Incidentally, someone earlier brought up the detective story analogy, and how people don’t like stories that are about figuring out stuff in the past (citing Sherlock being the only well-known fictional detective as evidence). That’s been annoying me, but I hadn’t been able to quite form an explanation as to why. Now, however, I’ve been able to put my finger on it:
First, as one of the resident, if less active than previously, lorophiles, I do actually enjoy digging into the past as much as speculating on the future.
Second, the detective story genre is much bigger than Sherlock. Sherlock, or to be more precisely Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is well known because he’s essentially the Tolkein of the genre – the ur-example that everyone, regardless of whether they’re familiar with the genre or not, is familiar with or at least has heard of. However, there are others that are reasonably well-known – I’m only peripherally interested in the genre myself and have mostly picked it up through watching detective shows that happened to be on air so I remember the characters rather than the writers, but Cadfael, Poirot, and Miss Marple all come to mind. More recently, there’s Bones and all those various CSI shows, which are much more popular among the general populace – if not MMO players – than the fantasy genre. It’s a big genre – there’s a reason why “the butler did it” is such a well-known cliche, and which other genre would you expect that cliche to come up?
The distinction is that good detective shows give enough clues along the way to at least present a credible illusion that the audience could figure it out before the hero(es). Sometimes they’ll be right, sometimes they’ll be wrong, sometimes there’ll be one clue that clinches it that doesn’t arrive until the climax, sometimes they’ll be deliberately mislead, sometimes they’ll make a blind guess and just happen to get it right – but the audience at least feels they’ve had a chance.
In the case of the Living Story: Regarding Scarlet’s aims, I think we got to that point around the time we found out Scarlet was involved in the Thaumanova reactor disaster and what she learned there. Some people had guessed it earlier, but back then there were so many theories flying around and so little to actually go on that the infinite monkeys principle applied – pretty much every reasonable possibility and several unreasonable ones had been put forth, and with so many theories somebody had to be right.
However, there are still a lot of mysteries we haven’t really got anything on. We know what the dredge and charr get out of the Molten Alliance, but not how that alliance formed. We still have no idea how she recruited the Aetherblades, or what her connection is with the steam creatures (and therefor the Watchknights) is.
To those who think Scarlet hate means she’s succeeded as a villain:
People don’t hate Scarlet like Game of Thrones fans hate Joffrey.
They hate her the way Star Wars fans hate Jar Jar Binks.
