Should works stand on their own?

Cafe Society
1

In the most recent thread about Star Wars, there was a discussion about some plot weaknesses, one poster said “You should read the EU [the books set in the SW universe]” and another responded “Maybe the EU is fun, but if you NEED to read it to make sense of the movies, the movies suck.” I think that can lead to an interesting discussion - how standalone should a work be to be ‘good’ in general? Here’s my take:

I think that a movie, TV show, comic series, book series, or the like should be standalone in it’s primary format - all of the major points should get made ‘onscreen’ or ‘onpage’. If there are spinoff books to a movie, it’s fine if they explore the backstory, worldbuilding, other characters, and the like, but it shouldn’t be the case that there are major parts of the main work that make no sense without buying spinoff books, comic books, and playing the video game. It’s perfectly valid to judge a work’s quality on it’s own, and if it has a fault then the fault can’t be removed with ‘well, if you play the third video game and take the ‘evil’ path you’ll see…’ or ‘if you read this later essay by the author, he changes his mind’ (like Heinlein with Starship Troopers).

In general, secondary works should be standalone aside from the main series, unless they’re clearly just ‘reference material’ (like the Dune Encyclopedia or Star Trek technical manual). They might reference the main work without explanation, but their own stories should be solid enough to make sense without cross referencing multiple other works. Exactly what is a primary work, secondary work, or multiple independent primary works is up for some debate, but generally a single series should stand on it’s own - if the Lord of the Rings trilogy didn’t work without the Simarillion or The Hobbit, then it would be fair to criticize it for that.

If you’re making an adaptation of a movie, the adaptation should bring enough from the main work that someone can make sense of the adaptation without having read the main work. For example, a Dune movie doesn’t need to do a deep dive into the Harkonnen and Atreides interfamily conflicts and historical roots, but should establish that they are have been enemies for a long time. It’s fair for an adaptation to leave in weaknesses of the original, like the way the LOTR movies don’t address the old ‘why not just fly into Mordor on the eagles?’ question any more than the main books do.

What are other people’s thoughts, and any noteworthy examples of this working or failing?

2

I do think works should stand on their own. I’ll give some leeway to sequels as it’s not unreasonable to expect the audience to have seen the previous movie. I’ll go with a non-movie example and pick video games Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. In Mass Effect 2, we’re introduced to a character named Aria who is the undisputed lord of Omega, a wretched hive of scum and villainy on an asteroid base. The game literally tells you not to, “Fuck with Aria,” and everyone treats her as some super duper badass. But within the context of the game, you have no idea of why everyone, least of all Shepherd, should be treating Aria with such reverence. Your character, Shepherd, has fought Space Cthulhu and some petty crime lord has your panties in a bunch? It didn’t make any sense. Turns out Aria was a character in some of the books and or optional downloadable contact from other sources. If you hadn’t read/played those then you have no idea who Aria is when she’s introduced in the second game.

And in Mass Effect 3 we have Kai Leng. Kai is supposed to be some super badass assassin coming after Shepherd. Why are we afraid of him? Unless you read about Kai in some of the supporting material (books, downloadable content, etc.) you don’t know who he is. Why the hell am I supposed to be afraid of this nut sack? ME3 doesn’t tell me why.

3

Mixed attitude.

On the one hand no work stands completely on its own. They all assume we bring to the experience of reading/watching/listening some shared cultural background.

On the other hand, everyone is going to be somewhat lacking in complete familiarity with everything the creative person drew upon in making this artistic work. It’s also grossly unfair of some reviewers / fans / snobs / etc to evaluate a work in such a way that it’s shortcomings and omissions are glossed over by assuming everyone is familiar with the stuff that the work in question didn’t bother to explain.

Example in point: we just watched Hold The Dark on Netflix last night and turned to each other at the end and said “That held my interest but what the fuck did we just watch? I don’t understand why any of what happened happened.” Went online to read reviews and immediately hit oodles and oodles of “Hold the Dark EXPLAINED” web pages, all of which accord the film lots of praise. Most of them explain that in the book that the film was based on it is explicitly stated that the married couple are an incestuous brother/sister pair, twins in fact. The precipitating event in the movie is the mom killing their child. I’m sorry, but knowing or not knowing that killer-mom is killing the product of an incestuous bro-sis twins relationship is kind of crucial to making sense of the movie. The various reviewers’ claims that the director left ‘clear clues’ is bad fanwanking. “Gee she said ‘We didn’t meet anywhere, there’s never been a time when we didn’t know each other’, hence total obvious that they’re twin bro and sis.” Umm no, people in small towns like this remote Alaska village who toddled and played together as babies in communal gatherings could be expected to make similar statements.

4

The ME examples are good, though Kai Leng was just awful, and from what I’ve read is awful even if you read the backstory.

5

Yes, I’d say that’s just a bad adaptation that fails as a movie. I think that adaptations from books are really prone to this, and you can end up with a movie that only a subset of book fans like and that non-book-fans don’t understand at all. I feel like Game of Thrones in contrast did pretty well with conveying the important book information. Some of the more complicated backstory (like how Stannis fits into the overall power structure) was glossed over, but you could follow the story in the show without reading the books at all and it didn’t feel full of holes.

6

Yes, completely. I love “series” of books, but I hate the ones where you need to have read book 6 before book 7 makes sense. The ideal series may have internal chronology, but should not depend on it. Many of the Sherlock Holmes stories allude to other stories (as well as alluding to many that weren’t ever actually written!) but it doesn’t matter. You can read Holmes in nearly any order (Sign of the Four perhaps the exception.)

Talbot Mundy was an adventure writer of the 20s, sort of an Americanized low-cal Kipling, and he wrote lots of books that could be strung together into a chronological series. But you didn’t have to read them in order: each book was self-contained.

This isn’t quite what the OP was asking, but nothing makes me madder than to get to the “end” of a book and see, “To Be Continued.”

7

I agree, with a caveat. I do think that works should stand on their own, but it’s ok to include the “extended universe” stuff as long as it’s appropriately explained, or is just background information that isn’t integral to the plot.

The Star Wars movies are usually fairly good about this- you can watch all 11 of the movies and never read the comics, watch the Clone Wars cartoons, or anything else, and come away with a full understanding of the movies.

But if you do consume that ancillary stuff, you get stuff like the background on the kyber crystals and the Jedi temple, etc… But you don’t have to have read that stuff to watch Rogue One and understand what’s going on.

8

There’s nothing wrong with a work that can’t stand on its own—if it’s clearly indicated to the potential audience what prerequisites are needed to appreciate it.

9

I think there are two different sorts of series in books and they are similar to the two different types of TV series - there’s the type where you can read/watch books/episodes in any order. What the different episodes/books have in common is the cast of characters and the setting and anything else is background and not actually necessary to the plot. Then there’s the other kind, where you have to read/watch in order or else it doesn’t make sense. I am currently watching an old TV series on IMDB , which is (for some reason I can’t figure out) missing random episodes from each season. The missing episodes make it hard to follow some storylines. There are series of books that work this way , and that’s fine with me.

What I can’t stand is the series ( of anything, but I’ve seen it more in books) where you really should have read book 6 in order for book 7 to make sense but in order to make book 7 understandable to those who haven’t read book 6, book 7 has a lot of explanation about events that happened in book 6

10

The thing about books though is that most of the time you read book 6 2 years ago, you’ve read dozens of books since and rather than forcing the reader to re-read book 6 (and 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 just to be sure) to get them to remember all the details, it’s generally better for book 7 to explicitly remind you of all the current plot points you need to know about.

11

Reminding you is one thing- I’ve encountered a couple of instances where it seemed that more than half of the current book was recapping prior books.

12

Agree overall with your perspective. I’m about the same. Ref this bit with which I agree…

What that really argues for is some sort of truth in labeling.

If the industry and the audience had a well-agreed term for “really needs to be consumed in sequence” and a different term for “stands alone well” we wouldn’t be disappointed to find one experience while expecting the other.

In the modern commercial entertainment world, everybody would love to develop the next great franchise. So we can assume the vast majority of works that aren’t already Episode 2+ are Episode 1 of (we hope a whole lot more). Which implies a lot of things. Including that Ep1 will leave a lot of loose ends to knit onto later.

Something like Superman or Batman is maybe the opposite extreme. It’s been done to death for so many decades that everybody knows the big elements of the backstory. Or at least of one flavor of the backstory. So the latest e.g. Ep 5486 doesn’t need to stand alone, but neither does the audience have to have consumed all 5485 preceding eps.


Finally, back at the OP, what does “stand alone” mean? Or rather, whose standards decide when something is stand-alone enough?

Sophisticated consumers of literature will have much higher standards for character development, motivations that seem to flow from in-story triggers, etc., versus somebody who just likes movies where shit done blown up good!

My point isn’t to threadshit, but rather to open a conversation about what are indicia of standalone-ness and how much is enough vs how much is too much? In light of my comments about an increasingly serialized world, how does that change in deliberately serializable stories?

Much like Discovery Channel TV shows. It’s much easier to cut and paste existing footage than it is to write fresh material.

Are they being legitimately literarily thorough, or are they just re-warming book 6 with a couple more chapters and relabeling the combo as book 7? To be repeated again in book #8?

13

I guess I’m too easy going because I don’t care what is or isn’t in a book. I go to see a movie for the movie’s sake, not because I want to see how closely it resembles some story in a book. It’s all make believe, anyway. It’s not like they are altering what is supposed to be an accurate rendition of a historical event.

14

I would say yes, works should stand on their own. It’s fine if prequels/sequels/stories in other media lend a deeper understanding of things, but actual plot holes that require some extra-textual understanding to resolve are just bad writing.

Star Wars as a whole is pretty bad at this. Partly because over the years there has been no one with a holistic vision for it and multiple different works have been made focusing on different parts of the timeline.

I’ll give something of a pass to explicit sequels. If someone is watching the nth movie in a series, it’s reasonable to expect them to at least know the main characters and the general plot and themes of the movies/books that came before.

15

Yeah a work should 100% absolutely stand on its own you shouldn’t have to read up to understand any film (you could argue its OK for a book?)

On the other hand it is totally fine alluding to things that aren’t in the movie, in fact done well this is an amazing way to build the world its set in.

The OP mentions star wars, and I think the original trilogy are the prime example of that. There are all thoughts of allusions to stuff like the Clone Wars, and they don’t mean you can’t make sense of the plot with understand them (in fact that would pretty pointless as when the movies came out, no one except George Lucas knew what they were). Instead they give you a sense of mystery and of this being part of something deeper. I remember thinking as a kid “Wow! there must be this incredible back story, can’t wait to see it someday!”

The main crime of the subsequent films is they told that backstory and it was completely and utterly awful. They actually went back in time and made the originally trilogy worse by doing that.

16

This is irrelevant to the ‘stand on their own’ part, though - if an actually sophisticated consumer says ‘hey, this plot point doesn’t make any sense’ and someone else says ‘it’s all explained if you play through the RPG and make these specific choices’, then the work isn’t standalone. If the ‘sophisticated consumer’ is just someone who’s nitpicking or unwilling to actually interpret obvious things in the story, then they’re actually ‘pretentious’ and I’m not really concerned with their opinion :slight_smile:

I consider a serial one work. The thing I’m talking about is not “S3:E2 of the TV series only makes sense if you saw the plot getting set up in S2:E7-10”, it’s “To understand what’s going on in S3:E2 you need to have read the novelization about this minor character, played the loosely related spin-off FPS and made these choices, oh and it helps if you read the pen and paper RPG sourcebook 3”.

It also doesn’t mean that I mind if there’s more backstory for a character in a work, but it does mean that they should be established in this work - to use the Mass Effect example, if you have a character who’s established as being a dangerous badass in the comic books, you can’t throw him into the main game and expect everyone to treat him as a badass without showing him. On the flip side, it’s fine if the comic gives his detailed backstory at the orphanage and explains why he likes that unusual weapon combo, that’s not neccessary information.

(I’m kind of short on time so I might do a bit more response later, wanted to hit two things)

17

Star Wars has good and bad examples:

The original Trilogy (and especially Ep IV) doesn’t and couldn’t call on any extra works. To establish that The Empire is evil, they intro it’s head individual guy (Vader) with a badass stroll through a battle, then have him threaten and choke people, and have the head ‘leadership’ guy (Grand Moff Tarkin) destroy an entire planet. To establish what the framework of the world is, we have some really brief exposition highlighting that there was “The Old Republic” that people look up to, that was defended by a wise “Jedi Order” that “The Empire” has wiped out, and that “The Emperor” has just dissolved “The Senate”, removing the last vestiges of The Old Republic, and “The Rebellion” is a group resisting The Empire. While it’s clear that there is a ton of room to expand on that, we don’t need to refer to anything else to understand what’s going on onscreen, and it’s done with one ‘old teacher’ exposition scene and incidental dialogue.

By contrast, in the prequel trilogy Ep I brings in Darth Maul who’s supposed to be a badass. But all he does is send some drones around to spy on the main heroes, then oppose them at the end - we don’t see him establish himself as evil or as a scary guy the way that we do with Vader. There’s spin-off material (comics IIRC) that does that setup, but it’s not shown on-screen. We do get a lot of the bigger picture backstory, but it’s too wordy overall and has a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense or just isn’t interesting - and the stuff that makes it interesting or sensible is, again, in spin-off materials.

Then in the sequel trilogy, we don’t get a good backstory. We have “The First Order” destroying an ineffectual “The New Republic” and opposed by “The Resistence”, but we don’t get an explanation of why “The New Republic” that came from The Rebellion in the original is on the ropes, or how The First Order relates to The Empire that we saw defeated at the end of the original trilogy. If you’re starting with a clean slate like the original trilogy it’s fine just to say ‘these guys oppose these guys’, but that doesn’t work when you’re building on the series. The explanation that makes this make sense is, to get back to the original point, in the spinoff novels. There’s plenty of other things that don’t really make sense, and people will say “Oh you should read the EU” or “Oh you should play this game series” - which is exactly the response I’m saying shows a flaw in the movies.

18

The original trilogy did it well. It is now standard in sf to dump you into a world and give you enough clues to figure it out. However, in the beginning of Ep. 3, Anakin kills General Grievous, and it is supposed to be significant, but who was not someone ever mentioned unless you watched Clone Wars.

Movies and books that don’t make that much sense unless you’ve seen earlier parts of the series are fine. Ones pulling situations and characters out of nowhere (or other types of media) aren’t.