when good stories go wrong

[caleb35]

Erotic stories that go on for an extended period of time have competing problems with regards to the sex acts.

1. If the sex is repetitive, then it's repetitive. That can be a problem in and of itself. Once the protagonist gets laid, you can't just keep saying that.

2. If the sex between the protagonist and the love interest escalates, it has to push boundaries in order to avoid being repetitive. Each person only has three holes. Some have even less. This boundary pushing will inevitably alienate some portion of the audience. If you signed up for a vanilla romance, you aren't necessarily onboard for exhibitionism or BDSM kinks or whatever brought in to prevent repetition.

3. If the protagonist has a series of partners, that can alienate members of the audience. For all the new love interest is different (thereby preventing repetition), they are also different from the romantic interest that the audience liked. Further, audience members may find the main character unlikeable if they ditch their romantic partner and won't necessarily be on board with a story about a main character who is left by their romantic interest. Other ways of removing love interests to make room for new ones are often depressing and incompatible with stroke fiction goals.

4. Adding new love interests without removing the old love interests does prevent repetition, but has all the potential pitfalls of harem stories because that's what it is. With the additional audience failure point that a protagonist who starts cheating on their love interest or becoming poly from monogamous may be seen as unsympathetic. And of course, audience who didn't come on with harem buy-in to begin with may find the transition jarring or offensive.


In short: yes. While I wouldn't say that The Wheel of Time going harem was a deal breaker, it did come out of left field and wasn't a popular direction for the story.

Some excellent points here, especially #2 (although I was not aware guys had three holes ). I think that does happen too often -- a story goes on too long and wants to keep pushing boundaries, so has to start becoming outlandish to do so. Sometimes the only way to continue a story and have the drama be meaningful is to look for non-erotic angles to mine for conflict.

 

[lovecraft68]

Do you think he might have had to hand it over to a ghost writer? I've bumped into more than a few situations where a long favored author turns into a parody of themselves. So bad it couldn't be the same person.

I suppose that's possible, but the writing had the same tone and consistency.

Where the ending failed for me was the villain 'Rasalom" was the ultimate psychic vampire. Misery suffering and death gave him power. In the original novel, the Keep he is imprisoned in an old structure and its in the midst of WW2. The protagonist claims if he were to get out all the pain death and misery going on would be enough to make him unstoppable.

Flash forward to the last book in present times and he has wrought mass destruction upon the world by unleashing nightmarish creatures, blocking the sun, etc. Example all of Hawaii is wiped out in a tidal wave, people are of course looting and killing each other, monsters the size of planes patrol the skies, over a billion dead, the world in fear and despair.

During this Rasalom left one building in NYC unscathed because the heroes all had gathered there and he wanted to them to see the ruin of the world.

Because 1000 morons gathered around the building and started singing it provided enough 'light' for the MC to be able to kill Rasalom. 1k people vs the entire world in fear and suffering and that was enough

Yeah, fuck you.

I always come to the conclusion that when someone is that creative and good of a writer there were multiple ways they can end a story and for some reason more than a few have taken the laziest lamest way to do so.

 

[lovecraft68]

I wonder how many people are pissed off with SOIAF because egomaniac could not care less about his fans Martin will never finish it. At least the authors being griped about here finished their story.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I wonder how many people are pissed off with SOIAF because egomaniac could not care less about his fans Martin will never finish it. At least the authors being griped about here finished their story.

Many, but I'm not one of them; he should have DNFed after A Game of Thrones.

Though that does remind me: a place where good premises go to die is a single solid one-book story getting stretched out across three interminable bullshit novels just to pad the Kindle Unlimited page count. For example, every fantasy romance series.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Well, his eyes as he falls are amazing and thank you, but that's not really the climax I wanted the story to end on.

 

[lovecraft68]

Many, but I'm not one of them; he should have DNFed after A Game of Thrones.

Though that does remind me: a place where good premises go to die is a single solid one-book story getting stretched out across three interminable bullshit novels just to pad the Kindle Unlimited page count. For example, every fantasy romance series.

Seeing you brought up comics earlier, there was this thing called a standalone story that was a cornerstone of comics from the get go. Then the Trade paperback was invented so every single storyline no matter how simple had to be stretched to six issues.

I know he wasn't necessarily responsible for this, but I always blamed Bendis for that, he was the king of making not much into way too much.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Seeing you brought up comics earlier, there was this thing called a standalone story that was a cornerstone of comics from the get go. Then the Trade paperback was invented so every single storyline no matter how simple had to be stretched to six issues.

I know he wasn't necessarily responsible for this, but I always blamed Bendis for that, he was the king of making not much into way too much.

Bendis is one of the kings of the great premise -> ????? -> terrible ending pipeline.

 

[lovecraft68]

Bendis is one of the kings of the great premise -> ????? -> terrible ending pipeline.

Totally agree, he had some great ideas and could carry them for a bit but always fizzled at the end.

 

[MillieDynamite]

David had hundreds of wives, as did Solomon. Betcha.. they couldn't keep track of their names. Must have had an assistant with them, "This is one is Rachel, you're fuckingalot, Majesty."

Quaranteam has this problem. At the end of the first book, he had like 50 wives. It's impossible to keep track of that many characters and they end up being single trait cutouts.

 

[StillStunned]

David had hundreds of wives, as did Solomon. Betcha.. they couldn't keep track of their names. Must have had an assistant with them, "This is one is Rachel, you're fuckingalot, Majesty."

"This one is Rachel, Majesty. She likes long walks on the beach, snuggling by a campfire in the desert, and having a plug up her arse during sex."

"Right you are, Chief Eunuch. I don't see any beaches or deserts here in my palace, so..."

"A selection of plugs are already set out in your chambers, Majesty."