A few weeks ago, inverarity posted on bad writing and stupid plot ideas, and I came up with something that had annoyed me for decades without my ever actually writing about it. Uncanny X-Men 137 (published in 1980) is the conclusion of one of the greatest comics runs in the history of the artform - but is marred by some of the stupidest plot devices in the history and prehistory of human writing. (I don't know, perhaps if ants were to do creative writing they could do something dumber; but so far as we are talking homini sapientes, this is about as bad as it gets.) Point one: Emperess Lilandra, ruler of a cosmic superpower, in command of a numerous and powerful super-powered "guard" several of whom are of Superman level, becomes aware that a super-powered woman friend of her own lover, Professor X, has gone mad and destroyed a planet, and that she is a threat to all life. Right. Suppose you or I, not to involve anyone really clever, were in the same position, what would we do? That's a no-brainer: we would obviously send a stealth squad to terminate this person with extreme prejudice, telling as few people as possible, and giving her no chance at all. She has to go down; everything else is secondary. So what does Lilandra do? Summon this person and all her friends - including her own fiance' - put on a parody of a trial that she intends to win no matter what (to embitter him further, isn't that clever?) and eventually puts on a kind of duel between her super-powered followers and his, which the opposition might conceivably win. And that would not even be the worst-case scenario: the worst-case scenario would be the Phoenix going mad again, which puncturally happens!
Lilandra and her people having proved to share the collective IQ of a four-slice toaster, the X-Men then go on to prove that theirs is two-slice. You are on alien, uncharted territory, one of your members under sentence of death, and being stalked by super-powered enemies who seek her life. What do you do? What the supposedly competent X-Men field leader Cyclops does is break the team in two and send them on the offensive, hunting for the hunters. Such an asinine strategy gets the exact reward it deserves - total humiliating disaster.
Now here is what I was saying joins with what you were saying:
We should bear in mind that for the great Phoenix continuity to have its proper tragic ending, nothing is really necessary except her final suicide. That is rightly there [... ] and means that, in spite of the idiocy of the previous few pages, the final impact of the story is tremendous. But the point is that, as a writer, you can get to that suicide any way you want. Chris Claremont chose the worst imaginable [...] a piece of self-inflicted damage that did not need to be there, at the climax of an immensely influential and rightly admired piece of work. That is, the lazyness of thinking up a maybe great idea without taking the trouble of thinking up the all-important path to get there.
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This reminds me of something...
Date: 2010-02-02 09:28 am (UTC)Lilandra and her people having proved to share the collective IQ of a four-slice toaster, the X-Men then go on to prove that theirs is two-slice. You are on alien, uncharted territory, one of your members under sentence of death, and being stalked by super-powered enemies who seek her life. What do you do? What the supposedly competent X-Men field leader Cyclops does is break the team in two and send them on the offensive, hunting for the hunters. Such an asinine strategy gets the exact reward it deserves - total humiliating disaster.
Now here is what I was saying joins with what you were saying:
We should bear in mind that for the great Phoenix continuity to have its proper tragic ending, nothing is really necessary except her final suicide. That is rightly there [... ] and means that, in spite of the idiocy of the previous few pages, the final impact of the story is tremendous. But the point is that, as a writer, you can get to that suicide any way you want. Chris Claremont chose the worst imaginable [...] a piece of self-inflicted damage that did not need to be there, at the climax of an immensely influential and rightly admired piece of work. That is, the lazyness of thinking up a maybe great idea without taking the trouble of thinking up the all-important path to get there.