Spanner R4 Update: Where Did I Get Some Of These Characters?

While editing Chapter 8 for the Final Revision, I got to thinking about the origin of some of my characters. Some of them are riffs on characters of other stories. Some of these riffs date all the way back to 1992, when I created the original group around Shira.

Diana Shockley: I created her as early as 1991 because I hated Appleseed's Deunan Knute when she killed Chiffon in the first graphic novel. The concept: what if Deunan were a villain?

Henry Becket: Her father was the second villain I created. He's basically the original Battlestar Galactica's villain Baltar without the smirk and with a fedora and thick glasses and the invincible delusion that he's the last actual hero in existence. When borrowing public-domain superheroes, I made him the Bronze Age version of the American Crusader from the Nedor comics.

Richard Becket: His younger-looking older brother is basically the Corporate version of Eblis, the Satan figure from the same show. He also thinks he's the good guy; since he's the story's supreme elitist, that means the masses are by definition the villain. His superhero identity is the Bronze Age Scarab — and for him I borrowed the idea of superhero lineages from The Phantom. The original Scarab was a Frenchman in Napoleonic Egypt, and the lineage has occult origins. Dick Becket is the seventh Scarab (the Golden and Silver Age originals being the fifth and sixth), and he has to fight his own successors, the eighth and ninth Scarabs. The Scarab lineage is central to the mystery of Spanner.

Drusilla Becket is the answer to the question, what if Erica Kane from the soap opera All My Children were a guru like, say, J.Z. Knight (of Ramtha fame) or Elizabeth Clare Prophet? For one thing, like them and other gurus, she made an enemy of Shira's grandmother Eleanor Richter, the children's author and witch.

Will Becket: If Diana is Deunan Knute as a villain, her younger brother is Mobile Suit Gundam's Char Aznable as an extremely ambiguous antihero. There will be hints of another antihero inspired by Char, Lelouch Lamperouge of Code Geass, especially come Book 5.

Colonel Tom Becket: I didn't get a good grip on the Dictel Corporation chairman until I saw James Cameron's Avatar. Then I realized he's basically the villain, Colonel Quaritch, as the chairman of Blackwater.

I just noticed that these are all Beckets. One of the characteristics of the Cromwell Becket clan is their stubborn resistance to change. They are more archetype than character. They claim divine origin, descent from the Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian gods. More than the other dominant clans in the Conservative Revolutionary Party, they remind people of Unseely Fae with their inhuman morality and their lack of respect for human lives.

This in contrast to my more protean heroes, and especially heroines. Shira is a chameleon. Jennifer has a whole arsenal of personae she can summon at will. Surviving Leila or Melody, even when they're not at full power, may depend entirely on what mood they swing into. The only heroic character who is genuinely archetypal is Ariel, with the striking white stripe in her black hair and her Holy Grail obsession. She's the one who puts the heroines' doings into some mythical context and puts them on heroes' journeys. She traces her own ancestry (and therefore her niece Leila's) through the female line ("bar sinister" in heraldry) to Mélusine, Morgan le Fay, and ultimately to Mary Magdalene. And of course she's a mentor character like, say, Willa Richter-Thomas, Zac Finney, or (looking to Chapter 16 R4) Dr. Hiram Whistler. Shira herself has multiple origins.

I'm not actually cloning any characters. I'm too good a writer to let myself be that lazy. But some of my own characters were inspired by characters in other works. Of course, creating them is only the first step. After that, their job is to grow away from their origins so they can help the other characters take the story away from their author and run amok.

Inside Spanner: Memetic Drift and the Ayn Rand Problem

There's a lot of Objectivists among the Corporates in Spanner, or at least they like to think they are. Problem: the Corporates are essentially the same as the villains of Atlas Shrugged. Spanner's "church of Ayn Rand" is no more similar to Ayn Rand's or Nathaniel Branden's Objectivism than the Catholic Church is to Jesus' religion or early Jewish Christianity. However, there is one crucial similarity, which I consider the fatal weakness of Objectivism and especially its ethics:

Social denialism.

That's the denial that humans have a social nature. In the infamous words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher: "Society does not exist." In other words, humans are by nature solitary predators — or should be. That "should be" is the core of Rand's egoist ethics — and of Max Stirner's philosophy of extreme egoism. This works to the benefit of those at the top of the Corporate hierarchy, the High Corporates who bear the titles "MBA" and especially "Incorporated". It doesn't work too well for ordinary civilians, who possess the social nature Corporates do not.

Here's the mutation: what if Rand's corporatist villains were her most fanatical believers? This, in fact, is what's happened in real life: only the James Taggarts and Orren Boyles are left when the religious Objectivists have left for real cults and the irreligious ones have grown tired of the philosophy's many contradictions and increasingly archaic errors (it is, after all, a distilled version of the worldview of the Gilded Age that lasted from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression, roughly 1870-1930). Once the religionists and the realists have left, then, you have the corporatists. I've observed that these people, including the Koch and Romney clans, are predominantly billionaire heirs, some separated from their Enterpriser clan founders by five generations or more. They believe in the virtue of aristocracy for its own sake, because they see their inherited wealth as a gift from God or whatever. They believe that democracy is a vice because to lack money is by definition to lack virtue.

Egoism has become the religion of the Orren Boyle crowd. In Spanner as in Atlas Shrugged, these people have no genuine sense of self, so they must build their false self (the colloquial definition of "ego") to compensate. As it turns out, Rand herself has become their guide, their master in ego-building! And so they build their egos into giant monsters. They deify their egos and build temples to themselves. They demand that all "lesser" people bow down and worship their egos as gods Or Else. And of course they build theocratic dictatorships dedicated to the glory of their egos. Now you understand the Corporate caste in Spanner.

Now witness their leader, one Prince William Richard Astor Cromwell-Becket of Dictel, Incorporated, Chairman of the United Corporations. Richard Becket used to be a superhero codenamed Neron back in the Cold War. He's the answer to the question, what if an older version of Ozymandias from Watchmen took over the world? He prides himself on doing deals during sex. His grandmastership of the Illuminati, however, is the subject of another post, on the elitist premises of fundamentalist "Nicolaitan" Gnosticism. But how can this guy reconcile Objectivist materialism with unworldly Gnosticism? In the way he deifies his ego, of course! This contradiction first comes to a head in Chapter 15, in which the Becket brothers and their sister Drusilla get their egos smacked by it.

Any meme can mutate into something radically different from what it claims to be. But some weaknesses in its philosophy encourage some very undesirable mutations. Ayn Rand's social denialism is a particularly pertinent case in point. That's not just because it's central to the Corporate worldview in Spanner, but also because it's become the elite consensus in America today, and the non-elite are suffering the consequences...

A Simple Conflict to Complicate: Dragonites vs. Enders

I was reading a book on the Book of Revelation (also known as the Apocalypse of John), called A History of the End of the World, by Jonathan Kirsch. He shows that the last book of the Christian Bible is a rage-fuelled mind bomb so potent that it has all but dominated Western culture at least since Emperor Theodosius turned the Roman Empire into Christendom by decree in 391. But the most important point I'm drawing from it in this entry is the extreme dualism the Apocalypse embodies. From at least the middle of Black Science all the way to the end of Spanner, America is torn apart by an apocalyptic duel between two factions determined to put an end to American democracy and replace it with an apocalyptic theocracy: the Gnostic fundamentalist Dragonites, the ultra-elitist conspiracy of self-described supermen who want to reimpose the old totalitarian caste system based on a cult of blood; and the Christian fundamentalist Enders, that group of militant cults determined to put an end to the world by force. Actually, the Enders don't have to be Christian; the Islamists and the Jewish Messianists are also Enders. Both factions see the world in ultra-stark black-and-white, either-or, with-us-or-against-us terms. If you're not for one faction, they believe, you are by definition part of the other. This is a "Gordian knot" that desperately needs to be cut before it destroys the world. In my dialectical worldview, there must be a third force dedicated to disrupting both forces. This force I call the Spoiler. But the Spoiler's disruptions are useless unless (s)he fights alongside, and for the sake of, the common enemy of both Dragonites and Enders: the people.

The Family Feud, 4: Eleanor Richter vs. Drusilla Becket

Perhaps the most titanic battle in the entire Spanner cycle is the recurring magic war between Eleanor Richter, the Richter-Thomas matriarch, a shaman and witch, and Drusilla Becket, channeller and designated guru to the Becket clan and their cult. Their first matchup in the series is during the middle of Bad Company; their battle, occurring in what in Spanner I call "dream reality", is over the souls of Nelly's lost granddaughters and Dru's prodigal daughters, the main characters of the novel, Charlie and Desiree Richter-Thomas. No doubt the two bitter enemies, rival leaders in the New Age movement, at least in the Seattle area, will have several rematches and grudge matches before the cycle ends. Who knows — they might even deserve their own story dedicated entirely to their decades-long war, somewhat in the tradition of the Thing vs. the Hulk in superhero comics.

The Family Feud, 3: The Cromwell Beckets, and Why They're Such a Menace

Pitted repeatedly against the radical, and usually at least somewhat populist, Richter-Thomases are the aristocratic, elitist Cromwell Beckets Though they usually don't use the name "Cromwell" in their own names (one exception being John Cromwell Becket, oldest of Colonel Tom Becket's five sons), they trace their ancestry back directly to the 17th-century dictator of Britain, Oliver Cromwell, and use him to claim that they are the true royal family of America, whose right to absolute rule was usurped by none other than the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. So they are absolute monarchists as well. By claiming that they can solve all America's problems by destroying the Republic in order to save the American Empire and make it stronger, they have made themselves — and their family business, the private mercenary army known as Dictel Corporation — the darlings of the American imperial elite, and their court intellectuals known as the neoconservatives.

The Family Feud, 2: The Richter-Thomases, and Why They Fight

Two strange families dominate Spanner and the Dictel trilogy. One of the is the aristocratic and authoritarian Beckets, the subject of my next entry. The other is the Richter-Thomases, the source of almost all the heroes of my stories. What is strange about them, at least compared to most Americans, is the culture they've assembled out of various European and American cultural castoffs: some from the more culturally radical elements of Weimar Germany in the 1920s, others from the cultural revolution in the US, especially California, in the 1960s and '70s.

The Family Feud: Introduction

One of the major conflicts that structures both Spanner and the Dictel trilogy is a long-running family feud. The two families battling over the fate of America and the world in my novels and comics are the Richter-Thomases, a nominally middle-class family with what turns out to be quite the revolutionary tradition, and the Beckets, a very much aristocratic family that traces its ancestry back to Oliver Cromwell and thus claims to be the true American royal family, cheated of its destined tyranny by none other than the Founding Fathers themselves, with the help of some of the Richter-Thomases' more treacherous ancestors.

Bad Company: Midpoint

In his guest article for Script Frenzy, Blake Snyder, author of the book on screenwriting called Save the Cat! (and its new sequel, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies), writes about the crucial importance in a story of the midpoint. So many screenplays and produced movies, for example, have weak second acts because they neglect the midpoint. But Snyder insists that the midpoint is "the key to cracking any story." He insists two things must occur at midpoint:

1. The stakes must be raised.
2. The Ticking Clock must start counting down.

And so the midpoint is where one of the most important events in the story must occur. Snyder writes: "Cracking your midpoint is the key to figuring out not only where your story goes, but what it means."

Charlie & Desiree's Crazy Idyllic Plans

Charlie and Desiree have big plans for when they get back together after the Beckets stop picking on them. The scandals surrounding Dictel and the Becket clan in the wake of Colonel Tom Becket's disastrous coup d'état attempt give them enough of a breather to be able to at least attempt to make them a reality. These include:

1. Getting married, of course, despite the fact that they are sisters.
2. Adopting their little sister Shira as their own daughter. Their oldest sister, Ruby Shears, suggests they adopt their cousin Jennifer Blair as well, in order to keep her and Shira together so they can become as inseparable as Charlie and Desiree are.
3. A special "body positive" method of childrearing they long to try out.
4. And so on...

Nearly everybody who finds out about these plans call them crazy. You probably will too. But they're sticking to them.

The Key Emerges: Mad Love + Revolution

For most of this month, my work on Bad Company has been stalled, and that has interfered with all my other projects this month. I haven't even been writing any of Spanner. However, the key to unblocking Bad Company has finally emerged. It's the answer to the burning question: What could possibly be more controversial than a Blackwater-type corporation like Dictel trying to take over America to force it to intensify the colonial oil wars in the Middle East? How about this: the self-destructive pop singer who is the novel's heroine falls in love with her own sister! The trick, of course, is connecting these two. The connection is the Beckets, the clan of military aristocrats who own Dictel. The youngest of the Becket siblings, right-wing New Age guru and tyrannical stage mother Drusilla Becket (think JZ Knight or Elizabeth Clare Prophet crossed with Lynne Spears or Dina Lohan) is the mother of Charlie and Desiree Thomas. Colonel Tom Becket (the irony of his name is deliberate), the patriarch of the Becket clan and chairman of Dictel, considers his wayward nieces a liability to the clan; when Charlie and Desiree fall in love, he declares that they are blackening the family honor and orders their murder. And so the final confrontation between Charlie and the Colonel becomes inevitable. "Mad love" thus provokes political revolution. I'll explain...