So I finished up watching the anime Bleach today (and by finished up I mean "caught up" to Episode 161. Woohoo!). I've been realizing as the current story arc plays out, however, that it seems to have succumbed to what I like to call the Dragonball Z effect.
To help those who have never watched the show understand the term, I'll explain a bit about the general plot structure of Dragonball Z. Villains appear. Heroes are defeated in an initial battle. Heroes regroup and train their guts out. Heroes complete their training. Heroes fight Villains again. Villains initially have upper hand. Then Heroes undergo grand transformations and achieve new, astounding powers (generally shown in an increase in hair length, unless you're the bald character). Heroes, with their new powers, defeat Villains.
It's not as bad a plot structure as it sounds. It's fairly analogous to how we deal with problems in life. "Hmm, I didn't get into med school. Time to go get some related experience, maybe retake the MCATs, and apply again. Oops, forgot to get my hair cut because I was working so hard, but hey! I got in!" When there's interesting character development happening inside of it, it can work pretty well.
Where it becomes a problem is when it gets repeated five or six times in a row. A character can only say "I've reached my ultimate power!" or "This is my true form!" once (or never, if you're in the habit of writing decent dialogue---but hey, translated Japanese needs to be given some slack). If you want your characters and plot to stay interesting, their power needs to stop growing at some point. You need to decide ahead of time exactly how powerful they can get, and what's going to happen after they do. If you want a happy ending, your series is done. If you don't, you can kill them off (and for God's sake don't be afraid to, no matter how popular they are--anyone whom you claim is fighting for their life really ought to be) and let the bad guys win, maybe prolong the series by telling the next story through the villain's point of view or finding a new hero to take him or her down.
Bleach, sadly, seems to have taken the Dragonball Z approach to storytelling, with neverending new levels of power for its characters. I can't blame it for doing so, however. The reason? Commercial success.
Why mess with a formula that works? Take the characters people already love, add some longer hair, let them fly (or make them glow when they fly if they already can), make them teleport when they fight instead of moving around like normal, repackage the same story, and sell it again! You too, can reach 349 episodes, especially if you throw in some filler for good measure and have a killer theme song.
So if publishing is driven by market success, and presenting the same thing over and over again is proven to produce market success even as it drives a once-proud series into the ground and reduces great characters to the status of trained monkeys, performing their one trick over and again, where's the lesson to be learned about writing? Does one plan on running their series into the ground just to keep getting published and pay the bills, or does one risk abandoning the series that got them published--and therefore their career? Tough to say, but for me personally the answer comes through a videogame series called Final Fantasy, which starts from scratch with every new game.
The creators of Final Fantasy branded their product differently than most other storytellers do. What they promised consumers with every iteration was a well developed game with great production values, completely new characters, a completely new world, and a few elements that would stay constant throughout the series, just for fun. And they consequently wound up with one of the most successful videogame franchises ever.
Ok, this has gotten long, but the gist of it as I feel it applies to writing is this: all characters must, at some point, stop growing--especially when it comes to supernatural powers. In a series, they must die, even if it's peacefully, between books, because 100 years have passed (see Redwall series). Otherwise your world becomes stagnant and boring. If people know that they'll get everything they loved out of your first story in your second, they'll come back. You can even brand yourself with a paradoxical series name to help them make that cognitive leap.
Let me know your opinions world--I'm curious.
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3 comments:
You have a blog!
I definitely agree with you about having to have in mind a sense of how powerful your characters can grow before being done. I feel like Robert Jordan totally fell into that trap with the Wheel of Time series - he stopped advancing the plot much despite having these gigantic novels, and lost track of where his characters were going. Or at least that's how I remember it being when I gave up on him, anyway. I don't know if you ever read the Alanna series, but Tamora Pierce does a great job with that - she's got a 4-book series about Alanna, and that's the end of the story - sort of. Then she wrote another series in the same universe from the point of view of another character, but where Alanna comes in and plays the mentor figure. Mercedes Lackey also does an interesting job with that - she writes all trilogies, and she sets them hundreds of years apart, so you see the whole history of her universe play out through her books. If you haven't read any of hers, they're good (and I think the ones I own are still on my bookshelf at home ;)
Hmm, sounds pretty good. Do you remember the titles of any of those books?
I know I have the Arrows of the Queen series, and The Black Gryphon series. (Those are the titles of the first books - the series may have different official titles - I can't remember). She's written a bunch of other ones, though, and some of them are closer in time than others. The Black Gryphon ones are sort of "prequels" to a lot of her other ones - they're centuries earlier than a lot of her other ones, rather than being just a generation or two apart, which most of the other ones are.
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