Meta Month, Day 20: High Stakes, Low Stakes

[mark_asphodel]

This is an extension of something I said over at amielleon's place.

War.  The battle between overwhelming Evil and whatever Good is still left on the planet. The Fate of the World (TM) in the hands of a chosen few.

Pretty high-stakes stuff, right?  Perfect for an Epic Story-- a novelization, even.  Well, maybe.

Low-stakes and mid-stakes stories are a good and lovely thing, and shouldn't be neglected, but let's just set those aside for tonight.  Let's focus on ways that a high-stakes tale of Jugdral or Elibe or Tellius can just... not work.  If high-stakes drama isn't your thing, then this probably doesn't apply to you.

1) The audience knows what's going to happen.

Actually, knowing the plot twists shouldn't "spoil" anything-- you know sitting down to a performance of Romeo and Juliet that they're not riding off into the Italian sunset, right?  The Ancient Greeks knew that Antigone's uncle Creon wasn't going to admit that she was right and then let her marry his son.  So, theoretically, a treatment of the first-gen Jugdral characters should be enhanced by the knowledge that most of them will come to a horrible end.  That in itself is not the problem.

2) Things are overmatched in favor of the Good Guys.  The 'fic reads like the equivalent of Easy Mode.

The enemies are surrounded, Team Blue has the entire army intact and all their legendary weapons and everybody's Level 20/20 and shows it.  If they're that awesome, why did this war take so bloody long in the first place?

3) The Bad Guys are too stupid/careless to win.

Fortunately, we don't see much of this in Fire Emblem, but in many media properties, it's a problem with canon.

4) The Good Guys are too stupid/careless to win, yet do anyway.

Arguably a problem with Fire Emblem canon in some cases.  Also a problem in fanfiction, often when an inexperienced writer has allegedly intelligent characters making truly ludicrous mistakes ("Don't worry, Lyn-- it's OK to be hit by a blunt axe!")

5) The writer tilts the playing field in a more subtle way than given above.

Huge problem, IMO.  One of the biggest problems facing alleged war stories in FE fandom is the refusal of writers to let any character who doesn't die in the plot to well, die. Come on, guys.  If there's no actual threat to your army because the tactician is so damn brilliant that everyone sails through unscathed, then what's actually at stake here?  If Eliwood and his friends can't lose, because the writer won't let them lose, then something's fundamentally wrong with the conception of that writer's war epic, IMO.  Seriously, read The Red Badge of Courage or All Quiet on the Western Front or even Catch-22 and imagine yourself a version wherein only the bad guys die and the good guys all have a pithy little quote-party at the end before they all shack up together.     

[Aside-- I think Franz gets killed a lot in FE8 fiction because he's exactly the type of character who does get offed in professional war stories.  It feels appropriate.]

6) Refusal to deviate from canon.

YMMV.  Some writers won't let anyone die because their conception of canon doesn't allow for it.  Some consider various game routes to be irreconcilable.  Some consider(ed) the Gaiden chapters in FE11 to be non-canon because of the conditions that had to be met to obtain them.  Like #1, this is not a problem by itself.

And sometimes all these combine to turn what is allegedly a high-stakes drama into a low-stakes comedy, and by "comedy" I mean a broken situation put right, not a laugh fest.  The prime example of this would be the many, many versions of Lyn's Tale floating around.

Lyn's Tale looks good, on the surface, for a full-scale dramatic treatment.  It has a small band of characters, a tight plot, and even a remarkably sympathetic guy on the wrong side in General Eagler.  But there's a real problem in trying to weave a great dramatic epic of wartime realism out of FE7's tutorial.  There is nothing at stake.  Quite literally nothing.  Canon dictates that the worst that could happen is that someone goes home with an owwie and the Tactician's rating isn't so great.  Everybody comes back for the second act.  And, given the vast number of Lyn's Tale stories out there, at this point the readership is quite familiar with that fact.  Unless the author is willing to dispense with #6, points #1, #5, and arguably #2 come together for something that might look on the surface like an "epic," but actually is no such thing. It's a sweet little comedy of camaraderie and coming-of-age pretending to be a war story, so "edgy" Tacticians and such end up ringing horribly, horribly false... and, personally, I just don't feel like reading any more of these any time soon.  To a certain extent, all fanfiction is about making the reader salivate on cue like a trained dog, and when it comes to Lyn's Tale, at this point my mouth is dry and my tail ain't wagging.  It's not that it's overdone, not exactly-- it's that the overdone-ness, and the done-wrongness, have reduced the potential impact of a canon-compliant "serious" retelling to nothing.  The writing and the characterization might be A++, but it's in the service of something that (again IMO) is a fundamentally dubious exercise.  If you're going to be SRS BZNS about Lyn's Tale, at least change something up-- make it not be a comedy.  Up the stakes.  

Or relax and let the Tactician just be some random kid in a cloak and let Sain tell his jokes.

Some interesting Lyn's Tale AUs are here and here.  One is rated M and the other T, both for good reason.

Comments

[raphiael]

I think shaking up the POV is one of the best ways to create a unique retelling, actually. As long as it's a telling of the story in novel format, it's novelization, IMO.