![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nym_wibblyThe first thing I hedged, fudged, dodged, and otherwise wimped out of dealing with when writing A Bed of Thorns was Gaston's background. And that was okay - he's a minor character in the story, and even more of one in Once Upon a Time's canon. The show used the visit to the underworld to retcon OUaT!Gaston somewhat nearer to Disney!Gaston and took the opportunity to make him a true villain, marked by evil (Her Handsome Hero). The character's first appearance in Skin Deep just made him boring, possibly with a low opinion of a woman's decision-making capability, and stupid enough to try and tackle the Dark One by making a windy speech on his doorstep. I couldn't make that fit with Disney!Gaston in my head at the time, and don't like the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast enough to draw on it for extra Gaston-ness, so I went with what Skin Deep gave us; clearly a soldier (sword and chain-mail, standing in a council of war), a nobleman (fancy uniform and insignia that might suggest high rank/office), has a mighty stick up his arse (everything he says and does is stiff, up to and including the bit where he's a flower), and leaps before he looks when his sense of honour is insulted (doorstep, speech, Dark One, dead now).
Belle revealed that theirs was to be an arranged marriage, so it wasn't a stretch to imagine that she agreed to marry him in return for his helping her people out in the war. One man not being an awful lot of help against an unstoppable foe, I imagined that he brought an army with him. That's sort of what the show went with, but sort of not; by that point both Belle and the audience knew Gaston to be a truly nasty piece of work, and she agreed to marry him with her back to the wall, knowing that she was accepting life with a 'monster'. That puts a different spin on her decision to go with Rumple instead. And there was some hazy talk about how marrying Gaston would make Belle a queen someday, implying either that he's a prince (and she's of suitable rank to marry one without anyone raising an eyebrow), or that he's planning to get his hands on a crown somehow. In ABoT, Belle agreed to marry Gaston for similar reasons - hand in marriage = help fighting the ogres, but without the guilt baggage, and without knowing much about him.
Not only can I not make A Bed of Thorns fit both canon Gaston appearances, I can barely make the two appearances fit with each other inside my brain. So I'm inclined to stick with what I took away from Skin Deep, and with the backstory I invented to tie his ancestry to Rumple's sometime feudal lord, the Duke of the Frontlands. That was just to avoid having to invent a separate character, to be honest, though it dovetails nicely with Rumple's jealousy of Gaston's engagement to Belle - it's totally Rumple to have more than one reason for feeling and behaving the way he does, and for none of his reasons to be particularly reasonable. He sees himself as Belle's rescuer, when he's feeling good about himself; he might be a beast and kinda green, but at least she was spared having to marry into that family, right?
What I never got into, and what I think even a generously critical reading of the WIP has to flag up, is the role of Gaston's parents. His father is a bit of a nonentity, and I have some ill-defined but decent reasons for that. Whenever Belle mentions the duke, it's to provide context for something/someone else. In his own right, he kind of doesn't matter. His wife, on the other hand, is actually driving certain sections of the plot - Gaston's later behaviour, once his father has disowned him, is the way it is because of his mother. She's shaped his attitude, his ambition, and his complete inability to notice that Prince James has a raging boner for him. Belle's main fear about marrying Gaston was having to go and live with this woman, who she found quite dreadful and disparaging. And in the process of relegating her role to pure exposition, I never even gave this background duchess a name.
Starting from scratch gives me some options, one of which is to actually introduce the duchess as a visible character from the get-go. Another is to write her out and use later-canon!Gaston's inbuilt evil and entitlement to drive the plot, and change James to match him. Make it an evil bromance instead of a chivalric one. I construct my stories so that they can't easily be pulled into isolated subplots. Or maybe more like a house of cards, hiding how little substance my plots actually have. Everything interlinks, in any case, and has knock-on effects. Switching to the nasty canon Prince James would provide one very, very useful piece of logical fallout for later on in the story, while creating some logistical problems for me during Belle's visit to her dad. But I'm rather attached to my decent-bloke version of James. He's the result of a coin toss; David's opposite, or David's twin in everything? Twin won, the show went t'other way and made him a bad guy. But the show also established that even bad guys can find twue wuv. Unfortunately, it also demonstrated that James was a raging heterosexual. But I never let a detail like mainstream TV canon heterosexuality stand in the way of a good slash.
ABoT!Gaston wound up rather hapless, and perhaps a needlessly sympathetic character. He serves an important purpose in showing Belle at her worst - try as she might to be fair minded, she just can't stand him or respect what he stands for. Other than that, he's a practical antagonist, and a chess piece I can move about the board more easily than others.
no subject
Date: 19 Dec 2018 20:58 (UTC)I wonder how moving characters along the axis of good-evil will affect how we as readers approach the big question (who's after Rumplebumble).
I vote for ignoring James' heterosexuality, raging or otherwise. Not that it's a voting matter, but still.
-intoni
no subject
Date: 19 Dec 2018 21:18 (UTC)https://www.critiquecircle.com/wordmeterbuilder.asp
Don't worry, ignoring characters' heterosexuality is (historically speaking, back before A Bed of Thorns when there were dinosaurs and cavepersons) what I do. If necessary, James and Gaston can be The Evil Gay.
no subject
Date: 20 Dec 2018 06:55 (UTC)This is where parallel posting really comes into its own: we can have All The Gays. Have our sympathetic gays and evil them too. Sliding Gays. 50 First Gays and other films I haven't seen. (No, I didn't get much sleep last night, why do you ask?)
-i