A few days ago, I read ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
melannen's take on canon het relationships (via umadoshi), which was fascinating and got me thinking, but I didn't respond directly there because I realized all my thoughts on the subject were veering toward written canon rather than TV, which had been the original topic. In particular, it made me think about series mysteries, which are probably the books structured most like TV shows anyway, but with a little more space for character depth due to the medium.
From melannen's post, point 5:
This is a big problem in a lot of mystery series, particularly on the lighter/cozy side, probably because they're more likely to have female leads. The Stephanie Plum books offer the most egregious example I can think of: It was pretty clear the author intended Stephanie and Joe to be endgame, or at least that's what's telegraphed from very early on, but in the interest of drawing it out for as long as humanly possible, she's put in a will-they-won't-they triangle with the mysterious Ranger, too, he of the intense sex appeal and almost zero backstory. I made it through at least fifteen books (they get swapped around the family at the beach cottage every summer), and still nothing had been resolved, at which point everything felt entirely formulaic and I gave up. I was only in it for the characters, not the actual mysteries, and if the characters weren't going to ever progress, what was the point in continuing?
( Well, this sure got long... )
melannen's take on canon het relationships (via umadoshi), which was fascinating and got me thinking, but I didn't respond directly there because I realized all my thoughts on the subject were veering toward written canon rather than TV, which had been the original topic. In particular, it made me think about series mysteries, which are probably the books structured most like TV shows anyway, but with a little more space for character depth due to the medium.From melannen's post, point 5:
There’s a large cohort of people who think the only interesting story about romance is How They Got Together. In fanfic this works, because we can write How They Got Together 20 million times and it just gets deeper and richer with repetition, but when you’re trying to do this in a series with continuity, you either end up writing excruciatingly endless will-they-won’t-they, or repeated breakups and get-back-togethers that mostly just present a case for why they shouldn’t, or a bunch of romance-of-the-weeks that aren’t worth getting invested in, or the situation where they get together and the romance does, in fact, stop being interesting, because the writers think the interesting part is over.
This is a big problem in a lot of mystery series, particularly on the lighter/cozy side, probably because they're more likely to have female leads. The Stephanie Plum books offer the most egregious example I can think of: It was pretty clear the author intended Stephanie and Joe to be endgame, or at least that's what's telegraphed from very early on, but in the interest of drawing it out for as long as humanly possible, she's put in a will-they-won't-they triangle with the mysterious Ranger, too, he of the intense sex appeal and almost zero backstory. I made it through at least fifteen books (they get swapped around the family at the beach cottage every summer), and still nothing had been resolved, at which point everything felt entirely formulaic and I gave up. I was only in it for the characters, not the actual mysteries, and if the characters weren't going to ever progress, what was the point in continuing?
( Well, this sure got long... )
