Category Archives: On Writing

Out of Water: Opening Thoughts

Posted by natechen on

There’s a lot of talk these days about what we can and cannot talk about. Colleges clamp down hard on “hate speech” and create “safe spaces” where only approved ideas can be discussed in ways that (supposedly) make things fair. There’s a lot of deferring to people based on who their parents were or how much money they have (or don’t have in most cases). There’s not a whole lot of talk about whether that’s good or bad for societies. It wasn’t always that way in America.

Consider the case of the National Socialist Party v. Village of Skokie, ruled on in 1977. The Nazis wished to hold a march there, the town wanted them to go away. The legal issue of the case was whether displaying the swastika in a town where one in six residents was a Holocaust survivor or direct relative of one constituted an attack on those people. The debate ran round and round the Illinois court systems and went to the United States Supreme Court briefly before being sent back to the state and ultimately resolved by the Illinois Supreme Court. The ruling was that the Nazis could march with all their uniforms and symbols intact, because doing otherwise would be a violation of free speech.

The Jews of Skokie fought back by planning a counterprotest, although the Nazis would eventually wind up returning to their preferred march site in Chicago when the ban against their meeting there was lifted. The community of Skokie then pooled their resources and built a museum to remember the Holocaust and inspire their descendants to work towards the prevention of such atrocities in the future.

Consider a different case. In modern Europe a sort of self-censorship called secularism has fallen into place. People believe whatever they want but they never share it in public venues. Religion or the lack thereof is only discussed with people of like minds. But now a large number of immigrants have entered Europe and they hold strongly to Islam. They do believe in discussing it in public, in fact they believe public life should be ordered by Islam and not secularism. This has caused a lot of social (and occasional violent) conflict in Europe.

Unfortunately, the self-censorship of secularism has left Europeans with weak skills in discussing religion. They barely understand how they think about religion (beyond that they should not talk about it) so they can’t understand how these newcomers think about religion. Many Europeans believe that living in Europe’s wealthier, freer culture will eventually win out over the religious training of Muslim immigrants. This is condescending and insulting, like offering a bribe to a man of strong principles. Europeans need to make the case for their culture in a context Muslims can understand and accept or there will never be a breakthrough.

Unfortunately after years of a culturally agreed upon censorship of religious discourse Europeans not only don’t have the rhetorical skill to engage in this debate, they’ve actually atrophied to the point where most of them can’t even see the kind of debate that is going on. Censoring free speech has left them too mentally impoverished to engage with the world around them.

There’s no doubt the people of Skokie hated the kind of free speech they faced on their own doorsteps. But by countering it with their own free speech the message of the National Socialist Party was rebutted and remains in ill repute. A lot of people in Europe got tired of the free speech of religious bodies and so they all agreed to censor it. But that left them vulnerable to a cultural conflict they now have no idea how to deal with it even as it grows ever more violent around them.

The Divided Futures started as a way for me to ruminate on political ideas in weird ways. I didn’t seriously think at the time that a penal colony for political dissidents was part of the future of American politics. In the last couple of years I’ve started to wonder. Who knows? Perhaps in a few years writing this blog will be enough for me to get thrown to the bottom of the ocean. In the meantime, I continue to support free speech in the hopes that the more people speak their mind the more bad ideas will be called out and the more all thinkers will grow and be ready to debate their ideas once again.

Kylo Ren – In the Shadow of Greatness

Posted by natechen on

In 1977 Darth Vader walked through an airlock, over the bodies of his enemies and into cinema legend as one of the most recognizable villains to ever grace the silver screen. He projected menace and power, crushed his enemies and nearly pulled a hero from the path of righteousness. His silhouette alone is instantly recognizable. To bring him to life required the towering presence of a bodybuilder, with a stunt double to fill in for his lightsaber battles, two separate costume designers, one to build his suit and another to craft his skull-like helmet, the boneshaking bass voice of James Earl Jones and a sound design team to add in the uncanny rasping of his breath. Any character portrayed in film is a mix of multiple contributors but Vader combined the parts so thoroughly, made each piece so much a part of the identity, that to remove one would be to destroy the character in his entirety. Like a chimera or Frankenstein’s creature, Vader is many parts stitched together into a single whole. His very existence is somewhat monstrous.

Every other villain to share the screen with Vader faded into the background. Even Grand Moff Tarkin and the Emperor were defined primarily by the fact that Darth Vader, the biggest bad guy in the room, deferred to them. Other villains in the franchise that had a role similar to Vader’s were carefully crafted to be distinct from The Man himself. Darth Maul was lithe and exotic, and very much a loner where Vader was comfortable with authority. General Grievous was wiry, shifty and stooped over. Count Duku was refined, polished to the point of being borderline greasy, and charismatic. Care was taken to make sure these characters wouldn’t have to compete with Vader, to make sure they could have a strong impact on the story and catch the attention of audiences.

Then along came Kylo Ren.

Unlike other Force using villains in Star Wars lore he is a deliberate attempt to homage Vader. But the problem is he doesn’t actually homage Vader.

He wields the Force but still has some strange sort of inferiority complex. He has incredible power but he comes across as largely ineffective and silly. Where Darth Vader was a villain who was a credible threat even when he failed and barely displayed visible power in the first film, Ren couldn’t even come out on top of verbal sparring with Poe Dameron even after stopping a laser blast with the power of his mind. If the intent was to create a villain to continue Vader’s incredible legacy of villainy on the silver screen then the movie failed entirely.

It seems to me that the point of Kylo Ren was to show a person aspiring to greatness and finding the model for that greatness in a force of incredible evil. There’s nothing wrong with watching a person aspiring to great and/or good things and slipping into evil along the way. If done right it’s both a beneficial lesson and an entertaining show, as anyone who’s watched Breaking Bad can attest. One of my favorite video game villains, Kefka, started life as a humble official and steadily undermined others until he was the chief political force in his nation and, ultimately, the greatest physical power in the world as well.

But these characters were interesting villains because they grew into their roles and became steadily more and more dangerous as time went on. Kefka was left eating the heroes’ dust at first but he quickly graduated to murdering towns, regicide and attempted genocide. Kylo Ren starts strong when he orders the death of a village but quickly stumbles when he can’t hang on to his prisoners or win any of the following ground battles he participates in.

The worst bit for Kylo’s character comes when he is saved from total defeat by Rey entirely because of happenstance. He didn’t have a clever way out, or force a draw by pulling up some deep reserve of power we’d seen glimpses of throughout the film, he was bested in an arena he was trained and experienced in by a complete novice. In short, he looked pathetic.

And yet, all of this would have been acceptable. Except everything about the character was designed to cause comparisons to Darth Vader.

There’s a phenomenon where you deliberately back yourself into a corner, where you make grandiose claims in order to spur yourself to greater heights, with the catch being that failure makes them look like an idiot. Kylo Ren’s deliberate comparison to Vader was the storytelling equivalent of backing oneself into a corner. It created such high expectations for the character that failing to meet them basically doomed the character’s effectiveness as a villain.

Now it’s possible Ren isn’t meant as a villain for future movies, that he will be redeemed at some (hopefully early) later point. But if that’s the case then so thoroughly and obviously ruining his ability to serve as a villain in the future still served to reduce interest in him and what he could become since he pretty much can’t work as a good villain anymore.

The hard truth is that villains need a certain amount of menace to them in order to work as villains. It doesn’t have to be a physical threat, the Mean Girl archetype works in school settings because they can threaten social ostracization for example, but all villains are somehow threatening. But when you implicitly invoke a certain level of threat then you have to bring that level of game or all ability to look threatening is lost. And that’s the problem with Kylo Ren. He’s not a bad villain. He just has too much to live up to.

You can’t always avoid standing in the shadow of greatness. You can even try to own that fact. But in the end that’s a double edged sword, so be careful. If it comes back to bite you it will do so twice as hard as if you’d downplayed the fact instead.

——–

On to other matters – we started this run of nonfiction posts on Star Wars heroes and we end on Star Wars villains. Next week look forward to the start of a new story set in the only place we know less of than outer space… Yes, that’s right. Our favorite salvage sub is back in action. See you at crush depth!

Genrely Speaking: The Mockumentary

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Genrely Speaking and wow it’s been a while since we did one of these. Partly because of the schedule I’ve been working on and party because the list of genres I feel qualified to talk about has been steadily shrinking. Today we’re going to look at a characteristic genre that is actually quite new in many respects.

A mockumentary is a work of fiction that takes the format of a factual documentary, “behind the scenes” making-of piece or reality TV show. While everything discussed in the mockumentary is fictional the “facts” of the story will presented as if they were just that – facts. (The “mock” in the title has less to do with insult and more refers to being an approximation of reality, although it can mean both.) While mockumentaries are almost entirely done on TV or in movies aspects of the genre can work their way into other media. In fact Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, while not a mockumentary in the truest sense, frequently quoted from a fictional galactic encyclopedia to give a perspective on events. A more recent example of a written mockumentary, one intended to serve as such, is Max Brooks’ World War Z.

The most famous mockumentary in modern pop culture is undoubtedly the sitcom The Office (in both the British and American incarnations) and people will tend to associate the term with comedy, particularly as it satirizes the easy target that is reality TV.

The highlights of a mockumentary include:

  • Interviews with experts and people who were on the scene. These may include characters who lived through the events the mockumentary is documenting, historians who have studied the characters in question a great deal or technical experts who explain the ins and outs of the way things work.
  • Ambiguous characters. A mockumentary is a genre that cares more about characters than about events, but the structure of the story naturally tends to give you a lot of contradictory information about them. Like in a mystery story – and real life – the things people say about themselves and the things other people say about them rarely mesh in a mockumentary. Part of that is differences between the way characters see themselves and each other, part of that is because some of the information you get in a documentary is bound to be false (deliberately or not) and so mockumentaries must be the same.
  • A lot of world building. There’s a lot of chances to slip in tidbits about a fictional world in a mockumentary. Was there an extinct race of elves on one continent of your world? Maybe a major character had an interest in collecting artifact from their civilization, a fact brought up during an interview with a close friend. The audience not only learns about your character’s interest in archaeology they learn the world once had elves. You can be more direct as well. In a mockumentary about deep space colonization you can have an expert on shipbuilding explain why a specific faster than light drive was chosen for an expedition and explain the “science” behind the drive at the same time. The possibilities are endless.

What are the weaknesses of a mockumentary? With ambiguous characters around every corner it can be harder to get attached to them simply because the narrators aren’t trustworthy. In most fiction the reader assumes they’re getting straight facts even if the work is written in the first person. But a mockumentary frequently introduces contradictory narratives to keep us on our toes. Even when the audience gets to see events “as they really happened” they still have to decide whether they trust the personal testimonies given after the facts. Constantly looking out for spin from fictional characters can be exhausting and too much like real life for some people

On top of that, it’s easy for mockumentaries to get caught up in the minutia and lose sight of the story. Too much time spent exploring all the viewpoints in a story, too much emphasis put on worldbuilding details instead of plot progression, and the story can fall apart. Even if the writer does a brilliant job audiences can still get fatigued with all the work needed to track it all.

In short, it’s very easy to overwork your audience with a mockumentary.

What are the strengths of a mockumentary? While characters will undoubtedly come off as ambiguous due to the way they are presented they can still be studied in much more depth in this genre than in most. A mockumentary is as much about the testimony about an event or series of events as the events themselves. What people say about something a simple as a car accident on the street can reveal a lot about who they are and what kinds of priorities they have. Done right, a mockumentary can provide powerful character studies.

I don’t think the mockumentary is ever going to “take off” and become a powerful force in the literary or entertainment worlds. They require a lot of work on the parts of both the creators and the audience, and the kinds of stories you can tell within the strictures of the genre are pretty limited. But that doesn’t mean the genre is bad – in fact, there are few other genres suited to the kinds of stories it wants to tell. The fact that without it we would have missed out on those stories is probably enough to make it a good genre.

The only real question is if it will ever be great. I can’t answer that but I have no problem with watching to see if it can.

Show Don’t Tell: A Nuanced Discussion

Posted by natechen on

I was discussing a film with a friend recently and we had a disagreement over how good it was. I felt the climax of the movie was poorly supported and came off weak. He disagreed, pointing out things that were in the film but that I felt didn’t support the climax very well, because I was told them by the movie, rather than shown. Since “show don’t tell” is such a foundational rule of writing I figured that was the end of the matter. But he asked me a question that made me think: “So does that mean every story needs to be told the same?”

The answer is no. But there are things that work well and things that don’t and long experience has given writers a pretty clear idea of what is what. When a writer says “show don’t tell” what they really mean is “showing produces a stronger reaction than telling.”

People who read this blog know that I feel the purpose of fiction is to provoke some kind of reaction – usually an emotional one – through their writing. So the best tool in the box is usually showing, because it will give you a stronger reaction than telling. But, like most generalizations, show don’t tell has a lot of nuance to it.

Let’s break this down by looking at the way this idea is applied in the first season of the CW’s show The Flash, particularly in the first season (and a few episodes of Arrow). The showrunners behind The Flash have done a great job with using show and telling to emphasize the important bits of their story. Let’s look the ways this principle plays out. Be warned – there’s going to be spoilers.

The show begins with a flashback to Barry’s youth where we see the night Barry’s mother died. This is the defining moment in Barry’s life and the most important plot point in the first season of the TV show. The climax of the season hinges on the impact this moment had on his life and character. It’s only natural that we see it, so that our impression of the moment is as powerful as possible.

The night Barry’s mother was murdered comes up in the series several times between the beginning and ending of the series’ first season, each time when the emotional impact of the event on Barry’s life will play a pivotal part on the way the episode unfolds. These flashbacks serve to put the incident back in our minds in a powerful way and make us ready to understand the new nuances of Barry and The Flash which the episode’s challenges will tease out, or to keep us in the zone as the mystery of Sarah Allen’s murder is pushed forward. Since the incident is important the show shows us to keep it fresh in our minds.

However, there are two times when Sarah Allen’s murder is brought up without a flashback but the memory is still important to what is happening. Not on The Flash, but on the CW’s other superhero show, Arrow. You see, Barry Allen was introduced on Arrow, and Oliver Queen, Arrow’s protagonist, was initially suspicious of him. Barry explaining his backstory and his reasons for being in Starling, his quest to find impossible things in the hopes he could one day explain his mother’s murder, are part of how Barry earns Oliver’s trust.

A season later, when Barry is a full fledged superhero and he pays Oliver another visit, the two men clash over methods. The still unresolved death of Barry’s mother is brought up again to show that Barry’s no stranger to the hardships of life. In both cases, the showrunners chose to tell, rather than show.

Why? Because these moments were about the conflict between the characters over things in the present, not about how the past shaped them. Yes, Barry’s past was relevant to the choices he was making and he had to explain himself, but the emphasis wasn’t on the events that shaped him. It was on the situation he was in and how people would relate to it. A strong reference to the past would have overshadowed the situation in the present, as the two were not directly connected.

There’s another time The Flash’s showrunners chose to tell rather than show – in the first season Joe West had suspicions about Harrison Wells and the Reverse Flash. They meet for drinks and exchange barbs. At the end Wells gives Joe a name to look up. Later they meet again and Joe tells Wells what he learned – that Harrison Wells’ fiance died in a car accident. Again, there’s no flashback to the death because the point of the moment isn’t to show us how the Reverse Flash took over the life of Harrison Wells or to elicit some kind of understanding of the Reverse Flash.

Rather, the point is to build the mystery around the character and keep us guessing as to his exact motivations and methods. A mystery is hard to maintain when the facts are being presented in the strongest way and the motivations of a character are put full front, so the showrunners chose to tell rather than show, to keep the strength of the presentation from undoing the desired effect.

In the end there are many reasons you may decide to tell, rather than show. But they will almost always boil down to one – you tell instead of showing when showing would create a reaction contrary to the one you desire. A good story is a tightly woven web and it doesn’t have enough space to give everything full voice. The impact of some threads of the story may need to be reduced in order to allow the climax of the story to shine. In those cases by all means tell and don’t show. But make no mistake, the rule to show rather than tell exists for a reason. When you show your story makes the strongest impact. A story that focuses on telling, not showing can work, if mystery is a major theme for example, but that kind of story is going to be fairly unique in its structure and content, not suited to the majority of topics.

Not every story has to be the same in the way it’s told. But if you’re trying to tell a normal story with an emotional climax, with no gimmicks to support the notion of telling rather than showing, then stick with showing. Or be prepared to be regarded as an underwhelming story.

The Hero’s Journey and The Lord of the Rings

Posted by natechen on

Periodically when I’m writing something I find a need to do some research and, since the hero’s journey was going to be a plot point – albeit a small one – during The Antisocial Network I figured I should read up on it some. One of the things people kept emphasizing as I read about it was that the two biggest movie franchises of the 20th/21st century, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, were perfect distillations of the formula. I can buy this with Star Wars. But it’s laughably inaccurate with Lord of the Rings (less so with The Hobbit, but that’s not what we’re looking at).

The basic hero’s journey consists of several basic stages, most of which the Lord of the Rings doesn’t adhere to or entirely subverts. Let’s take a look at them one by one, shall we?

  1. Establishing an ordinary world. Of course Tolkien and the Jackson films do this but that’s not surprising. Every story give some exposition and establishes the status quo before we get into the action. Nothing to see here.
  2. The call to adventure. This is the only part of the monomyth or hero’s journey that I find convincingly echoed in Lord of the Rings. Frodo does learn shocking facts about himself and the world around him that spurs him to take action. He learns about the nature of the ring he’s been left and the threat it poses and it frightens him.
  3. Refusal of the call. This is where things go off the rails. See, I can’t see any point in the story where Frodo refuses the call. He takes the ring to Rivendell on Gandalf’s advice but he never really seems to not want to do it – it’s a chance to see Bilbo and he’s always wanted to travel. Again, at Rivendell, no one has to convince Frodo to take the Ring to Mordor – he volunteers. Quite unexpectedly. In truth Frodo, while not eager to bear the Ring, still bears it without flinching. The closest we come to this trope is when he offers the Ring to Gandalf, thinking it might be safer with him. This could be considered a refusal of the call but it’s pretty far from how this trope usually plays out.
  4. Meeting with the mentor. Again, Frodo doesn’t seem to have any mentor character. Gandalf comes close, of course, but he doesn’t really equip Frodo for his task as Frodo can’t really be equipped for what he has to do. He is given talismans in the form of Sting and Bilbo’s mail shirt, as well as Galadriel’s phial, not to mention the Ring itself but these don’t come from Gandalf. On the other hand it’s Gandalf’s mention of Bilbo’s pity which ultimately opens the way for the quest to be completed. Again, there are echoes of this trope but nothing that really fits with it.
  5. Entering the unknown. This is the stage where the hero and his companions leave what they’ve known and enter the unknown. Theoretically this must happen when the hobbits leave the Shire, as they’ve never really traveled much, unless we see departing Rivendell as the moment when they enter the unknown… except most of Frodo’s nonhobbit companions have been to the places they’re going and… you see how the archetype isn’t making much sense by this point.
  6. Tests, allies and enemies. At this stage the hero and his companions face challenges, defeat enemies and get stronger… except in Lord of the Rings they don’t. Get stronger, that is. Yes, Merry and Pippen get larger, stronger and a little more martially ready later in the story and Gandalf ascends to a new level of wizardliness but other than that the characters don’t really become more formidable from the time they’re introduced. In particular the “hero” of this journey, Frodo, is a bit of an albatross in the story, doing more to expose his companions to danger than save them. Again, there are all kinds of challenges in Lord of the Rings, it’s just that none of them result in the kind of growing power in Frodo’s hands that the hero’s journey would lead us to expect.
  7. The supreme ordeal. At this stage in the story the hero is supposed to face the shadow, his nemesis of the story, go through a symbolic death and rebirth and emerge victorious by dint of the lessons learned through his struggles. While Frodo’s going into and emerging from Mount Doom might count as death and rebirth the fact is when he faces his ultimate opponent, the One Ring, he loses. He can’t overcome it and destroy it, Gollum must do so – and quite inadvertently at that. Again, the hero of this story isn’t the “hero”…
  8. The reward. Heroes are supposed to get something for all their work. Frodo is awarded PTSD. Okay, he also gets the adoration of a nation for a short period of time. This one applies, sort of.
  9. The road back. Again, this trope applies as Frodo does have to make a return journey, bidding farewell to his friends.
  10. Restoring the World. At this point the hero is supposed to use his newfound powers and the rewards he gathered during his adventures to make the world a better place. And again, the four hobbits do this, cleansing the Shire of the evil influences that have come upon it and restoring just government. It’s just that the hobbit who plays the smallest part in this is Frodo. His incredible exertions have won him to respect at home and the journey has left him diminished, scarred by heavy burden and long journey. His friends have grown and he has paid the price.

It’s important to note that there are a number of superficial similarities to the hero’s journey in The Lord of the Rings. Several characters seem to embody the tropes of the monomyth at various points – Gandalf’s death and rebirth leading him to the height of his powers, Aragorn being rewarded for his struggles with the crown of a kingdom and Merry and Pippen being forged into heroes of the Shire. But the so-called monomyth, while a common storytelling convention, is not the one Tolkien was working from. I’m not saying the monomyth is bad. But don’t let it blind you to what’s really going on.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a Catholic and his writing was deeply steeped in Catholic traditions. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the hero at the heart of the story is not a person who ascends to apotheosis but one who steadily diminishes himself on behalf of others. It’s the courage and sacrifice of Frodo we admire and the truth that there’s rarely rewards awaiting those who make sacrifices that gives the story its ring of truth. Writing conventions are all well and good, but don’t let them shackle you.

Sounds like a good idea to mull over next week, doesn’t it?

Star Wars Episode Eight: Course Correction

Posted by natechen on

So let’s pick up where we left off last week. The Star Wars character Rey has had some Mary Sue elements stuck into her character but that’s not the end of the story. I really feel that The Force Awakens suffered for these elements but I have to stress that they weren’t the sole reason or even the biggest reason I felt the movie was subpar. The holes left in Rey’s character exist for one of two reasons, in so far as I can tell.

The first is that the film didn’t have enough room to squeeze in all the kind of narrative support that make the wish fulfillment aspects of Rey’s character function within the larger story framework. The story is chock full of characters to be introduced, situations to be sorted out and story to be imparted. The whole film moves so fast that none of this information really gets examined deeply. This is a bad habit I see in a lot of recent movies, and Disney movies in particular, where filmmakers just throw a character archetype or well known plot on screen and expect the audience to fill in the blanks while the story glosses over the lacking character and plot development in favor of more spectacle. The studio wanted a blockbuster show and the other, more important stuff, got cut.

Now spectacle isn’t bad but Star Wars, for better or worse, hasn’t ever been exclusively spectacle. And furthermore, the archetype of a character without power suddenly unlocking hidden power – Rey’s archetype – clashes badly with the established Star Wars lore. For the first time we’ve gotten a Star Wars film that feels like it was made to be a blockbuster, and that’s sad. Understandable, given the investment Disney made in the movie, but disappointing none the less. So one reason Rey may not have gotten the development she needed was studio mandate. That’s lame, but it’s part of showbiz.

The second reason for Rey’s off balance character development is even more speculative. There’s a possibility that the film is setting up a story arc where Rey’s burst in power is a result of the Dark Side, the fast, easy and seductive half of the Force. With a quick burst of power fueled by her anger and the Dark Side much of what Rey does can be explained away. This doesn’t have any more support than the prevailing interpretation of the story, that Rey is just an absurdly powerful and fast learning Jedi, but it would better explain things in conjunction with the lore than the idea that Rey has amnesia and has forgotten previous Jedi training.

Of course, the biggest problem with this theory is that it doesn’t have support, the problem that the whole movie has to start with. In truth, it has less support than others, since Rey never actually shows any signs of Dark Side influence when using the Force. But it could have been the intent and, more importantly, it brings me to the question of how the poor writing around Rey’s character could be salvaged.

The first is if Episode Eight runs with the idea I just laid out. If we find Luke training Rey hard to cure her of a taste for the Dark Side it would go a long way to show that the existing Star Wars lore is being respected and open up opportunities for a lot of interesting ways for Rey’s character to go. She currently doesn’t have a clear direction for character development or arcs so by giving her an ongoing struggle with the Dark Side the writers would both do her character a real favor and take advantage of the opportunity to explore themes the franchise has dabbled with previously but never delved into in any meaningful way.

Another entirely viable option would be to make the next film primarily about Finn. He felt more like the main character of the first film, with his broken indoctrination and significant streak of cowardice giving way to new ways of seeing the world and the start of real personal courage. If Rey moves back out of the spotlight some the lack of polish in her character is less jarring. That doesn’t really solve the problems in her writing as such but if the film is constructed in such a way as to make the problems irrelevant then it still does some good work.

The third possibility is to give Rey a new and very personal challenge. The fact that she is never significantly set back through the course of the film is the greatest weakness of the character. Unfortunately, the writing of The Force Awakens severely crippled Kylo Ren’s ability to serve as a good antagonist in future films and I can’t see any new meeting between Rey and Ren having the dramatic weight necessary to be that setback. Hopefully the Knights of Ren that were hinted at will provide some of that needed threat so that Rey’s character can really shine.

The big lesson here is that even bad writing can be redeemed, most of the time. The real question for the typical writer is, would it be worth the time? All three of the solutions I suggested for Rey’s character problems require a certain amount of narrative gymnastics to function. Most writers find themselves better served by drawing what lessons can be had from bad writing and moving on, as the resources of Disney probably aren’t backing your less than stellar outing (and it probably doesn’t have Star Wars level brand recognition, either). The hard truth is, while a weak writing project doesn’t doom you as a writer, it can doom the ideas you invested in it.

At least until you can adapt those ideas into a new form for a later project.

Unless your Disney playing with Star Wars. At this point, nothing can really kill that project. But I’m still hoping they draw lessons from it and make it better.

Star Wars, John Wick and Mary Sue

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“Mary Sue” is a derogatory term for the protagonist of a work of fanfiction. Fan fiction, for those who don’t know, is a story about characters from a work of published fiction, TV, movies or comics. written by a fan rather than the people who produce that work. Any fan who has ever written down a new adventure for the crew of the Starship Enterprise has written fanfiction. It has no standards for publishing or quality, it just has to be written down by a fan of the work in question.

Generally a Mary Sue is a character of either gender (but typically female, probably because fan fiction authors tend towards the female – sometimes male characters are referred to as Gary Stu) who represents the author in a fanfiction. The label has grown in many ways generally it refers to any character who gets to live out a fantasy without effort, risk or negative consequences, as this tends to be the way fanfiction authors write themselves into stories. Early critiques of the Mary Sue archetype refer to the character as “perfect” within their own narrative but that’s not a meaningful qualifier, as it’s quite subjective when applied to characters in a story.

There’s a certain amount of jealousy inherent in the “perfect” critique, the kind of jealousy that you typically find when people see a singer on American Idol and figure they made it to the finals because she’s pretty or he’s handsome. It ignores the hard work and effort the person has put in to reach the place they’re in and yes, maybe there were some elements in there that weren’t “fair” like being born with a certain amount of natural talent or good looks but there has to have been more to it than that. But when we’re talking about characters it gets a little more complex.

I think Mary Sues provoke a strong reaction from people because they tickle that same jealousy vibe in our mind. But, at the same time, we want to see characters in fiction who are extraordinary. Otherwise they wouldn’t be anymore entertaining than our own circle of friends and we’d just spend our time with real people rather than these shadows and phantasms. So a good writer gives us characters who are more perfect than us but also gives those characters situations far beyond anything we could realistically tackle, situations that push those characters to the very utmost limits of their abilities.

I’ve said time and again in this space that the point of a writer is to provoke emotions from their audience. Mary Sues provoke contempt because they seem to achieve things safely and effortlessly when we know that, in real life, things are typically achieved through effort and peril. A competent writer avoids this by creating in us a certain admiration for the character as they overcome adversity, allowing us to experience the rush of empowerment while the character overcomes challenges that only a person of their skill could possibly accomplish. A poor writer doesn’t show this adversity, or shows it poorly, and earns our contempt as a person who wrote a Mary Sue.

When people complain about Mary Sues I think they frequently mean characters who get to live out a fantasy without facing any difficulties. Without risk, effort or consequences the character comes off as flat, dull and uninteresting.

Let’s examine a character who is a Mary Sue by the traditional definition – which is to say, he’s pretty much perfect. The character John Wick, from the movie of the same name, is considered the perfect hit man. From the very beginning we see people in the Russian mob who know what he’s capable of deferring to him. When he finally snaps and destroys a team sent to kill him with little trouble we start to realize just how deadly he is. For the whole rest of the movie the Russian boss is terrified of this force of nature who is coming for him and anyone who can get out of John’s way does.

However John Wick still has his problems. His wife was ill and died at the beginning of the film. He’s injured during a botched attempt to kill the son of the mob boss and takes refuge in a hotel for assassins where, in theory, no business is conducted. But there’s enough money on John’s head to persuade someone to break the rules and try to kill him in the hotel. John survives because an old friend helps but suffers more injuries in the process. His next move against the mob results in his being captured and, again, he escapes only with help.

Finally he offs the boss’s son but his friend is discovered and killed in retaliation. John finally finds the boss and wipes out his bodyguards in one last confrontation that ends with a brutal grapple between John and his nemesis that John barely wins. He staggers away in the rain, barely able to remain upright.

While John could easily be classified as a Mary Sue by the traditional definition, given his hyper competent fighting prowess and obvious wealth on display through the film, most people don’t consider him one because the amount of difficulty he endures throughout the film makes us feel admiration for his endurance, determination and single mindedness.

Unless, of course, you deplore violent movies in general and that ruins the experience for you. Because that movie… pretty violent.

But to the point – the fact that no one seriously considers John Wick a Mary Sue is one of the reasons I tend to use my own definition of the term. Because John does show us the power fantasy of being able to take revenge on the powerful, wealthy and downright criminal creeps who feel free to occasionally make our life miserable. But the price he pays for it is horrendous, the kind of price only a fictional character could pay. The risk of his own life was made apparent during every fight, the effort comes with every grunt of exertion and every moment of pain, the consequences made clear more and more people turn against John.

Now to the final point of this post. By this point I hope you’ve all seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens because we’re going to talk about it a bit in a spoilery way. And by “it” I mean Rey.

There’s been a lot of talk on the internet about how Rey may or may not be a Mary Sue. By the traditional definition she’s not – straight up. She flat out runs from the lightsaber – and by proxy the Force – when it’s first offered to her and she makes a number of fairly minor mistakes along the way, enough that no one would consider her perfect.

But given the reasons I think people react badly to Mary Sues I think I know why people see her as one.

Rey clearly represents three fantasies fulfilled. First, the fantasy of finding a place of belonging after being an outcast. She finds a home for herself by leaving Jakku and joining BB-8, Finn, Han, Chewie, Leia and the rest of the resistance. She risks leaving Jakku and possibly never meeting those who left her there again. While facing the reality that no one’s coming back for her isn’t necessarily a huge risk it undoubtedly cost a lot of effort – enough that I’m willing to let the ease with which the rest of the cast accepts her slide. Han did want to ditch her at first and Finn kind of needed her there for a couple of obvious reasons. The movie wasn’t focused on intense character developments so lack of further effort to live out this first, very character driven fantasy is fine. That the responsibility of finding Luke and bringing him back into the fold falls to Rey also makes it clear her living out this fantasy is going to have consequences for her in the future. While responsibility isn’t always a negative consequence it frequently can cause problems and is definitely a consequence.

The second fantasy Rey lives out is the fantasy of being very good at a number of mundane tasks like flying, fixing and fighting. The risks there are pretty obvious, every time she does these things she’s taking her life in her own hands. The biggest example of this when she take the Millenium Falcon into the air the first time. There’s a lot of good piloting in there but a fair bit of bad piloting as well. She could very easily kill herself and Finn doing this but she manages not to and I’m willing to give her this one on sheer audacity. The effort in this is set up in the opening montage as we see Rei’s life on Jakku – it’s clearly hard and difficult and will have equipped her to do all of the things we see her do in order to survive – except maybe pilot a starship but again. A pass for the audacity. I like that kind of thing, in moderation. There aren’t that many consequences for this but only because the consequences you’d expect from this kind of hypercompetency are overshadowed by the next bit.

The third fantasy Rey lives out is the fantasy of power beyond the lot of mortals.

Or, y’know, she can use the Force if you want it to sound mundane.

Point is, Rey has supernatural powers. She doesn’t start with them, not in any noticeable way, in fact the movie spends a little time hinting the powers might actually belong to Finn, not her, so these are new things to her character. She uses the Force in four cases. They are:

When she repels Kylo’s mental attack and counter reads him. Rey doesn’t run any risks here, failure doesn’t leave her any worse off and success is all up side, but it clearly costs her something and it has the consequence of making him angry and her drawing the attention of the big bad as a potential resource – just like any skilled person would be, only more so. Not a particularly Mary Sue event.

When she forces a guard to let her out of her restraints and leave his weapon behind. Again, failure doesn’t leave her worse off – well, maybe strapped down a little tighter – and success is pure profit. She does have to work at it, Rey tries three times before succeeding. While Kylo gets angry again and puts the guards on Rey this is still pure profit over where she was with no noticeable consequences. But this kind of surprising move twice in a row starts to raise eyebrows, especially because we know this isn’t the kind of thing a person can pull of without a lot of training.

When she uses telekinesis to rip the lightsaber from Kylo. A third time, this is a situation with no risk. She wouldn’t be any more weaponless if she hadn’t tried this. Worse, it’s apparently effortless as she overwhelms Kylo without a struggle and again this doesn’t bring her any negative consequences. Pure Mary Sue.

When she channels the Force during her lightsaber duel and defeats Kylo Ren. You’re probably tired of hearing this but her situation literally can’t get any worse when Rey tries using Force combat so she wasn’t really risking anything. Worse, as soon as Rey opens her eyes she’s in an unstoppable battle trance and proceeds to demolish Kylo. She even avoids negative consequences like guilt over killing him when the earth splits in two and conveniently separates them. That last bit is really bothersome.

In short, Rey’s Force abilities mostly got her out of sticky situations in a rather convenient fashion without much rebounding on her. Seems to fit the bill, doesn’t it?

So Rey is a little bit of a Mary Sue, or at least the way she’s written could easily provoke the same kind of reaction from people. There was definitely some poor writing at work in there. But saying that Rey had a touch of the Mary Sue identifies the symptom – what was the problem? Why did Mary Sueisms work their way into Rey’s character arc and what steps can be taken to shore up the weak writing in the future? Or at least in stories we write where characters explore similar themes?

Well, I think that’s a post for next week. Hope you’ll join me then!

Genrely Speaking: The Western

Posted by natechen on

Wow. We haven’t done this in a while. I know I promised you all more fiction at some point and trust me, I ‘m working on it, but these bits tend to be fairly popular too and I wanted to come back to genres once before turning back to fiction. So let’s take a look at a genre that I am personally not very invested in, but is still a major part of American literature.

While Westerns immediately conjure up images of the cowboy, the genre’s most common protagonist, there’s actually a lot of other figures that could populate a tale in the Old West. And it’s even possible to create a story with the Western feel without having to actually go to the historic time and place of the Western United States, circa 1870-1890. What you really need are the following:

  1. The feeling of openness. This, of course, comes mostly from the landscape. The Western plains are flat and featureless, giving the sensation of infinite possibility just across the horizon. Add in the very small number of people living there and that sensation only intensifies. It’s one of the reasons we see “space westerns” crop up from time to time in the form of shows like Firefly and the original form of Star Trek, to say nothing of anime series Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop and Trigun – outer space is the ultimate unlimited space. But this sense of openness extends to characters as well. The cowboy is the cliché of the Western, but many other characters populate these stories without anyone giving them a second glance. Robbers, prostitutes, miners, railway men and private investors all swarmed through the West and people never batted an eye. Watch El Dorado with John Wayne some time to get a feel for the many faces that can appear in a Western with nary a blink of an eye. From tough girl Joey McDonald (Michele Carey) who actually shoots Cole Thorton (John Wayne) to Mississippi (James Caan) who’s to green to even shoot, there’s a wealth of strong characters that avoid or earn most cliches nicely and who never earn a strange look from anyone else.
  2. The importance of independence. Characters in Westerns are at their most noble when they make their own decisions. Even El Dorado’s Nelson McLeod (Christopher George) is shown as something of a noble character simply because he decides who to work for and does it with all the considerable skill he possesses. The fact that he’s working for something of a villain doesn’t bother Thorton – those are just the kinds of decisions a person has to make. And a few months beforehand, Cole had been thinking about working for the same villain, so he understands the other side of the story. The important factor is that the characters are their own selves, and seek to remain so in spite of circumstances.
  3. The necessity of consequences. With all this independence running around and all these options to choose from there’s got to be another shoe dropping and it’s called consequences. People think of Westerns as all white hat/black hat in part because it shows people making decisions and then quickly facing the consequences of them. Joey McDonald shot Cole Thorton and, as a result, when the McDonald family needed Cole’s help he wasn’t able to help as much as he’d like because of the lingering consequences of his wound. Nelson McLeod worked for a villain and he wound up getting killed. But it’s important to note that Westerns try not to say whether the consequences came about because a decision was good or evil. Westerns are (typically) stories set right after the Civil War after all. Many people who went West had just fought a terrible war and, while they still felt there were things that were right and things that were wrong, they were much less willing to say for sure what those things were. The war had opened their eyes in many ways. The Western simply sees the facts of life – you make a decision and then the consequences come for you, for better or for worse. Even the vast open plains will only let you run from that for so long.

What are the weaknesses of the Western? Westerns are stories from a comparatively simple time. Frontier living was much more straightforward than life today and this is part of where the Western’s simply accept and deal attitude towards consequences comes from. But it can make these stories harder for a modern audience to accept.

Particularly because consequences in the Old West were doled out by whoever had the most raw power at any given moment, very different from the lives most people today live.

What are the strengths of the Western? Westerns are American myth, and thus have much of the appeal of all the great mythological traditions. Larger than life characters, chances for teachable moments and plenty of memorable moments to use as touchstones.

Westerns aren’t exactly “in favor” at the moment. They speak to a time gone by in imagery that is very steeped in that era. The age of the Old West isn’t far enough gone to be classic but not so near as to seem nostalgic or even relevant. But given time this genre will no doubt come back into some of its own and continue to do good work in the landscape of American storytelling.

 

In Defense of Critical Thought for Pop Culture

Posted by natechen on

This post comes about as an outgrowth of a recent discussion I had about the state of American poetry. Now those of you who read a particular recent post of mine know I don’t really read poetry in literary magazines much. Well while I was talking to a friend about American poetry I pointed out that I didn’t really think what you found in literary magazines really represented American poetry.

The heart and soul of American poetry is in our music industry. Be it country music, rap or generic “pop” music, the rhythm and rhyme of song and dance form the meter of our nation’s most important poetic expressions.

Now why should that be? Aren’t music labels focused on driving the bottom line? Bent on creating albums that will appeal to the consumer and do nothing for the human condition? Maybe. But maybe, just maybe, there’s more at work in this equation than you might think.

Make no mistake – all great cultural touchstones were originally parts of popular culture. Homer was blind – it’s unlikely he wrote down his great works himself. We don’t know much about his life but it’s commonly believed he traveled about as a minstrel and sharing his stories to make a living before he was “noticed” and his stories recorded. Shakespeare’s plays were considered lowbrow and his writing not up to the standards of university educated playwrights of his time. Jane Austen wrote brilliant novels filled with characters who are timeless and loveable. She also saw things about human nature that the greatest scholars still miss in their sweeping treatises. She was taught by her parents, reading books and basic socialization, there is nothing scholarly about her novels.

Yet these people are fairly representative of their eras of great Western culture.

There were no gatekeepers these people had to go past. No journals promoting them, no scholars encouraging them (the opposite was true in at least Shakespeare’s case) and no intent on their part to create timeless works. They just tried to share something with an audience in the best way they knew how and they did it so well they set a benchmark in some way, shape or form. When they set that benchmark people took note and their work began to spread.

This brings me to the real point of this essay. In the world of pop culture critics it’s not uncommon to hear people apologizing for scrutinizing TV, movies, pop music or comic books. It’s as if there’s no reason to sift through all these new media outlets that are catering to the populace at large rather than the particular psychosis of academia. Surely the only ones deserving of critical analysis are the artistes, the literary masters, the great poets. I would like to propose to this group of pop culture critics – of which I am a very minor and unimportant member – that it’s time to stop with that attitude.

The definitive voices of days past were working in popular culture, gaining recognition and praise precisely because vast swaths of people could get to their work and appreciate the deep and timeless truths masterfully presented in ways they could clearly understand. The proliferation of mediums and technology have made tracking with culture both easier and harder. We have more information at our fingertips but at the same time anyone can create quality content very cheaply and there’s more people doing it than ever before. The need for people to sift culture with a critical eye and find the things that are truly timeless and truly accessible is greater than it’s ever been. Pop culture critics have an important role to play in that.

There’s also a need for people who will stand up and say that our movies, music, novels, comics, TV and YouTubers could be doing better. Saying that there is room for improvement and suggesting how it might come about, not because of esoteric theories but because of human nature and the need to understand, will elevate the culture and bring us closer to the next great touchstone in culture.

So the next time you take a hard look at a movie or song that you really enjoyed and want to talk about it with your friends, don’t apologize. Own it. Think long and hard about pop culture, try to create some yourself and share the lessons with others. That’s the only way culture can go from a brief pop to a timeless classic.