Archive for March 2010

After And Before, Together

In Web on 15 March 2010 with Comments Off

At some point, possibly months ago, the old original podcast link for the web series After Judgment (which I tout constantly on Twitter) stopped updating. This is somewhat unfortunate because I prefer to re-watch the series in the intermixed order of After Judgment and Before Judgment episodes as they originally were released, and which that feed maintained.

While I think you can still pull up all the data from that original feed, and while you now can subscribe separately to episode of After Judgment and episode of Before Judgment, for convenience (if you happen to want to watch After and Before episodes intermixed in release order, as I do, I offer below the full list, to date, of intermixed After and Before episodes in their release order.
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What Are We Supposed To Conclude

In Fandom, Nonsense on 7 March 2010 with Comments Off

I’ve really enjoyed doing the Q&A’s, but based on how many times I’ve been asked the same question … I’d like to end the Q&A’s now.

The ellipsis there removes some specifics from the final answer in what became, as of, and because of, that answer, the final SlayAlive Q&A with Scott Allie about Buffy: Season 8. I’ve removed the specifics because I think that the more general statement the above sentence becomes via the ellipsis nicely sums up my own general view of those Q&A threads.

Or, at least, it does so when combined with an earlier use of paraphrase by Allie himself, in which he reduces (aptly) a question he says has been “echoed, rephrased, reflected” repeatedly to this: “What are we supposed to conclude from this thing that you’ve only started to reveal to us?”

And there you have it in a nutshell, the fanatical thread that ran through every Q&A discussion thread. Whether merely ignorant or simply rude, the insistence on running up to a serial storyteller, waving him off before he opens his mouth, and declaring that you don’t care that what he wants to do is Tell Us A Story (storytelling, of course, being something of an event which occurs over time), you just want him to tell you what it means, and/or how it ends, and/or at least what happens next.

I wish I knew, or at least I think I do, whether all these fans are just ignorant of how storytelling works, or whether they really do simply not care how it works, and just want their God damned answers now. But the storyteller — and, make no mistake, the editor necessarily is part of the storytelling process, not the marketing process — is under no obligation to be serving anyone’s interests in the story except the writer. The editor is not the publicist (who, to be clear, also should not be considered to beunder any obligation to out the writer’s intentions, let alone outright his plot development, in advance of the writer doing so himself), he is the editor. He is a servant to the story being told, and occasionally its master should he have something constructive to add to the writer’s process.

But one thing the storyteller — be he writer or editor — is not subject to is the whim of fandom. He is not at their beck and call, and just because this storyteller or that one might be gracious enough to give over some of their time to engage with a fandom during a story’s telling doesn’t mean free reign to assault him with demands to subvert that telling by outing meaning, endings, or what happens next.

Nestled amongst the nooks and crannies of this anti-storytelling entitlement are all the related agonies of fans insisting that the storyteller must not only know, not only respect, the vagaries of each and every permutation (hyperbole to underscore the point) of what this or that faction of fandom might potentially wig out and/or be concerned about, but, worse yet (frequently implicit, and occasionally explicit, in that insistence) must absolutely make sure that the stories he tells never tramples upon them, or, apparently, else.

No storyteller should ever be seen as being so obligated. Not by fandom, and hopefully not by themselves.

It reminds me, in tone to be sure if not in the specific issues or demands at hand, of the sort of crazy-making nonsense that drove me out of covering local politics, and if Scott Allie hopes to maintain his sanity as a storyteller going forward, I humbly suggest he stay away from any such Q&A sessions in the future.

There is only one thing he and any other storyteller should be obligated to understand about fandom (and I mean this in the sense that they owe this obligation to themselves, not to anyone else), and that is this: fandom, for all of its delight and wonder (and having founded a fandom event that in four years has raised over $300,000 for charity, I’m in no way a stranger to its delights and wonders) is bursting at regular and particular seams with people who either do not understand storytelling and do not seek to, or who simply do not care.

Steer clear, and just set to the task of telling story. Those of us who get it, get it. Those of us who can be made to get it, will get it eventually. The rest, they are just lost to us — ultimately, I’d argue, in many ways lost to themselves — and will not stop until you’ve given them the opportunity to drive you completely mad.