Once there were these characters on a quest (you know the one). They were facing insurmountable odds, and they weren’t sure what they could possibly do.
To be technical, THEY weren’t the questors. They were the support-staff. They were the help; hired, but willing. Call them “relatively brave volunteers”. Call them “Volunteers who didn’t really know the odds.” Call them “meat shields”.
It seems cruel to call out the character flaws of the extras; to be a good extra, in a story, you ought to serve the story.
But as a Dark Lord, as one for whom the imposition of will—upon myself, upon others, upon the Universe—is a reasonably defining trait, I don’t mind holding them up to my personal standards. Either their existence is too thin for them to care; they’re cardboard cut-outs, two-dimensional things inside the two dimensions of a page or screen, and that makes them a fraction of a faction of something real, and thus too abstract for me to worry about hurting their feelings…
…or they have at least enough potential existence that I can care if that potential is unrealized.
If this were a movie set, there’d be someone to yell at you, someone to tell you to get back in line, someone to remind you that you’re just an extra and you’re replaceable.
If this were a movie itself, you’d be able to look that director right in the eye (don’t ask me why the director is monocular; that’s outside the scope of this tale)—and say:
“I am no-one’s ‘extra’.”
It is at this point that you probably get fired.
…and you walk off a little stronger than you walked in. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating losing your job. I’m not saying that mindless rebellion answers every question; in fact, much of the time, people use it to avoid answering questions.
I’m saying: there are times in life when you realize it’s time to stop being an extra.
Maybe it’s the moment to walk off the set altogether. Maybe it’s the time to angle for a bigger part. Maybe it’s the time to shoot your own damn movie, when the rest of the cast has gone home (take these doughnuts; it’s dangerous to go alone, and you’ll need to bribe the guards.)
You cannot and should not try to control everything around you; at best, you’ll fail, and at worst, you’ll fail and be a jerk.
But you also shouldn’t live it up to the Narrator. Because the Narrator does not have your best interests at heart. Take it from me: even if you think the ending’s going to be a nice one, if it’s your ending, don’t leave it up to anyone else.
This is how the tale of the Extra ends:
“That’s when they realized they were in a fairy tale and everything was going to end happily no matter what, so they stopped trying, and the story went on around them, inexorably, and they realized, too late, that the hard work of acting on your own is far better than the trauma of relinquishing the rights to your life and putting it into the hands Fate, who is not always kind, and not always a very good writer.”
But:
I leave the real ending up to you.
Use it wisely.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
