Do the Janewayinistas remind anyone else of people who yell at town hall meetings?
Hmmmm-- there are some authors here that would relish that title...hmm... would that make the Editors and Authors "Death Councils"?
Random Thought: Was Janeway Killed Because She was So Polarizing?
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Well Peter David killed off Janeway. And I don't think he's ever claimed to love her. There was some debate if he even liked her. I'd kind of understand if you stopped buying his books in protest.
Peter David wrote Janeway's death at the instruction of former Pocket Books editor Margaret Clark. It wasn't his decision.
Which is fine, but that doesn't mean it was motivated by any dislike of the character.
*nods* I just felt like it needed to be said, since some people have accused the writers/editors of killing characters because they dislike them.
Well, when it comes to stop being a Trek fan, your favorites Clark, Berman, Braga and all of them are doing their best to make me quit the habit of being a Trek fan by constantly destroying my favorite characters so maybe your wish will be fulfilled in a not to distant future.
As for stop buying the books, I've already done that.
As for voicing my opinion, now that's another story. If I think that something is wrong, then I say that. I don't crawl under a rock and simply accept things. I fight back because voicing an opinion is the only way to make changes. The people who dare to stand up for what they think is right are the ones who creates history, not the "cave-dwellers".
Or to quote a Czech demonstrant who staged an illegal protest in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia against the Russian invasion one year earlier: "If we don't protest today, the Russians will take it as evidence that we all are happy and content with the current regime".
There are a lot of people who aren't happy and content with the current direction of the books and I do think that we have the right to voice our opinion.
No, I loved "Imzadi" - and "Imzadi II: Triangle" - but I had no idea who would end up being safe and who would die, especially amongst the guest cast. In fact, doesn't Data even use the Guardian to try to prevent some deaths?
But there was no way to know how Peter David would return everything to the status quo, except that, while TNG was running on TV and in movies, one was fairly certain he'd have to return all the pieces to the sandbox at the end.
"Imzadi II" was more intriguing. Knowing that in the future of "All Good Things..." that Deanna had died tragically, and it had caused years of friction between Worf and Riker...
Wonderful stuff.
It's not main character deaths that I like. It's authors telling exciting, unpredictable, page turning stories. And if you're asking Pocket Books to make guarantees that no main characters will ever die that takes a huge edge off future books. And therefore, I don't want them to follow your request.
No, they're not.
First off, none of those people work at Star Trek anymore. Berman's basically retired, Braga's working on 24 and FlashForward, and Clark was laid off from Pocket Books as part of their recession-induced corporate restructuring.
Secondly, none of them were doing their best to make you quit being a Trek fan. They were all doing their best to tell the best story they knew how.
Now, with Berman and Braga, a large majority of fans feel that they failed at that goal. With Clark, obviously some people feel she failed and others disagree.
That's fine. You can think she did as bad of a job as you want, you can disagree with her decision to kill Janeway, all that's good.
But you really need to stop taking subjective tastes and using them as a reason to launch personal attacks, and to stop taking subjective creative decisions as personal attacks. I promise you, none of those people sat in bed at night thinking to themselves, "How can we possibly hurt Kes and Janeway fans' feelings? By Jove, I've got it -- we'll kill them!"
it's the sense of entitlement that gets me.
"i feel wronged. i MUST have my way. they MUST cater to my whims and desires and no-one else's!"
"i feel wronged. i MUST have my way. they MUST cater to my whims and desires and no-one else's!"
First off, I wanted to thank Kristen (even if I'm a little late... I step away for a few hours and several pages of posts show up!) for taking the time to come here and talk about this. Putting aside the fact that this conflict over the "wrongness" of Janeway's death is the reason you did so, it is fascinating for me as an aspiring writer to be able to read your insights into the whole process that goes into creating these books, and I appreciate it. 
Now, to touch on something from a couple pages back...
But as I said, it isn't easy. One story I've been working on a lot lately - a huge sci-fi story, with a large-scale conflict spanning multiple years - certainly has its share of death, including a few very main characters (I'm talking characters that - were my story a Trek TV show - would show up in the theme song credits every week). There was one scene I just finished writing up last week, involving a main character death, and you know what? Writing it kinda sucked, in a way. It was painful. I found that as I was writing, suddenly I didn't want to do it... I didn't want her to die. But that was the story I had created. Her death was an integral part of the character development of another of my mains, and the resulting scene is compelling, gut-wrenching, and emotionally gripping. Well, at least I hope it is... the assumption there is that I've written it well.
Clearly, you are not a fan of main character death in general (understatement is my friend
). That's fine. I personally don't have a problem with it, when it's done well. But my point with all this is to try and get across that 1) it's not objectively a bad decision just because some people don't like it, and 2) it is entirely possible to love a character that you end up killing off. In fact, for some writers (for me, certainly, though not all writers, from what I've read/heard), it's an absolute necessity, unless NO ONE is going to die, since if I don't love my characters to a certain degree, I'm not going to be writing them very effectively.
Now, to touch on something from a couple pages back...
If that doesn't make sense to you, then you have a lack of understanding of something that is a very important part of being a writer (well, assuming you're writing in a genre/setting that puts your characters in a certain degree of peril... this doesn't apply if you're writing, say, a romantic comedy story). Writing the death of a character you love can be very difficult, certainly, but sometimes that death is... maybe not quite "necessary", exactly, but it's simply what's been chosen by the author/editors/whoever as the most compelling story path to take.
But as I said, it isn't easy. One story I've been working on a lot lately - a huge sci-fi story, with a large-scale conflict spanning multiple years - certainly has its share of death, including a few very main characters (I'm talking characters that - were my story a Trek TV show - would show up in the theme song credits every week). There was one scene I just finished writing up last week, involving a main character death, and you know what? Writing it kinda sucked, in a way. It was painful. I found that as I was writing, suddenly I didn't want to do it... I didn't want her to die. But that was the story I had created. Her death was an integral part of the character development of another of my mains, and the resulting scene is compelling, gut-wrenching, and emotionally gripping. Well, at least I hope it is... the assumption there is that I've written it well.
Clearly, you are not a fan of main character death in general (understatement is my friend
). That's fine. I personally don't have a problem with it, when it's done well. But my point with all this is to try and get across that 1) it's not objectively a bad decision just because some people don't like it, and 2) it is entirely possible to love a character that you end up killing off. In fact, for some writers (for me, certainly, though not all writers, from what I've read/heard), it's an absolute necessity, unless NO ONE is going to die, since if I don't love my characters to a certain degree, I'm not going to be writing them very effectively.
I only saw the FlashForward pilot, but it seemed good. I don't know how it will sustain a long-term TV series, but hey, one thing at a time. I'm not a fan of 24, but that stems more from my objections to its political ethos than anything else.
As for his work on ENT and VOY, my feeling is not so much that he's a bad writer, but that he'd been at Trek so long that he was suffering from creative burnout.
Intentionally pissing off Kes fans? To what end? The guys who wrote for the VOY TV show are successful multi-millionaires. They gained nothing from intentionally pissing off Kes fans.
I promise you, their idea was probably to tell a story about a good person who goes wrong, not to intentionally piss anyone off. Now, I'll happily concede that the VOY writing staff was suffering from such creative burnout and network interference that they didn't usually do a good job at accomplishing their creative goals. But that doesn't mean they're bad, belligerent, or trollish people as you describe them.
^^
OK, this will take us a bit out of topic and I know that there ae those who disagree with me here but I think that "Fury" was the "response" from those in charge to a letter campaign which was staged to have Kes re-instated as a main character again. Instead of bringing back the character or simply ignore the wishes from this group of fans, they did choose to show the fans "the finger" by bringing back and destroying the character.
Why would they otherwise bring back a character which they have done everything to erase every memory of just to destroy the character and finally kill her off (which was the original plan for the episode until Jennifer Lien persuaded them not to kill off Kes at the end)?
As you state, those people are multi-millionaires so showing the finger to a group of fans at the end of the series wouldn't affect their wallets.
To take this back on topic again, the "Janeway situation" is somewhat different but I do think that those in charge of that action must have been aware of the fact that wasting Janeway would make many fans sad and angry.
As for telling good stories, "Fury" was definitely not a good story and when it comes to the books, masterpieces like "The Black Shore", "Marooned", "Her Klingon Soul" and many others shows that there is possible to tell good stories without killing off beloved main characters.
OK, this will take us a bit out of topic and I know that there ae those who disagree with me here but I think that "Fury" was the "response" from those in charge to a letter campaign which was staged to have Kes re-instated as a main character again. Instead of bringing back the character or simply ignore the wishes from this group of fans, they did choose to show the fans "the finger" by bringing back and destroying the character.
Why would they otherwise bring back a character which they have done everything to erase every memory of just to destroy the character and finally kill her off (which was the original plan for the episode until Jennifer Lien persuaded them not to kill off Kes at the end)?
As you state, those people are multi-millionaires so showing the finger to a group of fans at the end of the series wouldn't affect their wallets.
To take this back on topic again, the "Janeway situation" is somewhat different but I do think that those in charge of that action must have been aware of the fact that wasting Janeway would make many fans sad and angry.
As for telling good stories, "Fury" was definitely not a good story and when it comes to the books, masterpieces like "The Black Shore", "Marooned", "Her Klingon Soul" and many others shows that there is possible to tell good stories without killing off beloved main characters.
That's ludicrous. Did you have a tinfoil hat on while writing that?
There's a very wise saying: Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to stupidity. Considering their track record on Voyager and Enterprise, I'm willing to believe that every time Berman and Braga got something horribly wrong they actually thought they were doing something good that the fans would appreciate. Because they kept on doing it.
^ This.
Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are not bad people. Just bad writers.
You are attributing their writing choices to malice on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Your argument boils down to, "I wouldn't do it, but they did, so they must be mean people." It's absurd.
They probably knew that the decision would be one that some fans would disagree with. That doesn't mean they did it with any intention of hurting anybody. Writers kill off popular fictional characters all the time; in our culture, it's expected that a mature adult can see a fictional character die in a fictional story without his or her feelings getting hurt. Especially since those fictional characters were never real in the first place.
The relative success or failure of an attempt to tell a good story does not change its status as an honest attempt to tell a good story. Failure does not negate honest intent.
Certainly. No one's claiming that you can't. They're just saying that in this instance, they choose to try to tell a good story that did feature the death of a primary character.
Once again, it's fine if that's not the kind of story for you. It's fine if you disagree with their decision. But stop trying to impugn their characters just because they made decisions you disagree with.
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