Another Hot Take: Multiverses Are Lazy and Hackish

Look, guys, the point isn't whether or not LOTR is full of plot holes and therefore a great example of lazy writing.

The real point is that many people can enjoy it just fine, regardless.

And there's nothing wrong with that, right?

A plot hole is not anything left unexplained. It's something which could not be reasonably explained.

There are a lot of fairly obvious narrative and pacing reasons not to do this, but it doesn't matter, because that's an artistic criticism, not a logical one that establishes a plot hole. And "a film you like has a plot hole!" is not actually a response to the underlying arguments about narrative consistency or coherence, anyway.

And I'll take the lack of response on the video to indicate that you thought it was real, which adds, along with the above, to my impression that these responses are coming out a little half-baked. It feels like this whole thing has turned in on itself and now it's all about the next reply/winning/discrediting each other. Which is probably why this keeps going off the rails.

Would advise everyone to take a moment and refocus on the topic. Or better yet, maybe just sit the rest of this one out, because I'm skeptical a productive disagreement is possible.

Tolkien is of note here I think in giving us the label of "Eucatastrophe." We accept that everything can suddenly go wrong after a series of cumulative events, but we rarely think of how everything can suddenly "go right" after many labours. And this takes the curse off of the Deus Ex Machina in that it reminds us that contingency can swing massive surprising outcomes in either direction. It is a formal device, yes. However, it is device that has some fidelity. The American Revolution, for example, was a real world Eucatastrophe. By all rights, Britain should've made short work of the Colonies. Of course, if the Colonists had possession of a Flux Capacitor or Infinity Gauntlet we wouldn't expect anything less than success. We don't have "world erasers" in the real world, but we do have apparent Deus Ex Machinas in the form of improbable victories when all seems lost. That is, unless you're a Bengals fan. Their season ended... ...badly.

The eucatastrophe is also, of course, a part of his Catholicism, and Christianity in general. A lot of thought went into it, and a lot of explanation has gone into it since. Pretty strange for the supposedly lazy option to require dramatically more work than something narratively simpler, or dare I say, safer.

People can like it or not. I actually have mixed feelings on it, narratively speaking, but it's tough to judge discretely. But to describe it as "lazy" is simply ignorant. Though we hardly need to get that deep into it to realize this; describing the dude who made up his own languages and wrote entire fictional world histories as "lazy" doesn't even pass the sniff test.

I am not simply trying to "discredit" the other party here. I am genuinely trying to make a larger point, as I had just mentioned. One that I believe we can all agree on.

Look, on a personal level, I have always found a lot of inconsistencies with those movies, but that's really not the point.

As I said earlier, even if that was not the case at all, I would still not be into those movies, for various reasons that I won't repeat.

And Corax can watch those movies and enjoy them 100% whether or not I think they have issues of narrative consistency.

I am going to provide an additional example so that we don't just focus on LOTR.

When Michael Curtiz was filming Casablanca, someone pointed out to him some plot issues or inconsistencies, I don't remember exactly what, and he famously replied, "Don't worry, I make it go so fast, nobody notice".

I think it is absolutely true, and a top-notch director like Curtiz perfectly realized that if a movie was entertaining enough, 99.9% of the people watching it wouldn't even notice any kind of plot hole or whatever.

And I believe he's absolutely right.

I am a little more confident, Yoda. I think we can all agree at the very least, that almost anyone of us can be a little forgiving of certain flaws in a script if the overall product is still compelling enough for us to be drawn in and to take interest in the characters and the issues they are facing.

Are there issues that go a little too far? I am sure we can also agree on that.

There was a while, years ago, when almost every other story seemed to end with some variation of "it was all a dream".

I think at some point almost everyone was tired of it.

So, I think if we're all willing to be just a little bit reasonable, we can all agree that, yes, some story tropes/narrative crutches occasionally go too far, but that sometimes we also enjoy a lot of stuff even if other people might find them narratively inconsistent (in which case it sort of becomes a moot point whether or not those narrative inconsistencies are real or not).

I think that's a fair compromise, don't you?

Spoilers dude!
*throws his hands up in exasperation while he also kicks a puppy in his way*

Oh, and before I forget - there are numerous examples, well known to many film buffs, of plot holes large and small in any number of classic movies from the 20th century.

The plot of The Big Sleep is considered by many to be absolutely impenetrable, if you take a really close look at all of the story points. (Leonard Maltin wrote, "So convoluted even Chandler didn't know who committed one murder, but so incredibly entertaining that no one has ever cared")

None of those has ever been considered to be something important enough to diminish the artistic merits of said classic movies.

People back in the day didn't get the opportunity to re-watch movies endlessly at home, they just went home and forgot about it, and mostly didn't take a very close look at the story points.

It is only now that we can watch, rewind, freeze-frame and fast-forward to our heart's content that noticing certain, umh, story issues becomes a lot easier (and also things like continuity errors, which aren't the result of the writing).

I am not familiar with the Catholic aspects of it. I just remember watching an old interview on YouTube where he explained the term and I thought that he had a fair point. Dr. Tolkien or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machina.

It's explained plain as the nose on your face in books right at the beginning of their journey why they can't ride the eagles to Mordor and why that would never have worked.

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I destroyed the dastardly dairy dame! I made mad milk maid mulch!

I hate insomnia. Oh yeah. Last year I had four cases of it, and each time it lasted three months.

I remember wondering why they didn't use the eagles when I saw Return of the King. They show up at the end and they are quite effective in combat. Gandalf established that he could summon them in Fellowship. And the films, amazing as they are in doing so much do not explain this particular detail. For some, who just watched the films without reading the books. it was a curiosity. Why not? The films would be better off with a line of dialogue explaining why the eagles cannot or will not help in this way. Of course, if we start playing this game, there are endless fans who would insert Tom Bombadil into the film and so on. As a charitable viewer, we can only infer that if they could've the would've and leave it at that. All of this, however, is miles away from the question of what our heroes would or should do if, for example, they were given a time machine.

They had to sneak into Mordor. Giant flying eagles would have been too easily seen by the all seeing eye of Sauron.
After all, One simply doesn’t fly nonchalantly into Mordor.

Boromir: One does not simply walk into Mordor.

Gimli: Gandolf, are you not still friends with the Eagles? They could fly the ring into Mt. Doom.

Elrond: The sleepless all-seeing eye would spy this, Son of Gloim.

Gimli: But 'tis is just a single eye. What if we created a diversion in the opposite direction?

Elrond: And how long do you think this distraction would last? Say you that it would purchase enough time for our feathered friends to fly over enemy lands into the heart of terror?

Gimli: Aye, time is the factor. What is the airspeed velocity of a lightly laden eagle?

Gandalf: Arnorian or Eriadorian?

If Elrond was given a Time Machine, he could have gone back and made Isildur (I have no idea how to spell his name) destroy Sauron's ring, and saved everyone the trouble.

People keep telling me how I can't compare book to screen except I don't see why. It's the same story on two different media. Why shouldn't I compare them? It's actually why I'm trying to avoid books adapted to movies nowadays. The other way is easier because then I'll be pleasantly surprised when I read a better rendition of the same story.

Time travel technology would just wind up with people going further and further back in time (Oh, no you don't! I'll go back five years earlier!) until they reached the beginning. And then there would be a big screaming match about what to do with the universe.

I politely suggested moving on earlier partially to avoid having to argue more forcefully, but okay:

Listen, I've seen this kind of thing a lot. In the early days it happened to me, too: responses become frantic and compulsive. Replies begin within a minute of the thing they're replying to (which isn't even enough time to read them, let alone consider them), people start spamming supportive articles, and they stop applying common-sense skepticism to anything that seems to help their case. The fact that I've mentioned that video being a fake a couple of times and haven't gotten back so much as a quick mea culpa is a big red flag.

And if that weren't enough, you took to The Shoutbox to say this after:

I just owned Corax big time in the Multiverse thread

So no, I don't think a productive disagreement is possible. Every post is either incendiary or the repetition of a platitude that everyone agreed on several pages ago. Whatever point you felt you had to make, I think it's been made. It was immediately established that no concept is impossible to write well about, and it's been established several times again since. It does not need to be established further. I would, personally, like to read or have a discussion that goes beyond that basic level of nuance.

Simply put, the Crucifixion and Resurrection are the quintessential eucatastrophe. This was the impetus for his inclusion of it, though as you noted there are lots of real-world echoes of it to choose from.

Anyway, I'm a little sympathetic to someone who finds it to be a poor thing to include in a narrative. But it's something heavily steeped in this theology, and for which he expended a lot of thought and energy. So it can be good or bad (all art is subjective, after all), but lazy, it is not.

Indeed. I'll use this excuse to link to and quote my essay from a couple of years back:

Reading This Will Prevent the Robot Apocalypse

:

However you sort out Terminator's narrative bickering, a pretty obvious question looms: assuming you can change the future by intervening in the past, why stop at John and Sarah Connor? Why not kill Sarah's mother, or grandmother? Why not blow up Ellis Island on the day her ancestor lands on the teeming shore? Maybe we can aim our headcanons at the problem and assume that going back before a certain point endangers elements of the future the machines don't want to change, but I have it on good authority from the Lepidoptera community that even small changes have large effects.

The result of this strategy would be an arms race not of technology, but chronology: the machines target Sarah's mother, so humans go back and save Sarah's mother. In response the machines target her grandmother, and the humans go back to save her instead...and so on and so forth, fighting backwards in time for an inverted eternity. If you want a picture of this future, imagine a reboot stamping on a human face, for ever.

To avoid derailing, if anyone wants to discuss it, here's a thread to do so.

Is it spam if you own the site you're spamming? Probably yeah, still. I contain multitudes.

I'm always fascinated by time-travel paradoxes in movies.

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I get excited by them specifically because I think "maybe this one has a new angle." It usually doesn't, but I can dream.

I'm a Star Trek fan and when I say Star Trek I don't mean the new series or the new movies, I mean the Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise...they do a lot of time travel too! Often those are great stories because it allows for more chances to do different type stories than they normally could do on a non time travel episode. I generally enjoy those time travel episodes, especially when they are done well. But like Corax pointed out, one has to shut off the logic side of one's brain or it becomes this, 'Let's go back in time and take care of the super evil Borg/baddies before they become all powerful.'

Yes, sometimes multiverses and time travel is lazy writing, sometimes it ain't.