Hideki Exposition (->Teen)

[mzyra]

Somebody made the terrible mistake of giving me the opportunity to exposit at length about one of my characters :D  This'll teach them! (But we can still love them really ;) )

Comments

[esmeiolanthe]

Hee hee, I inspired a whole post all by myself! :D That makes a lot more sense. Thank you!

If Hideki is going to be important (I get the impression he's a major player), then it would be/would have been helpful to see some of this backstory/interaction in the main story. It wouldn't necessarily have to be major staging or writing-- if Zack mentioned how much he doted on Hideki, or that the kid was getting a little spoiled, or that he wasn't taking the birth of the kids too well, that would help. Or if Hideki was in the background of some of the school conversations, looking jealous, or trying and failing to interact with other kids, maybe? (On second thought, that would probably make the staging harder...)

Especially if you want us (okay, maybe just me) to have any sympathy at all for Hideki (or for anyone foolish enough to get involved with him), you'll need to humanize him /in the story/ -- not that he'd like that.

I don't mean to seem like I'm being nasty-critical (I'm not trying to) or like I don't like the story (I do, very much!) -- it just really bothered me that he seemed to come out of left field like that...

Still friends? :)

[mzyra]

Oh, he was always going to get at least a part of a mini interlude /or something/ because ^all that alone will not explain who he'll be as an adult. There's more to come but I don't want to spoil it.

The thing is that I'm already trying to focus on too many people at once really; got to try and characterise all seven >.< of the Ryman kids (and that's going to be a struggle when their personalities are mostly so similar), and then there are first cousins... Just remember what I did with Seth; he'd existed in the background but nobody really knew who he was or what he was doing until after he was caught. I may not always get these things right and there might be better ways to reveal people and develop their characters to the audience, but there's often too much to tell by just shoving it into a chapter. Zack has mentioned he's been helping to raise Hideki (or at least an alien child) in a previous chapter, but of course they don't think they're /spoiling/ him, or maybe they'd have stopped :P I just thought I'd leave explaining Hideki until he was of more interest to the main family, but he had to crop up in the story anyway...

I have all my Hideki scenes planned out. Some of them will show bits of this and might have made you feel a /little/ sympathy even without explanation, but don't worry, sympathy is not /really/ the main aim with this one - or, indeed, with any of my villains. Just plot and an understanding of why, because people aren't generally just born murderers or whatever :P And, thereby, an idea of how, if possible, they could ever come back from it. 'Cause as I said to somebody else (I think): very few people have /no/ redeeming features, and everyone had a childhood, so... Shades of grey really.

I think that's part of the thing though - that's the first the boys or any of the Rymans really know about him. To them he /is/ left field and that's why he gets such a bad reaction when he's a jerk all of a sudden. If they knew all this, the boys probably would have ignored him (or Elliot would have teased him back). And people like him and Rodney would get slightly derisive pity rather than serious hostility.

Oh yeah: I have to say, I was cripplingly miserable for practically all of yesterday, but then I got that post and was like "Hang on, does this count as an excuse to do a long expository post for one of my characters? And /a villain/ no less? YAY! :D" So I went to bed very happy in the end ^_^ No worries :P

[esmeiolanthe]

Seth was very well done, I thought. You played fair -- he was where he needed to be, when he needed to be there, and the motivation made sense. As a reader, I couldn't have guessed all of it in advance, but nothing was withheld that should have been put in (if that makes sense). And while Seth is a bad guy (and I can't say I approve of his taste in men :P), I quite like him as a character, and I don't have the strong negative reaction to him that I do to Kimmy or Rodney.

Your reasoning for keeping Hideki pretty much out of the picture up til now makes sense. I don't remember Zack commenting about him, but I do occasionally miss things when I read -- as far as I can tell, I speed-read naturally, and I estimate that I get about 98% of what's going on. Sometimes there's important stuff in that last 2%, though. :( Maybe the problem is that I know that Hideki is supposed be/will be important. But thank you for taking the time to respond thoughtfully to my comments, both times. :) *hugs*

PS: Have you ever read anything by Megan Whalen Turner? (Odd question, I know. Sorry.)

[mzyra]

Thank you :) And heheheheheeee. Bad taste in men indeed ^_^
I expect you would have disliked him a lot more had I actually followed him closer while he was, you know, killing people. But he doesn't have that motivation anymore so he's oddly personable otherwise.

I wouldn't expect anyone to remember Zack mentioning it, it just sounded like small talk really, but if people went back and read through all the old stuff they'd notice a lot of odd/significant things (Seth as an adorable child, and a different major spoiler that I'm not sure anyone's remembered to notice *hmm*). Everyone's fine without those bits though, unless you start to think too hard about it ;)
What can I say? I talk too much about stuff if given the chance, especially my characters (/VILLAINS :D) *hugs*

No, can't say I've heard of her. Why? *is interested*

[esmeiolanthe]

Megan Whalen Turner is probably the best writer I've ever encountered for playing 100% fair and still surprising the heck out of you. In particular, her book "The Queen of Attolia" comes to mind: the climactic plot point seems to come completely out of nowhere, but if you re-read the book, you can see that she started setting it up on roughly page 6, and that there were all these points along the way where you could interpret things two ways: the one that made the climax completely obvious and the one that you actually went with.

There are currently four books in that series, of which "The Queen of Attolia" is the second. (The first book is usually filed in the children's section; the others are usually filed with the teen books.) They are all well written, and that playing-fair-and-still-surprising-you is, to a greater or lesser extent, present in all of them. It takes her six years between books, meaning that she'll finish the last one in about 2022, but they are /well/ worth the wait! Highly recommended in general, and also in specific if you're interested in doing that kind of plotting.

"The Queen of Attolia" itself is a formula romance, really. You know: boy breaks into girl's house, girl cuts off boy's hand, boy's cousin starts a nasty three-way international war about it... all the usual stuff. :)