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