Why Bungie gets visual storytelling wrong (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, July 27, 2015, 00:27 (3407 days ago) @ Leviathan

Heh, some years ago my girlfriend was reading the book that contained the Red Wedding (I don't remember which novel has it - I've only read the first book) and one day I got of the shower and she was just sitting there balling her eyes out. Anytime I asked her what was wrong she just started crying again and the rest of the day she was just slumping around.

I was surprised when I got to that point in the show of course, but had nowhere near that kind of reaction. :)

Well, for one thing, you are a man and she is a woman. Color me sexist, but it's not usually the men bawling their eyes out when people die. If she had seen it on TV first, you can bet the reaction would have been more intense.

While I agree that books and films do generally have different strengths and pretty much agree with your point in this thread, great passion can still illicit all kinds of responses from an audience it resonates with, no matter the medium. From my experience, if the reader has a good imagination and the author writes in a way that keys into it, a book can be just as powerful in the way that films can be.

Powerful, but not in the way films are. Writing is not specific and continuous like the 24fps of a movie are. You are perceiving Westeros with your imagination in the books, but in the show you are perceiving it via sight and sound. That is not the same at all.

I think a lot of your examples of comparing famous reactions to films and television to those of novels are not fair comparisons. Films and television are much more popular and accessible than novels and, perhaps more importantly, generally experienced by that wider audience around the same time when they are released or broadcast. The number of people who had read the Red Wedding was far less than the people who watched it, and since that startling, shocking event in the book occurred not on one specific Sunday night across the world but instead in different places in different times for each reader, you're not going to hear about it in the same way. When the Red Wedding happened in the TV show, you could talk about it with others at the water-cooler the next day. When my girlfriend read it she had no one to talk to.

Why do you think books are less popular? The GoT novels told the same story. Books are cheap. You can buy the paperback for a few bucks. Cable plus HBO costs a lot. By that measure alone they are more accessible than television. People are hungry for entertainment, so if books provide it better, they'd pick those over TV. But they aren't, and that's because audiovisual media is simply better at manipulating your emotions. If you had watched House of Cards, which was released all at once, you'd know everybody freaked out and talked about SPOILERS Frank killing Zoe END SPOILERS.

The bridge doesn't fall when someone randomly jumps up and down here and there, but when everyone jumps up and down at the same time. Films and TV have the power that kind of cultural impact while books generally do not, and I think that taints your examples above. You did't hear about one person reading the Red Wedding whenever they got to it, but you did hear when millions watched it at the same time.

Isn't this sort of admitting the greater power to audiovisual works? Nobody like their stories in a vacuum, and if you say that they are better able to reach more people that should be a flat out plus for them, and a minus against books.