December Meme: Jeeves, Bertie, and Rare Characters

[delphi]

(Suggestions Post)

dueltastic asked for some Wodehouse talk and some thoughts about rare pairs and rare characters, and I thought I'd kill both birds with one stone.

I'm a casual Wodehouse fan. I've read a handful of the Jeeves stories as well as having seen part of the television series, and I've read Psmith in the City. I've written two Jeeves crossover stories, and I regularly read in the fandom.

The Jeeves fandom does stand out, however, as one of the very few where my favourite characters are the protagonists and my favourite pairing is the most popular one (Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin, Mr. Orange/Mr. White, and Leon/Count D are a few others that spring to mind).

It will come as no surprise to anyone that I'm largely a fan of rare characters and rare pairings, and I think this is because the kinds of characters I like best are ones that are hard to feature as heroes in traditional narratives. I like mentors, geniuses, unpleasant people, amoral people, cheerfully oblivious people, painfully pragmatic people, and ultra-competent badasses - characters who have the ability to make short work of traditional narratives and as such require either particularly clever plots or scrupulous writing.

Not that it can't be done! Jeeves, Nero Wolfe, Enola Holmes, Spider Jerusalem, Moist von Lipwig - there are plenty of major characters who can be my favourites in their respective stories, but most often, the fictional people I like best are peppered into more biddable or friendlier or more realistic heroes' journeys.

Comments

[dueltastic]

I'm also something of a casual fan - I saw the series when it came out, so it got filed away with sort of a fond footnote in my head, and I've recently started picking up the books after stumbling across a lot of mentions. It never occurred to me until you wrote a crossover for it that Jeeves fanfiction existed. (Except in the sense that somewhere there's fanfic of everything if you look hard enough. But fanfiction in actual rather than theoretical sense never occurred to me.) I think rare fandoms appeal to me in a strange way.

I'm a little fascinated by your thoughts on non-traditional protagonists and non-traditional narratives that will support them as heroes, and I'm pleased they've tumbled out of these questions. I'm not sure I've put the thought into dissecting narrative extensively enough to immediately see how those character types impact the narrative, but I'm interested. My feelings on the hero's journey are that it's an interesting analysis tool, but then one has this problem of having a hammer and suddenly seeing a lot of literary nails, and I don't yet have a theory of how to move these character types into more prominent roles.

[delphi]

I might have been using the term hero's journey a little too loosely - although maybe not, given that I think that the kinds of protagonists I like may be more prevalent in non-speculative fic.

In the cases where my favourite characters are allowed starring or strong secondary roles, there are usually circumstances put in place to keep them from ruining the narrative despite being the kinds of people who would, in real life, ruin narrative by being too smart or too lazy or too contrary. Jeeves is a servant, Nero Wolfe is an agoraphobe with a more traditionally heroic legman, Enola Holmes is an underage girl in 19th century England, Spider Jerusalem cannot let things lie, and Moist von Lipwig has his circumstances controlled by an even smarter and more powerful supporting character.