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kaigouIt just now dawned on me -- oi! -- that complaining about a lack of bad guys in stories is going about it all wrong. It’s not that stories need more bad guys, so much as stories simply need more obstacles -- and what is an obstacle other than just “a character with different goals than the protagonist”? Those obstacles don’t have to be bad by whatever moral or social standard we’re using to define “the bad guy”, so much as honest human goals that just happen to be in opposition to the main character. For that matter, obstacles may even arise from a difference in ends but not means, or vice versa: the protagonist who believes the ends justifies the means, versus his best friend who believes changes comes from within the system... despite having the same goal (changing the world), they’re going to clash because their methods are diametrically opposed.
That reminded me of Wicked, which remains a brilliant example (IMO) of at least one facet of what I mean: that of taking a story and flipping it over. Reverse everything: the good guy, the former protagonist, is now the obstacle, and the opposition is now the protagonist. Can you tell the same story from the opposite side, and have characters see the behaviors and actions and outcomes as believeable? Even more, could readers end up seeing the former obstacle as even sympathetic? It seems to me -- thinking of some of the stories I’ve read in the SFF genre -- that a lot of times the bad guy couldn’t become the protagonist in his/her own story. The obstacle’s story and perspective don’t jive enough, don’t click enough -- well, not without a good deal of contortion on the part of the reader to retcon like crazy, to get it to work. One thing about Wicked was that it didn’t require a huge amount of contortionist tricks to turn the story on its head. (Not sure I can say the same about some of his follow-ups, but hey.)
The other input that helped this click in my head was finishing a crazy-ass-ride of an animated series, Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann. The series is in two parts, with the second half occuring seven years after the events of the first half. I’d seen mild spoilers that indicated that a nemesis from the first half would be an unlikely ally in the second half, and I know full well this is often a risky curveball in story-telling. Make the character too bad, and his loyalty to the Good will be questionable down the road; make him too weak (that is, easily defeated as one of the Bad), and his value-add to the Good is seen as negligble, if not completly superfluous and possibly nothing more than fan service. But I found that TTGL did an excellent job of making this supposedly bad-guy character both believable, and sympathetic, while he remains ranked with the Bad, in the first half.
A quick summary: the planet’s humans live underground, and any attempt to live on the surface means dealing with massive mecha-like robots controlled by animals or animal-human hybrids. Our group of intrepid heroes not only finds a way to the surface, but manages to defeat a beast-mecha and take over the fighting machine, and using this machine, they plan to take on the entire beast-man system that’s keeping humans down. Along the way to the capital city, one of the heroes unexpectedly meets up with a young beast-soldier named Viral. He proves himself a fast and efficient fighter, though our hero does get a strike or two on Viral. The fight escalates to machine-to-machine, and our heroes’ ingenuity proves to be just enough to beat Viral’s skills. Viral promises to return (of course), and kick their ass -- and at the same time, clearly states his motivation: he’ll be known far and wide among his soldier-kin as being one seriously awesome soldier, then.
While trying to avoid spoilers if you’ve not seen the story, I’ll skim a bit and sum up as: despite Viral’s growing personal grudge against these humans he sees as lesser beings -- not to mention being less experienced overall with the machinery used, and with fighting skills -- he keeps losing to them. On top of that, the planet’s overlord sends out Viral’s commanding officer to smack the humans down, and when the attempt goes astray and fails... Viral is left utterly baffled and astonished as to why the humans keep winning.
Here’s the first point where I started to feel sympathy for what had, up to then, been an apparently stock-character bad guy minion: “I’ll be back!” and all that. First, I realized that at no time had the heroes beaten Viral by being better than him; they’d managed to win each battle by coming up with out-of-left-field strategy combined with a sheer determination that outranked any of the beast-men. For the one fighting whose motivation is simply, “everyone will know I’m good!” versus the ones whose motivation is, “our entire species will no longer be kept in underground prisons!” ... it’s easy to see how the absolute life-on-the-line pressure of the latter could possibly, and probably would, shove past and through the not-quite-as-intense goals of the former. I clarify that because it does seem important in the balancing act: that Viral was not made to look stupid to make the heroes look good, but the writers made Viral look good... they just made the heroes look better.
Shortly after that scene, Viral is back at the capital, where another commanding officer berates him for his part in the loss. Not only does he retain the somewhat lost expression and frustrated expression he’d had at the end of the last (losing) battle, but when she strikes him physically, he does nothing, says nothing. He looks almost defeated, but baffled at the same time. Yes, part of what he says after the battle, and later, is focused on figuring out how to beat this foe (on a personal-grudge level), but he expresses a sentiment I don’t often see in ‘bad guys’. He asks himself, why can’t I beat them? What is wrong with me? He’s not just angry; he’s a frustrated-angry with himself as much as with his foe... so when he’s struck in anger by the commanding officer, he just takes it. Perhaps this is because it’s part of his soldier training, or perhaps he’s thinking he deserves punishment for the failure, but his pained confusion was a clear contrast to the usual cardboard “I’ll get him next time!” mantra.
Yes, I’m watching him get struck repeatedly for a failure that I know as viewer wasn’t entirely Viral’s fault -- and I felt immense sympathy for him. He’d walked the edge of the taunting bad-guy who keeps getting kicked in the teeth and keeps coming back for more, bad guy of the week and all that, but it was the shift from “I want to be recognized by the other soldiers” to a simpler, more personal-level question of “I want to know why I can’t beat you” that made Viral far less cardboard and far more understandable. Maybe even a little bit of seeing how ‘young’ the character was, too, when not in battle-mode.
Of course, as you can probably expect, one by one the good guys take down what the overlord throws at them (though to the series’ credit, the price of victory is never cheap and never easy and never without a significant cost). As one of the leading soldiers, Viral is involved in each battle and again and again is on the losing side. He’s finally presented to the overlord, and although the overlord is easily angered by anyone questioning him, Viral takes the chance. He begs, please, before you punish me for my failures, please, explain to me why I can’t beat them. He wants to know.
To his surprise, the overlord agrees. Alone in the overlord’s main chamber, the overlord asks him if Viral is really prepared to hear the truth. Is he really ready to hear why the humans will always win, why he is destined to always lose? Viral looks less determined than just resigned and confused, but he answers -- with the slightest of hesitation -- with a soft, “yes.”
That wish to know, to understand, suddenly turned him from a generic minion carrying out the overlord’s commands, to a genuine character with his own motivations and fears and hopes. It did not by any means turn him into a fluffy, loveable character -- through the remainder of the first half, and most of the second half, of the series, he’s just as nasty-mouthed and bad-attitude as he’d ever been. It’s just that the object of his ire shifts, and when he speaks truth to power (in the shape of the humans), his words carry weight as an obstacle. That, I think, is due to having seen that this is a character who -- when the chips are down -- wants to understand why more than anything else. He doesn’t take defeat as a reason to keep hammering away, but as a reason to ask questions and to grasp that something is beyond his ken, and he wants to know what it is... and if that will help him win, so much the better.
For all that the majority of the series does focus on the (human) heroes, taking the time within the series to tell the flipside of Viral’s experiences was an enlightening moment for me. It was as though the authors had said: we cannot just have “former nemesis in battle now as ally” and have heroes willing to accept the nemesis. It’s also that we have to show that the nemesis, himself, would be willing. It was the willingness to give time to the opposition, and not just show them throwing one Big Bad after another at the heroes, but why -- and their own internal struggles over failure or success -- that made the heroes’ losses all that more poignant, somehow.
In the end, when you discover the overlord’s motivations, it’s that much harder to see him as a Big Bad so much as just a Big Obstacle: again with the methods varying more than the actual goal, between the Overlord and our heroes. That adds a complexity and an emotional element to the story that’s missing in the vast majority of stories I’ve watched or read.
The other way, shy of creating a fully sympathetic bad guy, seems to be to make the bad guy human-sized somehow. I'm not certain how to describe it, but to reduce the bad guy's ambition allows for room for alliance (when the goals or methods match with the protagonists). Yet it also makes the obstacle's 'badness' that much more forceful or believeable, because the character him/herself, overall, is not a towering larger-than-life force-of-nature type that you'd never meet in real life.
Best example of that kind of turned-on-its-head comes with Spike, from Whedon's BtVS. Around the end of the second season, Angel has lost his soul and plans with Spike's girlfriend to destroy the world. Why? Well, because he's evil, of course. The last move I expected, as a viewer, was for Spike to approach Buffy with offers of temporary truce if together they're able to stop Angel's plan.
Spike explains:
An obstacle-character who has the same small pleasures and same human-sized desires and fears is an obstacle-character whose overall point of view may remain unsympathetic, but he's not dismissable any longer. Not for me, at least. The character's been humanized.
I think for a lot of bad guy characters, it's too easy to dehumanize them, because then there's no question the readers' loyalty can't be divided. How can you even begin to feel sympathy for someone who doesn't even have the same basic values in terms of the little things that bring goodness to a day? I mean, really. Dogracing, football!
I’ve always approached my own writing as categorizing characters in some loose mental way as, here are the good guys, here are the margin-allies (meaning those who may not be allies consistently but are for at least a specific goal), and that group are the bad guys. I’ve read enough mysteries and thrillers to know that you have to work out the full implications of the bad guy’s plot, from the bad guy’s point of view, to cover any potential plotholes: a really stupid plan, or a stupid goal, or a scheme that’s complex for the sake only of being complex... these flaws are obvious when I sit down and puzzle out what the bad guy’s doing at every stage of the game, how much s/he would know, when it started, where the bad guy’s got his/her limits, all that. What I never did, though, was think in terms of “what if the antagonist were suddenly the protagonist?”
Which is to say: what if the story has no bad guys?
What if the story has no one in it that a reader could point to and say, oh, him? He’s clearly bad. All the way through to the bone. Yep, yep. What if the story instead has a variety of sympathetic characters who may, or may not, be trustworthy but are all -- whether revealed immediately or later, or only hinted at through narrative and tone -- equally sympathetic? It’s true the risk, then, may be that some readers will find themselves rooting for the bad guys, if the internal conflict of means, methods, and goals is more fascinating and varied than cardboard heroes. That might be why some authors prefer to keep the bad guys as bad as possible, to make sure the readers remain squarely in the heroes’ corner... but I’ve read enough political thrillers, and old detective stories, to much prefer stories in which you’re never entirely certain whether you’re rooting for someone because he has your sympathy and also deserves your sympathy, and as a result you read in a state of mental torn-ness, wanting each to achieve their goal but forced to sit there and watch as they all duke it out.
I guess this puts me in the bad-guy category with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mikkeneko, who’d mentioned preferring obstacle-characters that can’t be attacked because doing so would have greater consequences than whatever negative consequences currently exist thanks to the obstacle. Like knowing your brother is the mafia boss, but even knowing you’d save lives by taking him down, being unable or unwilling to take that one final shot to kill him. It’s not something in the bad guy that makes him unstoppable so much as something in the good guy that makes him unwilling to stop the bad guy: it’s a tension that hangs between two comprehensible, possibly even sympathetic, points.
So with that said, I finally found the last piece of the puzzle falling into place, on my own writing. Ah-hah, I knew there was one crucial thing I’d yet to figure out, and I think I just might’ve gotten it.
That reminded me of Wicked, which remains a brilliant example (IMO) of at least one facet of what I mean: that of taking a story and flipping it over. Reverse everything: the good guy, the former protagonist, is now the obstacle, and the opposition is now the protagonist. Can you tell the same story from the opposite side, and have characters see the behaviors and actions and outcomes as believeable? Even more, could readers end up seeing the former obstacle as even sympathetic? It seems to me -- thinking of some of the stories I’ve read in the SFF genre -- that a lot of times the bad guy couldn’t become the protagonist in his/her own story. The obstacle’s story and perspective don’t jive enough, don’t click enough -- well, not without a good deal of contortion on the part of the reader to retcon like crazy, to get it to work. One thing about Wicked was that it didn’t require a huge amount of contortionist tricks to turn the story on its head. (Not sure I can say the same about some of his follow-ups, but hey.)
The other input that helped this click in my head was finishing a crazy-ass-ride of an animated series, Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann. The series is in two parts, with the second half occuring seven years after the events of the first half. I’d seen mild spoilers that indicated that a nemesis from the first half would be an unlikely ally in the second half, and I know full well this is often a risky curveball in story-telling. Make the character too bad, and his loyalty to the Good will be questionable down the road; make him too weak (that is, easily defeated as one of the Bad), and his value-add to the Good is seen as negligble, if not completly superfluous and possibly nothing more than fan service. But I found that TTGL did an excellent job of making this supposedly bad-guy character both believable, and sympathetic, while he remains ranked with the Bad, in the first half.
A quick summary: the planet’s humans live underground, and any attempt to live on the surface means dealing with massive mecha-like robots controlled by animals or animal-human hybrids. Our group of intrepid heroes not only finds a way to the surface, but manages to defeat a beast-mecha and take over the fighting machine, and using this machine, they plan to take on the entire beast-man system that’s keeping humans down. Along the way to the capital city, one of the heroes unexpectedly meets up with a young beast-soldier named Viral. He proves himself a fast and efficient fighter, though our hero does get a strike or two on Viral. The fight escalates to machine-to-machine, and our heroes’ ingenuity proves to be just enough to beat Viral’s skills. Viral promises to return (of course), and kick their ass -- and at the same time, clearly states his motivation: he’ll be known far and wide among his soldier-kin as being one seriously awesome soldier, then.
While trying to avoid spoilers if you’ve not seen the story, I’ll skim a bit and sum up as: despite Viral’s growing personal grudge against these humans he sees as lesser beings -- not to mention being less experienced overall with the machinery used, and with fighting skills -- he keeps losing to them. On top of that, the planet’s overlord sends out Viral’s commanding officer to smack the humans down, and when the attempt goes astray and fails... Viral is left utterly baffled and astonished as to why the humans keep winning.
Here’s the first point where I started to feel sympathy for what had, up to then, been an apparently stock-character bad guy minion: “I’ll be back!” and all that. First, I realized that at no time had the heroes beaten Viral by being better than him; they’d managed to win each battle by coming up with out-of-left-field strategy combined with a sheer determination that outranked any of the beast-men. For the one fighting whose motivation is simply, “everyone will know I’m good!” versus the ones whose motivation is, “our entire species will no longer be kept in underground prisons!” ... it’s easy to see how the absolute life-on-the-line pressure of the latter could possibly, and probably would, shove past and through the not-quite-as-intense goals of the former. I clarify that because it does seem important in the balancing act: that Viral was not made to look stupid to make the heroes look good, but the writers made Viral look good... they just made the heroes look better.
Shortly after that scene, Viral is back at the capital, where another commanding officer berates him for his part in the loss. Not only does he retain the somewhat lost expression and frustrated expression he’d had at the end of the last (losing) battle, but when she strikes him physically, he does nothing, says nothing. He looks almost defeated, but baffled at the same time. Yes, part of what he says after the battle, and later, is focused on figuring out how to beat this foe (on a personal-grudge level), but he expresses a sentiment I don’t often see in ‘bad guys’. He asks himself, why can’t I beat them? What is wrong with me? He’s not just angry; he’s a frustrated-angry with himself as much as with his foe... so when he’s struck in anger by the commanding officer, he just takes it. Perhaps this is because it’s part of his soldier training, or perhaps he’s thinking he deserves punishment for the failure, but his pained confusion was a clear contrast to the usual cardboard “I’ll get him next time!” mantra.
Yes, I’m watching him get struck repeatedly for a failure that I know as viewer wasn’t entirely Viral’s fault -- and I felt immense sympathy for him. He’d walked the edge of the taunting bad-guy who keeps getting kicked in the teeth and keeps coming back for more, bad guy of the week and all that, but it was the shift from “I want to be recognized by the other soldiers” to a simpler, more personal-level question of “I want to know why I can’t beat you” that made Viral far less cardboard and far more understandable. Maybe even a little bit of seeing how ‘young’ the character was, too, when not in battle-mode.
Of course, as you can probably expect, one by one the good guys take down what the overlord throws at them (though to the series’ credit, the price of victory is never cheap and never easy and never without a significant cost). As one of the leading soldiers, Viral is involved in each battle and again and again is on the losing side. He’s finally presented to the overlord, and although the overlord is easily angered by anyone questioning him, Viral takes the chance. He begs, please, before you punish me for my failures, please, explain to me why I can’t beat them. He wants to know.
To his surprise, the overlord agrees. Alone in the overlord’s main chamber, the overlord asks him if Viral is really prepared to hear the truth. Is he really ready to hear why the humans will always win, why he is destined to always lose? Viral looks less determined than just resigned and confused, but he answers -- with the slightest of hesitation -- with a soft, “yes.”
That wish to know, to understand, suddenly turned him from a generic minion carrying out the overlord’s commands, to a genuine character with his own motivations and fears and hopes. It did not by any means turn him into a fluffy, loveable character -- through the remainder of the first half, and most of the second half, of the series, he’s just as nasty-mouthed and bad-attitude as he’d ever been. It’s just that the object of his ire shifts, and when he speaks truth to power (in the shape of the humans), his words carry weight as an obstacle. That, I think, is due to having seen that this is a character who -- when the chips are down -- wants to understand why more than anything else. He doesn’t take defeat as a reason to keep hammering away, but as a reason to ask questions and to grasp that something is beyond his ken, and he wants to know what it is... and if that will help him win, so much the better.
For all that the majority of the series does focus on the (human) heroes, taking the time within the series to tell the flipside of Viral’s experiences was an enlightening moment for me. It was as though the authors had said: we cannot just have “former nemesis in battle now as ally” and have heroes willing to accept the nemesis. It’s also that we have to show that the nemesis, himself, would be willing. It was the willingness to give time to the opposition, and not just show them throwing one Big Bad after another at the heroes, but why -- and their own internal struggles over failure or success -- that made the heroes’ losses all that more poignant, somehow.
In the end, when you discover the overlord’s motivations, it’s that much harder to see him as a Big Bad so much as just a Big Obstacle: again with the methods varying more than the actual goal, between the Overlord and our heroes. That adds a complexity and an emotional element to the story that’s missing in the vast majority of stories I’ve watched or read.
The other way, shy of creating a fully sympathetic bad guy, seems to be to make the bad guy human-sized somehow. I'm not certain how to describe it, but to reduce the bad guy's ambition allows for room for alliance (when the goals or methods match with the protagonists). Yet it also makes the obstacle's 'badness' that much more forceful or believeable, because the character him/herself, overall, is not a towering larger-than-life force-of-nature type that you'd never meet in real life.
Best example of that kind of turned-on-its-head comes with Spike, from Whedon's BtVS. Around the end of the second season, Angel has lost his soul and plans with Spike's girlfriend to destroy the world. Why? Well, because he's evil, of course. The last move I expected, as a viewer, was for Spike to approach Buffy with offers of temporary truce if together they're able to stop Angel's plan.
Spike explains:
We like to talk big. Vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." That's just tough guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. You've got... dog racing, Manchester United. And you've got people, billions of people walking around like Happy Meals on legs. It's all right here. But then someone comes along with a vision, with a real... passion for destruction. Angel could pull it off. Goodbye, Piccadilly. Farewell, Leicester Bloody Square.
An obstacle-character who has the same small pleasures and same human-sized desires and fears is an obstacle-character whose overall point of view may remain unsympathetic, but he's not dismissable any longer. Not for me, at least. The character's been humanized.
I think for a lot of bad guy characters, it's too easy to dehumanize them, because then there's no question the readers' loyalty can't be divided. How can you even begin to feel sympathy for someone who doesn't even have the same basic values in terms of the little things that bring goodness to a day? I mean, really. Dogracing, football!
I’ve always approached my own writing as categorizing characters in some loose mental way as, here are the good guys, here are the margin-allies (meaning those who may not be allies consistently but are for at least a specific goal), and that group are the bad guys. I’ve read enough mysteries and thrillers to know that you have to work out the full implications of the bad guy’s plot, from the bad guy’s point of view, to cover any potential plotholes: a really stupid plan, or a stupid goal, or a scheme that’s complex for the sake only of being complex... these flaws are obvious when I sit down and puzzle out what the bad guy’s doing at every stage of the game, how much s/he would know, when it started, where the bad guy’s got his/her limits, all that. What I never did, though, was think in terms of “what if the antagonist were suddenly the protagonist?”
Which is to say: what if the story has no bad guys?
What if the story has no one in it that a reader could point to and say, oh, him? He’s clearly bad. All the way through to the bone. Yep, yep. What if the story instead has a variety of sympathetic characters who may, or may not, be trustworthy but are all -- whether revealed immediately or later, or only hinted at through narrative and tone -- equally sympathetic? It’s true the risk, then, may be that some readers will find themselves rooting for the bad guys, if the internal conflict of means, methods, and goals is more fascinating and varied than cardboard heroes. That might be why some authors prefer to keep the bad guys as bad as possible, to make sure the readers remain squarely in the heroes’ corner... but I’ve read enough political thrillers, and old detective stories, to much prefer stories in which you’re never entirely certain whether you’re rooting for someone because he has your sympathy and also deserves your sympathy, and as a result you read in a state of mental torn-ness, wanting each to achieve their goal but forced to sit there and watch as they all duke it out.
I guess this puts me in the bad-guy category with
mikkeneko, who’d mentioned preferring obstacle-characters that can’t be attacked because doing so would have greater consequences than whatever negative consequences currently exist thanks to the obstacle. Like knowing your brother is the mafia boss, but even knowing you’d save lives by taking him down, being unable or unwilling to take that one final shot to kill him. It’s not something in the bad guy that makes him unstoppable so much as something in the good guy that makes him unwilling to stop the bad guy: it’s a tension that hangs between two comprehensible, possibly even sympathetic, points. So with that said, I finally found the last piece of the puzzle falling into place, on my own writing. Ah-hah, I knew there was one crucial thing I’d yet to figure out, and I think I just might’ve gotten it.
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no subject
Date: 29 Feb 2008 12:55 am (UTC)I agree that Wicked is a wonderful example of this - where we get to see LFB's take on things. We see that she is (at least in her mind) wholly justified in doing what she does. I also loved the fact that Macquire made Dorothy so utterly insignificant in the retelling.
Of course, Tin Man (the sci fi mini series) was an example of how NOT to reimagine a classic. That did the opposite -- it introduced new Bad Guys with stupid, inconsistent motivations for being Bad. Quite a terrible take, I thought.
no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2008 03:12 am (UTC)I think what struck me most about TTGL was that, in the end, the alleged bad guy's actions were proven to be possibly the best choice of a bad situation -- and that the over-arching antagonist's reasons for being an obstacle were valid. In fact, when the antagonist finally says, "this will be the consequences of your actions," the protagonist acknowledges the statement as true. So do we cheer the underdog who cries against the storm and is willing to try despite knowing the most likely result is destruction? Or do we accept the obstacle who draws the line in the sand but at the same time prevents total destruction?
Or maybe the fact that I ask such questions is why -- under the trappings of fantasy and whatnot -- what I really enjoy are political thrillers. Then again, I'd give my eyeteeth to come up with the urban fantasy version of the Bourne Ultimatum... except that I think Gruber's already done it. Sigh.
no subject
Date: 29 Feb 2008 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2008 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Feb 2008 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2008 03:19 am (UTC)I learned the chart concept, I confess, from reading Daughter of Time when I was in junior high. I wasn't much for mysteries, but the topic of the mystery is the Princes in the Tower and whether Richard III was their murderer -- so it dovetailed nicely with my primary interest in history. As the characters found information and dug up research on the past events, one of the characters kept a running tally of who knew what, when, how, why, and who was where when, doing what, and who talked to who and who didn't or did like who, and so on. The entire concept of a logical system of listing historical (as in, "happens in a timeframe") facts and drawing conclusions from the gaps or overlaps... well, let's just say it had a much larger impact on me, in the long run, than I realized at the time.
Great book, btw.
no subject
Date: 29 Feb 2008 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2008 03:22 am (UTC)But what I'd never given thought to -- not in terms of my own writing, that is -- was making the antagonist just as sympathetic as the protagonist.
I can see how it's a risky move if you're not convinced your protagonist would remain the more attractive of the two (when it comes to who the reader roots for), but hey. There will always be people who watch a cowboy movie and cheer for the Indians.
no subject
Date: 29 Feb 2008 04:28 pm (UTC)I also love to put characters into internal conflicts. The Visigoth warrior who learns he's a foundling and a Roman by birth, right when the Visigoths lay siege to Rome - and I have him met his half-brother, a Roman officer. The Roman tribune who gets captured by the Caledonians and learns his father lived among the tribes for some years and he is heir to the Cerones from his mother's side. The (invented by me but not impossible) friendship between the German Arminius, Roman auxiliary officer and later rebel against Rome, responsible for three dead legions, and Germanicus, grandson of the Emperor and general of the Roman troops who want revenge for the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest.
Who are the bad guys now? :)
no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2008 03:28 am (UTC)I think the sole fantasy novel I read -- for a long, long, time -- was Lord of the Rings. (Never did get into the Hobbit.) The rest of what I read in grade school and junior high were historical works, like Centennial (about the evolution of a western state from unclaimed land to statehood, basically), or Shogun or Catherine the Great. Big, heavy, freaking intense loosely-historical works that leaned more on showing everyone's side over whitewashing events into a clear good versus bad.
I didn't read fantasy, for the most part, except when I hit my mid-twenties and was with someone who adored SFF (though the majority of that collection were the strong-tech SF of the 60s and 70s, Asimov, all that, there was fair amount of traditional epic fantasy, too). Still, I found a lot of traditional fantasy kinda flat (if not just plain derivative), and it wasn't until maybe six, seven years ago that I first read any urban fantasy.
Even at that, most urban fantasy sadly bores me, because the politics are just too lacking. Or they're in the story, but they're the kind of too-stark, simply-summed political views that just don't even exist in the real world. Ffffttt.
no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2008 05:48 pm (UTC)I read little urban Fantasy but that could be due to the fact I need more besides romance to make a book work for me, and judging from the blurbs, they all have lots of romance (I do like Lynn Viehl's Darkyn, though, and maybe I should give the Dresden Files a try). I have some SF in my collection as well.
But historical fiction takes more space, from Bernard Cornwell's battle 'n action stories to Dorothy Dunnett's epic cycles (have you read her, btw? if not, you should give her a try).
There is more 'different' Fantasy these days; I've heard good things about Erikson's Malazan books, and Joe Abercrombie or Daniel Abraham, fe. I think I'll try some out when they are avaliable in mass market.
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Date: 6 Oct 2010 10:44 am (UTC)I found this post particularly interesting because in almost every fandom I'm a part of, I always seem to sympathize with the "bad guy" more than the hero, especially when said bad guy is the center of a major redemption arc. Spike from BtVS, Zuko from AtLA, and now Damon from The Vampire Diaries; the common thread is their level of relatability and how easy it is to sympathize with them, despite the fact that they are the antagonists and, more often than not, have done very bad things. Bad guys and anti-heroes are flawed from the get-go by their very natures, and IMO this makes it easier to relate to their inner struggles and self-doubts than a hero whose flaws are shown to us gradually by the author. Plus, if their redemption arc is a success, the emotional payoff is so much stronger than that of a protagonist who merely achieves his goal.
My favorite example of a story being turned on its head so that the antagonist becomes the protagonist, besides Wicked, is Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. If you're at all a fan of anything by Whedon, I hope you've had the pleasure of watching this short film. Despite the silliness of the title, Dr. Horrible/Billy is one of the most sympathetic/tragic anti-heroes I've ever encountered. I won't spoil anything for you, but if you haven't seen this movie yet I'm begging you to watch it ASAP. Besides, Neil Patrick Harris is a hoot. ^_^