reworking Border Princes
Feb. 10th, 2007 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethBorder Princes has been bugging me. Because like I said, it has a lot of good parts scattered around the edges. So I kind of want to pull it apart and reassemble it into something that works instead.
There's a couple of main problems. 'Presence of Marty Stu' is a heading, not a detailed problem. What a MS does is distort the characters around it so they only exist in relation to it. Also it tends to magic away the problems - like, maybe character X is a jerk but he's not a jerk to MS because MS is Just That Cool. And what you end up with is a nasty combination of no distinctive characters (because they're all reacting to Just That Cool) and no conflict.
BP has conflict in the run-and-shoot sense, but in the emotional sense all the conflict is pushed to the edges. Conflict is when two characters are in a scene and they want different things. And it only exists for non-Team characters in BP. plus if James+character are in a scene the only time anyone wants something different than James is if they want to kill him or run away or something, never emotion-different. Like, Gwen's only conflict is if to leave Rhys, there's never any doubt James is Just That Cool and perfect. It would have been a bit more interesting if James had some kind of objection to Gwen acting as she did.
The other set of thought is intertext clearer - In the Buffy episode Superstar the character Jonathan MSed himself into a AU where he was Just That Cool, but he did it by stealing recogniseable aspects of other characters. When the spell wore off they got their aspects back. It was like a wonky version of the enjoining spell they worked at the end of the season, where everyone voluntarily pooled their best assets to create a Buffy that was Just That Cool (and Kick Arse). (note a- this condensed canon can be argued with) (note b- I should stop doing the capital letters thing, probably.)
So what would be interesting to do with James... who should be called Jonathan for the intertext funnies... would be to make him *recogniseably* a composite of the best characteristics of the other characters, and leave them *noticeably* lacking them.
Bear with me on this.
What I mean is - okay, so he gets the superpower of Giving Cool Names, which in canon is something Ianto does. Ianto loses his verbal dexterity, which leaves him a shadow of his former self. Without the snark, he really does just bring the coffee.
This is pretty much what happens in the book, if you want to look at it from just the right angle.
Now what would make it an interesting story with canon character illumination and some conflict would be if, sometimes, it *wore off*, so James lost his borrowed cool and the canon characters got it back. In the context of this example, Ianto would get his snark back, just briefly, and instead of a Torchwood slang entirely shaped by the interloper, they'd start having cute rhyming names for things because Ianto shapes their expressive language instead.
Further, instead of James being communication central, Ianto would be the one who passes the messages and reshapes them through his specific forms of expression.
And in seeing him lose and regain this function, we would see what his function *is*. We see Ianto has snark because someone stole it for a while.
So what else would a composite character have?
In the book, James and Gwen are lovers. Instead of Owen and Gwen. Therefore James stole Owen's attraction for and to Gwen. Whatever it is that Owen feels for her, James would get instead. Whatever it is about Owen that attracts Gwen, James would steal too. In this case that would mean being fiercely protective of her at risk of his own life, and being the one she can confide in about Torchwood. Plus the promising really hot sex.
Which would leave poor Owen with just the part where he's actually a bit of a tosser.
He wouldn't have any spark with Gwen. He'd just be this jerk she shoved up against the wall, and make comments that sound more creepy than not, and Gwen wouldn't respond.
And then it would wear off.
Owen would get back his knight to the rescue aspect, Gwen would see him as a port in the storm, and we'd *see it* because for a while it was missing.
Again, the MS has destroyed an existing Team Torchwood relationship, by putting himself in the focus of it. But unlike a book where they spend about the last dozen pages on the unraveling stage we actually get some compare/contrast going on, so we see the relationship that was destroyed.
One of the most interesting things James did in the book was be the much needed teambuilder, give the team a safety valve, something utterly non Torchwood related that let them let off steam. He's stolen some mass quantities of social skills from somewhere.
How about if he got them from Jack? So suddenly Jack is socially awkward! He'd be left with being the secretive bossy one, and James would be the charmer. How much of a contrast would that be?
I don't know what he got from Tosh, in the book... probably some technical skills. Bit sad really.
But you see what *could* be done. Pick a relationship, pick an aspect of character, and *explicitly* make him step in the middle and steal it.
So the upshot is we get a perfect character, one who makes the whole team work better by making it revolve around him.
What's the compare/contrast with Jack? Because he's the focus of the team as is, but he doesn't pull them together. He's more a mysterious absence of connection, for them.
But when the spell starts to fade... or the tech wear off, or however you want to phrase it within paradigm... you go from having magic combo Buffy to being Team Torchwood again. They'd all spin off in their seperate directions, they wouldn't have the guy they (under the spell) thought of as the heart of the team, and they'd feel their performance impacted.
And then instead of getting 'of course we love the MS and want to keep him! oops he's dead.'
we could have 'we love the MS and want to keep him but it would be at cost of parts of ourselves'
and you of course get the lovely gestalt being metaphor, the team that becomes something more than human by combining so closely.
but you get the thing where they've all lost their shiniest parts, and they've lost their connections to each other because they're only connected via the MS.
And the simplest way to write why that is an issue is to concentrate on the Gwen/Owen.
And it isn't as simple as Gwen/James just meaning Owen loses Gwen and Gwen gets Mr Perfect, because there's the Rhys factor. When she's shagging Owen she gets to be Gwen/OWen *and* Gwen/Rhys, but when she's around James she can't say anything nice about Rhys and she was just going to leave him. Because James stole her. And that's a big loss, half her life the way they were telling it in the book, everything outside Torchwood sacrificed to make combo-Torchwood happier.
But then there's Tosh and Jack and Ianto.
How do they connect? What connections has James interrupted?
Because there's no Jack/Ianto banter here. They aren't flirty. They aren't talking. James stole all the talking, so Jack and Ianto don't connect. There's just some orders Jack has someone else relay, and Ianto doesn't in fact turn up in time to help with anything. Apparently James stole his timing too.
James stole Jack/Ianto's time. No flirty stopwatch with these two. No spark.
... yes I realise in the book this is because nobody has spark, voice, or any of that good stuff. But taking that fact that I currently attribute to really bad writing and turning it into a thing that highlights what is usually *present*, we end up with a theme.
What if the choice is between magic combo Torchwood with superpowers (James) and everyone loving him (which is actually hella narcicisstic because he's got all their good bits so it's like loving your own good bits) and having him kick arse (because superpowers)
or
being a bunch of somewhat flawed individual human beings sans superpowers but with a lot more connections among the group, ie Jack/Ianto and the whole Gwen triangle, ie back where canon lives.
Have the spell flicker and the usual dynamics be restored and you've suddenly got a story worth telling *and* a conflict.
Because if you set up a character who by definition everybody loves and then have him threatened and then... well, actually, Jack went with the other guys for James' own good, but that was crappy writing because they didn't even bother writing the bit where he was persuaded, but my point is, if everyone loves him by design then of course everyone wants to keep him and if he wants to keep him too where's the conflict?
But if everyone loves him by design then it wears off and they get a clear minded choice about which version of reality they want to live with... that gets interesting. Then they have a conflict. BE their best parts or, well, shag them. (Or be their best friends, or whatever.)
A deliberate MS is always going to be dead dodgy, and persuading a widely read audience to read him past page, well, in my case, 42, is going to be very difficult. I think you'd have to give away the cuckoo nature at the start, have the spell fade *in*, so you establish status quo and then break it. And then you'd have a conflict between writing and audience - persuade all of them to like the new character even as he demolishes the existing ones! Rather difficult. Can be done, though, if he uses the 'sympathetic character' checklist as well as the MS one and has a bit of conflict and some self sacrifice and some needs-hugs and such.
Eventually the character-eater aspect of the MS would mean nobody else was remotely necessary.
But the world would get saved a lot, so is the trade off worth it?
... and we have to reboot to regular canon by the end, but that doesn't necessarily mean the canon people all decide 'no'. They could mostly decide 'yes' and have a couple of people with opposite reasons for deciding 'no'. Maybe Owen being selfish and Tosh being... I don't know, I haven't thought of anything for Tosh to do in this setup thus far. Or maybe it could be that Owen doesn't want to be selfish and is aware all his selfsacrificing bits got nicked by the interloper. That would be nifty. The MS makes it so the others can't be heroic therefore sets them up to try and break him up which would leave them with their heroic bits back which would then make them wonder if they should put him back together.
... I'm confusing myself now.
The point is, having a character or outside factor distort the canon characters is not necessarily of itself a bad thing, because you can use it to compare/contrast with the way they usually are, and highlight why we like them.
But the book doesn't do that. At all. So I want to take it apart and do something more interesting with it.
There's a couple of main problems. 'Presence of Marty Stu' is a heading, not a detailed problem. What a MS does is distort the characters around it so they only exist in relation to it. Also it tends to magic away the problems - like, maybe character X is a jerk but he's not a jerk to MS because MS is Just That Cool. And what you end up with is a nasty combination of no distinctive characters (because they're all reacting to Just That Cool) and no conflict.
BP has conflict in the run-and-shoot sense, but in the emotional sense all the conflict is pushed to the edges. Conflict is when two characters are in a scene and they want different things. And it only exists for non-Team characters in BP. plus if James+character are in a scene the only time anyone wants something different than James is if they want to kill him or run away or something, never emotion-different. Like, Gwen's only conflict is if to leave Rhys, there's never any doubt James is Just That Cool and perfect. It would have been a bit more interesting if James had some kind of objection to Gwen acting as she did.
The other set of thought is intertext clearer - In the Buffy episode Superstar the character Jonathan MSed himself into a AU where he was Just That Cool, but he did it by stealing recogniseable aspects of other characters. When the spell wore off they got their aspects back. It was like a wonky version of the enjoining spell they worked at the end of the season, where everyone voluntarily pooled their best assets to create a Buffy that was Just That Cool (and Kick Arse). (note a- this condensed canon can be argued with) (note b- I should stop doing the capital letters thing, probably.)
So what would be interesting to do with James... who should be called Jonathan for the intertext funnies... would be to make him *recogniseably* a composite of the best characteristics of the other characters, and leave them *noticeably* lacking them.
Bear with me on this.
What I mean is - okay, so he gets the superpower of Giving Cool Names, which in canon is something Ianto does. Ianto loses his verbal dexterity, which leaves him a shadow of his former self. Without the snark, he really does just bring the coffee.
This is pretty much what happens in the book, if you want to look at it from just the right angle.
Now what would make it an interesting story with canon character illumination and some conflict would be if, sometimes, it *wore off*, so James lost his borrowed cool and the canon characters got it back. In the context of this example, Ianto would get his snark back, just briefly, and instead of a Torchwood slang entirely shaped by the interloper, they'd start having cute rhyming names for things because Ianto shapes their expressive language instead.
Further, instead of James being communication central, Ianto would be the one who passes the messages and reshapes them through his specific forms of expression.
And in seeing him lose and regain this function, we would see what his function *is*. We see Ianto has snark because someone stole it for a while.
So what else would a composite character have?
In the book, James and Gwen are lovers. Instead of Owen and Gwen. Therefore James stole Owen's attraction for and to Gwen. Whatever it is that Owen feels for her, James would get instead. Whatever it is about Owen that attracts Gwen, James would steal too. In this case that would mean being fiercely protective of her at risk of his own life, and being the one she can confide in about Torchwood. Plus the promising really hot sex.
Which would leave poor Owen with just the part where he's actually a bit of a tosser.
He wouldn't have any spark with Gwen. He'd just be this jerk she shoved up against the wall, and make comments that sound more creepy than not, and Gwen wouldn't respond.
And then it would wear off.
Owen would get back his knight to the rescue aspect, Gwen would see him as a port in the storm, and we'd *see it* because for a while it was missing.
Again, the MS has destroyed an existing Team Torchwood relationship, by putting himself in the focus of it. But unlike a book where they spend about the last dozen pages on the unraveling stage we actually get some compare/contrast going on, so we see the relationship that was destroyed.
One of the most interesting things James did in the book was be the much needed teambuilder, give the team a safety valve, something utterly non Torchwood related that let them let off steam. He's stolen some mass quantities of social skills from somewhere.
How about if he got them from Jack? So suddenly Jack is socially awkward! He'd be left with being the secretive bossy one, and James would be the charmer. How much of a contrast would that be?
I don't know what he got from Tosh, in the book... probably some technical skills. Bit sad really.
But you see what *could* be done. Pick a relationship, pick an aspect of character, and *explicitly* make him step in the middle and steal it.
So the upshot is we get a perfect character, one who makes the whole team work better by making it revolve around him.
What's the compare/contrast with Jack? Because he's the focus of the team as is, but he doesn't pull them together. He's more a mysterious absence of connection, for them.
But when the spell starts to fade... or the tech wear off, or however you want to phrase it within paradigm... you go from having magic combo Buffy to being Team Torchwood again. They'd all spin off in their seperate directions, they wouldn't have the guy they (under the spell) thought of as the heart of the team, and they'd feel their performance impacted.
And then instead of getting 'of course we love the MS and want to keep him! oops he's dead.'
we could have 'we love the MS and want to keep him but it would be at cost of parts of ourselves'
and you of course get the lovely gestalt being metaphor, the team that becomes something more than human by combining so closely.
but you get the thing where they've all lost their shiniest parts, and they've lost their connections to each other because they're only connected via the MS.
And the simplest way to write why that is an issue is to concentrate on the Gwen/Owen.
And it isn't as simple as Gwen/James just meaning Owen loses Gwen and Gwen gets Mr Perfect, because there's the Rhys factor. When she's shagging Owen she gets to be Gwen/OWen *and* Gwen/Rhys, but when she's around James she can't say anything nice about Rhys and she was just going to leave him. Because James stole her. And that's a big loss, half her life the way they were telling it in the book, everything outside Torchwood sacrificed to make combo-Torchwood happier.
But then there's Tosh and Jack and Ianto.
How do they connect? What connections has James interrupted?
Because there's no Jack/Ianto banter here. They aren't flirty. They aren't talking. James stole all the talking, so Jack and Ianto don't connect. There's just some orders Jack has someone else relay, and Ianto doesn't in fact turn up in time to help with anything. Apparently James stole his timing too.
James stole Jack/Ianto's time. No flirty stopwatch with these two. No spark.
... yes I realise in the book this is because nobody has spark, voice, or any of that good stuff. But taking that fact that I currently attribute to really bad writing and turning it into a thing that highlights what is usually *present*, we end up with a theme.
What if the choice is between magic combo Torchwood with superpowers (James) and everyone loving him (which is actually hella narcicisstic because he's got all their good bits so it's like loving your own good bits) and having him kick arse (because superpowers)
or
being a bunch of somewhat flawed individual human beings sans superpowers but with a lot more connections among the group, ie Jack/Ianto and the whole Gwen triangle, ie back where canon lives.
Have the spell flicker and the usual dynamics be restored and you've suddenly got a story worth telling *and* a conflict.
Because if you set up a character who by definition everybody loves and then have him threatened and then... well, actually, Jack went with the other guys for James' own good, but that was crappy writing because they didn't even bother writing the bit where he was persuaded, but my point is, if everyone loves him by design then of course everyone wants to keep him and if he wants to keep him too where's the conflict?
But if everyone loves him by design then it wears off and they get a clear minded choice about which version of reality they want to live with... that gets interesting. Then they have a conflict. BE their best parts or, well, shag them. (Or be their best friends, or whatever.)
A deliberate MS is always going to be dead dodgy, and persuading a widely read audience to read him past page, well, in my case, 42, is going to be very difficult. I think you'd have to give away the cuckoo nature at the start, have the spell fade *in*, so you establish status quo and then break it. And then you'd have a conflict between writing and audience - persuade all of them to like the new character even as he demolishes the existing ones! Rather difficult. Can be done, though, if he uses the 'sympathetic character' checklist as well as the MS one and has a bit of conflict and some self sacrifice and some needs-hugs and such.
Eventually the character-eater aspect of the MS would mean nobody else was remotely necessary.
But the world would get saved a lot, so is the trade off worth it?
... and we have to reboot to regular canon by the end, but that doesn't necessarily mean the canon people all decide 'no'. They could mostly decide 'yes' and have a couple of people with opposite reasons for deciding 'no'. Maybe Owen being selfish and Tosh being... I don't know, I haven't thought of anything for Tosh to do in this setup thus far. Or maybe it could be that Owen doesn't want to be selfish and is aware all his selfsacrificing bits got nicked by the interloper. That would be nifty. The MS makes it so the others can't be heroic therefore sets them up to try and break him up which would leave them with their heroic bits back which would then make them wonder if they should put him back together.
... I'm confusing myself now.
The point is, having a character or outside factor distort the canon characters is not necessarily of itself a bad thing, because you can use it to compare/contrast with the way they usually are, and highlight why we like them.
But the book doesn't do that. At all. So I want to take it apart and do something more interesting with it.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 05:25 pm (UTC)I won't pretend to be able to comment on your specialist area other than to say I think I would prefer your story over Dan Abnett's. If for no other reason than it would actually involve the team rather than them being mere adjuncts. You should consider doing a review along these lines for Amazon.co.uk, just so folks can have a feel of what makes the story not work.
Looking back on things, I am glad that I started with Border Princes. I was the most driven to read Torchwood stories at that point, so it being disappointing bothered me less. And actually it was easier to read too, in that I'd already caught the notion that I wasn't going mad not knowing who James was. Still, it was good to follow up with better stories.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 04:00 am (UTC)fanfic I think much about
english in general I go to college to think much about
so sometimes the thoughts get together
I think Border Princes is meant to be in the middle because then the pictures on the edge go together best. But it don't much matter because it isn't like there's any arc going on.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 04:44 pm (UTC)And I never noticed the spines until after I'd finished Border Princes - I picked them up from a table display, rather than a bookshelf and never even looked at the pines until later. But as you say, there's little story linkage between the books (though it seems the authors did discuss matters together), so it makes no difference.
The sad thing is, I've read fanfics that were better than those novels. Okay they benefit from being much shorter, but even so maybe we ought to expect more.