blah blah theorycakes
Jun. 5th, 2010 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
recordWell helloooooo LJ! (You can imagine that being the Seinfeld belly voice, if you want to.)
Rather than attempting to catch up on the rather boring and trivial recent events of my life, here's something that I was talking to![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mousetrout about, after we read this article on io9. What's the appeal of the origin story?
My initial, kind of English-nerdy thought was, well, everyone likes a good Bildungsroman. I'm not even going to formulate this into a line of reasoning: Harry Potter, Q.E.D. But the weird thing about origin story movies (Batman Begins, for example) is that they only seem to work as an after-the-fact prequel. Maybe that's because in the initial movie of a comic book franchise, the origin story *does* get to be part of the plot of the movie, if only in a flashback or introduction piece. So as viewers, we're left curious and intrigued by what we know, and after getting sick of the franchise, we want to recapture that initial curiosity by spending a whole movie before the timeline gets "ruined" by whatever annoying or worn-out thing that ended up happening?
Or maybe it's that no matter what "beginning" the original seems to start with, there's always something that could have happened before? What IS the "interesting" or "main" part of any story, right? Especially when you're talking about a superhero, who, by the nature of the comic book, has to tilt at endless windmills for decades.
I totally would have watched a prequel to Lost rather than the last two seasons, too. Just putting that out there.
Rather than attempting to catch up on the rather boring and trivial recent events of my life, here's something that I was talking to
mousetrout about, after we read this article on io9. What's the appeal of the origin story?My initial, kind of English-nerdy thought was, well, everyone likes a good Bildungsroman. I'm not even going to formulate this into a line of reasoning: Harry Potter, Q.E.D. But the weird thing about origin story movies (Batman Begins, for example) is that they only seem to work as an after-the-fact prequel. Maybe that's because in the initial movie of a comic book franchise, the origin story *does* get to be part of the plot of the movie, if only in a flashback or introduction piece. So as viewers, we're left curious and intrigued by what we know, and after getting sick of the franchise, we want to recapture that initial curiosity by spending a whole movie before the timeline gets "ruined" by whatever annoying or worn-out thing that ended up happening?
Or maybe it's that no matter what "beginning" the original seems to start with, there's always something that could have happened before? What IS the "interesting" or "main" part of any story, right? Especially when you're talking about a superhero, who, by the nature of the comic book, has to tilt at endless windmills for decades.
I totally would have watched a prequel to Lost rather than the last two seasons, too. Just putting that out there.