Tag: Neil Gaiman

Amnesia for character development

I finished watching the Dead Boy Detectives. Quite enjoyed it (if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I’m a Neil Gaiman fan). There were lots of fun bits. I want to know more about Kashina, whom the Night Nurse met in the sea monster. I actually liked the Night Nurse, even though her character was drawn to be unlikable.

But the story line I liked most was about the Dead Boys’ living psychic sidekick, Crystal Palace. Not having read The Dead Boy Detectives comics  nor watched the Max Doom Patrol series (in which both the eponymous dead boy detectives and Crystal appear), she was new to me. *** Spoilers below***

A depiction of the interior of the character’s namesake structure as a spoiler buffer.

As the result of a demon possession, when we meet Crystal she has lost almost all her memories. She only remembers part of her name and nothing of her background. The demon has stolen her memories. What really intrigued me was the end of the amnesia plot line. Towards the end. Crystal, who has become a decent human being under the influence of her new friends, gets her memories back and realizes she wasn’t just slightly unlikeable (which she had a vague memory about) but a truly horrendous human being (give people night terrors or make them walk into traffic bad). She also learns about her dysfunctional family and how that had contributed to her toxic personality.

I really liked how the writing played with the potential of the amnesia in character development. Take a slightly blank slate character seeking for their identity. Build up their personality through their new experiences and social circle. even while desperate to remember their past.  In a nod to be careful what you wish for, have them regain their memories (or at least some of them) only to realize their pre-amnesia personality was very different – and one they now despise – and must live with. Kudos to the writers.

Villains I’d Root For Instead of the Protagonists

Another Wednesday Weekly Blog Challenge from Long and Short Reviews. So tempting to choose an anti-hero, who’s “a villain” but also the protagonist. I’m currently enjoying the Dead Boys Detectives from the Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman Universe (which he says he’s “not particularly” interested in creating as a cinematic universe though seems on the slippery slope to do so), so Lucifer comes to mind. 

It was a great series – classic detective/cop buddy show, if one of them was the literal devil. Great comedic edge.

But to choose Lucifer seems like cheating. And rooting for Hector over Achilles in The Iliad doesn’t seem to fit either, because Hector isn’t really a villain (and I’m not convinced Achilles’ is the protagonist).

I know there’s been occasions where I’ve thought the heroes so incompetent that I am a little rooting for them to just get taken out by the villains, but usually those stories are bad enough that I don’t remember them even if I did stick around to finish them.

Now I’m trying to think of stories were the heroes are upholding the social norms we are supposed to root for but I don’t actually do so, so I’d root for the villain. Again, I’m sure I’ve read such, but can’t think of any off hand.

Ugh. I think I’m going to go back to my cheating first thought and stick with the Devil, Lucifer from the Sandman Universe. And Crawley and Adam the Anti-Christ fit in there too. 

Mythical Fantasy: Neil Gaiman, Rick Riordan, and Road Trip Nostalgia

For each of these authors, there is so much that one could say that no one post could do them justice. I’ll be back to them in other posts.

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods,  the work I’m thinking of here, differs quite a bit from Riordan’s mythic novels. American Gods is adult-oriented and darker, whereas Riordan’s mythic novels are squarely the MG/YA arena. Yet they both not only talk about the immigration of Old World gods to America, but they also have a sort of nostalgia for the great American road trip and places you find along the way.

Gaiman’s American Gods travels the country celebrating not just the immigrant cultures and experiences that make up the country but also the off-beat places along the road, such as The House on the Rock and the climatic Rock City. In interviews, Gaiman has talked about his own road-trip experiences while writing the novel, e.g from his Rain taxi interview :

When I came to write them later it was incredibly useful having that knowledge of what it’s like down there—stuff I made up became very solid. With American Gods, I wanted to use that, and I would actually do things like go on little road trips. I’d say if my characters are going from here to here, I need to sort of follow the kind of places they’re going and see where they wind up. We get that wonderful chapter in Cairo, Illinois; it exists because I had to drive from here to Florida and thought I’d do it by taking back roads. I liked the sound of the name. When I got there I discovered it was this wonderful town that had once been full of history and that history had now passed by. The time when the Mississippi and the Ohio were trading rivers. Everything was happening on them—they were the arteries, the confluence, a wonderful place. Now it’s sparsely populated, with a sign saying “Welcome to historical Cairo.” That’s about it. I walked through the customs house museum which was one of the saddest little buildings I’ve ever walked through. So what can you have in Cairo? The Egyptian gods seemed so perfect for that.

Riordan’s YA mythic books, most notably the Percy Jackson series but also his Roman, Norse, and Egyptian series, also serve as a nostalgic map of American places. Just to name a few: the Washington Monument and Camelback Mountain in his Kane Chronicles (Egyptian), the St. Louis Arch and Las Vegas (Greek/Percy Jackson), the Grand Canyon (Roman/Lost Heroes), or the many sites of Boston (Norse). People have even used Google Maps to mark many of the places.

Both thus make great road trip books, especially if you can line up where you’re going with what appears in the book. But even if you can’t, their nostalgia for the American roadtrip would thematically enrich your journey.

Special shout out to Riordan’s Kane Chronicles, the premise of which is that two siblings leave a voice recording behind so it makes the perfect audiobook for the car. It is narrated by two people representing the two siblings who take turns recalling their adventures. They’ve released a new audiobook with new voice actors which I haven’t heard (I have an older version, which was great) so I don’t know how good a job they do.