Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 245

December 10, 2015

Arrow Thursday: Merry Christmas to All

This week’s Christmas episode of Arrow was great. Yes, there was a crossover episode last week, and I usually really like the crossovers with The Flash because Oliver and Barry are great together, but that was just . . . no. I wrote two thousand words on that chaotic word-and-picture salad before I realized that two thousand words of bitching is just not something I wanted on the blog. The title was “Five Pounds of Story in Two Ten Pound Bags,” and you can get the gist of it from these excerpts:


• “Vandal Savage is an immortal priest-magician and he is destined to kill Kendra and her soulmate, an Egyptian prince named Carter, and every time he does, he becomes more powerful, and he’s killed them 206 times. I did not make that up, it’s the actual number Carter gives them. At that point I was laughing too hard to follow the plot. Two hundred and six times? As Jack Burton, Prince of Little China, would say to Carter, Prince of Egypt, ‘You’re doing something seriously wrong, pal.'”


• “There’s a big showdown and Vandal Savage is turned into a big pile of dust, prompting me to flashback to Spike telling Buffy that if they have a daylight wedding, they’ll be ‘Mr. and Mrs. Big Pile of Dust.’ I miss Buffy.”


• “And then Kendra kisses Cisco good-bye and flies away to be Hawkgirl to Carter’s Hawkman on the spin-off because they’re soulmates even though they have no chemistry and their lives are basically one big flashback set to ‘Lather, Die, Repeat.’ It doesn’t help that their scenes in Ancient Egypt kept reminding me of The Mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, who did have chemistry.”


Yeah, I was bitchy. But the good news is, this week Arrow told one solid, unified story and told it really well. So I’m pretending last week didn’t happen.


How much to love this week:

• Damian Darhk pointing to himself and saying, “Bad guy,” when Oliver questions his motives.

• Mama Smoak’s reaction to the engagement ring: “I knew he loved you. I didn’t know he loved you this much.”

• Malcolm Merlin being Malcolm Merlin.

• Laurel’s Canary Cry being useful instead of just annoying. She’s still got Resting Bitch Face, but she looks strong and healthy and powerful, and I’m all for her.

• Felicity’s reaction to seeing Donna and Lance canoodling, not to mention the look on Lance’s face when he realizes whose mother he’s smooching. Yes, Captain Lance, if you marry Donna, Oliver will have slept with all three of your daughters.

• Mini-Felicity staring at the drone in nerd-wonder as it bears down on her, spitting fire.

• Oliver’s proposal to Felicity, which even made stone-hearted me smile.

• Oliver in general, doing smart things, including going back to being Dark Arrow and beating the crap out of the minions who helped kidnap the people he loved.

• The pacing which was non-stop without being frenetic.

• Darhk going home to a warm family welcome and “The Little Drummer Boy” while his minions shoot up the limo and Felicity.


Nitpicks:

• Oliver clears the bay, so Damian sends a drone to shoot everybody; Oliver has a Christmas party, so Damian sends minions to shoot everybody; Oliver and Felicity are in the limo heading home after the engagement, so Damian . . . . It just shows a lack of originality, which is odd because Dahrk is all about being unpredictable.


• The replaying of Oliver at a grave. I don’t care. I don’t believe it’s Felicity, I don’t believe they’d take out a key player, and only about a third of the people killed in this show actually stay dead anyway. (Sara, Roy, Andy, Ray and Malcolm are back, Tommy and Moira are still dead which is a shame. Three quarters of them come back if you count Thea, but she was only mostly dead, (although I still think Deadshot is still alive) and why does everything in Nanda Parbat remind me of Monty Python?)


• Those freaking flashbacks. Okay, that’s not a nitpick, that was just pure dumb storytelling. You have a main story that’s not only fast-moving but fascinating, full of characters we love and loathe, and they interrupt it to tell a story about the past where Oliver is threatened (although not much because hey, here he is years later, doing just fine) which HAS NO IMPACT WHATSOEVER ON THE MAIN STORY. The flashbacks used to be annoying, now they’re inexplicable. Okay, I’ll give them back one point for the shark, but otherwise, WTF?


But really, cut the flashbacks and this would have been a solid A episode because it has a great protagonist in Oliver and a great antagonist in Darhk (“Bad guy”) who engage each other directly for clear reasons, and who fight to death for their goals. I hope they backed the money truck up for Neal McDonough because he and Amell are super-powering this season. The rest of the cast is also excellent, but everything really rests on them, and they’re doing an amazing job of storytelling.


I forgive Arrow for last week. This week they focused on one story and nailed it. Also, good proposal, Oliver.


arrow409h1


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Published on December 10, 2015 16:25

December 6, 2015

For Love or Magic

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Lani’s latest Lucy March novel is out now, For Love or Magic, the third in the Nodaway Falls series, . If you like bad boys on the path to redemption, this one’s for you:


Eliot Parker’s good–for-nothing ex-husband has died and left her with a new lease on life: a house in sleepy Nodaway Falls, New York. But Eliot’s new house comes with a housemate: her ex’s ghost, whose personality has not been improved in the afterlife. And then there’s the new guy she just met, Desmond, and there’s something, well, supernatural about him; in fact there’s something a little odd about all of Nodaway Falls. Now Eliot just has to hope that her ex will move toward that white light soon, and that Des.


You should go here and buy it now.


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Published on December 06, 2015 03:48

December 5, 2015

Cherry Saturday 12 – 5 – 15

Today is Bathtub Party Day.


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I thought it was weird BEFORE I saw the picture.


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Published on December 05, 2015 03:39

November 28, 2015

Cherry Saturday 11 – 28 – 15

Today is Red Planet Day.


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I assume that’s referring to Mars and not global communism, but who knows?


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Published on November 28, 2015 03:36

November 22, 2015

There’s a New Girl in Town

Be Careful Amy


There’s a classic character in traditional adventure fiction: The Girl who’s the love interest for The Hero. She’s young, she’s beautiful, and she says, “Be careful, John,” a lot.* She may be the CEO of a major corporation at 23, but she still needs him to rescue her often. And sometimes she needs to die so he can feel incredible pain (aka “fridging”) and then go out and beat up the bad guys. I don’t know why there’s such a pervasive idea that the Hero’s Girlfriend has to be a helpless, boneless, gormless doorstop of a character, but it’s everywhere, especially on TV.


The Girl annoys the hell out of me.


WARNING: Massive Spoilers for Arrow, The Flash, Gotham, Grimm, Luther and Sleepy Hollow ahead.


Female protagonists have been getting stronger (although they’re still too damn rare) while the supporting character Girls have remained mostly accessories and plot devices. But something interesting has been happening in the past couple of years: TV audiences have been rejecting The Girl on a regular basis. Internet comments like “Can we put Laurel/Katrina/Juliette/Barbara/Iris on an island someplace and lose the map?” are generally followed with some variation of “She’s boring, she’s annoying, she’s whiny, she’s stupid.” Much of this is not The Girl’s fault: when you only exist as an object of desire for the hero in order to make his life more difficult and angst-ridden, you’re gonna end up boring, annoying, whiny, and stupid enough to walk into the bad guy’s clutches on a regular basis. Then add to that network casting that tends to fall back on model-beautiful actresses at the expense of personality and verve, and The Girl is pretty much stuck. I still don’t like her, but there’s not a lot you can do when “vapid” is baked into your character description.


The poster Girl for this failed trope is Arrow’s Laurel Lance, The Girl the Green Arrow was destined to marry except the audience said, “Oh, just no.” Laurel had the added burden of being riddled with bitterness and recrimination, stripping out all the softness and supportive gazes that serve the hero so well, and that pretty much left her not only useless but toxic. But Laurel was not alone.


There’s Barbara on Gotham, rich, beautiful, and prone to being an idiot, which makes Jim Gordon’s life even more hellish, and on Gotham that’s saying something.


There’s Iris on The Flash, beautiful, loving, and so devoted to the hero that she starts a blog about him while remaining unattainable, in no small part because Barry (aka The Flash) has grown up as her foster brother. (The actors have great sibling chemistry, but there’s something a little squicky about a carnal connection there since they both call the same guy “Dad.”) Iris also suffered from the “Don’t Tell The Girl The Secret To Protect Her Because We All Treat Her Like She’s Four-Years-Old” Syndrome.


Juliette on Grimm suffered from that, too, with an emphasis on “suffered,” since supernatural beings routinely trashed her living room and menaced her while she screamed, “What’s going on?” and her hero boyfriend, Nick the Grimm, dismissed it with increasingly lame excuses (“That huge window at the front of the house broke when a bird flew into it. And then escaped.”)


And then there was The Girl from the Past, Ichabod Crane’s colonial wife, Katrina, the Amish heiress-freedom fighter-witch, who dressed like Barbie at the Black Magic Prom. Sleepy Hollow‘s relationship with reality is always distant, but Katrina, moaning through a mirror at Ichabod because she was stuck in purgatory but could still stop by for a chat, was just a bride too far.


Be Careful


These characters range from pleasantly useless to the story (Iris) to downright dislikable (Laurel) but they all share the same basic problem: they have no agency and they must scream for help to make the hero’s life more difficult because he lurves them, even though readers/viewers keep asking, “WHY? Why in God’s name are you obsessed with this woman?” As if in answer, shows have been addressing the problem in three ways:


1. Giving The Girl agency by making her an Evil Girl. This still leaves her defined by the hero and existing to create his problems, but instead of being menaced, she gets to do the menacing. HUGE improvement. Downside: She tends to get killed, but hey, eggs/omelet.


2. Replacing The Girl with The Working Woman, aka The Felicity Smoak Solution. Bring in somebody the hero isn’t obsessed with, a woman he can work with as a partner and an equal until he recognizes her as his soulmate and kicks The Girl to the curb.


3. Making The Girl into a Working Woman. This one’s harder because it means evolving The Girl’s character, and she didn’t have much to begin with, so it’s generally only semi-successful. But good for the writers for giving it a try.


Let’s look at these fixes a little more closely.


00003-Die


I must confess, I love the Evil Girls. Barbara went crazy because she (maybe?) killed her parents (no, I don’t get that one, either). Juliette turned into a Hexenbiest because Nick accidentally slept with a witch (you had to be there). Katrina went bad because her son, Death, united with the demon Moloch to corrupt her (really, you had to be there). In all cases, they instantly became fun to watch. Barbara in particular is having a damn good time, but I also enjoyed the hell out of Juliette getting over her horror at what she’d become and taking on everybody who’d lied to her, patronized her, and tried to kill her; it was especially fun watching the supernatural go at her thinking she was The Girl and getting their asses handed to them. She and Katrina are dead now–Agency Kills–and Barbara just fell out of the window of a church tower, but her fall was broken by the pouffy (but beautiful) wedding dress she was wearing, so she only broke many bones and is still completely batshit and still destined to bear Jim Gordon’s baby. That should be interesting.


But my favorite Evil Girl is Alice Morgan of Luther. I could watch Alice for hours, starting with her Cute Meet with Detective John Luther, when he arrives at the house of her murdered parents and finds her outside, covered with blood and sobbing with grief. Sounds like a typical Girl, doesn’t she? Yeah, it’s not long before Luther realizes Alice offed her parents, and they play a cat and mouse game for the rest of the episode, at the end of which Alice walks away free, just too damn smart to be caught. But that’s not the end of it; sociopathic genius Alice is now obsessed with Luther, the smartest man she’s ever met, stalking him and his ex-wife, trying to understand him, falling in love with him, helping to save him when he’s arrested for his ex-wife’s murder, and drawing him to her with her insights into his cases and her willingness to do damn near anything just for the hell of it. For three seasons, Alice is an intermittent undercurrent in the story until the final episode, when she comes through for him, violently, of course. She’s arrested for murder again, escapes again, and disappears. But the final scene is the lawgiver Luther meeting the lawbreaker Alice on a bridge, a place that’s neither one side or other, a place they once threatened to kill each other. When Alice says, “You really do need to lose the coat,” referring to the jacket he’s worn throughout the series and that, like Columbo’s trenchcoat, symbolizes everything his life has been, he takes it off and throws it into the river before walking off into the sunset with his Evil Girl Genius. I love Alice. So she’s a murderous sociopath: nobody’s perfect and Alice is always, always, always fascinating.


Also good is the other approach to agency, equality with the hero:


00005-Working Girl


No surprise: I love the Working Woman.


The gold standard here is Felicity Smoak of Arrow, who was supposed to be a minor character IT girl but so charmed the audience and the Arrow that she was moved up to regular. She started out with the being-lied-to thing, but with one important difference: she knew she was being lied to and decided to roll with it. Halfway through the first season, Oliver came clean about being the Arrow (he had to, he was bleeding to death in the back of her car) and she joined the team. By Season Two, he was telling her she was his partner, not his employee. By Season Three, he was in love with her and the writers tried to devolve her into a Girl: she spent a lot of time crying. Now Season Four is here, she and Oliver are living together, and she runs a major corporation and the Arrow team, regularly kicking ass and giving orders, which Oliver accepts because Felicity is smart. She is the icon of the Working Woman, so I hope to hell they don’t screw her up with angst and Big Misunderstandings. She cried enough last year for the entire run of the series, even if it goes twenty years.


Then there’s Patty Spivot, aka the Felicity of The Flash. She’s a police detective who really wants to chase meta-humans and ends up as the only member of Barry’s foster father’s metahuman task force. She’s tough, she’s active, she runs into danger because she’s a cop, but mostly she embraces life with gusto. The best thing that happened to her all week was running into a Sharkman (aka King Shark) as he tried to kill the Flash; the second best thing was her date with Barry who was pretending he could see her even though he’d been temporarily blinded in a fight. They were both awkward but happy to be together until halfway through dinner when Patty said, “You can’t see me, can you?” effectively torpedoing that lie, and after that they were just happy. It was the kind of scene you can’t help but smile all the way through, right up to the great kiss at the end. Then they both got calls on their phones to go fight crime and headed back into action separately to plot lines of their own. I bear Iris no ill will, but Patty is a lot more fun to watch because she’s not All About The Flash. She’s not even All About Barry. She’s more All About Embracing Life And Bonus: Barry’s A Good Kisser.


Sleepy Hollow‘s Working Woman isn’t a girlfriend, she’s one of leads: Lieutenant Abbie Mills is a kick-ass, no-nonsense cop headed for the FBI when she sees the Headless Horseman decapitate her sheriff/surrogate father and shortly thereafter runs into the colonial Ichabod Crane, risen from the grave to fight evil with her, whether she likes it or not. Abbie may be my favorite TV cop right now since Joss Carter is no longer with us; she’s so smart, so practical, so open-minded, so driven . . . so Abbie. Like Felicity, she wasn’t supposed to be a love interest–the writers would have to be idiots to marry Ichabod off if they wanted him to end up with Abbie–but Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison have ridiculous chemistry and nobody liked Katrina anyway, so no tears were shed when Evil Katrina tried to kill Abbie and Ichabod shot her. I have no idea if there will ever be an Abbie/Ichabod romance and I don’t care, I just want to watch them fight the undead every week, with Ichabod pontificating on how things really happened back in the day and trying to cope with the modern world, and Abbie giving him side-eye and saving everybody’s butt on a regular basis. Abbie gives the best side-eye on television making her the Protagonist/Working Woman least likely to be lied to with any success.


But because I am perverse and love an Oh-Hell-Not-You love story, the Working Woman I’m most interested in right now is Adalind on Grimm. Adalind is a Hexenbiest (bad witch) lawyer: smart, selfish, murderous, and irresistible in her can-do approach to evil. Like Felicity and Abbie, she didn’t start out as a love interest, she was an antagonist our hero Nick loathed. (I find it interesting that Adalind was not supposed to be a recurring character but, like Felicity, was brought back and finally made a regular because she’s just that much fun to watch. Emily Bett Rickards and Claire Coffee deserve a lot of credit for bringing so much intelligence, verve and wit to their performances that they remade The Girl in spite of their shows’ plans.) I disliked Adalind because of the things she did to characters I liked, but I loved every moment she was on screen; there was just something about her enthusiastic, hardworking, implacable approach to evil, a Corporate Barbie from Hell. Then she had a baby and turned into a devoted mama for the few days before other forces of evil stole her infant, at which point she became the Destroying Mother, and whatever holds she’d barred before got tossed as she cut a swath of terror through Europe and the Pacific Northwest looking for her baby. I was pretty much Team Adalind at that point, even when she cast a spell so she looked like Juliette and slept with Nick to take his Grimm powers; after all, he’d help take her daughter away from her. Then she found out she was pregnant with Nick’s baby–which is when I stood up and said “I LOVE THIS SHOW”–and Evil Juliette got shot by another Grimm because she was trying to kill Nick, and now Nick’s stuck with Adalind as his baby momma, and they have the same enemies, and she named the baby after his mother whom she really did like, so he’s moved them into an old warehouse that’s a fortress because Hexenbiest or not, she’s his son’s mother and he’s going to protect them both, but Adalind’s thinking about going back to work as a lawyer. . . So much potential there.


One big worry: Adalind just told Rosalie, the closest thing she has to a friend (Rosalie would disagree), that she doesn’t want to be a Hexenbiest any more, which means there’s a real danger she’ll devolve into The Girl. DO NOT DO THIS, GRIMM. You’ll be undercutting one of the oldest romance tropes there is, the Opposites Attract (aka Rake and Virgin, Beauty and Beast) which in this case is a Grimm (killer of witches) and a Hexenbiest (witch). Come on, Buffy the Vampire Slayer made this work with two different vampires; let Adalind be an Evil Working Girl and keep her edge. She’s so much fun with all that power.


That’s the thing about both the Evil Girl and the Working Woman: they’re fun to watch because they’re powerful and they do things. They’re part of the main plot and not just as a barrier or a complication, they’re in there pitching and fighting equally with or against the hero. They’re fully realized characters on their own with their own goals and motivations. Why every show doesn’t deep six The Girl love interest for The Evil Girl or The Working Woman is beyond me: they’re fabulous.


Reboot


Instead, some of them are trying to reboot The Girl as a Working Woman, my least favorite solution to the problem. Laurel Lance is now the Black Canary, fighting crime with the Arrow Team and no longer casting smoldering looks at Oliver, except when she’s whining at him for not treating her as an equal. (You’re not his equal, Laurel, get over yourself.) She’s still the same Girl, she’s just dressed in black leather and a bad blonde wig now. Annoying. I think they may also be trying this with Iris, accelerating her journalism career and having her hang out at Star Labs to give the Flash team advice, but basically Iris is still just a really nice Girl. I have nothing against her, but I don’t particularly want to watch her. It’s telling that the writers don’t know what to do with her emotionally since I routinely tear up when Barry and Joe have one of their fatherly discussions on the show, and I am not a sucker for father-son dynamics in the least. But Iris? Such a nice girl. Where’s Patty? (I feel the same way about Caitlin, so it’s not just Iris who’s suffering from Girl Flu on this show.)


This approach rarely works because it’s trying to breathe life into a cardboard cut-out. “I was sweet and good and now I’m sweet and good with a career and tougher clothes” is not a fix. Make her evil with agency, make her an equal partner to the protagonist with agency, but do not spackle her empty shell and try to sell her as a fully realized character. She’s still gonna be The Girl.


I may be impatient about the whole Girl thing because romance writers solved this a long time ago. Mid-century romance heroines got rescued a lot by macho heroes, nurses fell in love with doctors, secretaries married their bosses, and agency was in short supply because it was so unwomanly. Thirty years ago we turned that around and gave our protagonists power over their own lives, so to see those passive, boring romance heroines from the fifties still showing up as love interests on the screen is maddening. We’re better than this.


And now, thank god, so are some of the female romantic interests on film, which is important because the love interest is still the primary role for women on the screen (more female protagonists, please). But lately there’s a new Girl in town and the best thing about her is that she’s not a girl at all, she’s a woman who lives her own life and might let the hero share it if he can keep up with her.


I really, really like her.


*It should be noted that Amy Kane in that first photo morphs from The Girl into a Working Woman at the end of High Noon, so it’s not really fair to use her image at the beginning of this essay. The picture is just such a classic I couldn’t resist.


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Published on November 22, 2015 03:35

November 21, 2015

Cherry Saturday 11 – 21 – 15

Today is False Confession Day.


ford3


I’ll start: I slept with Harrison Ford. I’m so ashamed.


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Published on November 21, 2015 03:33

November 19, 2015

Arrow Thursday: And We’re Back

I can’t believe it. They raised Arrow from the dead. There must be a Lazarus Pit in the Writer’s Room.



It’s damn hard to get a reader or viewer back once you’ve disappointed him or her, let alone stretched that disappointment over an entire season (or season and a half), but Arrow is back, and not just because John Constantine stopped by to get Sara’s soul out of the Hot Tub in Hell or Donna Smoak’s been sending texts to Oliver with teardrop emojis. It’s as if the writers looked up and said, “Wait, how do we tell a good story again?” and put the train back on the rails. There’s still evidence of the wreck, but it is once again a damn good ride. So of course I’ve been trying to figure out how they did it. My conclusion: they corrected seven key story elements that had either gone off track or never been on track at all. Needless to say, massive spoilers ahead.


1. Your story lives or dies with its protagonist.


Oliver Felicity


You hear a lot about making a protagonist likable. A protagonist does not have to be likable, she or he has to be fascinating, wonderful to read/watch. One of the reasons I wasn’t crazy about Grimm in the beginning was its very likable, very boring puppy-handsome lead, a great guy with a Mary Sue girlfriend whose biggest problem was that he was an unbeatable fighter of demons. (Nick has since taken so many knocks, including becoming a zombie and watching his Mary Sue turn into a Hexenbiest, that he’s pretty interesting now.) Oliver, on the other hand, was interesting from the get-go. He was out of his depth but driven, skilled but not unbeatable, flawed and vulnerable and versatile. The guy was playing so many roles, coping with so many damaged people while trying to deal with his own demons, that he was fascinating to watch. Then his back story dragged him under and the writers finished him off by making him a grimdark, immature, selfish, hypocritical jerk.


So this year when I tuned into the pilot, I was prepared for more Green Dickhead. Instead, Oliver said, “I’ve been a jerk. Really sorry about that, I’ll do better,” and proceeded to make good on his promise. He’s mature. He’s in a committed relationship with a mature, sane woman. He treats the others around him as equals. He’s surrounded by whackjobs, some of them murderous, and his problems range from difficult to bizarre, but he’s smart, thoughtful, active, and engaged with the world. The self-pity is gone; this is a guy who knows how lucky he is and is careful not to squander that. So when he’s jealous of Felicity’s former lover, he talks to his best friend, Diggle, in a scene that is two grown-ups trying to figure out relationships (I damn near fell out of my chair, they were so adult about the whole thing). When Felicity has a meltdown that would have sent the old Oliver into a tantrum tailspin; the new Oliver says, “I’ll give you the space to work it out.” And they gave him back his sense of humor, which is good because Stephen Amell can make me laugh with a monosyllable: when Felicity told Diggle he was the mature one of the two, Oliver’s entire protest was one small “Uh?” that was both vulnerable and funny, and more than that, very non-super-hero human. And he’s been texting with Felicity’s mom. I LOVE THIS GUY.


So Oliver Queen is a hero again, but more than that, he’s a terrific protagonist, the calm center of the insanity that is the Arrow universe, and that alone would be enough to bring me back. That’s the power of the protagonist: he’s gonna make or break your story. So forget likable (that’s easy and boring) and keep him or her human, vulnerable, and dimensional. You know, like Oliver Queen, Season Four.


2. Your main plot is your main focus; everything else should feed into that, not get in its way.


The Story


I loved it that Arrow kept its stories moving and packed with detail and action. And then they overdosed on storylines, trying to keep so many subplots going that their episodes became the plotting equivalent of word salad, especially since there was no cohesion, every subplot staked out its own little territory. Making that worse was that a lot of those subplots were toxic, like the I-slept-with-sisters-when-I-was-a-dumb-ass-frat-boy-and-now-that-I’m-a-wiser-grimdark-hero-I’m-doing-it-again. That storyline was like a cold sore: you never knew when it was going to flare up and ruin everything. This year, the Lance sisters are out of Oliver’s bed for good (fingers crossed) since he’s living with Felicity and the sisters have moved on to other things: Laurel is busy being the District Attorney and the Black Canary, and Sara’s dead moving on to the Legends spin-off. With any luck at all, that corpse of a subplot has been covered in salt and buried in lime. They’ve still got a lot of subplots–Oliver’s running for mayor, Felicity’s trying to bring Palmer Tech back from the brink, Diggle is looking for vengeance for his brother, Thea has a bloodlust problem–but they’re tying them all to the main plot with antagonist Damien Dahrk: Oliver’s running for mayor even though Dahrk is doing everything he can to make sure that office is empty, Ray Palmer was a prisoner of Dahrk’s until the Arrow Team rescued him, and Diggle’s brother is a lot less dead than previously thought and entangled in Dahrk’s organization. Best of all might be Thea, whose bloodlust goes away when Dahrk tries to whammy her with his magic; the curse of the series for everybody else might be her cure. As a result of these subplots’ close ties to the main plot, the story is more cohesive than it’s been in the past, and there’s an undercurrent of authority in the text that foreshadows that everything is going to merge into one mega-plot in the end. The adults aren’t just on the screen this time; it feels like somebody in the writer’s room stood up and said, “I have a plan.”


3. Your story moves or stagnates with your antagonist.


Damien


I believe I’ve mentioned that the antagonist is the fuel for story. Like a thousand times. The antagonists in the first three seasons of Arrow were good, but they all dressed in black, scowled a lot, and chewed the scenery as they ranted about vengeance and duty. After awhile, I couldn’t tell them apart, which was something considering one of them was played by John Barrowman. This year we’ve got Damian Darhk, a cheerfully evil son of a bitch in a beautifully tailored suit who’s going to destroy the city because he thinks it’s a good idea. He loves this plan. He’s excited to be part of it. He has a can-do personality with a take-charge attitude and he commands the screen whenever he appears, in large part because he’s played by the always excellent Neal McDonough. Dahrk isn’t paying anybody back, he doesn’t brood, he doesn’t emote, he doesn’t do inexplicable things because he’s Evil, he’s just brisk, efficient, focused, smart, ruthless, cheerful, murderous, and snarky. And evil. Also he keeps a shrine in his closet where he does blood sacrifices, and he can do magic, but mostly it’s his command of snark and menace that’s powering Arrow now. The character is a much-needed change from the tortured grimdark Bad Guys of the past.


The protagonist is the one the reader/viewer cares about and follows, but the antagonist? That’s the energy, the fuel for the plot and conflict. You know how I said the protagonist doesn’t have to be likable but does have to be fascinating? The antagonist doesn’t have to be UNlikeable, but fascinating is still a requirement. Damien Dahrk is the nuclear reactor of Big Bads because he’s so enthusiastically inventive about laying waste to everything around him.


4. Your story needs to be fun for the reader/viewer.


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“Fun” in this case means exciting, terrifying, enthralling, heart-warming, surprising, inventive, funny, horrifying, arousing, off-beat, or any combination of the above. Fun is the reader/viewer laughing out loud, weeping helplessly, drawing back in horror. Fun is the reason the reader picks up the book again, comes back for the next episode, fun draws the reader in so she or he can achieve catharsis at the climax. Fun is seriously under-utilized in way too many stories.


Arrow had some marvelously fun moments in the past. Anything with Moira in it was always good value. I enjoyed the hell out of Isabel, especially when Felicity hit her with a truck. The thing about Moira and Isabel, though, is that they never whined. They might stab you in the back, but they wouldn’t complain while they were doing it, so they were fun to watch. But much of last year was people moaning about betrayal and weeping about not being appreciated or being fearful about the future. It was like a kindergarten class at three o’clock: everybody needed a nap. And it was no fun.


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This year Diggle and Oliver have a drink in the Arrow Cave while Diggle makes fun of his whiskey, and then two good friends talk intelligently about relationships. Ray comes back from six months of miniaturized captivity and is delighted to find out he was kidnapped by a evil supernatural conglomerate “like Spectre!” Donna Smoak shows up in a pink cocktail dress, makes Felicity crazy, and picks up Quentin Lance in a bar. Felicity picks up a machine gun and blasts the bad guys when they attack her lab. Thea faces down Damian Dahrk and disconcerts him, which is a first for the story. Ray shows up to help with a fight, Curtis looks at Oliver and mutters to himself “You’re married, he’s straight, you’re married, he’s straight,” the fight scenes are more personal and involving (clearly owing a lot to Daredevil), and nobody except for Laurel whines. I even loved the over-the-top scene where Thea beat up the leering creep who said, “You look like a no-means-yes kind of girl.” That’s low-hanging fruit, but satisfying nonetheless. This show is fun to watch again because it gives its fascinating characters interesting things to do that make a reader/viewer say, “Oh, yes, more of that, please.” The last couple of episodes have done that so well, I watched them twice. Whatever they’re drinking in the writer’s room, give them more: this stuff is wonderful.


5. Your characters’ relationships should be strong motivators for their actions and the glue that holds their community together.


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I’m good with dysfunctional relationships, but they have to make sense, and for a long time, the conflicts in Arrow’s plots stemmed from characters acting like morons to create big scenes where everybody bitched at each other. This year, when two people in relationships important to the plot have a conflict, it’s because somebody really screwed up. Diggle’s mad at Oliver for kidnapping his wife; they work it out. Thea gets fed up with Oliver being a buzzkill, Oliver apologizes; later Thea admits he might have been right, Oliver lets it go. Oliver finds out Captain Lance is working with the Big Bad and is furious, Lance explains, Oliver’s still mad but he and Lance work out a plan. Felicity’s tense at home and fights with her mother, her mother brings her warm milk and the best advice ever given on TV, telling Felicity to talk it out with Oliver because “You’re never going to find another guy who’s that hot and cooks.” (I love Donna Smoak, she can do no wrong.) These people have real conflicts with understandable motivations, they resolve the conflicts, and then they move on because they have to: they can’t survive without these relationships. They don’t have time to obsess and whine, and they don’t seem to have any interest in it, either. It’s that adult thing.


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That’s important because every negotiation and compromise strengthens the community overall, and community is a huge part of the success of a narrative: if readers/viewers don’t want to hang out in the story world, they’ll leave. Again, that doesn’t mean the world has to be likable, but it does have to be a fascinating place full of fascinating people doing fascinating things that are well motivated and believable in the context of that world, which is made up of people in relationships.


The relationship that’s most often screwed up in stories is the romance. Don’t get me started on the Oliver/Laurel hate-fest that was supposed to be the Great Romance of Arrow. This year, sanity reins. Laurel and Oliver have explicitly stated that their past is so toxic that they’ll never be together, and they’ve formed a new relationship as partners in the fight against evil. HUGE improvement. And then, after three long years of Oliver banging every woman under thirty except Felicity and his sister, and Felicity making puppy dog eyes at him and then finding another billionaire to sleep with, they finally rode off into the sunset together at the end of Season Three, and I braced myself for whatever contrived Terrible Thing would drive them apart in Season Four, some Big Misunderstanding the writers would drag out over twenty-two episodes. Nope. Oliver and Felicity are living together, they’re happy, everybody accepts them as a couple, and that’s all believable because they’ve been working together for three years like a well-oiled machine; they’ve just added sex and omelets to the mix.


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What I really love about this is that it’s not a subplot. Oliver and Felicity’s relationship is just a fact, shown in small things like the way they look at each other when they’re trying to figure something out, the way Oliver puts his hand on her shoulder as he leans over to look at her computer, the way they sit on the couch and talk about the day’s events. It’s a hundred throwaway things, like Felicity on the new PA system saying, “This is your overlord, Felicity Smoak,” and Oliver saying mildly, “I’m going to regret putting that in.” It’s a huge relief to have all that angst over with and the romance contract clear, it’s a lot of fun to have that relationship playing in the background, and it’s a clear refutation of the idea that committed relationships are death to storytelling. Plus the stability of the relationship adds a lot to Oliver’s stability and maturity as a character. He’s not brooding any more because he’s happy. THIS is the way relationships on series should be done. I have to admit I had grave doubts about how Oliver was going to handle Ray coming back into Felicity’s life, but the writers nailed it, using the conflict to reinforce the strength of the relationship and Oliver’s maturity. This may be the best relationship on television, at least until Quentin and Donna hook up.


6. You need change to keep a long-running story vibrant and engaging.


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In a hundred thousand word novel, you need turning points to shake things up. A long running TV series has the same need. Arrow has a great cast, but they’ve been bouncing off each other for three years now, doing the same damn things–Oliver telling Felicity he can’t be with her because it would put her in danger (don’t get me started on that one), Felicity babbling double entendres, Diggle being quietly wise, Thea complaining that everybody lies to her, Lance ranting about the Arrow and obsessing over his Oliver-obsessed daughters, Laurel bitching about everything in general . . . that stuff got old. This year, everybody’s new again–Oliver’s sane, Diggle’s driven, Felicity has stopped babbling and taken charge, Lance is a double-agent, and Laurel . . . argh. Better yet, there are new faces. Now that Felicity’s a CEO, she needs an assistant. Enter Curtis Holt, with the brains, charm, and babble of the old Felicity, Felicity 2.0 in fact. And there’s Alex Davis, Oliver’s new political strategist, who patiently points out the weaknesses in Oliver’s mayoral campaign while Oliver cheerfully overrules him; the undercurrent of you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me in this character is a great counter-balance to Oliver’s I’m-gonna-be-mayor confidence, plus he’s hitting on Thea, the one with the bloodlust issues, so that has huge possibilities. There’s no whining or soap (mostly), just dimensional characters interacting with other dimensional characters in such a way that you want to see them interact more. Add the excellently evil Dahrk and the just-visiting John Constantine, and the new kids in town are bringing new life to the old crowd, creating new expectations.


That’s the real key to adding new things: they shift everything, creating new possibilities in the reader/viewer’s mind. If you know that if Character X says this, Character Y will say this because that’s what she’s been saying for three freaking years, your reader/viewer’s expectation is colored with exasperation and boredom. Throw a new character or plot event into the story, and the reader/viewer sits up and says, “OMG, what if . . .” and is engaged again. And if that reinvention is a logical extension of the story you’ve been telling all along, it can actually help rejuvenate the past because it led to this . . . Arrow’s new season is a textbook example of how to do just that.


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7. Your theme has to be inherent in the story line, coded not stated.

I got really tired of hearing Oliver say he needed to save his city, especially since Star(ling) City gets worse every year. In the latest episode, Oliver stated what I think might be the series theme, but he didn’t do it as a pronouncement this time, he did it as a passionate argument for why Diggle needed to give his brother another chance:


I’m asking you to hold out hope for Andy because I need that hope. I need to believe that no matter what happens in our lives, no matter how much darkness infects us, I need to believe that we can come back from that.


He wasn’t saying, “This is what I believe;” that’s theme-mongering. He was saying, “This is what I need to do in order to keep believing in what I desperately need to believe, so this is what we’re going to do.” Couched in action and character, that theme takes on more resonance that it could possibly have divorced from the story. And in so doing, it almost justifies those awful flashbacks because they lend weight to the “darkness infects us” line. Theme isn’t something that’s plastered on a story like a label, it’s the underlying idea of the entire story, the beating heart of the story. Most of that time, that beating heart does not need to be exposed (bleah), it’s enough to know it’s there and it’s working.


All of these fixes are making Arrow excellent again, but there are still a couple of things that could be better.


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1. Stay in the now of the story.

Don’t screw with time in your storytelling: readers/viewers will pick a time they like best and be annoyed with the other storyline for getting in its way. In the case of Arrow, it’s those damn flashbacks taking story real estate away from the the whole Dahrk’s-gonna-destroy-the-city-Oliver’s-gonna-save-it lovely clear conflict. Instead we’re forced to watch Oliver run a slave camp as an undercover Argus agent and rescue another beautiful woman. I will admit that seeing Oliver with John Constantine made the island almost bearable, but otherwise, I do not care about the drug overlord who is the latest in the long line of Evil Bastards torturing Oliver on Lian Yu. And when the third eligible woman showed up on the impossible-to-find island, I laughed. That Oliver is a chick-magnet even castaway in that terrible wig. This year, it’s an improvement to see an older, skilled Oliver holding his own without the wig, but the flashbacks are still the equivalent of your little brother standing in front of the TV, preventing you from seeing the show you want to see (“Greg, move your head”), which is the one set in the present. Focus on your main plot; it’s your bread-and-butter and everything else should be in service to it, not standing in its way.


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2. Don’t write characters that are boring or, worse, irritating when you think they’re charming.

The writers must hate Laurel Lance: they give her terrible story lines and selfish, stupid dialogue. Her latest plot line of raising her sister from the dead, finding out she’s created a soulless murdering zombie in a bustier, chaining her up in the basement of her apartment building (WTF?), and then omitting to tell anybody because she’s afraid people will yell at her when Zombie Sara escapes and starts a killing spree . . . . You know, I’m good with over the top. When SharkMan showed up on The Flash, I cheered. The guy on Arrow a couple of weeks ago who peeled off his tattoos and killed people with them? Loved him. John Cho walking around on Sleepy Hollow with his head snapped back? Bring it on. But Laurel bitching at Oliver for not treating her like an equal because he’s displeased with her for loosing a killer zombie on the populace? She’s the equivalent of your best friend’s awful significant other: You just moan when she shows up. Also her Canary wig is almost as bad as Oliver’s island rug. It’s all right to get rid of a character who isn’t working, especially all right to get rid of a character who’s screwing up your story world. The only way I can see to make Laurel fun is to make her evil, although that usually carries with it the penalty of death. I’m okay with that. The Arrow Cave is too crowded anyway.


Summing up:


1. Your story moves and breathes, lives and dies, with your protagonist and antagonist. Making them fascinating and getting them vividly on the page/screen in strong, focused conflict is key to the success of your (linear) story.


2. Cut any manufactured angst, unmotivated conflict, irritating and unnecessary characters, untethered subplots that clog up the narrative, back story that gives information the reader doesn’t want or care about, and anything that doesn’t serve the main story directly and efficiently.


3. Use character relationships as background instead of plot (unless you’re writing a relationship story) to create, evolve, deepen, and stabilize the story world.


4. Show your theme in action and motivation, don’t have your characters announce it.


5. Watch Arrow. It’s really good this year.


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Published on November 19, 2015 20:31

November 16, 2015

November 15, 2015

Thinking of Paris . . .

I don’t know if we have Argh People in Paris or even in France, but it must be said . . .


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Our hearts are with you and your beautiful city.


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Published on November 15, 2015 14:21

November 14, 2015

Cherry Saturday 11 – 14 – 15

Today is Moby Dick Day, or at least this is the day it was published on.


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Terrible book. Full of fish.


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Published on November 14, 2015 03:30