#feels very plausible to me as a simple lack of resources situation but its just so fjsonfeocnsornwdo

[gyrovagi]

is it for real the case that if you save treviso the shadow dragons completely fucking disappear from their hideout and you just get quests from bulletin boards but if you save minrathous JUST the crow merchant disappears from the diamond and literally everybody else is still hanging out. help.

[ganymedesclock]

Unrelated to the Lotor discourse but do you think Lotor and his squad might get a redemption arc? Or at least Acxa, since there's the possibility of her being Keith's sister.

I mean, I’m pretty sure wherever that group is going, they’re going together. Lotor’s team has been set up as a one-to-one counterpart of Voltron and remember the last time Voltron thought they’d lost a member for good in s2e13?

“Let’s go down swinging.”

Lotor’s pretty clearly not bothering with plausible deniability with regard to the generals. He’s taking personal responsibility for them in a way that might ostensibly protect them if they all get caught, like how Thace wasn’t held accountable for following Prorok’s orders even when Prorok was in hot water with the empire.

However, I doubt that’d pan out, for a couple of reasons. First, it would hinge on the generals ditching Lotor to save their skins which seems pretty unlike them. It’d be like expecting Hunk to sell out Voltron to save himself.

Second, even if we somehow assume the generals don’t care about Lotor and that Lotor’s somehow a terrible judge of who to trust, he’s kind of the only gig in town they’ve got. The main empire practically spits on them and since they’re imperial soldiers, they’re unlikely to be really embraced with open arms by a lot of rebel groups.

As far as what side of the fence...

I think “redemption arc” is a very simple term used for very complicated and often different situations.

That said, I think that ultimately Lotor and Zarkon have more irreconcilable (or, at least, very difficult to reconcile) divides between them than Lotor does with Voltron.

Ultimately, Lotor and Voltron see eye to eye in a lot of ways. They think that people ultimately want to be respected and acknowledged, and have power to affect their own situations. When Lotor goes to Puig, he superficially comes in like the empire- but is careful to make it kind of a show. Ultimately those hostages have nothing to do with his bargaining. Before the Puigian leader has offered him anything, Lotor already states he intends to spare the people of Puig.

Lotor messes with the empire and he messes with Voltron but with the latter, he’s a lot nicer, even though he doesn’t trust either of them, you get the feeling that he at least respects what Voltron’s trying to be. When we hear him speaking critically of them, he’s accusing them of not being heroic enough- where exactly are they when he’s attacking Puig, and why are they being so sloppy in this fight?

Conversely, when Lotor criticizes the empire and Zarkon, he criticizes the things that Zarkon sets out intentionally to do. He criticizes the lack of mercy, the racist policies, the aggression, the lack of tactical finesse. And he also takes distinctive, vindictive pleasure in screwing them over in a way that we do not see him doing with Voltron and their allies.

Basically, at this point: Lotor respects Voltron’s ideals, but he has more or less patronizing amusement of how they carry it out in practice. Conversely, all of Zarkon’s success and relative competence can’t win any points when Lotor basically abjectly  hates him and everything he wants to accomplish.

I think ultimately Lotor’s not really a villain as much as he’s a rival figure. That he challenges Voltron at their own game, on their own footing, and even to a degree plays by their kind of rules, creates this kindred thread between Lotor’s team and Voltron.

We’re really supposed to see them as two of a kind, and the two comets really drive this home.

Ultimately, if Lotor has to fall in with one or the other, I think he would much, much sooner go to Voltron than he would to Zarkon. Because like... what it’d take for Lotor to buddy up with Voltron is they’d have to earn his respect, and, probably, convince this pretty nervous calculating guy that they’re not about to lock him in the basement of the castle and keep him there.

What it’d take for Lotor to fall back in with Zarkon is basically either Lotor would have to give up on everything he stands for, or Zarkon would have to first pull a complete 180 and become a better person than even his past self really was, and then somehow convince Lotor to forgive him for everything he’s ever done.

One of these is very, very difficult for me to believe happening, and one of these is practically inevitable because Voltron’s gonna keep trucking onward doing its hero thing and they already have a leg in the door in that the first interaction between Voltron’s forces and Lotor’s were Keith and Hunk rescuing Acxa from the Weblum.

Acxa, cornered, and probably not going to make it, was saved by two paladins who knew she was working for the empire and went “uh... screw it,” and helped her anyway. And I really doubt Team Lotor just shrugged and forgot about it afterward.

Roughly- I find it more unbelievable that Lotor’s going to stick around Zarkon any more than he can’t afford not to. His faction has pretty much already splintered off from the main empire in every essential way, they’re just pretending they haven’t to exploit the empire’s resources while they get their own pieces in line.

After that, they’re either going to break loose on their own, or ally with Voltron. Though that I think depends on a lot of future context we don’t have quite yet.

[firstpuffin]

“It’s just a movie”: Does quality of writing matter?

-Note= minor Avengers: Infinity War spoilers.

As an aspiring creative writer who really cares about writing something fun, internally consistent and plausible, the one phrase that irritates me the most is “It’s just a movie” or some equivalent. It’s dismissive of the efforts of everyone involved, and of fiction in general and it is being said by people who spend money to consume this, for lack of a better word, service. Don’t people want quality in their product?

   I’ll try not to be too serious, or rant and whatnot, but this is a concerning subject matter for me. After all, who wants to spend money on something sub-par?

   I have a friend who watches some of the same stuff as I do and he once responded to my criticisms of a character with “well she’s hot”. I was watching one of the Hobbit movies, doesn’t matter which as I found them all terribly boring, with my mother and when I pointed out some flaws that really grated on me, she responded with “it’s just a movie”. I’m pretty sure I was lost for words and it kinda hurt; given all of her support for my own writing, what does she actually think of my chosen path?

  An uncomfortable amount of television that I watch is honestly quite poor and I justify continuing this by saying that I’m learning from the mistakes being made but when I see a fellow aspiring author who loves a series that is pretty terrible, I become concerned. Let’s take The Flash as an example: in the television series that follows the titular super-powered runner, major plot points are also often major contrivances. The events of the second season only happen because the main character goes back on a promise and lashes out at the villain who was about to leave forever, and earns his eternal hatred. This screws things up, killing one of the teammates (which conveniently leaves his wife free to pursue a new love interest for the next series) and allowing for a new villain.

  But okay, he was new to the hero scene and it was an emotional situation so I’ll let that slide. But then he does something equally stupid at the end of the next series. You see The Flash has had time to mature and has discovered both time-travel and its dangers, so naturally when he gets the girl that he has been chasing from the beginning, he proceeds to go back in time to do what he deliberately chose not to do at the end of the last series, potentially losing everything. But you know what? He had just lost his father who had finally been cleared of murder so I’ll, reluctantly, let this slide too. Even if it, conveniently, sets up the events of the next season.

  So we can’t blame The Flash for the events of series four because he nobly sacrifices himself in series 3. Instead, his friends decide to stumble all over his sacrifice and bring him back at the beginning of series 4. This is getting old. All I can say is that at least season 5 isn’t going to be his fault.

  It’s going to be his daughter’s. I guess bad decisions are genetic?

  So let’s change things up and talk about less forgivable contrivances. It is established repeatedly and early on that The Flash can move so fast that he can have an entire one-sided conversation with somebody who won’t have the faintest idea that it has happened due to the speed with which it happened. So how does anyone stand a chance fighting against someone so incredibly fast? Urm… ice guns? No. I mean yes, but that’s because the hero apparently just isn’t as fast for some reason, not because it’s a legitimate weakness. They don’t give a reason why.

  So once these absurd levels of speed have been established and he’s supposedly gotten multiple times faster since, he is framed for murder in series 4 when he finds a body in his apartment with one of his knives stabbing it and armed police at his door. We know that he could 100% clean up the body, have a bath and probably even read a newspaper on the toilet before the police enter his apartment and find nothing there. Does he? No. Because earlier in the episode he told his wife that he wouldn’t run away.

  Do you know what’s not running away? Cleaning up evidence of a false murder of someone who isn’t actually dead so that you are free to save lives and not rot in prison.

  So why is The Flash such a popular show? And it’s not just people like me who watch it because it’s bad, the show actually gets praise.

  This is my question: what actually matters in fiction? Should I write a screenplay for attractive actors and flashy fight scenes and just ignore character development, motivations and dialogue? Or should I continue writing in the hope that people will appreciate the effort I put into making a complex character involved in an internally consistent narrative?

  So I’ve given examples from a series that I feel is particularly bad, so where do I go from here? I could mention how when I was a child I loved the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies purely because it was my favourite superhero, but I was a dumb kid who honestly got a lot smarter after I left school and had to learn things for myself and so that particular anecdote would go nowhere. I could find more examples, particularly from the Arrowverse that spawned The Flash, but what is the point?

I’m not very good at online research, I can’t google to save my life, and nobody thinks that the poor television that they watch is low quality because that reflects badly on them. This means that I am going to have to form my own counter arguments. One, people don’t realise that what they are watching is badly thought out and contradictory and if I am to be honest, why should they? I only do because I am looking for it. Two, they are more forgiving than I am of flaws which is… fair. I can be way too unforgiving. And three, most people aren’t nitpicky bastards like I am.

-Note= I’ve been working on this piece for a couple of weeks now, unsatisfied with my one-sided tirade, and as I often find, time has given me an answer. I googled “do plot holes matter”. A simple solution that took far far too long for me to think of. Still, this gave me some rather useful, and sometimes distressing, opinions on the subject of plot holes and thus quality of writing.

  So, what is a “plot hole”? One of the sources I found took this definition from Google:

“In fiction, a plot hole, plothole or plot error is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot, or constitutes a blatant omission of relevant information regarding the plot.”

To summarise, those moments where you go “that don’t make sense” are plot holes. As I have complained a lot already, I might as well continue for a bit longer. The very first source that I found, and the same one that gave the above definition, provided a list of times where a plot hole doesn’t matter and would you believe it, I disagree vehemently with the first one. The author says that a plot hole doesn’t matter if there wouldn’t be a story without it, which I can accept only in those action films where the action is what is important.

  They use The Matrix as an example: why have a matrix at all? It seems the machines don’t need people to be conscious or something. Unfortunately it has been far too long since I watched it for me to comment, but like an uncomfortable number of the points made in their article, their argument is basically “it’s not real so don’t think about it”. The trouble is that while some “plot holes” are merely people taking things too seriously, an inconsistency in the story itself is worth pointing out. A personal example of this came from when Infinity War came out and people asked “why is Thanos trying to destroy half of the universe when he can just make more resources?” and this could fit into “there wouldn’t be a movie without it”. But this is complete balderdash.

  Ignoring the fact that the makers were trying to stay true to the source material, I always have to ask “when did we see Thanos create anything?” We didn’t. Well, there were illusions, but even if those were physical, they were also temporary. We didn’t see him create and we didn’t hear anyone say that he could. And if those don’t appear in the movie, then we have to assume that he can’t. It doesn’t matter what the source material was (y’know, those comic books where Thanos wanted to date the anthropomorphised Death), but instead it is what the movie itself has established.

  A Quora user called Sam Morris posted an answer to this question which kinda hurt my pride as a writer, but it made sense. He pointed out how it depends on the medium: novels and such need to be consistent because the reader will be paying more attention to the story and events, while television intends to serve a different goal; he describes watching television being like zen meditation, where the watcher clears their mind while the television stimulates the more excitable parts of their brain. On top of this, a television writer has to be able to work with what the producers want and sometimes cannot account for the inevitable holes that appear. This might well explain my problems that I mentioned with The Flash, although I am loathe to admit it.

  Finally, a writer for screencraft.org tried to categorise five different types of plot holes. His first type can basically be summarised with what I said earlier: we can only know what we have been told, with a slice of “roll with it”. His second type covers holes that are inconsistent within the story so again, we only know what we are told, although a better way of saying it in this case could be: rules are made within a story, so anything that goes against those rules is a plot hole.

I could keep going and explain all of his five types, but that isn’t the point of this article. Instead, I will try to summarise everything I have found so far: quality of writing does matter, to different people. An unsatisfying answer, right? One source basically doesn’t care, while another obviously does and has categorised why. I think that it was Mr Morris who really got it right. As an aspiring novelist, I should definitely be concerned about quality because readers will be paying attention; they will notice and be brought out of the moment by a glaring mistake. But should I delve into screenwriting, I should be prepared to deal with temperamental producers and try to write with as few obvious flaws as possible.

  On a more personal note, I feel motivated to keep the quality of my own writing, whatever the medium, as high as my skill level allows. Of course I wanted to anyway, I have long intended to write for children and I feel that anything relating to children should be top quality; high expectation results in high results, and quality writing has been shown to have various benefits on children. Regardless of what you think of The Guardian newspaper, their article on this study provides links on how reading effects children, increasing empathy and is not alone in their findings. There has also been talk of there being other benefits, such as improved critical thinking and can help to deal with serious themes such as coming of age etc.

  So while I was always intending on aiming for quality, my findings from this brief search are reassuring. People do care about quality, and yet are willing to let some flaws slide under the right circumstances, although this does not mean that they do not care in general.

-Note= What with a review of the first two Predator movies in the works, I feel like this blog has been quite negative, so I’m going to try and put something positive out soon. Maybe an Alien review; I watched it for the first time recently and I loved it.