In Serialized Fiction, Things Change, Which is the Bloody Point
Posted on October 23rd, 2017 by Adam-Troy CastroOne of the oddities of serialized fiction becoming the norm on television and much more common in print and at the movies is that people who know for damn well that a larger story is being told still react as if any temporary development or opening status quo is an immutable condition.
I first noticed this with GAME OF THRONES, as far back as the books, and to some extent it’s a natural result of an epic playing out at such tremendous length that characters doomed to die early on in the scheme of things still got the wordcount that would be due the central protagonist of almost any other book. Were GAME OF THRONES a single even if epic-length novel, Ned Stark would die around page 100, 200 at latest; it would be shocking, but we would not be so conditioned to think he would find some way to survive, and people would not have been so outraged that he doesn’t.
When I first started reading the books, I noticed a phenomenon that later played out with viewers of the series: at the onset, they all hated Sansa Stark. She was a simpering, romantic-headed little idiot! She was useless! Well, yes, she was. I picked up on this right away, perceived that she was also a very sheltered and dreamy little girl, and knew at once that she was undergoing a baptism of fire and that, eventually, she would be badass. So I knew that what I was watching was a process, and — in part because I live and breathe story and am not often fooled, in large things — I knew that she would change. And yet, when it became a TV show, I saw any number of fans say that the show was “all about” the torture of this character.
It would be as if the broad specifics of the BATMAN origin were told not in flashback after he was already running around in costume — as is indeed somewhat happening, wonkily, on the TV show, GOTHAM. People would snot that the show was just a sad little bereaved kid who exercised a lot. (Which is one reason why the first version of Batman’s origin, in the comics, was two breezy pages long.)
The introduction of Negan, on THE WALKING DEAD, both comic and TV series, involves one (1) episode where that villain cruelly executes people we presumably care about. I can understand that the brutal scene was too much for many, but I have seen fan rhetoric to the effect that the show as a whole was about “nothing but” despair, “nothing but” the torture of the characters at the hands of this villain. And I am not arguing with folks who found this the moment where they could not continue, but honestly, how many failed to recognize that what they were seeing was what it had always been, a movement in a longer story, the arrival of an antagonist with whom the characters would necessarily spend a long time in conflict, and would certainly ultimately defeat?
In serialized stories, you can have the characters happily return to status quo and a happy ending at the end of every episode, or you can play the long route and still structure the whole thing novelistically, in which case the lows, when they arrive, will last for as long as they would in a unified narrative. So Sansa will be in misery for a long time. So Negan will be on top for a long time. So Walter White will spend almost two seasons gradually getting deeper and deeper over his head, while in thrall to Gus Fring, and not every episode will have him do something amazingly cool. Sometimes he will just fret.
Sometimes, looking backward, you see that the route was always clearly marked. And sometimes, as with LOST or HEROES, looking backward, you see that they were always just making up whatever silly shit got them through the next hour.