Tag: meditations on writing

Adventure Time, Continuity, and Tonal Consistency

  03/16/2017       St. Elmo's Fire      6 Comments

I got into Adventure Time about a year ago. It was billed as a spiritual predecessor to Steven Universe, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The quality is pretty haphazard – individual episodes can be very good, but for most of its run it seems to throw consistent storytelling to the wind. There’s basically no telling what will happen in a given episode, or how much we’re supposed to care; maybe a given plot point be revisited and turn out to be vitally important a few episodes later, maybe a few seasons later, maybe never. It currently has a number of interesting ongoing mysteries and plotlines, but it jumps between them seemingly at random, which can be frustrating. It overall feels like a show that’s constantly trying and failing to figure out what it wants to be.

There’s one plot point that I found particularly baffling, however, and I think it ties into a recurring problem in shows like these that toe the line between episodic and plotty: they can’t decide whether they want to play a potentially serious topic for drama or comedy.

(Spoilers for episode 6×22, for those of you who care.)

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   On Writing, TV Shows      , ,

The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle

  03/17/2016       SpoonyViking      27 Comments

Welcome to the jungle / It ain’t all fun and games…

Hello again, everyone! Now that I’m close to finishing my Master’s, I’ll try to go back to posting semi-regularly. To (re)start things off, I’m going to cover something which I promised Farla quite some time ago: the “Dresden Files” comics. I won’t be looking at them as adaptations of a preexisting work, however, but rather, as original works themselves – as if they were an entirely separate franchise. I believe that will allow me to evaluate them in a fairer manner than if I analysed them as part of a book series which I already dislike. That also means I don’t have any plans of covering the comics that are straight adaptations of the novels.

So, without further ado, let me start with Welcome to the Jungle, the first “Dresden” comic book – one that is chronologically set before the first novel, Storm Front, although it was released in 2008 (which means the book series was already up to Small Favor at that point).

Oh, before I forget: there will be spoilers. (more…)

   Comics, Dresden Files      ,

Why Is Rorschach So Beloved By Fans?

  09/28/2015       SpoonyViking      22 Comments

Warning: there will be heavy spoilers for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen graphic novel (and, by extension, for the movie) here. Also, I urge you guys to first read this article (again, beware of spoilers), which compares and contrasts the portrayal of the Comedian and sexual minorities in the original comic and in the Before Watchmen prequel (written and drawn by a different team). Not that its contents are directly related to what I’ll be talking about; I just think it’s awful that not only Darwyn Cooke (the writer) is portraying a rapist and murderer as some sort of rugged anti-hero, lesbians as sexual fantasies for straight men and homosexuals as morally-bankrupt deviants, but that others (including famous comic writers like Grant Morrison) are praising his writing!

Anyway, on to THIS article. (more…)

   On Writing      ,

Relying on Unreliable Narrator to Wave Away Problems Doesn’t Work. Reliably.

  09/11/2015       illhousen      19 Comments

So, being active in a fandom I won’t name but that’s totally Harry Potter as well as criticizing various other work like Hunger Games, Name of the Wind, Twilight and such, I’ve noticed a peculiar thing: fans of said work would defend them by citing unreliable narrator.Why is a character hated by the narrative for no good reason? The narrator just has a bias against them due to personal reasons. Why show contradicts tell? The narrator is unreliable and tries to make themselves look better/worse because of reasons. Why killing these guys is a good thing, again? It isn’t, Katniss just rationalize it as a defense mechanism.

This argument is really annoying because countering it is not even so much difficult as tedious since it involves combing the text to demonstrate that, no, really, the narrative agrees with the narrator, we aren’t meant to question it.

So I think it calls for a talk about what unreliable narrator is and how it should be used.
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   On Writing     

Heroes, Power Fantasies, and The Legend of Zelda (Guest Review)

  08/09/2015       St. Elmo's Fire      36 Comments

I played lots of The Legend of Zelda when I was a kid, mostly the old GameBoy ones (which are, of course, the best). When their focus moved to fancy 3D console games, keeping up became more effort than it was worth, so it dropped off my radar for a while. This summer, I suddenly realized that let’s plays exist, so I decided to catch up on how the franchise has evolved since. I noticed some interesting things, which I believe can tell us something about how we view power fantasies, and how video games factor into that. (more…)

   On Writing, Video Games      , , ,

Let’s Talk About Myths

  04/15/2015       SpoonyViking      Add Comment

Since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by mythology. At first, it was because of the usual reasons – you know, “Wow, Hercules just strangled to death a lion with invulnerable skin! Cool!”, or “Wow, Odin and his brothers just built the world out of a giant’s corpse! Cool!”. As I grew up and learned more about other mythologies, especially once I got into college, I also learned to appreciate not only the intrinsic entertainment value of those stories, but also their deeper meanings  – even if, speaking from a purely personal viewpoint (as opposed to an academic one), I didn’t agree with or accept those meanings.

However, fascinating as the subject would be, I’m not going to talk about the myths themselves; rather, I’d like to talk about their reception and discuss how those ancient stories are reinterpreted and reimagined in modern times, especially in popular culture.
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   On Writing      ,

Fiction and Personal Growth, Part 2

  02/28/2015       SpoonyViking      Add Comment

Onwards to part 2! Now, the text after the cut continues directly from the end of part 1, so I’d recommend re-reading it first.

Oh, and in addition to the previous spoiler warnings, I’m adding another one concerning an important character in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, Inspector Javert. (more…)

   On Writing      , , , ,

Fiction and Personal Growth, Part 1

  02/17/2015       SpoonyViking      50 Comments

Can people change, for better or worse? Can a person truly let go of a part of their personality, their self, especially if it’s to fill the void with something else? I’m not talking about the changes we are (hopefully) forced to go through as we grow older (for instance, children have no concept of boundaries, but one expects adults to have already learned those at their age), nor about the little things such as likes and dislikes (“Yeah, I used to love that show, but nowadays I can’t get past how campy it is”); rather, I’m talking about the big things (or possibly a whole bunch of little things that all add up) on the scale of “Can a murderer truly repent for what he did – not because he was punished, but because he came to acknowledge that the act of murder itself is wrong?”.

Well, to be even more precise, what I’m really going to talk about is how fiction tends to deal with that kind of thing. Then again, the best stories always reflect something of real life, even if only an idealized version of it, so I’d be very surprised if nothing we discuss here can be applied to our own world.

Warning: there will be HEAVY spoilers for Kieron Gillen’s run on Journey Into Mystery, Al Ewing’s current run on Loki: Agent of Asgard, and Nobuhiro Watsuki’s manga Rurouni Kenshin. You have been warned! (more…)

   On Writing      , ,

Heroic Legends of the Modern Age: The Flash

  11/19/2014       SpoonyViking      17 Comments

Hello again, everyone!

So, at first I thought of doing the opposite of what Farla’s been doing: instead of presenting all the awful things that comic book writers and artists do, I’d present good comics. But then I realized that was a silly proposition – I could present good comics (or good things by bad comics), but that doesn’t negate the fact that the comics industry as a whole has some deeply ingrained issues regarding gender, race, a general fear and hatred of changes and, well, a whole lot of things.

However, while re-reading The Flash, volume 2, I was struck by lightning (appropriately enough) and decided to go on a different direction: a brief discussion on how the characterisation of super-heroes and the genre as a whole has changed over the years. To help keep things brief, I’ll focus solely on the Flash, specifically the aforementioned second volume, but much of what I’ll be addressing can be applied to other characters.
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   Comics, On Writing      , ,

Cimmerian, Yes, But No Barbarian

  10/29/2014       SpoonyViking      18 Comments

“Know, o prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars […] Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian; black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

Proof that even purple prose can be good, when done right.
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