Dominic wrote:If it was pre-planned, that is not really a cheat though. That is a question of the writer throwing a curveball for the sake of tricking readers.
You're talking about killing and resurrecting a character and his name isn't "Jesus". That seems like a cheat to me, I don't mind if it simply owns the fact that it's cheating by using miracles or other such nonsense, but don't kid yourself that miracles aren't cheating. How is "tricking readers" different from "cheating" in your mind?
Butch and Sundance dive in to the water and swim away, right? And, we both know that Thelma and Louise rode their magical flying car up to heaven. Duhhhhhhhh!
< -- authentic
The fact he was "revealed" as having been shot in the back is what really gets me. (Is him moving and getting shot it the back really less of a stretch than him being shot in the face and surviving?)
Ugh, that is so bad too, what logic is the reader supposed to apply there? Skywarp just stops what he's doing in the moment and watches as Thundercracker strolls away, then fires anyway? Makes no sense.
None of that happened for Thundercracker, nobody is shown taking him for repairs, there's a level of narrative consistence absent with AHM's TC scene.
It is actually a problem with Costa's run with the ongoing, not with McCarthy's "All Hail Megatron". (Just a clarification)
Yes, I agree that you're right. Unless you believe as Sparky and Anderson do, then that's wrong.
Please explain. I do not agree with Sparky or Anderson. I am just wondering where you got the impression.
I have recreated the pertinent quote-chain to help explain. Sparky and Anderson in this case believe there's enough ambiguity within the ending of the AHM TC scene that they feel it can be consistent within the narrative run to make sense in Ongoing where TC survives, that there isn't a narrative inconsistency in their minds to blame either AHM or Ongoing, but certainly if there were blame it'd be on AHM for leaving it open to them.
Costa set it up so that Ironhide would die in the first issue of the ongoing. Costa had every intention of bringing back Ironhide in the miniseries of the same name. The method of raising him was stated to be complex, arcane and damned near impossible to duplicate.
Seems like we're arguing in the shades of gray here on how much sorcery is cheating vs valid fictional expression.
This sounds like a topic for the comics thread. How did CoIE ruin DC for you?
OK, now I see why you took it the way you did, I wasn't clear enough by using "that way" in reply to your quote and leaving the object of the "big event" to the end of the sentence . We're discussing this more in the comics thread, but suffice to say that "Ruined DC in that way" meant that COIE ruined DC big events, not DC as a whole.
The problem with comics is as much the audience as it is the medium. (Comics that are not written to cliche spec tend to upset the audience. Marvel and DC have both tried to improve after the 90s. But, the fans tend to get offended by writers who do not load up books with callbacks to old comics or who do not write in a style that is 15+ years out of date.)
I don't think that's fair to blame the audience for simply anticipating what the publishers keep doing until they start actively looking for it. Yes, some fans will always want to avoid changes, people are often afraid of change after years of investment, but a publisher is supposed to do their job of deciding on and creating what the audience should want NEXT, not simply focusing on keeping the status quo.
It is very common for comic readers to use the same business model common in most English/Literature departments, specifically conflating reality and fiction.
These readers tend to view stories as being autonomous from the writers. As they see it, what the writer wrote/said or intended to write/say is less important than the meaning that the readers finds or conjures.
To these readers, reading a comic is not a question of reading a work of fiction, it is a question of observing and discovering. From this perspective, a back-write is not a revision so much as it is a revelation. In this way of thinking, writers and editors are not telling us a story that they wrote or back-wrote, they are recounting an event to us.
Bah! The reader should not overwrite the author's intent, they should respect it whether or not they intend to analyze it.
Sparky wrote:How is any of that a bad example, or horrible writing? You didn't even address anything with the "I, Robot" example. What, it doesn't fit your view so you're just going to ignore it and move on? And you're not seeing my point by saying that I forgot to fire the weapon with the other. The idea is simply to put a character in a spot where it seems like they can't get out of it. Yet, somehow, they can still find a way to get out of it. You see it all over the place if you really stopped to think about it. And AHM isn't the end of the story. You're completely ignoring the Ongoing here, which continues after AHM leaves off, where we find out Thundercracker did in fact survive. THAT'S where his 'commercial break' ends.
It's bad writing because it's using a cheap trope to jerk the audience around only to later reward them with a scene backing off the moment.
The "I, Robot" movie example didn't apply at all from what I could see, so I ignored it because you just seem so angry and want to argue about everything, it's my prerogative to respond or not as I choose, and I was trying to stay on topic and get us through this as quickly as possible. The reason "I, Robot" doesn't apply is that the narrative continues on and shows Sonny alive again in that same narrative, that the intent is made clear by later events within the same story, while AHM has no such scene intended by the author. I Robot movie also sets up the idea that Sonny is visually identical to his fellow robots in the film, thus giving credence to the possibility of that switch later, yet there's nothing I know of in AHM which thematically suggests the content might be jerking the reader around in that way.
That's why my later example to anderson was:
If this was a theatrical play where that scene was played out, the shooter shows anger, puts a gun in the face of the victim, the victim asks the shooter to wait, the shooter interrupts with more anger, the stage went black, a gun was fired, and then no other scenes showed the victim in that play.
As for AHM being part of the story, I am not buying that argument on any level, the story as a whole is under a specific banner and a specific set of circumstances which surround that idea, later issues continue from that point but are only reflections and extensions because they came later and aren't part of that AHM story or in this case written by its author. You are willing to accept later material to alter original material's intent, I don't think that's valid in this particular situation, so we've come to an impasse.
But as I keep telling you, sometimes the scene is meant to be ambiguous, to leave the character's fate unknown as a means for things like suspense or surprise or as a loophole to bring a character back and so on.
Not enough about AHM 12's particular material is ambiguous enough to fit that mold, those 4 panels are a clear chain of events that Skywarp intended to shoot Thundercracker in the eye out of anger in feeling as if TC betrayed the Decepticons. You can argue the survivability of the wound, but I'm not willing to entertain the idea that there was enough ambiguity in those 4 panels to allow for anything more, hence, impasse.
How about when Sherlock Holmes turns up alive after the waterfall fight with Moriarty?
That would be a great example because the author intended the character of Sherlock Holmes to be firmly dead at the end of "The Final Problem". Holmes' survival of the fight at Reichenbach Falls was an intentional retcon to appease readers who demanded the character's return, and Conan Doyle had to change the circumstances surrounding the situation in order to make the unsurvivable battle survivable - in other words, Conan Doyle intentionally cheated to change what his previous story had intended.
Or Gandalf in Lord of the Rings (technically he actually does die but it's not from the fall into that abyss as the story initially implies)?
He's a wizard and it's magic and the character did die and had to be reborn which that story's universe supports.
Or Goku after Namek exploded in DBZ?
Are you seriously trying to cite Dragonball Z as a quality example? It's a cartoon made for another society entirely.
Or Truman's father from the Truman Show (in terms of the fictional show itself)?
Unfamiliar and your example itself seems to require a modifier.
Or Kirk in Star Trek: Generations?
Wow, you really nailed me there by using the worst piece of Trek writing of its era, writing so bad that even the authors of it in the DVD commentary apologize for how clumsy it was. The Nexus is a MASSIVE cheat, possibly the most intentionally awful cheat in all of entertainment.
Are you content that I addressed all of your examples? No, because they didn't convince me of anything at all and thus wasted both of our time? Right. Well, now you know why I'm going to pick and choose what I respond to, don't freak out at me next time.
How does moving slightly while off panel not sound simple to you?
It is not the simplest explanation, that's why. If the author isn't showing us the character moving away in the next panel, the simplest explanation is that the character hasn't moved. If you assume that the character "moved slightly" in this case, what you're actually saying is that he moved considerably because there's a gun in someone's eye, a slight movement isn't going to change the outcome in a meaningful manner. It now has to be a movement slight enough that it doesn't change the dynamic of the relationship of characters yet significant enough that he entirely misses, that's not within the reasonable scope of the material presented, you have to make that up in your own mind contrary to the most likely thing you're seeing on the page.
Character's can do what a story needs them to do off panel when necessary. To actually use an on-topic example here, there was that exchange between Swerve and Brainstorm in MTMTE #15 about pressing a button, and Swerve literally says at one point after having pressed the button that it "must have happened off-panel".
Characters can only do in a story what the author intends, on-panel or off-panel, and that activity still has to be communicated to the reader for it to be an acceptable part of the story.
Your example from MTMTE is the very expression of a story communicating an idea of an off-panel event, the resulting action is expressed when Swerve uses a meta-bomb meta-joke to whisper to Rewind (not Brainstorm) "it must have happened off-panel", that's expressing the result. No such moment is expressed in AHM 12.
You want to talk about context? Let's look at the panel after we see Skywarp point his gun. It is just a close up shot of Skywarp's face. What is Thundercracker doing during that panel? Holding perfectly still? Given both are pretty high up in the sky at the time, with Thundercracker returning from sending the nuke into a low orbit that had just detonated, I doubt that either of them could hold perfectly still even if they wanted to. Not to mention, I can't see Thundercracker just sitting there while he's got a gun in his face. And then we see Skywarp's weapon fire. That's it. No sign of Thundercracker anywhere in that panel.
I'm done with this. You apply your own standard to "holding perfectly still" despite nothing saying one way or the other, yet expect that I should accept your take on this. You don't follow the chain of events as presented. You flat out ignore the fact that no other content is shown in the moment or the overall story arc to support your conclusions of "maybe he moved". You are applying the "anything at all can happen" mentality to this without thinking through what would most likely happen. Have you ever had a weapon pointed at you at close range? I have. Even the slightest movement can get you killed, when there's a gun in your face there is no movement you can do that can outrun a triggerfinger when that gunman is intending to shoot. Even the subtlest evasive movement is obvious and trackable at that range, and certainly any evasive movement at that range would still put Thundercracker in the 4th panel, miss or hit - if he drops down, the gun would be fired into his forehead; if he slides left or right and somehow the gun in his eye doesn't simply get pulled along with it since it's an indentation, he'd still be there; if he falls backwards he'd still catch the blast in his face. So you have to ignore all that by saying "someone moved", you have to literally break the chain of events in your mind to get away with your argument for panel 4, you have to say "he moved between panels 2 and 3" and then retcon a reason why that'd make any sense at all - that's not simple, and it's not logic, and it's surely not shown in the story before, during, or afterwards.
anderson wrote:I've grown far less accepting of the "kill 'em off for cheap drama then bring them back later" cliche over the years, so I wouldn't call it brainwashing. Just genre awareness. If a character's fate is left open, don't make assumptions about them.
Sounds like brainwashing to me when comic books as a
genre can convince you that it's "left open" where every other media wouldn't be able to get away with this without being called a cheat.
Obviously I did reach that conclusion on first glance, though now I look at what I wrote then and there's no way I'd have stated that Thundercracker was shot in the head with such certainty. I'd demand more evidence than we got. I definitely read things differently now than I did four years ago, at least when it comes to Transformers comics.
What's changed then? Sounds like the material's insistence at continuing the trend is what's changed, that it's continued use of the trope has left you less trusting of your own reason.
Maybe this is akin to the "CSI effect" that prosecutors all over the country have been suffering since TV shows like CSI started airing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect
The idea that "guilty beyond all reasonable doubt" has been changed by the public because those shows have drastically skewed laypeople's reasonable expectations.
Barry Allen in Crisis would be another, and neither character should ever have returned. They shouldn't have brought back Captain America and explained it away with the weird, "time travel bullet" or whatever. None of these resurrections are the least bit credible. On the other hand, I find the idea that Thundercracker was not killed, but badly wounded and forced to spend a year in hiding until other Decepticons found him to be entirely credible. If we'd seen his head blown off, it would be a different story.
Oh yeah, of course, Barry Allen and COIE could arguably be called the genesis of this whole phenomenon.
Cap's death... that wasn't even a good retcon.
We can argue TC's ability to survive the wound, I think that's reasonable based on the later material we have at hand, but I don't think there's any reasonable argument that can be made which allows for anything more than survive/not survive.
Over on the Comics discussion thread, Dom had this to say:
The problem is that few enough comic fans, (especially more vocal fans), seem to be willing/able to recognize back-writes as revisions rather than revelations.
That's what we're disagreeing on, obviously. You and Dom see Thundercracker's survival as a revision. Sparky and I see it as a revelation. We're never going to agree, because we never see Thundercracker get shot. Even in Ongoing #4 we don't see the moment of impact. There is no definitive answer. Clearly, I've personally changed my mind over time about just what happened. Whatever the reason, if the sequence of events had been written and drawn so that everything was spelled out nice and explicit, there would be no debate. Hence why I've said once or twice in this discussion that things were left deliberately ambiguous, possibly by editorial fiat, so that Costa would be free to go in his own direction regardless of what McCarthy did or didn't intend.
The problem I think is that we're arguing from a frame of contexts, and you guys are arguing that the MTMTE false-deaths are reasonable given Thundercracker's survival, yet the only reason you believe Thundercracker's survival now is because of recent books like MTMTE that have jerked you around into not trusting the original presentation of the narrative chain of events from 4 years ago. How can something presented at the time as a clearcut intention of a character being killed off, the character left out of that storyline altogether afterwards and then left off the pages for another year, work as an example of context that justifies itself when it finally reverses its statement? AHM makes a statement on its own, that's what I'm trying to say, within that context the argument that he might have survived should be treated as skeptical at best and a retcon at worst, neither of which make for good contextual argument support.
McCarthy's comment that Thundercracker's fate was "out of his hands" is precisely what makes me wonder if IDW editorial didn't instruct him to leave TC's fate open-ended to give Costa the freedom to continue the story in the way that he wanted.
That's a vague response though, it could easily be interpreted either way.
I'll grant you and JT this: it's entirely plausible to think that McCarthy intended that Thundercracker's story arc would end in his death. If that's the case, it's also entirely plausible to think that late in the game, once IDW editorial's plan became to continue the story in the ongoing series that leaving Thundercracker's fate uncertain became the easiest way to avoid disrupting McCarthy's storyline without having it re-written wholesale late in the day. No one will commit on what the original plan was, if there was one, so all we can do is guess. But that's a believable scenario.
But it can't be settled one way or the other by what's on the printed page. Or else we wouldn't still be arguing about it all this time later.
It also means it's really awful context for either side to use as an example of survivable violence.
Everybody loses!
Dom wrote:How explicit do you need a scene to be?
More, apparently. Theatrical plays like the example I used are ruined for sure. To me, this is a problem created by long-running comic books and soap operas too desperate to kill characters but needing to fake killing characters to draw ratings.
