The Expectations of Story
Warning: contains spoilers for The Last of Us Part II
Expectations are something I think a lot about when writing stories. When thinking of plot, I imagine a scenario and all the possible ways in which characters might react, or what could happen as a consequence. I try to throw out all of my initial ideas, because those are the ones that are most obvious, which tends to make them the most boring: the reader will expect those initial ideas, reactions, or scenarios.
Expectation is safe. Expectation is boring. The expectant reader thinks, “I know what’s going to happen. I can let my guard down.”
Expectation probably played a key role in early human development, allowing the brain to process all kinds of information that would otherwise overwhelm it if it had to focus on every single piece of data coming in. It’s what allows athletes to think about things other than where the ball is coming, like what they want to do after it’s received, or what the formation of the team is, and how they need to respond to dynamic changes in a game. Soccer players don’t have to think about where the ball is going to be when they’re dribbling down the field, their brain expects that it will be at their feet at a certain distance given the quality of the touch. Freed up from having to interpret this ‘low level’ data, the player can focus on the movement of the opposition players. As written by Kieth Payne in the article “Your Hidden Censor: What Your Mind Will Not Let You See” for Scientific American:
This makes good evolutionary sense. It is important to be selective so that the mind can devote most of its resources to the task at hand. But it is also useful to keep an eye or an ear out for the unexpected (especially if it might eat you or you might mate with it).
Not many people who read or watch movies want to be able to expect what’s going to happen. They want to be engaged. Few enjoy having the plot ruined. At the same time however, there are expectations that need to be met. Some of those are more important than others. If I’m going to watch a horror movie about demonic possession, I expect to be scared using religious imagery. If I’m going to read a Steven King novel, I expect great character development. Failing to meet those expectations is not likely to please me.
But sometimes we like it when things don’t always go the way we thought. The plot twist at the end, the turning of events we didn’t see coming. Going against expectations can be risky. Break too many expectations—or the wrong ones—and the risk is the alienation of the reader.
Subverting expectations requires some amount of flexibility on the part of the reader; those who are more rigid are less tolerant to unfulfilled expectations.
No where is this more demonstrable than in well-established fan bases. Long-running franchises, where worlds have been built, rules have been set, and characters have been developed, are less apt to have flexible viewers. After years of watching a show or following a series, a lot of emotional and mental investment has been made by the fan. No, Captain Kirk isn’t going to follow orders with his tail tucked between his legs. Yes, Wolverine does have a traumatic past. No, you can’t kill a zombie unless you destroy its brain. You get the picture.
Consider the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek. This is a series with decades of history. Gene Roddenberry’s DNA is firmly stamped on The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, Voyager, and all ten movies prior to the reboot. Space ships look a certain way. Star Fleet has an ethos. But before Star Trek (2009) even came out, fans were pissed. Suddenly ships didn’t look the way they expected. Spock had a romantic relationship with Uhura. There were lens flares, challenging even the visual aesthetic fans had come to expect! The show continues to be divisive.
Enter The Last of Us Part II. The Last of Us first came out on PS3 over seven years ago and was met with near universal praise. The world design, gameplay, sound track, setting, etc., were all superb. But it was the characters of Ellie and Joel that fans really connected with. They bonded with each other, and over the course of the game, fans bonded with them. The Last of Us is widely recognized as a masterpiece of storytelling.
The hype for its sequel has been building for almost a decade. But when it finally came out on June 19, 2020, much of the Internet came out against it furiously (currently sitting at 5.3/10 based on 118,977 user reviews). A lot of people have written as to why this might be so, and with the game investing so much time, story, and character into such issues as transgender identity and the appearance of the female body, the response from the more misogynistic, sexist, and transphobic parts of the Internet was predictable. It’s well understood that aspects of the gaming community are highly toxic—except, maybe, by those very corners of the community.
I’m going to set those kind of responses aside. I acknowledge them, but to write off all the bad reviews for this game is lazy, and boring. Other people have done a fine job explaining the controversy.
Allow me, then, to attempt to subvert your expectations as to why else I think this game has been met with such vitriol—and what that means to both readers and writers when considering our own stories and the responsibilities we have.
Last night I watched the video review made by Angry Joe, a popular game reviewer well respected and acknowledged as being fair, and thorough. I have no reason to doubt that. Angry Joe’s review lasts nearly an hour. He goes into great detail about why he really hates this game.
First, let me address this: no it’s because of a certain person dying…it’s how a character’s death is executed…How believable is it? How does it come about? Was it setup properly? How much agency does it have? Does it make any sense?
All fair points that I would agree with, in general. Angry Joe goes on to explain that the story doesn’t make sense, is not believable, and is not setup properly. Clearly that’s one person’s opinion, but as I listened to Joe explain why the story is poor and why it doesn’t make sense, it seemed to me to be less about the story objectively making sense, and more about the story not meeting his expectations.
…and we’re gonna play as Abby some more? Are you fucking kidding right now? Fuck Abby, I don’t want to play as this…this is exactly as I thought it was. Fuck this!
Angry Joe feels that Joel’s death is rushed, and consequently the rest of the game feels ‘rushed’ and ‘boring.’ He’s not happy about playing as Abby for a large part of the game, not happy about being unable to play with the characters he cares about.
…you know where it’s going, right out of the gate…so now, what we’re gonna do, is the rest of the game, we’re just gonna do a revenge plot…I’ve been waiting seven years in order to be able to re-engage with these characters, and when they come here, they’re nothing like the characters that we know, they’re done poorly, they’re focusing on completely different characters I don’t give a shit about that you didn’t introduce properly to make me care about them in the best way possible, and I’m playing more with them than I am with the characters that I’ve been waiting to play with, and then at the end of the game the characters that I wanted to play with are destroyed! They’re gone, they’re nothing, they’re broken or dead!”
The rest of the review is spent with Joe pointing out why he feels this way.
To be clear: I’m not saying Angry Joe is wrong. He has his own opinions. A lot of people share them. But I wonder if part of the underlying issue is simply that Joe had certain expectations. He wanted to play with certain characters in a certain way, expectations that were deeply held after almost a decade of waiting, and early into the game those expectations are not met.
The expectations that Angry Joe has are so strongly held that any significant deviation from them could have only been met in one way: with derision. From early on—before he even plays the game—Joe makes it clear he has a certain idea of how things should go. He has ideas about what could happen that fit sufficiently within his expectations. It’s something he’s clearly been thinking about, since he’s able come up with several preferable plot lines within a minute, and in fact he does so, starting around minute marker 33:20. He ends his listing of possible story ideas by saying:
…and I came up with that in five minutes and you’re telling me that in seven years this is what they did?
It’s obvious that having expectations about something not be met would cause anger. If I order a steak and the waiter hands me a cheeseburger, even though the cheeseburger might be the best one I’ve ever had, I’m not going to be happy. But that is an example where expectations were unreasonably broken, and that’s what this all comes down to, what we need to think about when writing plot and thinking of story: what will the reader expect, and how far can I reasonably push those boundaries? If we imagine the population on a bell curve according to the flexibility of their expectations, most people are going to fall right in the middle. There’s a range of motion where people are okay with those expectations being broken. The further away from center you go, the fewer people there will be to accept unmet expectations.
Appeal vs. Predictability
Measuring ‘public appeal’ and ‘predictability’ is a struggle many writers and artists deal with, due to the highly objective nature of those ambiguous metrics.
As a writer, a really interesting question arises, then:
If people are plotted against a normal distribution in accordance to their flexibility for accepting expectations, where along this distribution should good stories be placed?
If the y-axis represents the fulfillment of expectations, with the polars along the x-axis representing the extremes of predictability, then we understand that at ±2 deviations from the norm, we’ve lost the interest of 97.7% of our readers.
Deciding where you want your work to exist on this plot depends authorial intent. What is the goal? Are you trying to write a story that will appeal to a large number of people? If so, you should be predictable—but not too predictable. Or are you writing a story that’s not meant to appeal to the masses? The more/less predictable you are, the more/less people you’re going to satisfy. If satisfying other readers isn’t your goal because you’re writing for yourself, then you can write whatever you want.
Here we start to get into the debate of intent, accessibility, and marketability. If you’re working on a technical document, you want to be as far to the left side of the plot as possible—absolutely zero ambiguity in your writing. There are provable facts and strict guidelines that manuals and other technical documents should adhere to.
Avant-garde works spun out of MFA programs in Academic Literature scenes tend to skew the opposite direction, and in fact I remember having intense debates about accessibility during class with the rest of my cohorts. It’s a discussion that is so old it might as well be a trope. Ruben E. Reyes Jr. writes “The Language of Academia” in The Harvard Crimson:
Academia is a language in itself: a complicated, and often times unnecessarily polarizing part of a larger institution. The language of academia can be excessive and long-winded simply for the sake of complexity, as if being complicated means the academic’s ideas are of higher quality. Knowing the language of academia is a privilege, and often a result of whether or not people in your communities have had the chance to engage with higher education.
“The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing,” written by Victoria Clayton and published in The Atlantic, goes on to say:
The idea that writing should be clear, concise, and low-jargon isn’t a new one—and it isn’t limited to government agencies, of course. The problem of needlessly complex writing—sometimes referred to as an “opaque writing style”—has been explored in fields ranging from law to science. Yet in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition.
One possible responsibility of the author is to write a story accessible for their target audience. If the target audience is only themselves and a handful of others, then can a member of the non-target audience really pass objective judgement? If a story is written by a Black woman for a Black audience and I as a White man don’t understand the story, do I as a reader have the responsibility to acknowledge that I’m not part of the target audience, and to give more weight or space to the voices of those that are part of that target audience, when critiquing that story? After all, it wasn’t written for me.
I think the answer here is yes, but also no. Everyone has opinions. We’re free to express them. As a writer, the very idea that I can’t voice an opinion about something or that I should self-censor is anathema. There’s been a lot said about the responsibility the majority voices have for giving space to minority voices, particularly when the subject matter is intended for minority voices. I don’t know that any conclusion has been universally settled on, but I think a reasonable approach would be for majority voices to acknowledge their lack of authority, doing what they can to ensure space and time is given to minority voices without railroading them or dominating the conversation, as so often happens.
How then should I respond to Angry Joe, or other critics of the game—both the ones that hate it as well as the ones that love it? What do I make of The Last of Us Part II? How would I review it? What should you think about it?
I have my own opinions. Angry Joe has his. You have yours. Give it a play and form your own ideas, but when you do, try to remember: they’re just an opinion, as equally valid and correct as anyone else’s. Keep those kinds of things in mind when you’re working on your next story plot.
PS:
The game was a fucking masterpiece.