Hermann, teaching jaeger system management to the enlisted pilots: “In my class you will be punctual and self motivated. I’ll not tolerate any /shenanigans/.”
Jake: “Good lord, do you kiss Dr Gieszler with that mouth?”
Wow, for the first time in awhile I’ve written a scene that was better in my head.
So one thing I see a lot of earlier writers agonize over is how “the story was better in my head than when I wrote it”. Now, this is just speaking from my own experience (as is all my writing commentary) but the good news about that is it does actually go away after enough practice. Not in the sense that you become like, a magical mythical writer who gets everything perfect on the first try, but in the sense that once you’re committing words to the page you can actually come up with better and more complex stuff that what you can hold in your head at any given time. At this point I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought “Ooh, this scene in my head will be cool because of this sad thing I’ve thought up,” only to write the sad thing and discover a bunch more sad things that are even sadder because now I had everything laid out in front of me. So there’s hope there! (And yes, I like writing sad things that become MORE TRAGIC when I actually write them. I am broken.)
But last night in the kidnapping AU I wanted to write a scene where we get up to speed on the events before the story began. Granted, it was late at night when I wrote it, maybe I was tired. But it just came across as way too… tell-y, it’s just a very bland recap, but in my head it was like this sweeping sad realization of how our characters got to this point and what has been lost.
Chances are, this just means I need to re-write it, and the tell-y (instead of show-y) version will just become the mental heavy lifting outline I’ll use to couch the moment better in a visual scene. But I may end up having to do that rewrite way later, because on first drafts I try to maintain forward momentum and just write the next bit rather than stalling out to make an earlier one perfect (because I might need to do so again later anyway, undoing the hard work, if something down the line needs to be foreshadowed or contradicts an earlier lackluster scene in favor of a really interesting later scene).
But anyway, thought I’d give this peek behind the curtain for when things are going badly and not just when they’re going well.
Update: So I realized the problem with the scene was that I was putting it too early in the narrative! Which basically meant that instead of it being a scene, where actions and thoughts gave a cinematic sense of how the story was progressing, the whole thing just ground to a halt as I had to tell rather than show everything that led to the character being there.
I went back and couched one of the revelations the character had in a couple of scenes before that, where they actually do the thing that leads to them figuring out. It’s still a bit tell-y and think-y rather than action-y, but that’s hopefully to spare y’all seeing the monotony of a very precise character going through all the avenues to draw his conclusion. Now I’m back up to the scene I wasn’t doing well with before with a lot of the tell-y baggage out of the way so I can focus on the mood of it instead. Hopefully this time it’ll go better and I can move on from it quickly rather than needing to stay in it to finish all the exposition.
Ok but random thought I had while writing the Kidnapping AU – but what if one of the reasons Hermann doesn’t figure out that something is wrong with Newt sooner is because he can’t let himself connect the dots?
Hermann is a theoretical mathematician of sorts, right? Someone in academia can probably give me a more nuanced title. I’m not as familiar with the subcategories of that field, I do know some cryptographers personally, and at the highest levels of math things get a little bit insane and the risk of seeing connections where there aren’t any like Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” is a legit real thing that happens. Worse, Hermann’s focus was on making predictions, connecting disparate data points.
Hermann could very well have sensed something was wrong. He’s planning for Jaeger deployment, but to what end? Clearly he’s planning for a return of the Precursors and the Kaiju, maybe because he can sense something is out there. Except it’s a threat he can’t see. But what if his biggest fear as a mathematician is beginning to see patterns where there are none?
I thought you were maybe going a different direction with this idea that Hermann can’t connect the dots, so hear me out. Mine sounds dumb/reaching when I try to word it, but this was what I thought your point was going to be and it kind of ties into your actual much better point.
What if Hermann can’t connect the dots because (on some level other than just nightmares) The Precursors have taken a small root in his brain and They won’t let him. Just as we know from the supplementary material that Newt was not aware of the Precursors’ motives and actions through him, that he wasn’t aware of all the issues until suddenly he WAS aware but could no longer control things, maybe the hint of Precursors in Hermann’s brain keep putting Their spin on the patterns Hermann does pick up and convince him where he’s connecting the dots to is lunacy. Keep throwing him off Their scent, so to speak. They’re undermining his sense of certainty, undermining his faith in his own ability to understand things, to understand Newt and Newt’s actions (that he gained further insight on through the Drift).
It is a great way for Them to weaken Hermann if They can’t have him as their own. While the Precursors work on building up and inflating Newt’s sense of self/ego, They create self-distrust in Hermann’s foundation of his own mathematical reliance on patterns and prediction. And if he did start raving around the Precursor’s return without being adequately able to back it up? Better for Them. Anything to make him less likely to be in a mental and physical position to thwart the Kaiju when they return.
(I mean, obviously the Shatterdome staff DOES see Hermann as kind of a crazy kook…)
ok i’m sorry but i’m back again (because break in torts; let’s talk about the intentional or reckless infliction of severe emotional distress by extreme or outrageous conduct — no? ok)
im here to laugh about the difference between these two pictures and the inherent incredible ridiculousness of dr.hermann gottlieb
i’m sure it’s been noted before but i’m a broken record and it’s crunch time so let’s go
Avelera 