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OPINION: LG15 is a Cult Victim That Should Lose Its Religion

 
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ir3act
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 2:58 pm    Post subject: OPINION: LG15 is a Cult Victim That Should Lose Its Religion Reply with quote

In the chatroom, grace289 suggested I keep all my LG15 blog-style essays in a single thread with a heading that I would periodically update. Sounds good to me!

Latest Essay
LG15 is a Cult Victim That Should Lose its Religion

Previous Essays
**

REVIVAL WISHES: 2008 VERSUS 2016
TL,DR: LG15 coming back after such a long hiatus leaves it really detached from the original series and the unresolved cliffhanger of 2008. While I admire the creators courageously stepping into this challenging situation, I wonder if a soft reboot might have been better. Ideas for how a reboot could have worked follow.

So, what does everyone want out of a LONELYGIRL15 revival? I honestly don't know what I want. I know what I did want back in 2008. I wrote it into a fanfic called LONELYJOURNAL15 with help from Renegade15 and suze900.

I wanted a new LG15 series with an original character who wouldn't know anything about the Order or the Hymn of One and would interact with the other characters, providing both an entry point character and a way to put the Order back in the background (since the lead character knows nothing of it) and refocus on the slice of life stories. I wanted the Order debunked and reduced to a manageable size instead of being a cult so powerful that it couldn't be rendered on a web series budget. I wanted Sarah's evil explained away as a ruse. I wanted Gina alive and as a main character. I wanted a final story with a climax and conclusion.

However, I find that in 2016, I don't want those same things from a revival. I don't know what I want to see with LG15 anymore.

All the stuff I mentioned above -- I don't think it would have any impact to do any of it now. THE RESISTANCE finished in 2008. It has been far too long to pick up where the series left off and do so convincingly. All the actors have aged. Many have moved on from acting; Becki Kregoski runs a brewery, Alexandra Dreyfus is a professional photographer, etc.. Setting the videos in the past and coming up with some absurd explanation for why they were hidden for eight years would be logistically cumbersome and emotionally too late.

As much as I want Gina to be alive and well, Crystal Young would not be able to revive the Gina who was so carelessly killed off when her character was still in the process of coming out of her shell. Crystal Young is a married mother in her late twenties now. She can't play a teen anymore. So reviving Gina would need to acknowledge the years in between.

To do it with even a splinter of impact would probably have us discovering she survived the gunshot, was held prisoner, eventually escaped and built a quiet life in hiding -- all of which would have happened off-camera. The journey with Gina that got cut short would remain unfinished because the issues Gina was dealing with back in 2008 aren't the ones she'd be dealing with in 2016 and there's no going back now. Time has moved on.

Revealing Sarah to have been pretending to be evil now would be an awkward afterthought to an already awkward turn of character.

Repiloting is tough; this revived LG15 is essentially a new show -- except they secured the services of Jessica Lee Rose at least in isolated videos filmed far from the main action and they got Yousef Abu-Taleb back. This was probably essential; LG15 is revived with its original lead characters, giving this revival the right to consider itself LG15 where Season 3 and THE RESISTANCE often seemed insecure in its place in the mythos.

The first handful of videos and material seem to be focused on more intrigue with the Hymn of One and the Order -- and I confess, while I'm intrigued to see how Jenni Powell and Logan Rapp can make a meal out of these tangled threads and fractured remnants, the Order doesn't really interest me aside from being a useful plot device for impossible situations. I went into that at length here, so I won't get into it again.

What I really watched LG15 for was the characters. The sense of feeling close to fictional characters who were nevertheless as real as any online friend I'd only know through chats and blogs and vlogs. I didn't watch for the plot as much as the sense of intimacy, the casual interplay, the way Bree and Daniel represented all the struggles of adolescence. Slice of life stories in a fascinating and somewhat interactive format.

So, if I were to revive LG15 today and I could get the original actors -- I would probably do a soft reboot. The first video: Dorkiness Still Prevails.

Bree is 26-years-old, making her first video blog as part of a work project. She admits that this isn't her first time but she stopped vlogging due to a series of events that she'd rather not get into at this juncture as she is just not into talking about all the death cults and blood rites and faked deaths that lurk in a past she is eager to forget. It happened, it's (partially) on YouTube -- she doesn't want to focus on it anymore. She wants to focus on what she's doing today.

We find out about her job -- she's a social worker and consultant for a relief agency for people who are dealing with the trauma of abuse. She engages in updated and slightly more grown up versions of her old favourites like Proving Psychology Wrong. She is still socially awkward despite her trade and she and her corporate videographer friend, Daniel, get into all sorts of hijinks.

But as Bree and Daniel live and document their normal lives, it slowly becomes apparent that they can only ignore their traumas for so long. The Hymn of One is coming back and it's bringing the past with them.

So, yeah! A soft reboot. Obviously, that's not what LG15: ANCHOR COVE is. Obviously, Jessica Lee Rose is filming her material from Australia, she is not in Los Angeles, she would not be able to participate in the sort of reboot I suggest, and LG15: ANCHOR COVE is clearly serving a very different creative vision and operating under certain constraints and availabilities.

I don't really know what ANCHOR COVE is trying to accomplish, but it's clearly engaged with the Order mythology and eager to create puzzles and provide clues to the fans to engage them in the mystery of how Bree can be alive. Bree's resurrection is, to me, utterly ridiculous -- but resurrections always are and Jessica Lee Rose's involvement gives this revival a credibility the series had lost with her absence. Bree's ridiculous reappearance doesn't feel so ridiculous if you have the actress who plays her onscreen and involved in selling it.

I guess what it comes down to is that I accepted LG15 was gone and that I'd gotten all I ever would from it -- I was resigned to it and to move on, I gave myself closure; I wrote a story where Sarah wasn't evil, Gina was alive, Jonas and Daniel and Sarah took down the Order, Gina and a new friend defeated the creator of the Hymn of One, they scattered Bree's ashes to the swimming hole. They made their peace with the past and stepped forward into the future.

I have to set that aside now. Jonas disappeared after THE RESISTANCE, Daniel thinks he's dead. The Order is stronger than ever. The war never ended and they're still winning every round. But miraculously, impossibly, astonishingly -- Bree Avery lives. There's hope.

Daniel's grief over seeing this Bree -- "Not my Bree" -- it moved me. So, this revival has emotionally engaged me. I'm hopeful that this will be interesting.


But I don't really know what I want out of LG15 anymore as a viewer. What I really want is for it to be 2008 again and to set things right. That's not possible.

I suppose I will, at the very least, enjoy what I'm sure will be a fine web series and a worthy addition to LG15 -- and also make use of this opportunity to apologize to all the very nice people in this forum whom I mistreated and to show that I've grown the hell up since THE RESISTANCE and won't pull any of that old crap again.[/b]


Last edited by ir3act on Wed Jun 29, 2016 9:20 pm; edited 10 times in total
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ir3act
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 8:11 pm    Post subject: What Can They Fix in 2016? Reply with quote

LG15: What Can They Fix in 2016?

TL,DR:
It'd be cool if LG15's 2016 revival resurrected Gina, de-evilized Sarah and made sense of the Order, but focusing exclusively on the past would make the revival a sequel that's come far too late to have emotional impact. Those wounds, while painful, are also in the distant past and hopefully, the revived LG15 can touch on the past but be relevant and meaningful for today.

I think everyone would agree that LG15 made mistakes. Some were errors from being pioneers and early adopters of a new storytelling format; some were errors from failing to respect the characters and fans. Eight years after THE RESISTANCE ended on a cliffhanger, I wonder what's worth fixing and what's best left alone. Below is my list along with ruminations.

Killing Bree: Killing off your title character is always a difficult course. Whether or not Bree's death and the aftermath were handled well (and I think they were), I don't think we can debate that LONELYGIRL15 was stronger with LonelyGirl15 in it.

Can this be fixed? I'd say it's 1/3 fixed. Bree Avery is alive. But an explanation is needed and then there's getting the character back to doing what they were designed to do. In Bree's case, she was made to serve as the audience identification character, something she's not doing as a brainwashed cultist.

Given that Jessica Lee Rose is filming her LG15: ANCHOR COVE material far from the other actors in LA, I don't know how likely it is for Bree to return as series lead. They may have to carry on with Bree in diminished capacity.

Killing Gina: Gina's death was a mistake. The main issue was that Gina, as Bree's sister, served as a chance to help a trait positive girl and get it right. The actress had superb chemistry with all the other actors. The creators seemed to use killing off Gina to make the Order threatening again, but the random fashion in which it happened (the sniper was aiming for Jonas) made the Order incompetent. What's more, Gina's death was so muddled that viewers assumed she'd return at some point.

Her absence made LG15 depressing as opposed to a show that explored depression. By erasing Bree's sister, the show floundered for any right to call itself LONELYGIRL15. That said, I'm not entirely sure Gina is relevant to LG15 at this point. Despite her muddled death being easily reversed, it's been eight years. It's no longer a question of bringing back a good character for Season 3 as much as it is finding her a meaningful role for her in LG15: ANCHOR COVE. It would be awkward and clumsy if ANCHOR COVE sought to resurrect Gina as nothing but a balm on a past wound -- unless Gina somehow served a meaningful purpose in the ANCHOR COVE story.

Ultimately, ANCHOR COVE will live or die based on how well it tells its own story, not how well it cleans up somebody else's.

Loss of Normalcy: The great appeal of LONELYGIRL15 was not the Order; it was the sense of intimacy with fictional characters doing ordinary things in the format of the vlogs. Day to day life took a hit when the series introduced a teenaged billionaire into the show. With Season 3 and THE RESISTANCE, normal life evapourated from the series. This is probably the easiest thing to restore.

Sarah as a Villain: Another massive error was Sarah being revealed as an agent of the Order whose mission was to deliver Jonas and Maggie. This makes no sense given that since Sarah's first appearance, she's had access to Jonas and then Emma and Sarah. She lived with them for over a year. We had spent too much time with Sarah in her vlogs to believe that it was all an act and if Sarah had been evil the whole time, nobody told the actress playing her. There are no hints in her performance whatsoever.

There's also the fact that Sarah was a really popular and enjoyable character due to the wit and acidic charm that actress Alexandra Dreyfus gave the role. The creators, perhaps less charmingly, used the actress' cleavage for YouTube thumbnail images that would cause brief viewership spikes, but thankfully, Alexandra's humour and self-awareness made the character so much more than a body. To reveal that Alexandra's contributions to LG15 were all a sham and that this much-loved character was a lie -- it was nonsensical in the context of the plot and incomprehensibly hateful to the fans.

But, like Gina, I wonder if the situation is so distant from the present day that little can be done to address it in a fashion that is meaningful for LG15: ANCHOR COVE. It is pointless to revisit the past unless it serves the present. Perhaps ANCHOR COVE will show Gina and Sarah running a fish and chips restaurant under false identities and Sarah will throw out two lines about going undercover to save her captured friend; maybe Gina or Sarah is Daniel's ally.

Time has moved on; any overtures ANCHOR COVE makes to the past should be made with that in mind.

Constant Confusion: I would say that LG15 rivals THE X-FILES for having the most contradictory, confusing, impenetrable continuity in existence. The fact that LG15 ran for two years while THE X-FILES ran for nine seasons and a mini-series speaks to how quickly LG15 sped into a continuity quagmire. The Order, a vague set of ominous hints in the early videos, quickly became a bloated collection of irreconcilable information.

Their power levels make no sense: if the Order owns corporate America and the police and politicians, why are they so incapable of tracking down our protagonists who document their activities and location for YouTube videos? We're told Shadows are physically powerful; onscreen, they are overpowered at every turn. The Order's multi-million dollar genetics labs look low-rent and abandoned -- which is not to knock a low-budget project, but to point out that the dialogue is at odds with the images. The secrecy of the Order makes no sense: It's initially claimed that Watchers and the Hymn of One converts know nothing of the Elders and the Ceremony, but the show offers no explanation for how that can remain the case after the protagonists' vlogs, especially by Season 3.

The internal workings of the Order are nonsensical. Season 1 offered the explanation that, for whatever reason, Bree must choose to participate in the Ceremony; the Order will not force her, they seek to convince her. But by Season 2, the Order is sending henchmen to forcibly kidnap Emma and uses Gina as a test subject, and in Season 3, Nadia Dalton is a captive.

The Elders are described as the sole recipients of eternal life, yet they inexplicably have total loyalty from their mortal cannon fodder henchmen. We're told that the Elders are a highly select and powerful group except then new converts like Sarah and Edward Salinas are able to ascend to that rank through a single demonstration of loyalty.

And when seeking to recruit politicians, the Elders aim shockingly low and recruit a corrupt, embezzling Los Angeles City Councillor whom they end up having to assassinate. That's right -- despite wanting our heroes captured, the Elders outsource the murder of a random member of the team to this recruit despite the fact that that random person could (and does) end up being one of the trait positive girls whom the Order needs alive for their transfusions.

The Order doesn't make any sense. It's an all-powerful supercult with insufficient resources to capture a bunch of vlogging teenagers that's hidden in secrecy all over YouTube and has infiltrated every level of American society but is trying to establish a power base with on a municipal level while having billions of dollars to spend on facilities in abandoned hospitals and cheap camps in the desert with invincibly drug-enhanced henchmen who are easily fled and a double agent planted so well that she passed over hundreds of opportunities to betray our heroes for well over a year.

I don't know what to do with the Order. The Order is impossible to take seriously when the writers have made them as powerful or as competent as required for whatever action or consequences the writers want to integrate or avoid. An antagonist needs to have clear means, methods and motives in order to pose a threat. The Order has zero for three. The Order is the worst aspect of the series and the reason the show collapsed on itself.

Season 3 and THE RESISTANCE undermined the Order so badly that any subsequent portrayal is marred. It's impossible to ignore the extensive back catalog of contradictory portrayals. Onscreen, the Order is a clumsy and incoherent presence. Focusing on them made it explicit how the original writers had no gameplan for the Order, had no idea what the Order really was and had no intention of filling in those blanks. Quite inexplicably, the original creators made the Order the driving force of their franchise despite giving it no planning or consideration.

I cannot imagine that Jenni Powell and Logan Rapp are blind to these problems, but I also can't imagine how they plan to deal with them. I can really think of only two ways: either debunk the Order and reveal that it's actually less powerful than they appeared and a lot of their power was a ruse to intimidate. The second way would be to declare that the Order fell apart offscreen and the current version of the Order is a new organization that Jenni and Logan can depict on their own terms any need to explain inconsistencies or tie the present to the past.

Austin McConnell attempted this with LG15: OUTBREAK by having the Hymn of One defeated and replacing the Order with SHENtek, but it was handled in such an abrupt fashion that it felt unconvincing and unbelievable.

When forced to write the Order in my fanfic, I didn't try. I had the team find a storage locker containing Shadow, Deacon and Watcher costumes, props, fake IDs, Verdus and Lifesblood plaques, character sheets -- all indicating that the Order was actually a small organization using props, effects and hired actors to seem bigger than they were. It was a strained retcon that only worked because LG15 written and filmed by a small organization using props, effects and hired actors to make themselves seem bigger than they were, so any continuity contradictions were in line with how the series came off anyway.

Jenni and Logan seem to have rejected both methods in saying the Order is more powerful than ever while declaring OUTBREAK to be out of continuity. My limitations (and Austin's) are probably not Jenni's and Logan's, of course. Smile

Short Term Thinking and a Lack of Payoff: The great failure of LG15's third season and THE RESISTANCE was that the creators seemed to stop putting any thought into the larger story they were telling and every bit of planning seemed to exist on a video to video basis. As a result, Season 3 seems written around shock value moments (the Shadow in the house, Prom) and setpieces (the cruise ship) rather than where the series is going despite doing ongoing continuity. As a result, Season 3 and THE RESISTANCE are unsatisfying because they don't seem to have a clear beginning, middle or end -- there's nothing completed, nothing finished, nothing resolved.

The creators, having learned all the wrong lessons from THE X-FILES, didn't seem to understand that a well-written ending to a plot easily serves as a new beginning. But the show raised numerous plots -- Elizabeth Avery, Jonas' chip, capturing Lucy, Edward Salinas, Gina's memories, Carl's defection -- and it was like they couldn't figure out how to move these plots to a conclusion, so they would end by killing off a key player and there'd be no progression in the story. THE RESISTANCE is by far the worst offender with establishing a rival to the Order through Lifesblood Labs only to do nothing with the plot and end on a nonsensical cliffhanger where Sarah has been evil all along and Jonas is declared to be trait positive with no build up whatsoever.

Jenni and Logan strike me as pretty sharp; I'm sure they've taken time to plan. The fact that the title character is far from them and filming her material in isolation demands planning.

End Thoughts: I honestly feel that most of this cannot be fixed or is not worth fixing. I don't think resurrecting Gina and de-evilizing Sarah, as welcome as it would be, is a good starting point for a story about what LG15 means in 2016 -- although it might be nice to incorporate those elements alongside ANCHOR COVE's primary goals if it can be done effectively and meaningfully. I don't think the Order is a workable concept, but it looks like Jenni and Logan are going to try based on Daniel saying that the Order is more powerful than ever. I would prefer a return to normalcy and there's nothing preventing it from returning, but nothing I've seen so far suggests it's the goal and maybe Jenni and Logan are aiming to do something different. In terms of just being more prepared and forward thinking -- that's something Jenni and Logan can do, although they will likely do it to very different results than anything I ruminate on here.

This has been something of a stream of consciousness. Can LG15 fix its past in 2016? It might be nice to apply some salve to certain problem areas, but at the end of all this, I find myself thinking it might be best to just leave certain areas alone and move on. The Order, to my dismay, seems to be a critical point to address.


Last edited by ir3act on Wed Jun 29, 2016 9:22 pm; edited 3 times in total
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ir3act
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 3:38 pm    Post subject: LG15 OPINION: LG15 is a Cult Victim and the Order Must Go Reply with quote

LG15 is a Cult Victim That Should Lose its Religion

TL;DR: LG15's myopic devotion to the Order is inherently limiting and prevents the series from evolving and growing. LG15 writers have acted like LG15 is worthless without the Order the way real cults make converts feel worthless without the cult. The Order has run its course as a concept and it's time to wrap it up and move on.

After a lengthy rewatch, I've come to the view that the Order has been a massive waste of time and it should be removed from LONELYGIRL15 at the earliest opportunity. The series should wrap up the Order plots and transition to a new format where the Hymn of One is no longer a concern.

LG15: A Cult Victim: In many ways, the Order has afflicted the LG15 series in the same fashion that real-life cults assail their victims. The cult of the Order of Denderah has:
  • Discouraged individuality by convincing LG15 that it depends on the cult to survive, thus instilling a sense of dependency.
  • Isolated LG15 from a full range of stories and limited its diet of ideas to stories focused on the cult.
  • Caused LG15 to deteriorate as its viewing figures crashed and burned with all the cult-centric stories.
  • Forbidden LG15 from asking questions about the cult by making sure that any answers would be inscrutably vague.
  • Given LG15 contradictory, paradoxical information that serve to justify the cult's rule rather than inform or guide LG15.
  • Caused LG15 to become neurotic (focused only on the cult), psychotic (Sarah was evil all along?) and suicidal (nothing else would explain THE RESISTANCE and OUTBREAK).
  • Instilled LG15's current attitude that the cult's ends must always overrule LG15's needs.
  • Promoted LG15's feelings of guilt or unworthiness by dooming LG15's anti-cult stories to always end in failure.
  • Labelled non-cult focused series formats for LG15 (like vlogging from bedrooms) as illegitimate, worthless and unviable.
  • Dominated LG15's finances and diverted its funds to the cult by causing LG15 to go from a zero-budget vlog series to an action-adventure format so costly that LG15 had to cancel itself when it couldn't find sponsors.
  • Inducted LG15's friends -- the fans -- by convincing many of them that LG15 stories cannot function without the cult.
Falling in with a cult is painful and traumatizing. Many fail to escape, but we should never condemn anyone to being trapped within a cult -- not ourselves, not our friends and certainly not LG15.

The idea that LG15 can't work without the Order anymore -- that's precisely what any cult would want you to think. Escaping is almost certainly never easy and the recovery will always be fraught with difficulty -- but I believe that LG15 needs to take this step if it intends to build itself a better life.

(I was only being half-serious above.)

I wonder if LG15: ANCHOR COVE could (a) bring an end to this Order nonsense and (b) rebuild a version of LG15 that isn't tied down by all this rubbish. It's not an easy challenge. Over two years, the Order was built up as invincible (although any time they appeared onscreen, they appeared incompetent).

For Seasons 2 - 3 and THE RESISTANCE, LG15 treated defeating the Order as the endpoint of the show. These Order-focused stories have been an interesting, exciting experiment that has ultimately led to nowhere but excruciating aggravation.

It's time to move on from what hasn't worked for a long time. LG15 should get back to its roots and return to video blog confessionals telling stories of dramedy and human experience. Being on the run from super-Scientology is not a relatable concern for the everyday person. But how to defeat the Order? And how to continue after that?

Defeating the Order
I concede that at this point, it would be necessary to devote a run of videos to taking the Order down in order to sell the audience on the story. Austin McConnell tried to have the Order defeated offscreen and replaced with SHENtek; the fans rioted because Austin did nothing to earn this development. This story needed more space. So, given that Daniel remains a normal, average and somewhat depressed guy who feels totally dwarfed by the Order today, how could the Order be defeated?

Exposure: The format of vlogs and LG15's existence as a series of YouTube confessionals would lend itself to our heroes eventually exposing the Order to the public, to world governments and to law enforcement agencies who then take over the task of arresting and incarcerating anyone involved.

Assassination: Renegade15 once remarked that the LG15 story had gotten so dark that THE RESISTANCE should have graduated to Daniel and Jonas finding the man who took Bree's blood and subjecting him to sadistic torture followed by a bloody execution. I suppose LG15 could become Daniel hunting down Elders, Shadows, Watchers and Deacons and blowing their heads off one by one. Probably not the best route. Still. I'm sure Daniel reads comic books like PUNISHER and WOLVERINE and would have thought of it.

Partial Defeat: There's always the option of aiming a bit lower and having the characters cripple the Order enough to not have to deal with it in any future stories. Many options for this exist: Daniel and friends could damage the Order financially by somehow destroying all their monetary assets. Or Daniel and friends could find a way to poison the Elders so that trait positive blood no longer works for them or find ways to get the trait negative serum to every girl the Order wants to bleed.

Truce: Another alternative might be that Daniel can end the war with a peace treaty. Maybe he finds scientists who produce an alternative to trait positive blood -- a serum that will allow previous recipients of T+ blood to continue receiving the benefits but without the need to kill anymore girls.

LG15 After the Order
And so we are left with the question: what the hell does LG15 do once its reason for being is written out of the series?

Character Focused Dramedy: To me, LG15 is not at its best when the characters are breaking into buildings or digging up clues. They're at their best when they are normal people doing normal things but through the lens of the confessional vlog. LG15 was about lonely, isolated, troubled young adolescents reaching out into the world through social media. In 2016, they're now lonely, isolated, troubled young adults, so perhaps a slight upgrade of the format is needed where the characters now vlog about their professional lives and projects.

LG15 doesn't need the Order to create drama when Daniel's anxieties of inadequacy, Bree's social awkwardness and Jonas' bipolar disorder are limitless sources of difficulty and conflict. I would focus a post-Order LG15 on the characters -- Bree and Jonas and to a lesser extent, Daniel -- trying to reintegrate into society after a lengthy commercial break where they missed milestones like college and building careers and networks and now have to start all over (again, Daniel to a lesser extent). This mundane, daily life stuff is the real lifeblood of LG15.

Social Workers: I think I could easily imagine Bree as a counselor for young people in or recovering from abusive situations. I can see Daniel as the filmmaker creating documentaries about Bree's work. I can see their work broken up by their soap opera stuff, their complex relationships, their past traumas. I can see Jonas convincing himself he's above all these mental issues only for Bree and Daniel to realize that Jonas is actually more screwed up than all of Bree's patients put together.

Vlogging Filmmakers: The fact that Daniel is a filmmaker is a much-mentioned yet shockingly underused aspect of LG15 and I would really like to see that corrected. Maybe the exposure of the Order is done through a Daniel-helmed documentary and then the post-Order era is about Daniel doing his next documentary on life after the war with Jonas and Bree in the mix.

Long Distance Friends: I think the best possibility for a post-Order version of LG15, however, would be to make the best of a bad situation in that Jessica Lee Rose is far, far, far away from Los Angeles where the bulk of LG15 production takes place.

Yousef Abu Taleb said in the Story Forward podcast that he was looking forward to seeing Jessica "soon," so maybe travel plans are in order, but given that Jessica is engaged to marry an Australia-based actor and started a number of business initiatives there (dog walking business, an app for actors who need someone to rehearse with), she's probably not moving.

So maybe the theme of a post-Order LG15 could be long distance relationships: Bree, Daniel and Jonas now live very far apart (or maybe Jonas has become an agoraphobic and Daniel lives on the other side of town so they don't hang out as much). The vlogs then become Bree, Jonas and Daniel communicating with each other, maintaining their friendship with a great physical distance between them -- in a sense becoming to each other what they are to us -- online friends known only through online interaction.

Stranger in Strange Lands: Another cool idea that might be unaffordable -- transplant Daniel to Australia to be with Bree and it's all about Daniel dealing with being a newcomer in an unfamiliar place.

Dissenting Thoughts
I've been told that returning LG15 to small scale dramedy would be like doing a STAR WARS movie about the characters' struggles to get pregnant and find an apartment -- small scale and irrelevant. But the truth is that real life tends to be on a small scale and LG15's small stories were intimate, personal and deeply expressive.

LG15 attempted a large-scale epic of good versus evil and consistently found itself punching above its weight due to miniscule funding and inadequate resources.

Vlogs and low budget web shows defeat themselves when they're ashamed of being small scale or trying to compete with studio movies and network TV. Vlogs feature faces we've come to trust and welcome into our homes and hearts. Vloggers are our friends. They're comfort. You just let them talk to you.

And it has to be okay for a friend to have a bad night and hack out a vid and it has to be okay for them to fall into unquestioning fealty to an all-consuming cult from which they may never return. But if they reach the point where they're ready to come back, it has to be okay to let them.

Would we ever tell a friend that they should remain enslaved in the captivity of an abusive cult?

Conclusion
LG15 fell in with a bad crowd. It's time to leave that crowd behind and let itself grow and develop into what it needs to be. I know that lots of people like the Order stuff and many have argued that LG15 has left Bree's bedroom and can't return. But LG15 achieved an almost mythic status in popular culture and it did so long before Bree and Daniel went on the run.

That popularity was not the Order, nor was it the bedroom; that popularity was the feeling that Bree and Daniel were as real to the fans as any online associate with whom they'd know only digital interaction. That intimacy that bleeds into reality is the appeal of LG15, not this absurd supervillain cult.

These characters are wonderful and their adventures in life don't need a cult to validate them.

Disclaimer
LG15: ANCHOR COVE may prove me to be deeply, deeply wrong. Smile
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