Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 16 2015, @06:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the got-books? dept.

Mike Hale writes in the NYT that after Sunday night's Season 5 finale the wildly popular show seems to have lost its way, and to be losing faith with a growing number of its viewers. After two or three seasons of coherent and satisfying action, the show is spinning in place, stalling for time as it crawls toward an ending that will be more disappointing the longer it's delayed. Sound familiar? As with "Lost," there may be a blueprint, but it's not looking very sound. According to Hale, the escalating series of shocks in the season finale was a prime example of substituting sensation for imagination, busyness for drama. "Not content to kill off a mid-major character, the episode moved on to whipping girls, putting a major female character through an excruciatingly long, nude walk of shame and, in its closing seconds, assassinating a fan favorite who was one of the few wholly sympathetic figures in the show."

Amy Sullivan says that the problem is that it's incredibly hard to craft a epic series without getting necessarily bogged down in the middle installments. "Your protagonists are usually in some long-term predicament or up against an enemy who will keep winning until some resolution is reached in the finale," says Sullivan. "So the need to throw in a few shocking moments for the sake of surprise and to keep readers/audiences off-balance is understandable." According to Hale when you look at the overall framework, nearly all the characters are where they were when the season began. "The usurping Boltons are still in Winterfell; Sansa is still on the run; Arya is still hiding in Braavos; the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen and the sly dwarf, Tyrion, are still marooned in Essos; the Lannisters still occupy the castle in King's Landing," concludes Hale. "This can be blamed on the show's semidependent relationship with Mr. Martin's novels, but viewers (like me) who haven't read the books don't care about that. The question is how much longer we'll care at all."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Wednesday June 17 2015, @05:19AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @05:19AM (#197157) Homepage

    It sounds like a mess. I'm no writer, but I love stories. I have read, watched, and heard millions of stories. I can't say exactly what makes for a good story, but I can tell you what makes for a poor story. A good story must be short and simple, relative to the content of the story. Taking the contrapositive, any story that is long, overly complex, or drags on is a poor story. I'm not saying one cannot enjoy bad stories--hell, I have lots of guilty pleasures myself--but let's not pretend that such a story is well-written.

    >Chances are, there's somebody you can identify with somewhere in the huge cast.
    I don't see how this in any way makes a story better. I don't read books to find characters that are like myself (this is probably a symptom of advanced narcissism). Often, the characters I like the most are NOT like myself.

    >Very very well-constructed political intrigues, often-literal backstabbing, and all sorts of injustices.
    Shock value is cheap and easily abused. I can't comment on the well-constructed political intrigues.

    >Complex plot lines that run for years.
    Complexity is not inherently good. It's inherently bad, so a complex plot needs something extra to make up for it, or a dose of really good writing to blunt the complexity.

    >A real sense of catharsis among the characters that don't end up dead. These characters grow and change as things happen to them.
    So character development? Not really a new concept.

    >There ain't no such thing as plot armor in Game of Thrones. Almost anybody can end up dead at any time, for good reason or for no reason at all.
    People dying for no reason is not good writing, it's abusing shock value. Likewise, killing off people isn't somehow inherently good writing. By itself, it's just an attempt at creating shock value. If someone dies in a story, there needs to be a reason for them to die. If there's no reason for it, why include it in the story (other than to create shock)?

    >There are some fun fantasy elements in it, but they're introduced slowly in a world that doesn't believe dragons and magic and such could really exist.
    Not even sure what you're saying here. The setting doesn't have magic, but magic is being slowly introduced? Okay, I guess.

    Posting not anon so I get reply reminders, but I'll probably get downmodded by fans... Ah well.

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 3, Touché) by CirclesInSand on Wednesday June 17 2015, @09:05AM

    by CirclesInSand (2899) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @09:05AM (#197191)

    I have read, watched, and heard millions of stories...A good story must be short and simple.

    Holy shit. Millions of stories? ...then of course you like them short. Do you know how much a million is? It is a lot. If you are 40 years old, you'd have to read over 68 stories per day every single day of your life since you were born to have read a million stories.

    Some people may disagree with you that stories should be short though. Lord of the Rings for me, or The Iliad, the Odyssey, for others.

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday June 17 2015, @11:22PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @11:22PM (#197588) Homepage

      Thanks for doing the math for me. "Millions" is an exaggeration, but at this point they all blend together for me, what with "no story is original" and such. Story A is just some of Story B mixed with Story C set in World D, and so on. So it feels like "millions" to me, but if we're doing hard math, then maybe a few thousand. I've lost count, of course.

      You also missed the "relative to the content of the story" part; so much for reading comprehension, eh? If your story is about a hero traveling to countries X, Y, and Z and saving the world, then three books/volumes might be considered slightly on the higher end of "short". If your story is about a man who goes on a fishing trip and what he experiences, 150 pages is plenty. If your story winds on and on describing historical event after historical event, maybe you don't even know what the story you're writing is about, you're just vomiting stuff onto paper.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
  • (Score: 2) by TK on Wednesday June 17 2015, @02:19PM

    by TK (2760) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @02:19PM (#197268)

    I can't say exactly what makes for a good story

    This is where you should have stopped writing.

    There are no hard and fast rules for story quality. Primer [rottentomatoes.com] was complex, and the main characters die multiple times, but it's one of the best time travel movies I've ever seen. I highly recommend it, if you're into that sort of thing.

    There are plenty of counter examples to your preferences. Lord of the Rings was already mentioned. A lot of people seem to think the A Song of Ice and Fire books are pretty good too.

    --
    The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:12PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:12PM (#197500)

      Primer was complex, and the main characters die multiple times

      Er, come again? From what I remember nobody explicitly died. There was the bit where the one guy knocked out his other versions a couple times, and Mr. Whatsisname fell into a coma, but...

      If you're talking about the party, he may have let other people die a couple times, but I don't think *he* did.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 2) by TK on Thursday June 18 2015, @07:25PM

        by TK (2760) on Thursday June 18 2015, @07:25PM (#197940)

        I guess I need to watch it again. I could have sworn they spent about a dozen loops killing each other back and forth. I remember a sort of montage over it. I thought they were spawning different timelines, but I guess they were knocking each other out.

        Looks like I'll have to take another look at the timeline [imgur.com].

        --
        The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday June 17 2015, @11:33PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @11:33PM (#197592) Homepage

      >This is where you should have stopped writing

      You mean, that is were you stopped reading, because

      >There are plenty of counter examples to your preferences.

      where you missed that I said "short and simple, RELATIVE TO THE CONTENT OF THE STORY". LotR is just pushing the limit, but its story is very simple: dude travels to throw ring into volcano. On the side, roughly two overarching plot lines are happening at the same time. Its length is slightly too long for what it's trying to do, but not inexcusably excessive. With that said, you're right, I wouldn't rank LotR as a very well-written story. The world is fantastic, but the LotR books as a story? Not so much.

      >There are no hard and fast rules for story quality
      But there are a few hard and fast rules for stories lacking quality, which is what I wrote about. To cherry-pick a few examples, if you pull a deus ex machina in a mystery novel, that's bad writing. If your story is actively creating plot holes and contradictions without the pretense of an unreliable narrator, that's bad writing. If your story is long and complex without reason, that's bad writing.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!