BROCKTON, MA—Saying the plot was jumping all over the place and had become extremely hard to follow, onlookers confirmed this afternoon that 7-year-old Brendan Milner has been unable to maintain a single cohesive storyline while playing with his action figures.
By all accounts, the second-grader failed to adhere to any logical narrative arc, following one plotline for only a brief period of time before veering in wildly tangential directions as he acted out scenes with several of his favorite plastic toys, including the superhero Iron Man, the giant monster Godzilla, and professional wrestler John Cena.
“I’ll get you for that,” said Milner, who violently slammed the figurine of Iron Man into the WWE World Heavyweight Champion toy and sent it flying across the living room, contradicting a scene from just moments earlier in which the pair were best friends searching for a magical crystal. “Nobody beats Iron Man. I have power blasters.”
“Wait. Look out, there’s a bunch of hot lava coming out of a volcano,” added the child, introducing another ill-conceived element into the already disjointed series of events.
Sources confirmed that Milner’s plot started out promisingly, with John Cena and Iron Man teaming up with a triceratops to prevent a giant fireball from destroying the Earth, but noted that within little more than a minute, the storyline started to lose any sense of cohesion. Numerous reports indicated that the group of action figures abruptly abandoned the original mission in order to focus their entire attention on bringing the Star Wars villain Darth Maul to justice, ostensibly leaving the planet in imminent danger.
According to eyewitnesses, the story ultimately became impossible to follow, with a particularly jarring chain of incidents that involved the setting rapidly switching from outer space to beneath the ocean to a mummy’s tomb, all in a matter of seconds.
“Hurry, the bad guys are getting away,” said Milner, flying a Lego Batcopter with one hand while making the Godzilla action figure flip across a couch cushion in pursuit of an entirely unknown adversary whose offenses were never specified. “We captured you. Now you’re in jail.”
Onlookers listed more than a dozen inconsistencies in the child’s playtime activity, as well as a number of perplexing events that seemed to come completely out of nowhere and have no bearing on the storyline whatsoever, including instances in which Milner smashed together the faces of Iron Man and a Barbie doll for several seconds, had the protagonists flee from three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figures, and at one point, manipulated the John Cena toy to suplex a Playmobil farmer representing his second-grade classmate Tyler.
Those familiar with the situation also expressed their frustration at Milner’s heavy reliance on bringing dead characters back to life in order to move the plot along, specifically mentioning one gratuitous instance when a number of wooden blocks fell on a Spider-Man toy and killed him, only for the superhero to reappear two minutes later saying, “Follow me.”
Experts who were called upon to analyze the narrative noted that throughout the half hour spent playing with his action figures, the second-grader completely ignored basic elements of storytelling and chose instead to repeatedly introduce new dramatic situations, making the already sprawling and erratic plot even more confusing.
“Not only was the narrative underdeveloped, but the actions never set into motion corresponding consequences,” said Martin Elliott, a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, adding that the 7-year-old relied heavily on the “mentally lazy” plot device deus ex machina by frequently having a Transformers robot action figure or Happy Meal Minions toy show up from out of the blue to save the day. “As a result, the story skipped around haphazardly and created a sequence of disconnected events that even those paying close attention would be at a loss to decipher.”
“At one point, John Cena, who up until then had no superpowers whatsoever, suddenly gained the ability to fly at the very last minute to stop a rocket from crashing into the team’s base,” Elliot continued. “Unfortunately, it’s inconsistent details in his narrative like this that ruin any chance of enjoyment for anyone trying to follow along.”
All onlookers agreed, however, that the ending of his storyline, in which a giant 7-year-old boy came down from the sky and destroyed the Earth, was an excellent twist.
