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Maybe we're a bliss of another kind
I begin to understand why people write fanfiction.
(Cut for lengthy, lengthy background and some nineteenth-century novels.)
I blame my friend Shlomo, Neil Gaiman, and Jason Flemyng, in that order. When Shlomo came to visit this past weekend, a combination of conversation and books kept us up almost until dawn: I read his British airport copy of Anansi Boys, he read my Vess-illustrated copy of Stardust, and when we ran out of printed words we told one another stories, Pedro Malasartes, Hershel of Ostropol, a tailypo, Nasreddin Hodja, and two jokes about parrots. At some point in this process, we also checked the cast information for Stardust. (Peter O'Toole, yay.) In the role of Primus was listed Jason Flemyng, whom I thought I did not know; so I clicked on his name and realized that not only had I seen him in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), I had actually liked him in it.1![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lesser_celery, fleurdelis28, and nineweaving have patiently listened to me go on at length about this film. But it wouldn't leave my head, so last night I took the plunge of masochism and rented it on DVD, just to see if the few scenes I had remembered fondly were really any good or just less painfully bad than the rest of the movie. And I discovered that, trapped inside the bombastic morass that is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, are ten minutes of a really, really good film.
If the movie needs an introduction, it was bastardized from Alan Moore's graphic novel of the same name, and I didn't even need to have read the original to understand that Hollywood had had its wicked way with the source material. The nominal plot pulls together Allan Quatermain, Mina Harker, Dorian Gray, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tom Sawyer, and an Invisible Man stand-in (alas, copyrights) named Rodney Skinner, to combat a mysterious masked villain who is wreaking havoc on various non-intuitive bits of Europe—the Bank of England, a zeppelin hangar in Berlin—with the apparent intent of fomenting a world war; fifteen years too soon, but when did a good supervillain ever let history get in the way of his evil schemes? Or a plot in the way of a script, as the endless ear-shattering fights and tired revelations and motivations with the depth of a papercut prove. Of course the villain is proven to be someone unexpected whom the audience has seen from a mile away, and he is defeated at the cost of the plot-expendable, and the groundwork is laid for a sequel which thank God never came to pass . . . This was a movie even Sean Connery couldn't save. But I mentioned ten minutes, didn't I? Let's start with the characters.
In this world, the events of Dracula seem to have left Mina Harker more than half a vampire: she can bear sunlight and does not seem to require blood for sustenance, though she likes it dearly when she can get it, but she has the speed and stamina of nothing human and at one useful point she bursts into a cloud of bats.2 Meanwhile, Dorian Gray has achieved with his famous picture not only eternal youth but invulnerability; knives and bullets leave their marks presumably on the canvas, but for no more than a second on his flesh. A previous relationship is implied between the two, which seems to have ended badly. Of Mina's involvement in the League, Dorian remarks like a languid slap in the face, "So you're nothing more than an enticement," while she confesses herself skeptical that her former lover had the altruism to join up: "You were a selfish man, Dorian. This task requires heroes." But their affair rekindles aboard the Nautilus, at Dorian's seduction: he contrives to cut their fingers, offering her a nightcap of brandy, and it transpires that blood is a terrific aphrodisiac even for partial vampires. It must be a pleasant change for her to take a lover whom she can drain and still make conversation with in the morning. Whatever Dorian ultimately wants, a dalliance is no distraction to him; and with both of their inhuman capacities to be explored, perhaps even more desirable.3 And as they devour one another with kisses, visible in the stateroom doorway—though not to the otherwise occupied lovers; his face split by the frame, a man in halves, pale and sweating and late Victorian prurience-prudishness to the life—is Dr. Jekyll.
Here, Dr. Henry Jekyll never took poison and died along with Mr. Edward Hyde: his double identity is an open secret to the rest of the League, however much or little the outside world may know about the tragic disappearance of a well-respected physician and the mysterious atrocities that prefigured his departure, and the kind of shame that he desperately wishes the other characters would just never even mention. He has not even joined entirely of his own free will.4 Rather than a sneering little distillation of Jekyll's darker impulses,5 or simply the good doctor with the brakes off, this Hyde is an apelike beast with prodigious strength—the film holds him responsible for the murders in the Rue Morgue—which the other characters hope can be profitably pointed in the direction of the villains; there is no intrinsic value to Jekyll, who is more or less along as the ride, simultaneously dangerous and useless. "I'll not have the brute free upon my ship," Captain Nemo warns when the doctor looks about to lose his grip. "Must I take drastic steps?" Jekyll asserts tightly that he is in control, only to be sternly dismissed: "I very much doubt it."6 Yet when he asserts his refusal to transform, sickly resolute in the face of temptation—"Hyde will never use me again!"—Dorian Gray's practical, brutal response is, "Then what good are you?" And worst of all, the division between his selves is not as firm as the doctor might like to reassure himself. His double's mockery pursues him out of Mina's stateroom and down one of the Nautilus' endless corridors, fists clenched, shoulders hunched against himself, inexorably tracked by the reflection of Hyde in each porthole he passes:
"Yes, Henry. Look, but don't touch, that's your way."
"Just shut up. I won't be tricked again."
"Tricked? You've known what I was about each time you drank the formula."
"Liar! I'm a good man. A good man!"
"Who's lying now? You want it. Even more than you want her."
"No!"
"You can't shut me out forever. Drink the elixir."
"No!"
"She barely even looks at you."
"Be quiet!"
"She'd look at me!"
With this exchange, he becomes, of course, the character that catches my attention. Kim Newman finds Jason Flemyng's portrayal "one of the least effective depictions of the character on film," and I will admit that I've never seen another version for comparison and should remedy this soon, but I was fascinated whenever his Dr. Jekyll was onscreen. He is sympathetic at the same time that he's sordid, a hypocrite who can lie to himself but not his alter ego (whose honesty may be genuinely exasperated at Jekyll's pretensions to upper-class morality, or may merely derive from the pleasant knowledge that nothing can inflict as much hurt as the truth), whose greatest sin he can muster in this persona is voyeurism (appropriate to his role as hapless bystander, who can only watch while his murderous other does; but in the immortal words of Britney Spears, he's not that innocent), a disgraced doctor who is most helpful not as the physician that he trained to be, but as the bestial archetype that he loathes and longs for, a junkie to himself.7 I hate the term "dark" as anything other than a visual description, but this characterization belongs in a much harder-edged film than The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or at least in its own adaptation of Stevenson's novella.
All right. What does this have to do with fanfiction? Just this: those ten minutes where Dorian seduces Mina and Jekyll watches, to be confronted first by Hyde and then by Captain Nemo, and returns to his room only to discover that one of his precious vials of formula is missing, are so far as I am concerned the best in the entire film—and the plot collapses any of their intriguing implications and dissipates them entirely, and it does so with particular insult in the arena of relationships. To set up Mina and Dorian as uneasy lovers and then introduce Jekyll8 with his love or lust or whatever confusion he feels for her, has real promise. To position Tom Sawyer as Mina's hopeful suitor, and as a real rival to Dorian, has WTF?! I can't even explain what the character is doing in this movie.9 He has no personality beyond being youthful, brash, and American, and even when Mina cold-shoulders his gallantry—"You're sweet. And you're young. Neither are traits I hold in high regard"—the line tells us more about Dorian than about Sawyer. His flatness shows up especially badly against the other characters' layers. As a trio, Mina, Dorian, and Jekyll play beautifully off one another's double natures. However she came by her vampirism, Mina has by now adjusted to its benefits; before the startled eyes of the League, she dispatches one of the Fantom's men with sudden and bloody efficiency, and while the kill itself glazes her with sexual abandon, she coolly puts herself in order afterward, repinning her hair, neatening her mouth, until the wild-haired, crimson-eyed fury is tucked away into the modern Victorian woman again—but she has, unembarrassed, allowed an audience at her transformation. Each of her natures is convenient at a different moment, the chemist when she needs to identify a mysterious powder, the vampire when there are attackers to be disposed of, and she seems ashamed of neither. Far from displaying his particular demon to others, meanwhile, Dorian dares not even admit its nature to himself—the portrait that withers and blackens and decays in his stead, so corroded with vice and time that he no longer dares look on it for horror of what might look back,10 and yet which is so precious to him that Moriarty can cheaply blackmail him with its possession. But so long as his true reflection is out of sight, he can behave as though it neither exists nor has influence over him; it eats his sins and doesn't remind him afterward, and he glides unmoved through the years. Jekyll, of course, cannot put his secret self so easily out of his mind; each time he looks in a glass, who do you think looks back? And aboard the Nautilus especially, he cannot manage the kind of double life he led in London, even while the pressure of Hyde builds up and so does the knowledge that he is under observation. For subtler reasons, too, Dorian and Mina have less trouble with their dualities. Beautiful, steely women who can break assailants' necks with their hands or bleed them dry in seconds and still look like a Keats poem when the killing is done—sexy. Fretful, self-loathing doctors whose monstrous alter egos argue with them from mirrored surfaces? Not so much. And however hideous the record of Dorian's sins, all anyone ever sees is his unmarked flower face.11 There are levels of self here to which Agent Sawyer is utterly irrelevant. Yet we are somehow expected to accept him as a valid corner in a romantic triangle? His problems are all the kind he can shoot dead. He is not even in the same world as the rest of the characters.
Let's not get into character arc, either. Dorian at least meets his end as his duality forecasts: pinned before his uncovered portrait, unable to look away, he falls into bones and ruin as the portrait clears, fleshes out, becomes the dark-eyed, dark-haired, unspoiled Dorian Gray that Basil Hallward painted once with love. Jekyll's difficulties, however, are solved with the kind of shorthand redemption that does not match his character. Thank you, plot convenience. Is it for the sake of Mina that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde together perform their act of heroism—so that she will look at the cellophane doctor in the same way that she eyed the mountainous brute? When Jekyll downplays the deed with a half-cautionary, half-deprecating, "Let's not make a saint out of a sinner. Next time, he may not be so helpful," he is not speaking only of Hyde. If the film wants to make them a jigsaw, I have no argument. Dorian will die from the revelation of his hidden self; this Jekyll has already survived, and now his capacity for good and evil both is out in the open.12 But the film should then believe in that ambiguity, not crumple it into unmixed good. Let us never be sure what will turn up on the screen next. Or at least maintain some complexity of motivations: Jekyll and Hyde can still save the crewmen trapped in the flooding compartments of the Nautilus, but I would like to know why! Here there is no reason save an abrupt, apparent change of heart, which is far too simplistic for the density of character that that the movie hinted at; and in the end barely glanced off. Just about everything that can catch on fire or explode, catches on fire or explodes, and sometimes both (". . . burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp . . ."). Moriarty meets his maker. Were those the frozen wastes of Mongolia I saw slumming as Isengard? Ten minutes.
And I watch this cinematic implosion and I think, You know, if I'd been the writer . . . I am not going to write fanfiction based on the movie adapted from a graphic-novel crossover of damn near every classic of late Victorian literature—if nothing else, the layers of retelling would be ridiculous.13 But for perhaps the first time, the desire makes sense to me organically, not intellectually. Thank you, Shlomo, Neil Gaiman, Jason Flemyng, and terrible, terrible summer blockbusters. Oy. We shall see.
1. This post generated so many footnotes, I have decided to number them: the system of asterisks was starting to look like a reinvention of Roman numerals by dust bunnies . . . Unlike Wild Wild West (1999), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did not cause me to wish either for the last two hours of my life back or for the theater to spontaneously combust. But it was a big, stupid, high-effects blockbuster, and really it should have been frustrating because of the few intriguing elements it contained—as they were clearly not to be outweighed by the spectacle of the Venetian archipelago blowing up like dominos, however, one just sort of gave them up for lost.
2. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897): "His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw we all recognised the Count—in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with his arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink." In the novel, Dracula's death frees Mina from the taint of vampirism—"Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! the snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!"—which is obviously not the case in the film. One may also note that Jonathan Harker is here indicated to have been dead for some time now; it is unclear whether he died of natural causes or his wife.
3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): "The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them . . . and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their color and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament . . ." The movie never makes clear how much Dorian knew about Mina's vampirism when they were first involved, but his immortality and invulnerability come as a surprise to her; she learns of the first from an anecdote of the seventy-year-old Quatermain's boyhood days at Eton, where he once heard a lecture by a young visiting scholar named Dorian Gray, the second when she sees Dorian recover from being full-frontally machine-gunned with little more than exasperation for his ruined shirt. "What are you?" his assailant gasps. As he dispatches the man with a contemptuous sword-thrust, Dorian replies, "I'm complicated."
4. The monster, not the doctor, in fact strikes the deal with Quatermain: in return for cooperation with the League, they will be granted amnesty in England. One may therefore assume that the true nature of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not widely known, or such a return would hardly be safe.
5. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896): "Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him."
6. In an extended-deleted version of this scene, the exchange between Jekyll and Nemo is not brusque, but unexpectedly sympathetic. As Jekyll shakily apologizes for his rudeness—in response to Nemo's reprimand, he flashed, "Your talk is all well and good, sir, but your own past is far from laudable!"—and turns to leave, Nemo stops him with a single quiet question: "Has Hyde killed?" The doctor catches the kind of breath that is either a laugh or a sob and speaks half-turned back to Nemo, very steadily, as though he relates a simple and obvious fact: "He has done every evil a man can do. And my curse? I recall his actions." — "I sympathize," the captain answers. Like a man who has already seen how his life will end, "My curse? I recall my own." Not only does this scene provide Captain Nemo with the only real hints of character in the movie—and this is in the outtakes!—it explains the otherwise random pairing of Captain Nemo and Mr. Hyde in the final showdown, why Hyde would shout for Nemo when the rampaging vein-beast that used to be Moriarty's henchman is flinging him around like a rag doll, why Nemo would come running to risk his life for this bestial acquaintance; what makes them trust one another. If not soul-baring, at least they have been candid with each other; and Nemo has put some of Jekyll's misery into perspective. Instead, in the final cut, we get a brief and not particularly friendly interchange in which Nemo flatly cautions the doctor and Jekyll insults him in return, which does not cause the viewer to assume that the two would automatically watch one another's backs in a fight. I cannot imagine why anyone with half a brain would have cut—oh, wait. Never mind.
7. For this reason, I find the theatrical poster of Dr. Jekyll rather fundamentally inaccurate. Yes, it's sexy, which is the point of most posters—he smiles from under his brows, lit from beneath and all the lines in his face shadowed, half wry and half sinister, as though daring the audience to figure out his secrets; ingreygirlbeast's word, threatful. But this Jekyll almost never looks that confident, or that coherent. He is a man in pieces and he cannot figure out how to reconnect.
8. And Hyde, who claims the advantage where sex is concerned: in an ordinary frail man, he taunts, a woman who likes the taste of blood will have no interest. Monsters call to monsters; no mortals need apply. Thus the two temptations mix themselves.
9. In another deleted scene, he reveals that his initial impetus toward the League was the Fantom / M / Moriarty's murder of his childhood friend, a fellow agent whom I imagine we are intended to envision as Huck Finn. That's clever, but doesn't really help. Other than serving as a stand-in for Quatermain's dead son, which is of course a plotline we have never seen before, the young Colonies taking the torch from the old Empire, he contributes zilch to the film. Sadly, he is more in keeping with the general approach of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than any of the three characters I have previously described.
10. In the movie, it is not physical violence to the portait but Dorian's sight of it that can destroy him. I miss the original novel's turnabout that sympathetic magic is a two-way street, but the metaphor here at play—being fatally unable to confront one's true self even when forced to it—works for me, so I won't complain too much. Certainly not as much as I complain about Agent Sawyer.
11. It strikes me just now that the two men are well-opposed in appearance. Stuart Townsend's Dorian Gray is not the gold-and-ivory idolatry of Wilde's novel, "wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair," but rather a dark-and-pale mirror whose creamy skin and loose black hair could have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite mythscape. He dresses dandily, impeccably, with unapologetic consciousness of every little gesture or touch; he constantly performs himself, for himself, the best audience he will ever have. The world bores and amuses and slides off him like water, whether he leaves lovers or bodies in his wake. He is like a piece of art, even treacherous, tousled, fighting for his life, he remains unhurried as sculpture, faultlessly contemptuous of adversaries and allies alike. And he is beautiful, because that is the nature of Dorian Gray: what he sold his soul for, and in some ways all that he has left. "How sad it is. I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June . . . If only it were the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give. I would give my soul for that!" Narcissus, with his eyes tightly closed. Henry Jekyll, on the other hand and pace Jason Flemyng, is not handsome: or he might be, physically, but mostly he's so sick with guilt and desire that it's difficult to tell. He's a well-built man, but he carries himself as stiffly as a scarecrow who has never quite figured out what to do with his hands. He has the kind of fair, freckled, too-thin skin that looks like it's been scrubbed raw, and under stress he turns red and white in patches, slippery with perspiration; his mouth is full-lipped, redder than Mina's, the kind that someone should want to kiss, Jokanaan, but one wonders if Henry Jekyll has ever had a lover or if only Edward Hyde indulges that particular appetite. Jekyll wants other things. When he flips back the lid of his case of formula, his face is nearly Hyde already with wanting. Dorian may be as impermeable as oil paint, but everything in Jekyll shows too close to the surface. And this is not inappropriate.
12. One could argue that Jekyll and Hyde reach an understanding of their mutual inseparability and complementary contrariety—however potentially destructive, and however better-realized they would have been in a less stupid movie—that Dorian Gray will never comprehend or attain, because Dorian is all about the surface. Ultimately he is frozen in his own vanity, as one-dimensional as the canvas that holds him up, a painted man in a painted room; Jekyll and Hyde are not pretty, but they are capable of change. And while I do not know if this would have made them a better match for Mina, whose taste for experience and cynicism may not extend to repressed doctors whose baser inclinations manifest about ten feet tall and muscular as steroids, it does make them a lovely foil for Dorian. See previous footnote.
13. One day soon, in addition to reading the original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and watching Fredric Marsh’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), I will have to explore how it is that I can write that sentence and also write poems and stories based on other people's versions of thousands of years of oral tradition. Look, but don't touch . . .
(Cut for lengthy, lengthy background and some nineteenth-century novels.)
I blame my friend Shlomo, Neil Gaiman, and Jason Flemyng, in that order. When Shlomo came to visit this past weekend, a combination of conversation and books kept us up almost until dawn: I read his British airport copy of Anansi Boys, he read my Vess-illustrated copy of Stardust, and when we ran out of printed words we told one another stories, Pedro Malasartes, Hershel of Ostropol, a tailypo, Nasreddin Hodja, and two jokes about parrots. At some point in this process, we also checked the cast information for Stardust. (Peter O'Toole, yay.) In the role of Primus was listed Jason Flemyng, whom I thought I did not know; so I clicked on his name and realized that not only had I seen him in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), I had actually liked him in it.1
lesser_celery, fleurdelis28, and nineweaving have patiently listened to me go on at length about this film. But it wouldn't leave my head, so last night I took the plunge of masochism and rented it on DVD, just to see if the few scenes I had remembered fondly were really any good or just less painfully bad than the rest of the movie. And I discovered that, trapped inside the bombastic morass that is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, are ten minutes of a really, really good film. If the movie needs an introduction, it was bastardized from Alan Moore's graphic novel of the same name, and I didn't even need to have read the original to understand that Hollywood had had its wicked way with the source material. The nominal plot pulls together Allan Quatermain, Mina Harker, Dorian Gray, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tom Sawyer, and an Invisible Man stand-in (alas, copyrights) named Rodney Skinner, to combat a mysterious masked villain who is wreaking havoc on various non-intuitive bits of Europe—the Bank of England, a zeppelin hangar in Berlin—with the apparent intent of fomenting a world war; fifteen years too soon, but when did a good supervillain ever let history get in the way of his evil schemes? Or a plot in the way of a script, as the endless ear-shattering fights and tired revelations and motivations with the depth of a papercut prove. Of course the villain is proven to be someone unexpected whom the audience has seen from a mile away, and he is defeated at the cost of the plot-expendable, and the groundwork is laid for a sequel which thank God never came to pass . . . This was a movie even Sean Connery couldn't save. But I mentioned ten minutes, didn't I? Let's start with the characters.
In this world, the events of Dracula seem to have left Mina Harker more than half a vampire: she can bear sunlight and does not seem to require blood for sustenance, though she likes it dearly when she can get it, but she has the speed and stamina of nothing human and at one useful point she bursts into a cloud of bats.2 Meanwhile, Dorian Gray has achieved with his famous picture not only eternal youth but invulnerability; knives and bullets leave their marks presumably on the canvas, but for no more than a second on his flesh. A previous relationship is implied between the two, which seems to have ended badly. Of Mina's involvement in the League, Dorian remarks like a languid slap in the face, "So you're nothing more than an enticement," while she confesses herself skeptical that her former lover had the altruism to join up: "You were a selfish man, Dorian. This task requires heroes." But their affair rekindles aboard the Nautilus, at Dorian's seduction: he contrives to cut their fingers, offering her a nightcap of brandy, and it transpires that blood is a terrific aphrodisiac even for partial vampires. It must be a pleasant change for her to take a lover whom she can drain and still make conversation with in the morning. Whatever Dorian ultimately wants, a dalliance is no distraction to him; and with both of their inhuman capacities to be explored, perhaps even more desirable.3 And as they devour one another with kisses, visible in the stateroom doorway—though not to the otherwise occupied lovers; his face split by the frame, a man in halves, pale and sweating and late Victorian prurience-prudishness to the life—is Dr. Jekyll.
Here, Dr. Henry Jekyll never took poison and died along with Mr. Edward Hyde: his double identity is an open secret to the rest of the League, however much or little the outside world may know about the tragic disappearance of a well-respected physician and the mysterious atrocities that prefigured his departure, and the kind of shame that he desperately wishes the other characters would just never even mention. He has not even joined entirely of his own free will.4 Rather than a sneering little distillation of Jekyll's darker impulses,5 or simply the good doctor with the brakes off, this Hyde is an apelike beast with prodigious strength—the film holds him responsible for the murders in the Rue Morgue—which the other characters hope can be profitably pointed in the direction of the villains; there is no intrinsic value to Jekyll, who is more or less along as the ride, simultaneously dangerous and useless. "I'll not have the brute free upon my ship," Captain Nemo warns when the doctor looks about to lose his grip. "Must I take drastic steps?" Jekyll asserts tightly that he is in control, only to be sternly dismissed: "I very much doubt it."6 Yet when he asserts his refusal to transform, sickly resolute in the face of temptation—"Hyde will never use me again!"—Dorian Gray's practical, brutal response is, "Then what good are you?" And worst of all, the division between his selves is not as firm as the doctor might like to reassure himself. His double's mockery pursues him out of Mina's stateroom and down one of the Nautilus' endless corridors, fists clenched, shoulders hunched against himself, inexorably tracked by the reflection of Hyde in each porthole he passes:
"Yes, Henry. Look, but don't touch, that's your way."
"Just shut up. I won't be tricked again."
"Tricked? You've known what I was about each time you drank the formula."
"Liar! I'm a good man. A good man!"
"Who's lying now? You want it. Even more than you want her."
"No!"
"You can't shut me out forever. Drink the elixir."
"No!"
"She barely even looks at you."
"Be quiet!"
"She'd look at me!"
With this exchange, he becomes, of course, the character that catches my attention. Kim Newman finds Jason Flemyng's portrayal "one of the least effective depictions of the character on film," and I will admit that I've never seen another version for comparison and should remedy this soon, but I was fascinated whenever his Dr. Jekyll was onscreen. He is sympathetic at the same time that he's sordid, a hypocrite who can lie to himself but not his alter ego (whose honesty may be genuinely exasperated at Jekyll's pretensions to upper-class morality, or may merely derive from the pleasant knowledge that nothing can inflict as much hurt as the truth), whose greatest sin he can muster in this persona is voyeurism (appropriate to his role as hapless bystander, who can only watch while his murderous other does; but in the immortal words of Britney Spears, he's not that innocent), a disgraced doctor who is most helpful not as the physician that he trained to be, but as the bestial archetype that he loathes and longs for, a junkie to himself.7 I hate the term "dark" as anything other than a visual description, but this characterization belongs in a much harder-edged film than The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or at least in its own adaptation of Stevenson's novella.
All right. What does this have to do with fanfiction? Just this: those ten minutes where Dorian seduces Mina and Jekyll watches, to be confronted first by Hyde and then by Captain Nemo, and returns to his room only to discover that one of his precious vials of formula is missing, are so far as I am concerned the best in the entire film—and the plot collapses any of their intriguing implications and dissipates them entirely, and it does so with particular insult in the arena of relationships. To set up Mina and Dorian as uneasy lovers and then introduce Jekyll8 with his love or lust or whatever confusion he feels for her, has real promise. To position Tom Sawyer as Mina's hopeful suitor, and as a real rival to Dorian, has WTF?! I can't even explain what the character is doing in this movie.9 He has no personality beyond being youthful, brash, and American, and even when Mina cold-shoulders his gallantry—"You're sweet. And you're young. Neither are traits I hold in high regard"—the line tells us more about Dorian than about Sawyer. His flatness shows up especially badly against the other characters' layers. As a trio, Mina, Dorian, and Jekyll play beautifully off one another's double natures. However she came by her vampirism, Mina has by now adjusted to its benefits; before the startled eyes of the League, she dispatches one of the Fantom's men with sudden and bloody efficiency, and while the kill itself glazes her with sexual abandon, she coolly puts herself in order afterward, repinning her hair, neatening her mouth, until the wild-haired, crimson-eyed fury is tucked away into the modern Victorian woman again—but she has, unembarrassed, allowed an audience at her transformation. Each of her natures is convenient at a different moment, the chemist when she needs to identify a mysterious powder, the vampire when there are attackers to be disposed of, and she seems ashamed of neither. Far from displaying his particular demon to others, meanwhile, Dorian dares not even admit its nature to himself—the portrait that withers and blackens and decays in his stead, so corroded with vice and time that he no longer dares look on it for horror of what might look back,10 and yet which is so precious to him that Moriarty can cheaply blackmail him with its possession. But so long as his true reflection is out of sight, he can behave as though it neither exists nor has influence over him; it eats his sins and doesn't remind him afterward, and he glides unmoved through the years. Jekyll, of course, cannot put his secret self so easily out of his mind; each time he looks in a glass, who do you think looks back? And aboard the Nautilus especially, he cannot manage the kind of double life he led in London, even while the pressure of Hyde builds up and so does the knowledge that he is under observation. For subtler reasons, too, Dorian and Mina have less trouble with their dualities. Beautiful, steely women who can break assailants' necks with their hands or bleed them dry in seconds and still look like a Keats poem when the killing is done—sexy. Fretful, self-loathing doctors whose monstrous alter egos argue with them from mirrored surfaces? Not so much. And however hideous the record of Dorian's sins, all anyone ever sees is his unmarked flower face.11 There are levels of self here to which Agent Sawyer is utterly irrelevant. Yet we are somehow expected to accept him as a valid corner in a romantic triangle? His problems are all the kind he can shoot dead. He is not even in the same world as the rest of the characters.
Let's not get into character arc, either. Dorian at least meets his end as his duality forecasts: pinned before his uncovered portrait, unable to look away, he falls into bones and ruin as the portrait clears, fleshes out, becomes the dark-eyed, dark-haired, unspoiled Dorian Gray that Basil Hallward painted once with love. Jekyll's difficulties, however, are solved with the kind of shorthand redemption that does not match his character. Thank you, plot convenience. Is it for the sake of Mina that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde together perform their act of heroism—so that she will look at the cellophane doctor in the same way that she eyed the mountainous brute? When Jekyll downplays the deed with a half-cautionary, half-deprecating, "Let's not make a saint out of a sinner. Next time, he may not be so helpful," he is not speaking only of Hyde. If the film wants to make them a jigsaw, I have no argument. Dorian will die from the revelation of his hidden self; this Jekyll has already survived, and now his capacity for good and evil both is out in the open.12 But the film should then believe in that ambiguity, not crumple it into unmixed good. Let us never be sure what will turn up on the screen next. Or at least maintain some complexity of motivations: Jekyll and Hyde can still save the crewmen trapped in the flooding compartments of the Nautilus, but I would like to know why! Here there is no reason save an abrupt, apparent change of heart, which is far too simplistic for the density of character that that the movie hinted at; and in the end barely glanced off. Just about everything that can catch on fire or explode, catches on fire or explodes, and sometimes both (". . . burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp . . ."). Moriarty meets his maker. Were those the frozen wastes of Mongolia I saw slumming as Isengard? Ten minutes.
And I watch this cinematic implosion and I think, You know, if I'd been the writer . . . I am not going to write fanfiction based on the movie adapted from a graphic-novel crossover of damn near every classic of late Victorian literature—if nothing else, the layers of retelling would be ridiculous.13 But for perhaps the first time, the desire makes sense to me organically, not intellectually. Thank you, Shlomo, Neil Gaiman, Jason Flemyng, and terrible, terrible summer blockbusters. Oy. We shall see.
1. This post generated so many footnotes, I have decided to number them: the system of asterisks was starting to look like a reinvention of Roman numerals by dust bunnies . . . Unlike Wild Wild West (1999), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did not cause me to wish either for the last two hours of my life back or for the theater to spontaneously combust. But it was a big, stupid, high-effects blockbuster, and really it should have been frustrating because of the few intriguing elements it contained—as they were clearly not to be outweighed by the spectacle of the Venetian archipelago blowing up like dominos, however, one just sort of gave them up for lost.
2. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897): "His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw we all recognised the Count—in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with his arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink." In the novel, Dracula's death frees Mina from the taint of vampirism—"Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! the snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!"—which is obviously not the case in the film. One may also note that Jonathan Harker is here indicated to have been dead for some time now; it is unclear whether he died of natural causes or his wife.
3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): "The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them . . . and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their color and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament . . ." The movie never makes clear how much Dorian knew about Mina's vampirism when they were first involved, but his immortality and invulnerability come as a surprise to her; she learns of the first from an anecdote of the seventy-year-old Quatermain's boyhood days at Eton, where he once heard a lecture by a young visiting scholar named Dorian Gray, the second when she sees Dorian recover from being full-frontally machine-gunned with little more than exasperation for his ruined shirt. "What are you?" his assailant gasps. As he dispatches the man with a contemptuous sword-thrust, Dorian replies, "I'm complicated."
4. The monster, not the doctor, in fact strikes the deal with Quatermain: in return for cooperation with the League, they will be granted amnesty in England. One may therefore assume that the true nature of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not widely known, or such a return would hardly be safe.
5. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896): "Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him."
6. In an extended-deleted version of this scene, the exchange between Jekyll and Nemo is not brusque, but unexpectedly sympathetic. As Jekyll shakily apologizes for his rudeness—in response to Nemo's reprimand, he flashed, "Your talk is all well and good, sir, but your own past is far from laudable!"—and turns to leave, Nemo stops him with a single quiet question: "Has Hyde killed?" The doctor catches the kind of breath that is either a laugh or a sob and speaks half-turned back to Nemo, very steadily, as though he relates a simple and obvious fact: "He has done every evil a man can do. And my curse? I recall his actions." — "I sympathize," the captain answers. Like a man who has already seen how his life will end, "My curse? I recall my own." Not only does this scene provide Captain Nemo with the only real hints of character in the movie—and this is in the outtakes!—it explains the otherwise random pairing of Captain Nemo and Mr. Hyde in the final showdown, why Hyde would shout for Nemo when the rampaging vein-beast that used to be Moriarty's henchman is flinging him around like a rag doll, why Nemo would come running to risk his life for this bestial acquaintance; what makes them trust one another. If not soul-baring, at least they have been candid with each other; and Nemo has put some of Jekyll's misery into perspective. Instead, in the final cut, we get a brief and not particularly friendly interchange in which Nemo flatly cautions the doctor and Jekyll insults him in return, which does not cause the viewer to assume that the two would automatically watch one another's backs in a fight. I cannot imagine why anyone with half a brain would have cut—oh, wait. Never mind.
7. For this reason, I find the theatrical poster of Dr. Jekyll rather fundamentally inaccurate. Yes, it's sexy, which is the point of most posters—he smiles from under his brows, lit from beneath and all the lines in his face shadowed, half wry and half sinister, as though daring the audience to figure out his secrets; in
greygirlbeast's word, threatful. But this Jekyll almost never looks that confident, or that coherent. He is a man in pieces and he cannot figure out how to reconnect.8. And Hyde, who claims the advantage where sex is concerned: in an ordinary frail man, he taunts, a woman who likes the taste of blood will have no interest. Monsters call to monsters; no mortals need apply. Thus the two temptations mix themselves.
9. In another deleted scene, he reveals that his initial impetus toward the League was the Fantom / M / Moriarty's murder of his childhood friend, a fellow agent whom I imagine we are intended to envision as Huck Finn. That's clever, but doesn't really help. Other than serving as a stand-in for Quatermain's dead son, which is of course a plotline we have never seen before, the young Colonies taking the torch from the old Empire, he contributes zilch to the film. Sadly, he is more in keeping with the general approach of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than any of the three characters I have previously described.
10. In the movie, it is not physical violence to the portait but Dorian's sight of it that can destroy him. I miss the original novel's turnabout that sympathetic magic is a two-way street, but the metaphor here at play—being fatally unable to confront one's true self even when forced to it—works for me, so I won't complain too much. Certainly not as much as I complain about Agent Sawyer.
11. It strikes me just now that the two men are well-opposed in appearance. Stuart Townsend's Dorian Gray is not the gold-and-ivory idolatry of Wilde's novel, "wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair," but rather a dark-and-pale mirror whose creamy skin and loose black hair could have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite mythscape. He dresses dandily, impeccably, with unapologetic consciousness of every little gesture or touch; he constantly performs himself, for himself, the best audience he will ever have. The world bores and amuses and slides off him like water, whether he leaves lovers or bodies in his wake. He is like a piece of art, even treacherous, tousled, fighting for his life, he remains unhurried as sculpture, faultlessly contemptuous of adversaries and allies alike. And he is beautiful, because that is the nature of Dorian Gray: what he sold his soul for, and in some ways all that he has left. "How sad it is. I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June . . . If only it were the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give. I would give my soul for that!" Narcissus, with his eyes tightly closed. Henry Jekyll, on the other hand and pace Jason Flemyng, is not handsome: or he might be, physically, but mostly he's so sick with guilt and desire that it's difficult to tell. He's a well-built man, but he carries himself as stiffly as a scarecrow who has never quite figured out what to do with his hands. He has the kind of fair, freckled, too-thin skin that looks like it's been scrubbed raw, and under stress he turns red and white in patches, slippery with perspiration; his mouth is full-lipped, redder than Mina's, the kind that someone should want to kiss, Jokanaan, but one wonders if Henry Jekyll has ever had a lover or if only Edward Hyde indulges that particular appetite. Jekyll wants other things. When he flips back the lid of his case of formula, his face is nearly Hyde already with wanting. Dorian may be as impermeable as oil paint, but everything in Jekyll shows too close to the surface. And this is not inappropriate.
12. One could argue that Jekyll and Hyde reach an understanding of their mutual inseparability and complementary contrariety—however potentially destructive, and however better-realized they would have been in a less stupid movie—that Dorian Gray will never comprehend or attain, because Dorian is all about the surface. Ultimately he is frozen in his own vanity, as one-dimensional as the canvas that holds him up, a painted man in a painted room; Jekyll and Hyde are not pretty, but they are capable of change. And while I do not know if this would have made them a better match for Mina, whose taste for experience and cynicism may not extend to repressed doctors whose baser inclinations manifest about ten feet tall and muscular as steroids, it does make them a lovely foil for Dorian. See previous footnote.
13. One day soon, in addition to reading the original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and watching Fredric Marsh’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), I will have to explore how it is that I can write that sentence and also write poems and stories based on other people's versions of thousands of years of oral tradition. Look, but don't touch . . .
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I have been given to understand that there are serious, drastic, eye-bleeding changes between the graphic novel and the movie: I can't tell if I would have liked even those ten minutes if I'd been familiar with the original, but this is how my brain works . . .
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Another point is that Mina Harker is not named in the comic. Readers have to figure out who she is.
The ten minutes you describe read, in fact, like fanfiction based on the comic: as though the movie writer temporarily lost its mind and started doing something character-driven with about the same relation to the comic as the average fanfiction has to its original, not canon but interesting nonetheless.
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James (Dale) Robinson. I've never heard of him. IMDb informs me that he has such scripts to his name as Cyber Bandits and Hot Wheels; however, I see from Wikipedia that he's won three Eisner Awards, so he can't be totally without talent. Hmm.
temporarily lost its mind and started doing something character-driven with about the same relation to the comic as the average fanfiction has to its original, not canon but interesting nonetheless.
As fanfiction, frankly, I think they would have fared better . . . The problem is not just that these few scenes are better than the rest of the film. It's that nothing that happens in them has any impact on the rest of the film. The renewed affair between Dorian and Mina does not alter their behavior toward one another; she marks him out as her especial prey when the characters storm Moriarty's fortress, but we have no reason to believe that she might not have been best equipped (or disposed) to handle him anyway.* That Jekyll has overheard Dorian's confession of his portrait makes no difference to the man's eventual demise; it is still Mina who confronts him with his painted self, and neither she nor Jekyll seemingly thinks to wonder about the leverage that such a portrait could be used to exert on its subject.** As for Hyde's temptation of Jekyll (or whichever way that works), at the end of the day it's irrelevant: we never really see Mina interact with either one of them.*** Chekov would have torn his hair out.
*Her vampire's talents turn out to include the ability to recover from anything short of a punctured heart in a matter of seconds; Dorian's invulnerability is no advantage over her.
**Thus leaving everyone except the audience floored to discover that he's been Moriarty's agent all along. Since the movie offers no evidence that taking a knife to the canvas would leave this Dorian Gray with so much as a headache, presumably Moriarty persuaded him not with the threat of its destruction, but exposure: with the picture out of his possession, Dorian never knew if he'd find it propped up in his drawing room or exhibited in the National Gallery for all to see. Which, really, at least Jekyll should have considered—he's the byword for respectable fronts and reprehensible secrets around here, for God's sake.
***There is one moment in the aftermath of some shipboard disaster or other where Jekyll is patching up the wounded members of Nemo's crew with help from whoever else knows some first aid; he puts a roll of bandages in Mina's hand and she meets his eyes and smiles. In a more consistent movie, the viewer could then wonder which of them she's smiling at—the beast, or the doctor, or perhaps (o rare and most exquisite) both at once—but here it's just sort of meaningless. I know, I should just shut up and rent Mary Reilly (1996).
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In this world, the events of Dracula seem to have left Mina Harker more than half a vampire:
As
You really need to read the comics. The differences are so vast, and the comic so wonderful, I could go on about it endlessly. Jekyll might be a great deal less three-dimensional than what you discuss, but Hyde's a far more interesting character, particularly in volume 2. And you'll be happy to know Tom Sawyer's not in the books, but neither is Dorian Grey.
One might point out, by the way, that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is itself fanfiction.
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Seriously: ten minutes of fascinating film-sketch surrounded by two hours of special effects blowing up. I would have watched the movie that followed from those three characters. I don't really think I needed the one I got.
You really need to read the comics. The differences are so vast, and the comic so wonderful, I could go on about it endlessly.
They're on my list! I expect to like them; I loved V for Vendetta. Maybe I will just hide out in the bookstore tomorrow . . .
One might point out, by the way, that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is itself fanfiction.
Oh, yes—hence the layers of ridiculous. I just noticed that I don't seem to classify classical reworkings as such, and I'm not sure why that is. Are myths inherently more in the public domain, even when I know very well that people like Kallimachos and Ovid and Catullus have tweaked them in specific ways?
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I don't think so. I blame capitalism. Copyrighted characters shouldn't have to serve as nest eggs.
By the way, the comics also have the original invisible man.
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I am trying to figure out whether it's the length of time a story has existed that makes it more open to retelling, or what. Maybe it's just me.
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Er, echoes are not much prone to linkage, are they? I blame lack of sleep. :P (I typed "ploral" at first, which though interesting is similarly not quite right....)
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They're prone to allusion, which is a similar creature without the HTML. : )
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But no re-tellings of "Lord of the Rings" yet. Or "The Chronicles of Narnia", as far as I can remember, except one short story in Neil Gaiman's "Fragile Things"...
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Whatever this says about me, the first recent character who came to mind was Lord Peter Wimsey, who makes a cameo appearance in Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary (1997; itself a novel about Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell). He doesn't date back farther than 1923 (Whose Body?), but he seems to have assimilated into that whole mythscape of late nineteenth / early twentieth century mysteries. And now Jill Paton Walsh has written two more mysteries about him and Harriet. They are based respectively on Sayers' notes and her wartime Wimsey Papers, but I still think it's safe to say that he's achieved archetype.
There's also an entire novel about Sydney Carton, but I find that I have no desire to read it. If I want someone else's vision of the character, I'll stick with Ronald Colman, thank you very much. : )
Or "The Chronicles of Narnia", as far as I can remember, except one short story in Neil Gaiman's "Fragile Things"...
"The Problem of Susan?" (It's been copied down at the bottom of the page.) That's all I've seen for published retellings, too. I have no idea what exists in the way of fanfic.
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Is Mary Russell someone else's creation as well? Wherefrom?
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I am pretty sure she's original to Laurie R. King; Holmes, obviously, is not. I realize that was a misleading sentence.
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Because I can't tell if devoting this kind of analysis to a terrible summer blockbuster is just intrinsically doomed to failure—it's not even as though I'm recommending a film that I think everyone should see, I'm picking a few curious elements out of a mess that I would generally warn people against. I never have any idea if other people want to read that sort of thing.
even if I can't picture you writing fan fiction
I can't really, either. So far I've written flash and a chantey for
But I'm also thinking now that I want to write poetry about Dorian Gray, so I may have to disavow this paragraph in a few days.
(This does not discount my particular interest in seeing you do a treatment of my characters outside of poetry. I'm just saying.)
Heh. Thank you. I will see what I can do . . . (But only if you write more things I can read!)
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Monsters call to monsters; no mortals need apply.
I like this idea quite as lot.
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My useless talents are many and varied. Thanks.
I like this idea quite as lot.
Feel free to use it . . .
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A story about vampy!Mina and Dorian and Hyde would be awesome. The real interactions between Mina and Hyde in the books are lovely in a different way, as are Hyde and Nemo's.
(My secret shame is that I sort of enjoy watching Stuart Townsend try to act. It's like watching a kitten first try to walk.)
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If it eats my soul, you'll be the first to know . . .
The real interactions between Mina and Hyde in the books are lovely in a different way, as are Hyde and Nemo's.
Okay, now I'm curious.
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*tentacled handshake*
Heh, heh, heh... welcome to the crew, lass!
... You would probably get a kick out of the comic-book version. I've got the first big volume and it's pretty fun.
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It was always in my blood to die at sea . . .
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I actually hate the comic with a blazing passion, which I understand is rare: my problem with it is that it feels to me as though it has no sense of wonder. All the allusions to things that are in their originals beautiful get smeared with darkness and complexity, which is all very well, except that it leads to a world in which there is no light left and no understanding that light can be complex.
The Alan Moore-riffs-on-other-people's-work comic I do recommend, highly, is Lost Girls, which is his pornographic comic about the meeting of Alice, Wendy and Dorothy Gale in an Austrian hotel in 1914. Beautiful, philosophical, wicked and delicious, mirrors within mirrors. You can read our copy, because the library does not stock it and the cover price is seventy-five dollars.
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I have been reading reviews of Lost Girls for some time now; and eyeing the bookstore copy, which is sealed so that one cannot hide behind the occult section and read it.
*plots to visit at the earliest possible opportunity*
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Seriously, pick a day, and we can give you food and Lost Girls and possibly the movie of Something Wicked This Way Comes.
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You've got my sympathy. I hate it when they do that. Even though I suppose I understand why, it's still frustrating.
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I read the first volume tonight: I was impressed.
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As to fanfic... I think it is often a matter of seeing the flaws in the canon and wanting to do something with them. I've written fanfic at various times for Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ranma 1/2, and Harry Potter, all of which, although in their varying ways they've got something compelling about them, have got rather more lacunae than perhaps they ought. I've never felt the same desire to write fic for, say, Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind or Jablokov's _Carve the Sky_ or _Tous les Matins du Monde_.
On the other hand, there are settings that invite fanfic more, I think, because they sprawl and there's always space that might be fillt in: Lord of the Rings, say, or Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosiverse, which has produced a limited quantity fanfic of an unusually high average quality. However, I don't write fic for those, so I can't say for sure what motivates them as do.
And then, I suppose, there are settings that more inspire the feeling of "I could do that better." I'm not sure how they fit in, but I think they don't spawn so much fanfic as... subtle corrections. I have my suspicion that C.J. Cherryh's _Rider at the Gate_ series (can't remember what it's called the now) is one of the above for Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar and similar "isn't it cool to be a raffish-outsider-without-whose-kind-society-could-not-go-on and magically bonded to a telepathic critter?" series.
Hmm... I've not really thought about that last category before. My thoughts on the matter may be all full of hot air and worse. I'll have to put more contemplation into it. Or cast about for a series with which to do the same sos I can get it written and publisht and stop spending so much time mulling on fanfic and the anthropology of fandom and suchlike folderol.
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Hm. These days, my instinctive reaction to Mercedes Lackey—I will admit that it took a little while to build up, as I read Arrows of the Queen and The Last Herald-Mage in peace; and I will probably always be fond of Alberich—is not to take her premises and rewrite them well, but simply not to read her at all.
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Mine as well, although I've got a feeling that reading some stuff of hers in a systematic fashion could be useful from the perspective of working out what it is about her stuff that works, insamuch as her vast readership seems to indicate something does. (Although I suspect a lot of it is just having written a couple of rather good trilogies early on that set hooks and gained her a fair bit of reader loyalty.)
I was the same with _Arrows_ and _Herald-Mage_, FWIW, and Alberich, I've always thought, was a character who deserved a better writer. ;-)
She wrote him, I think, two novels as a viewpoint character. I read one of them and was, since I was expecting to feel near-Hunter S Thompson-esque levels of fear and loathing, mildly albeit pleasantly surprised that it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. Despite Alberich's relationship with Herald-Chronicler
Mary SueMyste.I think I wrote a much longer rambling post on this subject a few nights ago, and--I hope--had the good sense to not post it anywhere. If not, my apologies.
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I've noticed this effect, and done the same.
---L.
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The myth of Zugios and Atlante? Wins.
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---L.
Off topic, but...
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Awesomeness. : )
Re: Off topic, but...
Heh. And heh.
---L.