Script Doctoring
Title: Script Doctoring
Fandom: Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Verse: The Good Place
Characters: The Player, Alfred
Summary: The Player can of course fill any role admirably, but he’s never quite gotten used to that of a director.
Word Count: 572
The Player gets a transcript of everything that happens in his neighborhood, or as he prefers to think of it, a script of all the scenes that take place on what is, after all, only the latest of his many many stages. He is not unique among Architects in not reading every single page. However they avoid it because demons only enjoy paperwork when they’re inflicting it on someone else, while he finds it makes for an interesting challenge to play it by ear. Even if he fails, he won’t really fail, because all the action both vertical and horizontal has been Written, so he will have fulfilled a role, which is a kind of integrity, if not an ideal outcome. Sometimes he’ll get Alfred to sift through the remains of the day and write up an outline of the acts with a reckoning of the major beats and throughlines that have progressed or resolved, which gives him a much better sense of how everyone’s getting on than a blow-by-blow account ever could.
But he has to laugh because for the most part they seem to believe in the given circumstances that they’ve been told apply to them. Oh, not that they belong in the Good Place, it’s no surprise that they all want to believe they’re good and worthy people. In the Player’s experience most people do, and the vast majority of fatal flaws can be boiled down to the deep desire to be moral, and the fear that they aren’t, and the conflict. No, the part he can’t believe that they believe is that morality can be determined by a mere tallying of points. It is the basis of all the maneuvering done by this organization and all its satellite offices, but… come on. Still, a gig is a gig, and a steady one even better, and you can’t get much steadier than eternity. So what if no one in charge actually believes it? It’s still a terrific form of torture!
The Player can of course fill any role admirably, but he’s never quite gotten used to that of a director. As a lead actor he performed many of the same tasks, of pulling the group together and shaping their collective work into something worth seeing. But the assumption was that when the curtain was pulled aside and all eyes turned to the stage, he would be there. He didn’t even need to be a main character, so long as should a spectator get caught up in the action, he would be in a position to catch them. He neither knows nor cares if that’s the sort of thing people wanted or want, because it’s what they do, and he does it exceedingly well.
So no, he’s not a director, and he’s not a writer either, but he understands well enough the things that are written, and usually that’s all he needs to understand. Other times he must admit he could use a little help. Normally he can’t stand Reynaldo (yes of course he knows Bad Alfred’s name) and other self-styled dramaturges, because nothing needs to be that complicated, least of all abstract and brief chronicles of the times. But people are the opposite of actors, much messier and harder to predict than the characters who sum them up. In the future he might not be opposed to someone who smooths the curves in the road ahead.
This was originally posted at https://ernest.dreamwidth.org/10064.html. There are
comments there.
Fandom: Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Verse: The Good Place
Characters: The Player, Alfred
Summary: The Player can of course fill any role admirably, but he’s never quite gotten used to that of a director.
Word Count: 572
The Player gets a transcript of everything that happens in his neighborhood, or as he prefers to think of it, a script of all the scenes that take place on what is, after all, only the latest of his many many stages. He is not unique among Architects in not reading every single page. However they avoid it because demons only enjoy paperwork when they’re inflicting it on someone else, while he finds it makes for an interesting challenge to play it by ear. Even if he fails, he won’t really fail, because all the action both vertical and horizontal has been Written, so he will have fulfilled a role, which is a kind of integrity, if not an ideal outcome. Sometimes he’ll get Alfred to sift through the remains of the day and write up an outline of the acts with a reckoning of the major beats and throughlines that have progressed or resolved, which gives him a much better sense of how everyone’s getting on than a blow-by-blow account ever could.
But he has to laugh because for the most part they seem to believe in the given circumstances that they’ve been told apply to them. Oh, not that they belong in the Good Place, it’s no surprise that they all want to believe they’re good and worthy people. In the Player’s experience most people do, and the vast majority of fatal flaws can be boiled down to the deep desire to be moral, and the fear that they aren’t, and the conflict. No, the part he can’t believe that they believe is that morality can be determined by a mere tallying of points. It is the basis of all the maneuvering done by this organization and all its satellite offices, but… come on. Still, a gig is a gig, and a steady one even better, and you can’t get much steadier than eternity. So what if no one in charge actually believes it? It’s still a terrific form of torture!
The Player can of course fill any role admirably, but he’s never quite gotten used to that of a director. As a lead actor he performed many of the same tasks, of pulling the group together and shaping their collective work into something worth seeing. But the assumption was that when the curtain was pulled aside and all eyes turned to the stage, he would be there. He didn’t even need to be a main character, so long as should a spectator get caught up in the action, he would be in a position to catch them. He neither knows nor cares if that’s the sort of thing people wanted or want, because it’s what they do, and he does it exceedingly well.
So no, he’s not a director, and he’s not a writer either, but he understands well enough the things that are written, and usually that’s all he needs to understand. Other times he must admit he could use a little help. Normally he can’t stand Reynaldo (yes of course he knows Bad Alfred’s name) and other self-styled dramaturges, because nothing needs to be that complicated, least of all abstract and brief chronicles of the times. But people are the opposite of actors, much messier and harder to predict than the characters who sum them up. In the future he might not be opposed to someone who smooths the curves in the road ahead.
This was originally posted at https://ernest.dreamwidth.org/10064.html. There are
comments there.