They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot/Literature: Difference between revisions

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* Ramsey Campbell's ''The Overnight'' is a horror novel set at a big-box bookstore in England. Over half of the story is spent setting up the seething tensions and hatred just below the surface in the relationships among the staff. It's hinted that the bookstore is built on ground where a bizarre number of battles and acts of violence have occurred, and that the place has a palpable effect on people's emotional states. The store manager becomes an increasingly unsympathetic, almost grotesque and frightening character, and it's revealed that he's been sleeping in his office for weeks, thus being constantly exposed to the negative influence of the place. At the story's climax, the whole staff is locked in the bookstore overnight to do an inventory. Instead of the obvious payoff to all this buildup, the psychological horror of ordinary people trapped and turning on each other... {{spoiler|some slimy gray monsters come and kill everyone, and the creepy manager turns out to actually be the protagonist, as he is the only character left alive.}} It's like the author got bored with the story he was writing and decided to tack on the ending of a totally different, much less interesting story to wrap it up.

* Hawthorne's ''House of the Seven Gables.'' So many elements could have been fantastic stories (ghost story, mystery, romance, just about any genre, really) and what did it deliver? A whole lot of hot air and a stubborn refusal to say anything bad about the closest thing to a villain the author bothered to introduce. The pain finally ending in the two old people running away from their problems. And it's a classic. ''Ugh.''

** For [[Character Development]]. Why would Moist want to keep the Post Office going when he's no longer an avatar? [[It's Personal]] plus [[Not So Different]] gives Moist motivation and fuels real growth.

** In [[Discworld]], words have power, and a lot of words in one small space makes L-space and results in the words becoming ''sentient''. The letters were alive, and desperately wanted to be delivered - it was their purpose in life. When the place burned down, they effectively died. Discworld physics can be hard to understand if you haven't read the whole series - it's quite complex and comes out in little bits over all the novels.

* ''The Death of Grass'' by [[John Christopher]]. A very interesting apocalypse plot about all Earth's grasses dying, but after an interesting beginning the whole thing turned into survivalist horror and the plot might as well have been zombies for all the difference it makes.

* In ''[[Empire From the Ashes]]'', the galaxy is periodically purged of intelligent life by mysterios invaders known as the Achuultani. In the second book, their latest genocidal wave is defeated and their homeworld ({{spoiler|and the evil AI enslaving them}}) is identified. Humanity never does get around to advancing on the Achuultani homeworld...

* In [[Alan Dean Foster]]'s ''[[Spellsinger]]'' series, the lead character is a dabbling musician [[Fish Out of Water|transported to a magical world]]. But the thing is, the wizard who called for him was trying to get an engineer. The [[The Engineer|possible]] [[Magitek|awesomeness]] [[Magic Versus Science|of]] [[This Is My Boomstick|that]] is only matched for the fact that it would by any means turn out as a horrible case of [[Mary Sue]].

** Rick Cook fulfils this wasted potential in his ''[[Wiz Biz]]'' novels, featuring a computer programmer summoned to a world of magic.

* Stephen King's ''The Talisman'' gets hit with this. About a boy, Jack Swayer, who has to journey across the country to retrieve an artifact to save his mother, who is the counterpart to the queen of a fantasy alternate world. This alternate world is introduced, and much of the book is about Jack learning how to use his powers to travel there. You'd think Jack would spend most of his time in the magical fantasy world, which is tied to the [[Fisher King|fate of the queen and his mother]], right? Wrong. Jack spends the majority of the book hitchhiking across rural America and ending up in an [[Orphanage of Fear]]. He ends up spending a bit of time in the fantasy world towards the end.. and spends it riding a train through a desert. Weee..

** Given that this is King we're talking about here, his magical fantasy world may very well be powered by [[Eldritch Abomination|Lovecraftian horrors]]. And that train? May very well be [[Ghost Train|Blaine]] [[Epileptic Trees|The Mono.]]

** And then there's the way that the plot and characterisations bend over backwards so the female lead always gets the best result while still having every character simpering and fawning at her feet? There were so many good plots wasted where characters, setting or backstory could have been developed by the end of book 1 that some readers have maintained that the wasted opportunities are ''worse'' than the bad writing and [[Purple Prose]].

** Not to mention virtually all of the other Cullen back stories - Rosalie went on a rampage to gain revenge against the men who raped and murdered her, basically Kill Bill with vampires. Jasper was involved in a Civil-war era vampire turf war. Carlisle was a vampire hunter who was turned and had to maintain his humanity in 17th century England. Alice's story was basically ''Twiligh''t with a more compelling setting, a tragic end, and a hero and heroine who don't make us want to shudder and roll our eyes simultaneously. Even Edward's background before meeting Bella, in which he was basically a vampire Batman, is a thousand times more compelling than the story we actually got.

*** The "1981" comment most likely refers to conditions of the world: Dark times, with nobody able to trust anyone as Voldemort terrorizes the wizarding world with no end or savior in sight.

** The final battle between Harry and Voldemort. What could have been and amazing confrontation between both of the most powerful wizards at the moment, we got {{spoiler|an overly long [["The Reason You Suck" Speech]], and just the death of on the most powerful villains ever in just a blink. And then there's the aftermath (just two or three pages).}}

*** Harry's final battle with Voldemort probably couldn't have gone any other way. In the sixth book, we just saw the only wizard that was ever able to stand up to him equally get killed off, and that Harry just couldn't fill his shoes. Besides, as has been said elsewhere, Rowling had been setting up how Harry would win since the first book, and the ending becomes obvious in hindsight.

**** Approximately three hojillion fanfic authors have found other ways to write the final battle. Admittedly, many of them would not ''work'' (Sturgeon's Law), but that still leaves more than a few that would have. Just off the top of my head at random, Harry could have used his mental connection with Voldemort to fight the dude in a Battle In The Center of the Mind, where Voldemort's greater experience with magic would have been countered by Harry having far stronger willpower and conviction. (Voldemort is, ultimately, a coward. Harry, on the other hand, is almost suicidally determined.)

** Voldemort has this is well, besides his desire for immortality, we never really see any depth to him, just being something of a [[Card-Carrying Villain]]. He is the most feared wizard ever, and people fear to say his name, but outside leading a group of supremacists, we really don't see why this is so.

*** Particularly given that his immediate predecessor as a Dark Lord, Gellert Grindelwald, is off-handedly mentioned as having been the secret Nazi mastermind of a secret occult World War II, happening behind the scenes of the real one! How do you get more fearsome than that just by being a local terrorist?

* ''Debt of Honor'' by [[Tom Clancy]] could have been a very interesting book were it not a purely anti-Japanese/South-East Asia [[Author Tract]]. There are so many possible themes here. The dangers of over-reliance on a purely electronic infrastructure. Japan's relation to the rest of the world and the way it handles its warrior culture with it's purely defensive military. The tensions that are still felt between Japan and the Empire's former conquests. The Japanese economy's reliance on foreign investment and export. The interplay between the American and Japanese governments and the impact the proliferation of nuclear weapons has on the region. As it stands, the book would have completely faded into history were it not for the ending and it's similarity to that one September morning.