💼 Careercow Dan Harmon - Creator of Community, co-creator of Rick and Morty, and barely functional alcoholic

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Yellow Yam Scam said:
Another way to look at it is that he's put his work in, has become wealthy and will have residuals coming in until his children's children die so he can just screw around with his own little passion projects instead of being a cog in the Time Warner/Sony Pictures machine.
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Haramburger said:
He claims he wants kids but he was married and couldn't manage to inseminate & now that relationship has crashed so let's not get too charitable here.
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can you imagine the damage this drunk fuck could do to a child...let's hope the gallons of liquor have made him sterile
 
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On the one hand, US animation is stagnant as an industry so I try not to care too much about the whole mess (since all the real innovation is coming from other countries, and by that I don't even mean anime.)

On the other hand, fuuuuck this guy and his shitty personality cult. I had to try and keep a straight face when my sodding English teacher in college brought up his diagram in class.
 
Parthenos said:
On the one hand, US animation is stagnant as an industry so I try not to care too much about the whole mess (since all the real innovation is coming from other countries, and by that I don't even mean anime.)

On the other hand, fuuuuck this guy and his shitty personality cult. I had to try and keep a straight face when my sodding English teacher in college brought up his diagram in class.
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Fuck his "story circle" too, while we're at it.
 
KillThemCrackasBabies said:
Fuck his "story circle" too, while we're at it.
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Yeah, that was what she had, specifically name-checking Harmon. I honestly don't know if she respected his writing skills or was trying to be "hip to the kids." I hope it's the latter since she was otherwise cool.

Truth is, anyone who considers Rick and Morty good on any level hasn't really seen the extent of what the medium can really do. I've accepted, though, that after watching stuff like The Tragedy of Man, I'm spoiled when it comes to the possibilities of "adult" animation. You want an animated work that discusses the purpose of civilization, the nature of God, and confronts the horrors of existence? Look no further.
 
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The "story circle" actually is this acclaimed thing, but if you actually looks at it it's just a way to write "meatier" sitcom episodes for shows where you need to snap back to the status quo at the end.

  • A character is in a zone of comfort,
  • But they want something.
  • They enter an unfamiliar situation,
  • Adapt to it,
  • Get what they wanted,
  • Pay a heavy price for it,
  • Then return to their familiar situation,
  • Having changed.
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That's it; "Do a thing and then shake your world up a bit, and then go back to the way things were but you can sort of acknowledge a thing happened and use that going forward".

Which I guess is good for, again, sitcoms. But goddamn you'd have the thought the fat fuck literally reinvented storytelling with it. At it's core it's just "How a five act play goes" with extra steps. Motherfucker didn't think it up.
 
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KillThemCrackasBabies said:
The "story circle" actually is this acclaimed thing, but if you actually looks at it it's just a way to write "meatier" sitcom episodes for shows where you need to snap back to the status quo at the end.



That's it; "Do a thing and then shake your world up a bit, and then go back to the way things were but you can sort of acknowledge a thing happened and use that going forward".

Which I guess is good for, again, sitcoms. But goddamn you'd have the thought the fat fuck literally reinvented storytelling with it. At it's core it's just "How a five act play goes" with extra steps. Motherfucker didn't think it up.
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His own shows don't even follow the formula all the time. Probably because it's a hacky, cliched way to tell a story and if every episode followed the same formula then nobody would care about the show.
 
His story circle stuff is just a distillation of Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey". Some people talk about it like it's a genius thing he came up with, but he really just read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and dumbed it down.
 
Suck the Cock said:
His own shows don't even follow the formula all the time. Probably because it's a hacky, cliched way to tell a story and if every episode followed the same formula then nobody would care about the show.
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The first few years of Community did to a t. And for what it's worth those are the episodes I liked the most, before shitty parodies dominated the format.
 
KillThemCrackasBabies said:
The first few years of Community did to a t. And for what it's worth those are the episodes I liked the most, before shitty parodies dominated the format.
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Early Community episodes were probably the closest anyone ever got to consistently writing a story that fits the broad strokes of what Harmon thinks is good writing, sure. But even those episodes missed some of the points, and what's the point of the "story circle" if even its creator can't follow it consistently?

Like, what's the point of the first two points (the main character is comfortable but then they start a journey), if any plot, including early Community, can just as easily be caused by an outside force? Someone who doesn't go on a journey themselves, but makes the main character's lives worse unless they fix it? The cliche hero's journey involves the protagonist refusing the call to adventure, at first! Sure, if you believed in the story circle bullshit, you could find a way to phrase it so that technically it fits the broad strokes. But then, if you're actively trying to find an explanation for something that was supposed to, itself, be an explanation, then you're not really accomplishing anything. You've just made all analysis more confusing.
 
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Abaddon said:
His story circle stuff is just a distillation of Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey". Some people talk about it like it's a genius thing he came up with, but he really just read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and dumbed it down.
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Harmon himself acknowledges it's just the monomyth with radial symmetry.
 
I may be really late for this statement, but everything that comes out of this man seems like something a nominally-successful Lucas Werner would go on an hours-long rant about
 
Well doesn't seem like Harmon's getting into much public lolcow behavior these days without constantly being drunk on Twitter, but his instagram is still relatively active and there's a few gems here and there.

This one I think sums up Harmon quite nicely:
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If you must wander the desert - and you must - do it with a family of photographers. Coming home to working WiFi with a surplus of awesome thanksgiving shots, this one by @danvidetich. I think it’s a solid billboard for a Showtime Original called “Pay Dirt,” just spitballing but maybe it’s about a disparate family of grifters descending on Death Valley to find the potentially treasure-laden grave of their much loathed patriarch, Jimmy Dirt, who appears each episode as a ghost played by whoever you get when Michael Keaton passes. It’s equally possible the ghost is “real” or a manifestation of their shame or even part of an actual macro-grift perpetrated by my character, whose grifts DO involve some fake psychic activity. At the end of the first season there’s a reveal that was already predicted and dismissed by Reddit because there’s a fundamental logic flaw to it because the writers were making it up and the creator checked out early because he only wanted to work with Michael Keaton
 
AnOminous said:
He looks like he's so drunk he's barely managing not to just fall over.
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Him being his usual sloppy self contrasted with a normal family is what really sells it I think. You don't get the full effect of just how much of a complete, pathetic wreck Dan is when there isn't a mom in spandex running pants with her two kids and her girlfriend who's like 20 years younger than him standing right next to him.
 
And here I thought he had almost learned something by not returning to his Twitter. Figures.
 
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