This blog post has been brought to you by...me! My next book, Lost Station Circe, is releasing in July. This very month (sorry I've still got no date beyond that, my publisher is very busy). The first one, Starborn Vendetta, is available now from anywhere that sells books.
After an earlier post on ensemble casts, a comment from fellow author Stephen Cox got me thinking about a problem with ensemble casts I didn't even think of when I created that post. Emblematic, considering how many points there are about...large casts. Pardon me for mentioning the tainted name of Harry Potter, but it is an example that can help demonstrate something quickly. We get introduced to A LOT of characters in its first book alone, ten or twenty beyond what might be called the core cast. Just imagine if over half of them had never been developed further, which is almost what happens. It suffers somewhat from that problem where characters are just names, except when the story suddenly needs them not to be. Here begins what might be the ensemble cast's crippling blow: too many named characters in the kitchen.
Not every grand arcing saga needs a huge cast of characters, and not all large casts are equal, especially when it comes to an ensemble where each of them technically is supposed to have enough screen time to develop as their own people. There are plenty of examples I've either seen for myself (Firefly, Blast of Tempest) or heard about (Leverage) that succeed in developing an ensemble. But what about those that just...fumble it? Not to take too easy a potshot, but while it focuses largely on its two leads, Avatar seems technically to be attempting an ensemble between its human and alien factions. It's certainly got the runtime for an ensemble film. But outside...five characters, the other ten or so are very underdeveloped. I know there are deeper core problems with the story of Avatar, but this is one that could have made the story more digestible and enjoyable. And from what I've heard, the sequels aren't fixing the problem. Contrast it with a similar us-versus-them film Tora! Tora! Tora!, which with a noticeably shorter runtime manages to tell a compelling and heartbreaking two-sided narrative around the entry of Japan into World War II with the bombing of Pearl Harbour.
Video games are easier to forgive in this regard, as you play as one person in a medium still holding a stigma of 'story not important', so underdevelopment is less of an issue. But I shall compare two of my favourite games with ensemble casts, many of which get roughly equal amounts of screen time outside the main cast, and may come across as shallow if the player doesn't follow their optional content. Nier: Automata has one of my favourite casts, especially when you go through their side quests, but some remain underdeveloped, specifically the Commander and Anemone. They are introduced as key players, but we get little to nothing in terms of solid story and development compared to the Operators, Pascal, or Adam and Eve. And they play just as big a role in the story as the Operators, Pascal, or Adam and Eve. Meanwhile Mass Effect has an entire trilogy's worth of space to deal with its characters, and many characters move onto different things after the game where they are introduced (assuming they survive, ala Urdnot Wrex). But it suffers from a "tell, don't show" approach to its characters and world building that can REALLY drag things down, and its DLC characters show clear signs of having less attention given to them through resource issues.
I didn't want to use a bad example above, but contrast two good ones. Ensembles are difficult to get right, and it's very easy for characters to fall by the wayside. Either through forgetfulness, or necessity. Sometimes casts grow so large (insert any long-running shonen anime here) that it becomes borderline impossible to keep track of everything. You can come back and think "Wait, what, who were you again?" Good writing can compensate for that, but not always.
Now for the point where I talk about my book Lost Station Circe, where I employ an ensemble cast. And I ran into a problem straight away. Because of how the story was going, my initial core cast of seven with roughly equal screentime exploded into one of somewhere above twelve, which was stretching my ability to create a compelling story for them. I had to make some tough choices, and some that initially had a longer and more defined role needed to be scaled back to allow for fuller focus on others. It's still not perfect (IMO perfection is an unobtainable abstract so looking for it is a fool's errand), but it was either that, or the story was going to get hopelessly confusing and some of the parts I felt were essential to the story would need to be cut for time.
So...this is a thing. Following something up based on someone else's comment. Apologies if it's a little odd, unusual, not quite as polished as it might be but it's more about writing what I feel than some of my other blog posts. I also hope it's enjoyable, and that it makes you think about how a cast is written. Not ensemble fits into a story, but then not every story needs an ensemble. If you try to squeeze an ensemble where it doesn't fit, you get...well, great difficulty remembering who the heck this or that character is supposed to be. No matter how engaging the writing, it was very difficult remembering why I should be caring about Parvati Patel.
No comments:
Post a Comment