The Awesome Factor
The Awesome Factor. We all know what it is. Just earlier today I was describing District 9 to my friend and said that the giant robot that leapt over cars, shot beams and could telekinetically re-fire bullets was “pure awesome”. And it was. But you know what made District 9 such a good film? It was an original concept, and it was told in a realistic way. It managed to do a good job of making a completely bizarre situation heavily believable. The characters were often able to portray well both the admirable and despicable qualities of the average human.
The thing is, a writer, and particularly a young writer, can’t decide that their plot is going to include a great battle, and fill it with spectacular monsters and powerful warriors, and then rest upon their laurels that the book would be good. It’s an easy pitfall trap to fall into for a young writer, for obvious reasons- if you want to pitch your concept to your friends, the majority of them will be much more impressed with descriptions of the battles and monsters you’ll include then of the characterisation and narrative experimentation you’ll be using. But if you try to get away with other flaws by including some “awesome” bits, then when you actually show off the full version, it’ll ironically end up being extremely dull. With all attention devoted to thinking up exactly how many times the evil army will outnumber the good, chances are the plot will be predictable and the characters will be simple. A key example of this is in children’s writing would be Shadowmancer – it was marketed on its inclusion of popular elements such as magical amulets and ancient races of demons, and sold a lot of copies, only to be found by those who read more then the blurb that the actual writing and plot were of very poor quality.
The key word to avoiding the awesome-factor pitfall trap is priority. When you’re plotting the story, then make sure your priorities lie with making the plot and characters intriguing. Once you’ve made an original plot that your audience won’t be able to predict, and characters who are complex and decently likeable/hateable as the story requires, then you can tell yourself you’ve got a good concept. And if you want, from there, you can throw in some giant robots and big battles- it isn’t that excitement is bad for a book, merely that it shouldn’t take the place of storytelling.
One more thing I should mention is that “The Awesome Trap” doesn’t just affect stories as a whole. It can affect the individual characters, too. If you make your character a tall, handsome warrior with powerful magical talents and armour forged from the skin of dragons, but make him completely two-dimensional, he isn’t enjoyable to read about. He’s “badass”, sure, but pretty boring. It also stands to reason that a character who’s adept but not entertaining to speak to (for whatever reason) shouldn’t be loved by other characters; respected, aye, but not loved; it’s worth remembering that in real life, if there’s someone who’s great at everything but not very likeable you’ll often end up resenting them because they’re so much more talented then you. Plus you run the risk that such a character may end up becoming a Mary Sue, and that’s about as prime an example of the problems of the Awesome Trap as you’ll get. Mary Sues sound absolutely great as characters until you realise that with no weaknesses, there’s no threat, and the plot again becomes dull.
A story with too much Awesome Factor is like a beautiful but stupid and unlikeable member of the opposite sex. It seems like a nice idea when you ask them out, but if nothing they say actually makes you enjoy being around them, then you aren’t going to be really happy with them.
Yeah, Mary Sues are a general no no. Every character has to have some flaws, and every superhero warrior has to lose a battle or two…
Wesley
For comedic affect, legit mary sues and gary stus are quite useful.
Sorry, “effect”
Apologies for the earlier comment… I was actually going to say something profound.
District 9 rates almost as highly on my fantastic fantasy movie meter as Avatar. Not because the special effects are in the same league, but because District 9 uses something so inherent to being a South African without getting preachy.
If i told you that the entire situation was what it was like during the Apartheid days, you’d probably goggle. That is a perfect representation of the ‘bad old days’.
Even better was the fact that they used south african news broadcasts, instead of the thinly veiled hollywood ‘Timely magazine’. For example, Mahindra Ragenauth, the news reader reporting Wikus’ escape reads the seven o’clock news on SABC 3.
So while the robot sequence was ‘distilled liquid awesome’ the story and the characters is what made the movie for me.
Its a very good example of this blog.
When it comes to the actual quality of the special effects, I’m not sure you can exactly say that D9s was that much worse than Avatar, there was simply a lot less of it, because it wasn’t necessary.
Now do tell me, was that an actual real life news reporter hired for the movie?