FA+
Shop
Rant - Red Shirts, Revenge, and Bad wRiting
4 years ago
There's a trend in bad writing I've noticed recently I want to rant about.
It's bad writers having red shirts, minions, mooks, whatever you want to call them, not count as people when it comes to revenge plot or consequences.
It's like they've taken the idea of named enemies and trash mobs from computer games, and applied it to the story.
Most famous is The Last of Us 2. The entire game has Ellie killing her way through hordes of people in order to get revenge, only to spare the villain because killing is wrong. All the people Ellie killed to get to that point don't count, and as far as I know there's no in universe explanation for this.
My uncle was watching some British cop show that was trying desperately to be American (British detectives don't carry guns or get into dramatic shootouts). The bad guy is walking through an abandoned office building gunning down cops with a shotgun like it's a FPS, but when it comes to named characters, he spares them or hesitates long enough for them to escape. I didn't know the details of the plot, but it's hard to claim you're not a cop killer when you're blasting them to death with no hesitation, but they don't have their name in the credits so they don't count.
It's bad writers having red shirts, minions, mooks, whatever you want to call them, not count as people when it comes to revenge plot or consequences.
It's like they've taken the idea of named enemies and trash mobs from computer games, and applied it to the story.
Most famous is The Last of Us 2. The entire game has Ellie killing her way through hordes of people in order to get revenge, only to spare the villain because killing is wrong. All the people Ellie killed to get to that point don't count, and as far as I know there's no in universe explanation for this.
My uncle was watching some British cop show that was trying desperately to be American (British detectives don't carry guns or get into dramatic shootouts). The bad guy is walking through an abandoned office building gunning down cops with a shotgun like it's a FPS, but when it comes to named characters, he spares them or hesitates long enough for them to escape. I didn't know the details of the plot, but it's hard to claim you're not a cop killer when you're blasting them to death with no hesitation, but they don't have their name in the credits so they don't count.
