BW Media Spotlight

I may have brought this up before. With all the years I’ve been doing this site and all the time I’ve lost for one reason or another I’m not always sure, but it’s one worth bringing up again because it is a problem that’s getting worse here in the Year Of Our Lord 2022. Everybody wants to make huge epic stories now. Games have tons of DLC waiting, TV shows are multi-part multi-season stories, movies are larger than life even by movie standards (and some of them also think they’re TV shows), comics are flooded with events and stories made to pad out for a trade whether it needs to be graphic novel length or not, and the miniseries has enough parts to be a full season. It’s all meant to be flashy and keep you there for the next installment or go “ooh” “ahh” with giddy excitement, and then you move on to the next epic.

There’s a cost for all this though. All this binge watching, event-driven, very pretty stories are great for those who like to be invested in big, long stories…until they’re epically disappointed. Ask Game Of Thrones fans. However, that’s not the cost I mean, nor how hard it all is to digest and keep in your head by discussing it with your friends and fellow forum members, though that is a problem with binge in general. Imagine coming home from work or school or the dentist or something and just wanting to relax with a short story and then getting on with chores or going to bed, or if you have time maybe another or different short story. Well, sucks to be you more and more. Waste time you could spend dusting, taking out that overflowing trash, or feeding that dog you just had to have during the 2020 plague because for the next five hours you need to sit there to get the whole story…and even then you’ll only get a season’s worth unless you also binge season two. Want a quick little adventure to read? It’s continued in the next four issues from the previous three and don’t forget tie-ins and crossovers. Well, let’s try a book with 35 chapters and that’s just book one of four. This is a huge waste of time, but also money, and casual story consumers are being slowly priced out of both.

Now some of this is definitely the audience’s fault not for watching all this but in some cases demanding it, giving in to the Netflix-induced marathon session. “Binge season 3 and realize it could have ended there but season 4 will be ready to binge tomorrow.” Every story doesn’t just get remembered later on but is important to the next story and the previous story was important to this. For a group who wants to kill continuity it seems they’re determined to use up as much as your free time as possible and pay through the nose for it…and there’s no shortage of viewers ready to dive into that. I have nothing against serialized stories, even ones that go this long, but I’m seeing less and less of the done-in-one stories and I feel we’re really losing something special here, especially those who don’t have the time and money to spend.

Continue reading →