Where Are You Going Mr. Iron Man?

Thematically, where is Iron Man at? The first film was about Tony Stark losing it all then building Iron Man to reclaim his life and then company. The second film was about Tony Stark on the verge of losing it all but reinvents his technology, saving his life and keeping his company. The trailer for the third seems to promise that Tony Stark will lose it all before inventing a new Iron Man suit to regain his place in the world.

TheMandarin… The villain for the third film. He’s a Chinese caricature with ten rings of power he found from a crashed space ship. Oh, the aliens looked like Dragons which doesn’t further reek of gross stereotyping. He’s mad at the world. I’ll give him credit for, after years of presumably getting his rings ripped from his fingers, inserting them into his spin. It looks fucking sick.

How does he fit in at all with any of Iron Man’s thematic territory? Tony Stark describes himself as a futurist. For all his high technology, the man is grounded with a human perspective. His character is an exploration of what uses mankind makes of its technology and how it will choose to evolve with that technology. Thus the view of the Iron Man suit as a weapons platform is a critique of mankind’s weaponization of all its tools and obsession with kill potential. As a hero, the enemies Iron Man fights embody the problems mankind faces as the power it gains from tech grants it incredible and far-reaching abilities. Iron Man will never be the hero who “patrols” some city streets to ferret out muggers. He’s much more “big picture”.

The only area where Tony Stark and Mandarin intersect is that both are very powerful individuals. I get Marvel is making a push to unify all their heroes, create a single coherent world, and apparently hate aliens as ugly, simple, interlopers. But this throwback to the golden age of comics is deeply uninteresting. Given the commanding presence comic movies are getting, why is Marvel wasting this space by showing the world that comics haven’t aged since the 60s? Or is this a reaction to the space carved out by Batman? In place of being grounded, dark, with character focused arcs Mavel is opting for the silly, colorful, “guess who the new badguy is!?” type of nonsense. Remember when Batman Forever, Spider-Man 3, and X-Men 3 ran comic movies into the ground? What bugs me is the first Iron Man film successfully rebooted into fertile conceptual space. It’s like Marvel is pissed at their own success.

And can an Iron Man movie move beyond a rehash of his origin? What does the Man of Tomorrow fight against? How does he change the world? What will the world look like with tech that transforms people into demi-gods? Iron Man is, at least the only one I can think of, the sole hero who could grapple with any questions of where humanity will go and what it will look like. Batman is too obsessed with his own issues to ever give a shit about anything beyond Gotham. Every other hero is a reaction to current problems. They’re the ones who patrol around. Because they don’t have anything better to do. Really, how disgustingly ineffectual is it to wander around a city hoping to happen upon a clear crime?

I’m sad all this beautiful potential is being squandered. Robert Downey Jr. is going to carry the film regardless. He is Tony Stark. I just wish the owners of these wonderful ideas actually knew what they had. 

Image Copywrite Marvel

The Blinding Knife Review

So I’m about here:

The Blinding Knife was light and fluffy fantasy that took its magic system too seriously.

What a disappointment. The Blinding Knife reversed every single thing I liked about Weeks’s writing. Yeah, my expectations were high. Plus I felt I was doing Weeks a favor by forgiving his slides into melodrama. So there’s betrayal mixed in this. Here is where Mr. Weeks swerved off course, in my estimation.

The Villains were way too safe. The chief two, Andross Guile and The Color Prince, both feel like the exact same character to begin with. There’s just so much effort put into buffing their reputations that their weak actions seem even more pathetic. You can’t keep saying “these guys are meticulous planners who have been scheming years!” then have a 15 year old fat kid come in stupid and half-cocked, yet still beat every challenge and not have them look like idiots. It seems like they want to fail. Never mind the motivation of each boils down to “the author needs me to do it”, all they end up accomplishing is making the heroes look kinda good for a minute.

In general, too, everything comes too easy for Kip Guile, the Hero. In all of the Brent Week’s other books, even the first book of this series, the hero had to pay a high price for anything they wanted. Now this kid can’t even fuck up without getting what he wanted. How does it make sense to build Kip as the Fat Kid who Can’t Do Anything Right then have him run for days, learn an incredible complex game in a month (and beat a master of said game), beat other kids who have been training their whole lives as fighters casually, and still able to summon impossible magic to bail himself out of any situation with no training in it? There are more Outs then possible problems.  It made all of the action of the book tedious. I got more invested in the relationships of characters as a consequence. Looking for something dynamic. Even there though, everybody loves the heroes. Everything is forgiven. Say something stupid? Turns out it was funny, charming, and makes everyone like you more. Girl pissed at you for 16 years? Your mom will talk to her for 10 minutes and it’ll be all better.

The magic system was more than adequately explained in the first book. There was a chapter where a character went through an actual lesson plan. It was just block paragraphs treating this shit as real. I guess Weeks got some criticism on that as there are great pains put into covering any instance of new magic in the book. That pain was transferred to the reader. History and possible uses and whatever the rest of the whole fucking world thinks of people who use it and how it affects people who use it and ties to old gods… Jesus H the whole “dialogue” about the invisible color (I forget the name and a quick Google search yields nothing. Starts with a P) was a chore to get through. A disposable character was brought in to say “this shit is super mysterious and maybe super deadly. Don’t tell anyone about it because this book is dry as fuck”. I’m pretty sure that quote is verbatim but I don’t know the page number. So in the end, I got pages of teasing about something that doesn’t matter.

The “ending” was complete shit. On every single level an ending exists on, this one festered on the bottom most plane with a stink that’ll stay with you for a few days. First off, the “final battle” is a joke. Gaven kills one of these “gods” a few days earlier, single-handedly. Now he’s got an army and it’s more exciting? AT LEAST KIP DOESN’T FALL ON THE GUY WITH AN ALL-POWER ARTIFACT HE CONVIENTLY GOT. Reals? The badguys can be beat by the hero tripping? The author has the gall to drag out this pedestrian battle then throw a whole mess of shit in at the end then end the book like that was a clever cliff-hanger. Cliff-hangers are cheap tricks used by cheap authors. Every single chapter ended with some “but oh no!” that never turned out to be a serious problem. I just feel like the book stopped. Even with the threads that terminated in this book, there was no closure on them. More forgotten.

There are characters that are just distractions, filler. Namely Teia and Gunner. Ok, Teia is a slave for about three weeks before Kip miraculously bails her out in a wild fit of luck so any sympathy and potential for hidden conflict is obliterated quickly. Her power color is largely seen as useless and Weeks spends a great deal of time attempting to justify her inclusion in anything. In vain. Again, soft obstacles are placed in front of her that suspiciously conform to an easy test of abilities she already has. I couldn’t even describe her personality. I don’t think she has one. Gunner is author over-indulgence. Weeks is channeling Melville’s Moby-Dick. Every. Single. Passage. With Gunner was teeth-gnashing frustrating to get through. The idea is fun! He talks to a make-believe (or not) sea Goddess as though they are two old friends who hate each other. But the writing made me violently angry it was so bad. Now he’s gonna be a main character in the next book! Yay! I’m not fucking reading it now.

The parts I did like, and there were enough to keep me going despite all this other stuff I’ve been writing about, all of that gets murdered in this book. Gavin. Ya know, the whole entire actually interesting aspect to this series is killed for no reason. Well, Ok, I mean because Dazen is running out of time!! That’s horseshit. Dazen dealing with his brother was some item on a bucket list. That’s flimsy. Can I get a character that has more motivation than “the author told me to”? But really, story potential is jettisoned for no explained / good reason. That’s tantamount to a felony at least. JANIS BORIG! You made exploring the history of this world a fun, highly engaging, read! So… get killed before a fraction of your potential is used? Though she did lift heavily from Harry Potter. What with legendary magical artifacts (including invisible cloaks) and living other people’s lives in a dream-like manner, and being super powerful but living in some house where anybody could find her. But whatever! Fun is fun and she was that. The lack of context given to her death was insulting to anyone who invested at all in her character (me).

I rolled into this book ready to love it but Brent Weeks worked really hard to convince me not to. Tough to know how much I should hold this against Weeks. He’s still 5 for 6. But in all those other stories, he rubbed hard against disaster (with such unimaginative core stories) , so has he succumbed to bad instincts?

Garth Ennis, God Damn Legend

Garth Ennis always presents a story that screams for a guiding moral thread to pull the reader through the hideous violence and depraved sex, yet he never provides a definitive one. You’ll keep searching for one though. Only when you’re sure you’ve found the core message does he confound you with a contradiction. I’ve read his run on Punisher and I’m ten volumes deep on The Boys.

Punisher was by far the easier read. Good and Bad guys were abundantly clear. The overarching questioned seemed to be about the validity of vigilantism. I knew where I stood on that. Frank Castle being a war Vet only made the issue simpler. Frank Castle is a gift the world should consider itself lucky to have. Valley Forge, Valley Forge (volume ten), along with Punisher: Born, recast the entire series. Good and Evil were symptoms of the condition of human dignity. Which isn’t to suggest that this was just another battleground with another clear line drawn down the middle. It was more about how corrupt a person was. What things they let slide and what they didn’t, but it was a subjective position challenged by everyone they met and everything they did. What made Frank Castle the hero is difficult to pin down. He kills because he loves it, which doesn’t inspire dignity, he’s only removing the most corrupt people. His heroism is sacrifice, of collecting all the vileness of the world into himself.

The first two volumes of The Boys were really hard for me to read. I dearly love superheroes. I couldn’t stand and didn’t understand why they were shallow jokes, a passing reference to Legends, but with only dirty thoughts on their minds. It took me a while to piece together that they weren’t superheroes. The Boys isn’t a parody or send-up. It took a strong force of will for me to see a man in tights and a cape without thinking of him as a paragon of virtue. I didn’t even realize I had such a strong association between the two. Non-comic readers must be laughing at me but I think the point Garth Ennis is making hits a person like me hardest, but works for everybody, that there are solid and invisible connections joining action or dress to concept or idea that has no business being there. Maybe “speedo” isn’t a synonym for Justice for you, but I bet there’s something else. As well, these “superheroes” in The Boys are supposed to masquerade as the best of humanity while actually being the worst. Every average citizen in that world was just like I was when I started volume one.

For all the excess, Ennis’s stories don’t exploit the sensational but turn on small moments. It’s brilliant because all the excitement comes from the reader. It’ll be the typing together of a subplot spread over volumes that’ll remake a reader’s perception of a character. Or just a subtle touch to explain so much, as when Frank Castle would stare, monstrous frown and eyes super focused straight ahead. Massacres would follow that stare. Torture was a certainty. That look was at once scarier and more thrilling than the violence. It took every preceding, gruesome, act into account, said that wasn’t enough, had Frank promise more.

Evil and corruption can have an agent (or several), but the heroes’ (half-broken, angry men) real battle was against those negative aspects of humanity that gave rise to evil; greed and violence being the chief two. The lines between hero and villain can and often blur, as the hero adopts those same negative aspects to win or pursue their cause. It creates a sense that the world as it is is the problem, with heroes able to be corrupted in an instant. Hughie in The Boys, for example, wants nothing to do with the violence swirling around him, but ends up killing a man by giving into those dark forces for a second. Frank Castle is betrayed by his desire to serve his country and his survival instincts, morphing him into an insatiable killer. Ennis stories don’t end with peace the world over, yet feel satisfying. The hero completes their jouney while we understand the world a bit more, even if it is still as crazy as when the story started. It’s not about defeating evil but understanding and controlling it. Humanity is the villain, not a few bad apples, but a force inside every person that only needs a reason or circumstance to emerge.

What I love about Ennis heroes is that they know who they are, what they want, and how to go about getting it. They don’t waste the reader’s time fumbling around for what all can see is the obvious course of things. Though they fit the image of “manly men”, what makes them so compelling isn’t their skill in violence but their intelligence, uncompromising attitude, and directness. If the world is treacherous, then fittingly only a sure person with solid conviction could navigate it with anything close to positive results. The dark humor, arising as natural by-product when hero meets corruption, is a testament to the hero’s battered moral senses and lose of grounding human connection

Brent Weeks, A Deathtrap Designer With Morals

What Brent Weeks does is create a playground in very conventional stories. I wouldn’t say he’s rewriting them, but definitely updating. His work is in two separate series: The Night Angel (3 books, 1 novella) and The Lightbringer (4 books). Night Angel is about a remorseful killer-for-hire trying to wash himself clean of a dirty life. Lightbringer has two threads tying together, one of an unassuming young boy who finds out he’s special and destined for great things, the second a riff on The Man In The Iron Mask. It sounds pretty standard, right?

That’s fine. Once Weeks has all the toys setup he lets loose and starts up twist after twist. And not always in the opposite direction of what one would expect. He doesn’t use it like a trick, he’s thoughtful enough we can call it a technique.  Why it works so well is, matched up with a story any of us could call the shots on, the reader can’t ever be sure if he’s going to play a particular scene straight or spin it around. Then his sadistic side comes out and blindsides you. Cruelty is spread over the entire cast, so you’ll never know what position anyone will be in in the next chapter, how that’ll change their priorities, or maybe if they aren’t who they’ve said they were. It got to the point that mid-way through the second Night Angel book, if a character ever had something go their way I’d start grinning like mad because I know that’s only so Weeks can take it away in dramatic fashion. He excels at torture. What he did to his Aspiring King has stayed with me for months. And the beautiful thing is that each time something horrible happens, the story gets better, the characters become stronger (both in storytelling terms as well as in the fictional universe). The artificial limits of vulnerability placed on the different ranks of character is leveled. The excitement this produces can’t be understated because it is the reason to read these books.

But that’s why the ending leaves me bothered by Weeks, by his unwillingness to break convention despite roughing it up so. He litters the landscape with such shocking turns of event that it feels, in the moment to moment frenzy of reading, that anything can happen. Nobody is safe and evil, honestly, looks like the favorite to win. But the story won’t stray from Morality Tale territory. The main character is definitely going to live, learn valuable life lessons, meet one girl who will steal his heart (You only know 3 fucking women! You don’t know what love is!), and uphold virtuous ideas. Yeah, the conscienceless killer with the power of a demi-God fights to install the Good King and make everyone happy. The rebel slots himself into the machinery of what he fought against. Why am I being sheltered? Why does all the fun from before surrender into preachy monologues about Love’s place in the universe? The same writer who had a man eat stale, piss-soaked, bread wants to champion human dignity? Thankfully, The Happy Ending is bought with good people forced into bad situations, so it’s at least palatable.

In fact, Week’s construction of Good and Evil has considerable weight. He doesn’t just gesture toward lofty ideas and say “those”, he builds from the ground up what Good looks like and Evil. The city where most of Night Angel takes place is so thoroughly depraved, the character of the average citizen conveyed with so much careful sympathy, that you won’t be able to stop yourself from really wanting all their problems to go away. It’s the same with Lightbringer. You can cheer for the self-obsessed, pure bad, villain, or imagine how much cooler the world would be with less ego. In this way, the typically uninspiring Good actual deserves victory rather than it just guaranteed it. The horror that needs to be headed off will strike the reader as legitimate horror. If you’re going to write Good vs. Evil, at least make it count, and Weeks does.

Obviously, a man that puts the time into creating solid concepts to hand the story on does absolute wonders with character. It’s a shame that Night Angel suffers here, with a supporting cast that, to a one, outshines the lead. They’re so rich it feels like they got pigeon holed in the roles ascribed them. And the follow-up novella actually features the much more interesting Durzo Blint, though any of the other characters could easily support one. Kylar (the lead of Night Angel), who we’re stuck with, stayed flat for me during all three books. The little bit of character he did show I found grating, from jumping life-styles once he learns the grass is never greener, to having boring life goals (“Settling down” is never acceptable in fiction), only racing around to solve every problem that arises, and the biggest, displaying an astonishing and frustrating disregard for the incredible. He’s “given” a talking “suit”, made by the greatest Mage to ever walk his world, and repeatedly tells it to shut-up. A novella could be written about the suit. Kylar was too much the “Every Man” plot device. “Accidentally” doing things to serve the interests of one party or another (progressing story), but never being conscious of it. He likewise sapped the ending of real impact, which it was set up to deliver.

Lightbringer reveres that status, with a devilishly complex, charming man front and center, but paired with support that feels too comfortable in their roles (exception given to The White). They each do well enough shouldering their weight of the story, they just don’t leap off the page like everyone from Night Angel. It’s how the stories are setup. Night Angel has Kylar finding his way in a crazy world of shifting alliances across multiple parties; Lightbringer has Gavin holding all the cards. All the mysterious history, incredible abilities, fun, ect is sucked up into on man. As events spiral out of his control, I suspect others will claim a greater share of the wealth. 

Spidey Is So Misunderstood

There was so much pissing and moaning when Sony announced Spider-Man would be rebooted. But by end of the third film, he’d married his sweetheart, beaten two generations of his greatest foes, and be embraced by all of New York. People wanted to see where that story went?  I understand the frustration. Despite the emphasis placed on them by the comic-loving crowd, origin stories are typically the least interesting, least thought-out, least fun of all the stories in any heroes cannon. Oh, but when I heard this new story would hew closer to the Ultimate story-line, I got terribly excited. I am of the opinion that Brian Michael Bendis has an intimate friendship with Peter Parker and writes stories about that young man effortlessly and neigh-perfectly. He doesn’t tell stories so much as relates details of an actual life. Without question, of all the different versions of Spider-Man, Ultimate (for me) is the best written, most fun, most pleasurable of them all.

The movie captures a good bit of that. The first act of the film, leading up to the spider bite, isn’t all winks to the audience about what’s to come (Yay). Peter Parker is completely redone and expertly so. Andrew Garfield played this Peter so god damn well I instantly fell in love with him. After Parker’s death in the Ultimate Comics, The Amazing Spider-Man was like seeing my best buddy again. Garfield did this little hesitation with a lot of his lines, kind of a “where to begin…” look that just fit. Bendis wrote Peter with loads of inner dialogue. Just pages and pages of Peter Worries, Obsessions, Errant Thoughts. To put it all in a movie one would have to pause the film regularly just to have Garfield rush through it. Or. One could have a excellent actor give a little pause and it’s all said with a look.

Every review I’d read has mentioned the incredible chemistry between Garfield and Emma Stone.  Not how I saw it. I was so tuned into facial expressions because of Garfield that I was really put off by Stone’s constant ugly and angry faces. Girl just has bug eyes. I couldn’t get past it. I want my boy to have a pretty girl.

I was happy as a clam watching Peter go about his life. There’s enough meat (and likeability with Garfield) in the human aspects to be an enjoyable movie, or at least the preamble before the conflict. Then, once bitten, it’s like the film spasms. None of the care of explanation is carried through the middle act. Peter is throwing himself off buildings to test his new powers (he just walked to the top? Does a smart guy conduct tests where failure is death?), the Lizard makes a lab in a sparklingly clean sewer (even though he could still conduct the same research in his nice office lab), Peter calls up Gwen to tell her the exact name of the antidote to Lizardness… which hasn’t been brought up before and Peter was only back in Oscorp for a brief visit... so I don’t know about that one… The screen fades a bit, the darkness of the theater creeps in, and the thought hits you “this is another bad Super Hero movie”.

Not quite because Holy Shit Martin Sheen is the best father (ironic…). He’s ideal but not a fantasy. Uncle Ben isn’t a caricature of Kindly Uncle, he’s what every man aspires to be. No, it isn’t flashy and I couldn’t give you any memorable quotes, but he’s so perfect the joy comes from just hanging out with him. Of having every moment of life be infused with thoughtful character.

That’s what this film is like. The big moments aren’t like The Avengers, little chunks of humor and fun that anyone could excitedly tell a friend that hasn’t seen it and have them share the moment more or less. “The Hulk fucking smashed the shit out of everyone and everyGod”. The big moments in Amazing are the emotional payoff that have been simmering from a beginning that doesn’t hurry. “Yo, remember when that construction worker totally had Spidey’s back and called in that favor!?”. It pulls together the rough public relations Spidey has, the feeling of actually saving real people (something only Spidey seems capable of. There was a scene in comics where Peter gets to see a beach full of all the people he was ever saved. Nobody else can pull something like that off. The culminative effort and effect of all Spider-Man has done hits you then), as well as providing a satisfying action sequence (the Hero limping on!). That isn’t a good promotional clip but when you’re in the theater it just feels right. It feels really good. Having Peter start wearing his father’s glasses without comment from anyone is another standout moment that doesn’t much standout in a highlight reel, but hot damn if the loss of a father doesn’t slam right into you. Fair warning: bite your tongue when Uncle Ben dies to stifle the cry.

The Amazing Spider-Man is going to get overlooked and passed off as “meh” or “nothing special”. Which I get. The Lizard fits the theme in theory as a villain but comes off as wildly inappropriate. What that dismissal misses is the essence of Spider-Man. Despite the outlandish source of power, Spidey has always felt the most real and honest of all Super Heroes. Decades of comics later, he still has the feel of a guy dressing up in a borderline silly costume and just winging it in real world conditions. Not only does Amazing respect that, it understands it. The middle act is flakey, but the beginning and end (where it matters most) are spot-on. I loved it.

Fire Is Knowledge, Not A Double Mouth

Prometheus is the story of thee most unprofessional, uneducated, scientific crew’s bumbling adventure into a beloved universe. The revelations are flat and the sheer stupidity of the crew is off-putting enough to ruin the few good questions the film does raise.

I don’t wish to catalogue the entirety of stupid actions taken by this “scientific” crew during the movie. But I need to highlight the ones that slapped me so soundly out of any suspension of disbelief that I felt slightly numb afterword. But I want to be clear: I’m not some snooty science know-it-all. I graduated from high school. I don’t honestly believe this crew did.

Spoilers follow.

Here’s a test to see if you’re a better biologist than the one this trillion dollar expedition hired. You’re trapped in a creepy alien facility. All the aliens have been killed mysteriously. A strange stalk / snake  pops out of a nearby puddle. You:

A)     Run away

B)      Attempt to kill it (you’re scared)

C)      Put both your hands and face in front of it and talk to it like it’s a puppy

Why is this man begging to die? How did he suppress his survival instincts enough to behave so badly?

Now you’re another biologist. You’ve found the head of one of the aliens you’ve traveled two years to find against all reasonable expectations. You have it on your high-tech ship. You:

A)     Use them fancy sci-fi scanners that tell you everything about anything! (no thinking required!)

B)      … Just scan it. Those are really good scanners

C)      Jam an electrical spike into the ear to see what happens

What are we doing here? This was the ONLY head you had! How scientific was it to do something irreversible based on a spur of the moment hunch?

There are so many of these moments that I began to believe that mankind had been created as a host for (what will become) the Alien.

[Huge Oh My God Spoiler] The big reveal of the film was that the Engineers created Aliens as a biological weapon, and created humanity. Mysterious alien races that kill themselves with biological weapons gone wrong and are human seems to be in fashion now. Prometheus handles the idea better than most I’ve read. I started looking at human “instincts” and “nature” as perhaps programmed attitudes and behaviors. Instead of saying the crew was all assholes, I began to think of the hostility towards each other as a cultivated behavior. It’s an exciting idea to think of all human behavior as specifically scripted. All of the sudden human history is much richer with meaning. As I write this, and think of you, my audience, I wonder if any of you are unlike me and believe in God. Then I suppose these grand ideas are old hat to you. Where I believe this differs is that God has some eternal plan, and the Engineers are experimenting while creating. The Engineers feel more like a puzzle that’s solvable, while God is just unknowable so don’t bother thinking about it.

What I absolutely HATE about this ploy to introduce a mysterious, ancient, powerful, alien race then reveal it to be human is that it’s too human centric. I think of the ideas like “manifest destiny” and the Earth being the flat center of the universe. I come to science-fiction to see more than humanity. Or at least a convincing pretending. This big, beautiful, universe becomes flat and boring when the answer to everything is “humanity first and always”. Take the reasoning given for the creation of the Aliens. Biological weapon? It’s so shallow. Considering the, obvious, sophistication of technology the Engineer’s possess, along with how brutal the Aliens are, I can’t help but wonder if just making a bigger bomb wouldn’t serve the same purposes. But why that purpose!? Why is it all reduced down to designing a way to kill something? I want my ancient alien races to be damn near ineffable. Something clever, something more. Science-fiction is supposed to show more. Not just futurist guns and bombs with the same old emotions and desires driving everything. I loved the first Alien because, while it was a horror movie, the “evil” wasn’t evil. It was incidentally a horror movie. As far as I could gather from the film, Alien’s were just one species out there in the universe. They would kill you, but nothing personal, life can be “cold” sometimes (though the universe doesn’t have emotions). Now they’re a dumb civilizations dumb idea to kill some unknown thing.

I never know where to go with a movie like this. Would I go see a Prometheus 2? Yeah… I’m still interested in this vision of the universe. Plus I mean, H.R. Giger. But damn this thing was handled poorly. Though it did provide food for thought on the human condition. That can’t be discarded so easily. But as a movie!? Ugh.

Storytelling Is Not A Discrete Section Of The Brain

Recently, I’ve been fairly put off by women in literature, though it isn’t their fault. Descriptions typically tell you little of what the character looks like and a lot about what turns the author on. Breasts will be mentioned first or second on the list of her features, and they will grab many more adjectives than any other feature. Repeat observations on her status, condition, or for use in the particular scene always seems to head back to the breasts. I’m not upset with fetishizing women, I am that this sleazy thought process is so ingrained that authors do it without thinking. As though every reader really only cares about the level of perky to her tits. I’m not a scumbag and I’d like be recognized as such.

Where I think women are really getting beat on is with male fantasies running rampant in the guise of cultural taboo inspection. Recently I’ve read a novel where the twenty-eight year old male accepted, without complaint, his destiny to get with a fourteen year old girl. Another where an eleven year old (female) wanted to marry the early twenty-something (male). I’ve read about a society where women don’t know where babies come from and sex is just something you do with every guy you know. Another that laughed at the concept of breasts being an area of the body to be covered (feh, ankles are scandalous). Men’s role remain unchanged in each of these new incarnations of society. So are we really exploring cultural taboos through literature or are we creating realms of easy women? One could look at the book in question as a social artifact, make some observations on the current status of women as seen by men in whatever time period the book found publication. But I was reading a story and I’d much rather stay there. Does the male reader more easily lose himself in these fantasy worlds by adopting the author’s sexual proclivities? Certainly there are moments within the narrative designed to be a respite, giving the hero satisfaction which extends to the reader. What I feel when I have a woman served on a platter to me is revulsion. The illusion of the author’s GodHand, that feeling when reading that the story is from a genderless being of pure authority, is whisked away so quickly, with so little fan-fair, that I am double shocked by that and also the pervy old man now sitting with me, whispering tales of young women whose body and mind have been scripted to serve a hapless man hero.

Please stop. You are ruining your own story. You are doing so with a smile that is sly to you and creepy to me.

The female partner to the male protagonist is designed to be perfect for him. Saint like. The guy’s a bumbling mess with a mean streak of luck, but she loves him unconditionally from the moment she sees him even though he rarely, if even, says or does anything right by her. Funny that. I wonder if the condition many female characters find themselves in is due to an author’s inability to create a believable coming-together. Which isn’t a slam. Finding a person in this real world can often seem a lucky series of events in which nobody does anything particular to form the union, but it happens anyway, so perhaps personal experience isn’t the deepest well to draw from. What I’m saying is, if she’s only there to have magnificent breasts and provide personal closure for the hero, I’d prefer her left out.  

There is no reason to treat gender as any different than any of the other constructions of story. It should serve the story in some way. Strip away the great tits and what does a weak tag-along do for the hero? I vote nothing. Any calamity that befalls her is a frustration to the story proper. I have rarely, if ever, felt anything but happiness at the prospect of some little tart getting killed. Usually she does something dumb to get into the situation. I think it would be good for the hero. Toughen him up while providing more focus. If there must be a love interest, can they be an honest character?

The lack of female characters in stories is distressing (also: curious) because there is no reason for it. Often times the male lead isn’t all that manly. Though I’m loathe to start drawing lines to decide where and what manliness is. I like that male characters don’t all need to be Conan or worry for half the story if they’re living up to their father’s ideals. The point is, characters themselves, as is, could be shifted to a different body with no difference in overall narrative. I wonder if this area just gets glossed over in an author’s creative process. Perhaps they only think of Who and How someone beats the ArchFiend, and plug in a male just to get the gears moving forward. Perhaps it’s just for comfort. To know the emotions, social markers, ect, and thus be able to handle any contingency the story might present(as stories don’t seem to be all planned from the start).  Though the character is then taken to such ends that personal experience means little to nothing. Is there a different gender reaction to being named the Chosen Hero? Only if the story is located in actual Human time, with the full history guiding perception. I like to think that if creating another world, alien races, and uncontrollable powers, why not make the sexes equal? I read mostly Fantasy and Science-Fiction, but the imbalance is in more stories and in more ways within Fantasy. Makes me think there’s something in the Fantasy story construction process that tilts the mind to naming males in leading roles. Because even though it’s an alternate world, Fantasy is perceived as somewhere in some history, not a future or present. Then are prejudices leaking in by association?

Regardless, I don’t want to see the genre upended for some moral stroke uplifting women. Those false parades produce only a glamorous shell, which would only serve irony to again emphasize women’s shallow role in stories. I want better stories.