Chaos Theory

Storytelling with Buffy

Perfect tips.

The 8 Worst Kinds of Fictional Romances

"Congratulations! You’ve got two actors with great chemistry that the fans want to see together. But you can’t put them together yet, as that’d bring the dreaded Moonlighting problem. And then, eureka! Just give one (or more) of the pair a different love interest.

Dear writers: Please stop doing this. Please stop introducing new characters with the sole personality trait of “obstruction to the couple everyone knows will end up together.” Please stop telling us before they show up that you think we’ll really like them. If you’re right, you’ve got your protagonist breaking a perfectly good person’s heart (See: Richard, Superman Returns) OR you end up committing character assassination in order to make that character bad and therefore absolve your protagonist of any blame. (See: Jason Teague in Smallville. Hmm. You know what? Don’t mess with Superman on this at all.)

If you’re wrong, you’ve got bland filler that’s attracting all sorts of fan hate just by existing. If they’re lucky, the audience ends up forgetting they were ever even there. That’s what happens when you write a plot point rather than a person."

There's also....

"This isn’t just a love triangle. Instead, this is when the writers aren’t really sure where they want the characters to end up, so they keep all the balls in the air. Every pairing’s a possibility! Everyone loves everyone! We’ll just wait for the audience to tell us which ones they like. Or for the actors to develop chemistry. Or for the tea leaves to finish steeping. Just don’t force us into a decision, we’re not ready! Characters pair up, break up, form new pairings, break those up, go back to each other... eventually someone has to walk away, right? Or, in the alternative, no one ever gets together, they just all alternately stare longingly at some and glare jealously at others.

By all accounts, the new Tomorrow People had this problem in spades. Astrid and Stephen? Stephen and Cara? Cara and John? Cara and Stephen?"

Flamingo menace to society

Interview with the fellow who plays Jarvis about fun with flamingos:

"And then, the extensive conversations between myself and the writers' room went along the lines of two texts that were, "How do you feel about working with a flamingo?" Well, one text. And then a followup: "Bwah ha ha ha!" Them laughing. And that's pretty much all I knew about Season 2.

But there were four flamingos, as they told me, ranging in aggressive natures from quite mild to psychotic. And the nicest one was called Simon, and then the one that was a menace to society was called Cannibal.

And Cannibal, we had to do this scene where I had to chase the flamingo around, and maybe be chased by the flamingo. And it all looked very funny on paper, but then I sort of arrived and said, "Just checking: It's not dangerous? It's a flamingo, right? It's not dangerous?" And they went, "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Cowboy -- that thing will peck your eyes out." And I was like, "Okay..." And by the way, the handlers kept calling me "Cowboy," which did not inspire confidence. And so the girl put her arm out, and Cannibal just went to town, just, like, pecking away like a maniac. And so I thought, "This is worrying."

And then, it turned out that Cannibal really liked me! Cannibal sort of refused to peck me or chase me or be chased by me. Cannibal just wanted a hug. But then, as soon as the handlers came back in, Cannibal went nuts again. So we had to have them sort of stand off-camera, so that they would either run away from them or towards them. Poor Cannibal. I think he was pretty happy when his day was over."

Top Ten Christmas Miracles On Television

Pretty sweet.

Oh, Joss, you are my master

I'm listening to this and there's also a writeup of the best bit about storytelling.

Becoming and cookie dough and baking and Buffy

“I’m unbaked cookie dough,” Buffy said, of why she wasn’t ready for a “grown-up” relationship. Girl, you can decide you’re not ready to “settle down,” whatever that means. You do you, you know? But you’re not fucking “unbaked”—you’ve survived your mother’s death, died twice yourself, literally battled demons, saved the world, and loved and lost multiple times over. When, exactly, would you consider yourself “fully baked”?

One is never not oneself, and yet that self is also constantly changing, recalibrating, growing, shrinking, evolving, as it comes into contact with people and experiences that assert their unique effect on it. So yes, you could wait to “see what you’ll become,” but that could be true of the relationship between any one moment and any other moment in the future. And sure, if you want to have time to figure out your career without the burdens of being beholden to another person, or save money before you start having children, or just be on your own because that’s what you think you need, those are legitimate logistical and emotional concerns, but to presume that you are less full a person now than you will be at some later date seems to undermine everyone’s humanity, or place people who have either age or a determined list of “growth-oriented” experiences under their belt in some higher category of personhood than others. Which is also not to say that years and experiences do nothing to enrich (or even sometimes, unfortunately, to damage) the self, but only to say that the self is just as “self” at any instantaneous moment, and that time and experience act on the self in unexpected and interesting ways, yes, but not in some linear, predictable way that will result in a recognizable moment of having “become” oneself after which it’s all just living as that actualized self until you die. How very boring.

I’m not here to give life advice—please wait as long as you’d like to get married or move abroad or take a desk job or whatever. Or never do any of those things—there’s no “right way” to live a “good” life. But never believe the lie that you need to “become yourself.” You are already yourself. Which doesn’t negate the fact that every experience you have and every choice you do make—even and sometimes especially the “little” ones—isn’t transforming you. Marriage transforms; so does living alone; so does the death of your first pet, and hearing your parents fight for the first time, and, I don’t know, stumbling across a field of lavender. Just as some improv scenes are “important” because they’re the day he asks for a divorce, the day she gets the promotion, the day the apocalypse begins, some improv scenes are important not because they are “big,” but because of how a seemingly mundane scenario impacts the characters, reveals their strengths or weaknesses, asks them to confront some long-held prejudice or long-harbored fear.

And if we wait for those moments to seem “important”—on stage or in life—or wait to feel more “ready” by some arbitrary clock that claims we’re grown or ready rather than by our own internal belief in the fullness of our self and all of our experiences—we keep looking out toward the horizon of some imagined future self that falls away from us as we approach it, and never see ourselves, or the people in front of us, for the full, flawed, messy, beautiful people that we are now. And now. And now."

“Did you know this was what you wanted to do when you were growing up?” I meant, “act, write and tell stories.”

"But this, the thing that Felicia Day does, didn’t exist when she was growing up, didn’t really exist until she started doing it. She went to L.A. because she wanted a career that was unpredictable, that didn’t have boundaries on where the next five years would take her. She’s certainly found it."

"Accept that you’ll never have a “normal” life, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have some sort of love life, for fuck’s sake."

"This is Natasha’s entire argument to Bruce. The sterilization story is part of this. Yes, she was forcibly sterilized and yes, she knows that picket fences and kids aren’t in her future. But so the fuck what? You can still bone Mark Ruffalo! Natasha rejects the extreme views of Steve and Roger, instead believing that it’s possible to have a life that both has Avenger work and love in it.

And the movie is 100% on her side. They aren’t even subtle about it. Literally right before Natasha hits on Bruce the first time, viewers are reminded that both Thor and Tony have happy relationships outside of the Avenging  work. This primes you to side with her when she suggests to Bruce that such a thing is totally doable, particularly since they hang out together all the time anyway. Natasha, in other words, is the most emotionally healthy and rational person in the entire movie, except for maybe Thor. So what if she feels insecure and monstrous sometimes? The world does tell women who want an independent existence that they’re monsters. One is bound to absorb that message and feel insecure sometimes."

Mark Ruffalo on Age of Ultron, Joss, romance, etc.

"I think that what people might really be upset about is the fact that we need more superhuman women. The guys can do anything, they can have love affairs, they can be weak or strong and nobody raises an eyebrow. But when we do that with a woman, because there are so few storylines for women, we become hyper-critical of every single move that we make because there's not much else to compare it to."

"Of course, scabies is also a memorable experience, but volunteers are not so quick on the draw for that one."

"I thought it would be fun to attend the Marvel movie marathon, and so I suggested that it might also make a fun thing to write about.

However, there are a man and a woman out in front of the theater, dressed as Captain America and Black Widow, taking pictures with anyone coming in, so I chat with them for a moment. The woman, Kelly Perez, is enthusiastic and vivacious, an ace cosplayer of four years who agreed to appear because she’s friends with the manager here. She is not attending the marathon, and I cannot blame her, after seeing how some of the male attendees interact with her. Our Captain America is a guy named Luis, who is attending the marathon, and is assuredly not a regular cosplayer. “I actually got this [outfit] to put on a dummy, and it’s my first time wearing it,” he tells me. “It’s very snug.” He will wear his outfit the entire time, and after hearing how it makes him sweat, I am glad I’m sitting nowhere near him.

Here’s another fact you need to know, for events later on to make sense: I have a heart condition that makes it impossible for me to have caffeine, or stimulants of any kind, really, unless I don’t want my heart to work any more. As a result, I’m not so good with staying up super late, or functioning on less than five or six hours of sleep a night. This means future employers don’t have to worry about the possibility of my developing a cocaine habit, but it also means that I will not, for example, get to join in the mass coffee exodus that will happen tomorrow morning after the first Avengers movie ends. So I fear for my staying-awake skills.

There are hosts for our event, employees of AMC who are there to answer questions, maintain our enthusiasm in between films by hosting trivia giveaways, and to indulge in all the worst responsibilities of contemporary social-media-based requirements. For example, we are encouraged throughout the night to tweet, Instagram, and Facebook our experience, all with the requisite hashtags, of course, and are actually chided when our hosts feel there has been an inadequate amount of said hashtagging.

I do want to note that I’m still discovering new things in these films. I never really realized before that the secret hero of the first film is Pepper—she’s the one who kills the bad guy and generally does everything right, something the third film makes explicit by making her the final hero.

“Come on! You’re not excited?” says one host, demanding more cheers. Shut up, dude, it’s 1 a.m. Happily, he soon abandons this effort, and instead the theater starts playing surround-sound test noises. Loudly. Like, nature sounds. It’s confounding. Are they testing our reflexes? Are we supposed to collectively turn our heads to follow the animal sounds around the room? I swear to God AMC is fucking with us. Or maybe they’re punishing us for not hashtagging enough?

This marathon isn’t just a series of films; it’s a massive experiment in hypnotherapy via sleep-prevention technology. Maybe there’s something in the pretzel bites? These are the kind of thoughts that make honest-to-god sense to me as the credits roll at 7:49 a.m., and there’s some disturbing scrawls in an Iron Man notebook to prove it.

I do my best to take a short nap, sprawling out across three seats, a deeply uncomfortable position made more so by the bright lights and the people having a loud debate a few rows over regarding whether Ant-Man will eventually become an Avenger in time for the Infinity Wars movies. Shut up, nerds, I think, wearily, as I remember having spent 30 minutes internally debating myself a few weeks ago about that same question.

The trivia sessions have now become a marathon unto themselves, as our cranky ambivalence has resolved into something resembling angry capitulation to our hosts’ whims. You want us to shout? We’ll fucking shout. We will slice our wrists open to get a damn extra-large T-shirt at this point. He takes suggestions for the next prize, and I offer to snap a child’s neck in exchange for a $10 gift card. My neighbors feel this is a reasonable suggestion."

Metafilter commentary on this.

Vox commentary on also doing this.

"What is the name of the actor who plays Star Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy? That's the movie you just saw," he would ask us the next day.

This question, of course, is not "trivia," so much as it was "paying attention to the credits" or "having read an entertainment publication at any time in the past two years."

Imagine these questions happening after every other movie for 29 hours. Imagine this happening at 3:45 am.

The emcee returns. He wants to "get us pumped" ... at 4:13 am. This is somehow not a nightmare.

I realize I could have flown to Asia and back in the time I've spent in auditorium seven at the United Artists King of Prussia multiplex.

"Everyone creates the thing they dread," Ultron says in the movie, driving this point home.

I wonder if I've ever created anything I've later come to hate. Pitching coverage of this Marathon comes to mind."

Topless Robot has commentary from the same theater as Vox, apparently.

"I have made my first mistake of the evening: not purchasing the refillable Avengers mega-cup. They've sold out, much to the chagrin of some of the patrons, and instead I've purchased just a large soda to go along with my dinner.

I met recent med school graduate Samuel who flew in from Virginia Beach for the marathon and discussed strategies for when to sleep without missing the action. At this point, he's planning on napping during our next film, Thor, but for now I'm going to try and sally forth. If any film could possibly render me unconscious, it's Thor.

I will say that hygiene has been a big part of the event. People are changing shirts, brushing teeth, reapplying deodorant, and doing generally whatever they have to do to remain funk free. Granted we've only been here a day, but this could have gotten really funky, really quickly. As for me, while some of the signs of exhaustion have departed, I'm starting to get a little nervous. Two of my fingers on my left hand are twitching uncontrollably. Focusing on stopping the movement seems to work, but if I turn my attention back to the films, it isn't long before the twitching starts again."