Mystery Box Storytelling can be good, J.J. Abrams is just bad at it.

Now I know the first response is gonna be that Abrams coined the term so how can he be the one doing it wrong?  Did he identify a type of storytelling but not fully understand it?

I myself in the past have sometimes gone along with those saying Mystery Boxes are inherently bad because that's how you get Disney Star Wars.  And I still agree that it shouldn't have been the approach taken to Star Wars, that the Original Trilogy was Absolutely not Mystery Box storytelling.  Abrams problem seems to come from him seeing it everywhere.

But since I think this particularly is done badly by it's very name it's perhaps necessary to define it.  It's not any Mystery at all, it's certainly not twists where we weren't expecting there to be one, nor even any twists where we were expecting there to be a twist, and it's not anytime a character isn't named in the very first scene they appear in.  

A Mystery Box is something the story presents as being an unanswered question early on.  But I also would argue it only truly exists in serialized storytelling and not a question both asked and answered in one self contained Episode or Movie.

I feel bad about claiming I agreed with Mystery Boxes being inherently bad in the past because I've absolutely loved plenty of TV Shows and Anime that Absolutely did this, and specifically enjoyed engaging in that mystery speculation.  And that includes ones where the answer to the Mystery can be considered disappointing because it was either very obvious or not something I had a fair chance at solving in advance.  Because I truly believe in the adage that it's about the journey rather then the destination.  But the thing is I can hold the view that the answer to the mystery doesn't really matter and still enjoy engaging in all that speculation and coming up with theories of my own anyway because it simply is fun.

There is no actual tangible rule that explains what the Mystery Box stories I like did differently from Abrams.  The closest I could come to is saying the good ones don't have that as the only thing going for them, they are stories where I was actually invested in the characters and so the investment in the Mystery is about how the Answer is relevant to them, or at least they think it is.

But the thing is that's subjective, plenty of the shows I'm about to talk about loving are hated by others, and plenty of people like Abrams's Star Wars Movies, even Rise of Skywalker, I know because depending on my mood I've been one of them.  Yes I just admitted that the last part of the title of this post is Subjective, in fact it's a subjective opinion I have based on very limited information because his Star ____ movies are the only Abrams things I've seen, I haven't watched any of Lost.  Maybe it's really more Abrams being bad at explaining it in that Ted Talk people meme on then actually bad at doing it, artists are like that sometimes.

My favorite Live Action TV show and my Favorite non Japanese TV show was Pretty Little Liars, it's Mystery is ridiculously convoluted and ultimately doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and I don't care, I enjoyed every stop of the ride to get there.  It means way more to me then any Star Wars does, even The Prequels.

But the Mystery Box approach is also core to Twin Peaks and Game of Thrones going back to it's books.  Deliberately withholding information is Absolutely vital to what they were doing.

But what I'm most into is Anime.  Right now the most well known Mystery Box style Anime is Attack on Titan, and I enjoyed the first "Three" seasons of that show.  I stopped enjoying it during the "Final" season but not because I found any reveals bad or disappointing, everything about the show had changed basically which isn't inherently bad but I just wasn't into it anymore.

However my personal Favorite Anime of all Time is Noir.  And it too had a Mystery Box, who killed Mireille's parents and why does Kirka have their Watch.  If you think you've solved that mystery from just the information I provided you in that sentence you are correct, the answer is that simple and obvious but it didn't matter, I still love the scene where it was revealed and love that they pretended it wasn't obvious.

Witch Hunter Robin, Madlax, El Cazador de la Bruja are other fairly obscure 2000s Anime I enjoy in part for their Mystery Boxes.

Even Revolutionary Girl Utena and Neon Genesis Evangelion are Mystery Box shows, the objection you may make to why they are not, are equally applicable to The Force Awakens as far as the people who still like that movie are concerned.