Collected thoughts on Erik and fanfiction

Collected thoughts on Erik and fanfiction (a companion piece to C
ollected thoughts on Raoul posted to vicomte_de_chagny)

I cringe whenever I see fan-fiction in which 'Erik' is routinely best friends with 'Nadir' -- this just doesn't exist unless you're writing a story set in Susan Kay's world, which is in itself fan-fiction. The Persian in Leroux finds Erik both pitiful and terrible, but he isn't his friend -- more a sort of tolerated watcher who knows that he may some day have to take action. One can extrapolate a complex relationship from that, but simply importing Kay's names wholesale into a world that doesn't share her backstory because you want to give Erik someone to club around with feels like pure laziness to me :-(

The fandom tends to treat both Raoul and Christine as effectively inconsequential, with almost all their interest revolving around an idealised Phantom; it's something I find difficult to understand, given that the musical is basically Christine's story and the novel is largely seen from Raoul's point of view.
I'm not sure how you get devoted to a character to the degree that you ignore most of his original conception (smells of rotten flesh; laughs insanely; blackmails people for outrageously large sums of money; designs and installs torture chambers for fun; intends to blow up a full theatre during a performance; randomly pretends to be a ghost) and impose on him your own self-identification of the helpless unloved outsider... or at least, that's my best guess at the psychology behind it. I feel that people think of *themselves* as the poor Phantom whom everybody hates unreasonably, and whose cause they can passionately espouse, and transfer that into wanting to force Christine to love him as a reward for his sufferings.
I'm conscious, however, that I'm guilty of taking a rather similar attitude to Raoul where Christine is concerned -- not that I want to 'reward him for his sufferings', of course, but that I'm more concerned in fanfiction that he 'gets Christine' than that she is happy (which is why I can read tragic endings, in which one or all of the characters die, with more equanimity than endings in which Christine is taught that what she really wants is Erik after all!

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Susan Kay's Erik

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The Persian

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Erik as plot device

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A Necessary Evil

I came up with a much better title for this while I was typing it: 'A Necessary Evil', which in the context written refers to Edith herself, but also implies Thomas's attitude both to his words to her at the party and to her likely fate if he marries her... not to mention other aspects of his life which he is trying resolutely to suppress!

He is trying to do the right thing for once in his life, but he is definitely an unreliable/self-deceiving narrator, and his moral fibre is somewhat weak from lack of use :-p

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A Necessary Evil

The one thing he could find to be glad about in the whole humiliating evening was that he had set Edith free. But good resolutions are hard to keep...

The light from a hundred candles glimmered back from glass and silverware and lay softly across the starched white linen of the men and the silks and jewels of the ladies present, and where it fell it glowed with the gilded wealth of a gilded age. There was more money on display here than he or his family had touched in years, even before Papa—

Thomas cut off that thought almost before it had begun, closing it down as he had learned to close his eyes to all memories that led in the direction of his parents. Across the table his sister Lucille sat poised and calm, her smiling society mask a flawless shield over the bitterness beneath. ( Read more... )