Arctic Light

Current MASH feelings: no thoughts, head empty, only Them. This is not helping tremendously with getting any writing done.

I watched 11x05 "Who Knew" last night and had lots of feelings about certain parts of it which are expressed in this extremely spoilery tumblr post.

A further thought occurred to me when I rewatched it today (shush) that I didn't think about the first time ...

( Spoilers )

Thinking more about the Daniel Blackland series ...

I already inflicted the first of these thoughts on sovay in email, but now that I'm thinking more about it, I just keep coming up with freshly painful angles on the way that one quote from California Bones echoes through Dragon Coast in a number of the Gabriel and Max scenes.

One of the things Sovay and I were talking about in email is how Max and Gabriel's later developments are foreshadowed or at least thematically echoed in some of what happens to them early on, and I feel like this is a good example of that.

Spoilers from California Bones through the end of Dragon Coast.

( I was rereading the Max and Gabriel scenes in California Bones... )

I rewatched some of his scenes in Civil War yesterday ...

( Spoilers for both CW and the Falcon & WS show )

Okay, this is the post with All The Spoilers, at least for two of my favorite twists in the book. I strongly recommend that if you like being unspoiled and especially if you like to be unspoiled for character twists or characters turning out to be more than they seem, you shouldn't read this post until after reading the book. In one case in particular I had terrific fun figuring it out for myself and then being proved right.

I don't think either of these are the sort of thing I would consider a big deciding factor in whether to read the book; they don't drastically change the basic premise or anything like that. They're just neat.

( Extensive spoilers under here! )

Thoughts on Drummer's arc in season five.

( Spoilers obviously )

Thinking about Torchwood (as one does) ... I think one thing about this show that makes it so satisfying for me is that it doesn't hesitate to commit. Whether or not it makes narrative sense. And I was thinking about Owen's condemned man's walk in "Dead Man Walking" in light of that.

( And have thoughts )

When rachelmanija was here, we talked about hurt/comfort a lot (as you do) and the special frustration of being emotionally engaged in something where the author is clearly not into the hurt/comfort aspects nearly as much as the reader (me). The Matt Scudder books are like that -- it's not that nothing bad ever happens to him, the books are in fact an endless spiral of bad things happening to him, but it's handled in a way that usually doesn't quite get to where I want it to get to. The author is clearly not into it in the same way as I, for one, am into it.

I was thinking about it again recently because I was reading a long fanfic in which the author was clearly Not Into It in a similar kind of way, and it made me think about what it is that gives that Not Into It feeling. It's not that h/c has (or at least it doesn't have to have) endless descriptions of injuries and tending wounds -- in fact, a lot of it doesn't really deal with the details at all. But what it does have is that there's some kind of emotional crux or catharsis associated with people getting hurt. They don't just get hurt. Even if the getting hurt isn't the point of the story, as it is in a lot of h/c fanfic, it still reads as important. It might be used as an excuse for one character to realize how much they care, or just to freak out about the other one getting hurt; it might be the catalyst for an emotional conversation. But basically characters being hurt, physically or emotionally, is flagged as "important" in the text.

And being as it's something that I'm into, this is why it can be so monumentally frustrating when you have the setup for it and not the follow-through, because it feels like there's something missing; the emotional importance/crux-point/follow-up isn't there. I guess a similar situation might be the way that characters having sex is usually important to a relationship, so it would be like getting the buildup for sex, and then the sex happens off-camera and nothing actually changes; the characters just get on with their lives.

Which you can totally do, obviously! It just depends on what kind of story you're trying to tell. It's not a bad writing decision; it's just a matter of narrative focus and what the person writing it is into. But in the same way that lack of romantic follow-through on a romantic setup is frustrating to people who are specifically engaged in the romance aspects of the story, I think the lack of emotional "beats" hitting on the h/c is what's frustrating for me in fiction that has all the setup but doesn't quite follow through on it. It's not that I expect or even necessarily want detailed descriptions of injuries and healing; it's that I want emotional catharsis, and you can even have something that would be satisfying from an h/c standpoint but not have it feel quite right if the emotional beats don't hit in the right way. And on the flip side, you can have stories that give that hurt/comforty feeling in which nothing much injurious actually even happens, or is really dealt with, if there's still some kind of emotional crux or catharsis surrounding whatever does happen.

Why is it so common for so many series (TV shows, books, movies) to have a strong opening installment and then put their most dismal one as the second one? Whether it's merely bland and boring, or actively offputting in some specific way, I can think of so many that do this.

I expect some of it is narrative drop from the usually higher-budget and more action-filled opening installment, and some of it is the writers wanting to try something a little more daring after a crowd-pleasing opener. BUT STILL. Maybe you might want to wait a little while before dropping the book in which everyone dies gruesomely of yellow fever (Ben January) or the episode in which your only female character is sold into sex slavery (SG-1) or the episode that is every 80s mental hospital cliche ever (Iron Fist) or just the most comparatively generic and boring episode in the entire season (White Collar and so many others).

(This post brought to you by me getting so bored with the second episode of the show I'm watching as background-arting-TV on Hulu that I went and found an episode guide and skipped ahead to the next one that looked interesting. So far it's a lot better.)

I posted this over on Tumblr last night, but figured I'd also post it here.

( Gifs and light season 2 spoilers for eps 2 & 7 )

This is a terrible subject line, but I can't think of a better one that describes this concept.

sheron and I had a conversation about this awhile back, and I meant to write it up into a post, then forgot about it for awhile, but I was thinking about that conversation tonight and figured I'd go ahead and do that before I forget it all completely.

We were talking about how satisfying it is when serial-type fiction (TV shows, books, movies in a series) have the characters referring to each other or thinking about each other when the other one is not actually involved in the current storyline, or is elsewhere. Like, it's satisfying and happymaking all out of proportion to the actual amount of screentime it gets. Just a few offhand references can make it feel like the other character is present when they're actually not - it gives a tremendous amount of relationship continuity and emotional "weight", I guess, to the relationship, by suggesting that the characters think about each other even when they're not present.

We were kicking around the idea that this is actually one reason why fans sometimes come away shipping something completely different than the narrative actually wanted them to ship, or feeling like certain pairings just "have no chemistry". And it's really easy to do by accident if you're largely focused on the plot, I think, because some character relationships are more tightly plot-connected than others, so you have to keep referring back to them in the characters' thoughts and having that relationship come up in the narrative - whereas some of the side relationships don't necessarily have that, so if the writers don't make the effort to keep them in mind, they just sort of ... vanish except when the other person is onscreen.

And it doesn't even have to be much! Like, Sheron used the example of Steve/Sharon in Civil War - I don't dislike that pairing, but I agree with her that it would've given that relationship a lot more weight if we'd had a few instances of the two of them thinking about or referencing each other when they're not in the same scene together - like Steve stopping to consider the effect that him going on the run might have on Sharon, or a brief scene with her getting a text message letting her know he's okay at the end. It can be absolutely miniscule - just 10 seconds or 20 seconds here or there. The thing is that not having it in there might be part of why so many people came away feeling cold towards that relationship - because it gives the subconscious impression that they're just not that important in each other's lives.

It's not even necessarily romantic - I mean, it doesn't have to be. If someone is important to you, platonically or otherwise, you tend to do that kind of thing ALL THE TIME in real life. You think about your friend; you see things that remind you of your friend; you think "oh, so & so would like this" or you're reminded of an in-joke or something you once did together. In fiction, a little goes a long way, so it doesn't take much to give the impression that the characters' relationship extends beyond their actual scenes together onscreen. If you have 2 hours of a movie, then you really only need a couple of instances of that sort of thing to cement the idea that the two characters are important in each other's lives.

And if you DO get that with some relationships (even if it's literally just because they are both important in the plot and you have to keep having the two of them reference what the other one is up to) and you DON'T get that with others, it's going to leave a subconscious impression that some of the relationships are more important in the characters' lives than others, even if there are actually legit plot reasons why some of them have to be referenced more often. It STILL gives that impression (and might actually be a giveaway that the writers haven't necessarily thought through some of the characters' roles in the story to the point where they ought to have).

The OTHER thing we talked about in the same conversation, which also ties into the above, is how much the characters appear to care about the effect that their actions have on specific people around them, things like: will this make Character X view me differently? Will this hurt Character X? And this is another place where you can end up running headlong into unintentional consequences with the characters' relative importance in the narrative, or even the relative fraught-ness of the relationships. For example: if your character spends a lot of time thinking about their rival (getting stronger! trying to beat them!) but they're happy and secure in their relationship with their love interest so they rarely have to think or worry about it, you're going to end up giving the overall impression that their connection to their rival is actually more emotionally charged than the romantic one! (See also: one possible reason why people so often ship enemies/rivals/uneasy-allies over best friends, e.g. Harry/Draco vs. Harry/Ron, or Derek/Stiles vs. Scott/Stiles.

I kinda hate bringing up too many specific examples because I know some people are going to disagree - we're all watching different shows, etc - but since Sheron and I are both in Agent Carter fandom, we talked fairly extensively about Peggy & Angie vs. Peggy & the guys at the SSR. I'll just go ahead and put this under a cut because it's getting long and is also kind of spoilery for AC.

( The rest of it - some season 1 & 2 spoilers for Agent Carter )

That being said, there's also a certain confirmation bias with this kind of thing. I think you tend to notice those offhand mentions more when you're already invested in the relationship. And especially if you are invested, it's like a lovely little Easter egg, and it makes the relationships feel so much deeper and the world so much richer. (I love how Hambly does this in the Ben January books, for example. Ben thinks about his friends a lot when they're not around. The overall impression is that he's a guy who really gets attached to people, and it makes the other characters feel present even in books in which they don't appear.) I think if you never have characters do this, they come across cold - which might be what you're going for, but might not be. And if you only have them do it with certain other characters, it's going to seem like they spend more time thinking about those characters than anybody else, even if it's literally because it's a murder mystery and they're wondering if the other character committed the murder, but it'll STILL come across that way a little bit if it's not balanced by other instances of thinking/worrying about other people in their lives.

I never considered this at all before having that conversation with Sheron, and now I think about it a lot, in my own writing as well.

tl;dr - enhance your characters' relationships by have your characters think about the other one when they're not onstage!

Discuss?