#executive meddling

[quasi-normalcy]

Mel Brooks on taking studio notes:

[sammysgun82]

I saw you talking about Bela Talbot and the problems you had with the direction of her character and the season she was in. So I ask If you could do something different with her what would it be? especially since she was originally supposed to get more to her story.

Thank you for the lovely ask! I do like Bela a lot and I do fucking hate s3 so this is an interesting question.

What would I do with Bela? The reason I like her in the first place is because she’s one of the few female characters (especially up to the point she appeared) to have a backstory. I want more of that! I realize the season was truncated due to the writers strike but ending it like this feels as misogynistic as anything Kripke ever did. I would want her and Dean to have an actual conversation about their shared traumas because I think from what we know about Bela they have a lot in common. Putting on an act for other people being the most obvious. Dean puts on his dad’s coat and pretends he wants to fuck every woman in the vicinity and Bela puts on her obnoxious accent and acts rich and glamorous. Neither one of them is who they pretend to be and I wish there was so much more following this premise.

I wish we got more of Bela working with Sam and Dean on a case, as Red Sky at Morning is a rare delight in this season and I loved seeing her get to act exasperated, impressed, cunning and comedic. I love the chemistry between Lauren Cohan and JA and as always he is a much better actor when he has someone fresh to bounce off of. It isn’t strange that Bela had to be put in lingerie in a sex dream (this is Kripke after all) but it was very weird it was SAM’s sex dream lmao because she interacts so much more with Dean. I loved Bela outsmarting them, getting Dean’s car towed and generally being devious in Bad Day at Black Rock. So rarely on this show are Sam and Dean EVER shown to be morons that it’s a rare gem when it happens. Would that Gordon were given this opportunity. Victor sort of got to do it. Two other characters I wish we got more of.

What I really dream of is having an arc of Dean in hell with Bela there lmao. Because she actually was there. She was dragged to hell by the hounds right before him. Though I realize this would probably be a little pricey for the CW even back in 2007, the conceit is so great. Though given Kripke’s writing it probably would have been nothing more than him getting to “erotically” torture her. I fantasize of a better Supernatural.

What’s fascinating to me is that Bela was literally written because of executive meddling for s3 (along with Ruby) because the powers that be decided Jo was too young and naive and that’s why she was unpopular with the fandom. This was untrue of course; the raving, spitting bronlies hated ANY female character that dared to breathe on Dean (I know this has been rewritten as time has passed but I’ve read the old texts lmao… I know how much Jo was hated and how many death threats were sent to her actress. I know it’s popular to like Cassie these days but if you read the response to her episode it is BRUTAL) in a way that really wasn’t true for Sam. So they made Kripke cast more “camera ready” actresses for these roles and make them more quote sexier unquote. This didn’t work out so well. You can internet archive your way into soooo much Bela/Ruby hate it’s hilarious. This in turn affected the way Kripke and the writing team wrote both of them partially due to being pissed off he had to include new characters partially because he can’t write women to save his fucking life and partially because he didn’t like the response to them which feeds into the first reason. I honestly believe this is why we get so much straight up misogyny towards both of them coming from the main characters’ mouths.

I’m glad for Lauren Cohan she got out of this shit show and got to play bigger roles but I am sorry we never got more Bela. She was such an interesting character

[askagamedev]

How much executive meddling occurs in the game industry and development cycles?

There's practically never executive meddling in indie games because there are practically no executives involved. In AAA games, the vast majority of executive meddling comes in only one situation - when the development process for a game goes off the rails and is in danger of going far over budget, missing their ship date, and/or missing their minimum shippable quality bar. This wasn't always the case back in the PS2 era, where publishers were much more hands-on about wanting and demanding certain things, but the high profile failures in large part due to executive meddling have significantly changed things over the past twenty years. Nowadays, studios are given "enough rope to hang themselves" - a free hand to do exactly as they like until they cause their own imminent demise.

I've worked for a lot of publisher-owned studios in my career. I've worked at studios owned by Sony, Microsoft, Activision, and Electronic Arts. I was there in the early executive meddling era and I've been here for the post-meddling era. Since 2006, every studio I've worked at has been given enough rope to hang itself. The ones who don't hang themselves are the ones who are disciplined about the scope and the feature set of the game they are building. They have a schedule, they have a feature set, and they stick to it. You may have guessed the kind of games these tend to be - the franchise games with regular release schedules and the live service games with regular content updates all hope to stay in this lane.

Every game that I worked on that was not good had key problems that could be traced to the team's leadership being unwilling to commit to major choices. This results in a negative feedback loop - developers aren't willing to put in their best work only to see it tossed out, which leads to half-assed prototypes, which leads to the leadership changing their minds. This process typically repeats until the publishers get nervous at the lack of progress and the impending ship date, which leads to pressure to commit, which leads to a brutal crunch to ship something at the end.

When executive meddling happens, it's typically to replace the waffling leadership with somebody whose goal isn't to build the game that was promised, but to get the ailing project to ship at all. The publisher may also call in [rescue operators] to try to save the project if they need experts in key fields. Executive meddling happens when the project absolutely needs to ship and doesn't have the option of [delaying the release].

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[lamarckianenterprises]

Finding out that Kelly Thompson wrote Absolute Wonder Woman as a queer character but isn't sure if she can go all the way is very liberating to me. I'm not being beaten by a yuri dog playing chess, I'm losing to a woman in a dog fursuit who's telling me the suits want it open to interpretation.

Kelly Thompson Interview | Absolute Wonder Woman | Jeff the Landshark |

Kelly Thompson (Absolute Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Birds of Prey) is back! 👉Check out our CREATOR INTERVIEW playl

[alpaca-clouds]

Why am I still having this conversation?

Real talk, folks. Because I am just so sick and tired of this.

Whenever a piece of entertainment media comes out that is in some way a let-down compared to what came before, people will instantly go and vent about the creatives behind the media, or just outright go to harass them.

And I am sorry, folks, but if this is you, you are an asshole who does not understand how media is produced.

Are there cases where a creator absolutely messed up, because an idea was better in their head than it ended up hitting with the audience? 100%.

Is this what is going on in most of the cases? No.

What is going on is some flavor of production chaos and/or ✨executive meddling✨.

Literally, y'all who never came in touch with the industry really underestimate the horrors of ✨executive meddling✨. Hell!

Y'all somehow are of the opinion that a creative person working on a multi-million dollar project just gets to do their thing and then release what they imagined to the public. That would be nice. But that is not what happens.

What actually happens is that they have executive producers, normal producers and funny company departments like S&P (Standards & Practices) to worry about. If you want to know the fun with this, I think nothing says it better than the good old video Alex Hirsch did about Disney S&P on Gravity Falls. Yes. It really is that petty.

And mind you, this kinda censorship is just the tip of the iceberg.

Like, obviously there is censorship. Creators tend to have to fight for every bit of queer representation they put into their pieces of media. They have to fight for representation of mental health issues. Or representation of racism/oppression. Because to a lot of studios this alone is too spicy.

And on top of that you will have stuff going on like studios deciding that "actually, we gotta release this in 3 month now" and "yeah, we know we promised you would get 25 episodes, but actually you gotta finish this up in the next 8 episodes".

See, most creators work for companies that are publically traded and have a board of directors. And those people - due to the public trading - tend to aim to make creative works that appeal to ✨everyone✨. So it has to be inoffensive (in the way that white cis people - most of them - consider to be inoffensive, as they cannot be assed to actually look into what people consider to be offensive and what not) and appeal to ideally every demographic. Especially higher budget things will also often be audience tested to death. Oh, the ending of the movie is a bummer? Test audiences did not like it. "We do not care about your creative vision, change that!"

Obviously this tends to lead to products that due to having less of a creative vision tend to actually appeal to no-one really. It leads to stuff like the Marvel Movies. Those movies do have great structure and pacing and have been basically boiled down to a scientific formular of how to make an appealing action movie. But the folks making them - even if they are well-known indie darlings - usually get hired so that Disney can say: "Oh, look, we hired Indie-Darling XY. Don't you wanna see what they do?" Just for them to be forced to make the coorporate slob Disney wants. (Just look at how Disney treated Nina DaCosta doing the Marvels. Girl wasn't even invited to the premire of her own fucking movie!)

And I am just so fucking sick of people attacking creators over this. Like, do y'all hear yourselves? "Yes, it is very logicaly to claim that the creator whose first 4 seasons I loved suddenly forgot everything they knew about writing. This makes totally sense to me. It could not be that the entire entertainment industry is actually just a fucking hellhole exploiting creative people without honoring their creativity! Claiming that is preposterous!"

I really by now am so pissed. I have been telling people about this since I was literally 11 years old and learned about how shit went sideways during the production of Digimon Adventure 02. And then also learned about all the ways that Jerry Bruckheimer inserted himself during the production of Pirates of the Caribbean. And all the time people will just go, defend the fucking producers and blame the creatives.

By now - despite the best intend of the big media conglomerates trying to NDA everyone involved into oblivion - we know about so many cases.

Heck, I am seeing this right now also with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. We already know a fuckton of what kinda bullshit EA pulled on the production, including the fact that the game we got in the end was produced in about 18 months, after they had first wanted to make it live service and then after Anthem crashed and burned bulled the plug on it and said: "Yeah, please make a fully new single player game from the bones of the live service in a bit over a year." I wanna see y'all create a game with a cohesive narrative in that amount of time. Let alone without the main writer, who was fired by EA, and not by his fellow writers. (Like, yeah, Gaider disagreed with some of the other writers, but the issue is fucking EA.)

And again, this is not saying you cannot critique the pieces of media. Obviously you can. YOU SHOULD. But don't blame the creatives, unless you know for certain (because folks have broken their NDAs or because there never were NDAs) that it was the writers or directors involved that really messed up.

It is one thing to say: "I really dislike [piece of media]", and another to slide into some writers or director's DMs and tell them to kill themselves. If this is you: you should not be on the fucking internet. Period.

Really. Fuck y'all.

[deweydecimalchickens]

So, that Boys finale, eh? I am satisfied. I'm glad I watched it. I'd watch it again.

This sounds like damned with faint praise, but realistically, after five years of "I can make him worse", with a TV and a comics fan base to satisfy, and having swerved away from the comics ending early on, sticking the landing was always going to be difficult. Sticking the landing is always difficult. I am resigned to finales that don't satisfy, or seem designed to spite rather than reward the fans, or make earlier favourite episodes and characters unwatchable. This was not that.

(Incidentally I feel about the same about Good Omens.)

Specific spoilers for both show and comics below:

The ending of the comics was impossible as soon as they made Black Noir a) not a clone of Homelander and b) dead. That said, they still managed to hit the same thematic beats in a way that works: the irredeemably evil, too-powerful supe gets killed (specifically, gets his brains crowbarred out) and then Butcher becomes the final boss, taken out in a one-on-one confrontation with Hughie (acting in his capacity as the heart/normal guy/audience surrogate).

I liked that MM, the kindest and most sensible of the Boys, survived this ending. And the Female (though it's sort of implied that she and Frenchie might've survived Butcher's bomb in the comics). Butcher's murder spree through his former allies worked, thematically, in the comics - they'd all taken Compound V, they'd killed off a lot more superheroes, and it really did read as Butcher finishing the job he'd set himself. But I am soft-hearted in my middle age and don't want to cry about everyone, please.

The two I kinda wanted a limited redemption arc for both got it - Sage and Ashley. Look, I do not think I am the smartest person in the world. I do not understand what it's like specifically to be an uber-competent *Black* woman. But I know what it's like to be the only competent person on the group project, and I know what it's like to be mansplained to, and I know what it's like to just want to be left alone to read your books. And look, I have a type, and that type is 'very competent, very dangerous woman who just wants to be left alone'. Sage's tragedy was that she didn't live in a world where she could be an extremely competent Black woman. She was doomed to cleaning up other people's messes and not getting the credit. Helping the protagonists (is Frenchie the only man in the series who recognises her intellect and begs for her help?), willingly depowering herself and fucking off to a theme park was probably her best ending. And I liked the fact that as soon as she became stupid, her biggest priority was Harry Potter. Sorry not sorry.

She's also a good reminder not to let your sense of being the only competent one on the group project turn you homicidally angry, so there's that.

Ashley... "proud of you, bitch" about sums it up. She did so much stuff that was just awful on a mundane human level, for so long. She was Homelander as That Lady In HR. She did not deserve to keep power. But she was so clearly a person who was in over her own head and lashing out in terror, I'm glad she got to make one good choice before the grown-ups took her out for her own good.

And I'm glad that in both cases, redemption did not equal death.

Leaving Stan Edgar in charge of Vought with more government oversight was clearly a sequel hook for the next series of Gen V. When the Boys retire/die/disappear from watching the watchmen, the Guardians of Godolkin take over. Which would have made up for not seeing so much of them in the finale. But then Gen V got cancelled, so we'll just have to imagine it.

[smalltowngrey]

people going "lol go watch Heated Rivalry instead" or "haha another Johnlock conspiracy" are lowkey pissing me off

because this isn't just about Byler or yaoi, this is about potential executive meddling on an extremely sinister level and you should all be worried about what precedent this whole thing, if true, might set

[herpderpingest]

I feel like it's like

Showrunners: These two guys are soulmates. Cosmically linked. Infinitely, unendingly, fated to hurt each other and lose each other but then always, always find and heal and save each other. Their love eclipses the concepts of friendship and brotherhood. Across all timelines, every universe, they are destined to be together.

The network: No homo, though.