Oops No Magic System: What Writers Can Learn from Stranger Things (and D&D)

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in the first season, the Demogorgon isn't an evil villan, its a *shark*. A force of nature. An animal whose only goal is to feed itself and survive. The government fucked around and accidentally invited it into our world. The CIA literally spent millions of dollars around that time irl testing people for psychic powers. That's why I loved the first season, it made so much sense yet had so much mystery

I wanted Will to develop psychic powers like Eleven through the Mindflayer to bring the whole Wizard Will motif into manifest

Internally consistent logic is something I see disregarded in so much of modern media, it’s nice to see someone breaking down WHY it’s bad rather than just pointing at it and saying “writing bad” like every ragetuber who’s cropped up in the last few years

In season 3 I thought the Soviets were trying to use the gate as a wormhole between the US and Russia and that’s why Hopper ended up there.

As a gardener writer that just recently started working with a stricter structure: I've suffered for so long i will never stop planing now. I find that outlining the plot and gardening the more emotional scenes works great.

the key to writing your supernatural systems in a way that makes sense and feels convincing for the audience is to make sure you cast really attractive people. if your project is full of waifus, everything in it will work and make sense (no I do not know anything about weeb stuff and I do not care)

Magic is a wild beast for me. I only write short storys/novels but the philosophy is the same: magic/fantasy elements are not tools for the characters to solve problems but tools for me to create problems for the characters. For instanse one of my characters has a nightmare that crawls out of his ear and appears to be a bug with the head of a baby. That lets me confront the character with his missbeliefs about fatherhood/masculinity/trauma and only gets resolved if he is willing to grow. tldr: the characters don't use magic, the magic uses them.

Everything I adore about this channel: 1. Literally the advice I really wanted to learn 2. All of the points are clear 3. There are alot of jokes for me to listen to and its put in a sarcastic way that is honestly something I would watch even if I didnt like screenwriting 4. Perfect for listening as a podcast at times 5. I have more but I forgot.

As someone who uses the architect method and has trouble writing, when I see my friends using the gardener method I realize that a big benefit to their approach is that they can more readily get moving on aspects of the story they are passionate about. Knowing when to stop planning and just write is a skill, and one that I struggle with as someone who values planned out stories and characters.

1:20 "I'm not about negativity, I not about positivity, I'm about productivity" what a dialogue! I think I'm gonna add that to my next script.

I feel like a YT creator has graduated to a different level when they have a raid shadow legends sponsor

You explain things in such a confusing and yet understandable way, i love it

-First off… my boy DRIPPED out -honestly your animated recap was pretty funny. I could listen to you cynically retell the storylines to a movie or show anytime. -Idk if it’s a Gen Z thing but your format and method to teach writing technics really works for me. -you inject opportunistic comedy into your videos and that’s my favorite kind of comedy personally. -I feel like something you have built on several times throughout your videos is having a structured skeleton to your story. Making sure everything is logical and makes sense within the world you have created. -keep making content dude

I cannot understate how helpful you have been to clearing up my writing process, so glad you are finally getting compensated for you work

A theory I heard is that Will's actually the one with the world duplication powers and that's why the demogorgon got him and didn't kill him. I think makes sense

this was legit the funniest raid shadow legends sponsorship ive ever seen.

The downside to being an architect is character. Easiest example is the How I Met Your Mother finale. They had it all planned out, exactly how it’d end, and then the characters naturally outgrew that ending. But it still ended that way anyway, leaving a lot of viewers unfulfilled

Brother, you are in for one hell of a ride. D&D takes pulp fiction stories from screenplay to live theater. Also, Shakespeare is the best gardener alive. he knows if it's comedy or tragedy based on the last scene he wants (marriages or memorial services). From there he is really just vibing scene to scene. The plot action is based on recounting either a historical or folkloric tale. This structured approach frees him up to give the audience his sublime dialogue and wordplay. In short, gardeners have structure, but they are less interested in the macro plot elements, as they are in giving people the good stuff. This is how the tragedy Macbeth is freed up to introduce knock-knock jokes to the English cannon. Structured Vibes.

I'm a mix between a gardener and an architect (I'll explain in a minute). Here's my take on the merits of the former approach: The benefit of the architectural approach is exactly as you described it: you get a consistent, clean canon on the macrolevel that allows for foreshadowing and payoffs and a coherent structure. However, it does have some weaknesses: mainly, character. It's one thing to outline a beautifully meaningful character arc, but actually making it work in the moment-to-moment of the story is a completely different beast. In the same way that Gardening risks (but doesn't guarantee) leaving your story in knots, the Architect approach risks hollow character choices, unintended implications, and the specific sort of plot hole that arises when the writer is so laser-focused on their brilliant plan for the story that they didn't even think of the consequences that might arise from specific scenes. Most egregiously, a purely Architectural approach can limit problem-solving. If you've planned your story out perfectly, but while writing it included a small detail about your character (say, that they are afraid of spiders) that wasn't in your outline, you're left with a factor that you didn't plan for that could upset your entire plan. Either you need to make the detail irrelevant (which clutters things unnecessarily), revise your entire plan to account for it (which can break other, unrelated elements), or omit the detail altogether (which risks removing depth from your writing). It's why often in stories you'll get characters who make decisions that make NO sense--I'd wager (some of the time) that it did make sense in the outline, but fell apart once more detail and context was added later on. I'll give an example of how my hybrid Gardener-Architect approach fixes this problem. (Specifically this is for a novel, but should apply to every medium.) I have this one character who's exploring a far-away land, and I have a basic outline of "here are some things that need to happen, but I don't have all the details yet." So I start writing, trying to get her to my first major planned "big moment." Early on, she carelessly loses some protective gear, which informed me about her character. However, this results in her getting badly injured as she runs away from a scary creature, which is something I completely hadn't planned for. All of a sudden she now has to deal with an infection as she's stranded in the wilderness, which is something I hadn't considered at all in my brainstorming. It should have been on my mind, but it's little things like that which don't even occur to me until I'm in the scene, writing mimetically instead of just diegetically. With this information I returned to my outline and updated my plan to account for this. I went back to writing, and suddenly encountered some internal conflict regarding an element of her backstory I hadn't considered in my outline. It radically shifted the overall emotional trajectory of the story, but I liked this direction a lot better, so I returned to my outline and updated it accordingly. So on and so forth, back and forth, back and forth. Ultimately, I realized one of my major plot points that I was building towards was no longer compatible with my revised vision for the story, so I cut it rather than trying to force it in there. Just because a scene looks good from a thousand feet in the air doesn't mean it will work when you're in the weeds of the actual storytelling. These are some extreme examples, but even for stories where I outline more extensively to begin with, I often incorporate this method. The benefit is that, well, it's really fun, results in a far more compelling (and unique) story, and radically increases the available creativity by removing the burden of figuring out all the major plot points before I can even get started. The main drawback is that it's really, really slow. I'll spends weeks outlining, then weeks writing, then weeks more outlining. It's endless revision, literally: remaking my vision for the story constantly. It requires a lot of time to mentally readjust my outlook, to ruminate on moment-to-moment details and find ways to make them meaningful and relevant to the story. But every single time I do it, I'm left with a story that's far more human and powerful to actual relatable experiences than any of my "planned" stories. I'm just not sure I can recommend this approach to anybody looking to do this professionally--it's more of a hobby for me, and thus it taking a long time doesn't matter so much. Ultimately, there's no real difference between the Architect and the Gardener other than an order of operations. The Architect prefers to get the creativity and problem-solving out of the way first in order to focus on the presentation later, while the Gardener prefers to explore ideas with as much logicality as possible, and worry about the big picture later on. One strategy results in a very strong plot but potentially weaker characters, while the other results in a very engaging story in the moment-to-moment but risks its own cohesiveness later on (not unlike how most people live their lives, come to think of it). Like you said, neither system "guarantees" various issues, but they increase the risk. Most storytellers use a blend. Brandon Sanderson, for example, extensively plots the stories but gardens his characters. Terry Pratchett thought of it like woodcarving, where you have a plan but, if you come across a knot in the wood, you alter your plan to accommodate it. It all depends on what works best for you, both in terms of results and, uh, time. And no matter what, you'll always need to revise. Hopefully this helped!