All cheap and debonair

[sovay]

Talk to me about supporting characters. When you're supposed to fall for the heroine, and instead it's the second spear-carrier from the left who turns out to have the thorniest moral dilemma or the most fascinating backstory. This happens to me all the time; I can't be the only one. So who are your scene-stealers? Movies, books, operas—your own work—which character roles do you remember long after you've forgotten who played the protagonist?

(This post brought to you courtesy of Eleanor Cameron and L.M. Montgomery.)

Comments

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

I wonder sometimes if this happens when the writer's subconscious lets something loose, what had been restrained by the more natural, habitual main character. Maybe I'm reflecting on my own work, how in one of my novels a character came about unexpectedly and ended up running the show, though he was never the main character. I remember at a reading once an author said, well of course she loved such and such the most too, just as the readers did, because that character was who she'd like to be, but the main character was who she was.

Now, I have to think about your question a bit longer, think about what side characters I fell for (well, obviously, in the book I'd just read, the antagonist is the one who stole my heart). But I'm sure there's more. So, who came to mind for you?

[sovay]

I wonder sometimes if this happens when the writer's subconscious lets something loose, what had been restrained by the more natural, habitual main character.

Yeah; I think for many authors the parameters of a protagonist are more restrained, so all the really weird stuff precipitates out into the secondary characters, who don't come with the same expectations.

So, who came to mind for you?

Well, I was provoked by Prewytt Brumblydge and Dean Priest, but my liking for the supporting cast goes back to characters like Fflewddur Fflam in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, Sempitern Walker in Dianna Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City, or Puddleglum in C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair, all of whom I encountered in childhood and who made an impression on me one way or another—I leave out characters like Schmendrick (The Last Unicorn) or Howl (Howl's Moving Castle) or Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities) who fall into the much rarer classification of weird protagonist. But I've got a list that goes on for pages. I'm the person whose favorite character in Aliens is Bishop, or whose favorite scenes in Dr. Zhivago are the ones with the doctor's cynical half-brother Yevgraf. Pooh-Bah gets all the best lines in The Mikado.