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queenluaI’ve been watching Dr. Stone and Sucession in parallel, and let me tell you, it is a head trip.
Succession is an edgy live-action HBO drama consisting of an absolutely terrible family, their terrible friends, and their terrible fucking business empire. However, unlike the last show I watched with terrible people (Game of Thrones, gag), I’m enjoying the ride with this one. Its implicit satire of Entitled Rich Asholes is delicious and on-point. The politicking here is fun to watch in a way that GoT never managed to be for me—maybe I just find stories of corporate mergers and complicated financial instruments more inherently alluring, who knows.
Dr. Stone, by contrast, is the most fuck yeah, science! show I have ever seen. It’s structured like a shonen, but its whole schtick is this: a mysterious event freezes all the humans on the planet in stone. Some three thousand years later, a few humans start to emerge from the stone—including our hero, Senku, a genius high school student who’s bound and determined to ramp humans up from the stone age to the information age ASAP. Cue The Martian-style science geekery, in which he’s distilling the necessary components for a nitric-acid based solution that reverses petrification. Cue making primitive concrete from mashed-up seashells. Cue tech’ing into gunpowder to repel some enemies. And so on, and so forth. They get tungsten before the end of the first season. It heckin’ rules. (It’s been particularly fun to watch with Bird Guy, who cannot help but pause every five minutes to geek out over the chemistry involved, haha.)
But okay, past the tropey shonen stuff, there’s moments of real feeling, here—
Dr. Stone spoilers begin.
At one point, Senku uncovers a small village of humans whose ancestors escaped petrification, and who have been living with stone age technology in their little hamlet ever since. It turns out, they’re the descendents of some humans who were in the International Space Station when the petrification hit, and thus spared from its effects.
It turns out, Senku’s dad was on the ISS at that exact moment.
And Senku’s dad seeded the oral tradition of the village—the One Hundred Tales—with a message for Senku, in case Senku ever came back. And as the village priestess recited this story, the hundredth story of the hundred tales, which had been passed from father to son, across some hundred generations, across a gap of three thousand years, and I actually started sobbing,because I’m a sap, and because—God, in this silly shonen series, here is this beautiful story about how everything we do is for who comes after. Here is a story—the oldest technology, and the most human one. Here is how we reach each other.
Dr. Stone spoilers end.
Thought-trains from this:
1) Why does Dr. Stone work for me where so much of so-called “golden-age” scifi fails? When I go back and read Heinlein (or, for a more modern example, when I tried to read The Three-Body Problem), I always want to fall asleep; I just don’t care about anyone involved and everything they shout makes me feel like I’m in a physics class. I wonder if it’s not two-dimensional characters that people hate in golden-age scifi, so much as, just not super-likeable characters? Because Senku, like. Senku is not a complex character, but he’s fun and likeable as hell. Side-thought: is this something that’s easier to get away with in a visual medium than a literary one? You can communicate a lot of likeability via character design, visual tics, etc, after all.
(Disclaimer: I’m not a total snob; I loved The Martian as much as any other basic bitch. Maybe Heinlein just sucks most the time. Who knows!)
2) When people talk about “comfort food” shows, they often seem to be referring to stuff like... I dunno, slice-of-life anime? Stephen Universe? I dunno, stuff which just doesn’t do anything to me. You hear adjectives like “soft” and “comfy.”
Dr. Stone isn’t soft. It’s hype! a hype train! There’s no need for comfort when everything’s as suffused with joy as this show is. I love it more than any slice-of-life show; it’s way more comforting than anything I’ve ever heard described as “soft.”
And—okay, brief aside. I got into computers as a kid because I thought it was just fucking magical that you could store the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria in something you hold in the palm of your hand, I thought it was magical that I could send messages to friends 800 miles or 8,000 miles away and they’d be able to respond almost instantaneously, and I thought it was incredible that people did this.
And look, the reality’s more complicated than that. My job involves a lot of hard thinking about policy, and materialistic concerns, and gloomy fighting against larger systems or cruft that I can’t change on my own. I can’t just invent gunpowder or the transistor or whatever and save my village from certain doom.
But... okay, yeah, in this respect the show’s absolutely escapist. In Dr. Stone science just rules, it’s a fully humanistic endeavor, and honestly it was kind of nice to feel “maybe computers aren’t the literal worst” for a few hours, haha. I guess this is my kind of comfort food :P
3) I’ve never given too much thought about the type of fiction I write (which is probably a failing). Like, I just write the stuff that I want to write? I’m drawn to some idea and I do it? I’m not sure if there’s any kind of consistency in what I like to write about? Like, my fanfiction’s all out there, and when I stare at my current original fiction projects it’s like: kickass warrior gyrfalcon out for revenge, sad grad student in magical San Francisco trying to lowkey sabotage his lab’s despicable projects while also maintaining his own funding, testy thirteen-year-old who inconveniently has a goddess living in her head, and a choral piece in a pseudo-utopian society where everyone does that Quaker “decide everything by consensus, wait for answers in silence” thing except the year is 2500 so the whole process is Weird and High Tech. I have no idea what the commonality between these fuckers is.
But someone—can’t remember who, and can’t remember the exact phrasing—once said something along the lines of, “your writing isn’t soft, really, but I can always tell how much you love these characters, even when they’ve got sharp edges.” I should’ve written it down, because it was such a nice thing to say, and it resonated with me as something like a goal—I mean, “not soft and not edgy” isn’t much of a goal, that’s just a broad space between two poles, but “striking psychological realism, with some undercurrent of, people can change, and they can change for the better”? That’s something I could get behind, I think. (Maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow.)
An alternate pitch: “Cowboy Bebop, but less noir,” though saying that feels too much like flattering myself, haha. (Though like, yes, that show absolutely influenced the way I wrote short stories, please see the weird short story cycle I attempted in high school.)
I’m not interested making super-gritty stuff. I respect people who do that, of course, and read a lot of it! But when I sit down to write, I dunno... I’m shutting up now, because that’s all the answer I have, right now. I dunno. I write what I write.*
* aside: was in some writer’s group recently where everyone was introducing themselves in terms of, “I have been writing all my life blah blah always loved fiction blah blah,” “I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” etc, and I was lowkey surprised at how much that didn’t quite resonate for me? not that I don’t like writing, not that I’m not aiming for publication, and so on, but... writing feels somewhere between “breathing” and “climbing a mountain” to me. sometimes i’m doing it just because it’s a thing i do as a human on earth. in fits and spurts i decide it’s a thing i want to conquer and do an EPIC THING. neither feel like quite the same sort of thing?
4) I want to do a breakdown of The Shonen Formula TM sometime, how it works on a technical level and all that, mostly so that I can ape elements of it in my own fiction when I feel like it. I actually have a pile of meta-essays on writing that I’d like to hash out at some point (again, mostly for my own learning/edification). I guess watch this space, or, let me know if you’re interested in any of these topics:
* so what’s the deal with those fanfics that are super long but they feel boring? even though the sentences seem okay? and nothing happens??? like what is HAPPENING there on a technical level (of course, without naming names or quoting passages, I’m not here to drag fanfic authors—but there’s a commonality between all these styles I’ve noticed and it’s FASCINATING)
* what to do when you need to edit the overall flow of your piece (rather than focusing just on a scene, or a particular plot point, or whatever)
* novel structure breakdown (e.g. I outline some novels I like, pick apart how they work, and see what they have in common; hope y’all are ready for my Twain and Mishima exegesis)
* how to write a character being sad/isolated/mopey for an extended period of time without being boring (e.g. how the fuck did Osamu Dazai write Schoolgirl so good and can I steal his secrets)
* why do i always want to open my stories with grandiose mood-setting scenes? this is probably not a good idea? or maybe it is? idk i’ll compare some openings i went with vs openings i scrapped and see how i feel about them
* crowding and leaping, e.g. when you should be summarizing vs when you should actually be describing shit
disclaimer for all of the above: i have had wine tonight, my friends
Succession is an edgy live-action HBO drama consisting of an absolutely terrible family, their terrible friends, and their terrible fucking business empire. However, unlike the last show I watched with terrible people (Game of Thrones, gag), I’m enjoying the ride with this one. Its implicit satire of Entitled Rich Asholes is delicious and on-point. The politicking here is fun to watch in a way that GoT never managed to be for me—maybe I just find stories of corporate mergers and complicated financial instruments more inherently alluring, who knows.
Dr. Stone, by contrast, is the most fuck yeah, science! show I have ever seen. It’s structured like a shonen, but its whole schtick is this: a mysterious event freezes all the humans on the planet in stone. Some three thousand years later, a few humans start to emerge from the stone—including our hero, Senku, a genius high school student who’s bound and determined to ramp humans up from the stone age to the information age ASAP. Cue The Martian-style science geekery, in which he’s distilling the necessary components for a nitric-acid based solution that reverses petrification. Cue making primitive concrete from mashed-up seashells. Cue tech’ing into gunpowder to repel some enemies. And so on, and so forth. They get tungsten before the end of the first season. It heckin’ rules. (It’s been particularly fun to watch with Bird Guy, who cannot help but pause every five minutes to geek out over the chemistry involved, haha.)
But okay, past the tropey shonen stuff, there’s moments of real feeling, here—
Dr. Stone spoilers begin.
At one point, Senku uncovers a small village of humans whose ancestors escaped petrification, and who have been living with stone age technology in their little hamlet ever since. It turns out, they’re the descendents of some humans who were in the International Space Station when the petrification hit, and thus spared from its effects.
It turns out, Senku’s dad was on the ISS at that exact moment.
And Senku’s dad seeded the oral tradition of the village—the One Hundred Tales—with a message for Senku, in case Senku ever came back. And as the village priestess recited this story, the hundredth story of the hundred tales, which had been passed from father to son, across some hundred generations, across a gap of three thousand years, and I actually started sobbing,
Dr. Stone spoilers end.
Thought-trains from this:
1) Why does Dr. Stone work for me where so much of so-called “golden-age” scifi fails? When I go back and read Heinlein (or, for a more modern example, when I tried to read The Three-Body Problem), I always want to fall asleep; I just don’t care about anyone involved and everything they shout makes me feel like I’m in a physics class. I wonder if it’s not two-dimensional characters that people hate in golden-age scifi, so much as, just not super-likeable characters? Because Senku, like. Senku is not a complex character, but he’s fun and likeable as hell. Side-thought: is this something that’s easier to get away with in a visual medium than a literary one? You can communicate a lot of likeability via character design, visual tics, etc, after all.
(Disclaimer: I’m not a total snob; I loved The Martian as much as any other basic bitch. Maybe Heinlein just sucks most the time. Who knows!)
2) When people talk about “comfort food” shows, they often seem to be referring to stuff like... I dunno, slice-of-life anime? Stephen Universe? I dunno, stuff which just doesn’t do anything to me. You hear adjectives like “soft” and “comfy.”
Dr. Stone isn’t soft. It’s hype! a hype train! There’s no need for comfort when everything’s as suffused with joy as this show is. I love it more than any slice-of-life show; it’s way more comforting than anything I’ve ever heard described as “soft.”
And—okay, brief aside. I got into computers as a kid because I thought it was just fucking magical that you could store the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria in something you hold in the palm of your hand, I thought it was magical that I could send messages to friends 800 miles or 8,000 miles away and they’d be able to respond almost instantaneously, and I thought it was incredible that people did this.
And look, the reality’s more complicated than that. My job involves a lot of hard thinking about policy, and materialistic concerns, and gloomy fighting against larger systems or cruft that I can’t change on my own. I can’t just invent gunpowder or the transistor or whatever and save my village from certain doom.
But... okay, yeah, in this respect the show’s absolutely escapist. In Dr. Stone science just rules, it’s a fully humanistic endeavor, and honestly it was kind of nice to feel “maybe computers aren’t the literal worst” for a few hours, haha. I guess this is my kind of comfort food :P
3) I’ve never given too much thought about the type of fiction I write (which is probably a failing). Like, I just write the stuff that I want to write? I’m drawn to some idea and I do it? I’m not sure if there’s any kind of consistency in what I like to write about? Like, my fanfiction’s all out there, and when I stare at my current original fiction projects it’s like: kickass warrior gyrfalcon out for revenge, sad grad student in magical San Francisco trying to lowkey sabotage his lab’s despicable projects while also maintaining his own funding, testy thirteen-year-old who inconveniently has a goddess living in her head, and a choral piece in a pseudo-utopian society where everyone does that Quaker “decide everything by consensus, wait for answers in silence” thing except the year is 2500 so the whole process is Weird and High Tech. I have no idea what the commonality between these fuckers is.
But someone—can’t remember who, and can’t remember the exact phrasing—once said something along the lines of, “your writing isn’t soft, really, but I can always tell how much you love these characters, even when they’ve got sharp edges.” I should’ve written it down, because it was such a nice thing to say, and it resonated with me as something like a goal—I mean, “not soft and not edgy” isn’t much of a goal, that’s just a broad space between two poles, but “striking psychological realism, with some undercurrent of, people can change, and they can change for the better”? That’s something I could get behind, I think. (Maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow.)
An alternate pitch: “Cowboy Bebop, but less noir,” though saying that feels too much like flattering myself, haha. (Though like, yes, that show absolutely influenced the way I wrote short stories, please see the weird short story cycle I attempted in high school.)
I’m not interested making super-gritty stuff. I respect people who do that, of course, and read a lot of it! But when I sit down to write, I dunno... I’m shutting up now, because that’s all the answer I have, right now. I dunno. I write what I write.*
* aside: was in some writer’s group recently where everyone was introducing themselves in terms of, “I have been writing all my life blah blah always loved fiction blah blah,” “I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” etc, and I was lowkey surprised at how much that didn’t quite resonate for me? not that I don’t like writing, not that I’m not aiming for publication, and so on, but... writing feels somewhere between “breathing” and “climbing a mountain” to me. sometimes i’m doing it just because it’s a thing i do as a human on earth. in fits and spurts i decide it’s a thing i want to conquer and do an EPIC THING. neither feel like quite the same sort of thing?
4) I want to do a breakdown of The Shonen Formula TM sometime, how it works on a technical level and all that, mostly so that I can ape elements of it in my own fiction when I feel like it. I actually have a pile of meta-essays on writing that I’d like to hash out at some point (again, mostly for my own learning/edification). I guess watch this space, or, let me know if you’re interested in any of these topics:
* so what’s the deal with those fanfics that are super long but they feel boring? even though the sentences seem okay? and nothing happens??? like what is HAPPENING there on a technical level (of course, without naming names or quoting passages, I’m not here to drag fanfic authors—but there’s a commonality between all these styles I’ve noticed and it’s FASCINATING)
* what to do when you need to edit the overall flow of your piece (rather than focusing just on a scene, or a particular plot point, or whatever)
* novel structure breakdown (e.g. I outline some novels I like, pick apart how they work, and see what they have in common; hope y’all are ready for my Twain and Mishima exegesis)
* how to write a character being sad/isolated/mopey for an extended period of time without being boring (e.g. how the fuck did Osamu Dazai write Schoolgirl so good and can I steal his secrets)
* why do i always want to open my stories with grandiose mood-setting scenes? this is probably not a good idea? or maybe it is? idk i’ll compare some openings i went with vs openings i scrapped and see how i feel about them
* crowding and leaping, e.g. when you should be summarizing vs when you should actually be describing shit
disclaimer for all of the above: i have had wine tonight, my friends
