#I was invested in the sophia plot and them finding her in the barn was nuts

[lab-gr0wn-lambs]

twd season 9 intro has no right going that fucking hard with the visuals

[physalian]

On Subversion through Failure (wasting the audience’s time?)

I want to talk about two arcs today, one pretty much everybody loves, and one most every fan complained about before the fandom died. Both have to do with having characters completely fail to accomplish an objective, something they’ve been working toward for chapters or episodes or maybe the whole season.

Honorable mention to Infinity War’s “did we just lose.” IW and Endgame had meta reasons for happening the way they did, not just in-story. Books don’t have to contend with actor contracts and box office sales. Personally I don’t think Tony had to die at all the way it happened in the movie, but they killed him because of ~symbolism~ and everyone knew it would be coming and, well, he can’t play the character forever. Don’t love Endgame.

More to the point, both movies were more concerned with the legacy of the MCU over the best choices they could have made for the characters.

Failure in fiction is tricky to pull off in the best stories with the best of intentions, too. You don’t want the audience to feel bait-and-switched, like they invested all this time and effort into your book, only to have catharsis ripped away for ~subversion~ *cough*Star Wars*cough*

What was the point of all the nonsense if it all amounted to nothing? Why should we care?

So!

—

The Sophia Arc (The Walking Dead)

Almost the entire second season of this show has the characters stuck in one location, a remote Georgia farm, looking for a missing character, Sophia. Not every single episode is spent searching, but the continued excuse to not move on and to not get kicked out by the farm’s owner is that they haven’t found her yet.

Compared to season 1, which was constantly moving, constantly giving the characters new challenges and new locations and had very high stakes, season 2 was much more character focused, with more personal, low-stakes problems. I like character drama, so I didn’t mind, but if you came to The Walking Dead expecting a repeat of season 1, you were understandably disappointed.

The arc ends rather infamously with the revelation that Sophia had died and turned a long time ago, and was right under their noses in a barn. All that searching, all their effort, all that hope of finding her, was for nothing.

This arc had many issues, but some I think about after the fact include:

Sophia was reduced to a macguffin. She was barely a character in season 1 and disappeared too early in season 2 for anyone to care about her as more than just “she’s a little girl, you should care”. So audiences can only really empathize with her mother, who herself doesn’t go searching for her daughter, and who we also don’t really care about compared to the more present characters.

Sophia’s arc itself made no impact on the plot at large. The barn full of walkers did, but Sophia herself was just a consequence. The plot would have been the same had she not been in the barn, because 'you’ve been keeping them like pets' was the big reveal of the episode, the crux of the debate between the Group and their hosts is “walkers aren’t people you need to adapt to the new world”.

The refusal to leave the farm because they were tied to the Sophia search, on top of having many more episodes than season 1, drastically reduced the pacing audiences were used to. One overarching goal that never got any closer is exhausting. They were never close to finding her, even when they thought they were.

Above all, though, I think what damned this arc the most was that it just didn’t matter. The Walking Dead suffered its entire runtime from redundancy and stagnation. The heroes were never allowed to build a community and grow and make any progress against the walker plague before the writers forced a reset, burned it down, and moved them to the next location. Sophia’s death was the start of it all (though it was good for seasons 3 through 5ish).

She didn’t plague the plot after she was gone. Carol (her mother) mentioned her a few times in passing. The only depth the arc had was “life sucks and this show is grimdark hope is for chumps”. It having no point and no resolution was the point.

—

The Day of Black Sun (ATLA)

Between seasons 2 and 3, the hype for the invasion of the Fire Nation took up a whole season’s worth of episodes. Once Sokka learned of the eclipse, beyond finding Appa, his priority one was reaching the Earth King to get the Earth Kingdom in on a massive invasion that could decide the war before Sozin’s comet.

They brought so many characters back for this, spared no expense in the budget for the rendering of the air fleet and the sub squad, had Aang finally back in his Air Nomad colors and shaved his new hair….

And they lost.

They lost so badly, only the kids could escape with their lives, everyone else got captured as prisoners of war.

And that’s not even mentioning how season 2 ended with “The Earth Kingdom has fallen”. Which I’m not talking about here because that’s not quite fitting the trope here. The threat was always there, but the heroes weren’t fighting all season to protect the Earth Kingdom, only to lose. We only knew about it because we got Azula POV working in the background.

But anyway—Day of Black Sun. Why it worked:

We knew it was doomed from the moment the Earth King told Azula, thinking she was an ally. It did not come out of nowhere. The shock just came from a kids show actually going through with it and not having them triumph despite the odds.

The cost was severe, and felt through the rest of the show (which did not go on for 8 more seasons unlike TWD), and the new stakes were felt immediately. Zuko changed sides, the last real chance to stage a rebellion just died, the Fire Nation has confirmation that the Avatar isn’t dead, and now they have a terrorism incident to propagandize, probably making it easier for Ozai to push his “Phoenix King” vision on his war council and his country.

Failure was imminent from the moment they arrived at the Gates of Azulon. The Fire Nation forces were competent and highly skilled, as they should be, so nothing came out of nowhere or felt like manipulative writing. They were simply an army prepared for their adversaries, fighting for their home, on their homeland.

But they did still fail epically. When you were a kid, you weren’t thinking “but wait the season must have more episodes after this, something must go wrong”. Even knowing what’s about to happen during rewatches, it doesn’t diminish the impact of this arc.

—

Last honorable mentions to the season 4 finale of Supernatural. Where Team Free Will's quest to stop the rise of the Devil became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Due to... a lot of things, namely cope and a CW budget that made the visualisation of the whole world ending a bit too ambitious. But honorable mention nonetheless.

—

So if you’re going to have characters blow it, and this is your plan from day one, you should have consequences, good and bad, coming out of it, otherwise it’s meaningless and the audience will feel duped.

“Did we just lose” was a fantastic twist, don’t get me wrong, but, to me, at least, the setup for Endgame and the execution of Endgame was just a little too polished in too many areas, sacrificing meaningful character development *cough*Natasha*cough* for satisfying the giant MCU machine.

Because the dusting certainly didn’t have lasting consequences equal to the impact in the moment. It was just a blip, mentioned a few times and not mattering at all in one show, and then mattering a whole lot in a different one, but largely the status quo returned. Such is the nature of comics, I guess.

Sophia, too, was a great twist, in isolation executed very well, in the grand scheme of things it just didn’t matter. Had she been a Maes Hughes type, haunting show for four more seasons as some symbol of the loss of innocence or humanity or the better days gone by, then maybe.

I like this trope not just because it's subversive, but because once you decide your hero's going to lose, you have a lot more room to write a conflict designed to fail. More competent villains, more desperate heroes, more 11th hour decisions.

Especially when the audience doesn't yet know failure is inevitable, there's something about not having polished, pre-determined victories that can feel a lot more intense, because subconciously, as a writer, you're not making plot armor for your heroes.

[simkjrs]

you're one of my favorite presences on my tumblr dash and i love all your stuff and really want to read your saiki x worm fic, but the problem is i have no idea what worm is. how much of a time investment would it be to catch up on it?

it’s over a million words long so probably a long time. no worries though i have not read worm either. i think that the story is fairly readable without knowing worm, but here’s a quick and dirty guide to the worm universe:

this is a dark and gritty “superheroes vs supervillains” universe. people who have superpowers are known as “parahumans,” or “capes” if they’ve taken up a life of villainy or heroing. 

parahumans get their superpowers through “trigger events,” which are basically the worst/most traumatizing day of their life. you can imagine how well that goes

unbeknownst to (most) humans, the source of all parahuman powers are “shards”, which are portions of these large parasitic aliens who are basically using humans as guinea pigs to find cooler and more creative ways to use their abilities, in an effort to discover a way to escape entropy/heat death. 

parahumans are categorized by type and rating, i.e. blaster, mover, shaker, changer, master, stranger, trump, etc. usually rated on a scale of 1-10 per category. most of them are exactly what they sound like 

the main setting is brockton bay -- city where the government-run parahuman organization, the  PRT, is in a tenuous cold war / standoff with the parahuman-led gangs of the city:

E88 - white supremacist gang. has the most parahumans of any faction in the city. no one likes them. 

ABB - pan-asian supremacy gang, led by lung and oni lee. fewest capes of any faction in the city but people are still cautious of fucking with them because lung’s fight with the endbringer leviathan resulted in the island of kyushu sinking. 

the merchants: they just deal drugs

faultline and her mercenaries: they are fairly well-behaved when not on a job and keep their heads low, so the PRT mostly ignores them. 

coil: aka thomas calvert, a high-ranked official in the PRT; wants to rule the city legally as the PRT director and also illegally as the boss of the underworld. his power allows him to simulate two timelines, and he can choose which timeline to keep. he is the secret boss of the undersiders, a group of small-time criminals. lisa/tattletale is there under duress, and the rest have their circumstances as well. 

the triumvirate (3 most powerful capes in the world): alexandria (super strength, flight, eidetic memory & stupid fast processing/thinking that let her do shit like sensing emotions), legend (controls lasers), eidolon (can have any 3 powers he needs at any given time). 2 out of 3 of them are involved in a shady conspiracy, called cauldron, to save the world at any costs. 

endbringers: 3 giant monsters that take turns attacking cities at regular intervals, costing millions of lives with every single attack. heroes and villains have a truce whenever endbringer fights roll around, so they can focus on fighting the endbringers. 

behemoth: giant beast with versatile dynakinesis, picture earth/ground, irradiation, lava, explosions, whatever.

leviathan: giant beast that controls water

the simurgh: aka the hopekiller -- a pure white angel-like figure. the more you are exposed to her screaming, the more she alters your mental patterns, which allows her to turn people into psychological ticking time-bombs. combined with her potent precognition, she uses this ability to set up “simurgh plots” that cause a lot of devastation across the world. she has extremely potent telekinesis and the ability to tap into the powers of nearby parahumans to build dangerous weapons. cities usually get quarantined permanently if she attacks, in order to prevent her simurgh plots from advancing. 

slaughterhouse 9: a group of 9 parahumans who are infamous for, well, slaughtering. wherever they go, they slaughter people in horrific ways and if you don’t die from encountering their attack, well, you’ll wish you were dead instead 

about the only other thing you would need to know is that sophia hess is shadow stalker, one of the wards in the ward program that the PRT runs for underage heroes. in her civilian identity she and emma barnes bullied taylor hebert (protagonist of worm) so badly that taylor triggered. 

(thanks @meltyfaust for the corrections!)