Not Advancing the Plot

An interesting but frustrating thing about narrative media discourse is that “this doesn’t advance the plot” isn’t inherently a valid criticism (“advancing plots” isn’t inherently what narrative media is actually for), BUT a work receiving that criticism from an audience IS an indication that the work is flawed, because the nature of human attention spans is that an audience will only NOTICE that something isn’t advancing the plot if the thing is BORING.

“The plot” is what your brain starts thinking about when it isn’t FEELING anything any more (or, sometimes, when it has been kicked into feeling something ‘wrong’ that doesn’t mesh with the experience the story was hitherto creating). When it has dropped out of the silver haze of Being Invested. And “art that doesn’t make its audience feel things well enough to keep them invested” is about the closest thing you can get to “objectively bad art”.

For those keeping score, this is why this kind of discourse keeps continually cropping up around all the studio-mandated sex scenes in Very Serious Dramas but never gets levelled at those ubiquitous scenes of quiet domesticity that permeate every single Studio Ghibli movie, or the extended side gags on Community, or even (for the most part) the equally gratuitous sex scenes in James Bond movies.

The peaceful longing of quiet domesticity is what Studio Ghibli films are deliberately making you FEEL – that’s their whole thing (for all their breathtaking animation techniques the studio really doesn’t seem to have more than this one trick when it comes to narrative – but they do this one trick so well that it will continue to make them billions of dollars from now until the end of time).

A Community episode succeeds or fails based on whether or not it makes you FEEL amused, and the side gags frequently are doing more heavy lifting than the actual plot there.

Even the sex scenes in James Bond, while they would be boring in a vaccuum for all the same reasons they are in Literally Goddamn Everything On TV Right Now (it’s a very tired and well-worn trope that we’ve all seen a billion times, they’re almost never actually doing anything new or unusual with it, and even the people who find this stuff enjoyable can access a better version of it more easily for less money by opening a new tab), trick the viewer into remaining invested because they invoke the FEELING of a sort of friendly, familiar nostalgia – “heh, yep, there’s ol’ 007 up to his classic 007 shtick, same as always, heh, every day with this guy, I tells ya, I could tell you some stories about this guy, etc etc”.

Nobody ever ACTUALLY cares about “the plot” in and of itself, even when they think they do. “This doesn’t advance the plot” is just a layman amateur critic’s attempt to voice the emotionally-unmoored sensation of “this story no longer seems to know what it’s doing or why”.