https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/all-kidding-aside-i-find-the-creative
Freddie deBoer
Jan 13, 2026
… I love the basic
concept: in an effort to develop super soldiers the government subjected a
bunch of children to radical experiments to develop psionic abilities, then
pushed the most powerful of them to explore another dimension… but she brought
something back with her. Awesome, smart premise.
But if you’ve watched
the last couple of seasons, you already know the punchline: that cool,
uncluttered premise has been thoroughly retconned. Actually, the
government had already accessed that alternate dimension years earlier,
and actually, their experiments weren’t what created the psionic
abilities. No, in fact, the children with psionic powers got them because they
received transfusions of magic blood from the first test subject, and he
himself got powers because he… took a rock haunted by a demon from a dying
scientist he found in a cave while he was a Boy Scout? What? What the
fuck is this? In its later seasons, Stranger
Things did the worst thing a long-running television show can do: it
retroactively made its earlier seasons worse.
That drift from a
tight, self-contained, and (in a certain sense) modest story to a sprawling,
overcomplicated one that inevitably retconned earlier episodes and invited all
manner of plot holes - that’s exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about
troubles with modern storytelling. There’s a general drift from clear themes
and efficient storytelling towards sprawling, shaggy, seemingly directionless
plots that scream “Well, we might as well do this now.” That devolution has
happened with all manner of television series and movie franchises. The
television version of Westworld is a perfect example. While I
wasn’t as big on the first season as its most ardent fans, that season was
certainly a remarkable achievement in sharp, inventive, and confident
storytelling - in self-contained storytelling. It took place
almost entirely within a Western-themed theme park, focusing on the
philosophical awakening of “hosts,” that is, androids. There were plenty of
mysteries, but they felt smart, intentional. The modesty of the show’s
narrative horizons helped keep the focus on what really mattered, which was the
enduring question of what it means to be a human being, what it means to be
alive.
And then… oof.
I wonder if deBoer has missed an opportunity to make a
larger and broader point about the trajectory of franchise storytelling. He can say that The X-Files bugged him
because each set of questions led to more questions and no answers and he
wanted answers. I liked the show from seasons 1 through 5 and I liked the movie
but it began to go steadily downhill after that and part of the problem was
that the questions started getting answered and the answers were kinda
dumb. You see when you set up a high
concept Gothic romance in which “romance” is the quest for truth and not just a
low Gothic jumpscare freak of the week thing (though The X-Files,
seriously, excelled at that back in the day), you don’t have to answer all the
questions because the show was at its best dealing with how people deal with
the unanswerable. The X-Files could
be very serious and also mock its own conceit more viciously than anyone else
could (“Mulder … are you sure it wasn’t a girly scream?”).
deBoer gets at a problem that I think has been endemic in
American mainstream entertainment for generations. He writes that the nerds have one but still
act as if they are bullied. I … don’t
think that’s quite the problem. I think
the problem isn’t even about worldbuilding as such, deBoer’s complaint that worldbuilding
gets retconned for the sake of stakes raising is on point.
In fact I would venture to say that Star Wars was Exhibit A
for this back in the days of the prequels.
Previously we’d been told that The Force was out there to be wielded and
believed in or not and then with Episodes I through III midichlorians had
something to do with how well and effectively you could sense and wield The
Force. This was a giant retcon that
altered the nature of the franchise. The
sequels were stuck with a Force that you were born with access to and there was
no longer a question of whether she was born with it or whether it was Maybelline. Yup, she was born with it! The Force awakens and, no, it wasn’t asleep
at the wheel. Or was it? Is this the way or not?
But Avatar: The Last Airbender pulled off the feat
of having a great story given an idiotic retcon that made the entire “universe”
worse. I am going to assume you just
know ATLA and the spin-offs. No, I won’t
humor you. The cartoon series from 2005 that
emerged just as Justice League Unlimited was winding down stands as a
high point in serialized childrens’ animation comparable to Batman: the
animated series. The tale is about
the last member of the Air nomads finding out he is the Avatar, the one person
who can master the elements of earth, wind, fire and water (a rote cosmological
idea from Hellenistic speculative philosophy but one
that has come up as relevant to interpreting what the Apostle Paul meant by the
elements of this world in Robert Ewusie Moses’ survey of powers and
principalities in Pauline literature, I assure you this is true). Aang, the
Avatar, has to find a way to stop the Fire Lord from subjugating the rest of
the planet and the short version is that he does but not without some difficult
battles and getting murdered by the Fire Lord’s terrifying spoiled
fire-wielding prodigy daughter Princess Azula along the way.
Then the sequel series Legend of Korra was done and
my brother and I have vindictively referred to it as Legend of Entitlement. Swiftly we noticed that the world-building of
the original series had been jettisoned.
Back in the original series a fire-bender could generate lightning but
the technique was so dangerous if you did it the wrong way you could very
easily kill yourself. Then in the sequel
series Korra meets Mako, who is a wishy-washy fire bender who can just point
and shoot lightning like it’s nothing and why? Well, because athletes are able
to do so much more now than they could a hundred years ago and that’s all. That’s why.
So, sure, cyclists could win seven Tours de France in the last thirty
years and blood-doping and systemic cheating and performance enhancing drugs
and all that were involved. Did that explain how Makko could point and shoot
lightning a generation later from Princess Azula? Or was it just lazy hand-waving away
questions about the writers and show runners being too lazy and incompetent to take
their own mythological system seriously?
Then in Season 2 of Legend of Entitlement we get the
origin of the Avatar cycle and, damn, it was the worst mistake they made before
making Seasons 3 and 4 happened. The
Last Airbender just told us there was an Avatar and that the avatar continuously
reincarnated across the four elements in each generation. The sequel series gave us some Wan guy who
cheated and tricked his way into mastery of the four elements and then one day
he sees two spirits locked in conflict and he thinks he broke up the fight only
to discover that he separated a spirit of light and darkness from each other
and unleashed a new level of chaos and death on the world. Wan bonds with the spirit of light and tries
to undo the damage but it’s all impossible so he keeps reincarnating so that he
can one day bring balance to the world.
What?
So the founding origin of the Avatar is that the Avatar was
the one who created all the chaos in the world?
This was the dumbest origin anyone could have had for the Avatar. And now there’s a Dark Avatar? Does Avatar Korra think to reconnect the
spirits of darkness and light and thereby finally succeed where every prior
Avatar iteration was retroactively doomed to fail? Nope!
She beats the crap out of this new Dark Avatar and locks it away in a
tree for … who knows how long?
Maybe the show runners thought this was going to be epic
but I saw it as the shittiest and most incompetent knock-off of a Paprika
ending anyone could have done. Yes, dear
reader, if you somehow thought of Satoshi Kon’s surrealistic masterpiece that’s
because I name-checked it. In Kon’s film the narrative’s “lord of darkness” is
not defeated by getting a sheer beat-down from the power of light, he’s defeated
by balance, the balance of light and dark, and man and woman, and dream and reality.
This is the part where I admit I was considering seminary
decades ago and where I remind my longtime readers I’ve got an eighty-five book
reading list on different takes on Christian and some Jewish demonology and
spirit cosmology. So when I was watching
Legend of Korra I kept getting more and more infuriated at the stupid
storytelling decisions that were getting made that retroactively wrecked the
world that had been slowly and steadily and consistently built in The Last
Airbender.
The icing on the cake was Korra, having pined for Makko for
two seasons, in season four is retconned into having a lesbian crush on Asami,
the woman who was dating Makko and who had her boyfriend stolen from her TWICE
by the Avatar. But what does Asami
do? She decides she’s in love with Korra
and so she went from being the Q who gave James Bond his gadgets to the trophy
Korra gets to bang for saving the world.
And it got billed as somehow empowering?
No, I basically liked Asami Sato as a character and the fact that she
was demoted across four seasons from being the Batman of Team Avatar to Korra’s
trophy girlfriend gave me the sickening sensation that the writers of Legend of
Korra just seemed to be a bunch of entitled frat boy bros. Virtue signaling of the laziest Hail Mary kind
(the show had been bleeding off viewers across its four seasons) did not
salvage what turned out to be a disaster of a show.
By the end of Legend of Korra I saw that The Last
Airbender was like the original Star Wars trilogy, a lightning in a bottle
moment of collaborative genius that gave way to the fetid self-aggrandizing of
auteur ordinary and post-Joseph Campbell pedestrian chosen one tripe.
It’s not that I have some issue with strong female
characters as such. I own all The
Powerpuff Girls (they still rock).
Yor Forger is a favorite of mine and it doesn’t get stronger than a
woman who can mule kick a sedan into changing course while it’s driving toward
her (Spy x Family is a blast and a show I can enjoy with my nieces and
nephews, who share their uncle’s affection for animation in general and anime
more particularly). Momo Ayase from Dan
da Dan is what Korra could have been, maybe, if she’d been written by writers
and editors who were actually any good at storytelling. But American bids at
tapping into the epic fantasy and sci-fi elements of anime have tended to
founder. I think that is probably
because there’s a tendency to keep raising the stakes and retconning for the
sake of “the moment”.
Now what I hope people don’t do is say something like “What
about Chainsaw Man?” You’d have
to be as stupid as Denji to have not seen from episode one Makima was going to
be the big bad of the Control Arc. Korra
is, if you look at what she does and says, probably even a bigger idiot than
Denji! Whether it’s Denji from Chainsaw
Man or Tanjiro Kamado in Demon Slayer the animated heroes in anime
seem to have gone over in the US better than stuff like Elio in 2025. I think Chainsaw Man is a wee bit
overhyped but I did watch the twelve episodes of it and, sure, Power as an Eric
Cartman homage is definitely funny! It’s
very much R-rated toonage, though.
deBoer’s point that you shouldn’t go retroactively breaking
everything about your narrative world-building just to up the stakes is a point
I can basically agree with and I’d say the main perpetrators of this kind of
narrative nonsense would be The Big Two, and comics fans will know I mean DC
Comics and Marvel. The Big Two have being
stuff like Crisis on Infinite Earths or Infinite Crisis or Civil War or
whatever Marvel’s gonna do for generations.
Put the universe at stake! Is the
universe too small? Well, the multiverse
is at stake! You do it once in a while
and, okay, Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse were
still fun but The Boy and the Heron was still going to win that Oscar
and it earned it.
The thing is that by 2026 the idea that cartoons are just
for kids is pretty obviously not true if Chainsaw Man’s Reze arc could
get a theatrical release in the United States at all. Haven’t seen it or Demon Slayer but I am just
enough of an anime fan to think I’ll try to catch both. Sure, I know Shinobu’s gonna die but that won’t
mean I won’t root for her in Infinity Castle anyway. Denji might as well be nicknamed betrayal bro
because he’s such an idiot he can’t tell when he’s being marked for another
assassination attempt. He dreams small …
.
deBoer seems like he doesn’t watch anime at all but I
will go back to his complaint that The Matrix was pretty bad. My long-haul proposal is that what deBoer is
picking up on is that people like the Wachowskis do knock-off tributes to anime
landmarks and Hong Kong action films and Americans are suckers for it because
after decades of Sly and Arnold moviegoers feel like this stuff is new and
different. Well, okay, yeah, it was new
and different if you didn’t live on the “Left Coast” and hadn’t been soaking up
anime and Hong Kong action films since about the time John Woo’s Hard Boiled
came out. Back in my college days I
ended up meeting some folks from Hong Kong and so, well, it’s not a huge guess
to imagine that in the early through mid-1990s college boys might bond over
John Woo and Jackie Chan movies, right?
Well, if deBoer wanted an example of a franchise where
every attempt to raise the stakes and up the game of the newest story does
something stupid like retroactively vitiating the premise of the story that
came before nobody can do better than talking about the Michael Bay Transformers
franchise. Say what? Am I really going to go there? Of course I am!
You see the problem with the Bayformers movies isn’t
actually that the plots make no sense.
Each Bayformers plot, taken entirely on its own terms, is fastidiously
consistent with the possibilities and consequences of the use of whatever MacGuffin
of the week is in play. The real problem
with the Bayformers stories is that every new Plot Device that gets introduced is
based on something -in-universe that retroactively reveals that the Plot
Device of the immediately preceding film was pointless.
Brace yourselves.
Transformers gave us a quest to find The Cube, which
was the Allspark. Autobots and Decepticons
were trying to find the Magic Cube because it had the power to generate new
Cybertronian life, new Autobots or Decepticons depending on who was using The
Cube. This would have corresponded to
The Creation Matrix from the old Marvel comics run of Transformers from
the 1980s. The Cube ends up being
destroyed because it gets shoved into the chest of the evil Decepticon leader Megatron.
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen shows us that
the planet Cybertron itself was dead and had to be revived by way of a star harvesting
apparatus that was hidden away in ancient Egypt under a pyramid. The new Plot Device was being sought out by a
super old evil robot called The Fallen (Tony Todd, RIP, he sounded cool and
menacing a la Candyman as usual and it wasn’t his fault the movie was so
dumb). But, wait a minute, what were the
Autobots doing fighting over the AllSpark for in the first movie? Why fight over the device that can be used to
create new Cybertronian life if the planet itself is dead and has to be
rebooted? But …,
Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon reveals that
millions of years ago Megatron made a deal with Optimus Prime’s predecessor in
Autobot leaders, Sentinal Prime, to send a space bridge apparatus to the
Earth. This would be used to set up a
cosmic link between Earth and Cybertron so the Earth could be drained of resources
so that Cybertron could be revived. So now we’re told that this deal had been
brokered maybe a million or so years prior?
Did Megatron just forget this deal in the previous two films? Not exactly because Soundwave and Shockwave knew
of the deal as far back as the American moon landing. Oh?
So, uh, why didn’t Soundwave and Shockwave mention this a couple of
movies earlier? That sun harvester
device from the second movie wasn’t even necessary. Or maybe The Fallen was looking for it but
Megatron didn’t say “No, bossman, we’ve got a device that can let us revive
Cybertron by enslaving humanity and all we have to do is just go to the dark
side of the moon for it.” Nah, Sun
Harvester set-up meant Devastator could tear apart a pyramid in Egypt. That set pieces are already in place so don’t
mess with that. Still, if the planet could be subjugated without harvesting the
Sun through the Sun Harvester on Earth that would destroy the planet … why blow
up the planet if you planned to enslave the humans on it anyway?
As you can probably see by now, each new Plot Device pretty
obviously and simply renders the point of the immediately preceding Plot Device
moot. That gets us to …
Transformers 4: Age of Extinction. So now it turns out that anonymous entities
planted a bunch of Transformium all over Earth ages ago. Sixty-five million
years ago, okay? Even though Megatron
keeps getting killed off he’s back as Galvatron and he plans to use the magical
Transformium to reformat Earth to be suitable for Cybertonian life. Blah blah blah, bad guy gets defeated and we
get to. So Optimus Prime tells us at the
start of the film all this Transformium was around millions of years ago. I guess if it was around did they even need
The Cube to make new robots? If they did
why didn’t they just start looking for all that Transformium that was already
on the planet so they’d have enough raw material to make new Cybertronians
instead of going for the Cube that turns Nokia phones into nasty gunslinger bots?
But wait …
Transformers 5: The Last Knight reveals the entirety
of Earth is really Unicron the evil twin brother of Primus (i.e. Cybertron). So
what’s the point of those creators dumping Transformium to format Earth for
Cybertronian life if Earth is really just Unicron the twin brother of
Primus? Who needs to reformat the planet
Earth to be Cybertronian life-form compatible if all along Earth was also
Unicron!? How stupid are these robots
that they can’t remember their own histories?
You would think that the Earth itself being Unicron would be the first
thing anyone would want to know.
But we’re not done yet, there’s Rise of the Beasts
where “Unicron is coming”, the sixth entry if we don’t even count Bumblebee
(which, honestly, I actually like Bumblebee because E. T. meets The
Iron Giant directed by Travis Knight (of Kubo and the Two Strings) with
Hailee Steinfeld is a solid popcorn movie, Bumblebee is what a few of us
Transformers fans thought ought to have been done from the first movie). So,
anyway, by the Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Unicron is coming to
destroy earth even though in the immediately preceding Bayformers film we had
not been given any reason to think the Earth itself wasn’t still Unicron. Why would Unicron need to come to Earth when
Unicron is the Earth? At this point we’ve seen that every new Plot Device
hinges on a new element in the narrative universe that makes the previous Plot Device
impossible or pointless.
Even within Transformers lore there is a claim that
though there are countless dimensions and universe there can only be literally
one Unicron. In the Marvel comics
continuity that Unicron devoured every universe across the multiverse but some
kind of magical Big Bang happened when multiversal fragments hit each other and
so “our” universe was born. It’s bonkers
and hokey but was an actually consistent in-universe mythology. So, that’s another way to say that for
Bayformers to have Earth be Unicron and then follow up with a film where
Unicron is coming (in the 1990s) to devour an Earth that is still also
technically Unicron … why don’t we just have the next film be two dueling
Unicrons? Cyberton (also known as
Primus) can just sit that one out or maybe three planet-sized robots are going
to have a WWE smack-down and one of the Unicrons will be voiced by John
Cena. Sure, why not? He had a supporting
role in Bumblebee.
So, when deBoer complains that Stranger Things piled
on retroactive continuity changes that made everything worse it’s not as though
I can’t think of how this has been endemic in fantasy and sci-fi action
franchises going back over the last two decades.
Maybe, just maybe, the reason anime like Chainsaw Man
or Demon Slayer or Apothecary Diaries or Spy x Family or Frieren
have been doing well in the U.S. market is because thirty years of Hollywood
cribbing from Asian cinema has reached a point where the second-hand and
third-hand nature of the work has begun to show and it’s just easier to go
watch Asian cinema these days. These
days you don’t have to look that hard to pull up Belladonna of the Sadness,
for instance.
I’ll put this another way, in American post-Joseph Campbell storytelling the Chosen One has to save the world then save the universe then save the multiverse and then save time-space as concepts or something. In Frieren the elf mage defeated the Demon King about a century ago but she still has thousands of years of living to do and laundry still needs to be done and food needs to be cooked and she kinda realized that as so many of her human friends keep dying on her maybe she should have tried harder to be a better friend to them. Raising the stakes is not the same as keeping the stakes personal and I think what deBoer has intuited is that Hollywood in its present form has utterly botched that in its bid to keep “raising the stakes” in franchises that studios want to be cash cows that are ever producing the milk of entertainment.
