What fan discontinuity are you (or would you like to be) a part of?
Personal example: It's such a shame that George Lucas never got around to making the prequel films for the Star Wars franchise.
Also: A Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy movie would be awesome! It's a shame no one has ever picked up the rights for that.
Etc., etc., etc.
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141 comments:
SPOILER
I found the ending of Mass Effect 3 to be beautifully poignant, with Shepard and Anderson having their final goodbyes as the Crucible went off. SO glad they didn't introduce a last minute character or tried to shoehorn in some bullshit philosophy at the end.
SPOILER ENDS
Babylon 5's ending was awesome. Too bad they weren't able to spread the whole thing out over five seasons, but the four they made had almost no fat and wrapped up the stories of the main characters well.
Too bad they stopped making X-Men movies after the second one. I would have loved to see the Pheonix Saga on the big screen.
I'll join you in both of those.... :-(
Also, the Mercedes Lackey short story where she kills off all her own continuity to turn the Heralds of Valdemar into a Scooby-Doo episode Does Not Exist. Right now, I'm only buying the Valdemar anthologies for Tanya Huff's entries.
I suspect (from what friends have told me) that as I progress through the Ghost Whisperer series, the final season will also Not Exist.
YES to all Asha and Ana (I never got into Mercedes Lackey so I can't really comment there).
If only BSG hadn't been cancelled after the first season. That show had so much promise for a well-constructed, coherent ending. (Some episodes from the later seasons might exist as well, but definately not the final season.)
Er…I kind of liked the Hitchhiker's movie.
Also, I thought the Mercedes Lacky Scooby-Doo story was funny. (I haven't much liked the Valdemar short story anthologies in general though--too much variability in the quality. The story about the firecat and the priest was pretty good.)
Do I have to hand in my geek card now?
Do I have to hand in my geek card now?
My goodness, no! I don't know of a single Discontinuity that EVERYONE agrees on. :)
(Extremely minor Dark Tower spoilers below)
I prefer to pretend that the last three books of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series didn't happen. So much wasted potential, it was really really sad to read them. I'm into postmodern concepts in literature, but writing yourself into a story and then explicitly calling attention to your deus ex machina as an author ex machina ... a bit over the top. It really took me out of the story.
I also liked the HHGttG movie, even though most other fans of the books hated it. I love Martin Freeman, though, and I also already liked Zooey Deschanel and Mos Def, so I was predisposed to liking it. I'm one of those people who really loves to see their favorite stories reimagined a bit, too.
@Asha: Marauder Shields killed Shepard during the Battle of London. True story. Either that or the whole thing is subject to an unreliable narrator, who may or may not imagine he's Buzz Aldrin.
Generally, I'm partial to a number of them. There is no Moriarty in the new BBC Sherlock Holmes series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, just some Irish guy who wandered onto the set and wouldn't leave (actually, I'd go even further and suggest that the BBC ceased transmission in about 1997, but there you go). I live in a world where there were only two seasons of Dexter, three seasons of House, no True Blood and the The Walking Dead was a ninety-minute tv movie where the hero got eaten the moment he set foot in Atlanta.
I'll stop now, because I could go on for years. Seriously.
It's hard for me to figure out exactly which Star Wars novels Do Not Exist, because my favourite of all favourites, the inimitable Traitor, occurs 3/4s of the way through their five-year SharkJumpStravangaza, and has one of the previous unconscionably bad narrative decisions as a major plot point. I can safely say that post-Traitor, only a handful of plot points Really Happened, like Jaina Solo and Jagged Fel hitching up. Jacen most definitely did not forget the whole @#$%ing point of what he learned in Traitor and thus go evil, and even if he had, Mara Jade would have taken him down like Christmas lights in July, rather than getting fridged by narrative fiat. Honest to @#$%, who did they put in charge of this stuff?
(For some reason, I'm still trying really hard to avoid ME3 spoilers, despite not even having played the first game. I think the fact that the ending, whatever it is, has made so many people furious suggests that it's something I'm going to enjoy, some day. Swift scrolling and eye-averting has allowed me to thus far avoid learning anything about it except that it involves someone named Shepard, which I probably could have guessed.)
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So, this being an open thread, I introduce a parallel subject: Camp NaNoWriMo's next session begins in two weeks. I'm signed up again - anyone else planning to try to write a 50K novel in a month?
There's a second nanocamp in August, which I will also be taking on (because apparently bar graphs motivate me), and so while I've promised my brother that I will finally get around to properly writing the sci-fi story we've had schemed for years, I'm not sure if I'll do it first or second, and I still have like 18 other ideas for what to write in the other month. Brain is full now.
Hell, yes to the lack of prequel trilogy.
Also, Last Crusade was a fine ending to the Indiana Jones trilogy.
A pity there's only one season of Heroes. They might have had an interesting take on the super hero team idea now that the heroes were all together.
The over-preachy season of MacGyver doesn't exist, likewise the weirdly dark episodes of Simon and Simon.
Also, there are only two Vicky Bliss books, I think.
Given the state of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the radio plays and the books and the games and the movie and et cetera and stuffnsuch, is it even possibly to refer to 'canon'?
Also, Last Crusade was a fine ending to the Indiana Jones trilogy.
Normally I'm conscious of my discontinuity, but I am literally confused for a moment when people suggest there is a fourth Indiana Jones movie. I saw it in theatres, and did not completely detest it, but it utterly failed to establish itself in canon for me.
I waffle back and forth about my discontinuity because on the one hand, if there was no new series of Doctor Who, it would have taken me longer to find the old stuff and watch it. But, on the other hand, I miss Gallifrey. So I spend about half of my time pretending that there was no televised* Doctor Who after 1996.
Sometimes, I pretend there was nothing after 1989. But that's mostly because of my bone-deep refusal to believe that Ace ever left the TARDIS.
*You can take my Big Finish audioplays when you pull them from my cold dead hands. Which, as mine are all mp3 files, would probably take some doing.
Given the state of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the radio plays and the books and the games and the movie and et cetera and stuffnsuch, is it even possibly to refer to 'canon'?
For me, it's the Dove Audio books narrated by Adams and listened to about a billion times from when they were given to me as a kid. (I even burned the tape to MP3!)
Speaking of book franchises, about 2/3 of the Aliens novels do not, actually, exist.
The Star Wars EU Swarm War trilogy, in which everything beautiful and awesome is turned into cheap narrative toys in the hands of a hack author, and they undo a bunch of characterization because said hack author apparently forgot about it, never happened.
...Nope.
It's also too bad we never got more information about the Chiss, because they seem to be just completely scary-awesome, but they can have their own series without the %(#$%*( Killiks.
It's such a shame they never made a sequel to The Matrix, isn't it? And I don't know what you're talking about, there's no third X-Men movie.
I'll second BSG, though I still like it to halfway season 3 or so. And the rest was tollerable until the very last episode.
And man, I was really looking forward to see how Mai HiME would end. Shame they never made a last episode. (Spoiler warning for the uninitiated: The entire second half of the series did an IMHO overal good job showing the relations between the characters that were being build in the first half getting torn down, untill only two of the protagonists were still alive, sane and not evil, and both going of to their respective doomed last stands. By the end of the last episode, everyone is alive, great friends with no bad blood between them and completely and utterly happy with everything in their lives. Even the two ancient enemies, one a loyal servant of the Big Bad and the other one who sought a way to live long enough to stop him, essentially go 'GG, tnx-bai' and leave together.)
Babylon 5's ending was awesome. Too bad they weren't able to spread the whole thing out over five seasons, but the four they made had almost no fat and wrapped up the stories of the main characters well.
It is worth noting that apparently the reason for that is that they were told, "Season 4 will be your last season, five year plan be damned. So wrap everything up right now, and all of the new stuff you were planning on gradually introducing so that when it came up in season five everything would flow smoothly and make sense? Don't."
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As far as I am aware there was only ever one Pirates of the Carribien movie, the vast majority of "Enterprise" did not exist, and there definitely wasn't some painfully bad holodeck thing supposedly set during Pegasus, all Hitchhiker stuff after Marvin* is but a fever dream best forgot. There was something else I was going to say, and it was important damn it, but it's non-existence is so strong that I can't hold it in my mind long enough to type it out.
Trying to recapture that thing has killed off most everything else I might say.
It is a shame that there hasn't been a new Star Trek movie since First Contact. Those things were fun. Well, the even ones at any rate.
* Wikipedia tells me that the end of Marvin was in 1984.
As far as Star Wars goes, I point you to the Machete Viewing Order: http://static.nomachetejuggling.com/machete_order.html
Which is 4, 5, 2, 3, 6. And it re-forms the story into Luke's arc, with a flashback right after he discovers that Vader is his father, explaining how that happened.
So, this being an open thread, I introduce a parallel subject: Camp NaNoWriMo's next session begins in two weeks. I'm signed up again - anyone else planning to try to write a 50K novel in a month?
I have no idea what you;re talking about. (NaNoWriMo exists outside of November?) Care to explain?
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Given the state of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the radio plays and the books and the games and the movie and et cetera and stuffnsuch, is it even possibly to refer to 'canon'?
The radio series is canon in one universe.
In the other the first three books are definitely canon, the fourth book of the trilogy is disputed in some areas, and Young Zaphod Plays it Safe is generally classed as deuterocanonical. The video game (text adventure) is, I think, apocryphal. Possibly midrash, but really I just don't know the scholarship on it all that well.
Starship Titanic is of a separate religion entirely. Yes, the name is briefly mentioned in the canonical texts, but everything else is clearly part of a later seperate tradition outside of the Hitchhikerism mainstream. Thus it make no sense to think of it as being canonical or not. It would be like asking if the Quran were in the Christian canon, no it is not but it's still in somebody's canon. The two separate accounts of the events surrounding the Starship (one written, the other interactive) are quire divergent and cannot be easily combined. Some ignore this problem, combining them like the two creation accounts in genesis. Others privilege one account over the other. (Sometimes to the point of excluding the non-privileged account.) Thus we can see the reason for the three major schools of Starship Titanicism. To understand the many subsects of each school would require more space than currently advisable.
The television series, and the status thereof, is not well attested. It is believed that some accept it as a useful apocryphal work that can shed light on the Truth while not, itself, being factually accurate, and that others reject it outright, but it is possible that the most widely held position is a simple lack of knowledge that the text (if VHS can be called text) actually exists.
Thus we have covered all of the incarnations of the guide, but it remains important to do one more thing. What does it mean for something to be canon in one universe but not another? For those who hold the books as canonical, what becomes of the radio series? Some simply ignore the existence of the radio series, but for others it is a source of deep truth. Perhaps their Arthur Dent did not travel to Brontital, but a deeper understanding can still be gleaned by studying the story of the Arthur Dent who did travel there.
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It's such a shame they never made a sequel to The Matrix, isn't it?
I think I'm required to link to this.
I've always wondered why they skipped from Highlander 1 to Highlander 3.
It's such a shame they never made a sequel to The Matrix, isn't it?
I always find it a bit confusing when people lump Reloaded and Revolutions under the same discontinual tarp. Revolutions was awful (I went back and watched it again, years later, to see if I was just making up how bad it was, and discovered that it was actually worse than I remembered) but Reloaded seemed like a worthy entry, attempting both spiritually and narratively to continue the style of the original. Do folks really see them as being equally bad, or is it just that it would be awkward to try to distinguish 'flawed and unfocused' from 'plotless CGI clusterfrak' when dismissing them both?
I have no idea what you;re talking about. (NaNoWriMo exists outside of November?) Care to explain?
It's newer than NaNo proper, and less popular, but it's the same general idea, and held in two summer months (last year it was July and August, this year it's June and August). It mostly uses the same website (for forums and such) but you can also sign up to join a 'cabin' of six people, and get a private discussion board for just your group.
http://campnanowrimo.org is the thing you want.
To be honest, I've never understood either. Reloaded seemed like a lot of things where you could see the potential awesome, and be annoyed that it still managed to miss. Revolutions, honestly, I have trouble remembering half the time. I find myself shifting plot points and conversations from Reloaded into Revolutions for apparently no reason other than to have something there to hold onto because in the end there's really not much there.
And what is there tends to be cliches.
Still, whether judged against The Matrix or judged against what it could have been in itself, Reloaded did fall short, and I think that that's probably where the lumping together is coming from. Reloaded failed to live up to the original, and failed to live up to what seem to have been its own internal standards, and so if you're trying to imagine the Matrix Trilogy that should have been, Reloaded probably shouldn't have been there. Thus it can be excised along with Revolutions.
All of that that said, there were definitely things that I found to like in it.
@ Susan B - I agree with you about the variability. Some of them, you read and wonder WTF does this have to do with anything? I.E. if it doesn't answer any questions about the universe, doesn't feature anybody in the universe, doesn't feature any concepts already existing in the universe, and doesn't explain anything about the universe, why is it posing as fiction related to the universe?
And the less said about the Companion 'vacationing' at a modern-day ranch, the better.
On the other hand, you do still get some really interesting pieces - Tanya Huff's stories, also a series by an author I can't remember but which features a changling who'd been caught in the Mage Storms; most of them having to do with Karse have also been pretty good.... So it's not really as bad as I said at first. I do think Lackey is losing her interest in Valdemar (as well she might after, what, 20+ books?) but not willing to give it up yet, and the quality has gone down correspondingly.
Ooh, ooh, I finally thought of one!
I had this terrible nightmare in which my favorite episode of (the new series of) Doctor Who was replaced with a horrible monstrosity called "The Lazarus Experiment", in which bad science and an anti-science message combine to tell the story of a guy who, through his newly invented de-aging machine, turns himself into a sort of "alternate evolutionary pathway" giant scorpion! I know, who would ever think to write such an episode? The worst part was realizing that in my frequent re-watchings of the series, I couldn't just skip over the episode since it contains some plot-relevant stuff for the longer story arc. Fortunately, I woke up and watched the real episode, in which the world is taken over by aliens who want to ban all knitting and the Doctor and Martha save the world with the help of a psychically-infused piece of yarn from the Fourth Doctor's scarf in a glorious display of pure awesome!
Also, I had another nightmare where I was watching Star Trek: Voyager and saw Janeway and Tom Paris de-evolve into giant newts. It's funny, I'll accept just about any kind of bad science in my favorite shows as long as it's not too egregious (and I'll give Doctor Who a free pass for even worse science than most), but the one thing I just cannot stomach is misunderstandings of evolution.
While I'm complaining about episodes of Voyager (I've been working my way through the series for the first time on Netflix), how about "Sacred Ground", in which Janeway gets brainwashed via lack of sleep by a bunch of primitive religious cultists into believing that scientists don't know anything, and said cultists withhold the cure for poor Kes because they think acting as smug as possible and teaching that silly "scientific" captain a lesson is more important than the life of a person. The writers put the most obnoxious technobabble imaginable in the mouth of the Doctor just to make him look silly, and a bigger bunch of strawmem I've never seen. I was so insulted by the episode that I couldn't bring myself to go back to the series for a month afterward.
DC never did anything with any of the Young Justice characters after their eponymous series ended. And for some reason, they actually decided to stop publishing comics at all last year.
In a bit of doublethink, I happen to think Spider-Man comics have been uniformly excellent for the past two years or so, even though I happen to know that no story ever ending the marriage between Peter and Mary Jane was ever published.
Ah, super-hero books.
Also, I had another nightmare where I was watching Star Trek: Voyager and saw Janeway and Tom Paris de-evolve into giant newts.
If I recall that particular mass hallucination correctly, it wasn't even de-evolving, but in fact super-evolving, moving ahead along humanity's future evolutionary path... or something? Whatever. They should have just said that Tom crashed his ship into Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the story was Lovecraftian horror. They were already on the right track.
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Reloaded failed to live up to the original, and failed to live up to what seem to have been its own internal standards, and so if you're trying to imagine the Matrix Trilogy that should have been, Reloaded probably shouldn't have been there.
I have a hard time picturing a Matrix trilogy that didn't feature a Reloaded-ish installment. I mean, the first one ended with the implication that everything was going to change, immediately, now, and that would be one way to make a sequel - the end of the world, Revelation/Apocalypse-style, with people either rallying to Neo or the machines while existence itself gets torn apart, though then we'd just be getting to the overt and questionable Christian imagery even faster, and I'm not sure what third act could follow that.
The original was very much driven by two things: legitimate uncertainty (not knowing what the Matrix is, etc) and free will vs totalitarianism vs predestination philosophical leanings. And since they can't neuralyse everyone into forgetting what the Matrix is, a sequel that was trying to replicate the original experience was already in serious trouble. I thought they handled that very well by trying out the story of "Hurrah, we have the Chosen One! ...What exactly is it that the Chosen One does now? ...Anybody?" And the reveal was legitimately surprising, and I think a strong natural progression for the themes they had been playing on for the last several hours.
On my scale of 'things that would benefit from rewriting', where the low end is represented by Matrix Revelations, one step above that we've got Phantom Menace, and the next step up is where I'd put things like Reloaded and Return of the Jedi.
So, this being an open thread, I introduce a parallel subject: Camp NaNoWriMo's next session begins in two weeks. I'm signed up again - anyone else planning to try to write a 50K novel in a month?
Memememe. As usual, I'm in agony over what plotbunny to try my hand at. I did the 2010 NANO, and won, that was my (still unfinished and unedited) mystery set in the Jewish community of Winchester in 1203.
I tried again this past November, but was working about sixty hours a week then, and flopped after 11,000 words. That was another historical mystery (they're my main thing), this one with three nineteenth-century lady lawyers from San Francisco as joint protagonist. Part of the problem with that one was my lack of planning--still need to figure out what's happening with that plot--but part of it was research. IT'S TOO HARD TO WRITE HISTORICAL FICTION ABOUT A TIME WE HAVE NEWSPAPERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS AND STUFF FOR. WE KNOW TOO MUCH STUFF.
So now I'm considering my options. Too many plotbunnies! I swear, they BREED.
The other problem with my ninteenth-century plot was that it started to be about Chinese prostitution in the City back in the day, and one of my protagonists is an activist trying to shut the brothels down. I did a lot of reading, and got somewhat tangled up in questions about race and privilege and whatnot, and have had to step back and do some thinking about how I want to make this work.
I did, however, write a draft of a scene where some Irish priests burn a brothel to the ground (this is San Francisco legend), and my dad gave it to his priest, who apparently enjoyed it...so there's that.)
Oh, you've all mostly mentioned mine. Highlander--although I don't acknowledge the third movie either.
And Star Wars of course.
I also don't acknowledge "Irish Tweed" among Andrew Greeley's Nuala Anne McGrail books, but I don't know if anyone here follows those.
I think I just have the one.
Whenever we talk about The Legend of Korra some people speculate that it might have been possible to make Avatar: The Last Airbender into some kind of big-budget movie trilology deal. I don't think it would work, but with really good writing and a committment to the the Asian-inspired world, who knows?
Also I live in a world where there totally is a Book 3 in The Spirit Binders series by Alaya Dawn Johnson...and then I wake up and weep again.
chris the cynic: The television series, and the status thereof, is not well attested. It is believed that some accept it as a useful apocryphal work that can shed light on the Truth while not, itself, being factually accurate, and that others reject it outright, but it is possible that the most widely held position is a simple lack of knowledge that the text (if VHS can be called text) actually exists.
Really? It was on fairly often when I was a kid...oh, right, it being on at 2am would matter availability-wise to a lot of people, wouldn't it. Fair enough.
Not having seen it in ages, I just remember the Scrabble scene and thinking the theme song was pretty.
Susan B: a horrible monstrosity called "The Lazarus Experiment", in which bad science and an anti-science message combine to tell the story of a guy who, through his newly invented de-aging machine, turns himself into a sort of "alternate evolutionary pathway" giant scorpion!
blah blah blah indefinite lifespans (conflated with immortality) are immoral blah blah death is what makes us human* blah blah Scorpion King blah. Next!
(I don't know, though, an indefinite lifespan might be worth becoming the Scorpion Queen. Especially if the whole feeding-off-others'-lifeforce thing can be satisfied by livestock, which was never tried.)
*Tell that to my mom's dead cats.
Fortunately, I woke up and watched the real episode, in which the world is taken over by aliens who want to ban all knitting and the Doctor and Martha save the world with the help of a psychically-infused piece of yarn from the Fourth Doctor's scarf in a glorious display of pure awesome!
That sounds more like so-bad-it's-good than proper good to me. Maybe it really is good and it's just hard to capture its awesomeness in description?
We are told that the humans rarely remove people above a certain age because after some undefined point it's simply too hard to let go. Thus if one wants to liberate all of humanity from the matrix it is possible that a first step would be, simply, to unplug all of the children. Everyone young enough to let go, in one swoop. Perhaps certain older people who, as a result of ideologies that place their focus elsewhere, are deemed more able to let go of the world they know than the general population.
So that would be the Rapture and then after that... who knows? Certainly all of the physical objections to the prophecy checklist can be hand-waved away if it's just a computer program whose laws can be rewritten at will.
None of which is what I was originally going to say.
My original point is that I agree that if you're going to have a series of films, even a series as short as three, instead of a stand alone you probably do need something Reloaded-like, perhaps even something that sticks pretty close to Reloaded, but Reloaded itself is at best an pale shadow of what the movie should have been.
That sounds more like so-bad-it's-good than proper good to me. Maybe it really is good and it's just hard to capture its awesomeness in description?
Actually, looking at the two episode descriptions side-by-side, they do look about equally awful, don't they? But I think the scorpion story could have been good if they'd ditched the "blah blah blah indefinite lifespans (conflated with immortality) are immoral blah blah death is what makes us human* blah blah Scorpion King blah" angle and the "alternate evolutionary pathway" garbage. I think sometimes it's hard to tell from a description whether an idea is really really good or really really bad: it all depends on who's writing/acting/directing it. For instance, "girl is chosen to fight vampires and demons while having a steamy romance with a vampire with a soul" gets a great big "meh" from me, but it was the writing that got me totally hooked.
As for my proposed episode to replace "The Lazarus Experiment", well, I'm extremely fond of knitting AND I always wish New!Who would include a few more direct references to the old series, so an episode involving knitting aliens and The Scarf would get more than a few "squee"s from me if it actually existed, bad or not!
Whenever we talk about The Legend of Korra some people speculate that it might have been possible to make Avatar: The Last Airbender into some kind of big-budget movie trilology deal. I don't think it would work, but with really good writing and a committment to the the Asian-inspired world, who knows?
Wow, I forgot about Avatar: The Last Airbender! I agree, a movie or three would be awesome! I just know they'd keep the humor and warmth of the series intact, too!
I don't really care for anything in the Artemis Fowl series after the book with the demons and the halfway interesting romantic foil for the main character.
Forgetting about interesting plot lines and character developments in favor of heavy-handed environmental messages and trite romance options; bad medicine.
Yeah. Nevertheless, I am curious about the next one, partly because rubbernecking and partly because I made a bet with nobody in particular Orion dies offscreen before the beginning of the book, and I want to know if I won. (I was surprised he even survived to the end of the previous book.)
Beast Wars seasons 2 and 3 were 26 episodes each, and the writers were not affected by Furman's apparent hypnotic charisma (+5 against male geeks) and thus were not dazzled by his incoherent semimystical bullshit. Also, there was no sequel series.
*fully anticipates nothing but crickets on this*
chris, while that entire sequence is obviously made entirely of the best parts of everything, I have to take note of this:
Janeway: So put that together and we get an improbability factor of ... well it's pretty vast, but it's not infinite. What point did he actually reach?
Tores: Infinite improbability.
Janeway: Which leaves us a pretty vast improbability gap still to be filled!
As being on some superlative level beyond best. What parts of Japanese culture might term S-rank best, perhaps. Because Janeway was supposedly supposed to be a science wonk, and I would love it if she actually said things like that, without any indication that it might be confusing to anyone.
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*fully anticipates nothing but crickets on this*
I can't substantively contribute, I'm afraid. I stopped watching when it became clear that Tigatron and Airrazor were going to remain guest stars instead of the eminently sensible course of making every episode about them, all the time.
I was really looking forward to see how Mai HiME would end. Shame they never made a last episode.
THIS SO HARD.
I wish they'd finished up Kashi-Mashi, too. They were building so nicely toward a world where all three protagonists could go live in a happy triad and not care what anyone else thought of them.
(Minor spoiler: They did that thing where they make two entirely viable romantic pairs, suggest that maybe they should be a trio instead, go LOL NO and collapse into a pair with a sad third, receive massive fandom backlask, and then SWITCH WHO THE PAIR WAS. Ep13 canonically Does Not Exist in my house, which is mostly SixSpouse's insistence.)
I agree that it would've been nice if they'd made an AtlA movie. You'd think they could pull off some pretty spectacular special effects, and it could
I agree it's a shame that there wasn't a prequel trilogy for Star Wars, but maybe that's for the best. I'd hate to see what would happen if Lucas started feeling like he needed to tinker with the trilogy we have. He might end up replacing the force ghost of Vader with the prequel trilogy actor that Luke would never recognize, or something.
Man, you know what would have been awesome?
A continuation of the Dune series of novels. I mean, the sixth book ended in a pretty epic cliffhanger, but the author died before he could write another.
So wouldn't it be great to get some awesome big-name author to write a sequel? Maybe even some prequels too, why not.
What? "How aboutKevin J. Anderson?" AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! No, that would be silly.
I'm just glad that Bethesda keeps making games in new and interesting worlds. Visiting the Summer Isles and seeing them really deconstruct those Redguard stereotypes was totally worth the wait. (Of course, what were they going to do - remake a northern European fantasy setting, complete with "grit"? Haha.)
Likewise, I'm just grateful Whedon didn't just randomly put major female character "on an island" to make sure she never made it into his movie sequel. I think he's really coming out of his hipster sexist phase.
Will Wildman: thought I was the only one who felt that way about Traitor. Totally one of my favorite books, completely impossible to recommend to anyone.
I'm so glad Neal Stephenson never wrote a thousand-page book devoted to mocking Wittgenstein.
And while I'm sad we never got any more X-men stories, I think ending the book's run after the conclusion of the Dark Phoenix saga was a wise move. There's no way to top that without increasingly contrived threats to the universe that only earthlings can stop, and no one could possibly expect that to make any sense.
I think that it is terribly hard for people to accept, on a real, deep, gut level that evolution does not have a long-term plan, or even a short-term plan, and it is not taking us somewhere specific. Evolution does not care if homo sapiens sapiens gets smarter, or loses its little toe, or back teeth, or gets less hairy, or becomes less religious, or becomes one with all things. (The term 'spiritually evolved' has nothing to do with biological evolution). Evolution does not have a special soft spot in its heart for us as a species, just because we invented a word to describe it. We and a gorilla are equally successful outcomes to evolution. We and a tapeworm are equally successful outcomes to evolution. Evolution does not have a mental process. Evolution, like the honey badger, does not care. The honey badger is another successful outcome, BTW.
It is very, very hard for human beings to wrap our heads around this, for some reason. There is no goal we are travelling toward. There is no specific thing we will become. There is no winning this game. You just keep reproducing, and muttering 'genes don't fail me now'.
I think this may be linked to the way people try to create a moral (or immoral) aspect to 'survival of the fittest'. There isn't one. 'Fittest' does not mean most masculine, or most feminine, most aggressive or most cooperative, most intelligent or most social. A concept apparently lost on the men lamenting online about how evolution should MAKE women want manly men like them, instead of the sensitive wimps they go for nowadays. Sorry dude. He may be a hipster IT guy with no muscle tone, but his reproductive strategy is succeeding, and yours is failing, and there is no evolution referee to step in.
We have an awful time thinking about this clearly. And science fiction writers sometimes don't even try.
I think that the thing that I find strangest is that the entire point of the episode seemed to be to point out that evolution is something unpredictable, and yet to make that point it requires you to first accept that evolution is something that can be predicted. That contradiction is at the heart of the episode, and it didn't need to be.
I always thought it odd that the Lost finale was 15 minutes shorter than advertised.
@Launcifer
I knew things got a little surreal right after the beam. I happen to enjoy Indoctrination Theory, though I'm pretty well convinced it's not what what Bioware intended. I like it as an alternative.
I know it could potentially have been great to have more seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Buffy sacrificed herself to save the world (and Dawn) and that really was the end. Of course there's spin-offs - Angel, Faith - but I'm glad Joss wasn't tempted to do another couple of seasons just to get syndicated.
Donna Noble died in "Journey's End", though the Doctor tried everything he could to save her: he could have forced a mindwipe on her, saving her life but destroying her memories, but she wouldn't consent and he wouldn't force it on her. She joined the short list of Companions who died in action: Katarina, Sara Kingdom,
Adric, and River Song.
The movie A.I. ends with David in the drowned amphilbicopter, encased in ice, his eyes open, staring at the Blue Fairy, a blue ghost in ice. Always there. Always smiling. Always awaiting him.
First I have to say a few things:
-- Star Wars Episode I isn't so bad. Its core story is fine, and its foreshadowing subplots are quite well handled. But suffers from two major problems:
1. It doesn't set up enough of the main "saga" story, given that they only had three movies to do it.
2. The massive budget led them to be more concerned with spectacle than with actually telling the story in a good and engaging way. It's the same problem the first two Harry Potter movies have.
-- But Episodes II and III are rubbish.
-- I like the fifth season of Babylon 5... mostly. The first half does drag on a lot (mostly because those episodes would've been spent wrapping up the Earth Civil War arc if it weren't for the cancellation-then-uncancellation debacle, and the telepath colony arc was only supposed to be three episodes long), but there are some good episodes in there: "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari", "Day of the Dead", and basically all the stuff with Londo & G'Kar on Centauri Prime. And the second half of the season is as good as ever.
-- I like the Hitchhiker's Guide movie too.
-- And the finale of Lost.
-- I really like the second half of the series Enterprise, and that for me justifies the existence of the series.
Now for my own discontinuities:
-- I can understand why they never made a film sequel to Highlander, but I think a movie that explores the mystery of where the Immortals come from could've been really good so long as it was a good explanation. Or they could've made a prequel movie set entirely in the past -- Connor in the 17th Century or whatever. Or even a film follow-up to the TV series spinoff.
-- I'm a little surprised they never made a sequel to Predator until they finally made Predators in 2010.
-- OPTION 1: Or a new Alien movie after 1986's Aliens until this year's film Prometheus. You could argue that the story's over with Aliens, but it would've been cool to see the Aliens finally make it to Earth.
-- OPTION 2: Or a new Alien movie after 1992's Alien3 until this year's film Prometheus. Alien3 was so disappointing (although the director's cut is pretty good) that you'd think they'd try to give the series a better ending.
-- For some reason they didn't make a Star Trek film for five whole years between The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country. There was the "there will be no peace as long as Kirk lives!" bit in The Voyage Home, then the very next film resolved that -- they never really explored the story possibilities of the Federation and Klingons being warring enemies again.
-- For that matter, the way that they just stopped making Next Generation movies after Insurrection. I mean, Insurrection was kind of mediocre, but not enough to kill the series! We never even got a proper resolution for that crew like the original crew got with TUC.
-- Why was the final season of Star Trek Enterprise a shortened season anyway? I mean, 21 episodes? Why couldn't they have made it 24 episodes like season 3 was so the series could reach an even 100? "Terra Prime" was an excellent season finale, though.
-- The final season of Angel was a mess, but I'm still disappointed they cancelled it after only four seasons.
So someone actually liked Predators? That is amazing. Seems like a lot of effort just to please one person, but I'm glad it worked for you.
I'm going to go ahead and confess that I'm a Star Wars Fan who doesn't do the "Prequels? What prequels thing?" The reason I acknowledge the prequels is simple. I like the soundtracks from them. Augie's Great Municipal Band is my favorite song from all 6 soundtracks. (It's the song that plays just before the ending credits in Episode I, if anyone is wondering.)
So, yes, I'd embrace the discontinuity if I could keep the music somehow.
-- Star Wars Episode I isn't so bad. Its core story is fine, and its foreshadowing subplots are quite well handled. But suffers from two major problems:
1. It doesn't set up enough of the main "saga" story, given that they only had three movies to do it.
2. The massive budget led them to be more concerned with spectacle than with actually telling the story in a good and engaging way. It's the same problem the first two Harry Potter movies have.
-- But Episodes II and III are rubbish.
Oh, I think the prequels - or parts of them - are salvageable. (And, admittedly, Phantom Menace might need the least work. I've been rewatching them and boggling at the fact that they're actually worse than I remember. O_o) That is, I think somewhere in the mess that is the prequels, there's a half-way decent story that could've been told. It just wasn't.
Actually, I think there's several different stories that could've been told. That's half the problem. Lucas (or someone) needed to make some decisions regarding how we're supposed to view things and communicate that properly. They also suffer badly from spectacle and the addition of things that add nothing to the story and mostly just raise questions. (See the various people postulating that midiclorians + no love = Jedi brothels.)
If I were going to try to fix Phantom Menace leaving as much of the existing stuff intact, I would...
-clear up wtf is going on with the Trade Federation. I have no clue why they're attacking Naboo, and yet also claiming they're not. Whut. They need to either be holding Naboo hostage to get the trade route taxes repealed or they need to be doing (or just plain be) something else entirely. I'd be tempted to combine Tatooine and Naboo and have Qui Gon checking in on the son of a - now deceased - friend and fellow Jedi (or, hell, his own son) while he and his Padawan were dealing with either getting the planet un-blockaded or dealing with whatever more sensible threat I came up with. (Palpatine's plan I follow - create a threat that will get him elected Chancellor. What the Trade Federation thinks it's doing I have no clue.)
-make Anakin older - more of an age with Padme, the son of a moisture farmer, who's always tinkering with stuff and desperately wants to enter the pod races, much to the dismay of his parents. Hell, some of the existing dialogue could work, with some less stilted direction/performances. (And possibly make him the illegitimate kid of a Jedi - then the force can be strong in his family without any silly chosen one nonsense or midiclorians.) Now he's "too old for training" much more plausibly - if we even want to bother with that. (Because I think the story works much better if Anakin is a good person who ends up going bad than a somehow inherently messed up person, which I fear the existing prequels imply. After all, he does come back to himself and save Luke in Return of the Jedi.)
-make Jar Jar more of a real person/replace that character with an actual character.
-make Padme a senator or somesuch and drop the whole elected royalty nonsense.
-add a non-Jedi character, preferably a woman, to the cast. (Some of us need non-Jedi to identify with.)
-replace the wacky races villain of the pod race with a real character, one who may be ruthless, but is actually winning on skill. this makes the story more interesting and gives Anakin's win more weight.
-figure out how to actually make the pod race seem like part of the plot and use it to reveal that Anakin is strong in the Force.
-have Palpatine actually field Republic troops against whatever I decide the menace is, cementing his position as a do-things chancellor. local troops can also be included, but as it stands Naboo fixed it's own problem, so why'd we need a change of chancellor again? (which ties back to Trade Federation wtf?)
There's a big gap in Angel, starting in the middle of the third season when Cordelia disappears. Something apparently awful happened, because next we know, Angel's deep in his Angelus place, Faith's busting out of the big house to fix him, and Cordy's in a coma.
I deny the existence of Connor. Most of that fourth season just does not exist for me. For the most part, I like the fifth season, but really... Something went horribly wrong.
I wish Piers Anthony had written a followup or three to On A Pale Horse. It would have been nice to see other incarnations of immortality.
Who is this "Connor" of whom you speak? I know Angel had a son named Connor, and he was kidnapped as a baby, but after Angel realized there was no getting him back he eventually got over it and moved on.
And it was sad when Cordy went into her coma, but hey, it could have been worse: she could have been evil, or possessed by an evil entity or something. (I actually liked the Jasmine part, though! Especially since the scene where Fred is on the run in a public area was filmed at my local mall!)
Despite Ana's reassurances, I am starting to fear for my geek card though: I actually liked the fifth season of Angel alright. Also, I LOVED the sixth season of Buffy, when she fights the First Evil. Though it was a little odd that they never showed how she came back from the dead, or where Andrew came from…
Actually, you seem to be in the minority on Predators if you didn't like it. It's certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
I would like a fourth book in the Hunger Games trilogy.
I'm familiar with everything Stephenson's written, but my familiarity with Wittgenstein is rudimentary enough that I'm not sure which of his books you mean or how it mocks him. Would you mind clarifying?
Anathem. Saunt Proc is a pretty clear Wittgenstein proxy, and the book is pretty clear that the Procians are the bad guys and we should be siding with the Platonists--uh, I mean the Halikaarnians. Since I'm a firm anti-Platonist and a firm Wittgensteinian this was kind of annoying.
Also, is it just me or are the comments being displayed in a really weird order?
Speaking of Douglas Adams (sort of), my best friend has a theory that Tom Paris is a Time Lord.
Personally, I'm really sorry Star Trek never did a series about the history of the Federation. I also deeply regret that Straczynski never did his proposed episode dealing with the aftermath of Babylon 5 at different time periods - as a historian, I'd've loved a story in which we get to see a debate about different interpretations of history - but given that they had to wrap up five seasons worth of material in four seasons, I can hardly blame them for cutting it.
Word on the early Federation stuff, Arresi.
The first two seasons of Torchwood should have been 13 episodes each, not the unorthodox 12 they went with. I don't quite understand the decision not to do over-the-top season finales like in Doctor Who. Perhaps the material in Torchwood lends itself better to smaller stories, but I bet they could have made something good if they'd tried. It's also a shame we never found out what happened to Jack's brother. I thought they were setting that up to be an ongoing plot thread, but they just seemed to forget about him.
And it's a real crime that they stopped making the show after Children Of Earth. Toshiko really came into her own in that story.
Susan B: Also, I LOVED the sixth season of Buffy, when she fights the First Evil.
It took me minutes to realise you meant sixth. At least I figured it out before actually correcting you.
(I actually liked the Jasmine part, though! Especially since the scene where Fred is on the run in a public area was filmed at my local mall!)
Isn't it at least funny, if nothing else?
(Mom was surprised when I expressed liking for it. I was surprised that she was surprised.)
Didn't the Jasmine thing canonically never happen, except for Angel and later the rest of the team, because of Wolfram and Hart's reality-altering magic? That's some strong discontinuity.
Jadagul: Also, is it just me or are the comments being displayed in a really weird order?
To me, they're chronological as always.
"make Padme a senator or somesuch and drop the whole elected royalty nonsense."
I'd go the other way. Make her a hereditary monarch, taking the throne after her parents died in a tragic pod race accident or something. Explaining why these people are so hard-up for leaders that they're electing teenagers to anything except maybe small-town city council is too mind-numbingly silly.
You know, I have a strange relationship with predictability. If something is the kind of bad movie that you go to because it is a bad movie, if it has B movie written on the side in giant letters, then I don't mind so much.
This sentence describes me so closely that it's almost scary. BRAIN TWINZ! Husband and I have this ongoing thing where one of us looks forward to X movie, the other expects it to be crap, and then one is disappointed and the other is pleasantly surprised. Expectations! They are bizarre.
Having said that, I liked Predators (2012) okay. BUT! I am an absolutely avid Aliens fan who sees the entire Predators franchise as an inferior franchise that is bafflingly allowed to encroach on my baby. Why? WHY?? So. I expected Predators to be the worse thing ever, and since it DIDN'T insult my mother, drink all the milk in the fridge, and scuff up the floors, I was pleasantly surprised.
But I agree it was predictable from start to finish. SPOILERS. Oh, look, the guy from That 70s Show is a serial killer. Oh, look, the female character is the one who is noble and good and big on cooperation and communication skills. Oh, look, the guy calling for help is clearly dead and is a trap. Oh, look, Laurence Fishburne is not here to be Helpful. *YAWN*
I did like that it was one of the few movies that at least toyed with the idea of a Sensible Suicide. (When the female character loses a fight with a pseudo-dog-thing.)
I don't like the Indoc. idea but I don't have a problem with it per se. They didn't earn it in the writing and they certainly didn't justify it by stealing from Deus Ex but, okay, if that's my alternative to the ending cinematics, I'll go with it.
Mainly I think that letting your producers cobble together an ending with the tagline "mass fan speculation" (which was actually on someone's crib sheet, according to the "Final Hours" podcast) is just asking your audience to turn on your bad writing. Not having an ending by the time the game was initially slated to go out tell me that either the development cycle was rushed or that they shouldn't have shunted Karpashyn[sic?] off to work on the M.E. mmo... Gah. I could rant about this for hours, so I won't. It's safer for everyone that way. Suffice to say, I'm kind of at the point where there may be a third ME game, though equally it may be a weird recurring nightmare I've been having where I get trolled by Bioware.
Torchwood finished after Children of Earth - although, truthfully, that one is a bit Schrodinger for me - sometimes it exists, sometimes it doesn't.
B5 has a proper fifth season, where the Civil War arc wound down with the creation of the new governments, and then Sheridan went Beyond the Rim, his purpose fulfilled. There was certainly no further series involving the creation of a heavy war ship based on the White Star design.
Amy Pond dies in the prison, shouting "Praise Him", because she could not break her faith in the Raggedy Doctor, her childhood friend, who had kept her safe for all these years. It did mean that the question with The Silence was a bit trickier to resolve, but all went out well. And it turns out Rory is utterly competent, if not a bit suicidal, as a companion, because his wife's death hardened him in ways that scare even The Doctor.
(Who, I agree, is still reeling from what happened to Donna, and he may or may not have sword off redheads for a bit, because he has rotten luck with keeping them alive.)
Willow and Tara have a loving relationship, although Tara always keeps an eye on Willow to see if she's backsliding into magic use again. They're working through a sort of 12-Steps program.
I think it was a good idea for the Star Trek franchise to rest after First Contact - the series reboot was kind of an irritation, as I thought they could have gotten a lot of good life out of DS9 kinds of movies.
Mostly, though, it's really too bad that they stopped The Mummy franchise at two. That was a pretty good comedy series.
Someone replaced the fifth Harry Potter book with a huge tome that had a really unsatisfying ending...
Who's Harry Potter?
Ahem. Sorry.
What was the issue with the fifth one? I've lived my entire life knowing very little about where one HP story ends and another begins.
Remember those rumours about a Doctor Who episode with pirates, in which Rory got hypnotised and behaved like an idiot, and "died" yet again for some silly reason? I'm so glad they didn't make that episode, and instead we got that lovely historical gothic story with the awesome scene where Rory fought the weeping angels up the clock tower in a thunderstorm, and Amy took a back seat for a change.
As a dedicated (and betrayed) fan and (former) supporter of Bioware and Mass Effect, thank you for making sure it was the very first thing up here.
(Isn't the Indoctrination Theory just one big thing that the fans all collectively agree should/does replace the ending anyway, making it a Discontinuity?)
NO SPOILERS HERE. (Well, except that there is a Mass Effect 3 and it ends.)
@Will Wildman
(For some reason, I'm still trying really hard to avoid ME3 spoilers, despite not even having played the first game. I think the fact that the ending, whatever it is, has made so many people furious suggests that it's something I'm going to enjoy, some day. Swift scrolling and eye-averting has allowed me to thus far avoid learning anything about it except that it involves someone named Shepard, which I probably could have guessed.)
While there may indeed be the sort of people who like the ME3 ending, they're probably not that likely to be the people who like the rest of the series.
Anyway, the problem with the end isn't really just the plot. I will explain without spoilers:
A fourth of the problem is the fact you end up with no choices and nothing you do, or did at all during the game, matters (Unlike the second game, where it did matter, and which is what fans were expecting again), another fourth is the complete lack of actually explaining what happened to the characters afterwards (You know, like all RPGs do.), and another fourth is the InferredHolocaust that developers missed. (And yet another one most fans missed WRT the last scene: Amino acid handiness. Ah, you and the developers forgot about that, didn't you?)
Actual issues with the _plots_ exist, but are nowhere near the majority of the problems.
I think a special shout-out goes to the last episode of Enterprise, which the Star Trek extended universe itself has thrown into discontinuity. (As it was a holodeck program, the books just claim it 'deliberately lying history' to cover up the fact that Trip went undercover as a Romulan spy.)
This one's probably got a major case of YMMV, but I read the first four books in a very short time and LOVED them. I then got into fanfiction and fan communities in general, and got very excited for the release of Book 5... And when it came, perhaps inevitably, I was kinda disappointed, in a way that I wasn't for the last two... even though Book 7 is Harry, Ron and Hermione go camping.
Spoiler for Order of the Phoenix follows...
We discovered in books 1-4 that Voldemort tried to kill Harry, a defenceless baby, for very specific reasons...
Maybe Harry had inherited some power of his father's that meant he was the only one who could kill Voldemort - this was my theory, anyway. Voldemort had killed James but planned to spare Harry's mother - only killing her because she got in the way. Maybe killing Harry would have formed the basis of a mystical rite. Maybe some other reason...
I'd seen some speculation that there was a prophecy, but I hated that idea... it just seemed so clunkily obvious and dull. And it turned out... it was a prophecy! It turns out that the reason our hero is Super Special and Chosen is because he prophesied to kil the Bad Guy. But of *course* the Hero kills the Bad Guy, that's the way stories go... I mean "Hero has to kill the Bad Guy" isn't exactly a spoiler. And I don't really like the idea that people are just destined to do stuff... it goes against the idea that the hero should make heroic choices, and suggests more that you need to be Special and Chosen in order to make a difference.
I don't think I'd have minded nearly as much if Trelawney's prophecy had been one of her tea-leaf mutterings rather than an established True Canon Fact... for instance, Voldemort or a Death Eater could've overheard it, believed it to be true and acted accordingly... turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy... Voldemort believes Harry to be his enemy and singles him out... thus becoming Harry's sworn enemy... Harry has to destroy Voldemort.
I know there's an element of that in the text - Dumbledore points out that the prophecy might have been referring to Neville rather than Harry, but Voldemort effectively 'chose' Harry. I sort of hoped that it would turn out that Neville was the Chosen One after all, but to no avail.
I also didn't like Sirius's death... it was very strangely done. Thought there was going to be some sort of explanation, but there never was.
For myself I just thought the fifth book was of substantially lower quality than the rest of the books, and considering that the first and especially the second weren't that good, that's saying something. I didn't buy the characterization, I felt that the plot was wholly composed of contrivances, and by the time I had finished I never wanted to touch anything Potter related again. I mean there were other things, but those are more or less the major points.
@Makabit
Explaining why these people are so hard-up for leaders that they're electing teenagers to anything except maybe small-town city council is too mind-numbingly silly.
I could live with her being hereditary monarch, and I could live with her being elected to some moderately important governing position. Perhaps they've decided to have a 'youth assembly' and an 'elder assembly' as their bicameral legislation (This wouldn't be anywhere near the oddest thing in the SW universe), and she's the youth prime minister or something.
What I can't see is having her as the sole elected leader. And it's clearly not any sort of symbolic position, she appears to have almost no one she needs to consult with to do anything, she seem to control the military, and she can give orders to their Senator.
Frankly, the real question is why they made her so young. They should have made her 19 instead of 14. Granted, that makes her 30 to Anakin's 20 in the second movie, but if that amount of age difference is off putting, just add 5 year to the 10 year time skip between the first and second movie. Anakin would be 25, Padma would be 35. (As officially humans live to like 150 years in the SW universe, her apparent youth can be handwaved away.)
Granted, I'm not sure why the heck _Anakin_ was so young, either, but changing his age would have changed the story, where as Padma's age in the first movie was pretty irrelevant.
I could not help myself. I usually lurk here, but I spent a long night awake bemoaning the fate of Shepard. My heart was broken. I just couldn't understand the reasoning for tacking on THAT ending. It just didn't fit in with the established, well, everything. It would have been awesome and beautiful at the end of Deus Ex or something similar.
I'm sticking with my idea that one of the writers heard the review saying that Deus Ex: Human Revolution was the "Thinking Man's Mass Effect" which is not justified, in my opinion.
I like IDT because it extrapolates the obvious un-reliableness of the moment into something that could work the themes of the story. I can forgive the massive macguffin, I can forgive the unexplicableness of what happened to Legion... but, hell, what the FUCK was with that ending? Did they just forget their own lore? What did they expect people to think? Was that rumor about Casey Hudson and the other guy locking himself into a room for several days right? Just... Damn.
I mean, I forgave DA2 because I could see it was a massive experiment. It was also the SECOND entry in the franchise. Not the last and final chapter. WTF?
Are you annoyed that the developers tried to hand wave away the Inferred Holocaust in the blog?
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I KNOW I AM. *nerdrage*
I still very much doubt that IDT was intended, but I genuinely feel it is a better alternative. Because otherwise... Damn. *shakes head* I have really enjoyed the other 99% of the game. But... duuuuude...
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ME 3
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It just baffles me that after having an entire super-special DLC mission in Mass Effect 2 whose entire sole premise was 'destruction of a Mass Relay is a supernova-class destructive event and will therefore completely obliterate its solar system near-instantaneously', they would then end their frakkin trilogy... by destroying the Mass Relays in a freaky explosion thing that looks similar enough to what happened to the Bahak system, without a single line explaining why, uh, it's like totally like different and stuff because of magic. (Which I still would have hated, but it would have shown some level of care or professionalism or intelligence.)
I know it was because of the whole 'you should totally seek out your own destiny and future and not rely on these incredibly convenient and cripplingly vital bits of miracle-tech, so we're just gonna take care of dat~' that I see a ton, particularly in RPGs, and... it's hard to put into words, but I see why they thought to do this, even if I hate that they did it.
And I'm not even one of those folks who was going to build Tali a house on the homeworld we all spent 5 hours reclaiming for her.
(My Shepard preferred blueberry pie)
SPOILERS FOR ME3
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It was very unsatisfying for pretty much any romance after it was played out. My Shep preferred, um, sausage. So mine spent lots of time going back to talk to Kaidan and talking him down and making sure he wanted to stick it out with my Shep. How did LI wind up back on the Normandy? Why was the Normandy running away?
And, yeah- the explosions were supposed to show our outgrowing the relays... which, um, yeah. Can destroy a star system. That... that's terrible. How could they forget that? And then there was the issue of amino-acid issues. Did they not realize how bleak that ending was and how people would be pissed about it?
And not enough answers. I can't believe we can take it all at face value. What happened to all the people on the Citadel? Why the hell would the geth die in the Destroy ending? How does Synthesis even work without Space Magic? Control makes a tiny bit of sense, but why does Shep have to die for it? WHY? This wasn't what I bought three games and 100+ hours for. It doesn't fit the theme of doing all the darn work and getting a victory that they established in ME2.
@HelenLouise: Many thanks. I confess to not being a fan of the series as a whole, but I seem to know far too many fans. You've given a route into future conversations that goes beyond "would anyone like a cuppa or a smoke?"
ME3 spoilers to follow
@JonathanPelikan: Actually, there's a (hamfisted) explanation for that, created by the peeps over at the Bioware forums. Essentially, the difference is that Arrival featured a Mass Relay being walloped by an asteroid at speed, versus ME3 walloping every Mass Relay with coloured light at speed because ART! Now, I admit to not really following the difference considering the fact that, either way, you end up with a broken mass effect relay probably dooming a system either to outright destruction or a long, slow death due to starvation and the immediate cessation of interstellar trade, but I'm prepared to admit that there might be something there beyond the obvious handwavium.
@Asha: I imagine that the inferred holocaust handwave was down to ART! in the finaly analysis. Much as it galls me to say it, you're correct in terms of what you say concerning IDT, if only because nothing else makes sense. Hell, that doesn't make much sense in context of Blue Cthulhukid, but I'm willing to go with it on the grounds that the sources cited by the chap who wrote the ending (Exec. Producer Casey Hudson) point towards... er... the Matrix Revolutions ending. So. Yeah.
Seriously though, I get the idea of narrowing the options to what is effectively no option at all. I can see how they might have reached that point with decent writing. The problem is that there are a number of things that I would change in the writing as is in order to achieve that end. I wouldn't have Shepard dreaming of the Cthulhukid for a start: it would be the Virmire sacrifice. That might carry weight, come the end. I might even have Anderson (who was born in London, don't'cha know?) be the one to posit the idea of co-existence, for the sake of the curveball. I'd throw in the option for a single shot, ME2 Reaper IFF mission-style, so that players who felt that no-retreat, no-surrender was the only way to go. I've got a shed-load of alternative theories in my options given the existing crap, FWIW.
That said, I doubt it really matters. Give it until Dragon Age 3 and then Electronic Arts will crush Bioware, repurpose a few people and then move onto the next target, probably Rockstar (though that might be too large a company).
I haven't played the ME games, but I find this conversation fascinating. (Including the YouTube link that Jonathan posted that is... supposedly showing in this thread according to my moderation panel, yet I see it not. Disqus Y U SO FLAKEY?)
But if we're to talk of rage-inducing video game endings, there are a number of people at Obsidian who need a VERY STERN TALKING TO regarding the ending to KOTOR 2. Even if it was Lucas Arts' fault.
Someone who knows nothing about Mass Effect but a lot about Deus Ex* here. How the hell did Deus Ex get into this conversation?
Note that I have no objections to you spoiling Mass Effect to answer that question, and given that it's somehow related to the ending I assume that will be necessary.
* Assuming we mean Deus Ex and not the spinoffs or tie-ins or AUs or whatnot.
ME3 Spoilers
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And now they are creating an Extended Cut in order to explain why their crap stinks.
As for the Hologram Kid; I've got to wonder what the hell was up with it from the first. I think that kid might have been real when the game started, but I work with kids. I've dealt with plenty who were lost and frightened ones. Kids are taught to go to people in uniform for help. That kid was acting strange, and so was Shepard. So... bad writing, or foreshadowing? I have no idea.
I agree, the emotional punch would have been greater if they had used the Virmire Casualty, but I think their logic was that Ashley/Kaidan were soldiers. Sacrifice is part of the job. A child, without anyone to protect him/her, is a parents' nightmare and the nightmare of most adults, too. Hell, I was in Japan last year during the big quake and seeing my students all right afterwards had me bawling.
But why did Hologram kid take that form? How did it know? Who knows. My alternative is that the Crucible should have unshackled the Reapers who were bound by, say, Harbinger and hope they turned on each other. That way the could have milked more out of the Reapers later and still be able to save people.
You know the ending to Deus Ex*, with the three choices and whatnot? That's the ending to ME3, right down to their relative positions on the screen.
* I might mean Deus Ex: Human Revolutions rather than the original. In my defence, it's nearly half-past three in the morning.
ME3 YADDA YADDA DON'T LOOK IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED IT
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You know what would have worked best, given the situation? If Shepard had been the catalyst because whyever.
No stupid kiddie hologram, no crap on the station beyond hir stepping into a machine, powered by rainbows and enough single-player assets to make it work. Just you, choosing to damn the galaxy or save it, based upon the experience you'd had as a player. That wouldn't even need a rewrite (beyond removing that frigging kid, obviously - not that it's a bugbear /sarcasm)!
As is, I figure that the DLC coming - well, the one that isn't multiplayer - will chiefly concern itself with reasons Bioware got the ending right because ART! (not that I'm labouring that last one, obviously, but when you invoke that one as your defence for shit writing, you have a problem) and we, the plebs simply did not understand. No amount of handwaving will nullify the idiocy of Joker doing a bunk mid-battle, nor of his suddenly acquiring teleportation equipment in order to beam my comrades aboard when they've already pledged to help me prod buttock and take names until their pens run out of ink.
Actually, scratch all of that: the Reapers were simply unknowable, each a nation unto themselves. We've just removed all that bollocks at a stroke and let Shepard get on with the serious business of saving the galaxy.
ME3 spoilers:
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Well, hell, if we're actually going to talk about the ending, I wrote giant blog post back when I first finished it. To summarize for people who don't want to real that incredibly long rant:
I had issues with pretty much aspect of the ending, not just the actual plot. I mean I could have lived with that sort of ending...but not with Shepard putting up with it. Downer Endings are annoying, but I could have lived with, I dunno, having to destroy earth or the fleet or Shepard's love interest or Shepard themselves. Or if we totally screwed up on uniting people, and we lost the entire war and had to just be satisfied by flinging a light into the future so the _next_ cycle people win.
But Downer Endings that _Shepard_, of all people, just accepts, cause HULK SMASH anger. What's more, it was a _nonsensical_ downer ending. I mean, if you're going to that, at least give us the _logical_ downer endings like 'We cannot actually win this war', not 'You must sacrifice yourself in one of three ways and cause inferred holocausts. And then here's your weird crashing ship that makes no sense.'
And the gameplay was poor, also. All that work, almost no results except that doing enough of it opened up one single new ending. As I pointed out, this could have been fixed with _cutscreens_ of your allies showing up at the start of each battle and reducing the enemies you face.
Compared to those issues, the actual _plot_ problems were almost nothing.
ME3 SPOILERS
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That was one of my Wild Mass Guesses about how the series was going to end- Shepard standing in some spiffy light beam and becomes a Super Saiya-jin (Or closest equivalent) and uses it to fix things. His or her survival would depend on the relationships established (having a love interest, helped so-and-so) and previous actions, and the outcome would also be based on those actions. The Reapers might be kinda explained (personal opinion was that they were harvesting species because of some ancient race finding 'immortality' and wanting to 'share it' with the most 'worthy'.) but it would be better if they stayed scary space Cthulhu.
But the whole "look at our ARTS you stupid unwashed masses, and choke on it!" attitude bugs me. Badly. Did the fan base piss off the writers that much?
If I'm honest, I think that half the problem with the writing is that the concerns hinge solely upon elements either relating to or directly flowing from the ending. The guy (well, two guys, though one is more of a background figure) who wrote that is also Bioware's most prominent mouthpiece, having appeared at PAX East, last year's E3 and a few other major conventions, as well as being EA's preferred executive producer for Bioware (Vancouver) material. The ending is Casey Hudson's baby, people don't like it and he's pitching a hissy fit over the fallout. It probably doesn't help that economic logic prevents anyone from owning up to its having been a colossal mistake.
Heh.
Husband and I watched a B-movie recently that was SO B that I don't even recall the name, but it was about art forgery. Anyway, this PRECOCIOUS ARTIST who NO ONE UNDERSTOOD was being a big hissy-fit thrower about some DERIVATIVE HACK in his class getting all the accolades while he got nothing. And there's this hilarious scene where he is breathtakingly rude to an art curator who refuses to buy his stuff.
I can't remember what her response was exactly, but it was basically that "it's not that we don't understand your ART, we understand it just fine. We just also realize that IT SUCKS" only with epic regal dignity. Alas, we the viewer were not, apparently, supposed to agree with her.
Yeah. I agree. And, as I've said, this ending would work well on a different game. Just not Mass Effect. I rather liked the Dark Energy plot that was scrapped. At least it was foreshadowed in the second game.
"Artistic Vision" what does that even mean? I'm still holding on to a shred of hope that the Extended Cut will give us some hope, but I doubt it.
Part of me still hopes for people to get blue babies out of the story. There's nothing wrong with wanting a happy ending, even one that has more sweet than bitter.
Star Trek: The first three seasons of Enterprise take place in an alternate timeline, which was erased when paradox caught up to the idiots that were trying to mess with history. Really, time-traveling alien Nazis?
By the way, if anybody is wondering what all this 'Mass Effect 3 ending' stuff is about, I must recommend in the strongest possible terms that you start with this video:
Dude would be the best college professor ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MlatxLP-xs
... All I said was that people like it, not just me...
@Ana, yeah that's sort of what happened over this game, except you had webcomics, online game reviewers and the vice-president of the parent company (and former Bioware founder) saying variously we get your anger but/there is no anger/you're dumb because/I don't even 'cause ART. What was hilarious was watching the company cycle through months' worth of PR tactics in about fifteen days out of what started to look like sheer panic.
@ Asha: Artistic vision, when asserted by the artist, generally means "You called me on my crap and I can handle it/don't have an adequate response to your questions".
*Can't handle it, rather.
Damn I wish I knew how to edit these damn posts of mine.
Heh, I always find something I wish I could edit in mine.
Then you have very intelligent people telling the company EXACTLY what was wrong with the ending. I've seen videos like the Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage video that JonathanPelikan linked to, and read articles that point out how it fails as literature because it completely ruins its own narrative structure. They then start quoting the words of the writers saying there would be no 'bespoke ending,' and there would be 'sixteen different endings,' etc. Those are some pretty specific claims. And they have yet to come up with a direct answer.
And then you have fellow fans telling you that you are too stupid to appreciate the ending and stroking Bioware's ego. When it's at least, what, 85% of the fanbase being displeased? Really? And they still can't admit something is wrong? Really?
At the end of the day, Bioware isn't Bethesda (not that Bethesda's great on listening generally, but on this specific issue it came out with probably the best response I've ever seen from a games company). Bioware pretends to encourage input from fans and players but, when it comes to the crunch, it tends to ignore any genuine concerns raised. You'll get nods to certain things - and some of those are pretty damn brave (Steve Cortez had a husband? Awesome!) - but the company tends not to respond well to genuine criticism of its products or its business practises.
Pretty much the first obvious statement in response to the problem was an announcement that the company was junking further DLC for Dragon Age 2 (which is ironic, considering the two post-release adventures were some of the better bits of DLC I've seen in a while) and moving straight on to Dragon Age 3. The company response was effectively: "We've had serious complaints from customers concerning our last two products but fear not: here's something else we're making!" That's not really a sensible way to respond to questions and complaints from your customer base.
This extended cut is also a mealy-mouthed response, to be frank. It isn't going to be Broken Steel: Bioware is not going to make any real attempt to change the ending in order to fix the problems. We'll likely get more of the same, belabouring the point, because we obviously aren't intelligent enough to see how the Cthulhukid is a masterstroke. The fact that the guy in charge of the project outright lied when he was promoting the game won't even be acknowledged. Hell, it probably can't be, but making a genuine attempt to reconstruct or restructure the ending might generate some goodwill from the customer base. The company might find itself in dire need of that, given the declining standard of its products over the past two years or so.
ANATHEM SPOILERS BELOW
Anathem. Saunt Proc is a pretty clear Wittgenstein proxy, and the book is pretty clear that the Procians are the bad guys and we should be siding with the Platonists--uh, I mean the Halikaarnians. Since I'm a firm anti-Platonist and a firm Wittgensteinian this was kind of annoying.
That's not how I remember the book at all. The worst thing we saw a Procian/Wittgensteinian do was embarrass the protagonist on TV*, whereas the actual bad guys destroyed planetary civilizations and enslaved the survivors. It's also made clear that whilst we only see the Platonist/Halikaarnian superpowers "on screen", study of both metaphysics leads to superpowers (Incantors and Rhetors), and both schools needed to cooperate to save Arbre from the invaders. Furthermore it's at the end of the book the "villainous" Procian is brought back and heavily implies that he was the one using the world saving superpowers for the Procians, while the protagonist was watching the Halikaarnian strut his stuff.
*Well there was the whole 3rd Sack thing, but both sides were equally at fault for that. I'm only talking about things that set the Procians apart from the Halikaarnians.
Anathem Spoilers
Malpollyon: I actually reread the last third of anathem in the past couple days, due to this conversation--this was a bad idea because I don't really have the time for it, but it's done now. And my conclusion is that in some ways I was being unfair, but the main problem I was complaining about is worse than I'd remembered.
You're right that it's unfair to call the Procians the bad guys. They're quite clearly made out to be assholes, but everyone's kind of reconciled by the end and they do good stuff. Though I'm annoyed that they paint the main Procian guy as someone you're clearly supposed to dislike; even with the making him into a huge jerk I'm still pretty sure I like him better than I do the actual protagonists.
But I do think the book is really irritatingly contemptuous of the philosophical position--the Procians redeem themselves when the accept the existence of the Hylean Theoric World (i.e. Platonic Forms) and give up on their formalism. As someone who's a formalist sort of professionally and sees Platonism as obviously false this is rather irritating.
Add to this the fact that the notions of causality the superpowers are based on is completely incoherent and amounts to a butchering of quantum mechanics equivalent to Deepak Chopra or The Secret, and that you're obviously supposed to feel like this makes some sense, and the whole thing is deeply annoying.
Of course, I hear that linguists have the same reaction to Snow Crash.
@Launcifer
It isn't going to be Broken Steel: Bioware is not going to make any real attempt to change the ending in order to fix the problems.
Yeah, and the problem is much more serious than the Fallout 3 ending problem, which was perfectly fine narratively, it just had a stupid plot hole in it. A tiny plot hole of 'Hey, there are some people here who could live through this suicide mission if they went instead of me, and, oh yeah, one of them is a slave that cannot disobey my orders.' is not really comparable to the _massive_ problems with the ending of ME3. Throw in a few lines about the controls being DNA-locked to your father, so only you could do it, and tada, the ending works.
People also wanted free play after that point, but that was always a trivial complaint, because holding off on the last mission was an obvious solution. In fact, the entire complaint was pretty trivial, but Bethesda leapt in there anyway to fix it.
And, of course, Fallout 3 wasn't really based in the sort of universe-changing decisions and always finding a third option that ME3 was. If, somehow, the Lone Wanderer found themselves at the end of ME3, the ME3 ending would be fine for them...that character was always reacting to things, and following a pretty set path, and none of the choices the LW made really affected _anything_.
In fact, in a really funny example of how little your choices, and in fact the plot, matter in FO3, you can do something very stupid at the original end: After Broken Steel came out, people would come onto the forum baffled as to why drinking the purified water was killing their evil character. Gee, I wonder why? Good guys might have 'honor before reason', but they were playing evil characters and decided to go with 'evil before reason'. Or, more likely, weren't paying a damn bit of attention to the plot and didn't realize they were poisoning _themselves_.
But that was because the premise of FO3 was 'wander around killing monsters, occasionally talk to people who would tell you to fight your way to specific places, where you got some swag'. (Please note I have no issues with FO3 being like this. I love the game.) Whereas the premise of Mass Effect was...not that. It really really really was not that.
Then do you feel there is any point in fans continuing to complain? This is an honest question; if I hold on to hope, I also keep holding on to the bitter, bizarre and ugly disappointment that has plagued me since I was first spoiled for the ending (and not just at finishing the game.) Moving on means admitting that ME3 is and will always be broken. After all that investment, it is really, really hard to do that.
My feelings about this have been, well, pained. It really felt like I was cheated of my investment, or worse, have a friend turn around and stab me in the back. I would daresay a lot of other fans have felt the same. Objectively, I feel ridiculous about it. It's a video game. Why do I feel like it's a personal betrayal?
Objectively, I feel ridiculous about it. It's a video game. Why do I feel like it's a personal betrayal?
If it helps, I'm still upset about KOTOR 2! *betrayed fan high fivez*
I think there's value in still being vocal in the hopes that OTHER companies don't, say, abandon their peer review world-building process in order to cater to a vocal internal development team and/or collaboration partner, but I'm an optimist like that.
Yeah, it is only a computer game, but it's also a significant investment in both time and money. I know my version of the trilogy has probably cost me around £150, given I've purchsed most of the dlc and at least one collector's edition. Probably spent in excess of 230 hours on it, too. That's a lot of time and money to waste on a piece of entertainment that leaves you with complaints.
Then I shall continue to join the throng of IDT, just because I rather like the concept proposed. *slaps hands, and offers a hug* Let us rage along teh interwebs then. ^_^
My N7 hoodie is an awesome hoodie. I have no complaints about the hoodie. The first two games were beautifully awesome and I have no regrets about playing them and the money spent. *shrugs* But the ending felt so much like they decided "hell, we can't please everyone so let's piss them all off!" Ugh. Ugh. Nerdrage.
Yeah, it is only a computer game, but it's also a significant investment in both time and money.
I've made hideous mistakes in time/money investment that haven't affected me as strongly as this. (Ask me about investing my big nest egg *right* before the 2007 stock market crash.)
I cared about the characters and the story. Not just because I paid money, but because they were interesting, and I loved them. I wanted them to make it out alive, and I wanted them to succeed. I knew that wouldn't always be possible - sometimes redemption includes sacrifice - but I wanted to see that. I wanted closure.
Usually, if that's not going to come, I can foresee it and disengage ahead of time. But when you don't/can't, and story and characters are tossed aside for whatever the hell that ending was, it's hard not to take it personally. Because not only is it a total failure as an ending, but the creators (well, one of them) treat you like an idiot for caring. *That's* the bit that really makes it truly awful for me - I feel like the creators not only care less about their universe than I do, but they think I'm a total chump for it. (I'm okay with creators who view their fans with fond bemusement - I don't actually require that artists be the biggest fans - but I'm not okay with contempt, and I'm really not okay with contempt plus a side serving of "fuck you". And contempt plus "fuck you" plus "you just don't understand my aaaart" makes me froth.)
@Asha
Then do you feel there is any point in fans continuing to complain?
Only to the extent that it makes companies less likely to behave like this.
There seems to be some sort of idea that they aren't able to fix the ending. Why, I don't know, as games regularly are released broken. There's some sort of randomness about 'art', but the fact is, it's not art. In fact, the reason that all the endings are basically the same seems to be because of executive meddling because there are plans for things to be released later in that universe.
So, no, ME3 isn't going to get fixed. If people are complaining to get it fixed, they might as well stop.
OTOH, complaining so that Bioware understands why sales of their game have dropped off...that seems reasonable.
Come to think of it, I'm gonna say that Avatar: The Last Airbender never had a pointless filler episode in its most well-plotted and tightly focused season in which a goofy village puts on a weird trial and there's a tepid mystery.
"make Padme a senator or somesuch and drop the whole elected royalty nonsense."
I'd go the other way. Make her a hereditary monarch, taking the throne after her parents died in a tragic pod race accident or something. Explaining why these people are so hard-up for leaders that they're electing teenagers to anything except maybe small-town city council is too mind-numbingly silly.
Granted, I'm not sure why the heck _Anakin_ was so young, either, but changing his age would have changed the story....
In what way? I seriously can't think of any. In fact, aging him up would make some of the bzuh moments go away. (That he fell in love with Padme at nine and obsessed about her for ten years. Unless we are supposed to write him off as born creepy stalker, that's just bizarre. Also, the Jedi considering him too old to begin training sounds far less weird if he's a teen than a nine year old.)
Aging Anakin changes the story, although not necessarily in a bad way. I think because of his age, he actually believe the Jedi when they say they'll come back and save his mother, and as he realizes with increasing intensity that that was a big lie, he starts to crumble. In addition, his desperate fears over Amidala are clearly connected to his fears and distress around his mother.
OTOH, as a teenager he might have been more deeply traumatized by his previous experiences.
I don't know. His entire story is so...not working for me. You'd have to completely rewrite anyway.
Did the Jedi say they'd come back and save his mother? I just watched the dratted thing, you'd think I'd remember. (But it's so bad. Sooooooo bad.) And what in blazes was he doing for the ten years in between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones? He apparently had no contact with his mother until the dream of doom. That kind of kills the character motivation you're suggesting for me. (Not that it wasn't what was intended. I'm pretty sure it was. But it was handled so poorly it's not really there.)
Yeah, his story needs a complete rewrite to make any sense at all. Especially in the context of his redemption in Return of the Jedi. It's as if Lucas forgot between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones that Anakin was supposed to be redeemable and started writing him as born creepy stalker weirdo. Which pretty much ruins everything.
Going for the obvious here, but here in discontinuity land, I really loved the Firefly movie. Whedon did such a good job keeping the character chemistry from the show. The ending was particularly fun, loved the scene about Simon's rich bank account being reactivated and then he spends it all to buy Wash a regenerated liver and Daddy Tam looks so horrified. I also look forward to the sequels based on the question of why the heck Book went off with the alliance soldiers after they slaughtered his community. I read online that there was an alternate script where Book was killed and the fans would never get to find out what was going on with him. What a waste of plot that would've been.
...ah that felt good.
And isn't it nice that the X-writers never made Emma Frost a main character, or stuck her in a random relationship with any other main characters. It looked like they might be going there, but then she admitted that her mutant powers have the side effect of making her allergic to all fabrics, and that soon even wearing very skimpy clothes would be too much. Having her retire to become a nudist was a touch of unexpected hilarity that served the X-verse much better than having her step in as a major character.
Here's a thought: if we drop the whole monarch thing, what exactly do we lose, other than a bunch of over-elaborate costumes? If she's just a citizen who organizes an escape to go tell the senate about the invasion, doesn't that make her a STRONGER character? Even a BETTER character? Of course, she was barely more than a plot device in Phantom Menace, and becomes pure plot device in episodes II and III, so I'm not sure if they would want her to be a stronger character.
I don't think there's any indication that the Jedi lie/plan to come back to save Anakin's mother; their whole goodbye scene revolves around "Will I ever see you again?" to a degree that makes it clear they figure it's completely up to chance.
This fits with the general Jedi sentiment of 'don't think about your family, ever', but completely fails to take into account the fact that Anakin is already a nonstandard recruit and therefore procedures probably need to be adjusted further.
But I am still unhappy about them all just shrugging off slavery on Tatooine - let's consider here: the Trade Federation on Naboo clearly has an army of tens or hundreds of thousands of droids, and from what we see, they successfully occupy most of the cities on the planet. This is treated as a Big Deal by the Republic Senate, and while they aren't able to force action, there's a major outcry for an intervention of some kind. Tatooine in comparison has only three spaceport-class cities, a vastly smaller population, and outright slavery. Now, the only reason that six commandoes, a dozen fighter pilots, and two Jedi are able to free Naboo is that the Trade Feds have power consolidated at the top - take two dudes hostage and blow up a droid-command ship and the entire army is neutralised - but the situations are otherwise not enormously difficult. The key difference seems to be that Naboo is a nicer vacation spot and not crammed full of poor people.
There is a reasonable chance that my June Nanocamp project is going to start from a close analogue of the "I didn't actually come here to free slaves" scene and then run in the direction of "but I believe the Force did bring me here to do so."
If she's just a citizen who organizes an escape to go tell the senate about the invasion, doesn't that make her a STRONGER character?
Isn't the point that she has the authority with which to officially request military aid from the senate (and later the gungans)? I wouldn't think that it's actually important to inform anyone of the invasion - if the planet gets blockaded and no signals can be sent out, it's going to be pretty obvious that something has gone wrong.
For a moment I had the startling thought that maybe the Holonet (the instantaneous interstellar communications network) only gets invented in the years between Ep1 and Ep2, but then I remembered that we see Sidious (on Coruscant) talking to the Trade Feds (above Naboo) so that theory is kinda shot.
I am beginning to have the most awful feeling that the 22nd episode of House MD's 8th season will very much need to not exist.
If we wanted to have her not be royalty, perhaps Naboo could have a system of official couriers. Messages bearing the full authority of the rulers, if not delivered in person, are required by law to be delivered only by these people.
It wouldn't be a dangerous job, you just go somewhere, deliver a message, come back. It's something that you might give to bright young teenagers so that they can travel around, experience places not their own, and get a feeling for how government and diplomacy works.
Then you've got Padme, who probably got her position by winning an essay contest or something, as the last free courier and thus the last person who has the authority to deliver the messages that need to be delivered.
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Of course, I'm actually all in favor of making both her and Anakin older.
I'm not sure if they would want her to be a stronger character.
They may not, but I would. Stronger characters give one a stronger story. I think that's one of the (many, many) failings of the prequels.
I like Chris's idea of her being an official messenger - that could work whether Naboo has royalty or some other form of government. Of course, I lean toward aging her up to her twenties anyway and Anakin to his teens - you'd have enough of an age gap that the romance might not start until the next story, but it would be far more plausible that, say, a sixteen-seventeen year old fell in love (or lust or whatever) with a twenty-four year old. But she doesn't return his interest until he's a few years older and had some Jedi training, because she doesn't really see him as "adult."
And I think I'd prefer it if Anakin's turn to the Dark Side came as a result of trying to be a Jedi in a galaxy that was full of problems. You'd have Sith machinations, you'd have the Republic's inertia and the fact that they've allowed real problems to develop because the Republic is simply too big to rely on Jedi to fix everything (as they seem to be), the Jedi's inertia - they've gotten too set in their ways and lost touch a bit with what's important (this seems necessary for the more questionable stuff Yoda says in the original trilogy), and then if you pile on young love - especially if we actually give Padme a job doing things and suddenly you don't even need a secret romance (or you have very different reasons for one - now's a bad time, for example) to start pushing him over the edge. Especially if we rewrite it so the Separatists have good cause and are perfectly good people being manipulated - as the Senate is - by Palpatine. Then when the power to fix everything is dangled in front of Anakin, his temptation becomes more understandable.
Meanwhile, you have Padme and other people working to fix things the slow non-supervillain way and making some progress. Anakin's flaws become impatience and the usual things that cause superheroes to go villain.
There is a reasonable chance that my June Nanocamp project is going to start from a close analogue of the "I didn't actually come here to free slaves" scene and then run in the direction of "but I believe the Force did bring me here to do so."
A very good turning point indeed. And I like your heroes better already.
Re slavery and Anakin's mother: I figured the Jedi council had some inflexible rules about only saving Jedi kids, maybe because of some past disaster. I imagined Qui-gon's attempt to buy Anakin's mother was the act of an older Jedi with the experience to know when to skirt the rules. But he didn't have the money. Afterwards, when there was money, Obi-wan was in charge and he's young, newly promoted, and more likely to follow the letter of the law.
But I found the Jedi council as presented in the movies so unimpressive and annoying they automatically morph into force-using bureaucrats in my mind.
Here's a question: do they test Anakin's mother for Force midichlorians, or is it just assumed that the Virgin Mary is the least interesting person in the room?
No, they do not. There is so much fail, it's truly hard to know where to begin.
They bought her story? I don't think I would if I were in Qui Gon's shoes. And even if he's a magical Force baby, that doesn't mean she's not Force sensitive. And besides, slavery!!!
Here's a question: do they test Anakin's mother for Force midichlorians, or is it just assumed that the Virgin Mary is the least interesting person in the room? Because I can't remember and I don't want to go re-watch.
They don't - which in context is not totally unreasonable, because Qui-Gon recognises Anakin as having superhuman abilities well before testing him, and when he asks about Anakin, Shmi doesn't say anything to indicate that she's got any similar capacity. But now that you mention it, he does leap with curious speed from 'virgin birth plus superpowers' to 'made by the Force' rather than checking whether Shmi might also be superchlorianed up. There's the (I think/hope still noncanonical) idea that Palpatine was the one who used the Force to instigate the Force-fetus dealy, but it would have been interesting if Shmi had actually had a conscious role to play rather than just being the Incubator of Prophecy.
The more I think about it the more I'm fascinated by the idea of Shmi as someone with enormous Force-sensitivity but no academic/dogmatic knowledge thereof, who has spent her whole enslaved life trying to understand why she can feel so many things that others can't.
The notion that it was either Palpatine or his implied master Darth Plagueis is *heavily lampshaded,* but never outright stated -- technically it is subtextual rather than textual, but we are at least meant to think it is a possibility, in canon. Now, it could just be the Palpatine has heard the Jedi theory of Anakin's conception and was fishing to see what Anakin knew about it when he talked about generating life via the Force -- but Occam's Lightsaber slices differently.
On the other hand, it is plausible that if one Sith could do it, it is possible that someone else or even the Force itself could independently do such a thing. But "Anakin was grown by the Sith" is at least as canonical a conclusion as any other.
For the record, we all need to get together and rewrite Star Wars some time. We'll have to dig up notes from that time we discussed Return of the Jedi.
I'm down with this.
I make a motion that Shmi is super-force-sensitive and Anakin is the bodily representation of her inherently kind nature, yet marred by the sadness and horror she has witnessed in a life of slavery.
(Though, depending on how MUCH we can re-write, I'd like to drop the immaculate conception entirely.)
A Ramblite re-write of Star Wars? That could only be awesome!
My own not-a-fanfic version of events that is still a plottish haze entirely dropped Shmi along with the immaculate conception, as part of how my 'verse has also completely ditched the 'inborn powers' notion and, strictly speaking, just about anyone could become a... monk-without-a-cool-name-for-their-order-yet... with sufficient dedication. The Anakin-analogue's character-establishing scene is mostly about the reasons that's a sketchy concept, and is one of the things that makes Qui-Gon-analogue think he could be a good apprentice. But this discussion is reviving some other ideas I had and making me think there's a spot for her after all.
At the very least, she probably provides Bechdel passing. (Which we might still get with the Handmaidens.) But I hate to cut out a female character simply because the men writing the script criminally underused her. *sigh*
Maybe we could gender-change some Jedi. No reason Yoda and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan and Nick Fury ALL have to be male, right? /mischievous
I still vote for a female equivalent to Han or Lando for the prequels. Some of us don't identify well with Force users, and roguish types can be fun.
(That's in addition to other suggestions re: female characters, not instead of.)
At the very least, she probably provides Bechdel passing.
I had no idea what you meant, until I checked the internet and recalled that Shmi and Padme do briefly discuss the presence of slavery and lack of Republic on Tatooine. I am constantly forgetting that Padme was actually with them throughout that part of the story, rather than just hanging out on the ship.
Maybe we could gender-change some Jedi. No reason Yoda and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan and Nick Fury ALL have to be male, right?
It wasn't clear from my above commentary, but the Qui-Gon-analogue in my case is definitely a woman. Most characters don't have direct analogues, but there's a woman who shows up later who's vaguely similar to Mace Windu. If/when my cast eventually does make it to meet up with the heads of their order, I have no idea what the rest of that bunch will look like.
But you can't make original fiction, I need you for my plan to rewrite Star Wars.
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Actually, at some point I probably need to develop the knack of making not-fanfiction. But then again I also need to develop the knack of making plots, which I seem to suck at.
Ideas I can do. Scenes I can do (sometimes.) A series of scenes strung together into a larger story creating a plot? That I can't do.
That's one of the nice things about doing fiction in response to something like Twilight or Left Behind, no need to worry about plot. The plot, or lack thereof, has been taken care of, you just have to worry about a scene.
Anyway, there's a lot of stuff I should be doing if I ever want success as a writer. Good luck writing your not-Star Wars.
This is what I struggle with, too, for what it's worth. World-building is comparatively easy for me (in my head, I make no claims as to the result on paper). Character building, as well. But a start-to-end, coherent, original plot is very hard for me to conjure from nothing.
At least I'll always have public domain fairy tales to re-tell.
Wasn't it awesome when Grievous started spouting poetry in the middle of his fight with Obi-Wan, instead of just being some random robo-dude with a cough?
Also, it's too bad James Cameron never finished Avatar (though the scenery shots I have found online were beautiful). I heard it was going to be this really interesting story about some human spying for the human miners on the planet, only to join the side of the natives once the native chosen one shows him that, despite everything that's wrong with Earth (as we would have seen at the beginning of the movie), the humans still don't have the right to invade and destroy another planet. Then, he and the son and daughter of the native chief were supposed to learn to like each other as each taught the totally naive Chosen One zir knowledge and skills: the human, the strengths and weaknesses of human technology; the son of the chief, leadership and tactics; the daughter of the chief, stealth, individual combat, and their tribes druidic (in a D&D sort of sense) ways. I understand they even omitted the standard knows-slightly-more-than-the-protagonist-at-the-beginning non-character! It's just too bad this movie never escaped production, though I understand that most people would not have sat in a theatre long enough to watch it. Perhaps Cameron will deign to make it a multipart TV special?
Also also, it's too bad Lost Planet never came out. I heard it was going to be an interesting story about colonists' efforts to escape those at home, driving them to steal resources that everyone desperately needs, while also exploring what it would mean to make contact and open communications with a truly alien intelligence. I also heard that they were going to have a solid multiplayer component that would nevertheless not be an emphasis of any part of the series, and that they would never do anything so idiotic as splitting a wonderful community across two editions of the same game, and that there was a wonderful sequel planned from the beginning, rather than an utterly plotless trainwreck graphics update tacked on when trilogies became fashionable.
[Note: I will personally write the script of a Lost Planet remake. I'm not entirely sure why I care so much.]
Okay, I'm totally in with the idea of rewriting Star Wars to make it better. I'm a scripter, so while I might not be able to do jack for worldbuilding, I can string together scenes into something that might resemble a coherent plot and then pass it off to checkers to make sure that I'm not having someone act wildly inconsistently with their character. I may be able to keep the timeline straight and the scenes in order.
I'll happily vote those things out of the EU with you, though my short list of EU novels that exist includes Brian Daley's trilogy about Han, set before the movies. (And I never really felt like Zahn grasped the feel of the Star Wars movies. But that's a minor quibble.)
My very favorite book series is Ellis Peters' (Edith Pargeter's) Brother Cadfael novels, a mystery series set during the English civil war in the 12th century and starring a sort of proto-humanist monk whose patience, kindness, and good humor might lead one to overlook his razor-sharp mind and decades of military experience. The series is matter-of-fact about the horrors of leprosy, abdominal wounds, starvation, etc., but it's also full of little moments where human beings are better than they could be. It's also matter-of-fact about miracles. My very favorite book in the series is The Pilgrim of Hate, in which someone facing a short miserable life due to a disability is miraculously healed and a man eaten up by desire for vengeance finds out that when it comes down to it, he can't kill in cold blood. There are so many scenes of beauty in that book because the people of the abbey and the nearby town come together to hold a pilgrim festival full of light and joy.
I've heard that the BBC series with Derek Jacobi as Brother Cadfael did an especially fine job filming that book. They avoided the temptation to turn the disabled person into a faker running a long con on his own sister. They did not turn the would-be avenger into a man who had already committed a horrific murder in the grip of religious mania. They didn't add a subplot about a half-rotten corpse being boiled down to a skeleton and lard it with stomach-churning dialogue about the details, or replace the ceremonious public procession on the Feast of the Translation of St. Winifred with a near-mob-scene called "Cripples' Day." And they didn't turn Cadfael into the sort of jackass who incites mobs to beat people up!
Also, I'm still exasperated that the Linda Hamilton-Ron Howard fantasy romance series Beauty and the Beast just ends, with Catherine still pregnant and still a captive of that rich creep who wants her baby because it's Vincent's.
It is so sad that they never made a sequel to Shrek. That would have been Brillant!!
The Exorcist was a truly great film they should make an Exorcist II
Alien and Aliens were so wonderful I hope they eventually make Aliens III.
As for books.
Robert Jordan should have written a dozen sequels to The Eye of the World.
Game of Thrones needs at least 3 sequels.
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