I think predictability is necessary for some stories (with suffering) to be enjoyable

[Ibrinar]

I was thinking about the topic and felt like talking about it. The predictability of the god guys winning in the end and things like that often get mentioned as a negative. But I think what is seldom mentioned is the positive side of a little predictability. Some stories would just be unpleasant to read without being pretty sure it will have a somewhat positive or at least bittersweet ending. Mainly when the main character is in a bad long lasting situation like abuse/slavery/some nasty curse or whatever. In most stories for entertainment it isn't a question of if but when and how the situation will end. And I don't think it would be better for the if to be in question. Because if it was a coin toss I would always have to ask myself "do I really want to subject myself to this if it might just have a downer ending?" Well it isn't just personal pain for the MC of course, if in classic LOTR inspired fantasy novels there was a 50/50 chance of the dark lord winning in the end and everyone suffering that would probably make me hesitant to start them.

That of course isn't an amazing new insight, but the merits of predictability just isn't something I often see discussed. So I decided to make a thread. Not that bad ends don't have their place.

[warty goblin]

I think predictability of the general endstate of a story is a good thing, and to a certain extent defines genre. The dark lord is defeated, the world is saved from aliens, the detective catches the killer, the hero and heroine ride off into the sunset to have backbreaking amounts of sex, etc. Basically we pick up a story in a particular genre because we want to see that thing happen at the end.

Where I think predictability becomes less of a virtue is in the path to that endpoint. If every fantasy novel follows a runty dude trying to chuck a magical artifact in a major geological formation, we'd probably burn out of the genre pretty fast. It's in the stuff in the middle that we want to see new stuff. Dragonlance Chronicles is at one level a straight up copy of the LoTR defeat the dark lord (or lady) plot, but the route taken looks enormously different, and even the execution of the ending is pretty radically distinct. Middle Earth is saved because Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam all stayed their hands when they could have killed Gollum. Ansalon is saved because the next big bad wants to usurp the evil goddess and can't do that if she rules the world, and he wants to rub his power in his estwhile friends' faces. The how is more important than the what.

I suspect there's a sort of stable distribution where a very small number of stories need to exist where the expected thing doesn't happen, precisely so that when we get to the moment where it looks like the dark lord wins or the killer gets away or the heroine will never forgive the hero his (misunderstood) transgression we get that pleasant frisson of tension because just maybe this time it doesn't work out. As a completely off the cuff estimate, I'd figure this portion is probably about 1%, and I'm probably being generous.

[Kitten Champion]

One of the things I found increasingly intolerable about the episodic SF/horror/fantasy/thriller series The Outer Limits was that it almost always pushed for the unpredictably dark conclusion. Whatever the protagonist(s) try to do over the span of the narrative would be undermined with the ironic twist conclusion. Whatever hope you in the audience are supposed to have in watching the characters struggle and eventually reach a climax where their efforts are seemingly being paid off is crushed inevitably by the overall tone of the series.

After a point, the dark twist ending is used enough that it just becomes emotionally draining knowing the futility of what you're seeing. That's for a mere hour-length show, for a longer epic story... that'd be even harder to accept.

I don't think a story is bad because of this - it is an element of horror especially - but I think you need to be able to look back after and say the story wasn't just toying with you because it could. Like, if you're expecting Man to win v Society in a Kafka work it would be somewhat confusing because those are the themes and ideas he's developing over the course of the narrative and not an uplifting story of human perseverance in the face of a world gone mad.

The one high fantasy novel series where this is a pertinent question that I can recall is Joe Abercrombie's The First Law series. I don't want to spoil the ending too much, but it did leave me with the question of whether - had I known where it was heading - I'd have read it at all as the ending is conspicuously cynical and quite depressing on various levels. Still, while I could criticize aspects of it, I think ultimately it earned its ending. Or at least it wasn't dark for the sake of being dark.

[TheSummoner]

I'm not sure if I'd use the word predictability, but I agree with the general sentiment. Stories tend to follow one of a few general structures because over time we've realized that we just find it satisfying. We want the characters we root for to win in the end. We want them to struggle, but we want them to overcome. And I think most importantly of all, we want the chain of events that unfold in the story to follow logically. An audience is willing to accept a downer ending if it makes sense in the context of the story. The big examples I like to give for this one are Ned Stark's death in A Game of Thrones and the Red Wedding in A Clash of Kings. Both are gigantic downers that are generally completely unexpected to a new reader (or viewer of the HBO adaptation), but both are logical end results of the actions taken and choices made by the characters involved and both make perfect sense in retrospect. They're the two most iconic moments in the series because of how well they're handled. Ned Stark may be the closest thing to a main character at that point in the story and you may expect that means he will succeed and triumph in the end, but his choice to show mercy to his enemies proves to be almost as fatal as being played by Sean Bean.

The opposite of this of course is the annoying recent trend of subverting expectations. Hack writers see examples like the above and think that the scenes are well written and impactful because the audience doesn't see them coming. You were expecting the hero to defeat the villain he's been set up to clash with since the very first scene? Nah, just have another character with no connection to the villain appear out of nowhere and shank him. It's cheap twists with none of the work put into actually setting them up. It's not clever, it's just random and the twist undermines any setup or foreshadowing that there may have been towards the expected outcome. It's like the audience is being led on from point A to point B to point C and suddenly, for no reason ends up at 7. Seriously, Game of Thrones season 8 should be required viewing for anyone who wants to write any sort of story. It's a perfect example of what not to do.

[Saintheart]

I think the OP is right when he makes a distinction between predictability and expected structure for a genre. Literary snobs intentionally blur the two as if they were the same thing, pseudo-intellectual literary snobs blur the two without realising the difference, and everyone else just gets on and enjoys the book.

Assuming we ever get a single-author ending for Song of Ice and Fire (we won't) then my guess is that the overall structure of the entire collection of telephone books ultimately is going to look a lot like any other fantasy series: inciting problem, collect allies, brave perils, confront last major antagonist, and end the story on a defined level of savoury to sweet, happy to unhappy. Just because GRRM is good at disguising the fact it's a collective of protagonists rather than one figure, and awful at resolving subplots, and determined to show his readers the mirror of them at their worst rather than at their best, doesn't change that fact.

Lord of the Rings certainly sets the standard for the quest structure of a story, but even it doesn't go to the predictable. If you're reading it the first time you're expecting Frodo to be the ultimate hero. That isn't quite how it turns out; Sam has to literally carry him part of the way to the final objective (and consider the contrarian, if not tongue-in-cheek analyses that argue Sam is the actual protagonist and hero of LOTR, not Frodo) and one of the series' antagonists - Gollum - turns out to be essential for success in that his own greed prevents Frodo from failing the quest at all! Gollum's intervention is foreshadowed about as explicitly as it can be, but the result still isn't entirely predictable.

Hence the old, tired saw of fiction writing: give the readers what they expect, but not the way they were expecting it.

Nothing wrong with expected structure. Nothing wrong with tropes. Nothing wrong with a familiar set of factors. These are only irritations to those who've read them too much and too often, i.e. literary snobs. (And, per good old Professor David Foster in his book, that's all that literary criticism really comes down to: pattern recognition, playing the silly game of asking 'where have I seen this before, what allusions is the writer trying to make').

[warty goblin]

Assuming we ever get a single-author ending for Song of Ice and Fire (we won't) then my guess is that the overall structure of the entire collection of telephone books ultimately is going to look a lot like any other fantasy series: inciting problem, collect allies, brave perils, confront last major antagonist, and end the story on a defined level of savoury to sweet, happy to unhappy. Just because GRRM is good at disguising the fact it's a collective of protagonists rather than one figure, and awful at resolving subplots, and determined to show his readers the mirror of them at their worst rather than at their best, doesn't change that fact.

Eh, maybe. Martin's written some very odd and often extremely dark endings in the course of his career, and he's certainly not limited himself to stories that affirm the fundamental worth of humanity, at least in remotely clearcut terms. Off the top of my head, some past oddities include but are not limited to:

• Finding out your principles mean nothing, the love of your life is a lie you told yourself, and everything's going to freeze to death and die.
• Your animal rights violations have displeased somebody with a very powerful set of ecological warfare tools. Your economy and society are now completely trashed.
• A world is saved from itself in an act of supreme arrogance by a man who lucked into the powers of a god, violating the bodily autonomy and most deeply held religious beliefs of billions in the process.
• Heaven exists, it's a giant amorphous parasite, and all you have to do is feed yourself to it and surrender your existence as an independent being with a meaningful self. Or remain eternally, fundamentally alone.
• Maybe-intelligent aliens can use your religion to hijack your brain and drive your culture into insanity, infanticide and self-destruction.
• Since you've failed in a series of sad, lazy and basically pathetic ways for most of your life, rather than confront that why not spend the rest of your life having sex with animated corpses?

Always remember folks, ASoIaF is Martin in a good mood.

Damn, now I want to read A Song for Lya again.

[TheSummoner]

Whether the general structure ends up similar to other fantasy stories in the end or not, the key thing is that Martin tends to put some actual work into the setup. A good twist is one you don't expect, but that makes perfect sense in hindsight. One that if you read through a second time, knowing what is going to happen, the clues are there and you can see them even though you may have missed them the first time through. That's the difference between an actually clever twist and lazily subverting expectations just for the sake of being unexpected.

Since it hasn't really been touched on, I want to address OP's point about characters suffering a bit. Without adversity, there is no plot. The hero has to have something to struggle against and overcome or else there's nothing heroic about them at all. Conflict is what turns a mundane chain of events into an actual story worth telling, and it's the antagonist that creates that conflict. The greater the threat posed by the antagonist and the harder it is for the hero to overcome that challenge, the more satisfaction you feel when they finally do. It's really not suffering that matters, but the fact that there is some challenge for the hero to struggle against. And that challenge doesn't have to even be a character, just something difficult for the hero to face.

Even though I'm really not a big fan of it, my go to example for this one is Star Wars. Darth Vader is a great antagonist. He's large and imposing. He's shown to be brutally powerful, yet also intelligent. His helmet and voice make him mysterious as well. More than that, Vader is always in control of himself and the situation around him. When Vader shows up, either the heroes run or they die and this remains constant up until the final confrontation where Luke finally overcomes him. Contrast this with Kylo Ren in the sequels. He's got a promising start when he first comes out of his ship, masked and immediately shown to be quite powerful, but it lasts all of one minute before the favorable comparisons to Vader fall flat. The very first thing that happens when he confronts the protagonists? They make light of him, quickly diminishing any threat he may have had. Kylo throws temper tantrums and kills his subordinates for asking reasonable questions (contrasted with Vader who never lost his temper only killed subordinates for incompetence and failure). Kylo removes his mask, also removing any mystery that may have surrounded him. Most damningly however, Kylo never wins. You can make a menacing villain who lashes out and can't control his temper. You can make a menacing villain without the need for mystery (though if that's what the goal is, there was no point in giving him the mask in the first place). What you can't do is have the hero defeat the villain in every encounter they have and even go so far as to have a secondary hero make light of him to his face with no repercussions in the very first confrontation and still expect the audience to consider that villain to be a credible threat. Nothing Vader does is particularly original or clever, but the fact that he pulls it all off so well is what makes him one of the most iconic and menacing villains out there. Kylo on the other hand is a joke of a villain that ultimately proved to be less threatening than many actual clowns.

[Lemmy]

I mean... The obsession with "subverting expectations" has a large part of the blame for ruining multiple beloved frachises.

So... Yeah... Predictability isn't necessarily bad.

[Lord Raziere]

I mean... The obsession with "subverting expectations" has a large part of the blame for ruining multiple beloved frachises.

I mean the main problem is that they are doing it with long-running franchises whose entire design is setting up formulas to live for so long they become zombies of impenetrable continuity. I, as a staunch expectation subverter, find these attempts lazy. If your going to subvert expectations, go all way and don't even do it in a long-running franchise.

They way you do it, is that you take the thing you want to subvert and instead of using the actual thing, you create a copy of it, then begin diverging and altering it until its own thing that while it starts out being similar, it ends up different.

Like say want a subversive pokemon. you don't actually use pokemon itself, thats going to get you nothing but fans hating you for ruining pokemon. you take the premise of pokemon, the building blocks that you want to keep, then you make something similar to pokemon, but has its own rules that allows it to go in different directions, explore different things, so that people can enjoy pokemon and your subversive pokemon without having arguments over whether its a good pokemon story, because your instead making a NEW story that is VERY MUCH SIMILAR to pokemon but can be said to be distinct enough to NOT be a pokemon, even though the entire premise is "pokemon but a bunch of things subverted so it goes in a different direction".

like there are other things you can make than constantly recycling the same big name shows over and over again. even if your just taking a superman, slapping a new name on them then doing things differently even though its clearly a superman knockoff thats more original than the whole nostalgia merry go round we're currently on where people keep bringing up actual Superman to retread his stories over and over and over and over again, or make him something he is not, because darn it at least a superman knockoff would be TRYING to make a separate character, even if the archetype is the same.

there is ways to do subversion correctly. there is ways to write stories different from the tired old tropes, correctly. but constantly trying to keep the same old characters alive through a combination of nostalgia and "hip modern updates" isn't the way. don't blame the tool, blame those who misuse it.

[Lurkmoar]

If one deals with a Franchise Zombie, you shot it in the head.

Or take the more practical approach of ignoring it, and let others that enjoy still enjoy it. And find something that appeals to ones tastes more.

[BloodSquirrel]

I think what's important is that a story has to follow some sort of logic and rules in order to be a, well, story and not just a random sequence of events. And a story that follows logic and rules is going to be at least somewhat predictable, because that's what logic and rules are for.

And, yes, some of those rules and logic are narrative in nature. If a movie has a theme, then that theme is going to impose certain rules on the story. A happy ending to a movie whose theme is "Love conquers all" is necessary because it's the ending that is consistent with the narrative logic the movie is establishing. A coming-of-age story need to end with the main character having experienced growth and finding a place in the world, because the aspect of life that it's examining has that as its major feature, and ignoring that means suddenly abiding by a different set of rules.

This is why a movie can get away with a major twist that can even go so far as the completely change the genre of the film as long as it can do so while keeping both the pre and post-twist parts of the movie running on the same recognizable logic. We might have been mistaken about what that logic was before, but as long as it makes sense in retrospect, the whole movie still holds together.

[Lemmy]

The whole "subverting expectations" is itself a cliché by now... Most of the time, all it does is remove classic story elements that work (and that's why they became classics) and add story elements that are frustrating or nonsensical, but make presumptuous authors feel way more clever than they actually are.

GoT seasons 7 and 8 could be textbook examples of this. So could a lot of modern cinema.

[dehro]

I think genre and execution matter, in these things.. It's been a few decades, but I remember trying to like Dean Koontz.
I liked his build up and tension progression, but I remember that the final chapters were always a let down with how the plot resolved.
Sadly, I don't really remember any details, but I do remember that after the second or third book I gave up.

[Tyndmyr]

The opposite of this of course is the annoying recent trend of subverting expectations. Hack writers see examples like the above and think that the scenes are well written and impactful because the audience doesn't see them coming. You were expecting the hero to defeat the villain he's been set up to clash with since the very first scene? Nah, just have another character with no connection to the villain appear out of nowhere and shank him. It's cheap twists with none of the work put into actually setting them up. It's not clever, it's just random and the twist undermines any setup or foreshadowing that there may have been towards the expected outcome. It's like the audience is being led on from point A to point B to point C and suddenly, for no reason ends up at 7. Seriously, Game of Thrones season 8 should be required viewing for anyone who wants to write any sort of story. It's a perfect example of what not to do.

I am in full agreement with this.

With the well done examples, one looks back, and sees all the foreshadowing and realizes it makes perfect sense, we simply were a bit blinded by genre expectations. The making sense bit is a great deal more important than being surprising. If you can pull off both, wonderful! But a film can absolutely work wonderfully without being surprising at all.

After all, I can't imagine that any of us going to see Lord of the Rings expected to be surprised. Most of us had read the books, and even if not, the story's elements have largely become the default for fantasy, so they are unlikely to surprise many. And yet, the movies are still quite enjoyable.

A lot of pop music works this way, with extremely familiar patterns being repeated. The brain derives some satisfaction from seeing the patterns and completing them. Now, obviously, just being predictable isn't any more useful than just being surprising. Either for its own sake isn't going to get you far. There's no magic button you can mash to avoid doing the work of building a story that makes sense.

I mean the main problem is that they are doing it with long-running franchises whose entire design is setting up formulas to live for so long they become zombies of impenetrable continuity. I, as a staunch expectation subverter, find these attempts lazy. If your going to subvert expectations, go all way and don't even do it in a long-running franchise.

Absolutely. Spaceballs is wonderful. The newest Star Wars trilogy is...not. Making your own thing brings a lot of freedom, even if you're doing a bit of a send-up of something else.

I think genre and execution matter, in these things.. It's been a few decades, but I remember trying to like Dean Koontz.
I liked his build up and tension progression, but I remember that the final chapters were always a let down with how the plot resolved.
Sadly, I don't really remember any details, but I do remember that after the second or third book I gave up.

It's a common problem. Stephen King suffers from it as well. Usually his books have a really fun concept, and it's built initially with great characters, the growing sense of dread, but the third act falls a little flat.

This is largely because of his belief that all evil is ultimately petty. The schoolyard bully, not a true villain. Probably also explains his love of bullies as his B plot.

I'm a fan of stories that have truly evil, competent villains. A great many do not, but those that do are a delight.

[BloodSquirrel]

The whole "subverting expectations" is itself a cliché by now... Most of the time, all it does is remove classic story elements that work (and that's why they became classics) and add story elements that are frustrating or nonsensical, but make presumptuous authors feel way more clever than they actually are.

GoT seasons 7 and 8 could be textbook examples of this. So could a lot of modern cinema.

The problem is that"subverting expectations" in an existing franchise tends to mean suddenly changing the rules of how the setting works. If the world was saved 20 times in a row by brash heroics, and you decide to "subvert expectations" by showing how stupid and impractical brash heroics are, then you're directly contradicting the facts so far established in the setting.

That's why deconstructions usually need to exist in their own settings where they can establish their own rules that examine the underlying assumptions of their target genre instead of imposing them on an existing setting where those assumptions have been proven correct.

[Lord Raziere]

The whole "subverting expectations" is itself a cliché by now... Most of the time, all it does is remove classic story elements that work (and that's why they became classics) and add story elements that are frustrating or nonsensical, but make presumptuous authors feel way more clever than they actually are.

GoT seasons 7 and 8 could be textbook examples of this. So could a lot of modern cinema.

So....a very popular TV franchise whose author of the books they're based on has yet to finish his books being taken over by people rushing the plots and a cinema full of nostalgia flicks based on old long-running comic book franchises that have been around since probably before you or I were born? all your examples prove my point: its not the tool thats the problem, its that its that its being used in stories so old and popular they can be regarded as a form of tradition at this point. you have yet to name a single story that isn't affected by the nostalgia factor.

Absolutely. Spaceballs is wonderful. The newest Star Wars trilogy is...not. Making your own thing brings a lot of freedom, even if you're doing a bit of a send-up of something else.

Exactly. the problem with the Sequel Trilogy was trying to make a new star wars thing. We already have lots of star wars things. By labeling it Star Wars, it had to be bound by its rules and canon- and thus a lot of the old canon had to be destroyed. when you imagine if they didn't have the Star Wars label, sure, it would be riskier and probably wouldn't garner as much attention. thats always a problem. But you can't keep resurrecting the same old thing to try and tell the same old story over and over again. your never going to catch that lightning in a bottle again. and sometimes....we should just let things end. just let a beloved story go and move on. asking for Star Wars to always exist is to ask for it to die a slow agonizing death rather than a quick peaceful one.

you know whats a beloved classic videogame? Chrono Trigger. you know what isn't? Chrono Cross. so everyone just ignores the latter and says Chrono Trigger is the only videogame of the two that matters and they are pretty much correct since its the one people actually bring back in remakes. one and done. sure, Chrono Trigger is a dead franchise but that doesn't mean I don't love it, or that it isn't good. people have fond memories of Chrono Trigger, and there is no need to tarnish that by making anything else with the label of being apart of that franchise. if you really want to emulate the feeling one gets from Chrono Trigger, I'd rather have a Spiritual Successor rather than a soulless skin level copy.

[TheSummoner]

So....a very popular TV franchise whose author of the books they're based on has yet to finish his books being taken over by people rushing the plots and a cinema full of nostalgia flicks based on old long-running comic book franchises that have been around since probably before you or I were born? all your examples prove my point: its not the tool thats the problem, its that its that its being used in stories so old and popular they can be regarded as a form of tradition at this point. you have yet to name a single story that isn't affected by the nostalgia factor.

I'll bite. I'll even use your own example from before

Every main series Pokemon game has a villain team. Team Rocket, Team Aqua, Team Magma, Team Galactic and so on. The main conflict of the games tends to be that the villain team is a powerful criminal organization trying to use whichever legendary Pokemon is on the box to enact some great plan that will ultimately reshape the world with them in control. This is, in essence, the plot of every game from Generations 3 to 6. It's pretty formulaic. Then came Generation 7 with Pokemon Sun and Moon and the villain team is Team Skull. Team Skull is not a powerful criminal organization, they're a gang of punks and outcasts. They're a nuisance, but they're never presented as a great threat or taken all that seriously. They have no great plan and are kinda morons. They're punks who cause trouble because they're bored and have nothing better to do and because their gang is the only real thing that gives them any sense of belonging. Team Skull is not the main villain, they're amusing side villains. Even the main villain, Lusamine, does not fall into the typical pattern of chase the legendary on the box for ultimate power - she's a conservationist driven insane by the loss of her husband. Her goals have nothing to do with the box legendary, but rather an obsession with an entirely different Pokemon from another dimension that her husband had been studying before his disappearance. The subversion extends beyond plot and even into recurring gameplay elements. Most Pokemon games have a gauntlet where you walk through a hallway filled with enemy team grunts who stop you to battle before you can confront their leader at the end. Sun and Moon are no exception, but they do put a rather funny twist on it - the last Team Skull grunt before you face their boss Guzma stops you, says "Pretty strong, ain't you? Then go right ahead. I'm no numskull. I don't fight battles I can't win!" and just lets you pass proving himself smarter than just about every other grunt in the series. Ultimately, Team Skull is a joke, but they're a funny joke and probably a big part of why Gen 7 was received as well as it was. The criticisms I've seen of the games tend to focus more on linearity and the number of cut scenes and amount of hand-holding the game does, but overall people tend to find the story and characters a refreshing change of pace.

You very easily could take an established series and do something new with it, but for it to work, you'd have to do two very important things. First, you'd actually have to put in the work to make whatever twists exist make sense and the second is that you would have to respect what came before. The biggest criticism I've seen about the Star Wars sequels is how much they fail at those. The universe is back into a state of war despite the end of Return of the Jedi ending on an upbeat note with the Empire defeated. Enough time has passed in-universe for a new threat to rise, but no effort is put into explaining how the status quo of the universe suddenly got reset to the state it was at the beginning of A New Hope. The heroes that the fans knew and loved? Well, Han went from being a Republic general at the end the OT to being a deadbeat dad and went back to his smuggling days. The eternal optimist Luke who refused to give up hope that there was some good left in the man who genocided an entire planet became the sort of man who would attempt to murder his nephew in his sleep and sit back while a new evil Galactic Empire rises. Leia... Really doesn't do all that much at all frankly and as sad as that is for the woman who more or less had to rescue her would-be rescuers from the Death Star, it still means she got it better than the others. A new movie set decades later doesn't have to be about those characters, but it absolutely shouldn't have contempt for them in the way the sequels seemed to. You could write the sequels such that Luke, Han, and Leia are minor background characters or even ones who are only mentioned but never actually appear. Of course, Disney knows that the fans love those characters and that'll drive ticket sales, so neither of those are really options. There's other ways to do it though - the OT characters need to be present, but they aren't the focus so have them off doing something in the background until it's time for them to appear in the main plot. If Disney wants to kill them off, then let them die doing something that matters and have it seem like their life between the end of Episode 6 and then and their death meant something. Certainly it would've been better received than Luke running off to be a grumpy hermit, having one fight but not really even being there and then fading away. Let him die a hero's death saving the lives of the new protagonists from certain death or something. Probably the biggest slap in the face to everything that came before was Palpatine returning. Dude blew up. Twice. Once when Vader threw him into the reactor and a second time when the entire second Death Star blew up. Not only his his survival completely illogical (and unexplained), but it undoes the victory from the OT. It's not nostalgia that made people hate the sequel trilogy, it's them being terribly written movies with no in-universe consistency that use the legacy of the originals to draw in an audience and then treat the characters that audience knows and loves and the universe the story takes place in with utter contempt. And after that, writers who think they're far more clever than they really are turning around and blaming the audience for not being smart enough to appreciate the golden turd they created. If you want proof, then look no further than The Mandalorian. Season 1 has little connection to the movies beyond setting and was incredibly well received. Season 2 has Luke and other established characters appear, but even so, it's not his story. Maybe future episodes will change this, but at least as of now, he's a minor character in the titular Mandalorian's story. He's treated with respect by the writers, however and the reception of it tends to fall somewhere between unconstrained joy at best and thinking that it was a cheap nostalgia bait and didn't feel deserved due to lack of setup at worst. Even those critical of Luke's scene in the Mandalorian don't have anywhere near the level of vitriol as they do for the way his character was written in TLJ.

As for Chrono Cross, I can't comment much because I haven't played the game, but I'd be careful of using video games as an example. Subverting expectations is largely plot and storytelling phenomenon and video games in particular tend not to focus on story above other aspects of the medium. It's why I was careful to separate gameplay from plot when talking about Pokemon Sun and Moon.

[Lord Raziere]

Okay....I don't see how providing an example of subverting expectations actually working in a long-runner goes against my point: if anything that is more evidence against Lemmy's proclamations that it seemingly all bad. my main point is that subversion is a tool, like any other storytelling tool. it just seems harder to do that with long-runners because there are so many expectations to live up to and if someone deviates from those expectations, people seem to burn them at the stake for being different- rightly or wrongly.

like how do we tell the difference between a creator truly being bad, and fans just not liking change? that and many great things started by subverting the tropes of the time they were made in, but then became archetypical and household names later down the line, what is one generations fresh subversion is the next generations tired cliche. in that light is what even is "predictability" if it only comes after something makes waves as something new and fresh, after being mutable and open to not being that?

[Saintheart]

like how do we tell the difference between a creator truly being bad, and fans just not liking change?

Good storytelling.





Not to mention that subversion of a genre, or a trope, invariably requires that the writer has mastered the genre or trope already to know where the stress points and change levers are within that genre or trope. This is the point made in Robert McKee's Screenplay. Ingmar Bergman did not start creating brilliant arthouse films at the beginning of his career, he first mastered the form of three act story structure in his films and only then felt himself confident to reach out. Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, and his other finest works didn't come until he was nearly 20 years into making conventional films, and indeed he didn't really strike out into artistic filmmaking until he had at least 10 years under his belt having made a dozen movies before. Hitchcock had a similar period of apprenticeship before The 39 Steps and spent another 10 years before Rebecca was nominated for an Academy Award. In the area of sculpture, you need only go to the museum in Florence to know how this path was played out by Michelangelo: David and the Pieta I were his early works, illustrating his mastery; Pieta IV is almost impressionistic by comparison, so much so that you don't realise they're by the same artist.

This mastery doesn't appear in Hollywood, at least not anymore; hence why it's mostly old men who are making the best films, because there is no real path of apprenticeship anymore, no 'middle budget' for a director to use in order to not just learn his craft but master his craft. This is particularly apparent in the case of The Last ****pie, to which all internet debates return: Rian Johnson was handed a budget roughly four or five times what he'd ever been given in the past, and his effort strikes me even now as the work of someone who doesn't know how to leverage all the tools he has available, and who doesn't really understand the genre he's working in as a creator of content (as opposed to being a fan of that genre, which I suppose he was at some stage).

[TheSummoner]

Listening to what specifically those fans are saying and applying some critical thinking to the work in question to see if those complaints hold up.

[Lemmy]

I'm not saying that deconstructing a genre or having surprising twists is bad... Just that it isn't any more clever or creative than using established story elements, and that it's very, very easy to do poorly.

"Subverting expectations" recently became a bit of a fad, but there have always been authors who chose "surprising" over "satisfactory" and "logical".

GoT source material doesn't matter. At the end of the day, what's there is what its awful writers chose to create. And they created perfect examples of why "subverting expectations" isn't clever and should never be more of a priority than simply writing a good story.

[Tyndmyr]

like how do we tell the difference between a creator truly being bad, and fans just not liking change?

Fans don't hate change. Ask any fan what new thing they'd like to see in their fandom, and they will talk you to death.

They hate poor quality. Even the possibility of something awful existing in their fandom is likely to be met with dislike. But if the thing actually turns out to be really good, that concern will be quickly forgotten.

Of course, when something crappy is pumped out, and fans hate on it, and the producers try to defend it by bashing their own fans, well...that always ends in a giant mess. Generally speaking, bashing your customers is not a winning play.

This is particularly apparent in the case of The Last ****pie, to which all internet debates return: Rian Johnson was handed a budget roughly four or five times what he'd ever been given in the past, and his effort strikes me even now as the work of someone who doesn't know how to leverage all the tools he has available, and who doesn't really understand the genre he's working in as a creator of content (as opposed to being a fan of that genre, which I suppose he was at some stage).

There's a rule of thumb in many businesses. Don't attempt something more than twice as big as anything you've ever done before.

It's not that it's genuinely impossible to do so...but generally, competence is earned a chunk at a time, it doesn't just all pop into existence at once. Even the most competent of people can become overwhelmed if they are suddenly plunged far out of their depth. Aiming bigger is fine, but steady growth is a lot more likely to be successful than drastic changes.

In Rian's case, he went on to make Knives Out, which was really quite a good film...and which had a far smaller budget, and lacked the constraints of an extremely well known universe.

[Sapphire Guard]

Like most storytelling 'rules', it depends.

What is your story trying to accomplish? Most importantly, following tropes or subverting them are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Whichever works better depends on the story, and no story is better or worse just by picking one of the two paths.

LOTR is cited as being pretty tropey, but if you look closer, not so much. The Dark Lord is not defeated in battle. It'S about destroying the superpowered magical artifact, not using it in battle.

The return of the king is a distraction, the battles are diversions that are not the path to victory. There is no happily ever after, Frodo is physically and emotionally scarred and never recovers.

ASOIAF gets a rep for killing its main characters, but look closer. Someone's father dying at the start of the story to kickstart his children's path to revenge? How tropey is that? We just got to spend some time with Ned first.

As of ADWD, our POV characters that have died are Ned and Cat, so that's one and a half. (Arys and Quentyn are mostly inconsequential). Robb was never a POV character. GOT is not super revolutionary at all, it's just good at hiding it.

[Mechalich]

GoT source material doesn't matter. At the end of the day, what's there is what its awful writers chose to create. And they created perfect examples of why "subverting expectations" isn't clever and should never be more of a priority than simply writing a good story.

The source material of GoT does matter, because ASOIAF is quite possibly the most famous example of 'writing yourself into a hole' to ever penetrate the popular consciousness.

ASOIAF is, as some others have mentioned, actually extremely conventional. It's a quasi-medieval fantasy world built around a modified version of an actual historical conflict (in this case the War of the Roses, something Martin has freely admitted) with the addition of a supernatural existential threat. The only real difference, apart from a much higher than usual level of detail with regard to the ranks of the nobility, is that Martin turned the 'brutality' and 'cynicism' dials up to eleven. The problem is that 'brutally cynical world dominated by violence' isn't readily compatible with 'escapist epic where the world is saved.' ASOIAF, through the five books that have been published, is the story of lots of humans fighting each other in a series of struggles that are about to be rendered utterly meaningless when the ice zombie horde kills them all.

All evidence suggests that there's no good solution to this, and the Martin knows this and has thrown in the towel (we're coming up on ten years since A Dance with Dragons was published). There's simply no way out without some sort of tawdry deus ex machina that invalidates the core themes of the series. The show, faced with this problem, embraced just such an approach - by making the Night King a single point of failure for the ice zombie horde and then deliberately exposing said failure point for some inexplicable reason - and also simply dropped any effort at all to tie in a wide range of plotlines to the overall story. Now the execution for forcing the series to an ending other than 'ice zombies, everyone dies,' was full of awful choices, horrible execution, and downright inexplicable decision making, but there were no good options.

Essentially ASOIAF changes epic fantasy tropes involving character and cultural behavior, but failed to provision for how this would change outcomes, resulting in a disconnect that crippled the story's ability to progress. I mean, you absolutely can write a story about how humanity gets so wrapped up in an internal struggle for power that they fail to take the appropriate steps to handle an existential threat, and people definitely have, but it wouldn't look anything like ASOIAF.

[TheSummoner]

Now the execution for forcing the series to an ending other than 'ice zombies, everyone dies,' was full of awful choices, horrible execution, and downright inexplicable decision making, but there were no good options.

Not defending Martin's writing habits and definitely not defending anything the show did after it ran out of book material, but there's always options. "Making the Night King a single point of failure for the ice zombie horde and then deliberately exposing said failure point for some inexplicable reason" was executed in an absolutely idiotic way, but the idea there was a decent one - kill the guy(s) making the zombies move and the zombies stop moving. It's a trope in and of itself, but there's logic to it. The problem is all in execution - it happened way too quickly, way too easily, and it completely ignored that there were plenty of other... well, Others out there. The Night King was the leader and presumably the strongest, but without dealing with the rest, it leaves the question why they couldn't pick up the slack. There's also the fact that the hordes of the dead have been turned back before. The protagonists could've tried to find out how and repeat what worked in the past. If some of the various fan theories out there hold any weight, the method might be something other than defeating them in battle. I'm not trying to write an alternate ending, just saying there's plenty they could've done other than deus ex Arya.

Method aside, the entire thing was resolved in all of one episode. Winter is coming for 8 seasons and then when it arrives, it's over in a single battle, ended by a single stab. Draw it out. Have the dead ravage the land for a while before the protagonists are able to rally and fight back. Everything up until that point was building the idea that the petty wars of men mean nothing because winter is coming and the army of the dead with it, but then that plotline, built up from the very first scene is resolved in a single battle and swept aside so we can go back to the ultimate conflict... the petty wars of men and whose butt gets to sit in the world's least comfortable chair.

[warty goblin]

All I'm gonna say is that if you think Martin's plan for the end of ASoIaF is anything that looks like standard fantasy defeat-the-dark-lord happily ever after, you may be somewhat unfamiliar with Martins oeuvre as a whole. I've read most of his old sci-fi from the 70s and 80s, and the setups are usually reasonably conventional space opera sorts of things. The actual plots often go in weird directions, and then the endings can be entirely off the hook. Nightflyers for instance involves giant galaxy cruising telepathic space monsters that maybe caused the Bible as the B plot, the actual A plot involves sex-switched cloning, incest, murder, telepathic zombies, and literal ghosts in the machine. Of all the Martin I've read, only Fevre Dream and The Armageddon Rag have anything that could be described as a remotely happy ending, and The Armageddon Rag isn't so much happy as the alternative is much, much worse. But thematically ASoIaF is much closer to A Song for Lya and Dying of the Light, the former basically concludes that the most fundamentally human action possible is to turn down heaven because we're existentially broken by our need for separation, and the latter is even grimmer. Everybody's principles get absolutely shredded by an indifferent, dying universe, everybody loses their love, and the main character is probably going to be killed in a pointless duel, which honestly represents substantial personal growth on his part.

Like 80% of everybody dying, and the entire planet being ruled by a telepathic network of tree-beings who keep the survivors locked in the stone age would be entirely plausible for Martin. I say that because he's written exactly that ending before.

Damnit, now I want to reread Dying of the Light

[Saintheart]

All I'm gonna say is that if you think Martin's plan for the end of ASoIaF is anything that looks like standard fantasy defeat-the-dark-lord happily ever after, you may be somewhat unfamiliar with Martins oeuvre as a whole.

Which is probably a large reason why he can't finish this one. Not a lot of writers can switch and then write well in multiple genres, not even if the ghettos of sci-fi and fantasy are down the same street*. (In passing, Dan Simmons is about the only author I've read who can, from horror (Carrion Comfort, Song of Kali) to science fiction/space opera (Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion) to dystopia (Flashback) to historical fiction (The Crook Factory) to forms of historical speculative fiction (The Terror, The Abominable, The Five Hearts). And even Dan never went near the fantasy genre.)

* Generally the snobs who call sci-fi and fantasy 'ghettoes' of fiction make such pronouncements from the porches of derelict houses in Serious Literature's ghost town.

[Mechalich]

All I'm gonna say is that if you think Martin's plan for the end of ASoIaF is anything that looks like standard fantasy defeat-the-dark-lord happily ever after, you may be somewhat unfamiliar with Martins oeuvre as a whole. I've read most of his old sci-fi from the 70s and 80s, and the setups are usually reasonably conventional space opera sorts of things. The actual plots often go in weird directions, and then the endings can be entirely off the hook. Nightflyers for instance involves giant galaxy cruising telepathic space monsters that maybe caused the Bible as the B plot, the actual A plot involves sex-switched cloning, incest, murder, telepathic zombies, and literal ghosts in the machine. Of all the Martin I've read, only Fevre Dream and The Armageddon Rag have anything that could be described as a remotely happy ending, and The Armageddon Rag isn't so much happy as the alternative is much, much worse. But thematically ASoIaF is much closer to A Song for Lya and Dying of the Light, the former basically concludes that the most fundamentally human action possible is to turn down heaven because we're existentially broken by our need for separation, and the latter is even grimmer. Everybody's principles get absolutely shredded by an indifferent, dying universe, everybody loses their love, and the main character is probably going to be killed in a pointless duel, which honestly represents substantial personal growth on his part.

Like 80% of everybody dying, and the entire planet being ruled by a telepathic network of tree-beings who keep the survivors locked in the stone age would be entirely plausible for Martin. I say that because he's written exactly that ending before.

If the ultimate ending of ASOIAF actually is 'ice zombies, everyone dies' then the work is a gigantic waste of time, which of course is one of the central problems of 'subverting expectations' in the first place.

A lot of bad 'subversion' involves setting up a bunch of Chekhov's Guns and then...just leaving them hanging on the wall. Proper subversion still involves setting up those guns, but instead of firing normally they produce an unexpected outcome, like misfiring, or being used to beat someone over the head or serving as a crutch for an injured character. This is one of the reasons why, as Saintheart mentioned, that in order to properly subvert a genre's conventions a creator needs to properly understand why those conventions exist and how they work in the first place.

[warty goblin]

Generally the snobs who call sci-fi and fantasy 'ghettoes' of fiction make such pronouncements from the porches of derelict houses in Serious Literature's ghost town.

Did a Serious Literature Person run over your dog or something? Cause this much ire towards something you seem to think is also irrelevant just seems weird.

If the ultimate ending of ASOIAF actually is 'ice zombies, everyone dies' then the work is a gigantic waste of time, which of course is one of the central problems of 'subverting expectations' in the first place.

I never said everyone died, Martin can be existentially bleak but he's no nihilist. I also rather strongly suspect that subverting expectations isn't really his goal, so much as it is a byproduct of him writing the stories he wants to write, which happen to be uninterested in happy endings or straightforward morality plays. Remember, to Martin genre is just furniture, the actual story is the human heart in conflict with itself. ASoIaF has vastly more main characters than anything else he's done, each with their own interior and exterior lives interacting in complicated ways. Between that and the distractions of actually being happy and successful, no wonder it's taking a long time.

[Tyndmyr]

If the ultimate ending of ASOIAF actually is 'ice zombies, everyone dies' then the work is a gigantic waste of time, which of course is one of the central problems of 'subverting expectations' in the first place.

I honestly think GoT was saveable, just...not in the fashion that they did it. First off, they just needed more time. Season eight tried to go from literally dozens of open plots to none over the course of almost no screen time. This was never going to work out well.

Can Dany turn to evil? Of course. She's had a lot of reason to get angry. But her evil needs to make more sense for her. Why does she feel she needs to burn defenseless townspeople BEFORE going to murder Cersei? That doesn't fit. I totally get her wanting to kill Cersei, and willing to accept casualties in the process. That's justified as hell. But taking a detour to be evil for evil's sake is not.

You can wrap up plots by killing people off....that's very GoT. If the Ice horde slowly pushed down, murdering their way through things, compressing all the survivors together in a deeply uncomfortable situation that leads up to some overt murder, hey, that's a plot.

I honestly think the showrunners just burned out after doing GoT that long, and wanted to do something else.