Fangirling About a New Series
You'll have to excuse me, Inklings, because I discovered a series last week that has be absolutely hooked. I'm not the sort to binge-watch anything, really, unless I'm super ill and can't get up to "be a productive human being" and all that jazz.
But last week, when I wasn't capable of being a productive human being (whatever that is) I ended up binge-watching all 36 episodes of this web series called "No Evil" by Betsy Lee on YouTube. As some of you might have gathered, I'm a huge fan of deep lore and consistency in worldbuilding. I really love when something that's revealed ten chapters in was there all along if you go back and reread the first chapter.
No Evil has this down to a T, and I'm not exaggerating. We've all seen it before. A sequel or a later chapter opens with a character receiving a necklace or a scar or a precious possession that they've carried with them ever since, but if you go back to the first movie or an earlier episodes or the first chapter, it's not there. It's never mentioned, never shown, never given even a passing thought. And we all know this happens because that thing the character received is going to play a major role in the current arc, but it wasn't mentioned before because it wasn't important, or even because the creator hadn't thought of it yet.
In episode 25, I can tell you spoiler-free that one of the characters takes off a necklace that turns out to have significant meaning via flashbacks. But you can see that she's wearing that necklace as early as episode 4, and in addition to the narrative developments that happen between episode 4 and episode 25, the videos were released 4 years apart. Think about that. Four years of planning for payoff in one small exchange and a flashback.
It's always fun, in long-running series, to find places where a character or an event or a legend breaks the canon. Like where Obi-Wan says in A New Hope that he's never seen the droids before, but he knew in the prequels that Anakin had owned and worked on both of them.
When I find things like that, I usually laugh and move on, but it's always a wonderful surprise to stumble on one that I think is going to be canon-breaking, but it's not. When I saw her take off that necklace, I thought for sure I had one, but when I went back through the episodes, it was always there. I just didn't notice it.
So from 2012, when the series started, to the present day, I haven't been able to find a single point at which the canon contradicts itself. Not a single point.
This is consistency on a godlike level, and I LOVE IT. It certainly doesn't hurt that I really like the premise and the characters, the setting, and the plot.
I highly recommend this series. It's flipping amazing, and... I will probably be writing fanfiction while I wait for the next episode to come out.
#YouTube #Fanfiction #Consistency
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