Oh shit, thank you for articulating this, I think this is exactly the issue I was having with a series I read recently - it hit a lot of those potential pitfalls you mention. Like, to keep up the analogy, say one wanted to apply that structure to some kinda plotty mid-game epic about Edelgard being a #girlboss and it's like
Chapter 1: Edelgard POV, early academy phase. She's trying to get into a good position before declaring war on literally everyone, so she's in Enbarr talking to one of her dad's peeps who'd be really useful to keep around/inconvenient to replace. But she loses control of the situation and dude might blow her whole plan so Hubert kills him.
Chapter 2: Seteth POV, same approximate timeframe, where he's investigating where all this unrest in the Eastern Church is coming from and also, why's Rhea being so cagey lately?
Chapter 3: Inexplicably it's six months later and Edelgard's the emperor now. What about that dude she had killed? What about Ferdinand's dad, what about Hubert's dad, what about any of the housecleaning and base-building she had to do to get here? Never mentioned. There's a bittersweet Edelgard/Dorothea scene and then Edelgard goes all Flame Emperor and fucks up the tomb.
You can get away with just hopping around between emotionally charged scenes in fanfic, if the canon has enough plot to build off of. You can just slot missing scenes into wherever they'd go, and not write any connective tissue because the canon already provides that and everyone knows what happened. In pro fic... it was baffling. There were just several rungs missing from this ladder for no reason! But this is the only time I've seen it (or seen it flubbed hard enough that I noticed) with something plotty so afaik you're right that this stays mostly in fanfiction-land. And (I say with all fondness for fanfiction) THERE MAY IT REMAIN.
I think Washburn manages to bring it off because the big emotional scenes are most of the plot, the characters have enough meat to them to sustain that attention, and what's happened in between chapters gets kinda backfilled by implication and suggestion. Take any of those things away and it'd probably feel a lot more disjointed.
The sentence fragments definitely are some type of weird artsy decision but I could not decide if that was some kind of MFA house style or what
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Date: 2021-10-05 01:40 am (UTC)Chapter 1: Edelgard POV, early academy phase. She's trying to get into a good position before declaring war on literally everyone, so she's in Enbarr talking to one of her dad's peeps who'd be really useful to keep around/inconvenient to replace. But she loses control of the situation and dude might blow her whole plan so Hubert kills him.
Chapter 2: Seteth POV, same approximate timeframe, where he's investigating where all this unrest in the Eastern Church is coming from and also, why's Rhea being so cagey lately?
Chapter 3: Inexplicably it's six months later and Edelgard's the emperor now. What about that dude she had killed? What about Ferdinand's dad, what about Hubert's dad, what about any of the housecleaning and base-building she had to do to get here? Never mentioned. There's a bittersweet Edelgard/Dorothea scene and then Edelgard goes all Flame Emperor and fucks up the tomb.
You can get away with just hopping around between emotionally charged scenes in fanfic, if the canon has enough plot to build off of. You can just slot missing scenes into wherever they'd go, and not write any connective tissue because the canon already provides that and everyone knows what happened. In pro fic... it was baffling. There were just several rungs missing from this ladder for no reason! But this is the only time I've seen it (or seen it flubbed hard enough that I noticed) with something plotty so afaik you're right that this stays mostly in fanfiction-land. And (I say with all fondness for fanfiction) THERE MAY IT REMAIN.
I think Washburn manages to bring it off because the big emotional scenes are most of the plot, the characters have enough meat to them to sustain that attention, and what's happened in between chapters gets kinda backfilled by implication and suggestion. Take any of those things away and it'd probably feel a lot more disjointed.
The sentence fragments definitely are some type of weird artsy decision but I could not decide if that was some kind of MFA house style or what