There are tropes and storytelling choices that most authors know are bad ideas, like writing a prequel to explain mundane elements of your protagonist’s backstory. Where did they get those boots they’re wearing in the first chapter? Literally no one wants to know!
But some mistakes can lure in unsuspecting writers like the glowy bit of a deep sea fangly fish. Authors get dazzled by the hype and don’t realize the danger their stories are in. A lot of my clients are in just such a position when I first crack open their manuscripts, so I’d like to go over a few of the most common issues and how they can be fixed.
Spoiler Notice: The Atlas Six, The Batman, Sandman, Stranger Things 4, and Shadowshaper
1. Hiding the Stakes
The novel The Atlas Six* starts as six misfit mages are approached to work at a super-secret magical library. They have to leave their friends and family behind for a year or more, and they’ll likely be in danger from the library’s many enemies. Okay, that’s cool, but why are they doing this? What do they stand to lose if they don’t? What are the stakes?
For several chapters, there are none. We only have some omniscient narration to convince us that the library is super cool and rad, with the implication being that any mage would love to work there. Those are some very weak stakes, and the characters don’t even know that for sure; they can only take a secretive recruiter’s word for it.
As the story continues, we eventually get some actual stakes: the characters are actually trapped in the library and one of them has to die before they can leave. But this doesn’t help the early chapters, which have nothing important on the line.
Stories without compelling stakes are boring because there’s no reason for you to care what happens. It’s one thing if a story simply has no stakes, but it’s another thing entirely when the stakes exist and the author is concealing them. Sometimes this happens in the form of meta mysteries: the hero knows that these unusually dog-eared books are actually the first sign of a murderous cult, but the audience doesn’t. In other cases, the stakes just show up later: what do you know, these unusually dog-eared books turned out to be the first sign of a murderous cult! Either way, the story is sabotaged for no real gain.
Why Authors Do This
Most stories are about mysteries in one way or another. If it’s not a whodunit mystery, then it’s the mystery of whether a pair of brave hobbits can get the One Ring all the way to Mount Doom. So writers figure, why not add more mystery? It’s similar to a horror movie where the filmmaker has realized that darker scenes are scarier, so they make the scene so dark that you can’t see the scary stuff any more.
Authors also tend to assume that the initial novelty of their premise is enough to keep readers interested. Or they might think their characters are so compelling that readers will be instantly attached. And sometimes they’re right! For readers who’ve never seen a mysterious magic library before, or are really drawn to a collection of misfit mages, the lack of stakes might not be a deal breaker. But a lot of other people will put the book down, and there’s no reason it has to be that way.
What to Do Instead
The snarky option would be to say “don’t hide your stakes” and then recline on a tropical beach somewhere, but I’ll try to be a little more helpful. It’s fine to keep some of your story’s stakes mysterious; the trick is that you also need something compelling to start out with. Then, you can reveal the bigger stuff later, which creates the rising tension that stories need for proper pacing.
For example, let’s take one of Atlas Six’s misfit mages, a young man named Niko. After several chapters in his POV, we find out that he thinks the library can show him how to protect his best friend from a magical monster. Those are great stakes, and if we had known them from the beginning, Niko’s chapters would have been much more compelling.*
At the same time, the author could still have kept their secrets about whatever bigger problem Niko and co. will later discover at the library. What matters is that we have something to tide us over. This is one of the few situations where writers can have their cake and eat it too!
2. False Endings
The Batman’s throughline is a two-part investigation. The first part is Batman hunting down the Riddler, on account of the Riddler’s many murders. The second part is both Batman and the Riddler working to expose the most corrupt figures among Gotham’s elite. Batman wants to jail them, while the Riddler wants to murder them, hence all the murders.
This plot works really well, and the climax occurs when Batman drags the last corrupt elite out of his hiding place, which unintentionally gives the Riddler a chance to shoot the man dead. Batman then captures the Riddler, and they have a falling action sequence in which Batman gives a speech about how they’re not the same: Batman stands for justice; the Riddler only wants revenge. Movie over, right?
WRONG. Instead, it keeps going for quite some time, as the Riddler’s Twitch followers launch a bunch of attacks on the city. This has little to do with the Riddler’s established motivations, nor does it build on previous plot threads. Those have all been tied up already, so instead the movie opens a new one right when it should be transitioning into epilogue.
False endings like these occur when the story has already concluded its highest-tension arcs and then tries to build tension again. Sometimes, that means conjuring entirely new arcs out of thin air; other times, it means turning an existing minor arc up to eleven. Regardless, the results are always disappointing since there’s little chance for these new conflicts to have the same level of tension as what came before. False endings also reduce satisfaction, because they give the impression that what looked like the climax before didn’t actually matter.
Finally, false endings damage the audience’s trust. It looked like the story was over once, and that turned out to be a lie, so why should anyone trust it’s actually over a second time? Even when the credits play or the last page is turned, a nagging feeling remains that the story hasn’t really concluded.
Why Authors Do This
Everyone loves twists, and there are few bigger twists than the story not actually being over. Authors know that audiences like to be surprised, which can lead to discarding any other concerns in favor of the biggest surprise possible. There’s just something very appealing about the hero thinking they’ve won, but then realizing in horror that they very much haven’t.
Alternatively, sometimes a story just has too many arcs to resolve them all in the climax. Sure, the hero can defeat their nemesis and free the city from tyranny, then maybe have time to kiss their love interest, but what about overcoming their fear of horseback riding? And their rivalry with the God of Checkers? And their growth arc about not needing parental approval anymore? And…
This type of false ending typically crops up in longer works, since the more time we spend in a story, the more potential arcs open up. A door-stopper novel or season of television may simply produce too much content for everything to be resolved in a neat package. Forcing all of that into the story’s climax would be a disaster.
What to Do Instead
If your goal is to create a surprise twist, that’s doable, but it depends on making the characters think things are over. Rather than actually resolving the highest-tension conflicts, you craft a situation where it’s credible for the hero to think the conflict is resolved, but your audience knows it isn’t.
For example: Your highest-tension arc is defeating Warlord Evilpants. Your heroes attack Evilpants’s castle, overcome the soldiers, defuse the magical wards, and defeat the giant golem. But Warlord Evilpants isn’t there. Some of the heroes figure that he must have run off, so they celebrate their victory. Then you spring the twist: Evilpants is waiting outside the walls with an army of castle-eating beetles, and this was all a trap! Since you never actually resolved the highest-tension arc, the audience won’t be tricked into thinking the story is over.
If the issue is that you simply have too many arcs to resolve them all in the climax, the key is to resolve some of them before the climax rather than after. If there’s no room for romance, that’s fine; you can have your lovebirds finally kiss in the penultimate chapter, as few things are more romantic than knowing you’re about to defeat a great evil together.
3. The Slow Burn
Episodes one to five of The Sandman are hardly fast-paced, but they at least have a plot that steadily builds until it concludes with Dream getting all his magic items back. Then, episode six is largely filler, while episodes seven and eight are devoted to maybe kinda sorta eventually getting the vortex plot going. There’s some cool stuff in those episodes to be sure: Death is great, and the immortal Hob Gadling has a lot of novelty, but neither of them move the plot forward or contribute to Dream’s character arc. Granted, that’s partly because the show isn’t really sure what Dream’s character arc is, but the point stands.*
Meanwhile, the vortex arc’s first two episodes flow by like frozen molasses. Dream spends most of his screen time looking for a few errant retainers, something that has almost no impact on how the vortex conflict is actually resolved. The rest of those episodes are spent with the vortex herself, Rose Walker. It seems like she’d have to move that plot forward, but instead, she’s mostly looking for her brother, which is tangentially related at best. Through both episodes, you can tell there’s a plot somewhere and that the show will probably get to it eventually, but there’s a lot of time to kill first.
This pattern repeats itself in most published stories that are described as a “slow burn,”* and it’s something I hear from a lot of authors I work with. They don’t want to get to the plot too quickly because that would be rushing things, and this is a slow-burn story! Or maybe there isn’t a plot at all, and the “slow burn” refers to a relationship arc that will eventually conclude once the requisite number of words have elapsed.
The obvious problem is that if a story takes forever to get anywhere, it’s really boring! There’s little tension without movement, and novelty can only last for so long. Such stories depend almost entirely on attachment, and anyone who doesn’t have that attachment gets left behind.
Why Authors Do This
Partly, it’s a case of survivorship bias. If you finish a really long story, chances are pretty good that you enjoyed that story. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have put so much time and effort into it.* This effect can give authors the idea that a story’s length is what makes it good.
Additionally, if a story is good, then attachment builds over time, meaning greater satisfaction once the story finally concludes. The finale of DS9’s Dominion War means more because the heroes spent three seasons fighting for it, and the Adora/Catra kiss is cathartic because of all the emotional drama those characters endured up to that moment.
It’s understandable that authors want that kind of effect for themselves. I would desperately love to write a scene between two old friends who’ve been buddies since chapter one of a five-book series. I can feel the emotional bond just thinking about it! But getting a story to that point isn’t easy, so writers take shortcuts.* They add a bunch of filler to drag out the plot, or they describe two lovebirds going through their normal lives for a few hundred thousand words until it’s time for a kiss. These cheats can certainly make a story longer, but they can’t replicate what makes long stories good.
What to Do Instead
If you want a long-term arc that takes a while to resolve, you need to entertain your audience in the meantime with a series of shorter arcs. This most readily calls to mind a relationship arc supported by a series of external conflicts, but that’s just one version. The anime Fruits Basket uses a series of short-term relationship arcs between its many characters to keep viewers interested until it’s finally time to resolve the long-term relationship arcs of Tohru, Kyo, and Yuki. Amphibia uses a series of character growth arcs to support a slow-burn war plot.
A second option is to construct a plot that simply has a lot of content, so you can easily break it up into child arcs. This works best for plots with really high stakes, as it’s easier to see how achievements like that would take a while. Naomi Novik employs this tactic in the Temeraire series, which features an eight-book arc to defeat Napoleon. Napoleon’s a pretty big deal, so it’s not difficult for Novik to create new child arcs for each book. First the heroes have to stop Napoleon’s invasion of Britain, then they have to prevent him from making an alliance with China, then they have to temporarily join forces with Napoleon to prevent an outbreak of plague… you get the idea.
4. Villain Retcons
Season two of Stranger Things introduces the Mind Flayer, a shadowy smoke-spider that controls the Upside Down. It’s the big bad, with lesser creatures like the Demogorgon as its foot soldiers. So far, so good. Then the fourth season introduces Vecna, the Mind Flayer’s main lieutenant. This also works quite well, as Vecna’s complex plans make him more dangerous than the Demogorgon, but it still leaves plenty of room for the Mind Flayer to take over as the elder-god boss once season five is released.
But then, shortly after revealing that Vecna was originally a human from Eleven’s backstory, Stranger Things pulls a bizarre retcon: Vecna was behind everything the whole time! He’s the reason that critters from the Upside Down keep attacking, and he even created the Mind Flayer! Plus, Vecna is still alive despite being burned, chopped, and defenestrated, so he’ll be the big boss of season five.
What the heck? The big bad isn’t an unknowable alien being; it’s some guy with psychic powers. That’s a lot less intimidating, especially since the heroes beat him up so badly he had to slink away in defeat. And we’re really supposed to believe Vecna was behind everything from previous seasons? If that were true, why didn’t he send more than one Demogorgon through the first gate when he had the chance, since the whole Upside Down is apparently a hive mind now?
Switching villains like this almost always creates inconsistencies, and it’s a major letdown in terms of threat level. If the previous villain was constructed properly, then they’ve established why they’re dangerous over time. Even if the new big bad is technically more powerful, they’ll still feel less threatening because they’re new to the scene. The audience doesn’t know this newcomer, no matter how many evil powers are on display.
Perhaps worst of all, villain retcons prematurely end the previous villain’s arc. Stranger Things had a series-long arc devoted to defeating the Mind Flayer, and now that arc is just gone. We’ll never get any satisfaction in that story, short of another retcon in season five.
Why Authors Do This
A lot of reasons, starting with one we’ve seen before: trying to create a cool surprise. What could be more surprising than revealing that the villain you’ve been building up isn’t actually the villain at all? They’ll never suspect it. There’s also a certain “look how clever I am” aspect to it, since these retcons often involve a villain who’s supposedly been manipulating events from behind the scenes. Some authors just like the feeling of getting one over on their audience, unproductive as that may be.
Another common reason, at least from clients I’ve worked with, is that authors simply get bored of their existing villain. Authors get bored of their heroes too, but the cost of changing out the main character is obviously very high. With a villain, it often seems like they can be rotated at will, since they aren’t the one that readers are experiencing the story through.
Finally, some authors do this because they aren’t sure how to end the story with their current villain. That may very well be the case with Stranger Things. An unknowable elder god is very difficult for mundane humans to credibly defeat, but as we’ve already seen, Vecna can simply be stabbed to death.* I can sympathize, but that doesn’t make the retcon a good choice.
What to Do Instead
The most dependable way to switch villains is to introduce the new big bad while the old one is still around. Once the current villain is defeated, the new one can step into the void. This allows your new villain to build up some threat before they have to fill the big shoes, and it also means that the old villain’s storyline will get some closure, rather than being retconned out of existence.
Sometimes the new villain is physically present, the way DS9 introduced the female changeling* a few seasons before she took over from Dukat as the Federation’s main enemy. In other cases, you only need to introduce the idea of a new villain, the way She-Ra tells us about Horde Prime a few episodes before he shows up and replaces Hordak as the big bad.
If you specifically want an “I was secretly behind it all” reveal, that’s a lot harder. You’ll still need to conclude the original villain’s arc before bringing in the new one, and you need to foreshadow that there’s someone else behind the scenes. Finally, the reveal needs to be meaningful in some way. This often means that the secret villain is someone the audience already knows, but it could be something else like the introduction of a theoretically relevant faction. If your urban fantasy setting hasn’t had vampires until now, and your new big bad is the leader of a vampire invasion, that could do the trick. Just make sure to foreshadow it adequately.
5. Friends & Family NPCs
In the urban fantasy novel Shadowshaper, Sierra is struggling to learn magic and defeat an evil sorcerer. She’s joined on this quest by love interest Robbie, who has two major roles: First, he teaches Sierra about magic. Second, he fuels her resentment over not being taught magic before. She also has a best friend, Bennie, who doesn’t have any magic. Instead, Bennie provides emotional support and reminds Sierra what she’s fighting for.
So far, so good. But then, Sierra’s brother, Juan, joins the story. He has two major roles: First, he teaches Sierra about magic. Second, he fuels her resentment over not being taught magic before. Then her friends Tee, Izzy, and Jerome also join. They don’t have any magic, but they provide emotional support and remind Sierra what she’s fighting for.
You can see the issue here. Stories can end up with too many characters for all sorts of reasons, but new authors are especially drawn to adding characters to represent the protagonist’s social and familial circles. When these characters don’t have distinct roles in the plot, they blur together and get harder to remember while still taking up some of the audience’s precious attention span.
This is an especially common problem in urban fantasy stories, where the protagonist’s friends and family are often on the mundane side of the masquerade. This means they’re far less likely to have the skills necessary to meaningfully contribute, and the story needs to spend extra time bringing them into the magical world. Shadowshaper is a relatively mild example compared to some manuscripts I’ve worked on, where it seems like every cousin and in-law joins the party at some point.
Why Authors Do This
For some writers, it’s in pursuit of realism or a means of breaking the trend of protagonists being only-child orphans with no friends. They forget that there’s a reason heroes tend to be slim on friends and family: in real life, most humans have far more people in their lives than would ever work in a story. Parents, siblings, a romantic partner, work friends, college friends: it adds up fast. Heaven help you if the hero is part of a polycule!
Beyond realism, many authors specifically want to tell stories about community, which is super understandable. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in the USA, we have a huge over-reliance on rugged individualism, when the most important work requires collective action. It’s no surprise that authors want to push back. Unfortunately, stories that go over capacity on characters don’t signal community so much as a faceless blur that follows the hero around.
What to Do Instead
The good news is that if you want to include the protagonist’s friends and family in the story, you can absolutely do that! You just need to be prepared, and the most important thing is to have a plot that’s big enough for multiple people to contribute. Shadowshaper’s plot is serviceable, but it’s also very simple: all Sierra has to do is track down the evil sorcerer and defeat him in a magic battle.* There isn’t much for the secondary characters to contribute except to help Sierra fight some zombies, and that battle feels pretty tacked on.
Instead, what the story needs is more robust steps. Perhaps the villain is seizing control of important supernatural locations in Sierra’s neighborhood, making the main conflict a protracted battle for territory instead of a single duel. That would give the story time to bring Sierra’s friends fully across the masquerade and then have them learn different types of magic to push back against the invaders. From there, they could develop different roles that would make them more distinct. Perhaps Tee is a skilled tactician from her time in the chess club, while Jerome’s first-aid training makes him the team medic.
Of course, it’s also important to make the characters stand out by giving them rounded motivations, developed personalities, and distinctive dialogue. But those considerations can only take a character so far without the foundation of a robust plot. If you want to write a story about community, make sure there’s room for the community to be involved!
Sometimes, the only response an editor can give to a new writer’s impractical idea is “don’t,” but that’s fortunately not the case for this list. While each entry is a common source of problems, there are ways to properly implement them if you know how.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
LOL
Warlord Evilpants – love the name =D
and thoroughly enjoyed the demo of character redundancy in Friends and Family NPCs
Fixing number five sounds like it might fit a high fantasy book series. The stakes of the big problem start small and then get bigger as the problem turns out to be bigger than the protagonist thought.
Haven’t seen the series, but the it sounds like Sandman is following the original comics
Of course, the pacing for a monthly comic or even a graphic novel is different than a TV series
Pretty close. Some things are consolidated – eg, the Corinthian is a more proactive antagonist throughout (he knows Dream was captured and enacts a scheme to keep it that way, and he knows Rose is a vortex so he goes looking for her in the hopes that she can take Dream out).
Episode six combines The Sound of Her Wings with Men of Good Fortune – the first half being don’t fear death (or at least don’t fear Death), and the second being that life is still worth it.
Re The Batman, I think it was a victim of the current fashion of assuming villains have to be right. And therefore having the story work too hard to make them right, getting itself into a corner where it requires a sudden atrocity to make sure they still *are* the villains.
I never liked the “villain has a point” trope
I mean, the villain doesn’t have to be evil just for the sake of being evil… but that trope muddies things as far as I’m concerned
In regards to The Batman (2022), I don’t think it fits as an example of False Ending really. When I think of a False Ending, I think of a movie that reached a good ending point but then inserted something else to keep the story going and reach a convoluted ending. If The Batman had ended with Riddler arrested and their brief face-to-face meeting where Batman gives a speech about how they’re not the same, about how Batman is for justice and the Riddler is for vengeance, it wouldn’t have worked as an ending because Batman’s developmental arc would NOT have been completed. The main ideological conflict was that Batman was recognizing more and more similarities between him and the Riddler and how he influenced and inspired the Riddler in pursuing vengeance instead of justice and how he felt like the Riddler’s more murderous methods were getting results whereas his 2 years of vigilantism wasn’t getting any results. When he fights the Riddler’s goons as they attack the political rally in the Stadium, and he badly beats that one Riddler goon who says, “I am vengeance.”, echoing what Batman had earlier said in the film, THAT is when Batman truly understands that what he thought was justice was in actuality vengeance and that he needed to fundamentally change his approach and embrace justice. That’s where we get the literal Baptism scene where Batman sheds his Vengeance and becomes Justice, by instead beating up people in the shadows, he leads the people out of danger and into the light. It’s rather obvious WHY the Riddler’s Subscriber’s Stadium Attack had to happen in order for The Batman to have it’s proper ending. The movies and it’s explored themes wouldn’t work in any other way because Batman wouldn’t have learned his main lesson.
If The Batman’s ending could be compared to anything, it’d have to be the ending of The Dark Knight, namely how the climax of the film isn’t the defeat of the big bad guy Joker/Riddler but how Batman makes a Critical Moral Decision at the very end in response to Joker/Riddler attacking their core beliefs that changes them forever. The stakes are not simply the physical stakes of stopping the bad guy’s plan but also the philosophical stakes as well. While they do have their differences, the two Batman films are pretty similar in that both the main villains get captured and imprisoned and have a 1 on 1 talk with Batman but them being imprisoned only precedes the real climax of the film at the end. So no, The Batman doesn’t really work as an example of a False Ending.
In regards to the Riddler, I kind of have mixed feelings because while he certainly went off the rails with his methods, his issues with Gotham were valid. He grew up with a hard impoverished life in an orphanage that traumatized him and even when he worked hard and beat the odds to become a financial accountant to make something of his life and when he found out about the financial corruption at the heart of the city funded by the cannibalized funds of the Wayne Family Philanthropic Foundation and tried to expose it, he was shut down. Trying to do things by the book never worked for the Riddler, because he was not of the rich and powerful but an impoverished plebian.
I am somewhat annoyed that the Riddler is kind of another example of the current trend of Revolutionary Villains Who Have A Point but because the Heroes exist to maintain and serve the status quo, the Revolutionary Villain whose goals were correct but methods were extreme, suddenly have to do a sudden and inexcusable atrocity in order to make sure they still *are* the villains. Jessie Gender has a pretty fantastic video “How Superhero Movies Misunderstand Revolutionaries” that explores this trend.
There’s also of course the classic example of Killmonger from Black Panther although I’ll actually say that Killmonger was a better or more justified example. There’s this 10/10 fantastic video essay “Everything You Missed About Black Panther (2018)” by FD Signifier which is honestly pretty damn fire and does a pretty damn great job at analyzing Killmonger and showing how his violent extremism wasn’t out of nowhere but as a result of his trauma growing up. There were so many subtle nuances and symbolism in the 2018 Black Panther film that I just didn’t see or notice. Like in 4:00 of FD’s video, when Okoye, T’Challa, and Nakia entered the South Korean casino, the shot of them entering and the specific placement of them along with the respective colors they were wearing (Okoye- Red, T’Challa- Black, Nakia- Green) to represent the Pan Africa/ Black Liberation Flag colors.
Or how Killmonger always did have some latent fascist tendencies in his radical rise, like how he said that “The sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire”, which is a direct reference to the common colonial saying, “The sun will never set on the British Empire”. Hinting that Killmonger’s proposed violent revolution wasn’t going to end colonialism and imperialism around the world but simply switch things up with the Wakandans on top as the World Police.
Before that, in the Ancestral Plane, Killmonger/Erik’s father N’Jobu told him that the sunsets in Wakanda are the most beautiful in the world – presumably something he told Erik often in his stories. Obviously, the “sun will never set” line is a reference to the British Empire, and when we see London near the beginning, it’s overcast and washed out, with very little color, meant to be a striking contrast to the colorful Wakanda. There’s a sense that when a country engages in imperialism – when its “sun never sets” – it loses its vibrancy, becomes something soulless. Erik wants the same of Wakanda.
Throughout the film, Erik is portrayed facing away from the Wakandan sun. When he first enters Wakanda, the sun is rising behind him. When he challenges T’Challa, his back is to the sunset. Even when he visits the Ancestral Plane, the sky is obscured by the walls of his apartment. Only at the end, when Erik is dying and has given up on his imperialist ambitions, does he stop and actually look at the Wakandan sunset and realize just how beautiful it is, acknowledge what Wakanda would have lost if he had succeeded. All that amazing symbolism and thematic imagery and I’m only now realizing it was always there. I guess I really kind of underestimated the technical story artistry that went behind Black Panther.
On that note, I love that the first scene we see Killmonger, he “liberates” Vibranium, but then steals a mask that isn’t Wakandan, just because it looks cool. He’s got the rage, but he doesn’t have the empathy to apply his anticolonialism to others than himself. It’s things like that that make me go “Wut” at the “Killmonger Was Right” crowd. The movie is pretty good at showing that he isn’t just a good revolutionary who engaged in random acts of violence: his ideology is fundamentally flawed from the start, and the movie shows it well. Also, Killmonger’s methods are derived from his training as a CIA black ops assassin, good at destabilizing regimes but not so good at creating them.
A lot of subtle symbolism in Black Panther kind of just flew over my head that I didn’t really notice. Anyways, I think FD Signifier’s video about Black Panther was very interesting and educational and worth watching.
Ooh that really is some neat symbolism in Black Panther! I already loved that movie, I want to watch it again now with this additional knowledge! :D
Episode 6 is one of the best things I’ve seen on TV or film in a long, long time. Edged out slightly by Calliope. But yes, after episode 6, there’s this vortex and all of that was just excruciating to get into. Once I understood how everything fit together it was great, and I loved how everything ended. But yeah, episode 7 coming off Episode 6 was a definite letdown.
Yeah, I also found episodes 7 & 8… very disappointing.
I loved the new season of Stranger Things– I thought it was all beautifully done, the acting, the storylines, the CGI, and I thought Vecna was a great bad guy. But this just eats at me. Other than the obvious retcon (they retconned how Eleven got her powers, too), it just makes the Upside Down a whole lot less cool. Vecna is just a misanthropic demon whereas the Mind Flayer was literally an evil eldritch god. I would’ve preferred it if he was the Mind Flayer’s main lieutenant.
Lots of great things about it, but the worldbuilding wasn’t one of them.
I think the Vecna thing was at least partially done because the Stranger Things team thought that the audience would find a basically human villain with human motivations more compelling than an evil eldritch god that just does things for unidentifiable reasons. Its why monsters are given some sort of backstory rather than being treated as animals out on a hunt for food. The humans are being attacked because the monster wants supper is not that compelling for many people.
I don’t know, I found the Mind Flayer way more compelling as a consumptive force of nature than as some guy’s pet creation. The unknowability is the appeal of cosmic horror. It’s existential, a being that doesn’t know or care, just consumes. It can’t be punched into defeat. And Stranger Things had plenty of human villains for the heroes to fight, as well, so it’s not like the audience has no villains to latch onto. So defanging the cosmic horror weakens it a lot, in my opinion, and makes a vast unknowable horror into… some guy being mad. Now let’s go punch him! Sigh.
The Mind-Flayer existed before Vecna encountered it, so there’s still room for it to be more independent of him than he thinks.
I hope so! Either way, though, I’m not a fan of Vecna as a villain, but maaaaybe they can pull it off without losing the existential horror that’s what drew me to Stranger Things in the first place.
I *am* a fan of Vecna, but my theory when he first showed up was that he was trying to take over in the Upside-Down after the Mind-Flayer had taken a couple of big hits in the previous two seasons, rather than them being directly connected. I’d have preferred that.
(I also have a theory that the maiden name of the late Mrs Creel will turn out to be Byers. I can’t help but find it significant that the pain Will feels when the Mind-Flayer or Vecna’s power is nearby is in the same spot where One had that implant).
I think they want Eleven to take over the mind flayer again to show how powerful she is (or leave it free to take revenge in a karmic death way) to avoid having a too powerful villain.
Hopefully the gang will have to fight Vecna and the Mind-Flayer on two “fronts,” which will also help make everybody useful.
My theory is that Vecna is inside Max now (Eleven powers had never had to do with life and death, but Vecna’s powers are a lot more undefined). So eveything is posible.
This is the problem with judging mid arc. Vecna is far worse than you realize and it will all make sense. You have to understand who and what he is before you can judge. #it will make sense in the end but it’s not the end
(Speaking as someone who knows vecna from dnd … His portrayal thus far is the tiniest fraction)
I don’t think it’s judging mid-arc, I think it’s judging the concept of Vecna as a villain rather than a monster, where the monstrousness of the Upside Down is what makes it threatening. A human villain representing the UD, whether or not that’s Vecna, decreases the existentialism. But of course that’s just my opinion.
That said, isn’t claiming that “Vecna is far worse than you realize and it will all make sense” the same as judging mid-arc? We don’t know how the arc will turn out, so it’s premature to claim it’ll all work out and make sense.
Also for the record, this character isn’t actually Vecna from Forgotten Realms, that’s just a nickname the kids gave him.
Another motivation for the True Villain reveal: they want to redeem the previous villain, and being able to pass the buck for the old ex-villain’s actions to a different one is a major shortcut on that front. Especially if the villain had any particularly atrocious acts behind them.
Thank you so much for the tips. I was surprised this article included analysis over the tropes itself, what was the authors’ intention behind it, and HOW to not fall for the same mistake. This is not just TELL us don’t, but also SHOW us what to do instead. It’s my first discovery of this site and I’m eager to see more.
I love their writing advice! They’re excellent and explaining things clearly and providing concrete advice and examples.
Here’s one of my favourite blog posts. It introduced me to the idea that showing or telling (from the adage “show don’t tell”) is a spectrum, not a binary. It also has lots of other useful pieces of thought and advice.
https://mythcreants.com/blog/should-you-show-or-tell/
It sounds like the author of this article is the type of person who needs a straightforward: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them” type of plot.
Saying that a hiding the stakes plot is boring without acknowleding that sometimes the point is to learn the stakes with the character, as well as the entire analysis of The Sandman plot makes it seem like the author just wants instant gratification and not to be drawn into a plot. The writing tips for each section aren’t always “better”, they’re just other tropes to use. It also doesn’t help that the analysis covers mixed media without acknowledging that while books have a long time to really explore whatever the author is working towards while movies/tv shows don’t get that opportunity.
There’s a big difference between learning the stakes with the character and hiding the stakes from the audience, which the article alludes to and which they have an entire article on (the meta mystery article that’s linked to in that section.) But even when you’re learning the stakes with the character, the audience will get drawn in quicker and more deeply if they have something to care about. They might be wrong about what’s at stake, or it might just be a minor stake that either gets resolved quickly or gets folded into the larger problem once the true stakes are revealed, but we need a reason to care if a character succeeds or fails at what they are attempting to do.
When it comes to slow burns, the point is that readers need to feel like the plot is moving forward. It can move slowly, but a lot of “slow burns” just through in a lot of filler to slow things down and as a result bring the plot to a grinding halt. Even the most devoted Wheel of Time fans acknowledge that “The Slump” that takes up three freaking books in the middle of the series is excruciatingly painful to wade through and you really don’t lose anything by skipping them. Or think of the infamous camping scenes in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Nobody is praising Rowling for putting a slow burn in there, they’re complaining that nothing happens for chapters at a time.
There should be a warning for spoilers, or a section to hide them in case we don’t want to read them.
Oops, there should have been one at the top for the new works, thanks for catching that!
A great example of ‘surprise, the big bad is actually someone other than who you thought’ done well is in the Kingdom Keepers book series. I read them with my son (they are kids’ books) and was pleasantly surprised by the twists. It’s foreshadowed that someone else is pulling the strings, but the lesser villains are still compelling enemies on their own. And everyone gets a conclusion by the end.
Bold of you to suggest Neil Gaiman doesn’t know how to write.
Kind of joking, but in all seriousness, I think the show (& the entire series of graphic novels you could have looked to) might just not be for you. There is, actually, a ton of purpose to every bit of the episodes you brought up. It just doesn’t come into play immediately and isn’t spelled out. You may as well have complained about the bit with Shakespeare in ep 6 being superfluous – spoiler alert, we circle back to that later on.
Part of what you’re missing is that Sandman is very much about the concepts at play. & by concepts at play, I mean the Endless. They’re each the anthropomorphic personification of the thing they are named for – they are the thing itself. Given that Death is death & Dream is dreams, time does not matter for them. They are of the Endless. For that reason, the story is not linear – time isn’t a linear thing for them.
As far as episode 6, there’s a few main points there that I think you’ve missed. Dream was so caught up in capture & escape & revenge & his tools that he forgot who he is and WHY he is – he forgot that he is Dreams, that he has a task to do, that he exists to serve a function. Death is there to remind him of that by showing us her own task. He also expresses confusion at why mortals fear Death, when death is part of life. Yet, when we go to Hobb, he doesn’t seem to understand why mortals want to live so badly, either. This should essentially dehumanize him – show that we are making a mistake if we think of him as a man. But, he also learns how much he can actually relate to mortals and care about them through his meetings with Hobb – and that character development matters a lot for the vortex storyline.
As far as the vortex episodes go, I’ll try to keep it brief and not spell out every connection. First off, finding the loose dreams is essential to how that arc wraps up. As Dream mentions, the vortex will pull the rogue dreams towards her. And she does. And the fabric of reality is almost changed because of it, but is not actually changed because of it.
Her younger brother is used as a tool by Corinthian to get her where he wants her, her hunt for her younger brother discourages Dream from simply killing her. The dream with her younger brother shows a dramatic shift in Dream’s thought, as initially she is banished before Dream grows enough to accommodate her growth. Fiddler’s Green protects and empowers Rose, and calls in Dream when the time is right. Unity Kinkaid was introduced in the first episode – remember? Honestly, this should have been your first clue that we circle back to things that seem to be left alone initially. Here we see the power of choice, and that Dream is starting to understand the value of life (which he did not in ep 6). The housemates? Well, that would be spoilers, but more of them than you would expect will come back later. Additionally, the housemates exist to illustrate the wide breadth of dreams, and what a problem it would be if all the walls fell down between them. Some of those dreams would not go together well.
Rose herself is a pretty flat character. That is intentional. I imagine you get sick of the whole “the central character is sooooooo special, look how cool they are” thing? Rose is not that. Rose is an ordinary person with ordinary dreams (reuniting with her brother) who was swept into extraordinary circumstances. Speaking of her brother, he shows the power of dreams, right? Even though is life is SO terrible when he’s in that house, he can escape into dreams! He still has some kind of refuge from that awful dude.
Quite honestly, the Sandman portion of the article read quite poorly. It gave me the impression that you don’t like conceptual, nonlinear story, and have therefore branded Sandman as Not Good Enough instead of acknowledging your own personal preferences. If you want to be truly good at critique, you need to learn the difference between “this is not my cup of tea” and “this is bad,” and I think you’ve failed to do that here.
To add one thing – no, you do not have to read the comics to understand what I wrote out. I happen to have read them, my roommate has not. My roommate brought this article to my attention and said it included a poor critique of Sandman that didn’t seem to understand the conceptualism at play, nonlinear storytelling, etc.
I watched the Sandman and am reading the comics. I’m enjoying them. However, I agree with the point this article is trying to make– they’re VERY slow-paced, and I would have enjoyed them MORE if everything was more tightly woven together.
Pointing out something could be better about a work doesn’t mean that work is bad.
Re False Endings. Minority Report is another case in point. The premise/predicament is straightforward – are the precogs reliable? Is Tom Cruise going to end up killing somebody? The film resolves these issues, but then embarks on an entirely different narrative arc in which Tom escapes from prison and confronts the evil genius behind the whole thing.
I only watched one episode of The Sandman. I think maybe this is an interesting example of how what constitutes good story-telling in one medium may not work in another? The core issue was a lack of focus – who was the central character, exactly? Roderick? Morpheus? Alex? Alex is the obvious candidate but whereas the Sandman’s physical dilemma is the most compelling (will he get out?) and Roderick’s the most emotionally compelling (a man willing to resort to evil means to resurrect his dead son – how far will he go?) Alex is dramatically inert as a character. What is his defining predicament? Crucially, none of these characters resolve their issues – ie, make that penultimate choice – as their respective situation changes due to factors beyond their control.
After reading point 5 – can you write an article (or do a podcast) on how to write community stories? It’s an important topic but not easy to pull off.
I’ll have to give it some thought. I’m not sure I have more to say than I mention in this article, but perhaps something will come to me!