#hence my racking my brain to find the intersection of 'who got done dirty and who do I actually care enough about to fix' lol

[ratmonologue]

Top 5 characters whose stories you would rewrite, given the chance =)

ok I was not ignoring this I just needed like 3 days years to think about it because GREAT QUESTION, this will get long and progressively more unhinged, let's go-

5. Holland Vosijk ADSOM: Debating whether he belongs on this list, because on the one hand his part of the story would not be as impactful as it is if it wasn't completely soaked in tragic dramatic irony, but on the other hand, :,((. So I'll just change one tiny little bit at the end, to make it so he.... how to not-spoilers things.... so he Realizes certain consequences of certain actions. He deserves that much, at least. Also ice cream. I'll write the existence of ice cream into his world.

4. movie!Faramir LotR: I get what they were they were trying to do here, to give him a bit more of a character arc re juggling the pressures/responsibilities/legacies of Gondor and his father and Boromir and his own moral compass. And I actually don’t hate most of it! I don’t mind that he was tempted by the Ring at first - even the kindest, most level-headed person in such desperate circumstances is at least going to spare a glance at the supernaturally-alluring desperate measures, and imo that doesn’t make him less level-headed or kind. Therefore what DOES feel out of character, and what I’m changing, is how much of a dick he is for a bit there. No gratuitous Gollum abuse allowed.

3. The BBC Merlin knights: For the purposes of this list, they count as one. If it were up to me this would be less of a rewrite and more of a plain old write because I think they deserve a proper spinoff series full of more wacky Arthurian hijinks (Green Knight, anyone? questing beasts? the Holy Grail?) in which Merlin and Arthur and co. only have brief, humorous, and completely irrelevant cameos. The rest of those dunces deserved some character arcs too. If a full spinoff is out of the question, then at the very least keep Lancelot alive longer and give us some Ramifications re Guinevere and him knowing about Merlin’s magic and whatnot, give Gwaine his potential depth back and don’t just reduce him to comic relief, give Leon the respect he deserves for saying no to certain death so many times, etc etc yeah basically I just want more of all of these idiots. I love them.

2. Kai Leng Mass Effect: Yeah, ugh, I know, but hear me out: what if... he was an Actual Not-Pathetic Secondary Antagonist who DIDN'T completely suck shrimp balls?? Have him cameo in ME2 while you're "working for" Cerberus, establish him as a halfway competent sort of rival who's actually like, plotting things or whatever, so then when he comes back in ME3 it's like "oh shit, it's THAT bastard!" rather than "this is SO FUCKING STUPID [punts controller through screen, while crying over Thane (yes, I'm fixing that part too)]." I hate him, you hate him, we all hate him, for good reason, he sucks SO HARD, he can't even land a single hit on me until the goddamn cutscene has to give him the win on Thessia, but! It did not have to be this way! He could have been marginally competent with some writing tweaks, and fellow ME players everywhere could have rolled their eyes significantly fewer times! I want to hate him the way I'd hate an actual adversary, not the way I hate a piece of gum that refuses to un-stick from the bottom of my shoe!

And, in the #1 spot because all these years later, thinking about it STILL fills me with rage... Yassen Gregorovich's Alex Rider Prequel Book.

Context: The Alex Rider series, action/mystery novels about a 14-year-old James Bond expy, was not THE most formative childhood book series for me, but it was up there. In the top 5. Seeing as how I have been the exact same brand of predictable my entire life, 10yo me's favorite character was Yassen, the opposing-team assassin with maybe 20 pages of screentime over a 9-book series. It was obvious that he had... morals is too much of a stretch, but there was a sense of still waters running deep. He was played as a 'darker side of the same coin' sort of deal re Alex himself, and had some Complex History(TM) with Alex's father and uncle, both of whom were, like Alex, MI6 (double) agents, both dead prior to the series' start, one so by Yassen's hand. Yassen also dies young halfway through the series, of course, but his ghost hangs around.

Fast forward a decade or so, well after the series proper had ended. Find out Yassen's getting a prequel book, aptly titled Russian Roulette, tracing how he went from an orphaned nobody to one of the most yikes most competent secret agents in the world. Get HYPE, because he's a goldmine of potential for fleshing out both himself and Alex's past. If you're going to do a spinoff/prequel, this is exactly the kind of character you want for it.

Unfortunately (and this is where we shift from Context to Rant), in my excitement I’d forgotten one crucially important fact, and that is that Anthony Horowitz is completely incapable of keeping track of his own books’ canon.

I’m not gonna rewrite a play-by-play here (that’s stored in a probably 6 page word doc I vomited up shortly after finishing the book wherein I attempted (failed) to rewrite it all to make it make sense), but the short version is that 1) sometimes the timelines and/or events just straight up contradicted what was established in the main series; 2) Horowitz apparently chickened out of the fact that Yassen is kinda sorta definitely a villain and/or he just didn’t know how to write a corruption arc; which together led to 3) Yassen has virtually zero agency in his own book, and in the moments he does have agency, the decisions he makes don’t make sense, in that they are straight up impossible to reconcile with both this perpetually-victimized younger version of himself and the calculating hitman we know he becomes. That’s another thing, we didn’t see him evolve from one to the other, he just kinda. clumsily flipped a switch at the end there. I don’t have to explain that that kind of writing is stupid and lazy. And I know, this is a middle-grade Bond ripoff, I’m not gonna get fuckin, idk, Black Sails levels of character nuance or anything, but like. We can still have a little nuance in this nicely complex premise? Just a smidge? Please...? Apparently not.

(And I’m not even going to get into whatever the FUCK was going wrong with John Rider’s character, except to say that he was hands down the most important person in Yassen’s life and something in his characterization was Definitely Going Wrong as compared to what we already knew of him, which in turn fed into Yassen’s whole everything feeling Off, etc etc why is this entire book made of Nonsense Hell)

In conclusion, there was SO MUCH POTENTIAL and it was SQUANDERED by author laziness and yes I am angry but I’m also just Sad. the entire point was to show all these different people and events and overarching themes (which did actually exist, believe it or not) from alternate angles, but instead we just got a mess. it could have been amazing. and while I clearly haven’t figured out how to make it amazing yet, at least I’ve identified the problems, and that’s step one.

And yeah, there was a russian roulette scene (the gun kind) in the book. Two, actually. They were horrifying and should not have been in a middle-grade series. But they’re honestly among the least of my issues here.

You’re not remotely a great person, Yassen, but for some reason I love you and you deserved better. And Anthony, if I ever meet you: it’s on sight.