"They Used to Be Friends!"

My stomach has been weird these past few days, but I think it’s mostly settled. It’s been worse before, though, so thank goodness for that.

It is PI DAY! Eat some pie. Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up, if you go to parties for that? It’s, unsurprisingly, not as big a deal in this Puerto Rican household.

Right now I’m re-reading The Sea of Monsters and taking notes for annotations. After that is a de Castell book? I think? It might be Patriot Witch. I’m a little behind on my reading.

“They Used to Be Friends!”

I don’t have Amazon Prime, other than the free version, so I cannot talk about the quality of its new Young Sherlock. But! I saw from trailers and clips that it has young Sherlock Holmes befriending a young James Moriarty. And while it’s entirely possible that it’s done incredibly well and makes a compelling story and relationship, my gut reaction is that… well, I don’t like it. It smacks of this problem I see in writing origin stories where a lot of writers think that the best way to create dramatic conflict is to have it so that the hero and his nemesis used to be friends. Best friends. 

Look, this can work, but along with a love interest that exists and has no real relationship with the hero, it often comes across as pretty cheap. Best friends are people you have strong emotions for! And if those emotions turn negative, it makes a bigger difference than some random guy you met a few minutes ago. That’s just how emotions work. But so many writers either speedrun through it, or make this so common, it sometimes feels trite and cliched and overdone.

Like, I remember watching the Marvel Netflix shows, in the late 2010s, and it started to get really frustrating to me that so many of Marvel’s shows and movies relied on this. The end of Doctor Strange reveals that his former friend, Mordo, is going to be evil. Frank Castle’s nemesis, Jigsaw, was his former war buddy. Iron Fist’s enemy was his best friend from Kun Lun. I’m sure there are other examples, but those are the ones that stuck out to me. And these are not all badly done! Only the Iron Fist one is, really. But I had gotten very tired of it.

Then there was Pan. This one’s on my mind because I’m doing Peter Pan with Book Club. That movie is a prequel that has Peter Pan and a young James Hook as becoming the best of friends, declaring that nothing will ever come between them, right? Except we know that’s not going to last, and it just feels cheesy and awkward.

Absolute Batman has this thing too, with its radically different take on the Batman mythos, where basically half the rogues in his gallery are actually just Bruce’s best friends. Except we know that they’re the identities of his famous enemies, so they eventually will be supervillains, and so we’re not really invested in the friendship to begin with.

Now I’m trying to figure out why this fails for me in some examples, and not in others. Wicked, for instance, works for me, despite Elphaba and Glinda being on opposite sides being a foregone conclusion. I suspect because so much work is put into developing their relationship with each other in the musical–and that even when they’re on opposite sides, they clearly don’t hate each other. 

Or something like The Flash (the show, anyhow), in which the villain of the first season is revealed to be the mentor character. In that, you get this twisted thing where the villain was deliberately using the hero from the start, and it puts everything in a different light (later seasons try to do something similar, and aren’t anywhere near as effective). Barry suddenly realizes that everything he learned from his mentor was actually a ruse to attain someone else’s goal by any means possible.

The trick, I think, is much like you have with love interests: start by actually developing the characters and their relationship. If you want us to care about these characters, and how their relationship turns sour, actually show us how they meet, what they mean to each other, and how they can grow apart. Absolutely don’t rely on name recognition–in fact, that makes it all the harder. If you take two characters that we KNOW will become enemies, and make them BFFs, well, you have to put in the work so that the audience actually cares about a friendship they already know will end.

Taking two iconic enemies and saying, “Hey! What if they were friends once?” isn’t enough! You have to give me a reason to care about that.

Also there’s no indication in the original stories that Holmes and Moriarty ever knew each other so it’s just a weird choice that feels lazy.

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