cornerofmadness

I wanted to talk a little bit about prequels and the troubles with them. I was talking earlier in the week with

all_choseny who is more excited to see the Potterverse prequels than I am. I hear GMM is delayed on the next Game of Thrones book because he's gotten hooked on the prequels. Hell I've written a few myself. But in many ways they are tough to do and even tougher to do right.

Don't get me wrong I'm not anti-prequel. I'm quite excited to see Boom!'s early Slayers comics and I think that's because it's so wide open. Outside of the First Slayer, and the two Spike killed we know next to nothing about pre-Buffy slayers (unless there's stuff in the comics I don't remember or never read) So it's hard really to mess things up.

Enterprise suffered a lot in the Star Trek universe because it was a prequel set so far ahead of Kirk's time. (It suffered from some bad writing too but that's another topic). They didn't want to stick with the same old same old villains and in a way I can't blame them. I can't tell you how damn tired I am of daleks and cybermen in the Whoverse. But they turned around and created a supervillain in the Xindi that seems utterly implausible that we never heard of them in ANY other ST verse.

So prequels can be hamstrung by existing canon. God knows I was when I published Blood Red Roulette to the point I had to put out an author's note for the book to say the pre-existing short story canon was erroneous (and in partly it was).

That's a bit of my problem with the second Fantastic Beasts movie. We already know Grimwald isn't going to DO anything to Dumbledore. We know he's not going to get the wizards to enslave muggles. At best, he paves the way for Voldemort so half the teeth have been removed from the movie. For me that's what was better about the first movie which still had problems, it was less tied to what comes later (but the obscurus is SO powerful it's as implausible we've not heard of it as the Xindi were)