Why Isn’t Anyone On Team Bella, Part II: Of Sequels and Hockey

(Thanks to all who’ve expressed their sympathies! Your kind wishes mean a lot to me.)

A while back, I wrote this blog entry about a certain love-triangle pattern often encountered in fiction, and I talked a bit about why I’m frustrated by the place it leaves for the women ostensibly at the centre of the story.

Let me make it perfectly clear that you have only Andrew Lloyd Webber to thank for this follow-up: he’s the one who decided to write a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. All I did was decide to see it, which obviously absolves me entirely of the blame.

But even if you don’t quite buy my logic of responsibility there, he’s also the one who structured that new musical in a second form of that troubling love triangle. On the outside, this second version seems better than the first. They’re exactly the same in some respects – two men love a super-awesome girl. One is a misunderstood angsty genius guy who is actually the girl’s True Love. The other is a straightforward, confident dull guy.

In the original, the angsty genius is the murderous, frigid one and the straightforward guy is a warm, kind dude. In version two, the angsty genius is secretly a super-nice fella who wants everything that’s best for the girl, while the straightforward guy is an arrogant douche who thinks only of his own gratification.

Recognize this story? You sure do if you’ve seen Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, if you’ve watched a win-her-back movie like Run Fat Boy Run, if you’ve read a YA book where the main character could be played by Michael Cera, or if you bought a ticket for Love Never Dies. (That last would be the real title of Phantom Mark II. I wish I was making that up.)

So, I know what you’re thinking: how did we get here from the original Music of the Night?

Well, if you followed that link above to my previous entry, you may have noticed a footnote in which I pointed out that fandom likes the idea of the Good-For-Her Boring Guy* becoming an abusive monster as soon as he gets with the girl. This is the premise of a bunch of fanfiction in various fandoms, with the main attraction being that it allows the female main character to hook up with the Super Sexy Bad Boy Genius with whom she shares True Love, and it does this without making the audience want to stage an intervention. If Raoul is a bigger tool than the Phantom, then Christine is totally justified in dumping him to be with her Angel of Music. She’s trading up, right?

If you’re the people responsible for Love Never Dies (or the book which shares its plot… yes, I wish I was also making that up), the answer is yes. Because they have taken the premise shared by hundreds of fanfic authors and made it their own. To say more would spoil; all I can assert here is that if you have any affection for the original musical, please avoid this sequel. I tell you this for your own mental health: you’d think at the very least it’d be so bad it’s good, but no, it’s just so bad it’s bad.

Anyway, despite some weird moments, like one where he grabs Christine’s throat for no apparent reason, the Phantom is clearly the nice guy in this re-imagined love triangle; yeah, he makes a couple threats, but they’re surprisingly awkward and apologetic even as he’s making them, and he’s not the one who’s portrayed as an alcoholic gambler who hates his own kid. He confronts his worst enemy in a seedy bar, alone, and all he does is mock a bit and make a bet with him. A lot of fuss is made about how he’s the only one who can give Christine what she needs, music (that’s right, music, get your mind out of the gutter!). At the climax, he tries to talk someone out of suicide. Suffice it to say, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that the Phantom and not Raoul was the one who, you know, spent most of part one killing innocent people.

So now we have a story in which Christine, shackled to an emotionally distant whiny douche by marriage, should really be with the sexy, genius, supercool Phantom who not only is sexy, a genius, supercool, etc., but who also is reasonably NICE. Like, he’s no honorary Canadian yet, but if he keeps on this path, maybe he’ll be visiting our embassy soon. And that’s power to women, right? Having Christine’s big tragic romance be with a sweetheart instead of a monster. Right? Who’s with me?

I’m not going to analyze in detail all the problems with what the Internet refers to as Nice Guys. You can find an excellent essay at the online ‘zine Ferretbrain or, if you prefer your info in nerdy pictorial form, you can check that out here. The idea in a nutshell: in life and in fiction, many of those who consider themselves to be “nice guys” are as guilty of treating women as not-quite-people as the “jerks” with whom they contrast themselves, just in less obvious ways.

Although, yeah, I guess if the choices are “woman’s true love is depraved bad-boy genius” and “woman’s true love is sweetie bad-boy genius,” then, sure, the latter’s better, but surprise! We’re still not talking about this in terms where the woman is more than just a prop in a story about two men. (Love Never Dies is particularly epic fail in this respect, but more on that next week in the – dun dun dun – review!) Instead of telling the story of the super-cool genius whose faults drove away the woman he loves, we’re telling the story of the super-cool genius who has to rescue the woman he loves from her own bad judgment. Yerg.

Allow me both to suggest an alternative and to admit to a lie. The lie is this: I claimed at the beginning that this entry was inspired by Love Never Dies, but really, it formed in my brain a week or two before, when I watched Score: A Hockey Musical on the plane on the way to London.

Score is the story of Farley Gordon, a sheltered and homeschooled Torontonian raised by liberal hippie parents. Farley’s a superstar up-and-coming hockey player who has one problem: in the over-violent sport that is our national game**, he refuses to fight.

Farley is definitely a nice guy: he’s a pacifist so open-hearted that he sincerely tells a reporter how he felt bad for beating the other team, because didn’t they all want to win, and wouldn’t everyone have more fun if they just didn’t keep score? Unlike some of the other “nice guys” in the stories mentioned above, he’s still able to stand up for what he believes in, albeit in a firm, calm, bad-ass-less way. But he has the typical nice-guy romantic problem: the girl he loves, Eve, seems to be in a relationship with her skeevy but sexy music partner, Marco.

But here’s where Farley, Eve, and Marco get around the stumbling block that trips up Erik, Christine, and Raoul (or Dr. Horrible, Penny, and Captain Hammer, or… etc.). Farley doesn’t think Eve should be with Marco, and he thinks the dude’s a slimeball who’s not good enough for her. He gets mad when he thinks the two of them hooked up. But it’s not because he has the idea that he somehow deserves Eve for being better for her than the other guy. No, Farley’s just upset that he’s lost the girl he likes—upset because he assumes that since Eve is with Marco, he must be what she wants and therefore better for her than he can be. Even in his distress, he automatically accepts that her choice in men is her own business.

Eve, on the other hand, is no soppy woman who unwittingly likes someone horrible. She recognizes Marco’s prickish behaviour – at one point, he forces a kiss on her – and tells him in no uncertain terms to back off or else. She has agency in this love triangle. Farley’s problem is never, ever that the woman he loves “doesn’t know what she wants.” Oh, she knows, all right, from the beginning of the damn musical. And she knows what she doesn’t want, and she takes that into her own hands so that the protagonist can’t waste all his time wondering why “women like jerks” but has to wonder “what can I do to make this woman like me.”

Which answers a question you might be wondering: of course it’s OK for a guy to be the main character in a romance. The trouble is when he’s the only actual character, and his love interest is a cipher who exists only for her effect on him.

So let’s have three cheers for Eve and for Farley Gordon, and maybe we can try to pretend Love Never Dies never existed.

Like we weren’t going to do that anyway.

*Like James Potter or Raoul – the one who’s competing with a Bad Boy Sexy Guy, such as Snape or the Phantom for the affections of a love interest like Lily Evans or Christine Daae. See previous entry.

** Sorry, right. Lacrosse. How many lacrosse matches have you seen, that’s all I’m saying.