MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 18

 

I’m going to say it one more time, for those who missed my snark on Facebook: This is Trevor’s Inigo Montoya moment.

Nobody who has seen or read The Princess Bride can forget the scene where Inigo, a fencing “wizard” who has trained all his life to kill the six-fingered man who murdered his swordsmith father, finally confronts his quarry and gets to say the words he has waited all his life to say: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” 

One of the things I most wanted to play with in Masks was the idea of revenge-driven heroes. A surprising number of heroes are motivated by either a desire for revenge or a desire to make sure that a past wrong is never repeated. That’s a great motivation—come on, it’s propelled The Punisher for nearly 40 years and Batman for more than 70. And there’s a reason—it really speaks to readers, and it makes the job easier for writers.

Let’s face it, we’ve all wanted revenge, and sometimes that revenge has been disproportionate to the offense. I hated the bullies who tormented me as a kid, and I wasn’t above meting out horrible fates to them in my fiction—usually accidentally, of course, since they hadn’t actually wronged my characters. There’s nothing that makes us quite as savagely happy as seeing the bad guy get his. And revenge is an easy plot for a writer of adventure stories; if the bad guy definitely did something terrible, you can cram in some really crackling action scenes, secure in the knowledge that no punishment you can devise is too severe for a murder/child molester/terrorist/etc. None of this namby-pamby business of reasonable doubt; if he murdered the hero’s girlfriend before his very eyes, the audience is totally fine with seeing that villain get blown into hamburger.

But by now, you might have figured out that I can’t leave things alone, especially when they’re easy things, and the superhero obsession with vengeance always interested me because superheroes, almost by definition, don’t rely on due process. When they’re right, they’re really, really right—but they can also be really, really wrong. Trevor gets a lot of the classic elements of superhero origin stories, including the quest for vengeance on behalf of a murdered mentor … but what if all the evidence pointed to the last person the readers would want to see hurt? And what if we couldn’t be sure whether Trevor was wrong about her, or we were? Remember, we’ve had flashbacks to Rae’s childhood friend who went missing, but we have only her word about how she came by the costume and what happened to the man who gave it to her. Trevor, meanwhile, came to Los Angeles hunting the man who had stolen Jude’s identity, and it’s been pretty clear all along that whoever is wearing that costume—the man Moon was tracking—is connected to Jude’s disappearance. Now Trevor, like Inigo, has finally come face-to-face with his quarry … and it’s the girl he loves. Whoops.

This, by the way, gives me the opportunity to invert another trope. In superhero comics, a girlfriend finding out the hero’s identity is very often a cue for her to get killed off or turned evil. Well, Rae’s not going down so easily, and if she’s evil, she’s been evil all along. So are we dealing with a tragic case of mistaken identity, or a stone-cold sociopath who’s been stringing our hero along while wearing the symbol of a man she murdered?

The answer is … I’m not going to tell you just yet. But don’t kill me, because next week’s chapter picks up about ten seconds after this one ends, and Rae and Trevor are about to have their first really big fight. And once again, there are surprises in store.

This week’s soundtrack is Mumford and Sons’ “Dust Bowl Dance,” with lyrics drawn from the John Steinbeck novel The Grapes of Wrath. It’s become a sort of personal soundtrack for me when I write vengeful characters whose quests for vengeance end in a very, very bad place. I think the end of the song might be how Trevor’s feeling about now …

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 12

This chapter goes all the way back to one of the stories that got me into graduate school. Seriously.

In 2006, I got an interesting offer from the scholarship foundation that had paid my tuition at USC. They would pay for me to get a master’s degree as well as a bachelor’s—if I could find a California university that would accept me into a master’s program within the next, oh, three months. There followed a completely insane period of midnight research, intensive soul-searching, and frantic test-taking. I registered on Monday for the Graduate Record Examination (like the SAT, but for grad school) and took the test that Friday. My official CD-ROM containing my official test-prep software didn’t arrive until after I’d taken the exam. (Luckily I’m one of those people who naturally test well—yes, we exist, and yes, I agree it’s unfair.) But the only part of the application process that genuinely worried me—not the tests, not the transcripts, not the thousand-and-one forms—was the writing sample. To get into a master’s program in writing, I had to submit professional-quality writing in my intended genre. Because I wanted to major in fiction writing, that meant short stories or a section of a novel.

I can bluff my way through a test. I can bluff my way through an awful lot of bureaucracy, and I can sweet-talk department secretaries until the cows come home. But you can’t con a writing sample like you can con a department, and I didn’t have time to write something especially for the application. I had to pull stories out of my files and polish them up in the hope that they would be judged worthy, and I knew the stories would receive more scrutiny than any other part of my application. Since Masks was the largest, richest, most complex thing I’d ever written, that meant picking the best Masks chapters.

One of those chapters happened to be about the Masked Rider—a short story told in terms of a stack of comic books read by a young boy. Stories from different eras of comics had wildly different takes on the Rider, and the few commonalities between the different mini-episodes explored his character in ways I found interesting. I don’t remember all the details I stuffed in there now, but I do recall that the Teddy Roosevelt sequence also included a cameo by Annie Oakley and a reference to the fact that the Masked Rider limps when he walks, which is why he so rarely gets off the horse. He tells Oakley that he’s had the limp all his life, but it got worse after the Battle of Gettysburg. Make of that what you will …

Oh, and the whole thing was inspired by this letter which I read reprinted in some random old book. The chance to combine T.R. with Buffalo Bill Cody and superheroes was just too good to pass up. And I was quite astonished when I actually got into the program ... especially when I met my fellow students and realized I was almost always going to be the only "genre fiction" writer in any class. It makes me wonder sometimes what the admissions committee saw in my ghost cowboy.

Then we come to Rae’s confrontation with Mike. I’ve heard from readers with two different interpretations of why Rae says these things to him. Some people seem to think that she’s conning him, crying crocodile tears to get him to back off and leave Trevor undiscovered. Certainly the fact that she starts crying so suddenly indicates to me that she’s faking it, at least a little. But I’m mostly in the other camp—I think she genuinely is upset about the way the alpha-track kids are privileged over the normal kids, and she draws on real feelings to scare Mike off here.

Part of that, I’m sure, comes from my own upbringing and the way it worked into Rae’s character. I spent a goodly portion of my childhood in one of the richest counties in the United States—but in one of the less affluent parts of that county. I went to private religious schools, where I was usually on the low end of the socioeconomic scale. My family wasn’t on food stamps or anything, but I was the kid who wore K-Mart clearance clothing instead of name brands, the one who never bought hot lunches because they were too expensive. I was the scruffy one, the one from the blue-collar hometown, and at least among girls, it didn’t matter that I was a probably-certifiable genius—I just never measured up to their standards.

It didn’t matter at first, but as I got older and met classmates who had access to pricey private tutors and extensive test-prep programs, I felt like I had to work twice as hard at my studies to overtake the kids who were far above me on the social ladder. I had to compete with people who, in my mind, got to cheat—so I competed extra hard. I was a straight-A student, the girl who won more academic honors than she could carry, and that was my ammunition in the class wars. “What I did over the summer” essays, for my classmates, were about vacations to far-off places; I would go to the public library, pick a random subject I didn’t know much about, and read every book in that section until I was satisfied. I was the classroom expert on everything from carousel-horse carving to Aztec human sacrifice. It helped that I genuinely enjoyed learning, but when my classmates complained that I blew the curve on tests, I apologized for spoiling their day—and then went and studied even harder for the next test, because unlike them, I couldn’t afford to get a B.

Now, Rae comes from a relatively wealthy family, what with her father being a well-known televangelist, so I applied my class anxiety to her dealings with superpowered heroes. I met enough kids growing up who thought their parents’ money made them my natural superiors that I enjoyed blacking bullies’ eyes; considering Rae’s history with bullies, it only made sense that she’d attack powers snobs with the same ferocity. And so she uses her one real advantage—her intellect—to keep up with the superhuman Joneses. I think she does pretty well.

And then there’s Rae’s missing friend. She’s based on a true story, as it happens, but I think she deserves a blog entry of her own. Maybe someday soon …

This week’s soundtrack is Johnny Cash’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Further On Up the Road”, one of the songs I use as the Masked Rider’s theme. (The other is, of all things, Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Pony Man.” I never said I was sane, guys!)

By the way, guys, time's running out to download "Talisman," the short story I wrote in 48 hours to raise money for some needy kids. I need to actually buy the stuff for them, so the sale will be closed and the story taken down on Sunday night. I have no plans to reprint "Talisman" in any future collections, so if you want to know what Trevor was doing in the middle of the Night Lords' War, or you want to meet his mentor face-to-face, or you just want a bonus Masks fix for this week, you have until the end of the weekend to pony up a whole two dollars for a story twice as long as a typical Masks chapter. All proceeds go directly to buy much-needed school supplies for the children of a needy local family ... who, by the way, don't know yet that I'm doing this, because the teacher who told me about them is going to surprise them with the goodies. :)