@jeangable
I hate supernatural but writers should never write to please their audience.
Well...you should, actually, at least a little bit, because you want their to actually BE an audience, and not you just shouting your stories into the void. Or like, a Cormac McCarthy novel, where whenever you get done reading it, you’re like “Why did I read this? To make myself sad?” You generally want people to like and enjoy what they’re reading/watching, and not have them feel like it’s some kind of punishment. That doesn’t mean it has to be happy, or their faves won’t die, or their OTP canon, or you have to do everything to please the audience, but you also should not make most of your audience regret ever consuming your media either. Which shows like GoT and SPN have really fallen into.
You shouldn’t write just to piss off your audience either, which was kind of my point. Quite a few writers think that simply writing something that pisses off or angers your audience, ‘subverts their expectations’, is somehow a sign of good writing in and of itself. It’s not. No more than having an unhappy ending is a sign of good writing, because see, it’s unhappy and that’s not how you are supposed to end stories. Well constructed stories, with natural dialog, sound characters and story arcs, a world that builds upon itself, no shock value for shock value’s sake, those are things that make up good storytelling.
[Andrew Dabb’s other ‘I wrote this knowing fans will hate it, but so what’ moment that I mentioned was 11x23, which was just a really, really poorly told story, not him standing up for artistic integrity. People weren’t angry because their fave died or whatever. People were angry cause it was some insultingly bad TV that was poorly made. Cause again...no resolution to existing story arcs, but we got ten minutes of a British lady trying to catch a plane. Ten minutes that did not need to exist, she could have simply shown up at the end, and nothing would have changed, that ten minutes added nothing to the story, and took time away from other places it could have done more good.]
Writing just to please the audience is as bad as writing just to anger the audience. It’s cheap, and is not about storytelling.
