Taking a pause on the freewrite to talk about TV shows and other bits of fiction I find interesting. I have been catching up on Arcane and on Boba Fett. One feels like an oddly drawn version of Harley Quinn and the other, well, it is starting to feel more and more like a vehicle for other things. Case and point: In the last two episodes Boba has had less than a minute of combined screen time and I don’t think he spoke for more than 10 seconds. That’s weird. However, it isn’t so weird if you view aspects of the show as a way to connect to the past and the future–as Boba really serves as such a connection. There is a lot they’ve worked to connect to the Bad Batch and older shows and it works, but it does take away from the show being a stand alone show. I want Boba to be about Boba. This is the way.
Arcane feels… strange. Oversexualized teens is the way of anime, but few add in the crazy of Harley Quinn. This is doing it and doing it while telling a sweeping lore that covers years of video gaming within League of Legends. It got me thinking about games and the stories that connect them. It made me feel like there will be an Apex Legends show in the near future. Of course, it also had me thinking about the concept of Open vs. Closed game realities. Arcane is purely backstory, which offers a closed plot. We know about many of the featured characters because no less than 6 of them appear as playable heroes in game. We know where they end up and this is about how they got there. Apex is Open. They are telling a story forward while the game reveals precious bits of backstory, they also move the narrative forward with each new character drop. We don’t know how it ends or if it is even capable of ending.
Just a few thoughts on story this evening. That is all.
Some Thoughts:
- Building my Madden playbook is taking a long time and the plays are not going as well as I hoped. I’ll be rolling into the game against my kid tomorrow unprepared. Entirely unprepared.