In story telling, it’s crucial that characters act according to their own motivations, and not because the plot requires it of them. There is an elegant way to make the character serve the plot when it doesn’t really make sense, what Michael Byers (no relation) calls the Sure-But-And-So, but that’s a discussion for another time…
Category: Other Series
Demogorgon Spotted in 1959 Puerto Rico
From Hunter S. Thompson’s novel The Rum Diary.
Comparison of the Structures of Seasons 1-3
In this post, I’m going to go through each of the three seasons of Stranger Things and analyze them in terms of basic story structure and pacing. Before jumping in, I want to first get some of the jargon out of the way. For purposes of this discussion an “A Story” is the central conflict…
The Cliches Season 3 of Stranger Things Needs to Avoid
It’s almost become expected that as a series continues the quality will trend downhill; it doesn’t always happen, but it’s so common as to become cliche. I suspect the reason for this is because the lead up time to the original film or TV season (or novel) can often be years, while the turnaround for…
The Mechanical Issues in Stranger Things Season 2
While overall I enjoyed Season 2, it certainly was not as strong as Season 1. In this post I want to critique the season in terms of technical story telling mechanics. I know I’m a bit late to the Season 2 criticism party, but hopefully you’ll find it interesting to look at the season not…
Where the Season 2 Story Structure Went Wrong
I just finished Season 2 today, and while I think it was overall pretty decent, it certainly didn’t live up to the quality of Season 1. I suspect a lot of this is from what I’ll call Season One Depletion. Basically, you have writers who’ve had ideas percolating in their heads for years, then they…
The Unique Three-Dimensionality of Johnny Lawrence
(Full disclosure, I haven’t seen Season 2 yet. Waiting to get over my Game of Thrones hangover before diving in.) Borrowing from Michael Byers’s Faking Shapely Fiction, a three-dimensional character needs to possess three characteristics: unaligned traits, spectrum traits, and self-reflection. Unaligned traits are those which can go together, but we don’t expect them to….
The Novella is the Right Form for Cobra Kai
This will be the first in a short series of posts where I’m breaking down just why Cobra Kai’s Season 1 was so good (I haven’t seen Season 2 yet, we’re using it to fill the break between GoT and Stranger Things). It’s also the summer, I’m done grading papers and instead of responding to…