Books and movies suck, so why not TikTok?
Tick-tock on the clock But the party don't stop
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Two, Issue 67
Drop-toppin', playin' our favorite CDs
Pullin' up to the parties
Tryna get a little bit tipsy
Don't stop, make it pop
DJ, blow my speakers up
Tonight, I'ma fight
'Til we see the sunlight
Tick-tock on the clock
But the party don't stop, no
The Sunday Reader, March 3rd, 2024
It takes until page 944 of the Running Grave for Cormoran Strike to tell Robin Ellacott that he is in love with her. Robin, of course, leaves without responding.
But this will they/won’t they didn’t start on page 1. No, this has been going on for 5,014 pages spread over seven books. And while the first four books hovered in the 500-page range, the most recent three are solidly in the 1,000-page doorstop category.
How do you manage 5,000 plus pages of Will They/Won’t They? Easy! Page after page of he has the feels, but just cannot tell her. She thinks of him constantly, but cannot tell him how she feels. It’s a communication breakdown!
Pro tip: If you cannot communicate, the least you can do about it is to SHUT UP.
It’s enough to make you rage quit the book into the trash and take up TikTok. At least there if something is stupid it’s over in 40 seconds at worst.
And the author of the Strike series of novels, Robert Galbraith – the crime novel nom de plume of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling – is far from the worst offender. It’s a given at this point that George R.R. Martin will never finish the next Game of Thrones book, never mind the rest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Robert Jordan died after finishing only 11 novels in his Wheel of Time trilogy; it took Brandon Sanderson another three novels to tie everything together and finish the series.
Sanderson, meanwhile, is just four books into his planned 10-book Stormlight Archive. But he’s no Robert Galbraith; he’s already at 5,087 pages.
Then there’s the morass that has become the Marval Cinematic Universe. There’s a new Marvel Universe entry every week; if you miss one, none of the rest make sense. That means if you and your friends go to the movies to see the next Avengers movie, but you’ve missed one of last year’s 472 MCU TV shows on the Disney channel, you’ll be frantically Googling on your smartphone in the theater trying to figure out what’s going on.
I’ll admit I never really read the last 10 – TEN??? – Wheel of Time books. After the first three I began to root for someone – anyone! – to kill the ridiculously whiny main character: “Why do I have to save the world??? Why can’t someone else do it?” I skimmed the last chapters of the next few books when they came out in bookstores, and then I abandoned even that.
Speaking of rage, it really seems like George R.R. Martin hates his readers. For decades he was a journeyman science fiction writer best know for his Wild Cards series about mutants. Journeymen genre writers make a living grinding out books; there are 32 volumes in the main Wild Cards series, and there’s more than one series. Most of these are anthologies of short stories by a variety of writers edited by Martin.
Then came Game of Thrones, the first book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire. The first books sold fairly well. Then came the TV series, and book sales exploded.
One of the few criticisms of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is that pretty much all the heroes and main characters go through multiple battles unscathed. Sure, Gandolph dies. But he gets better! Only Borimir ends up dead dead, and only so he can be redeemed for his moment of doubt, lusting for the One Ring.
Martin thrilled readers by going directly against this; heroic Ned Stark has his head chopped off at the end of Book 1. Readers were less thrilled when most of the remaining Starks were murdered through sheer stupidity during the Red Wedding. Sure, we Starks have been blood feuding with the Freys for years, but they swore an oath! Let’s leave all our weapons and armor outside and let them lock us into their hall where they totally won’t murder us!
Turns out the Freys totally would, and totally did.
But the real measure of Martin’s hatred of his readers is the ending of the TV show, which was based on his plan for the rest of the series of books. The ending basically turns eight seasons of Game of Thrones into the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch: I’ve been deliberately wasting your time.
After seven seasons of Jon Snow running around yelling Winter is Coming because the Night King is bringing a zombie army to kill everyone…the Night King and zombie army are wiped out in a single battle. Sorry you spent seven seasons watching that! Imagine a Lord of the Rings where Sauron and all the ringwraiths are wiped out in the very first battle, and then the rest is people arguing over who will run Gondor.
Or don’t, because eight seasons of politicking and maneuvering are also thrown out two episodes later. Turns out none of that matters; the one with the dragon wins and simply burns everything and everyone else. When the dragon rider is slain, the dragon also melts the throne and flies away, and the kingdom dissolves.
So here’s the ending: Winter lasted one battle; there’s no throne and no kingdom, so the entire game was a waste of time.
Sorry you spent eight years watching!
The worst part of this – and the reason it’s such an obvious shot at fans – is that the entire problem could have been fixed with a single message slide:
One Year Later
The Night King is the same kind of MacGuffin for Game of Thrones that the One Ring was for Lord of the Rings. When the One Ring melts, Mordor collapses, Sauron and the ringwraiths fade from the world, and what’s left of the evil army runs away. So put up a One Year Later sign, have somebody or other say “Oh no! All of Westeros has fallen to the Night King’s zombie armies!” And then have Arya go stick a knife in the Night King, at which point he turns into ice and shatters, as do all the zombies.
Now it’s tempting to cite Sturgeon’s Law at this point. When a critic argued that 90 percent of science fiction is crap, science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon responded with Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of everything is crap.
Instead, I’m putting this down to Feola’s Law: All trends are flogged into the ground until they provoke a backlash.
Tolkien wrote a wonderful fantasy book: The Hobbit. If one book is good, why not three? So Tolkien followed up with his The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
If a trilogy is great, wouldn’t a trilogy of trilogies be even greater? So Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant was a trilogy of trilogies. Except even that proved too confining, so the third trilogy had four books, for a grand total of ten.
The whole trend has become so ridiculous that humorist and science fiction author Douglas Adams labeled the cover of his book Mostly Harmless as "The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy” and "the book that gives a whole new meaning to the word 'trilogy."
So if Feola’s Law is in play, what’s the backlash to these never-ending stories? There are at least two. The first is hard to quantify, but it’s had enough impact that creators are complaining about it: readers and viewers are refusing to start any series that isn’t completed. Why invest in a series that might not end for another decade? Or ever? Here’s author Larry Correia on the impact on newer authors: They write an epic fantasy, and then people don’t buy it because they’re scared it isn’t going to get finished. This has even leaked over into sci-fi. I can’t speak for thrillers or other genres, and I can only hope that those authors aren’t getting burned too because their most famous guy turned to @#$! or died.
The second backlash is TikTok. It’s been the fastest growing social media platform for years. And while Facebook has been skewing older and losing attention, two thirds of 18-19 year olds are on TikTok.
And why not? You can watch any TikTok you want; no need to have seen 247 related shows, or have read the previous 10 books. You can doom scroll for 5 minutes or 5 hours. If something sucks, just flip to the next.
And why would any teenager ever read Game of Thrones? Think of it this way: the first book in the series is 28 years old. The fifth is 13. And 13 years is how long we’ve been waiting for the sixth book.
Which isn’t the last.
So should you read The Running Grave if you’re a mystery reader? Sure! Just use the Feola Folio method: immediately flip past any chapter consisting of a main character whining about how they cannot communicate. You’re left with taut 500-page thriller. The Feola Folio method works on all sorts of works. For example, Moby Dick is quite the ripping yarn if you skip all that stuff about the history of tattoos.
And what if you hate TikTok? No worries. YouTube has already copied them with Shorts. Short-form videos designed for doom scrolling are everywhere!
One might say this trend is being flogged into the ground.
The backlash is coming.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Tuesday March 5th - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup
Thursday March 7th - The PE Vlog: We’re taking a couple of weeks developing marketing graphics for Feola Factory as an exercise to understand how and when AI tools are useful. This week we’ll look at the final collateral.
Friday March 8th - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday March 10th — Diverse Nazi stormtroopers and other stupid AI tricks. Last year Perfecting Equilibrium laid out how Large Language Models would follow algorithms into complete absurdity. Last month Google had to take down its Gemini AI after it started producing images like Native American and African American World War II Nazi stormtroopers, complete with Nazi uniforms.