Plotting failure

You and your smuggler friend are in an illegal gambling den. You think it's risky betting money that isn't technically yours, but the smuggler, well, he's confident, he's always confident. You're being chased by the gangsters who run the den, shooting at you and the smuggler.

You and your smuggler friend are in an illegal gambling den. You think it's risky betting money that isn't technically yours, but the smuggler, well, he's confident, he's always confident. Maybe over confident, and he skips a trick by one of the other players. The people running the den don't like tricks, and falsely accuse the smuggler. You and the smuggler need to make a quick exit. Next you're being chased by the gangsters who run the den, shooting at you and the smuggler.

Which one scans? The first paragraph or the second, difficult, I know. So difficult.

Last week I read two comic books, Star Wars #16 and Guardians of the Galaxy #5, both of which, to me, missed a trick. Slight skips in plots can throw me, to the point where sometimes I can't finish a film, book or comic book. I find myself with so many questions.

To clarify, I know that some text need skips. Authors will withhold information to develop a plot, and nonlinear narration can be fantastic (and closer to memory recollection).

But the 'accidental' skip, a missing page, for example, causes problems. Why does the plot skip, is there something else missing? Is it worth trying to make the logical leap needed to bridge the gap?

Balancing branches

It is fairly reasonable to say that Emperor Palpatine is an untrustworthy fellow. He is Gollum without the calming influence of Smeagol, Sauron and Melkor[1] combined, Vorgons if they were evil, a Bond villain that manages to triumph. Palpatine ain't no friend of yours or mine[2].

I mention this because I've read some of the 'journey to Force Awakens' comic books and Chuck Wendig's Star Wars Aftermath in preparation of the forthcoming film. I am a little excited, it is a film I'm looking forward too, and the comic books and book appeal to what I think is Star Wars, my expectations and experience.

The chance to speculate on possible themes also appeals. Upon finishing the fourth issue of Shattered Empire it occurred to me I had seen the tending to a garden training method elsewhere. In fact, it's in one of my favourite comic books, Usagi Yojimbo, in which our hero confesses to his training master that he couldn't tend his garden. His master then says the test wasn't about gardening, the seeds had been boiled, but to see whether Usagi would cheat or confess his weakness.

Shattered Empire climaxes with a high-security laboratory being broken into by Luke Skywalker and Shara Bey[3] to recover trees Palpatine had stolen from the Jedi. Luke is surprised there are two trees, and they agree to look after one tree each. Bey gets to keep one because "it should go to a good *home*." Fairly simple instruction, and yet...

The massive narrative[4] of Star Wars up until now has been binary. Jedi and Sith, light side and dark side[5], "do or do not", even when the films have touched the muddy grey-area that is closer to life it has been on good/bad terms. Binary does not work if one eliminates 1 or 0.

So, what if the two trees are binary. What if Luke knows, through the 'magical powers afforded to him through the Force', that one tree is tainted, like Usagi's seeds, never to grow properly? If Shara Bey is given a tree because her future, her home, is good; by extension Luke's future, Luke's home, is bad. And bad in this binary universe means Sith.

Aftermath deals with the Empire's 'long game' and doesn't feature any gardening (sadly). What it does feature is interesting characters that Chuck Wendig has put a lot of care into. The characters are believable, they hurt and make mistakes, they drink to forget. And not 'shoot the wrong being' mistakes, mistakes in interpersonal relationships. In this universe relationships happen, and they go wrong, just like human relationships.

There is a line in The Big Bang Theory's theme about how we attempt to unravel all the mystery with mathematics, science, and history. Culture helps us solve these mysteries; when the boy dies at the end of the book, when the singer sings about architecture, when nuclear war results in a comic book about law and order in overcrowded mega cities, all of these narratives create space for us to examine more than just what is in front of us.

A science fiction western movie, heavily based on an earlier Japanese film allows this space, just in the same way and to the same extent that a restoration comedy does. To deny one over the other is to give into the dark side.

That mystery is simple to ask and so, so complex to answer. Are my seeds tainted, or will they grow, and how can I know for certain before I plant them?

Notes
1 - I will now paraphrase Kent Brockman, 'it's in the Silmarillion, people.'
2 - 'BB-8's going to be one of the greats, it's a fact he buys rounds for all of his mates', I could keep up the Star Wars themed rhyming couplets until Arthur Dent gets his cup of tea.
3 - Bey being mother to Poe Dameron.
4 - That was a typo but I might stick with it, expect micro narrative and macro narrative to appear some time. Soon.
5 - 'You make me cry,' to paraphrase Glasgow's Urusei Yatsura.

'Getting high on the random association vide'

The Marvel universe is the universe of outsiders. Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam is perhaps purposefully an outsider. Adam is the first man according to Christianity. Adam and Eve were the first mutants in Scottish literature.

I make associations with everything[1], mostly at random but not at random. These things are in my head, along with everything else.

There are a lot of things I find confusing, both inside and outside my head, so associations kind of help make sense out of nonsense. I tried making a list[2] but that itself became a massively branching interconnected tree.

The main problem I faced was where to start, as I was listening to Pavement earlier we'll start there, yes we shall.

I associate teenage heartbreak with the Pavement l.p. Wowee Zowee. It happened in my first year at university, after I had turned twenty, but you know, those three sides of vinyl are connected to my first-not-first love. Grave Architecture and Serpentine Pad are for me two of the best tracks on the album which sings from track two onwards (I have mixed feelings about We Dance).

First-not-first-love will have two associations. Tim Booth and James covering Sunday Morning by Lou Reed takes me back to standing in a school corridor aged 14 whistling this and the girl I fancied asking why I was so cheerful[7]. Well, because she was talking to me, I don't know... The other association with first-not-first-love is the female name Clare[8] spelt that way. Just seeing that word will make that melody skip into my head. Do-day-dah, de-di-dah, do-day-dah, de-di-dah.

Breakups are another thing. Here it is It's The End Of The World As We Know It by REM. I know the lyrics are about earthquakes and the rest, but deep in my heart it is about losing one's partner and that feeling that even if it is the end of the world it might be okay. Eventually. After a bucket load of trouble, simply nothing to be done but get on[3].

Feedback. I love screaming guitars, tube screaming effects are the best. Fifteen minutes of feedback and e-bows, hell yes[4]. But, whenever feedback crops in thoughts and conversations it is I Feel Fine by the Beatles. No screaming, more restraint, but feedback nonetheless.

Feedback comes in loops, cycles. Jane's Addiction[5]'s Been Caught Stealing is my bicycling song. It's mostly that lyric, "it's mine, mine oh mine, and I don't have to pay for it", that gets me. The open road, cycle path, they're mine (and yours if you want).

Though I think about music when running I don't associate any music with running. Running is clouds, freedom, floating, with a beat but not a beat I can disclose.

Petanque is suspicion. Messenger bags are Justin's. Bricks sleep and don't hang in the air same way spaceship do. Starship trooper boots. It is more hygienic in bottles. Central reservations broke our gardens. 'Potato on a radiator gonna let it remain in a locket'. The mind gets dirty as it gets closer to thirty, she's flirty and thirty, about the age when women get dirty, it's dirty story about a dirty man[9].

To paraphrase one of my favourite bands (of all time) talking about their shared appreciation of "Stephen Malkmus and the magic of Pavement", I do this all the time. And if I could do it all over again I would do it all over you. And by you I mean me, and isn't that the real truth. No[6].

Notes
1- Almost. Well, depending on my mood. Just watched Great British Bake Off and thought 'and this is my shooting hand' when Sue Perkins asked a contender to show their hand.
2- The Mikado can teach the reader a lot about political cronyism (Lord High Everything-Else), ageism (that song about elbows), and the daily routines of school girls. It also demonstrates the use of demonizing language when describing the other, the unfortunates, and the poor (or was that Peter Lilley?).
3- I am not too proud to say I'm okay that I associate the Pastels with a girl I once knew called Aggi. And that sentence starts with a Belle and Sebastian lyric.
4- Beck, and not the guitarist Jeff Beck.
5- That well-known international source of addiction news.
6- One reference and lots of connections. The Simpsons, the X Files, Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek, the list goes on.
7- Have you heard the lyrics?
8- The girl in the corridor wasn't called Clare. I don't know where Clare came from, it might have been a film or book for all I can remember.
9- All of that because I was thinking about ants while watching a fly.

Event management

I have already begun, something happened prior to me starting this sentence, something that this whole essay is based upon. It was quite an event, but for reasons we shalln't go into now, it shall remain unspoken. Actually, given its relevance to what is coming up, I think I should give it a proper title: the Event.

Events crop up in fiction, they are an interdependent part of narration. To my untrained eye fiction is an event happening which causes a series of subsequent events, all of which may or may not resolve the issue that caused the initial or subsequent events. 

Various genres take slightly different approaches to their own internal events, and a creator might employ a direct linear approach to events, or swap and change through the sequence. There is no one rule when events are relayed to the reader, no one method better than another. Sometimes the event(s) are mentioned, sometimes they are not. Sometimes the first chapter will contain all the information one needs, sometimes one waits until the very last sentence.

However, there is a danger that the first event is overpowering. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John le Carré) starts with the fallout from a disastrous mission failure, and the first 60-odd pages can seem thick with detail. Snowden's secret in Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) is there early on in the book, and yet can you recall when you actually learnt it? Both are fascinating events, though given different readers' approach to books they can seem too much. 

What reward is there in seven unreliable characters when one just wants light-hearted comedy after a busy day of work? 

Of course there is never just one event, either in fiction or its pale imitator life, and that is what fascinates me. The cascading sequence of events in narration and how they trigger different perspectives on life.

I have never experienced a nuclear war, though through Judge Dredd and 2000ad I have a good, well thought-out speculation on what might happen next. Even though it seems there is a tendency for the zombie apocalypse to end the world as we know it, we've never been closer to a nuclear war (it is still a mad, MAD world).

So the nuclear war that created Mega-City One is more an excuse to explore human nature. Judge Dredd applies the law like a robot, avoids personal and sexual relationship (illegal for Judges, remember, like sugar for citizens), and will always get the perp. And yet, Dredd also ends the segregation of mutants. Through nuclear war an exploration of equality.

My history with Mega-City One goes back many issues, and each prog heaps another load of speculation into my mind. I have less of a history with Nonplayer and The Surface, so the events and speculation they inspire are different.

From what I gather the catastrophic event in Nonplayer is due to that most human of natures, artificial intelligence. At the start of issue one the reader is presented with something happening beyond the rules of an artificial construct. It is not an artificial construct as there is no control, and life is without artificial control, just humans.

At the start of issue #2 of Nonplayer the reader is treated to a visual feast. The Surface features an equally pleasing cityscape. While I am unsure of the actual event that predates the start of The Surface, all human life is there to see, personal relationships and the current state of our capitalist society. The Surface is a satire which sends itself up, a sharpened metadrama to help drawn attention to the hints the narration is trying to tell you.

For me, the strongest intertextual reference I had during my first reading of The Surface was the first Starship Troopers film. It is the almost hysterical propaganda items in the film, "would you like to know more?", though The Surface adds the modern dating app 'swipe right' if you would like.

Nonplayer is different in that sense. Here is the rabbit hole of Wonderland, though it is easier to follow the rabbit whenever you like. 

I can find so many intertextual references for Judge Dredd that I might as well pick my most recent. Dredd is composite of all detectives before him (and greater than Batman, there, I said it), heavily procedural yet flawed, closer to George Smiley than an automaton law machine might be willing to admit.