Anatomy of a Cliffhanger

[loopy777]

I posted this to my tumblr a while ago but forgot to cross-post it here. However, a recent post by LJ Lee on Legend of Korra's meaningless action sequences reminded me of this, and so I'm digging this back up for everyone here to enjoy.

How to Create Meaningful Conflict

So, I think it's well-established that the Avatar comics published by Dark Horse and written by Gene Yang are not quite up to par. Just about the only actual praise I hear about them are, "Well, they give me my ATLA fix." I think that's like sniffing the bag to get your potato chip fix, but hey, if that works for some people, then great. I'll never be satisfied by the tin-earned dialogue, blatant Out of Character behavior, and reckless undermining of the original cartoon, but that’s hardly something about which I’ve been quiet.

The Rift, Part 2, however, contains a storytelling failure that I think is an excellent learning opportunity.

(The following is adapted from a post I made on Avatar Spirit, made to stand alone by request.)

The Rift, Part 2 ends with a cliffhanger (as comic books are wont to do) that presents a number of characters caught underground during an earthquake, with a cave collapsing on top of them. In most other franchises, this would be a dangerous situation, but among these supposedly imperiled characters is Toph. Just on the other side of the collapse, close enough to shout through a crack in the earth, is Aang. Now, between these two, you'd think the situation would be easily resolved. But for some reason, Aang isn't powerful enough to Earthbend without collapsing the whole cave on top of his friends (Kyoshi is rolling in her grave), and there’s iron ore in the rocks to boot, so only a Metalbender can save the day. Toph, of course, invented Metalbending, but she's presented as merely the only thing keeping the rest of the party from certain death.

The last page shows Toph holding up the collapsing cave, while Katara poses with fear and hysterically informs Aang, "Right now, Toph's Metalbending is all that's keeping us from getting crushed!"

Oh, please.

I think you're all with me, here, in believing that there's no way that Toph and Katara are going to be crushed. (At least, not in a fatal way.) Aside from the fact that we're all horrible cynics who know that a main character wouldn't die without the cover advertising it like death is going out of style, we're all either watching Legend of Korra or have at least absorbed spoilers from the first episode (which was released in the US in March 2012, over two years ago), so we know that Katara survives to teach the new Avatar, and Toph grows up to lead a Metalbending police force in Republic City.

Just to avoid confusion, I'll confirm that there's no Republic City yet in The Rift, and Aang is still alive and well and not even remotely thinking of reincarnating into a woman anytime soon. This all takes place a mere year after the cartoon's finale. So we have definite proof that the cliffhanger will be resolved in a pleasant manner, and anyone who still has interest in this franchise is well aware of it.

"But Loopy," you say, "that's a pitfall of all prequels! Once we know that a certain character survives, their chronologically earlier plotlines lose all tension and there's no way to create worthwhile conflict for them."

First of all, let me thank You for such a wonderful lead-in. That couldn't have been better if I scripted it myself.

Now, aside from being a pitfall of prequels, a variation of this is a common complaint about Superman stories as well. Superman, by definition, is the Superest Man, and he can't be threatened by anything on Earth besides Kryptonite. So how has his arch-nemesis Lex Luthor bedeviled the Man of Steel for longer than Kryptonite has existed, and in eras and continuities where Kryptonite was either not available or nonexistent?

Good storytelling, that's how.

Thanks to his Avatar State, Aang is pretty much Superman. Maybe he can’t turn back the world, but the Avatar State should be enough to lift a small mountain if Kyoshi can break off a massive peninsula from its mainland and turn it into an island. Gene Yang has attempted to negate this advantage by taking away the control of the Avatar State that the cartoon's finale established, but what Mr Yang doesn't seem to get is that there's no point to a villain or situation that threatens Aang physically, whether he can glow it up at will or not. We know that Aang's not going to lose, because we know exactly when he dies. So how do we create a conflict for Aang on any level?

Well, as Lex Luthor does for Superman, a truly great villain is one who threatens the things that Aang cares for, especially the people whose fates we don't already know thanks to far-off sequels. And it just so happens that Aang cares about everyone's life and well-being. Everyone. In the world. All those people. Quite the opportunity, isn't that?

There are all kinds of stories that could be told about endangering the people Aang wants to protect, with the Avatar State not even being a viable option because smashing things is so very rarely an effective solution for life’s troubles.

Take a look at the some of the episodes in the third Book of Legend of Korra. In one of the early plots, Korra meets the Earth Queen, a tyrant who's making life miserable for all of Ba Sing Se and its surrounding villages. Against this threat, there's nothing even the Avatar can do because people like Mako and Bolin's grandmother- peasants living in the city's Lower Ring- revere the Queen regardless of how awful she is. That's a great conflict for a global super-cop: Beating up the Earth Queen will accomplish nothing, killing her will leave a power-vacuum, and going full-out Terminator and wiping out those who serve the Queen will leave an everyone-vacuum.

Now that's drama!

In comparison, threatening Aang with a cave-in that could kill his friends is... utterly pointless? Trite? A cliffhanger that exists solely because every comic has to end with a cliffhanger? Whether or not Aang has the physical power to do anything about it is irrelevant to how boring a situation it is. The preview of the third volume shows that the real point is to force a bunch of characters close to Toph in a situation that makes them reflect on their lives so that they can have heartfelt conversations with her, but half of the preview is still wasted on trying to convey the tension and urgency of the cave-in to the reader, as though we’re anywhere near the edges of our seats over this.

Superman: The Movie understood how to challenge its protagonist, and had Lex Luthor shoot two nuclear missiles in opposite directions while he kept Superman distracted. When he learned about the missiles, Superman could only stop one, and the other would allow Luthor to win. It's that kind of villain who should be threatening Aang right now. Someone who makes us wonder what would actually happen if Aang failed.

Or, you don't even need a villain. Have a cave-in threaten two different groups of people, and Aang can only save one. Sure, when we read the next volume, it turns out that Aang came up with a clever way to save both sets of people anyway, but if it's not a cheap move, then it's a rewarding pay-off for real dramatic tension. We wonder how Aang will save the people. We wonder if he might not fail, and only save one group of people. That other group doesn't have their fates locked in, and the story won't end in an anti-climax if they die, so we can actually worry about them. And in worrying about them, we worry about Aang as well. How will it affect him to fail like that? What will he do in response to those feelings? Will that influence the larger situation in any way, like if not being able to save some Fire Nation people causes problems for Zuko?

There's all kinds of possibilities there, all of it good drama.

And so there's tension.

This type of storytelling comes from an author who is capable of really asking, "What happens if the hero of my story fails?" The best ones know how to make that happen without diminishing the hero, or ending the story. They can set up situations where the tension isn't, "Oh no, is the hero going to die halfway through the movie without anyone relevant to take their place?" Because no one falls for that. At least, not above the age of six. I think all of us were fairly sure that Luke Skywalker wasn't going to fall to the Dark Side while we were watching Return of the Jedi, but there was tension around how he would face Darth Vader and whether he could save his father. (Oh, spoilers: Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father. Sorry about that.)

That's why Jet is such a good episode of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon. (One of my favorites, actually.) At the climax of the episode, Aang fights Jet to save a village from being wiped out by the Freedom Fighters' plans to flood it, not to survive or beat the bad guy, and despite Aang and Katara’s greatest efforts, they fail. The fight had tension, and the drama came when we realized that all of Aang and Katara's power was no match for a dude who can whistle. Jet whistled the signal to his Freedom Fighters, and both we and the protagonists watched as a village full of people seemed to be drowned.

We thought, for a moment, that they failed.

Or, at least, we considered it entirely possible.

And the payoff came when we learned that Sokka had saved the village, by doing something unexpected and evacuating the people before Aang and Jet's fight even started.

That's storytelling.

Good stories don't have to end in failure, but they have to make us gasp. They have to make us worry, or wonder. They have to make us ask, "What is the character going to do about this?" For too many stories, the answer is, "The most obvious possibility," but when it isn't, we become invested in the outcome, just by way of our wondering.

This is a lesson that can be applied to all kinds of stories; it doesn't need to be limited to superheroes. Romances live or die on whether the audience believes that the characters might not find true love together. Love triangles are an attempt to mitigate this, and in that way they're functional enough, but it's far more compelling to appeal to some other aspect of a character's wants or needs. Picking between the werewolf and the vampire is all well and good, but isn't it much more interesting if the heroine has to choose between helping her best friend with something important or moving across the country to be with her love?

Even The Promise would have benefited from this lesson. Thanks again to Legend of Korra, no one seriously thought that Aang would kill Zuko. How much more interesting would it have been if the stakes had been, instead of a murder and a war we knew wouldn't happen, the rise of a bunch of villainous leaders in the colonies who would have hurt the colonists, perhaps hurt some new friend of Aang's? It’s the same conflict that Korra was able to make work with the Earth Queen.

The key is that failure shouldn't mean that the story will stop. It should simply mean that the story should change, and in the best storytelling, even the hero's success would also change the story.

Once you have that, then your story will never be boring, and that's all any of us want from our entertainment.

Comments

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Dang, I really should be hanging out wih the the cool kids at Tumblr, shouldn't I. But I like my text-based mediaaaa...

Great point about the elements of suspense. Even in non-prequel situations, simple physical survival is simply not an interesting stake, as you point out, especially when the character is established to be extremely capable or the death if it happened would gut the entire story.

When writing pastfics I would summarize my guide to suspense with the acronym WHO: Why, How, and Original characters. In a pastfic there's no suspense about what happened or what became of canon characters. However, questions about why that past event happened, exactly how it happened, and what happened to non-canon characters are still up for grabs. That's where things get interesting, and incidentally these can be helpful for non-fanfic, non-pastfic situations too. The world isn't going to end in a ball of fire in a superhero story, but why was it threatened and how is it saved? The superhero isn't going to die (or if he does he going to come back, let's face it), but what about the little guys who don't have plot immunity/limitless resurrection coupons? A story is only consequential as the consequences it's willing to stomach, and often those consequences lie more in the subtleties of choice and character than the big, flashy stuff.

I mentioned roleplaying games over at my place, but the stakes-setting techniques in modern indie RPGs helps in this regard, too. The TV drama roleplaying game Primetime Adventures, for instance, suggests that instead of setting the stake of a conflict along the lines of "Does the Hero of the Universe save the world?" make it more like "Does she maintain her secret identity while saving the world?" Win or lose she's going to save the world, but she's going to have to deal with real fallout if she blows her cover in the process.

[loopy777.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've been pleasantly surprised at how much play my essays have gotten on tumblr. For all that it's an art-oriented service, and that I only have a handful of followers, my essays get surprising play. I could probably get even more response if I really engaged that community, but I'm content with my little corner. I hear that the trolls and haters are especially virulent over there.

"The Burning Wheel" is another such RPG. I actually learned about it at a geek convention, at a panel titled "Losing Should be Fun," which was about both RPG's and video games. I've never been able to play that system, but hearing about it was one of the major influences that got me thinking about the stuff in this essay. The other is the 2008 Guardians of the Galaxy comic book (the one that inspired the movie), where the writers (Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning) were especially adept at constantly putting the team into interesting failure states.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Tumblr seems to have virulence built into it, both in the sense of stuff going viral and people getting worked up into a frenzy. I've revitalized my account and followed you, in case you didn't realize it's me. ;)

I've never played BW either, but it always seemed really cool. A lot of these indie games have worked in ideas about story that apply to writing as well.