I want to get hold of the story and...

Do you ever just get like Big Feelings for characters and want to rewrite, like, everything that ever happened to them?
... if you write fanfic, probably yes.
But just... this isn't a writing mood because I don't want a big plot to fix all the plots, it's a Big Feeling where I just don't want any of them bad things to have happened to anyone ever.
... of such feelings are no powers aus made, except then no bad things are happening to people who share at best a name with them, and it's just...
it's really frustrating, looking at canon, especially the ones with an ending
anyone's ending
sometimes everyones
and you want to get hold of it and just...

... I mean I know it was the plot and what everyone went through that made us care in the first place
but past a certain point all canon gives them is unrelenting horror and woe
and I did not want that.

I get it that they make us identify with them and put them through hell and have them come out the other side
but
not everyone makes it

and I am not resigned to that.

I want the parts where they come out triumphant.

More than that I want them to rebuild a world where the bad thing cannot happen again.



I watch the wrong genres. All the fighting, none the rebuilds. Everything gets broken down.

And it gets weird when you watch a lot of different corners and they break the existing institutions and, like, leave them that way? Like there's examples all over superhero and F&SF where they seem to be saying that the problem is having institutions and systems at all, and a whole bunch of vigilantes with no oversight is somehow better.



I miss the Justice League. Embassies all over the world. Living together, on call superheroes ready to face whatever the world throws at them.

It wasn't a perfect solution, but they got rid of it for a bunch of A listers who mostly weren't even slightly human, up in a satellite, with no way to sign up, and no mention of making a living at it. Because somehow volunteers literally looking down on us all is better?

No. Trying to build systems of law where everyone is held accountable is much better.


And yet stories keep tearing the old thing down and just... leaving it? Like that?
As if that's ... done.



I wanted a story where the Avengers setting up a training academy mattered.

I wanted a story where the Avengers were an actual team.

But no.



It just feels like existing canon is all about breaking everything, and nothing about rebuilding.
Like, sometimes you end with a smile and the potential to rebuild, possibly even the promise to do so, but the next bit of the story they show us is where the new thing breaks.
As if that's the interesting bit.


Pretty sure whole things are also interesting.

Pretty sure building them is also hard.



Maybe I need another genre.

Conflicting approaches

I slept a really long time again. Like, really. Long.
Twelve hours asleep after 17 awake is not helpful.
And the dreams weren't even organised, they've gone all fall apart images of school in my head.

I did wake up thinking about Rupert Giles.

There's a thing where the protagonists are youngers and the story goes out of its way to get rid of parent and mentor figures. Which is weird. I mean, they couldn't just have them be loving and supportive dentists who can only contribute by ducking, they just have to... in that case mindwipe, but like on the Flash or Buffy, split them up or lock them up or kill them off. Or, in the mentor case, have them be evil and useless. Because the protagonists are young.

I didn't actually like this even before I was mentor generation old. Now I'm like... stop killing me? Please? Maybe? Maybe stop killing all the hot ones?

( Read more... )

So I started out thinking about generation differences and how you could distance knowledgeable olders from the center of the story by giving them outdated attitudes... but then I thought that was daft because have you met olders? They are plentifully plural. Attitudes all over the place.

So now I'm back to just, include. Include all. Have the ongoing argument without lining it up by age.



And maybe come up with some solution other than the Masquerade, because that is getting old.

(no subject)

Why do people in stories jab their wands into people?
It's a ranged weapon you need to swish around to make it work, jabbing just means it's useless.