Let's Talk about Cardinal Richelieu

 Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is working just fine after the last update, and that’s pretty darn cool! Especially because it has the Yule Festival and now a crossover with Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. I’m pretty excited for that.

Also I’m hoping that I will FINALLY finish putting up Puerto Rico pictures this weekend.

AND season two of The Witcher is now on Netflix wahoo!

Anyhow I saw the 1993 Three Musketeers from Disney and I had thoughts, mostly about Richelieu. My movie review is here but let’s talk about one of the greatest literary antagonists of all time.

—

Let’s Talk About Cardinal Richelieu

My biggest issue with the 1993 Three Musketeers is that it does Cardinal Richelieu all wrong. Which is a shame. Mind you, their Cardinal Richelieu is still a blast to watch because he’s Tim Curry, and he’s having a ball chewing all the scenery and out-hamming every other performer on the set.

But the entire Plot of the movie is about stopping Richelieu’s plan to take the throne of France for himself, and… no. Just no. This isn’t Cardinal Richelieu’s thing! The entire movie is him walking around cackling and talking about how he’s so excited he’s going to be a tyrant and that’s not who Cardinal Richelieu was, in fiction or in reality. So… let’s back it up and explain Cardinal Richelieu.

Alright in the days of King Louis XIII of France, Cardinal Richelieu was appointed Chief Minister. Think, like Prime Minister. And despite the fact that a clergyman should definitely not be in charge of these things, Richelieu was actually really good at his job? Kings of France did not, at this point in history, have as much power as you’d think from the king of a major country, and Richelieu made sure that the royal court (or, himself, really) had a butt-ton of power to make sure the country ran smoothly. He also kept France going in wars against other countries, making the interesting choice to have alliances with Protestant nations despite being a cardinal and wars of religion being A Thing at this point (still had the Huguenots in France persecuted though). He had a reputation for being a conniving mastermind, which is probably based in truth considering that it’s him who brought the Rossignols into court, who went on to make an unbreakable cipher.

Richelieu was immortalized in literature as the villain of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Except while he is the villain, he’s not… okay, he is that bad of a guy, but he’s not a cackling supervillain. He’s utterly ruthless and unsympathetic, but he also keeps the country running smoothly, and his plot is to have it publicized that the queen is having an affair with the Duke of Buckingham–which she IS, by the way (in the book). The Musketeers stop him because they think this will end in disaster. And when they foil his plot in the end, he actually offers them a promotion because he’s impressed with their work, and he knows that talent like that shouldn’t go to waste.

Richelieu cares about what happens to France. That doesn’t mean he can’t be petty or have other motivations–I believe in the novel it’s suggested that he once made advances on the queen, and she rebuffed him, and so he’s held a grudge against her ever since. Fine, whatever–but first and foremost is that he keeps the ship sailing smoothly. Everything else comes second to that, or at least he can spin it that way.

His plan in the 1993 movie is to take the throne. Why? Ignoring the historical impossibility of how that would even work (because who watches movies to think about history anyway?*), why would he want that? Richelieu’s entire schtick is being the power behind the throne. The movie justifies it as that the king’s becoming more independent and Richelieu doesn’t want that, but he’s also running the country pretty terribly as it is–it’s mentioned more than once that a lot of people are starving in the countryside, and already know it’s Richelieu’s fault.

Not only would a version of Richelieu faithful to the original story not want the throne, he’d never get the country to the point where average people are starving–and if he did, they certainly wouldn’t think to blame him.

I don’t like that the second season of the BBC Musketeers killed off Richelieu, but the actor they picked went off to be the Doctor so I get it. But I really, really like the first episode of the second season, in which they heroes all suddenly realize that even if Cardinal Richelieu was a scheming bastard, he kept the country pretty safe, running well, and the king from making too stupid decisions, and with him gone everything could quite easily go off the rails (which it does when Rochefort comes back).

In short, people seem to think that Cardinal Richelieu is Jafar or Mordred, a figure trying to take power for himself by whatever means necessary. No. He’s more like David Xanatos or Grand Admiral Thrawn. It’s not just hard to beat him, it’s hard to imagine what beating him would even look like, because he can easily turn any defeat into a victory by staying far enough from the action and taking notes on how to beat the heroes next time.

There’s a character in Invisible Library based off of his archetype, simply known as the Cardinal, and in his debut novel the heroes don’t have to defeat him–they can’t, he’s way above their pay grade anyway. It’s about convincing him why killing them would be against his best interests.

Cardinal Richelieu is this really complex and interesting villain. I would say I’m frustrated that not a lot of writers get that, but it seems that plenty do, actually. So it’s more frustrating when I see that someone doesn’t get it. I understand that the 1993 movie was probably trying to make the Plot a lot more accessible by simplifying the Plot to make it easier to understand to average moviegoers, and I can’t fault it too much for that. And again, Tim Curry is a lot of fun to watch. But the cackling Richelieu plotting for the throne? That feels so against the idea of who Richelieu is supposed to be that it seems like they could have, and should have, written an entirely different character there.

*Okay, sometimes I do that. But I try not to get bogged down by it.

Protagonist Power Levels

 Yesterday finished A History of What Comes Next! And supposedly there’s going to be a big announcement for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla on Monday! Let’s see if I can get the game working by then.

The idea of doing a Note on Spider-Man and why the MCU version struggles to gain cookie points with me was considered, but a quick look through my Google Drive showed me I had already written a Note to that effect back in August 2019. I may revisit that topic, but I think it might be best to first watch No Way Home. Though it may devolve into gushing how amazing Into the Spider-Verse is.

Also I started jotting ideas for another Note but then saw I did that one too. Maybe I’ve written about this too and forgot, but who cares? We’re doing this.

—

Protagonist Power Levels

So I’ve been working on my Iron Druid sporkings again and once again, I’m struck by something very frustrating with Atticus as a character: he’s way too powerful to start with. Even if we ignore that in the second chapter of his debut book he’s made practically immune to death (I’m not kidding) he’s still absurdly powerful from the get-go. And he’s more intelligent by miles–the villains are really bad at coming up with plans to kill him. The final battle with his longtime enemy, Aenghus Og, has him reveal that he’s so much more skilled at swordplay and so Atticus quite easily dispatches his foe.

It’s pretty stupid.

Really good hero/villain confrontations require the writers to work out a delicate balance of power. If the antagonist is not a challenge to the protagonist’s on physical terms, he must be in some other way. I’m not saying that the protagonist has to be a wimp compared to the antagonist–though it’s more relatable to the average reader I think–but being more powerful right off the bat? Probably not the right track. Hounded tries to hide this by having a lot of stupid subplots that kill the time until the finale.

Part of the difficulty of writing Superman, for instance, is writing a story in which he fights someone because, well, he’s Superman. When he fights someone, it tends to be someone who is in his weight class, power-wise, like General Zod, Doomsday, or Mongul. Or someone with kryptonite. And then there’s Lex Luthor, who isn’t as strong as Superman, but is wickedly intelligent and uses that brain of his to start evil plots that Superman has to stop. Also he carries a butt-ton of kryptonite (which actually gave him cancer in the DCAU).

In the conflicts in which his strength isn’t enough (which is more often than people think), Superman has to think of some other way to defeat the villain.

Or in the case of long-running serieses, it’s good to see how the protagonists grow over time. In something like the webseries RWBY. When we start the series, the main cast members are all incredibly skilled fighters by normal people standards, and the usual monsters they mow down with ease. But they’re still teenagers, and as the show goes on and they come across bigger monsters and other humans who are much more experienced, they’re very clearly outclassed. It’s not until about Volume 8 or so that our heroes even come close to fighting Neo on something like even footing–and even then, it’s a team effort. The only ones who clearly manage to completely trounce her are someone with godlike magical power, and someone who has decades of experience on her.

I think a good balance is Dresden Files? Harry Dresden is a very powerful wizard, and can take out mooks easily enough, but he’s still mortal, and many of the villains he faces aren’t, and are several levels above him. Most of the big villains are nowhere near characters he can beat on his own–and if they are, they’re smart enough to not face him alone. Again, it’s not about being able to out-magic his enemies, being more powerful than them. It’s about out-thinking them on many occasions, and he has to think of ways out of the conflict that don’t involve a straight-up fight. Sometimes that involves invoking the enemy’s weakness (like with faeries and iron), or it’s about getting someone else to take care of the problem (like summoning Mab or the Wardens to clean up a problem).

The point I’m making is: you absolutely cannot have your protagonist be superior to your antagonist in every way and still make it feel like a satisfying story. Maybe your hero is stronger than your villain! But then you have to work out why that villain still poses a challenge to the hero, in a way that’s not “Because the Plot refuses to let them meet until the end.”

And this doesn’t mean your heroes have to be weak to begin with! But there’s a difference between ‘hero starts out strong,’ and ‘hero starts out, and continues to be, able to curbstomp his problems with no difficulty.’ Leveling up the hero as the story goes on is one way to do it. Making your hero have to outsmart or outmaneuver the enemy is another.

Just don’t try working with an invincible hero from the start. It’ll either be really boring or really annoying.

—

On Character Descriptions

 Today is my dad’s birthday and the plan is to cook him a jambalaya and cobbler tonight. So I have that to look forward to! I also hope to get a good walk in, some Christmas shopping, and get a bit further with “Tombs of the Fallen” in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla this weekend, but the game keeps freezing when I get to East Anglia so not sure how that will go!

Also I read a comic that had been on my to-read list for ages on Goodreads, and sadly it wasn’t as much fun as I hoped. Oh well.

And I think at least some Puerto Rico pictures will show up on Facebook this weekend.

---

How to Tackle Character Descriptions in Prose

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I figured this would just be a thing I talked about verbally, until I sat down Thursday and figured, hey, this would actually be an okay Saturday Note topic. But basically: I’m starting to get kind of fascinated about the ways in which authors of books decide to design and describe characters. 

For example, I think most of the writing guides I’ve seen in the past decade or so try to discourage the notion of you stopping the action to describe what a character looks like, especially the main character. The surprisingly popular way of doing this, which I’ve seen almost universally condemned, is the Mirror Scene, in which the protagonist is getting ready for his or her day and looks into the mirror, and explains to the audience what he or she looks like. And I get that halting everything to give a description, especially if it’s not a good one, can be incredibly annoying, but how else are you going to get this information across?

And there ARE ways, but then you have to work to spread that information out in a way that’s not an infodump, or accept that not all the details you have in your head are going to make it into the text. If you DO put that much detail, you have to make sure it’s applied fairly consistently. I’ve noticed that sometimes authors will put plenty of detail into describing one or two characters but not work on the others. Kevin Hearne in the Iron Druid books (at least the first two) has attractive female characters described in pretty excruciating details in their outfits and the way they look, whereas most of the male characters are given much more basic descriptions--in that case it’s pretty obvious what’s caught the author’s interest.

Something I find really interesting is how a lot of authors manage to describe a character really well without actually giving you a ton of details? They hand out abstract ideas more than concrete information. Moist von Lipwig is, for instance, said to be really average-looking with no obvious distinguishing facial characteristics, and other than maybe his hair color and a couple of basics we’re not given much to go on. Which is part of the point, as Lipwig uses his nondescript appearance to avoid the authorities as a con man and thief.

I first started really noticing this with a blog post from Rick Riordan ages ago, when he mentioned that he doesn’t do detailed character descriptions in his books, citing that he wants readers to make their own images from imaginations, as they’re probably going to do that anyway while reading. And he’s right? Percy Jackson isn’t given that much of an obvious description--we’re told he’s got dark hair and green eyes, and maybe he looks mischievous. The sequel series tells us he’s apparently attractive for a guy his age, and that he looks a bit like a skater kid. And it’s said in a roundabout way that he’s white. I think my favorite description though is Annabeth--Percy tells the audience she’s pretty, with blonde curls first when he’s flitting in and out of consciousness, but then when he’s fully awake that she would look like a stereotypical California girl, except that her gray eyes ruined the image.

And right there, you probably have in your head a very solid image of what she looks like, to you, but the author managed to get that picture in your head. It works really well when he’s describing the gods as well, because with the Greek mythology theme he’s depicting them as archetypes that are adapted to American culture. Telling you that Ares is a mean-looking biker, or that Poseidon is tanned and wearing Hawaiian shirts, or Zeus is in a pinstriped suit--this all gives you a better picture, one that feels better for you, than if he did paragraphs upon paragraphs giving you exact body proportions and facial features.

Also going on character descriptions: I don’t remember exactly covering this one point in a creative writing class, but there’s a tendency to try to make sure that characters fit our expectations in that they way they look “fits” with their personality traits. And that’s not bad in and of itself, and there are ways in which it really works. But I also really like when character descriptions subvert your expectations?

Right now I’m slowly working my way through the Witcher books, for instance, and there’s a character, Sigismund Dijkstra, who we are told is fat and bald and large, and dresses flamboyantly, giving the impression of a well-dressed pig. And you know what his job is? He’s head of Redanian intelligence--and he’s darn good at his job. It’s a bit wasted because from the beginning of his appearances the viewpoint characters all know exactly who he is, so it’s not as if the discrepancy ever actually becomes relevant.

I would like more authors to really play around with character descriptions like this? To have a character look a certain way that automatically brings to mind a certain personality or archetype and then have the person act in a completely different way than one would expect from the way the person looks. This isn’t that rare in fiction at all (though usually it’s reserved for villains who look like heroes), but I would like it to be more varied in different character types other than ‘Here’s a bad guy who looks like a good guy,’ or vice-versa.

---