The peril of assumptions

If you’ve ever said the phrase, “when you assume it makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me'” — first off, please punch yourself in the face. Society can’t function without a certain set of assumptions, such as the assumption that if I step out of my house I won’t be hit by a falling piece of space junk.

Second–at least where fiction and fictional characters are concerned–I may grudgingly admit you are right. For Exhibit A, I will present Schroeder from the Peanuts gang.

Who, you ask?

This guy.

For some reason, when I was reading Peanuts strips as a kid, it wasn’t Charlie Brown or Linus or Snoopy that I latched onto, it was this random blond kid with the toy piano. Schroeder. He just seemed so cool. Otherwise hard-as-nails, cynical Lucy was head-over-heels in love with the guy, yet he had no time for her nonsense. His idol was Beethoven, who is awesome. He had hair and didn’t suck his thumb. He was an artist. This, thought grade-school me, this is who I would want to be.

And then every animated special disappointed me, because Schroeder wasn’t a featured player. He was never meant to be. The bald kid and the thumb sucker and the bald kid’s dog were the axes upon which the Peanutsverse revolved. They were the ones who got to go to France, while Schroeder and the rest stayed home. Cool as he was, Schroeder was doomed to be an extra.

Oh the betrayal. How dare Charles Schulz treat my chosen personification in such manner? Well, he dared because, again, Schroeder was never really meant to be a focus. I ballooned his importance in my own head and my heartbreak was directly a result of that. Nevertheless, I still consumed and enjoyed the comic strips and cartoons, but man, to this day there’s that small, irrational part of me wishing Schroeder had been portrayed as important as I felt he was.

Exhibit B is going to venture into spoiler territory for a recent film release concerning a quaint little franchise called Star Wars. If that concerns you, I advise you to stop reading now. I’ll even throw in a very sad Luke so you’re less likely to accidentally see the next paragraphs.

Still here? All right, let’s talk about Captain Phasma. The stormtrooper leader played in the new film by imposing giantess (and Brienne of Tarth) Gwendolyn Christie.

You probably don’t need a reminder visual, but here’s one just in case:

Phasma is one of those characters that people obsessed about, forming assumptions of her character based on her appearance in early press releases, and possibly the Brienne tie-in. Did interviews with Christie and others use words like “badass” or did we coin them ourselves?

If you’ve seen the film you can probably guess where I’m going with this. Phasma in The Force Awakens looks good but does nothing. Well, arguably worse than nothing. She’s taken prisoner towards the end of the film and forced to lower Starkiller Base’s shields at gunpoint, then our heroes say they’re going to toss her down the garbage chute, and that’s the last we see of her.

Supposedly we’re promised that Phasma will return with a bigger impact in subsequent movies, but for now, she’s not even someone who put up much of a resistance when asked to basically open the gates to the enemy. People are complaining about that as a betrayal of the character.

Except, is it? Within the movie itself, was it ever established that Phasma is a die-for-the-cause badass? Couldn’t she just as easily be some unusually tall daughter of a First Order bigwig enjoying a cushy officer’s position, who isn’t really all that brave or stoic when the chips are down? That’s a well-known evil (or even good-yet-corrupt) archetype, after all.

The point is that she really didn’t have a character to betray, did she? To say that means you had preconceptions and assumptions based purely on her image and other metadata going in. And when the character didn’t seem to actually fit those assumptions, and/or wasn’t really as big a part of the narrative as you’d hoped, you felt let down. You felt, in my terms, Schroedered.

It’s not pleasant, but if we’re perfectly honest as fans, we have no more control over these matters than a fan fiction author who desperately wants Harry Potter and Draco to kiss. Now on my end, I was surprised by how Phasma ended up being shown to us in The Force Awakens, but on consideration I actually find the possibility of her having some more cowardly, mercenary aspects to her character more intriguing and compelling than, say, a flashy but ultimately bland badass like Darth Maul. I suppose in Phasma’s case a future film could still present her in a more kickass mold, but for the time being everyone wanting that will have to just buy her action figure and pretend.