Reasons why people hate Raoul

[igenlode]

https://comments.deviantart.com/1/704229187/4476504416

We've seen 'Raoul is selfish'/'Raoul only cares about Christine's looks'/'the Phantom has known Christine much longer' (all debatable statements, in terms of the book) often enough before, but where on earth did I just could never forgive him in the book for him wanting Christine to think about him when she was crying over the death of her friend come from?

What friends of Christine are seen to die in the novel? Buquet? (He's said to have been popular...)

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

I don't get it. What friend? What death? What the heck is this person talking about?

You were a lot more eloquent than I would have been under the circumstances. :P

[igenlode]

Well, I haven't had any response, so we'll never know what she had in mind -- I wonder if it was some reference to something that happened in Susan Kay's book?

(I had someone tell me indignantly last week that Kay was considered 'secondary canon' where Leroux-Erik was concerned, when I pointed out that you couldn't actually cite things that happened in fanfic novels as evidence for Erik's state of mind in the original...)

[betweensunandmoon]

I haven't read Kay's book, so I don't know. (And after some of the things I've heard about it, I don't want to read it.)

Secondary canon? So every fanfic ever is now secondary canon, then? *headdesk*

[igenlode]

The irony is that the fan in question -- not the one who wrote the original comment about 'the death of her friend' (Erik, perhaps? But that sort of fan tends to assume that Christine saw Erik as something more than 'a friend'), but the one who was talking about 'secondary canon' -- said that she hadn't actually read Kay's book either. So she is treating as canon events that she only knows about through having seen them repeated in other people's fan-fiction...

To be fair, Kay's book is just as much entitled to have fanfic written for it as Lloyd Webber's musical is; they are both adaptations based on the same original text, as are all the other 'Phantom' films which very occasionally get stories written for them. What gets up my nose is when people treat Susan Kay as having some kind of divine insight into Erik's 'real' history which has then become the authentic backstory for Leroux's character, to the degree that it's accepted fanon.

But then it gets up my nose when people randomly mix different versions anyway; in my mind, the different continuities exist as non-communicating parallel universes. The things that happen to Christine in the musical don't happen to Christine in the book, and that version of her doesn't know anything about them. Musical-Raoul and Leroux-Raoul are effectively two different people with different histories and behaviour, and you can't just give musical-Raoul a slightly-older brother Philippe while ignoring all the other family dynamics that make Leroux-Raoul what he is. And no version of the Phantom outside Kay has a best friend called Nadir -- the daroga's relationship with Erik in Leroux is that of a suspicious watchdog, not a devoted companion (let alone lover!)

But this is a bit inconsistent of me, really, since the musical is based explicitly on the book (to the degree that things are hinted at -- Christine's scarf, her father's violin playing, the 'Little Lotte' rhyme -- merely as allusions to the corresponding sections of the novel despite having no real function in the new plot), so it's reasonable to assume that nothing in the backstory that isn't explicitly contradicted has been changed. And there could be an unseen daroga lurking behind the scenes (even if he doesn't actually take any action in the moment of crisis), and, more plausibly, there could be a Comte Philippe frowning on Raoul's activities (even if this appears to be a completely different Raoul with a different role in the plot).
And I myself have adopted Raoul's two older sisters as head-canon for the musical version, even if Lloyd Webber's intention appears to have been that this Raoul is a Vicomte in his own right rather than the baby brother of a Comte, and used Raoul's aunt in Lannion as backstory for "Love Never Dies"... so I'm being quite inconsistent, really :-(