Category: Lists

Five Female-Led Comics to Read While Waiting for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Get It Together

11/28/2016

So, is a Black Widow movie ever going to get out of early development?

Will Disney ever get over its fear of having its new superhero sub-department contaminated by the female market segment, and give girls everywhere the stories and toys they’re clamoring to pay good money for?

Will our daughters’ daughters someday be able to live in a world where a movie that lists a female hero’s name second in its title isn’t considered radically progressive?

I don’t know.

But in this particularly difficult time of setback for women, I’d like to take a moment to recognize the fact that we’re living in a renaissance of actual, paper-and-ink comic books that respect and celebrate female power.

I’ve written before about why Harley Quinn is an important character for women in spite of being a terrible role model, and I continue to enjoy her antics, flaws and all, in the New 52, but thankfully, she’s far from being all we have.

So, while you’re waiting and campaigning in righteous frustration to end the shut-out of women in the mainstreamiest of mainstream storytelling, remember to take occasional, much-needed refuge with…

5: Bombshells

This alternate DC timeline follows some of the most prominent female characters of the universe as they develop their identities – independent of the often male-mentored circumstances of their main universe origins – against the backdrop of World War II.

The sexual prejudices of the forties exist here to be faced but never hold the characters down for long, especially once Amanda Waller begins to earmark superpowered women for her alternate universe, Hitler-fighting Suicide Squad – The Bombshells.

4: She-Hulk (Charles Soule)

Sadly, this title didn’t run for long, but I highly recommend grabbing the two volumes that exist.

Jennifer Walters (a.k.a She-Hulk) is the professional woman’s hero. After leaving a prestigious law firm that expected something different from her than good legal work (ostensibly because of her superpowers, but the parallel to her gender is clear), she’s determined to start up her own successful law firm. Naturally, her first solo case drags her into a far-reaching conspiracy that tests her skills, her principles, and most importantly, her ability to count on her substantial brains instead of her physical talent for smashing.

3: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

This is possibly the funniest and most good-hearted comic in existence. It’s self-aware and optimistic, and Doreen Green’s confidence and genuine kindness are wonderfully infectious. She loves her curves, she loves her friends of both the human and squirrel variety, she loves her work helping people, and she goes out of her way to love her villains.

She’s the unbeatable Squirrel Girl, because she’s the hero who takes the time to chat with Galactus about his eating habits, after a discussion on the evolution of gendered pronouns that warms this English major’s heart.

She’s exactly what’s needed for both young girls looking to get into comics that welcome them, and for adult readers who need a break from the doom-and-gloom of other comics.

2: Jessica Jones: Alias

…Then again, sometimes you need a hit of the grown-up dark and serious. That’s where Jessica Jones comes in. She’s the gritty anti-hero with all the flaws and baggage of her most popular and fascinating male counterparts, which makes her refreshing in her own way, because flaws are exactly the critical character component that’s so often lost in the effort to make female characters “strong” enough.

Jessica’s a hardboiled private investigator with a drinking problem and a past made of horror and failure. She’s an inconsiderate, self-destructive mess, and she’s exactly who you want on your side when you need to get to the bottom of a mystery for the right cause. She’s crude and sad and smart and infuriating, and utterly compelling on every page.

1: Ms. Marvel (G. Willow Wilson)

There are no words adequate to express the importance or coolness of Kamala Khan (a.k.a. Ms. Marvel). She has the kind heart and optimism of Squirrel Girl in the #3 spot, but with far less insulation from serious, real-life issues.

Kamala is the new hero of Jersey City, somewhere people like the Avengers don’t tend to pay much attention to protecting. She’s also in the thick of growing up a millennial Muslim girl in the U.S, facing challenges both universal and specific, and always complex and relatably presented.

She’s new to her powers, bringing back the superhero metaphor for the combined terror and empowerment of puberty, and through everything from family fights to bad dates to chaos-sewing visits from Loki, the reader gets to watch her grow into a hero for a new generation.

Got more favorite female-led comics to recommend? Comment below!

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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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #1: The Glass Lampshade

5/30/2016

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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

Fiction Pet Peeve: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Am the Parent, Therefore I Disapprove."

This is a simple one. It’s that moment when a character points out and possibly even protests the terribly insulting thing the plot is doing… to no effect.

Example? Why, I’m glad you asked.

In the final season of Angel, a series of shifts in the show’s focus and one actress’s pregnancy resulted in the main lineup of evil-fighters looking like this:

That’s five men (the green demon is a white actor underneath if you’re keeping score on that front) and one woman. The woman, Fred, is brilliant and thoroughly lovable but also the only member of the team without either superpowers or some level of combat training, making her the go-to damsel.

In the lead up to the series finale, Fred gets implanted with a demon, which is slowly killing her as it gestates and prepares to take over the world.

Desperate to save both the world and herself (because who wouldn’t be?), Fred works long hours in her laboratory looking for a cure, in spite of her deteriorating health. When Wesley, one of her many doting male associates, comes to tell her to rest, she objects with, “No! I’m not just the damsel in distress!”

“I’m better than that!”

Yay! Fred’s reclaiming her agency! Surely the writers have noticed how they’ve been treating her and are about to rectify the problem, and-

Oh, wait, no.

****Spoiler Alert****

Fred’s attempts to save herself come to absolutely nothing, and her soul is eaten by the demon who takes over her body, providing lots of angst for her many admiring male survivors.

****End Spoilers****

This peeve isn’t about the general practice of pointing out problems with fiction from within the fiction (known in storytelling jargon as “lampshading,” hence my little title joke).

It’s a technique that can do wonders under the right circumstances, ideally when the story pointing out the writing sin is a work of meta-satire that successfully manages to be smarter than most stories that commit said sin.

Sidney in Scream makes a complaint of this sort that works, because her respective story takes it to heart, when she tells Ghostface that she doesn’t watch horror movies because the victims are an insulting bunch of busty blondes who “run up the stairs when they should be running out the front door.”

I really AM better than that!

Sidney says this shortly after Ghostface finishes with his busty blonde first victim of the movie (played by Drew Barrymore), but Sidney herself remains competent throughout, outsmarting and outmaneuvering Ghostface, at one point running upstairs to escape through a second story window only after he blocks her attempt for the front door.

Even that opening scene with the death of Casey subverts the tradition Sidney is calling out by actively desexualizing the violence. Casey remains fully clothed in a baggy sweater throughout, and as soon as the scene transitions from flirty meta-banter to physical threat, it turns deadly serious, focusing on audience sympathy for Casey over the more typical creative dismemberment.

This part of the scene is not FUN.

Lampshading can also work when it’s used to write off a practical issue that’s standing in the way of the best possible story.

“Hey, didn’t we used to be a delivery service?”

In the case of this Futurama joke, the show is completely guilty of the sin it’s pointing out, that is, inconsistent accounting for how the characters spend their time and make their income. It works, though, because the strength of Futurama comes from the variety of its zany, episodic plotlines.

No one’s mourning the fact that we don’t spend more time watching the cast delivering packages. This isn’t something that’s central to the point of the story, and there’s no real-life social context attached. It’s an oversight that doesn’t ill-use or insult anything except, mildly, the audience’s long term memory, so once we receive this nod of acknowledgement, we can move on to enjoying the crew's more interesting spacefaring hijinks, satisfied that our intelligence is respected and the creators aren’t trying to slip anything past us.

The lampshade only becomes pointless, worse-than-nothing glass when a work of fiction commits a more real-life serious or story-integral sin and then points it out without doing anything to remedy it, apparently with the mistaken belief that pointing at the problem is the same thing as fixing it.

There’s a scene in City of Bones in which the Shadowhunters have to sneak into a church to raid a secret stash of anti-demon weaponry. So as not to imply that Christianity is the only viable avenue for fighting evil, Jace quickly explains that all organized religions are secretly in on the cause.

“We could just as easily have gone to a synagogue or a mosque.”

Yeah, but you didn’t though, did you, Jace? The lampshade line is there, but Christianity remains the only religion we actually see involved in fighting evil.

Okay, religion is an extremely delicate subject, and if an artist doesn’t feel qualified to represent a real-life culture in fiction, steering clear can sometimes be the wisest course of action, so maybe we can give that one a pass.

Not so much this little gem of a moment in the Twilight book-verse:

“You know, I saw this story on the news last week about controlling, abusive teenage relationships.”

Jacob throws this out there in Eclipse, the book in which Edward disables Bella’s car and physically prevents her from visiting other friends. The joke of this line is presumably intended to come off something like, “Ha ha, Edward and Bella sure are easy to mistake for an abusive relationship, aren’t they? But they’re not, though.”

Except they completely are, and this lampshade does nothing to change how unhealthy they are or how reprehensibly the story romanticizes that abuse.

Should we even touch how bad the Marvel movies have gotten with this lately? Eh, why not, we all know these, right?

Remember that party scene where the Avengers men all acknowledge that, back in their solo franchises, most of them had love interests? They talk for a while about what the ladies are up to and try to one-up each other with stories about how smart/independent/tough/generally awesome their girlfriends are.

That’s really sweet, guys. It’s great that you’re so supportive. Sounds like some of those women are having pretty cool adventures!

…Which we’re never, ever going to see any of, are we? Not a snippet of any of them ever doing anything remotely relevant to any movie that we’re actually watching, ever again. Nope, the narrative follows the men, and the men alone, wherever they go.

But at least we’re going to get some new costumed women soon who might get some narrative focus of their own, right?

…Right?

“It’s about damn time.”

So sayeth Wasp when Hank Pym, her movie-universe father, finally bestows on her her mother’s supersuit, indicating that he’s done being demeaningly overprotective of her.

Yes, Marvel. It is about damn time Hope’s father acknowledges her power (see last week’s peeve). And yes, we get the meta-joke that it is about damn time Marvel movies likewise acknowledge female supers collectively.

It was "about damn time" a long time ago. It was "about damn time" before this post credits tack-on in Ant-Man, and it continues to be "about damn time" far more urgently and dramatically than a 2018 release of a movie titled “Ant-Man and The Wasp” (emphasis mine) can come anywhere close to addressing.

Lampshades alone don’t make problems go away, not if the problems are big enough. Self-deprecatory humor can only buy you so much leeway. Sometimes the only patch for that insulting plot is to just do the thing right in the first place.

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

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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #2: I Am the Parent, Therefore I Disapprove

5/24/2016

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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

Fiction Pet Peeve: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!

As this is a list of fiction pet peeves, and we're approaching the top, it’s probably not necessary to start out by noting the intensity of my loathing for this habit of fictional parents, but I’m going to anyway.

Hate it.

Swinging at it with a red-hot mace hate it.

Okay, let’s get on with this.

I’m talking about those fictional parents who unilaterally and selfishly disapprove of their children growing up and pursuing happiness in any way (especially romantically), while asking us, the audience, to sympathize with their pathologically unreasonable dehumanizing of said children, who often aren’t children at all.

Pictured: A disapproving father and a goddamn assistant district attorney superhero!

Let’s just say it, one of the biggest problems with these fictional parents is that they’re almost always fathers obsessing over maintaining control over their daughters.

This assumption that girls have less of a right or desire to make their own choices and mistakes in the pursuit of adulthood (and sex) than boys do, or that it’s somehow cute and fitting for fathers to feel a sense of possession of their daughters that doesn’t apply to sons or mothers, is a massive real life issue of inequality that fiction more often than not plays for cheap laughs.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

Oh, wait, I decided I like my adopted daughter’s husband after all. Guess I better musically sign over the lease and title. Cue the awwws.

Shudder.

This kind of parental disapproval also gets used, bafflingly, in attempts to make villains sympathetic by supposedly proving that they “care” about someone other than themselves, in spite of the fact that their possessiveness usually demonstrates the exact opposite.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue conflicted sighs.

I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue conflicted sighs.

And as horrible as the gender stereotyping is in all these, that’s not to say that the mother-son, mother-daughter, and father-son versions don’t exist, or that they can’t also be hugely problematic.

Lois’s behavior toward her sons on Malcolm in the Middle, for example, is notoriously nightmarish.

She disapproves of almost everything any of them do, including most of their relationships, plans out each of their lives from beginning to end down to the smallest detail, and applies techniques banned by the Geneva conventions to make them comply with her vision. And yet, Lois as a character is not only played for laughs but played for sympathy, with her actions repeatedly excused and justified as tough love.

As with many overused and oversimplified fictional motifs, there’s of course a tiny grain of truth in here that occasionally gets explored with some actual care. It’s no secret that parents and their children fight, or that parents (ideally) want to protect their children. Sometimes parents are overcautious or slow in recognizing their children’s maturing capabilities and needs, or they project their own experiences on their children beyond the point where it’s helpful, and often parenting mistakes are made with the best intentions.

This is all real, exploration-worthy stuff.

Edna from Hairspray is a perfect positive example of a disapproving fictional parent, one who tries to veto her daughter’s ambitions in an attempt to shield her from reliving her own disappointments, but who eventually learns to trust in her daughter’s self-confidence, becomes her biggest cheerleader, and comes out of her own shell, inspired by her daughter’s example.

King Triton from The Little Mermaid follows a similar pattern.

He certainly crosses a major line when he destroys all of Ariel’s stuff, but he doesn’t do it out of a blanket disapproval of the concept of his daughter growing up and falling in love. In fact, when he first hears the rumor that Ariel’s in love, he’s thrilled for her and can’t wait to meet the object of her affections. There isn’t even a mention of any political restrictions on whom Ariel should marry, being a princess and all. He doesn’t break out a shred of disapproval until he finds out that Eric is human, at which point he flips out over that very specific prejudice, instantly feels horrible about it, and ends up growing to accept Ariel’s choice and celebrate her happiness.

Parents placing a different level of value or different expectations on boys and girls is also a very real issue that can be depicted responsibly. Park's parents in Eleanor & Park are a great example of fictional parents who do this but ultimately learn to accept and respect that their son isn't what they once assumed he should be.

Of course, not all fictional parents have to work out their issues and end up supportive allies of their children by the end. Real life sadly holds truly terrible parents as well, parents who exert control over their children for entirely selfish reasons, without wanting to see them grow into self-reliant adults with happy romantic relationships and full lives. Fiction has a place for those parents too.

Ahem.

That place is not smiling in the opening credits of a show about a heartwarming, would-be appealing family.

The Secret Life of Bees does the extreme negative of the gender issue well, because even though Lily's father is given a slight, grim sort of pity toward the end, he’s fully acknowledged as a bad father. Treating a child as a possession rather than a budding human being due to gender (or for any reason), is bad parenting, and he’s a bad parent. No arguments there.

There’s nothing wrong with unhealthy relationships in fiction, as long as the work doesn’t ask us to believe that they’re anything else.

The point where the disapproving parent triggers this peeve is where a story shrugs off this kind of bad parenting as “just the way parents are,” or, more commonly and insidiously, “just the way fathers with daughters are.”

I’m looking at you, Arrow/Flash/Legends of Tomorrow TV universe.

If you’re a dad with a daughter on these shows, you automatically hate any man she might be romantically involved with. You hate any possibility of her doing anything dangerous which, given the superhero universe, means doing anything at all. In fact, you usually hate the possibility of her ever hearing about the existence of anything dangerous or meaningful or plot-related in any way, unless, in the case of Merlyn, you need to use her for some part of your own scheme which you’ll later claim had something to do with loving her. You fully endorse the use of guns and dishonesty to keep her under control.

Oh, she might call you out on it on occasion, but don’t worry, less than an episode later, she’ll tell you how right unconditionally forgiven you are, because you were “only trying to protect her.”

Then you’ll make a condescending, off-the-shelf joke about how all fathers want to keep their daughters helpless and isolated forever and you just can’t help it and couldn't possibly be expected to.

…Bull…. Shit.

This dysfunction is not inevitable. It is not healthy, and it is not cute. Respecting your adult daughters as human beings is not too lofty an ideal to aspire to. There are plenty of wonderful, supportive parents in the real world, who want their children, daughters included, to chase their dreams and their dream partners and live real, adult lives.

This is what good parents want for their children. The same things they’d want for themselves.

There are even a few of these parents in fiction, though not nearly enough.

Know what I think, Lance, West, and Merlyn? I think if you couldn’t be motivated by disapproving of everything your daughters do for no reason, your shows wouldn’t know what to do with you.

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

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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #3: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!

5/17/2016

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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

If you already know what I’m getting at based on the title above, Horror geek kudos to you. Double kudos if you happen to remember the 2009 3D remake of My Bloody Valentine, to which I will be taking a sledgehammer in this article.

Oh, and for which there will be spoilers, in case you care.

Now, to explain this peeve to anyone who hasn’t guessed it, I’m going to turn the mic over to my good friend, Annie Wilkes.

"The bad guy stuck [Rocketman] in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out, but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned, and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting, 'This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!'"

Thanks, Annie!

In the book version of Misery, Annie expands on this by contrasting it with a different week of her favorite serial, in which the cliffhanger left Rocketman in a crashing plane, and the start of the next episode showed him finding a parachute under his seat.

Maybe not the most likely thing to happen, she admits, but she finds it acceptable. And that’s the real point of this peeve. Drawing the line where manipulation of the audience crosses over into just plain cheating.

That line is crossed when the story lies.

A couple of my favorite movies sadly nudge their toes over this line. Sorry, Ex Machina and Saw II, you’re in the hot seat this week.

Overall, Ex Machina is a seriously smart and intense Sci-Fi thriller, and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend skipping the spoiler section here and watching it asap.

But it does have two little lines in it that drive me crazy…

***Ex Machina spoilers ahead***

"Ava isn't pretending to like you."

Nathan says this to our hero, Caleb, about the flirtation he’s developing with Ava, the artificial intelligence they’re testing together.

What Nathan means in that scene is that he programmed Ava to be capable of sexual interest as a human would be, not to flirt with Caleb in an artificially pre-scripted way.

But later on, when Nathan is trying to ease Caleb out of the head game he’s put him through for the purpose of testing Ava, he proposes, as an alternative to Caleb’s debate between believing that Ava likes him and believing that she’s an imitation of a person liking him, the third option that, “She’s pretending to like you.”

The pause after this suggestion might as well include a "dun dun DUN!" music sting.

What Nathan is saying this time is that Ava is not imitating flirtation because she was programmed to, but because she is conscious and intelligent enough to view Caleb as a means of escape from Nathan’s lab and is manipulating him for this purpose, which turns out to be exactly the case.

It’s a great twist, mostly, but it’s undercut by the She’s not pretending to like you/She is pretending to like you contradiction.

The most satisfying twists are the ones that were hiding unnoticed under our noses the whole time. Twists that come out of nowhere can be okay too, but twists that come out of a place we were explicitly told not to look, those feel like a cheat.

***End Ex Machina spoilers***

Saw II pulls almost exactly the same gambit.

***Saw II spoilers ahead***

The premise of Saw II is that Detective Matthews and a full S.W.A.T team have John Kramer (a.k.a “Jigsaw”) cornered in his lair while one of Jigsaw's deadly games plays out, with Matthews’ son stuck inside it. The twist is that the game has already finished, the monitors in the lair are showing a recording, and that Matthews’ son was being protected throughout the game by a Jigsaw accomplice and is now inside a time-delay safe that will open and reunite him safely with his father, if Matthews can only wait around that long without doing anything rash.

It’s my personal favorite of all the obligatory Saw twists, enough so that it actually topped my list of favorite underrated twist endings.

There’s just one teeny little line you have to ignore, or it ruins everything.

“[You can waste time here until your son] starts to bleed from every orifice he has. Oh yes, there will be blood.”

Jigsaw is referring to the sarin gas that kills the losers of the game, and he’s explicitly stating that this will happen to Matthews’ son in the near future, as if the game is still in progress.

All the other cryptic gibberish Jigsaw feeds Matthews throughout the movie makes sense in retrospect, knowing that the sarin game is over and Matthews’ own game only requires him to sit still while the timer runs down, but this one line has no alternate interpretation that works that way.

It’s just a flat-out lie.

***End Saw II spoilers***

The Ex Machina and Saw II offenses can be somewhat defended by the fact that Nathan and Jigsaw are both untrustworthy characters. They damage the sanctity of their own experiments by lying to their subjects the way they do, which doesn’t seem to mesh with their motivations, but they’re imperfect, not entirely sane people. Jigsaw’s even dying of a brain tumor. It can be rationalized that they’d make a few mistakes and occasionally fail in adhering to the scientific method.

What can’t be excused is when the story lies directly to the audience, without a fallible character as an intermediary.

Your turn, My Bloody Valentine 3D.

This one’s simple. It’s a whodunit slasher movie with a shrinking cast of suspects. Classic! Let’s all try to guess who the killer is before our friends can!

Wait a minute, let’s not.

There’s really no point, not when the culprit, Tom, is effectively absolved not too long into the movie by being locked in a cage while more killing happens outside his reach.

It’s a killer-with-multiple-personalities twist, so some moments can be explained away as an unreliable narrator. Tom interacting with the masked killer, for example, is written off as a hallucination, but this doesn’t work on the cage scene.

The cage is not a hallucination. The pickaxe that the the killer uses to bend the door, trapping Tom inside, is not a hallucination. The big reveal montage showing how everything was done has Tom using the pickaxe to bend the cage shut from the inside, but… Annie, would you like to field this one?

THE PICKAXE WAS ON THE COCK-A-DOODIE OUTSIDE OF THE CAGE!!!!

You’re the best, Annie. Please don’t hurt me.

We enter into fiction expecting to be misled and misdirected a little, sometimes more artfully than others. When we go to a movie called My Bloody Valentine 3D, we should probably expect tricks as tacky as a parachute under Rocketman’s seat. But we always deserve better than the Cock-a-Doodie lie.

It means the difference between a cheap, cheesy good time and the joyless futility of playing a guessing game with Chris Griffin.

Chris: Guess what word I’m thinking of. And it’s not kitty.
Meg: Is it kitty?
Chris: GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

Hey, audience! Guess who the killer is. And it's not Tom.

It's Tom! Betcha didn't see that one coming, did you?

I don’t want to play anymore, do you?

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

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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #4: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

5/9/2016

2 Comments

See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Oh, whom to call out this week! There are so many to choose from. As a completely isolated occurrence, this trope might be a minor annoyance, but what launches it to top five list peeve status is the fact that it happens all the time.

Seriously, go to a summer blockbuster, and you’ve got a good eighty percent chance of witnessing it. Possibly two or three times.

So where to start…

What the hell, let’s just shotgun it.

List not exhaustive. Not remotely.

This is that moment when the hero abandons the love interest (or occasionally another variety of living motivator, as in the case of Ant Man and his daughter below) to go be somewhere more important.

Sometimes this involves saving the world,

Or another world.

Sometimes it’s about personal angst.

Sometimes the hero is literally given no choice.

Sometimes the important someplace else the hero is going is simply away, in some condescending effort to protect the character left behind.

Because of course only the hero knows best.

Sometimes the parting is a tragic tearfest.

Sometimes it only exists implicitly, and the inconvenient abandoned characters are swept unceremoniously under the rug.

Sure, their hitching-a-ride maneuver together in Civil War was cool, but at last report, Hawkeye was retiring to spend time with his wife and kids, and Ant Man had just spent his solo debut movie fighting to clear his name in order to win visitation rights with his daughter.

What the hell are they both doing here at all, much less helping the side of the Civil War conflict that will brand them both international supercriminals? Why is there only a passing moment of questioning this decision for Hawkeye, and none at all for Ant Man?

Not that paying attention to the abandonment scene is necessarily better. Once the hero makes the intention to leave known, whatever the reason, the love interest is then put in the absolute no-win position of playing the part of the whining, nagging, “what about meeee?” hindrance to what needs to be done,

Or saying something to the effect of, “Oh, I understand, of course you’re more important that I am!”

"Come back with your shield, or on it."

This is that moment that draws the line in the sand between primary and secondary characters. Between the characters whose choices matter, and the ones whose choices don’t. Those who will be treated as heroes, and those who will be treated as motivators or obstacles for the plots of those heroes.

Or, in those cases where the abandoned character is inescapably main, it serves as a telling test of the respect the abandoning character (and maybe the author) has for the abandoned character as a decision-maker.

Answer: None.

Okay, there is some emotional human truth hidden in a few of the less egregious instances of this trope.

Most people who enter into a romantic relationships in real life probably struggle at some point with balancing the responsibility to partner and family with the responsibility to self, personal goals, and any non-relationship-related feelings of one’s purpose in life.

It’s not always easy, people screw up, and not all couples can find a functioning balance. That’s a completely legitimate piece of the human experience to explore, and certainly one that would be exacerbated by the lifestyles of superheroes and similar archetypes.

Plus, when we think about the term “hero” as something more than a synonym for “protagonist,” we’re thinking of someone willing to make personal sacrifices for the greater good. Giving up the chance to live a long, happy life so that lots of other people will have that chance falls under that description.

Then there’s the fact that we only have so much room to care about so many main characters at once. Sometimes a story really does demand pushing away the extras to give the hero that big moment. The final Harry Potter book would have lacked a certain amount of that “coming full circle” feeling if Ginny had tagged along on the horcrux hunt with the original central trio, for example.

The issue is that the pervasive and unremitting use of this moment, which sorts one lover onto the hero side of the line and the other onto the passive plot device side, the pattern that emerges is quite clearly, “Romantic love does not require the mutual respect and effort of two equals.”

Worst of all (and truthfully the crux of this peeve) is the way this implication combines with the fact that the vast, vast majority of the heroes who do the abandoning in this trope are male, while the love interests are not only female, but are frequently the sole female representation in the story, or even lazily attempted token examples of female strength.

This compounds the message that “Romantic love does not require the mutual respect and effort of two equals,” making it into “Women exist only as needed to add romantic subplots to the lives of men, and have no priorities or abilities outside of loving men and caring for their children. Men, on the other hand, lead full, varied, meaningful lives which may include romance, women, and children, though these are often dangerously tempting distractions from more important matters.”

A message that gets repeated and re-affirmed over and over and over again, through infinite little fictional moments like these, each with its own excuse of varying flimsiness.

Sigh.

Think I’m going to stay in tonight and rewatch Mad Max: Fury Road.

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

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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #5: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect (and Nothing Else)

5/3/2016

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Seems like time for a new Fi’s Five list, doesn’t it?

A couple years back, I posted a rant (among my favorite articles on this blog to date) about one of my biggest fiction pet peeves: Rape Gang Alley.

This month, I’ll be counting down five other recurring fictional motifs that get under my skin. Some are plain and simple errors, some are common cheap devices that rub me especially the wrong way with their excessive prevalence.

First up, that monster, weapon, place, etc. crafted carefully for maximum dramatic effect… and nothing else.

Example, you ask?

Well, much as it pains me, I’m going to pick on The Hunger Games.

I love-love-love The Hunger Games, so I mostly forgive its wordbuilding flaws for the sake of the great characters and moments said world supports, but the rules of the eponymous game definitely count as an example of That Thing.

They're perfectly designed to set up Katniss's rebellion, which means they're pretty severely unrefined for their intended purpose of subjugation within the universe.

Really, in seventy-four years of forcing teenagers to fight to the death for the amusement of the rich, not one of them has ever considered suicide before Katniss? There’s no “play by the rules or we’ll kill your family” contingency already in place for this?

And if there isn’t such a precedent in play to keep tributes in line, why have none of them ever tried taking their righteous anger out on their captors at the first opportunity before? No one ever thought it might be worth putting up a force field to allay any temptation before Katniss’s stunt?

Sure, Katniss is a rebellious type, but these aren’t huge leaps given her position. No one else went there first? In seventy-four years? Why not? Why are all these loopholes still available?

Because drama wants Katniss to get to do these things and catch the bad guys unprepared.

Or, for a less cerebral, more visceral kind of logic-challenged drama, how about those subterranean monsters from The Descent?

The Descent is a frequent low-level entry on lists of the scariest movies of all time (when said lists acknowledge the existence of movies made within the last twenty years). It follows a group of spelunkers who lose their way in a cave system full of flesh-eating troglodytes, and yes, scary it is.

The problem is that the main weakness of the creatures, the main hope for the heroes, basically the central deciding element of the conflict, is the fact that after evolving for as long as they have in the absence of light, the creatures can’t see.

This allows for a lot of very tense scenes in which the heroes must make as little noise as possible to allow the creatures to pass them by, including a scene in which one of the creatures crawls unknowingly over a living person’s body.

Okay, it’s dramatic, but drama is all the thought that went into that monster design. Animals that evolve to live underground do end up with limited or nonexistent vision, because vision isn’t a priority for survival or mating when there’s no sunlight to see by. Other senses, on the other hand, are a priority when vision isn’t a viable option, and animals that survive and thrive without light adapt to compensate.

Why on earth would a species that’s existed underground long enough to lose its eyesight not have developed a decent sense of smell? How about heat sensing? Even while swimming through rivers of blood, those lost humans have to stand out pretty warm against an underground stone backdrop.

The only possible reason for these creatures to exist this way is to be able to crawl dramatically over potential victims without eating them.

It’s in the same boat those blood testers from Feed that drive me absolutely nuts. Who in their right mind would program a device to give results to the question “am I about to become a zombie?” in the form of dramatically cycling lights, unless their sole priority was to create audience tension?

This gripe isn’t a dismissal of the importance of drama, not by any means. The point of fiction is to make the audience feel something, and writers get a certain level of license to push things in dramatically necessary directions. There’s a responsibility, even, to give the fiction a chance to push further or present its subject more clearly than the cluttered randomness of reality can do alone.

But please, present me with that story in a place that feels possible from every angle, not only head-on. Give me enough internal logic to keep me from thinking my way out, and I’m that much closer to a captive audience.

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

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #1: Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

2/28/2016

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Before we get into the top entry on this list, let’s review this month’s rules: This is a list of characters who should not be liked, not as people, but as characters, for writing gaffe reasons that are insulting, insensitive, or just plain clumsy, and yet for one reason or another, they find a place in my heart.

(Click the links for Favorite Fictional Character That I Shouldn’t Like #2, #3, #4, and #5)

It’s especially important to note this week that my affection in no way cancels out those gaffes.

This week also gets one of these:

****Spoiler Alert Through Season Seven****

And, jeebus, I guess one of these:

****Trigger/content warning****

Okay. *Warmup stretches.*

If you know the show, it should be pretty obvious where I'm going with this. If not...

Why I shouldn't like him:

This. Right here.

All right, slightly more explanation required, I guess. After all, I've got no qualms liking an unforgivable bastard of a character, as a character, if that's the intent. Fiction needs its great villains. There's nothing wrong with that.

The problem here is that's not what you're seeing above. Or at least, it's not supposed to be.

Here's the short version of Spike's storyline:

We're introduced to him in season two as our new big villain, when he displaces the far more boring vampire boss before him, and he's one hell of a memorable bad guy. As in, scary sadistic son of a bitch.

In season four, he gets abducted by a shady government organization that implants an experimental chip in his brain to make him incapable of physically harming humans. He joins up tenuously with the heroes for protection, and for the opportunity to indulge his lust for violence, since the chip leaves him able to fight other demons, which is pretty much how Buffy's "Scooby Gang" spends a dull Wednesday night. They reluctantly accept him as much-needed backup muscle for when Buffy's hands are full, and as an informant on the demon underworld.

Spike slowly develops a genuine attachment to some of the good guys and earns the trust of most of them, to the degree that he's routinely left on bodyguard duty for Buffy's little sister, the show's go-to McGuffin and damsel in seasons 5-7.

Spike and Buffy have a tempestuous sexual relationship, during which Spike repeatedly professes his love and asks to make them official, while Buffy... well, if a skilled team of writers accepted a million dollar bet that they couldn't create fictional, hypothetical proof of the possibility that a situation could theoretically exist in which it might be remotely fair to call a woman a "tease," the result would look a hell of a lot like season six Buffy.

She says no, then yes, then no, then yes. She uses him, and then refuses to acknowledge him when he tries to talk to her about it, and then uses him, and then calls him worthless, and then uses him again.

And again, and again.

When Buffy tries to break it off for good, Spike tries to rape her. (His brain chip doesn't apply to her, because magic).

That's not open to interpretation, by the way. This isn’t me calling out a scene for being badly presented. It’s not a Jaime-and-Cersei-Lannister case of something coming across onscreen differently from the way it might, possibly, arguably have been intended (not that that isn’t bad enough).

I refuse to spend any longer than I already have sifting through eroticized YouTube music videos looking for an unaltered clip of the scene to share with the strong-stomached, but if you want to hunt it down for yourself, the episode title is “Seeing Red.”

Suffice it to say, it's meticulously unambiguous. A point is even specifically made that Spike only stops because Buffy manages to hurt him enough to make him, not because of any spontaneous epiphany on his part.

Anyway, Buffy fights him off, cries for about a minute, and then gets up and carries on with her life pretty much as if nothing happened, going so far as to suggest keeping him as her sister’s guard, while Spike slinks off to wallow in guilt, embarks on a quest to win his soul back (Buffy vampires lose their souls in their transformation), comes back harrowed and cured of his violent urges, reconnects with Buffy on a purer, more emotional level than their physical affair, pulls himself together inspired by her faith in him, yadda yadda....

Do I need to spend words on what's wrong with this picture?

It's a rape plotline revolving around how goddamn hard this is on the perpetrator. How tragic a victim he is in all this, how sorry we should feel for him, how all he needs is for a good woman to love him, and he can change. One little soul-quest, easy as that.

It's also dripping with the implication that no doesn't really mean no, because in all their encounters before "Seeing Red," when Spike tells Buffy that she doesn't mean what she says, the narrative allows him to be right.

It's a story about a woman we're supposed to admire and respect as a symbol of strength, falling in love (for all intents and purposes, quibble all you want about what qualifies as love) with a man who tried to rape her, and we the audience are asked to agree.

If there's a trope in fiction that can piss me off harder than this, I don't ever want to know what it is.

Social justice aside, I'm also going to call plain old clumsiness on this whole plotline.

As if using a rape attempt for the purpose of motivating Spike to go get a soul weren't a terrible enough idea, it’s followed up with a season cliffhanger fake-out in which we're supposed to believe that he’s actually questing for a way to get rid of the chip. There’s lots of militantly cryptic wording about making sure "the bitch gets what she deserves," which serves the triple purpose of killing any sympathy Spike might have left at this point, if there were any, making absolutely no sense with the penitent headspace the larger storyline insists that he's in at this point, and failing as a fakeout for anyone with even a Saturday morning cartoon level of attunement to forced-cryptic phrasing.

And then there’s the ill-defined nature of what a “soul” is supposed to be. Buffy's had a vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend before.

There was plenty of drama in the early seasons revolving around Angel losing his soul and getting it back, and it was always played as two people, the soul and the demon, fighting over one body. Angel, the soul, is a white knight through and through and controls the body when present. Angelus, the demon, is a stone cold psycho. It's night and day. It's not a character with issues, but two characters.

Yes, this dynamic was slowly retconned over time so that characters who got vampirized later on could retain some of their personality, something about the demon that inhabits the victim's body latching onto the most evil tendencies already present and unleashing them, but it's never explained in any solid, satisfactory way, so based on the closest thing we have to a defined set of rules, the show spends five seasons letting us get to know and, against all odds, like the demon that inhabits Spike's body, and then it tries to clinch that liking by handing the reins over to the human soul who, according to those rules, should be regarded as a separate person.

Everything about Spike’s plotline and his relationship with Buffy before the rape attempt gives the appearance of building toward the conclusion that Spike already has a soul for all intents and purposes, if not a human one. It hints that the black-and-white view that most of the Scoobies have of demons versus humans is overly simplistic and unfair. It seems to be leading toward some kind of pivotal epiphany on Buffy's part that will snap her out of the rampaging self-pity fest she's been stuck in all through season six and back to some semblance of the noble, fun-loving, irreverent hero we all know and love.

Nope! Instead we're told that Buffy and her less tolerant Scoobies were right about calling Spike inferior all this time, and that he does need this ill-defined magic bullet of a soul in order to be good enough to be one of them, no matter how much he might try and mean well without it.

What?

And no, no great revelations for Buffy, because after what Spike does, the story has the no-win choice between addressing how awful Buffy’s been, at the peril of implying that it could in any way justify Spike's actions, making this plotline even more offensive and insensitive than it already is, or letting her entire arc of unlikeability off the hook with an unsatisfying fizzle. To its very small credit, it goes with the latter.

Why I Love Him Anyway:

This is the part where all the guys in the audience roll their eyes and loudly wonder why women always fall for the obviously bad guys, and no denying, that's totally part of Spike’s appeal. I could put in my two cents on why that appeal exists at all, but, well, I tried going into it, and it nearly doubled the length of this leviathan of an article, so that's going to have to wait for a more general post of its own.

This one's about what's special about Spike, not general, and there’s a lot of special. His story is like an expertly woven, fine silk tapestry that just happens to be a depiction of a giant middle finger. If you can manage to ignore the big picture, the details are breathtaking.

I went into watching Buffy with the spoiler hanging over me that Spike was going to be a main love interest, and I wanted so much for it to be a lie. No matter how much I liked watching him as a villain or how good their chemistry was, there was just no way Buffy could fall for Spike, this predatory monster who terrorizes her friends and makes jokes that aren't jokes about kidnapping and torturing his ex-girlfriend for leaving him, without it being an insult to her character. I was convinced that no amount of progress could ever make me accept them.

And with the downright artful patience of countless tiny moments, the show did what I would have called the impossible. It made me feel for them as a pair.

There's the moment when Spike finds Buffy crying after her mother's brain tumor is found and sits with her, just sits, wordlessly, helplessly, the only way someone who cares can when a hurt is beyond expression.

There’s the perfectly subtle moment when Willow's temporarily insane girlfriend, Tara, accidentally burns Spike by opening a window to the daylight, and instead of lashing out with his usual defensiveness, Spike brushes off Willow's apologies with honest grace, because before Buffy, he spent the better part of his undeath loving an insane person as well and knows exactly what it's like.

There's the slowly unwinding backstory, which unlike the tragic pasts of so many badboy characters that exist solely as love interests, actually feels like a living, continuing part of who he is.

Spike's someone who's spent his whole life being put down and written off. When he was finally offered approval by a vampire woman, he threw himself, quite literally body and soul, into crafting himself into what he had to be in order to keep that approval, which, in her case, was the flashy killing machine he is when we meet him. And when even she rejects him, he clings desperately to the power that persona gave him, which slips, little by little, as he finds himself questioning whether that was ever what he wanted to be.

Nothing about his backstory excuses the inexcusable things he does, of course, but it does make him believable and relatably vulnerable, and more compelling than any quantity of abstract, detached sympathy points could make him, to a degree where he can carry a story independent of his relationship to our heroine, which is an impressive feat for either a villain or a love interest.

After the long, slow build of this, comes their big, defining moment.

Spike gets captured by the villain of season five, an actual evil god, and refuses under torture to give up the location of Buffy's sister. We've seen him do good things and go to crazy lengths in his attempts to impress Buffy before, but this he does with no expectation of surviving to collect any kind of thank you.

Sorry, Angel, you're not special. If that's not proof of a soul, what is?

Once Buffy and Spike’s relationship, such as it is, actually begins, I'm sold. I'm Team Spike. If anything, I'm rooting for him to find the self-respect to stop taking Buffy's abuse and walk out, if she can't snap out of her own issues enough to treat him like an equal.

But Buffy’s got plenty of reason to have issues, and if anyone ever had a lot to atone for, it's Spike, so the fact that she has so much to apologize to him for in their early relationship feels like it might be just enough to put them on even footing. There’s a sense that they might be two very messed up people who might ultimately be able to find some happiness in each other if they’ll just talk out their problems.

And then...

And then. This. Shit.

Right about here is where I hit the five stages of grieving.

Denial: This isn't happening. It's a dream sequence. One of them is about to wake up.

Anger: I defended you, you monster!

Bargaining: Okay, I got suckered. I forgot who he was. I can be annoyed that his redemption plotline went a little too far with demonstrating his capacity for selflessness if this was going to be the ultimate point, but maybe the plotline is salvageable. Maybe I had this smack in the face coming for buying in, and-

Wait, it's not finished? You're going to do it again? You're sending him on another, shorter, clumsier redemption arc after you just pulled off the near-impossible task of redeeming him once? No. Not cool.

Okay, so maybe the whole Buffy and Spike plotline I've gotten invested in is unsalvageable, but I can still keep my overall love and respect for the show, right? I mean, it’s Buffy! It's a female-led superhero show before that was even a hot issue! It’s created by the incomparable Joss Whedon! It's got a groundbreaking lesbian romance! Surely this is an isolated misstep. Right...?

Wait, hold up.

Here are all the Buffy characters I can think of who are known rapists:

Spike: Tries and fails to rape Buffy, sexually threatens Willow on multiple occasions, later confirmed as having been an active serial rapist in his villain days.

Veruca: Takes advantage of Oz in his werewolf form, knowing he’s temporarily incapable of human-level decision-making.

Faith: Tries to rape and nearly kills Xander, successfully rapes Riley by appearing to him in Buffy’s body (rape by fraud).

Jonathan: Alters the universe to make himself universally beloved and admired, has sex with multiple thereby brainwashed women. These events are not undone or even forgotten when the universe is reset.

Willow: Erases Tara’s memory of the fact that they’re having a fight, leading to sex between them that Tara would not have consented to at the time if she’d had access her full mental faculties.

Warren: Mind controls his ex-girlfriend into sex and then kills her when she recovers and tries to escape.

There's every chance I've missed some, and this is only counting literal rape, not any of the sci-fi and supernatural rape allegories that come up on the show all the time without involving literal sex acts.

And now, here's how many of those characters fight on the side of the heroes in the final confrontation with evil:

Yeah, the show's obsession with redemption, to the point of belittling the importance of the victims' experiences and even implying that they owe their attackers forgiveness and understanding, was always a pervasive theme. It just takes that gut-turningly brutal Spike and Buffy scene to take it to a place too real to ignore.

So, have I made it through sadness into acceptance yet?

Well, I accept that I'll never be able to rationalize a defense for this plotline, and I accept that I'll never give up loving the many pieces of the show that are smart, emotionally powerful, and even socially revolutionary. I can't even give up loving the parts of Spike as a character and Spike and Buffy's relationship that are awesomely effective, before and, yes, even occasionally after the episode that makes them indefensible.

Has the cognitive dissonance caused by this contradiction obsessed me to a Poe-esque degree that ultimately drove me to plan an entire month of blogging around working up to cracking it open and poking its insides with a stick?

... Why do you ask?

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 Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #2: Pocahontas (Disney)

2/21/2016

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Once again, for February this year, I’m counting down my favorite characters who by all rights shouldn't be favorites, and yet something about them never fails to win me over.

Click the links for Favorite Fictional Character (That I Shouldn't Like) #3, #4, and #5.

Next up, we've got one of the beloved Disney princesses of my childhood, but she’s not here for the usual reasons Disney princesses can be difficult to defend.

Why I shouldn't like her:

Mostly because this is an incredibly awkward movie to watch once you're old enough to comprehend things like cultural sensitivity. Disney definitely gained a lot of good intentions between the days of Peter Pan and Pocahontas, but it hadn't quite gathered the competence to back up those good intentions.

In case you ever wondered, no, there's no such thing as a blue corn moon.

Admittedly, Pocahontas isn't a story you want to strive for complete historical accuracy with, because then it would be about a woman who died of smallpox at the age of about twenty-two, after a brief political overseas marriage, and then became best known for a posthumous rumor started by a much older man about how she was totally infatuated with him back when they possibly crossed paths, when she was ten.

At least, we can all hope it was only a rumor.

It's the legend of Pocahontas, the forbidden-love-in-spite-of-the-differences concept, that makes a good movie.

Disney supposedly did its research before realizing exactly how much of the history would be unusable, but somewhere along the way, someone skipped over reasonable solutions like using as much accurate window-dressing that would work in a romantic children's movie as possible, or scrapping the project entirely in favor of something less problematic, and instead the strategy somehow became to include as much randomly generated imitation mysticism as could fit in the script, cloaked in somberly dignified earnestness.

And plenty of magic leaves not native to North America.

This is the same sin of passing off made up gibberish in a fictional representation of a real-life human culture as last week's example, only exponentially worse, since this one’s connected with, you know, real-life genocide.

Okay, enough depressing reality.

Stripped of any real world context and viewed in a bubble, Pocahontas still has the significant storytelling problem that Pocahontas is always right.

Always. She has an infallible moral compass.

See, she has it right here.

She never has anything of substance to learn from her romantic foil, only things to teach him. She's already perfect in every possible way.

How can you even argue with lectures that come with the approval of all the cute animals?

Other characters complain about her unreliability and recklessness, but we're not seriously expected to see those as flaws when said other characters are standing in the way of love and peaceful cooperation. The closest Pocahontas ever gets to imperfection is needing the occasional pep talk from her magic willow tree mentor before making a decision, but even that demonstrates the superior wisdom she derives from her closeness with nature.

Pictured: A Mary-Sue wrapped in a racial stereotype.

Why I love her anyway:

I'm going to date myself pretty dramatically here for a moment. When I was five years old, Pocahontas hit theaters. This was before Mulan, before Princess and the Frog, and way before I processed the concept that movies not made by Disney existed as anything but a curiosity for old people.

I missed out on the movie theater window for some reason and had to endure a five-year-old’s eternity of all my friends talking, singing, and dressing up in celebration of the incomparable awesomeness of their new favorite heroine, until the day the big display of VHS copies finally appeared along the back wall of the Blockbuster, so I could find out for myself.

At long last, I put in the tape, pressed play, and had my pink-loving, tiara-wearing mind utterly blown.

Five-year-old me wasn't an analytical fiction blogger. She had never heard the word “feminism.” She hadn't given a whole lot of thought yet to why Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella weren't quite as much fun as their younger sisters. She didn't understand the history or present of gender prejudice, no more than she knew about the rules of character development or what happened after the founding of the real life Jamestown. She probably couldn't have told you exactly what it was about Pocahontas that compelled her memorize every word, note, and image of it until she could act it out over and over again with the help of her dolls, and some furniture and couch cushions when she ran out of dolls.

But I am, I do, and I can.

Pocahontas wasn't technically the first Disney princess to rescue a prince; Belle, Ariel, and even Jasmine all sort of beat her to that distinction, but only in passing, token moments in larger action sequences, before or after their princes’ flashier, always more plot-essential rescues of them.

Pocahontas was the first Disney princess ever to rescue the prince as the single climactic action of the story.

She doesn't just get her token heroic moment. Her heroism is the point.

I can explain that now, and I can't overstate the revelation it was at the time or the power she had for me because of it.

Pocahontas is brave and principled and has nature superpowers and doesn’t do what she’s told, but most miraculously of all, she never gets taken down a peg because of it and forced to wait for someone else's pardon and rescue like a good princess.

She’s a musical heroine who gets two ballads of her own and a powerful, determined share of the going-to-war montage song, which may be an odd point of appeal, but those songs are one of my forever soft spots, and she wins a guy whose non-saving of her in no way makes him less dreamy.

Sure, she has to give him up to become a diplomatic translator, but he asks her to stay with him, so it counts.

Talk about dating myself, I remember when Mel Gibson's voice was wholesomely crush-worthy.

Adulthood and the study of storytelling have given me a taste for more complex, less cloyingly perfect protagonists, but that first feeling of discovering a heroine who was completely the hero of her story is something I'll never forget.

One might even theorize that it helped create the F.J.R Titchenell you know today.

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 Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #3: Dharma Finkelstein-Montgomery (Dharma & Greg)

2/14/2016

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Once again, for February this year, I’m counting down my favorite characters who by all rights shouldn't be favorites, and yet something about them never fails to win me over.

Click the links for Favorite Fictional Character (That I Shouldn’t Like) #4, and #5.

For those who don't know, Dharma & Greg is a sitcom revolving around the passionate but rocky marriage of an extremely New Age woman and a straight-laced lawyer born of old money.

It's a funny, clever, often heartfelt personal favorite of mine, but being a '90s sitcom, its thoughtfulness is often sacrificed in the name of the joke.

Why I shouldn't like her:

Dharma's the type of character who's very evidently written from the outside in, to her detriment. She comes into existence as the epitome of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" archetype, giving the instant illusion of being a special gem of a character, as women onscreen go, by pure virtue of not being bland and wooden.

Dharma and Greg are presented as equal co-stars of their story, maybe even with a little extra emphasis on Dharma as the breakout character with Greg as her more understated straight man, but in practice, particularly in the early years of the show, her quirky wildness is clearly tailored for the express purposed of getting the desired reaction out of Greg for the sake of his emotional development, and then attached to the surface of her with krazy glue, rather than naturally extending from any organic part of herself.

In the pilot episode, for example, Dharma sees Greg, recognizes him instantly as her soulmate, and asks him out for pie... in another state. They jump on a plane, have the best date of their lives, and end up coming back married.

It's wild! It's spontaneous! It shatters the crushing weight of the rules of what's normal and reasonable that have governed Greg's suffocating existence up to this point!

And it's a completely unrealistic habit for Greg's social opposite, his economic opposite, to have.

Dharma's a yoga instructor at a struggling New Age co-op. She lives in a dilapidated apartment converted from a battery factory, but she loves her life, her parents, her work, and her friends, cares not one bit about financial success, and finds joy in everything. Contrasted with Greg, she's supposed to be walking proof that money can't buy happiness.

She's later shown to be irresponsible and impulsive with money on occasions when it falls into her lap, but the pie excursion isn't Dharma's reaction to suddenly having a rich boyfriend; it's played as a normal, semi-regular thing for her.

How?

And why is she best friends with a barely restrained psychopath?

We're told that things that seem normal to Dharma seem normal to her friend, Jane, as well. They have a shared cultural background and long-built rapport that Greg can't break into. Yet apart from her genuine regard for Dharma, Jane's primary character traits are all somehow related to criminal malice.

Dharma's the kind of person who cries inconsolably when Greg squishes a spider and gives impassioned peace-and-love speeches to powerless city hall paper pushers in defense of her right to put coins in other people's parking meters, but it hardly seems to bother her when Jane suggests poisoning a professional rival with antifreeze in total seriousness and with the not-so-subtle implication that she's done it before.

There's never any explanation given for what their friendship was founded on or why Dharma cuts Jane so much slack, other than someone at the writing desk wanting to give her a best friend who makes Greg as uncomfortable as possible.

Sorry for the minimalist and generic pictures this week, btw. Someone REALLY needs to release the complete Dharma and Greg in digital form, hint hint.

That's not even to mention the inconsistencies in the subcultures Dharma supposedly belongs to. Words like “Wiccan” and “Druid” and “hippie” and “New Age” get casually tossed around with no evident understanding of what they mean or how they're not interchangeable.

The show's representation of the lives of the 1% on Greg’s side may be equally erroneous, I have no way of knowing, but as someone who spent my middle school years in a Waldorf-style homeschooling cooperative, I can pretty confidently call out Dharma's lifestyle as a careless hodgepodge of half-understood mismatched elements seasoned with plenty of plain old making shit up.

Though it does occasionally hit the nail on the head...

Dharma: You know that stuff [cold medicine] doesn't do anything. It just makes you feel better.

Greg: That's what I want!

Why I love her anyway:

As a character designed to provoke a certain reaction from an outside perspective, Dharma's pretty effective. Her hopeless optimism is infectious, and her simple ability to have fun in daily life is something I want to study, isolate, and keep a syringe full of it on my person at all times.

And for a character created from the outside-in, the in part does eventually take effect as the series progresses, with Dharma becoming more consistent and less childish, and Greg's issues being played up as more extreme and trying for her, rather than average and only trying for him.

Dharma's positivity, compassion, and energy make her an influence we should all be so lucky as to have in our lives, but she’s at her best when we get to see the cracks in her faith, including in her own upbringing, with its stifling rejection of both conflict and commitment.

"Every time I get angry, I meditate, and it just bottles it up!"

During the hellish preparations for her parents' long-awaited wedding, she loses her patience and snaps at them:

"You always told me your way was better, because every day you chose to be together. But did you ever stop to consider that there was someone else in that house who woke up every morning wondering if this was the day her parents would choose not to be together?"

Even her faith in her own supposedly predestined relationship is tested. In the make-or-break argument for Dharma and Greg's marriage in the final episode, the crux of all their differences comes out in her exclamation:

"I don't think I can raise a child like that. I don't know if I can raise a child with you."

Those are the moments when she's finally, after her shaky origins, a true co-protagonist, and when I love her the most.

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 Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #4: The Vulcans (Star Trek)

2/7/2016

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Welcome back to my February countdown of favorite characters who by all rights shouldn't be favorites, and yet something about them never fails to win me over.

Click here for Favorite Fictional Character (That I Shouldn’t Like) #5.

This week’s culprit isn’t a single character, but it's the consistent attributes of the Vulcan culture that I have my love-hate relationship with, more than any individual example, so I’m dragging them all into this.

For those who don't know (if any), the Vulcans are that Trek species who claim to be purged of all emotion, with all its pesky, dangerous and unpredictable side effects, and revere pure, perfect logic above all else.

The automatic response to Vulcan philosophy is pretty obvious, and as a writer of fiction, someone whose life's work revolves around making people feel things, maybe it hits me a little extra hard. Without feeling, and without the feelings of others, what's the point of being?

The Vulcans don't only reject the carnal kinds of feelings that so many human religions seek to regulate; even satisfaction derived from things like intellectual discovery and helping others counts as emotion and is therefore un-Vulcan, though Vulcans are expected to participate in those activities anyway in carefully controlled, emotionless ways.

What does that leave to live for?

That's how we emotional humans are supposed to respond to high-and-mighty Vulcan lecturing, however, so that's not necessarily a character failing.

Where the Vulcans really fall apart is on their own terms.

Why I shouldn't like them:

Applied pure logic is impossible.

Period.

Not only impossible for us poor humans with our incurably emotion-addled constitutions, I mean it's a theoretical impossibility.

Observe:

You're in a room, a classic logic puzzle room with two doors leading forward. You can't go back the way you came. Each door offers a clue.

A helpful sign on an empty stretch of wall reads,

Assuming you trust the sign on the wall, which door do you open?

Door #2, of course. Right? Why?

Well, because being a creature of logic, you didn't panic and act on your first impulse to open the door promising true love. You thought things through and realized that the rules told you that neither room is empty, so the sign claiming its room is empty must be lying, and therefore both must be lying, and therefore the room promising true love must contain the tiger, and the other room, by process of elimination, must contain true love.

Go, logic!

Except no, that's not why you picked Door #2. That's how you picked Door #2.

You picked Door #2 because, before you put your logician's hat on, you made the emotional decision that finding your true love is a preferable outcome to being devoured by a tiger.

Go, emotion!

You can try to dress that up as a logical decision, "Oh, I can better live up to my responsibilities if I'm not dead," or "pairing is a function necessary to the continuation of the species," and maybe that'll fly as long as the people you're arguing with are making some unconscious emotional assumptions of their own, but pure logic doesn't dictate that the well-being and continuation of your family or your species or even all life in the universe is an inherently good thing.

That's strictly an emotional truth.

A completely emotionless entity of pure logic would be able to figure out far more complicated puzzles than the one above, puzzles few humans could, and that's a wonderful tool, but first, someone has to tell this emotionless computer the objective.

The objective might be "Find true love and don't die," as in the example above, or "Arrange this wedding seating plan in a way that won't cause any blood feuds," or simply "Solve for X," but whatever it is, one has only to ask "Why?" or "So what?" enough times in order to reach a question to which the only answer is, "Because this matters, damnit!" as explained by someone with feelings.

So this proud, ancient, interplanetary culture built entirely on the emotionless observance of pure logic is itself founded on a logical oversight, and no one notices?

Or they're, what, too scared to say anything about it?

Why I love them anyway:

Like pretty much every Trek species, the Vulcans are less a believably fleshed out fictional culture than they are a caricature of a small facet of human nature, and as such, overlooking the flawed internal logic of their existence, they can be very enticing.

Who hasn't occasionally wished for the ability to switch off irrational feelings, especially fear, to make it easier to do something that seems to make obvious sense?

It would certainly make speaking in meetings easier, even if the unleashed inside of your brain doesn't look like the hell dimension from Event Horizon.

Which everyone's does from time to time, right?

And whenever a Vulcan tells off a human for irrational behavior, part of you wants to tell the Vulcan to stop being a pompous, insensitive ass, but part of you also looks at the irrational behavior of certain less heroic real-life humans, the ones whose "Because it matters, damnit!" reactions somehow fail to trigger in defense of things like humanist fairness but work overtime on defending prejudicial hate or documenting celebrity fashion faux pas, for example, and you want to be the Vulcan.

You want to try to use logic to explain why they're wrong. It's a perversely comforting idea, that everything wrong with humanity might be nothing but a failure of logic, and therefore fixable with logic. If you're an analytical type already, as many Sci-Fi geeks are, that's incredibly tempting to believe.

Even so, much as the simplicity of the Vulcan concept can appeal, my favorite Vulcan moment comes in Deep Space Nine, the Trek series that consistently gives the most complexity and depth to even the sillier reaches of the Trek verse.

In the episode “Take Me Out to the Holosuite,” Captain Sisko rallies his friends to go up against his long-time Vulcan rival, Captain Solok, in a baseball game.

Yes, this happened, in the serious years of the show.

Solok has spent the duration of his and Sisko's careers taking every possible opportunity to take Sisko down a peg, always in an academic, logical forum, of course. He enters into the baseball challenge as a way of demonstrating his superiority physically as well as mentally, which he does.

Sisko and the rest of his mixed-species team get quite thoroughly thrashed by the all-Vulcan opposition but bond over their enjoyment of working together and giving a challenge their best, in true sports movie fashion.

When Solok sees the DS9-ers not crushed by his victory, he criticizes them in a superior, Vulcan manner for celebrating a manufactured victory, prompting a rousing toast among the DS9-ers, "To manufactured victory!"

Solok leaves in a close to a huff as a Vulcan would ever allow himself.

If you're noticing Solok's motivations (frustration, egotism, and obsessive rivalry) to be distinctly emotional, the DS9-ers catch onto that too, in spite of his collected facade.

Is it reading too deeply to speculate that the Vulcan purgation of emotion isn't half so effective as they claim it to be, and that their oh so logical self-presentation is little more than enhanced self-control and a wish of an idea that they cling to as hopelessly as any human viewer might be tempted to do so?

I do hope not.

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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<<Previous

Five Female-Led Comics to Read While Waiting for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Get It Together

Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #1: The Glass Lampshade

Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #2: I Am the Parent, Therefore I Disapprove

Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #3: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!

Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #4: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #5: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect (and Nothing Else)

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #1: Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #2: Pocahontas (Disney)

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #3: Dharma Finkelstein-Montgomery (Dharma & Greg)

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #4: The Vulcans (Star Trek)

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