Cover Your Story Scaffolding, Or, Grumbling About Monarch Season 2
“Never let your readers hear the dice roll.”
It’s common advice from genre writers at gaming conventions, and it’s good advice.
It’s not a prohibition from using the framework or scaffolding of a game system — Honor Among Thieves uses initiative order and D&D’s time pacing during its combat scenes. It’s done well and feels natural even if you’ve never heard of the game before. While that stands out to D&D players, that scaffolding is not obvious, even though it is present.
The principle applies more broadly; when the scaffolding shows, the story suffers.
Plot stupidity, deus ex machinas, anything where it leads the reader (or viewer) to suddenly realize that the only reason certain things are happening is “because there has to be a plot.” (The variant “Only the Author Can Save Them Now” is definitely what I mean here.)
I’m only three episodes into season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and it seems determined to strip away the facade and show off that scaffolding.
Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed the first season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters; it was nuanced, layered, and smart. While characters made occasional stupid choices, it made sense within the context of the story and the nature of that character. The hotheaded military guy is aggressive when that’s not a smart move? Makes sense. The idealistic person is blindsided by humans being awful? That tracks. The burned-by-the-system cynical character doesn’t trust anyone enough to share information? Of course not.
In season two, a world where Godzilla is known to exist, Monarch is still ill-funded and ineffectual. A few real examples from the same episode: It absolutely makes sense that corporations would try to profit from Titans (thank you Pacific Rim), but a third of a way through the second season seems like a strange place for a group you’ve never heard of before suddenly be ultra-influential and an outsized factor. Ah, there’s giant billboards showing some of your party’s faces as wanted fugitives? Let’s have them go run a simple errand instead of laying low, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Oh, you just happen to have an old “prototype” of the exact doohickey we need? How convenient.
Of course we all know that, yes, it IS convenient for the authors and writers. Those things drive the plot. You need scaffolding to give the story structure and shape. But when those convenient coincidences (or lapses in judgment or memory) are too large or too common, your readers and viewers are having to mentally duck and weave around that scaffolding to follow the story.
They are paying more attention to the structure than to the story itself.
There are outliers — House of Leaves immediately comes to mind — where the structure is very obvious, but rather than detracting from the experience, helps draw one into it. I found Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories compelling, not because I just wanted to “win” and get the best ending, but seeing how the story changed with those decisions. Even my pet peeve of “clap for Tinkerbell” — in the stage versions, at least — increases the immersion for the young audience it’s meant for.
If you’re thinking about your work in progress, TTRPG campaign, or what you’ll write in the future, there is a fairly easy solution. You know what decision you want the characters to make. You know where the next scenario or scene should happen. You know they’ve got to survive this unsurvivable fight somehow.
All you have to do is to rationalize it. And if you can’t rationalize it right away, add small details until you can.
One more actual example from the same episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters:
Our protagonists are being pursued by primitive religious zealots at night. It is a poorly lit night, and in some kind of wilderness, so everyone is just fast-walking. The zealots, who are maybe 100-200 meters back, want the protagonist’s camera, but are probably going to kill our protagonists as well. Ah, take the film out of the camera! That way we can keep the film and … leave the camera on the ground which may “buy them some time”. Immediate hard cut to one of the zealots walking carefully and examining the ground…and the camera pans down to show us our protagonists crouched in a small depression only 4 meters away.
Obviously they wanted this tense, life-in-danger scene. Across three different “will they be revealed” moments it both tense and provides a character moment for one of the zealots as well.
But to get to this scene, our protagonists had to wait for the zealots to catch up. They had to just…twiddle their thumbs instead of using the time the camera supposedly bought.
It would be easy to fix.
The ditch might be the only place to hide they could get to. One of them could have the classic “twisted ankle”. They argue too long about whether or not to give up the camera. Then they have a reason to be in the situation they’re in.
The same story beats can happen. The same scenes.
It just takes a little more effort and thoughtfulness.
This may seem like a small, unimportant quibble, and to a degree it is. We’re all aware there has to be some degree of scaffolding. There will be small imperfections here and there.
It’s what I said above, though. All those examples above are from a single episode. Even if any of them wasn’t big enough to kick me out of the story completely, having it happen over and over again was just too much.
You want the ways you get the story from one scene to another, or get your characters from one location to another, to at least try to make sense within the fictional universe.
It shows that you care enough about the story to make sure the scaffolding doesn’t show.
(1) Yes, I know there are some times that is acceptable or expected, work with me here.
Featured Image by Bruno from Pixabay
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