geekariffic:

blogquantumreality:

thedoctor-smith:

geekariffic:

blogquantumreality:

The 100 01×12 “We are Grounders (Pt 1)”

This, I believe, is the first mention of the Commander in the series. What’s really sad is that this shows the kind of care that used to go into the worldbuilding in the first two seasons of this show, before Jason Floppenberg began driving the plot to serve his own hobby horses without regard for narrative and characterization consistency.

I disagree. I reckon that the worldbuilding is done on a per-episode basis. In this episode, Tristan (?) is sent by the commander to replace anya. He says that the commander thinks anya has been fucking it up and he’s here to do the job she failed at.

But later down the line, we learn that Lexa was Anya’s sekken. And she has great respect for her, (OOC dachman thought anya would be maternal to Lexa) etc. That doesn’t make much sense when The Commander in this episode is basically like, you’re fired from this job because you’re useless. It also doesn’t pair up with the type of decisions Lexa makes later down the line (Gustus excluded, I think, because that was a matter of saving face in public).

If worldbuilding was done in advance, I reckon there’d be far more consistency (and logic) than there is.

Also, wtf happened to Ryder?

Excellent point, @geekariffic – so much of post-commentary features fanon influences vs. what really happened in canon.  Creates disconnect.

( @geekariffic as well )

That being said, would you not agree that in Seasons 3 and 4 (especially 4) the narrative arcs actually don’t work when analyzed from a retrospective of where the creative team was ultimately going? And that this phenomenon is decidedly more blatant than in Seasons 1 and 2?

Like the Floukru subplot in S3 served no useful function. Narratively of course Luna isn’t going to take the chip. The hero-protagonist (aka Clarke) is going to be the one to save the day in the final battle. That was telegraphed from the beginning. Or that creepy Emerson serial killer plot, which was completely nonsensical on the face of it. Or, for that matter, Pike trying to justify his act of mass murder on the basis of flimsy reasoning.

And then in Season 4, practically every “save the world” subplot hope spot gets smashed to pieces because the creative team needed to drag out the bunker reveal until mid-season. So as a result we got a smashed water treatment device so Bellamy can save 500 25 people, a gross Nightblood synthesis plot that served no purpose except to possibly dangerously justify human experimentation without consent, and OOC whipsawing back and forth from the grounders who in any sensible “when the chips are down” scenario, would absolutely agree with Clarke that in the vein of peace and unity, fairly parcelling out who from what clan gets to go into the bunker is the way to go.

As far as such convoluted unnecessary subplotting goes which serves to disjoint the narrative, I would say the Finn going barmy arc is probably the closest to such for S2.

@blogquantumreality well Obvs, the Wb and the narrative and the character development (or lack thereof) gets worse as the show goes on.

I remarked to a friend recently that some of the arcs on the 100 felt like the equivalent of manga filler plots – Gohan didn’t need a super saiyaman side plot the same way Luna didn’t need to feature in s3.

The WB doesn’t make sense in a basic level (TW 307)

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Lexa would have guards present who would run into a room at the sound of gunfire. That’s what mooks are for. That’s SOP for military organisations – low ranks take the brunt of the risk.

But it doesn’t make sense in a grander scale – what is said in one season doesn’t match what then happens in another. I absolutely agree with you there, hence my original disagreement in the earlier reblog about the quality of the WBing.

@thedoctor-smith fanon annoys the hell out of me insofar as the long-lasting fanon character traits don’t seem to be born out of the original canon characters at all. Like, did we watch the same show?

Anya, for example, was a powerful, terrifying, give-no-quarter, don’t-fuck-with-me, serious-business, warrior woman. How she became the sassy, sarcastic, joker big sister seems so removed from that original character.

And I understand that fanon now has a history of its own, that there are now ‘standard character archetypes’ for any fanfic, but it’s still fascinating how fanon changed a character so much.

And then the greater disconnect of how fans of the fanon watch the actual canon on TV, and complain when the canon characters don’t behave like the fanon ones. These are two distinct character histories now. They won’t overlap. But even then the WBing is inconsistent.

The tl;dr of this message is that Worldbuilding is hard but fun, but you need to think it through in advance instead of trying to do it on the fly and retcon problems afterwards.

I think you both have made the best points on this – my regard for s1 and s2 in terms of the ‘worldbuilding’ or just storytelling, is that, certainly in s1, it was awfully sloppy and relied upon ‘horny teenagers in the woods’ horror tropes before anything significant actually happened. In fact, nothing much happened in s1 – it was all stage-setting for three separate societies to engage in a battle royale, with very little in-between.  Just basic staging.  ‘Here is the Ark, here is Earth, here is Mt. Weather, here are their representatives.’   

S2 worked better because there was tighter control of the plot in one direction (marching on Mt. Weather), but – and I think this is one of the most significant problems with the show – stage setting is not world-building.  Grounders resembling castoffs from Mad Max films is not world-building.  This show is literally a cut-paste collage of various other media in an attempt to look like world-building.  The grounders ‘origin story’ could have been something fascinating – if told from THEIR point of view.  Sadly, we’ll never get that. Instead, we get Skaikru discovering the individual mysteries and conspiracies around their origins (all of which still do not add up because these ideas are borrowed from other sources) – so it becomes Skaikru’s survival story instead of the Grounders.  Grounders are, increasingly, disposable.  Why?  Their culture is all smoke and mirrors. No need to delve too deeply into the how or why of anything, because the point of view of the series remains firmly with Skaikru (and only in latter episodes of s4 are we seeing this being questioned by characters like Roan and Luna – both of whom end up dead).  

This show takes no time to discover itself, so all conclusions are rushed, all problems major and minor become catastrophes and no attention is paid to the sidelines.  Kudos to the designers who give the show some depth, but it’s only from a design standpoint.  Confusing worldbuilding or narrative structure with design is just one of many problems.  

The fanon vs. canon has been going on at least since s2 and it’s understandable that some fans prefer their versions (many of which are insanely well-written), and voice annoyance with the failings of the show over what are seen as ‘obvious’ plot holes and disjoints in the narrative that the writers ‘should have’ known better about and they probably did: but no time was taken to correct. 

If anything, the 100 is an example of poor writing leadership, too few episodes to tell the story and an unwillingness to learn from mistakes. It’s cut-and-paste storytelling. A bit of GOT here, Hunger Games there, Mad Max over here, some Arthurian romance over there, some Lord of the Flies, some Masque of Red Death, some Colossus: The Forbin Project, some Lord of the Rings, Battlestar Galactica, even Caprica.  This isn’t storytelling, it’s just cribbing.  It’s one thing to be inspired by these stories, it’s another to take their plots and characters and throw them on a board and move them around like D&D characters. 

Imagine the Stranger Things kids making up their own stories based upon comic books they’ve read and films and television they’ve watched and I think we’ve got a pretty good idea how much thought goes into making this show.  I think the writers probably love those other works, but they’ve not done the work of building it themselves they have (to paraphrase Jurassic Park) ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’ and instead of developing the material, they’ve just played dolls with it. 

The best writing, filmmaking, world-building also borrows, but it knows when it must blossom into its own thing or just become a bad copy.  It’s fan fiction, like so much ‘original’ work is fan fiction.  It’s just not the good stuff.