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Monday, April 28, 2008

Why Entertainment is Boring

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

One of the consistent things about the entertainment media that I find annoying is the predictability. Currently (and for some time now) the entertainment media has been fixated on "people with money (other than entertainers like ourselves) are bad/evil/uncaring/cowards while poor people are honest and brave". People in between are some of both, but most often ignorant and mislead.

An example is the continuing plot line you run across in the new "Dr Who" series. Courage is not found in the upper classes, only venality, pride, cowardice, treachery, or whatever bad trait it is found needful to express (some might express some other emotion, but if so they are quickly killed off before they can do so). The lower classes are always brave and self-sacrificing for the greater good, so long as they have a leader, i.e., The Doctor.

I would think they could do better if when they set their scripts up they simply threw dice or spun a wheel to determine which character is going to "rise to the occasion". That way there would at least be some "suspense", some "mystery" about what the characters are going to be.

But this applies across a lot of shows.

I just think it would be better if courage and self-sacrifice is not shown as only the purview of one class, while evil/badness is the purview of the other class. Humans do not act that way.