Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2019-04-24 10:23 pm
silveradept) wrote2019-04-24 10:23 pm
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/run/media/silveradept: The Magicians Season Four Finale: Breaking Fannish Hearts, Again.
The Magicians had a fourth season finale a little while ago. You can still see the fires burning over in that corner of fandom, and for good reason. I'm going to be linking to pieces written about the finale that do a far better job of summarizing what happened and what went terribly wrong with that idea. Those pieces, and my summaries and commentaries of them, have content warnings for suicidal ideation, completed suicide, and mental illness at the very least, so this may be something to avoid if you have seen enough, or you do not want to engage. The rest of this post is going under cut.
The show decided to take a departure from the books they were based on, and proceeded to have the nominally main character of those four seasons, Quentin, become actively suicidal and then complete suicide. The stated reasons for this, according to the producers, were related to the idea of killing off a character that presumably always has Plot Armor - the white male protagonist.
They massively fucked it up, because what they had done for those four seasons was to build a bisexual, mentally-ill, suicidally-ideating white male, and then they wrote him completing suicide and then learning that his friends missed him after he was gone. There wasn't closure in any meaningful way, and the imagery of finding out afterward played into various stereotypes of the suicidal. (The more I learn about what suicidal ideation looks like, feels like, sounds like, the more I am convinced that I was suicidally ideating when stuck in the abusive relationship with my ex. I didn't realize it at the time, so I never mentioned it to the therapist. Because I could still believe in the math. And in the difficulty of completing suicide in such a way that there would be anything to give. And even then, the math still told me it would not solve the problem. I am better now. It took six months of experiencing homelessness to do it - couch surfing is homelessness, even if it didn't feel like what my brain believed was "real" homelessness at the time - but I am better now. The trigger for those feelings is no longer in my life, and I know what to watch out for now as signs that those feelings might be coming back.)
As you might expect from such a terrible handling, the fandom for the Magicians, and even several people who haven't seen the show, strongly criticized the decisions that had been made for the fourth season. I bounced out of The Magicians as a fandom early on because I didn't like Quentin as a character or his actions, and the general setting of the show that seemed more interested in trying to be a grimmer, darker version of a portal fantasy (or the equivalent thereof in the school of magic). I apparently didn't stick around long enough to see Quentin turning the corner toward the character that he was by the end of the fourth season. I'm not sure that I would have wanted to, either, given the way that things have now gone solidly south. There's a fifth season already confirmed, so it's entirely possible there will be a Cosmic Retcon, given how often the Reset Button has already been wielded in the show.
If that happens, that will be both good that it wasn't permanent and infinitely cruel that someone has to wait through a season break before such a thing happened, and that there will have been one more layer of deception put upon the case, the fans, and those outside the writers' room.
Even if they did hit the Reset Button, there's a good chance that The Magicians lost their fandom with this action.
Having read these accounts (and seeing how many more accounts there are linked from there that I am sure are equally eloquent and detailed in the ways that they lay out the case for how massive a fuck-up this is, I had a single thought that encapsulates a lot of the aggravation at the Bury Your Queers trope coming out again, anger at the supposedly safe turning out to be vulnerable, and the ways that the action played out so that there would be no such thing as closure for the fans or the characters. Because I am a Fandom Ancient, at least by Tumblr standards, and we have seen this before. In another big show that still has an active and kicking fandom. And that is putting out new seasons, although in print form rather than the televised versions. We're up to season 12, if the comic book I saw at work today was from the latest season.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer had a moment like this in its sixth season. Seeing Red, the episode that killed Tara, also put her in the main credits for that episode. Joss had intended for a character that died early on to show up in the credits to make the point that nobody had Plot Armor, but the one that actually had it happen was Tara. Who was a lesbian. And died through a sudden act of violence that had no warning at the hand of an angry white boy. In the middle of a storyline about Willow getting addicted to the magic and using it for terrible purposes. Bury your queers. And fridge them, too, because Tara's death was Willow's motivation to fully embrace her angry magic side and go do something truly permanent to the world. (And, in the process, kill herself, most likely.)
It happened before. It will likely happen again, given the amount of words that have been put down on screens and pages about what happened here. In so many ways, this iteration is worse, because it's not a point about how death doesn't discriminate / between the sinners / and the saints. (There was a re-listen in the household recently. Some things are prescient, even if only retrospectively.) In this particular case, the showrunners wrote an accurate portrayal of Quentin's mental state, his actions, and all the signs that were leaaing up to this point. But they were focused to much on subverting the protagonist Plot Armor that they lost sight of the fact that the trope only gets properly subverted if the character has played it straight (, white, cis, abled of body, not-ill of mind). The showrunners created a queer, mentally-ill character and then glorified his death in exactly the wrong way. They may not have intended to create that character, but they did so, and they didn't stop to think about what the ramifications would be for following through with the storyline they had set up for him.
Or they did, and they went through with it anyway, knowing full well that what they were doing and what would happen to the queer audience they had brought to the show. If all publicity is good publicity, then this was certainly a good decision to bring publicity, other consequences be fragged. What's a little queerbaiting / queercatching between friends? We all know everyone is so desperate for representation that they'll take whatever comes to them, even if that means the character then ends up dying for someone else's motivation or pain.
This isn't meant to be dismissive of the very real feelings and pain fans of the Magicians are going through right now. We felt it terribly when Tara died and we did much of the same thing. I don't know how much "AU -Tara lives" fic we still have access to, but I'll bet there was a lot of it at the time, because, you see, the transformative division of fandom (the "fictionals", to borrow a Mira Grant term) have a way of pushing back hard against bad decisions. When the showrunners and the writers' room isn't thinking, fic gives us what they could have produced, had they been thinking. They show the actual consequences of decisions like Quentin's, rather than the rose-colored glasses version that often appears on screen. They ignore what they see as inexcusable, and then they write something better.
Sometimes, we might note, they drop the fandom entirely, and then a show swiftly follows bad decisions into cancellation. Buffy lasted one more season on television after it killed Tara and used it fuel Willow's pain. (And then gave the saving-the-world role to Xander. There's a shark in there somewhere that got jumped.)
I don't say "We've seen this before" as a "fool me once" sort of statement, a tsk-tsk that fen should have guarded their hearts against getting too invested in a character, because when you're invested is when they kill the character or otherwise write them out. "Fan," after all, is the first three letters of "fanatic". It's that kind of devotion that keeps shows, stories, and characters in our minds and hearts long after their canonical material is done. It produces the good stuff, the ways you get other fans, how you pull others along for the ride. The fic, the art, the whole thing.
No, this is a warning, as are all the other pieces that have been linked and shared about the finale. Getting people to invest in your characters requires your audience to invest a little of their hearts in those characters. For as much as a showrunner might want to disclaim that they have any responsibility for the hearts of their audience, they still have that responsibility. Decisions about characters and their actions will change hearts, give them hope or despair, happiness or sadness, empathy, sympathy, or rage.
Which is not to say that a showrunner can't do anything that would affect the hearts of the audience, or even to write out a beloved character if the plot (or an actor's commitment or attachment to another project) requires it. Take the responsibility seriously. If what you are going to do is going to hurt the fans, make sure that why you are doing it is for a good reason, and acknowledge that what you are doing is going to hurt. And, if your work continues on enough, show the why, and the effects, and perhaps even show that some of the characters aren't necessarily going to get over it quickly or easily, either. Understand that the feelings are real, that there are people who love your characters and they see part of themselves being killed off or sent away.
If you have to break hearts, do so with full knowledge, with understanding, with empathy and sympathy, and for reasons that your fandom will hopefully come to understand. Don't do it for cheap tricks or because you think it's daring or edgy. Those reasons backfire. And the fandom does not forget these things. Perhaps we trust and give our hearts more than we should, because we want things to be good and to see ourselves. But we are also the kind of people who stay mad.
Even if The Magicians undoes it all at the beginning of Season 5, they won't be able to regain what they had. That trust is shattered, and each shard of that should stick as painfully in the showrunners as it does for the fans. If it doesn't, then it shows who lacks heart.
The show decided to take a departure from the books they were based on, and proceeded to have the nominally main character of those four seasons, Quentin, become actively suicidal and then complete suicide. The stated reasons for this, according to the producers, were related to the idea of killing off a character that presumably always has Plot Armor - the white male protagonist.
They massively fucked it up, because what they had done for those four seasons was to build a bisexual, mentally-ill, suicidally-ideating white male, and then they wrote him completing suicide and then learning that his friends missed him after he was gone. There wasn't closure in any meaningful way, and the imagery of finding out afterward played into various stereotypes of the suicidal. (The more I learn about what suicidal ideation looks like, feels like, sounds like, the more I am convinced that I was suicidally ideating when stuck in the abusive relationship with my ex. I didn't realize it at the time, so I never mentioned it to the therapist. Because I could still believe in the math. And in the difficulty of completing suicide in such a way that there would be anything to give. And even then, the math still told me it would not solve the problem. I am better now. It took six months of experiencing homelessness to do it - couch surfing is homelessness, even if it didn't feel like what my brain believed was "real" homelessness at the time - but I am better now. The trigger for those feelings is no longer in my life, and I know what to watch out for now as signs that those feelings might be coming back.)
As you might expect from such a terrible handling, the fandom for the Magicians, and even several people who haven't seen the show, strongly criticized the decisions that had been made for the fourth season. I bounced out of The Magicians as a fandom early on because I didn't like Quentin as a character or his actions, and the general setting of the show that seemed more interested in trying to be a grimmer, darker version of a portal fantasy (or the equivalent thereof in the school of magic). I apparently didn't stick around long enough to see Quentin turning the corner toward the character that he was by the end of the fourth season. I'm not sure that I would have wanted to, either, given the way that things have now gone solidly south. There's a fifth season already confirmed, so it's entirely possible there will be a Cosmic Retcon, given how often the Reset Button has already been wielded in the show.
If that happens, that will be both good that it wasn't permanent and infinitely cruel that someone has to wait through a season break before such a thing happened, and that there will have been one more layer of deception put upon the case, the fans, and those outside the writers' room.
Even if they did hit the Reset Button, there's a good chance that The Magicians lost their fandom with this action.
Having read these accounts (and seeing how many more accounts there are linked from there that I am sure are equally eloquent and detailed in the ways that they lay out the case for how massive a fuck-up this is, I had a single thought that encapsulates a lot of the aggravation at the Bury Your Queers trope coming out again, anger at the supposedly safe turning out to be vulnerable, and the ways that the action played out so that there would be no such thing as closure for the fans or the characters. Because I am a Fandom Ancient, at least by Tumblr standards, and we have seen this before. In another big show that still has an active and kicking fandom. And that is putting out new seasons, although in print form rather than the televised versions. We're up to season 12, if the comic book I saw at work today was from the latest season.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer had a moment like this in its sixth season. Seeing Red, the episode that killed Tara, also put her in the main credits for that episode. Joss had intended for a character that died early on to show up in the credits to make the point that nobody had Plot Armor, but the one that actually had it happen was Tara. Who was a lesbian. And died through a sudden act of violence that had no warning at the hand of an angry white boy. In the middle of a storyline about Willow getting addicted to the magic and using it for terrible purposes. Bury your queers. And fridge them, too, because Tara's death was Willow's motivation to fully embrace her angry magic side and go do something truly permanent to the world. (And, in the process, kill herself, most likely.)
It happened before. It will likely happen again, given the amount of words that have been put down on screens and pages about what happened here. In so many ways, this iteration is worse, because it's not a point about how death doesn't discriminate / between the sinners / and the saints. (There was a re-listen in the household recently. Some things are prescient, even if only retrospectively.) In this particular case, the showrunners wrote an accurate portrayal of Quentin's mental state, his actions, and all the signs that were leaaing up to this point. But they were focused to much on subverting the protagonist Plot Armor that they lost sight of the fact that the trope only gets properly subverted if the character has played it straight (, white, cis, abled of body, not-ill of mind). The showrunners created a queer, mentally-ill character and then glorified his death in exactly the wrong way. They may not have intended to create that character, but they did so, and they didn't stop to think about what the ramifications would be for following through with the storyline they had set up for him.
Or they did, and they went through with it anyway, knowing full well that what they were doing and what would happen to the queer audience they had brought to the show. If all publicity is good publicity, then this was certainly a good decision to bring publicity, other consequences be fragged. What's a little queerbaiting / queercatching between friends? We all know everyone is so desperate for representation that they'll take whatever comes to them, even if that means the character then ends up dying for someone else's motivation or pain.
This isn't meant to be dismissive of the very real feelings and pain fans of the Magicians are going through right now. We felt it terribly when Tara died and we did much of the same thing. I don't know how much "AU -Tara lives" fic we still have access to, but I'll bet there was a lot of it at the time, because, you see, the transformative division of fandom (the "fictionals", to borrow a Mira Grant term) have a way of pushing back hard against bad decisions. When the showrunners and the writers' room isn't thinking, fic gives us what they could have produced, had they been thinking. They show the actual consequences of decisions like Quentin's, rather than the rose-colored glasses version that often appears on screen. They ignore what they see as inexcusable, and then they write something better.
Sometimes, we might note, they drop the fandom entirely, and then a show swiftly follows bad decisions into cancellation. Buffy lasted one more season on television after it killed Tara and used it fuel Willow's pain. (And then gave the saving-the-world role to Xander. There's a shark in there somewhere that got jumped.)
I don't say "We've seen this before" as a "fool me once" sort of statement, a tsk-tsk that fen should have guarded their hearts against getting too invested in a character, because when you're invested is when they kill the character or otherwise write them out. "Fan," after all, is the first three letters of "fanatic". It's that kind of devotion that keeps shows, stories, and characters in our minds and hearts long after their canonical material is done. It produces the good stuff, the ways you get other fans, how you pull others along for the ride. The fic, the art, the whole thing.
No, this is a warning, as are all the other pieces that have been linked and shared about the finale. Getting people to invest in your characters requires your audience to invest a little of their hearts in those characters. For as much as a showrunner might want to disclaim that they have any responsibility for the hearts of their audience, they still have that responsibility. Decisions about characters and their actions will change hearts, give them hope or despair, happiness or sadness, empathy, sympathy, or rage.
Which is not to say that a showrunner can't do anything that would affect the hearts of the audience, or even to write out a beloved character if the plot (or an actor's commitment or attachment to another project) requires it. Take the responsibility seriously. If what you are going to do is going to hurt the fans, make sure that why you are doing it is for a good reason, and acknowledge that what you are doing is going to hurt. And, if your work continues on enough, show the why, and the effects, and perhaps even show that some of the characters aren't necessarily going to get over it quickly or easily, either. Understand that the feelings are real, that there are people who love your characters and they see part of themselves being killed off or sent away.
If you have to break hearts, do so with full knowledge, with understanding, with empathy and sympathy, and for reasons that your fandom will hopefully come to understand. Don't do it for cheap tricks or because you think it's daring or edgy. Those reasons backfire. And the fandom does not forget these things. Perhaps we trust and give our hearts more than we should, because we want things to be good and to see ourselves. But we are also the kind of people who stay mad.
Even if The Magicians undoes it all at the beginning of Season 5, they won't be able to regain what they had. That trust is shattered, and each shard of that should stick as painfully in the showrunners as it does for the fans. If it doesn't, then it shows who lacks heart.