Dr. Stone's bad case of Premise-itis

I've written about the first season of "Dr. Stone" in this video. With the manga ending, I somewhat have a final impression of the series as a whole.

"Premise-itis" is real and it affects "Dr. Stone"... badly, but not all too badly.

Premise-itis is when the premise of a series - the propulsion that gets the story and the characters going - is too big in scope to fulfill. It is totally a term I made up.

Writers have to over-sell in order to push units. They're competing with other stories and other media even. It's simply the Red Queen hypothesis of capitalism. When you present a story, you have to present where it's going, and really crafty people - not crafty artists, mind, but simply crafty salesmen - have an ability to make a story look a lot bigger than it actually is. So whenever, say, a protagonist says they want to be a pirate king, or a ninja king, or a ghost king, or a wizard king, or a sci-fi/fantasy setting has all these characters and all these creatures and mythology and what not, we all shake our heads and say, "Oh, premise-itis. Why are you so delicious?" And, truth be told, the writers themselves believe in premise-itis and think there is more to their story than really there is.

Which is why, and perhaps this is unique to my generation, I've been avoiding grandiose stories and prefer those where the main character has to achieve a simple goal i.e. a boy wants to touch a girl's boob or an incompetent bodyguard has to protect his employer from assassins.

Not all stories succumb to premise-itis, but it's very, very hard not to. The more you promise, the more you expose yourself to fuck up. Take "Attack on Titan", for example, which had as fine an ending as possible - if you really thought about it logically, there wasn't much of a way for Iseyama to stick the landing perfectly. The story was so big - stretching through millenia but also through spiritual realms and human morality - that any ending where Eren and Reiner beat each other up would seem extremely small. When looked upon from that perspective, he did the best job possible.

Then there was the excellent anime "Odd Taxi" that came out winter of last year, which fell hard on its face, or into a river, in the ending. Click on the following text for the spoiler alert: After setting up all these characters with their subplots, the main character's taxi just jumps off a bridge, and everyone says, "Oh, well now the series is ending." The two comedians, who are in a professional rivalry, become friends again. The idol group just dissolves. No one knows who killed the girl. The video-game addict decides not to be a video-game addict anymore. I was rooting for the show so much and it just crumbled into nothing at the end, though there were early signs that it was going to bust (mostly Odokawa's inconsistent characterization). Which is why there is no review of it on this site.

The symptoms of Premise-itis

The beginning of a story infected with premise-itis is usually the most interesting part. That turns out to be enough to hook the audience for the entire series' duration.

"Dr. Stone" has an incredibly interesting premise: what do people do when the whole world has been petrified?

When I made that "Optimism of Dr. Stone" video, what impressed me about the story was that, rather than people falling into despair, Inagaki focused on people needing to be pragmatic and surviving. The only way to do that was through science, so he focused on one particularly smart person. The story took that premise, showed the flaws of that smart person, but then covered those flaws by introducing a very robust cast.

The story doesn't really recover once the war with Tsukasa begins, and, in hindsight, it gets really satisfying when they get to America. (Who cares about spoilers at this point.)

It needs to be said: Tsukasa's empire is not an empire. Empires are defined by geography. There is no sense of territory in "Dr. Stone".

Honestly, it might not have hurt the story if it did get deeper into stuff like that.

You may say, "But the show is about science, not about politics." But what made the show interesting in the beginning was that science aided and overcame politics. By not getting into politics, you no longer show that; it just becomes about using technology to stop thugs.

In hindsight, it might have helped if Tsukasa's worst fear - that people would misuse technology - came true, which kinda happens with the Medusa, the petrification device, but this wasn't really explored to fruition. I mean they fought that island village, but... it's an island village. Tsukasa was a great foil for Senku because he had a modern sensibility, and was, in many ways, a modern leader.

When they try to investigate the petrification device on that island, that was, despite the writing being excellent, the nadir of the series.

In hindsight - and I'm going to say "in hindsight" a lot, because I thoroughly enjoyed the technical writing of the series - Senku not having any flaws is a major problem for the series. It's not because you don't empathize with Senku; I never really believed in that way of thinking, that the audience needs to empathize with characters. The issue is that only a complete cynic or degenerate would disagree with Senku; everyone else would say, "That's reasonable." People in a story need to disagree because, at a basic level, then the audience is not sure what exactly will happen in a series. Even the main character's friends need to disagree, in a small way, so that they can still surprise the reader. I'm not saying at all that the main character has to be an incompetent boob.

The only people who would disagree with Senku on a fundamental, philosophical basis would be people who lived in modern society with Senku, Tsukasa being an excellent example. Every one of us has our own concept of how happiness is achieved, and we would naturally disagree with Senku on certain things. Tsukasa basically believed strongly in government and its role in human happiness, but the series did him dirty by not going into the details of his society. There could have been an interesting antagonist who believed in the binding forces of religion, a character much like Enrico Pucci of "Stone Ocean".

Of course, this is the reason why Xeno is possibly the series' best villain.

Xeno is a scientist just like Senku, but he believes in science's ability to project power. Where Senku is more of a scientist who likes to amuse and delight, Xeno believes strongly in production and output. Xeno's military might, measured in battleships and guns, made for a great challenge to Senku's ingenuity and agility. The battle with Stanley's fighter aircraft and the race in South America were very, very satisfying. But the reason why they were satisfying is that the villain's methods worked, and you could not easily dismiss them; the work Xeno put behind his technology was equal and maybe greater than Senku's.

Then everyone gets petrified again and Suika turns 17 or something. This begins the true downward slide of "Dr. Stone". They then try to build a rocket and find out that a race of cybernetic beings petrified the whole world, thus causing immortality, in order to convince humanity to propagate their species. Senku essentially becomes science king.

Oh, Premise-itis

A series doesn't have to be perfect all the way through, it just has to be right. Premise-itis makes it very hard to discern what's the right thing to focus on versus the wrong, especially when the story is so big and encapsulates all these elements.

Which is sad for "Dr. Stone's" case because the series is written very well on a technical level. Go on and read it for a good study on how to start and end a chapter, how to make scenarios interesting, and how to write with proper cadence.

But the series overpromised, and there's no way to overcome that. It's better to promise your readers excellent writing. But if you're going to promise a lot, like Araki has done for many of the Jojo parts, taking things slowly, and evaluating frequently when direction should be changed, are the ideal approaches.

The main flaw of "Dr. Stone" is that it genuinely believed that science could overcome anything, but the reality is that writing can overcome anything, because it makes up all the rules. At least, within the safety of its pages.