Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "avatar-the-last-airbender"
Animal companions, conservation of detail, and emptiness
A couple times now I've tried to give Peal an animal companion to follow him around and help him out a bit, and every time I come to better realize how such things simply don't seem to work in books, or if they do, then I have no idea how.
In a more visual medium such as comics or cartoons, animal companions always have something to do: it's a simple thing to get them into a second or two of funny hijinks in between the actual plot stuff, or being petted by someone, or even just lounging in the background to remind us that they exist.
But it's all so much harder to write about. You need to be more conservative with the written word: everything you put on paper has to have more of a purpose, as there's really no foreground or background - there's just ground, just the same words for everyone. What would be a funny bit of shenanigans in the back, or a half-second cut, now stands equal to the important stuff.
If there wasn't mail to be delivered or other plot stuff she had to be present for, Hedwig was never at the scene at all. She'd have had nothing to do - she couldn't even make a witty remark that a comic relief character might have used to remain relevant. In the end, we'd have forgotten she even existed at all. Or at the opposite end, her hooting about and pecking at people would have gotten in the way of everything, in-universe and out of it.
The thing that arose this point was me writing a short story involving, among other things, a wolf approaching Peal to beg for scraps, then following him around for a while. In a cartoon it would've been a no-brainer - give him someone to hang out with, so that he wouldn't need to be all alone in the wilds; some more variety to scenes, a bit of levity, and cuteness value; occasionally even being helpful to him. The vast majority of cartoon heroes had their animal buddies, but in literature it's so much rarer, rarer still to be done in a remotely meaningful way.
Shame.
In a more visual medium such as comics or cartoons, animal companions always have something to do: it's a simple thing to get them into a second or two of funny hijinks in between the actual plot stuff, or being petted by someone, or even just lounging in the background to remind us that they exist.
But it's all so much harder to write about. You need to be more conservative with the written word: everything you put on paper has to have more of a purpose, as there's really no foreground or background - there's just ground, just the same words for everyone. What would be a funny bit of shenanigans in the back, or a half-second cut, now stands equal to the important stuff.
If there wasn't mail to be delivered or other plot stuff she had to be present for, Hedwig was never at the scene at all. She'd have had nothing to do - she couldn't even make a witty remark that a comic relief character might have used to remain relevant. In the end, we'd have forgotten she even existed at all. Or at the opposite end, her hooting about and pecking at people would have gotten in the way of everything, in-universe and out of it.
The thing that arose this point was me writing a short story involving, among other things, a wolf approaching Peal to beg for scraps, then following him around for a while. In a cartoon it would've been a no-brainer - give him someone to hang out with, so that he wouldn't need to be all alone in the wilds; some more variety to scenes, a bit of levity, and cuteness value; occasionally even being helpful to him. The vast majority of cartoon heroes had their animal buddies, but in literature it's so much rarer, rarer still to be done in a remotely meaningful way.
Shame.
Pankarp
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