#and the mcu itself makes a point of throwing things out if they're not working or if the ptb simply don't know about it

[bedlamsbard]

one of the things I've noticed changing about Star Wars over the past seventeen years or so -- I originally got into the fandom in 2007 -- is that along with general fandom shifts, there's also been a shift in base lore knowledge and expectations that was not here ten, fifteen years ago, that's partially reflective of the shift in the actual canon. not necessarily the EU to new canon shift, but the kinds of stories and characters that are focused on in the new canon, that then reflects back on what fic writers are expected to know. I don't know how many people remember that Wake and Gambit predate Disney canon; they're not really EU fics, but they're closer to that than they are to the new canon because they are older than almost anything in the new canon. like, what was and wasn't canon LITERALLY changed while Gambit was in progress.

I do think that the pre-Story Group, there was a lot more flexibility in what was and wasn't "canon" as far as fic writers go -- and I do see this in other long-running fandoms too, but everyone else is less insane about it. it feels like ten, fifteen years ago, it was a lot more forgivable both to not know things from canon and to ignore or change parts of canon if you did not. and today it's basically like. a crime. and this isn't the nitty-gritty lore stuff like Darth Malak's home village, but things that are now being taken for granted as being common knowledge that really, really were not ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. and for those of us who were writing back then -- or earlier, I'm sure there's people who were writing while the PT was actually coming out, let alone the older OT and EU fen who have the same problem -- it's incredibly jarring to be ripped for shreds for something that would not have been an issue when the story was coming out. because it wasn't hard canon. because it wasn't common knowledge. because if it wasn't onscreen in the actual films it wasn't considered canon. because if you hadn't read the books/comics/whatever you would simply not know it, and this was pre-ebook, or at least right on the verge of when ebooks were starting to be a thing. you had to have the actual physical books and if you didn't have access to them, you would simply not know the thing. and now you're expected to just know all of that. like, Wook was around back then, but it wasn't modern Wook, and you have to know it exists to look things up on it, you know. back in the day it felt like it was a lot more acceptable to just make things up if you don't know them and today in this fandom it feels like you really really cannot.

went into a fugue state and started rereading Backbone and I'm not sure if you guys are aware of this but this fic is really really long

[imrandymeeks]

Your mind is probably off of Scream, but I figure, why not?

I think something that kind of annoys me about the whole franchise, but 5 specifically, is it's too attached to the first one, and only the first one.

2 has nowhere else to go, and it's very attached to the motives from 1.

3 makes a point of going back to the beginning (which is one of the blockbuster rules you were talking about, not really horror), so it ignores any elements of 2 for 1, and focuses on Billy's indirect origin.

4 remakes 1, so it ignores 2 and 3 to uncomplicate the faux-remake and focus on that element, paying homage to 1

By the time of 5, I'm over it. Billy's daughter? The same house? Randy's niece and nephew? You may as well have skipped any of the sequels, because their impact is insignificant. And none of the sequels ever really matter. Any surviving character outside the trio either dies early (Cotton/Judy) or disappears (Joel/Mark), and the killers 2-4 don't ever get any lip-service.

I think it'd be a lot more original for a new installment to borrow from the sequels rather than the original, reward the viewer for sticking with the franchise despite them not having revered status.

This will have to change with 6, because 5 changed to formula too much with a quartet of survivors, and the protagonist shifting to Sam. Which will break this repetitious cycle, but kind of sucks, because of any sequel to follow, this was definitely the last of whose tone I want repeated.

Also I was thinking Kevin Williamson's writing is under-appreciated, but his ideas for Scream 5 back in 2011 kind of throw a wrench in that thinking.

Yeah, it's not even just the Scream problem, it's a general franchise thing. Like, it's the tug of war situation between trying to move the story forward and trying to keep the elements that worked working still. So lots of serialized media, especially with strong enough studio backing involved, ends up regurgitating itself over and over.

Weirdly enough, the less ambitious series may end up working better, the one that does not try to do arcs and story progression, and generally just doesn't complicate things. Which is to say, the Bond franchise, for instance, has an advantage of simply skipping the installment that didn't quite work and trying lots of things within the seemingly narrow framework of a spy-fi procedural movie series. All while a more lore-heavy, contunuous story tends to repeat itself due to the corporate nature of movies (books and comics, way less so), and where repetitiveness is a feature and a part of the appeal of procedural, episodic fiction, it's really not great for something trying to be an ongoing serialized narrative.

In theory, say, Men in Black or Ghostbusters should be the episodic, fun, disconnected series, but they're the drawn-out, overly devoted to the first film's formula things instead. And Marvel's trick is having everyone believe the MCU is a connected, serialized narrative, while it's actually more on the episodic, supervillain of the week side of things with some connective tissue thrown in for the bigger nerds in the room.

And yeah, I'm not a fan of ignoring everything but the original film, see: Terminator, Halloween, maybe even Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Grow a pair and don't throw away all the wonderful nonsense your series has accumulated over the years, that's a cop out. Incorporate shit, don't ignore it.

I mean, it's kind of a hoarding approach, but hey.