[ SECRET POST #4565 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4565 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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03.
[Lion King (2019)]


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04.
[Cassandra Clare]


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05.
[The Witcher]


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06.
[The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince]


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07.
[Dark]


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08.
[That Guy With Glasses/Channel Awesome/ #ChangeTheChannel]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 56 secrets from Secret Submission Post #654.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: "Wasted potential"

[(Anonymous)]

I think some wasted potential comes in when it looks as though a character is being set up a certain way, and then the creator doesn't follow through. Or sometimes you can just SEE a character having a lot more nuance, or providing an interesting lens/commentary on a situation, or serving a clearer role in the plot, if only some fairly minor thing had played out slightly differently.

I know I have an example...mmm, oh! Sybil in Downton Abbey I thought was a waste. Younger rebellious sister, abandons her life of privilege to go be working class, and we get to see exactly none of that before she dies in childbirth. Plus I thought her adapting to working life in WW1-ish era came a bit too easily, as again, we don't get to see her struggle with anything more than learning to bake a cake. Some of that's the scope of the show -- but there could have been something more interesting there just by witnessing more of her life, even if the facts of the plot weren't altered.

Or in the recent mini-series Archie 1941, Betty seems like she would have been more involved in the war effort, but instead she moons and worries over Archie. At the end, Veronica announces to her father that she's going to be a nurse (heh, a nice dovetail to Sybil, actually) -- it's not quite out of the blue, and the larger problem is that a 100-page miniseries wasn't enough space to do more in, but nonetheless. As it is, neither woman reveals as much as they could about the homefront (because everything in a story should be serving a purpose).

Or a lot of freaking side and supporting characters in the Anita Blake books who once had personalities and their own motivations (and could have been interesting foils for Anita, or at least seriously challenged her biases further), except they all had to either "converted" to serving Anita or they quietly disappeared from the story altogether.

Or the character of Jericho in Libba Bray's Diviners series, who had some wasted potential to start with (I know other readers found him boring) as a government experiment, the one Steve Rogers-esque survivor of a polio-and-super-soldier-serium cure, struggling with not feeling human or independent...which could have been presented more interestingly. And then wasted potential again when Bray decided to resolve a long triangle by giving him Fresh Bad Guy serum that made him almost rape the female lead.
Oh, okay. Well, never mind then.

And sometimes, yes, building up a wasted character's potential would mean telling a different story, but whether that's a good thing or not is purely subjective. Like, yeah, we can a perfectly fine rip-roaring yarn about Young Hero Saving the World that's heartfelt and poignant and exciting... or maybe we could have had a heartfelt, poignant, exciting story about the random Elf Queen the Young Hero met once who was hinted at having Interesting Backstory. I'm sure creators themselves have done that -- realized that actually, this B-plot is way better, let's do that instead. Either way you get a good story, but one version doesn't have those tantalizing little glimpses of SOMETHING that could have been SO GREAT to see more of. Sometimes the other is so deadset on telling yet another iteration of standard tropes they don't even see the better (read: more creative, original, insightful) characters they created in the process.