I have to admit that my conscious reaction to Alan was 'now I understand why everyone claims Raoul is so boring' ;-p
You see, Raoul de Chagny has also been characterised as "the golden retriever of the [Phantom of the Opera] fandom" -- fair-haired, sunny in temperament, devoted to the point of self-sacrifice... and uniformly ignored as canon love-interest in favour of rewriting the plot to ship the heroine with the brooding mysterious stranger who reduces her to hysterical terror and kills people :-p I could never understand the attraction in that, because I was seeing things from Raoul's point of view, where he is confused, horror-stricken at his own failure to save the woman he tries to rescue, and determined never to let them be parted again. (And it did occur to me that that first scene I wrote for Alan is scarily close to the first story I wrote for Raoul, where he is in the Phantom's power and trying to bargain with his own life to attain a moment's distraction).
But now I come across this fandom, and for the first time I get it. Because Alan does absolutely nothing wrong: he's unselfish, he's resourceful and intelligent, he's brave and loyal and devoted and clean of heart (and if he ends up having to be rescued by the lady, why so does Raoul...) And yet compared to the elusive, damaged, doomed Thomas, he's far too perfect to be interesting: he just comes across as a none too subtle embodiment of all-American virtue in the face of those wicked English aristocrats. I found him tedious and slightly irritating, exactly as people describe Raoul... up until the moment when Thomas stuck a knife into him, anyway ;-)
(The answer, of course, is as always to consider the characters as people from their own points of view, and not as symbols of anything. Alan is chivalrous but deeply uneasy about Edith -- has the best man really won? And the more he learns, the more desperately angry and afraid he gets: desperate enough to believe or hope that simply being right is its own armour. And of course he has his own background and history -- intersecting with Edith's, but from his point of view, like everyone else's, the world is centered on him ;-)
But I still find Thomas more instinctively compelling (partly, I think,because he represents the intellectual where Alan represents the solidly physical) and want him to justify Edith's belief in him, even though objectively he really doesn't deserve our partisanship any more than the Phantom does. There is at least the justification for it that Edith does love him in canon, and that their relationship offers him a chance at redemption, as opposed to the Phantom's unwanted and unrequited love which is the cause itself of monstrous things... but if she loves him, it is because he quite cynically seduces her, and because she doesn't yet know the truth.
Tortured bad-boy allure strikes again... and this time I'm no more immune to it than the rest.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2018-12-11 01:43 am (UTC)You see, Raoul de Chagny has also been characterised as "the golden retriever of the [Phantom of the Opera] fandom" -- fair-haired, sunny in temperament, devoted to the point of self-sacrifice... and uniformly ignored as canon love-interest in favour of rewriting the plot to ship the heroine with the brooding mysterious stranger who reduces her to hysterical terror and kills people :-p
I could never understand the attraction in that, because I was seeing things from Raoul's point of view, where he is confused, horror-stricken at his own failure to save the woman he tries to rescue, and determined never to let them be parted again. (And it did occur to me that that first scene I wrote for Alan is scarily close to the first story I wrote for Raoul, where he is in the Phantom's power and trying to bargain with his own life to attain a moment's distraction).
But now I come across this fandom, and for the first time I get it. Because Alan does absolutely nothing wrong: he's unselfish, he's resourceful and intelligent, he's brave and loyal and devoted and clean of heart (and if he ends up having to be rescued by the lady, why so does Raoul...) And yet compared to the elusive, damaged, doomed Thomas, he's far too perfect to be interesting: he just comes across as a none too subtle embodiment of all-American virtue in the face of those wicked English aristocrats. I found him tedious and slightly irritating, exactly as people describe Raoul... up until the moment when Thomas stuck a knife into him, anyway ;-)
(The answer, of course, is as always to consider the characters as people from their own points of view, and not as symbols of anything. Alan is chivalrous but deeply uneasy about Edith -- has the best man really won? And the more he learns, the more desperately angry and afraid he gets: desperate enough to believe or hope that simply being right is its own armour. And of course he has his own background and history -- intersecting with Edith's, but from his point of view, like everyone else's, the world is centered on him ;-)
But I still find Thomas more instinctively compelling (partly, I think,because he represents the intellectual where Alan represents the solidly physical) and want him to justify Edith's belief in him, even though objectively he really doesn't deserve our partisanship any more than the Phantom does. There is at least the justification for it that Edith does love him in canon, and that their relationship offers him a chance at redemption, as opposed to the Phantom's unwanted and unrequited love which is the cause itself of monstrous things... but if she loves him, it is because he quite cynically seduces her, and because she doesn't yet know the truth.
Tortured bad-boy allure strikes again... and this time I'm no more immune to it than the rest.