Asking @quiddie if she'd talk shop w/ me about the storytelling of WBN, part 2: the data!
When I get intrigued by a story, I like to deep dive, but it's never my first choice, because that process is only exciting for my writer brain. After writing 1M+ words of fiction, the urge to analyze every narrative choice is a hard thing to turn off -- but the first three episodes of Worlds Beyond were doing exactly that. My reader brain was delighted to be carried off to a new world by storytellers who I knew and trusted, and the early going was captivating, enchanting, exciting, etc.
Then at the 45m mark of episode 4, Suvi says to Ame:
"If this is what you need to do, then fine. But please, I ask you as a friend, do not presume to know how I feel, and NEVER contradict me in front of strangers."
Without my writer brain engaged, I reacted as I might in a real-life social encounter: instant red card, I'm never interacting with this person again.
But I wasn't going to let a little bump disturb me, especially with a project that was perfectly tailored to my interests. Longform, earnest fantasy storytelling with pro sound design and such a dream cast it might as well be made by Sega? I pressed on.
"Hey, shut up? Shut the fuck up."
Now I was starting to rationalize: it's early days, the Simpsons didn't even look like the Simpsons until like, season 3? I'll hang in.
Episode 11 -- the one where Suvi spins out in the shrine of Orima -- was so viscerally unpleasant I yanked my earbuds out in the grocery store and forgot about the podcast for a month.
During that time, the writer brain started to whir in the background.
I couldn't remember the last movie affected me like that. And there was something exciting about what Aabria was doing, on a technical level: it felt like she was jeopardizing the story's viability by going after a core tenet of most actual plays: good vibes only between PCs. Could the story work if the party doesn't get along? If, every week, the audience was at risk of TPK via psychic damage? Forget dangling your protagonists over shark-infested waters, that's real suspense!
So I got back into the story, this time with my analytic brain switched on. It was enjoyable! Watching four people writing in realtime is engrossing. While I struggle to appreciate emotional PVP in an unscripted context, it wasn't hard to appreciate the scene work between Aabria and Erika, and soon I was back on board -- Suvi actually became my favorite PC. For a goof, I ran some analysis on the transcripts, to see if I could find any fun patterns, but no real shockers in there. (It was a little wild to see that Steel was talking more than Eursulon, though.)
I got bored w/ the annotating after the second arc though, because of course the real thing a writer should study is: how's the audience responding? And there's a much more direct way to figure that out.
Part 3 on Friday: 10,000 reddit comments.
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