Saturday, November 25, 2023

On Nostalgia as Substitute for Writing Characters

 I somewhat considered not doing Saturday Notes this past few weeks, because I’ve been so busy with YALLFest, National Novel Writing Month, and Thanksgiving. At the same time, I’m also desperately hoping to reach 50 Saturday Notes this year, and for that I need to fill out the next few weeks.


So! Note this week. Because I read a book about education this week, I started writing a Note about that, but the fact is that I have nothing valuable to say about the subject other than school sucks and so does the education system in this country.


On Nostalgia as Substitute for Writing Characters


Alright, so yesterday I read Batman/Superman: Supergirl, which is Jeph Loeb doing a re-do to reintroduce Supergirl into the DC canon a few years after she’d been killed off in the continuity reboot that was Crisis on Infinite Earths. Basically, Supergirl lands on Earth, Superman picks her up, Batman is suspicious, and then Darkseid kidnaps her, shenanigans ensue. It was adapted into a so-so animated movie released straight to video.


Something that I noticed while reading this story is that Supergirl doesn’t have much personality at all. Considering she’s the center character for the story, this is a massive freaking problem.


I kept scratching my head while reading this. Loeb’s introduction at the beginning of the trade paperback talked about how he was enamored with this character they’d written, with how she was so lovable and you couldn’t help but admire her. Part of the story is Clark getting Kara adjusted to everyday life on Earth, and when she seemingly dies, he absolutely loses it, because she’s such a sweet and innocent soul who never got to experience the happy things in life.


And we don’t know this girl. At all. There’s too much Plot going on, and the times we do see Kara are not even in montages; there are lot of scenes that start after her learning about Earth, or having a shopping trip, or training with the Amazons, but we get so little of her personality that I couldn’t tell you the first thing about Kara Zor-El. She’s just Some Gal. The trouble is that the writers are projecting, and hope that the reader also projects, personality on what they haven’t written, based on what you already know about the character from past stories.


Alright, so I’ve talked a lot about how supplemental media and tie-ins shouldn’t be required for a story to work, right? This is kind of like that, but with specific characters and such. This is especially common with comic book characters, because very often the audience for these stories is made up of people already at least vaguely familiar with the characters. This comic was the recent example I just read, but it’s far from the best or most famous example.


[pours a cup of apple juice]


Do you remember Batman v. Superman?


One of the biggest problems with that movie is that it doesn’t bother explaining much; it runs on the assumption that you’re already familiar with the characters. There isn’t supplementary material fleshing them out, either, at least not that I know of. But because these are iconic DC characters, the movie assumes that you know who they are, and so it runs with them and their powers or personalities, hoping you’ll keep up. The result is a deliberately obtuse film with heavily symbolism and things happening with little to no explanation. It’s not doing any of the work, because it hopes that you’re already doing it in your head to make sense of it.


“You know this stuff, right? We’re just arranging it in a different way.” Well, okay, but apparently we’re not on the same page if you start with Batman being a little homicidal, so you should back up and explain where the fudge you’re coming from. There’s some work you need to do that shows who these people are, especially if you’re going to go in radically new directions with them.


This is less egregious if the characters and ideas presented in the story are less focused on. If Batman or Superman appear as supporting characters, or mentor figures, then it’s more excusable if the writer doesn’t spend much time giving them characterization. If it’s part of an ongoing series that’s been running for years, then that work has already been done. But if a character is being reintroduced to the canon, like, say, Supergirl in this comic, or Batman in BvS, you have to do character development for us to understand who this person is and what she or he is trying to accomplish in the Plot.


There’s a piece of writing advice from Stan Lee that goes something like this: assume that this comic is the first installment that the reader picks up. That means you have to write it in a way to convince the reader to pick up more. If your reader picks up a story and finds that the writer didn’t bother to develop a character, one who is just introduced in that story, because he or she assumes you know that guy from a comic you read years ago? That’s a massive freaking problem, and new readers are going to put it down.


Furthermore, it’s frustrating because very often these developments are supposed to matter–so when Supergirl “dies” in the story, we’re meant to mourn with Superman about her life, when we know nothing about who she was to begin with. When Batman is going off the rails and killing people in BvS, this is meant to be a degradation of the character, but we didn’t see what he was like before he got homicidal, so this also means nothing to us. 


And it’s obviously not great when a character’s major choices and character arcs don't’ mean anything to us.

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