In the previous post I talked about reading the second trilogy of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. I'm not going to recap the whole thing again, so if you didn't already, read the previous post.
In the first three books, our narrator Jacob falls in love with Emma, a girl with fire powers like the Human Torch or Firestar or whoever. Emma has lived in a time loop for about 70 years so she's remained 16 years old that whole time. Back in the 1940s she was in love with Jacob's grandpa, but he left their loop to live a normal life. Weird, huh? Or you might even say...peculiar.
So through the first half of the fourth book we've established Jacob and Emma as a couple. But, then when they go to a loop that's in 1965, Emma calls Jacob's grandpa. When Jacob finds out, he decides Emma isn't over his grandpa and drops her like a hot potato. And that's pretty much it for Emma.
Enter Noor, an Indian (from Bombay) girl who can swallow light and puke it up, which is really important. Jacob helps save her from some bad guys and so then they fall in love, basically starting the whole thing over again.
Now the problem here is that as the author you can make your characters dance to whatever tune you play. So you can have Jacob drop Emma and almost instantly fall madly in love with Noor. Buuuuuuuut (it's a big but) as the reader, it might take me a little more time to get used to that idea.
I mean, I've spent 3+ books with Jacob and Emma getting together and in the span of about 20 pages the author breaks them up and washes his hands of the whole thing. Then just summarily drops Emma in the discard pile, making her essentially a background character, or just another one in the gang.
It just doesn't work for me as the reader because I've invested so much time in this already. Over three books the author set this whole relationship up. I was wanting them to live Happily Ever After. Get married, have babies, and all that stuff. Then because she makes one phone call I'm supposed to instantly throw the whole thing out and pivot to some new relationship?
Noooooope. (It's a big nope.) It does not work for me. As I said in the previous post, it seemed so obvious what the author was trying to do. Basically the author hit the reset button because with 3 new books, what could you do with two 16-year-olds in a YA series? They can't fuck, so they can't have kids. They can't get married, though it is in Florida, so maybe they could. There was really nowhere for them to go, so just reset and start over. It's so obvious and lame.
And just sidelining Emma was a dick move too. The author could at least have given her someone else. Let her be with Jacob's grandpa in the past or something. Or some alternate universe version of him or some damned thing. Or give her a new guy too. Or hook her up with one of the others in the gang. Or just fucking kill her off. That would have been better than that weak-ass excuse to break them up and then relegating her to a secondary character for the last two books.
Anyway, the point is, the author controls what happens in the story, but the author does not control whether or not the reader will buy it or not. You just have to hope they'll go along with whatever shit you pull. For the most part, readers will because a lot of readers for books like these are not very sophisticated thinkers. The Goodreads scores for all 3 books are over 4.00 so I think that bears that point out. So I guess most readers were cool with Jacob just dropping Emma and basically tossing her aside like an empty beer can for the mortal sin of wanting to say goodbye to a man who had died whom she loved once. I mean, that's a pretty terrible thing, right? If you happened to go back into the past, you'd never do something like that, would you?
Or if you got a bunch of Infinity Stones you'd never go back in time to marry your old sweetheart, right, Steve Rogers?
Anyway, like I said, the author can dangle some new relationship in front of us to try to make us forget the old one, but that doesn't mean I will right away. Just because you as the author want something to happen doesn't mean it will happen that way for your audience. We're all different people and think and feel differently, right?
Just something to keep in mind.
3 comments:
It sounds like these characters have the Spiderman problem. Spiderman can't become enmeshed in Mary Jane or any other character for long, because the thing that the young adults who like Spiderman love about the character is the angst and the attraction between the characters. The uncertainty of will they? or won't they? That "spark" is what they want. They don't want a fulfilling relationship, and the people who are making money on the story know that. So they have to split people apart shortly after getting together. You should watch "Heartstopper" on Netflix. The whole first season is the angst I'm talking about. I won't be surprised now that the two leads are in a relationship if the second season introduces conflict that splits the two characters apart. I think it is interesting that Ransom Rigg's wife is Tahereh Mafi. I used to read her blog about ten years ago, and then she got a book deal. I saw she married Ransom Riggs shortly after that. Now, I guess they are a super YA writing duo who write on desks opposite each other while spending time together. I think the next step will be to create a YA factory similar to what James Patterson does, making millions by having other writers write the stories and then putting their names on the jackets.
What author builds up a relationship over 3 books and just drops it? Plus a character you liked was reduced to a minor character. I'd have a problem with that too.
I read they were going to do some kind of series that would involve NFTs but some people complained and they dropped it.
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