onjaggedwingz.myfastforum.org

WingZ · Site Admin Joined: 15 Aug 2008 Posts: 127

ENDGAME
Character Notes and Future Thoughts

I. Dave Duncan
I started writing Duncan when I was about 14 or so. I was very depressed/confused/conflicted at the time and I projected a lot of that onto him. We had some other similarities too, in that we weren’t complete losers, but we always seemed to be on the fringes. We were angry and had low self-esteem, but we also had that one thing (for him, basketball; for me, writing) that made us stand out.

Dave, at first, was a convenient proxy for what I thought I wanted at the time. Like a lot of naïve TBs, that amounted to “wouldn’t it be cool if I got put back in diapers and babied!” (Headshake). Throw in a girlfriend and a close-knit cadre of colorful comrades and the rest (i.e.: the jerks like Matt Sabrien) wouldn’t seem as bad.

When I re-approached Dave a few years later, I tried to give him a little more depth. He’s finally escaped most of the things that made him miserable in his early teens, but he’s not exactly at ease either. He has trouble seeing himself as a good guy, a capable guy, which is where Steph comes in. He’s not Catholic, but penance resonates deep with him.

Steph, for her part, is almost like a live-action Lisa Simpson…with baggage. Like Dave, she had things in life that made her miserable (though hers came earlier in childhood). Unlike Dave, she coped by overachieving rather than brooding. They compliment each other well because they share that common hidden fragility.

I also wanted to use Steph to send a message: be nice to the smart/weird girls early on. They might (and often do) grow into total hotties.

II. The Geek and the Cheerleader
It’s not hard to see where this began. You take two competing archetypes: your pretty, shallow, outgoing cheerleader and your wimpy, brilliant, socially inept geek and you throw them together. The challenge was in rounding them out and making them three-dimensional. Both characters had influences in both real life and cinema (think pre-Spiderman Kirsten Dunst for Keri; think pre-Hobbit Elijah Wood for Casey), but it wasn’t to the point where I was borrowing someone else’s creations.

Writing the original G&C was fun, but I’m not sure I’d do it again the same way. Basically, I took a kitchen sink approach. Every thought or fantasy that came to mind, I tossed in. I stole characters from movies and books. I even looted some of my other writing (hence, Tarek/Red, the alien bent on conquest) and threw myself in there as an interlocutor/explainer/commentator on how outrageous things had gotten. The whole endeavor was larger than life.

Following up on that was difficult, not only because the first G&C was well-received (not to mention, freakin long!), but because of the kind of standard I had set. I wanted to keep things fun, but I wanted to make them a bit more believable too. With G&C 2, I think I pulled that off OK.

Problem now is I’m not sure where to go with these folks. They aren’t teenagers anymore; they are my age. A lot of the wild and crazy (and yes, fun) has dissipated. Also, given that they went to different schools and seem to have wildly varying trajectories in life, it’s safe to say they have drifted apart. My initial plans for another sequel would probably bypass the college years and follow a chance encounter a few years later and what follows from that. As of right now, I’m nowhere near ready to approach this.

III. Heather
Heather, initially, was my stab at trying to replicate the whole ‘girl treated like a baby by strict parents’ subgenre of diaper fiction. I got into it for awhile, but I eventually lost interest. I don’t recall the exact reason; it just didn’t seem me, I guess.

Not long after giving it up (or maybe even concurrently; the timing eludes me), I did start work on another Heather story called “Stepping Blind.” This introduced a loner named Oliver who was to become Heather’s savior. I wrote out most of a story involving magic and outlandish science. It just got to be too fucked up and I abandoned it a chapter or two from completion.

Heather, as I see her now, is a cautionary tale. Some people in the AB/DL world (especially those who, for lack of a less sweeping generalization, are dumb teenagers) get it into their heads that it would be/would have been great if their parents babied them. This shows the other side of that and the effects it can have. The complex relationship Heather had with her parents literally straddled the line between love and abuse and the tragedy of her brother was a psychological primer to it all.

IV. Erin and Jim
I like Erin. I like Erin a lot. As I think I mentioned before, she began as a composite of some girls I knew. They were rebellious, they had a distinct style, they didn’t get along with their parents, etc. I decided to take that and push the envelope with it. What if they didn’t just fight back, but they dropped out completely instead? And could someone like that ever be reclaimed for society?

Jim, of course, answered the question in the affirmative. Ironically, I made Jim a journalist long before I was certain I’d become one. I wanted an authority figure, an ex-jock, a surrogate father. In other words, I wanted a traditionally-defined male, albeit presented in a non-caricatured fashion. So I concocted Jim and made him “old at heart” as both an in-joke (because I’ve often felt 40-plus myself) and a counterbalance to Erin.

Needless to say, like a lot of my character sets, they compliment each other because they are able to help each other out. Jim is Erin’s sanity; Erin is Jim’s spark. They may live apart, but they know that they’ve changed and impacted each other profoundly.

Another thing on Erin: because of her background, she was sort of a safe outlet for some less friendly ideas (namely, a lot of punishment). As time progressed, I diversified her and added a few more real-life examples to the composite. Ultimately, Erin is proof that you can learn from your mistakes without tossing away who you are (which, I readily concede, is a sideways jab at all these assholes who live like heathens, cause a ton of damage, go born-again Christian than have the audacity to blame everyone and everything for the bad choices they made). She isn’t some grrl power cliché. In fact, she’s still highly fractured. But she’s functional now and I’d like to expand on that functionality even more. Eventually, she will talk to her parents again. She will settle down. She’ll just be slow and stubborn about it, which is most certainly her way.

V. Adam
One of my weaknesses is that I love sports and sports storylines are riddled with clichés. If they make one more movie about some untalented losers pegged as underdogs who topple a clearly better squad or some hardnosed, long-winded coach pulling a dysfunctional team together, I’m going to yell and throw things.

Yet it is precisely from that mold where Adam came. Granted, I tried to round him out the best I could, but he’s still your prototypical “Rudy.” He gets by on sheer effort and never gives up. Adam is also one of my more normal, more grounded characters. Sure, he has his incontinence and he has The Drive, but he doesn’t have the same static as some of the other folks (which becomes pretty evident when he meets Dave). He has family, he has support and in the end, you kind of get the sense that he’ll be OK.

That said, his appearances are littered with in-jokes and references. A guy I once knew actually did date a girl with the same name as his sister and didn’t seem to think it was weird. After applying that here, I guess no one else thinks it’s weird either. Corey Miller, though wholly fictitious, is meant to represent the archetypical golden boy: comes from a talented family (which, in the case of the Millers, actually does exist), oozes natural ability, seems poised for great things, etc. The moral of the story is that guys like that are only as good as the guys around them, which, in this case, happens to mean Adam.

VI. Megan
If you’ll recall, I came up with Megan emerged by consensus. Her story was the result of a series of choose your own adventure-style polls. But beyond that, here is what I was going for: I wanted normal. Megan is (or was) an average, normal girl who just happens to be surrounded by craziness on all sides (be it circumstances or people she knows). She’s lured to it, in some sense, but at the same time, she’s terrified of becoming one of “them.” Ironically, Megan’s method of de-crazying is to return herself to a time when things were simpler and made more sense (aka: regressing).

Megan is somewhat unique among my characters in that while diapers were what introduced her to the interest, they aren’t really central to it. Megan likes coloring, cuddling and being held. She’s more an adult toddler than anything else. Also more or less unique is that she may get frazzled, but she isn’t dependent on it in the least. She can turn it on and off at will.

If I do go for a sequel (maybe Meg and Tony’s adventures on the road), I may want to explore her losing some of that control, some of that normalness. Or I may have it hold fast in the face of even more crazy shenanigans. Who knows.

VII. The Punks
Anyone who has seen the movie can tell that this was influenced by “SLC Punk!” It is not, however, a direct homage nor is it meant to be. With “A Punk’s Tale,” I was both satirizing and celebrating a lifestyle that intrigued and repulsed me at the same time. I was never a punk, but I had a number of friends who were punks or skaters or both. I dug on the fact that they kind of pried themselves away from the mainstream high school social hierarchy (which I loathed), but I didn’t quite get their conventions.

Seth was born when I took some remembrances of myself at that age and grafted them onto a full-fledged member of the scene. He functioned as an observer/narrator, but he was sure ‘nuff immersed. The other parts of his life (uncertainty about the future) were semi-universal to a lot of teenagers and provided the fuel for Seth’s antics. When I re-visited the character, I noticed a number of similarities between Seth and my brother (capable, but possessed of questionable judgment), so I decided to play on that a bit, as noted in WILDCARD.

Cori and Robbo are both vaguely based on people I’ve known, neither of whom were punk. The ‘Robbo’ model was this big, clumsy, well-intentioned kid who wore thick glasses and whose mom worked at a supermarket. He wasn’t quite as slow or as constrained as Robbo was, but overall, he seemed to take things well. Cori shared some characteristics with one or two girls who were short of stature but large of attitude, but overall, I think I was using her to make a class statement. And that statement is that contrary to quasi-socialist griping, class in America does not matter. Someone like Cori can go punk. Someone like Randy can fall on his ass. Someone like Robbo can work himself up. We’re all individuals, so quit trying to homogenize us.
-END-