#ttte mary marvel

[greatwesternway]

What's your take on Proteus?

The first time the show tells us about Proteus, it's in a story that Skarloey is relating. This implies that Proteus is a folk hero or an urban legend since tales like that usually are maintained as oral histories.

However, the next (and final) time Proteus is mentioned, it seems instead that he is a character created by a children's author named Mary Marvel.

Couple of possibilities then.

Proteus is a narrow gauge folk legend and Mary Marvel just adapts existing stories about him for print.

Proteus is a character she created and that why she's written so many stories about him.

In a perfect world, I'd prefer if it was Option 2 if only because I think the concept has an interesting byplay with the RWS itself. That is, the engines of the RWS are famous in their world because they have been written about in these books. And there's a whole book about children not believing the engines were real because they were characters in childrens' books. So I think it'd be quite amusing if Proteus was a fictional character from a children's book, but because Sodor engines' experience with this is that they're in books and they're real, therefore logically so too must he be. Or have been.

I also prefer this option because Proteus' story involves magic, which I do not care for on the surface level of a RWS story. Story within a story is fine because trains themselves are superstitious and prone to fanciful belief.

But there's one thing complicating that idea: the statue. The statue of Proteus that Peter Sam finds is very old. Much older, I think, than Mary Marvel is. Of course, we could afford ourselves some sense-of-time fuckery: even though times change, time does not pass on Sodor. We could easily assume the same sort of lineage for the Marvels as the Hatts have. And it would be analogous to Christopher Awdry taking up his father's work. Parallels are very satisfying!

But if I was gonna actually use Proteus, I think I'd do a mix of the two just to keep it tidy. Proteus was originally just an urban legend about a narrow gauge engine with a magic lamp, a story famous enough for someone to commemorate it with a statue (and then promptly forget about it). Mary Marvel found the (conveniently public domain) story compelling and built out a children's book series around the character.

Also, as an aside, I think the Skarloey Railway engines (as well as the Culdee Fell ones and Arlesdale too) tend to behave more maturely than the standard gauge engines, due to their tighter financials. They can't afford to be fucking around like Sir Topham Hatt's engines do. The niche railways seem to have a repertoire of cautionary tales (Godred, Smudger) to keep engines level-headed, so a nice morale bolstering tale (even if it features unlikely magical intervention) is something I think they might see some value in. I'd prefer if the point of the story wasn't so broad as "wishes come true" because what do trains really ever wish for beyond what they mostly already have? Still, Peter Sam wished to find his way back to the incline, sought out what he thought was the magic lamp (videogame level design wisdom: if you're lost, head towards the light), and lo, he got his wish.

#ttte proteus #ttte mary marvel