On Overthinking Genre Fiction

What kinds of stories lend themselves to inventing justifications for plot holes?

Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash

In this weekend’s recap of recent output here, I semi-apologized for last week’s posts being lightweight fluff, and suggested I would write something more serious this week. I’m a little blocked up on that, though, because the big Supreme Court decisions have produced a giant flood of angry and idiotic #content that’s sort of smothering all political topics, and there’s some stuff going on with my day job that makes writing about academia a little fraught right at the moment. So, I’m going to write another kind of silly pop-culture thing here, just to keep my fingers limber.

The proximate cause of this is a Ben Lindbergh essay at the Ringer, headlined The Importance of Scrutinizing Sci-Fi and Fantasy Stories, talking about criticisms of recent Star Wars products and the “You’re taking this too seriously” complaint. As someone who’s spent a lot of time in and around SF fandom, this is a very familiar argument, and Lindbergh does a nice job sketching out the basic contours of it, which I can summarize in a pull-quote paragraph:

There’s nothing wrong with consuming or sampling this bottomless buffet of adaptations, sequels, and prequels in a casual, passive, or childlike way; for one thing, it’s almost impossible to keep up with the sci-fi/fantasy fire hose, and for another, these stories’ capacity to provide a distraction and put us in touch with our younger selves is part of their appeal. But sci-fi/fantasy franchises have become our culture’s dominant and defining fictional narratives, and they attract some of our most skilled artists and storytellers. There’s more to them than may have been immediately apparent from Saturday morning cartoons (though there was merit to those, too). To insist that they can best be appreciated by deactivating one’s critical faculties, or that they shouldn’t be held to the same standards as any non-genre fiction, is to concede that they can’t measure up unless they’re graded on a curve. It’s not a slight to subject them to scrutiny; it’s a sign of respect.

As a person who reads and watches a lot of genre fiction, I basically agree with this. To the extent that genre fiction works or doesn’t, it’s generally for the same reasons that more “serious” fiction works or doesn’t, and thus worth subjecting to the same types of analysis.

At the same time, though, I’m also a person who sometimes used the “Don’t think about this so much” line with regard to fiction, somewhat implicitly in my recent round-up of airplane reads, and a bit more explicitly in talking about Stranger Things. In the same way that the stories themselves are worth analyzing a bit to understand why they work or don’t, I think it’s probably also worth a bit of analysis to understand this split in reactions.

To some extent, I think there’s one of those “There are two kinds of people…” dichotomies at work, here, with regard to the response to breakdowns in the telling of particular stories. Lindbergh gives an example of such a breakdown in the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series, and while I haven’t watched that specific product, it’s not hard to think of similar examples in other franchises. He notes that this took him out of the story, but a paragraph or two later adds:

But many Obi-Wan watchers came up with convincing justifications for some of the series’ logical leaps, or simply accepted them in order to dwell on the aspects of the series they found rewarding. That’s good! I wouldn’t tell anyone how to enjoy things, or worse, that they shouldn’t enjoy things.

I think this lays out the sides pretty well: those who simply accept the gaps in order to dwell on more rewarding parts, and those who invest some effort in trying to fill those gaps in. It’s tempting to make this a trichotomy, the third side being those who say “This is dumb” and check out, but in another sense, I think that’s just an extreme version of the “accept to dwell on the rewarding parts” reaction, one where there just isn’t anything sufficiently rewarding to justify continued engagement. The parallel extreme on the accepting side is probably to be found in a certain strain of fanfic, where people are so bought in on the rewarding parts that they’re moved to write their own stories to fill in the gaps.

But it’s not entirely clear to me to what degree this is about the people reacting to the stories, and to what degree it’s about the stories themselves. I’m somewhat inclined to say it’s a people thing, mostly because I only very rarely feel the impulse to justify logical holes in stories. I’m pretty consistently in either the “This is dumb but I’ll roll with it” camp (much of Star Wars, some Star Trek) or the “This is dumb, I’m out” one (most comic books and comics-derived IP, Doctor Who). I’ve also been known to shift from one “This is dumb” sub-group to the other as series go along and story problems accumulate— I was happy to roll with the dopey aspects of early Harry Potter but after the first few books it got to be too much, and I kind of checked out.

On the other hand, it does feel like there are some shared characteristics to the types of stories where fans and creators end up going to elaborate lengths to justify logical gaps in stories. The trivially obvious example of such a characteristic¹ is that these reactions tend to come from serialized media of one type or another— comic books, novel series, tv shows, trilogies of movies taking inspiration from the serialized short films of an earlier era. The serial structure creates an expectation that the story to come will build upon and be consistent with past episodes of the story, and the longer the story goes on, the trickier that gets.

These also tend to originate in highly visual media— comics and various video formats— where it’s relatively easy to create an impression of depth without putting in the huge amount of background work that would be necessary to avoid creating story gaps. Fantastical architecture in comic books and Star Wars sets, weird-looking aliens in the background, a wild assortment of spaceship designs— these are primarily added because they look cool, and they create a sense of a rich world without any detailed explanation. And then down the road some fan or low-level writer has to take on the task of reverse-engineering an explanation for something that’s basically a spandrel, something inserted by an artist or designer who needed to fill some space. (Or, in the case of Star Wars, to not fill space by creating yet another bottomless void with no railing around it…)

A somewhat more controversial claim that nevertheless feels right to me is that the stories that inspire the most fill-in-the-gaps effort seem to be centered on characters who are, for lack of a better word, a bit under-developed. Personality-wise, Harry Potter is a bit of a blank space, whose impulses and motivations can shift as needed for story purposes. Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo start their stories as sketchy archetypes (whiny teen, feisty princess, rogue with a good hear, respectively). And so on. The central characters mostly start out without complicated personalities of their own, and are prone to shifting from one relatively stock type to another as the story moves along.

That description sounds somewhat damning, I know, but there’s a sense in which it’s a Good Thing, at least when it comes to inspiring people to fill in gaps in the story. The relative blankness of these characters makes it easier for fans to insert themselves into the story— Peter Parker’s problems are generic enough that it’s relatively easy to imagine yourself in his place, and then you get to be Spider-Man. And that kind of personal engagement is a strong incentive to find ways around gaps in the story logic that hold up at least long enough for the harried junior writers to fix them in some later iteration.

I think ths is probably a part of why about the only series I’ve ever been invested enough in to put significant effort into devising explanations for story holes is The Wheel of Time back in the day. Two of the male leads, Rand and Perrin, are a bit blank to start out, but share enough superficial characteristics with me (they’re both large and from a hick town in the middle of nowhere) that it was pretty easy to project myself into their place. And by the time they started to get more complicated and the continuity a little more tangled, I was well bought in and willing to devote some time to inventing justifications for things that probably didn’t actually make much sense.

(At least, that’s a plausible story I can tell myself. And, hey, I met my wife through WoT fandom, so it worked out pretty well in the end…)

I don’t know that there’s anything really groundbreaking in this analysis, but I do think it’s worth a bit of thinking about why people react to particular stories in particular ways. And that has at least been a mildly diverting way to pass a little time for me during an otherwise highly irritating week.

---

If you fall into the group of people who enjoy reading this kind of thing, here’s a button you can click to get it in your email:

If you’d like to take umbrage at any of my characterizations of fans or stories, the comments will be open:

1. Maybe I should say a trivially obvious example instead; another one being the fact that these mostly show up in genre stories that have some other superficial reward (spaceships, wizards, explosions, battle scenes,…) that the justification allows fans to keep enjoying.