thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-13, Elliot Wilen wrote:
Other examples from fiction. And apologies in advance for hogging space.Sometimes a creator gets into a rut in his own work, and you wonder why the heck you're bothering to continue. There are at least two general cases I can think of; one is almost always bad in fiction, the other can go either way. It isn't clear to me whether either can work in an RPG context.
The always-bad: the sequel that undercuts the original. Consider The Fly II and Aliens 3. Both start by saying, "Everything that mattered to the protagonists in the previous film is negated. Geena Davis dies. Newt dies, too." Maybe, maybe an RPG that did this to a preestablished world could work as an effective critique but I think in practice it would suck all the interest out of the setting.
Note that this is different from the grand operatic approach or the classic (comedy)-tragedy-comedy sequence. You could say that the end of The Fly II somehow redeems the tragic ending of the original, but only at the cost of doing great violence to a fine story's integrity.
The sometimes-good: the sequel that recapitulates the original. The best example I can think of is the now-obscure but beloved Macross series of anime (note: not the American Robotech equivalent which for all its faults did manage to carry out the comedy-tragedy-comedy pattern). The first series & movie adaptation was about culture triumphing over militarism, with culture expressed via music and a love triangle to complicate things. (Plus, there are giant transforming robots.) All of the sequels and prequels basically tell the same story again. However, the story gets told with different characters each time, with quite different treatment in terms of maturity and "grittiness", and in different times and places. There is also an explicit chronology and an allusive backstory that connects all the stories together. I find the ones I've seen to be both enjoyable and interesting. Yet it's hard to say that any of them are necessary beyond the first. On the other hand, the way that the themes are deepened through variation and additional revelation of the backstory enriches the work as a whole.
