Blinding the God's Eye View

As fans we know an awful lot about the books, movies and television shows that we love. We know every scene and every point of view.  We get to see everything from the big picture down to the smallest details. We watched the deleted scenes and read the interviews with the writers and cast. The perspective we have on these stories must be a little like God sees the world.  All that inside knowledge we have informs the way we write the characters.  Something very interesting can happen though when a writer lets go of all that hard won knowledge and deliberately writes from the perspective of a true outsider.  You get a fresh look at characters that are as familiar to us as old friends.  Within canon, we know who everyone is, what their motivations are and what really happened in the story and why. All of that is not readily apparent to the outsider.

         I always use Harry Potter as an example, so this time I’ll go Batman.  Suppose my normal wheelhouse was mystery focused stories rooted in Batman’s skill as a detective mixed in with a little slice of life Batman family stuff, relationship with Alfred, maybe a hint of sultry femme fatale Selina Kyle romance, and so on, but I’m blocked on my latest murder thriller and want to explore some different aspect about what it is to be Batman.  So I start a new story from the point of view of an entirely new character, unrelated to the Batman Mythology.  Jennifer Kolwalski is a 32 year old assistant council in the public defender’s office in Gotham City. Her husband is a supply officer in the navy on extended deployment in Pacific. She has never really had a firsthand encounter with the craziness that happens in Gotham. Never been kidnapped by the Joker, never been gassed with fear toxin. She had to take the bus to work that one month when Twoface had bombed the subway and the tunnel was being shored up. She does however work the Batman desk in her office.

        Last year her boss put the moves on her at the New Year’s Eve party, and she’d shut him down. Two weeks later she’d been assigned to defend the first of many clients put into the system by Batman. She didn’t get the Riddler, she got the guy who drove the Riddler to the Gotham National Bank then got knocked out by a steel boomerang to the face. The Batman desk was the kiss of death for a career in Law. Not only was Batman meticulous about providing the police with evidence and coerced confessions, but there was a stigma attached to being arrested by Batman.  To juries, if Batman beat somebody up, he must have been doing something wrong.  Anytime she could plea bargain a charge down a step or two she counted it a win.  She’d been doing this long enough that she was starting to get repeat customers. Sure some of them were scum but others were just guys taking any work they could get and where did Batman get off knocking them around like he did? Poor Jerry was going to need surgery to fix that shoulder. Any police officer that tried to get information from a prisoner like that would have been thrown off the force, and the case dismissed out of hand.  The system wasn’t perfect, but there were rules, and Batman thought he was above them.  She had tried to argue that once, that Batman wasn’t a duly deputized officer of the law and his vigilante actions had no legal standing but the Judges always seemed to make exceptions just like the juries.

          So that’s where she’s coming from. The story doesn’t really get going until she comes home late from another hard day of work to find a badly wounded Batman lying on her living room floor in a puddle of blood and a couple of dirty cops on the mob payroll searching apartment to apartment looking for him.  Should she hide him? Turn him in? Unmask him? Ask him why he does what he does? She has her assumptions about him, but she doesn’t know Bruce Wayne as anything but a name. She doesn’t know his history anything about his family.  He’s made her life hard, but he’s also a wounded human being in need of help being hunted by killers. There are a lot of places to go with this, and they aren’t bound by what I know about Batman.

Wow, that ran kind of long. Let me give you an example of a very good fan fiction that did an excellent job of keeping that outsiders perspective.  The story is from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom and is told from the perspective of a member of Watchers Council.  It was inspired by “The Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad and concerns Xander’s time in Africa after the Hell mouth was closed. Most of the characters are original and richly developed, and the author painted a very detailed and interesting picture of Africa, specifically Mali. It's really one of my favorite stories from the Buffyverse. It's called "Facing the Heart in Darkness" by Liz_Marcs

http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=liz_marcs&keyword=Africander+Fic-A-Thon&filter=all