Zero stake filler.
Jumping around time periods destroys pacing to begin with. Even excessively disjointed mysteries become annoying to follow.
Its giving up on natural plot progression to begin with and just jumping ahead or backwards.
The book is so much better than the game
If you have to cut to black and interrupt the whole storyline to give some 10 minute explaination of a characters backstory to characterize them its because you’re a hack and couldnt present it to the audience in any other way besides explaining it directly to their face.
Its braindead and lazy.
Yep, mystery as I said above. Or some kind of anthology like v/h/s where its just cutting between stories and time periods with 0 investment which is what this book is & executed poorly.
Plots dependent on time skipping as a vehicle for storytelling are redundant garbage. Anthologies are also a meme just to throw a bunch of short stories together because there’s not enough substance there.
Your entire point here is “flashback bad”
And why does it have to take 10 minutes?
Flashbacks can be short too. Like the one in lord of the rings.
A. You wrote about genres not moments but I’ll say that was an error on one of us and just move past it.
B. Basically it needs to be plot relevant and you can’t know what happens/needs to have a reason for it to exist.
That’s literally any scene. Any scene can be not plot revelant. Any scene can retread old information.
Your problem seems to be common problems rather than inherents.
You even admitted that the Lord of the rings flashback was good so clearly there isn’t an inherent problem with them.
No it’s not each story builds on each other.
It’s either building Dutch’s and Zues’s trust of each other, Dutch’s first appearance which establish’s his role in the world, establishing character connections, or building up Zues’s knowledge of predators which is what gets Dutch’s trust in the first place. (So basically my first point)
Regardless let’s go back to time jumps and say the book is bad.
If you removed the time jumps would that solve anything?
Congratulations now your jumping from base to base doing the same things as before except now Zues is a rookie the entire time.
“Time skip bad”
What’s wrong with short stories?
Length doesn’t determine quality.
(With exceptions like Mag size for guns if you want to be technical and go outside of stories)
Imagine the Predators intro but after they’re parachuted in they give you a black and white flashback of each character. What do you call that? Filler. They ask Isabelle what happened before she got abducted and it transitions into 'nam tier flashbacks…
no one cares.
Its autistic filler & could have been covered in a couple lines of dialogue. Just panning time and reducing screentime for things that could actually be relevant. Red flag sign of sparse content.
No one cares how they rose through the ranks, we know they are spec ops, we don’t need to see their medals. None of this is a mystery. What they were doing before the movie began doesn’t matter.
Predator movies drop you right into the action.
Trying to develop a character within 2 paragraphs.
Which is essentially what these flashbacks are.
The good short stories don’t and just let people infer details because there’s content they have to actually get to. The only thing more filler than constant character flashbacks are sex scenes.
If your story doesnt need to take place over the span of YEARS then tighten it up simple as.
The audience is capable of infering details without cutting-to-black infodropping someones history in detail. Exposition dumping is reserved for worldbuilding and things later relevant to the story, character flashbacks are just bad. Show not tell. Why start the story at the point you did if you’re going to jump around? Not including prologues ofc.
Half the book would skip worthless details and he’d have to write things relevant to the plot so yes.
Will yall just stop bickering with each other and make my dam Dinner you lazy weed parents like fuck. You made me and @Weevo540 eat kraft mac with no cheese powder for the last 6 nights.
But mom @Finessology out here with a new weave and an 90$ set of nails. Like come on
And dont even get me started on dad @Eshtion with his Precious Moments collection. Dad drove 15 hours to get a Morton Salt moment like dam. And it was 2,290 and he wouldn’t stop at McDonald’s to keep me quiet either
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I dont know why I was suprised you’re awake lol.
you’re always here at like 2 am
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Im on Break at my 3rd Shift job!!
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You want to watch the main character play catch up for half the book? If theres anything that shouldve been timeskipped its this guy learning everything we already know.
lol what if aliens started with not-ripley in a white room being flashback dumped in full detail because thats essentially why the book sucks then at the very end there’s a relevant encounter with xenos & its already the the last chapter at that point.
slog slog slog
The characters weren’t that deep in the first place. In order for a character centric story to be good the character has to be good.
Predators is the old fashioned muscle men fighting Pred.
Plus also
THOSE THINGS AREN’T REVELANT TO THE STORY
Story is preds hunt criminals
Show. Don’t tell. That’s a basic of writing. And that’s exactly what flashbacks are for.
A. Again this is assuming it’s even that long in the first place
B. Flashbacks can be revelant.
Exactly my point. The time skip avoids this because it doesn’t matter.
So every predator movie has to be the same?
And what actually…
No.
Predator
Chopper comes in
Debriefing scene
Chopper scene
Exploring the jungle
Coming across the bodies
Coming across the camp
THEN we finally get an action sequence.
Pred 2 did
Predators has the parachute scene but after that it’s exactly the firstovie until the mob A.I action scene.
A. With short stories you can devolop a character through action
B. Flashbacks are apart of a characters devolopment, not the entirety of it.
SO SHORT STORIES AREN’T BAD IN THE FIRST PLACE
Why does it have to be constant?
One is enough.
God this just makes me hate bad writers
Yes.
Sex scenes are just blatant sex appeal.
The time skip adds a bit of realism to the world.
Things take time, rookies get promoted. Not everything happens at once.
In fact most cod games probably do this under the radar.
Since when is flashbacks info dumping?
Would you describe the Lord of the rings-
KNOW WHAT YOU ALREADY SAID THE LORD OF THE RIMGS FLASHBACK WAS GOOD SO CLEARLY IT DOESN’T MATTER
That’s what flashbacks are
In fact
YOU LITERALLY SAY JUST USE DIALOGUE WHICH IS THE EPITOME OF TELLING
Flashback is showing. It presents an unknown element of a character as it’s own short story that compliments the current story.
Because pacing. In long media, showing a character backstory before they’re even revelant is awful.
Imagin a series showing off the backstory of a character that’s not even introduced until episode 5 and it ends up he’s a side character.
Or imagine a cold character, who both the rest of the cast, and the viewer, slowly learn about.
Either way your going over the information. Only difference is that you actually get to see it instead of being told a long winded conversation.
Like?
Yes. It was fun watching some one discover it slowly.
Like in predator
Or predator 2
What?
A. Nowhere in the book is there a flashback
B. You mean one of those intros where it likes “this is what happened”
Ya. Those are fine as a plot introduction. Aliens is already slow paced as is so I don’t think it’d work.
A. You mean like it built up Ripley’s daughter being dead, built up to the board meeting, built up aripley leaving for LV-426, built up the marines in the locker room, cafeteria, load up, and the drop scene, and then built up the missing colonists, then built up the barricades, then built up Newt, then built up finding the colonist, then building up the hive, AND THEN WE SEE ALIENS
A lot of set up till we actually see the namesake.
And the one chapter things is completely exaggerated. Predators are sprinkled multiple times during the book.
oh cool is it same place same characters etc ?
By characters you mean Zues then yes
As well as Dutch.
Literally the only character here.
As for place…
There’s a jungle
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Dutch check
Scary pred check
jungle check
Sold
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Don’t forget Zeus dont got no legs
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From what I recall wasn’t he just permanently injured?
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Permanently injured no legs whats the difference. Lol
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Oh not much just having to live in eternal pain like a mini hell on earth. You know. No big deal.
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Yep
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Flashbacks are sitting down delivering the audience a powerpoint presentation in a completely disconnected storyline thats already happened, hell they’re usually narrated. It’s low stakes content no one’s invested in. Base -> flashback story to a pred -> next base -> another flashback story of a pred is a ridiculous format. You’re just telling the audience the same stuff they already know like some sort of recap episode.
lord of the rings gets a pass because its a BOOK adaptation extremely dense on worldbuilding. You get sauron flashbacks and stuff too it doesnt mean they’re good inserted halfway into the story and theres no reason these couldnt just be prologues that later circle back to being central to the plot, it just disrupts the whole story they’re inserted into the middle.
IE squid games prologue works parallel to the last game, imagine how crap it would be if they kept interrupting the current game to cut to old mans flashbacks.
If you want an example of why constant timeskips injected into the middle of the story are irritating watch the new Dune. I could almost give it a pass because its just him having visions of the future but its just feeding the audience the same information every night watching zendaya smile in the desert but 5 seconds longer each time. I like Dennis’s directing but this is why Dune is unadaptable.
The book was already slow-paced. It reads like a mockumentary.
They cover this in a few lines instead of timeskips for a reason.
It’s not plot relevant its just character details and establishes that time has passed with a few lines. Now think Alien 3 where Newt and Hicks die offscreen, garbage timeskip. A flashback wouldn’t have made that any better. Flashbacks waste screentime. They’re never neccesary, just means your current plot is loose and needs holes filled in by the most direct, distracting method possible.
But no this book was just a recollection of preds killing people in a jungle like some kind of anthology series with the same predjungle short stories sprinkled throughout while the protag goes whoaaa crazy, so its not even that.
Predator 2 mentions the val verde incident and then stops there because thats as plot relevant as it is, if they start rerunning footage from pred 1 at that point its just filler.
Preds are barely in the book and most of the time of they are theyre dying in an anticlimatic flashback with a host of characters we dont know or care about because they exist in some subplot past timeline.
I lightly nudged the delete button gg im not reposting that.
This is addressed in a single scene to convey time has passed, not because ripley’s daughter is integral to the plot of the current movie or even a character at all. We don’t know her.
Then go check Aliens 3 amazing timeskip where hicks and newt die offscreen.
Literally none of this is a flashback and if it was it’d be shit storytelling. Imagine flashing back to a cafeteria lol.Timeskips used in LOTR as last-resort worldbuilding because its a dense book, sauron stuff takes place over AGES, and its not possible to cover all that. Look at the new Dune movie, I like Dennis as a director but constant cuts at night flashforwarding to zendaya smiling in the desert - this is part of the reason why Dune’s unadaptable, its not definite parallel storytelling like maybe I Am Legend either. Even though its at night in dream sequences so you arent directly missing anything relevant to the character, you still know its taking up valuable runtime.
As for Aliens Cameron told a single, fluid story there. The prologue was newt on the colony. Prologues and epilogues exist so you don’t have to skip around the story IN THE MIDDLE and take the audience out of it. Very rarely are flashbacks used to tell parallel storylines, simply using it to jump backwards 'nam flashback/timeskip like its a segment on the history channel is the laziest padding. Half of it didnt pertain to the MC.
Imagine squid games but they cut to black every time the old man starts speaking they interrupt the current plot and start showing his childhood. Completely unneccessary, disjoints everything.
Stalking Shadows reads like a mockumentary its incredibly light on actual pred content and preds just exist as climaxes of each timeskip to watch a bunch of underdeveloped generic fodder characters die then skip around and do it again.
Predator 2 addresses the val verde incident in a few lines of dialogue, we don’t need val verde re-run episodes because it doesnt pertain to the current story.
The point was that there’s a lot of scenes before we even get to Xeno’s.
You do realize the book isn’t a flashback either right?
It’s a story being told in sequential order.
Imagine thinking flashbacks can be used willy nilly.
I think that’s a you problem.
There is no skipping around. It’s one fluid flow of events. They just don’t happen back to back.
Ok I like how you admit this argument isn’t even an inherent problem
Never saw it
Whatever book, or show, or game your playing
Stop
None of these issues are inherent to flashbacks. Flashbacks are more than recaps. Just stop watching bad shows because it’s clearly giving you the impression that flashbacks are only possible one specific way.