#i'm sorry you gave me an opening and the intense rant just poured out

[absentlyabbie]

@p0cketw0tch replied to your post “who needs sleep when you can stay up passionately venting with...”

Too much Serious! High Drama Soap Opera and not enough Fun! Hijinks Soap Opera

i mean, a huge part of the problem is that they set out to be Gritty and Real and very nolan-esque, and also they were hellbent on oliver queen being the smallscreen batman of their wet grimdark dreams, when they should have just sucked it up and admitted from jump that they were a dc superhero tv show based on decades of comic books ranging from corny to crazy to deep and innovative. they should have leaned in to the tropes and genre flavors available to them.

they didn’t open their world up to magic or metas or aliens until the expanding stable of shows forced them to, and it exposed how badly they’d limited themselves in the fun crazy nonsense they could have been exploring the whole time.

and honestly, where was the fucking creativity? can you, if i put a gun to your head, think of one single thing you could mark as a “visual identity” for arrow, other than being way too often too damn visually dark to see? can you think of a singular example, even one, of them doing something interesting with their cinematography, something that broadened or deepened the tone or atmosphere or characterization with the way they used lighting or shot framing or camera angles or camera tracking?

never once did they do ANYTHING fun with tone and theme. we had no experimental, creative episodes trying on different genres like hats. nothing that was crafted to evoke the sense of a horror movie, no fun “arrow, but the office” kind of bits. no fun playing with point of view!!

i could literally write you an entire episode of the arrow we could have had in which 98% of the episode is from the pov of Random Starling City Citizen and the main cast are largely in background and periphery, and then it recenters in the last 1-3 minutes to tie everything up in a neat and even poignant bow, all while the entire episode serves as a comedic vehicle, a refresh point, useful filler, and an anchor that grounds the setting and our heroes in it. 

because i actually did do that chatting with @obscure-sentimentalist, on not enough sleep and flying by the seat of my assless chaps in a tumblr chat log, so there’s no excuse for why an entire team of professional tv writers couldn’t come up with something as fresh and interesting as that.

we should have had recurring backround randos who deepened the story and made the stakes and setting more real and more firmly tethered our heroes to it all and with purpose, specifically through being background randos.

we could have had a groundhog day episode!! we should have had an episode in which a character, literally any character except oliver queen keeps reliving the same day over and over. again, wacky hijinks and fun set pieces and fabulous explorations of character that can still easily be walked back for your regular storyline!! and all of that with a sneaky sucker punch of serious pathos coming in right at the end.

episodes themed on major holidays. halloween episodes evoking horror movies, or just the horror genre, or an actual sense of horror to pull an avatar the last airbender and play with one-off tonal shifts that expand your world and let you cast your characters through new prisms of storytelling conventions.

they’re based on comic books!! where are the fun, crazy villains we deserved! flash at least got shit like music man, but there’s a wealth of other smalltime characters and baddies the big screen will never have interest in that are just sitting there, free real estate. klarion the witchboy is never breaking big time, but on small screen he could provide everything from thrilling, entertaining viciousness to just sheer wackiness because it’s a magic amoral teenager dressed like a pilgrim who shops at hot topic, nothing would be off limits.

we could and should have had all of this and so much more. cash-strapped shows on friggin syfy manage this kind of refreshing, creative tv by thinking big and even thinking small, but ultimately thinking about having fun. but arrow and, honestly, almost all of the cw dc shows that followed it have this sense of homogeneity and shallowness that gets numbing and bland.

it wasn’t budget that the cw arrow lacked, it was imagination.