One Thing After Another
Story time thoughts
I read a manga. In it, the heroine had promised to do something, hadn’t done it, and weaseled out with a claim that the man she promised it to had broken his part first.
But this didn’t hold together. The heroine lived in fear of her life, and she thought that this promise was part of her best possible route to survival. She would have done it.
Part of the problem was that the volume covered many days.
Movies in particular have the problem that they can elide time like that. Most obviously, the Millennium Falcon and all its crew from Han to R2D2 had to spend as long hiding from Darth Vader as Luke spent training with Yoda. (With no hint that the Force can affect the motion of time.)
Writing has a somewhat different relationship to time, and so do comics, because the story does not move at a rate approximating real life. A novel can pass over a century with a sentence (and a comic with the caption “A century later”), and then dilate for pages on end over a moment. (A suitably dramatic moment or a literary work, to be sure.)
But scene cuts in writing can work just as they do in movies: to confuse time. To make something last, logically, far longer than it should have. To make time appear full. To keep characters unduly focused.
Focus is the one I notice the most. Let us take the villainess isekai plot,1 which is where I noticed it most recently.
For an egregious example, I read one in which the heroine landed as the villainess in a video game. When she attended school, she tangled with the heroine, ending up dead or exiled.
School lasted for several years, and it was several years until she attended it.
BUT
She was intensely, intensely focused on the game. Need to avert the problems, need to deal with the love interests (and it had a whole love tangle), need to deal with the other characters, all in light of the danger of the game.
You can’t keep yourself keyed up to that pitch. You’d wear out and grow numb. Especially when she’s a bright, cheerful, outgoing girl. She shares interests with some other girls, she goes to parties, she goes running around the enormous edifice that is the family home with various characters.
Not once in the story does she even catch herself to realize she’s forgotten the game and hastily check what she’s done in order to ensure she’s not bumbled things.
This is all the more crucial in that these stories never have the game world betraying itself. Except, sometimes, by having pop-ups that give information or allow side quests. The world itself utterly surrounds the character, who sees, smells, tastes, feels, and hears just as in life. Who eats, sleeps, drinks, goes for walks, and all the rest.
For years.
You would forget sometimes.
Even if every now and again you would be jolted by memory that this is part of the game. Or, no doubt, by the realization that that is not part of the game, because no game world is large enough to operate as a world. (Landing in a world clearly circumscribed by the game would have interests of its own, to be sure, but it would dominate the plot.)
Then, this is also compatible with the complaint I made in the opening: the character should have time to do things. If you are stuck as the doomed villainess in a video game, particularly if the time scale is short, you can make a plan even if you have to write it in code, and carry it out without the issue of cut scenes forcing the issue.
(True, cut scenes can force the issue, but like a world circumscribed by the game, would dominate the plot.)
It’s one thing for our villainess/heroine to forget she’s in a game and act as if it’s a life. It’s another thing for her to make plans and then forget them, especially when she never ever forgets that she’s in a game, no matter how unrealistic that is.
Ah, story time, in the world, and in the text. Juggling is essential.