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

Content added Content deleted

VisualWikitext

Inline

@@ Line 41: / Line 41: @@
 * 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.
-* A fairly old one, but jarring nonetheless. Let's set up a premise, shall we? A prominent mobster whose famed rise to power altered a nation is caught by the police for tax evasion. Before they can capture him, however, he is shot by an unknown assailant who leaves him in a three day long fever state in which he lays down a trail of poetic, rambling, possibly insane [http://www.feastofhateandfear.com/archives/dutch.html last words]. He also leaves behind a massive hidden treasure of mob money, and a trail of secrets surrounding it, which is never found. This all [[Roman à Clef|really happened]]. Now, this was adopted by famed avant-garde author [[William S. Burroughs]] into a novel idea, written as a screenplay. Awesome, right? [[Well, This Is Not That Trope|Wrong.]] The book is instead a long, bizarre, [[Very Loosely Based on a True Story|completely fictional]] screenplay that delves into a fake [[Captain Ersatz]]'s history, explores subplots based around Burroughs' own fictional characters, and gives the main character his own set of fake, much less interesting, last words.
+* A fairly old one, but jarring nonetheless. Let's set up a premise, shall we? A prominent mobster whose famed rise to power altered a nation is caught by the police for tax evasion. Before they can capture him, however, he is shot by an unknown assailant who leaves him in a three day long fever state in which he lays down a trail of poetic, rambling, possibly insane [https://web.archive.org/web/20070607184913/http://www.feastofhateandfear.com/archives/dutch.html last words]. He also leaves behind a massive hidden treasure of mob money, and a trail of secrets surrounding it, which is never found. This all [[Roman à Clef|really happened]]. Now, this was adopted by famed avant-garde author [[William S. Burroughs]] into a novel idea, written as a screenplay. Awesome, right? [[Well, This Is Not That Trope|Wrong.]] The book is instead a long, bizarre, [[Very Loosely Based on a True Story|completely fictional]] screenplay that delves into a fake [[Captain Ersatz]]'s history, explores subplots based around Burroughs' own fictional characters, and gives the main character his own set of fake, much less interesting, last words.
 * 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.]]