Status Quo Must Be Established Before It’s Changed

My laptop is, once again, a massive raging douchebag. It began updating Thursday morning, and didn’t finish until Friday evening. UGH. I should get a new one.

I read Impossible Creatures this week, which was quite good, and kind of led to my thoughts here in a very roundabout way. Now I’m reading The Fifth Elephant by Pratchett. Also, I liveblogged my rewatch of BIONICLE3: Web of Shadows a couple of days back, so if you’re on Tumblr you can check that out.

I saw an article about the video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from Polygon, where the writer said, “I can’t wait for it to be adapted to live-action!” and that just made me furious. Not everything needs to be turned into live-action! Doofuses!

Next week I will try to attend an arts festival so I might not be able to write a Saturday Note then.

Status Quo Must Be Established Before It’s Changed

My favorite book of all time is Here, There Be Dragons by James A. Owen. If you ask me to, I will read it aloud to you; it’s not too long. The setting of the main story is the Archipelago of Dreams, which is in a succession crisis after the entire royal family is murdered. Part of the Plot involves restoring the rightful king to the Silver Throne and setting things right. When we see the Archipelago and the King in the next book, almost a decade later, there’s another crisis, but the majority of that Plot takes place elsewhere, and at the very end, the King announces that he’s going to dissolve the monarchy.

HWAET.

Put aside your feelings on whether or not you like monarchies–personally I am not a huge fan of them. The point I’m making is this: we don’t really get a great idea of what a monarchy is like in this setting. We go through the work of making a certain status, and then before we’ve gotten a chance to really understand what it’s like, the story completely wrecks it, and says that what we’re doing instead is much better (and we don’t get a good view of that system, either).

It is perfectly alright if you tell a single story that shows what happens in an invented setting when the status quo is disrupted. That’s fine. That’s the setup for an awful lot of fantastic stories in fantasy and science-fiction. But in a series of books or movies, if you keep constantly changing the status quo… well, the audience doesn’t have a handle on things. The monarchy doesn’t matter to the audience, because it’s abolished basically as soon as we see it established.

Admittedly, it’s better than the alternative, where Status Quo is God–a series where everything stays the same despite big things happen that should cause changes. The prime example of this is BBC’s Merlin, in which the status quo doesn’t change much in the first three and half seasons, despite promising from the get-go that we’ll see Arthur’s utopian kingdom. What we get instead is five seasons of broken promises.

It is not fantastic, though, when you keep switching the status quo on the audience. Movie serieses have a tendency to do that because it’s a quick and easy way to create drama, especially with iconic characters. Batman v Superman ends with Superman getting killed by Doomsday, which the world mourns. The problem is that we haven’t really seen enough of Superman just being Superman, outside of a montage in this movie. So when we’re told that the world is irrevocably changed now that he’s gone… well, we have very little frame of reference.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe does this too, although admittedly a bit better. We get very little bits of the story dedicated to SHIELD, though it IS a presence in several movies before it’s dissolved by HYDRA in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. We don’t see that many of their actual operations, though, just glimpses. More egregious is when the Avengers move from Stark Tower, or get dissolved–we only get tiny little looks at what they’re life is like as a team, so when that team is no longer in operation, the world looks pretty much the same to the audience. It also makes any of the “Oh no, the Avengers are gone!” stories feel a bit hollow, because, well, the only times we see the Avengers are in massive crises like alien invasions. 

And yeah, those are movies, they have to do big cinematic moments. But it’d be nice to see the Avengers just… as Avengers, not as a team in the middle of a disaster. Age of Ultron attempts to do this a little bit.

If you want the audience to care about how things have changed, you need to show them what the world was like before the change. You need to give people a reason to care about why things have changed. That doesn’t mean that it needs to be good–you can show that the way things were was actually pretty sucky. Star Wars does this with the Old Republic. We see that the Republic, towards the end of its lifetime, was actually really bad at addressing issues like a planet under invasion from the Trade Federation, and that the Senate’s inability to solve problems led to the Separatist Crisis, the Clone Wars, and eventually the rise of the Galactic Empire. It’s a bit clumsily handled, sure, but we know what that status quo was before it changed, and so we cared that it did.

And status quo doesn’t have to be an idea applied to the setting or worldbuilding! It can be something with character dynamics.

BIONICLE has a bit of a weird example that’s on my mind having just watched one of the movies. But Web of Shadows has the Toa team torn apart, and it’s kind of just ‘meh’ in the movie itself because we don’t have much idea of how the team worked together. The reason it works overall, though, is that the supplementary material, the stuff that’s actually worth more of your time, develops the team and how they interacted with each other before all of these events happened. There are other issues–the author had to go in a direction he didn’t want to with one of the characters because the movie’s writers demanded it, and he admitted that he didn’t like it very much, and it shows with how clumsy it’s done. But he’s doing his best.

[The setting of Metru Nui is also this kind of weird, dystopian thing, but I don’t know if that’s intended by the text because no one acts like it.]

You need to do something with the status quo when you write a story, if you’re planning to make changes to it. You have to give us a reason to care why it will change, especially if you’re going to make radical changes to it. You can’t just change the entire political system at the drop of a hat, and expect the audience to take it seriously if we haven’t seen the original political system to begin with. You can’t change a team dynamic if the audience doesn’t know what the team is like before that.

If you want us to care, give us reasons to care.

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