L.J. Writes

wrongquestions posted: It's Easy to Be a Saint in Paradise: Thoughts on The Good Place's Third Season (via thisweekmeta)

I enjoyed this critique of The Good Place, but would go further and argue that the problems with the story and worldbuilding in Season 3 are bringing out the worst in its premise of eternal bliss and damnation, and is in danger of destroying everything that was good or meaningful about the show.

( spoilers for The Good Place S3 )

As previously discussed, my first foray into Anne McCaffrey's Pern series was a couple of out-of-order volumes that I found alternately intriguing, boring, and creepy. About twenty years later, I made a second entry the way it should have been all along, with Dragonflight, the 1968 novel that started the series.

My impressions were as follow:

( Two positives, two negatives )

In short, as Julie Andrews sang, the very beginning is a very good place to start. Dragonflight was a better start for the series than my original introduction, and it certainly had a lot of fun elements. The experience was marred for me, however, by the narrative playing favorites and getting into outright rape/abuse apologia. (Yes, it was published half a century ago. No, that does not make it harmless.)

Next up is Dragonquest, which I read once before and have almost entirely forgotten. I don't have the patience to re-buy and re-read it, so I think I'll follow along with Silver Adept's deconstruction instead.

The second half of LoK Book 2 did some really interesting things story-wise, including telling the story of the first Avatar and providing an ending with real consequences, one that set the stage for the next and arguably the best season of the show. There were some weaknesses in the buildup that I think undercut the conclusion, but overall I was okay with the season. I could see its flaws, but I had fun watching and certainly I wasn't enraged by the end, which is always a plus.

( Some spoilers )

For all its imperfections, however, the ending of Book 2 made lasting changes to the world--something Book 1 miserably failed at--and set up the events of Book 3: Changes. For that reason I think of it as a bridge season, and the Book 1 that should have been.

I'm reading this long piece on the Second World War. Somewhere around where the author lovingly describes the portrayal of the weather in the 1943 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Wagner's non-Viking opera, I started to suspect the essay has ranged far beyond the Longform tagline that sold me ("An essay . . . on how and why we forget war"). Still, these war minutiae are so entertaining I don't really care where it's going.

It's certainly a piece that rewards patience. At one point author Lee Sandlin discusses Wagner's artistic intent for Der Ring des Nibelungen and then goes on for 10,059 words about the Battle of Midway, military bureaucracy, Bob Dole, an allied campaign in Tuscany, the conditions of U.S. marines in Okinawa, and Hitler's love of architecture before swinging back to Wagner and contrasting his understanding of Der Ring with Hitler's.

And when it came to Hitler's understanding of his favorite opera, especially in contrast to its creator's, I was struck by a most creepily unwelcome feeling: Familiarity. I think his line of thinking would be familiar to anyone who's run around geek and fandom circles--you know the type, the person who disregards what a work is about to talk about its external trappings as though those are the point--and, far more troublingly, map those points to the real world.

( In which I discuss Hitler and other racists, in case the title didn't clue you in )

The settings and cool powers of genre fiction are fascinating and seductive, I know. I've spent many an hour lost in the world of Middle-Earth and later Harry Potter. In the end, though, the true power of these fantastical elements comes not from being cool and sparkly but from the resilience and morality of the stories they tell. Take away the struggles with power and loss from LotR and you're left with a silly elves-and-goblins story, one with unfortunate racial implications at that. (Arguably Professor Tolkien brought the BNP's accolades on himself, at least in part.) Take out the struggle between good and evil from Harry Potter and you have a bunch of kids waving wooden sticks around. The real magic in these stories is in the humanity of the tales told, not in the supernatural feats performed in the pages. Forget that and--well, it won't make you Hitler, at least in of itself. But you could be missing the depths of your favorite stories, and if there's one thing a dedicated fan can't stand it's missing out.

Plot Versus Character by Jeff Gerke is a how-to book for both plot-centric and character-centric fiction writers to integrate these these two aspects of the craft. I have aired my decidedly mixed feelings about Part 1 of the book dealing with character. However, as expected, Part 2 on plot was much more satisfying. Plot is the author's own admitted strong suit, after all. I'll discuss where I found Part 2 helpful and where frustrations and questions still linger for me.

( Some swell chapters and some big problems )

Despite the book's problems, I think Part 2 is still worth a read especially if you keep the book's overall limitations in mind, or have a good internal filter like recommender inkdust does. If you can winnow the chaff from the wheat, discarding the incomplete or flawed parts while internalizing the good, I think this book can serve as a good guide for story structure and how it can integrate with character development.