Problems with Thomas

[igenlode]

Having written one one-shot for "Crimson Peak" in an evening, I then felt that in order to be fair I ought to do a Thomas-PoV piece to counterbalance Alan's view of Thomas (especially as I actually found Thomas by far the more compelling character!)

It actually turned out a great deal more difficult than I was expecting; basically, when you get down to it, Thomas Sharpe kills people. Or at least, he seduces them for their money and then stands aside while his sister gets rid of them for him. So it's pretty awkward to try to write a story from his point of view without its coming across as a whitewash.

His motives and sincerity are almost completely opaque in canon; he makes no attempt to protect Edith from his sister until very late on, so how much of the love-making can we believe? If he wasn't a complete villain (and the ending of the film wants us to believe that he wasn't) then what on earth did he tell himself about what he was doing?  The best I've managed to come up with — based on the line in the film where he says he has always 'closed his eyes' to things that make him uncomfortable — is that he is mentally blocking the consequences of his actions. Which, given that, on the most charitable interpretation of the plot, he hasn't realised that his sister murders every woman he marries, makes him both weak and wilfully blind!

So it's quite tricky presenting his viewpoint while showing him mentally editing his memories to skitter around all the murkier parts of the past... things that the reader knows, and the character is subconsciously not allowing himself to think about.

Put bluntly, I think the problem is that I'm trying to make the character look more sympathetic than the facts at that point in the story would suggest... but the facts suggest that he is basically Bluebeard, and the characterisation throughout the film doesn't match up with that at all.  He's heavily under the thumb of his sister, he's weak and he's clearly lying and/or evasive for a significant proportion of the story, but he's sensitive, he's intelligent, he's creative, and at some point he evidently does fall in love with his (future) wife. And since she doesn't really match the pattern of previous women the siblings have set out to sacrifice, there probably was a genuine attraction from quite early on.  But... if he does love her, the worst thing he can do is actually marry her, which is effectively going to be a death sentence — and he must at some level know this.

Hence the fanfic, based around the concept that his forced renunciation halfway through the plot was genuinely intended to be a real one... until his sister stepped in with a bit of canonical murder, and swept him back into 'well, I'll go along with it for now and just assume we can somehow find some way out of it later' mode ;-p