Scans_Daily

There's a Kurt Busiek twitter thread on that: " The shared universe is nice frosting, but if you have to reference and explain it all the time.. the stories bog down with procedural junk that doesn’t move anything forward, because the writers want to do something else. "

He suggests earlier in the thread that the best way to read seeming " failures " to exploit shared universe solutions is to assume " they tried and it didn't work ". That is genuinely one of the best ways - you're already taking as a given that the character is capable of and motivated to get the thing they want, so of course they would've tried that means to their end. The fact that they're still trying clearly means it didn't work, and that they're just getting on with it.

It's either that, or you assume " it didn't occur to them in the heat of the moment ", which also makes sense - because to accept the premise of any story is to accept that you're reading about imperfect beings in dynamic situations. There is nothing that inherently prevents people in real life from acting " sub-optimally ", whatever their understood capabilities and capacities - there's correspondingly nothing for fictional people, who are ultimately the products of real people.

To take any other approach is to look at what you're already taking as given when reading and throw it out in favor of entirely subjective points about story construction. There's nothing inherently wrong with those points, but with regards to the story as-is, they only mean as much as the statement " A is not B. " does.