#it's just an unnecessary subplot that adds nothing of worth to the game really and nothing to the characters and takes away all their oomf

[arttrampbelle]

Ok mini vent/tsimping? (Look there's good points and bad points)

I hate mk12/mk1 shang tsung's writing. And his stupid needle wannbe basic bitch claw gloves.

HOWEVER!

I will admit despite all that. He's once again THE ONLY THING GOOD ABOUT THE NEW MK GAME. and it's sad really because it's just mk11 2 electric boogaloo,but different packaging. Srsly. Fr. It really is. Nothing changes. Nothing is special. It's the same shit. Trying to pretend to be something better but it's not really.

But again like i said. Despite that. Unless you're a shang tsung tsimp.

You're not going to really like the new game. Unless you have no standards and aren't really a mk fan. And are just here for the hype.

But in all seriousness,i would like alan lee as shang more and watch more of his shang ,if people stop putting him in those stupid fugly ass gloves. Get rid of those and we good bro.

I mean really. If mk onslaught can make him look like this

And keep his smugness in 12.

Getting rid of those damn gloves would make this less distracting. And stop making me so pissed off. (Im petty,i hate his gloves,sue me)

And his role needs to be done better,but i chalk that up to once again piss poor writing. And even then....still the only entertainment about the new mortal kombat game is SHANG TSUNG. Once again he has to save the damn franchise because they keep making other characters shit. Ugh.

And i want him to "win" but i want it to be worth it and actually earn it and not be plot convenient for tsimps like me. Like im a huge fan but damn man. Give me something with oomf,with flavor,not imitation fake ass cheese. Gimme real chedder,ya know ehat i mean?! Like damn.

NOT MAKING LIU KANG A VILLAIN IS THE BIGGEST MISTAKE AND FUMBLE THEY (NRS) EVER MADE!

But i digress.

Shang tsung still is a cutie. Not the best in the new game as he isn't quite as delicious as the og tagawa,and im still disappointed and am rejecting canon and substituting it for my own,but still shang tsung is shang tsung and I'm out of proper kontent.

So he'll do. For now (i do 💖hate💖 how he still got charm,swag, or rizz as the young kids call it now).

Like despite the shitty writing,he's still cute.

Honey I'm so sorry they did you kinda dirty. But despite the shitty script,mr alan lee does a decent job. At least he fucking tries. Unlike some characters!!!! *stares death glares at this mk12/mk1 lame ass version of liu kang* . Like I'm so sorry sweetie that they give you half assed villainy and call it good. Ugh,you deserve so much better.

So for me this shang's a 5 or 6 solid out of 10. But this is me being a tsimp so eh. Dont take my word for it.

[bibliophileiz]

An Ode to Spoilers: How ‘shock value’ flies in the face of conventional storytelling

My name is Iz and I love spoilers.

One of my favorite books I’ve ever read is an epic tragic love story that ends with the lovers dead. The first dies suddenly and horribly, and the other is left embittered, hopelessly navigating his now empty existence until he too dies in an unmomentous scene that feels almost more like a sigh of relief than the gut-wrenching destruction of a character I spent 353 pages with by that point. 

Here’s the thing though: I knew all that was coming when I started Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, because I know how Homer’s The Iliad ends.

I’ve read a handful of retellings of the fall of Troy, and I never expect them to have happy endings. (I was pleasantly surprised when David and Stella Gemmell’s Troy trilogy ended with two of the characters living happily ever after.) Same goes with any stories that take place during destructive moments in history -- The Other Boleyn Girl will end with Mary watching her sister’s execution, The Titanic will always sink, and any book you read about the Holocaust may be about hope, but it will also be about trauma. 

So let’s take it out of the context of history and into fiction. One of the most famous tragic love stories of all time, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, tells you in the prologue in Act I that Romeo and Juliet will die at the end -- presumably so that people who wanted a happy ending know to leave right then and come back when Much Ado About Nothing is playing. 

Shakespeare wasn’t the first or only storyteller to do this either. The audiences of Greek tragedies knew good and well Antigone was going to die for her loyalty to family and the gods. Even the muses in the opening of Homer’s The Odyssey kind of tell you what’s about to happen. Which suggests that in many of the most iconic and long-lasting stories in Western culture* the storytellers haven’t been too concerned with spoilers.

This is not what we’re seeing with storytellers today.  

Possibly because fans are now obsessed with getting online and talking out theories for what and how certain plots will play out, writers -- and TV writers in particular -- have become obsessed with “subverting audience expectations.” Some have even come out and said they’ve changed endings after fans correctly predicted their plans. Think about that for a second: audience surprise is now more important to some storytellers than having a plot-driven narrative.

There’s a scene in the CW show Jane the Virgin where, in a flashback, a precocious young Jane at her first ever book reading asks a romance author why she ended a particular book with the couple NOT living happily ever after. The author tells her love doesn’t always work out.

“Yeah, in real life,” Jane says. “But this is a romance novel. In a romance novel, they get a happily ever after, not happily until a mortar shell explodes just when Jean Luc’s finally coming home from the war!

“Everyone knows in tragedies they end up dead, in comedies they end up happy and in romance novels they end up together,” she later adds.

Of course the author tells Jane basically what head show writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss told us about the end of Game of Thrones earlier this year: “Sometimes you need to subvert the ending for the element of surprise.”

The takeaway for Jane is that she has to read the endings of books first so that she knows what happens. This is something that comes up in other meta stories about storytelling. (In the 2003 movie Alex and Emma, Emma, played by Kate Hudson, tells professional novelist Alex, played by Luke Wilson, that she always reads the ends of books before deciding whether she wants to invest her time in the whole thing. Alex is flabbergasted. Also, I need to rewatch that movie.) 

Does this mean I think all TV shows, books, movies, etc. should be spoiled? No. But it does raise the point that audiences want to know they’re on the same page as the storyteller. I don’t want Rob Thomas to manipulate my emotions and make me think I’m watching a particular type of story only to blow Logan Echolls up in the last 10 minutes. I don’t want to read 10,000 pages and watch 7 seasons of a Jaime Lannister redemption arc that ends with him riding back to King’s Landing for a pointless death scene with the woman who sent him down the path of self-destruction in the first place. And I better fucking not have watched Kylo Ren oversee the massacre of a peaceful village at the beginning of The Force Awakens for The Rise of Skywalker to end with him banging Rey. Because those stories weren’t presented to me as the kind of stories that would have those endings.

If Game of Thrones the TV show had told us at the outset that this was the story of The Tragedy of Danaerys Targaryen, would as many people have been shocked, pissed off, bitterly disappointed in the ending to a show they’d spent literal years watching and being invested in? 

The other side of that question, of course, is: If Game of Thrones the TV show had told us at the outset that this was the story of The Tragedy of Danaerys Targaryen, would as many people have watched it in the first place, knowing it would inevitably end with Danaerys’ downfall?

Call me crazy, but I think yes. The show would still have been successful. Hell, I’d argue it would even have been better -- with everyone knowing the end, getting there is tighter. There are fewer false starts and unnecessary characters, the writers, actors and audience are all on the same page, that whole Dorne subplot probably doesn’t happen. With a general consensus on the destination, it all becomes about the journey.

And if we’re really being honest with ourselves, that’s what storytelling is actually about. Because I read 369 pages of The Song of Achilles, knowing damn well it wouldn’t end happily for Patroclus and Achilles but also getting to see how happy they were in the middle -- how their choices brought them to Troy to fight with the Greeks, even though they didn’t start the war themselves; how they spent 10 years making a life there together; how Achilles brought love to Patroclus’ life and how Patroclus kept Achilles human throughout the war. And instead of being a bitter love story, it was a beautiful one, and it was worth the ending.

Having an audience that understands the writer’s storytelling goals will always be better than leaving an audience shocked, angry, and confused at the wholesale destruction of characters they’ve invested in. Intentional storytelling will always be better than shock value.

*I say stories in Western culture because, unfortunately, I am not as familiar with stories in other cultures. (I know/have heard of some of them, but don’t know them well enough to know what the prologue says. Someone who knows -- does The Epic of Gilgamesh tell you at the outset that Enkidu dies?) But I’d be interested to know if some cultures care about spoilers more than others, and just generally would like to see more discussion on this whole topic.