June 20, 2007

On Bad Writing

OMG spoilers ahead for Lost and the Dark Tower!

The producers of Lost recently went on record to explain how they listen to fan complaints and have altered the show according to viewer wishes, and this is why much of the last season has sucked.

Well, duh. At least they finally admit to it. But do the producers place the blame on themselves for being so bad at planning and telling a story that they actually have wiggle room to allow the audience control over their brainchild?

No, they blame the fans... for having bad ideas!

This weak shit really reminds me of that time when Stephen King stopped the final Dark Tower novel cold in the middle of the climax to bitch out the readers at extreme length because he imagined we might want to find out what happens next in the story.

We were the worst sort of people, he chastised, unimaginative human potatoes who would gleefully deny Frodo his nice peaceful retirement and probably caused the Holocaust too. Wah.

After a buildup of three decades and seven books, you're goddamn skippy we want to find out how it ends. If you didn't want anyone to know what Roland discovers waiting at the top of the Tower, you could have, oh... never published the book.

Me? I'm reading to the end of what you wrote, and screw the fourth-wall-breaking lack of writer's craft that led you to shame me for it.

There's a difference between asking a writer to add pointless sequels to a finished story a la FF7: Advent Bad Movie, and wanting to know how the book ends in the first place. Similarly, there's a difference between criticizing a story element and demanding to be given control over it.

In neither case is "Fine, I'll give you greedy little shits what you want, and I hope you choke on it!" an appropriate answer.

And so, Dear Lost producers/writers/dogfood, I know how heavily you rely on fan input, so I hope this is useful for you:

Your audience complained that the supporting cast is populated with unimportant, pointless warm bodies. To address this, you abruptly thrust two boring extras into the spotlight out of nowhere. You did this without any lead-in, and without showing us why we should even care about these two people in the first place.

It was obvious from the start you were merely fulfilling an obligation. Yet you promoted this development as a major leap forward in the story. Extras will now be people! Woo! Only, not really. Everyone else on the island was still nothing more than a blurry background motion--exactly what people were annoyed about in the first place.

Several episodes later, you decided that the fans weren't warming to these suddenly overexposed characters quickly enough for you. The audience wasn't buying it, and so you decided to spin this into proof that you had been right all along. See, you still weren't getting it.

And so you wasted a full episode saying "I Told You So!" by killing off these two pointless new main characters in a manner I can only describe as 'nakedly retaliatory.' And now, the failure of Nikki and Paolo has given you a perfect excuse to never try anything new or take risks with side characters ever again.

Sweet deal, we could always use more scenes of Kate weeping with indecision over the unwashed penis buffet God has seen fit (in His inscrutable way) to serve her.

And now you're in an interview, gleefully rubbing the fans' faces in the whole debacle as proof that they had no idea how to tell a story.

Guess it takes one to know one.

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