumbles on a dragon in a hangar and is chosen to be his pilot (because dragons are disguised as airplanes to hide them from the public). She obviously has some trouble adjusting. We later find out that she and the other dragon pilots cannot fall in love with anyone, because then the dragon won’t let you pilot. And then actually, it turns out that the purpose of dragon pilots is to guide this giant kaiju-sized dragon that wakes up every seventy-four years, and if they don’t he’ll go and wreck Japan. And then in the middle of doing that, the team is told that one of the priestesses that performs a ritual during this whole thing must sacrifice her life.

All in twelve episodes!

I came away from this anime thinking that the people running this military are horribly incompetent. The dragon chooses its pilot, so they can’t control that, but every step after that, they apparently do everything they can to withhold valuable information from their specialized employees until right before or right after it becomes necessary for them to know. Telling your pilots that they cannot fall in love is kind of important for Japan to not be stomped on by a giant kaiju dragon! Except they’re not told that, or that there is a kaiju dragon, until they actually become issues.

Plot Secrets. These are Plot Secrets. The reason the secrets aren’t told to the protagonists is for no actual, in-story reason, it’s because the writers want to surprise the audience with a twist. It’s especially egregious here, where the character in question is in the military. You’d think the commanding officers would be invested in giving as much necessary preparation to the characters as possible.

The human sacrifice thing? Yeah, I can understand a particularly douchey military/government might hide that until the last minute, to say, “Look! You’re already this far, you can’t turn back!” That might be a decision they don’t want the people on the ground to have time to think about (because it’s awful). But everything else? There is no excuse. These people have a job to do if you want the country to exist–give them as much knowledge as they need to do that job.

The Last Jedi got a lot of flack for this, as it should, but we won’t talk too much about it here (I will put Devereaux’s quote, however: “In the loop or in the brig, pick one”). It’s not the only offender by far. It’s a symptom of the whole idea that the writer must surprise the reader, and the story suffers from it. If the characters are in a military that we’re meant to see as competent, why are they being lied to or misled by superiors? You can maybe get around it with something like, “The superiors think there’s a spy,” but then that Plot would go in a completely different direction.

This isn’t to say that characters can’t withhold information from each other, even Plot-relevant information. They can! I usually use Rick Riordan as a negative example these days, but in this case: in the first couple of Heroes of Olympus books, most of the viewpoint characters have an important bit of information that they don’t share with their companions. Except here, it makes some sense: they’re teenagers, not adults in a military organization, and are afraid of alienating their peers. In many cases, they don’t even know that what they’re hiding is actually relevant. It makes sense in that context why they’re keeping these secrets.

[The problem, of course, is that Riordan uses this formula for just about every viewpoint character.]

There is this weird idea that I see sometimes that, “Hey, the in-universe reasoning can be terrible as long as it makes the audience feel what the author intends.” Which I think is a limited gimmick–repeatedly having characters stupidly keep secrets for no reason, over and over, is going to make me feel that I’m reading an Idiot Plot. As Limyaael said, “An idiot that I’m not supposed to regard as an idiot is intolerable.”

If characters are knowingly keeping information away from our protagonists that would let them do their jobs correctly, you better have a damn good reason for it in the story. Otherwise, it’s just terrible writing.

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