The Tethercat Principle

This'll be kind of a "random thoughts" blog; just wanted to discuss a thought from a few weeks ago while Mason, Isaac, and I were working on editing Better Yet?; I observed (mild spoiler alert) that the last time the character of Jodie is seen, she's sobbing at the end of Act 2, Scene 2. There are three more scenes after that, and Jodie makes no appearance in any of them. This works with the direction the story goes, and it's fortunate, I joked with the other guys, that the final scene mentions that she's pulled together, otherwise, since she was so inconsolable last time we saw her, the audience might worry that she never recovered.

Some call this the "Tethercat Principle"; basically, it's the assumption that whatever it is the characters were doing last time you heard from them, they're still doing that. It's called that based on a Far Side comic which depicts two dogs using a cat as a tetherball. Readers were devastated rather than amused, and Gary Larson later wrote that perhaps they would have found the comic more palatable if the caption, rather than simply reading "Tethercat", had told that the cat eventually escaped and got his revenge. Otherwise, it feels like the cat will be stuck in the tethercat predicament forever.

It doesn't just apply to fiction, you know. It's kind of the way the human brain works. Think about it: if a person is wearing the same outfit they were wearing last time you saw them, or are sitting in the exact same spot where you left them, your first impulse is to be alarmed that they've been wearing that outfit or sitting in that spot the entire time since you parted ways. When you see someone you haven't seen in years, you're stunned that they've gotten older. I guess we all still carry that teensy bit of childlike narcissism, assuming that people kinda hang from coathooks waiting for us when we're away.

And here's another one! A less recent thought, but one I remembered, a big realization I had upon studying Dungeons & Dragons books in preparation for Keys & Kingdoms stuff. There's a big difference in designing creatures for video games, which is where I originally took my inspirations, and doing so for tabletop games. In a video game, every unique creature costs time and money to design and construct, so often you want as many creatures as possible to use models you already have, just maybe change their colors and a few accessories, and so you have a bunch of enemies that all look pretty much the same, but each has different statistics and abilities to challenge you. In a tabletop game, there's no limited graphics processor to constrain creature design and there's also no computer calculating the stats for you - both are entirely in your own brain, therefore it's easier if every creature looks different but they all have the same stats. Isn't that interesting?

Anyway, yeah, that'll be the end of today's random thoughts blog. It's a couple of days late because I've been waiting to see the final cut of Better Yet?, and that was delivered last night. It's coming very, very soon.