Bleach Is Ending

Bleach is the name of a manga / anime which I began watching (for I started with the anime) at around the age of 14 or 15. It was introduced to me through a friend, and was my first ever anime… though to this day, I’ve not branched out into many others. But as immediately taken aback as I was by the exaggerated emotions and actions that are often found in anime, I’d soon found myself hooked onto this ridiculous idea of this character leading a double life, attempting to maintain a typical teenage lifestyle at school whilst running off every 5 minutes to slay monsters (Hollows) with his oversized sword (Zanpakutou).

If this sounds like it might appeal to you, then you live in the wonderful age where the entire series is viewable for free on Crunchyroll. Bear in mind that some story arcs detract from the manga in order to give the manga a chance to get further ahead in the plot, before the anime caught up with it. If you’d like to only watch canon material, your guide to avoiding filler episodes is here. What an enlightened age you live in.

So, back to my personal Bleach experience. Whenever I watch the first few seasons of Bleach (often referred to as the Soul Society arc), I’m catapulted back in time to when I was going through my GCSE’s, and the sense of wonder, entertainment, and non-reproducible exploration into the culturally varied tropes of anime plot never fails to make me smile. The idea of swords having their own souls and magical abilities greatly appealed to me, and is something that has stuck with me to this day when considering any fantasy character’s possible magical range of abilities. While this theme, alongside the overall narrative of people with swords fighting demonic monsters, is not exactly the most original basis for a story, it was my first encounter with such material and I therefore escaped any disillusionment because of this. In other words, I managed to enjoy the material instead of going “typical Shonen plot lol”.

Many will tell you that after the Soul Society arc, Bleach began its decline, and honestly, as much as I love the series, I wouldn’t argue with that. What I would argue with is the idea that it’s no longer worth watching. I believe that the subsequent ‘Arrancar arc’ is still enjoyable and engaging, although the climax of this arc certainly does feel like it would be an apt place to finish the entire series. It is after this point that almost the entire Bleach community is in agreement that the manga began its sheer decline. With the ‘Thousand Year Blood War’ arc, the manga (the anime now cancelled) began to descend into an over-saturated mess of characters, ill-explained abilities, one-note enemies, retcons out the wazoo, awful pacing and just a general lack of a cohesive or believable narrative. The fights spiralled into a playground world of “my ability is more suited to kill you than yours,” and the deus-ex-machina grew so out of control that the word ‘asspull’ now gets your comment automatically removed from r/Bleach, more from an exasperated “WE KNOW” than as an overly offensive or unfair remark.

But even the Thousand Year Blood War arc managed to give us some awesome moments and character revelations. Whilst the arc as a whole hasn’t made sense (and still won’t, unless the final 20 pages have the depth and cohesion of a hundred issues), individual fights and moments have still ignited my now mostly forgotten feeling of hype and anticipation for the next week’s issue. It’s something I’ll sorely miss.

I’m not just here to slam the final story arc, though. Bleach as a whole actually contains some expertly crafted leitmotifs and character relationships, as well as a plethora of unique and enticing abilities and fights. The anime in particular has some very well animated fight scenes, and had I the option of experiencing it all for the first time again, I wouldn’t shy from it at all – even the final story arc. It’s been an absolute pleasure to follow the story of this cast of characters over the years, and whilst it’s sad that the manga is ending (presumably) with a whimper rather than a bang, it’ll always hold a place in heart.

The Movie as a Limited Form of Narrative

Note: The second half of this blog post uses the new Netflix Original series ‘Stranger Things’ as a point of discussion, but reveals no spoilers or plot points.

I’m not a big movie guy. Name a classic movie that everybody’s seen, chances are, I haven’t seen it. And after we get done with the ten straight minutes of “So you’ve never seen [x]?!”, I’m just about ready to stop talking about movies altogether rather than justify my reasoning. But here it is: I think TV series do it better.

Well, ‘TV series’ is getting to be an outdated term, what with the increasing number of shows releasing directly to and exclusively on streaming services such as Netflix. And sure, there are some stories which suit a movie better than being stretched out over a series. But the downside of cinema is that you’re highly restricted by the length which your movie is allowed to air for, so as to get the optimum amount of showings in the theater per day. This often constricts narrative cohesion, with most movies having plenty of cut footage. There is no movie that I can think of where there hasn’t been at least one scene that should have been explored in greater depth, or one plot point that feels somewhat convoluted in order to get the rest of the movie rolling. Much of the time, it’ll feel like we’ve barely become acquainted with a set of characters before we’re meant to be fearing for their lives, or rooting for their romantic interests, or whatever the subject of the movie is about.

‘TV Series’, on the other hand, have more than enough room for character development and a fully fleshed out plot. Often, of course, this leads to the opposite problem, with many series having ‘filler’ episodes (see: Breaking Bad’s fly episode), some plot points being redundant (see: Orphan Black S2E8) and the pace of the overarching narrative feeling a little too slow (see: The Flash, Season 1). But nothing is perfect; these are all good shows (in my opinion) and I’d much rather have something with a few redundancies that still makes sense, than something which is cut together and barely retains its narrative thread.

Fun fact: It is for almost the exact same reasons as I mentioned above that I thought season 8 of Doctor Who was just pants. They decided to do a series of non-linked, standalone episodes and almost every single one of them felt rushed and constricted.

Stranger Things just released on Netflix, and is what finally prompted me to write this blog post which has been brewing in the back of my mind for the better part of a year. Stranger Things has eight episodes, all of which were released at the same time, as many Netflix Originals now do. However, I believe that there was more of a solid reason behind why the Duffer Brothers released them this way (if it was in fact their decision). At the end of my viewing I felt that I’d watched an eight hour movie as opposed to a TV series, and lo and behold, when I looked this up, many others felt the same way. The Duffer Brothers stated that they envisioned it as an eight hour movie themselves, so kudos to them for achieving their desired effect.

I’m not a specialist in writing for screen. We had a few modules about it on my Creative Writing course (which I just found out I achieved a 2:1 in, go me!), but we didn’t delve too deeply into the overall craft of making a screenplay, and therefore I’m no expert on what the narrative difference between a movie and a TV series is besides quantity, and basing your structure around that. This eight-hour movie concept, then, is an abstract one to me, as there must have been a reason as to why I pegged it as more of a movie narrative myself. I just can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that the series is more of a self-contained story (which may or may not have an ambiguous ending or some loose ends, I leave that for your viewing discovery), whereas most TV series are written with narrative threads for future series in place.

All I know is this: It proves my point about the limitations of standardised screen times for movies. In eight hours, there was enough time for character development, emotional exploration, side-characters that felt real, suspense that lasted long enough, and a plot that wasn’t in a rush to get to the end. And yet, when I review it in my head, it doesn’t feel like it stretched out at all; nor does it feel like a TV series. I remember it like it was an hour and a half movie… just a real, damn good one. Of course, you wouldn’t sit in a movie theater for eight hours straight watching ‘Stranger Things’, and I won’t deny that the movie-going experience is an enjoyable social occasion that I’d hate to lose. But maybe it’s time for us to stop restricting ourselves to the current forms of narrative we perceive as absolutes, and step into unknown territories such as eight hour movie-series hybrids.

The Short Story and Me

After happily giving feedback to a good friend’s piece of writing, I felt inspired to finally pick up the digital pen and get to writing fiction again. I needed some time to recover after university picked me up like some sort of creative lemon and squeezed me dry, but as creative lemons are wont to do, I soon ditched this nonsensical metaphor and got down to writing a good old fashioned short story.

When I first started writing, as a child, I didn’t really consider the idea of short stories at all. I’m not sure I knew they existed. I was, after all, a child, and thought that three or four pages in my literacy book might have amounted to much more in the format of a paperback. But the reality is, I started out with short stories, as I’m sure many people do. Our Year 2 literacy teacher asked us to write a story of whatever length, about whatever we could think up, and all I can really remember was that it had something to do with a magical flying island and a woman who’d found it by diving into a well. My teacher thought it was excellent, and showed other teachers, got me to record an audio reading of it, the whole shebang, and to this day I believe that this is what really kickstarted my ambition to become a writer, which is somewhat amusing considering the likely less than publishable nature of my childhood magnum opus. In fact, it was simultaneously as damaging as it was uplifting, for it planted a seed of arrogance that survived until university put me straight. But hey, each to their own hubris.

Well anyway, I did some writing on and off, but it wasn’t until I was around eleven or so that I really began to write more. At the age of twelve I started writing New Recruit (or: The Life and Times of Reluctant Teenage Vampire Jack Chimcholi) as we saw in last week’s blog post. This was, of course, more of an attempt at a novel, being split into chapters and updated over the course of about a year. And, as mentioned in last week’s blog post, I thought that it was quite the successful story at the time. But even then, I was aware of the lack of plot and structure from not thinking ahead, and would therefore resort back to the short story as a mode for storytelling, more from laziness than from anything else. One short story I remember writing was about a man who was chased down by an evil, self-driving bus in the dead of night… and now that I come to think of it, my Year 2 story probably made a lot more sense than whatever that was. Regardless, I brought it into school, and my tutor told me it was brilliant, further solidifying my sense that I was something special, maybe even a prodigy when it came to writing.

As I grew over the next few years, my writing turned to poetry, the like which many developing writers probably have somewhere hidden under their floorboards, if they haven’t burned it already. Much of this poetry will never see the light of day, and the light of day will thank me for it. (Picture an insecure 15 year old with a dark past who was convinced he was stuck in the ‘friendzone’, and you can cringe even without the source material.) Despite the mounting horror I feel whenever I turn my mind towards these works, they were still integral to my development as a writer, and even helped shape the way I would approach short stories when I later returned to them.

I chose English Literature as an A-Level because, hey, study what you know, right? And eventually our teacher (let’s call him Mr. Howard) asked us to write a short story about a subject of our choice, so long as it adhered to the genre of Gothic that we’d been studying. Much like that fabled Year 2 task a decade earlier, but uh, more Gothic, obviously. By this point, however, I’d grown an appreciation of the darker side of storytelling, and proceeded to write a short story which is possibly the first one I’m not ashamed to discuss in this blog post, though it does still show a hint of the immature, overactive, nonsensical teenage mind that brought us Jack Chimcholi. This short story, scrawled quickly in the space of an hour, was named Human Harvest, and followed the flight of our stereotypical Gothic damsel in distress and she attempted to flee from the hands of her lifelong tormenter, the owner of this stereotypical Gothic castle who forced her to eat human flesh for her meals. I won’t reveal the entire narrative, but there was a nice grisly twist at the end and it almost even made sense. To my great relief, Mr. Howard was impressed with it, though he argued against the name, which wasn’t originally Human Harvest but instead something else that I don’t quite remember. (Also, I just looked up the title Human Harvest, and it’s a movie that was released in 2014. I wrote my story in 2012. I was the original, damn you!) And the reason I mention all of this was because it was the next great step as a writer, coercing me to return to the short story as my preferred choice of narrative.

I wrote many short stories thereafter, publishing many of them on my personal Facebook page for want of a better place. Many more of them stayed on my PC, and have since been lost to time, for I was a non-Dropbox using fool. There was some good stuff in there, though. Well, maybe not good, bur some salvageable concepts at the very least. These short stories, typically first drafts that would be abandoned to the mercy of my terrible attention span, acted most simply and most effectively as experience. There’s a theory that it takes 1,000 hours to perfect your craft, and that if you want to get good at something, you’ve got to spend hundreds of hours being awful at it first. Whilst there’s no perfecting writing, I’m very glad that I spent much of my time creating these works, even if they are lost to time or are otherwise rubbish.

And then I started my BA in Creative Writing, and finally began to realise that I wasn’t the only person in the world to write half-decent stories. Good job, Kristian.

I learned some of my most valuable lessons about short stories in my first semester. Mainly that they were not, as I had previously considered, simply short novels that could be used as a platform to practice writing. In fact, all that short stories really have in common with novels is that they’re both pieces of prose. Some people believe that short stories are closer to poetry that they are novels, and I’m inclined to agree. The more I look back on my time as an emo teenage poet (oh god), the more I’ve come to realise that I never put my fictional narrative development on hold during those years; I merely explored it from another perspective. I came to understand that short stories have to be short stories for a reason, and that many of my previous (and future) faults were (and would be) writing a short story that would prefer to be a novel. I mean, sure, people can still enjoy a short story about a man who has an imaginary friend that follows him everywhere he goes, ruining his relationship with his parents and girlfriend and driving him to the point of insanity, but when you try to squish that into anything less than 4,000 words it begins to feel very crammed. And that example was from a piece of coursework that I handed in last year, because simply knowing how to write a short story isn’t good enough. You have to stop your imagination getting away from you.

So I’m going to continue writing short stories. I’m going to write them until I have tons of the things, and publish them into some sort of collection that you can do a nifty little read of on Amazon and hopefully enjoy. That’s the plan for the next few years. But I also need to practice my novel writing separately, and that’s something that I have precious little experience in. So I’m gonna go suck at it by myself for a little bit. Maybe turn 4,000 words into 40,000, more, who knows. And if my short story collection or this fabled novel ever sees the light of day, I’ll be sure to let you know right here.

Criticising Critics

So, as an aspiring author and potential future content creator, it’s pretty much premature career suicide to slander critics before I’ve even released anything. However, after the release of the Warcraft movie and the immense gap in opinion between critics’ reviews and reviews from those who simply watch movies for enjoyment, I thought it might be worth taking a bit of a closer look as to who critics are and why we value their opinions.

So firstly, I’ll admit two things – I’m biased towards thinking Warcraft is going to be good, and I’ve also not seen the movie yet. This is not a review of the movie. For all I know, the critics could be right, and the movie could be awful. This is also not a panic post, where I desperately try to justify to myself that the movie is amazing and that the critics, therefore, have to be wrong. Movies don’t mean that much to me. I’m sure Warcraft has plenty of flaws. But something about the way critics are treating this just rubs me the wrong way. It’s hard to believe that a movie can be a worthless piece of trash from 5 people when 500 more are arguing its merits, and I’m then told that those 500 people are wrong because they’re not the super special 5 critics who know if a movie is good or not.

Critics exist, I think, for two main reasons. They exist because people want to know if a movie is worth going to see before they spend their money, and they exist because whenever a creative mind produces a narrative, an academic mind becomes curious as to its workings, wants to deconstruct it and reconstruct under various different perspectives and fully comprehend the subtexts and intertexts woven throughout. I do not see the latter in most Warcraft reviews. I see someone who has been paid to sit down and watch a movie, and has gone into it believing that it’s one big advertisement (as they may believe all videogame movies are) and are on some level personally offended that another industry would use theirs as a platform off of which to propel themselves. With this in mind, then, I believe they’ve gone in to the movie with every intent of tearing that movie down, magnifying its weaknesses and refusing to believe that any sort of decent narrative exists within the movie in front of them.

Or maybe it just sucks. Maybe it’s a solid 5/10. But the amount of people who have left that movie singing its praises on social media is what’s caused me to eye these critics suspiciously in the first place. Fans of the franchise and newcomers alike call it a decent movie at the very least, and some critics response to this has been an elitist one. If you’d rather not give them the click, here’s about the sum of it:

“Warcraft” is currently quite rotten on critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, sporting a 22 percent rating. Just four of 18 reviews were considered “Fresh,” though even those were rather tempered. Maybe the most positive thing we actually read during this roundup process was: “‘Warcraft’ doesn’t suck.”

It would seem that if you don’t get paid to see a movie, your opinion on it isn’t justified. If you enjoyed the movie, and felt like saying that you enjoyed it without going into an extensive 700 word review about it, then critics hate you, because you’re the problem. Movies are no laughing matter. All you’re doing is encouraging directors like Duncan Jones to continue slandering the movie industry with thinly veiled attempts at marketing. I am, of course, embellishing here, for that is no direct quote, but I’ll give my left leg and the pinky toe on my right if that’s not the attitude that some critics currently have.

It’s an abuse of power. Trying to kill a movie with your influential ways for prejudiced or even completed misguided (more on that here) reasons completely discredits your opinion and calls in to question all other reviews that you produce, in my opinion. If there’s an ulterior motive behind your slandering then you’re no better than a politician… only now, it’s about killing a genre of movie that you don’t like instead of doing something significant like attempting to steer a parliamentary decision. Bravo.

The Right Amount of Death

(I discuss a few different fictions in this blog post, but give no spoilers.)

I remember being very young and stopping at the beginning of the book, thinking, “What’s the point? I know what’s going to happen. The good guy defeats the bad guy. He looks like he’s going to die but he doesn’t. He always wins.” And then I read A Series of Unfortunate Events and added, “Unless this is one of those depressing books that tries to do things differently.”

Well, of course, as I grew I learned that there was more to fiction than just good guys beating bad guys. Sometimes there were no bad guys. Sometimes the main character was the bad guy. Sometimes it was ambiguous as to just who the bad guys were. And sometimes the bad guys turned out to be the good guys. And whilst all these variations were true, the main character still survived, unless he had some heroic death at the end. It was all getting rather stale.

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series changed all that. With no lead protagonist or clearly defined antagonist, this narrative grabbed my attention. But then, many stories have done this, too. It wasn’t too far into the series, however, before I realised that characters were dropping like flies instead of being given tragic, Shakespearian deaths. They were dying pitifully, stupidly and sometimes without having the chance to even salvage their reason for existence other than to portray the cruelties of the world.

Shortly after finishing (what’s currently written of) the series, I thought, well that’s that then, George is a genius. He’s got it right. He’s made human beings squishy sacks of killable meat. (And whilst I’m sure other authors have done this before, this was my first instance of discovering such ruthless storytelling.) He’d done what I’d longed to see in fiction; he made me fear the deaths of my favourite characters. Whenever they got into fights I thought, oh no, this is all too possible, I really do hope they scrape out of this. If they came down with an illness my heart clenched. If they entered hard climates I’d worry about their survival. In short, George R.R Martin reworked the way my mind predicted narrative, and for the better.

But despite all of my praise, A Song of Ice and Fire does not fulfill the right amount of death.

“Well then, Kristian,” I hear you say. “Just what is the right amount of death? Do you want fully fleshed out characters to have their cadavers piled high as Mount Rushmore?” Well actually, I think A Song of Ice and Fire might be the only fiction I’ve read that overdoes the amount of death. Sure, it’s shocking to begin with, but after a while you grow accustomed to it. I won’t spoil anything, but a character died in the last season of Game of Thrones that made me go, “Well that sucks,” as opposed to freaking out as I would have if this had happened earlier. It has become a running joke that if you state your preference for a character then they’ll be promptly killed off, and the series itself is known for its relentless body count, shaping expectations of those that come fresh to it, readers or watchers.

There’s a balance. There was a time when, after reading A Song of Ice and Fire through to in-completion (sorry George), I almost sneered at most other fiction for shying away from death. If a character came to the brink of death and survived, I’d tut. I wouldn’t be annoyed if death clearly didn’t suit the narrative, but whenever it was, for example, implied instead of shown, I’d be left wanting more.

A few days ago I watched a series which changed my perception on the matter. I won’t name it or hint at the series, for that would give away the game to newcomers, but it’s not something you’d expect to have a lot of tragedy in it. In the first few seasons a few deaths were implied, but never outright shown or discussed, or carried impact or significance. This didn’t put me off, per se, but the amount of danger the characters faced at this point led me to think more and more about the likelihood of death and how it just wasn’t happening.

And then they killed my favourite character. Swiftly. Brutally. Realistically. And I didn’t see it coming. And it was perfect.

So the moral here is that there’s a balance. If this character’s death was preceded by a mountain of bodies, I’d have been less affected. I’d have even seen it coming as they charged heroically into the fray. But without prior tragic events occurring, such as the deaths of minor villains and a few less minor ones, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb for shock value. With this perfect balance, that narrative instead allows you to fear for the characters whilst still being caught off-guard when they die. And that’s how you really destroy people’s emotions.

Tragedy in Comedy

Like most people of my generation, I’m typically in the middle of watching a television series on Netflix (or some other streaming service). These shows are usually dramas of some kind; I just recently got finished watching The Tudors, for example, and before that, Luther. Fantastic show. I personally prefer it to Sherlock, if you think it fit to compare the two. Perhaps I’ll write a blog post about it sometime, but it’s mostly due to plot coherence and maturity of tone (the second point being personal preference and the first being a measured criticism). But I digress.

Sometimes, when I’m in-between shows on Netflix and all feels wrong in the world, I jump over to a comedy. Most notably, I’ve rewatched all of Scrubs which is without a doubt the best comedy show of all time (more on that later). I watched a good five seasons of Community which I also thoroughly enjoyed, and right now I’m currently powering through another popular comedy series.

A quick side note, one comedy I’ve never been very invested in is Friends. I don’t know if maybe I was just barely out of their target audience or what, but I find the show highly overrated. It’s funny enough, and I’ll watch it if someone else has it on, but there was this whole culture built up around the show’s characters in which people tried to mimic them and apply their logic to real life, and it always sort of… irked me. And I’m not sure I like laughter tracks. Why should I need to be told when to laugh?

Well, anyway, what I wish to discuss is the balance of how much tragedy to put in a comedy. I believe Scrubs had the perfect balance, with your typical conflicts between friendships arising and being dealt with in a humorous or heartwarming manner, but also the larger themes of death, love, personal growth, and the stress of working as a doctor. I could watch the chronicles of John Dorian many times over (barring the season we do not speak of) and still find life lessons and reassurance. Also, seeing as this blog post is the king of unrelated side-notes, isn’t it cool how ‘John Dorian’ is so similar to ‘John Doe’?

Community was excellent as well, especially Abed. I haven’t actually seen the last season yet (it’s not on Netflix, boo) but I’ve seen the majority and whilst Community is overall more lighthearted than Scrubs, it still has its poignant moments. Most notably, for me, was Abed’s character.

The problem with comedy is that without some elements of tragedy, or continuity of plot, you leave the audience with no lingering interest. It’s why, I think, so many comedies opt to have a potential couple whom they propose to the audience through a series of will-they-won’-they events, usually only allowing this plot-line to have a conclusion when they’ve sufficiently built up lasting interest in other elements of the series. And to have plot you need conflict, and to have conflict you need some sort of tragic event. This is why death happens in comedy, even though it isn’t funny. It allows characters to develop, making you more invested in their character and increasing the vibrancy of the comedy.

Perhaps there’s something to be taken away from that.

Stephen Moffat is Leaving Doctor Who

(This is not the weekly blog post, as it discusses a subject which many readers may not be invested in.)

Mild Doctor Who spoilers ahead; knowledge of up to season nine is recommended, though no key plot points are spoiled, merely referenced. Season 8’s “Kill the Moon” and “In the Forest of the Night” have their finales discussed briefly.

So this news is a little old now, but it’s taken a while to simmer at the back of my mind whilst the front pretends it has more important things to do. Showrunner Stephen Moffat will be stepping down from Doctor Who at the end of Season 10, after six seasons of leading the show and having written some episodes prior, under Russel T Davies’ running.

I don’t know how to feel about Moffat. On the one hand, he created the Weeping Angels, arguably the best villain introduced in New Who. On the other hand, he ran them into the ground, taking them outside of their niche narrative and inserting them as smaller roles with each passing appearance. He created the Eleventh Doctor, my favourite of them all, trumping even Tenant. But he also created season eight, and whilst the head writer is not to blame for an entire season’s collaboration of multiple writers, he must surely take some of the blame for London turning into a forest and the moon being a goddamn egg.

Here’s one thing I do know, though: Hearing people cheer for your departure from the role of showrunner must be crushing. The constant complaints and utter hatred launched his way for some sketchy writing and questionable plot lines is over the top, and the sheer fact that he deleted his Twitter account (to escape, I’m assuming, from said hatred) just makes me feel ashamed. Am I happy he’s stepping down? Yes. It’ll be nice to step away from shaky plot lines being explained with a mere “wibbly wobbly” and a laugh. It’ll be nice to see what Chris Chibnall brings to the table. But give credit where it’s due. Doctor Who has always had some dodgy writing. It’s not meant to be hardcore, steeped-in-fact Sci-Fi. And Stephen Moffat has done some brilliant episodes, and not just far in the past; did anyone else catch Heaven Sent? Because that was a narrative masterpiece. (Shame about Hell Bent.)

My main issue with Doctor Who is not its writers or lead writer, but its structure as a seasonal narrative. Monster of the week worked for the first few seasons, because the overarching plot was smaller, subtler, and lead up to a finale which left no loose ends. But I think Moffat’s writing was different. It was geared towards longer story archs, more potent in their importance, more grand in their aspirations. Season five didn’t do it too badly, continually drawing out attention back to the cracks and having large plot lines develop in the more notable two-parters. But lately it’s been like… sorry, what was that whole thing with the Time Lords? Yes well that was all rather interesting, let’s go do something completely irrelevant for the next few episodes. It just doesn’t work, and moreover, it’s frustrating. And unless Chris Chibnall either changes the way plot lines work, or changes the overall structure of the series, then I worry that it will continue to fall short of expectations.

Express Yourself

One of the biggest problems I have personally nowadays is expressing myself, in any way, shape or form. Now, I’m not going to become a ballerina (although I’d be goddamn fabulous), but I am considering one particular experiment.

In school and basically all the way through my life, I’ve hated reading out things. My voice has always been monotone on such occasions, as I refuse myself to allow the slightest hint of emotion to seep through; not that of my own, but that of the characters and narrative. The reason for this is, simply put, I always felt stupid when doing so.

Recently, two things have happened. At my university, we had a visiting writer come and talk to us about writing for radio plays and the benefits it can have. And secondly, I’ve started listening to a series of audio dramas called Dalek Empire, a spin-off series of Doctor Who. (It’s absolutely fantastic, by the way.) And due to these two things, I’ve become more and more interesting about writing for audio.

But performing? Me? It would be a train wreck.

Wouldn’t it?

Having no acting experience of any kind, and considering my previous shying away from reading aloud, I’m inclined to think so. But my voice can go through a range of different impressions, and on a personal level I do feel like I could be up to an attempt at voice-acting. I obviously won’t be great and will surely have to improve over time, but what’s the point in wondering without ever trying?

A few weeks ago, the incredibly talented Monty Oum of RoosterTeeth productions passed away at the age of 33. He was one of the greatest animators I’ve ever seen, and although I don’t know nearly enough about animation to judge it, many others who do, agree. Company CEO Matt Hullum said, “As for honoring Monty, we will do that in our own way. In lieu of flowers or gifts, we ask that you simply do something creative.”

This inspired RoosterTeeth employee Jon Risinger to make this reading of poetry. Whilst I don’t intend to read any poetry (and I’m more than a little jealous of that voice. Which is a totally manly thing to say!), this is what re-sparked the idea of writing and performing some sort of audio thing in my mind. And now you’re up to date. Now we’re here, and I need to write and attempt to read it!

Some problems I’m forseeing with this are my microphone quality, and my voice itself. It might be awful. My microphone is from a gaming headset, and should be decent enough quality, although obviously not to a professional standard as can be heard in Jon’s reading. In fact, it’s probably a foolish idea to post about this before even knowing it will work.

If this does work out, the first one will be short. I’m talking maybe a couple of minutes. I’ll post it on Youtube and link to it in a new blog post, so long as you’re interested. So long as it works. So long as I don’t suck. Which is rather probable.

So, this is my attempt at not only finding a new way to express myself, but also to keep the influence of Monty Oum alive. I didn’t tweet about him or make any mention on Facebook, but his passing did sadden me as it did many untold numbers of others. Thirty three years is far too short, though what he achieved in that time is far more than many of us do in our lifetimes.