Thursday, November 17, 2011

Internal rules and logic in sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories

My friend Clint sent me a great article from The AV Club about the importance of adhering to internal rules and logic within stories - especially genres like fantasy and sci-fi, where seemingly anything can happen.

In these genres, the fundamental realities of a world can be anything imaginable: There can be wizards, or dragons, or intergalactic spaceships, or time travel, or dragon-wizards in time-traveling intergalactic spaceships. Nothing can be assumed. Which makes it mighty easy for authors to cheat by changing the rules whenever it’s convenient to the plot: “Oh, did I not mention that dragon-wizard time-travel spaceships are sentient and can crossbreed to produce baby spaceships? Well, they can.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with changing the rules of engagement in the middle of a scene in order to provide an out for a hero in an impossible situation. In fact, here’s an interesting mental exercise when reading or watching the kind of stories where heroes get backed into corners: Note how rarely they think their way out solely with the resources at hand—the ones the audience already knows about—and how often they instead get away because something changes, whether it’s a new person arriving on the scene as a help or a distraction, an outside event that changes the shape of the problem, or just something the audience wasn’t in on, like a hidden weapon or ability.

And changing a story’s rules mid-stream can be an effective way to foster tension. Consider what happens in The Ring when Naomi Watts acts on what she assumes is the correct way to end the threat of Samara, and finds out too late that reality isn’t what she thought it was. Or what happens in Alien when the crew of the Nostromo sets out to capture an alien the size of a rat, and winds up unexpectedly facing something bigger than a human. Or consider the time-honored, annoying, but often-effective Twister cliché: When someone begins a story by saying “None of us has ever seen an F5 tornado! Never! That would be like the finger of God!” there’s a 100-percent chance that the characters are going to be facing that finger by the end of the movie. In all these cases, what makes the rule-change effective is the characters’ sheer terror at facing something outside of their understanding of how the world works. They think they know where they stand, and they act accordingly. Then they find out they’re wrong, and they have to figure out their actual standing in a hurry, with their lives at stake. 

The article is so comprehensive, I'm not sure I have anything to add to it.  Check out the rest of the article here.

6 comments:

  1. I'm sorry but this bit alone:

    "There’s nothing inherently wrong with changing the rules of engagement in the middle of a scene in order to provide an out for a hero in an impossible situation. In fact, here’s an interesting mental exercise when reading or watching the kind of stories where heroes get backed into corners: Note how rarely they think their way out solely with the resources at hand"

    The first part is just wrong. You cannot do that.

    The second part is also wrong because that's exactly what happens in the good stuff.

    Yes of course there is bad SF/F - but it's bad when people do what he thinks is okay.

    Complete and utter bollocks.

    (Hm, must have got out the wrong side of the bed.)

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  2. I'm going to have to disagree, sort of. I think it's ok to change the rules midstream but I think the product is better if you're clever enough not to change them.

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  3. I wish the writer hasn't used the phrase "changing the rules" because I look it more as subverting the expectations. For instance, The Ring example he cites isn't so much the rules being changed as the character having made an incorrect assumption about how the problem will be resolved.

    For me, truly changing the rules would be starting off the film saying "Sunlight kills Gremlins" and then have the little monsters walk out into daylight at the end of the film with no ill effects or explanation. (If the story made use of a plot point that made the Gremlins immune to sun, then that would be fair.) And I think that's the kind of cheat you guys are talking about.

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  4. Even with the caveat of saying "subverting expectations" over "changing the rules" I think the article is poorly written and is sort of muddling a bunch of ideas into one.

    Whether you call it changing the rules or subverting expectations the statement about protagonists rarely using the resources at hand or thinking their way out of a situation is just off base. The best protagonists think their way out of situations using resources audiences know about in a clever way the audience didn't predict. They don't consistently rely on deus ex machina or reveal some convenient hidden ability at exactly the right time. That's just lazy.

    I agree that subverting expectations... the "keep them guessing" philosophy is a good one, and I also agree that sci-fi and fantasy (and all movies really) need to establish ground rules for the world they create and stick to them. I'm not sure this article coherently argues either point very well and often makes contradicting statements or uses inappropriate examples. I mean, the Alien becoming big in Alien isn't really a great example of setting up rules or expectations. A better example might have been Ash turning out to be a homicidal droid who wants to sacrifice the crew to save the monster.

    The full article clearly starts by making the "establish ground rules" argument with the "In Time" discussion of the arm wrestling thing... the "subverting expectations" switch-out would not work for their argument here. Then, they almost immediately contradict their point on rules in the next section by basically saying "it's ok to break the rules if you need to get your hero out of a jam." Which I really disagree with.

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  5. But we'd be here all week if we were picking apart all the plot holes from 'In Time' :)

    My favourite is still the moment where Justin and Amanda (I can't even remember what their characters were called) smash the armoured truck into the bank... and as the dust clears, the bank vault door is miraculously wide open. Did they hit it that hard?!?

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  6. Actually, just have to make one point in defence of something the article mentions - R2-D2 being able to fly in Phantom Menace/Attack of the Clones but never again after that.

    Pretty sure there's a moment in AotC just after R2's saved Anakin and Amidala in the big droid factory (all conveyor belts and pots of molten iron) when he uses his boosters to fly across a gap, after which they short out and R2 ejects them accordingly.

    Could be mistaken, but as proving this would involve watching AotC again, I think i'll just live on in ignorance...

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