Good story ideas hidden in otherwise bad fiction

[debtcollector]

So, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is on Netflix now, at least in the US, and I watched it for the first time since high school. And while it pretty much is still the giant CGI-porn fanservice wank-fest I remembered, I did notice that there was a potentially fascinating story behind all the spectacle.

"What happens to the heroes after they save the world?" This question happens a fair amount in modern fiction, but most of the time they end up just saving the world again after taking a little time off (see: Die Hard, Watchmen, Advent Children, the Incredibles, the Bourne novels, etc.). But for almost half of Advent Children, the two biggest (surviving) characters are dealing with problems they can't actually fight the conventional way: people they love getting incurably ill, survivor's guilt, relationship troubles, and the like. I noticed that this part of the story, if properly fleshed out, would actually be far more interesting than the half-assed excuse to throw Sephiroth into the climax that actually drove the plot.

I would watch a drama about heroes having to deal with real-world problems after saving the world, so long as it wasn't delivered as heavy-handedly as Square Enix did. So what about you? What bad movies, games, shows, books, etc., have you found that actually had interesting story ideas buried inside?

 

[TakerFoxx]

The Invisible stands as the movie I hate the most, due to it's douchebag of a protagonist, poor writing, and general bad acting and construction. But the idea of someone being stuck in a ghostly limbo while their body is in a coma and can "interact" with their environment only to have said interactions erased once their back is turned is pretty fascinating. It's just a pity that the movie it was used in was so shitty.

On that note, it seems the one I saw was actually a remake of a Swedish movie, so I am kind of curious of the original was any better.

 

[shootthebandit]

H.A.Z.E seemed like a really good premise. Super soldiers inject themselves with drugs. Not only does this make them stronger but it alters thier perception of war. The protagonist then becomes a guerilla fighter after discovering this

It wouldve been good if the big twist wasnt written on the box and if it was actually a well made game. The mechanics couldve fitted so well with the narrative just a shame it was another sub par generic FPS

 

[StriderShinryu]

I feel there's some decent material to me mined in the Twilight series. I mean, it's nothing really new that hasn't been done before in various forms of media, but I've always found the human/vampire dynamic to be an interesting one. There's also some definite inherent coolness to the age old vampires VS werewolves struggle.

As for games, the first one that comes to mind is actually an odd one given that I immediately thought of Dante's Inferno. I still think that Dante's Hell could be a very good resource for games of various genres, but the way the actual Dante's Inferno game did it just didn't work. I think it did have some cool level and enemy design that would have been much better used in a game that didn't feel like a second rate God of War clone.

 

[Queen Michael]

The Invisible stands as the movie I hate the most, due to it's douchebag of a protagonist, poor writing, and general bad acting and construction. But the idea of someone being stuck in a ghostly limbo while their body is in a coma and can "interact" with their environment only to have said interactions erased once their back is turned is pretty fascinating. It's just a pity that the movie it was used in was so shitty.

On that note, it seems the one I saw was actually a remake of a Swedish movie, so I am kind of curious of the original was any better.

I saw the original nine years ago, since I live in Sweden and we watched it during a school trip. The acting was good, and the script wasn't bad at all either. Definitely a good flick.

 

[Vault101]

Mass Effect 3

How do we make the player emotionally invested?

Well we've got two previous games worth of character interaction and story-

I KNOW CHiiiiiiiilllllllldreeeeen!!!!!!!!!! everybody gets emotionally worked up over kids!!!

EDIT: actually that's more of inverse of the op's question

 

[soren7550]

I feel there's some decent material to me mined in the Twilight series. I mean, it's nothing really new that hasn't been done before in various forms of media, but I've always found the human/vampire dynamic to be an interesting one. There's also some definite inherent coolness to the age old vampires VS werewolves struggle.

On that same note, The Host (the book, not the Korean film) had a lot of potential to be something interesting. A parasite body snatcher race invasion as seen through one of the parasitic body snatchers. At one point in the book they bring up the question of what they're going to do with their human children they give birth to. They're not born with a body snatcher in them, and (from what I can remember) this is the first race they've taken over that has long gestation periods/live births, so they grow very attached to their young. So at what point do they give up their child to a body snatcher, if at all? And what happens to that kid growing up in a world where their race in a sense is nearly extinct?

There's also a bit of a subplot of older humans being able to take back their bodies from their body snatcher and heavily resisting their takeover of their bodies, so this raises to question to the aliens if they should just kill humans that are past a certain age since it's likely they wouldn't make for good hosts, and if it's worth the high risk to even be on the planet.

Instead, most of the 600+ pages goes on about farming, the human resistance not liking the main character, and the love rhombus.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I'll go out on a limb here and say School Days. Yeah, that's right. I'm about to say good things about everyone's least favourite slice of life "romance" anime.

If you take it as a deconstruction of your typical romance/harem anime the concept is really quite solid. Essentially it's our main man Makoto getting into a bad love triangle and through massive cowardice and self doubt never clears things up. He also is the sexiest man alive apparently because he has even more sex with the entire female student body.

Now, it fails because it misses its focus on sending an arty deconstruction message over and regardless of the characters and plot. Rather than using the characters to tell the arty deconstruction message. It's built to haphazardly blunder towards the shock ending no matter how contrived it becomes in order to get there because the shocking ending IS the entire point of the anime even existing. There is no School Days without Makoto getting murdered by Sekai at the end. Spoiler warning but who even minds? It's freaking School Days.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

I'll go out on a limb here and say School Days. Yeah, that's right. I'm about to say good things about everyone's least favourite slice of life "romance" anime.

If you take it as a deconstruction of your typical romance/harem anime the concept is really quite solid. Essentially it's our main man Makoto getting into a bad love triangle and through massive cowardice and self doubt never clears things up. He also is the sexiest man alive apparently because he has even more sex with the entire female student body.

Now, it fails because it misses its focus on sending an arty deconstruction message over and regardless of the characters and plot. Rather than using the characters to tell the arty deconstruction message. It's built to haphazardly blunder towards the shock ending no matter how contrived it becomes in order to get there because the shocking ending IS the entire point of the anime even existing. There is no School Days without Makoto getting murdered by Sekai at the end. Spoiler warning but who even minds? It's freaking School Days.

I actually thought the game was crazy concept when you think about it. They turned a dating game into a horror game by creating devastating consequences for your failure. Though the game has good endings including where he winds up with two love interests. I've never played it though, so I don't know if the gory endings come out of nowhere or if the characters are threating the whole game

 

[Supercereal]

I Think that both In Time and Looper had the chance to be truly terrific movies but got buried under crap. you see glimpses in the movies but nothing fully realized in my view. The premise of both movies was brilliant but In Time got to bogged down in being a robin hood story and Looper just ended to much like OMG THAT KID IS SECRETLY AKIRA !!?!??!

 

[shootthebandit]

I Think that both In Time and Looper had the chance to be truly terrific movies but got buried under crap. you see glimpses in the movies but nothing fully realized in my view. The premise of both movies was brilliant but In Time got to bogged down in being a robin hood story and Looper just ended to much like OMG THAT KID IS SECRETLY AKIRA !!?!??!

The whole kid thing was interesting

Spoiler

kill the kid to prevent his future self from killing you

i dont know why they had that weird kinetic stuff (im not going to spoiler it) because it literally added nothing to the story

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

I Think that both In Time and Looper had the chance to be truly terrific movies but got buried under crap. you see glimpses in the movies but nothing fully realized in my view. The premise of both movies was brilliant but In Time got to bogged down in being a robin hood story and Looper just ended to much like OMG THAT KID IS SECRETLY AKIRA !!?!??!

The idea of looper is good. Though no one makes anything original or amazing out of the idea. Like going back to kill Hitler only for someone worse to take his place and having to go back in time again to stop your self killing Hitler for the greater good. lol. I wonder how they would market a movie where you have to protect Hitler? lol

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

The idea of looper is good. Though no one makes anything original or amazing out of the idea. Like going back to kill Hitler only for someone worse to take his place and having to go back in time again to stop your self killing Hitler for the greater good. lol. I wonder how they would market a movie where you have to protect Hitler? lol

I imagine it would be an artsy melodrama on the ethics of time travel; if it slid into the comedic parody that most Internet videos use the idea of saving Hitler for people would get upset very quickly.

OT: Empire State was a book that I saw in the store and thought had been written just for me. It has everything I love: Pulp fiction, superheroes, weird science, alternate universes. Unfortunately, it was merely OK. I'm not sure it was "bad fiction" so much as it was painfully mediocre and clearly the work of a first-time novelist (the pacing got awful for most of the last third of the book). I'm tempted to pick up one of his other books to see if he got better, but I can't find copies in my local bookstores to browse, and I don't want to risk $20 on ordering one.

 

[GabeZhul]

I'll go out on a limb here and say School Days. Yeah, that's right. I'm about to say good things about everyone's least favourite slice of life "romance" anime.

If you take it as a deconstruction of your typical romance/harem anime the concept is really quite solid. Essentially it's our main man Makoto getting into a bad love triangle and through massive cowardice and self doubt never clears things up. He also is the sexiest man alive apparently because he has even more sex with the entire female student body.

Now, it fails because it misses its focus on sending an arty deconstruction message over and regardless of the characters and plot. Rather than using the characters to tell the arty deconstruction message. It's built to haphazardly blunder towards the shock ending no matter how contrived it becomes in order to get there because the shocking ending IS the entire point of the anime even existing. There is no School Days without Makoto getting murdered by Sekai at the end. Spoiler warning but who even minds? It's freaking School Days.

I actually thought the game was crazy concept when you think about it. They turned a dating game into a horror game by creating devastating consequences for your failure. Though the game has good endings including where he winds up with two love interests. I've never played it though, so I don't know if the gory endings come out of nowhere or if the characters are threating the whole game

The visual novel (or rather interactive anime, but I digress, let's not get bogged down by terminology) has something like twenty-one endings. Out of those twenty-one endings, about 15 are "good ends", where Makoto ends up with one of the heroines, and two harem ends (one with Kotonoha and Sekai and one "classic" harem end where he is having a fling with practically every female character at the same time), plus there is one "bonus" ending that is practically just the same addition to two other endings (it's all a little confusing thanks to the game consisting of chucks of pre-rendered animation, so you can think of this as the same omake that can be reach as an addition to two other endings).

The remaining three endings each are the gory bad ends the story is famous for. If you do the math, that is less than 15% of all possible endings.

So no, School Days was never intended to be a subversion on harem tropes, it is a very straightforward school life romance story with a dramatic love-triangle and a whole load of clichés. The only reason it got as famous as it did was because of the interactive anime format and because the anime adaptation decided to go for the shock value with its ending.

In fact, said shock ending became so synonymous with the franchise (yes, the "Days" games are actually a full-fledged franchise) that the PS2 remake added a bunch of other gory bad ends just to please the fans.

 

[Belaam]

Twilight. Classic symbolism has vampires as symbols of aristocracy, civilization and class run amok - nobles literally consuming the peasant class and only destroyed by returning to the most basic and primal of weapons, the sharpened stick. Conversely, werewolves are symbols of letting that primalism run lose: a lack of civilization leading to savage attacks that can only be stopped by silver bullets as a civilized mix of metallurgy and firearm technology. Thus the two always at odds.

Twilight almost turned that whole Western European class conflict into a discussion of race in America. The white people are the civilized leeches bleeding lesser humans dry while Native Americans become savage animals. Civilized as white, peasant as brown. Both with strengths and weaknesses and both locked in an eternal conflict by their nature. Some pretty serious and upsetting stuff could have happened with that setting. And that's before you factor in that the peasant side is now nearly exclusive to men. Heck, the adventures of the only female werewolf could be fascinating.

But instead we got, well, Twilight.

 

[balladbird]

Fire Emblem: Awakening comes to mind. The core plot is literally a cliche-ridden snorefest: Mustache-twirlingly evil villains trying to bring about the awakening of a dragon of darkness sealed away 1000 years ago! Quickly heroes! Band together and summon the dragon of light lest the world be ended!

the character interactions, on the other hand, are deceptively complex, and deal with mature and interesting themes. Since character interactions are the unofficial reason to be playing the game, I still always recommend FE:A to friends as a good game, but if Nintendo hadn't insisted on hiding the actual meritorious story elements behind optional sub-events as if they were ashamed of them, and kept the boring crap on the surface the game would have been one of my favorites of all time, instead of just a good RPG.

Edit: Oh, and I almost forgot "Ikki Tosen"

I don't care what anyone says, the concept of "let's recreate the characters, drama, and political intrigue of 'romance of the three kingdoms' in the modern day" was bloody brilliant. it deserved so much better than a plodding panty fighter that was more interested in flashing tits than doing anything with such an amazing premise.

 

[GabeZhul]

Twilight. Classic symbolism has vampires as symbols of aristocracy, civilization and class run amok - nobles literally consuming the peasant class and only destroyed by returning to the most basic and primal of weapons, the sharpened stick. Conversely, werewolves are symbols of letting that primalism run lose: a lack of civilization leading to savage attacks that can only be stopped by silver bullets as a civilized mix of metallurgy and firearm technology. Thus the two always at odds.

Twilight almost turned that whole Western European class conflict into a discussion of race in America. The white people are the civilized leeches bleeding lesser humans dry while Native Americans become savage animals. Civilized as white, peasant as brown. Both with strengths and weaknesses and both locked in an eternal conflict by their nature. Some pretty serious and upsetting stuff could have happened with that setting. And that's before you factor in that the peasant side is now nearly exclusive to men. Heck, the adventures of the only female werewolf could be fascinating.

But instead we got, well, Twilight.

I.. would actually pay good money to see this.
This is the best part about this kind of fiction that a lot of people don't really appreciate: in fantasy and sci-fi, anything and everything can be, and usually end up being, chock full of though-provoking allegories and layers... And then somehow we keep getting these horribly written messes as bestsellers over and over again while you practically has to go out with the patience of a fisherman when you want to catch a really good book in the sea of trite that dominates most best-seller lists. Kind of sad, really.

Captcha: Ivory Tower
No captcha, I am not elitist, I am just very, very cynical. -.-

On topic:
The whole idea of Dracula being a bit of an anti-hero and the lesser of two evils in Lords of Shadows 2 had a lot of things going for it. The basic characterization was there already: Gabriel being a generally good but betrayed "hero of light" who was ready to sacrifice everything to protect the world even after he was repeatedly betrayed and lost everything dear to him, then he gains immense power at the end and returns to lay vengeance upon his betrayers... and then he suddenly descends into being a chaotic evil card-carrying villain, except in the end the writers use all their might to drag him back into anti-hero territory for some reason.
In fact, it felt like there were two separate writing teams, one that was convinced that Dracula was a fundamentally good anti-hero and another that thought Dracula was a complete monster, and the who sides never communicated with each other until the whole game was put together and nothing could be changed anymore...

But cast all that crap aside and focus on the main idea. Imagine that when turning into Dracula, Gabriel didn't become a lunatic mass-murderer but instead he became something of a medieval Doctor Doom. He would embark on a crusade to bring order to a splintered land, whether they like it or not, and while the kings and lords would hate and fear him because he is "evil", he would slowly gain the trust and even love of his subjects by being the better alternative and by providing them stability through his absolute power. I don't know about you, but that sounds a million times more interesting to me than the jumbled mess the game developers delivered.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Something in the Action Man CGI cartoon series. About as generic a kids show as the name implies, and after all the characters were introduced it took a major animation and plot downgrade. But the titular character's power got me interested even if it seems tailor made for drama.

Basically whenever Alex is sufficiently full of adrenaline (while not fighting generic mad scientists he's a professional athlete), his brain becomes a physics supercomputer capable of calculating the exact path to succeed in/get out of whatever perilous situation he and usually some innocent bystanders are currently in at the end of the episode (avalanche, nuclear train crash, falling zepplin, etc.) in fractions of a second. Collections of CGI numbers would flash into each new object to be used without specifying exactly how, you just knew that the seemingly random object would be used, then when the chain was done time would unfreeze and he would actually set the chain in motion. Almost as if he were improvising his own Rube Goldberg sequence.

I would like to see this particular power given to someone else. Maybe as a hint system for a video game character to solve physics puzzles or something. Closest thing to it in film I think would be the 'Sherlock scans' in the recent Holmes movies. Maybe have a competitive game where two or more players can use it to achieve opposing goals, but have no way of knowing if another player's moves will mess up the chain until it actually starts.

Captcha: Always there.