Teen Wolf reminds me some things are still true

by Doctor Science

When I wrote about what Teen Wolf has taught me about the TV industry, I said that the sloppy way Teen Wolf had introduced the character of Cora was a mistake even bad fanfic writers wouldn't make in telling a story, so I theorize that storytelling isn't actually what these professionals are trying to do.

But as I thought about similar problems with other characters, it hit me that I'd made a stupid, stupid mistake. I can't believe I forgot that women aren't people.

It's not that they're not interested in telling stories, it's that they're not interested in stories about women, DUH!

Cut for spoilers up to Teen Wolf 4.06 and beyond.

In my earlier post, I said:

The only explanation I can think of is that the Teen Wolf writers and showrunner (TPTB) aren't actually trying to tell stories. I think they're creating snapshots or brief scenes, little dioramas or vignettes, where the aim isn't to tell a *narrative* (= events in time) involving *characters* (=virtual human beings instead of hollow frames). Instead, they want emotion-laden pictures, where all that matters is how things look, how competently that hollow frame is painted, and how much emotion the actors can put into today's lines.

This was about Cora, Derek Hale's long-lost younger sister.

But I also thought about how when Lydia encountered Peter in 3.11 they had almost no lines, and it's pretty clear that it was because showrunner Jeff Davis had forgotten Lydia's season 2 character arc. And I was reminded of this issue all over again when at SDCC Davis was asked why Malia has apparently normal mental development, despite having lived as a coyote for the past 8 years, and he replied:

We were hoping the audience would forgive us for that one.

In other words, they have no explanation, it was just convenient for the plot, and the character is just a device.

It's like the table in this scene from 4.03:

Is the table really Italian? Does it make sense for it to be Italian? Does the table have an Italian backstory? None of this matters, because the table is a *prop*, just there to help out the human characters.

And Cora, Malia, and even Lydia are just there to help out the *human* characters, too -- mostly by serving as "love interests". There are probably hundreds of stories in which a Hale sister or cousin meets Stiles and they become romantically involved -- as Malia has, and as Cora was intended at one point -- but those stories are written by bad fanfic writers, so we say they're "Mary Sues" and look down on them. But at least Mary Sue Hale has a backstory that makes some kind of narrative sense -- because she's written by a teenage girl who's interested in the character, who thinks about her as a full and worthwhile person. Who doesn't realize yet that women aren't people, not when Hollywood tells the story.

This is extremely frustrating and discouraging for me, because a bunch of us have been analyzing Teen Wolf recently, and we're starting to think Jeff Davis may actually be doing something really narratively interesting: telling an unusual story, and telling it more through visuals and implications than through spoken lines. Davis can think outside the Hollywood box in some ways, but not enough to consistently think of women as people. All our culture is problematic.

Comments

[JakeB]

Isn't a Mary Sue story only one in which the universe of the story is perverted by the wish-fulfillment desire of the writer?

Doesn't detract from your point, in that even the cheesiest Mary Sue story would probably have a fuller character than the weird cardboard cutouts you describe as populating this show . . . .

I recall a friend once telling me, while she was in the middle of earning her MA in English, that one way of talking about characters was the distinction between flat and round characters. Many of Dickens's characters, for instance, being flat, while Dostoevsky's were round. Perhaps this is just abuse of geometry a la Fashionable Nonsense, but I'm also reminded of Ursula Le Guin talking about how in a well-written fantasy (or, more specifically, a well-designed fantasy story), the world was like an iceberg: you only ever see 10% of it, but the rest of it has a very large influence on how what you see behaves. And anyone paying attention can see the difference between this type and the other.

Also, only touching on the women aren't real trope and because I feel the need to expel some bile, I had been contemplating (irregularly, don't worry) for some years as to just how misogynistic John MacDonald was, in all those terribly popular Travis McGee novels. I read them all, in order, and I'm pretty sure that every single woman that he has a relationship with ends up murdered or raped or both, with the exception of the one who dies of brain cancer. Repellent and it makes me glad I read them so many years ago, time at least has bleached it a bit. But which also leads me to observe that despite the new James Bond being the best ever, every single woman he's had sex with so far has died. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I would be pleased to know it.

[Fair Economist]

I think part of what may be behind Teen Wolf getting so bad is the inherent implausibility of these Modern Fantasy universes. The idea that the world could always have had large numbers of dangerous supernatural beings with serious self-control issues *and nobody ever noticed* is pretty preposterous. They did try, IMO, I thought it was pretty good in S1 and meandering but trying in S2. You can never have LeGuin's iceberg in that kind of universe; to mix metaphors, the lead weight of preposterous backstory would pull the whole enterprise below the waves.

The fairly blatant sexism of thin female characters is a separate problem and not particularly limited to Modern Fantasy - as Jake's examples from other genres demonstrate. If anything, it's probably somewhat better on average thanks to the witch archetype and the fact that female superhumans are still superhuman. Also, possibly that women are often a big part of these audiences may play a role too.

Another drag on modern series is the excessive amount of dramatic character twists. Characters switch from good to bad to good to bad to good to bad to.. well, you get the idea. It's a reaction to the more traditional problem of having pure evil characters vs. pure good, which is silly too, but it's often gone way over the edge in the other direction.

[JimV]

"LeGuin's iceberg" sounds a lot like Ernest Hemingway's famous iceberg:

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

(I'm not accusing LeGuin of plagiarism; she probably credited Hemingway.)

[JakeB]

Jim, it's even possible that I'm misremembering exactly what Le Guin said . . . I think it's in Languages of the Night, I will dig through it and see.