Tamora Pierce & Returning Heroes

Hoo boy, we had an election, and, uh… that happened. I was about to wangst about my life choices, but there are bigger issues in the world. 

Currently reading a bit of a different book, but we’ll see how it goes! It’s very long, though. 

Do you know Skyrim is thirteen years old? Or will be in a couple of days? That’s just nuts.

Tamora Pierce & Returning Heroes

So I recently re-read Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce, and having just read her Alanna series, I had a thought: Pierce did a really good job of including the heroes of the previous series, the four books about Alanna of Trebond (which I read for the first time this year). The new protagonist, Daine, meets them, and they help her out in different ways, while the driving action of the story is still hers. And I found this interesting, because of how odd this is in screen media in today’s world of big Hollywood revivals.

Let us take the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.

[Okay, I know I often use this as an example of Bad Writing, but it’s a high profile piece of fiction that I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with, so it works.]

In the Sequel Trilogy, not only are the heroes of the Original Trilogy shown to become absolute failures in nearly every respect, they’re also completely unable to do anything to stop the First Order. The best Luke can do, really, is create an illusion as a distraction to Kylo Ren. And on the surface, you can see why this was done: if you want the new characters to shine, you can’t just have the old characters come in and be able to curb-stomp all of the bad guys. The problem is that it makes the old characters not just look old, but also completely incompetent and stupid. We know they should have been able to handle this years ago, based on what we’ve seen, so seeing them now written in a way that makes them unable or unwilling to makes us feel less like there’s a narrative reason for it, and more like the writers are deliberately holding them back.

Or! To use a non-SW or non-sequel example: Young Justice. Several times we see the Team (our younger heroes) solve problems and combat villains that the Justice League themselves aren’t able to. Part of this is intentional on the League–them being so young, and less public, they can pull off covert missions, or do things that the villains will underestimate. In those cases, it works, especially as we see that each member of the League is more than capable of taking on a major villain on their own. In other cases, such as the Team figuring out a puzzle that the gosh darned Batman didn’t, or working out how to defeat a villain that gave the League hours of trouble, it’s pretty darned egregious.

It’s a really cheap thing, if you think about it–to prop up your new heroes, you make it so that the old heroes are just bad at their jobs. Sometimes you can use some sort of reason to handwave it away, but if you repeatedly do it, again and again, it shows that you cannot think of anything making your protagonists special. And if the only way you can make your protagonist special is by making everyone around dumb or useless, well, uh, that’s not good writing (unless this is some sort of parody).

Wild Magic doesn’t have this problem. The heroes of the original quartet can’t fix things on their  own, but it isn’t because they’re incompetent. Their usage of magic shows that they can handle plenty of things–and indeed we see them handle problems. They are good at what they do! But Daine, our new heroine, brings a new skillset to the table, and a connection to what’s going on in the world that they don’t.

The old heroes are helpful, and they’re still good at what they do. Daine is constantly in awe of them, not just because of their reputations, but also because of the feats she sees them do in front of her (though she’s also often shocked by how informal they are, given that they’re nobles and royals). They don’t solve everything, because the protagonist needs to do something, but their role in the story is important, and no one else could be filling that role.

I wish more writers would do this? That if there’s an older hero, a legacy of some kind being fulfilled, that the predecessor isn’t useless, that the predecessor has a role in the story that shows that he or she is important to the goings-on. The new protagonist doesn’t have to be smarter or more powerful for the Plot to work–Tamora Pierce shows that. The protagonist can just fit a different, unique role that the predecessors can’t, learning from them.

You don’t have to tear down the old to build up the new, when it comes to character writing.

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