text/gemini; lang=en
# Too much reincorporation can be a good thing
One of the worst parts of Shrinking is also the best. In writing, there is “reincorporation” which just means “reuse existing characters, items, or locations” (as opposed to bringing in new stuff). Both reincorporation and bringing in new things have their upsides.
Shrinking really overdoes reincorporation to a ridiculous degree so much that it constantly reminds me that this is fiction, this is a show. Yeah, yeah, I can handle laser swords and aliens without being jarred out of a watching experience but the constant crisscrossing “wait, those two know each other, too?” of Shrinking is out of this world. Friends and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia also has a very cross-connected core cast of characters but in a way that was foundationally set up to be one. In Shrinking, it’s always so weird and fluky and farfetched.
The trade-off is that we do get a close-knit, cozy community of a show. So I don’t know. I hate it and I love it. Not something I’d want out of every show, I don’t think, because it does make the show feel super artificial. But it’s an artificial sweet that does manage to be comforting.
Roger wrote in with an example of too much reincorporation that doesn’t work for him:
> the way Star Wars keeps coming back to the same few people, which makes the universe feel small when it’s meant to be huge. But if you’ve got something that isn’t meant to be huge...
But in Star Wars, there’s a few differences:
* there’s an explicitly magical explanation (the Force)
* people sharing the same goals and same vibes will keep running into each other
* there’s not cross connection, there’s repeated connection. Solo meets Qira again, Luke meets Vader a handful of times. It’s not “oh suddenly Artoo and Wicket run into each other in a bar on Bespin”.
That said, I do hate the “Force royalty” trope, and I loved how Rogue One and The Last Jedi were on the track to subverting that. I love how the Force permeates the entire story so that “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” is a catchphrase; I don’t like the “pure bloodline” vibes.
In both Star Wars and Shrinking, it’s also that… the world, the galaxy even, might be big, but here are the people we follow. Not that Star Wars with the expanded canon and legends has a particularly small cast.
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