Sequels and Prequels

[rowyn]

When I think about "seeing more" of my favorite characters or settings, I always want to know: What happens next?

Although I've read, and watched, plenty of prequels, part of me is always a little disappointed by them. I don't want to know what's gone before. I don't want to see the edges of the story filled in, to see what was happening to those characters when the camera was following this character. I want to move forward, to get the answer to And then?

In a similar vein, I dislike it when authors give spoilers for their own works. Diana Wynne Jones, dearly though I love her work, does that way too often. She'll have a first-person narrator who's supposedly writing this book after the fact, and keeps sprinkling in tidbits about how things turn out. Stop that! I don't want to know how it ends until it ends! Oddly, though, flashbacks within a text don't bother me, as long as it's not "three-fourths of the book is one long flashback".

Anyway, I'm curious now: how many other people feel the same way? When you've got a character you like, are you as happy to see a prequel as a sequel? Or do you prefer one over the other? What about the foreshadowing-by-sledgehammer that some authors like? How much do spoilers spoil it for you?

Comments

[level-head.livejournal.com]

I'll bet you were annoyed by Daniel for weeks. ];-)

Movie trailers are unfortunate to me; I'd rather be delighted and surprised by what happens. And Dan Brown's foreshadowing in his works such as The DaVinci Code and Deception Point seems rather amateurish.

It reminded me: I don't want to do that. ];-)

Suspended disbelief is fragile, and precious, and should NOT be disturbed. The reader will recover without having to be jarred out of it.

===|==============/ Level Head

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Oh yes - MOVIE TRAILERS. I used to love movie trailers. There's still a certain appeal to them, since many times the movie trailer is a lot better than the movie ever is ... but in the case of a good movie, a trailer just goes and spoils it.

Terminator 2 would have been a whole lot of a different experience, if I hadn't seen the trailer first and seen who the good guys and bad guys were supposed to be. It could have been one awesome surprise.

Much more recently, after seeing an extended trailer for "Polar Express", gwendelkitty commented to me, "Well! We don't have to see the movie now. I think we just saw the whole thing."

I think I've had a lot more fun going into a good movie if I have no idea what to expect. For one thing, I had no earthly idea what to expect when I first went in, as a 7-year-old, to see "Star Wars", except that it had something to do with spaceships, and I liked spaceships, so that was good enough for me. What I got was a lot more than what I expected, and I'm grateful for that. =) A little more recently, I think that movies like "Secondhand Lions", "The Cat Returns" (Studio Ghibli) or "Millennium Actress Chiyoko" are best seen without any idea what to expect.

That's one reason why I really like the core premise of Rowyn's "Just Trust Me" campaign - that the players really have very little preparation to know what the "twist" is going to be in the game. Is it science fiction? Fantasy? Is it time travel or vampires or maybe they find out that magic is real? No idea! It starts in something resembling a familiar real world, but then the surprises happen, and it's a matter of discovery to find out what's going on. That's a whole lot different than, say, generating a Dungeons and Dragons character: running into goblins or dragons with your Paladin won't be a surprise; it's an expectation.