Urban fantasy & character bloat

[thanate]

Through a chain of recommendation coincidences that aren't particularly important to my point, I just topped up on the library's collection of Ilona Andrews's Kate Daniels series, one of which was a novella in Hexed, which is a sampler collection of novellas out of four different urban fantasy universes. And having finished the Ilona Andrews story, I tried reading the others, and didn't get more than a few chapters in to any of them. The last one was all written in present tense narration, and the other two were variants on just too much series backstory/worldbuilding crammed into a quarter of a paperback. (The Ilona Andrews story had some of that too, but a) it wasn't as much, possibly by virtue of being light on minor characters with lots of series backstory, and b) I could skim all that, since I've already read the series.)

swan_tower had a post a while back about failure modes of many-book epic fantasy which included a bit on character bloat: in that context, it's mostly the two-fold problem of slotting in hordes of minor characters for POV bit parts, and then getting attached to some of them enough that you then need to expand to follow up on what happens to them, diverting the narrative from where it was otherwise supposed to be going.

The intersection between these things has got me contemplating character bloat as a function of the urban fantasy-style series.* What I see is this: you begin with your loner narrator. S/he has a few ongoing relationships and some worldbuilding knowledge, all of which get summed up as they become relevant, which is the normal course of things. But by several books into the series, the important characters have accumulated a great deal of complicated back-story which gets info-dumped in far too little space, even when their changing status isn't in any way relevant to the story being told. And then various minor characters get a line or two of back-story intro to remind the continuing reader of their previous adventures or alert the new reader that there were such.

There's some justification for continuing reader cues and a little orientation for someone starting in the middle. And there's a certain amount of realism to the idea that as you spend time in a certain context you accumulate history with the other people associated with that context, be it social circle or work contacts or just geographic closeness. But there's the proverbial fine line between (say) explaining that you're bringing your competent young werewolf employee along vs recounting the backstory of his previous relationships with you and how he used to be gorgeous and why he isn't anymore when none of these things are in any way related to the story you're currently trying to tell. Multiply that by seven or eight characters, plus a few places or organizations and your worldbuilding recap, and that's a sizeable chunk of not-story taking up space. Worse yet, an impatient reader will find it either redundant or extraneous, depending on whether they're familiar with the information already.

I'm also wondering about this in audio-visual media (and I'm going even more out of my depth here, as I've really never watched TV and rarely do movies either.) No unifying thoughts, but two points:

a) Does the character re-intro info dump happen in long-running TV series? Or are we assumed to get it from context & remember based on visual cues. The visual aspect does remove a little of the burden of name-recognition from the viewer; in a world where you've build up a lot of minor characters there's always the difficulty of ensuring the reader remembers which one you're talking about.

b) There's a franchise version of character bloat-- working cameos of episode 4-6 characters into the earlier Star Wars movies, for instance-- that seems like sort of a mid-way point between this and the epic fantasy version. Still extraneous, but by virtue of being a movie it doesn't take up as much room as the roaming POV problems.

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*Disclaimer: this is not my genre. I've read half a book of the boy-type Dresden files, Laurel K Hamilton's Anita Blake up to the book about Edward's past (after which I gave up in disgust b/c the woman couldn't make up her mind what she wanted from life; also that was over a decade ago), the first of Seanan McGuire's Toby Daye books (which didn't irritate me, but I haven't gotten back to them, either) and the Kate Daniels books up to Gunmetal Magic. Oh, and most of Raymond Chandler, which is a bit of a godfather to Dresden at least, and which I seem to remember doing better by this particular complaint. I've also read a bunch of things other people had to say about UF, but if I'm wildly overgeneralizing, do please say.

Comments

[jazzfish]

a) Does the character re-intro info dump happen in long-running TV series? Or are we assumed to get it from context & remember based on visual cues.

Yes and no. When it does it's often the province of the opening credits. Famously, for the third/fourth seasons of Due South the business-types wanted every episode to open with Fraser saying "I first came to Chicago on the trail of my father's killers, and for reasons that don't bear exploring at this juncture have chosen to remain as liaison to the Canadian consulate." The producers compromised by having someone say that line early in episode: often Fraser, but sometimes his partner Ray, and at least once it was an old Gypsy woman.

The other thing is that nearly all long-running TV series are episodic and static, precisely to avoid that problem. The three I've watched that weren't like that are Avatar, BSG, and The Wire. All three solved the problem with "Previously On" segments before each episode, encompassing a minute or so of footage from previous episodes that's going to become relevant. Often, at least in BSG and Avatar, that included a bit of "why do i care about this minor character again?" (The Wire is very much sui generis: it frequently doesn't bother introducing characters the first time you meet them, let alone reminding you of who they are.)

Someone who's watched other series (immediately coming to mind: Buffy/Angel, Lost, Babylon 5, Mad Men, The Sopranos) might be able to tell you how they handled it. I'd be interested to hear about that myself.

[thanate]

I hadn't thought of the opening credit montage thing, but that is a usually tasteful-in-context version of the infodump. And skippable by the viewer watching multiples in DVD format. Huh.

The one datapoint I can think of is having caught an episode of Buffy where an ex-boyfriend comes back married to someone else, and the re-intro is rolled into various characters' reactions to the surprise-wife. That worked fairly well, but having seen about three other episodes through the entire run of the show, I can't say how representative it is of anything.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The place I have seen a lot of character bloat in modern fantasy I otherwise like is in Charles de Lint. I like many of the character's he's got, but they do not ALL have to make a cameo in EVERY book, my land.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. I've pretty much only read de Lint short stories, but I remember hearing about this before. Though my impression was that he does more of the in passing cameos rather than full intro backstory for minor characters? Which is slightly less annoying.