Question Disc about feedback - offshoot (TFA spoilers)

jmhyp wrote:

Kristin Darken wrote: Well, that goes back to one of my biggest complaints about the speculation style feedback that has long dominated our forums feedback. How many people in this thread started their response or comments with some variation of "Clearly the story is only at the stage of introductions and exposition so far. So there is a limit to how much I can say." And is then followed by several paragraphs of comments on what should be done differently, better, or should have been left out...

Have you read fan feedback of The Force Awakens? Just about everyone in the world gives feedback on stories that are released serially by saying "well this is just part X but given what just happened, here's what I think will happen. AND this is what I would have done differently." Youtube is littered with opinion pieces about how TFA could be better, could be different, could be in a metaphor for turnips, whatever. That's what fans do. They internalize what they read/consume and then want to play with it.

Whateley is not special in that its fanbase does this. It is NORMAL in that its fanbase does this. It may not be how you want to receive feedback about your stories. But it seems like human nature, especially among vocal fans of a property, to want it to be better, to have opinions (no matter how unfounded) about how it could be better, and to always be craving the next part at the detriment of commenting about the current one. The forums are the place to do this.

The point here is you and the fans approach Whateley from widely different perspectives. Serious discussion about a story is probably impossible until time has passed. Commenting seriously about a story in the week after it is released is not going to have any depth. It isn't until how the story affects the universe at large is more fully understood that we could post meaningful reviews of those works. As readers, we can't see how the story fits into [Chou's] tapestry until the other stories around it are filled in. As the publisher, you can already see that tapestry. You know how this story leads into Summer vacation. We won't have that perspective that until that summer story is released.

I read this... and my reaction was much as what those of you who know me well might expect. I started putting together a fairly blistering response to what is one of my two big pet peeves. But I was tired. It'd been a long month. And to be honest, I think most people agree with me to some extent. They simply get excited and don't think when they start posting after reading a story. And mostly, those posts aren't the ones that cause the most frustration. The posts that DO cause the problems reliably come from the same few people. People who, while claiming to be fans of the WU refuse to talk about any story newer than 2007 with any semblance of a positive stance. As if the early stories were somehow inherently flawless and everything since is lesser and only their personal knowledge of the universe and writing will help us sustain any sort of readership going forward.

So... in specific response to JMHYP: I get what you are saying. Really.. I do. I'm following the reviews and social media responses to the new Star Wars as well as discussing it in context of my work environment... with actors, directors, and designers... mainly of whom have film credits, some even with Star Wars film credits (you know that Imperial officer who Dark Vader chokes for his 'lack of faith'.. ya, I have worked with him on at least one show a season for the last four or five years). But I'll come back to the specifics of the Star Wars thing, because while I was considering how to respond to this, someone else did it for me... and maybe it will mean something more if it comes from someone other than me.

However... even if I DID agree with you 100% that that is what fans do, I want to point out where your analogy fails.

You see, There is a difference between walking out of the theatre having watching 100% start to finish of the first movie of a trilogy and loading up the forums after having read Part 1 of a story that we have told you is a 3 Part piece. The difference is that, in the first case, while you know that the 'whole' story won't be known until all three movies are released... that movie one in the trilogy is designed to be a complete movie. When we tell you that this is part 1 of a story that will take three releases to get all of it out there... we're telling you that for no reason should you expect to walk away from reading this first part thinking that you've seen all four traditional parts of a story - exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution. MAYBE from time to time you will see an episodic release in which each 20k word part will be "self contained" with its own exposition and its own climax, etc. But that will be rare.

We are simply breaking the stories up into parts to keep from giving out a novel in the first week of the month and nothing else until the middle of the next month. So... in a story where there is a lot of new stuff... you may get a lot of exposition and rising action in Part 1. Part 2 might be even more rising action without hitting a climatic moment.

And to evaluate a story in which you've only seen some exposition and rising action as if you have seen a completed story... is like writing a review not on "The Force Awakens" and the rest of the new trilogy after having watched the whole of "The Force Awakens" ... it is like writing that review after watching the first 35 minutes of "The Force Awakens."

And if you were dumb enough to do that and publicly post that review... you would deserve the derision you would receive.

Now that doesn't mean that you cannot respond to that one-third of a completed story that you did get. That's not my point at all. My point is that YOUR responses should reflect what you know and should measure what you receive not upon an unrealistic expectation... but what you were given.

Back to Star Wars... Evidently there was a big article in Huffington Post that had dug up some 40 plotholes/flaws in The Force Awakens. Another reviewer decided, instead of posting the in depth review that he'd planned out; to counter the Huff Post article and the armchair critic mindset that inhabits social media. And... rang more than a little true of the issue I'm talking about.

Well, I've waited a few weeks to write my “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” review and finally, after multiple viewings and numerous vibrant discussions, I feel that I’m ready to give this movie the review it truly deserves.

I gave the film a ton of time to sink in. I analyzed the story structure and plot. I got to know the characters, both new and old, and came to understand the motivations and performances of the actors portraying them. I prepared myself to gush over the rollicking relationship between Poe Dameron and his new Stormtrooper pal, Finn, the brilliant puppeteering of BB-8 and the star-making performance of Daisy Ridley as the burgeoning Jedi known simply as Rey. I was ready to tell you about how much I adored the direction the filmmakers took with the legacy characters of Han, Leia and Luke while making Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren one of the most layered and interestingly flawed villains I’ve ever seen. I was excited to prognosticate over clues that were left in the film to set up the remainder of the series. Sure, the movie has its flaws. It’s a little heavy on the nostalgia and there are a few moments that are little too convenient for me, but there are a million other things I loved that quickly outweighed those problems. I’ve spent the last few weeks searching for precisely the right words to convey just how excited “The Force Awakens” has made me for the future of the franchise and planning how I would use those words to write a fair and balanced review.

But as I sit down to write that review…I simply can’t.

And here’s why…

The Huffington Post’s article, “40 Unforgivable Plot Holes in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens”.

Over the last few weeks I saw this article reposted over and over both by folks in the film industry and outside of it. The reposts often carried captions from Facebook users like “Yep!” or “This is exactly my problem”. Oh shit. Did I miss something? Maybe the Huffington Post and half of Facebook saw something I didn’t. I needed to know more. So I read the article. I read it numerous times. In the end, I came to my own conclusion…

The Huffington Post has no idea what the fuck it’s talking about.

I don’t know about the rest of you but I’ve grown exhausted with the horseshit, hater culture that online, millennial ‘journalists’ use to click-bait their way to some sort of self-perceived intellectual high ground. Hate first. Don’t bother asking questions later.

After all the thought and effort I put into prepping my review, the Huffington Post article had somehow stunted my ability to write about the new “Star Wars” movie. But I refused to be deterred. Thus, this article is not intended to review “The Force Awakens”. It’s intended to rip the head off the Huffington Post’s dumb-ass review and shit down its still-gasping esophagus.

Now, keep in mind I’m not a professional reviewer or even a journalist. I’m just a regular guy who has spent the better part of his life dedicated to studying story structure, plot, character, scene study and script development while working on twenty some-odd motion pictures over the last seventeen years. I might not be the guy to question the Huffington Post’s lofty review, but I’ll give it a shot.

So what are these “40 Unforgivable Plot Holes” and why is the Huffington Post ass-backward in their review? I blame it partly on the click-bait era. I also think that being a contrarian dick makes people feel intelligent. But those aren’t the reasons the review is horseshit. It’s horseshit because it really seems like the reviewer didn’t watch the movie at all.

This quote is his preface to actually countering the plot points from the HuffPost article. You can find the full article: over here.

Hurtful to say nothing? No. Frustrating to hear nothing when you're expecting something? Maybe. But maybe better to say nothing than to tear it down for being incomplete when we've already said it was incomplete before we put it out there. And no, I'm not saying you did that. It's alright to say something like "from the way this part is set up, I can't really give you 'story' feedback... but what I read flowed well. I liked the way a few of the characters popped out..." and so forth. If there are specific characters that come across as flat or uninteresting, you can say that "so and so doesn't really come across in the section, maybe there's information there that I don't get, but I'll have to wait to see more of them before I can really judge anything about them." Then, if this really was the main point of 'reveal' for this character; they know it didn't work... and if not, they can wait and see if you get what you need when that part comes out... and if you took the time to note something about it in one part, when that info is revealed, you should commend to update it "Hey, in part 2, you do this thing with so and so that makes what I mentioned in part 1 obvious. He's not uninteresting, he's actively hiding things and keeping the others from being aware of these connections." or similar.

That's why I put in all the character thread starters, actually. I was ... oversubtle? maybe... when I did that.. to try to imply that something that you could talk about who was being introduced. That people would note bits of implied backstory to watch for in the future, talk about which of the girls are changelings and headed to Poe and which... are not. And in talking about the characters and which ones are becoming friends/ groupings of friends already... that you might be able to speculate which become 'teams' at the school. Because, as we've said, they aren't all going to be one big happy team like TK.

There really is a lot of information in this first part even if its not battlefield action. Half a semester into the timeline people are going to be making references back to character traits or backstory that were hinted at in Calamari Part 1 and wondering how anyone thought there was nothing to comment on... I'm looking forward to it.

Well, not that it is any huge surprise but... evidently you didn't read the Gen 2 release article either, because statements like that were already made prior to you ever seeing Calimari. Normally, those sorts of things are referred to as 'teasers' and not spoilers, though... items from the content taken out of context and/or abstracted in a way to create interest about an upcoming release. You probably know that... but it wouldn't have suited your attempted snark.

But hey, thanks for providing evidence for my point.