Most Satisfying Slime ASMR Video 2018 - Rainbow Slime ASMR #5
Hi, there! It's Diane, the nursing geek, and today
I'm going to do a video response to a video response on the subject of what is
an author's responsibility. And in this case I'm specifically talking fiction,
although I think some of this holds true at least in the terms of "you need to
deliver on what you've set up" for most types of writing. So the video that I'll
link to below - and if I can do a card I'll do a card above - Kate Cavanaugh did
a video response to a podcast talking about readers feeling betrayed by the
epilogue at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And I actually agree
with a lot of the points she made, but with a little different slant
hence this video response. I will say, when I put out there that I do think
that an author has a responsibility to their reader to deliver on what they set
up, I do want to make clear I'm not talking about failing to finish a series.
There can be a number of reasons that you fail to finish the series that are
completely out of the author's control: loss of contract, loss of inspiration,
just personal life events. So, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about in
a completed work, when you have set up certain expectations for your readers,
you do need to follow through on them, otherwise you're gonna have some very
annoyed, disappointed readers who're probably not going to come back for more.
And sometimes that is explicitly a marketing issue, such as if you're going
to stick Romeo in ... Romeo and Juliet in a romance aisle, you're gonna have some
very disappointed readers, because in the romance aisle you're pretty much
expecting a happy, happily ever after kind of ending.
So how you put it out into the world marketing wise is a piece of that.
That's a part of how you're setting expectations in your readers. But also what you put into
a story sets up expectations, because we've become trained as people within a
culture that uses certain genre tropes that if X Y Z happens, we might not know
how we're gonna get all the way here but there is an expectation we're gonna get
there somehow. And a lot of that comes down more to character and character
development than plot. Even though who lives who dies, those are plot decisions,
but how it's done is a character decision. Using the example of the
epilogue to Deathly Hallows, I'm totally in the camp that refers to it as
"Epilogue? What epliogue?" because it felt pasted on. It didn't feel like it was flowing
naturally from the seven novels that led up to it, and that's a lot of lead-up.
It made a little more sense to me when I found out she actually had the epilogue
pretty much already written first. Okay, now I can understand how it came into
being, because it would not make sense to write that after writing these seven
novels, because the characters had grown and developed in different ways than she
probably initially conceived of them. I think every author has had characters do
that to them they. They take on a life of their own,
they develop different resonances than you thought they were going to, they go
in directions you weren't planning on. And, well, to some extent, we try to
structure and contain that. Sometimes it really does seem that it takes on a life
of its own and you are sort of following along trying to just keep it knitted
together in a way that makes sense. If that happens, your ending that you
wrote beforehand is probably going to need to change. Otherwise you will have
readers sitting there going, "Where did that come from?
Is that really meant to be part of this book? Of this book series?" and feeling let
down, if nothing else. I think "betrayed" might be overstating it, but
definitely feeling let down. And that's a valid critique of anything, that you feel
the author set up certain expectations and let you down, which means you're
probably not going to go back and buy more of their books. Nobody, I think seems
to have taken it that far with JKR though. To go to a TV example, I'll go to
my favorite TV show. Why not? I'm wearing plaid. Supernatural has plenty to
critique and part of that is the way they handle killing off certain
characters. They're notorious for killing off lots of female characters and lots
of characters of color. Yes, lots of lots of characters in general die. The white
guys do tend to be the ones who are more likely to be resurrected though, so that ...
That is just a general critique, and that's part of the responsibility of
writing within a societal context in which you don't want to be contributing
- albeit I'm sure unintentionally - to a depersonalization of certain types of
characters ... certain types of people through the way you treat certain types
of characters. That's just something to be mindful of and that I do think is
probably its own other video on authorial responsibility. I'm going to
talk about specific delivering on what you set up in terms of one particular
character that was killed off actually three years ago. She had been
introduced in the seventh season of the show and an important part of her
introduction ... it's not the first thing we see of her but it is the first thing
people tend to think of when they think of the introduction of
Charlie Bradbury is her dancing up the glass elevator with headphones on.
Yes, that's relevant. It's not exactly Chekov's gun, but it is something that
was tied to her character right from the get-go and was iconically tied to her
character. In the episode in which she was killed off three seasons after that
where there's been some development. She's only been in a few episodes in
between. She's been in several in that tenth season, though, in which we saw that
she wasn't the scared little mouse she had been in that first episode where,
yeah, she definitely found the courage to do what she needed to do but she was
also like, "Lose my number. I never want to see you people again. Keep me out of this stuff."
And the second time we saw she was also, "Get ... keep me out of this.
By this point, she's become a hunter. She is voluntarily going out and looking for
monsters to kill, and she has just completed a Martha Jones-esque
traipse across Europe and Russia, apparently, to bring the MacGuffin home
of the Book of the Damned. In the process, we've seen her being chased by
the new bad guys who just got thrown in, and stabbing one of them through the
neck. So she's come a very long way. She's not just this scared little person.
We also learned along the way that she's a very resourceful person partly because
she's been on her own pretty much since the age of 12. All of these things are
relevant because of how she was killed off. I don't think many people would have
been happy she was killed off period, no matter what but the way it was done is
why a lot of people felt really betrayed, and I would go that far in this case
partly because she was not only a woman but she was also a queer woman and,
really, this is how you're gonna kill her off? She's trying to break
a code using a computer. This is why she's been brought in. She's a hacker. And this
other character, Rowena, is getting in her face, annoying her, making it impossible
for her to concentrate. You're telling me the Charlie Bradbury, this resourceful
person who was introduced wearing headphones - okay not headphones like this,
they're just the ones I happen to have - but didn't have any sort of headphones
or earbuds or anything that she brought with her when she was called in to do
heavy duty code breaking? So her only answer to dealing with this annoyance is
to leave a securely guarded place and go put herself in a completely traceable
motel room only to be killed off in the bathroom where there was a window
visible that she could have climbed out of to escape? So the problem isn't just
you killed the character off. The problem is you developed a character in a
certain way to be really resourceful, to have these certain things associated
with them, and when you killed them off you basically lobotomize them. That is, I
think, a breach of authorial responsibility, because you've violated
the expectations that you set for the reader - in this case the viewer. So that's ...
those are two examples of how I think authors need to think about being
responsible in terms of following through on what they set up. Is that
something the reader is owed or the viewer is owed? I'm not sure that's the
right word, but you can't be surprised if you pull
something like that and your readers or your viewers say, "I'm done." And I do know
people who said that after that particular episode, so I'm sure there are
people who didn't go back and read any other of JK R's stuff after Deathly
Hallows - not enough to make a drop in the bucket, apparently, but ...
So if you're gonna do something like that, think about the fact
that you are very possibly alienating your reader and ... yeah. I can see I'm
already over ten minutes, which is longer than I wanted to go so I'm gonna cut it
short and say please let me know your thoughts on this topic in the comments.
If you are interested in seeing more of this, please hit subscribe. And if you
found this in any way interesting or engaging, please give it a thumbs up, and
I will see you next time. Bye
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