It is a good idea, when you put it like that, but the way it was executed just made all the characters look bad. :( What would you have done with it?
That's not an entirely fair question, because you've already seen a lot of the things I've done with it ;-p Admittedly, starting from the premise that you're obliged to accept the whole package, secret-Phantom-love-child and alcoholic depressed Raoul included...
Frankly, I don't have any trouble with having Erik still pining away; when you 'let someone go', however noble you are trying to be about it, it *doesn't* magically stop you from loving and craving them in your self-imposed exile, or make jealousy any less acute or painful at the thought of them disporting themselves in the arms of another. Especially if that's the only love you've ever had. He hasn't promised not to think about her (least of all because twenty-first-century morality may in the future say that this is the mandatory 'healthy' and socially-approved obligation); he has promised himself not to pursue her or inflict himself any further upon her. I find it entirely likely that he goes on nursing that image in his heart, not exactly having a lot of other material in there with which to console himself -- and I don't find it improbable that ultimately he snaps and feels compelled to do something about it. But then I never had a great deal of emotion invested in the Phantom's redemption, so the idea that he fails to learn his lesson and just tries to do the same thing again didn't strike me as a distortion of the character.
(What *did* strike me as a distortion of the *story* was the idea that he could try to do the same thing again and have it magically work out this time around, especially when that is achieved by an unacknowledged retcon of the original.)
I don't think the spawn-of-Phantom plotline was necessary, since about the only thing it actually achieves is to provide a scene where the Phantom supposedly repents and sends Christine and Gustave away for the boy's own good -- which he then proceeds to forget all about within a matter of hours, not to mention promptly revealing the deadly secret he has begged her to keep hidden forever to the very last person she would presumably want to know about it... (And, I suppose, it provides ALW's desired 'redemptive finale': see, there is someone who will accept and love him after all despite his face! But that's a bit of a hand-wave as well, given the child's horrified rejection of him moments earlier.)
I think you could perfectly well have the Phantom reacting to Gustave's existence simply on the grounds that he *is* Christine's son (an aspect which LND tends to overlook, to the degree that killing the son of the woman he supposedly loves doesn't become repugnant to him until he realises that the boy is his 'heir' rather than the obtrusive spawn of Christine's marriage). It's a Peter Pan situation; the boy is Christine's son and he shares her talent and her future promise, so as he can't have Wendy/Christine, why not take Jane/Gustave? (The fact that the fandom sees fit to get outraged over this on the grounds that such an desire makes it appear that he is interested in sodomising the boy -- "Yes! Yes!": oh, how dirty that sounds -- says more about them than it does about him.)
Likewise, I don't have any inherent objection to the idea that Christine and Raoul's marriage has, for whatever reason, come under strain, or that Raoul doesn't get on with his son; there are all sorts of potential reasons for that which don't involve Christine having been lusting after the Phantom for the last ten years. It actually makes for an effective dramatic arc to present the idea they are drawn closer together again and learn to value what they have after encountering an outside threat, let alone if it turns out to be a revival of the very conflict that originally brought them together -- and the irony that it takes the Phantom's intervention from entirely other motives to give Christine a truly happy family, the supposed happiness in itself that he envies her, is an appropriately bittersweet ending. (Even better from that perspective, of course, if he expires in the odour of sanctity in order to achieve this; so I'd probably elect to kill him off with a ruthless hand :-p)
I don't think you necessarily need to prostitute Meg, although I don't care enough about the character to make that an inherently objectionable element; or she can perfectly well do so for her own frustrated ambition -- plenty of women have slept their way to the top and hated it -- and blame that on him, rather than doing so in self-sacrifice for a Phantom she has no particular reason to love, given that he has robbed her of everything before the start of the show. She has enough reason to be jealous of Christine at that point for taking over her limelight and stealing all her master's attention at a moment that could be critical for her career (and she isn't getting any younger). Or you could put your own bruised and persecuted OC in to take the role, and I've see LND fanfic that does. It's very hard not to read it as self-insert or an Other Woman created to heal Erik's Wounded Soul from that Mean Christine, though :-(
(The problem being, I think, that all these fanfics are written, like LND, on the premise that the audience inherently loves and pities the Phantom, without needing any particular in-story reason to do so; it's just a given that we should automatically sympathise with him whatever he does. And I don't come in with that wave of prior commitment.)
Whatever else you say about LND as it currently stands, it does have those intersecting plot strands: the Phantom's desire for Christine, Meg's frustrated ambition, and the (unexplained) conflicts within the Chagny family, and those interact to generate a full two acts of story, however contrived. I think my one *major* problem with it is the blind assumption that Christine is, 'of course', in love with the Phantom, not least because her actions in the story as shown don't actually give that impression -- although rewriting it to make Christine unambiguously eager to dump the family she has made in order to shag the Phantom senseless wouldn't make me any happier with it :-P
So what I'd do with it is pretty much what I have done: keep the Erik who tries to get his heart's desire in entirely the wrong way (that's in character), keep the element of conflict between Christine and Raoul while developing the reasons behind it, keep Gustave's fascination/repulsion for 'the beauty underneath', and drop the element where Christine suddenly does a volte-face and melts into the Phantom's arms because his song is just so Beautiful (or make it explicit that she *is* under the old power of his music at the time, although I think it's harder to do that when he isn't singing and she is).
Let the Phantom try to regain his lost love, and end up by destroying the present success and prosperity that he has failed to value (why not put the idea of the fire from the Prologue back in as a culminating disaster? Or is that copying the film version too obviously?) That works for me as the sympathetic tragedy for the character that ALW was clearly trying to achieve.
Let Christine forgive him *yet again* (that's in character).
Let Raoul have his character arc, because to be frank he doesn't get much of one in POTO -- but I'd rather do something positive with it. Showing Raoul developing a better relationship with Gustave -- in parallel with the Phantom's desperately misguided attempts to seduce him 'to the dark side' without any real understanding of child psychology -- would be one direction to pursue, for example.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2021-05-15 09:48 am (UTC)That's not an entirely fair question, because you've already seen a lot of the things I've done with it ;-p
Admittedly, starting from the premise that you're obliged to accept the whole package, secret-Phantom-love-child and alcoholic depressed Raoul included...
Frankly, I don't have any trouble with having Erik still pining away; when you 'let someone go', however noble you are trying to be about it, it *doesn't* magically stop you from loving and craving them in your self-imposed exile, or make jealousy any less acute or painful at the thought of them disporting themselves in the arms of another. Especially if that's the only love you've ever had.
He hasn't promised not to think about her (least of all because twenty-first-century morality may in the future say that this is the mandatory 'healthy' and socially-approved obligation); he has promised himself not to pursue her or inflict himself any further upon her. I find it entirely likely that he goes on nursing that image in his heart, not exactly having a lot of other material in there with which to console himself -- and I don't find it improbable that ultimately he snaps and feels compelled to do something about it. But then I never had a great deal of emotion invested in the Phantom's redemption, so the idea that he fails to learn his lesson and just tries to do the same thing again didn't strike me as a distortion of the character.
(What *did* strike me as a distortion of the *story* was the idea that he could try to do the same thing again and have it magically work out this time around, especially when that is achieved by an unacknowledged retcon of the original.)
I don't think the spawn-of-Phantom plotline was necessary, since about the only thing it actually achieves is to provide a scene where the Phantom supposedly repents and sends Christine and Gustave away for the boy's own good -- which he then proceeds to forget all about within a matter of hours, not to mention promptly revealing the deadly secret he has begged her to keep hidden forever to the very last person she would presumably want to know about it...
(And, I suppose, it provides ALW's desired 'redemptive finale': see, there is someone who will accept and love him after all despite his face! But that's a bit of a hand-wave as well, given the child's horrified rejection of him moments earlier.)
I think you could perfectly well have the Phantom reacting to Gustave's existence simply on the grounds that he *is* Christine's son (an aspect which LND tends to overlook, to the degree that killing the son of the woman he supposedly loves doesn't become repugnant to him until he realises that the boy is his 'heir' rather than the obtrusive spawn of Christine's marriage). It's a Peter Pan situation; the boy is Christine's son and he shares her talent and her future promise, so as he can't have Wendy/Christine, why not take Jane/Gustave? (The fact that the fandom sees fit to get outraged over this on the grounds that such an desire makes it appear that he is interested in sodomising the boy -- "Yes! Yes!": oh, how dirty that sounds -- says more about them than it does about him.)
Likewise, I don't have any inherent objection to the idea that Christine and Raoul's marriage has, for whatever reason, come under strain, or that Raoul doesn't get on with his son; there are all sorts of potential reasons for that which don't involve Christine having been lusting after the Phantom for the last ten years. It actually makes for an effective dramatic arc to present the idea they are drawn closer together again and learn to value what they have after encountering an outside threat, let alone if it turns out to be a revival of the very conflict that originally brought them together -- and the irony that it takes the Phantom's intervention from entirely other motives to give Christine a truly happy family, the supposed happiness in itself that he envies her, is an appropriately bittersweet ending. (Even better from that perspective, of course, if he expires in the odour of sanctity in order to achieve this; so I'd probably elect to kill him off with a ruthless hand :-p)
I don't think you necessarily need to prostitute Meg, although I don't care enough about the character to make that an inherently objectionable element; or she can perfectly well do so for her own frustrated ambition -- plenty of women have slept their way to the top and hated it -- and blame that on him, rather than doing so in self-sacrifice for a Phantom she has no particular reason to love, given that he has robbed her of everything before the start of the show. She has enough reason to be jealous of Christine at that point for taking over her limelight and stealing all her master's attention at a moment that could be critical for her career (and she isn't getting any younger). Or you could put your own bruised and persecuted OC in to take the role, and I've see LND fanfic that does. It's very hard not to read it as self-insert or an Other Woman created to heal Erik's Wounded Soul from that Mean Christine, though :-(
(The problem being, I think, that all these fanfics are written, like LND, on the premise that the audience inherently loves and pities the Phantom, without needing any particular in-story reason to do so; it's just a given that we should automatically sympathise with him whatever he does. And I don't come in with that wave of prior commitment.)
Whatever else you say about LND as it currently stands, it does have those intersecting plot strands: the Phantom's desire for Christine, Meg's frustrated ambition, and the (unexplained) conflicts within the Chagny family, and those interact to generate a full two acts of story, however contrived. I think my one *major* problem with it is the blind assumption that Christine is, 'of course', in love with the Phantom, not least because her actions in the story as shown don't actually give that impression -- although rewriting it to make Christine unambiguously eager to dump the family she has made in order to shag the Phantom senseless wouldn't make me any happier with it :-P
So what I'd do with it is pretty much what I have done: keep the Erik who tries to get his heart's desire in entirely the wrong way (that's in character), keep the element of conflict between Christine and Raoul while developing the reasons behind it, keep Gustave's fascination/repulsion for 'the beauty underneath', and drop the element where Christine suddenly does a volte-face and melts into the Phantom's arms because his song is just so Beautiful (or make it explicit that she *is* under the old power of his music at the time, although I think it's harder to do that when he isn't singing and she is).
Let the Phantom try to regain his lost love, and end up by destroying the present success and prosperity that he has failed to value (why not put the idea of the fire from the Prologue back in as a culminating disaster? Or is that copying the film version too obviously?) That works for me as the sympathetic tragedy for the character that ALW was clearly trying to achieve.
Let Christine forgive him *yet again* (that's in character).
Let Raoul have his character arc, because to be frank he doesn't get much of one in POTO -- but I'd rather do something positive with it. Showing Raoul developing a better relationship with Gustave -- in parallel with the Phantom's desperately misguided attempts to seduce him 'to the dark side' without any real understanding of child psychology -- would be one direction to pursue, for example.