I was watching an episode of the original Kino’s Journey recently. The episode was part two of “Coliseum”, where Kino ends up in a deathmatch tournament, though surrendering is an option, but the main story isn’t what matters. It’s what happens at the start of the episode. The final four are forced by the mad king behind the event to watch a puppet show about how he ascended to the throne. I won’t go into details, but one of the participants got really angry (because his own story was tied to the events) while another was bored by it and Kino and the other girl were at most apathetic to the whole thing.
I was thinking at first how the reaction to that story helped set up the character’s reveal by the end of the story since it was kind of obvious who he really was. As my brain tends to do with a good story, it went into being a character there myself (or some better variant of myself), confronting the man as Kino would do later, but in my own way. I figured out who he was and why he hated the king from his reaction, noting that stories are a sort of gateway to the soul. Usually we think about that when it comes to the writer, but then I took a different mental path: what does our reaction to stories say about us?
One date idea I’ve had (if I could find a woman to agree to one and time slips further away from me) is a personal double feature. She grabs her favorite movie, I grab mine, we watch both and then we explain to the other why that movie mattered to us. Two people can have the same favorite movie, or book, or episode, or game but for different reasons. At a time when Hollywood’s alleged creatives seem transfixed on telling their story through characters they didn’t create at the expense of those characters’ stories, I kind of wonder what the stories we’re into says about us, because there are so many types out there.
Look at our choices of genre. I prefer sci-fi stories, while my dad goes towards more terrestrial war stories. Even then he’s more into the action side of things than ones that focus on the horror of war or wartime romances. I’m a little more open to a romance subplot, but I do prefer action based war stories…though mine has more giant robots than his.
What’s your mystery preference? Batman? Miss Marple? Scooby-Doo? Magnum P.I.? And which version of Thomas Magnum do you prefer? What about police shows? More into the procedural or do you want to try to solve the crime before the heroes do?
When it comes to horror, I’m out, but I also don’t believe someone is going to become a serial killer from watching Michael Myers (not to be confused with comedic actor Mike Myers) go after his sister. What is your preferred take, supernatural or normal insane loon who just appears to be otherworldly? Is Goosebumps too much for you or A Nightmare On Elm Street not enough? I don’t think we can learn about people just from what they prefer to watch, read, listen to, or play. That’s the kind of surface level viewing of people we get from the current Hollywood mindset even when Hollywood itself isn’t involved. Why do prefer Freddy over Jason, or the xenomorphs, or the Terminator, or the obsessed roommate who takes tsundere to a murderous extent? I’m not providing answers, I’m asking questions.
Cool story, Mark.
The guy in the Kino’s Journey episode had a personal connection to the puppet story because he lived those events. Unless someone made a biopic about your life, you aren’t going to have the same experience. However, something about the stories we gravitate to tie into the events of our life and the influences we have. I choose Batman over Moon Knight because when Batman takes on another identity, it’s not a split personality or the result of some ancient deity. I tend to shy away from the rare occasions Batman takes on the supernatural because it’s not what I go to a Batman story for…yet oddly I’ll totally watch that concept in a Justice League tale that Batman shows up in. On his own or with the Batman Family I want to see him use his brains as well as his fists, his stealth as well as his gadgets. I just think that’s really cool. And of course Batman’s “no kill” policy forces him to find ways to non-lethally take down opponents, though when the writers go for a more violent or mentally disturbed Bruce Wayne, that’s not Batman to me. It’s why I shun the Matt Reeves The Batman but the Kids WB cartoon of the same name is one of my favorite takes on Bruce and Gotham City. And DC hasn’t ruined that show’s original characters like they have Harley Quinn or Renee Montoya.
I live in the real world, so I don’t usually follow stories set in some version of it. Even then something more hyper or unusual has to come into play, whether it’s an alien stalking the city or a criminal trying to force a retired special ops man to kill someone. I can go outside my comfort zone. My all-time favorite movie is both a terrible adaptation and in a genre I don’t usually follow. I actually liked the Samuel L. Jackson take on John Shaft. I’ve liked movies others don’t because the character fed some need I have or enforced some belief I share. When you take those elements away, as the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd tends to do, it stops being that thing they wanted to use to sneak their own story past the studios or prove their “superior” tastes. It’s why I gravitated towards Babylon 5 over Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. On the surface they’re the same show, but while others may disagree there were elements that felt wrong in a Star Trek show while B5 was not bound by the same rules because they didn’t exist in that brand.
I know all of this is very rambling like a loon stream of consciousness, but like I said my goal here isn’t to answer questions. Instead I want to encourage storytellers to think about those questions. When continuing or adapting a brand, try to figure out why people gravitate towards it. That’s rather easy thanks to social media. X-Twitter and it’s clones, YouTube videos, I’d throw Reddit in there if there weren’t reports of moderators silencing certain voices–all of it full of people happy to tell you why they like something. You’ll get conflicting stories, activists, fan shippers, surface level takes, and the aforementioned everything for meeeeeeeeee types among the old-fashioned hipsters. However, somewhere in that mess is an idea of why these things matter to people. It’s thus up to fans to figure that out for ourselves and tell them. And don’t ask for “my version of (X)”. You aren’t owed it, but if there’s something you’d like to see, feel free to ask. The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica was so original in its approach it should have been it’s own brand rather than pretend to be connected to anything Glen Larson created. I saw nothing of the original in what was in the new take, and I wasn’t alone in that. So I never watched it and regret nothing.
I just want to get people thinking about stories, why they matter to you, why other stories matter to other people, and really think about why they matter at all. We may not agree; in fact I’m sure we won’t, and that’s fine. Understanding why those stories matter may help us come together a bit more or at least understand one another. That takes effort so the surface people will never do that, and the elitist snobs and hipsters don’t care anyway because it gets in the way of caring only about themselves. For the rest of us, there’s a reason stories endure and some endure more than others. Figure that out, and maybe you’ll be able to understand other people a little bit better.
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