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Fri Dec 11
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Where Have All The Good Times Gone? |
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io9 
04/12/09
In the words of TVtropes, True Art is Angsty.
Possibly it's a spin off of "happy is boring" above. Serious is dark. Flippant is light. The cheapest way to get taken seriously is to be dark. That's the gateway to the lowest common denominator critics might dare to consider your work at all.
I would also not say that BSG had a "happy" ending. To the extent it did, it's a product of a relentlessly, overbearingly dark series, so that an ending with a glimmer of hope about it translates to happy.
04/12/09
04/11/09
As for endings in particular, as they say, an ending is only happy because you've stopped following the action.
04/11/09
People have confused "happy" for perfect.
04/11/09
A)A copout. God did everything!
B)Fear mongering. Beware teh robotz!
C) Not happy. Roslin died, Starbuck disappeared, everyone scattered and half the people never saw each other again. After sticking together for so long, they got to Earth and everybody split up into their own little selfish tribes.
04/11/09
Not only did they give up everything they were, their culture, their friends, etc, but as far as I can tell only Hera had a decendant that made it. everyone else must have died horribly, eated by wolves of killed by chicken pox..
04/11/09
04/11/09
On that note, why not add a section to io9 where users can submit stories to be read by others? Add a rating and tagging system, and you might even be able to find some quality material to be published or adapted for the screen. Just make sure to restrict the stories to original characters and scenarios, there's enough crappy fanfic on the web as is.
Just curious, how many would be interested or willing to participate in something like this? Also, to anyone familiar with copyright law, how would one go about setting up creative commons licenses for submitted works?
04/11/09
Personally, I'd like to try my hand at original fiction, but I AM VERY LAZY. Sooo much easier to kvetch about the labor of others.
04/11/09
I don't like watching shows that always have happy stuff and not sad.
A good balance between life and death is what I really enjoy.
04/11/09
The balance is severely out of whack towards the depressing/sad side.
04/11/09
I'm tired of the depressing trend too. It's all gloom and doom, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Look how people slammed "Life on Mars" (US) ending b/c it dared to be happy instead of depressing. Never mind that it was ultimately more meaningful than the original -- since it ended happily, it's automatically bad. (oh, also bad b/c it was American and everything American is inferior to everything European)
I'm going with #2. Like teenagers who are into emo and stuff.
Maybe the culture will grow up and get past its faux-adulthood (again, like teenagers who don't know squat about life act all "deep") and get more balanced.
In the Great Depression (which was immeasurably worse than today's or the 70's recession), there were a lot of cheerful movies and radio shows.
Who knows, if all SF wasn't hung up on being "deep and meaningful and edgy" maybe more people would watch it.
I'm not sure BSG had a happy ending, though -- they give up sanitation, medicine, and the wheel to die among the ape-men b/c God did it?
04/11/09
And I also wouldn't say the British version is necessarily depressing (it certainly could be taken that way, but I don't think it has to be). It ended with Sam being happy about who and where he was. He had found a place in the world where, against all odds, he belonged, and it didn't matter to me that the whole thing was inside his head and taking place in the final milliseconds of his life. Of course, your mileage may (and, indeed, apparently does) vary quite a bit, but that's my two cents.
04/11/09
Both Sams ended up happy about who and where they were -- except one of them did it in reality and for (presumably) years and years and in the process, discovering cool stuff for all mankind and maybe getting some nookie. The other just went splat and caused a lot of paperwork and grief to his mum and friends. Much more selfish.
04/11/09
Maybe I'm just a bit too blase about the distinction between reality and fantasy in my fiction - something I suspect the final appearance of the Test Card Girl was meant to comment on - but I think Sam happy in 1973 was the emotionally appropriate resolution, and it just doesn't matter that much whether it's real or not.
Although I'll admit the question of his mother is troublesome, one way to approach it is that the people in 1973 and 2006 had become equally real, and one group needed him far, far more. Whether that's just equally real to him or in a more objective sense is something I think Ashes to Ashes might end up clarifying, as the series one finale suggested Gene Hunt is somehow more real than previously believed.
Clearly, we just disagree on this point, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I figured another round of friendly clarification was in order.
04/11/09
I don't mind your clarification -- it's just that most people thought the original ending was better and "sooo kewwwwwl!" only b/c it was a downer. They couldn't articulate any reasons other than that.
Still don't know why you're hung up on 3 lines and one shot, though... it's much less of a structural problem than a protagonist who makes himself the third most interesting character in his own fantasy... ;)
04/11/09
First they tossed all their knowledge, science, inventions, history into the sun. Then it was revealed that their (and our!) existence and that of everyone who came before and will come after is part of some cosmic lab experiment and that pretty much every major event in the show was rigged by god to get once little girl bring her DNA to one planet and start the cycle all over again so the rats could keep running on the wheel.
Not my idea of happy, sorry.
04/11/09
They basically gave up and surrendered, comitting suicide in a much more final manner than Sam in the british version of Life on Mars.
04/11/09
04/11/09
04/11/09
04/11/09
04/11/09
04/12/09
04/11/09
Pain and struggling define us in many ways. And when we see or hear or read of such strife, we empathize, and we feel for those who are suffering so.
Strife gives life meaning. Gives our successes meaning. Gives these stories meaning.
Because as you said, without such meaning, these tales would be mere entertainment.
04/11/09
Of course struggle and conflict are essential to any real plot, That doesn't mean every story has to be about abused drug-addicts trapped in a cruel war-torn world they never made. I'm looking forward to some optimism for a change.
04/11/09
04/11/09
I'm sorry, I suppose I should have clarified my position in my first post. My belief is that there must be some real emotional struggle, something with which the reader or audience can connect in the story itself, whether it is at the beginning, middle, or end.
It's also why I feel that bittersweet endings are often so profound and moving.
As a comparison, I liked Stargate SG-1. But the vast majority of the episodes were fluff. Go to planet, get screwed, shoot people, come home.
It's not the ending that must be sad, necessarily. But a happy ending without struggle is an empty one, in my opinion.
I loved battlestar galactica because it was such a bleak story. But despite the bleakness, the characters did their best to live their lives, to find some joy in a post-apocalyptic world. I actually was disappointed by the ending, for reasons unrelated to whether or not it was a "happy" one.
04/11/09
Doing the Dark 'n' Gritty so often seems a cop-out. Then again, I'm no real writer, I just bitch about them online.
04/11/09
Exactly. Writers aren't good enough to get anything truly meaningful out, so they go "oh, we'll make it depressing, and that'll be Profound!"
Why not have all the struggle and pain mean something, in the end? "Life's a bitch and then you die" -- yes, we know, give us a reason to carry on. Or at least don't depress me on a weekday night after I've come home from work, sat in traffic, have to get up the next morning, etc.
04/11/09
Darkness and grittiness has its place, but so does optimism and idealism. I'm an idealist to a large extent, and what Whedon said in the other post today about believing in humanity's inherent goodness in spite of evidence really resonates with me. But when people start talking about "human nature," and how it's supposedly human nature to be selfish or greedy or whatever the hell, I generally tune them out. Not because I don't want to hear it, but because I don't accept it, and I feel like I have reasonable grounds for not accepting it. I don't believe that humanity got this far solely through individuals exercising their self-interest.
I think a lot of people underestimate just how much of our worldview is bound to culture and not to human nature. Right now our cultural worldview is that everybody is out for themselves. It's not true, it's just an excuse that some people make for their own shitty behavior.
04/11/09
04/06/09
04/04/09
04/04/09
Nobody's going to make high-quality stuff out of the goodness of their heart just to make the fans happy. It's economically impossible.
BTW, variety is the only genre that gets much lower ratings than SF. There hasn't been a successful variety show in decades. NOBODY watches that.
04/04/09
Basically putting on a sci-fi show is (or at least it used to be) a pretty expensive affair, and cost analysis showed that once you get to seven seasons, if you have a shot at a daily syndication market, it's best to just dump the new eps and milk the show for the rest of its viable life in syndication, where there is practically no overhead.
This is what I was told a while back, anyway. Dunno if it's actually true.
04/04/09
That, and the standard actor's contract being 7 years, at which point your cast gets big raises.
04/05/09
Tyler's House of Pain churned out episodes just so it could be sold to the syndication market.
Quantity =/= Quality
04/05/09
04/04/09
04/04/09
Also, they spend more time telling young'uns to get off their lawn.