this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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a woman searching for her kidnapped father who hopes to trade a (spoilers) for his release who is herself kidnapped by a semi-immortal and befriends a man who has only lived his whole life in a bootcamp against the background of a 200-year-old unethical social experiment precipitated by a global nuclear catastrophe... is not what I would call a bland plot.
Even if executed badly, written poorly, acted ineptly, shot awfully, edited confusingly and delivered sub par, I don't think the plot is bland.
Compared to, say, a lawyer starts at a new office and falls in love with his secretary, or a teenage daughter falls in love with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks.
Or compared to whatever the fuck the Halo series was
I thought the point of all halo stuff was humans shooting aliens and aliens shooting humans. 🐈🦅
The entire point was the introduction of Master Cheeks.
I'd say most of that is the setting, not the plot. The plot was mostly about slowly uncovering that setting, bringing a MacGuffin from A to B, and having random stuff happen along the way. Many of the character interactions felt surface level (heh) as well to me, probably because or why (as I said) I couldn't really get into the characters.
Idk, I don't blame you if you see it differently, but the overall narrative and character building left a bit to be desired for me.
I'm very deep into this stuff having worked in entertainment my whole life, plot as fabula vs plot as syuzhet - the world of the drama vs the events of the drama - which are inseparable and at times interchangeable.
While you could say Fallout S1E1 is just set up for a standard Aristotlean call to adventure, you could also take each beat granularly: Howard (who becomes The Ghoul) faces a tough social confrontation at a kids birthday party, obviously hurting from being down on his luck as an actor, when seven or eight nuclear bombs detonate, but there are also sub beats regarding the size of his thumb (detailing his history of military action, and setting a call back for the Fallout Boy thumbs-up logo which we learn about in coming episodes...)
While I agree it's probably not going to be anyone's favorite show of all time, I do think the dramaturgy is well-considered.
Pacing is a dramaturgical issue sure, (as well as performance, cinematographic and editing-room issue) but you can pace a plot of "girl loses balloon, girl looks for balloon, girl finds balloon" like sesame street, an action movie, a chekov play, an advertisement or a 12 hour German expressionist epic - it doesn't change the plot itself.
That's not plot, those are premises. Premises are fine at the beginning of a series but they need to do something interesting with those premises.
For example, lawyers starts a new office and falls in love with secretary is just a premise, a starting point. But it turns out that said lawyer has a strong imposter syndrome that makes him doubts everything he does despite his externally cocky attitude, while the secretary is actually a down on her luck law student who got emotionally abused by her previous boyfriend who is now the new hire on a high tier firm that is the main competitor of the protagonist's firm. Main guy shows interest on the secretary but they have a fallout due to her wariness and his insecurity. Then the opposing firm starts a hostile takeover by stealing clients and lawyers. Main guy is on the brink of bankruptcy which throws him into a spiral. So he concocts a crazy plan that involves a dangerous representation of the local mafia, to which one of their big players are the estranged family of the secretary who she tried to abandon to run away from the insecurity and violent life. So now they find out this facts about each other when the mafia accidentally kills one of the lawyers of the opposing firm under weird circumstances and both the lawyer and the secretary end up hashing their deep emotional baggage on a road trip to another district and find their respective strengths, her to confront her criminal father and him to stand up for his employees, then…
You get the idea, that is plot. Things that happen to the characters or that the characters do, that fundamentally changes them and the context. A cool premise can only get you so far. In Fallout things barely happen and the characters end up more or less at the same place they started in, emotionally speaking.
see my reply here for further explanation about what I meant: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11015082
In dramaturgical terms I'd define what you say here as
it's a plot summary or precis.
And then to take a few of your points:
these are character attributes and are not necessarily writer-controlled and could vary wildly between the writers' intent, the directorial notes and the actor portrayal.
debatable about whether this is plot. If we see (or hear about) this happening relative to a turn of a beat or a block of the objective to a character in a beat - then, that's plot otherwise its exposition
If we see the main guy making a move, this is plot, the reason for her rejection is an attribute or expository, but is not specifically dramaturgical
Technically this wouldn't actually be plot without us seeing the opposing firm (presumably by synecdoche of seeing a character from the firm). So if we meet people from the competition firm it's plot, but if we don't then the plot would be more accurately described as "characters X, Y and Z leave the firm" and less accurately that "the competitor steals the characters"
the reason for being this specific is a) artistic - that drama (including comedic drama) relies on character relationships and dialogue and b) the process of turning writing to performance to product is a large and refined one that requires adherence to these principles to function
While I can surely appreciate a technical breakdown, that was still a lot of hot air. That doesn't change the fact that, whatever your want to technically call what happened in Fallout, it was not interesting. It was flashy, it was pretty, but it was not interesting. Thus bland, like rice without seasoning. It's there, it fills a stomach, it has nutrients. But ultimately it is boring and inconsequential.
I think you and I watched different shows. It was very interesting to find out what's going on with these vaults. With this ghoul. With this squire low level grunt in the brotherhood. They all had interssting stories and character traits that played out nicely together into the larger picture/story.
We definitely watched different shows. Matter of taste I suppose. But none of those things were actually interesting. They were set up as mysterious, but were actually telegraphed and predictable. The characters really displayed no depth at all, nothing that happened to them or that they did changed them in any significant way. And the whole thing has massive plot holes and ends in a event that only video game fans would care about but overall, instead of a resolution, leads to a cliffhanger.
Bro what are you even talking about. Lucy and Maximus had their entire world-views turned upside down, completely changing allegiances by the end of the season. Cooper/the ghoul probably had the least development but he did go from bounty hunting for the love of it to trying to find his family again.
I'd swear you never even watched the show, you're just throwing out mindless criticisms with no bearing on the actual plot.
To me the interesting part is blaming this on plotting, why I'm digging into it is that - as writers/creators/dramaturgs we often coalesce around how it's never what is happening, but how the people dealing with it interact with each other.
What plot events do you feel were missing? We had nukes, monsters, gun fights, h2h combat, robots, all the main characters interact. What plot point, if added, would've saved it for you?
First of all, I don't think it needs saving at all. It is what it is. Most people like it and I think that it barely qualifies for background noise. That is not a bad thing, nor do I think it's a bad show. But everything that has happened in Fallout I have seen it better executed and in more interesting ways elsewhere. It's cliche events, predictable story, characters have no agency and their arcs are flat, and it has a weird almost Disney like censorship over the whole plot. We almost never get to see the truly (few) eventful and important beats. But also even minor things that would be interesting or impactful to watch, they always cut or pan away the camera.
Nothing needs saving, no entertainment needs to be good, but arguably, we want entertainment to be good, therefore it should be good. That is the line of conversation. Of course Maslow's hierarchy of needs exists, but let's take that as read.
I want to dig into the "cliche" and "agency" part: Fallout (the games) are themselves pastiches of south-west Americana - westerns and cowboy dramas with a retro scifi flare (like how most cyberpunk dramas are pastiches of film noir). With that premise in mind, of course you need A Man With No Name as anti-hero.
It's also an homage to a video game - a genre defined by everything being a go-fetch quests as a simplified version of Aristotles Poetics.
So I don't think you can adapt fallout and ignore these influences - that's part of the fun. If you don't like westerns and quests you're not only going to hate fallout tv show, but the fallout games too. But also red dead redemption, elder scrolls, mass effect...
We disagee that it was Disney-esque (there were heads exploding in every episode, a guy gets shot in the gooch, children are frequently murdered, there is on-screen sex, rape via deception, slavery, impalement, desecration of corpses, mutilation, maiming and vivisection, cannibalism, frequent visible kill shots to the head, nudity and tier-1 swearing).
What are the important beats we don't see? >!the explosion of the city caused by the important guy, causing a main character to hate him!< - we certainly see the aftermath and consequences frequently and a significant part of the final episode discusses it. I can't think of anything else.
I've never rolled my eyes so hard at a comment, and I've been on the Internet for decades. We are talking past each other. You obviously don't care what I said. Unfortunately I have no more time to entertain your ego, so I'll give it to you. You won the Internet debate, hurray!
I just find it interesting, I'm sorry you don't. there's no need to be rude.
No man, the topic is interesting but you made it annoying and rude yourself. By ignoring everything I said by over explaining how my opinion is wrong(!?). I'm more than happy to converse about Fallout, and all the good and bad it has to offer, just not with you.
I didn't say it was wrong, I said we disagreed.
I also responded directly to everything you said and then asked you follow up questions for clarification?
definitions 2 and 3 both work here.
I had thought the premise was a daughter trying to find the father, a bounty hunter on a bounty while also trying to find his family, a squire caught in political machinations trying to save himself, and a suspicious vault citizen investigating the mystery of another vault.
And then over the episodes those premises were fleshed out, coming to interesting conclusions in episode 8.