Lazy Days- Followed by Starvation

Hmm....

I’d write about lots of things but to be honest I haven’t actually done anything interesting lately. It’s a sad state of affairs but sometimes I just go into deep states of complete boredom, using funny videos from the internet to keep me from falling back into my ancient slumber.

I suppose I could tell you about some of the anime I’ve watched... Or the manga I’ve read... or the games I’m looking forward to... But let’s be honest, do you really care? Well of course you do, you are a pawn in the great machine of life and need someone ‘hip’ to tell you what’s cool and what’s not.

Hell I’ll give you two for free:

Not supporting Maestro cards so I can’t buy your crap is not cool.

Top hats that hold parrots inside of them are awesome.

But I do tire writing about the same god damn things, especially since they all seem to relate to fricken Japan, which I loathe now but keep going back to like a crack addict.

I’ll tell you what, let’s talk about industry. Let’s say you wrote an amazing story for a movie or a game, feel pretty proud don’t you? Your story even helps make the product a massive hit. Your content with yourself and like a responsible adult you let it go, because that story is finished.

But on a rainy starless night there comes a knocking on your door.

Tap tap tap.

Slowly you open the door and see a hunched over ‘thing’ covered by a dark cloak, and as you recoil in horror it laughs at you and gives you an impossible choice.

Yes, it seems your bosses don’t want to lose the ‘franchise’ and wish you to make a sequel. When you tell them that the story is finished they look at you confused, as if you started talking in an alien language. But then they understand, nod their heads and say “Oh we get it, don’t worry then... you don’t have to work on it”.

This has been a trend in big name titles for years, I would even say for my entire life, where the reasoning goes “Well the first one was a hit so the second one will be”, or “Whoa, glad the first was a success cause now we can start work on the sequels”. Even when a story has been clearly finished a producer can find a way to breathe forbidden life into its corpse, but such an action leads to what I like to call one of writings greatest fears. You can either suck up your pride and dignity and work on the sequel, or you can let it go and have someone else touch and prod your work inappropriately.

To me this would be the worst thing ever. I could never extend a story past the point I had taken it, but I also could never give it to anyone else. The problem you see dear reader is that usually my endings involve death because as I see it life is a story and so death can only be its true end, so right off the bat continuing one of my stories would be pointless. But don’t forget death doesn’t just apply to characters, the death could belong to the concept of the story or something like that... to the point all the characters might as well be dead because everything has now been said and done. On the other hand the thought of giving my characters away sort of sickens me to the core. No matter how talented the new writer is they are a different person... I could map out the entire story for them and still it would turn out as their creation... not mine. The world would have their sequel, but it would be from a parallel universe populated by the shadows of the characters they once knew.

Writers in the ‘big business’ get faced with this dilemma alot and I suggest you go out and find an example of this somewhere... find an interview with the original creator of a series that has been given to another and read it. Can you not see the sadness and regret in their somewhere?

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Now with that sad tale out of the way let’s have a big angry rant to cheer ourselves up.



WHY?!

Why do you keep making sequels for things you don’t need to! You crush creativity in a world of blandess! I name you Blukter, crusher of ideas! Horrible fiend!

Don’t get me started on f***ing Reboots, they are the worst of all. Do you know what I hate most reader? F***ing reboots. There’s a very simply reason as to why, it doesn’t matter if there good (Like the new batman films, which are good... But I don’t care, Grah!) same stories do not nourish me. Oh I bet you thought I was kidding about the whole story eater thing... I bet you were like “Huh, he’s trying to be clever... drawing parallels between the necessary act of eating and finding new stories” well I wasn’t, I quite literally consider them part of my daily diet.

Let me put it like this, before you is a plate with a delicious cake. You eat the cake, it is good. A man walks up to you, takes the plate but then immediately puts it back in front of you. You look up at him questioningly and ask what is he doing and he replies “I saw how much you enjoyed that cake so I decided to serve it to you again” you look back down to the plate yet there is nothing there, you have already eaten that cake. You look around the room and see people eating from the same plates again and again, but there is nothing on their plates and with horror you realise their starving to death.

(See? That above was me trying to be clever by basically saying you’re creatively ‘staving’ by being fed the same thing again and again)

It’s not a simple matter of merely finding the same kind of cake, for the new cake can have the exact same layers and tastes but at the end of the day it is a different cake... and perhaps you’ll find something in it you weren’t expecting, perhaps it will even be good. The point is I can’t eat things I have already eaten, not unless I cut open my stomach (But what’s the point of that?).

Let’s go with the batman example.

Oh look, they rebooted batman.

Oh look, I don’t care.

Ok I’ll do it seriously, hehe. Hey a new batman film, why it’s a reboot I believe? Well look at that, its Batman doing cool Batman things... But ... We already knew this? We know batman and his many forms already... from the totally camp to the totally badass... why... why do we need to be reminded that Batman’s cool?

Basically from a creative stand point all it does it tell us that Batman’s cool. It can’t help us explore our own ideas of being a vigilante like batman... because the first comic/film did that. So exactly what does this film add at all to the mind? Don’t give me that crap about it being for a generation that’s not familiar with batman, it’s not that hard to go back and find your old things that made you like batman and show the kiddies that.

For a long time now Batman’s story has been finished for me, thanks actually to the batman cartoons. Not that new one, bleh. The cartoon was amazing and they did the sequel, batman in the future. But what’s interesting is that the real last episode is from the Justice league, which basically explains everything and gives Bruce the best farewell. For me that finished Batman simply for the reason that the cartoons held consistency, which is why I’ll never read comics.

Batman’s story has ended for me, and it was good. Why are you trying to make me watch it again? It will merely taste the same.