The Netflix Fog of Fantasy

Inside the Forgettable Fantasy Formula

When I was a kid, you had to stretch the definition of fantasy quite a bit if you were going to claim there was any on TV at all. The Hobbit, (a one time only special) was about it. This wasn’t even a matter of ‘you get what you get and you don’t get upset,’ Because you were getting nothing except an occasional rerun of Jason and the Argonauts or Sinbad.

Things improved in the eighties. I can still remember one-off films like Hawk the Slayer and The Archer: Fugitive from the Empire. They weren’t masterpieces, but they stuck. Forty years later, they’re still distinct and separate entities in my mind.

If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I tell you about The Shannara Chronicles… I would die. It’s been barely ten years since its premiere. I read the books back in the 80s. I can tell you about all other kinds of stuff that happened in 2016 but I can’t tell you a thing about that show.

How is it that utter garbage like Death Stalker and Ator the Fighting Eagle, manage to stay singular in the mind, whereas The Shannara Chronicles, Rings of Power, The Witcher, and Willow, begin to blend together into this universe of poreless, young and diverse people, all dressed alike and all on an eternal stream of fetch quests? How did this happen to something that should be as uniquely vibrant as high epic fantasy?

First, these uniquely horrid shows are all unique to this period starting in 2016. While it is tempting to just say, they’re all woke and then stop trying to think about them, here’s the big thing, the Left supports its own in a way that the Right just doesn’t.

And they ain’t watching it either.

There’s something more at work here. Certain elements unique to this utterly unloved genre keep cropping up.

What are they? And why do they exist at all?

First, remember that almost everyone copies Netflix’s playbook. The sole exception being HBO, which is why their fantasies have at least stood out as their own entities.

It comes down to creative DNA, we’ve been over some of this before. Netflix began with the plan of being the world’s biggest DVD rental store. While it succeeded in that mission, it never had the slightest creative ambition at all. That DNA stuck. The only thing Netflix was interested in was optimization. It began by optimizing the DVD selection, then it shifted to streaming and that skill-stack morphed into optimizing retention of customers. When it had to shift to originals, it reached its natural endstate of optimizing engagement.

Not engagement by making anything good you understand, just engagement for its own sake. Any identifiable moment of disengagement was numerically isolated and ruthlessly attacked.

Thus was created the Netflix Forgettable Formula.

• Front-Loaded Action: Traditional films build to a climax in the third act. Netflix often requires a major action sequence or hook within the first five minutes to prevent viewers from dropping off.

• The “Tell-and-Repeat” Rule: To accommodate distracted viewers (e.g., those scrolling on phones), plot points are often reiterated 3-4 times in dialogue so the story is easy to follow even without looking at the screen.

• 15-20 Minute Reset: Writers are encouraged to reset the stakes or restate characters’ goals every 15 to 20 minutes to re-engage viewers who may have tuned out

• Multi-Threaded Plotting: Using A, B, and C-lines (main and subplots) that peak at different times to maintain constant narrative momentum.

• The 7-Block Model: A rhythmic pacing structure designed to keep episodes moving quickly, often culminating in an emotional or narrative cliffhanger. (This is pretty much a variation on the Harmon Story Circle, a device for telling stories where nothing has really changed but you kind of feel that it has).

Netflix’s philosophy of non-story telling is that consistency beats distinctiveness. They want everything to be just good enough to keep you from unsubscribing. This happens in all streaming originals but fantasy adds some unique stresses to this system that makes it all too incredibly obvious. Most shows really don’t have to be all that one-of-a-kind, a different actor for what is basically the same recipe is good enough but high fantasy has to invoke a matchless world unlike any other. And they just can’t.

The Netflix Forgettable Fantasy Formula has five components.

1. The Interchangeable World.

“They all look like they came out of the Unreal Engine… Because they did.”

Almost all of these fantasy shows use “Volume Stage” technology. Basically everything is shot in front of giant video screens, at first it looked like that should create more variety and not less. However, there is a nasty little secret, unique assets take time and effort. It’s easier just to re-use pre-made assets wherever possible and all of these things are made using the Unreal Engine.

Pre-built terrain libraries, shared lighting setups, stock foliage and architectural kits, the same Unreal Engine workflows. Once you’re doing these things you aren’t designing anymore, you’re just assembling. Your average AI guesswork is more unique.

It doesn’t show that much when you are simulating a rooftop skyline of New York or Paris, but it does show when you can’t tell the difference between Novigrad and Numenor just by looking at them.

Rendered, lit, and composited, these aren’t places anymore they are the end products of the same pipeline.

2. The Costume Rack Characters

This is where most of the accusations of “Woke” come from. On the face of it, it is indeed ludicrous to have African-Americans, Asians, Indians, Maori, and only the occasional White all living together in a tiny village in what is clearly coded as a Northern European setting.

But this is really a side-product of the system that produces it. Welcome one so far as Hollywood is concerned but it’s still side effect.

You see, these aren’t characters, they’re tag bundles:

Demographic tags

Personality tags

Trauma tags

Gender tags

Empowerment tags

Racial tags

And of course sexuality tags

These tags are carefully and lovingly assembled by marketing executives who were drastically over-promoted during the DVD boom. Each tag the end product of over priced market research but no actual creative process. These tags are thrown randomly at a wall and whatever tags are closest together becomes a “tagonist.” This “tagonist” is then presented to the audience as an identifiable individual character. There is no voice, nor world view, the only defining traits are the tags themselves.

They aren’t characters, they are loadouts for specific box checking missions. You can’t remember them because there is really nothing to remember.

The tag-onist is neither a protagonist or antagonist because as you are about to see, good and evil don’t exist in these worlds.

3. The Flattened Moral Landscape

Earned moral weight has been exchanged for default moral ambiguity.

You can ask deeper questions in a fantasy. I know this act is evil, so can the result of this action ever truly be good? Am I doing what is necessary — Or am I simply justifying sin?

It’s legitimate to ask questions like that – BUT NOT IN TOLKIEN! No, Sauron is no way shape or form a Walter White character unless you are going to literally the beginning of time. He is not a morally complex and tragic figure, he is absolute corruption that can not be negotiated with, only destroyed. It’s that clarity that gives the Lord of the Rings moral weight.

Everything in all ways forever being shades of grey is a modern infection. And in fantasy’s case patient zero is Game of Thrones. Its massive (early) success spawned lazy imitations. In fairness to Martin he built a world that earns its moral ambiguity. Loyalties that conflict colliding with political realities that create consequences that felt grounded and irreversible.

The Netflix Formula will always sand everything down all the time. So naturally, morality is flattened too. If Evil loses its teeth, and Good loses its meaning then Choice loses its consequence.

As naturally as a duck swims, Hollywood looked at “Build a world where moral complexity emerges” and truncated it into, “Make everything morally gray.” When you have no moral conflict, you only have moral fog. So difficult choices become interchangeable decisions.

More simply, if nothing can matter, then nothing will be remembered.

4. The Prestige Filter

Speaking of everything being grey.

*gak!* Desaturated color palettes, low, moody lighting, slow, self-serious pacing, characters who speak in hushed tones about Very Important Things.

This is the legacy of Game of Thrones and, like everything else, it’s the wrong lesson. Darkness is intrinsic to Westeros, it’s unavoidable as snow in the North and treachery at King’s Landing. And it has no place in Lothlorean.

The prestige filter is now part of the flattening process. The first few episodes of the Witcher actually had its own filter. It looked and felt like a product of the dark fairy tales of Eastern Europe with everything being harsh, strange, a little off-balance. But before the first season was over, the prestige filter was firmly muzzling any kind of individuality the series wanted to have.

Fantasy was never meant to be one note. It’s supposed to be the warmth of shire versus the terror of Mordor. The vitality of Zamora versus the decadent rot of Stygia. The glory of Lhankmar and the dark whimsy of Ankh-Morpork.

The setting is the all and the everything of high fantasy. But this isn’t setting at all. It’s just tone and tone—applied evenly, mechanically, across everything is just another way of making worlds interchangeable.

5. The Poreless Pinterest People

Casting is a critical component of the Netflix Forgettable Fantasy Formula. Although, in this case the metric addled executives are letting the people decide. The people on Netflix to be precise. And this one isn’t just hitting fantasy either, all period pieces now have this issue.

Here is Millie Bobby Brown, star of the Netflix fantasy film Damsel. She was cast because she has 72 million followers on Instagram (most of whom are technically real).

Source: Geeks of Color

Some part of your mind is probably wondering, what the hell is wrong with her smile? Well, she’s had botox at the age 21 to paralyze her top lip so it doesn’t curl downward when she smiles. You can’t smile like that naturally, so either it’s Botox or she needs a neurologist.

I picked her because you’ve heard of her but every fantasy show now has this problem. These people are unnaturally beautiful. No pores visible, no scars, no imperfection, and no buccal fat. No life lived without constant modern comfort.

You can’t find a single face of solider who has marched for weeks under a blistering sun or the haughty face of noble raised in a rigid alien caste system. These people have never known life without air conditioning and nutritionist.

Fantasy requires immersion and a sense of separation from modern life. Nothing shatters that illusion faster than looking at that face and thinking, she definitely has an Instagram account.

These people are never picked because they are right for the part, they are picked for broad appeal, global marketability and above all a social media presence.

The Plague Has Broken Out

If the contagion was limited to Netflix, then no problem. But since Netflix is the industry leader everyone copies their playbook. Except they tried to combine it with their existing creative structures and managed to make something that was genuinely worse.

The only exception was HBO. They have been around a lot longer and had a drastically different creative DNA.

Or at least they did. But if you have looked at the upcoming Harry Potter series and the current direction of House of the Dragon, it becomes obvious that the Netflix Forgettable Fantasy Formula’s creeping tendrils are starting to find their way into the cracks.

The tragedy of all this is that fantasy was never meant to be bland. It was meant to be strange, dangerous, and unforgettable. It gave you places you could return to in your mind years later, characters who felt like people you had actually met, and moral struggles that meant something because they demanded a choice. The old, (often cheap) productions understood this instinctively. They didn’t have the money to fake a world, so they had to commit to one. The modern shows have all the money in the world, and no idea how to use it. They don’t build worlds anymore. They assemble them. And in doing so, they strip out the very thing that makes fantasy worth watching in the first place.

What the streaming era has perfected is not storytelling, but consumption. These shows are engineered to be watched, to fill time, to keep you from turning them off, but not to linger. Not to haunt you. Not to matter. The formula smooths everything down until nothing can catch, nothing can challenge, nothing can offend, and nothing can stay with you. You finish a season, the next one auto-plays, and a week later it’s all gone, replaced by the next product in the queue. Not because it was bad, but because it was designed to be forgettable.

And that’s how you end up where we started. I was the exact audience for The Shannara Chronicles. It should have been something I remembered for the rest of my life, even if only as a curiosity or a failure. Instead, it vanished in my mind as if it had never existed at all. That’s the Netflix Fog of Fantasy.

It doesn’t destroy the worlds that came before it, it does something almost worse. It has replaced them with something that leaves no trace behind.

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