Current Events > My choice of media consumption took a tole on my creativity.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm revisiting a story idea that I kicked around from 2004 to 2012. It never got past the "dreamer" phase of reciting dialogue to myself and enacting scenes in my head. I wanted to revisit it since I legitimately intend to bring it to fruition someday. As such, I'm writing down what concepts and scenarios I can remember from back in the day.

While there are inspired moments, there are also some cringy scenarios which highlight how junk media conception marked my creativity.

It's guilty of the "If you beat them in a fight, you get to keep them" mentality found in a number of anime shows. You know what I'm talking about. A character tries to kill the protagonist, they lose the fight, then they show up a week later in the protag's spaceship talking to the person they tried to kill as if they were old college roommates.

There's also a shift in allegiances that is straight out of pro wrestling. The antagonist and his righthand man watch as the protagonist is physically beaten within an inch of his life by the antagonist's underlings. Because he respects the hero's courage to take on insurmountable odds, because he's tired of working for the bad guys, and because his boss was mean to him that day!, the righthand man switches sides at a pivotal moment and saves his former foe's life; becoming his sidekick in the process.

In wrestling, that makes sense. If your boss is a dick and your foe is someone you respect, you might want to switch teams. In a scenario where people are playing for lives, it's a bit silly for the henchman to wait until a murder-in-progress to realize he's with the bad guys. Even if he did, and he tried to do something about it, the man he worked for would almost certainly have both men of virtue shot. Because guns exist. Not everything is about hand to hand combat.

I'm not saying that you can't enjoy pro wrestling, anime, or video games if you intend to write a story. But I'm looking back on how there really wasn't a counterbalance to that. I didn't watch or read works of dramatic integrity to elevate the quality of my writing. I just recycled the kinds of scenarios I was used to seeing without realizing how lowbrow and/or improbable they were. The "you are what you eat" principle applies to what you feed your mind as well.

Sounds like Darth Vader.

There is some overlap with Vader's redemption, I'll admit, but it really would have played out a lot more like a wrestler leaving a bad guy faction to form a tag team with the hero.