The Patreon Letters - June 03, 2017 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Jackson here with this week's Patreon Letters! This week is our first payment week(!!!), which is very exciting and means that when everything processes, we're going to move ahead with the first stage of bonuses and goals. What does that mean right now? Well let's break it down:

• Later this week, we will be putting up the first posts for you to either vote on, or suggest Games for Abnormal Mapping, depending on your pledge level! I think (hope) Patreon will send you an email when that happens so no one is out of the loop. 
• M's Full Throttle Let's Play  ended last week, it's a fantastic game that they love dearly, so if you want to join them on their journey one afternoon there has never been a time. Next week, they begin playing Life is Strange, with episodes going up every Tuesday and Thursday. 
• The Amory Score  this week reached its third episode! We talked about Everything Evil, a song which we both love deeply and somehow Molly ends up scoring it 5/10. She will regret this decision for the rest of her life. 
• Next week is Second Officer Slog ! This marks the first episode of SOS which we've recorded post-launch, so there's no more embarrassing election predictions that play really badly in 2017 
• We hit the $100 goal this month (!!!) which means if you keep your eyes peeled, a certain zone of goof should be appearing on the horizon...

Well, that's housekeeping taken care of! Lots of good things coming up, and I am very excited to start making progress on the goal rewards. Thank you so much for all your support, it's allowing us to make really cool things: you're the best.

Anyway. This week, Hbomberguy released a video: Sherlock Is Garbage And Here's Why , which is almost 2 hours long and of course I watched all of it, because it's not like I'm busy or anything. And it's alright, it outlines a lot of the problems with the show: it's bad, it hates you, it is an endless series of teases for future payoffs which will never come, etc etc. But I came away from the video with this feeling that it didn't really communicate why the show is bad, because it didn't understand what a story is.

The problem with Sherlock isn't that the mystery mechanics are bad (they are), or that it consistently treats both its fans and its source material with bare contempt (it does), but instead something far more fundamental: it literally doesn't tell stories. If you watch an episode of Sherlock, and pay attention to the way that each scene flows to the next, your brain will begin to break down, because there is nothing to hold onto. Characters act without motivation, events occur randomly without logic or purpose, the show works only to justify whatever stylistic affectation it has in the moment and nothing else. Hbomberguy settles on the conclusion that Moffat's writing is bad because he makes promises he can't keep, but doesn't go a step further to recognise that the promises themselves represent a fundamentally broken approach to storytelling.

Me and M watched Transformers: Age of Extinction on Monday, which also doesn't have a story. Mark Wahlberg is a monster to his daughter, Optimus Prime murders every single living creature he comes across and Kelsey Grammer is tragically upstaged by the fact he simply cannot compete with the potential of Anthony Hopkins telling us the Secret History of Transformers. Every scene is meaningless, there is no plot and there are no characters, merely ideas and moments punctuated with either awful attempts at humour or an explosion. 

Now, Transformers is obviously a famously 'bad' series, and despite Hbomberguy's contrarian title, "Sherlock Is A Big Piece Of Poo" has not been a controversial opinion since Irene Adler became a sapiosexual dominatrix. But these two things in tandem got me thinking about how broken a lot of storytelling in our media is, and how there seems to be such little understanding of why, or even what the problem is.

Last year Marvel released a movie in which the heroes went to war over an ideological disagreement which was never mentioned after the first 40 minutes of the movie. After this, the movie pivoted to be about custody of a character we still don't really know outside of: there is queerbaiting. The movie concluded with a reveal about his past that had nothing to do with the supposed reason for this civil war, and the final scene was a monologue to the audience promising them that nothing mattered, conflict was fake and please buy a ticket for the next one. This movie reviewed very well.

It isn't even a bad movie: it fixes all the problems of a Sherlock or Transformers, there is no smoking gun, no Sapiosexual Dominatrix Irene Adler to stick out and go "this is a war crime" to the audience. It's (mostly) funny, it's (mostly) well paced, and the actors are (mostly) charming. It's got, as M talked about last week, the full weight of the Disney Machine on its side. But if you actually take a second to analyse it as a work of storytelling, it's fucking broken in its core. 

Now, I'm not laying all this at the feet of H from Steps and his 2 hour video, because he doesn't actually say much that I actually think is wrong. But it's a well documented problem in criticism, especially in nerd spaces, that we focus far too much on extraneous details that we forget to approach art for what it actually is, even in a video professing to be peeling back the curtain to do exactly that. 

It's a deep, deep problem, and it's something I've been thinking about a lot this week. We're ingrained in a culture that profits of us seeing art in this way, off being able to identify the difference between the Good Art and The Bad Art as a matter of branding, which helps no one except the few companies who profit from it.

Anyway, that's enough from me. Didn't intend for this to such a follow up to M's letter, but that's what happens when you're both sad about Art and Capitalism and talk every day.  

-Jackson