Canon fodder: serial fiction and how it works

Sorry hueg

But also awesome.

That's fantastic.

it's interesting how these undeniably mythic characters like superman are inherently different from, say, the iliad or the odyssey or bible or whatever in that those stories are essentially closed while superman stories necessarily have to remain open because dc/warner brothers have shareholders

capitalism as a relentless driver for narrative, basically

counterpoints?

why doesn't herakles make landfall with the achaian hosts on trojan shores?

what happens to odysseus after the trojan war?

what happens to aeneas after the trojan war?

what does shakespeare have to say about all this?

the four gospels are a promethean sequel to the torah (which is itself a ripoff of hellenic myth)

who the fuck did james joyce think he was?

different from, say, the iliad or the odyssey or bible or whatever in that those stories are essentially closed

Strange to say, not only was the bible closed by the Council of Nicea (which got a shout-out earlier itt) for essentially political reasons, but the Iliad and Odyssey both became closed texts under the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos, who wanted canonical versions of Homer's texts to be used for political purposes, too. It is suspected that such characters as Thersites, the stereotype of the loutish common soldier who gripes about his betters who then give him a much-deserved hiding, were fixed into the canon at that time.

just wait till Superman v. Bloomsday

slowclap.gif

one interesting difference would be that the Bible or Torah or Vedas or whatever, a lot of those older narratives arose from commonly told folk stories or oral narratives, and were shared among people in a community, passed down generations, etc. whereas Superman was thought of by like one or two guys in an office on a weekend.

i don't think Biblical stories are "closed" either, just look at Christmas, a modern capitalist folk tradition famously incorporating many different elements from many different cultures into a synthesized "Christian" holiday

but the whole nature of ongoing serials is that lots of people make contributions - lots of things that are "core" to a character like Superman may actually come later, by other authors. kryptonite, for example, was introduced in the wartime radio serials, written by some other guy entirely.

I love this Count of Monte Cristo character flowchart (NB clearly all spoilers)

I have no idea whether Dumas worked out the awesomely intricate plot of Count of Monte Cristo beforehand, or just hoofed it as he went all along over two years of serialisation, but either way it's an incredible achievement.

noahdysseus. olias of sunhillow

Genuinely surprised that serialised novels haven't made a comeback in the Kindle age, it would appear to be perfectly designed for them.

Maybe Bezos ought to see if Oprah is interested.

but the whole nature of ongoing serials is that lots of people make contributions - lots of things that are "core" to a character like Superman may actually come later, by other authors. kryptonite, for example, was introduced in the wartime radio serials, written by some other guy entirely.

― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Sunday, April 29, 2018 8:25 PM (two days ago) Bookmark

yeah this is a good point. i guess when you get down to it nobody can own an idea. once it gets out, it is inevitable other people will join in and it will grow in meaning. things can be pulled in from entirely different media. perhaps in the end, the true canon is defined not from top-down from the authority figure/symbolic IP holder but through the larger social/cultural sphere, what meanings survive the ages.

this is why it always feels so dumb when dc/marvel (mainly dc) feel like they have to do big continuity reboots to simplify the backstory or drop bad stories. just don't reference the bad stories, they disappear. the "canon" is whatever people believe matters, and the "continuity" is just the stuff where people notice if you contradict it, where it damages the illusion of the characters and their world as having a consistent reality. like if two characters who dated for years in the 80s are depicted as meeting for the first time in a new issue, or if someone betrayed the team eight issues back and now they're back but nobody is commenting on it, that's a violation of continuity that pushes the reader out of the universe. if they flirted in one panel in 1966 and now are depicted as meeting for the first time, it's fine - almost nobody will have read both comics and how many of them will care?

the kind of fans that maintain wikia can still insist that it's canon that, idk, gambit belongs to a stupid thieves guild devoted to an immortality elixir under the orders of a Highlander, but if you just never use that stuff it doesn't matter. obviously a better approach would be to not use gambit altogether but you know what i mean.

I'm completely on board with that approach

I got into it with someone who was continuity policing on another site because the idea that every work needs to be explicitly or even tightly linked does nothing for the reader and is usually a negative for the writers.

I think the case in point was Marvel's Runaways show on Hulu and how, to them, it somehow mattered that it's explicitly set in the same world as other Marvel junk. The show has no real references to characters that don't appear in it, and while you could do a plot relying on the fact there are people with super powers out in the world, they haven't done that plot. I can watch the show and assume it's its own thing. Some producer saying it's in the same space means nothing because there is no actual linkage on screen. But if some authority says they're contemporaneous, then it suddenly matters because..

also, no one should use Gambit

idk, there's a very slavish attitude towards continuity that a lot of writers exhibit nowadays, especially if they were fans of the IP that they're working on. (Morrison's Batman RIP story where *everything* is in continuity was painfully eye-roll inducing.) Seeing how a writer integrates a 30-year-old story element into a story they're currently writing can be interesting, but in a way that's like watching someone put a puzzle together as opposed to an interesting story.

In my ideal world, continuity would be a la carte, i.e. it should rarely shackle a writer, who should feel free to abandon stuff as they see fit (which I think is the general rule of thumb that Doctor Who writers follow).

Genuinely surprised that serialised novels haven't made a comeback in the Kindle age, it would appear to be perfectly designed for them.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, 1 May 2018 19:23

They have in China! So many people reading the latest instalments on their phones in the metro, etc.

it's also abundantly clear that some serial concepts work way, way better outside a shared universe. x-men is absolutely one - the core concept of people getting superpowers by genetic accident, and there being disputes over whether that is exciting/scary, is rife with possibilities, many of which are closed off immediately (or become bizarre and meaningless) in a world that also has people who get superpowers from science experiments, government aliens, dying aliens etc. the runaways concept (kids find out their parents are supervillains) isn't really *harmed* by being in the marvel universe but it doesn't gain much either and maybe makes it feel less like its own thing. like if suddenly it was revealed that harry potter actually takes place in the same universe as the one from which dorothy travels to oz. pointless and vaguely diminishing to both.

constraints can be valuable to writing, one thing writers of an ongoing open-ended thing need to do is leave it open for the next person, leave them a free a hand as possible. at its worst this equals "nothing sticks" which turns off readers. but more generally you want to avoid things that seriously cage in the story possibilities and at least with the x-men, being in the coherent "marvel universe," which can never really seem to experience the radically, comprehensively transformative effects of a rising tide of superpowered humanity, has perhaps contributed to the actual history of the series, in which for vast stretches of time the main defining features of the team were that they were ragtag outlaws trotting the globe hunted by baffling conspiracies, dealing with political schisms in a galaxy of bird people, and disappearing up their own increasingly bizarre history of time-travel, rebirth as cosmic beings, bodies swapped by telepathy, conspiracies within conspiracies, etc.

in between of course claremont did a ton with the prejudice angle and morrison tried to open up the speculation on a different, mutant-filled world, but i think a lot of the gibberish stems from writers, including those two, not *really* being able to do all that much with this radical concept in a shared universe, so it's like, um... how about they fight cyborgs again, but this time they're under mind control?

I've been trying to workshop a "What about Bob?"/Captain Ron crossover movie in my head this week and I have no idea why

both have a patriarch trying to keep control of his family in the face of an antagonist the family is sympathetic to, I guess

one of the fuck yeah moments in the original dragonlance trilogy is weis/hickman neglecting to narrate prizing the dragonlance from the glacier, going instead with a poem. that lacuna signaled that like with ancient arcadian myth countless more legends awaited telling beyond the main storyline

and now I've discovered that Captain Ron was almost directed by John Carpenter

Escape from the Carribean

watched captain ron a month or two ago for the first time. my god it's the pits. desperately needed to be a whole lot more surreal or a whole lot less gross, one or the other.

it’s a halfassed family comedy from like 1991

the only redeemable part is Kurt Russell’s enjoyment of being a goof

the gorillas/guerillas is the only real script setup that lands

quarter-assed at best

at its worst this equals "nothing sticks" which turns off readers.

A citation is probably required here - apart from anything else, comic strips operate off a general knowledge of the characters (Spider-Man, Mandrake, Judge Dredd), which not only are compatible with nothing sticking, but are dependent on that.

hmmm, fair point... I guess I was thinking of things like character deaths getting reversed almost immediately, which has never much enhanced my own attachment to / faith in a series.

another issue: how much do you need to let the audience breathe, or get comfortable with a new status quo, before you throw some other change at them? apart from the value of leaving that status quo in effect until you've told all the stories you can tell with it, is there some value to just letting people process its arrival and enjoy imagining its possibilities? i'm thinking of early 90s x-men, where magneto "died" in december 1991 and was back for the summer crossover in 1993 with hints being dropped that spring. that's not a ton of time to even register that he's absent, given all the other things the x-men have on their plates (and the failure of the books to thematize said absence). then the outcome of that big return story is that he is rendered comatose, so his return, much built up for the reader, turns out to be a fizzle. the real change in the status quo you're supposed to pay attention to is that magneto takes away wolverine's adamantium, which DID stick for a while but wasn't built up to at ALL.

i think with serial fiction you kinda gotta let things sit for a second. even if you know the status quo the last writer handed you was actually lousy, maybe you gotta try and make it work for a while (even as you set up the elements for something different). ime there's a whiplash effect when you're reading something that keeps changing creative teams, dropping threads, setting up new shit that doesn't get explored... idk.

On the other hand, the Anatomy Lesson (though "except if you're 1980s Alan Moore" is an exception to a lot of rules)

I think it's worth noting that we are many of us buying TPBs now, through Netflix's "*splort* Here's six episodes of a TV show" model.