Maintaining the Horror Campaign – “The Best Day Ever”, or “No, Mr. Whedon, Don’t Do It!”

“Passion is the source of our finest moments; the joy of love, the clarity of hatred, and the ecstasy of grief.”

—Angelus, from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

Joss Whedon (Director of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and The Avengers…  Where have you been?) uses tropes.  The one trick in his bag he’s infamous for is what happens when a character is given one heck of a great day.  I’m going to drop some spoiler warnings right here.  If you plan to watch the first couple of seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer sometime soon, then you should skip this article.  I don’t mind.  If you aren’t planning on doing it for a while, though, keep reading.  We can’t be slaves to shows we may never watch, can we?

Still with me?  Alright, let’s talk about Whedon’s first, and cleanest example contestant on the hit game show “Best Day Ever”: Miss Calendar.  In Buffy, the Vampire Slayer’s first season, Giles is presented as a knowledgeable high school librarian/occult expert, whose job is to train and prepare the local demon slayer/cheerleader.  Giles is also a technophobe, and often incapable of performing his role to the best of his ability at the dawn of the information age.  Thus, enters Jenny Calendar, Sunnydale High School’s resident computer science teacher, a foil and potential love interest for the bookish Giles.

Giles and Calendar’s push and pull romantic entanglement wound throughout the first two seasons, as both felt an attraction to each other they tried to deny.  Meanwhile, Miss Calendar’s gypsy lineage catches up with her.  ‘Janna Kalenderash’, Miss Calendar’s gypsy name, was planted at Sunnydale to keep tabs on Angel, a vampire cursed with a soul.  Angel, who needs to make up for his past, is helping the slayer kill demons.  The gypsies, however, don’t care whether Angel does good or ill: they want to keep him cursed.  And to do that, they need to keep Angel miserable.  A single moment of true happiness would lift the curse, and Angel would become the monster Angelus; an event that Jenny fails to prevent when Buffy and Angel’s relationship becomes physical.

Buffy eventually pieces the problem together, discovers Miss Calendar’s role, and confronts her.  There’s a falling out between Miss Calendar and Buffy and Giles when they realize Jenny lied to them since the first day they met her.  Meanwhile, Angelus rampages throughout the city of Sunnydale, hooking up with past friends, and terrorizing the Slayer’s extended family.  Miss Calendar continues, alone, to search for a way to recapture Angel’s soul.  In an episode called ‘Passion’, Giles interrupts Jenny’s work, and she opens up to him.  She tells him everything about her and about her people’s history with Angel.  Giles tells Jenny that the strange thing about feeling betrayed is that it has a tendency to happen when someone’s been betrayed.  But, they make cute.  Jenny asks if she can see Giles later, and Giles tells her she can come over to his house.  They smile.  Their relationship is saved.  Life is beautiful.

In a touching scene, Giles returns home to find a rose at his front door and La Bohème wafting from the record player.  He finds an ice bucket on his desk with a chilled bottle of champagne in it, along with a folded note which reads “Upstairs”.  Giles grabs the bottle and follows a trail of votive candles and rose petals leading to his bedroom, where he finds Jenny Calendar dead, her neck snapped by Angelus.

Why, Mr Whedon, Why?!  Calendar was a fun character, and Giles is a good man.  He deserves happiness in his bitter life!  Why would you do such a terrible thing?

Well, let’s detach ourselves from the characters for a second.  How important is Miss Calendar to the ongoing plot?  Did Buffy really need a computer science teacher who’s a secret gypsy witch?  Willow would go on to be the face of magic in the show, and is tech savvy enough to use the early internet whenever that plot device is needed.  In theory, Calendar supplies an older female figure to the show, but Buffy has a mother, so the show doesn’t need Calendar to play that role, either.  The truth is, as likeable as Calendar is, she’s expendable.  If we took the time to break down the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer into Playable and Non-Playable characters, Buffy, Giles, Willow and Xander would be easy choices for playable characters.  Miss Calendar, however, would likely be a character played by the game master.  She adds nothing to the group, except to bring out an aspect of Giles’ personality and needs, and something to hang a plot off of.  And when she’s no longer needed to keep the current plot in place, her death continues to mature Giles’ personality, and adds a dimension to Giles’ relationship with Angelus.

We talked about this in the last Maintaining the Horror Campaign article; how you should build up non-player characters, then hack them to pieces in front of the players to give a sense of horrific depth to your game.  Joss Whedon agrees with this principle, and constantly sets characters up for the fall.  When interviewed about this very rare (for 1998) death of a popular character, Joss explained that he did it to show that “not everything is safe, that not every one is safe…to show that death is final and death is scary.”  And it works.  Jenny’s death makes Angelus a very real and dangerous villain, and later, continues to set up Angel as a compelling anti-hero, who would go on to star in his own spin-off show.

But let’s get beyond the last article.  This particular death is interesting because it establishes a pattern in the way Whedon, and a lot of other authors, kill characters.  Whedon likes to up the ante of character death by giving that character one great day before they die.  It makes that character’s death all the more tragic if we elevate that character on a pedestal the moment before the axe falls.

It’s a good way to wind the audience.  When death finally comes, it’s all the more tragic.  But what happens when you use that tactic so often that it becomes a trope?  And what happens when your audience begins to recognize your pattern before you conclude it?

As game masters we sometimes forget to restock our literary ingredients and overuse “Things keep getting worse” until the soup tastes blasé. But what if, for a change of pace, you singled out a character and made their life better.  What if your party traveled with a Duke who fell out of favor, and that Duke was summoned by the King to return to court?  What if the King admitted he made a terrible error, arrested the conspirators that forced the Duke from his lands, and knighted the players for protecting the King’s good and faithful servant.  What if the Duke’s wife, who distanced herself from her husband when he was under suspicion, welcomes him back while she weeps tears, ashamed at what she did?  What if his children, who were imprisoned while their father escaped the law, were reunited with their father.  Out of the blue?  Everything resolves itself?

Wouldn’t you be suspicious?

This sounds like a plot.  This sounds like something bad is coming.  Maybe something went wrong with the mastermind who’s pulling the Duke’s strings, and she needs a desperate change in plan, so she put a chess piece back on the board.  If that’s the case, then the strategist will take a more active role, and the story will get very violent, very fast.  Or, maybe this mastermind seethes in anger at a wrong the Duke once committed against her.  In this scenario, the vindicator ruined the Duke’s reputation, and made him miserable, but miserable isn’t good enough.  She needs to crush the Duke for his past transgressions, and the only way she can do that is to build the Duke up one last time before she tears him down.  Either way, things are about to get nasty.  And, if you’re obvious about it, the players will grab hold of their guard rails, and look forward to the fall.

But being obvious with the plot so your players can recognize tropes and look forward to their ultimate conclusion isn’t the only way to play with player expectations.  This next trick involves Benjamin J. Grimm, otherwise known as The Thing, from The Fantastic Four.

In 2011, Fantastic Four contained a plot arc by the name of “Three”.  The premise was that one of the original Fantastic Four was going to die.  The hook, though, was that no one, except for the people working on the project, knew who of the Four it would be, or why it would happen until the final book.  Once again, I need to drop the spoiler warning, for what should be a pretty obvious reason.  If you’re behind on your Fantastic Four reading, then you’re probably going to want to skip the rest of this article.  I find it unlikely that I have many readers that are currently invested in the Fantastic Four and don’t know how Three ends, but it happens.  If you don’t think you’ll end up reading Three any time soon, though, then you might as well continue.  YOLO.

Throughout Three, individual members of the FF were all struggling with individual, and dangerous, problems.  But something different was happening to Ben.  Ben was getting one of the best days of his life.

You see, Ben hates being The Thing.  Many superheros written before The Fantastic Four were portrayed as self-confident thrill seekers, but when Ben looks in the mirror he sees a monster.  Reed Richards, Ben’s closest friend who shoulders partial responsibility for his curse, struggled for years to discover a way to reverse Ben’s physiology. But the fluke accident that gave the Fantastic Four their powers continues to elude one of the greatest brains on Earth, and most all of his experimentation resulted in failure.   The Future Foundation, Reed Richard’s child prodigy think tank, worked on the problem independently and found a solution by working with Ben’s condition instead of ‘fixing’ it.  They can’t turn The Thing into Ben permanently, but they did design a ‘window’ for The Thing to change into Ben on rare occasions.  The Thing hesitates, unsure if he’s willing to be Ben for a day, only to know he must return to The Thing for another year.  In the end, though, this is a non-choice, and he agrees.

Ben gets one day to make up for lost time, and he makes the most of it and goes clubbing with Johnny.  When walking back to the Baxter Building he comes across some wise guys from his old neighborhood called ‘The Yancy Street Gang’.  Normally, he’d take their crap in aggravation, too big to fight back without seriously hurting someone.  But now he takes a pop at something he always wanted to do, and socks those idiots in the jaw.  Later, he spends the evening with his girlfriend Alicia Masters, and what they do is left to our imaginations.

The next morning, Johhny and Ben are in the Baxter Building when the alarms blare.  Inside The Baxter Building, there’s a portal that leads to The Negative Zone, a nightmare dimension under the domain of the alien tyrant Annihilus.  Ben, still in human form, scrambles to shut down the portal and protect The Future Foundation, but there’s a problem with the controls, and the portal needs to be closed from the other side.  Ben mans the controls, ready to die at the hands of the invading extradimentional army… when he’s shoved back through the portal by Johnny.

On the other side of the portal, Ben reverts into The Thing.  By now, though, his vaunted strength is useless as the portal closes just before the alien horde descends on Johnny.

It’s an interesting switch on “The Best Day Ever”, isn’t it?  Here, Ben was given everything he wanted for a day, and many readers of Fantastic Four saw that as a clue.  Those readers know the set ’em up, then knock ’em down trope.  People die when you give them everything they want.  Johnathan Hickman, The author of Three, knows that trope too.  He knew some people would see the ‘evidence’ and expect Ben to die under the weight of it.  Hickman also knew that when he failed to deliver what people thought they’d see, but still fulfilled the plot’s promised agenda without resorting to tricks, that people would nod their heads in approval at an ending that was expected, but not predictable.

Understanding tropes is important.  Understanding how they work and why they work will help add a layer of craftsmanship to your own stories.  Treading familiar plot arcs with your players will key into our desire, as humans, to see and follow patterns, and give the story a feeling of continuity and authenticity.  And when you understand a trope well enough that you spin off of it, spiraling the well-established trope into unexpected grooves, that’s when you will impress your players.  Those are the plots that stay with people for the rest of their lives.

Return to Maintaining the Horror Campaign’s Introduction.