thread: 2011-02-16 : OH MY GOD OH MY GOD
On 2011-02-26, Vincent wrote:
I've been thinking about the third insight, insight into real live people, real live human nature. Of the three I think of it as the writer's insight; it is, I propose, where writing fiction and designing games overlap. I have a thought like "when you're losing an argument, THAT'S when you throw a punch," so I design a game around it. If I were a novelist, though, I'd write a novel around it instead.
So I was thinking about Spartacus in those terms. It's clear that the writers have, like, a theory of human nature, a guiding principle or body of principles that let them write with such breathtaking confidence. I was thinking about "people never accept their circumstances," but then, no, in fact people in Spartacus DO accept their circumstances, and way too readily, when they favor them. It's not quite that, it's broader, it accounts for both. But here's a thing I CAN say: when someone finally submits to you, that's the moment that you start to trust them, but it's also the moment that you can't trust them ever again.
So what you have in Spartacus is a vast playing-out of this, in permutation upon permutation. Who imposes their will, and how; who submits, and how; who trusts whom, and how, and what comes of it; and all this across lines of class, status, sex, station and relationship. What happens to a friendship when one friend imposes his will on the other? A marriage? Master & slave? Colleagues? Lovers? Parent & child? When both are men, both are women, across sex lines? When there's a third person involved?
So that's cool, the show has a pretty interesting thesis going and they're doing well by it. But THEN, every single time you think they're about to misstep, every time they do something risky and you're pretty sure they're about to blow it, instead they don't. It's SO FUN to watch them hit it, dead on, time after time.
