What would make you no longer want a sequel?

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Originally Posted by Bohandas

This thread is not exclusively about comics. I'm primarily talking about TV; regular tv; this excludes hour long dramas.

EDIT:
And in any case my greater point is that serialization itself is in general a hallmark of pretentiousness.

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That’s how I thought at first. You are attacking the idea of serializaton itself, and you are taking it to an extreme by upholding the Simpsons and Aqua Teen Hunger Force as your examples of the best TV. Essentially, you are saying there is something wrong with any show that presumes so much as to change the status quo and expect people to remember things like plot points, changes to the cast, and developments in character relationships.

Taken seriously, you are saying there is something wrong with the majority of TV for taking itself seriously enough it expects you to follow the action, if not week to week, then season to season. Moreover you suggested just bringing back characters that have died without explanation in any show. How would that work for shows as diverse as The Big Bang Theory, The Flash, or even a cartoon like Gravity Falls, in fact just about any half hour show that isn’t an episodic adult cartoon comedy with an established status quo.

Stories need to end, but that doesn't mean new stories can't be told. My life has consisted of several stories so far, and while some of the characters stay the same across certain stories, most of the characters change, most of the themes change, and they all have different main plots.

The problem with stories that overstay their welcome is that they keep retelling the same story with the same cast. Imagine if LOTR was just Bilbo + Gandalf + a band of merry dwarves traveling to Mordor to fight Sauron. Sequels work when they bring new material to the table and aren't bound to legacy.

E.g., a big reason people take issue with serialized superhero comics (outside of specific self contained story arcs) is that they're a revolving door of retcons used to keep the status quo intact. Imagine what it would be like if comics characters aged over the years and kept passing mantles down over generations. Imagine a universe where 70-90 years have passed in-world. That's enough time for 3-4 heroes to take on the same identity in sequence, retiring and giving their legacy.

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Originally Posted by CarpeGuitarrem

Stories need to end, but that doesn't mean new stories can't be told. My life has consisted of several stories so far, and while some of the characters stay the same across certain stories, most of the characters change, most of the themes change, and they all have different main plots.

The problem with stories that overstay their welcome is that they keep retelling the same story with the same cast. Imagine if LOTR was just Bilbo + Gandalf + a band of merry dwarves traveling to Mordor to fight Sauron. Sequels work when they bring new material to the table and aren't bound to legacy.

E.g., a big reason people take issue with serialized superhero comics (outside of specific self contained story arcs) is that they're a revolving door of retcons used to keep the status quo intact. Imagine what it would be like if comics characters aged over the years and kept passing mantles down over generations. Imagine a universe where 70-90 years have passed in-world. That's enough time for 3-4 heroes to take on the same identity in sequence, retiring and giving their legacy.

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Eh, I'll raise you the Novels of the Change on the advisability of that one.

Gen 1: Electronics and internal combustion abruptly stop working. Various charismatic leaders of retrograde skill winnow some order and organization out of the chaos, and, once it's relatively stable, must band together to fight the evil SCA whiz/gang sociologist who's built a slave empire out of Portland.

Gen 2: The main character is the illegitimate son of the main two good-guy leaders, and the Chosen One. (This is all well-established in the former trilogy.) He assembles brave companions to trek from Oregon to Nantucket, source of aforementioned catastrophe, to get the artifact that will save all the lands from Washington to Iowa from a much more faceless, cosmic kind of evil that is hacking through the folks back at the ranches with eerie competency while saying "I... see... you" a lot.

Gen 3: The aforementioned main character's daughter has a ridiculously happy upbringing. Not only is she the daughter of the triumphant king who is also a fantastic dad and all that; she has nothing but fond memories of losing her virginity at a festival orgy. (Just about everyone is a neo-pagan at this point, because the neo-pagans of Gen 1 were so popular.) Then, abruptly, someone in a diplomatic mission from across the Pacific goes boldface and attacks, thereby fulfilling the great thudding prophecy of the last cycle as a tacked-on sequel hook - surprise, turns out the faceless cosmic evil has gone global - and it's off to Japan she goes to set it right.

Upshot: If "different" means "progressively less interesting", it's no improvement.

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Originally Posted by Reddish Mage

I would really like to know where else you were introduced at the age of 11 to 1) post-modern deconstructionist and post-nihilism type media 2) Hollywood media featuring more slender vulnerable action hero guys and kick-ass females 3) mystical-philosophical-cyberpunk 4) total illusion scenarios.

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I can't tell even if my life depended on it, honestly. But it isn't so much precociousness (which I guess to some extent, I was) as much as a completely disorganized experience with knowledge and books in general. I never read "teen" literature at its intended age, for example. I went by anything with reasonable length whose vocabulary wouldn't excel mine by a considerable margin.

Spoiler: Answer for # 1-4

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Anyway; # 1 I think exceeds the actual deepness of the Matrix. True, I was probably too young for proper understanding of "actual" philosophy, but post-modernism and dystopian literature wasn't alien to me in the least. # 2 isn't actually something I ever payed attention to: I always was more a literature boy (and literature is always more avant garde than films), and most (if not everything) of what I am into, contains strong female* characters in one way or another. Since it's not something I actively look for either, I pay more attention to the absence than its presence (i.e.: it's natural for me to watch/read proactive women in fiction). # 3 is probably bc I met anime very early in my life, and I always liked cyberpunk in general. I knew what Alita, Akira and GoS were about before watching Matrix. # 4 I'm not really sure, since it's way too specific. Having read the Petite Prince at very early age probably affected my perception of Cartesian narrative, I guess.

*Whatever that's supposed to mean.

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Originally Posted by Reddish Mage

Heck your pretty precocious if you already were exposed: post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk, manga-style media or even media in which the messianic hero has to go on a heavy trippy vision quest with a lot of people saying he's a failure and he can't do it.

The matrix is pretty ground-breaking for how trippy they make the story, the characters are not stock Hollywood types, and the philosophy isn't exactly something pre-teens are overexposed to.

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Oh, I agree the Matrix was "groundbreaking" in most standard aspects as far as Hollywood go. I mean, it's not that I don't understand what or why people liked it. It's just that I wasn't the average viewer, so it never created an impact on myself. It was like watching the old black/white movie White Zombie. It is a good zombie movie? Yes. It was groundbreaking at the time? Probably. But was anything revealing/constructive there for me, specifically? No. Not at all. DIfference is, I like White Zombie quite fondly

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Originally Posted by Bohandas

It's not so much the Descartes' demon angle that's a cliche (or at least it wasn't at the time, before everyone started copying The Matrix) it's the various vacuous pseudo-profundities and hackneyed feelgood claptrap about the power of love that makes the philosophy of The Mateix subpar

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The Decartes demon wasn't even entirely "new" concept, for its own time or not. Matrix was the first mainstream blockbuster to feature anything more complex than Superman travelling back in time by spinning counterwise to Earth. But I can name a couple other fictions who weren't necessarily copying Matrix's virtual reality concept on film. Matrix was the first to also be appealing to the general public, which is not a lesser feat at all.

And yeah, for all it's "philosophical" background; everything that was actually on the screen (as it was presented, and not as something you can only truly savor after reading a treatise on the film) had "cheesy" written all over it's face. Specially anything related directly to Neo and not the setting itself.

I think quoting Descartes as your philosophical launching point shows there really is more to the philosophical background of the Matrix than you are willing to get. What they are doing is far beyond a seventh century basic illusion scenario and much more rooted in late 20th Century Continental philosophy.

Yes, it is deeper, what you call “cheese” is a certain post-modern flair done purposely to make points about the building blocks of identity, self, society, knowledge, meaning, free will, etc. Las Vegas, percisely for its plastic and small model replicas of other structures, is a model aesthetic to a certain breed of philosophers.

I’m not the best to be the one to go into depth philosophies. Suffice to say, that while The Matrix may not be exactly a French philosophical novel, nevertheless are hitting the right notes and making the right points. Even the fact that the meaning isn’t perfect plays into notions that everything is an incomplete construction complete with pregnant meanings that play into incomplete alternative explanations.

All of this is very explicit on the part of the Witkowski sisters, who were upfront on some of what they were reading and even embedded references to specific philosopher’s works in the movie.

Descartes is someone an American who took a philosophy class might refer to, look at Jean Baudrillard to find works that really inspired what’s on screen.

A brief statement on The Matrix, I only ever saw the first movie. My reaction at the time it came out was that it was a pretty decent (not great) movie, with a fully complete story.

When I heard there were going to be sequels, I thought that didn't make sense because any events beyond the point the movie ended on should've been a curb-stomp on the side of the heroes'. I just didn't think that there was anywhere for the actual story to go which was likely to be interesting without completely undermining the ending of that movie. So I opted not to go see the sequels (at the time, or since).

Although I will say that it should (always) be possible to make a good sequel to The Matrix, what it would require of the story is apparently not the direction the sequels went. Say, have the major story elements of the movie largely occur outside the matrix, for example.

I don't really recall anything very philosophical in that first movie. I'm not sure if that's because it wasn't there, or that it was unremarkable to me at the time. I'll admit I may be an atypical audience member, though. So there's that.

On the topic of the thread, I suppose this means that I will have little interest in a sequel if I think the constraints required of a sequel would require undermining or negating the plot threads of the previous movie.

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Originally Posted by Reddish Mage

Even the fact that the meaning isn’t perfect plays into notions that everything is an incomplete construction complete with pregnant meanings that play into incomplete alternative explanations.

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This sentiment amuses me.

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Originally Posted by Reddish Mage

That’s how I thought at first. You are attacking the idea of serializaton itself, and you are taking it to an extreme by upholding the Simpsons and Aqua Teen Hunger Force as your examples of the best TV. Essentially, you are saying there is something wrong with any show that presumes so much as to change the status quo and expect people to remember things like plot points, changes to the cast, and developments in character relationships.

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To be fair ATHF had lots of changes, just no overarching story development. They changed the name and theme song several times, they did half a season without the main characters, the protagonists' detective business closed. But none of these things were part of an overarching narrative

Y'know, philosophy aside, I never really understood why the Matrix sequels garnered so much hate. I mean, they weren't groundbreaking cinematic genius or anything remotely approaching it, but, at least to my mind, they provided a passable narrative that was competently told, overall. Although I could really have lived without the whole motivational speech/Zion orgy/Neo & Trinity sex scene >.< That and that weird self-indulgent navel-gazing or whatever that was that was with Neo talking to Colonel Sanders the Architect.

But it really didn't seem like the unwatchable drivel a lot of people castigated it as, certainly no more so than the average Hollywood output of any given year.

*shrug*

Oh, one other thing that would make me not want a sequel: Adam Sandler's name attached to the project -_-;

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Originally Posted by Reddish Mage

I think quoting Descartes as your philosophical launching point shows there really is more to the philosophical background of the Matrix than you are willing to get. What they are doing is far beyond a seventh century basic illusion scenario and much more rooted in late 20th Century Continental philosophy.

Yes, it is deeper, what you call “cheese” is a certain post-modern flair done purposely to make points about the building blocks of identity, self, society, knowledge, meaning, free will, etc. Las Vegas, percisely for its plastic and small model replicas of other structures, is a model aesthetic to a certain breed of philosophers.

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The word sophomoric, literally "pertaining to wise fools", was invented to describe that kind of "depth". In ancient Greece. Also, Descartes was from the seventeenth century. That last bit might have been a typo, but I'm assuming it isn't, because taking the technological rule of thumb "old = primitive" and then applying it to philosophy without bothering to fact-check is absolutely everywhere and I'm sick of it.

But what really drives me nuts on this front is when people refer to Plato's allegory of the cave when they're really referring to The Matrix.

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Originally Posted by DomaDoma

Upshot: If "different" means "progressively less interesting", it's no improvement.

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... I'm honestly not sure what your point is here. Of course progressively less interesting is a bad thing, but I'm not sure how allowing generational change is inextricably tied to dwindling interesting-ness :smallconfused:

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Originally Posted by Scowling Dragon

What would make you no longer want a sequel? Or another installment in some kind of story?

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Short version:
Losing interest.


Longer version:
You mention story, and that is the crux.
Generally speaking, a story has to have a beginning and an end. There must (again, generally speaking) be answers to the questions the story raises.
If a story is cool, I may want more stories featuring the same characters and/or settings.
But the stories have to have continuity. If they don't they're not really sequels, just random stories with backdrops similar to the original stories trying to draw on their coolness.

Example: Lost.
A series I never bothered to watch. I read that every season there were new questions, and people would tune in, expecting answers to those questions, only they would never get answers, but merely get strung along. It seems somewhere, someone realized that you don't actually have to tell a story, merely pretend to, in order to get people to pay you money. Once enough people wise up to the scam, you shut it down and start up another faux-story. This is actually the reason I prefer mini-series. The objective of a normal series is not to tell a story, but to make money, while a a mini-series by definition has to tell a story with an ending. Lost never caught my interest.

Example: Friends. Seinfeld. Frasier. MASH.
The concept seems simple enough. Create characters that people care about and tell a new story about them every week. Once you exhaust the setting, you either jump a shark and get shut down (not these shows), or shut down the story gracefully yourself and start telling another one with different premises. I never watched Friends or Seinfeld, but Frasier and MASH managed to keep my interest all the way through, and I would show interest in sequels, hoping to get as good a story as the originals.

Example: Blade Runner 2049
Blade Runner was fine as a standalone movie. The sequel takes place in the same setting with a new protagonist. Hence the story continues based on setting rather than character. This is also fine because it is an interesting setting, and the story is well told. Of course if you didn't care about the setting and only liked the original characters, you may be disappointed because they do not play the main role, but that is a matter of individual preference. Managed to keep my interest, and if there's a third movie, I may watch it.

Example: And speaking of blades, Blade movies 1-3:
The first was original.
The second was a new take on the setting, further developing the setting established in the first movie and showing respect for continuity (not perfect, but what is?).
The third was contrived and ridiculous. Jumped the shark. Lost interest, and would not be interested in a sequel.

Example: Days of our lives. The Last Jedi.
Did outrageous stuff, seemingly in an effort to make the story seem fresh and interesting rather than simply try to tell a good story. Messed up continuity. Also suspiciously reminiscent of the "Lost" example scam. Much like equipping Conan the Barbarian with a .44 Magnum without ever explaining why. Some people will love it, others hate it (my preference should be obvious from my description).

Example: Game of Thrones, season 1-5 + 6-7.
Season 6-7 are a perfect example of what happens when you don't take time to tell the story properly. The audience may still have a great deal of love for the story that they developed during the first seasons, but once lazy storytelling becomes the norm, they will eventually get fed up. I will watch the last season knowing that I will probably be disappointed with it.

Example: Computer games set in the Forgotten Realms.
Not the characters, but the setting caught me. Many interesting stories told, and it took the spellplague to get me to lose interest in canon. New games definetely have my interest, but these days I do research before I buy.

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Originally Posted by TeChameleon

... I'm honestly not sure what your point is here. Of course progressively less interesting is a bad thing, but I'm not sure how allowing generational change is inextricably tied to dwindling interesting-ness :smallconfused:

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Oh, it's extricable, but you have got to consciously watch it. One of the biggest problems with sequels is authors coasting off their previous mojo, and that goes double for audience reaction when you're not even talking about the characters who kicked off the momentum in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Misereor

Short version:
Losing interest.


Longer version:
You mention story, and that is the crux.
Generally speaking, a story has to have a beginning and an end. There must (again, generally speaking) be answers to the questions the story raises.
If a story is cool, I may want more stories featuring the same characters and/or settings.
But the stories have to have continuity. If they don't they're not really sequels, just random stories with backdrops similar to the original stories trying to draw on their coolness.

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You didn't say whether you would watch a sequel without story continuity. Sometimes the sequel just takes the characters and/or setting and tells a new story.

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Originally Posted by Misereor

Example: Lost.
A series I never bothered to watch. I read that every season there were new questions, and people would tune in, expecting answers to those questions, only they would never get answers, but merely get strung along. It seems somewhere, someone realized that you don't actually have to tell a story, merely pretend to, in order to get people to pay you money. Once enough people wise up to the scam, you shut it down and start up another faux-story. This is actually the reason I prefer mini-series. The objective of a normal series is not to tell a story, but to make money, while a a mini-series by definition has to tell a story with an ending. Lost never caught my interest.


Example: Days of our lives. The Last Jedi.
Did outrageous stuff, seemingly in an effort to make the story seem fresh and interesting rather than simply try to tell a good story. Messed up continuity. Also suspiciously reminiscent of the "Lost" example scam. Much like equipping Conan the Barbarian with a .44 Magnum without ever explaining why. Some people will love it, others hate it (my preference should be obvious from my description).

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I'm not sure what your examples do or whether they reinforce your point, but you clearly are speaking Scowling's language with your attacks on Abrams mystery-ism Lost and TLJ.

While I lean more toward Scowling than most people, I daresay you don't need to hate sequels on general principle in order to feel strung-along by LOST, or want to avoid LOST based on the word of people who do. (Haven't seen Last Jedi yet and can't comment there. In the interest of the broader not-wanting-a-sequel thing, I'm saving it till it gets to the cheap theaters because, in retrospect, The Force Awakens just did not make a lot of sense.)

When the story is complete.
I hate when characters have their arcs tidied up, all the loose ends tied together, all the lessons learned, only to have everything undone for the next one.
"What was the bloody point!?" is my cry.

I will admit I have gone a bit berserk on the concept of sequels. I shouldn't oppose them on a fundamental level I'm just so tired of the modern trend of the slew of remakes and sequels that I find myself gagging on instinct.

My initial reaction to this question was definitely: When the story is done. There are too many good stories with terrible sequels, too many things I liked slowly ruined by constant addition.

However, Grey_Wolf_c's point made me realise that the problem in this case is bad sequels. There are plenty of stories I don't want sequels to but that's only because I fear they will ruin it but even though that fear has often been proven correct it's not inherently a trait of sequels.

Bad sequels have made me not like sequels and I don't think that will ever change, but I cannot argue with the fact that a story I didn't want a sequel to in the first place couldn't have had a good sequel if done by the right people. I mean, even when I don't want a sequel (because of lack of faith) I can't help but wonder what happens next, I can't help but want to see more of these characters. I don't trust the idea of Toy Story 4, I don't think they should add another story to a trilogy I really liked yet part of me still wants to see more of these characters and it seems that one of those two wishes is going to end up coming through so now all we can do is hope it lives up to it's predecessors.

So the only real rule I can give to the question when do I not want a sequel? When the people in charge don't have a story to tell. If Hollywood could just wait until good proposals and scripts were submitted before sequels were commissioned I'm sure we'd all have much more faith in the concept (maybe).

Prequels, especially science-fiction prequels, tend to be worse than sequels. The writers start out having already written themselves into a corner right out of the gate because you have to make good on throwaway lines like "years ago you served my father in the clone wars"

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Originally Posted by Reddish Mage

Descartes is someone an American who took a philosophy class might refer to, look at Jean Baudrillard to find works that really inspired what’s on screen.

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I looked him up but I couldn't figure out what he was on about. Wikipedia's description of his philosophy sounded like someone randomly stringing words together. I don;t know whether this comes down to translation errors, poor writing on wikipedia, or his philosophy actually being nonsense but I am not prepared at this time to rule out the latter.

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Originally Posted by DomaDoma

Eh, I'll raise you the Novels of the Change on the advisability of that one.

Gen 1: Electronics and internal combustion abruptly stop working....

....Upshot: If "different" means "progressively less interesting", it's no improvement.

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I read "Dies the Fire" with interest, but you got further in the sequels than I did.

It's pretty rare for me to stay interested in a series past the third book.

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Originally Posted by DomaDoma

Oh, and the anime tradition of having an endgame set in stone early on, and then putting it off until the sun explodes... worse than the worst that sequelitis has to offer. If The Land Before Time has double digits' worth of terrible sequels, you're at least left with one solid, closed story arc to enjoy.

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I just found out that there was a 14th movie. MarzGurl's review was actually somewhat positive for it, which is the real signal that it should just end on a good note now, please.

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Originally Posted by Reddish Mage

You didn't say whether you would watch a sequel without story continuity. Sometimes the sequel just takes the characters and/or setting and tells a new story.

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Star Trek has some very successful spinoffs with minimal story and character continuity. But they do have setting continuity (even Abram's alternate timeline take on the universe) and that can count for a lot. Battletech is another franchise that has zero continuity between many novels except for the setting. I enjoyed most of those. Story continutiy between The Hobbit and LOTR was transparently incidental, but I enjoyed those also.

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Originally Posted by Reddish Mage

I'm not sure what your examples do or whether they reinforce your point, but you clearly are speaking Scowling's language with your attacks on Abrams mystery-ism Lost and TLJ.

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Merely personal examples of how the principles mentioned came into effect upon experiencing specific works of art.