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The “pacing” of a piece of media comes down to one thing, and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with your personal level of interest. It comes down to this question alone: Is the piece of media making effective use of the time it has?

That’s it.

So, for example, things which are NOT a example of bad pacing include a piece of media that is:

A slow burn

Episodic

Fast-paced

Prioritizing character interaction over intricate plot

Opening in medias res without immediate context

Incorporating a large number of subplots

Incorporating very few subplots

Bad pacing IS when a piece of media has

“Wasted” time, ie, screentime or page space dedicated to plotlines or characters that are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or thematic resolution at the cost of properly developing that resolution. Pour one out for the SW:TCW fans.

The presence of a sidestory or giving secondary characters a separate resolution of their personal arc is not “bad writing,” and only becomes a pacing issue if it falls into one of the other two categories.

Not enough time, ie, a story attempts to involve more plotlines than it has time or space to give satisfying resolutions to, resulting in all of them being “rushed” even though the writer(s) made scrupulous use of every second of page/screentime and made sure every single section advanced those storylines.

Padding for time, ie, Open-World Game Syndrome. Essentially, you have ten hours of genuinely satisfying story….but “short games don’t sell,” so you insert vast swathes of empty landscape to traverse, a bunch of nonsense fetch quests to complete, or take one really satisfying questline and repeat it ten times with different names/macguffins, to create 40 hours of “gameplay” that have stopped being fun because the same thing happens over and over. If you think this doesn’t happen in novels, you have never read Oliver Twist.

Another note on pacing: There are, except arguably in standalone movies, at least two levels of pacing going on at any given time. There’s the pacing within the installment, and the pacing within the series. Generally, there’s three levels of pacing–within the installment (a chapter, an episode, a level), within the volume (a season, a novel, a game), and within the series as a whole. Sometimes, in fact FREQUENTLY, a piece of media will work on one of these levels but not on all of them. (Usually the ideal is that it works on all three, but that’s not always important! Not every individual chapter of a novel needs to be actively relevant to the entire overarching series.)

Honestly, the best possible masterclass in how to recognize good, bad, and “they tried their best but needed more space” pacing? If you want to learn this skill, and get better at recognizing it?

Doctor Who.

ESPECIALLY Classic Who, which has clearly-delineated “serials” within their seasons. You can pretty much pick any serial at random, and once you’ve seen a few of them, you get a REALLY good feel for things like, for example…

Wow, that serial did not need to be twelve episodes long; they got captured and escaped at least three different times and made like four different plans that they ended up not being able to execute, and maybe once or twice they would have ramped up the tension, but it really didn’t contribute anything–this could have been a normal four-episode serial and been much stronger.

Holy shit there were WAY too many balls being juggled in this, this would have been better with the concepts split into two separate serials, as it stands they only had four episodes and they just couldn’t develop anything fully

Oh my god that was AMAZING I want to watch it again and take notes on how they divided up the individual episodes and what plot beats they chose to break on each week

Eh, structurally that was good, but even as a 90-minute special that nuwho episode feels like it would have worked a lot better as a Classic serial with a little more room to breathe.

How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (derogatory)

How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (awestruck)

If you’re not actively trying to learn pacing, either for literary analysis or your own writing…honestly? Just learn to differentiate between whether the pacing is bad or if it just doesn’t appeal to you. There’s a WORLD of difference between “The pacing is too slow” and “the pacing is too slow for me.” 

“I really prefer a slower build into a universe; the fact that it opens in medias res and you piece together where you are and how the magic system works over the next several chapters from context is way too fast-paced for me and makes me feel lost, so I bounced off it” is, usually, a much more constructive commentary than “the pacing is bad”. 

This is a very specific rule that has been taken dramatically out of context and is almost always used incorrectly.

“Show, don’t tell” applies to character traits and worldbuilding, not information in the plot.

It may be easier to “get” this rule if you forget the specific phrasing for a minute. This is a mnemonic device to avoid Informed Attributes, nothing more and nothing less. 

Character traits like a character being funny, smart, kind, annoying, badass, etc, should be established by their behavior in-universe and the reactions of others to them–if you just SAY they’re X thing but never show it, then you’re just telling the audience these things. Similarly you can’t just tell the audience that a setting has brutal winters and expect to be believed, when the clothing, architecture, preparations, etc shown as common in that setting do not match those that brutal winters would necessitate. 

To recap:

Violations of Show Don’t Tell:

A viewpoint character describing themselves as having a trait (being a loner, easily distractable, clumsy, etc) but not actually shown to possess it (lacking friends, getting distracted from anything important, or dropping/tripping over things at inopportune moments.)

The narration declaring an emotional state (”Character A was furious”) rather than demonstrating the emotion through dialogue or depicting it onscreen.

A fourth-wall-breaking narrator; ie, Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove directly addressing the audience to explain that he’s a llama and also the protagonist, is NOT the same! This actually serves as a flawless example of showing rather than telling–we are SHOWN that Kuzco is immature and egotistical, even though that’s not what he’s saying.

A fictional society or setting being declared by the narrative to be free of a negative trait–bigotry, for example–but that negative trait being clearly present, where this discrepancy is not narratively engaged with. 

(For example: There is officially no sexism in Thedas and yet female characters are subject to gendered slurs and expectations; the world of Honor Harrington is supposedly societally opposed to eugenics, yet “cures” for disability and constant mentions of a nebulous genetic “advantage” from certain characters’ ancestry are regular plot points that are viewed positively by the characters and are not narratively questioned.)

A character declaring that their society has no bigotry, when that character is clearly wrong, is not the same thing.

The narrative voice declaring objective correctness; everyone who agrees with the protagonist is portrayed as correct and anyone who questions them is portrayed as evil, or else there is no questioning whatsoever. For example: in Star Trek: Enterprise, Jonathan Archer tortures an unarmed prisoner. What follows is a multi-episode arc in which every person he respects along with Starfleet Command goes out of their way to dismiss the idea that he should bear any guilt, or that his actions were anything but completely necessary and objectively morally correct. No narrative space is allowed for disagreement, or for the audience to come to its own conclusion.

NOT Violations of Show Don’t Tell:

A character explaining a concept to another character who would logically, within that universe/situation, be the recipient of such an explanation.

An in-universe explanation BECOMES a SdT violation if the explanation fails to play out in reality, such as a spaceship being described as slow or flawed in some way but never actually having those weaknesses. Imagine if the Millennium Falcon was constantly described as a broken-down piece of junk…and never had any mechanical failures, AND Han and Chewie weren’t constantly shown repairing it!

Information being revealed through dialogue, period. Having your hacker in a heist movie describe the enemy security system isn’t “telling” and thus bad writing. Having information revealed organically through dialogue is what “show” means.

The “as you know” trope is technically a Show Don’t Tell violation, despite being dialogue, because it’s unnatural within the universe and serves solely to let the writer deliver information directly, ie, telling.

Characters discussing their own actions and expressing their motivations and/or decision-making process at the time.

The existence of an omnipotent narrator, or the narration itself confirming something. Narration saying “there was no way anyone could make it in time” is delivering contextual information, not breaking Show Don’t Tell. 

Keep in mind that “Show, don’t tell” is meant to be advice for beginning authors. Because “telling” is easier and requires less skill than “showing,” inexperienced authors need to focus on getting as much “show” in as possible. 

However, “telling” is also extremely important. Sometimes, especially in written formats, the most appropriate way to deliver information to the audience is to just say it and move on.

Keep in mind that a viewpoint character in anything but…a portal fantasy, essentially…is going to be familiar with the world they’re in. Not every protagonist needs to be a raw newcomer with zero knowledge of their new world! In most cases, a viewpoint character is going to know things that the audience doesn’t. Generally, the ONLY natural way to introduce worldbuilding in this situation is to just have the narration point them out. (It makes sense for Obi-Wan to have to explain the Force; it would make no sense for Han to explain the concept of space travel to Luke, who grew up in this universe and knows what the hell a starship is. So, if you’re writing the novelization of A New Hope, you need to just say “and so they jumped into hyperspace, the strange blue-white plane that allowed faster-than-light travel” and move the hell on.)

For that matter, in some media (ie, children’s cartoons) where teaching a moral lesson is the clear intent, a certain level of “telling” is not only appropriate but necessary!

The actual goal of “showing” and “telling” is to maintain a balance, and make sure everything feels natural. Show things that need to be shown, and…don’t waste everyone’s time showing things that would feel much more natural if they were just told.

I love how flexible English is, and I love how rigid French is! I know I've talked about this before but these traits always stand out to me and each has my preference in different contexts...

English is blessed with a very complaisant syntax, it often gives you multiple choices with regards to sentence structure, word order, verbal forms, etc, and if you worriedly (Frenchly) ask which one is the right grammatical choice, English speakers will say "Idk, depends on the way you want to say it? on whichever one seems best to you in this context?" (Distraught French speaker: "How can it be up to me? what does the rulebook say?? Which one were you forced to learn by rote in school and recite like a robot?")

English also offers a profusion of monosyllabic words which essentially act as Lego bricks you can stack on top of one another to innovate to your heart's content, it’s amazing. And much harder in French, which has longer base words, often with silent letters at the end, which may or may not need to be pronounced if they end up in the middle of a compound word, where they were never supposed to be... Poets in English love compounding because concision makes a poetic image more vivid (e.e. cummings’ "a watersmooth-silver stallion" obviously has more impact than "a stallion with a silver coat as smooth as water"—the immediacy of the image is what matters.) Fantasy writers love it as well; they can invent words in a really natural-sounding, frictionless way. French translators do their best but can only come up sometimes with a longer, awkward, painfully-hyphenated word because French has much more of a "who do you think you are" approach to inventing new words. (In Lord of the Rings “Dimrill Dale” was translated as “La Vallée des Rigoles Sombres”, “lockholes” as “trous-prisons”...)

French on the other hand is blessed with a very unforgiving syntax with a well-defined framework of rules (and yes, I know, many exceptions, but those are rules under another name), plus a profusion of little grammatical footholds (think: wherein, thus, thereupon...) so as not to lose your grip on the meaning of a long sentence. A badly-structured, pointless sentence in English can hobble along clumsily, tricking you into thinking it's viable until you try to understand the point it's making and are like "... what did i just read"; while this sentence in French would crumple down like a dry sandcastle and refuse to get up until you've made some attempt at fixing it. Usually by making a better use of semantically-weak “tool words” that don’t carry any information but are here to make sure the sentence holds together well. French primary school kids are force-fed these words and the grammatical structures they enable in truly excruciating detail.

So all these rules (and their painstakingly-defined exceptions) provide a solid frame which makes it possible to build long meandering sentences without loss of clarity. English can be more fun because you're swinging from vine to vine at greater speed and with more freedom of movement, but in French which forces you to lay railway tracks for your train of thought, it’s often easier to see how each component connects to others and how it led your thoughts from here to there.

Marc Auge explained how when we shifted from modernity to what he calls “supermodernity” we ended up creating “non-places”. They’re the opposite of place, as in they’re places with no real identity, and have no real emotional connection with the users. They’re there to fulfil a specific need and that’s it. It’s places like gas station, metro station and supermarkets, places where you go and you feel so detached, like everything is out of place. (The name of the book is  "Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity" it’s really interesting)

I can not describe how weird it is to see this on my recreational tumblr though

Some people are autistic. They spend their entire lives comparing being touched in ways they hate to being in pain, because people refuse to understand any other way. The world is hard to live in for them, because the feelings that hurt them are not categorized as Bad, and therefore what is torturous is not understood as torture.

Kink really unnerves a lot of people because it upends a lot of assumptions about how brains feel things. How can you want to experience something in the Bad category?

But I think kink better understands and allows for the actual complexity and reality of how brains feel things.

It’s actually more like this: There are very few, if any, actually inherently Bad stimuli. Instead, everything has a threshold at which it is unpleasant, even unbearable, and a threshold at which it is neutral or even good. Those are not necessarily opposite ends of the spectrum and can in fact overlap in weird ways. The intensity of a stimulus, or how much it pushes the limits of your processing, is not necessarily the same as “how much” stimulus, either.

Everyone is different in where their thresholds lie. There is a ton of diversity. This is…okay.

Furthermore, your thresholds are not fixed. You can adjust them a lot based on circumstances, such as how predictable the stimulus is, how much control you have over it, how much control you have over the rest of your environment, the amount of things you’re simultaneously processing, and so on.

In other words, if you experience something in an environment that is controlled, planned, and has low levels of unpredictability and extraneous stimuli, in a way that is curated to your ability to process it, that can cause a dramatic shift in whether you experience that thing as pleasurable or horrible.

I see posts written by people who believe that doing a thing categorized as Bad in a sexual context is inherently going to cause harm, regardless of consent. The implication, though, in singling out “kink,” is that there is a “normal, natural” form of sex that is not “inherently harmful,” that lacks the characteristics that make pain, for example, harmful.

These people are regarding “normal” sexual activities, certain forms of touch or stimulation, to be inherently “safer” and less hurtful.

But to an autistic person, a touch may feel much worse than pain, no matter how gentle it appears to be. To an autistic person, many “vanilla” and innocuous acts might feel unbearable. But they don’t get treated with suspicion, because the people for whom they are Bad are not Normal.

When you are autistic, agency over your own perception is one of the biggest things you have to fight for in order to heal and be healthy. “This hurts me because *i* say it hurts me” is…basic. Because people don’t believe you when your hurts are non-normative.

sound familiar?

OH MAN SEE SEE SEE i wish we knew so much more about how bull elephants interact with herds and families - we've documented bull elephants traveling to matriarchal herds and fake wrestling with male calves, and we've documented bulls protecting orphaned calves, but in god's name i want every in and out about it. everything we know about elephant social interaction is not enough. it's a Thing that introducing old bulls to a population lowers the amount of younger bulls in musth, also known as the state in which bull elephants desire nothing but murder and possibly sex, but - i want to know the precise mechanisms. old bull elephants teaching younger bulls manners renders me VERKLEMPT. i just wanna know every secret elephants have.

This is better documented in African Elephants than asian ones because they're easier for elephant biologists to observe by the means of 'sitting on top of a jeep and taking notes' but the general scope goes like this:

Elephant herds are largely matriarichal as both a means of protection- elephants have a long childhood and it's easier to protect calves in a group, AND as a socio-political means of sexual choice.

An African elephant is pregnant for nearly two years, then she spends at least 3-5 years with that calf completely dependent on her, so she only gets a few opportunities to have babies before she hits menopause, and it's a lot of damn work so she is naturally EXTREMELY picky about who she mates with. And if she's younger, her mom, sisters and grandmothers will also be real picky about who she mates with and WHEN too- can't go around risking a teenage pregnancy, especially not with asubstandard male. Elephants also have a pretty clear idea of what they want out of a Male too: they have a marked preference for Large, Old, Socially Adept Males. Large males are HEALTHY males with all thier bones in place and functioning digestive tracts. OLD males are healthy, have good intelligence to stay alive, and have good teeth. Socally Adept Males can make friends, get along with her whole family, won't engage in dangerous behaviors like trying to kill her calves or grandmothers. It's a good system that produces robust, intelligent and helpful calves.

This means however, that most female elephants are into Dilfs, or even Gilfs. Which is extremely frustrating when you are a horny teenage boy elephant, so they go a bit nuts with hormones and social isolation and get involved in teenage elephant gangs and do things like murder rhinos out of sexual and social frustration.

BUT! If there are Large, Old, Socially Adept males about, they like being parents too, but are largely pushed out of the role by the matriarichal herds and their strict group politics that exist to prevent unsuitable mating. So They turn thier attention to these violent orphans and like your beloved Batman go "I'm gonna parent the shit outta that."

They mostly do this by herding the Lads around, pointedly demonstrating Behaviors like "How to dig for roots so you don't starve" or "How to knock over a tree" or "Greeting a Matriach Properly so she doesn't sic her descendants on you", and disciplinary behaviors like "Jabbing naughty Lads in the ass with a tusk" and "Hitting you in the face with a branch until you STOP THAT" . This is WILDLY beneficial for the young males under thier tutelage, who are less likely to die of accidents, and start mating earlier because they've had a Suitable Gentleman make introductions for them, like they are fancy men at a regency-era ball being intoduced to the debutantes.

you a bitch

Fun question! I think that the answer first depends on what we’re considering a “civilization” because there are a few definitions. For the purposes of this answer, I’m going to assume that you meant civilizations as in societies with the presence of cities, and not a broader definition of civilizations. Keep in mind that I’m not an expert on the history of clothing or fashion, so these are just my speculative thoughts. Note that I’m also going to just blanket call non-pant bottoms either “skirts” or “dresses” although the actual styles and names of these clothes obviously vary widely across cultures. 

There is a very visible trend between cradle civilizations across the globe and the absence of pants. I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all. Keep in mind though that “no pants” isn’t a hard rule, and even societies that are popularly depicted as never wearing pants had some members of the social strata that wore pants at various points in time (ex. Roman soldiers). Still, generally-speaking, the trend holds up. Given that pants are the norm in the West now, and are appreciated for their safety and practicality, it seems kind of odd that they weren’t more common prior to the Middle Ages among civilizations (in the West, at least). 

Ultimately, I think this comes down to necessity (or lack thereof). First off, cradle civilizations spawned in temperate or warm climate zones. India, Mesopotamia, China (note that most of ancient China was within modern China’s temperate or subtropical zones), and the later civilizations of South America are such examples. Draping, spacious fabrics are best suited for these climates (and particularly for more arid regions, thin fabrics) and so there’d not be much need for pants or long sleeves throughout the year. During the winter, layering long skirts with a cloak or even leg wraps suffices since winters in temperate zones rarely get cold enough to necessitate a dramatic change in fashion. 

It’s also not necessary given the modes of living of the people in these civilizations. Living in a city, walking around on foot all the time and usually engaging in some kind of commerce or servitude rather than hard labor, doesn’t really require pants. I’d imagine that pants become more common the further from cities that you go because they become more practical, which is why you see some pants being worn by farmers of some ancient cultures. Still, it isn’t necessary. Roman farmers got along all right by just wearing long tunics. 

Really, I actually think that the answer to the question can be best understood if you flip it on its head: what made people start wearing pants in the first place? Two answers that I can think of: colder climates, and/or horse domestication. For the same reason that wearing pants isn’t necessary in temperate or hot climates, wearing pants is necessary in cold climates. You could still get by with thick, multi-layered dresses, but for the guy out in the cold or snow most of the day, a garment that closely insulates your legs is logically much more appealing than something that allows for air flow. If civilizations began in cold climates instead of warm climates, then we’d probably be seeing many more ancient civilized (i.e. city-dwelling) cultures that rocked pants and wondered why everyone else was wearing those barbaric skirts. 

The second part of this answer is equally logical but much more specific. Try riding a horse without anything covering your inner legs or groin and see how well that goes. Nobody likes chafing. Pants evolved out of a need for more protection riding our faithful steeds, which is probably why the oldest pair of pants found yet belongs to a Central Asian nomad. Central Asia does tend to have cold winters, so the climate factor is also at play, but I’d imagine that the selective pressure (if you will) of horseback riding played a significant role too. If you happen to be curious about early horse domestication, I answered a question on the topic directed at my sideblog, @barbariansatthegates here. Looking at the dates, and you’ll see that the first known pair of pants dates roughly to the earliest speculated date of horse domestication (3000 BCE vs 3500 BCE). Cities don’t have much use for horses beyond transport, and so, not much use for pants. Those using horses in early civilizations would be the vast minority. On that note, you again see horse use coincide with pants-wearing among Romans: their cavalry. 

so maybe i’m just projecting here but i think the entire Mitchell family, in the Mitchells Vs The Machines movie, are autistic as hell, and also quite probably don’t know this about themselves.

like! i absolutely loved the movie, it was incredibly funny and cute, and then on every level it was like ‘yeah this is a bunch of people who don’t quite know why they’re so weird, why mimicking normal suburban behavior never really works for any of them, why they often fail to connect even with each other because they all have very different interests and ways of coping with frustration and disappointment, because they have clashing stims and overload thresholds, because the world is just A LOT TO DEAL WITH and they all retreat and engage in different ways. but they love each other, and as soon as they accept each other’s individual strengths and weirdnesses, they click.’

like. they’re autistic. that’s a family of autistic people. that’s what’s going on there. the daughter leans full-throttle into peak meme digital absurdism because it covers her own inability to enjoy or reproduce more classically coherent art, though underneath she’s begging viewers–and her own dad–to see past the oversaturated mask of Nothing Matters Lol and to say, hey, you matter.

the dad’s overwhelmed at all times with the anxiety of being a suburban patriarch and needs to hyperfocus on woodsy survivalist stuff to have a sense of control over his life; to translate the artificial and increasingly digitally-bounded environment he’s stuck in into a more simple and authentic environment that he deeply regrets leaving. he hangs on to an ancient car, he wears the same clothes for twenty years. 

the mom is trying to be a good housewife by calibrating everything she does to instagram models of domesticity– there’s a RIGHT way to do things, and so what if they suck to do? they’re right, they look right, everyone says they’re right. their home is crammed with Live Laugh Love generic decorations that don’t even suit it because they clash with the authentic, messy, chaos of the family’s actual personality. every year her husband and daughter just clash worse, as her daughter grows up pretty unapologetically into someone the dad just can’t understand and isn’t even trying to. the mom’s tired, lost, stressed-out and jealous and full of an anger that isn’t acceptable for women to express. she’s not getting it right and she’s trying so hard and why isn’t it that enough?

the boy just fucking loves dinosaurs and gets so overloaded looking at his crush that he has to scream and throw himself out the nearest window, and i respect that immensely. 

So one of the things about my life is that my parents were really terrible at building life skills and sharing sound life advice and practical adulting skills.

- never immediately buy the stuff stocked at eye level. They stock the most expensive stuff there. Look above and below before buying anything - the bargain stuff, which is usually fine if it's food, is usually by your feet

- relatedly, if it's a tool rather than something like food or toilet paper, and you can, try to buy the second cheapest version of the thing rather than the absolute cheapest - "second cheapest" is usually where the biggest step up in durability happens

- it's both less work and less money to double the recipe on a casserole/lasagne/shepherds pie and freeze one of them in one of those foil dishes, than it is to make two casseroles on two different evenings with seperately bought smaller ingredient packs

- specific things to buy in bulk, like kilos and kilos of all of them whenever you have spare money: rice, lentils, tins of tomato paste or crushed tomatoes. Ideally spices and oil too. With these three things always hoarded in bulk, you can eat boring but healthy and fairly nutritionally complete food for a good few weeks, and eating enough will hopefully make it easier to resolve whatever the basic money issue is in the first place - also makes it easier to do the smart thing and choose rent over new food

- before you commit to acting on negative feelings, eat and drink something. Whenever we were angry as kids, my mum had a rule that we could only come to her about it if we'd tried eating something first. I have many memories of sulkily cramming a slice of bread into my mouth or chugging down a glass of milk in front of her, and it wasn't always the best, but the net outcome is that as adults, even my not amazingly self-aware cis brothers tell their girlfriends "I really need a big bowl of pasta! Let me get to the stove!" instead of just expressing anger, and I do try to fix my problems at a more basic level before going off at someone

-hydrogen peroxide is good for cleaning surfaces, but not good for disinfecting wounds, even though the fizzing can feel nice. it damages your broken tissue just as much as it kills bacteria, by reacting with the oxygen inside cells (hence the fizzing). this slows your healing down.

-to reduce blood stains, scrub the fabric with ICE COLD WATER and a bar of soap. as soon as you wash the blood in hot water, the stain sets. wash blood as soon as possible, ideally while it’s still wet; the longer it sits, the less you’re gonna get out later.

-if you need to lighten bones like for display, hydrogen peroxide and dish soap are good, but never use bleach. bleach damages the bones so bad that they get powdery because they dissolve. bleach just keeps breaking things down basically forever until you use a special bleach stop. don’t use bleach to lighten fabric either unless you really know what you’re doing, because, again, it’ll start dissolving the fabric eventually too. 

-it’s harder to orgasm when your feet are cold. i don’t know why, but i’ve found it’s harder to do pretty much anything when my feet are cold. get some nice socks and enjoy your life more.