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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: 2) by TK on Wednesday June 17 2015, @02:19PM
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
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
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
>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.
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