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sol1056 · 6 years

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vld S3/S4 story structure: braided, reset, and broken

And we have the last of these three, why did I ever say I’d explain this. Someday I’ll learn, I swear. Part 1 is story structure and how doing it wrong can mess things up, and Part 2 is about VLD’s story structure in S3/S4 specifically.

Behind the cut: braiding elements vs a full-on story reset, the broken structure hiding in S4, and some easy ways (no seriously, real easy) to fix it.

S3′s braiding vs resets

With both Shiro and Zarkon on-screen again, we have a structural reset, and we’d just need to make sure we come out of it having learned something. Character development especially needs to be clear (and really obvious that it couldn’t have happened any other way), or readers will get irritated that their time was wasted. Truth is, a reset’s not automatically bad. It’s just not the most graceful way to do it.

(but if you do the ‘he woke up and it was a dream’ bit, that is absolutely a bad reset and will piss people off)

After the Shiro-return and Keith-leader elements, we get ‘Zarkon returns’. But if we see Zarkon as being undefeated -- y’know, he just took a short nap in the middle -- that means the original ‘defeat Zarkon’ element never ended.

It did get suspended, though, and that’s a really... bizarre thing, in terms of how VLD presented it. From the start, the goal has been explicitly ‘defeat Zarkon’. Not ‘defeat Zarkon et al’, nor even ‘defeat the evil empire’. That tight focus is the root of S3′s early aimlessness, since Zarkon -- the main goal for two seasons -- is gone. Add in S3E1's title, ‘changing of the guard’, and it’s reasonable to infer the ‘defeat Zarkon’ arc has ended.

One key about braiding is shifting the element across the story, in gentle nuances as it’s explored. Take ‘become a team’: we could say this overarching element is actually composed of three contiguous parts -- ‘shiro as leader’ in S1/S2, ‘keith as leader’ in S3, and ‘shiro as leader’ in S4. Despite positional shifts, the braided element itself is intact.

In the same way, if it’s not ‘defeat Zarkon’ but ‘overthrow the Galra’, then we have ‘defeat Zarkon’ in S1/S2, and ‘defeat Lotor’ in S3/S4, again keeping the braided element intact.

I’m gonna add a caveat to that, though. What we’re talking about here is when a role shift becomes a plot point. Allura is a protagonist from the start, as is Keith. But Allura’s growth is part of the structure (via a plot-point) when she moves from princess to paladin, just as Keith does when he goes from paladin to leader to blade.

Similarly, the character role behind ‘overthrow the Galra’ is ‘antagonist’. Zarkon moves from ‘tyrant’ to ‘main antagonist’ when he takes an active role blocking the protagonists, and the same for Lotor. In other words, if Lotor is not an antagonist, then this braided element is truncated for the duration of Zarkon’s long nap.

That might not make sense right now, but just keep it in the back of your head in the next section. Hopefully you’ll see where I’m going with that.

S4′s broken structure

Continuing from the previous post, by S4, we’ve got a lot of tangles. Taking the explicit order of events in the story, the structure might be:

<shiro v2> OR </here is shiro> <can Keith co-lead> <zarkon returns> #6 <black lion refuses> #7 [ open/close: backstory, pidge, etc] </black lion accepts> #8 <keith leaves> #9 [ open/close: matt, allies, voltron show] <finale battle> </lotor threatens> </finale battle>

We have a new event element of #7 ‘Black refuses Shiro’, and its resolution overlaps closely with #9 ‘Keith leaves team’. The writing implies a cause-and-effect: “Keith isn’t here, please accept me", which means #8 ‘Black accepts’ doesn’t trigger #9 ‘Keith leaves’ -- but is instead triggered by Keith’s implicit absence. In other words, Black doesn’t wait for Keith to make it official.

That said, I’m tempted to say #8 ‘black accepts’ is not resolving #7 ‘black refuses’ -- but instead is a new event, an opening of ‘black accepts’. This depends on whether the ‘Shiro returns’ character is returning or new; if the same Shiro, then it’d make no sense to end this #8 probationary acceptance, switch Keith back to Black as part of closing #9, and then switch Black back to Shiro again, to close out #7.

I mean, I guess you could do that. But I think it’d take a damn good writer, and even then some readers will want to pry open your version of Black and ask some serious questions. Characterization is the key --remember what I said about stakes driving the hard choices, which in turn drive the plot points, which in turn become the story structure.

If Black has no consistent motivation, then plot’s driving, not character. If Black is a character, too, then closing the element becomes even more important because that demonstrates growth or change in the character.

The other tangle is that ‘defeat Zarkon’ re-emerges before ‘defeat Lotor’ is resolved. We could say it’s a parallel: where Shiro returns and shuts Keith down, Zarkon returns and shuts Lotor down. The problem is that stories are fundamentally about protagonists -- so while this is a lovely parallel, Lotor is not a protagonist. He cannot be both the continuation of the antagonist and a parallel protagonist.

However! Let’s say the story was super-clear that we’re dealing with a Shiro v2, who is also explicitly a Haggar puppet -- then the parallel might work (or at least, be less failey). As Zarkon shuts down Lotor, Hagar (via Shiro) shuts down Keith. I still find it awkward, and it’d require groundwork (and a lot less being coy), but given the other reflections between Lotor and Keith, it could work.

Well, it’s still kinda ehhhh... Between Lotor’s abrupt fall from grace -- out of sight, mind, or influence of any of the protagonists -- along with Zarkon’s complete disinterest in his former agenda (”lion, what lion”) -- I can’t get past the sense that it just doesn’t work. The protagonists never actually protagged; the resolution of the ‘Lotor threatens’ element was basically as deux ex machina as Thace or Allura’s magic.

fixing the antagonist issues

There are two ways to address the disjointed sense of Zarkon playing the protagonist’s role in taking out Lotor. One way is to let the protagonists actually protag, and strike a severe enough blow to Lotor.

Cut that military propaganda filler episode, and give the protagonists something resembling a victory. Lotor goes down, the team prepares to strike a final blow on the empire, and Zarkon rises in time to rebuff the heroes (in another echo of S1, but fine). With the event element (’lotor threatens’) thus ended, Lotor’s re-appearance marks a new character element (’lotor plays nice’).

This might be the oldest Char in the book, but hey, some people still fall for it -- and you can reverse it just as easily. Lotor and team break up, closing out the ‘lotor plays nice’ element, and wham, Lotor reappears as an obstacle. You still get the same result, but without the dissatisfaction of seeing an antagonist beaten while the protagonists were busy filing their nails.

The other way is to make Lotor clearly a contagonist, rather than an antagonist. It’s an archetype from Dramatica, with these core behaviors:

hinders (if unwittingly) rather than helps the protagonist

not directly opposed to the protagonist’s goals (unlike the antagonist).

may ally with the protagonist in the overall conflict, but still gets in the way, prompts the protagonist down the wrong path, etc.

(Frex, done right, Loki is a far more interesting contagonist than antagonist.)

The reason I don’t see the story trying this is because while Zarkon's napping, there’s no active antagonist on the screen other than Lotor. If there's any one thing that gives S3/S4 its strangely disjointed and choppy structure, it’s having a contagonist play antagonist for, oh, most of S3.

That’s the biggest reason for a sense the story had stalled: the protagonists weren’t actually fighting an antagonist. And that means no headway on the ‘defeat the antagonist’ goal.

However, if we’d had Haggar as a defined and active antagonist, we’d be having a different conversation. Rather than appear randomly to goad Lotor into being a proper antagonist, if Haggar had instead said, ‘kid, wave to the people while I crush these puny rebels’, we’d have an interesting contagonist clashing with Voltron -- and we’d have a sense of forward movement, with Haggar as a legitimate stand-in for Zarkon.

On top of that, the parallels of Zarkon-to-Lotor and Shiro-to-Keith would be much more stark, and feel less like an antagonist did the dirty work on behalf of the protagonists. We could still have Keith fascinated, but the whole ‘lotor threatens’ element wouldn’t even exist, and S3/S4 might outline like this:

<where is shiro> [ open/close: keith as leader, new roles, comet, etc ] <shiro v2> <can keith co-lead> <black lion refuses> <black lion probation> <keith leaves> [ open/close: matt, allies, etc] <finale battle> </finale battle>

If contagonist is Lotor’s character role, then he’s not a plot device, and isn’t part of this structure. For that matter, even being stripped of resources, friends, and whatnot, he’s still a contagonist. He should have a structure to his own part, and an impact on the structure we see above, but not as a true antagonist. More importantly, he wouldn’t have the story-burden of carrying that braided element of ‘defeat the empire’.

That element would instead rest on Haggar, as one-half of interchangeable faces of the evil empire. Again, characters, not plot devices; even then the switch might not be an element of structure, unless it comes with a radical shift in strategy.

In which case, resolving the elements becomes quite straightforward:

#writing #story structure #voltron #voltron meta #sol thinks about stuff

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