Yet everyone keeps existing

Today a thing that is bothering me about TV shows is how the whole money and time underpinning of Regular Recurring Guest etc distorts our view of the story and privileges the regulars over... everyone. In universe.

Like obviously this is an access problem. There are as many people in a fictional world as in a real one, we have at the outside an hour a week to spend looking at them, mostly we arent looking.

But in universe the people doing the saving spend a lot more time and effort on some people than others, and in universe in some shows the regulars are the only help there is.

So they save the world, starting with their friends. And that is fair because they too only have so many hours in the day. But because of the whole 'plucky band of heroes, vastly outnumbered' structure most stuff I watch has set up, their actions just... damp out. Status quo ante may reassert itself, but things dont get better. And that means the group of people doing the helping stays like, Team and Team adjacent.

I've been reading a lot of BtVS fic and that one is a particularly acute example up until season 7. ( Read more... )

I have really lost the habit of essay writing and this is not a tight coherent argument.

It's just

the story stops focusing on people who arent being paid to be there this week
and the story often keeps the regular characters isolated as a way to raise stakes
and these things push a particular model of problem solving that tends towards the toxic

individuals with protagonist power do all the deciding themselves and solve only this week's acute problem

and I would rather
not.

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I want to see what happens to everyone else.

Thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayers this go around...
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Writers set up problems so they need solving through violence.

Dont like the spell someone is doing as a prayer to their god? Well smash the god!
... which is messed up. Other times to break a curse Giles made his own offering. That's an option.

So I want there to be more times when the story is set up to give kind options.

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Humans have communicated, negotiated, allied, formed communities, since at least the start of being human. We are so pack bondy we bond across species. We get concerned about non sentient robotic appliances. We are legit upset when the battery runs out on a rolling camera, because we liked the rolling camera bot a lot. We care! We develop entire civilisations starting from the basic building blocks of being able to care about everything!

And art, narrative, story, it's an incredibly powerful tool for building empathy and understanding. Give us access to the stories of people very unlike ourselves and we can and will start to care about them. If science fiction is good at anything it's good at that.



But we also have anger. And hoped for catharsis. And I guess there's shows that just... zoom right in on that.



But I want to find more of the stories where we actually have to figure things out and build a world together.

Even for the bitey ones.




Or, I guess, write them