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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.
no subject
There was this book, Toothless, that I got as an audiobook in 2010 and listened to over and over. One-sentence summary: instead of the Second Crusade, Europe got the zombie apocalypse. Ok. The protagonists for part of the book are these three poor jerks in the army of the undead, who just want to get their evil grunt work done and not get re-killed in the process. Along the way their original names got lost, so they're called Toothless, Breakneck, and Curdle after their most prominent physical characteristics.
I wanted the whole book to be just about them, whining, sulking, trying to game the system, consoling each other, pitying themselves, and constructing bullshit nihilistic arguments that the zombie apocalypse was a good thing, if you took the REALLY long view. (Breakneck and Curdle were totally Those Two Villains. You know the trope: the amiable thicko and the sad twerp. Toothless was grandiose and prideful.)
In fact, only a quarter of the book was about them. The rest was well-written, but it wasn't what I checked in for. I checked in for my three horrible jerks caring about each other.
(Somewhere there is an Anne Rice quote that I can't be bothered to track down, where Lestat says something like, "Is there love in hell? Do devils walk with their arms around one another's shoulders, saying, 'Ah, you are my dear friend, how I love you'?")
Ooo! Anne Rice, and another dead guy! My favorite book she ever wrote is Servant of the Bones. The Servant in question is undead and has killed a lotta people, but at heart he's basically a hapless young guy from one of the Jewish families captive in Babylon in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. He signed up to do a distasteful ritual that would probably kill him, under the impression that it would help end the captivity in Babylon. He got subjected to a completely different ritual that DID kill him, and all that was left afterwards was his bones, coated in gold. These were supposed to house his spirit, as a genie-like servant for sorcerers to command. The bones do house his spirit, but his spirit is hopping mad, and who wouldn't be. Almost every time he's summoned, he leaps out, kills the sorcerer who's trying to command him, slaughters everyone else nearby just to make a point, and then goes back into the bones and pulls the covers over his head, as it were.
The book is about what happens on the occasions when Azrael, for that is his name, manifests and doesn't (just) start killing everyone in sight. The plot and tone is wildly uneven. The backstory about Azrael's human life is grand; I have little idea whether Rice did any research or just made shit up, but it's very convincingly told. The modern-day stuff is meh; murder, double-crossing, an omnicidal maniac cult leader with a biological weapon, and some stuff about contemporary Hasidim that I'm pretty sure is condescending/sickeningly cutesy/offensive and inaccurate. The only bright spot is that Azrael has a loving and fully described sex scene with an older woman who looks a lot like Anne Rice. ^_^
In short, Azrael needed to pack up his backstory and move to a better novel.
Non-dead-people-related:
The Dark Knight Rises by Christopher Nolan has two villains. One is Bane, who's so changed from his identity in the comics that he might as well be a new person. The other--
oh, by the way, spoilers for a movie that came out three years ago--
The other villain is Talia al-Ghul, a character who doesn't appear in comics and was invented just for the movie. There were a lot of dissatisfied comics fans going, "Why should we care about this character we've never heard of?" but I think that's silly. Talia and her lovely assistant Bane were better villains than that mess of a movie deserved, and I'd have watched a solid two hours of Disabled Warlord Guy and Evil Messiah Murder Girl manipulate people and blow shit up.
I think it comes down to the same thing as in my first example: terrible, disgusting people who care about each other and will always have one another's backs against the whole rest of the world. That's always going to make me care about people, quickly and completely.
no subject
Nitpick (because it doesn't change your point), but Talia's been around in the comics for decades. I believe that she, like Bane, got changed rather a lot for the film.
no subject
That sounds adorable. What went wrong? Who was the book really about?
"Is there love in hell? Do devils walk with their arms around one another's shoulders, saying, 'Ah, you are my dear friend, how I love you'?"
Most definitions of hell would say not, I think, because then it wouldn't be hell, like the fable where the only difference between the two regions—in each, the traveler sees plates and dishes of wonderful food and people who have no elbows, so that they can pick up the food, but they cannot put it in their mouths—is that in hell everyone is angrily, starvingly trying to feed themselves and in heaven all the people are reaching out and feeding one another. But then C'est d'Aucasin et de Nicolete would disagree:
"But in hell will I go. For to hell go the fair clerks and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney and the great wars, and the stout archer and the loyal man. With them will I go. And there go the fair and courteous ladies who have friends, two or three, together with their wedded lords. And there pass the gold and silver, the ermine and all rich furs, harpers and minstrels, and the happy of the world."
He got subjected to a completely different ritual that DID kill him, and all that was left afterwards was his bones, coated in gold.
Well, that's not horrifying!
Seriously, that is exactly the sort of detail that would have made it impossible for me to read the book when I was younger. Now I just look at it and wonder where Rice got the idea, because there's really not a precedent for it in Jewish ritual. Human sacrifice kind of went out after the Binding of Isaac.
Almost every time he's summoned, he leaps out, kills the sorcerer who's trying to command him, slaughters everyone else nearby just to make a point, and then goes back into the bones and pulls the covers over his head, as it were.
Aw. I'm sorry he didn't get a better book.
(Of course his name is Azrael. Is he actually supposed to be the Angel of Death or just a very angry sort of familiar spirit?)
Talia and her lovely assistant Bane were better villains than that mess of a movie deserved, and I'd have watched a solid two hours of Disabled Warlord Guy and Evil Messiah Murder Girl manipulate people and blow shit up.
Maybe you can file off enough of the numbers to give them a home in original fiction sometime. I'm not being flippant. Someimes fix-it fic is the only thing left to do.
[edit] terrible, disgusting people who care about each other and will always have one another's backs against the whole rest of the world.
Right: that made me think of the only scenes from the 2012 Les Mis I've seen. The Thénardiers are dreadful human beings, but I like them so much better as a mutually supportive couple than as a passive-aggressive disaster zone of codependent criminal behavior.
no subject
I see an interesting comparison here with the tropes of the puppy-kicking villain vs the one that loves his dog. I find it creepy in humans, when we see the horrible merciless fill-in-the-blank go home after work and become a loving cheerful well-balanced every-day guy (or woman). Such compartmentalization! It's terrifying, because I imagine: what if I'm seeing only that at-home side, now?
And yet, in a devil, that humanizing is maybe comforting.
Or, by making the non-human less alien, it's a failure of imagination.
no subject
Ah! I flashed on Mephistopheles—Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it—so I was thinking of the devils as inmates.
(I am now thinking of Angel on My Shoulder (1946), where the Devil poses as a damned soul in order to win the trust of a recently murdered gangster and stage a breakout from Hell for purposes of his own.)
And yet, in a devil, that humanizing is maybe comforting.
Or, by making the non-human less alien, it's a failure of imagination.
I like that formulation. I think it depends on the story, for me. I like my trickster devils when I find them in folklore; I do not want my aliens, or my dryads, or my demons, to be just like us.
no subject
This reminds me of a sort of reverse case of what we're describing -- I tried to listen to an audio version of Don Juan in Hell, and gave up once I decided it would be a pretty decent concept if only Don Juan weren't in it -- he's a crushing bore, and he monopolizes the conversation.