The Bigger the Problem, the Messier the Story

 I've probably talked about this before, but a blog entry I read recently reminded me of it again.  And no one probably read it the last time I talked about it anyway, so why not repeat it?

This blog entry was talking about a recent issue of Action Comics.  Writer Jason Aaron recently took over the classic Superman comic after working on a lot of Marvel comics, especially their Star Wars series.  The latest story arc is about a more dangerous Bizarro who finds that he can use magic to turn all of Metropolis into a Bizarro world.  This includes Superman and his family and friends.  But then in this latest issue, Superman is able to get rid of the Bizarro influence, sometimes.  Meanwhile, the Bizarro spell starts spreading throughout the world.

The author of the blog did not like this and from the sound of it, I didn't really either.  It's a problem that I'm actually familiar with from stories I've written like Girl Power: League of Evil and the Gender Swap Outbreak.  The bigger you make the problem to solve in your story, the messier it gets.

It's really kind of a basic math:  the bigger the problem to solve, the more variables you end up with and thus the more complicated it gets.  The first Girl Power mostly just focused on four superheroes who are changed into women.  Then the second one focused on clones of the male versions of those heroes who end up turning evil.  The third story then, bad guys use the device from the first story on a global scale.

Expanding it to the whole world then brought up a bunch of questions like:  what happens to women?  What happens to people who are underwater?  Stuff like that.  It started to make the story kinda messy.  Though of course I still like it, maybe I could have localized the problem more to make things easier on myself.

I had the same problem about six years later with the Gender Swap Outbreak series.  That's about a virus that gender swaps guys.  (Kinda prescient in 2019.)  But then once it infected a whole town and then the whole world, I had to start wondering:  what happens to women?  To kids?  Stuff like that.  In both cases I didn't really want nothing to happen to some people or it'd be kinda boring.  But it makes the story a lot more complicated and as things get more complicated, it can be harder to cover everything without leaving holes.

In that blog entry the author hopes that since a bunch of people have been killed and the world devastated this is one of those things where at the end everything goes back to the way it was beforehand because otherwise the consequences are pretty grim.  It's a reminder that when your problems get too messy, it can cause an author to fall back on deus-ex-machinas to solve things.  Like in League of Evil, the Flash character is transported to the future and winds up merging with the evil clone of the Batgirl character and then with the added brainpower (and a couple of decades to putter around) finds a way to make a machine that can change people back--those who want to anyway--and brings it back to the present day.  I don't think it's exactly a deus-ex-machina because there is a rational, scientific (in comic book terms) resolution, but some people might feel that way.  When you're basically hoping for a deus-ex-machina by issue 2 of what's probably at least a 6-issue arc, that shows exactly how messy things are.  It's doubly messy because I don't think this is even one of those line-wide events across all the DC comics or even across all the Superman comics.  So it doesn't really make sense that you could fuck up the whole world and yet in every other comic everything is just business as usual.

So as I've said before, the smaller you keep the story in terms of the central conflict, the number of central characters, the number of locations, and the timeline of the story, the easier it is to keep everything focused and to avoid creating plot holes.  That Action Comics story should probably have just kept things in Metropolis to avoid getting too much going on.

It's just something to remember if anyone who reads my blog ever does any writing--besides me.