Complex Numbers

Don't Do It

Here's my first entry for June's "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+], with a theme of tropes.

Ripped from the Headlines  

For anyone too lazy to click on the link (as I usually am), to summarize: this is when a show or movie or whatever is based on current events. It's not usually a true story, but if, like, there's a story about some priest sexually abusing an altar boy, the movie will be about a different priest sexually abusing a different altar boy.

Not that anyone has the balls to actually make such a show.

I don't care about such shows. By which I mean, I don't give a shit if something is based on something out of real life, or entirely made up. Well. It's not like you can entirely make something up, or entirely be accurate to the details of a real event. Even the most outlandish science fiction or fantasy at least adheres to some anchor in reality, even if it's only to consider what one would do in a weird situation.

But there is one instance of this trope that I absolutely will not watch or read, and that is a COVID story.

Fortunately, I haven't seen anything like that yet. That doesn't mean it's not out there. It probably is. It's not like I'm aware of everything that gets released. But if I become aware of it, I'll wish I hadn't.

I don't want to see a movie based on the masking argument. I don't want to read a book centered around the vaccination argument. I really don't want to see anything titled "Love in the time of Coronavirus" or anything similar to that.

And above all, I will puke my fucking guts out if I even hear the merest whisper of a romance that involves two (or more; I'm cool like that) people managing to find a way to hook up in spite of social distancing and mask mandates.

No. I want my entertainment to, ideally, forget that the 'rona is or was ever a thing. I want my fiction to go on like nothing ever happened, like millions of people didn't die from it.

Just don't do it.

Failing that, at least don't make it central to the plot.

Pretty much any other current event is fair game: climate change, civil unrest, school shootings, war in Europe, terrorist incidents, whatever. I'm just not going to put up with covfefe-19 plots. Period. The only masks I want to see in movies or on TV are the ones worn by superheroes and the villains that oppose them.

And why? I know I should be able to, as a writer, articulate exactly why this is. The block, I think, isn't about writing, but more emotional -- a visceral reaction to overusing something that's occupied our brains enough for the past 28 months or so. Note that I'm not saying we should pretend, collectively, that it's not happening or didn't ever happen. Just that I don't want it encroaching into my fiction.

Other than that? Rip the hell out of the headlines. Truth can be stranger than fiction and all that. Just stay away from a certain virus.

You know. Avoid it like the plague.