Originally published at: Video: Stranger Things' Dustin unknowingly revealed a major plot twist… back in 2016 | Boing Boing
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I wonder, in cases like this, how much was pre-planned (or just parallel thinking, often using common genre tropes), vs how much was the writers looking at fan speculation and thinking, “Hmm, that’s not a bad idea…”
I have to think that GRRM can’t avoid altering the plots of his upcoming novels in response to the tv shows and their fan response.
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Some authors stay away from fan-sites about their work precisely to avoid this sort of thing.
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Yeah, though sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially when something is big enough in the popular culture. (E.g. Stranger Things or Game of Thrones.) GRRM really can’t avoid being aware of the response to the show, for example. It’s always going to be sitting in the back of his head as he writes, now.
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I love MBB’s shocked gasp at the end! 
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I can’t help but think this is the funniest thing I’ve read on the BBS for a long time.
“upcoming novels” makes them sound rather more imminent than they are likely to be.
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Um, we are thinking of the same author, aren’t we? (Emphasis mine, btw)
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“Upcoming” was just shorter than “hypothetical future novels that may never actually exist.”
Oh, he’s writing those novels. (He’s talked about it recently.) Whether he’ll ever finish is another matter entirely.
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Much like I have been writing those unit tests for my web components, in other words.
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He recently said that exact thing. Well, I guess he didn’t say he’s altering them per se, but he’s clearly aware how the show ended and that his endings will be different. It hits to your core question though; just how much do the reactions of fans and the passage of time impact the original vision?
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I saw that more as a statement about how writing the book was an organic process wherein the narrative came into shape as it wrote it, and thus was never going to match his rough outline from which the tv show was loosely adapted. That his shaping process might be guided by the response to the show never seem to be acknowledged, though given that he admitted he isn’t adhering closely to any sort of pre-existing general narrative, it seems like that just increases the impact the responses to the show will have.
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It’s in geologic time.
The closing lines:
“Fine, so Jon Snow is king of all the realm. Are you happy now? But everyone else still dies because fuck you! The end.”
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Damn… Gaten and crew look soooo much younger than they do now.
>_<
Even though I still love the show, Pitch Meeting nails exactly what’s problematic with the writing in S4.
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while i think some writers do plot everything out, or at least have some particular beats they want to hit - i suspect for most writer’s, “vision” is more like a feeling of the world and the characters.
cause it’d be hell, i think, to just be transcribing a single random idea you had once, year after year. ugh
you can see it’s a process, not a specific roadmap in stranger things with the side characters 11 meets when she runs away, with the characters who seem dead but come back, with - as @Melizmatic’s vid points out - 11 not speaking when we first meet her, but actually she was totally speaking just fine - etc
( and if they really truly had this all planned out years ago, they would have filmed some of the flashback scenes earlier on so that el didn’t look so much like a cg dancing baby )
i think they’re definitely taking some fan feedback into account: probably filtered via the producers and netflix. ( no justice for barb though. yet ) also probably feedback from the actors and crew. the feedback of friends and family. and their own opinions on how things are turning out…
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Yeah, I thought it was a very wise narrative move to portray her reliving being that age in her current body instead of continuing to de-age her. It was a lot less jarring to imagine her in a sort of VR memory landscape instead of going full Irishman on her.
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