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When somebody destroys me, I want to feel it
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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I would honestly recommend to you his Blue Moon Rising, his first published novel, which takes high fantasy and turns some of its tropes upside-down and sideways with a liberal dose of snark, and also without the phoning-it-in tendency of his later works. It features a virgin prince who rides a unicorn being sent to kill a dragon because his father the king is trying to get him killed to get rid of the excess heir. Except the dragon wants to be rescued from the swordswoman princess who was dumped at his lair. And that's just the beginning of their problems, including an infestation of demons, the politics of feudalism, a castle with unusual architectural problems, practical goblins, and some incredibly cool but fickle magic weapons. If any of this sounds interesting to you, I will send you a copy.
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Heh. Blue Moon Rising was responsible for upsetting me very badly when I was ten years old and my god-aunt Susan left her copy at our house and I read it; I don't think any of the snark or the deconstruction registered with me and all that came through was the horror of the Darkwood, some of which I remember as really visceral. There was some kind of enormous amoeba-like creature that had come flowing out of a mine and swallowed all the inhabitants, but their bodies were still visible inside its transparent flesh, slowly breaking down as it digested them—the line that stuck with me was "dark shadows that had once been men." It stayed in my head for weeks and gave me trouble sleeping because of the images it conjured, which were probably worse than anything on the actual page; there were the implications of unrecognizability and decay, but also something about the way people became dead things—once men, no longer. Looking back, I think it was something of the same horror I was able to identify in Bulgakov's "The Red Crown." But I was ten and I had no filters between the words on the page and the images in my brain, I didn't know how to give myself distance by analyzing the writing style or breaking down how the author was creating the effect, I couldn't unsee the story and it wouldn't leave me. I've never actually tried re-reading the book. I am assuming from your recommendation that it is not actually like that for an adult!
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There is seriously no way you could have been expected to know that. It's likely the book would have struck me very differently if I had read it in grad school or even college—my current thresholds for disturbing imagery are well above those of most people I know. You and
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Man, now I want dessert, and I even had three bites of chocolate pastry tonight. (The lizard generously shared hers. *g*)