Rules, rules, rules!

I probably won’t ever run a TV show. But if I do, I’ll try to follow these guidelines:

1. The rules of the world will be established before the writing, not during. Or after.
This means I will not have to figure out halfway through the story how exactly my characters’ magical abilities work, resulting in retroactive plot holes. I will not change a character’s backstory just because I realize it’d be neat. This goes for small details, too, because:

2. I will keep in mind that my fans love to think about the story.
They remember everything that happens, they analyze it, and they try to guess what will happen next: using their knowledge of what is and isn’t possible in the setting, and their understanding of the characters. Surprising them is alright, as long as it is still within the realms of what I’ve previously established as believable.

Every plot hole, every retcon, is a slap in the face of my audience.

3. The characters determine the story.
I will not have my characters make stupid and obvious mistakes just because the story won’t work otherwise. When a solution to a problem is obvious, my characters will actually figure it out (along with the audience). If my villains cannot come up with better plans, then I need better villains.

4. Some characters are best in small doses.
No matter how popular this one side-character proves, and how much I myself have come to love him: I will keep him a side-character. When I develop him and make his role larger, I will first wonder what makes him popular, and I will try to preserve this aspect at all costs – even if it means I will have to give up on my plan to give him a bigger role.

5. Character development is necessary, but a challenge.
I will let my characters change according to their experiences, at a realistic pace and in natural ways. But I will also have to keep an eye on what this means for the character chemistry on the show, and whether it is still in harmony with the overall storyline, or my messages. I will try to find ways to avoid a character changing too much, if it means he would not work out anymore.

6. I will introduce new characters only when necessary.
When I introduce a new character, they will have a role to play in the storyline, and this will be obvious soon after their introduction. Their introduction must not come across as forced, but has to feel like a natural consequence of the other characters’ actions.

7. I won’t advertize my show with “Everyone could die!”
Suspence should not come from the question whether a character survives, but how he survives. Besides, each of my characters will be too awesome to be sacrificed for a cheap shock effect. I will also remember that every killed-off character means that I alienate a part of my fanbase. So if I do have to kill off a character, I will do it meaningfully. And I will remember:

8. There are other ways than death for a character to leave a show.
If an actor becomes unavailable, my cast becomes too big or a character just doesn’t work out anymore, I still won’t kill them: I will have them move to a different town or country, get fired from their job, declare that they need to go soul-searching for a while, or disappear on a secret mission. That way, I can theoretically bring them back if it turns out that writing them off was not a good idea, the actor becomes available again, etc. They can also return in single episodes as special guest stars! But even if they won’t actually get to return on the show, it’s nicer for their fans to think that they’re out there, somewhere, happy and busy with their own lives, rather than six feet under.

9. If I do kill a character, he will stay dead.
Everything else just cheapens the experience, probably won’t be convincing (though this depends on the setting of the show), and opens the door for complaints about double standards: Why bring back her, but not her?

10. Being dead does not mean being forgotten.
If a character dies, my surviving characters will still remember them. They might still talk about them. They might need time to overcome their grief. They might wish to avenge them, they might become traumatized, depressed, guilt-ridden. Or joyful. It all depends. The emotional consequences of death will be explored.

11. My characters need stability.
Instead of catapulting my legions of characters all over the place and have my storyline driven by nothing but lack of communication, misunderstandings and grave and stupid mistakes, instead of throwing my characters into unchartered waters and seperating them from all their loved ones as soon as the season starts, in an attempt to create a fast-paced, action-oriented, mind-blowing mess of a storyline; I will give my characters time to sit back, form an alliance (which will actually be positive, and will last), assess their situation, share information and then choose their next step with a certain degree of thought involved. It will make for much more satisfying watching for the audience. After all, the audience have enough time, each week, to think about what would be the best option for my characters. Why not reward those who love the show enough to speculate about its future course?

OK, this might have been aimed quite directly and exclusively at Heroes.

12. I will be confident.
I will be confident about my ideas, characters and themes. If a part of my fanbase (or the media, or casual viewers) express doubt or mistrust, I won’t be intimidated, because *I* know my story best. I know why I am doing what I am doing, I know where I am going with it all. As long as I stay true to my original ideas (especially the underlying themes) I cannot disappoint and alienate my fans, because they will still be getting what they originally fell in love with.

A lot of this can be summed up with: I will be consistent! Nothing annoys me more about a show than a sudden change to the rules, the premise, the mythology, the very foundation of it all.  It means that the creative forces behind it have run out of ideas, or would rather be making a similar, yet significantly different show. Well, why don’t they then?

Nothing inspires less confidence than a showrunner who promises one thing, and some months later delivers the exact opposite.

Concerning Maya’s storyline

It looks like it’s this International Blog Against Racism Week again, which means I’m increasingly often coming across posts that address Maya’s storyline. It’s sad that the people who claim to be concerned with a fair portrayal of coloured characters are describing the storyline in just as limited perspective as the people who would like all non-white, non-Petrelli characters to get off the show.

Example: The idea of “the problematic Maya and Alejandro storyline, how she’s crossing the border with her creepy mind-melting black goo disease, killing the (white) locals”.

This is a fairly common interpretation of this storyline. Maya’s power is primarly considered a threat to the white US-Americans. But why? Because that’s what the cliché says, the stereotype of the illegal immigrant who brings dangerous diseases into the USA. But is it also what the storyline says? Is Maya’s power really shown to be a danger first and foremost to white people, to white US-Americans?

Let’s look at the facts for that. Let’s compare numbers and so on. Maya accidently kills a couple of dozen people in her native Dominican Republic. She kills a couple of smugglers and refugees in Honduras, and there are many instances where she almost kills people, but Alejandro stops the effect: In the church in Venezuela, Nidia in Guatemala, the policemen and Derek and later Sylar in Mexico.

Derek is the first white man to enter into Maya’s storyline. He is a US-American, and he is affected by Maya’s ability, but doen’t die of it thanks to Al. Not only isn’t he killed by Maya, he is even freed from prison by her. Maya and Alejandro don’t kill him, they help him.

Who kills Derek? Sylar does. Fellow white, US-American Sylar.

Like Derek, Sylar receives help from Maya and Alejandro (and Derek), in an episode appropriately titled The Kindness of Strangers. In the same episode, Derek discovers that Maya and Alejandro are sought for murder, and he does what any white US-American stranded in Mexico would probably do: he shares his findings in confidence with the only other white US-American around. He buys into the idea of the foreign Middle Americans being dangerous, the fellow US citizen being an ally.

And this proves to be a fatal mistake.

When Maya, Alejandro and Sylar cross the border, Sylar convinces Maya to kill the border patrol. This is the first and only time she kills white people, and it is largely because of Sylar’s presence and influence. Alejandro wanted to find someone to smuggle them over the border (sans Sylar), which would probably allowed them to pass over into the USA without anybody dying. But Sylar convinced them to… just drive over the border in broad daylight, which was bound to cause trouble.

The border patrol consists of five men. I cannot really get a good look at all of them in order to guess their ethnicity, but let’s just assume they are all five white.

This means that Maya has killed five white US-Americans (only due to the influence of another white guy), and several dozens (if not hundreds) of Latinos from various countries.

This is what’s wrong wih the above description of Maya’s storyline: By describing Maya’s power as primarly a threat to white people, to citizens of the USA, you imply that the lives of five white Americans count more than those of dozens or hundreds of Latinos.

It doesn’t matter whether this implication is accidental. If it’s there, it’s there. In any case, Maya’s storyline ought to finally be considered as a whole, not just the bits and parts of it that would be outrageously racist if they were all there was to the storyline.

But yes, even though the storyline is definitely more than this cliché people love to cite, it certainly contains this cliché. The show’s original plan for the second part of the second season, the scrapped virus storyline, contained a subversion of the cliché, so it’s fair to assume the writers were aware of it.

Maya was meant to be the one who saves humanity from the Shanti Virus. This is foreshadowed in the online graphic novel Maya y Alejandro, which was released just before the start of the second season. Even if it looked like Maya was a danger to everybody who crossed her path (not just white people, just like the virus was a threat to the entire world and not just white people), it would have been revealed that she was actually the opposite, she was their salvation.

I also take issue with the complaint that the route that Maya and Alejandro travel towards the USA shows that “the creators think that all Middle American countries are the same”. This complaint would be valid if the show hadn’t supplied an explanation for why Maya and Al find themselves in Honduras, of all places, when their original starting point was the Dom. Rep. But it did:

After she accidently killed her brother’s wedding guests, Maya left the country for Venezuela. She started out in Santo Domingo, which is located on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic, so if you cross the ocean, you’d end up in Venezuela.

Now, I have no idea whether this would be the common escape route for Dominicans on the run from the police. From an outsider’s perspective, just going by what the map shows, it looks like an obvious option. Correct me if it isn’t. I’d like to learn something, too.

It is from Venezuela that Maya and Alejandro travel US-wards. Well, probably. It’s not really said where they learn of Chandra Suresh, where they find the (Spanish language) copy of Activating Evolution. There is no reason to assume that they don’t find it in Venezuela somewhere, though. They would be looking for an explanation for what’s happening to Maya before taking any action, before taking any risks. I don’t know if Venezuelans would try to enter the USA via boat, or whether they would take the route over land.

From a storytelling point of view, the reason why Maya and Al cannot just take a ship to the USA (be it from the Dominican Republic or from Venezuela) is obvious: The way they proceed through country after country, you can measure their progress, and antitipate when they are going to reach Mohinder and cause further complications for his already complicated situation. It’s also more dynamic to show them move around, rather than show them sit in a hiding place on board a ship.

This makes sense. It does not make sense at first glance, just from looking at the first episode alone, but why can’t people be a little more patient with this storyline?

I get it that this is a sensitive topic for many Latin Americans and those sympathizing with them, but that is just one more reason that I would prefer a more open, a more balanced discussion of this storyline. Of the whole storyline, in its entirety, taking all its aspects, the contexts etc. into account. By reducing it to the racial cliché that it does contain (with the original intention to subvert it!), you are not working against racism, you are promoting it.

Mweee!

It’s true (I guess), not all people who hate a female, coloured character (like Maya) are racist or misogynistic.

However:

a) If you choose words like “whore” and “bitch” to insult her, you are probably misogynistic.

b) If you draw attention to the pronounciation of her name, you are probably racist. She pronounces her own name in her native accent. Implying that this is inherently funny and wrong and only the pronounciation used by native English speakers should be acceptable, that is racist, and no way around it.

c) Saying that you prefer this specific character to be killed off rather than given character development like all the other characters on the same show that also started out relatively one-sided? You can forigve any other character for the slow-moving plot, except this one character? At least admit that this is irrational and most importantly your personal opinion, and the show is in no way obliged to indulge your bias. Neither are the other fans obliged to listen to your whining on and on again.

d) When I see that a person or character is under attack from racists or misogynists, I do not join in on the bashing, I distance myself from it almost automatically, because I really, really, really do not approve of these things and don’t want to make it even easier for the jerks.

Heroes Season 3

HELLO TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN!

Could Heroes 3×01 please be leaked online? ;_; Tomorrow or so? So the vast majority of fans, those who would like to watch the episode unspoilt, won’t have to avoid fandom for two months.

I feel excluded. That’s not nice, especially right now that I am missing all the crazy, awesome The Dark Knight madness, simply because my country does not get the movie until late August. That’s one topic I cannot discuss with my friends, and once I am finally able to, in August – they will have moved on. Boo.

And Heroes? Worst case scenario: the same thing will happen. I’ll have to avoid the topic, I’ll have to stop frequenting places online… And since I’m much more actively a Heroes fan than I’m a Batman fan, that’s a lot tougher to do. And frankly, why should I have to? It’s no fun. Being a fan should be about fun, not about worrying.

2×11 Again

What I hate about the ending is more or less Peter and Nathan. Really makes me angry when I think about it.

Peter almost kills Hiro and Matt, and he tells Matt that he is on the wrong side – and that’s so utterly dumb of Peter, because he really isn’t all that certain who is right and who is wrong, and the appearance of these two guys who have always been on the side of good previously should really give him pause, but he says those idiotic lines. Then Nathan steps in and asks whether he is on the wrong side, too. It is said in a very surely-Nathan-couldn’t-possibly-be-on-the-wrong-side kind of way. And I hate that, because Nathan has been on the wrong side before, Nathan is not perfect, and Peter trusting Nathan almost turned very badly in the last season finale. But here, it’s… somehow shown to be just that: Nathan couldn’t possibly be wrong!

And later, Peter feels bad because he almost destroyed the world. And I think he should feel bad! He almost killed Hiro! He was choking him! Hiro was helpless! Peter almost killed Matt! His naivity and recklessness nearly set free the virus! He should realize how dangerous he can be, and draw the consequences!

But what does Nathan tell him? Don’t blame yourself for things that could have happened. That out of the mouth of a man who almost let New York be destroyed. Yeah. Don’t feel guilty, because that’ll only make you feel bad. So THAT’s the result of Nathan’s soul-searching, coming to terms with his previous near-villainy? That he just has to stop worrying about the shit he has done, because it’d just depress him?

Add to that when Claire tells her mother that SHE WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND, since she has no abilities WHINE.

Why the hell are these the popular characters? They are self-centered assholes. =(

Sorry if that’s all a bit harsh, but eeeeeh. >_<