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Last week we watched the new Dungeons and Dragons movie, which was a pretty fun time although I wouldn't say I loved it, and I remembered that I saw people were writing fanfic for it, so I checked that out. There's not really all that much of it yet; it's not taking off with a bang the way summer movie fandoms sometimes do.
I realized through browsing this fic more, though, and mulling it over, that Regé-Jean Page's heroic paladin side character was the best character as well at the most funny and engaging part of the plot, and that his character's VERY SPECIFIC schtick is... kind of the same as Fraser's (due South): an impossibly, perfectly altruistic and impossibly, perfectly beautiful hero dedicated to helping any and everyone... who is also incredibly literal at all times.
This latter characteristic is a popular type of humor with robots, aliens, etc, eg Spock or Data, but I can't think of any previous examples besides Fraser where it was combined with the Too Perfect Handsome Hero type eg Steve Rogers or Clark Kent (another source of narrative tension and humor on its own, since you get a constant stream of 'Is this guy real?' reactions). Part of the deal with a perfect hero's comedy is that the narrative bends around them because they have sorta been parachuted in from another genre - like legend or folk tale - in which it's nearly impossible for them to lose. You get a lot of comedy mileage from this with the people around them, ie the Rays or the questing party in this new movie, but it does make the character kinda overpowered, from a Dungeon Master perspective. In other words, I conjecture that he couldn't be in more of the film because the writers wanted more uncertainty about the outcome.
I realized through browsing this fic more, though, and mulling it over, that Regé-Jean Page's heroic paladin side character was the best character as well at the most funny and engaging part of the plot, and that his character's VERY SPECIFIC schtick is... kind of the same as Fraser's (due South): an impossibly, perfectly altruistic and impossibly, perfectly beautiful hero dedicated to helping any and everyone... who is also incredibly literal at all times.
This latter characteristic is a popular type of humor with robots, aliens, etc, eg Spock or Data, but I can't think of any previous examples besides Fraser where it was combined with the Too Perfect Handsome Hero type eg Steve Rogers or Clark Kent (another source of narrative tension and humor on its own, since you get a constant stream of 'Is this guy real?' reactions). Part of the deal with a perfect hero's comedy is that the narrative bends around them because they have sorta been parachuted in from another genre - like legend or folk tale - in which it's nearly impossible for them to lose. You get a lot of comedy mileage from this with the people around them, ie the Rays or the questing party in this new movie, but it does make the character kinda overpowered, from a Dungeon Master perspective. In other words, I conjecture that he couldn't be in more of the film because the writers wanted more uncertainty about the outcome.
