finales and emotional continuity

Jan. 7th, 2020 04:02 pm
inferiorwit: (Default)
2019 gave us three big loud finales of tentpole franchises--or "finales," considering how none of these IPs will ever be allowed to die--which, for a not-insignificant portion of their intended audience, fell flat. All this despite each of these finales trumpeting how thoroughly they were devoted to tying up loose ends, bringing back beloved characters, and honoring the continuity of their respective IPs.

As a writing term, "continuity" describes a state wherein the events of a story progress in a consistent way (i.e. if, during a scene, a character starts smoking a cigarette, then that cigarette should be accounted for throughout the scene in order for it to have continuity). In the context of comic books, television, and other long-running serialized media, it also describes acknowledgment of previous events in the series (i.e. a Marvel comic from the 90s referencing the events of another Marvel comic from the 70s).

There are a lot of people out there who are convinced that devotion to continuity is the reason so many long-running series have been successful. And while audiences sure like to look clever when they notice the last episode of a show has referenced something that happened in the first episode of the show, I'd argue what they really respond to--what makes great finales--is emotional continuity.

To fully explain this, let's use as an example one of my favorite serialized science fiction stories, an iconic and venerable series with true pop culture staying power: Transmetropolitan.

(What, you thought I was going to talk about Star Wars? Fuck off.)

( Spoilers for Transmetropolitan ahead )
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the life cycle of every superhero show on the CW

Dec. 10th, 2019 09:52 am
inferiorwit: (judgment)
  1. Let's make a show about a superhero!
  2. Let's give them a fun, diverse supporting cast!
  3. This is going great!
  4. If one superhero is good, more superheroes are better. Let's make the fun, diverse supporting cast into superheroes, too!
  5. Oh wait, now we have to scale all our antagonists to account for the fact that there are multiple superheroes available to fight them.
  6. This is getting out of hand, we don't have the budget for this.
  7. Better introduce petty interpersonal drama so the superheroes don't have the team cohesion to effectively fight our latest god-villain!
  8. shit fuck people aren't watching anymore because our show is annoying and terrible now
  9. kill off some of the superheroes for ratings
  10. wait shit fuck people are mad we murdered our fun, diverse supporting cast
  11. introduce more superheroes
  12. repeat steps 5-11 forever
  13. welcome to hell
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so i took my mom to see aquaman

Dec. 23rd, 2018 10:59 pm
inferiorwit: (socks)
I know everyone else has been seeing the Spider-verse movie, but my mom isn't super thirsty for Jake Johnson. So.

I think the wrong approach to an Aquaman movie would've been to conclude that the entire character is a joke and redesign him from the ground up. And this movie didn't do that, so thank god. Instead, the filmmakers decided to take all the goofy comic book shit at face value and extract as much fun and joy out of it as possible, up to and including an army of crab men rendered in loving CGI detail.

The result is not quite as personally affecting for me as Wonder Woman, but definitely better than basically every other DCEU movie so far. I never saw Justice League, so I can't say whether Jason Momoa's performance is better or worse than in that movie. But I can say that if you hold The Little Mermaid responsible for your sexual awakening, this movie has a lot to offer you.

I love how ( SPOILERS )

It's also notable that ( MORE SPOILERS )

As a final note, this movie is 142 minutes long and my showing included 10 minutes of pre-roll ads. Not trailers. Ads. The trailers were an additional 10 minutes. I think I've figured out why nobody goes to see movies in the theatre anymore.

Anyway, if you plan to do literally anything else after you see Aquaman, make sure you catch an early showtime.
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Clark Kent, Boy Reporter

Aug. 6th, 2016 03:30 pm
inferiorwit: (pony)
In anticipation of there suddenly being way more Superman fic out there, I figured I’d put together a tip sheet for people who want to write about Clark doing journalism for a living. This is nowhere near an exhaustive guide, just a quick rundown of where I keep seeing writers slip up.

Source: two generations of my family worked in newspapers and I considered journalism as a career before Postmedia made it way less appealing. If anyone has any corrections or stuff they’d like to add, please do.

general stuff:
  • I fell down a research hole on the DC wiki and still can’t figure out what Clark’s major is. It’s not necessarily journalism. There’s no one degree that qualifies you to be a journalist.
    • when my dad was hiring for his papers, he usually preferred English majors over journalism majors, because “the English majors were better writers.” This is probably not empirically true.
  • Comics and movies usually portray Perry White as the autocratic overlord of The Daily Planet, making all the editorial decisions, responsible for hundreds of employees, yet only interacting with the same three or four all the time. In reality, a lot of what Perry White does in the comics gets delegated out to a small army of section editors and assignment editors and managing editors and look there’s a lot of editors, okay? The EIC is the boss of the whole operation, but he doesn’t spend the whole day bellowing orders from his office because if he did, he wouldn’t get anything else done.
  • Print newspapers get most of their revenue from ads. There can be significant pressure not to piss off the advertisers, especially these days.
  • Some newspapers have embraced the digital age. Some haven’t. Some use paywalls on their websites. Some don’t.
  • The most unbelievable thing in Man of Steel was that a newspaper in the year of our lord 2013 had that many employees and was hiring.
writing about writing
  • Some journalists are better at reporting than writing. Some are better at writing than reporting.
  • Your average news article is structured so that all the most important details are at the beginning of the story, with the least important details at the end. If fiction stories start with “it was a dark and stormy night” and end with “the butler did it,” then news stories start with “the butler did it” and end with “it was a dark and stormy night.”
  • News articles are supposed to be objective. Personal opinions are usually confined to editorials or columns.
  • Because news articles are supposed to be objective, they will usually strive for “balance.” If a story involves a controversial issue, the writer will often seek out contrasting opinions so the reader can see both sides of the issue and make up their own mind.
    • This can sometimes lead to “balance bias,” where the most seemingly benign statement in an article is contrasted with the ramblings of some yahoo for the sake of fairness.
  • Articles are usually quite short–less than 1000 words. Longer, more in-depth features happen either because the issue in question requires it, or because the feature is on a topic considered “timeless” and isn’t subject to the same kind of deadline pressure.
hip newspaper lingo
  • Art is a photo or diagram or whatever used to accompany a story. Pretty pictures used to catch the eye and illustrate the article.
  • A reporter’s beat is the subject that they usually cover, such as crime or politics. A reporter who’s an expert on a particular subject is a correspondent.
  • The big unwieldy newspapers are broadsheets. Small commuter papers are tabloids. Broadsheets are usually considered more prestigious and reliable than tabloids.
  • Copy is any written material. Copy editors edit copy, make sure there are no legal issues, write headlines, and figure out where to place a story in the newspaper’s layout.
  • Stories will sometimes be under embargo, where they can’t be published until after a certain date or time.
  • If an editor decides not to run a story, that story’s been killed or spiked.
  • The first paragraph of a news article, with all the important details, is called the lede. Deliberately or accidentally placing important details later in the story is called burying the lede.
  • Wire services (commonly shortened to “wire” or “the wire”) are syndication services that provide stories and art to various newspapers (and TV and radio stations) for a fee. Reuters, Associated Press, etc. If you’re a copy editor and you need filler or art or whatever, you grab it off the wire.
movies to watch:
  • All the President’s Men - pretty good look at the realities of investigative reporting (hint: there are a lot of tedious phone calls involved). The filmmakers were so dedicated to accuracy that they had the Washington Post’s garbage shipped in so they could put it in the movie set’s trash cans.
  • The Paper - 24 hours in the life of a New York tabloid. Michael Keaton’s in it. Great look at the day-to-day operation of a newsroom and the relationship between reporters, editors, and the editor-in-chief. Also it’s really goddamn funny.
UM OKAY THIS POST IS WAY LONGER THAN I INTENDED IT TO BE

BYE
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