thoughtfulThe majority of urban fantasy is written in the first person. I fight the monster, I open the door to the creepy crypt at the bottom of the hill, I try not to summon a snake god to Thanksgiving dinner. This creates a feeling of absolute immediacy, while also creating a feeling of safety, since most first person narrators are reasonably guaranteed to survive their stories. (I consider, say, Rose Marshall an exception, since she's already dead. Maybe this explains why she gets shot so much.) It also limits the perspective of the books. When you're reading a Toby book, the only information you'll get is what Toby has to give, and that information will always be filtered through her particularly Toby-esque way of seeing the world.
Third person gives you more leeway on the will she/won't she question where surviving is concerned, and also creates the option to provide the reader with additional information. Sure, the protagonist is bound by their own perceptions, but the author gets to play with omniscience. This is both good and bad, and the varying degrees of third person omniscience is a topic for another day. Suffice to say that sometimes this distancing serves the story very, very well.
I have just finished reading two third person urban fantasies, neither of which will be named here, because I'm looking critically at structure, not trying to compare-and-contrast their plots or the quality of their writing. In the first, the author took advantage of the third person structure and hopped from place to place, now following the villain, now following a secondary character, now returning to the primary protagonist. The omniscience was kept to a minimum, since otherwise, the plot would have turned boring for the reader; this is obviously pretty tricky, but the writer handled it well. I don't think this book could have been written in first person, and the tense never bothered me. It was a third person book because it needed to be.
The second third person urban fantasy stuck to an extremely limited perspective, following the protagonist at the exclusion of all else. At no point, did we get information that she didn't have, which made waiting for her to catch up occasionally a lot more frustrating than I expected it to be. I'm used to being forgiving when my UF/PR protagonists are a little slow, because I'm used to being so deep in their heads that I can see why they're not making the intuitive jumps that I can make. I know how they think. In the absence of that knowledge, I kept waiting for the heroine to be smarter than I was, and I kept being disappointed. It honestly left me wondering why the author didn't stick with the first person perspective that's standard in the genre. It would have been the same story; it would even have been a stronger story, because the immersion in the heroine would have made it much more urgent.
Choosing a story's point of view can be difficult, but I find that usually, I can tell which they need to be by looking at whether the story would even be possible in a tighter perspective. And I try to keep things as tight as possible, for the immediacy. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary.
So how do you feel about perspective? Does first person keep it tight and immersive, or is it off-putting and overly familiar? Does third person make things mysterious and flexible, or is it distancing and remote? Or does it even matter if the story's good?
Thoughts?
(*If the movie starts with people in the water, it's either an evil sharks movie, an evil alligator movie, or a sea monster movie. If you see a shark within the first five minutes, it's not an evil sharks movie. Etc.)
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June 21 2011, 15:45:03 UTC 6 years ago
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June 21 2011, 15:59:46 UTC 6 years ago
June 27 2011, 22:10:36 UTC 6 years ago
July 6 2011, 17:01:45 UTC 6 years ago
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June 21 2011, 20:51:18 UTC 6 years ago
I love Katniss Everdeen like burning, and I suspect I'm not alone in this.
I'm also one of the few people that not only thinks Isabella Swan has a personality, but likes her.
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June 21 2011, 21:14:47 UTC 6 years ago
And I have a heroine you will absolutely not be able to stand in one of the things I'm writing, but that is okay; there are others who will like her just fine, and I'll be glad Katniss paved the way (unless I get told that there can only be one yada yada, because there's definitely more than one male protag of this nature...) :)
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June 21 2011, 21:41:05 UTC 6 years ago
I appreciate characters who don't open up until they've decided that they like, trust and/or respect the people around them, because I'm like that. In a dystopia, like the Hunger Games series, I'd have a hard time believing in a main character who was very warm and open from jump, because you'd either have to be very privileged, very stupid, or very manipulative (and Peeta IS manipulative) to be able to maintain that kind of personality in a world like that.
I suspect Peeta as a POV character would be someone I'd have a very difficult time identifying with. I didn't really start to think he was a very interesting character until I saw how SMART and sly he was, though I thought he was kind and would probably be good to have as a friend.
Katniss has a lot of fire inside her, and under the coldness there's plenty of heat, but it's something she reserves for situations that require it and people who've earned it, either in the bad way or the good way, and I have a lot of respect for that.
I lose interest in POV characters not when they seem like people I wouldn't want to eat dinner with, but when they don't make any sense to me. If they aren't internally consistent or their personalities change a lot, I'm done. I had to stop watching Heroes after two seasons and I don't care for comic books for this reason.
I also cannot tolerate POV characters who are excessively stupid or gullible because if I'm sitting there screaming at them not to catch the Idiot Ball and they keep doing so, I get frustrated. I get particularly irritated with characters like Ned Stark when the author makes it clear that we're supposed to admire the character for being honourable or good or warm when what they're really being is stupid and stubborn, and that stupidity has terrible consequences for others they ought to be trying to protect. Fortunately there're other characters in those books :)