Why ALWAYS the same damned cliche?

[Umbran]

Ah, but their rat bastardness won't come up immediately. I'm not talking about the simpleminded sort of villainy that infests fanfic. The audience should be cheering for the main characters at least through the first season, with a few hints here and there that smarter-than-fanboy watchers could pick up on.

Right, but that one looks like a cliche to start, now doesn't it? Since most series don't survive into their second season, you would not generally be able to tell that such a series differed from the norm before it got cancelled. For all you know, Dogbrain, Firefly was going to break the cliche any number of ways in it's second season, if it had had one.

Plus, once this little ruse is discovered, the series reduces to one of the previous cliches. So it's a temporary fix, at best.

Twists that the audience will not notice quickly don't really add to the survivability of a series. It takes a lot of effort to write and produce one of these things. To do extra work that the audience may never see often isn't worth the effort, and tends to lock hte writers into paths that cannot be easily flexed to meet audience preferences. The only genre series I can think of off the top of my head that had a solid multi-year plan from the stat was B5.

 

[takyris]

Quote SPECIFICALLY where I stated that this is what I wanted. I lay down the gauntlet. Where SPECIFICALLY did I say that this is what I was looking for? I challenge you to provide SPECIFIC QUOTES that this is what I was looking for.

Well, I could quote this:

Once, twice, five-hundred times, it might be okay, but now it's just oldness and tiredness--a sign of a complete lack of imagination. Even Firefly decided to use this tired old cliche--Whedon could have done better, and I take it as a sign that he wasn't really trying when he decided to use such an overdone theme.

Your issue seems to be with the theme itself and not with whether or not the theme is done well. I don't see a use of tropes as being a sign of a complete lack of imagination -- although I will note that your position, if I am understanding you correctly, is a very popular one in the Old School Science Fiction field. Powerful editors decry "character stories" and "the same old thing, only with different characters" and call out for stories with new ideas -- and will, if directly asked, say that they would prefer a story with many original ideas and cardboard characters to a story with well-realized characters telling a popular (and thus, "done before") form of story.

I understand that you didn't SPECIFICALLY say that you wanted it to be completely black and white. I didn't say that you said that. Please tell me what line made you believe that I said that you wanted that. I said that your idea didn't really interest me any more than any other, because I've seen it done badly, like any other idea. And I said I'd rather see an old-fashioned idea done well than a newfangled idea done badly. You brought up Firefly in a negative context, saying that you thought Whedon "wasn't really trying" when he came up with the idea for the Firefly universe. And yet, the Firefly universe is, in my opinion, a very original one, and an original one done well at that -- our heroes aren't paragons of virtue, space combat wasn't glamorized with sound effects or unrealistic dogfighting, and the protagonists served for the side that lost the civil war, with the exact ethics of which side was right and which side was wrong left deliberately unclear. Add to that the lack of aliens, the mixture of high-tech and low-tech, and the cultural diversity, and it seems like a fairly original concept. Perhaps you and I have different definitions of originality.

Or perhaps it's just that Whedon was trying to be original in a lot of different ways and said, "Wow, if I try to be original in ALL ways, I'm going to completely lose my viewers, because viewers at some level need something familiar to latch onto," and opted to keep the theme of the outcast hero as something familiar for the reader -- and that just happened to be the one thing you wanted. In which case, sucks etre vous. To demand that a creative work be original in all ways would indicate less than complete experience with creating things for users.

If you're making a website, you can put the navbar in a weird place (in the middle or at the bottom, instead of on the top or left side), or you can make the navbar function in a weird way (different from normal dropdowns or simple clicks), or you can make it appear strange (odd alien sigils instead of words) -- but you can't do all three. If you do all three, nobody can use your site. Or, if you don't dig on Web stuff: adding one new spice to your dinner gives it a dash of newness. Adding twenty new spices to your dinner makes it taste horrible.

This doesn't refer to your idea in a vacuum state, of course -- it's a fine idea, and my point of disagreement wasn't that it would be bad to do it, only that it would be bad to throw out all fiction that uses that element, regardless of whether it was done well or poorly. My originality comments apply only to your supporting example, in which you state that Firefly was less than great because the creative team chose not to be original in one specific area, even while bringing in original elements in many other areas.

Or were you just inventing a strawman to attack because you hadn't the acumen to come up with a real statement?

No, I wasn't. Thank you for asking, instead of phrasing it in a manner that might have been construed as rude. Glad we could keep this civil.

 

[Henry]

Blame the fact that the cliche works WELL, and has been working since the story of Robin Hood. It can draw in the most people quickly, because setting up the story does not take that much effort. For a novel, turning cliche's on their ears is fine, because you have the room and the individual reader's investment. For a TV or Movie, you have to get LARGE GROUPS of people invested RIGHT AWAY, or there won't even be a second EPISODE, much less a second season.

Frankly, many people are likely to look at this bunch of charismatic bastards trying to enforce their will, see the image of the high school bully who tormented them for years in there, say, "this is stupid," and flip the channel.

One way it COULD be done, is make it clear the evil rebels are going to lose - they are outgunned, outnumbered, and don't have a snowball's chance - but hey, they're gonna try anyway, because they have no other choice, right?

Then, they are the underdogs, and they have sympathy. It worked for Natural Born Killers!

 

[drnuncheon]

"Action" on Fox was beloved by TV critics and TV insiders, and went nowhere. There was also something called "Profit" that was supposed to be dark and evil and brooding and depressing and intelligent, and... it also went nowhere.

"The Sopranos", on the other hand, is doing fine, despite being the story of an adulterous, abusive murderer and his equally villainous henchmen. In fact, most of the Mafia-related movies and shows would fall into this category. The Godfather is regarded as a cinematic great, and many people love The Usual Suspects.

Going a bit broader, the 'heist movie' - such as Ocean's Eleven or The Italian Job - is generally about the villains, but it's easier to forget: their opposition is faceless, personified only in a security system and perhaps some antagonistic policemen.

Of course, there's a staggeringly popular film that is an expression of the "rebellion that is all about imposing its tyrannical will upon a fairly benign republic". The rebellion's got "bright, interesting, quirky individuals" in "suitably tight clothing". There may not have been "great interpersonal development" but there was at least some "amusing banter".

It's called The Matrix.

J

 

[RavenProject]

"Action" on Fox was beloved by TV critics and TV insiders, and went nowhere. There was also something called "Profit" that was supposed to be dark and evil and brooding and depressing and intelligent, and... it also went nowhere.

Profit was awesome but way ahead of its time. In fact, it might still be that way.

 

[Umbran]

Blame the fact that the cliche works WELL, and has been working since the story of Robin Hood.

And that brings up the simple question of why the cliche works so well. The answer is fairly simple - it's an idea that folks relate to. Conflict with The Man is as old as civilization. Every nation has it's stories of uprisings. Heck, the USA was founded by such an uprising.

In terms of exploring the psychology and personality and interactions of characters, a cliche like that is often a good and useful thing. It gives you a known framework in which you can explore the unknown characters.

 

[WizarDru]

"The Sopranos", on the other hand, is doing fine, despite being the story of an adulterous, abusive murderer and his equally villainous henchmen. In fact, most of the Mafia-related movies and shows would fall into this category. The Godfather is regarded as a cinematic great, and many people love The Usual Suspects.

True, but with a few key differences. In Profit, the main character was totally unsympathetic on virtually every level. It had some funny moments, but scenes like the 'Cobb Salad' incident were painfully unfunny and bordered on the unwatchable. I don't turn to entertainment to see *#$&(# like that, unless it's to see them gunned down.

The Sopranos features many sympathetic characters, and is as much an analysis of the world they exist in and how they try and often fail to reconcile it that forms the source of the show. Tony is conflicted, because he knows that the life he lives is a terrible one, but he sees no way out and no way to stop living it. An audience can root for Tony and others to redeem themselves, even if they fail. Watching that is fascinating.

Watching evil people try to find ways to be evil on a massive scale is not. Blake's 7 managed to have bad people against bad people, but many of them were too 3-dimensional to be truly bad...though some were amoral.

If I don't find some reason to care about the characters, then I won't watch. Tony Soprano instantly showed me that, in some ways, he was a likable character. Witness the opener or the episode where he, a poweful mafioso, is made to feel like a performing monkey by his neighbors, who think he's something of an amusing curiousity.

If such a series were to work, it would have to really make me like the characters, and a series about a bunch of charming bad guys who eventually aim to do nasty things to other people is not nearly as appealing as Firefly, where a bunch of former soldiers and castaways eke out a living on the frontier, where survival is more important than the rule of law.

 

[drnuncheon]

True, but with a few key differences. In Profit, the main character was totally unsympathetic on virtually every level.

Never saw Profit - I was just pointing out that the suggestion (the characters are 'bad guys' but portrayed in a sympathetic light) can and has been done successfully. And that's the key - make the audience care about them as people and it doesn't matter how evil they are. It's the opposite of the 'demonize your enemies' tactic.

J

 

[Kesh]

Ah, right, but of COURSE, how SILLY of me! The ONLY purpose of science fiction is to PANDER! It's not real art. Making people think or examine themselves is the absolute OPPOSITE of what science fiction is all about. Science fiction is ONLY made for PANDERING and sucking up to the lowest common denominator. Forgive me for forgetting that.

*sigh* Sure, if you want to fork up all the money to create it, you can create any kind of art you want.

That doesn't mean anyone will want to watch it. If you want executives, producers and the general public to actually watch your show, some amount of pandering is necessary, or it'll never survive on the air.

For example, take Babylon 5. JMS, the show's creator, has stated several times where he had to compromise with the executives to keep his show going, and bring a few things down to keep from alienating his audience. The classic "sounds in space" cliche is one he wanted to leave out, but found test audiences just plain didn't like.

It's still a great show. But, compromises were made in order to keep it going.

 

[Green Knight]

That, in many ways, is the universe in which the fiction of Warhammer 40,000 is placed. The talented, interesting, beautiful people are shut down ruthlessly by the Empire of Humanity because they tend ultimately to bring in Chaos, which is actually personified Evil. The people the reader most likes and with whom he most identifies are usually the very same people who must be sacrificed so that Mankind, as ugly an existence as it has, can avoid annihilation by its enemies.

Makes for a very dark place, indeed. In the far future, there is only war. And the fiction, so I've heard folks say, is not at all to everyone's tastes.

In Warhammer 40k, Luke, Han, and Leia would have been crushed by the (actually extremely competent) Space Marines (say the white armored White Consuls), led by a ruthless, dark robbed Inquisitor with enormous psychic powers, who is kept alive by bionic implants. Luke and Leia would be the Inquisitor's children, and in the last sentence of the story, the Inquisitor would reveal he knows this. And the galaxy would have been better off for it.

Yeah, the 40k setting IS fantastic. I can't wait til Green Ronin puts out an RPG for it.

Basically, it's like this. The Imperium is the harshest tyranny that Mankind's ever lived under, but they've got no choice. If they DON'T rule over the galaxy with an iron fist, then they'll fall to Chaos, which is even worse. So they gotta crack down on the psychics, the mutants, the heretics, and so on, because more often than not, they're agents for the Chaos powers, and if they gain enough power, before you know it, you'll start seeing planets getting swamped with demon hordes, Chaos Cultists, and Chaos Space Marines. In other words, the Imperium's job is to keep the human race alive, NOT individual humans. So they'll wipe out an entire planets population with Exterminatus if by doing so they'll prevent a danger which may threaten 10 other worlds. Humanity's all that matters, not the individual. This quote pretty much sums it up.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. This is a tale of those times. It is a universe you can live in today if you dare, for this is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. If you want to take part in that adventure then prepare yourself now. Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars. There is only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods. But the universe is a big place, and whatever happens...... you will not be missed.