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[design by Ally]
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How Characters Live
by Dark Mirage
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I’ve never made any secret that the only Mutant X character I cared about was Mason Eckhart. O, Emma had her moments, but never enough of them.
Mason was the only MX character who wasn't pulled of the shelf of standard tv characters, reconstituted in water, and sent off to be predictable, perfect, and PRETTY PRETTY PRETTY. He looked odd, had a mind and wasn’t afraid to use it.
In common with other tv characters who weren't off-the-rack, the off-the-rack people who do MX had no idea what to do with Mason, so first they pretended he didn't exist anymore, and then they killed him off. Never mind that Mason was a source of sly humor, counterbalancing Particleboard Adam and his Unquestioning Followers, and never mind that the character was a favorite with many fans.
There is an analogous case: Martin the Lizard in V. Briefly, Martin was an alien lizard, part of invasion force to abscond with Earth's oceans and stock the meat larders of the lizard folk with humans. Martin had the burden of a conscience, and knew destroying a sentient species was wrong. So Martin conspired, along with other Righteous Lizards, against his own species to spare humanity, not because he liked humans (frequently he seemed annoyed with them) but because of the immorality of genocide.
This is a deeply thoughtful notion, especially for TV. Ken Johnson steeped himself in the history of WW2 before writing V, and while I've never seen the claim anywhere, near as I can figure, Martin is based on Admiral Canaris, who ran the Abwehr (Army Intelligence) during WW2 and who MAY (or may not) have slipped data to the Allies to defeat Germany. After the failed attempt by von Stauffenberg to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, Canaris and thousands of others were executed, and the whole truth of him may never be known. [Even now, however, there remain classified secrets involving WW2 still a long way from becoming public knowledge.]
V the Miniseries begat V the Final Battle which begat V the Series.
In V the Series, Martin was killed off in the first episode. Sound familiar?
The fans were not happy about Martin's croaking. The series was embarrassingly bad.
In a desperate move, ***POOF*** Martin's twin brother Phillip was conjured up, but it was too absurd, too late. Phillip was not the gutsy Martin, who took chances to save a sentient species he did not appear to particularly even like--but defended on principle. Phillip had power, and could do much as he pleased.
Which brings to mind other questions:
Will Marcus Eckhart show up at the eleventh hour of S3?
Will it be revealed that it was REALLY Marcus Eckhart who was murdered by Brennan?
[Note: for those not steeped in the life history of Mason Eckhart, he's a twin; his sib drowned when they were 8 years old.]
Peter Mohan was not involved in S1, and ignored its conventions. Who knows where Mohanization will take S3? The only certainty is that it will be an ugly ride; fans are already sad or angry about what they've been told.
A lot of fans feel betrayed or cheated. They have every justification for feeling that way. The good news is that there is a workaround Mohanization.
The idea that characters are the property of a particular individual or corporation is a relatively new one in fiction. We're bound by the legalities of the age, but, consider:
Who owns King Arthur? Robin Hood? El Cid? Or any number of heroes from mythology?
No one and everyone. They belong to all of us, and we can tell what stories of them we wish. They'll live as long as we read their stories and tell more of them. My favorite incarnation of Arthur is that of Alex in “The Last Starfighter”. Robert Preston’s ‘Merlin’ (Centauri) is a delight. There is no Lancelot, but Lancelot was a late French addition, anyway.
So, within the legal bounds of fanfiction, the croaked and trashed characters of Mutant X belong to no one and everyone. The fans always seemed to know them better than the writers, who wrote them carelessly. The fans certainly loved them better; TPTB have never seemed to give a damn about anything other than showing as much skin as possible.
As long as we have fanfiction about these characters, read it, write it, these characters will live. How else does a character ever have life, anyway, unless someone somewhere thinks about them and loves them?
Simply because an uninspired wretch in Hollyweird decided MX would take this odd path, and that Rodentia would be the new star, doesn't make that The One and Only True Story, especially since it is unsatisfying and SILLY. Write your own stories. Write the MX saga the way YOU think it should have gone, with the characters developing in the way you imagine they would have.
S2 began so dreadfully I was convinced with 201 that MX had lost its show-soul after being Mohanized. Sadly, I was correct. I didn't wait to see Mason's 'return' at the end of S2. And I’m glad that I did. The ‘Mason’ who returned in ‘Lest He Become’ was NOT Mason Eckhart; the authentic Mason was arrogant, ironic, and frequently funny, but never, ever an Evil-Pill-popping stereotype.
I've written an entire alternate universe of Mason-focused stories, to date about 150,000 words (counting Nor All Your Tears in its present form, which is likely to expand quite a lot more). This isn't the only possibility, of course.
Write your own stories about your own favorite characters.
There are infinite possibilities, 99.9991% of them better than S2 or S3. Go write them. The characters will live as long as you write them and love them.
Dark Mirage
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The Sun Never Sets on PureMX.net
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