[ SECRET POSTS #2128 & 2129 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Posts #2128 & 2129 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
[Time Lincoln]


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03.
[Avatar: the Last Airbender]


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04.
[Once Upon a Time]


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05.
[Repo the Genetic Opera]


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06.
[The Avengers]


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07.
[Homestuck/Touhou]


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08.
[ElfQuest/Wendy Pini]


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09.
[Reservoir Dogs + HBO's Oz]


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10.
[The Walking Dead]


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11.
[Covert Affairs]


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12.
[Ouran Host Club]


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13.
[Jae Joong from DBSK and JYJ]


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14.
[Elementary]


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15.
[The Girls Next Door]


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16.
[Steven Moffat]


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17.
[Star Trek: The Next Generation]


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18.
[Alan Cumming/Son of the Mask]


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19.
[The New Normal]


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20.
[Mass Effect]


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21.
[Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle/xxxHolic]


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22.
[Resident Evil 6]


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23.
[Revenge/The Social Network]


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24.
[Cardcaptor Sakura]


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25.
[Glee]


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26.
[Khimeros]


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27.
[Once Upon a Time]


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28.
[Gregory House/Lady Gaga]


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29.
[Glee]


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30.
[The Walking Dead]


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31.
[Madonna "Die Another Day" MV, BEG "Sixth Sense" MV]


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32.
[Doctor Who]


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33.


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34.


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35.


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36.


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37.


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38.


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39.


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40.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 046 secrets from Secret Submission Post #304.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

16. http://i.imgur.com/CGfGv.jpg?9261
[Steven Moffat]

[(Anonymous)]

True. I may hate the shit he did to Amy and River's narratives and in general The Reichenbach Fall but I must admit that he can make me cry on command.

[(Anonymous)]

At least he was reasonably true to Canon with Reichenbach. "A Scandal in Belgravia"? Yeeeeeeaaaah not so much, no.

[elaminator]

+1

I have issues with Moffat like a lot of people do, but damn can the man make me sob. Sadly enough, even when I know it's coming. (Like in the season finale of Doctor Who.)

[(Anonymous)]

That last line is silly and disingenuous.

[(Anonymous)]

Am I the only one who doesn't either love or hate Moffatt for his "soul crushing scenes" but just find those scenes of his long and boring? In the last Doctor Who I found the leaving scene to be stupid, predictable, and long overdue. Even in the Sherlock final episode I didn't really get all that emotional (it was certainly nowhere near soul crushing), and I think the bit of emotion I did feel was more due to Martin Freeman's acting than Moffatt's writing. I feel like I must be missing something here if everyone else is finding these scenes to be so emotional.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's about wanting people to suffer emotionally, it's about wanting people to feel so strongly about the characters you've created that when bad things happen to them, there are REAL REACTIONS. I want the people who read my work to be emotionally invested in what I've done. That's why I write fanfic, because I'm invested in these characters. If I published something original, to know that htere are people out there who feel the way about my characters the way I feel about someone else's creation would be astounding.

[(Anonymous)]

haha pretty sure a lot of people hate him for reasons other than "soul crushing scenes" ie. what a misogynistic/homophobic/ignorant little prick he is.

[streetcake]

I've heard shit about Moffat and what he did to the latest Doctor Who seasons before I started watching it, so I was so surprised to find so many episodes written by him that were so amazing.

If you wanna write like that, spend some time thinking about why it impacted you as emotionally as it did, and take note of that.

[(Anonymous)]

I think I'm in the small group of people who actually like his writing. That said, there's nothing wrong with wanting people to be invested in your story, actually that's what I always aim for.

And I don't even get why people hate him or his writing, emulating his style got me my highest grade yet at degree level.

[(Anonymous)]

of all the things I can praise Moffat's writing for, emotional attachment to the characters is one thing I cannot attribute to him

in cases where I get sad over a character's farewell, it's more like I got attached to the characters despite his writing.

he writes action scenes well and comes up with nifty plots but... emotionally he leaves me blank

[(Anonymous)]

I don't really think he's all that great of an emotional gut-punch writer, personally. He's also got some very sketchy personal politics/ideology that he can't help but write into his work, which I find frustrating.

He's sort of like a less feminist, less talented Joss Whedon, rly.

[othellia]

If by "soul-crushing," you mean "soul-crushingly boring"...

Honestly though, writing and the emotional impact it leaves viewers with is a subjective thing. For every person that cried their eyes out at the end of Angels Take Manhattan, there's people - like me - who just wondered where Brian was in all of this. And, on the flip side, for every person - like me - who couldn't stop bawling at the end of Doomsday, there's a lot that were probably like "Oh god, this is annoying. When is this episode going to end?"

But yeah, so you're not going to be able to reach out to everyone no matter who you are or what you write, but there's definitely nothing wrong with wanting to hurt people like that, so to speak. The tragedy genre exists for a reason. It's just one of the many ways that we as writers can leave a permanent mark on people.

[augustbird]

idk about doctor who but the only writing i thought was emotional in sherlock was reichenbach

and that was steven thompson

so

[forgottenjester]

On one hand I get what you're saying.

On the other hand I think there are two things I never want to evoke in my audience and those are frustration and apathy. Moffat has certainly done that.

So it's a toss-up.

[fauxkaren]

I'm pretty sure that I'm a souless monster because Moffat has never once made me tear up or feel any real kind of sadness. I really have no idea where he gets his reputation for being so tragic.

The only Doctor Who epiosde that has made me full on cry was "Father's Day". I tear up during Doomsday and Journey's End a bit. Oh! And I teared up with John Smith in "Family of Blood". But Moffat didn't have anything to do with any of those stories.

[iggy]

Lol. But creating legitimately emotional and powerful moments is one of the things he's shittiest at imo.

[(Anonymous)]

I thought the "soul-crushing" part was due to people's disappointment in the decisions that were made in his shows. Those emotions were disappointment and rage tbh, and not a genuine coaxing of emotions regarding the events that actually happened in what people watched.

[(Anonymous)]

I can't stand his writing anymore because it seems he cares way more about the endpoint than getting to it. So he basically fucks up his own canon ALL THE TIME just so he can get a tearjerker ending in. There's no logic to his writing anymore.

Now, a write who I love/hate who DOES put me through emotional turmoil without fucking up her own canon is Shonda Rhimes...

[tenlittlebullets]

Hmmm. Moffat doesn't give me the boatloads of feeeeeelings and overinvestment that Russell T Davies did, but there are certain elements of the writer's craft that he's very, very good at, and he loves using them to jerk his audience around:

1. Building suspense, which he then uses to either scare the pants off you or drive home an emotional sucker punch. He's less great at it over the course of a whole season, but within an episode, he doles out hints and snippets of information at exactly the right speed to give you a horrible half-figured-out sense of foreboding and then clutch your face in sudden realization ten seconds before the characters catch on. I will never forget that fucking cave scene in Time of Angels, because I knew his tricks by then, and I knew that "the monster has been in the room with you all along" was one of his favorites, and yet he still managed to lead me around by the nose and keep me distracted enough that the bottom fell out of my stomach when I realized "but... then why do all the statues only have one--OH JESUS FUCK NO."

2. He has his fingers poised on a certain number of psychological buttons that are incredibly potent if you're sensitive to them. The unreliability of memory and perception, and the fact that in the end they're all we've got. Being menaced by a dumb machine that can't be reasoned with because it's just following its orders to the (unintentionally gruesome) letter. A particular brand of body horror. A particular delight in taking everyday things and investing them with hidden qualities, usually terrifying but oddly appropriate ones.

3. He is generally very good at structuring his underlying themes and symbolism, and at pushing the pieces around the chessboard in a well-ordered way, such that even when he's being lazy as balls about sketching out the plot and characterization in any detail, there's a sort of coherence behind the story he's trying to tell. It still resonates to some extent even when his plot points are 100% unexplained bullshit and all his character development happens offscreen, much like a fairy tale still resonates even if its sequence of events topples at the faintest whiff of logic. See: Doctor Who Series Six And The Oddly Significant Game Of Live Chess.

4. Also, if all else fails he's quite capable of falling back on style and wit to sell a scene, even if he's a bit over-reliant on that at times and not quite as clever as he thinks he is.

(This is all talking about Doctor Who, BTW. For some reason, Point #1 doesn't hold for Sherlock at all--I found Study in Pink and Scandal in Belgravia almost offensively ill-paced, and for opposite reasons.)

Mostly, though, I think his reputation is down to his long history of trolling fans for fun on Twitter, to Who fandom's time-honored tradition of railing against the current showrunner, and to general fandom's recent shift towards being more flailingly demonstrative about their feeeeeeelings and loss of the ability to can. That, and the distinct possibility that Moffat is one of his own monsters and feeds upon us through our screens: every child hiding behind the sofa, every grown adult side-eyeing an innocent statue, just makes him stronger.

[dirac]

I think Moffat can be good if he's restrained. Give him too much creative freedom and he loses focus, and starts salviating over his own ideas too much to let the rest of us know what's going on.

[(Anonymous)]

yeah, i'm gonna agree with the few people saying they like his plots better than his characters. he's one of those writers who i think can technically write well, and understands writing well, but possibly doesn't understand human psychology at all (except maybe his own and people like him?). so many of his characters are so all over the board that i have trouble getting emotionally attached. i like his plots and the potential of some of his characters however.

its one of the reasons i dont like moffat doing crime stories like sherlock. all the sherlock episodes i watched were totally impossible for me to figure out. and no, i don't mean that they were too complicated or didn't have enough clues, i love stories that are complicated and low on clues! by psychology (a believable motivation for a killer) is integral to classic detective stories and moffat is lacking this IMO. i often get the feeling that his characters are more vehicles for his plot than anything else, which isn't necessarily bad (many writers do the exact opposite) but it doesn't grip me

[(Anonymous)]

Up until these episodes that just aired, Moffat had never made me cry. RTD, on the other hand, apparently had a direct line to my tear glands (Pete and Jackie finding each other in Doomsday made me cry every goddamn time). I think Moffat writes interestingly, but I don't think he deserves as much credit as he does for being "OMG THE BEST WRITER DOCTOR WHO EVER HAD!" because he has a nasty habit of leaving massive plotholes around the place.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't even hate Moffatt, but if you think he can bust out an emotional sucker-punch, you owe it to yourself to check out Joss Whedon's work.

[(Anonymous)]

Uh, I think the reason most people hate him is because he's pretty sexist...?