The negative example

When I don’t need my brain for anything else, I often watch manga and manhwa recaps. Yesterday I ended up watching a 3-hour recap of the most tedious story I’d ever experienced. About 15 minutes in I wanted to bail. But then my professional interest kicked in. Even though the story had all of the elements of a good opening, it just didn’t work.

The story lacked what Barthes called the hermeneutic code, a fancy French philosopher’s way of saying mystery, suspense, and forward momentum. The story had lots of action, but it kept putting the problem after the solution, or instantly dissolving new problems with an immediate solution. After studying the first 30 minutes of the recap I realized it could have been fixed simply by shuffling around the event order and deepening the perspective. The story wasn’t broken, the author had simply mishandled what’s called the discourse, or how the story is presented.

As tedious as the story was, though, I learned a lot from studying it. You can see 100 examples of something that works and they just pass unnoticed. But when something fails, you feel it at a visceral level.