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Fi's Five Favorite Hero/Villain Pairings #1: Batman and The Joker

9/29/2013

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Come on, who else could it possibly be?

(Click the links to check out Hero/Villain Pairing #2, #3, #4, and #5. You might also enjoy my Favorite Fictional Couples list entry on The Joker and Harley Quinn, if you can forgive the lack of pictures in my earliest blogging efforts).

Individually, Batman and The Joker are one of my favorite heroes and quite possibly my favorite villain respectively. Put together, they’re magic. The two of them and their relationship are so complex that it’s hard to know where to begin analyzing them for the purpose of a bite-sized blog entry, and I have to fight the urge to stand back, point at them, and scream, “Wow, look at that!”

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Can you feel the epic?
I’ll try to be more coherent. If you’re not familiar with even the absolute fundamentals of Batman… who are you and what the hell are you doing on my blog? Seriously. I mean, I understand having to give out some cliff notes on Shakespeare, but this?

*Deep breaths.*

Okay, okay, here’s how it goes:

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Batman is the superhero alter ego of Bruce Wayne, whose billionaire parents were murdered in front of him by a petty criminal when he was eight years old. He’s spent his life obsessively studying all physical and mental skills that could possibly be of use in fighting back against crime and, as an adult, applying those skills through his Batman persona to protect his super-crime- and ordinary-crime-riddled city of Gotham.
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The Joker has no secret identity and no agree-upon backstory. He’s had plenty of aliases, but whoever he used to be was lost when he detached from reality and became The Joker after a particularly bad day that even he doesn’t remember all the details of. In most interpretations, part of it involved being disfigured by contact with unknown chemicals. In some, this was indirectly caused by Batman interfering in a robbery he was taking part in.

Now, he’s a psychotic killer clown. It’s not as simple as that, of course. He’s an embodiment of chaos and malice, detached from reality and logic, utterly unpredictable. Sometimes he feels like proving that everyone is one bad day away from being like him, sometimes he feels like blowing up the city, sometimes he wants to be recognized as a legitimate comedian, and sometimes he just wants to steal stuff.

Already you’ve got a clash on plenty of levels. Good versus evil, justice versus anarchy.


Batman responds to his life-changing bad day with seriousness, order and nobility. Joker responds to his by completely rejecting those things.

What they’ve got in common doesn’t help matters any either, like mental illness. Yes, Batman too. He’s rational and moral, but he’s got a major god complex and an obsessive-compulsive behavioral pattern bad enough to preclude the possibility of any healthy interpersonal relationships. No psychiatrist would give him a clean bill.

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Not even these guys
Of course, similarities and contrasts aren’t enough to create a great hero/villain dichotomy, just enhance one. The fact that the two of them both act out their opposing philosophies very publicly in the same city, a city that both of them, Batman especially, feel very possessive of, is enough to put them at odds but not enough to add that personal touch that makes them special.

Like Dr. Frankenstein and Seymour Krelborn, Batman’s got the guilt of having created his monster antagonist, at least in his head. Even in the interpretations where Batman had nothing to do with Joker’s accident, he does make the conscious, repeated decision to preserve Joker’s life, knowing how dangerous and incurable he is, and how very far from escape-proof Arkham Asylum is.

Why does he keep on doing it? That’s the crux of their eternal impasse, what locks their two obsessive personalities together. Batman’s on the dark side as heroes go.

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In case you couldn't tell.
But he draws a non-negotiable line at killing. He won’t do what was done to his parents, not to anyone. And it’s that determination, combined with his seriousness, that compels Joker. For all Joker’s wild mood swings, Batman is the one obsession he never forgets for a moment. Batman is the ultimate challenge of incorruptibility. If he can lose control, anyone can.

Likewise, Joker is the one villain out of Batman’s extensive rogues gallery who obsesses him nearly as much as the task of being Batman itself, the one who can get in his head and shake his formidable confidence, just a little, thanks partly to his absolute lack of human decency, mostly to his ever-growing history of going to any lengths necessary to do exactly that.

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Joker can’t actually kill Batman, even if he sometimes thinks he wants to, because he’s built too much of his own identity around their relationship, and Batman can’t kill Joker, because then Joker would win. And so they stay, because that’s the magic of comic books. No matter what happens to either one of them, they’re eternal characters in a floating canon, always waiting for the next chapter, reboot, or reinterpretation.

As Heath Leger’s Joker succinctly puts it,

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"I think you and I are destined to do this forever."
Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi's Five Favorite Hero/Villain Pairings #2: Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes (Misery)

9/24/2013

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(Click the links to read Hero/Villain Pairing #3, #4, and #5)

Misery is a strong contender for my favorite Stephen King book and a lock for my favorite Stephen King movie adaptation. Yes, my being a writer has plenty to do with that fact, and if you don’t already know why, you soon will.

For the purposes of this entry, I’ll be referring to both the book and the movie, because while they’re both excellent standalone pieces, they handle different parts of the relationship well. The book takes advantage of plenty of internal monologue to explore Paul’s side of it more thoroughly than a movie could, but the movie has Kathy Bates, whose performance adds a whole lot of depth to Annie.

If you haven’t read or watched it, here’s how it goes:

Paul is a wildly popular cheesy romance author who’s just killed off his heroine, Misery, so he can reinvent his career. He gets in a car accident on a snowy, secluded mountain road, breaks both his legs, and is rescued by Annie, a former nurse and, in her own words, his number one fan.

The movie does the slow burn creepiness of this next part best.

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Subtle villains aren’t King’s strong suit.
They’re snowed in. Sure, the phone lines are down. Sounds reasonable. Annie’s clearly a lonely shut-in with a stalker-y fangirl crush on Paul and his books, but that’s not too strange. There must be lots of lonely women out there who find comfort in the Misery books. And she did just save his life, that’s gotta earn her the benefit of the doubt.

They get to talking, he opens up about his career doubts and shows her the literary fiction manuscript he’s just finished.

Then the storm passes, the snow plows come through the road to town, and still her phone is out, and she’s not taking him to the hospital. She does go out and get the final Misery book though, and when she reads the ending, creepy turns horrifying.

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Annie’s violent tantrum is the easy part. Her confession that she’s letting the world believe Paul is dead isn’t too much of a shock. The worst comes when her mood swings back to calm. In a scene I’m sure is more difficult for any writer to watch or read than anything the Saw franchise has to offer, she makes Paul to burn the new, non-Misery manuscript, then immediately sets him up at a clunky old typewriter and forces him to write an new Misery book undoing Misery’s death.

****R Rating ahead****

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Most relatable thing ever? Most relatable thing ever.
****Back to PG13****

Annie won’t accept just any sequel, either. She’s not the most sophisticated literary critic, but she knows lazy writing when she sees it, and it’s the one thing she won’t stand for. Well, that and escape attempts. That’s when this happens:

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Fun fact: In the books Misery and The Shining, Annie Wilkes and Jack Torrance wield an axe and a blunt weapon respectively. In their movie adaptations, it’s reversed. I personally think both changes were for the best.
The two of them spend months alone together in Annie’s house working on the book. Much like Seymour and Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, the codependence between them gives them one of the closest relationships you’ll find between hero and villain, but in this case it’s the hero who can’t walk, the hero who is dependent for his very survival, the hero who has to be clever enough to keep giving the villain reasons not to dispose of him. Paul has to keep Annie in her good moods as much as possible, keep her desperate to read the next chapter, and play into her growing romantic fixation on him to survive.

Their isolation makes it impossible for him to avoid being affected by her as well. He never goes full Stockholm syndrome in his head, but he does start to dread her sanest moments as well as her bad ones, because they make him aware of the good, fun person she could have been if she weren’t crazy. More importantly, he grudgingly realizes that having to write to please her is forcing him to be better at it, eventually curing him of his artistic crisis of faith.

Sledgehammers. More effective than writtenkitten.net.

****Spoiler Alert****

In the movie, where much of Paul’s inner progress is lost in translation, he acknowledges Annie’s later influence on him in a one-off line after burning the new Misery book to distract her long enough for him to kill her and escape. In the book, my preferred ending, he burns what Annie thinks is the new Misery book and then publishes the real one and returns to the series with renewed enthusiasm.

So, yeah, this one’s got a happy ending.

****End Spoilers****
​

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi's Five Favorite Hero/Villain Pairings #3: Seymour Krelborn and Audrey II (Little Shop of Horrors)

9/17/2013

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(Click the links to read Hero/Villain Pairing #5 and #4)

This play is awesome, and everyone should see it. The movie is less awesome, due to studio interference, but will make pictures considerably easier to come by for me. Both involve human-eating plants from outer space. That’s about all I can say before one of these:

****Spoiler Alert****

Okay. It’s a tragedy, one of my favorites. At least, the stage version without the forced happy ending is.

For those who don’t know, here’s how it goes:

Seymour is an awkward, insecure orphan who’s been raised and used as unpaid help all his life by the owner of a struggling florist shop. He’s good with plants, and through some convoluted circumstances, he acquires a specimen never before seen (on earth), names it Audrey II after a coworker he has a crush on, and figures out how to keep it alive.

With blood is how.
Well, not at first. It starts small,
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…nursing blood off of Seymour himself, bringing new business into the shop with its novelty value and winning Seymour the approval he’s always craved. But it gets bigger, and hungrier.
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When it gets big enough to talk, and too big to live off of Seymour, it points out how much easier it’s already made his life and promises to get him anything he wants if he’ll keep bringing it fresh blood.
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Something about this deal seems like a bad idea.
This would be an excellent moment to cut and run… but the first plant food candidate makes it so damn easy.
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The original Audrey’s boyfriend… well, he isn’t the kind of guy you feel like rescuing when you see him accidentally asphyxiating while getting high on nitrous oxide. Which of course is exactly what happens. And why waste the body?

Then Seymour’s boss finds out and tries to blackmail him. Oh well, he was a terrible guardian anyway.



Seymour does get Audrey, and fame and fortune as a celebrity gardener, just the way Audrey II promised, but by the time he realizes that Audrey II is planning to infest and conquer the world and decides he can’t take anymore, the plant’s already gotten big and strong enough to devour people whole. Seymour swears to stop feeding it, so it lures the human Audrey close enough and kills her for itself.

Then we get one of my favorite hero/villain confrontations of all time. At least, in the play we do.

Seymour takes the cleaver to Audrey II, realizes he can’t make a dent in the tough outer husk, and jumps in its mouth to hack it apart from the inside. There’s a tense silence… and then Audrey II swallows and spits the cleaver out.

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This is exactly as self-satisfied as a plant smirk can be.
Then the invading plant species gets the final musical number to take over the world.

In some ways, there’s an almost Frankenstein’s monster quality to the relationship between Seymour and Audrey II as well. Audrey II wouldn’t be alive without Seymour. He could destroy it at any time while it’s little, but he figures out how to keep it alive for the sake of his ambitions, and everything it does is ultimately his fault.

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And like Frankenstein's monster, this is what it does.
Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, though, Audrey II is a self-assured and expertly manipulative villain from the very beginning. It’s the monster rolled together with Lady Macbeth. Seymour and Audrey II spend most of the play together, dependent on each other, Audrey II for blood, Seymour for the recognition and success he’s so desperate for.

Audrey II does everything it can to keep him dependent, to keep him from noticing that the human Audrey loved him before he was a success, that he’s smart enough to get a better job, that he could make a life for himself without cheating if only he thought so himself.

They’re as close as parts of one psyche. Audrey II is the devil on Seymour’s shoulder, the self-doubt necessary to cause the snowballing, it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time tragic series of events. It’s the worst part of him, and in the end, in the most literal way, it consumes him.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Hero/Villain Pairings #4: Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Q (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

9/10/2013

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(Also check out Hero/Villain Pairing #5)

I’ve hinted at my love for Q in my mini-list, Fi’s Five Favorite Star Trek Villains, but his relationship with Captain Picard demands its own full entry here.

With Star Trek taking place in one of the most sprawling fictional universes ever created, they’re not the most – for lack of a better word – monogamous of hero/villain pairings. Picard faces new bad guys practically every week and has a few other recurring nemeses, and Q branches out to pester the casts of Deep Space Nine and Voyager when The Next Generation is over, but the dynamic between the two of them is something special.

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Yes, Q dares to take Picard's chair.
Q isn’t the first character to spring to mind as archnemesis material. He’s essentially a trickster god. His omnipotence allows for lots of surrealism and absurdity, so his episodes generally have a lightness to them that doesn’t accompany other recurring villains, like the Cardassians or The Borg.
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Though all three have canonically seen Picard naked.
For main villain credit, though, Q does have the advantage of being the first villain of The Next Generation. He sets the scene for the whole series in the first episode when he intercepts the Enterprise and decides to put humanity on trial for his own amusement.
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This episode isn’t funny. It’s terrifying. It ruthlessly establishes how very far out of its depth humanity is in its exploration of the universe. Picard and the crew have absolutely no recourse against this omnipotent being, no options but to keep humoring and talking to him and hoping that he’ll get bored with them and leave them as they were when he does.

And in the final episode, Q is the one who ties everything together, reminding Picard of how they met and telling him, before sending him on his way again, that the trial never ends.

There’s plenty of silliness in between…

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But that’s what makes their relationship so fascinatingly different from the unrelentingly serious ones. It’s not about trying to destroy each other. All Q really wants out of Picard is attention and amusement to break up his eternity of boredom.

All Picard wants out of Q is to be left alone, and even though he knows Q is all-powerful and could think him out of existence in an instant, he refuses to bend an inch for him or be anything but himself.

Whenever Q shows up with his distinctive introductory sound effect, announcing that everyone is now subject to his whims for an indeterminate period of time, Picard isn’t scared or even seriously angry.

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Go away, Q. I don’t have time for your shit.
(Okay, not a direct quote, but almost)
And that’s exactly what Q finds so interesting about him. Groveling would be boring.

The odd closeness this creates between them comes out in the episode when Q is banished and stripped of his powers by his own kind for being too much of a troublemaker. He can live out a mortal life as anything he wants, and he chooses the human form he’s been using to appear to the crew of the Enterprise and asks Picard to take him in.

Why? He confesses to Picard,
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“Because in all the universe, you are the closest thing I have to a friend.”
Not much changes when Q regains his powers. The two of them continue to clash. Q never stops being a villain, and Picard never stops regarding him as an irritation. And it continues to be fascinating, because Q isn’t a villain who can be fought, but what Picard has done is even more impressive under the circumstances. He’s made an impression on him.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!


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Fi's Five Favorite Hero/Villain Pairings #5: Dr. Frankenstein and the Monster

9/4/2013

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For the month of September, I’m going to be celebrating one of my favorite facets of storytelling, the fascinating, infuriating, sick, downright awful, and intensely powerful relationships between protagonist and antagonist.

At number five on the countdown of my favorite hero/villain pairings, we’ve got one of the big classics, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

First, though, I’m going to have to be a nitpicky English major and clear up a few things. I’m talking about the book, not the many film, stage, and other adaptations that have come since. In said book, Frankenstein is the name of our tragic mad scientist hero (Dr. Victor Frankenstein, to be precise), not the name of his monstrous creation, which is simply referred to as “the monster” and a number of other uncomplimentary monikers.


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The monster is also not green, just so’s ya know.
If you haven’t read it, the words “Frankenstein’s Monster” and the phrase “I’ve created a monster” (not a direct quote from the text but consistent with the spirit) are now common enough parts of the English language that you’re probably aware of the bare basics of their relationship. Man creates monster, is horrified and ultimately destroyed by it.

Here’s how it goes with a little more of the juice left in:

Victor is on the verge of giving up his childhood passion for science, disappointed by the limitations of physics, when he secretly discovers a method to create life. He obsesses over building a person from scratch, has to scale him up considerably to get all the little details right, and tests his idea.

Once the monster is alive, Victor finds him so horrifying and unnatural-looking that he runs out of the room, giving the monster time to escape and brood on his new daddy abandonment issues in peace.

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Classy, Vic.
The monster wanders around for a while, figuring out how to take care of himself, trying to make friends, but everyone runs away terrified of him. He spends months watching one family, learning language from them, secretly doing what he can to help them, only to be chased away when he finally works up the nerve to introduce himself.
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Bizarro unhelpfully warns you there no am spoilers ahead! Why you run?
****Seriously, though, spoiler alert****

Finally, the monster vows revenge on humanity in general and Victor especially. Victor’s tough to get to at first, since he’s busy being a rich, paranoid, self-loathing, reclusive invalid…

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Like this.
…falling into feverish spells and generally scaring the hell out of his parents and his fiancée, Elizabeth (yeah, she’s going to come up again in a bit).

But his little brother is easy enough to find.

The monster strangles the kid and gets the beloved governess, practically another sibling, hanged for it, ripping the family apart. When he finally does get to confront Victor, he makes him an offer. If Victor creates an equally hideous mate for him, to share and understand his loneliness, he’ll leave with her, find an uninhabited bit of jungle, and leave Victor’s remaining family and the rest of humanity alone.

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Hence the name of the apocryphal sequel.
Victor postpones his wedding, runs off to set himself up in a new lab, and tries to work on the bride monster, but then he imagines a world infested with the monsters because of him, backs out and destroys his work.

Of course, the monster finds out and goes back to terrorizing him, starting by murdering his best friend, and threatens ultimate revenge on Victor’s wedding night. Victor can’t wait any longer to end this and get on with his life, so he goes home and somehow manages to convince Elizabeth that he hasn’t been cheating on her in all this time he’s spent cryptically sneaking around. She forgives him, they get married, and he tells her to stay inside that night while he goes out to meet and fight the monster he knows is going to show up.

Because leaving Elizabeth alone sounds like a brilliant idea, if you don’t know about the monster’s romantic streak. Say, because he just tried blackmailing you into creating a bride monster.

Yeah, the monster stands Victor up and kills Elizabeth instead. Victor chases the monster to the arctic to destroy it once and for all, realizes he’s no better at subzero survival than he is at parenting, and dies in the attempt. The monster ends up sobbing over Victor’s body, realizing that revenge hasn’t made his existence any more bearable.

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This is the winning monster and bride pair from the effects makeup show, Faceoff, that’s going to be featured in this year’s Halloween Horror Nights. No, I don’t have much of a tie-in. I’m just throwing them in here because they’re really cool.
Victor Frankenstein and his monster are one of the most iconic and perfect pairs in that very special subset of hero/villain relationships in which one of them exists because of the other. Victor is responsible for the thing that’s ruining his life and the lives of everyone around him, an embodiment of that spirit of curiosity that he loves so much but has to cut himself off from to keep it from overwhelming him.

The monster is completely alone and directionless, dumped into the world without plan or precedent, and Victor is the reason, the only connection the monster has with who and what he is. There’s no way the two of them can avoid having it out in the end.

The monster gets to tell a huge part of the story, when he first explains to Victor what he’s been up to since running away, enough that the book really belongs to both of them.

Frankenstein is effectively two tragedies woven together, two heroes acting as each other’s villains. Victor gets something like the Aristotelian model, a good person with great abilities suffering a great downfall caused by his own mistakes, while the monster gets a revenge tragedy, a good person put in a horribly unfair position becoming a monster in his own right in the pursuit of justice.

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VS.
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Suddenly, I really want to see these two in a fighting videogame.
There’s nothing that could make this pairing any more perfect, so I’m just going to close with a picture of the eighteen-year-old woman who thought them up on a dark, stormy night in 1815.
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Respect.
Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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