Forced Writing

Recently for no reason I was re-binging Archer on Hulu, though season 7 I watched on Amazon because I bought it after it came out 4 years ago and that way I didn't have commercials.  Anyway, the last episode of that season, the titular Sterling Archer goes to the house of film star Veronica Deane to trick her into confessing to the murder of her ex-husband and director of her current movie.  As part of this he brings a cyborg double of himself to record her confession. 

She confesses and then grabs a gun he leaves on the table to shoot him four or five times.  Then the other Archer pops out to confront her and she shoots him once in the gut before running out of bullets.  We're of course meant to think the first Archer was the cyborg but then it turns out the one in the pool is the real him and he's been in a coma for the last 3 seasons.

Anyway, watching it a few times it never makes any sense why A) he brings a gun with real bullets that B) he sets on the table for her to use and C) doesn't wear a bulletproof vest if he's doing A & B.  The whole scenario is horribly contrived and forced.

Another example I can quickly think of is in the seventh Star Trek movie, Generations.  The evil Lursa and B'Tor hack into Geordi's visor so they can get the Enterprise-D's shield frequency and attack the ship.  During the attack the main reactor overloads or something and so they have to separate the ship with the bottom part blowing up and the saucer section crashing on a planet.

That has always felt so contrived and forced because you know in the show they could have ejected the core or some damned thing to save the ship before it blew up.  But it was a movie and they wanted a new ship, so they wanted to blow up the old one.  Just like in Archer, they wanted to do these stupid coma fantasy seasons so they had to find a way to put him into a coma, whether it really made sense or not.

This sort of thing happens a lot in comic books too.  If you have Batman v Superman, who wins the fight will probably be determined by whose book it appears in and/or who's doing the writing.  If Superman appears in a Batman book, Batman will probably take him down.  If Batman appears in a Superman book, Superman will probably win.  And the same is true for any titles, DC, Marvel, or whoever.  These fights are frequently contrived to achieve whatever outcome is needed for the story.

In the 80s Marvel had the Transformers meet Spider-Man in one issue and there was a whole spin-off series of Transformers vs GI JOE.  IDW has had the Transformers crossover with just about everything:  Star Trek, My Little Pony, Ghostbusters, and of course all those other Hasbro properties like GI JOE, Rom: Space Knight, Action Man, Visionaries, and MASK.  Which the dumb thing about these for me has always been that Transformers are huge, usually heavily-armed robots.  The idea that any humans could defeat them definitely seems contrived.  (That was also something I didn't like in the Bay movies.)

The problem with all of these things isn't so much that they happen so much as how they happen.  When they're so obviously contrived, it really gets irritating.  If characters have to act contrary to common sense or how they usually would or you have to write in some kind of deus ex machina to achieve the desired result, then it's a sign of poor writing.

It's probably just as well I haven't really done crossovers in my books, though the Girl Power series was conceived originally as a Scarlet Knight/Chance of a Lifetime crossover--until I realized no one had probably ever read all 11 books of both series and thus wouldn't care about a crossover.  So I just took the core concepts of both series to mash together.  On the blog back in May 2013 I wrote a brief description of the crossover story but people didn't really care.  So I haven't contrived things that way, but I've probably contrived things in other ways.  I'm sure we've all done it at some point in writing.