Saalon Muyo

How did I miss this on the first pass?

But damn it, doesn’t anybody know how to write an ending any more?

I’m just gonna let that one stand without further comment.

Well, turns out his response was even less insightful than I feared.

George R. R. Martin made his brief case for why he hated the end of Battlestar Galactica, and he reverted to the overused “God did it” complaint.  It’s unfortunate, especially because he framed his complaint as a “Writing 101″ error, which, as you can imagine if you read my – ahem – impassioned post about my frustrations with A Song of Ice and Fire,  I took as somewhat ironic.

Leaving aside the fact that a deus ex machina is not always, in every case, a bad way to end a story – certainly the narrative foundation of the Western world is built on poems and plays rife with them – I think the “God did it” criticism is just shallow.  The finale sucks because a character gives a speech you don’t like that takes up 2 minutes of a 3 hour finale? That’s all there is to say?

Not that the ending is a deus ex machina, anyway.  If you didn’t see the mystical overtones coming years ago, starting all the way back in season 1, you were constructing your own ideal version of Galactica that did not exist.  Much like as I didn’t see A Song of Ice and Fire expanding endlessly starting with book 2, it’s probably my own fault for being so frustrated now.  We see what we want to see, no?

(NOTE: Though I mention the finale of Battlestar Galactica in this entry, there are no spoilers at all for the finale or series beyond the opening of season 3. On the other hand, spoilers ahoy for A Song of Ice and Fire)

Funny the things that set you off. I was reading George R. R. Martin’s “Not a Blog” today and saw he made mention of having hated the Battlestar Galactica finale. That, apparently, is what it took to finally get me to write about Martin’s last book, A Feast for Crows.

You can blame Brennen and Brent for my initial obsession with A Song of Ice and Fire, the massive, epic fantasy series by Martin of which A Feast For Crows is part.  I remember clearly getting A Game of Thrones, the first volume in the series.  I had won a gift certificate to Amazon.com from a trivia game Brent was running, and asked what the heck I should buy.  One of the books Brennen recommended was A Game of Thrones.  And so it began.

I also remember very clearly reading it.  Not what it felt like to read it, but the actual physical sitting with the book in my hands.  It was my Grandmother’s funeral in Erie, and I can still picture myself on a cheap hotel bed, feeling the shock of Ned Stark’s startling death.  The same goes for book 3, A Storm of Swords, also read in a hotel room, this one not so cheap.  I was in Alexandria, VA with my mom.  She was on a business trip and I had tagged along.  Instead of exploring the city, I sat for hours in that room, plowing through one of the best fantasy novels I had ever read.  I made it out of the room for comics and a bowl of amazing Texas style chili. Otherwise, it was Martin all the way.

I say this to get across my deep love for the series.  There was a time when this was becoming my favorite fantasy series, when all I could do was talk about how affected I was by the series’ momentum, brutality and authenticity. A time may come again when I feel this way, too. Today, not as much.

I am not going to gripe about the publication delays faced by book 4, A Feast for Crows.  An author must take the time he needs to write his story, and waiting is not my problem.  It’s frustrating as hell, certainly, but quality and not scheduling is an author’s primary concern.  So A Feast for Crows was late. So it was very late. Big deal.

What bothers me is that the novel we got was a sprawling, long delayed side story of little consequence to the series.  Long fantasy series’ generally have this problem. At some point in the middle they begin following every rabbit down every hole, adding side characters and background stories until the main plot is barely advancing at all.  In book 1 our main characters are the only point of view characters, but by book 4 we are spending half of our time with people of whom we have rarely if ever heard.

A Feast for Crows may not be a bad book, but it is a pointless book.  Martin’s original plan was to jump forward 5 years following A Storm of Swords, a bold idea that the end of that novel almost necessitated. The ending of Swords left characters on the verge of great developments, at the cusp of realizing much of the setup of the first 3 volumes.  A five year jump would put us right in the middle of that payoff, allowing the final 3 volumes to race ahead from that point.

Book 4 was going to be A Dance with Dragons, a title full of promise considering we had spent the first half of the series slowly building the character of Daenerys and the return of dragons into the world.  It was likely to continue the deliberate but fantastic character arc of Anya Stark, a child  now on the cusp of being capable of the vengeance promised to her enemies.  And it was almost certain to drop us into the middle of whatever terror was building beyond the Wall.

Instead we got, respectively: Nothing, almost nothing and nothing.

Somewhere along the line, Martin soured on the idea of jumping ahead. He said the need for flashbacks filling in the lost time was crushing the narrative of the novel and that jumping ahead was not feasible.  So book 4 changed to A Feast for Crows, and it would presumably fill in those 5 years.

I was skeptical.  If you initially thought those 5 years weren’t worth writing, was this really going to make for an interesting novel? Or was it going to feel like a book of backstory whose only reason for being written was setting up the next novel?  I had, perhaps unfairly, assumed the jump was being done because the intervening years did not need to be told in detail.  In fact, the revelation that even the initial version of book 4 was going to be flashback-filled had me worried. Why jump at all if you’re going to detail what we missed anyway?

Still, Martin hadn’t let me down and I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.  It might not be the most exciting book, but it would at least be necessary.  And maybe it would be exciting, after all.  Who knew?

Then came scary change number 2: A Feast For Crows was being split into 2 books.  Not chronologically, but by dividing which characters would appear in which book.  That 5 year period we were going to skip entirely? Yeah, it had just become 2 books.

A Feast for Crows was not an easy read for me.  I admit freely I was very worried about the quality of this book due to the confusing narrative changes Martin had made to it.  I know I’m not the writer of this series, but I have trouble understanding how a period you once felt confident you could skip could become 2 whole novels.  This sounded like a writer too wrapped up in the minutia of his world, too intent on telling every detail of his story.

Unfortunately – and you can attribute this to seeing what I expected to see if you’d like, though I’d disagree – that was exactly what I got.  Worse, I got something I did not expect: a preponderance of time spent on side characters of whom I had no emotional attachment and some odd narrative changes.  Do the political maneuverings of the Greyjoys really matter to this story? The same of the Martells:  why should I care? Was there any need to suddenly start naming point of view chapters after character aliases?

Worse, the of previous point of view characters who did make an appearance, few were the protagonists for whom we had been asked to care to this point.  Yes, I think Jamie Lannister is an interesting character. Sure, I’m fine watching Cersei’s plans fall apart around her.  But to spend the better part of a novel on them, the Greyjoys and the Martells while leaving only two or three chapters each for any of the Stark children was highly disappointing.  It gave the impression of reading the series bible for background, not of getting the next chapter in the story itself.

Compare this to the end of season 2 of Battlestar Galactica, in the last minutes of which we suddenly jumped a year ahead.  We saw lives changed without explanation, new conflicts, new problems.  And then, when season 3 opened, we stayed a year ahead.  In fact, it jumped another 4 months further down the path.  Major changes had occurred, and rather than worrying about showing us how each one had come about, it plowed ahead, confident the audience would learn most through context and the rest as needed.  Imagine if, instead, season 3 had opened back before the end of season 2 and decided to spend the season filling in that last year.

Now imagine that season 3 only did that for half of the characters, leaving the rest for season 4, and didn’t pick back up with the plot until season 5.

Sure we could have said “Oh, that’s exactly how Tigh lost his eye,” or “Oh, so this is when Tyrol became the head of the union.” But did we need it?  Certainly not, and the series was stronger for jumping the exposition and getting on with the business of telling its story.

Which leads me back to what set me off.  I’m curious as to what, exactly, Martin hated about Galactica.  Is he going to be upset that the series didn’t deliver on what he felt it had promised him?  That it had abandoned plot threads over its run and did not resolve them sufficiently in the finale?  That it focused on characters he didn’t feel were important?

I ask because I have this sneaking suspicion that any complaint he levels on Galactica could be leveled doubly against his own series.  Certainly Galactica played loose with many of its early themes and had a bad tendency to lose main characters for weeks at a time.

But do you know what it didn’t do?  It didn’t give fans an entire season detailing exactly what role Simon and Dorel had in the Cylons’ decision to come to New Caprica while showing us no more than a few minutes of Tyrol and Tigh and ignoring everyone else. It didn’t extend itself endlessly, pushing the expected finale further and further away.

Do you know what it did do?

It ended while I still cared what happened.

Here’s hoping A Dance with Dragons proves me wrong. I want to love A Song of Ice and Fire again.  Maybe Martin will use Galactica as a mirror and not just as a punching bag.

Pointing out Bill O’Reilly’s gross hypocrisy never gets old, but this video from The Daily Show is extra-special awesome.

Holy crap!  Park Chan Wook, director of the great Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, the amazing Oldboy and the phenominal Lady Vengeance is doing a vampire movie.  I mean, when you were reading Twilight, wouldn’t you have rather seen Edward do something like this?

Anyway, check out an early image from Thirst:

Extra bonus: That’s the father from The Host!  Korean cinema is kicking more ass than should be allowed lately.

Some days you learn things about filmmakers you love that you wonder how you didn’t know until now. Like how Takashi Miike, director of some of the most screwed up films I’ve ever seen (Haven’t seen Audition yet? Oh, please, do give yourself nightmares with it.) apparently also does movies like this:

How do you see an already effed up director as even more insane? Find out he directs kids films, too.

I’m totally renting this as soon as it comes out. Go Yatterman!

What exactly is wrong in the brains of the studio marketing teams who produce most trailers?  How many “In a world…” jokes need to be made before they at least come up with a new formula to run into the ground?  I mean, when even the parody is getting old, it’s time for a change up.

A couple of years ago when Paprika came out, the first trailer to hit the net was a little unpolished, but eye-catching.  It had great music – which turned out ot be from the film’s awesome soundtrack – and a whole lot of really cool and trippy imagery.  I watched it about a dozen times until I got the chance to see the film in theaters.

A few weeks ago, I got something out of Netflix and a trailer for Paprika was in front of it.  I figured I’d watch the trailer again; I liked the film and the music and I could spend the minute and a half reliving some Satoshi Kon style weirdness.  Instead of the cool first trailer, I got this Movie Guy Narration style piece of junk.

I like the movie and after watching the trailer even I don’t really want to see it.  It’s not even a good description of the movie. It’s a really awful back of a novel plot blurb. And the music sucks.

Who cut this and why?  Who is this trailer appealing to, exactly?  Mass market film zombies?  They aren’t watching Satoshi Kon anime anyway, I can assure you.   And even if they were, I seriously doubt there’s a single person watching a trailer saying “Yeah, but I need to know if I’m in a near future where there’s a machine that can control our dreams! I can’t see this film!”

Though if you are out there saying that, please leave a comment.  I’d love to do some psychoanalysis.

This American Life rocks.  By now, you’ve realized that, right?  You haven’t?

Well.

How about this: Do you think you know why the mortgage crisis happened?  Have you listened to the This American Life story about it?  No?

Well.

The Giant Pool of Money might be the best episode of This American Life ever.  It’s the most lucid, fascinating and informative story about the mortage crisis you’re likely to find.  It should win a Pulitzer, or a Peabody, or whatever they give audio news programs.  It’s that good.

Check it out.  Please.

This seems to be a popular genre for fear mongers these days.  Write an essay pretending to be a traveler for a future (or describing an encounter with one) that warns of a dire apocalyptic collapse of our world that we could have prevented if we weren’t so damn stupid.

It goes something like this.

Imagine that that future I have made up whole-cloth with minimal research is not fiction in the slightest.  See all the scary demons that live in my made-up future world?  Don’t you think you might have nightmares about them?  Your kids will be miserable or dead.  Socialist Islamofacists will urinate on your grave while inserting foreign objects into the orifices of your granddaughters.  Everyone will wear turbans but nothing else, because our soft, socialist economy will have left us with nothing save our newly adopted Islamist faith.  If only someone in your day had been smart enough to realize all of this!  If only he could have written some pseudo-fiction, we could have all been saved!

The good writers do a decent job of it.  Simmons’ time-travel terror tale was as well constructed as it was overblown.  He’s one of the best horror-fantasists I’ve ever read, and even when he’s delivering a dubious message he’s capable of doing it well.

Glenn Beck is no Dan Simmons.  (He’s not even an Orson Scott Card).  His core point is actually sounder than Simmons’ is: this Wall Street bailout is very likely to hurt us more than it will help.  Unfortunately, he has run out of ways to deliver this message and has fallen back on 60 year old Red Scare tactics and moronic time travel hyperbole to get his point across.  It’s the kind of article I’d expect to see linked on p1k3 as “Asshattery.”

It’s probably not worth breaking the thing down point by point – I mean, it’s signed “Worker 2744A” for God’s sake  – but I should at least give something other than a vague head shake at it.

It didn’t take long before so many of our tax dollars were going toward interest payments that we couldn’t fund even the most basic of government programs without massive tax increases on everyone. People now work most of the year just to pay Uncle Sam (or, as we now call him, “Comrade Sam”).

Hmm, yeah, ok, interest payments for our debt are going to become overwhelming.  Not a bad point, Glenn, not bad at–

–wait, Comrade Sam?! Sigh.

At least he avoided a Fear The Muslims rant, right?

You might want to spend a little less time worrying about carbon and a little more time worrying about Iran. We’re now in a new mini-Ice Age but, believe me, Iran isn’t using their nukes to warm any homes. (PS The International Atomic Energy Agency just revealed to you that Iran appears to be refitting their long-range missiles to carry nuclear payloads. Did you think they were joking or were you just too busy with lipsticks and pigs to notice?)

Oh.  Never mind.

Meanwhile, he uses one of my favorite devices of this genre:

Good call on not worrying about protecting our borders. That works out really well for you in 2019.

Note how the specific date-dropping makes it sound like the author has actual knowledge about the future, and that you should maybe have a few nightmares about what occurrence he’s referring to in 2019.

Here’s my question.  Did he pick the date out of a hat, or did he spend a couple of hours employing fake logic to go along with this fake time travel story?

In closing, remember this golden rule and you should be fine: Your Constitution will never fail you, but your leaders will. Be wary of anyone who tries to convince you that it’s the other way around.

You mean, like George W. Bush?  Who you compared favoribly to Batman in The Dark Knight, in particular to  how he breaks laws to catch evil terrorists?  You mean leaders like that, right?  Because it sounds like you’re saying that even though you don’t like Bush much,  you respect that he’s willing to go outside the bounds of our laws (or, if you will, our Constitution) to fight terrorists.

If you want a fictional view of the future, I advise sticking with actual science fiction that doesn’t cloak itself in essay form to scare you into agreeing.  Your average episode of The Twilight Zone is both scarier and more plausible than this kind of crap, and it didn’t need to dredge up antique Red Fear or remind us of the perils of Islamofacism to make its point.  Hell, WALL-E is smarter than this, and that guy’s last film was about talking fish.

As a side note, Beck might want to rewatch The Dark Knight for subtext.  Just saying.

Dear Mr Kring,

I have been very critical of your show, Heroes, over the past two years.  Even when many were praising it during season 1 I found it to be slow moving and derivative.  There was enough promise to keep me watching, though, so I stuck with it through a disappointing end of season 1 and an even more disappointing season 2 run.  I say this so that you understand this is not the critique of a Heroes fanboy who’s looking for the show he loved to come back.  It’s the critique of a genre lover who sees the resources you’ve been given being squandered on uninspired and pretentious storytelling who wants your show to live up to its potential.  That’s the context.

Now the critique.

I’ve heard you say that you never read comic books and don’t know anything about the genre in which you’re writing.  You say this as if it’s a good thing, a badge of honor.  It’s not.  Working in a genre with which you are not familiar does not give you a leg up on the competition, but almost guarantees that you will walk ground already well explored.  When Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, one of the many works Heroes mirrors but fails to live up to, he was responding to a genre he knew well.  It was a seminal work precisely because he had done his homework, and his understanding of the genre did not chain him to following conventions.  In fact, it allowed him to brilliantly subvert them.

Heroes, meanwhile, is to me like someone playing the melody of a symphony without knowing the harmonies, counter-melodies and rhythms.  You see the plot devices you’d expect from the genre, but they play out in entirely conventional ways.  There are characters that fit into the mold of a superhero story, but without the development they’d need to be anything other than archetypes.  There are the powers we’re familiar with, but no invention as to their use.  It has never ceased to be a superficial retread of ideas better explored thirty years ago.

Take, as an example, your most persistent villain, Sylar.  If you were more familiar with the genre, you might have seen a very similar villain in J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars.  The similarity isn’t the problem, but that Sylar reuses a plot idea that was more deeply explored in the previous work.

In Rising Stars we learn that whatever power is behind the supers of that world is finite, and that with every use the strength of all supers decreases.  Yet, if one super dies, their power redistributes, boosting everyone else.  The power-thief in Rising Stars goes into action out of fear of losing their own power, while Sylar simply does it out of egoism.  One deals with an interesting and believable human motivation while the other gives us a one-dimensional villain.  I’m sure that your writing staff is capable of a more nuanced and interesting villain that is still as evil as you’d like him to be, but so long as you try to hold yourself apart from your own genre you risk being a faded copy.

Another example, this one from the upcoming season.  I  hear you’ll be introducing a serum that grants people powers.  I hope that you can find something interesting in that plot, as the already similar 4400 tackled this very idea a few years ago.  4400 was by no means a perfect show (and this idea is by no means original), but it explored the ideas behind its genre conventions in interesting ways.  I’m concerned that you are not using this idea because you saw it and believe you can do it better, but because you simply did not know someone already went there.  Not to say this is a new premise in the genre, but considering other similarities I admit to some concern.

I am also worried about your reuse of your own story hooks.  I hear that we’ll be seeing a dark future again, which now makes three seasons out of three driven by the exact same device.  A hero goes to the future, sees something bad, and has to try to stop it from occurring.  I admit that the best part of season 1 was seeing that mushroom cloud in the first episode.  The power of that came from its unexpectedness, and that power is gone after the first use.

Why not put a moratorium on time traveling for a season and find a new, surprising way to set the stakes of your season.  I know you believe season 2’s weakness was waiting too long to show Peter the virus-decimated future, but I disagree.  The problem was showing him that future at all.  The Shanti virus could have been built up through your existing characters, instead of showing us an X-Men Days of Future Past style apocalypse.  The stakes were certainly missing through much of season 2, but another bout of time travel was not the way to set them.

Finally, please stop predicating so many of your plots on the gullibility of your characters.  Mohinder is tricked by Sylar for far too long in season 1, and Peter has the same problem with Adam in season 2.  There is no narrative meat to seeing our heroes be so easily mislead for episodes at a time.  Trickery is like mind control; it often plays as a lazy shortcut to getting your characters into conflict with each other.  Giving them strong, developed motivations would be more satisfying and would let us continue to respect these characters in the morning.

In Heroes you have one of the best budgeted, best known superhero series ever.  You have a certain amount of creative freedom and a national audience.  I don’t need another Watchmen, but I’d like to be surprised by the show instead of frustrated by how often I can see what’s coming episodes away.  I hope season 3 is the success I’ve been waiting for, but if it’s not I hope you have the time to right the ship before it’s too late.

Sincerely,

Eric Sipple