lol we gave a narrative compulsion to a character who had a drive that was largely centered around not wanting the responsibility and fear of failure.
Them remaking star wars: “Yeah so we thought it was kinda silly that Luke initially refuses to join the rebellion, didn’t seem very heroic, so we changed that. Same goes for Han solo seemingly leaving his friends behind. Also it was super mean of him to respond ‘I know’ to Leia’s ‘I love you’ it just didn’t make sense”
Pacing and Leading, what’s that? A horse shampoo?
lol we gave a narrative compulsion to a character who had a drive that was largely centered around not wanting the responsibility and fear of failure.
They seem to have forgotten that Aang was barely a teenager when he was told “Hey, kiddo, you’re the chosen one!”
“So you’ve gotta stop being a kid and be an adult immediately.”Then later learns that him doing what makes total sense (and is objectively a correct action) as a kid, not wanting to take on the scary responsibilities of adulthood when they’re still literally a child, winds up with everybody/thing he remembers with love and fondness were brutally destroyed.
Okay, sure. But! Have you considered how much of a bummer that would be for the audience?
They seem to have forgotten that Aang was barely a teenager when he was told “Hey, kiddo, you’re the chosen one!”
Actually he wasn’t a teenager, that was kind of the core of the problem. He wasn’t supposed to be given that burden until he was 16 but the monks smelled the war so they dropped “you need to save the world” on this kid when he was 12.
“you were gone for 100 years and war broke out!”
“I see you, I hear you, you’re valid”
Aang, waking up from 100 years frozen in an iceberg: “Well that happened!”
Isn’t the story beat “kid fucks around until visiting the old air temple and seeing his dead mentor causes him to freak the fuck out and realize the implications of the war”?
Why do a coming of age story without character development? Why doesn’t Korra start out as a child yelling, “I’m the Avatar! I’m gonna do my best and respect other points of view along the way!”
Its wild to me. it’s almost like going “Moby Dick is a story about a man trying to catch a whale, but for some reason the author wasted a bunch of time on other stuff. In our remake we’re only gonna show what matters: That bit where the whale drags him under.”
Or really just “we’re gonna cut to the bone and show the only thing that matters: The climax”.
Did this producer grow up watching vines exclusively?“Avatar is about fighting fire lord ozai, so we’ve cut everything that isn’t the fight”
That bit where the whale drags him under.
Uh, spoilers much?
I was going to get around to reading it, honest.
Most of the book can be skipped truthfully. There’s about 80 chapters of whale facts and the first of those starts with “I know all there is to know about whales, so let me set the record straight: whales are fish” and then he goes on to list things which whales are larger than.
He also stops the narrative dead in its tracks to go into an essay about the symbolic power of the color white, in case you, the reader, didn’t get it.
It’s nice to have a story that isn’t full of all the symbolism or metaphors. Just a guy trying to catch a whale
I mean I guess it doesn’t count as subtext if the author is going to the trouble to spell out what he means
Only cowards use subtext!
I know all the ways to cook whale.
Gumbo whale
Fried whale
Coconut whale…
Now imagine they didn’t have a time skip fast forwarding thru all the ways to cook shrimp, but just had 80 chapters of ways to cook shrimp. And the first of those chapters being demonstrably wrong.
Chatgpt vegan outdoor cat cookbook time
Tbf, that’s also how my brain works when i’m trying to concentrate.
Because character development is slow and boring and gets in the way of the ~~ spectacle ~~ that Netflix audiences want. Character development is for children. Adults demand non-stop action and ironic quips.
Isn’t the story beat “kid fucks around until visiting the old air temple and seeing his dead mentor causes him to freak the fuck out and realize the implications of the war”?
Well no actually, “let’s go fuck around with the elephant koi” is actually the episode directly after he finds his home destroyed and his guardian (and everyone else he ever knew) dead.
Ya it’s not until the solstice episodes where he talks with Avatar Roku that the time line for the shoe really starts and they realize they have to kick into high gear.
What was the rationale there? That seems like poor pacing
I think it’s important to the vibes of the show in general. The point of Aang’s journey isn’t “grr the fire nation killed my family now I need revenge.” The catalyst for his fight against the fire nation is Roku telling him that Sozin’s Comet is coming soon and that Ozai is going to lead another major invasion with it. Until that point Aang mostly just wants to help Katara learn to waterbend.
I see, these make a lot of sense. It also helps to create a slow burn for pay off of a battle with Ozai. Thank you! @cosecantphi@hexbear.net
Edit: You’ll cringe for this, but that sort of makes sense for Netflix to not have an elephant koi detour. I think the impetuous being the air temple + a vision for the comet would be a snappy pace befitting a few seasons of a Netflix show.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this show, but the vibe I get is that Aang’s grasp on his power is still very rudimentary, so there’s not much he can do about it in the moment, and so he just wants to take the edge off and have some fun to keep his mind off the fact his people were all murdered after he abandoned the air temple and deprived the world of the avatar for a century.
So all protagonists must be 100% correct and good from the start and know everything and be perfect? No character or narrative growth?
Also why must everything “advance the plot”? Why can’t Aang just do things because their fun? That is a way of telling a story and “advancing the plot” in itself.
Again, if this is how they are dealing with characters, wtf are they going to do with Zuko?
Filler episodes are good
I mean you need some of them, if every episode is made up of full throttle battles and major plot twists, it can get exhausting and actually diminish the value of those plot points/twists and battles. At that point, it might as well be a movie.
Though there is also the problem of too much filler, but filler episodes play a key part in pacing, and providing background information and motivations of characters, fleshing them out.
Yes, I mean it, filler episodes are good
And if they weren’t, One Piece wouldn’t have such a large audience
This is wrong one piece filler is bullshit and bad, except for that like one arc but that was a fluke
I don’t watch One Piece but the only thing I know is that it’s all filler and the plot never goes anywhere and they are always usually at point zero of their search or whatever
That is not even close to true lol
The anime is a bad anime adaptation that has lots of padding, but it isn’t mostly filler like naruto is its just paced poorly, but they are constantly making progress
Mate, one fucking thousand episodes, you should be able to fit all Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time and Animorphs inisde that. The plot can’t be that long so it must be 99% filler
Counterpoint: Kill la Kill pared everything down as much as possible, eliminating filler and eliminating or truncating redundant animations, and wound up with nearly perfect pacing as a result. Meanwhile something like Hunter x Hunter turned into like 90% filler (or even worse, story progression that was so empty and slow it basically was filler) and became basically unwatchable as a result.
There’s definitely a line where paring things down goes too far, like Cyberpunk Edgerunners was Studio Trigger taking the streamlining a little too far when the story could have had a bit more in places, but in general I can’t help but feel like filler is more a negative to overall pacing and the approach should instead be to control the overall pacing with things that still advance the overall story but are more focused on a narrower tangent, instead of just throwing in completely empty and self-contained filler.
wrong, hunter x hunter is good. sometimes a story is some guys hanging out and playing a video game. character interaction and development can be story all on it’s own even if there isn’t a “main plot”
Hunter x Hunter turns into “what if we do a training montage but drag it out for 100 episodes and then also it goes nowhere anyways, with a high stakes constantly-relevant apocalyptic plot that’s kept in slow motion and full of weird politics about how revolutionaries are bad and silly overlaid onto racist caricatures of the DPRK.”
Like it starts off with an interesting enough premise and the pacing doesn’t really get bad until they go play yu-gi-oh for like 20-30 episodes in a storyline that means nothing and goes nowhere, but then it just gets unwatchable with the chimera ant arc where it just hangs in stasis to do the world’s slowest training montage that ends up not even mattering because the real answer was just “use a literal nuclear weapon to solve everything, lmao.” Like everything from what was it, something like episode 60 to episode 140 (it’s been a long time since I watched it) could have been squished into 20 episodes and still have been slowly paced.
nah all that stuff rules. sometimes a good story is hanging out with the cool characters you like and not worrying about the broader plot or pacing (which are still good)
But that’s not what Hunter x Hunter does in the Chimera Ants arc. There it stops on a cliffhangar to go have background characters give Gon and Killua a Rocky training montage for ten hours while everything else treads water in the background, then just has someone come in out of left field and solve the whole thing with a nuclear bomb and some incoherent philosophizing over which is the bigger evil: the cannibal monsters with magic powers who want to eat the world, or like this guy who didn’t want them to do that who used “the most evil weapon ever conceived which is very illegal and bad” to kill one cannibal monster with radiation poisoning, solving everything through the power of Great Man theory and nuclear weapons.
That final fight before the nuclear bomb deus ex machina was probably the peak of the entire series in terms of fight choreography and animation, though. It just should have happened 50 episodes earlier and ended that arc then and there.
Makes me nostalgic for some series made for TV where you could jump into a random episode and enjoy it even if you weren’t following along the whole plot. Particularly I remember Supernatural having a lot of monster hunting episodes that didn’t really drive the plot but were really fun.
Monster of the week with seasonal arcs is perfection
Ok. Between this and reading about how they toned down (or removed) Sokka’s sexism that he overcomes by being humbled by strong female characters, I am now convinced live action Airbender will be bad.
As is tradition
The thing that tipped me off is that they are making a live action Airbender series
the live action one piece is great though, they could have made this not shitty
its okay so far, the mansion having every room every surface covered in plates is pretty funny, but its not an improvement on the source. 2d animation will always be a strange medium to convert to live action
Can we stop letting people who don’t understand the source material have control of the source material?
They have at least 7 producers announced so far for the first season of 8 episodes. There’s an obsession of the Hollywood Gen X nepobabies to always get as many eyes on and hands writing as possible for all content, which invariably makes a good show impossible to create.
Writer’s rooms are often so packed they often have a revolving door of people of writers each writing different episodes at the same time, no longer using smaller writing teams because the production timeline is so tight, but because there literally isn’t enough room for all these writers to be in one space. These teams are no longer just 3-4 writers out of the group, but often over a dozen people. They don’t meet to communicate with the other writers in a large group because how do you have a pitch meeting or a script review with 100 people? You can’t, so you only bring them on for maybe 2 episodes and then they leave.
The new live action Star Trek series are notorious for being pretty bad and for having more writers and producers than they have episodes. Why did Star Trek Picard need over 60 producer/writers to make 30 episodes? (many of whom had so little creative control over the final product that they don’t even get listed on the wikipedia or IMDb page) Why did Discovery have about 90 people writing 65 episodes?
You need some level of consistency on your show and a handful of writers committed to making the content consistent in its narrative tone and storytelling style. The “many hands” model neither makes the work lighter nor produces quality content, yet it remains a foregone conclusion in Hollywood production under Gen X producers.
the bit in the redlettermedia episode where mike is counting the amount of producers in an episode of Discovery is mind blowing
Here time stamped RLM Discovery S2 review, absolutely bonkers.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It is owned by people that don’t understand the source material. I expect your suggestion is impossible to implement.
I’m not super duper mad or anything, I wasn’t gonna watch it either way (Legend of Korra was lib as fuck). I just think Avatar was a very tight solid story, and it’s fascinating how much some producers can look at solid character arcs and not understand them, why they’re there and how they work
“Why wouldn’t this traumatized 10 year old child rush across an unfamiliar world to immediately become a super-weapon in someone else’s war literally subjective hours after his entire people and culture were destroyed in a super-naturally empowered genocide?”
We’re also making Aang 37 so we can explore more mature themes. We think the audience will really like that better.
Also we’re removing element bending to make it more realistic. Aang is now a brilliant scientist who has qualms about dropping his wonder weapon on Japan.
The only element he needs to master is uranium.
We’ve actually just decided to make the show The Office with Asian characters. That’s it.
Christopher Nolan is this you?
It reads like they’re trying very hard to justify cutting all the “unimportant” episodes where we slowly have the characters better understand each other and the world was better fleshed out. All so that the new show can be 10 episodes a season.
Remaking things has never appealed to me, I don’t get it, I have the original good thing on my shelf, i will watch it as I want. Your new thing seems like yoy wanted money but didn’t want to risk making something new. Cowardly producers want more money but are so afraid of producing a thing that isn’t instantly popular.
Yeah it would honestly be better if they just said “we don’t have the budget to show all these adventures, so we’re gonna have to get creative”.
It wouldn’t be fine, because those adventures are the point of the show, but it would be better. Would at least show they understand it.There’s always something admirable about a creative admitting what their limits are and how that has altered the production of their art. Rather than just trying pretend the limits don’t exist and spinning it as “actually I’m very clever to avoid these obvious flaws from the original”, so they can cover for their bosses not giving them the budget they need to actually bring the project in successfully.
Even worse: the show is 8 episodes per season. Impossible to tell a story in this time frame, streaming media’s constraints are making for awful content with bad pacing. The overall length of a Netflix Season is too long for a film, and too short for a full season show. The premium tv episode length often also makes for episodes that are either trying to pack in a movie run time of content into half the time or more commonly to pad a standard network length episode into twice the time.
I think the only way to use this to make good content is to make your Netflix Seasons just be part of a season like Season 1: Part 1 and Season 1: Part 2, or to shoot for telling your actual story arc over the course of many seasons, each one being a chunk of the main story circle with a tiny mini side adventure loop built in.
I think two good examples of how to use the Netflix production/distribution cycle in these ways are Inside Job and Lupin, both of which seem to be canceled earlier than expected.
The Netflix model cannot successfully produce narrative driven content, because its format is too long for a for a movie, too short for a show, while also being too expensive for a show budget and not budgeted enough for a movie. It leads you to either make a mediocre spectacle or to have to spread your content out over multiple seasons.
Netflix will always betray you at a number of seasons other than your target, and having gaps of time between episode drops means you have to always make each mini-season feel partially complete but also not entirely complete in case you get renewed.
So whats the reason for freezing himself then lol? Did it as a bit?
Prolly had a vision about that too
And especially as the series went on, Seasons 2 and 3 are a lot more mature in theme than, say, Season 1 was. So for us, it was about striking that right balance, of making sure you were true to the DNA of the original. But at the same time, we had to make it a serialized Netflix drama, which meant it couldn’t just be for kids. It had to also appeal to the people who are big fans of Game of Thrones. And so, it had to feel grounded and mature and adult in that way too. So that’s, like I said, the tightrope that we have to walk.
Who was asking for this? I don’t remember ever speaking with another fan of ATLA and them saying “I wish it was more like Game of Thrones”. Why does it have to appeal to an older audience? Most of its fans are probably in their 20’s or older, and we are still big fans of the original show.
Also “mature” apparently means “they swear now” to these people lol. What’re the odds we’ll see some gratuitous sex scene?
Aang and Katara eventually get married, so we just have them fuck right off the bat in this one
What’re the odds we’ll see some gratuitous sex scene
Hopefully not the characters are kids and teenagers
Don’t worry, they’ll turn them into adults because game of thrones had adults in it as well
Gotta watch Admiral Zhao bone someone down.
Because Game of Thrones was very popular and made lots of money. That’s all these people and the executives they work for understand.
They are going to make it like Season 7 Game of Thrones too, not like Season 2
Just make a new property set in the same universe and then they won’t be bound by atla’s plot or characters at all.
Stop rehashing shit for the love of God.
The original writers are making more Avatar shows and books and stuff, but for some reason someone decided to let Netflix make this shit
but then they wouldn’t have a show to copy off of
then they’d have to put effort into a work of art
There is literally a whole TvTropes page about this, “Refusing the Call” and “The Call knows where you live”.
Yeah some guy wrote a book about a dude with a thousand faces and he refuses to call a bunch of people too :ricky:
He’s bad at adulting
I don’t get the reference :/
Iirc, Hero with a Thousand Faces by Campbell (the monomyth guy)
ooh thanks
That and then I’m referencing Ricky from trailer park boys who is famous for saying things slightly wrong
Yeah I got that
Really thought we had some Ricky emoji already
Look making Aang develop as a character and learn when it’s necessary to get serious is too much work. Can’t we just do a magical exposition dump into his head to solve all these pesky things like “motivation” or “growth”
They’re doing it to Sokka too. They’ve nixed his initial chauvinism from the get-go, so he doesn’t get to have that point of development either
By the end of the Netflixization, its just a vaguely Asian coded martial arts magic Punsher retread.
But still liberal so the magic punisher will refuse to kill the fascist dictator but instead just metaphorically take away his soul and literally imprison him for life in a dark cell below ground, which is much better.
In the case of Avatar there could be a case made that Nickelodeon didn’t want their children’s cartoon to end with the hero killing someone.
What with a major theme of the series being aang struggling with the necessity of violence and actively looking for ways to end the war while avoiding it as much as possible.
I mean, aang is a very non-violent and pacifistic person. It makes sense for his character
Except for when he went into avatar mode and sank all those fire nation ships, based on the number of sailors required to operate one of those ships and the ice cold water temperature he had to have killed at least a hundred of them
He’s not Aang when he’s Avatar-mode, he’s like possessed by the cumulative consciousness of all Avatars. Or at least he’s not fully in control and just acts reflexively. He didn’t master this until the end of the series, when he seemingly could maintain avatar-mode in a stable Aang controlled way
Every time he goes into the avatar state before then it’s because he’s lost control of himself and is lashing out emotionally. The avatar state is more or less a vehicle to show him at the peak of stress and emotion.
And the fish one in particular is an “all hope is lost, no avatar has ever failed worse than this” moment combined being straight up possessed by the ocean spirit. We never see him do anything at that level again
Asian-coded MCU slop. I’d bet money on it.
You can’t make this shit up, c’mon, a literal child can point out why this is wrong.
i am anti avatar (both blue people and tla) on principle but come the fuck on. don’t make your show that you’re aiming at an older audience less complex and interesting than the one for 7 year olds
