Arctic Light

I fell down a rabbit hole this evening reading the comment reblogs on this Tumblr post on 90s TV. I ended up deciding to copy some of them here to save them from the inevitable linkrot and post decay.

https://www.tumblr.com/laylainalaska/794609119262900224

Original post:

I don't know what those '90s sci Fi TV writers were putting in their shows but I wish they'd start doing it again

#they de-escalated the stakes every once in a while so that you can see what the characters are like when they're not under duress
#they made statements about the world through allegory
#they invested in depicting developing friendships and relationships between their characters
#they assumed that their audience was paying attention to the screen and wanted to be there
#and that their audience has enough intelligence to follow narrative clues and even sometimes to predict the ending
#dont even get me started on this i will go ALL DAY

I don't agree with every single point in every reblog. I also think there's quite a bit of TV now that still does most or all of this, though usually it's the dramas and procedurals rather than scifi, and a lot that's not great about 90s and earlier TV. But there is also a lot of food for thought in here, so I just threw a bunch of the comments into this post to mull over.

The asterisks separate out each different reblog; basically each is its own separate comment, generally in dialogue with the original post rather than each other.

Thoughts are welcome!

( Under the cut )

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 )