I've been (binge-)watching Breaking Bad. If you've seen it, I doubt you wonder how it might inspire a post like this one. As I keep telling Randall, "I hate this show and everyone in it!"
It's not even remotely true; it's a great show. But it might be if I were a better person. Awful things happen in that show, and every last one of them could be prevented if people weren't so petty, irrational, and/or stubborn.
It's a show about meth, what do I expect? I have to turn my nihilistic side on just to endure it. No surprise, then, when the characters abandon morality at the drop of a hat.
It's entertaining because you know there are going to be a ton of bad decisions interspersed with a few sparks of genius to keep the system sustainable. I'm four seasons in, and almost none of this would have had to happen if Walt had just let his rich friends pay for the cancer treatment like they offered. I've got a season and a half left, so there's still time for the author to prove to me that something positive came out of that rejection. Still, even if he can somehow justify Walt's refusal, it's gonna be difficult to make the argument that the world's a better place after Walt went underground.
I know, that was never the writer's goal. But I suppose that's my point! The success of the show hinges on people acting against their own best interests. Walt refusing his friends' funding is only one example among many. People often refuse to cooperate with people who slighted them, whether the slight was real or imaginary. People pass on miracle opportunities because they're too proud or stubborn. Catastrophes abound.
It's usually something so bad that the viewer can't imagine the involved characters' relationship will ever recover, but of course, they'll be thrown into a situation where they, again, must cooperate, and their barrier to success will be a history of pettiness.
For a more extreme (in a way) example, consider reality TV. The competition is what allows the genre to survive. Nobody would watch The Biggest Loser if fat people simply got thin. Cooperation doesn't attract an audience. The dice need to be loaded, the system needs to reward betrayal and pit the contestant against one another. The producers fail if the contestants have a healthy relationship with one another when a particular season ends.
Maybe it says something good about society that we have to turn to television to indulge in this kind of drama, that we don't live in a society that's as dog-eat-dog as the competition in the looky-box? More likely, it says something bad about us that we like to indulge in such shadenfruede at all.
Luckily, my point doesn't involve passing judgment. Let's face it, I'm out to capitalize on keeping an audience entertained. I need to be able to create this kind of tension between my characters. A phrase I hear tossed around by a lot of writers involves "murdering one's babies." It refers to when a passages needs cutting, and those passages often feel like the best writing you've ever done, It's valuable advice, but I'm beginning to think the phrase deserves a spinoff.
"Make your babies murder each other." If you create characters you care about, your audience is likely to care too. But nothing will attract an audience like a conflict between two characters they love. So as we start fleshing out clannies, we need to make sure to include some features that will put them at (repeated) odds with their closest friends.
Believe it or not, I'm not entirely sadistic. I've come to realize one of the morals I want to emphasize in Arbiter is the 'be the bigger (wo-)man' one. Part of the protagonists' development should include their ability to cooperate, to come to understand when petty stubbornness won't be worth the consequences, to showcase the power of cooperation when people stop assigning blame or demanding credit. To do that, though, we need to demonstrate why blame and credit are worthless. We're gonna need to include a whole lot of infighting over credit and blame, then, before they're abandoned.
So, help me practice. What fiction (TV's probably easiest here, but feel free to branch out) can you think of that's driven entirely by conflict between friends, family, or even enemies aligned against a common cause?
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