Valid Premises

[jburneko]

This was said down in the "big three you never see thread."  I have a question about it that I thought deserved its own thread.  I *DO NOT* want this to devolve into an argument over the opinion stated in the quote below.

On 2001-11-27 05:02, contracycle wrote:

What's Buffy the Vampire Slayer about? Kicking demon ass & casting cool spells? Nope. It's about love.

Which is why its unwatchable garbage, IMO.  All it really is is Yet Another Soap Opera - dull and shallow.

First of all I maintain that the Premise of Buffy is a bit wider than just Love.  It's about modern teenage problems of which Romantic Relations is a big part.  That Premise has mutated slightly as the characters have gotten older but Romantic Relations has stayed central because that Premise is pretty important at all stages of life.  This brings me to my actual question.

Judging from your reaction you seem to think that Romantic Relations has sort of been done to death and isn't a valid Premise anymore.  AM I reading you correctly?  And if I am, I'm curious as to why you think so?  I draw this conclusion because your inclusion of the phrase "Yet Another Soap Opera" seems to imply that ANY narrative that focuses on Romantic Relations is "shallow."  Not just Buffy's presentation.

To me the purpose of examining any Premise in a fantastical setting is of course to shine new light or at least a different colored light on that Premise as it exists within the real world.  Take for example, the Premise of Romantic Relations in the Buffyverse as opposed to the World of Darkness.

In the Buffyverse (forgive me for such an odd word but it's the one my girlfriend uses and she's a bigger fan than I am) we've seen ALL manner of supernatural entity exhibit some kind of Romantic behavior.  It may be dark twisted oddly illogical Romantic behavior but it is still genuine Romantic behavior and not some simulated facsimily of said behavior.  The resultant Theme is that Romance is Ubiquitous.  Romance doesn't require a soul, it doesn't require you to be human, it only requires you to be alive in some sense of the word. (In Buffy, a vampire's body is dead, but the demon that animates the body is quite alive in a demonic sense)  Now of course we the audience are free to reflect on that as we please.  Is Romance fundamental to life?

This is WAY WAY WAY different than the World of Darkness approach.  In the World of Darkness Vampires are genuinely dead bodies kept alive by the blood of other beings.  No demon.  One thing it makes VERY clear is that vampires do not have genuine emotions.  They do have MEMORIES of emotions but are incapable of experiencing new emotions.  Emotions and therefore Love are part of what make you Human.  So, theoretically, vampires in the World of Darkness are incapable of GENUINE Romantic relations.  They can simulate romantic relations because they still have the intellectual concept of love.  So that raises a new kind of question: Is the intellectual concept of love enough to carry on a genuine romantic relationship or is there something more required?  I don't know.  Let's play a game of Vampire focusing on love affairs and find out.

And that to me, is the power of the RPG over other mediums.  A book, TV or Movie can only make statements.  Any questions that arrise in us the audiance have to be answered by ourselves or at least wait to see if the show decides to go in that direction.  However, with an RPG the audiance and the authors are the same.  As questions arrise in the audiance so shapes the story to formulate an answer.  Instant intellectual gratification.

Anyway, I've now wandered pretty far from my original question which was has Romantic Relations been done to death?  Or indeed has ANY Premise been done to death?  I say no, because there is an infinite number of unsual circumstances both realistic and fantastic that these Premises can be examined under. These circumstances then yeild interesting questions and observations regarding these Premises as they exist in the real world.

Jesse

[Epoch]

Jesse,

Minor side point, but where do you get that Leechs in the WoD are incapable of experiencing "new" emotions?  Is this a VRev thing?  Sounds interesting to me, but in the limited amount I used to know about Vampire (back in the 2nd Edition days), it doesn't ring a bell.

[jburneko]

On 2001-11-27 14:17, Epoch wrote:

Minor side point, but where do you get that Leechs in the WoD are incapable of experiencing "new" emotions?  Is this a VRev thing?  

The only edition of Vampire I own is Vampire Revised.  I never even played a game of Vampire.  It does state very plainly that Vampires are incapable of real emotions and that they simulate having emotions as a desperate attempt to hold on to one of the few remaining elements of humanity.  They simulate having emotions in a futile attempt to experience something they can only intellectually remember.  I remember this distinctly because it was one of the few things that really caught my attention while reading.  I don't have the book with me now but if you'd like I can cite a page number for you.

Jesse

[Marco]

I think the important part here is 'IMO.' Clearly, buffy is not unwatchable (it has viewers). Shallow is up to the individual (and yet it's one of those loaded words that often implies a context which doesn't actually exist).

Contra hates Buffy but how could that possibly invalidate an entire Premise?

Btw: Buffy *changed* themes (IMHO). If it were a game and the game system was integral to the way the characters were portrayed thematically, they would've needed a new system in, like, their last year of high school. It went from Scooby-gang vs. The World to Scooby-gang vs. Themselves. It also changed Vampire-definition: spike, with no soul now gets Angel-Buffy-action (!). How can demons be demons if they're capable of love?

-M.
Not that I'm complaining--I like the show.

[jburneko]

On 2001-11-27 14:36, Marco wrote:
Contra hates Buffy but how could that possibly invalidate an entire Premise?

No, No, I'm not debating Contra's opinion of the show.  That's EXACTLY what I want to avoid.  It's the fact that he tagged on the "Yet Another Soap Opera."  And that his reaction was based on the fact that someone pointed out the show was about Romantic Relations.  To me it seemed to imply that ANYTHING based on Romantic Relations would be dull and shallow at least to Contra.

I wondered if my reading of his statement was correct.  Basically I read his statement as: Because Buffy is based on the Premise of Romantic Relations, Buffy is dull and shallow.  I get this from the fact that the first statement was: "Buffy is about love." and Contra's reply began with, "That is why..."  This is different from: Buffy's HANDLING of Romantic Relations is dull and shallow.  I'm curious as to which is Contra's real opinion.  If it's the first then I'm really curious if he feels Romantic Relations as a Premise has been done to death and why.  If it's the second then perhaps there is nothing to discuss and I apologize for misreading his statement.

Jesse  

P.S. This of course applies to everyone.  Does anyone feel that ANY Premise has been done to death?  If so, why?

[ This Message was edited by: jburneko on 2001-11-27 14:55 ]

[joshua neff]

First of all, Jesse's right--let's leave Contra's opinions about Buffy the show out of this. They're not relevant to the argument.

Second, I don't think any Premise has been done to death, especially in regards to RPGs. You could have the same set up for a game, with the same Premise, & with two different groups (even including some of the same people), you'll get two very different outcomes. The big Premises are generally called "universal" because they are just that. Love, Death, Politics, Honor, blah blah blah. I don't think they'll ever get tiresome & trite.

[Ben Morgan]

The only edition of Vampire I own is Vampire Revised. I never even played a game of Vampire. It does state very plainly that Vampires are incapable of real emotions and that they simulate having emotions as a desperate attempt to hold on to one of the few remaining elements of humanity. They simulate having emotions in a futile attempt to experience something they can only intellectually remember. I remember this distinctly because it was one of the few things that really caught my attention while reading. I don't have the book with me now but if you'd like I can cite a page number for you.

This was there in 2nd Edition (and probably 1st as well), but it seems to be one of those things that most WoD players seem to skip over, like all the sections that talk about using the game to create stories, rather than just revert to D&D hack & slash.

Going solely on the impression one gets from the plethora of VtM-based MOO's, MUD's, MUSH's, and what-not, it's easy to see how this whole concept of vampires not being capable of emotion gets lost, because a great majority of the games I've seen are used as excuses for people to engage in (for desperate want of a better term) cybersex with Ann-Rice-styled trappings.

And that's the real frustrating thing with Vampire. People who are into it always seem to be intersted in little more than killing things and having sex. You'd think that they could at least make the sex & violence interesting, but no, they have to reduce everything to die rolls.

Now that I've strayed horribly from the point of the thread, I'll get back to it.

I agree with Ron's statement in the Big Three thread in that Romance is a Premise very rarely seen (and usually very badly dealt with when it is) in Gaming. In the realm of TV and movies, it has been done quite a lot, but I think that it's a concept that will always be with us as a sentient species. It's one of those things that can even trancend differing cultures, which may have radically disparate ideas regarding love & romance (contrast the Western ideal of "True Love Conquering All(TM)" with that of, say, Japanese culture, where True Love is often something which brings a Hero to ruin because it conflicts with his Sworn Duty), but it is something which has always been present, and will continue to be.

In short, I don't think it will ever be done "to death". Someone will always read an old story, and want to cast it in a new light.

Re: Buffy, I'm thoroughly convinced that Joss Whedon is a gamer, and not just because of the Nerdy Legion of Doom. The way I see it, he's been running a six-year game whose storyline is quite consistently far superior to nearly anything I've seen from the WoD crowd (certainly anything I've seen in White Wolf's metaplot). Don't begrudge me my soap opera. :smile:

[contracycle]

Hmm.  I don't necessarily think that Romance as premise has been done to death, but I do feel it has become the default filler of nearly anything amde for TV.  I feel there is a tendency to include a romantic angle as a way of contriving a happy ending in the Heroic tradition - the slaying of dragons is rewarded by a princess.  The result is what I see as the abrogation of almost all other elements of story, notably setting consistency, in favour of this, to my mind artificial, romantic dynamic.  It's When Harry Met Sally on infinite loop without the depth.

This has a severely distoring effect on the soap genres, IMO.  Somebody was intervewing whatsisname, played Bobby Ewing, about Dallas - how many times he'd dressed up as a policeman, how many times he had been involved in the rescue of a kidnapped or held person.  The number of women seduced was 11.  Now I think this happens becuase the writers, desperate to fill up the hours, are applying a cookie cutter approach - slap in romantic subplot here, big pointy arrow.  Another prime offender is the nominally "gritty" and "realistic" East Enders - who just happen to have cross-married and exchanged houses so often that its hard to tell who gave birth to who by whom, and indeed this very ambiguity is held in reserve for the basis of yet more straight-to-wok plotting later.

More annoyingly, this mandatory happy ending appears to be a very prominent feature of American TV and film drama; no confrontation with badguys is possible without a damsel to rescue and whose affections to win - or at least so it is in a good 90% of productions.  Interestingly from my perspective, some of the stories which have been very popular and effective don't make use of this (IMO crude) device at all - in Die Hard Bruce Willis is happily married and stays that way; in Star Wars the romantic subplot is very much in the background and is a bait-and-switch after all.  By contrast, "chickflicks" which make the romance a primary rather than sub- plot don't suffer from the banalaties of the parachuted romance becuase the characters are properly established and explored in that context.  After all the "romantic" subplots are more often than not really seduction plots; the relationship itself is implied but not explored in the way it is in a mature working of romance such as that between Warren Beaty, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in Reds.

The very truncated treatment of romance in the seduction subplot is the secret of its repetitiveness; it can be duplicated again and again almost word for word, as we see in James Bond or Knight Rider (Bond has a better excuse 'cos he's a cad).  These romantic plots are not really there as romantic plots but as exposition of the lead and providing a romantic lead to act as a foil.  Doing the actual relationship bit would require that the character change, which would work against the "reset at credits" design of much of this sort of TV or film serial.

I think Buffy is not really about romance at all, to the extent that its "about" anything other than eyecandy.  Admittedly I have only seen a few episodes, so I am not best placed to comment, but the whole "teen angst" thing appears to me to be a much better description of its premise; the romance element is merely the subject of some of this angst.  But the romance MUST be there becuase of what I see as a conventionalised structure for TV serials, especially those aimed at a youth audience - hence the "snappy" dialogue and the complete immunity to fear.  Now IIRC Buffy has had some persistant romantic leads, which is unusual for such serials which usually need to contrive some deus ex machina to explain why the lead (say Knight Rider) does not change - the romantic lead is shot, turns out to be a spy, suffers a tragic accident, is prommised to another - whatever, anything at all to make sure that the basic infinitely repeating loop of the basic "story" is not derailed.

Anyway, since my teens I've been playing the game of trying to to guess how the romantic lead will be eliminated from the picture.  Its mildly entertaining but distressingly predictable, like the Red Shirts in Star Trek.  

[Ben Morgan]

I think Buffy is not really about romance at all, to the extent that its "about" anything other than eyecandy. Admittedly I have only seen a few episodes, so I am not best placed to comment, but the whole "teen angst" thing appears to me to be a much better description of its premise; the romance element is merely the subject of some of this angst. But the romance MUST be there becuase of what I see as a conventionalised structure for TV serials, especially those aimed at a youth audience - hence the "snappy" dialogue and the complete immunity to fear. Now IIRC Buffy has had some persistant romantic leads, which is unusual for such serials which usually need to contrive some deus ex machina to explain why the lead (say Knight Rider) does not change - the romantic lead is shot, turns out to be a spy, suffers a tragic accident, is prommised to another - whatever, anything at all to make sure that the basic infinitely repeating loop of the basic "story" is not derailed.

That's the thing, though (how's that for alliteration?): the characters HAVE changed, in some cases quite drastically, and continue to do so. And because the characters have changed so much, the Premise has shifted. Characters that started out as teenagers are now dealing with decidedly much more adult-oriented issues, ie: Buffy's mom dying (specifically from something against which Buffy is powerless), Xander getting married, etc. The balance of focus on the supernatural element of the show as opposed to the more "human" element has varied from season to season, and in some cases, from episode to episode. Howver, it does not do so randomly, but with purose to highlight whatever element is most powerful at a given moment. So instead of the tone of the show being choppy, it instead strives to be consistently meaningful.

The show deliberately eschews the "sitcom effect", where everything is resolved in the space of one episode, and everything ends up in the same place as it started. Buffy has, for the most part, a very distinct sense of its own continuity (there were some hiccups earlier on i the series, btu most have been ironed out), and as such, the episodes have to be watched in a certain order. By standard Soap Opera conventions, Buffy is indeed a Soap Opera. However, it is by no means a mediocre one.

[Mike Holmes]

C'mon, every premise was done to death probably by the time Shakespeare was done with 'em. And we've been cruising on vapors ever since. I suppose some of these dead horses have been beaten longer than others, making them less palatable than the others, but is there anything new under the sun, at least where basic premises like romance are concerned?

Still, what other option do we have? Pick a premise for which you have enough passion to breath a little life into, and go with that. Personally, romance bores me, and not just bad romance as described by Contra.

OTOH, I'm a sucker for novelty. I like Buffy because of the stupid absurdity of juxtapositions of normality and the supernatural, and the jabs they take at the ridiculousness of the Hidden World concept. Which I see as the premise of the original movie, and, when they occur in the series, are what keep me coming back. The way I see it, the Angstie Romance plots are just filler to get to those moments. I'm sure I would feel different if I were a thirteen-year old girl. Explains the remarkably broad audience.

"Hey, haven't seen you since graduation!"

"Yeah...Big snake, huh?"

Mike