No matter whether we’re talking animé, manga, or American TV, a show should make sense, or it shouldn’t. (“Hunh?” you say. “Why would a show not make sense?” Hang with me a minute and I’ll explain.) I’m talking, once again, about the two rulesets for the “reality” of a show. I keep tweaking and refining them; maybe at some point they’ll approach Zen-like simplicity. In their current form:
Ruleset #1: Actions have consequences. Events develop logically. While the rules of physics may vary from story to story, everything works within them. If anything completely inexplicable happens, it is a Mystery, and usually a plot point. (Otherwise it may be a Deus ex Machina).
Ruleset #2: Actions have no consequences, and events occur without cause; often without permanent effect. The impossible occurs regularly. Objects and characters appear and disappear as needed for momentary plot or gag convenience; if it is convenient to ignore previous events, they never happened.
I have sometimes thought of Ruleset #2 as the “Bugs Bunny rules.” If Bugs meets Elmer Fudd in a cartoon, it’s always the first time they’ve met. If Elmer shoots Bugs, the bunny isn’t hurt, even if the reason is absurd. If Bugs drops an anvil on Elmer’s head, Mr. Fudd is right as rain by the next scene. We know these rules, and we know not to take anything we see seriously, because it’s all harmless, and nothing really changes, whether Bugs and Elmer are in a Wagnerian opera, or the old west. One series that takes ruleset #2 to the extreme is Excel Saga, which warps reality to the point of having a built-in device for resetting continuity.
Note that ruleset #2 can intrude into ruleset #1 in limited fashion. This normally happens as a gag; the most common occurrences are “the washpan falling from nowhere,” an impossible “emo face,” or a character (usually a girl) yanking some object out of hammerspace (usually to hit a guy). Usually, the SEP field manifests to protect “reality,” and people don’t notice these oddities. But generally, people are required to “obey the rules” in their behavior, and no SEP field can protect them if they violate this. If a character acts in a manner completely inconsistent with known behavior patterns, the audience loses empathy, and becomes outsiders to the story, because they don’t believe what the characters are doing any more. Witness the recent backlash against Yoshida in Shana II: she’ll hold her own against tough Shana, but fold against meek Konoe? Events receive some protection; more than characters, perhaps. Gag things can happen, like in AMG, normal, non-magical characters appearing and disappearing in puffs of smoke, right in front of Keiichi and Belldandy — and no one bats an eyelash. In the AMG manga, the students arrive at college one day to find it’s been turned into a European castle. Everyone shrugs and goes home.
“Dramatic entertainment” (or entertainment that thinks of itself as dramatic) can go only as far into ruleset #2 as can be covered by an SEP field. Souske Sagara may produce a truly astounding number of weapons from his person, but he can’t hide an Arm Slave there. He can become extremely concerned about Kaname’s safety (to the point it affects his loyalty to Mithril), but it wouldn’t make sense if he suddenly started acting like a lame harem lead towards Melissa Mao. And a bona-fide fireball-tossing wizard cannot show up riding on a unicorn to attack Sagara in the Arbalest.
If things exist which shouldn’t, either they’re a Mystery (and often a plot point), or it’s a “mistake of convenience” to allow the writer to solve a problem. (Or set one up, such as the Whispered, in FMP.) Often, a bad writer can put himself in a corner, because a variant of the problem occurs later, but the writer doesn’t want it to be easily solved. What happens then can be either a deus ex machina; its close relative, the contrivance, or a lapse in which the writer simply ignores the problem and expects his audience to not notice.
The SEP field can protect events and objects from becoming lapses — but it can’t protect characters very well, because characters are the core of a story, not object or events, and so people aren’t very forgiving of problems there. If something happens once in a show that exceeds the ability of the SEP field to cover, it is a goof — because the SEP field is really rooted in the audience’s perception, and its willingness to suspend belief in logic long enough to accept what happened as entertainment. Even the best writers can mistake their audience’s willingness to “play along.” Should such mistakes keep happening over and over again until the audience begins to reject the characters or show, it’s bad writing.
Unfortunately, this is Coyote Ragtime Show’s greatest sin, and it indulges in it repeatedly, almost from the very first scene. That one, I can forgive, although not forget. When actual plot starts getting the same treatment, now that I can’t forgive. I found CRS to be a fun show at first, and I really enjoyed certain of the villains, but in the end, poor writing killed it for me. I wrote about it a while back, but now that it’s out in R1, I thought I’d bring it up for a bit of rehashing.
CRS’s major failure is that it’s an incredibly stupid show, because it can’t operate under the rules of logic. It’s not that impossible things happen (much) — no wizards riding unicorns show up. It’s that there’s no rationale behind the actions the characters take, usually because the situation is often absurd to the point of contrivance. Sometimes it’s just a matter of characters not doing the logical thing. (It’s not required that characters make the optimum decision, but they shouldn’t make clearly stupid ones, unless that’s the point of the scene.)
The first couple of episodes of CRS are fairly action-packed and kind of fun. There were some real groaners, such as the names of certain characters, and the fact that the villain’s henchwomen embroider their group’s name on their parachutes, but I can give points for style as well. The show would be quite entertaining if overdoing style was the only problem. Unfortunately, the writers repeatedly have the characters do stupid or illogical things, and have events occur which should not be possible. Most of the time, it’s to move the plot along, but occasionally it’s just for entertainment. By the later part of the series, the logic gaps are unforgivable.
Spoilers below the fold…
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