So here it is, the major hole in the plot…what the French would not call pièce de résistance, but rather…uh…trou del’ intrigue? I dunno, I’m not French. Grâce à dieu.
It’s a rather obvious plot-hole, but it does seem somewhat common in the genre, probably for completely pragmatic reasons: when a magical-girl-manga’s success warrants a continuation beyond a first volume, an obvious way to adapt the plot to the new, more epic scale lies in introducing a new, greater villain – and have the original villains do a heel/face switch. Which then leaves the question why the original villains were acting so…well, villainous before.
Which requires some sort of torturous plot contrivance to explain why apparently-villainous behavior was somehow conducive to opposing a greater evil. Or just completely ignoring the plot-hole and hoping the readers will let it slide…
The Queen uses a different approach: by trying to impair her audience’s sanity before reaching that point in her story, she hopes to prime her listeners to accept obvious inconsistencies more readily. I mean, once you have gotten a glimpse below the thin veneer of sanity hiding the true, mercilessly chaotic nature of the universe from fragile human minds, swallowing a plot-hole even of this size must appear quite refreshing in comparison.
While it’s a viable approach, I didn’t tag along with her plan and kept whatever-it-was-that-the-twins-were-doing-with-each-other hidden from the eyes of my audience. Mostly because I think my audience’s sanity should already be sufficiently impaired by all of the madness on display in earlier chapters…
It doesn’t work entirely as planned – Snuka catches on to the contradiction. But at least nobody gets so enraged over the plot-hole that any over-ripe tomatoes (or rocks) come flying towards the Queen. So I guess it still worked well enough…
I spend some time vacillating on which member of the team should be the one to catch on. Mopey would have been an obvious choice, as would have been the current incarnation of Biff – both of them qualified on basis of intelligence and scientific thinking. Gregory seemed less qualified, but he’s had his moments of unexpected lucidity in the past…but ultimately, I settled on Snuka. He might not be as smart as Mopey or (currently) Biff, but he’s street-smart instead: he has a well-founded and persistent distrust of other people and naturally suspects hidden agendas behind everything they tell him, so it makes a bit of sense that he’d be the one most likely to catch on.
More on Monday.
Was wondering when this part would be addressed. The best part is this is a movie, not a show, so technically this problem shouldn’t happen. I’ll emphasize “technically” as Williams Street (Aqua Teen Hunger Force) famously tends to have this problem: they have a solid plot for the first 15 minutes and then realize they’ve got another 15-75 minutes they need to fill and scramble to create enough filler to make it to the end.
Though better-written plots generally can still salvage this situation by having the former-villains say they were trying to push the heroes to become stronger ahead of the curve the greater-scope villain was aiming for so that hopefully they’d be powerful enough to derail the greater-scope villain’s plans.
Yeah, the problem naturally tends to be more pervasive/serious in serialized media than in movies, specifically. But even among movie scriptwriters there are some who write according to the seat-of-your-pants mantra, going down a plot road without to clear an idea where it’s actually going – but most movie scripts go through multiple re-writes, so problems stemming from that approach tend to be ameliorated before the end product hits cinemas.
There are ways to write your way out of that sort of corner, but they aren’t necessarily the most elegant ones. But with manga directed at a younger target audience, including the magical girls genre, it’s most often not even really tried – they seem to rely on the willing suspension on disbelief and the drag-along effect of the plot to keep the audience onboard, and in general they seem to succeed.
There is an easy answer to that plothole of yours. Sure, if magical heroes defeat Queen’s minions, then she is doing exactly what Latho wants. But Latho sent mechanical monsters wanting them to lose. The Queen, however, intended to win and stop Latho’s plan that way. And she would get away with it if not for you meddlesome kids and… your complete lack of dog.
Funnily enough, a dog might have posed a far greater challenge to Latho than the meddlesome kids. Meddlesome kids are something that Latho’s well accustomed with – considering them preferable, even, to older and less easily led
victi…partners.But a dog poses a completely different level of problem to a creature with a plushie-based physique. “…to shreds, you say?”, to quote Professor Farnsworth. XD