The Reset Button, by Queen of Swords

[epistler]

This is something Paolini is very much guilty of. Characters get hurt and instantly healed up without a scar, for free. People are tortured and then forget all about it like it never happened. Nobody dies. Actions have no consequences. Mistakes are made but not paid for. And so on.

 

 

 

The Reset Button

I've never met a reset button I liked.

It started with Star Trek : Voyager, the second Star Trek show that I watched regularly. Like most Star Trek series, this one was determined to maintain its status quo at all costs. The main characters had regular romances with passing aliens, but these relationships (if one could dignify them with the term) broke up at about the forty-minute mark, and everything was back to normal on the Voyager. I could have lived with this, but not the constant pounding the ship took from various battles-of-the-week, only to be restored to its pristine condition by the next episode, hence the reset button. The worst offence, however, was the evolution of Tom Paris and Captain Janeway into giant salamanders, but advanced medical treatment restored them to their human condition, with their hair and makeup the same as it was before. Now that's some treatment.

But this is Star Trek, and one has to cut them some slack, considering how many entities (producers, Paramount, etc.) preside over such a show. I have greater expectations for novels, which don't have to conform to the strait-jacket of a popular television series. A novel can push the envelope and bend rules over backwards. In other words, the protagonist of a novel can be treated realistically and can show the effects.

In a fantasy novel, therefore, the hero bleeds when he's cut, and he continues to bleed until the wound clots or heals. Or he dies. Granted, this doesn't happen very often, but when a hero does die, I always silently congratulate the author. Killing off your characters, whom you love and whom the readers (hopefully) love even more, is never easy.

Is it done at all, though? Certainly; in the first book of R. A. Salvatore's interminable Dark Elf series, Homeland, the hero's father was killed. In a later novel, Wulfgar the barbarian was also killed. At this point, the reset button went into play and Wulfgar came back from the dead. Granted, the experience had left him a changed man, but since he was one-dimensional to begin with, I wasn't interested in reading further. Sherlock Holmes is a character who deserved to return; Wulfgar is a nonentity.

In lieu of death, many characters end up beaten to a pulp or tortured. Once again we have the less-than-brilliant Dark Elves, capturing the philosopher-scimitarist Drizzt, who slashed his way through about a dozen Salvatore novels. The Dark Elves torture him, and use a flask of Magic Potion to revive him, healing him so that they can torture him again. Okay, you know where this is going. They leave him alone, with the flask conveniently close at hand. His friends break in, pour all the Magic Potion down his throat, and he's back in working order. Wowee.

In Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule, the hero, Richard, is horribly tortured by a psychopath called Denna. She leaves him with broken bones and bloody welts, deprives him of sleep and food, and puts him in something that sounds like a strappado, a device that suspends the victim's weight by the arms and results in dislocation of the shoulders. In Kara Dalkey's wonderful novel Goa, the hero is subjected to this device by the Inquisition, and he is unable to use his arms until the third book of the series. Richard bounces back with no problem, no infections, no lasting psychological scars - heck, he even has enough energy to have sex with his tormentor. He does cry a lot, though. Perhaps that had something to do with it. Boo-hoo long enough, and thou shalt be healed.

Reset buttons, whether tear-activated or otherwise, are a cheat. When we are caught up in a character's life and saddened by his sufferings, it's a callow twist for the author to magically dismiss the problem just so that the hero can run on to save the world. It's melodramatic at best and manipulative at worst. In David Farland's Runelords series, I was cheering him (the author, not the hero) because he was gutsy enough to have one of the main characters, Borenson, be forcibly castrated at the end of book # 2. Moreover, Borenson was married to Myrrima, a woman warrior I liked, but they had not consummated the marriage yet. What an ending! I could hardly wait for book # 3.

I will never read another of this author's books again. A healer does magic that is supposed to restore Borenson's "walnuts". While the magic is working, he and Myrrima set out to some place, but she's fatally wounded along the way, and his "walnuts" regrow at about the same time she dies. He leaves her body in a river and goes on to his destination. That night, he's in bed, and Myrrima snuggles up beside him. Turns out she was a latent water-wizard, and by putting her in the river, he activated her talent, and she survived. They make passionate love and I make gagging sounds.

Now there's a reset-button in all its splendor. Myrrima's talent wasn't obvious before, and since she was already a warrior, she is now Superwoman; Borenson's "walnuts" are in their accustomed location (and are you as tired of that euphemism as I am?). Mr. Farland, have you considered writing for Star Trek?

Some authors are brave and creative enough to discard the reset button, and I applaud them. The problem in doing this, of course, is that it's hard to torture your characters and then have them recover in time to save the world. Okay, that was a little bald, but for a good example, look at Barbara Hambly's Dragonshadow. The main characters are taken over by demons, tortured, and forced to commit horrible acts. The sheer monstrosity of the mental rape is not something they or I can get over. In the first book of this series, Dragonsbane, they had a wonderful, loving relationship; by the end of Dragonshadow, it's a pale, sad memory. I couldn't handle all the pain. It made The Shining look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in comparison.

One series that never pulls punches is George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Although one character does make a reappearance after we're led to believe he/she is dead, the series is beautiful in its portrayal of life as nasty, brutish and short. People suffer, and they don't get over it. People are horribly injured, and no one runs to their aid with magic potions. People die, even if they're deeply loved. It's heartbreaking to read, and yet no book ends without some touch of hope, some promise of a future for a character we've come to care about. This was one of the problems I had with Ms. Hambly's books. There was no spark of light at the end to ameliorate the torment that had gone before.

William Horwood's Duncton series is another story made excellent by its lack of an automatic happy ending. By the end of the series, many of the sympathetic characters are dead, and yet I never had a feeling of crushing angst; this was a satisfying conclusion, because the heroes died accomplishing what they had set out to do. I tried to emulate this in my first novel, Ravenard, and although I’m not sure if I succeeded or not, I am sure that killing off the protagonist(s) is something very few authors can get away with. It may be a satisfying conclusion, but it’s not a completely happy ending, either.

One final problem with the lack of a reset button is that you’ll find it difficult to write a sequel. In the novel I just completed, the protagonist sends his closest friend away in the last chapter. He does it for the sake of that friend’s safety, but he knows that their friendship is over. I always had fun writing about that friend, who was the only scientist I’ve ever seen in a fantasy novel, but I know it will be difficult to bring him back in any subsequent books. And I’m not sure I should try. Not after I’ve written so much about reset buttons, anyway.

Comments

[baronleduc]

You know what ? I never thought a reset button exists until now.

Question though from a neverwas writer like myself : where or when is the right time to use such devise ?

I think the utility of having a reset button in a fiction depends of how far the story goes, and also how much materials the writer can pull off - especially if it is profitable at the long term. the longer the fiction, the higher chance the writer will have no choice but to use this option.

For years, my brother and I are working on a graphic novel (I'm the writer, and he's the visual artist). I'm almost done with the script, and then we'll start the drawings. However, I remember a discussion I had with him wherever there will be a sequel or not. I'm against it because the way I construct the plot, the end is simple and not enough room for ambiguity (therefor, no reset button). But my brother said he wouldn't mind if there is a sequel, because he sees potentials in term of longivity.

[cmdrnemo]

Not an expert, but I can say a couple of things.

Firstly: If you are telling a day in the life style serialized story hitting the reset button makes a lot of sense. Because every day blending in to all the others is how life often feels even if things are changing.

Secondly: If either the heroes or the villains are fighting to maintain the status quo then the reset button is a victory condition for that side. This worked really well in 1984. Reset with just a hint of unsustainable.

Thirdly: It helps prevent power creep. If you keep the idea of resetting everything to base values at the end, then you are less likely to keep introducing more power into the situation in order to maintain interest. Which forces more effort into the storytelling and in that case it is a limitation that can produce better results. That's a bit iffy, it can work, but sometimes it just results in Star Trek Voyager. So make of it what you will.

The writing of Voyager and Enterprise was utter crap of the worst sort. TNG, however had 4 good seasons, still regarded as one of the all time great TV shows. It hit the reset button hard at the end of every arc, including the final.