True.
But how often are you let down, in fiction, when a tantilizingly hazy backstory is filled in with bold letters?
I'm going to say with comics here but... Superman, for example. If all you know is that he was sent off a doomed planet as a baby, as its last survivor, to Earth where his scientist parents knew he would have superpowers and thrive and so on... that's really really awesome. You can paint in whatever backstory you like as you go. Further, he grew up the adopted only child of caring upright farmers and...
When YOU walk in, he's a reporter for the biggest paper in the biggest city... but even that's just a cover because he's actually, like, if Jesus could benchpress oil tankers.
And then... invariably... various writers try and fill in the blanks with their distinct interpretations and... yuck. Just yuck. They can't agree if his parents couldn't even touch each other in a cold scientific distopia or if they were mad rebel lovers in a place that looked a lot like the future we envisioned in 1938 or... what. Was he a year old when they sent him away? Was he a feotus in a "birthing matrix"? Was his hot girl cousin sent out as his baby sitter? Were his dog and his hoss and his cat and his monkey and his goddamn paramecium sent out as tests before him?
Did an evil ***** spaceprobe blow up his planet? Did the core of the planet just explode in some weird atomic-volcanic nutjob natural causes nightmare? Did... anti-cloning terrorists do the dirty deed?
And, like, oh Christ... are his parents dead? Just one? Was he a superhero when he was a kid? Did he have a friend who knew his secret or a girlfriend who was catching on or... you know, did he hang out with SUPER-TEENAGERS FROM THE FUTURE? Did his girlfriend get powers too, every other months?
You waterdown the power of the narrative with every additional frill and... muddy that water still with every contradiction to a past storyteller every time you do it?
Or you can have... "Last son of a doomed planet, raised by simple farmers as a normal-if-overnoble man, now he's a reporter and... CURTAIN UP! SCENE ONE: IN WHICH DORIS GETS HER OATS!"
Wolverine turned out to have been, like, a little spoiled sissy-boy in Nova Scotia, for God's sake.
Cable's the son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey who was possessed by a demon, infected by *****-cancer and taken to the future where...
*deep breath*... he was raised by the SOULS of Cyclops and the REAL Jean Grey put into NEW bodies in the FUTURE, which was orchestrated by his "sister" from an alternate future (the daughter of real-Jean and Cyclops in a timeline where he'd never been born) where she is now... like... eighty... and the former possessor of the Phoenix force...
*deep breath*... where he was raised to be the Mutant Jesus battling an immortal from his parents time and, oh, HIS clone (Cable's clone) ended up the protege of the immortal and... at the end of it all, he travelled BACK to now-ish to defeat the immortal at a time when he was more vulnerable but at this time, his parents are in their late twenties and he's the age of his own grandfather...
And his grandfather is a space pirate sleeping with a cat girl.
Y'know? Seriously.
Even Batman... BATMAN... gets muddled up in... WHO killed his parents, was it the Joker, was it just some dude? Did he catch the killer, maybe he never did, maybe he thinks he did but isn't sure?
I mean... you know what I mean.
Onstad being the only writer who'll probably ever work on his characters... and being such a great writer of characterization... this probably WOULDN'T be the case?
But on a literary level, there's something to be said for mystery.
I mean... "The only place Beef could find a girl nerdy enough to love him was the afterlife and, even then, the girl LITERALLY from heaven, his HEAVEN-SENT GIRL, he comes close to screwing it up now and again."
That's maybe exactly enough. Maybe most of the rest of what we know about her SHOULD be told indirectly through her actions and asides and so on.
Complicating it with... the suicide of a sea captain and... the weird mental riddle of what she could've been doing hanging around in the afterlife for 250 years, what she could have in common with an Earth dude if she's been chilling in heaven reading manuals for 250 years, what the exact mechanism for her still being in touch with American popular culture is... all of this is muddies the water... in my imagination, anyway.
There is the slight chance that I overthink matters.
Author
Topic: The Story Of Molly Sanders. January 23, 2007. (Read 7351 times)