is jenner evil

i know everyone wants jenner to be a bad guy but what if he was not.
i just want to know about the idea of jenner being good in a fan fic. maybe something pushes him to do the things he did. maybe he has a sickly child who can not survive the move or something. anyways i thought this might be a good topic. tell me what you think.

i know everyone wants jenner to be a bad guy but what if he was not.
i just want to know about the idea of jenner being good in a fan fic. maybe something pushes him to do the things he did. maybe he has a sickly child who can not survive the move or something. anyways i thought this might be a good topic. tell me what you think.

If you utilize the book, that is way more than possible; it would actually potentially make a great story. From the movie's perspective, it's pretty much set in stone. Jenner, in the movie, was a commercial fiction antagonist, bad all the way, just as Mrs. Bris and Justin were both entirely moral with few if any faults.

That's why the movie is considered a children's movie and the book is considered young adult literary quality fiction. So, I hope that grants you my undaunting perspective.

I defended Jenner on the IMDB message board for SoN[=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084649/board/threads/]IMDB message board for SoN, in the post named "Jenner!!" where almost everyone shouted "Jenner is sheer evil!".Well,url==http://=http:///url sure in the movie he is, but not in the novel. I actually feel sorry for him after reading the novel, I don't want him to become evil as he does in the movie, maybe this puts me in the minority.

But as you suggest, Jenner is no born evil, and he does have a tendency to become evil, it is so even in the novel. Maybe it's the discontent towards the Plan, and the combination of anger, jealousness, hatred and lust for power that turns him from pessimist into evil, like that he lost someone who was deeply beloved by him, and that someone's death is caused unintentionally by Nicodemus, Justin or even Jonathan(maybe they don't even know it at all), but Jenner thinks it's all their fault and wants his revenge. Okay, this is my two cents, hope it helps.

well what i meant to say is in the movie is it not possible that jenner was just percieved as evil. i mean who can say his true intent. i mean he may have been good but became evil in order to posibly protect something. i mean his true intentions could have been intended to be good but then twisted evil as he lost hope.

Jenner was just a typical cutthroat politician trying to get to the top of the ladder. if we call him evil, then we ought to be calling our entire government evil, 'cuz often times they do the same thing, only on a much more secretive level. In as small a community as the rats have, Jenner wouldn't be able to hire a hitman to take out Nicodemus, so he just had to do it himself. That's my take.

I don't know if I'd call Jenner evil, I would say instead that he let greed and the relative luxury of thier existence on the farm get the best of him. He might have panicked when the idea of the Plan was brought up and was driven to any extremes, even murder to ensure things would continue.

I find his remarks when the human threat was mentioned in the council meeting in the movie interesting..."Not if we got them first." I wonder what he had in mind, surely he didn't think they could defeat the entire human race, or even all the humans in the immediate area. Perhaps he intended to make a strike on some humans to send a message that the rats were not helpless, and then
make some kind of settlement. Who knows?

I don't know if I'd call Jenner evil, I would say instead that he let greed and the relative luxury of thier existence on the farm get the best of him. He might have panicked when the idea of the Plan was brought up and was driven to any extremes, even murder to ensure things would continue.

I find myself in agreement with this statement because even in the book, there is mention of a growing discontent between Jenner and Nicodemus especially when the topic of "The Plan" comes up.

I've often wondered the self-same point. Jenner, from the film's outset, came across as a vicious and callous manipulator, which, as far as we as the audience could tell, he most certainly was. Yet I am always one to give fictional characters extra thought, and so found myself ruminating over Jenner and his brief 'life'.
Consider how he could be ‘good’. Although he was clearly marred by insanity – as his homicidal actions towards Nicodemus, as well as the maddened sword-fight with Justin, proved – he nevertheless made some statements that invoked the great muse of curiosity. During the sword fight with Justin, when Justin accused him of killing Nicodemus, , he answered: “He…he wanted to destroy everything!” Following this, of course, came the classic line : “I’ve learned this much – take what you can, when you can!”
What does this reveal about Jenner? Well, the line about Nicodemus’ destruction of the Rosebush yields an interesting insight, namely, an evident concern for the wellbeing of the society the rats had created there. I like what Slew had mentioned about luxury and how the rat lifestyle could have affected Jenner. Although I would not justify his actions entirely by the defence of his way of life – I think certain madnesses played a key role in his violent actions – it does help to craft a plausible series of explanations. What drove him mad? Perhaps his NIMH enhancements took to him differently than the others, or perhaps he had a unique injection that led to an unbalanced neurochemistry. Most certainly, he despised the humans who captured him (“Not if we get them first!”), so could a lifestyle of theft from human habitations be subtle form of vengeance against his captors?
One thing which added to my curiosity was on an artist’s site (possibly MaximumNImh.com?), which showed some artistic concepts for the film’s design. It emphatically mentioned how Jenner found theft and parasitism a simpler method than harvesting food. Perhaps it was fear that drove him to do whatever was necessary to protect the Rosebush Colony.

Whatever the cause was, I would find it interesting to -reinvent Jenner. Although most certainly violnet and sociopathic, it would be intriguing toexplore this fascinating character in much greater depth. And hey - isn't that what fanfiction is for?

I've often wondered the self-same point. Jenner, from the film's outset, came across as a vicious and callous manipulator, which, as far as we as the audience could tell, he most certainly was. Yet I am always one to give fictional characters extra thought, and so found myself ruminating over Jenner and his brief 'life'.
Consider how he could be ‘good’. Although he was clearly marred by insanity – as his homicidal actions towards Nicodemus, as well as the maddened sword-fight with Justin, proved – he nevertheless made some statements that invoked the great muse of curiosity. During the sword fight with Justin, when Justin accused him of killing Nicodemus, , he answered: “He…he wanted to destroy everything!” Following this, of course, came the classic line : “I’ve learned this much – take what you can, when you can!”

yes some one finaly hit close to the nerve i was aiming for. the point of this conversation was to ask what was the everything jenner was talking about. what had driven him to do that wich he did"

A fic that attempts to explain Jenner's motives would be fascinating. I'd absolutely love to read it.

With Movie Jenner, you've pretty much got free rein. There's nothing whatsoever revealed about his personal life, so many times it's simply assumed that he was too absorbed in politics to bother. This is possible, but it's always fun to explore new aspects of the character.

My advice? If you do decide to go the 'Jenner is really good!' route, do not make Justin and Nicodemus the bad guys. Or if you do decide to explore darker parts of those characters (which, I admit, would be kinda cool), give them reasons for acting the way they do.

In the book, Jenner and Nicodemus were friends before NIMH. In the end, Jenner simply left the colony with his followers. He survived a disastrous attempt at electrical theft, and had a family of his own in the city.

Was he evil? You decide.

--Meg

Ah! Here are the links I mentioned previously! [=http://www.maximumnimh.com/item-1-2003.html]Here are the links I mentioned previously! Showing the character worksheets, these magazine excerpts give revealing little tidbits and nifty snippets into the inner workings of the characters. Comics #1 through 4 give the bits on Jenner I was after; however, there's much more info here that goes into many topics of interest.

I wonder what authors think when their readers psychoanalyze their characters like this.

Thanks for the awesome link! I think I own that issue of Toon Talk...sadly, I can't find it anymore.

I love that it goes into Jenner's motives, but I wish they came across better in the film itself. I get the feeling that he is fueled by desire for political power--it's pretty definite that he's not really interested in any moral questions. You know he's not losing sleep over this.

Someone else already mentioned this, but I think it bears reiterating: Jenner obviously dislikes humans. To a certain degree, this makes sense. That said, he has no problem living off of them if they're foolish enough to let him. It's a sort of indirect revenge, a survival of the fittest kind of deal. I can imagine Jenner as an avid reader of Darwin, and probably Machiavelli as well.

He reminds me a bit of Cassius from "Julius Caesar". One line in particular stands out in my memory.

"Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much. Such men are dangerous."

Granted, the similarities pretty much stop there. Cassius is much more sympathetic than Jenner, but just as manipulative of the tragic hero, Brutus. This comes back to my previous remark about a wish to know more about Jenner's motives.

Speculation is fun, isn't it? I could do this all day. :)

--Meg

I wonder what authors think when their readers psychoanalyze their characters like this.

I personally would think that they'd usually feel flattered. The fact that we try to "psychoanalyze" a creation from someone's brain means that they've succeeded at one of the most difficult aspects of storywriting: charactarization. The character has to be deep and believeable enough to have any sense of being able to treat them as an actual "person."

Think about it. When you watch NIMH1, you don't go on about how brilliant the writing or the art was, at least while you're watching (at least, I don't, unless I'm trying to view it that way). You're absorbed by the story. When you watch NIMH2, however, you're constantly jarred into being reminded that there's some untalented hacks behind the curtain that are pulling the characters strings and making them say the most uninspired dialoge one can imagine. I mean, honestly, the setting is completely unrealistic, and I would hope that people with half a brain would be smarter than the characters in it.

That, I believe, is the key difference.

liapplauds Simonli

Exactly. On my favorite site, Jabootu.com, they refer to that kind of setting as a '10-Minute World', in which any reasonably intelligent person would be able to take over in ten minutes flat.

Ugh, NIMH 2...Evil Martin doesn't hold a candle to Jenner. (I'm having a very pleasant mental image of Jenner kicking the crap out of Evil Martin, which I may have to make a drawing of.) A story is only as good as its villain, which is why "The Secret of NIMH" rocked.

--Meg

I say Jenner was at most, a very outspoken character, just doing what he could to convince others to seeing his point of view. Something I'm sure we've all done at one point, or another. He was just expressing what he considered 'best' for the colony.

However, the second he resorted to murder, as a means to an end, is when he potentially became 'evil' and/or just simply insane. My vote goes toward a little of both.

From a design standpoint he is definately eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil, very evil, bad, malo, nasty, boese, schlecht, sinistrum, and ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bad to the bone.

In the book he definately had redeeming qualities but in the movie I think he became the "rat we love to hate".

Plus anybody who has eyebrows that have an "indenpentent volition" has to be evil. Some sort of devil has possessed his eyebrows, I am sure of it.

Aloha!

Marcus

lilaughs hysterically at Marc's commentsli

Yeah, I agree about the eyebrows thing. Such was definitely the case in the "Pride and Prejudice" miniseries on A&E back in the early '90s. One of the actresses had absolutely terrifying eyebrows. If you think Jenner's eyebrows were scary, imagine them on a woman.

I know. It boggles the mind!

--Meg

I could have swore that the during the movie at times, Jenner`s eyebrows would float above his head :shock: .
Evil?,, who knows, but if someone is talking to me and thier brows come out and float above thier head even for just a second I would drive to the nearest VFW and order a double shot of anything :lol:

Sorry this is such an old thread, but I thought it would be better than making a new one.

I don't think Jenner was actually evil in the books. He was just the obvious choice to be made evil since he was one of the named rats that wanted to continue stealing from humans, and so the humans reading would think of him as evil.
In fact, in some passages, you can see that Justin actually admires Jenner.
"These were my two closest friends. We liked the same games,the same jokes, them same topics of conversation. I particularly admired Jenner, who was extremely quick and intelligent."
It doesn't make sense that he would betray his own best friend.
And he misses him once he leaves too.
I think some of the rats opposed the plan because they just wanted to continue with what they were used too, and were afraid of anything new.
Maybe they were even lazy and thought doing things the hard way would take more work then stealing so that's why they opposed the plan.
Perhaps they were afraid the plan wouldn't work, that they wouldn't be able to be self-sufficient, and they've be left starving and without food, and with a much larger population.

Something else I don't understand is that in the movie, when the rats are pulling Ms. Brisby's cinderblock house in, they're smiling evilly. Why did they draw them like that? They shouldn't be happy that the children are trapped inside, they should be horrified. They shouldn't be happy that the plan to move the house failed. It's never said they're in league with Jenner.

You’re not the first one to bump an ancient thread around here. :)

In the book Jenner definitely wasn’t evil, he and his followers just had a difference of opinion. But in the movie, he was set up to be the villain right off the bat, based on his appearance. From the first frame, they telegraph that he’s gonna be trouble. He’s largely a blank slate as to how and why he was moved to murder, since he has the same difference of opinion as the book version. So why didn’t he just leave, like his book counterpart? That’s where it’s been up to folks like you and me to fill in the blanks. If you’ve seen some of my fan-fics (plug), you know I have my own theory, one that some may differ with; but it beats the ones that paint him as evil and nasty just for the sheer fun of it.

when the rats are pulling Ms. Brisby's cinderblock house in, they're smiling evilly. Why did they draw them like that?

Hmmm…it’s not that I never noticed it; I guess I just thought it was another of TSoN’s many inconsistencies, one that could possibly be chalked up to artistic license. Without looking at that scene, I think it’s possible that they could be grimacing with the effort; a cinderblock ain’t light!

Welcome to the forums, BTW, Greta. 8) Irrelevant aside: I gave the name Greta to one of Justin’s kids in my fan-fics.

Cool, I didn't know you made a fanfic where a character had the same name.

maybe he has a sickly child who can not survive the move or something. anyways i thought this might be a good topic. tell me what you think.

You'd think if he had a sick child, he'd be a little more sympathetic to Brisby instead of telling her to get lost.

What did you think of the character Isabella from the books who had a crush on Justin? She was only mentioned for a while. I wonder why she was even there.

I haven't read all the sequel books, but I know Jenner had a son name Racso, which was Oscar backwards, but people don't seem to talk about him much.

The sequel books are...nowhere near as well written as the original novel. Since they're by a different author, I just dismiss them as inferior fanfiction. Paul Gibbs' work is a more deserving continuation of the story.

As for why Jenner turned to evil (in the movie), my theory is that he was terrified of having to live essentially like a medieval peasant, after having enjoyed the technologically advanced rosebush community. This blinded him to everything else, and so he was driven to any possible means to prevent the Plan from happening.