I've recently gotten into, or rather back into the Hellraiser fandom and I love your posts about Kirsty and Pinhead/Elliot Spencer. Now onto my question: How do you think H3 had played out if Kirsty had been the main character again and not Joey? Or do you think they'd done as much as they could with the character and she was supposed to have a happy ending raising Tiffany?
Hi! Thank you for liking my posts and joining in on the conversation!
In terms of what Hollywood would have actually done with her: I think had it been Kirsty in Joey's place, we would have been able to see a real emotional momentum build for her and Pinhead/Elliot. I doubt that hollywood would have given us a romance...at least not with Pinhead. However, I suspect that they wanted to build off of the character dynamic in some kind of direction that teased at emotional/sexual tension, and here is my reasoning:
Joey to me has a lot of character aspects that feel grafted from Kirsty, like her mourning for her father, the gothic fever dreams, sassing back against Pinhead, and the dream interaction between her and Elliot. Clearly they were trying to replicate important aspects of their missing heroine in their new heroine. In Hellbound, the visual implication to me when we first see Elliot is that Kirsty is actually dreaming of his death/rebirth. Hence why she recognises his photo later. It makes sense, if you were intending to continue such a theme, to have them meet and speak in her dreams in the aftermath of saving her, as if his spirit had stuck with her (hence why I suggest that in my fic). The "a dream of one war is a dream of all wars" justification actually feels like a poor way to tack up an explaination once the heroine who was already established having such dreams was gone. In other words, it feels like the "Elliot's ghost" thing was possibly originally meant for a story with Kirsty in it, or at least manifested from that idea.
It even feels like in the absence of Kirsty, they had to flashback to the sacrifice scene in H2 to get Joey - and the audience - to grasp the emotional momentum that Joey was inheriting from Kirsty. Something that would have established the context in an even more thematically sensible way if the same girl was in the conversation instead of Joey.
It's worth noting that there are earlier scripts of H3 in which Elliot and Joey actually have a romantic arc during these dream sequences, and Joey actually becomes Pinhead's "bride" in exchange for career momentum, like some kind of creepy/sexy faustian deal. I don't think they would have ever presented Pinhead alone as a truly viable romantic option outside of some dark cenario like that.
However, I believe had they been able to keep Ashley/Kirsty on board for the third film, they absolutely would have given her a romantic arc with Elliot and may have even considered it in early stages, and I think what we have left, both in the early Joey scripts and the final film, strongly reflects that intent, or at least an awareness that something *like that* would be the right emotional momentum for a third storyline that included Pinhead and where he was at psychologically post H2.
For how I personally would do it, I am actually exploring the idea of Kirsty in H3 in my fic Roses for the Abyss, which has kind of been on an unofficial hiatus at the moment because my current job is too draining. But there are two fantastic authors who have done awesome stuff with the same core concept, and actually finished their stories! Please check out @inkworthywords 's The Pin and The Casket and @hamatebone 's From The Ashes series!
