I watched Warcraft this past weekend. Throughout the first half of the film, I was confused. The story wasn’t boring, but it was somehow unsatisfying. The characters were well-defined, but were not engaging. The dialogue wasn’t bad, but it kept falling flat.
What the hell was going on?
The Damsel-in-Distress is an intriguing trope, the female-gendered variation of the Salvand archetype, which is a character that needs saving. As the most prevalent expression of the Salvand, the Damsel not only informs our myth and literature, it embeds an insidious bias into our personalities, our culture, our politics. It’s a bias that corrupts our judgment, and thus our attempts at justice, like no other archetype.
I’ve analyzed the Damsel before here, to show how it tricks us into perpetuating it by trying to save women from it. After all, the whole point of the Damsel is that “she” needs to be saved: trying to save women from the Damsel trope actually strengthens the Damsel trope. This ironic dynamic leads to a lot of head-desk moments, like when CBS’s Supergirl series failed the Bechdel Test‘s third bullet in a hook line intended to evoke girl power: “It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it’s not a man.”
Well, a few things have happened over the past couple of years that illustrate this principle neatly and deserve discussion, incidents involving a few of my genre favorites: fantasy (Game of Thrones), sci-fi (Fury Road), and hard-boiled fiction (In a Lonely Place).
The first meme at left, created by some anonymous online genius, made me laugh harder than anything has in years.
The brilliant juxtaposition of a classic commercial and a contemporary fantasy drama was just a pretentious analytical commentary I apparently could not resist.
And, if you don’t get the reference (kids) check out this video.
Inspired, I created a few Faceless Man memes of my own. Not anonymous!
On 1 May 2016, the world learned that Jon Snow from Game of Thrones was still alive.
On 1 May 1746, exactly 270 years earlier, the John Snow (a “snow” is a type of sailing vessel) was captured by the French off Newfoundland, plundered, and scuttled two days later. It’s part of my Synoptic Journals living history project.
The season 6 opener for Game of Thrones reminded us all how critical information is to a story, what’s included and what’s excluded, where a narrative starts and stops, how reliable the information is…
I’ve said before that remakes and adaptations are often better than the originals, using OutKast’s Hey Ya! and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind as examples.
The argument is now being made, by Chris Taylor at Mashable (but also by others), that the HBO series Game of Thrones is surpassing its source work, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire:
In 1996, Martin published … A Game of Thrones, the first in what was then supposed to be a trilogy, to critical acclaim. In 1998 came the second volume, A Clash of Kings, and lo, it was even better. The year 2000 saw the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was perhaps one of the most densely layered and consistently surprising tomes I’ve read in any genre. It took the HBO show two seasons to do justice to this book.
And then? Martin spun his words, and his characters spun their wheels. He sat in his home in New Mexico typing out page after page, introducing new character after new character into his world of Westeros but not really advancing any of their storylines …
The showrunners, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, have been far less self-indulgent. (And for good reason — if a book is only bought a million times, it’s still a huge hit for the publishers. But if a show drops down to a million viewers, it’s a disaster.)
… In short, wherever Martin seems to be going out of his way to keep strands untied, introduce ponderous new strands and frustrate the reader, Benioff and Weiss are doing the opposite — uniting strands and delighting the viewer.
Read the rest here.
Modified due to reader concerns that the previous version was racist. *shrugs* Thesaurus progressivism.
Let me preface this by confessing a bias: I really like gunpowder fantasy. On the other hand, I think the sub-genre focuses too much on pirates, as if they were the only thing going on between the rise of fire-arms and the Industrial Revolution. So, when NBC announced it was airing a series about Blackbeard, particularly on the tails of Black Sails on Starz, I wasn’t sure I wanted to ride another buccaneer bandwagon.
Then, I heard that John Malkovich was starring. Continue reading
