Welcome To Eltingville Storyboards (Act 1, pgs 15-23a)

More Welcome to Eltingville storyboards by Stephen DeStefano.

Nothing much to say about this stretch, other than, dialog-wise, I would not have Pete or Lord Atrocity say the word "midgety" in a script in this manner. Times change, the world hopefully evolves, and sane people learn things and make different choices in their creative work. It (arguably) sounds funny in the sentence, Pete's response is (arguably) funny, but you can always find other words that are not harmful and still get the joke across (all jokes are arguably funny, btw). Or you can write a different joke! It's that simple. Life doesn't hinge on one joke or line of dialog. If you're talented you can come up with something else that doens't toss a slur out. It's not being politically correct, it's respecting the audience, respecting people and not being lazy.

Lazy writers, whiners and creeps can scream "woke" all they want, that's fine, could be they just suck and their sense of humor never got past high school. Words have meaning, art has meaning, society needs to evolve and be more repectful because we have to live with each other. Yes, artists should be free to take their work where they want, but if someone can only punch down, they might be someone with a limited talent. They might have some other problems on top of that.

Edginess for its own sake is a creative dead end. It's easy to throw certain words into a comic or a script to shock or get a cheap laugh. I've done it plenty of times. Sometimes we go too far, and you shoulkd be able to recognize, adjust and revise if you think you're pissing on marginalized people. We're responsible for our words as well as for our own creative "vision" (I love when creators use "artistic vision" to justify slurs or toilet humor, but, whatever). You can serve both, it just takes a little extra thought. I know we all hate inconvenience, some things are worth it. I'm not talking about blunting your work. You don't have to police yourself to the point of paranoia and be worried about every little thing in a script or comic, just be aware of things, read the big room and act like an adult human being if called out. We all make mistakes.

You can still write about anything. You can still write crazy, out-there WTF shit. You just don't have to be needlessly cruel (unless you're punching up, then you can go ballistic imho, nothing hurts people in power anyway, unfortunately. No evil was ever defeated through mean political cartoons or stand up routines. Not even a dent. So open the floodgates). Comedians have been complaining of being hemmed in by societal change for a century. Maybe even longer. Somehow we have more goddamned comedians around than ever. Ugh.

Anyway.

Next time I'll probably have notes instead of an unplanned rant. We'll be getting into Lord Atrocity's freeze spell, Pete's severed head, frozen anti-freeze potions and possibly the deleted monster sequence.

More, soon, later.

All the Welcome to Eltingville storyboard posts will be tagged with: "WTE Storyboards" in case folks want to look through them more easily.

The opening title sequence storyboard post can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/welcome-to-title-93300910

Act 1, pgs 1-14a can be found here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/welcome-to-act-1-121083950

Stephen DeStefano can now be found on Bluesky: @stephendestefano.bsky.social