Welcome to Inkbunny...
Allowed ratings
To view member-only content, create an account. ( Hide )
chandgrit

Why I believe the power of friendship ruins your writing.

(((Spoilers for Undertale! You've been warned!)))

So I am not a fan of undertale I don't plan on playing delta rune supposedly it looks at your undertale save and I'm sure the save I have is not what I actually played, me and my brother share a steam account basically and when I went to give it a try like a year after it came out the game started on a black screen so I had to do some googling tried to reset my save nothing worked this damned save felt like a virus so I waited for the 15 minutes to start playing the game then I got the true pacifist cause it's basically the real ending, and my brother may have played it again since then so who even knows what's no my game save right now, plus delta rune will probably just be a smug cunt for 30 minutes since the genocide Boolean is set to true.

Anyway enough ranting about undertales gameplay mechanics and talk about the power of friendship trope. First off it's a popular variation of the deus ex machina trope which is previously unknown device or character or in this case abstract concept that comes in at the end with little to no explanation prior to this part of the story that fixes everything and gives your story a happy ending. Now yes stuff like kingdom hearts and yuigoh talk about the power of friendship every 5 minutes so it's not unexpected but just cause It tries to ingrain into your head that it's gonna pull of friendship magic doesn't change that it has all the other problems. Now I want you to take away any bias you have towards the existence of gods or lack thereof for this since this is about gods in a fictional setting not real life.

The thing that named deus ex machina was gods coming down on to a stage during a play using a machine to lower them cause deus ex machina roughly translates to machine of god. Now I want you to think of any story in any game, show, book, movie whatever that you think is really good, now imagine the ending was a god you never heard of and has no backstory comes in at the end to just make the climax the happiest at the end of the story. Most likely you would feel like this really canceled out a lot of everything that happened previously and just make you wonder why did the writer end it like that. Most people know the story of star wars so if you had a hard time coming up with an example to put an all powerful god scene in let's imagine this. Luke is near darth vader, force god jizzem appears and merges with luke, this makes luke super powered, he snaps his fingers and darth vader becomes good, luke then teleports to han solo to save him from boba fett and unfreeze him from carbonite. Luke unleashes his god energy and we cut to a scene of the death star blowing up with emperor plapetine inside it, obviously this ending would have made the movie way better. Now it's okay to have gods in a story but this way of doing it just feels lazy to me it feels like you wrote yourself into a corner and took the easiest way out of the situation.

Now I wanted to get that out of the way cause I feel like friendship is basically the god comes in and saves everything but worse in my opinion. First and I like I said this isn't about weather or not you believe a god exists but at least know what a god can do you know there seen as being more powerful then a person and can alter how the world works, friendship is a feeling an abstract concept it has no actual power in the real world the only time it ever has power is in fiction and pretty much always in the deus ex machina way unlike gods which can be the deus ex machina type or be actual characters. The other big problem is friendship does a lot of things it can just give you insane luck or armor/healing/resurrection abilities or even a friendship powered laser beam of death, how do you gain friendship would you and a friend basically be immortal if you where the best damn friends in the universe or is friendship powers more quantity over quality like would you have stronger friendship powers then those friends if you where say an internet celebrity that meets fans at conventions you probably wouldn't be best friends with many or any  of them but you would at least sort of be friends with a lot of people, usually a lot more then the average person. See friendship powers are used in all sorts of things but they don't really have an clear rules it's just a convenient way to solve a problem as far as I'm concerned. Now I like kingdom hearts and persona even though they rely on friendship powers and I actually think there fun to play which is why I can enjoy them in spite of the friendship powers. You know it also just has to be said in real life if you are about to die and you remember that your good friends with someone it won't make whatever is dangering you just dissapear into nothing friendship powers just do not work irl.

TL:DR friendship powers seem to lack rules and are often put into situations in stories where the writer has given up and will take any idea to get them out of the hole they've written. It just feels like such a lazy way to end your story like you don't even care, in which why should i care if you don't. In addition friendship magic does not exist in real life, at least I hope people know this sometimes I'm not sure.
Viewed: 3 times
Added: 5 years, 5 months ago
 
New Comment:
Move reply box to top
Log in or create an account to comment.