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J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

So I go over to The One Wiki to Rule Them All (a fun title, but not as catchy as Wookiepedia) and look up the One Ring and get a full download. When it was made, where and how and why. How Sauron pretended to be a dude to trick people into accepting it. Just the whole thing.

And I was like, cool. I’m sure all the stuff isn’t explained in the book until deep into Return of the King, but I’m familiar with the gist and not afraid of spoilers. So I proceed with the novel.

My beloveds. Do you know when literally all of that is revealed in the text? Chapter Two. Chapter two of the first book of The Fellowship of the Ring. Like, Chapter One is ‘A Long Awaited Party’ and it has Bilbo’s Eleventy First Birthday Party, but then Chapter Two is ‘The Shadow of the Past’ and it fully explains everything about the Ring. To my knowledge nothing meaningful, or even particularly noteworthy, about it is revealed after that point.

The most important single item, the most important working of magic, the MacGuffin of all MacGuffins and it is completely outlined in chapter two of book one out of six. Sanderson could never.

All of the rest of the story, all of the tension and twists and the like, all come from people and events. Will they get to a place in time? Can this person be relied upon? Will these folks put aside their immediate fears to focus on the bigger picture? Can Sauron’s pride continue to blind him to our heroes plan?

I can only think of two ‘twists’ in the proper sense in all of the Lord of the Rings: Gandalf’s return and the foreshadowed but still kind of out of nowhere appearance of the Ents (maybe that Dernhelm was Eowyn?). And you know what? It’s still a deeply compelling story. I was so fully engrossed in the Battle of Pelennor Fields. The climax at Mt. Doom is not lessened by the fact that no new power or quality of the Ring is revealed, or suddenly leveraged in a clever way.

I like a lot of modern fantasy. I’m a huge Sanderson fangirl and I’m enjoying The Will of the Many right now, so I’m not intrinsically opposed to a bit of a mystery around a thing. But the sort of JJ Abrams-ification is as detrimental to good story telling than any Whedonified quips.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

And here is my art for @codelyokozine!

nobody in these games is ok

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past