I was browsing in Rodney's yesterday when I ran across the novelization of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). I was morbidly curious, so I took ten minutes and read it. Like most novelizations, I think it was done from the shooting script, so it's an improvement on the finished film in that it includes some evidently deleted scenes in which character development occurs rather than clichés and explosions, but that didn't make it good. Mostly it reminded me that the movie annoyed me so much that I wrote 4300 words about it in 2006. I still like Jason Flemyng's Jekyll. He could have done with a better film around him.
And he's not the only one. Among characters I like, there is a small subset I have mentally classed as "better than the stories they came from." Sometimes it's an actor salvaging their screentime—I'm thinking of the time I kept watching The High Bright Sun (1964) just for Denholm Elliott's cynical British agent, or Mercedes McCambridge's torch-singing survivor standing head and shoulders above the psychobabble of The Scarf (1951), or the compulsive professionalism Peter Cushing brought to otherwise deadly roles like Henry Miles in The End of the Affair (1955). Sometimes it's the sense that a character got away from their author, like Waldo Butters in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files; he is so instantly and eccentrically himself that I was not surprised to find out he was intended as a one-off who just refused to stay offstage. Sometimes it feels like structural failure elsewhere in the narrative: Nicholas Flokos' Nike (1998) disappointed me by slamming a sudden hard right into tragedy for no good reason I could discern then or now, but its protagonist Photi Anthropotis is a lovely sad clown of a modern Greek luftmensch and I still feel very tender toward him more than fifteen years later. And every now and then I have absolutely no idea what happened, but it's a fact that I actively like Licinus Honorius of Mary Gentle's Ilario: The Lion's Eye (2006) even when I want to clobber much of the novel around him.
I could go on, but I'd rather ask you. Who are your favorite characters who deserved better stories? What narratives do you revisit just for the supporting cast or a choice subplot? (What narratives would you never revisit, but you remember that one bit really fondly?) Recommendations? Warnings? Can you fix it with fic? I'm going to see if it's too late in the day to buy donuts.
And he's not the only one. Among characters I like, there is a small subset I have mentally classed as "better than the stories they came from." Sometimes it's an actor salvaging their screentime—I'm thinking of the time I kept watching The High Bright Sun (1964) just for Denholm Elliott's cynical British agent, or Mercedes McCambridge's torch-singing survivor standing head and shoulders above the psychobabble of The Scarf (1951), or the compulsive professionalism Peter Cushing brought to otherwise deadly roles like Henry Miles in The End of the Affair (1955). Sometimes it's the sense that a character got away from their author, like Waldo Butters in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files; he is so instantly and eccentrically himself that I was not surprised to find out he was intended as a one-off who just refused to stay offstage. Sometimes it feels like structural failure elsewhere in the narrative: Nicholas Flokos' Nike (1998) disappointed me by slamming a sudden hard right into tragedy for no good reason I could discern then or now, but its protagonist Photi Anthropotis is a lovely sad clown of a modern Greek luftmensch and I still feel very tender toward him more than fifteen years later. And every now and then I have absolutely no idea what happened, but it's a fact that I actively like Licinus Honorius of Mary Gentle's Ilario: The Lion's Eye (2006) even when I want to clobber much of the novel around him.
I could go on, but I'd rather ask you. Who are your favorite characters who deserved better stories? What narratives do you revisit just for the supporting cast or a choice subplot? (What narratives would you never revisit, but you remember that one bit really fondly?) Recommendations? Warnings? Can you fix it with fic? I'm going to see if it's too late in the day to buy donuts.
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