3x09, "The Small Dark Movie of Your Life"

[DavidG]

"Relax," I want to say. "You are all in the hands of very good writers. There's a good chance you will end up dead, and tortured, physically and emotionally. Your loved ones may suffer and die. Life may well and trully suck, should you get to keep living it. But it won't be meaningless." You know what is terrible? I'd find that comforting, myself.

I think that's why many of us are here. We aren't going to get the instant gratification of the pulps, but we're going to get something far more precious, even if it cuts deep into our comfort zone (and even if we like the pulps as well).

I don't think Daphne is coming back. I don't think there is a plot device big enough to make her coming back not cheap.

Agreed. Though given this is the PTB, there are likely things at work we won't recognise for months or years.

I've been thinking for a while that it would be useful to start a board for discussing the various trailing threads that we have at the moment. We have rather a lot of them. They might not all really be trailing threads, but it would be useful to get them into one place. What the heck was going on in Not Alone? What happened to Faith? All that stuff.

Certainly there are things that warrant digging into. Not just the factual side, but the mythology as well, we know the team were each different aspects of the Trickster, but does the loss of Daphne and the semi-loss of Hafs, and Sol to lesser extent, change the way we interpret that, and what does that tell us about the meta-narrative.

Singh still bothers me - because his mythology seems so meticulous. Why would he kill the person who listened to him? Why did he kill the driver? Yeah, the anomaly messes with people, but... it bugs me.

It's positively anomalous

[miminnehaha]

In my head, "SDMoYL" is set across from "Any Other Day", like a question and a response. 

Daphne:

There's so much he can control. He knows how to jump from a bridge. If she didn't believe that, she'd have tried to stop him.

But he also knows how not to. What if he doesn't want to wait for entropy?

Ah. So that's what I'm afraid of.

And Chaz:

thinking about Daphne twining a lock absently around her fingers, and you wish, you wish, you wish--

Except you don't really wish you were dead. That's the worst part. You just wish you wished you were dead.

Which is interesting. Really, really interesting.

We started with Daphne, and I identified with Daphne, and I am crying for Daphne (not the first fictional character I've cried over by a long shot, but the first I've actually thought of as a person in real life. Damn this weird, wonderful experiment in fiction-of-the-future!). 

That said, this feels... appropriate.  Also, like that whole team-phoenix thing* is a distinct possibility, and why didn't we realize it before?

*

(edited for brevity)
Lioness
   
Re: 3x09, "The Small Dark Movie of Your Life"
« Reply #212 on: Today at 11:36:47 am »

Dear me. That's giving me plot bunnies. I can imagine a storyline in which the WTF's surviving members need to take themselves out, in order to protect everybody else. And they, and we, find out that it's not the first time. WTF would be a sort of phoenix department, as it were.

Hmm.

[/sub]

[miminnehaha]

The thriving subterranean city underneath the FRTFO bench has shops selling a fine selection if tinfoil haberdashery...

In all the latest styles...

http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/

And a "Build-a-Brainshield" workshop.

[Edmund Schweppe]

The thriving subterranean city underneath the FRTFO bench has shops selling a fine selection if tinfoil haberdashery...

Exceptional Hats. Which have never been observed to consume the brains of their wearers.

[txanne]

The thriving subterranean city underneath the FRTFO bench has shops selling a fine selection if tinfoil haberdashery...

Exceptional Hats. Which have never been observed to consume the brains of their wearers.

They've never been observed to consume the brains of their wearers.

FTFY.

[Edmund Schweppe]

The thriving subterranean city underneath the FRTFO bench has shops selling a fine selection if tinfoil haberdashery...

Exceptional Hats. Which have never been observed to consume the brains of their wearers.

They've never been observed to consume the brains of their wearers.

FTFY.

Pbbbt. :-)

[Lioness]

but this is fiction.  There should be a reason, when characters die. 

Sometimes the reason can be that someone needs to die to remind us that anyone can die. Not a redshirt, because that proves nothing, not a clumsy effort like with Tasha Yar on TNG, because that proves nothing about the quality of the writing, but someone we truly care for, in a way that truly hurts, to remind us that the authors will go wherever they need to to tell the story in the way it deserves.

This. Exactly this.

Thank you.

[BeatriceEagle]

but this is fiction.  There should be a reason, when characters die. 

Sometimes the reason can be that someone needs to die to remind us that anyone can die. Not a redshirt, because that proves nothing, not a clumsy effort like with Tasha Yar on TNG, because that proves nothing about the quality of the writing, but someone we truly care for, in a way that truly hurts, to remind us that the authors will go wherever they need to to tell the story in the way it deserves.

And if that can crank also up the pressure on Chaz, then so much the better.

Why do we need to remember that they'll go wherever they need to go?  Why can't we remember that when they go there?  I'm not going to argue anything about what made the writers decide to kill Daphne.  What I will say is that if they killed her just to prove that they could, I will be extremely annoyed.

[Leah Bobet]

Why do we need to remember that they'll go wherever they need to go?  Why can't we remember that when they go there?  I'm not going to argue anything about what made the writers decide to kill Daphne.  What I will say is that if they killed her just to prove that they could, I will be extremely annoyed.

Not speaking in any authoritative way about this particular decision?

But sometimes stuff happens in a story because that's just how you find out the story goes.

[BeatriceEagle]

Why do we need to remember that they'll go wherever they need to go?  Why can't we remember that when they go there?  I'm not going to argue anything about what made the writers decide to kill Daphne.  What I will say is that if they killed her just to prove that they could, I will be extremely annoyed.

Not speaking in any authoritative way about this particular decision?

But sometimes stuff happens in a story because that's just how you find out the story goes.

All right, I'd like to preface this by saying that I am not referring to Shadow Unit in this post, and am just discussing my ideas on writing in general.

No matter how intuitive the writing process is, stories don't just go ways on their own.  Authors get ideas from whatever story-ether they get them from, and then they accept or discard the ideas.  And, okay, ideas can surprise you and sneak up on you, and sometimes they're hard to let go of.  But I think that a lot of the time, if an author feels really strongly that a character has to die, the death probably does something: enables plot, exacts a price, establishes a certain amount of realism, or just eliminates a character who has nowhere to go.  And I'm 100% okay with that, even if that character is someone I'm attached to.

But if an author kills off a character that I'm invested in, and there's no clear payoff to it, at least in terms of story?  I feel cheated and angry, whether that was just the way the story went or not.  And if an author kills off a character I'm invested in, just to prove that they can kill a character I'm invested in?  I'm going to feel more cheated, and more angry.  Those probably aren't universal responses, but I don't think they're unreasonable ones.

[txanne]

Joss Whedon, I'm looking at you.

[Leah Bobet]

No matter how intuitive the writing process is, stories don't just go ways on their own.  Authors get ideas from whatever story-ether they get them from, and then they accept or discard the ideas.  And, okay, ideas can surprise you and sneak up on you, and sometimes they're hard to let go of.

Obviously I can only speak to my own process, and nobody else's, but mine do.  To the point where once I did actively (and vehemently!) reject a direction for a story, and then it took the back door, stacked the deck for 80,000 words, and then cornered me and made me go there because there was, by then, no other way out.

I was kind of put out about that for a while.

I do get that it's probably a bit weird in terms of relationships with one's own fiction, though, and that it may not have anything to do with anyone else's process, period.

But if an author kills off a character that I'm invested in, and there's no clear payoff to it, at least in terms of story?  I feel cheated and angry, whether that was just the way the story went or not.  And if an author kills off a character I'm invested in, just to prove that they can kill a character I'm invested in?  I'm going to feel more cheated, and more angry.  Those probably aren't universal responses, but I don't think they're unreasonable ones.

Well, no, of course; they're your responses.  For which one should never have to apologize.  Because telling other people how they should relate to a piece of writing is like telling other people how they should relate to their spouse.

[BeatriceEagle]

No matter how intuitive the writing process is, stories don't just go ways on their own.  Authors get ideas from whatever story-ether they get them from, and then they accept or discard the ideas.  And, okay, ideas can surprise you and sneak up on you, and sometimes they're hard to let go of.

Obviously I can only speak to my own process, and nobody else's, but mine do.  To the point where once I did actively (and vehemently!) reject a direction for a story, and then it took the back door, stacked the deck for 80,000 words, and then cornered me and made me go there because there was, by then, no other way out.

I was kind of put out about that for a while.

I do get that it's probably a bit weird in terms of relationships with one's own fiction, though, and that it may not have anything to do with anyone else's process, period.

Well, obviously no one can speak for anyone else's process.  But I think we might not actually be disagreeing.  Because I can relate to that example, and anyway, if a character's death is the only way out, then that's that.  I don't mind that.  It's only if the death is just sitting there not doing anything that I get annoyed.

[el_jefe]

I do think there is a larger story to be understood here.

^^^ That

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

I personally am glad that the PTB didn't chicken out, and are sticking to the master plan despite our reactions.

Although their maniacal cackling as we squirm makes it hard to sleep at night, 

[Korvar]

The thriving subterranean city underneath the FRTFO bench has shops selling a fine selection if tinfoil haberdashery...

I am wryly amused that I spent time and effort getting "haberdashery" spelled right but misspelled "of".

Slightly more on-topic, this is the episode I want a behind-the-scenes/writer's commentary on.