I was reminded of fairy tail, and how anime normally doesn't have a plot.
The plot of fairy tail: natsu tries to find dragons and doesn't. Later, natsu tries to find dragons and doesn't. Eventually, natsu finds a dragon and it dies, so, basically, he doesn't. I guess he meets some folk sometimes but they're not relevant to finding dragons, so...
Almost every anime and manga have a plot in the first episode and the last episode, and other than that it's spinning its wheels. You're lucky if the manga even gets to the last issue before the author dies or it's cancelled. I often wonder if it's normal for manga authors to skip planning an ending, because why bother? It's all setup for a status quo that can be milked infinitely.
But, lord of the rings doesn't have much plot either.
Ringwraiths attack hobbits, it is scary. They band up. The band breaks up. Orcs attack helm's deep, but they lose. Ents attack orthanc, but they don't lose. Orcs attack gondor, but they lose. At some point gandalf loses a fight but he gets better. Hobbits try to throw ring in mount doom. It is scary. No really, scary things happen. Then they throw ring in mount doom, the end.
They barely do anything. The biggest event is something that happens to them: the band breaking up. Not so much protagonists as along-for-the-ride-gonists. After the sieges the locations are never seen again, so it's possible tolkein lied to us and the orcs won. We wouldn't much notice.
The illiad: achilles angsts for a while, then he dies. Troy falls due to achilles dying gloriously.
"But, it's, like, really angsty! The king is involved and shit!" Yeah okay but we don't even have a band gets together, band breaks up dynamic. The odyssey has a plot, but the plot is basically: crewman dies. They get to the next island, then a crewman dies. Later, a crewman dies. "But they all die in interesting ways!" Okay, cool, but that's spectacle, not a plot. Odysseus lives, though, and ends up killing ten dozen guys who weren't on his crew, the end.
But really one piece is the master. Monkey tries to find treasure, it isn't there. Repeat for 1000 chapters.
I like daughter of the empire because shit in fact happens. She gets a giant ant colony, for example. Colonization stories in general have, like, plots. I'm sure I'd find red mars intolerable nowadays, but you can't say it didn't have a plot.
Shannara: gang tries to find macguffin. It is scary. There's no reasonable way they don't die horribly, in fact. But anyway, they find macguffin, they win, the end. One time the only likeable character gets turned into a tree. "Shit I wrote someone tolerable...wait I know, I can milk this for [[[tragedy]]]." When novels were invented they were said to be wholly evil, and it's difficult to blame them for this viewpoint. Hard to defend the history of fiction.
You may remember a lot of plot, but it's sleight of hand. It's all: there was an obstacle, but they got over the obstacle, and kept going. In one piece it's: monkey is afflicted by horrible ADD and can't focus on treasure to save his life, but eventually he gets over it and realizes the the treasure might be over there. 100% of eveything is crud, we merely like some of it anyway because our taste is bad.
Real life has a plot. Get married: stuff will happen. Have kids: there is no return to normalcy with kids underfoot. An endless font of things happening.
In modern art, almost all plot is amputations. Some guys' life changes because he doesn't have a right arm anymore. Okay it's plot, but nobody wants to read that, and rightly so. (Everyone wants to read shannara apparently, and wrongly so.)
You might want to make allowances for the fact that a genuine plot will change the genre of the story. I will be explicit: when plot happens, the characters can do things they couldn't previously do, or can't do things they previously could. Stuff changes. E.g. a genuine warrior story doesn't stop when the war is over, the next volume is about the warrior getting married on his farm or whatever. He can't go around killing anymore. Things happened.
I don't want to make those allowances. No matter how confusing genre shift might be to consumers, it's better than not having a plot.
So therefore, Neon Genesis Evangelion actually has a plot. One of the few. But most anime people disdain it because of the massive tonal shift and waifus becomes disgusting.
ReplyDeleteThis is true, it does have a plot.
ReplyDeleteI would even tell folks to study it to see what a plot looks like.
It's a nihilist self-hating plot, though. The author produced it for the purposes of torturing himself. (It worked.)