Raoul and Erik's roles in effect exchanged

[igenlode]

I know that I have written at length and with some analysis about my old theory that the issue with "Love Never Dies" was that Lloyd Webber had accidentally managed to swap over the functions of Raoul and the Phantom from those seen in POTO -- but I can't actually *find* any of those discussions in order to archive them, save for my very brief original mention of it as "the insight that didn't make it into the story" of "The Choices of Raoul"...

I think the topic must always have come up as part of *replies* on my part to other people, which means that the relevant discussions are either trapped in my FFnet PM box (might be worth trying to check all the outgoing messages from the relevant period, circa April 2013-2014, the next time I travel in to the library), in my likewise inaccessible Dreamwidth message outbox, or else scattered all over LiveJournal/Dreamwidth in assorted journals :-(

The closest thing I have managed to track down is a comment to a comment in vicomte_de_chagny, on the subject of Why "Love Never Dies" is a tragedy.

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Edit: in the course of going through a year or so of review replies in my FFnet outbox I came across this, which is probably at least one of the bits of analysis I was thinking of (though I'm pretty sure I must have discussed it more than once!)

One of the things that fascinated me about "Love Never Dies" is that it sets up a situation in which it is basically *Raoul* who is damaged by life and falling to pieces, and unable/refusing to accept any comfort from Christine: because the show is mainly interested in trying to dump Christine into bed with Erik to make up for the 'wrong' she is supposed to have done him (although the boot rather seems to be on the other foot...), it never bothers to give any rationale for what is supposedly going on here. But the effect of what essentially amounts to swapping over Erik's and Raoul's roles -- rich protector/employer versus tormented outcast who hurts her and hates himself for it -- is that it inadvertently moves Raoul into the position of psychologically interesting antihero represented by the Phantom in the original story. The plot of "Love Never Dies" as written is in effect Raoul's tragedy, but it doesn't realise this... which is why it doesn't work terribly well.

Second edit (Jan 27th):

POTO "with a twist" with Raoul and the Phantom exchanging places has already been done: it's Love never Dies :-p
The intention is made pretty much explicit, with Raoul talking about being a monster behind a mask, etc., the Phantom being rich, powerful and having two beautiful women at his feet, and Raoul being angry, powerless and tormented. What I *don't* think that Andrew Lloyd Webber realised was that in the process he has also turned the Phantom into the 'boring, entitled' character, with Raoul instead becoming the complicated underdog with intriguing depths and a tragic relationship with Christine!
At any rate, LND had precisely the opposite effect on me from that presumably intended: before I encountered it I simply took Raoul for granted as Christine's destined love-object. Immediately I heard it I became highly partisan in Raoul's direction :-p

I don't conveniently say "oh, LND-Raoul is really a fluffy harmless bunny who has been totally misrepresented in canon". He is a damaged, angry, and very unhappy character, and if you're going to use him you have to work out how he got that way and what plausible routes there are to get him out.

If he does get out. Because the other thing Lloyd Webber doesn't seem to realise about the show that he himself wrote is that in swapping the roles of Raoul and Erik he has effectively created a story that is *Raoul's* tragedy -- he loses everything, not only his self-respect, his present and his future but even what he thought he knew about the past -- as the original was Erik's tragedy.
And in altering the ending for the Australian production, Lloyd Webber has without thinking about it placed Raoul in the most appalling position: Christine appears to be trying to use her 'aria' to reconcile with him, and yet by doing so is unwittingly dooming their relationship, placing him in an agonizing situation. She has already entrusted Raoul with Gustave, thus putting him in a situation where he can either keep his word to her or else the terms of the bet that he has made -- and his choice at that point thus makes him *directly* responsible for Gustave's kidnapping and hence his wife's death. It is Raoul to whom Gustave flees when his mother tries to foist him off on the Phantom, thus requiring Raoul to bring the child back...

So I spent a couple of stories in simply trying to represent Raoul's point of view not as the villain of the piece (which I don't think even ALW intended, though that doesn't stop the fans) but as the tragic protagonist.

I tell a lie when I say that Love Never Dies inspires me only with the desire to change it. It's got some powerful music, and the scenario is not so utterly implausible as you might think -- assuming you start from the assumption that you're throwing away Erik's redemption at the end of the previous show, and never liked him that much anyway, because "Mr Y" is pretty unlikable in this. Not actually a problem, until you start to try to interpret him as the romantic lead and Christine's behaviour as that of a woman secretly in love with him -- because on the face of it she spends most of the show standing up to him and telling him repeatedly to stay out of her life, thank you :-p

So I find Raoul's situation in this (with so many unexplained loose ends -- Lloyd Webber never bothers to give us any description of what has happened to him and Christine over those missing ten years, or why) to be a fruitful one for fanfic prompts, and have written quite a few.

Feb 4th:

...it's basically an attempt to rewrite "Phantom" with Erik as the romantic lead and Raoul as the twisted, self-loathing antagonist. And the major flaw in that (apart from the fact that "Mr. Y" isn't actually a very likeable character; protagonists don't *have* to be likeable, but unfortunately the musical keeps presenting him as deserving of our sympathy when what we're seeing on stage is anything but!) is that it effectively puts Erik into the 'boring, entitled' Raoul-role and Raoul into the place of the tormented anti-hero with the hinted-at past and the hopeless passion who loves and loses the heroine :-p

Lloyd Webber has -- I think deliberately -- switched the roles of the two characters for his sequel, but without realising that in the process he has written a story that is effectively *Raoul's* tragedy just as "Phantom" was Erik's tragedy. So you've got a plot that's pulling against its surrounding structure and isn't telling the story that it thinks it is; Christine and Raoul's broken relationship ends up being more interesting than Erik's possessive attitude, which is certainly not the intention.

Anyhow, that was my analysis of why the overall effect is so unsatisfactory... and one of the reasons for writing this fanfic. Because if you look at the events of the story from Raoul's point of view, by the end he has now lost *everything*: his wife, his son, his self-respect, his patrimony, his good name, the life he thought he had, any future they hoped to have and even the past he had always believed to be true. Erik has the belief that Christine died loving him, and the Mini-Me he always wanted in the form of Gustave: Raoul has nothing at all :-(

Comments

[watervole]

I've just googled Love Never Dies.

Ugh. How on earth did Lloyd Weber lose the plot so completely?

[igenlode]

I've just googled Love Never Dies.

Ugh. How on earth did Lloyd Webber lose the plot so completely?

That was pretty much the response of a lot of the fandom at the time ;-p
Including at least one faction of Erik/Christine shippers whose reaction was 'if we'd known that this was what we were going to get after wishing all those years for an E/C sequel, we would rather not have had our wishes granted!'

Basically the plot tramples all over the Phantom's prior redemption (instead of choosing to let Christine go of his own free will, we are now informed that it was she who inexcusably chose to abandon him) and presents him as a thoroughly unadmirable character whom we are told that we must like, because characters who disagree with him are culpable and Bad. (When Raoul snaps at Gustave for demanding his attention, this is presented as Raoul being unreasonable. When the Phantom snaps at Meg for demanding his attention, that is presented as *Meg* being unreasonable!)

So there were devoted fans who hated the show for giving Erik his happy ending and then snatching it away, there were fans who hated it for turning Christine into a mere reward to be passed around and then killing her off, there were fans who hated it for giving Raoul a complete personality transplant, and there were even a small but dedicated band of Giry-fans who hated it for what it does to Meg and her mother. And, to be fair, there were fans who loved it because it Proves that Christine Really Loved Erik All Along, and because it was The Return of Our Beloved Phantom, and because Erik gets a son (even if at the cost of the death of the boy's mother).

I think the non-fandom critics without an emotional axe to grind generally concurred on 'some good music but a weak storyline' (Guardian review: "Although Lloyd Webber's score is full of gems, in the end a musical is only as good as its book").

For my part I *wasn't* a massive "Phantom" fan when I came across "Love Never Dies" -- in fact, I'd only ever heard the big hit numbers from "Phantom of the Opera" and generally gathered the gist of the plot and characters from those -- and all I could remember of those original LND production reviews was that the show had run for a short time in London and been adjudged a general flop. I knew in advance that the fans hated it "because Christine dies", so that aspect didn't exactly come as a shock. And I did like a great deal what little I'd heard of the music -- if I hadn't, I'd never have bothered to go looking in the first place.

Even so, I found that the storyline felt horribly forced and just didn't make sense in terms of the characters' behaviour: the whole supposed big climax of 'Christine gets to choose again, and choose *right* this time' doesn't deliver as intended, because Christine hasn't the faintest idea what is going on behind her back, and is given no opportunity to make any decision, either by the author or by the two men who are using her as a pawn in their argument. In fact the musical has to take care to kill her off before she can find out the truth; she is never given a chance to ask inconvenient questions!