Yet everyone keeps existing
Nov. 7th, 2021 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday 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. The Scoobies save the world, and they add their romantic partners to the group, temporarily, but the only times they find someone else doing the work the someone else is secretly evil. The core group are the only righteous source of help. ... and usually pretty much the only source of help.
So people die because they havent noticed them yet. Fair, they are not omniscient.
But people also just, like, drop off the edge of the story because busy?
We get some follow up on Harmony and Jonathan and Amy, and they're all about how much damage Sunnydale does.
But like, Rhonda and Heidi got possessed by Hyenas, and then just... lived with those memories? And apparently went vegan, according to the Yearbook, according to the wiki. But they're just, like, living with that, because the ones who know what was going on do not like them as people. They're not friends with the heroes, so they're gone off the edge of the story.
And that is how writing works! It would be really difficult to find time and page space to follow up with every single one off character! Also it would shift your empathy around in different ways, and guide your attention, and how you think about that 'verse. The writers dont want to do that. Because they are done with that metaphor. A certain sort of mean girl is like a hyena pack, 45 minutes, the end. Why would they want you to care about the bullies after that?
In universe tho Xander's little white lie about having forgotten it all really limits the chances someone else will so much as have a chat with them about it. Giles wont because the Watchers are trained to secrecy. Xander is embarrassed. Everyone else either doesnt know or thinks the Pack dont know.
It's messy. Not in a way you can blame a bunch of 16 year olds for in universe, but in structural ways you can blame teachers and writers for.
There are more than two teachers in Sunnydale high. Several of them are not even evil. They dont get a chance to be good though. They dont know enough.
I was checking the wiki for one off characters and found Mrs Jackson the History teacher, who only exists to confiscate a puppet and know nothing about the plot, and Ms Miller the English teacher, ine of the few black characters in Sunnydale, who exists to get nearly killed by an invisible student. Everyone says, good teacher, helps students, but, we dont really get to know how the story effects her. Mrs Tischler was in the Nightmares episode teaching Health and Human Development. But the season 2 episode with the eggs had a different guy for a similar topic. Did she leave? Does Sunnydale have a high teacher turnover? We dont know.
... I mean I would not have wondered in school either. That Doctor Who episode where they sleep in the school would have seemed about right. To be fair I did go to boarding school some years and they did, in fact, sleep in the school. But. It makes sense the story doesnt look where the characters dont. I get that.
It's just it's part of how the characters stay isolated and vulnerable. And I get that this too is intended by the writers, it's just... creepy. Bad. Wrong.
Humans form communities. It's our problem solving tool. I watch a lot of TV about problem solving via superpowers or pointy sticks, but, those have limited application. And humans historically have not all been good at the pointy sticks. So we form communities.
The Slayer staying secret so she isnt under attack 24/7 and can be both bait and trap makes perfect sense, but isolation isnt the only way to be secret. Isolation and never telling anyone is like the poker face approach, you cannot afford any tells. Hide alone in the dark, never show anyone anything. But even in season one, people know things, even if they dont know what they know, so how useful is that really?
You can also hide in a crowd.
Run self defence classes and then it isnt weird that there's some people being especially dedicated to this extracurricular. And, bonus, there's more people with more skills on the not dying front.
Put demon lore on the internet and yeah you'll have magnified the potential problems but, also, too, it'll be a lot harder to eradicate everyone who knows important stuff.
Having to hunt down the one and only copy of a book seems antiquated and dangerous.
... yes I liked Giles' speech about knowledge being smelly and he did get it all scanned ready for Willow, but, there are so many possibilities for distributing knowledge now, it's frustrating.
But to loop back to what was meant to be the point, if you want to make a story about
a small band of plucky heroes fighting overwhelming odds
by becoming the nucleus around which forms a community?
The structure of TV storytelling, the thing where those people only exist when available and paid to do so, actually really gets in the way of that.
So characters are written as one offs not because that's how that series of events would go but because that's how that story would go.
Accustomed story structure. Actually weirdly isolating.
Like I'll admit I'm drawn to stories of the weird ones who notice things and try and deal with them because nobody else seems to be doing so, but after a while, the basic problem is the big one, that nobody else seems to be doing so.
You'd want to fix the big one. Not just put out fires, invent fire departments.
When I started watching Agents of SHIELD I thought it would have to do something like this, something larger than the individual parts, individual teams even. But then the big twist movie happened and no actually, it did not.
It's about power. Power in a democracy even. The stories I watch keep ducking out of combining power and responsibility. They keep telling a story where some people are just more capable than others and therefore do all the deciding, even should do all the deciding in universe, with the bad guys being the ones going Hey, Accountability, Is A Thing. And that is not how it works if we're grokking the value sets that theoretically underpin democracy. Or your basic Nothing About Us Without Us.
Story structure, having regulars, focusing on a small group, it makes it easier for this particular fail mode to engage.
Not inevitable though. I mean there are other genres. I just keep on watching the Small Team Versus Universe sorts.
And then complaining about it.
I also keep noticing whose stories dont get told, and I dont know where to go to find some of them. Like, I know its on me that I keep watching the high school show when I'm Giles age, but, I also dont know where to go to find a show about... what the Council should be like. What structures you'd need to set up in place of the ones we see in the shows I watch. Where to find stories where almost everyone is over 40, instead of shows getting cancelled about the time everyone passes 30.
And I'm tired of shows whee the solution is a good being killed. I know, I watch them, that's on me. But I want a show where the disparities in ability and needs are as huge as they can be in F&SF *and* the solutions are to figure out how everyone can live with that.
I mean even the superhero show that eventually sent everyone to prison had the prison turn into an auction and kill everyone, so, that is A Problem, you know?
And we really do need to ask, if prisons are a problem, what is the solution?
But not very many stories are actually doing solutions.
I love Legends of Tomorrow in no small part because bad guys dont stay that way and people sort their lives out and stop needing the evil cults. Which is great.
But they also have ways of not only killing people but destroying them with hell weapons so they're, you know, dead and gone, lost to eternity even. Which is really really not good. Really.
I dont know if I'd start watching a show that saw what Catherine Madison was doing to Amy Madison and then sat down and tried to solve things with talking
but
I find myself wanting to write the story where someone attempts to solve things with talking.
Sure she cursed children and swapped seats to steal her own child's life, but, she's also a person, maybe we could solve this with less eternal torment?
Saving people matters.
Not just helping the helpless or defending the innocent. What, am I meant to run an assessment form before doing a belp? Is it means tested? Because I've fucking had it with capability assessments and means testing and hoops to jump before somebody deserves.
Need matters, so how about helping everyone who needs it, because doing good is good to do, and in the long term probably works better.
Deserve is irrelevant.
Stories make it relevant by severe rationing of available resources. So lets fix that.
How about we approch every story by trying to figure out what it would take to make good, and how we can make that happen.
Sometimes it would take fixing entire socities and getting legal recognition for non human sapience, but hey, politics is a thing that people do.
And then we could try not just dropping the stories after they leave the emergency. If so many people are learning first hand they need help, it wont just be one person who does something about that. It wasnt just one footballer campaigning for school meals, it's just a lot easier to tell that story and focus on it.
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.
I want to rewrite Angel so they draw together everyone they help and together make the Hyperion into housing for Gunn's friends the homeless kids and then train them up to have day job skills to repair the place and also survival skills to defend it. Not ideal that they're under attack at all in the first place, but hey, since they are, why not do something about that?
So I guess I want Anne's story and not Angels.
I want to redo Buffy the Vampire Slayer and just... keep everyone they save? Keep the people who are in the know? Attempt education at school, ffs.
I realise Giles is stuck playing the role of patriarchy and colonialism, but, how about there's more than one influential adult who gets to survive?
Bring in the Guardian lady from the get go. Have that rebel Watcher who tried to use Faith have a slightly better plan that does not get her arm cut off. Bring the supposed authority of of the Watchers into better focus.
I mean it makes sense a teenager doesnt ask much about the details, but where does the authority of the Watchers Council of Great Britain derive from? The epic power of We Say So? The old boys network? Does it come from the Queen, or a queen, or parliament, or tradition, or habit? The differences matter.
I can get whole story arcs out of compare/contrasting fictional organisations intended to deal with some balance of Stars and Magic that were founded in and shaped by different specific moments in British history. Torchwood being Victorian and The Forget coming out of the Great War make them distinctly different in outlook and attitude. The further back in history you project the origins of a given organisation the more disruption you have to explain them weathering. If they were William the Conqueror's work then how did they weather the Anarchy? What did the Wars of the Roses do to any inherited authority they may have relied on? If they were chartered by Queen Elizabeth the first then how did they manage the civil war and parliament winning? And what would being rooted in the one time and traumatised by the others have done to them institutionally? ... compare contrast to what it did to Britain...
Honestly I can't see the Watchers as particularly ancient. They're the sort of British hangover that assumes it has authority anywhere in the world because British. That's pretty specific. And it'll wear off.
The Justice League being a United Nations organisation wore off, and not to their credit, I feel. The Avengers have a whole movie about the existing international authorities being somehow wrong about the concept of borders and how deciding to 'save' people needs a bit of talking about first. These are very relevant questions about the use of power in a global context.
Makes sense a show set in Sunnydale wouldnt come up with answers to them, but, still, relevant in the background.
And I can see why the story doesnt focus on it because I go off on ever so many tangents just thinking about it, and very few of them lead to the kind of armed showdown meant to be cathartic on TV.
I want to see what happens to everyone else.
Thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayers this go around...
I want a story about the Guardian lady in her pyramid always having someone to talk to, and ways her advice is and isnt helpful over the eras.
I want to throw out the clumsy magic as drugs metaphor and get some of the women who grapple with healthy uses of power to get help and support, from each other or from other groups. So it's not only Willow that gets rehab or a coven to connect to. So people make connections that aren't all their own age, or their parents. Just a magical community, such as the one that economically supports at least one magic shop at a time, but actually talking to each other and being relevant to the story.
Giles to confront the difference between that magic was bad and all magic was bad.
... okay magic as drugs is really baked in, but, difference between drug abuse was bad and you should probably take meds sometimes.
Ways to get a healthy balance in your life, not just... hide and lie and struggle.
I want some kind of Sunnydale support group that we get to see, not just a one off reference by Jonathan.
Acknowledgement of the difference between assorted religions and slinging power around, so Willow going to Wicca group and being annoyed it wasnt all spells is more explicitly a Willow problem.
I know the metaphor starts with a world as much like our own as possible and then just puts a demon face on any difficulties suitable for punching. I can see why their world stays the way it does, from a writing perspective.
But I want to write about communities living in those worlds, because they would learn and grow and adapt, as humans tend to.
As people tend to.
... I want to write a story where someone has An Important Talk with the mantis lady, maybe involving sperm banks and developments in artificial insemination, and possibly use said story to work through frustrations with how Star Trek Enterprise treated Insectoids, especially insectoid babies.
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.
I've been to talks about zombie shows where the question that interested them was, could you kill a zombie?
The question that concerns me is, what kind of cultural moment produces shows where the writers take away every option except, could you kill this person?
I participate in Z Day on NationStates every year and we use cure missiles. No zombies, maximum survivors. It takes coordination and planning and the ability to help your neighbours, but we get it done every year.
Why are there popular stories based on that not being an option?
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
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. The Scoobies save the world, and they add their romantic partners to the group, temporarily, but the only times they find someone else doing the work the someone else is secretly evil. The core group are the only righteous source of help. ... and usually pretty much the only source of help.
So people die because they havent noticed them yet. Fair, they are not omniscient.
But people also just, like, drop off the edge of the story because busy?
We get some follow up on Harmony and Jonathan and Amy, and they're all about how much damage Sunnydale does.
But like, Rhonda and Heidi got possessed by Hyenas, and then just... lived with those memories? And apparently went vegan, according to the Yearbook, according to the wiki. But they're just, like, living with that, because the ones who know what was going on do not like them as people. They're not friends with the heroes, so they're gone off the edge of the story.
And that is how writing works! It would be really difficult to find time and page space to follow up with every single one off character! Also it would shift your empathy around in different ways, and guide your attention, and how you think about that 'verse. The writers dont want to do that. Because they are done with that metaphor. A certain sort of mean girl is like a hyena pack, 45 minutes, the end. Why would they want you to care about the bullies after that?
In universe tho Xander's little white lie about having forgotten it all really limits the chances someone else will so much as have a chat with them about it. Giles wont because the Watchers are trained to secrecy. Xander is embarrassed. Everyone else either doesnt know or thinks the Pack dont know.
It's messy. Not in a way you can blame a bunch of 16 year olds for in universe, but in structural ways you can blame teachers and writers for.
There are more than two teachers in Sunnydale high. Several of them are not even evil. They dont get a chance to be good though. They dont know enough.
I was checking the wiki for one off characters and found Mrs Jackson the History teacher, who only exists to confiscate a puppet and know nothing about the plot, and Ms Miller the English teacher, ine of the few black characters in Sunnydale, who exists to get nearly killed by an invisible student. Everyone says, good teacher, helps students, but, we dont really get to know how the story effects her. Mrs Tischler was in the Nightmares episode teaching Health and Human Development. But the season 2 episode with the eggs had a different guy for a similar topic. Did she leave? Does Sunnydale have a high teacher turnover? We dont know.
... I mean I would not have wondered in school either. That Doctor Who episode where they sleep in the school would have seemed about right. To be fair I did go to boarding school some years and they did, in fact, sleep in the school. But. It makes sense the story doesnt look where the characters dont. I get that.
It's just it's part of how the characters stay isolated and vulnerable. And I get that this too is intended by the writers, it's just... creepy. Bad. Wrong.
Humans form communities. It's our problem solving tool. I watch a lot of TV about problem solving via superpowers or pointy sticks, but, those have limited application. And humans historically have not all been good at the pointy sticks. So we form communities.
The Slayer staying secret so she isnt under attack 24/7 and can be both bait and trap makes perfect sense, but isolation isnt the only way to be secret. Isolation and never telling anyone is like the poker face approach, you cannot afford any tells. Hide alone in the dark, never show anyone anything. But even in season one, people know things, even if they dont know what they know, so how useful is that really?
You can also hide in a crowd.
Run self defence classes and then it isnt weird that there's some people being especially dedicated to this extracurricular. And, bonus, there's more people with more skills on the not dying front.
Put demon lore on the internet and yeah you'll have magnified the potential problems but, also, too, it'll be a lot harder to eradicate everyone who knows important stuff.
Having to hunt down the one and only copy of a book seems antiquated and dangerous.
... yes I liked Giles' speech about knowledge being smelly and he did get it all scanned ready for Willow, but, there are so many possibilities for distributing knowledge now, it's frustrating.
But to loop back to what was meant to be the point, if you want to make a story about
a small band of plucky heroes fighting overwhelming odds
by becoming the nucleus around which forms a community?
The structure of TV storytelling, the thing where those people only exist when available and paid to do so, actually really gets in the way of that.
So characters are written as one offs not because that's how that series of events would go but because that's how that story would go.
Accustomed story structure. Actually weirdly isolating.
Like I'll admit I'm drawn to stories of the weird ones who notice things and try and deal with them because nobody else seems to be doing so, but after a while, the basic problem is the big one, that nobody else seems to be doing so.
You'd want to fix the big one. Not just put out fires, invent fire departments.
When I started watching Agents of SHIELD I thought it would have to do something like this, something larger than the individual parts, individual teams even. But then the big twist movie happened and no actually, it did not.
It's about power. Power in a democracy even. The stories I watch keep ducking out of combining power and responsibility. They keep telling a story where some people are just more capable than others and therefore do all the deciding, even should do all the deciding in universe, with the bad guys being the ones going Hey, Accountability, Is A Thing. And that is not how it works if we're grokking the value sets that theoretically underpin democracy. Or your basic Nothing About Us Without Us.
Story structure, having regulars, focusing on a small group, it makes it easier for this particular fail mode to engage.
Not inevitable though. I mean there are other genres. I just keep on watching the Small Team Versus Universe sorts.
And then complaining about it.
I also keep noticing whose stories dont get told, and I dont know where to go to find some of them. Like, I know its on me that I keep watching the high school show when I'm Giles age, but, I also dont know where to go to find a show about... what the Council should be like. What structures you'd need to set up in place of the ones we see in the shows I watch. Where to find stories where almost everyone is over 40, instead of shows getting cancelled about the time everyone passes 30.
And I'm tired of shows whee the solution is a good being killed. I know, I watch them, that's on me. But I want a show where the disparities in ability and needs are as huge as they can be in F&SF *and* the solutions are to figure out how everyone can live with that.
I mean even the superhero show that eventually sent everyone to prison had the prison turn into an auction and kill everyone, so, that is A Problem, you know?
And we really do need to ask, if prisons are a problem, what is the solution?
But not very many stories are actually doing solutions.
I love Legends of Tomorrow in no small part because bad guys dont stay that way and people sort their lives out and stop needing the evil cults. Which is great.
But they also have ways of not only killing people but destroying them with hell weapons so they're, you know, dead and gone, lost to eternity even. Which is really really not good. Really.
I dont know if I'd start watching a show that saw what Catherine Madison was doing to Amy Madison and then sat down and tried to solve things with talking
but
I find myself wanting to write the story where someone attempts to solve things with talking.
Sure she cursed children and swapped seats to steal her own child's life, but, she's also a person, maybe we could solve this with less eternal torment?
Saving people matters.
Not just helping the helpless or defending the innocent. What, am I meant to run an assessment form before doing a belp? Is it means tested? Because I've fucking had it with capability assessments and means testing and hoops to jump before somebody deserves.
Need matters, so how about helping everyone who needs it, because doing good is good to do, and in the long term probably works better.
Deserve is irrelevant.
Stories make it relevant by severe rationing of available resources. So lets fix that.
How about we approch every story by trying to figure out what it would take to make good, and how we can make that happen.
Sometimes it would take fixing entire socities and getting legal recognition for non human sapience, but hey, politics is a thing that people do.
And then we could try not just dropping the stories after they leave the emergency. If so many people are learning first hand they need help, it wont just be one person who does something about that. It wasnt just one footballer campaigning for school meals, it's just a lot easier to tell that story and focus on it.
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.
I want to rewrite Angel so they draw together everyone they help and together make the Hyperion into housing for Gunn's friends the homeless kids and then train them up to have day job skills to repair the place and also survival skills to defend it. Not ideal that they're under attack at all in the first place, but hey, since they are, why not do something about that?
So I guess I want Anne's story and not Angels.
I want to redo Buffy the Vampire Slayer and just... keep everyone they save? Keep the people who are in the know? Attempt education at school, ffs.
I realise Giles is stuck playing the role of patriarchy and colonialism, but, how about there's more than one influential adult who gets to survive?
Bring in the Guardian lady from the get go. Have that rebel Watcher who tried to use Faith have a slightly better plan that does not get her arm cut off. Bring the supposed authority of of the Watchers into better focus.
I mean it makes sense a teenager doesnt ask much about the details, but where does the authority of the Watchers Council of Great Britain derive from? The epic power of We Say So? The old boys network? Does it come from the Queen, or a queen, or parliament, or tradition, or habit? The differences matter.
I can get whole story arcs out of compare/contrasting fictional organisations intended to deal with some balance of Stars and Magic that were founded in and shaped by different specific moments in British history. Torchwood being Victorian and The Forget coming out of the Great War make them distinctly different in outlook and attitude. The further back in history you project the origins of a given organisation the more disruption you have to explain them weathering. If they were William the Conqueror's work then how did they weather the Anarchy? What did the Wars of the Roses do to any inherited authority they may have relied on? If they were chartered by Queen Elizabeth the first then how did they manage the civil war and parliament winning? And what would being rooted in the one time and traumatised by the others have done to them institutionally? ... compare contrast to what it did to Britain...
Honestly I can't see the Watchers as particularly ancient. They're the sort of British hangover that assumes it has authority anywhere in the world because British. That's pretty specific. And it'll wear off.
The Justice League being a United Nations organisation wore off, and not to their credit, I feel. The Avengers have a whole movie about the existing international authorities being somehow wrong about the concept of borders and how deciding to 'save' people needs a bit of talking about first. These are very relevant questions about the use of power in a global context.
Makes sense a show set in Sunnydale wouldnt come up with answers to them, but, still, relevant in the background.
And I can see why the story doesnt focus on it because I go off on ever so many tangents just thinking about it, and very few of them lead to the kind of armed showdown meant to be cathartic on TV.
I want to see what happens to everyone else.
Thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayers this go around...
I want a story about the Guardian lady in her pyramid always having someone to talk to, and ways her advice is and isnt helpful over the eras.
I want to throw out the clumsy magic as drugs metaphor and get some of the women who grapple with healthy uses of power to get help and support, from each other or from other groups. So it's not only Willow that gets rehab or a coven to connect to. So people make connections that aren't all their own age, or their parents. Just a magical community, such as the one that economically supports at least one magic shop at a time, but actually talking to each other and being relevant to the story.
Giles to confront the difference between that magic was bad and all magic was bad.
... okay magic as drugs is really baked in, but, difference between drug abuse was bad and you should probably take meds sometimes.
Ways to get a healthy balance in your life, not just... hide and lie and struggle.
I want some kind of Sunnydale support group that we get to see, not just a one off reference by Jonathan.
Acknowledgement of the difference between assorted religions and slinging power around, so Willow going to Wicca group and being annoyed it wasnt all spells is more explicitly a Willow problem.
I know the metaphor starts with a world as much like our own as possible and then just puts a demon face on any difficulties suitable for punching. I can see why their world stays the way it does, from a writing perspective.
But I want to write about communities living in those worlds, because they would learn and grow and adapt, as humans tend to.
As people tend to.
... I want to write a story where someone has An Important Talk with the mantis lady, maybe involving sperm banks and developments in artificial insemination, and possibly use said story to work through frustrations with how Star Trek Enterprise treated Insectoids, especially insectoid babies.
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.
I've been to talks about zombie shows where the question that interested them was, could you kill a zombie?
The question that concerns me is, what kind of cultural moment produces shows where the writers take away every option except, could you kill this person?
I participate in Z Day on NationStates every year and we use cure missiles. No zombies, maximum survivors. It takes coordination and planning and the ability to help your neighbours, but we get it done every year.
Why are there popular stories based on that not being an option?
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
no subject
Date: 2021-11-07 09:09 pm (UTC)I personally think the problem is substantially based in the desire for film/tv directors and showrunners to make extremely collective work seem the product of individual white male genius.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-08 04:31 am (UTC)follow up with every single one off character
That's what fanfic is for. In good fandoms :)
They dont get a chance to be good though
Maybe they do! Maybe they save the world from other things we don't hear about. Again, what fanfic is for. Maybe every one of these no-name no-dialogue characters have a whole world that they save and monsters they fight and therapy they should probably get.
Does Sunnydale have a high teacher turnover? We dont know.
I'm gonna guess hell yeah. Many probably die. Many others manage to leave town because this town is horrible in every way. Some probably get turned and staked for all we know. Endless possibilities. I'm having fun just thinking about it.
The slayer being isolated iirc is brought up because Buffy *isn't*, relatively to all others before her. She has family and friends whereas they had watchers and early graves.
distributing knowledge
Now I'm thinking of Natasha leaking the files. Let Willow leak files!
the nucleus around which forms a community
I would love that. It takes a village. A supporting community around the chosen ones is great. And it can or can not become part of "the whole world knows the secret and rehauls all its systems", depending how big you want the community part to grow. But rehauling the whole system - what you said, what the Council should be like, and that's supposedly the comics and more so the post-chosen fanfic, where Giles rehauls the council to be more inclusive and less secret, where slayers are a small community and not a single isolated weapon.
But yeah grown-up-fantasy-scifi tends to lean towards the dark and gloomy or gory, which takes a lot of the fun out of it.
make the Hyperion into housing for Gunn's friends the homeless kids
Love this
I think the Watchers are ancient but were not always British. I think the "colonial patriarchy" took over and established itself on the ruins of many groups of Watchers from many places with many traditions - which, you know, fits with history too, and with what little we see of non-uk watchers
Giles to confront the difference between that magic was bad and all magic was bad.
... okay magic as drugs is really baked in, but, difference between drug abuse was bad and you should probably take meds sometimes.
Doing heroin in a dingy flat and dying of ODs and STDs bad, some weed on the weekend and maybe shrooms on a holiday not so bad (I can see Ethan positing that very theory)
Sunnydale support group
I think I saw the fic. There should definitely be a lot more of it
An Important Talk with the mantis lady, maybe involving sperm banks
I may misremember, but I think the problem was less the sperm, more the eating of entire human beings
smash the god
Aw well it's not the god, is it, just a statue, an artefact/representation. A vessel. Still bad maybe(memories of "the sacking of the temple" stories from my Jewish childhood), but it's not quite the same as smashing the actual god... which they also did in other cases, iirc. I mean Glory. Illyria.
Anyway I am having fun and my brain is buzzing and so many wonderful worlds sprawling away from every single unexplored corner of the show is why I got into fandom. Thanks for the exercise :)