I came to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series at probably the perfect age– I think 13 or 14, whenever my brother started to get the collections. I really loved them, and I still do, although they don’t move me quite as much as they once did. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve never been the type to feel embarrassed about what I used to like when I was younger. You like the stuff that you like at a certain age and then later you’re a different person and you feel differently; that doesn’t make the art worth less or the memories less cherished. Still: I have a hard time reading those now, just like there are bands I can’t really enjoy anymore that I once loved deeply.
One of my biggest complaints with that series is that Gaiman, for all his masterful world-building, makes the bad decision to make every random character pop up again in some way that’s connected to a bigger narrative. Like, there will be some minor character in an early story arc, and then there will be a reference to some other events, and it’ll turn out it involved that minor character. It happens all the time in the series. I get what he’s going for, an interconnected world where everything is linked, but to me it backfires, in that it shrinks the world. The world of Sandman is this teeming mythology, built from the some of the world’s most complex and multifaceted mythic traditions. Its sense of bigness and room for exploration is what makes it so appealing. So when every event or character turns out to have some direct connection to some other event or character we’ve already encountered, it robs that world of its biggest strength. It doesn’t make everything seem connected, to me. It makes everything seem contrived and small.
There’s lots of examples of this– the Harry Potter series springs to mind. Two egregious examples, for me, come in the original Batman movie and in the third Spiderman film. In the former, it’s revealed that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed by the Joker; in the latter, that the criminal who would become the Sandman killed Uncle Ben. These are particularly bad because they remove the sense, integral to both characters, that what drives them initially is not supervillains but the regular street crime that so many people can identify with.
As with so many artistic things, the nadir of this comes in the Star Wars prequels. (May the Fourth be with the current stock price of Disney, guys.) Again, one of the best parts of the original three films is the teeming world that they build, a believable, alive fantasy universe that you feel like you could explore. The fact that so much of the story comes back, again and again, to the supposedly out-of-the-way and nondescript Tatooine; that Chewbacca, for some incredibly inexplicable reason, has a long-standing friendship with Yoda; the plot-killing, utter illogic of the fact that Darth Vader built R2-D2 and C-3P0…. It’s not just the damage this does to consistency and the plot. It’s how it robs the universe of its great feeling of vastness and potential. It isn’t actually cool to explain where Boba Fett comes from; in fact, it sucks whatever cool was left within the character right out. Building backstory is not building character, and a more expansive, more mysterious, more open fantasy world beats one that’s filled with cursory, meaningless connections any time.
You would not have this problem if you forgot the characters’ names as soon as you finished reading about their first appearances.
I had forgotten (if I ever knew) that you read fantasy. Have I suggested that you try some of mine, which is aimed at academics? If so, please excuse it as evidence that I’m a bona fide absent-minded professor.
I’ll give it a look for sure!
I’ve always felt that the worldview of religion has the same problem. It seems to have a view of life and world that is vast and celestial, but the logic of it makes the world seem small and to run on conspiracies good and bad. Evil is in the world – that’s because of Satan! A thunderstorm destroyed the village harvest? – that was done by witches that fornicate with the Devil! Your child recovered from grave illness? – you can thank the Lord for that! etc.
As a piece of literature, the Bible suffers from the same smallness, at least in parts. It shows, as HL Mencken “unmistakable signs of having been tampered with.” God gave a son to the Virgin Mary, who’s sacrifice would go on to save all mankind from damnation. As it turns out, earlier parts of the Bible predict that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, and would be called a Nazarene. An lo! that’s just what happens later on. Things don’t work out so neatly in the real world.
Skeptical scholars point out that the early parts of the Bible really don’t line up with the tortured reasoning used by early Christian apologists. They didn’t really have anything to do with Jesus.
So, a bit out of area, but would that advice apply to ensemble roleplaying games? Conservation of characters is sometimes suggested as a means to help tie various characters together and reduce the risk of telling four separate stories.
I do see what you mean about the downside. There’s also probably tricks that can be used by making the connections organizations or cities or the like, having players make connections themselves, or just increasing the number of degrees of separation. But in a collaborative medium I’d think that some connections can help weave a story together.
Oh, yeah, I think it makes tons more sense for an RPG than for fiction.
Cool. I think it could also make sense for writing in a shared universe even if it isn’t an RPG. But the virtue there is probably connecting with and at times challenging other authors’ works rather than tying back to your own prior works.
R2-D2 was actually introduced as a random, unimportant droid among many on board that ship from Naboo. He emerges from obscurity to save the day.
So, that was a prequel origin handled well I think.
C-3PO, yeah, that was a poorly conceived origin story from the get-go.
You’re correct about the Star Wars prequels. It detracted from the story, and was simply stupid, to have had Anakin build C-3PO. In a series which contains the most famous “secret” connection/revelation in all of film history, all of the extra coincidences/connections seem superfluous and silly. They make one think that perhaps the creative well had run dry, and that gimmick or fanservice were intended to replace good storytelling. This idea seems to repeat itself in “expanded universes” for Star Wars and other fantasy/science-fiction writings, where the stories are either obvious retreads of things which we have already seen, or do not seem to really belong in the unique framework of their respective series.
Sandman is a very different situation. The connections in that story are integral to what we learn, in the end, was the true tale: since his release from captivity, Dream had been intentionally setting into motion a series of events which would eventually lead to his own demise. Many, or most, of the freestanding stories along the way were in fact pieces of a larger plot which came together at the very end. Neil Gaiman did in fact start off with an overarching story from the beginning. How much the details changed along the way as the series (and even the medium/industry in which he was writing) evolved is up for discussion, but there was an intention from the stars to have these stories come together not as a nod to the random interconnectedness of the universe, but as components of a very deliberately built trap which Dream created for himself.
This is something that has always irritated me but I had never found a good way to articulate it. The same phenomenon occurs in the musical “Wicked,” a revisionist prequel to “The Wizard of Oz.” If I recall correctly, Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion all personally knew and went to the same university as the Wicked Witch of the West. Also, Galinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West were frenemies in college. Also, the Wicked Witch’s black, pointed hat was a gift from Galinda, intended to make the Wicked Witch look unfashionable at a party and therefore a target of ridicule. Why couldn’t the Wicked Witch have just picked out her outfit herself?
On the subject of “Star Wars,” I think it was Mike Stoklasa as ‘Plinkett’ who complained that, in the prequels, all of the Jedi dress like the inhabitants of Tatooine for no apparent reason. Of course, Obi-Wan Kenobi was a Jedi in the original movie and happened be living on Tatooine, so he was wearing a hooded, sand-colored tunic. George Lucas, not understanding his own story, decided that all Jedis had to dress like Obi-Wan did in “A New Hope,” even in combat situations where you don’t want loose clothing getting in your way and snagging on things.