An Unpopular Opinion #1: Sequels are Cancer. · 10:35pm Apr 20th, 2015
In my time talking to people, I’ve found a lot of people hate my opinions. I don’t like being an asshole, so I keep a very firm bite on my tongue most of the time. Maybe I’ve gotten old, or maybe I’ve reached the point of assholish pretentiousness where I just stop giving a damn.
This is the first in what will be a series of blogs containing what I believe to be divisive opinions. Something I have quite a few of, and have never particularly benefitted from having, but I feel like there's a few that should probably be said. I'm not sure which few, so tough.
Plus I hear drama-stirring blog posts are all the rage these days. Seem to have even gotten a few people into the top 50 followed on the site.
Sequels are Cancer.
That’s the tl;dr. If you like blindly accepting facts, now’s a good time to save yourself some reading.
If not, the first thing that has probably come to mind is some sequel you enjoyed. To be honest I’ve enjoyed a few myself, but I don’t believe any artist in almost any medium has truly benefited from a sequel. This blog post is mainly about is the harm sequels can cause to an artist’s growth.
I believe two of the biggest mistakes I made when it comes to writing were listening to people when they wanted me to make Let’s Find You a Date! more than just a one-shot, and letting the popularity of Flying High, Falling Hard get to my head and make me continue it past its planned conclusion. The smartest thing I think I ever did starting out, however, was decide that whenever I wrote a new story, I would try to write something different.
If you don’t have experience spending years learning a craft, let me tell you the two true enemies of development:
1.) Stagnation
2.) Contentment
The first are where sequels become a problem. The second can come from success, which can often come from sequels.
To explain it like the math nerd I am: learning is logarithmic.
In base 2: Log(2) is 1. Log(8) is 3. Log(7 billion) is ~33.
This is what they call the skill ceiling. Sometimes there is no actual ceiling, but the growth slows so much there might as well be. You will never learn as fast as when you’re new to something. That’s why it’s vital to anyone’s growth to move on when you begin to feel the stagnation set in. Many don’t, because learning new things is hard and they’re content where they are.
I first learned about this idea from what Louis C.K. said when George Carlin died.
Relevent part starts at 2:52
I spent 15 years as a comedian, going in a circle that went nowhere. I hated my act, I had been doing the same hour of comedy for 15 years…and it was shit, I promise you.
The thing that blew me away about this fellow was that he kept putting out specials. Every year there would be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album. How did he do it? It made me literally cry, that I could never do that. I did the same jokes for 15 years.
On the CD they ask him, how do you write all this material? And he says, “Each year I decide I’d be working on that year’s special, then I’d do that special, then I would throw away that material and start again with nothing.”
This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. After you are done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, you throw them away. What do you have left? You can only dig deeper. You start talking about your feelings and who you are. And then you do those jokes until they’re gone. You gotta dig deeper. So then you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares and doing jokes about that. And then they’re gone. And then you start going into just weird shit.
It’s a process that I watched him do my whole life. And I started to try and do it.
One of the biggest things I underestimated was just how terrifying it is to abandon what you’ve become good at to go be bad at something.
I took baby steps. I went from drama romance to comedy romance, then from that to a true love romance, and from that to another romance where I worked on consistent characterization, I guess. I learned a lot from how different those stories were. I grew confidence in what I was doing and eventually I dove off the deep end.
Initially it was a disaster.
Equestria from Dust. It sat next to my other stories which had thousands of views with barely more than a hundred. Present tense, massively AU, and biblical prose. Two EqD prereaders proofed the first chapter for me. The first made 5 comments, the second told me to ignore all 5 and made no comments of his own. I wasn't sure what I had written or even if it was any good.
Watching that fic on the day it was published was terrifying, especially as I saw my fears coming true. Still, I have never felt such a sense of growth as I did when I wrote that first chapter.
I decided I would continue to write the thousands of words I had planned for that story, even if only a dozen people read them. I felt like it was a story I needed to try to write, simply because the growth I felt while writing it was too real to ignore.
Eventually the limelight shone on it through EqD features, a high rating, and the bottom 3 slots of the featured box. The responses I received on that story are probably the best I’ll ever receive on any.
That’s as much as I’m going to talk about myself.
My two biggest regrets were continuing stories. The best thing I ever did was throwing away what I had become known for and try something new. So no matter how much I’ve ever liked a sequel or series, a part of me wishes they instead went on to try create something entirely new.
My take on sequels:
Bad if they are only for the sake of making a sequel. Good if you still have something left to explore. Bad if said exploring is just going over things previously stated. Good if you take the foundations already laid and build something more on them.
3001920
I think that pretty much sums it up, really. Sequels are good when there's genuine creative vision behind them, and writer is doing something new and interesting with the story and characters.
Both in fandom and broader media, there are way too many sequels with little justification or planning beyond "The first one did really well, so let's make more."
I feel like it's somewhat relevant to note that I keep your old blog post on "X things writers should do" as the login background on my writing machine specifically to remind myself that it's not only okay, but necessary, to do new things. In light of the context of your post, I'm largely inclined to agree with your opinions herein. The only minor caveat I can add is that sometimes, just sometimes, sequels can turn new tricks out of old hats. I'll then caveat that by saying I can't think of any examples off hand, so here we are.
People are so bad with sequels I have made it my duty to end stories for them.
Every so often I'm watching a TV series and then I watch a certain episode that's perfect. Everything wraps up and the questions left unanswered are better than the answers ever could be. And then I just stop watching that show at that time, I close it off and let that perfect moment be its legacy.
There's this scene in the Mentalist where the hero comes face to face with the man who killed his wife. It's in a public area, thousands of witnesses. The bad guy starts talking shit, confident that the hero who is a shifty, cunning conman won't do anything in this exceedingly public situation. Instead the hero pulls out a gun and blows the fucker away right there in front of everyone. And the episode ends with him calmly finishing his cup of tea over the man's corpse.
The series then has him go to jail, get out of jail, realise that the man he killed was a fake, and start up the whole fucking chase over again. The series kept going, unable to die, lurching through the motions of a finished story. It descended into mediocrity when if it ended forever on that note, despite whatever viewer outcry occurred, it would have been perfect and one of the greatest endings I'd ever watched.
White Collar does the same thing. I still believe that the last episode of Breaking Bad should never have happened, and the penultimate one could have been the greatest ending in television history if they let it stand. It's the advanced version of kill your darlings: Sometimes you have to look your greatest creation in the eye and pull the trigger because it will never become more beautiful than it is.
3003067
Yeah, this happens way too often in TV. The writers think it's going to be the last season, so they do a great job tying up all loose ends and giving it a satisfying conclusion ... then the show gets renewed for another season.
3003691 I get why they do it. What's weird is when we, unpaid fanfiction authors on The Internet, beholden to no one but ourselves, do the same thing. I'm as guilty as anyone.
The answer is probably just that positive feedback is as addictive as anything.
3002526
"A lot of sequels are bad" wouldn't exactly be an unpopular opinion. Where my opinion becomes unpopular, is that I believe almost no artist's growth is benefited by doing sequels. Their quality is mainly reader enjoyment, but they do not benefit the author (aside from money or popularity). It's my opinion that this is the case for 99 out of 100 sequels or more.
And to be clear my opinion isn't that sequels as stories are bad, it's that they are bad for the artist who could alternatively be learning more.
3005986
In a way I feel like that desire to write unplanned sequels is a result of contentment. Your story is doing well and you're content with it, so you'd rather continue doing that then write something new where you may struggle or even fail.
That's some true advice. You'll never know just how much getting outside of your comfort zone can really help you until you actually experience it, and it's super important. Human's aren't built to be static creatures.
I'm working on a sequel now, but that is because the story is too big to cram into one novel.
I can see doing a hard reset, throwing everything away.
It does give a sense of freedom.
It also gives more chances for Dame Experience to kick and punch a writer though.
Then again nothing of value is gained without pain and sacrifice.
Kudos on the blog.