#what this haunting my thoughts for the past two days? not at alllllllllllllll

[whatkindofnameisella]

ha. okay. i know i said i was leaving. but i have been having some thoughts i wanted to share.

i’ve been thinking a lot about what led me to a place of such intense disappointment with ep 118. i think a lot of widojests have been asking themselves the same thing - how did i stack the odds so against myself? how did i get my expectations to such a high place? and for me, at least, the more i think about it, the more i realize my mistake was in thinking of cr as a story.

i mean. no matter how you look at it, you have to admit that from a storytelling standpoint, fjorester is.... strange. a bit nonsensical. a bit tone deaf to the themes of the characters. it’s just kinda poor storytelling. in my opinion. in what world do writers create a world and storyline and characters like c2 and then pick........ uh......... that......... as their romantic plotline? in what world is the damsel’s story about learning that life and romance is not like a book and that embracing her individual identity and strength is something to be celebrated, and then her love interest the guy she met at the beginning of the story who she crushed over and was rejected and ignored by for months, only to be suddenly approached again in a romantic sense for maybe a month? a few weeks? before getting together with him? over the other figure in her life who has been consistently supplying emotional support and encouraging those elements of beauty in individuality that is not pretty or clean, stepping in when the crush wasn’t there and expecting nothing in return? i mean? in today’s landscape? objectively a dissatisfying storytelling choice.

but when you look at it from a gameplay standpoint, it becomes fun. it becomes “aw the husband and wife get to rp a romance together, how cute”. it’s the fun option you pick because screw it, you like it and it’s fun to pursue this romance, it doesn’t have to make sense, it’s a game.

there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it, either way, but one is a fun game with plot and one is a..... mediocre story at best. realistically, a dissatisfying and disappointing one.

and the issue with cr is that the line between story and game is so often blurred. and, you know what, well deserved, because it often does do both. the cast refer to what they do as storytelling pretty often. but the thing is, they’re not really creating a full story, per se. they’re creating an improvised permanent first draft. that’s not the same thing as a story. a story is revised over and over again, looked at from different perspectives, rethought and redone until the ideas are best conveyed. a first draft is the thing that has all of the clunky bits, the mistakes, the things that in revision you look back on and think “wait, with the things i’m trying to convey, that doesn’t make sense, actually. let me do that again.”

cr can’t do that. what they do is what they do. now, there is a really interesting element to that, where if there is something that’s maybe not quite right they have to build from that in order to get what they wanted from that moment. it makes it more like real life. and i think that’s interesting. but it is also endlessly frustrating - how many conversations have i wished had happened? how many dynamics do i feel like are wasted and unexplored? how many plot points are expanded or sped through in unsatisfying ways? in a dnd game those things don’t matter as much. in a story, they do.

i mean, i would be really excited to see where the story would go if i thought that those elements of having to build from dissatisfactory decisions would lead to explorations of the areas where fjord and jester clash with each other. what happens when he wants to spend the rest of his life at sea? what happens when jester stays close with artagan her whole life? what happens when jester wants to be independent and fjord’s first instinct is to protect, not support her? what happens when she wants to be treated like the adult she is and he continues to see her as unpredictable and childish and innocent? if they actually confronted those things i might actually enjoy this development. it would highlight all of the most interesting things about their character arcs and force them to develop in interesting ways.

but uh. i kinda doubt it? and that sucks. i really want to believe that confrontation of those elements could be possible, but the general consensus that ive gotten through internet osmosis seems to be that the cast are happy about this development and parts of the fandom that are also happy feel like those of us who don’t like it need to just suck it up and deal with it, because this is what we’ve got. that doesn’t really scream, “this story is a living thing that could change and is willing to explore the not good things about this relationship that could and probably would break it” to me.

and so, i guess i got invested in cr as a story, not as a game. which was bound to bring me to disappointment some day. you can’t get a perfect story from an improvised first draft. but after everything that this show has done amazingly, it’s just. so disappointing. ugh.