On Wasted Characters

I’m currently reading The Teutonic Knights by Henryk Sienkiewicz which is apparently like the Polish national epic novel or something? Yeah, I have some issues with it, like the main character being a moron, and also an eighteen-year-old who falls in love with a twelve-year-old. So, uh, what the fudge Poland?

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On Wasted Characters

You know all those gods who appear at the end of The Red Pyramid? No? It’s this scene in which the Kane siblings are in the throne room of the gods, and looking out, they see hundreds upon hundreds of other Egyptian gods looking back at them. And if you’re like me, when you’re reading this you’re like, “Wow! There are so many gods in this setting! I imagine the next two books in the trilogy will involve dozens upon dozens of gods! And even if they don’t become main characters, there will be massive armies of gods ready for battle!”

Except that’s not what happens. The very next book tells us that in the spirit world there’s a nursing home for the gods who have been forgotten (i.e., most of them), holding thousands of gods who are losing their minds at lack of belief. They do get a battle scene in the final book, but it’s mostly played for laughs as geriatric Egyptian gods clobber a bunch of monsters.

Or using another god example: in the novel American Gods we’re told that the New Gods have pretty large numbers and power on their side. The three we mostly interact with are Mr. Town, a man in black type of god who doesn’t even realize he’s a mythical construct, Media and the Technical Boy, god of technology. Mr. World, who is in charge of the spookshow (the men in black organization), gets a couple of scenes too. But we’re told about oodles of New Gods: gods of train and railway, gods of automobiles who are covered in blood from all the sacrifices they’ve gotten, gods of psychology and cancer and telephone. I’m not annoyed that they didn’t get more screentime in the book--that’s a single novel that has a lot of things it’s got to convey, and the main character doesn’t spend too much time among the New Gods, so of course we don’t see that many.

The show doesn’t have that excuse. It gives plenty of subplots to characters who only had one or two scenes in the book, and there’s a specific subplot about Mr. World marshalling his forces. And yet we don’t see that many New Gods. In fact, quite a few of the gods on the side of the New Gods are just Old Gods taking different guises. Which has its place in the narrative, but there is a massive opportunity the show just isn’t taking. It seems as if there are only three New Gods and it’s underwhelming.

Or hopping to another series: The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica books quickly set up the Archipelago of Dreams as the realms of imagination. Worlds out of myth and legend all take place there on different islands. Worlds upon worlds of fantasy are mentioned as co-existing having their own creatures and lifestyles. And yet while the sequels explore some of them, for the most part they’re concerned not with the multitudes of worlds but with time travel shenanigans.

I understand that authors won’t always have the chances to explore all the possibilities they lay out. But it’s a bit frustrating when a writer leaves things open like this, only to sort of shut down any possibilities of using the background characters they’ve already established as existing. It’s not just not using possibilities, it’s using those possibilities for show and then locking them up and never pulling them out again.

The excuse of ‘I didn’t have time’ doesn’t quite work in some of these. James A. Owen’s series has seven books. You would think that they’d have some room to explore the Archipelago. And yet books three, five, six and seven are about time travel shenanigans. In fact the Archipelago is destroyed for the last three books of the series. That’s… kind of a problem, guys.

If you’re not going to use these elements, then don’t introduce them to begin with! Or at the very least, don’t make them the centerpieces of the story. The American Gods show made a point of making a subplot in its second season about what the New Gods are doing. So not showing us any of the New Gods other than the ones we’ve already seen, is pretty darn egregious.

Introduce major elements only if you’re willing to use them. Don’t plot a series that involves oodles of cool new characters and worlds if you’re not going to bother with them.

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-EAHC