Picture if you will, the valar and maiar gathered around discussing creation.

Reviewee: I have invented a new kind of animal! It lives in the water, has gills to breathe, and flippers that enable it to move. I call it a “fish.”

Critiquer: Yeah, that’s good, but… what if this “fish” lived in trees and had wings to fly with?

Reviewee: Well, the point was to make a thing that lived in the water…

Other Critiquer: Man, I really like this “lives in trees and has wings” idea! You should give your fish brightly-colored feathers and have them sing.

In the FurTheMore writing track, writing groups and critiques — and specifically, how to give good critiques — were a major focus. Having only recently gotten into the world of actually being in a writing group, this discussion was fresh in my mind as I watched and winced at a person in a recent group meeting having their perfectly good kid’s book being twisted into all kinds of weird pretzel shapes. Instead of critiquing the story that she had brought, the discussion kept turning to all sorts of different things the story could have been (or to some of the critiquers’ way of thinking, should have been).

The thing reached a head when one of the critiquers suggested that the entire story could be told in pictures, with none of the reviewee’s words at all, to which the reviewee replied, “So what’s the point of my even doing it?”

Please don’t do this to people.

Giving useful feedback can be difficult, and the thing about writers particularly is that we’re a creative lot. When we see an idea that sparks thoughts and possibilities, we want to spin new stories out of them. It’s as natural as breathing! But in the context of writing critique, it’s as useful as putting a fish in a tree and telling it to fly.

Unless the reviewee is specifically looking to brainstorm new ideas (which can also be a great exercise), your job as a critiquer is to address the text at hand: what works, what doesn’t, and specifically if the writer succeeds at making the text do what it’s supposed to do. “Maybe your fish should have its eyes on the side of its head to more easily spot predators” is useful feedback. “Your fish should be a bird” is not, and worse, it can be actively harmful. I don’t think anyone at the meeting intended to tell the reviewee that she had wasted her time and effort creating a useless story, but that was clearly the message she was receiving.

Giving Good Critique in Three Easy Steps

So, what should you do? Try this…

“Get” the Story. Look for what the writer was trying to accomplish, as well as fairly universal things like “Do the sentences make sense?” and “Are the characters engaging?”

Talk About What Worked, What Didn’t Work, and What Was Great. Using the famous “shit sandwich” model (the bad stuff surrounded by good things on either side), give feedback that’s as specific as possible. Remember that the point is to discuss the story that’s actually on the page, not the amazing story you came up with in your own head.

Suggest Changes. Here’s where you can toss in your own ideas, but keep in mind that the changes should be to address what didn’t work first and foremost. If the reviewee’s fish has given you a great idea for a bird, go ahead and mention it as a possibility for expansion or a new direction if you like. Or maybe go create your own bird. You’re a writer, after all! And the best part is that by doing that, you empower the reviewee to make an even better story, instead of tearing them down and making them wonder what the point of having written it was.

Source: K-On! Wiki

So what do you do when your little four-panel comedy manga gets picked up as an anime series and blows away all expectations, becoming a huge hit– even if that success has more to do with the anime studio than with your own talent?

…Well…

…You cash in, of course! Which is what the creator of K-On! attempted to do with K-On: College and K-On: High School. Spoiler alert: it didn’t really work, but you can’t blame the guy for trying. But what I’m really interested in here is the attempt, because I’ve found a lot of interesting applicability to my work on Suburban Jungle.

Adaptation Expansion

I won’t go quite as far as Digibro and say that “the K-On! manga suuuuuuucks” because I don’t think it does. I mean, everything in the manga is also in the anime. It’s just that the anime is also so much more. Reading the K-On! manga feels like an outline, or a very rough draft storyboard of the anime series.

To fault the manga for this is kinda pointless. K-On! the manga never professed to be anything more than what it was: a disposable four-panel comedy strip. Imagine if Zootopia was a licensed version of a Garfield-style comic, and you might see what I’m getting at.

To that end, I don’t envy the position Kakifly (the creator of K-On!) found himself in. The story of K-On! had a definite end, and there were only two real ways you could carry on: either you follow the older four off to college, or you stick with Azusa and do the next year of high school. I don’t know if he was unable to decide which, or he wanted to hedge his bets, or what, but he went with “do both,” running two different series simultaneously with alternating chapters… effectively dooming himself to not doing either one well.

More of the Same, But Differently

Of the two branches, the High School storyline works better, if only because the characterization is stronger. Azusa, Ui, and Jun were already established by the original series, and Nao is an interesting new addition in her own gothy way. Sumire… eh… the less said about Sumire the better. But the storyline, as far as it goes, focusing on Azusa’s quest to create her own Light Music Club rather than living in the shadow of the previous one, does at least have a spark.

The College storyline, by contrast, just falls flat. The only new character who makes an impression at all is Akira, the lead guitarist of “rival band” Only Girlz– but even she was clearly created to merge the roles of Yui’s caretaker and tsundere glomp-target into a single character. It’s as if Kakifly tossed Ui, Nodoka, and Azusa into a blender to create Akira… and then had no more ideas for the rest of the cast. As for storyline, there isn’t any to speak of beyond a vague “battle of the bands” one-sided rivalry on Akira’s part that even the members of Hokagou Tea Time barely even notice.

In short, the follow-up manga series disappoint for two major reasons: the first being that the manga was never as good as the anime in the first place, and the second being that the follow-ups needed to be more removed from the original series and allowed to be their own thing. (The fact that a big Yui/Azusa reunion moment keeps being hinted at, but never appears, doesn’t help either. I’m guessing this was being set up to be the highlight of some future chapter that never materialized.)

When You Come to the End, Stop

As I say, I don’t envy Kakifly’s position… because I was in a similar one myself. When I decided I wanted to return to The Suburban Jungle, there was a lot of pressure from people wanting me to just pick up where it left off and basically do more of the same, with variations. Some people wanted Leona to become the new star, some people wanted Drezzer, many people just wanted it to keep on going the way it had.

And Suburban Jungle was a mid-tier webcomic! I can’t imagine the kind of pressure I would have felt if it had been made into hugely successful TV series.

But at the same time, I have studied enough sequels, spin-offs, and reboots to know that just tacking on more chapters after “the end” just feels anti-climactic. It didn’t work for Babylon 5 (twice!), it didn’t work for M*A*S*H or Are You Being Served? or even The Three Musketeers and it wasn’t going to work for me.

That’s why I took such pains to separate Rough Housing from Starring Tiffany Tiger. There is some of that “combine characters from the previous cast to make a new character” thing going on… Charity, besides being the combination of Dover and Comfort one would expect from their child, also has elements of Tiffany, for instance. But it was important to me from the beginning that there not be any absolute corollaries, and not simply repeating the same story or gags with a different skin.

In the case of K-On!, my armchair advice would have been first to let a few years pass in the real world in order to gain some distance from the work, and then to have made a stronger break. If you absolutely wanted to continue with those five characters, which I think could have worked, then fast forward past college and reunite them as adults. My suggestion: make them the stars of a TV show about a band, a la The Monkees, and having to deal with wanting to be For Realz Serious Musicians in a world that just thinks of them as being a corporate cash-in. That could open whole new avenues of humor and would crank up the recurring theme from the original of serious musicianship vs. fluffling off in new and interesting ways. Just imagine Ritsu trying to manipulate studio execs, or Mio finding a website full of fanfiction about herself, for starters…

Dammit, now I want to develop this show. ¬.¬ Anybody got the phone number for Kyoto Animation?

-The Gneech

PS: There’s still more I have to say about K-On! and in particular what effect it’s had on how I think about and approach Suburban Jungle, but that will have to wait for another post. In the meantime, the rest of the series is here: Zen, Music, and So. Much. Tea. (My K-On! Obsession, Part One) and K-On! the Anime v. the Manga, Part One.

Source: K-On! Wiki

So those who pay attention to such things have probably noticed by now that I’ve been rambling from time to time on Twitter et al. about K-On!, which started as a four-panel manga comic in 2007 and was adapted to an anime in 2010, eventually gaining a total of 39 episodes and a feature film. K-On! sat in my “Anime To Be Watched” bucket list for some time and I finally found it streamable on Hulu.

I devoured it over the course of a few weeks and, like Cardcaptor Sakura and Love Hina before it, it has already started to have a huge impact on my own work. On the strength of the anime I also tracked down and read the manga, which in many ways turned out to be a mistake… but I will get to that in another post.

The premise of K-On! is simple enough: it is a silly comedy, following the daily activities and school career of a Japanese high school “light music” club. The series begins with the club’s founding, and ends when the girls graduate, and spends a lot of time watching the girls joke around and be silly goofs. Like Seinfeld‘s famously being “about nothing,” there are no major dramas and nothing “exciting” ever happens. This leads to the show’s most common criticism, that it’s nothing more than “cute girls doing cute things.”

But looks can be deceiving.

In case it isn’t obvious, there will be spoilers for K-On! ahead, in as much as you can spoil something that doesn’t exactly have plot twists. It does have surprises, of course– that’s how comedy works.

Season One, Part One: Yui

The structure of the series basically breaks down into five pieces, which are simply enough: season one (parts one and two), season two (parts one and two), and the movie. Each one builds on the one before, and there is actually a story arc that connects them all, but it’s subtle and made of dozens of small blocks, rather than the more typical major plot points.

Season one part one focuses on Yui, the viewpoint character through most of the series. She is aimless and dreamy, having spent her life drifting in a kind of fog, only able to survive everyday life because she keeps being adopted by protectors such as her little sister Ui and her friend Nodoka. Yui is sweet-natured and playful, and is an archetypal savant, capable of doing incredible things once she sets herself to it, but in order to learn a skill, she has to forget some other skill to “make room” for it.

Yui wanders into the K-On (or “light music”) Club thinking that it will be like her elementary school music class, where she can just clap castanets and be told she’s doing a great job by the teacher, and is more than a little dismayed to discover that they expect her to actually do things like sing in public and play a real instrument. She immediately decides to quit.

On the other hand, the rest of the club members have a big problem: the club must have at least four members, or the school will disband it. It’s only by the sheer force of club president Ritsu’s personality compelling the other two current members to join that it has as many as it does. In order to save the club, Ritsu and the others pull out all the stops to convince Yui to stay, first by playing a concert for her, then promising to teach her to play the guitar, and then finally all going out and getting part time jobs to actually buy Yui a guitar, as she can’t afford one on just her allowance. This gesture moves Yui so much that she vows to learn to play the guitar no matter what it takes, to honor what they’ve done for her and so the four of them can stay together and play as a band.

The remainder of the first half of the first season is spent fleshing out the supporting cast and establishing the characters of the club itself. The focus here is on episodic comedy, and it’s really good comedy, whether it’s the Mutt-and-Jeff banter of mischievous Ritsu versus straight-laced Mio, Yui’s airheadedness, or the “What planet are you from???” humor of rich girl Mugi and the club’s faculty sponsor and resident cosplay-fanatic Sawako. At this point in K-On!, the laughs come fast and frequent… and this quietly sneaks you into caring about the girls and their daily travails, as well as seeing their friendships form and strengthen. The K-On club spends precious little time actually working on their music, tending to drink tea and eat cake more than anything else, but they all love spending time in each other’s company, and somehow manage to pull it together when performance time actually comes.

Season One, Part Two: Azunyan

As funny as the opening episodes are, the show really doesn’t become “about” anything until midway through the first season, with the appearance of Azusa. In the story, a year has passed by this point and for Yui, Ritsu, Mio, and Mugi, it’s the beginning of their second year. Hokagou (“After School”) Tea-Time, the official name for their band, is playing at the reception to welcome new freshmen to the school, and there they are seen by Azusa, a freshman guitarist who is immediately mesmerized by the chemistry and unity of the band.

She quickly signs up to join the K-On club, much to the joy of all but especially Yui, who has never had someone look up to her before and goes off into her own dreamworld at being called “Yui-sempai.” At first the upperclassmen fawn over how girlish and cute Azusa seems, to the point of putting her in cat ears and treating her like a kitten. Instead of calling her “Azusa-chan,” as would be more typical, Yui dubs her Azunyan (or “Azu-meow” in the English version), a name that will stick.

This dynamic is almost immediately turned on its head, however, when the rest of the girls discover that not only is Azusa a much better guitar player than Yui, but is actually a more skilled musician than just about any of them and takes her music very, very seriously– to the point where she yells at her upperclassmen for their blasé attitude and storms out. She does eventually return, but it’s clear that the event has had a deep impact on the other four, making them take their music more seriously, but also making them realize how important the club is to all of them.

Azunyan, for her own part, comes to realize that there’s more to making music than the technical skills involved. What made the Hokagou Tea Time concert that blew her mind so enthralling, wasn’t how well each member of the band played their individual instrument, but how well the four of them blended together to become something larger than the sum of their parts, and it’s that connection that she has been searching for up to now. Even though the K-On club is in many ways a group of 4+1 rather than a group of five (something that will become even more important in the second season), Azunyan is still an important member of the group, a thumb to their four fingers.

The remainder of the first season (which is actually quite short) is in some ways a do-over of the first half, only now exploring the dynamics of the “new, improved” K-On club and ironing out rough spots, such as the back-and-forth between Ritsu and Mio and how their own culture of two fit together, and how aimless airhead Yui of the first episode has morphed into the focused and energetic (if still an airhead) Yui of the season finale.

Season Two, Part One: The Golden Age

The entirety of season two, which actually has twice as many episodes as season one, takes place over the course of the four upperclassmen’s senior year, and that countdown to graduation informs the entire season. The first episode of the season opens with Yui, no longer floating in a mental bubble, instead zooming to school on the first day of the year, running up to the music room, and rocking out on her guitar in a routine she’s clearly been practicing for some time while she waits for the rest of her friends to arrive.

With the beginning of the school year, the club again turns its efforts towards recruitment, not only because that’s just what you do at the beginning of the school year, but because when the original four graduate, that will leave Azunyan completely alone. It’s a muted note at first, but it is also the moment when the girls first realize that before long, there will be no more After-School Tea Time, both figuratively in the name of the band, and literally, because they will graduate and scatter and not be there to drink tea together.

Their recruitment efforts fail, with the suggested reason being that because the girls already seem to be such a tightly-knit group, that none of the freshmen want to join because they’d feel like they were intruding. In an usually level-headed speech, Yui tells the other three upperclassmen that she actually prefers it this way, wanting to enjoy the time of being just the five friends while they can; Azunyan overhears this, and realizing how important her club-mates have become to her, agrees, deciding to let the future of the club resolve itself… in the future. Yui does insist on at least a gesture of giving Azusa a “new recruit” of her own to look after… in the form of the pet turtle Ton-chan. It’s not quite the same as new members, but it’s the only way Yui has to make sure Azunyan won’t be alone.

The next several episodes of the series then very deliberately stop talking about it. That isn’t to say that the subject isn’t there, but the girls, and by extension the show, all make a point of being “in the moment,” whether the moment is a Christmas party, or a school trip to Kyoto, or several rainy days and Yui’s various attempts to keep her guitar from getting ruined by the weather. The four upperclassmen, sharing the same class, become more and more of a unit by their shared experiences, while Azusa begins to form her own connections with other girls in her class (notably Yui’s younger sister Ui, and their mutual friend Jun). But the older girls and Azusa keep making a point to come together, by phone call or text message if they have to, even if those calls or texts are random and out-of-context inside jokes sent by Yui. The older girls think of Azusa as being one of them, regardless of circumstances keeping them apart, and they are always eager to bring the group back together.

Season Two, Part Two: Thank You and Farewell

Structurally, K-On! goes a little wonky here, which seems to be an artifact of the manga/anime production process more than anything. It’s fairly typical for an anime adaptation to run while the manga is still in publication, and since anime comes out much faster, it’s quite common for the manga to run out of story long before the anime does. (Love Hina went through this as well, as have who-knows-how-many other stories.)

Thus, the final half of season two seems to have been written mostly by the animation studio, rather than being adaptations of the manga. The last point where there is clear overlap is the class play, where Ritsu and Mio are roped into playing Romeo and Juliet much against their will. From there, the anime production studio start pointing squarely at the final school festival and the older girls’ graduation, while the manga continues being more-or-less serial gags. (And as before, I’ll talk a bit about the manga in another post.)

In the latter half of season two, as graduation looms, all five of the main characters have to face and cope with what is a metaphorical death. Having spent so much of the past two or three years respectively being defined by their connection to the K-On club, they have to figure out what their lives will mean without it. The older four girls therefore resolve to all get accepted to the same college– something highly unlikely given their very different social strata and academic achievement levels. As a band, they will play together one last time at the school festival, an echo of the festival that first brought Azunyan into their fold. But no matter what happens, even if the upperclassmen somehow manage to achieve their goal of landing the same college, there is no way to stay as five. The upperclassmen will graduate, and Azunyan will be left behind. That much is unavoidable. And so they have to find somehow to say farewell.

It’s hard to discuss the ending of the series without a) giving away spoilers, and b) getting all emotional. Somewhere along the line the comedy of the show, while still ever-present, has backed off a little and the emotional content has become the driving force, and by the time that becomes clear the viewer is left to wonder when that actually happened, because it was so subtle and by degrees. There’s never a “it was comedy, now it is drama” moment, but there is a definite moment when you realize the warm and endearing K-On! you’re watching at the end, is not the same pure goofiness you were watching when it started.

The true emotional climax of the series, the festival concert, is quite powerful. All of the understated realization of the clubs’ approaching end is finally brought to the foreground. It’s an intense and moving episode… which then weirdly leaves something like five more episodes to go. This is the structural wonkiness I was referring to before. There are still important emotional beats, as the girls’ college future is decided, and they give Azunyan her farewell gift, but as important as they are, none of these hit with the same force as the festival concert episode. It’s not unlike Peter Jackson’s film version of Return of the King, which feels like it ends three times before the credits finally roll.

This problem could have probably been addressed by tighter planning in the series planning stage, but knowing how working on serial entertainment of any kind is, on top of what little I have actually learned about the anime industry, I’m not terribly surprised it ended up the way it did. And really it’s not that big of a flaw, but it is the first real gaffe of the entire series in my opinion. (The other major gaffes of the series, in my opinion, happen in the movie.)

And then… the series ends. Yui, Ritsu, Mio, and Mugi graduate, give Azunyan a farewell concert and song with her as both subject and sole audience member, and head off to new adventures in the future. Azusa becomes the new club president, with Ui and Jun as her first recruits, to carry on the club next year. The members of Hokagou Tea Time will never stop being friends, and never stop loving each other, but life must carry on in separate ways.

Encore: K-On! The Movie

The K-On! movie is kind of a weird duck. It is set during the same time frame as the latter half of the second season, and focuses on the K-On club all taking a pre-graduation trip together to England. Although it goes into more detail about the composition of the farewell song Yui writes for Azunyan, there is little actual new story. It is instead mostly a retelling of the end of the series with a slightly different focus, with quick cameos of every supporting character, recurring gag, or visual motif of the series crammed into an hour and a half.

The one new thing the movie does bring to K-On, which has until now been almost completely nonexistent… is puberty. Which brings me to the topic of shipping.

When Yuri Met Moe

So. About K-On! and shipping. Well.

I mean, it’s there… kinda? But it’s also mostly not. Sort of.

It’s hard to discuss. I mean, Ritsu and Mio are pretty much platonic life partners from childhood, to the point where they are literally shipped by their own classmates, who strongarm them into playing the roles of Romeo and Juliet for the class play. Despite the views of a thousand fanfics, the two of them don’t seem to actually be romantically inclined and are both less-than-thrilled at the prospect of being treated as if they are or forced to act as if they are, but that’s a damn shame because the two of them are so perfect for each other. Neither one will ever be as happy with a husband as they would both be just staying together as spinsters for the rest of their lives.

Then there’s Mugi, who clearly sees the world through yuri goggles (even more explicitly so in the manga than in the anime), gets all shippy when Sawako-sensei so much as puts her hand on someone’s shoulder, and kinda squicks the rest of the club by rambling about “how nice it is when it’s just girls.” But that, beyond Yui’s never-ending glompage of Azunyan, is as far as the series goes. Yui is established early on as wanting to hug anything cute (such as every dog she ever meets on the street), and so her glomping on Azunyan easily falls into the realm of “more of the same.” Yui thinks of Azusa as an adorable kitten from the minute she first walks through the club door and never stops thinking of her that way.

How Azusa feels about it, on the other hand, is harder to make out. Being the archetypal tsundere kohai catgirl, of course she objects to any form of PDA… and Yui is the club queen of inappropriate PDAs… but she also is very clearly eager to hear from and spend time with her sempais, and spends a lot of time connecting with Yui in particular as time goes on. (Early on, most notably in the manga, Azusa seems to crush on Mio, the same way half the school crushes on Mio. I think this may be a cultural thing, or possibly indicative of the manga writer’s own preferences… Mio, after all, is the only member of Hokagou Tea Time to have a fan club, the show has a strange fascination with putting Mio into maid outfits, and so on.)

Without having shipping goggles on, it’s hard to read more than the weird pressure-cooker of being a teenager into the ship-teases in the series. But then the movie comes along and, basically… Azusa puts on her shipping goggles. Yui spends most of the movie trying to come up with lyrics for the band’s farewell song to Azusa; at one point, Azusa catches a glimpse of Yui’s notebook which has the words “Azusa” and “love” on the same page, jumps to the conclusion that Yui is crushing on her, and she spends the middle part of the movie in an extended freakout.

From the standpoint of “that kind of thing happens in real life,” well, yes it does. I’ve been in those “Do they or don’t they?” extended freakouts myself and Azunyan’s thoughts and behavior were very relatable.

However, from the standpoint of “is this a good story for K-On!“… I’m not so sure. To be quite honest, it feels more like a fanfic than an actual K-On! story. The main series, up until the last graduation arc, is characterized by its light and fluffy, almost-all-jokes-all-the-time approach. The only time anything in the series comes close to touching on romance is in a bonus episode when Ritsu thinks she’s received a love letter and broods about it, only to discover it was actually just song lyrics from Mio the whole time. To delve into shipping, comes across as just putting in what the writers assume the audience expects this kind of show to contain, while missing what K-On! is actually about.

So What IS It Actually About, If You’re So Smart?

K-On! is a thesis on zen, cleverly disguised as a moeblob slice-of-life– the same way Groundhog Day is a buddhist parable disguised as a romantic comedy.

Despite the surface gloss of being cute and silly antics of some hyper and ditzy high school girls, K-On! is really about being engaged in the moment. Yui begins the series floating along detached from everything, and doesn’t really come alive until something catches her and makes her want to engage. Ritsu goes off on silly imaginary adventures in her head for fun, and has her own mini-crisis when she wants to forsake her drums for something that will bring her more attention… but then when she stops, digs in, and actually experiences the moment, she becomes inspired to take them up again. The majority of the second season is a study in “Let’s enjoy the now, because soon it will be gone!”

This is why “nothing happens.” Because the show is not about things happening. It’s about these characters going through various experiences and how it shapes them. Super-focused Yui, rocking out during the first moments of the second season premiere, is in a perfect moment of zen, where her sense of self and all the worldly distractions are released, and only the truth of the moment remains.

This is why shipping particularly is a misguided addition. Because what is shipping, besides attachment? That yuri feeling of longing, that rambling obsession with what could be, what might be, what ones wishes were true, these are not what is. Yui and Azusa’s awkward, embarrassing, and largely one-sided confrontation doesn’t lead to any kind of enlightenment on the subject, either. Azusa’s illusions collapse in on themselves, but she doesn’t learn anything from it… and Yui barely even registers what happened.

Granted, I’m prone to wearing shipping goggles. Heck, I ship my own characters. ¬.¬ So naturally this part of the movie had me intensely interested while it was happening, but even then I felt like it was off and would probably have been left unsatisfied by anything they did with it, just for this “it’s not what the show is about” feeling. But it also broke the cardinal rule of comedy by not being funny. So what seems to have been largely intended as the centerpiece of the movie just doesn’t work, and it undercuts the payoff of seeing the “upperclassmen sing to Azusa” episode repeated in high res at the movie’s end.

All of that said, the movie is still beautiful to look at and does remind you of all the warm and fuzzy feelings the series generated in the first place, so to that extent it does the job. But I would definitely say that K-On! The Movie is something that only has appeal to people who already love (and have watched) the anime series in the first place.

And Still More Blather to Come…

This post is already way longer than anyone is likely to read– so if you have read to this point, you have my amazed gratitude! I have more to say about the topic, in particular going into the manga, the differences, and the attempts at sequel/continuations, but also about how the show has impacted the way I look at and approach Suburban Jungle, but I think I’d better put all that stuff in another post… later. Until then, I invite you to check out the video below, on how the animation brings the characters of K-On! to life.

-The Gneech

So I discover from my Twitter feed, much to my own surprise, that I had people specifically wanting me to weigh in on Ghostbusters before they decided whether or not to go see it.[1] Well, the answer to that is an unequivocal: Yes! Go see! Preferably opening weekend because that’s all Hollywood cares about, they consider anything not a blockbuster to be a flop, and we don’t want to give the assholes any excuse to say “See? Women in the lead, killed it!” Or, as I put it on Twitter:

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of it a bit, shall we?

As should be obvious to anyone, I am a Ghostbusters fan. As such, my experience of Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (or simply “Ghostbusters 2016″ as I suspect it will generally be known) is going to be colored by that. All those fanservicey inserts? Those were put there for me. And reader? I squee’d.

I can’t address whether the mainstream viewer will enjoy it as much as I did, because mainstream audiences and I are from different planets. I mean, I think so? The ghosts are scary regardless of whether you get the connection between the subway ghost in this movie and the Scoleri brothers from Ghostbusters II, and the jokes are funny regardless of whether you notice the “Big Twinkie” ad in the background.

However, if you are a fan already, this movie is steeped in Ghostbusters history. The cameos are obvious and awesome, even if some of them were a bit shoved in. Bill Murray’s especially stands out as not only an important moment in the current story, but also as a sly commentary on Peter Venkman. But there are references to and elements brought in from just about every previous incarnation of the Ghostbusters, from the Extreme Ghostbusters-ish array of busting gear that Holtzmann dreams up, to the animated logo ghost from Real Ghostbusters, to a stinger at the end that references… [spoiler!].

However, of special mention and dear to my own nerdy heart, is that the entire thing is almost a movie version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which I was totally not expecting. And by that, I mean, the core plot of the story is the same core plot of GBtVG: “Evil genius using ghosts to power up ley lines and ascend to kaiju-hood.” In the Video Game, it was the ghost of Ivo Shandor using rivers of slime, deftly tying the original two movies and the game into a cohesive trilogy. In the new movie, it’s an internet comments section personified in the form of Rowan.

Between Rowan and Kylo Ren? Watch out, internet manbabies. Hollywood is coming for you.

But the biggest GBtVG moment, and one that is way too specific to be an accident, is the Macy’s Parade. The Video Game takes place on Thanksgiving, 1991, and originally had a giant parade sequence which had to be dropped in production. And while yes, it’s a perfect way to give [SPOILER] a cameo, it’s also a shout-out to a lost moment in the game. Given that Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the game, and that Ackroyd was a big consultant behind the new movie, I can’t help but think this might have been something he specifically brought to the table.

So yeah, as a Ghosthead, this movie definitely reached into my brain and pushed the Happy Button. It wasn’t absolutely flawless, but my quibbles with it are matters of emphasis rather than any serious objection. I would have liked Erin and Abby to be differentiated a little more. I would have liked a little more backstory on who Rowan is and how he ended up that way, as well as a little more definition of his personality in general beyond “creepy dude,” and honestly his big transformation at the end is a bit clunky and inconsistent– but that moment is short and it actually is kind of a footnote to the “real” ending, so you get carried past it quickly.

But these things are all minor clunkers in the overall result. I spent 99% of the movie either grinning or laughing, and came out of the theater already planning my trip back to see it again… later today.

-The Gneech

[1] The power! The raw social POWER! I AM GNEECH, MOLDER OF OPINIONS! *cough* Erm. Pardon me, got a little carried away. ^.^’

So sometime last week Matt Trepal (creator of Fight Cast or Evade) pointed me at a writing technique called “7-Point Structure.” It’s not that far removed from the Snowflake Method/Five Act Structure I’ve already been using, but it is different enough that it can give you new insights on a story.

The best breakdown of it I’ve found comes from the person who first popularized it, Dan Wells, and you can see that here:

In order to sort of teach myself the ins and outs of it, I decided to make a 7-point breakdown of Zootopia, as that’s fresh in my mind and a remarkably-tight story considering the “toss everything out and start again” way it came together. I mentioned it on Twitter and had several folks express interest, so I’ve decided to post it here, because I love you.

WARNING! ZOOTOPIA SPOILERS AHEAD! BECAUSE DUH.

This discussion assumes you already have the gist of 7-point structure. If not, go watch those videos and come back. ;) Also, Zootopia (in italics) refers to the story/movie, while Zootopia (not in italics) refers to the city itself.

As John Lasseter so aptly put it, Zootopia‘s real subject is bias, both how it effects people and how they deal with it. As I started dissecting Zootopia I rapidly came to the conclusion that it has three major arcs, to wit Judy Hopps’ arc, Nick Wilde’s arc, and an overall Zootopia’s Promise arc. They are all connected by bias: Judy’s having to cope with bias against the idea of a bunny cop as well as her own bias on the subject of foxes, Nick having internalized the bias against foxes as well as his own bias on the subject of Zootopia’s failure to live up to its own ideals, and all of Zootopia’s struggle with the messy intersection of its stated ideals and the reality of life.

In light of that, the true plot points of Zootopia aren’t necessarily a simple list of “A happened, then B happened, then C happened” but of the characters’ progression. Zootopia is a character-based story, not an event-based one. And here’s how it falls out:

Starting Point	Hopps: Hopps is discounted as a police officer (by Bogo and Nick)
	Nick: Nick is convinced there’s no point to being anything but “a shifty fox”
	Zootopia: Zootopia claims to be “where anybody can be anything” but is far from that in reality

 

Plot Turn 1	Hopps and Nick: Hopps recruits Nick to help her search for Emmet
	Zootopia: 14 animals are missing

 

Pinch 1	Hopps and Nick: Captured by Mr. Big
	Zootopia: Manches goes savage

 

Midpoint	Hopps: Nick stands up to Bogo for Hopps
	Nick: Hopps saves Nick’s life during the Manches chase and shows him respect and compassion
	Zootopia: Lionheart is arrested, revealing that all the missing animals are predators turned savage

 

Pinch 2	Hopps: Hopps resigns from ZPD in despair
	Nick: Nick feels betrayed and breaks off his friendship w/ Hopps
	Zootopia: Zootopia is violent and full of prejudice

 

Plot Turn 2	Hopps: Hopps figures out the mystery
	Nick: Nick realizes Hopps truly values his friendship and forgives her
	Zootopia: Bellweather’s plot is revealed

 

Resolution	Hopps and Nick: They become respected police and equal partners
	Zootopia: Zootopia lives up to its promise, even though “life is messy”

 
The way the 7-point structure works is that you start with your desired end state and from there you make the start the opposite of that. Thus, if the end state is “Judy and Nick are partners and Zootopia is making progress on its ideals” then the beginning has to be “Judy and Nick are enemies and Zootopia is failing or actively working against its ideals.” In this particular case, it’s Bellweather who’s actively working against Zootopia’s ideals, but she wouldn’t be able to succeed if the rest of the city didn’t already have the underlying tensions that she exploits.

Each plot turn or pinch, therefore, is a stepping stone from the starting point to the resolution. An interesting thing to note is that a lot of scenes or moments that stand out about Zootopia do not actually register in terms of plot: the character of Flash for instance, while an awesome piece of set dressing, doesn’t really impact the story at all except as a plot device to burn up some of Judy’s timer and add dramatic tension to the “Nick stands up to Bogo” moment. The character of Gazelle, despite her incredibly catchy song, is not important to the plot at all except as a sort of mouthpiece for the ideals that Zootopia is failing to live up to.

This kind of analysis can show you hidden things about your story, such as empowerment issues. For instance, if you have a story full of “strong women,” but all of the plot points are driven by male characters, guess what? You still have a patriarchal story. (Not a problem in the case of Zootopia, but one I did find in another piece I applied this method to.) It can also help you boil down your story to the most essential elements, and show you where things need to be stronger.

For instance, if your resolution is “Luke becomes a fully trained Jedi” and your starting point is “Luke is a mostly-trained Jedi,” this is gonna be a pretty weaksauce arc. On the other hand, if your resolution is “Luke becomes a fully trained Jedi” and your starting point is “Luke is a powerless nobody in the middle of nowhere,” you’ve got a lot more to work with!

In the case of Zootopia, they did a really good job intertwining the characters’ arcs with the thematic (“Zootopia’s Promise”) arc. Judy and Nick have to be friends and equals at the end: therefore they have to be enemies and socially-disparate at the beginning. But the reason they are enemies is because Zootopia isn’t living up to its ideals.

Dude. That’s some tight plotting.

This, more than any adorable furry critters or catchy songs, is why Zootopia works. It’s just damn well written!

-The Gneech

“Jeeves is a secret agent, starring Colin Firth.” I should love that, right? I mean, I have one or two other buttons you could push, but this should be a slam-dunk “instant favorite” for me.

Nope.

I loathe this terrible, awful, no-good movie. Besides not actually being very good at what I would have considered its selling points, it is also deceptively marketed and prurient in its intent and tone. All of the “charm” is not charming. All of the “humor” is not funny. And instead of being escapist superspy fare, it’s just idiotic, hateful, sophomoric violence-porn with no aesthetic or story value.

In short, it sucks.

NOTE: There will be spoilers ahead, if it is indeed possible to “spoil” a movie that is already rotten. But you’ve been warned, in any case.

So we start things with a clear “George Lazenby couldn’t make it” James Bond stand-in being sheared in half by Gimmick Henchman, with one half flopping to the left and one half flopping to the right, Wile E. Coyote style. It’s dumb, but they’re trying to establish an OTT aesthetic, I get it. Amazing how there’s not even a drop of blood in this room full of rubber body parts, but yeah, okay, I get it. CGI dismemberment is fine as long as it’s not bloody, sayeth the ratings board. That enough would have knocked the movie off my faves list, but it isn’t the real problem.

So then we move into the main meat of the story, where Forgettable Protagonist Boy gets inducted into the Kingsmen, hitting all the same beats MiB did better, while Colin Firth investigates the mystery of Samuel Jackson as Lisping Steve Jobs Wants to Destroy the World. It’s serviceable if a bit dull, but leads to where the real problem is.

Samuel Jackson as Lisping Steve Jobs has stolen the macguffin from Secret Agent Super Dragon: he has a hate plague app implanted in cellphones all over the world, which makes people go berserk and kill everyone within plot device radius. He decides to run a test of this at the !Westboro Baptist Church; Colin Firth attends to investigate, gets hit by the mind control ray, and then spends the next ten minutes slaughtering everyone in the church, because he’s a badass superspy in a bulletproof suit and they’re all just degenerate hicks.

And then I walked out.

I’m told it gets worse from there. I don’t even want to imagine. But let’s dissect this moment of cinematic poo-throwing, shall we?

First and foremost, it’s clear that the movie thinks that filling the church full of annoying bigots makes it totally okay to spend ten minutes showing them all slaughtered one by one, in close up from almost Colin-Firth-cam view. It’s all super-quick cuts and choreography, and again without a drop of blood. You’re not supposed to be thinking about the horrors being inflicted on these people, you’re supposed to be impressed by what a badass Colin Firth is. (Luckily for us, we were reminded by a PSA at the beginning of the film that if a kid puts on harris tweeds and shoots up a school after seeing this, it’s totally not the movie’s fault.)

Well guess what, movie? It’s not okay. Do you maybe not understand what makes bigotry bad? The reason these hate group people are awful is because they would think it was funny to have a single person walk into a room full of [group they don’t like] and wipe them all out in gruesome ways. Ha, ha, darn those wacky bigots! …Wait.

Presumably the movie will then follow up with Colin Firth being all horrified at what he’s done and whinge about not having any choice, etc., etc. (I don’t know, because as I say, I walked out); and while that may theoretically be an out for the character, the filmmakers had a choice. You were the ones who chose to revel in this crap; you were the ones who said, “Hey, who wouldn’t want to vicariously slaughter a church full of crackers?”

I was shaking with rage when I walked out of the theater. Not just at what the movie had done, but that none of the previews or reviews had objected to this, or even fucking mentioned it. I went in expecting classic superspy escapist fare; instead I got loathsome violence porn. If I’d wanted to watch a goddamn Tarantino movie I would have had my head examined watched a goddamn Tarantino movie. One of my standing policies is to never willingly watch movies in which “murdering people and laughing about it is totally okay, as long as they’re the wrong sort of people” is a core value.

To hell with you, movie, and to hell with your poisonous mindset. You are absolute garbage, and you’ve brought shame to everyone involved in the production.

-The Gneech