The Zero/Sum Plot Whammy

“Who knows, and more importantly…who cares?”
– Dr. Ashens

—

SPOILERS

The Black List was a relatively amusing and increasingly ridiculous procedural show supported by the star power of James Spader as the morally ambiguous criminal mastermind Raymond ‘Red’ Reddington.

Pictured: The only reason to see this show.

The ever present issue of whether Red was the main character Elizabeth’s father kept creeping into the narrative but much the same way the classic issue of ‘will-they won’t they’ tends to pop up in shows, where the sexual tension between two characters can never quite be resolved or you (supposedly) lose the drama. So the issue of Elizabeth Keene’s parentage never quite got annoyingly prevalent.

Then Elizabeth died.

This DID get annoying: quickly. There’s a meta-issue when dealing with the death, heel-turn, or ‘big decision’ for a main character and that is this: a series cannot adequately or safely run without a protagonist involved. I’m slightly impressed with The Black List for running episode after episode without Elizabeth with characters constantly confirming that she was DEAD DEAD DEAD.
To be brutally honest though the failings the show began to make themselves known rapidly in succession. Red is an interesting foil but as a main character his mixture of casual evil and secret understanding/planning ahead for everything makes him REALLY dull. Imagine if Professor Moriarty was the main character of a show. It SOUNDS interesting but it would get galling in record time because his motives are purely selfish, he’s unthinkingly cruel at the best of times, and he always ALWAYS is a step ahead of his enemies to the point that he’s impossible to circumvent. Situations are no longer a matter of pluck or luck they’re just a matter of time.
So we were left with Red and a bunch of largely uninteresting side characters wandering around and trying to get revenge for Elizabeth. As I say even though I was sort of cooling off on The Black List before this choice this outright made me bored with the whole proceedings.

Then Elizabeth turned out not to be dead.

Surprise! Only…not really.

Here’s the thing: this wasn’t a shock. Neither would it have been a shock if she had been dead.

This is the issue I’ve chosen to call for now the Zero-Sum Plot Whammy because I like funny titles for things. You may believe you’ve come up with a cool and compelling concept to keep people guessing and interested, but you’ve actually done exactly the opposite.

You’ve provided only two options to a question are both are as inevitable as they are DULL.

Imagine if in the next Star Wars movie Han Solo turned out to be alive. Would you cheer or groan?
Now imagine the point of the next movie was discovering if Han Solo was alive or not. Again, this is NOT interesting. If he’s dead then his death is greeted with a shrug. We went through all the feels we were going to when he died so if he’s still dead that’s perfectly unsurprising and not worth even considering for long.
But if he’s alive likewise it’s really hard to care. His death then feels like a cheat and if the issue is brought up the meta problem raises it’s head again. We can only figure you’re mentioning the whole death situation for two inevitable outcomes.

A lame cheat or an equally lame anticlimax.

I was only mostly dead!

This is why I didn’t largely care for the recent reveal of Captain America as a Hydra agent the whole time.

I wasn’t ‘outraged’ as many have been because frankly the whole concept is so transparently ridiculous it’s more pathetic than infuriating. Again we have two options to consider here…

A: Captain America has always been or just recently became a member of Hydra, which is nonsensical.

or

B: This is a cheat. He’s mind controlled or a clone or it’s a dream sequence or he’ll ‘get better’ or he’ll die. In every single case this is a middle finger to the character for no other reason than cheap publicity.

You might consider a confrontation between a villain and a hero to be on the same wavelength in terms of Zero-Sum Issues and if you aren’t careful they become that way without any veil to hide behind.

Options?

1: Hero defeats villain. Duh. That’s the way stories work.

2: Villain defeats hero. Well, I guess the story is over now.

If this is the sum total, the black and white totality of your story then you’re darn right it feels anticlimactic if to you these are the only two options and your story is stumbling towards them from the offset.

But consider a few of my favorite examples that buck this trend.

1: Lord of the Rings: Hero defeats villain but in the process is so utterly changed he can no longer live in the world he saved.

2: Sonic the Hedgehog: Villain defeats heroes AT THE BEGINNING OF THE STORY.

3: Star Wars: Hero nearly defeats villain and loses his soul in the process.

4: The Dark Knight: Villain defeats hero but hero creates a lie to prevent the villain from winning.

There’s plenty more examples, but you need to find as many options as possible to choose from to make the choice seem less shocking and more obvious.
Even if Big Hero Six the admitted unconventional reveal that the hero’s brother HAD died in the explosion (which apparently vaporized him?) was more of a let down than an amazing revelation to me because I so expected the brother to appear I kept waiting for the inevitable…only to be greeted with the obvious which was treated like a wondrous unique idea.
Same thing with Frozen honestly which from the first advertised itself as ‘unconventional’ so naturally it would have an ‘unconventional’ reveal at the end. The problem for me was that this attempt to circumvent tradition was obvious, forced, and if Maleficent was any guide, literally the only way Disney knows how to go against it’s own formula at this point. The girl is the true love for the girl and the prince is evil. What a twist?
No because the set up was telegraphed and the ending was so proud of itself it made the flimsy excuse for a reveal all the more brittle and irritating, at least to me.

Yeah…THAT’S the way the story went…

Same with the reveal of ‘bad’ characters who suddenly prove to be traitors. How shocking!
Only thing is…it’s not.
If you can predict what a director/writer traditionally dislikes you can sometimes (at least in badly written productions) predict who will do what and when.
Prince of Persia the movie was obvious from the offset because it was a thinly veiled allusion to the Iraq War. I’m not kidding. Despite the game having nothing to do with politics the movie went in a weird tangent, describing swords as ‘weapons of destruction’ and featuring an invading army attacking a pious Muslim city because a greedy man in power lied about it for wealth and glory. It’s not just nonsensical in context it makes the ‘twists’ obvious.
Doesn’t help that the bad guy was Ben Kingsley who was also bald.

I have my doubts he’ll turn out to be a decent fellow…

Same with Kingdom of Heaven. Gee, I wonder if the southern accented crusader will turn out to have lied about the virtuous muslims to start an unjust war?
Same with a lot of procedural shows. Nine times out of ten if a man declares himself a Christian, a conservative or a patriot for no discernible reason it will result in him inevitably being the villain and if someone is suspected of being the villain and is an ethnic person or outright a Muslim with suspected loyalties they will turn out to be wrongly accused.

What? It’s subtle political commentary!

Every head of a corporation is doing bad things for bad reasons.
Every hippie is well meaning and decent.
The first scare in a horror movie is never really the killer/monster, it’s someone playing a prank.
Every soldier is either forthright to a ridiculous degree or damaged and insane.
All bald people are generally bad people (with the exception of Professor X)

Leaving politics aside this generalization is entirely BORING.

It’s like all the atheists being villainous in God is Not Dead and equally irritating.

Profiling no matter the mouth it comes from is sloppy and annoying.

Hyperbole: It just makes us all look silly.

The surprises for me come from when the meta is circumvented deliberately but behind the scenes.

Case in point: In the movie Serenity a major character from the show is killed suddenly and without preamble. This is one of the few decisions by Joss Whedon I can support and it does indeed make the next battle with otherwise main characters very tense because he’s already proven he’s willing to kill them without warning if the situation demands it.

In the movie Hellboy the loudmouth, antagonistic government agent guy who seems to exist to annoy and yell at the main character in the end actually rises to the occasion of fighting and villain and even bonds with the hero in a quiet moment. That was genuinely shocking: that the otherwise stock character had some kind of characterization.

The Dark Knight is one of my favorite movies for this reason. The violence is so quick, especially for an action film, it actually hits home quite solidly and the introduction of an intelligent, funny, and politically active character who is also the villain impressed me along with making another decent character fall to the dark side by playing on his virtues (his interest in fairness) rather than a vice.

The end to The Hunger Games genuinely shocked me because every single clue pointed to two possible conclusions but the main character chose a third option at the very end. Also the typically heroic rebels proved to be not so heroic after all.

The major deaths in Last of the Mohicans are still devastating because the stage is set for the heroes to succeed…and they really don’t. In the end they suffer terrible losses, a hero loses his life and then the one he tried to save almost for no reason than bad luck, a heroic sacrifice goes to waste, a man is murdered after he repents of his sins. It’s gripping, raw, and it plays with conventions not because it’s a hip thing to do but because it’s the way the story, and honestly life itself, tends to work.

Changing a dynamic is impressive if it actually pans out. At the end of The Dark Knight, Batman retires…and rather amazingly in the sequel he’s a broken down, dispirited recluse watching everything he fought for crumble around him. In the recent Captain America: Civil War I’ll admit to being impressed that they actually held to the conviction of making a story that tore The Avengers apart and until the end of the story basically made the villain the winner.
You don’t need to ‘win’ to be a decent person and you sure as hell don’t need to be decent to ‘win’.

Just because Boromir died does not mean he wasn’t a hero.

It’s a mature understanding of these things: considering the world of a story beyond the conventions and tropes while all the while still understanding these that leads to truly inspired and gripping tales I believe.

So instead of making Captain America a Hydra and telling the comic readers ‘screw you’, how much better would it have been if he was suspected of being one? Was he in the wrong place at the wrong time or did he plan on aiding the villain’s cause? Do they have a hold on him? Leaving things ambiguous creates those multiple options to allow speculation.

Granted you as the writer SHOULD know how things are (otherwise you get Lost where questions are answered with more questions then just shrugs) but in making your mysteries populate the suspects list. If the choice is between two people then it’s actually not a mystery: it’s an obvious split between two uninspired decisions for a plot’s benefit, not an audience’s enjoyment.
If you keep being asked ‘So What?’ then you failed as a writer. You’re supposed to make people care.

And you can do that by encouraging audience participation by making them speculate, not making them choose between the lesser of only two evils.

When in doubt consider the example set by The Inklings: C.S Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams.

Joe Schreiber: Bringing Zombies Back to Life

Zombies are dead. Old, tired, and frankly by this point more than a little rotten.
They’re also everywhere and infecting anything they can get their grubby hands on.

Franchises…franchises…

Some point in eagerness to shows like The Walking Dead or movies and games rife with zombies galore and claim now is the golden age of the zombie because of the sheer abundance of them in all forms of media. But just because there’s a lot of something around doesn’t mean that most of it represents laudable quality. There’s so many instances of cheap, throwaway zombie fiction by this point it seems like zombies cropping up in something is a detriment to it, not an advantage. The zombie, like any number of placeholder ideas, has become an excuse for laziness by tacking on a popular concept to distract from a lack of other virtues behind a production. This is probably why so many poor independent showings are quick to embrace the living dead. They’re relatively cheap to portray, they’re well known, and they need little to no explanation.

Some things you just don’t question.

But where was the horror? Where was the shock and disturbing inspiration behind the shambling monsters that had been turned from creatures to fear into parodies, into antiheroes or even love interests. Like Vampires it seems that the idea had outweighed any meaning.
Now they were just a stamp of public approval: a washed out notion without any substance, brainless and moaning meaninglessly.
So zombies, despite their continued popularity, were dead to me.

At least until I listened to the audio book Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber.

If you can ignore a cover like this you have no soul.

The reason I want to share my revelation here is not only my hopes that if you are in any way a fan of zombies and true horror that you check out his works, its that rarely do you witness a miracle and when you do you want to share it.

Joe Schreiber has consistently done what I thought was impossible:
Make Zombies Interesting.

You know me. I tend to look down my nose at tropes as the crutch of authors who have command over every letter of the alphabet and every word of every language ever conceived, but they took the short cut. The reason this irritates me though I came to realize isn’t the tropes themselves, its that nothing is done to expand upon these or reexamine them.
You can point to parodies as a form of reexamination, but to me unless a parody has had a great deal of work put into having some kind theme it amounts to little more than pointing your finger at anything and laughing, expecting others to do the same. That takes very little effort and less talent to pull off.

It takes time, it takes passion, and it takes guts to look at something as dusty as zombies and make it your own, make it fresh, make it compelling and give it a real pair of legs.

(Too many zombie puns. You see how saturated the culture is with these bloody things!)

Death Troopers can be condensed into an accurate but prosaic tagline.
Star Wars with Zombies.

And YOU thought that was just a weird cosplay thing, didn’t you?

For a longer description it is the story of two brothers who have been imprisoned for their rebel sympathies onboard an infamous Imperial prison barge called Purge coping with the death of their father and negotiating the dangerous alien inmates day to day, the struggles of a beleaguered Imperial nurse in the med bay and her medical robot ‘friend’ treating prisoners but dealing with the stigma of being associated with them, and the machinations and tribulations of a Storm Trooper commander who has to deal with conniving leaders and his squad of men while balancing it with his own innate desire to survive any situation. There’s also an artistic Storm Trooper, a surprisingly friendly prison guard who risks his life to make the lives of his charges easier, a band of alien prisoners each with their own cultures and cliques, and a vengeful gang lord with an agenda of his own.

And zombies.

You might not see the major difference between Death Troopers and every other zombie related story ever made from the above description but to me it’s revolutionary.

The cover of Death Troopers shows a Storm Trooper helmet covered in blood and suspended from a meat hook. The TITLE ‘Death Troopers’ lets on from page one that this book will be about Star Wars and zombies. Everyone reading the book will likely be prepared from the offset for exactly what will happen and when. Zombies. We all know them. We’ve seen them hundreds of times before. We’ll probably open with a few chapters about pointless characters and then we’ll get to the parts we all know that are coming: loving descriptions of the same shambling corpses from every other production ever made. Nothing new.
I felt a similar ennui. Having zombies in Star Wars was novel seemingly, but in short order the book would become just another zombie story or just another Star Trek novella.

Then, about twenty chapters into the book, I began to get genuinely uneasy.

The zombies were nowhere to be seen. We got plenty of descriptions of the effects of a virulent disease running rampant in the prison vessel, but for the LONGEST time neither hide nor hair of the walking dead. And EVERY opportunity is there for it too! The Purge is shaken by a strange tractor beam and the power cuts out. A Storm Trooper detachment is sent to investigate a derelict Star Destroyer. Even when eventually there are scenes of main characters wandering the darkened hallways there is still no zombie gratification. There’s hints. There’s some teases but nothing so blatant as a telegraphed jump scare.

The truth hurts.

Instead the majority of the novel is spent establishing an atmosphere, building up characters we can like and if we can’t like them we can at least understand them. The lion’s share of work is poured into making us care before the desert is brought out at last.
And the big slam-bang introduction to the zombies for the first time?
One sentence at the end of a chapter.

“And then he saw them.”

To be honest when the book actually DOES describe the zombies in gruesome detail towards the end, as effective as that could be, nothing chilled me like that sentence.
The denial of what was expected was so refreshing, so tantalizing, so original especially when bolstered by so much substantive character and atmospheric establishment that I found myself truly invested in something as simple as a zombie plot line.

Yes, we’ve all seen it before at face value: disease wreaks havoc on a population of people including the main characters and eventually zombies show up. But Schreiber does the unthinkable and instead of poking fun at the tired ideas, instead of winking at the audience to let them know how hip he is, instead of treating the whole production as some kind of obligation that requires him to follow a set standard of rules, instead he TAKES IT SERIOUSLY.

…because it beats being stupid, that’s why.

You’d be surprised how scary a zombie can be when the people in the universe the zombies exist in do not consider them commonplace, let alone possible.
The fantastic when it’s too thick on the ground become mundane, but when you introduce it bit by bit into the lives of people we’ve come to be interested in I believe it takes on a much more powerful sensibility.
Zombies even in Star Wars are something otherworldly, some inexplicable and unimaginable. When they do show up the characters quickly discern what they are, but they never get used them and so by extension the audience never quite feels familiar or comfortable with even as old and familiar a friend as the walking dead.

Zombies only want love…and brains.

One of the best ways this is accomplished is that the characters in the story, Trig, Kale, Zahara, and Sartorius, are all convinced that whatever story they’re living it’s NOT a zombie story.

Consider The Walking Dead, even Tell Tale Games much praised video game version of the series. There might be some fine writing and character development present in those games, but do you really feel that a story could be told with those characters if zombies weren’t involved? The be all and end all of plot progression in so many zombie stories is the zombies themselves. Without zombies there is no story and oftentimes no characters.

Can you imagine her with a day job?

Not so with Death Troopers. When we’re introduced to our cast they’re all going about their lives entirely independent of the story we see them inhabiting in the moments the book captures. To Trig and Kale the rebel brothers there story is a prison story where daily they have to deal with guards and inmates of different species and if they ever do escape they have their own plans for the future. The nurse Zaraha has a backlog of history that has shaped who she is and this particular joinery of Purge she considers another standard professional stint, not nearly as important as her own plans for later life. Sartorius the Storm Trooper commander until very late in the book practically considers the ensuing zombie issues as mere nuisances compared to his own aspirations of political power or just personal interests.
Everyone is well established for our leads to even regular rank and file Storm Troopers and prisoners named or unnamed as believing that their own lives revolve around their own concerns.
A plague of zombies is the last thing any one of them is expecting, which any sane person might. Because of this I actually found a bond with these characters despite the fact that there was the distance to cross initially of them living in a science fiction universe even before the horror/fantasy of zombies intruded.
It was that slow and steady introduction of an element so fantastic that people who were used to aliens considered it crazy talk that made the most unbelievable elements of story (intelligent droids, weird creatures, giant star ships) that much more probable.

What the…a ZOMBIE?
I’ve seen dragons and wizards and elves before, but this is CRAZY!

It was a master stroke: the suspension of disbelief in one genre with elements from another!

Schreiber also wrote a few other zombie related stories including one set in a Sith academy called Red Harvest which repeated this successful formula I believe to great effect. The initial introduction of the story isn’t to a world we can’t understand, it’s to characters we CAN.

Another cover which begs you to read it.

No matter how odd the idea of a secret training facility in almost magic-like powers on another planet might be, we can however all relate to a young student concerned that he’s about to be shown up in front of his peers. The book gradually piles on the atmosphere by describing the serpentine academy set up. It well establishes the relationships between students and the society in the school and builds into every character a sense that they have their own personalities, their own goals, their own thoughts about the future.
And yet there are differences. Whereas in Death Troopers we got multiple perspectives in a giant space ship here we have confined more personal internal monologues of students plotting their way into the good graces of their masters or how to get back at those who humiliated them. Like Sartorius the Storm Trooper Commander there’s a lot of Sith students we can’t really like morally, but we understand them as people. They’re not just bundles of cruelness and villainy: they’re products of their surroundings and thinking individuals who have come to the decisions as to what their behavior must be in order to survive.
We’re not told ‘these are people you should like’ instead it’s ‘these are PEOPLE. People who may grow and change. People whose decisions matter. People you may see yourself reflected in even if you don’t always want to.”

What do you mean ‘How do I feel?’ I’m just the ditzy girlfriend who gets killed by the monster. I don’t actually HAVE a character, m’kay?

THEN the zombies come on and, like in Death Troopers, Schreiber daringly doesn’t let them out of the box until the last possible moment.

Steven Spielberg when making Jaws intended to have the shark on screen a lot more than it ended up being so, but the prop was leaky and necessitated that poor ‘Bruce’ the shark only showed up on rare occasions. It was unconscious brilliance. People still say that Jaws is one of the scariest monster movies made, and the antagonist is barely ever on screen until the moments when it would be most effective for him to be so. When Bruce shows up its an event.

One broken prop.
One giant leap for horror films.

Between times we get evidence of the shark, people talking about the shark, and the primal, fearful images of deep water. We spend more time with the people than the monster so when the shark begin to attack we feel a sense of loss.

A sense of HORROR as we relate to those being eaten alive.

Needless to say as a die hard fan I picked up a four issue comic which was based on another Schreiber novel Chasing the Dead. Yes, zombies again…but AGAIN Schreiber makes the notion completely fresh and stirring.
Imagine this premise and tell me you wouldn’t want to read it on principal:

A girl and her brother when they were both young encountered a serial killer called The Harvester and in the struggle that followed the brother managed to kill the man with his own weapon. Years later the girl, now grown and with a daughter, receives a telephone call from a mysterious source. She is told that her daughter has been kidnapped and will be killed…unless she follows the specific, and cryptic, instructions of her kidnapper.
Only thing is that the kidnapper uses similar turns of phrase as the killer from her childhood.

This actually doesn’t happen in the comic: they were contractually obligated to remind people there were zombies in the story I suppose.

I read the entire series in a day. That doesn’t happen to me very often. Despite my enjoyment of comics I can find as a rule it very difficult to muddle through even a well drawn comic if the concept is difficult to grasp, the character motivations odd, or the premise convoluted and ridiculous.
Chasing the Dead is simplicity itself from the beginning, but it slowly evolves over time into a complex but never quite irritatingly obtuse horror story. Yes there are zombies but, as if he had a bet with himself, Schreiber waits TWO issues before introducing them.

In his ZOMBIE story.

Let’s face it: by now zombies are bored with themselves.

Can you imagine what kind of pandaemonium would occur if a Walking Dead title came out and it took multiple episodes or chapters to see a zombie, let alone hear about one?

But in Chasing the Dead, as with Red Harvest and Death Troopers, the zombies are like icing on a delicious cake. Without them the stories could actually work fine, but with them the characters and concepts at work breath new life into their aching bones.
And all he has to do is take the idea seriously: treat the zombie mythos with respect.

As silly as something can seem if you care about it you can craft it into something worthwhile. If you care you make the most outlandish things seem plausible; suspend disbelief by yourself believing in what you put forth for others to experience.

Joe Schreiber I think proves that in fiction you CAN have your cake and eat it too. You can have a great story and interesting characters…AND have zombies. The two are neither interconnected nor mutually exclusive. Each of the three stories I mentioned here even ends with a whizz-bang finale involving a pitched battle, sometimes with explosions so you get the whole package.
Who said action had to be ‘mindless’? The fun parts mean so much more if I’ve been brought round to genuinely bother with a fictional universe and its inhabitants. I feel like something has been accomplish rather than just filled space. We can have fun sure and even dumb fun, but it means so much more when we can also care.

It’s not impossible. All it takes is a little class.

So in the end I’ll think of Schreiber whenever anyone trots out the creaky excuses that the tropes have been done to death so why bother giving them new life, that media as a whole is just a pointless playground to relax stressed minds instead of a place where stories can be told with substances and themes and ideas, that no one tries anymore.
Schreiber does, and God bless him for it.

Zombies live again.

Hoo…ray…for Joe Schrei..ber…

Lets see others bring the same spark to the other tropes wandering around. If we’re going to live with tropes for Heaven’s sake make them dress up and act proper!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens…WHAT???

I just saw the trailer for J.J Abrams flagship production for a new generation of Star Wars, a movie projected to have a two hundred million dollar budget.

Now bear in mind I have been known to be wrong my assertions (quite a bit sometimes) and jumping the gun is rarely a way to ensure proper judgement on a matter.

But isn’t a trailer supposed to actually make you want to WATCH the movie in question, even a teaser? Especially a teaser?

Lets take this piece by piece. I include speculation and good old fashioned rage. I was hyped as hell to see the new spin they put to this franchise, wresting it from the incompetent hands of it’s one time creator George Lucas who had turned a once respectable science fiction/fantasy series into a laughing stock.

It’s depressing to me now that watching the new trailer made me think ‘The prequels might have had awful acting and writing…but at least they made me EXCITED to see the films in theaters!’

Even Avatar (a movie I despised) at least in the trailer told me this was something new and wondrous. The story might have been worthless but there was an attempt to put forth a vibrant new world the likes of which the silver screen had never seen before.

On the flip side…

So we kick off with some kind of ‘Not Yoda’ voice declaring ‘An Awakening’. It sounds a little like Benedict Cumberbatch actually which is both good and bad. He was a fine Smaug voice and a great Sherlock, but he hammed up Star Trek: Into Darkness pretty badly. A role it occurs to me that had him making grim pronouncements with cliche language…kind of like the beginning of this trailer.
Then we fade in on the most interesting thing in the world, especially for the first sight of a long dormant beloved series returning to vibrant life after so very long a wait.

We see…a desert. An empty desert.

Enthralling.

We hold on this after fading to it for a good sit. I…just don’t get it. Were they afraid that unless we saw Tatooine we’d forget this was supposed to be Star Wars? Here’s the thing guys. Tatooine…IS BORING! There’s not much that alien or interesting about it. It’s literally a planet covered in sand. It was so boring that Luke Skywalker couldn’t wait to LEAVE it in the first movie and in the prequels when the first movie spent so long wandering around in the same desert wastelands, did the audience thank that movie for doing them favors? Quite the opposite. Naboo might have had annoying frog creatures but at least it had TREES.
So this is our introduction to our new Star Wars: a flat expanse of completely featureless sand.
Honestly I’ve seen zero-budget independent movies with better production values.

Moving on we have our first shock. SURPRISE! BLACK GUY!

That sure doesn’t look like Temuera Morrison.

He looks around and heads off towards…nothing. No spaceships. No groups of other Stormtroopers. No creatures.

He literally just walks off screen like he’s as confused as we are.

Now this guy doesn’t look that Australian to me. Or white. So clearly he isn’t a clone which the previous films all but established that the Stormtroopers were. I guess J.J Abrams is once again bucking the established backstory for his own purposes which is actually fine with me. I always found the Stormtroopers more interesting without them being clones anyway (although it does make our heroes of The Rebel Alliance pretty murderous of loyalist soldiers than given the original trilogy).

So…a Stormtrooper. He’s not a clone. He’s in the desert. Should this mean anything? Get me excited?

Well I guess I’m intrigued but this is a really weird way to kick off the new Star Wars. Not to mention it all but shoves in your face the oft-stated complaint of politically correct devotees everywhere: WHERE ARE THE BLACK PEOPLE IN STAR WARS?

Leaving aside the utterly contemptible condescention assumed that there must be people of every ethnic background crammed into films just to make some kind of quota or to satisfy the poor, huddled minority masses who won’t watch anything unless the people on screen share their pigment, this strikes me as too much compensation. It’s like waving a banner that says THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THIS MOVIE.

Okay. So…is this guy actually a prominent character at all? Does he wander off screen and never come back or is he eaten by a monster seconds after the screen fades out in this scene? Does he have a name? Does he have any lines?

I’m not impressed just because you get to parade your inclusivity, or impression thereof.

Who knows, he might turn out to be the main character, but if that’s the case at least have him be DOING something, not just sweating in the middle of a boring as literal dirt desert.

And from this we smoothly transition to…

What…the…?

Sigh…Jingle Droid.

This…thing…looks like an unholy combination of R2-D2 and one of those push toys you find in preschools. It trundles on it’s fake little CGI way and it’s almost like the mocking spirit of George Lucas itself, sneering at us for hating Jar Jar Binks and daring us to get over this new wholly unnecessary inevitable comic relief. Again, maybe it’s just in the movie for a few seconds or it’s just in the background or it’s a main character. I have no way of knowing.

What I have to ask though is…WHY?

J.J this isn’t very impressive CGI all things considered. It’s not a compelling character by any stretch of the imagination either. I have no idea why you’d want to stick a droid of a trundle wheel unless you honestly just wanted to mess with the thing. Where can it go? Why make something that moves SLOWER than just sticking a pair of tires on it?

I just hope it doesn’t speak in a high pitched voice or something. Or do slapstick. Or become pivotal to the plot.

Or exist.

This one image over any other tells me at least now that Star Wars is not only NOT going to improve with this latest statement, it may somehow impossibly get much, much worse even without George to include his own brand of crazy and pointless.

I could be wrong (I’d like to be) but I can tell a toy plea when I see one.

Star Wars. You used to be unintentionally called children’s entertainment, but it looks like it’s not only literal now, it’s official.

Maybe Disney demanded this thing after Frozen’s Olaf snowman character proved so marketable…sorry…IMPORTANT to the plot for Frozen.

Then we’re in for Stormtoopers in some kind of troop carrier bathed in blue light because they wouldn’t like quite so fake and plasticky if they weren’t.

I always felt that Star Wars could use shaky cam.

But clearly we’re supposed to be impressed again. Look! There’s at LEAST half a dozen of them, and they’re on the world’s most featureless, boring scout ship! Then the door opens revealing…nothing.

Maybe when they finally make a trailer instead of a teaser they’ll finally fill in all the blue screens. Or add props.

Turning now to our inevitable main character, a WOMEN this time!

See guys? J.J’s not sexist OR racist! He just obsesses about gender and ethnic differences!

It’s like a land speeder only bigger, uglier, dumber and harder to park. 

And she’s dressed like Luke Skywalker because if she wasn’t we wouldn’t know she was a hero. Or in a Star Wars movie.

Remember that Star Wars movie that made the mistake of setting parts of it in DIFFERENT climates than we were used to from the previous films? One battle was set on a frozen moon and another scene in a city in the clouds and there were some scenes set in a swamp? NOBODY liked that movie so I’m glad that J.J learned his lesson: change nothing, keep repeating the same ideas and images, and directly ripoff the classic aesthetics for no real reason. That’s what fantasy filmmaking is all about.

Honestly, who even remembers this movie?

So she CGIs off on her big, stupid flying electric razor and suddenly we switch to X-Wngs!

I don’t know if this is actually supposed to be Zev Senesca (AKA Rogue 2 who finds Luke Skywalker) especially since the actor playing the character passed away, but it sure looks like him, and it would also be the first indication I was actually watching an official Star Wars movie instead of a fan-film or the trailer for a video game.

Then the X-Wings fly pointlessly close enough to the lake to cause it to flare up beneath them. It’s all very pretty I suppose, but the question does arise: WHY ARE THEY CGI? Seriously? We SAW Abrams standing with a real X-Wing model with working cockpit during a charity stream. Lucas got by fine without making his X-Wings CGI once, and you can’t tell me they had to be CGI to pull off the water trick. Ever thought about CGI on the water but NOT on the models? That way they might actually look…real? Maybe? Am I a million years behind the times or is this too much to expect?

I hate un-skippable cutscenes.

And the next scene…will probably live in infamy.

Here we are in a frozen forest directed in such a way I swear with a few downgrades to the costume and upcoming special effect you’d swear this was filmed in someone’s backyard during the winter.

A guy in black robes staggers across the snow and draws a lightsaber. I’ll say this at least: it’s the first and only saber in the teaser. That must have taken a lot of restraint, especially for Disney which was probably going through the footage and looking for all instances of those shiny glow-sticks that kids love to buy in bulk.

This guy (clearly a Sith or some kind of proximally) draws his saber and for a moment I get excited. That sound! That hum and that glow! It’s like my childhood has come again! I’ve been waiting YEARS to see light sabers again in a real Star Wars movie and here we are at last. I’m almost ready to forgive the wonky directing, the pompous and pointless narrator, the unimpressive and pointless CGI just for the chance to see one of the most original, iconic, simple and elegant weapons in history blaze forth once again finally showing once and for all that you don’t need stupid gimmicks and extraneous effects, all you need is an inspired concept and imagination and…

Necessary!

Ugh…

It had to have some kind of stupid extra feature, because God knows everyone felt that Star Wars Episode 1 was pretty disappointing, but the fact that Darth Maul had a TWO-BLADED lightsaber made up for everything.

This is again trying so hard, and at the moment appearing to fail equally badly. It seems like an attempt to one up Episode 1 with something cool added to the lightsaber idea. In the trailer there’s even a pause before the two little blades pop out as if the audience is supposed to gasp in shock at the ingenuity and wonder at the possibilities…instead of laugh at the concept of a LASER SWORD with a hilt MADE OUT OF LASERS.

Again notable is the fact that his guy is pulling out his sword in order to fight…nobody. Maybe they forgot to add the effect or he just heard a twig snap or he’s just ticked off for no reason today and wanted to vent. It all might prove to be a genius move and a great idea leading to a really awesome battle.

But for now, like so much of this trailer, it strikes me as proving that Star Wars is washed up and out of ideas rather than suggesting otherwise. We got a cross-shaped light saber! Why?

To…block lightsabers I guess? Does he have a light dagger to fight with in his off hand?

Or is it just there to make light sabers ‘new’ so they can be marketed all over again?

I’ll reserve judgement…except when I don’t. It’s probably the last unfortunately.

And after wading through this cavalcade of apathy, retread, and surpassingly lifeless clips we have to close out with a bang, right? We need a final image of cement the notion that Star Wars is BACK baby!

You’re going to pre-order tickets now to get ahead of the rush because this last image is going to blow your socks off so hard your feet will go with them. This is it. The showstopper. That moment in the teaser everyone is going to go back to over and over again to marvel at the detail and technical wizardry on display, the sights and sounds they’ve never seen before.

This is it. The main Star Wars theme is going to kick in and we’re going to see something amazing followed by the title at last to prove once and for all that J.J isn’t half-assing this. He’s bringing it back, kicking it into gear, and setting it loose on the world!

Yay.

J.J is half-assing this.

I might be proved wrong about all my speculations, but this is pretty damning right here. The Falcon is CGI. The Tie-Fighters are CGI. The landscape they’re both flying over is CGI.

It looks like a video game cutscene, and Blizzard actually makes better cutscenes than this!

Did I lie?

And the final slap in the face in the title. Besides the fact that the font in the middle of the words makes it look even MORE like a fan-film, it’s also missing something.

Episode $$$

There’s no number. I know that J.J did the same thing on Star Trek, but numbering those films was never as important since they only usually had tangental connections at best. Star Wars however is an ongoing story told in segments. Going back to its inception the whole idea came about because of movie serials which were told in one continuous stream, each chapter concerning different events but wrapped up in the universe of the whole.

Taking away the number seems like the last definitive proof that this Star Wars has detached from the previous films.

That won’t stop it from leeching off the fan base, echoing ideas (because it has no new ones) and banking on nostalgia instead of anything original. But it won’t play into the rich lore because who has time for that? It will trot out the aging actors so the fans can squee and then let them drift off screen. It will rely on computers over all the practical effects they promised. Notice how there wasn’t any real hints at plot? Because that’s probably been sidelined to make way for more pandering and CG filler.

It just seems again and again to take the easy way out, and then it has the gall to expect me to be impressed?

I’m sorry. I was excited, but this anti-teaser made me bored. It’s just another cash-in.

If the trailer proves me wrong then I’ll happily declare myself a fool and pessimist.

For now…I miss the Christmas Special.

At least it had new ideas and didn’t use CGI as a crutch.

Sonic Boo: The Importance of a World

No, I didn’t forget the ‘M’ in the title. You probably supposed my review of the show Sonic Boom would be a negative one out of the gate. I tend to be pretty harsh when it comes to entertainment’s foibles, I’m a fan of Sonic when he takes chances and not when he’s complacent to some kind of pointless dumbing down of character, and I’m not fond of kid’s shows that actively diminish IQs. It doesn’t help that the game Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is also apparently an unpolished, largely unfinished mess which is making some fondly look back to the glory days of Sonic 2006. So I could just spend my time on this journal ragging on the show or the game for the numerous little nitpicks as well as big gaping plot holes, quality issues, and just plain lazy pandering steps that all backfired in such a big way as to make even me who was that close to being a die-hard fan nearly concede that Sonic as a franchise might be not only dead but also buried with a stake through it’s heart by this point. OR… I can do something a little more constructive and explain what I feel is the major issue that crippled this reinvention from the word ‘go’. Sonic as a character and as a franchise has managed to poke its head up above the cloud of pretender mascots by virtue of one thing I’d argue: a definable world. Not necessarily a terribly original one initially or one that made total sense all things considered, but in the original games to about the Adventures series there was some attempt to surround Sonic with a consistent cast of characters, story elements, and even locations that played a part in his journey’s like South Island and Station Square. Sonic was forging his own identity, especially pulling away from undue association with his closest rival Mario who also had his own identity, his own world to inhabit. The Mushroom Kingdom is unmistakable from the zones in Sonic while likewise Dr. Egg Man/Robotnik was not just a carbon copy of Bowser. Sonic was trying to be something else and something definably itself; the big stepping off point which kept that series alive when other mascots like Aero the Acrobat, Bubsy, Awesome Possum, and numerous others fell by the wayside. None of these pulled themselves together enough to have a united mythos, in fact each game in their series seemed like a completely different universe with only vague associated elements to even remind you that the game had any ties to their franchises. But Sonic had iconography: the rings, the loops, the robot enemies, the various companions Sonic would fight along side. Sonic had distinguishable music, style, and yes…attitude.

Sonic once upon a time.

That of course brings us to The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog (SATAM). Both of these shows displayed essentially the two different directions the series could take: a madcap poorly defined colorful character who was not all that different or memorable compared to any other cartoon…or a remarkably daring departure in which all the desperate elements built up over the years were united in a single story with continuity, with concepts that went beyond the simplicity of a game into something verging on a small scale science fiction epic. Adventures was perfectly serviceable as an energetic but forgettable foray into children’s entertainment, but SATAM combined Sonic with a strong backing story and world transforming Sonic from just another mascot into a wholly realized sub-universe of characters and history. Just as the still ongoing comic series in the both America and the UK which not only tell their own stories based on the same concepts but are also notable as THE LONGEST RUNNING FRANCHISE BASED COMIC SERIES EVER MADE.

Sonic in a dark story involving interspecies warfare? Nah…that could never happen!

Transformers dropped off and then picked up again. G.I Joe had a resurgence after the movies injected a little life into its veins and there’s been several one shot comics bringing back nostalgic stories for one last go around…but Sonic has not only never left it’s still going. There is so many opportunities to tell stories that Sonic in the comic sense is like the Marvel and DC series with some comic tales based on the past, present, and future of his world without even resorting to showing him on the page. Name another video game/tv show based comic series which has spinoffs devoted entirely to side characters. Sonic has had SERIES based on the adventures of Knuckles. KNUCKLES! The same one-note buff guy that the latest incarnation of Sonic hasn’t even bothered to give any personality let alone a backstory or identity. And therein lies the issue. Where is Sonic Boom set? When is it set? Why are there some animals like Sonic and his friends (and random other ones) who are anthropomorphic in appearance, yet one episode of the show has Sticks the Badger looking for a PET? So…some animals are like regular animals? Why? Are there un-anthro versions of hedgehogs or echidnas or badgers? Where did Dr. Eggman come from? Why is he the only human (I assume he’s a human) in the world in EITHER the game or the show? Why does he only have a relatively small island fortress and why does he care what happens to Sonic and company? By the same token, why does Lyric in the game? He’s one of the ‘ancients’ is he? So why do ancients want to replace all living things with robots? And if he does, how is he any different from Dr. Eggman? The answer to all of this is WHO CARES?

Even Sonic barely cares anymore.

And that’s not a dismissive shrug on my part, it’s a genuine question. It seems nobody cared, not the animators, the writers, the producers, the actors…no one. Sonic has literally been stripped of all meaning, pulled from his world and left to just bumble about in a colorful void of purposelessness. The literal message we’re getting here is that no one cares about Sonic, and neither do the people handling him now either. Why does he have sports tape around his limbs? It makes him look ‘cool’ I guess. Why does he live in a beach house with Tails? Come to think of it, where are Tails’ parents? Where are his parents? Where are Amy’s? Are they all the same age or are some of them younger or older? What motivates any of them? Clearly Sonic doesn’t want to have Eggman or anyone else take over the world…but why? Does he have plans for the future? Does he have some history with any of these characters? Does he have any personal principals driving his decisions? Does he even have any quirks of character? The answer again is WHO CARES. For those complaining that in the past Sonic has had no discernible character this is like a parody of that concern. Sonic has been stripped down so far that we’ve struck bone and are left with an empty mascot all over again. He has no personality beyond the actor doing an impression of past Sonic actors. He’s a copy of a copy of a copy.

It says here you now officially have no personality.

Here’s another thing that might startle you (or not): My Little Pony did it better. YES. My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is a children’s television show and intended to be one and it has colorful characters, silly humor, and doesn’t always make much sense…but STILL. If you ask me who Pinkie Pie is I can tell you, and anyone could tell you after watching a few episodes, what makes her tick, her quirks of personality, her history, her interests, her fears, her relationships, her goals and motivations. I can even practically tell you her age! There’s a scene where she talks with her friend Fluttershy and is told ‘I’m a year older than you.’ That’s not specific, granted, but it’s SOMETHING. It’s an implication that ages exist in the universe of the characters and that they have meaning and difference.

Pictured in this scene: More character development than a video game and a television series combined.

Ask me anything about Sonic and his gang after watching every aired episode of Sonic Boom so far? I can’t tell you anything. Sonic, Amy, Tails and Knuckles are cardboard. Even Sticks is like a halfhearted attempt to recreate Pinkie Pie, except that as I noted with Pinkie some effort was put into making Pinkie a person in her own right. Sticks might as well be a synopsis: ‘She’s a paranoid weirdo’. Okay…so…why? Because she lives in the woods? Is she younger than she looks? Nope. She’s just weird. As for Tails he likes to invent things. Why? Because he does. Literally, that’s all. No indication he has any goals in doing so or any history or personality to prompt what he does. He makes stuff because that’s what his CHARACTER does. He’s a tool for the plot, not a person. Knuckles I think is supposed to be a generic jock type who only cares about himself. That’s not only cliche it’s also really uninteresting because he’s not supposed to be a villain, he’s supposed to be a hero. Why would I care about someone so self absorbed they are verging on losing association with reality? There are scenes where Knuckles ignores what’s going on around him because he’s more interested in himself. That’s not exactly heroic behavior. Nor does it actually tell us anything about him. So he’s a jerk…so what? Amy acts like a psychiatrist and juggles sometimes. Is she a showman? Does she have an interest in psychiatry? Nobody cares. She does whatever as long as it’s funny.

Sports tape = Character

Again going back to MLP, there were some real risks taken with the characters on the show when it came to what they did and when. Kids don’t always like or understand emotional scenes, but shielding them from bad feelings entirely does them no good at all. There are episodes of MLP in which the fun loving Pinkie is left alone or neglected, and suddenly her character trait which by itself would seem tailored to be a joke is taken in a whole new direction. Pinkie examines herself, the fact that perhaps at times she IS a joke…and that makes her very insecure and unhappy. The very notion of comic relief is subverted because the character has stepped outside of the cliche to realize that sometimes they playact their part without knowing what to do if that act ever falls through. Name another character recently who reexamined their own context and even second-gussed their reasons for being the way they are. But Sonic Boom doesn’t care. From now until the end of time Knuckles will be a self-absorbed jock most likely. Nothing anyone on the show or in the game does has any consequences on purpose. There’s times the characters fight but it’s as contrived in execution as it is in conclusion. And are these really lessons we want kids to learn? Not everything kids watch or enjoy has to have a ‘lesson’ (and some ‘lessons’ they do get are very poorly delivered) but everything a child experiences becomes a part of their data bank to call up throughout their lives if it leaves an impression. A kid isn’t just watching television to turn off their minds, they’re doing it to feed their minds as well. And Sonic Boom is brain starvation. No characters. No ideas. No continuity. No logic. No world.

This is your brain on Sonic Boom.

In MLP the first episode was partially devoted to not only the history but the mythology of the world even before we met the main character. In Sonic Boom the first episode through the last aired so far hasn’t had one detour to find out anything about our cast or where they live at all. It’s just been a sequence of events meant solely to pad out time and provide leeway for a few tepid jokes. And even the jokes don’t make any sense. I KNOW it’s for kids, but do kids not care about logic? When I was a kid things that didn’t make sense infuriated me, especially if the person made no effort to explain them. Dr. Eggman when lifting up a robot with his flying vehicle says ‘You might want to burn some calories!’ Um…it’s a ROBOT. Is the joke supposed to be that Eggman is stupid? Yes it’s a play on the robot being called Burn Bot but even that makes no sense. Literally none. Eggman admits that Burn Bot can’t burn anything. That’s not funny. That’s just stupid. And it’s not even stupid in the context of someone IN the show doing some ridiculous. It’s the writers all but saying ‘We don’t care.’ straight to your face, and laughing about it. In MLP there’s a scene where the characters joke about a bowl of punch being ‘Spiked’ since the dragon named Spike has fallen asleep inside of it. Now granted kids might not understand the reference, but it actually seems to say something interesting about MLP as a world. The reference makes sense in context because, weirdly enough, to the cast it makes sense as a play on words. Apparently in the MLP universe ‘spiking’ a drink is something that actually exists in popular knowledge. Weird for a kid’s show, yes, but at least it makes some kind of logical sense. The universe hasn’t warped just for the sake of a pun.

At least there haven’t been any jokes about ‘chasing the dragon’…yet.

But in Sonic Boom there are so many, many moments in which the laws of reality break in order to facilitate a humorous moment. Sticks is shown to be kicking robots and breaking them to pieces…but the next moment she’s charged a giant robot and is ineffectually hitting it with her wooden boomerang. Why? Because it’s funny when characters get frustrated trying to do things that are impossible. Why however is she unable to take on a larger robot when smaller robots she can literally kick to death earlier? No reason. The world broke so that the ‘joke’ would work. And why is there buttons on a table? There’s a scene in one episode where a table is scene in the foreground and it appears to have a collection of buttons and a screen on the side? WHY? Does the table activate a holographic game of something like in Star Wars? Does it heat up like a microwave? It looks like the table top is made out of wood so probably not. Does the little screen turn on? Did Tails make this table or did he and Sonic buy it somewhere? Why if they have so much technology does their little house run on wind power and if it does how can they have electric powered tables with so little energy to expend?

Seriously…WHY DOES THE TABLE HAVE BUTTONS ON IT?!?

I’m nitpicking now. But seriously. For me the table was the last straw. Nobody cares so neither will I. Until someone shows some effort, some passion, and maybe a bit of sense Sonic needs a nice long dirt nap.

Destiny: Fun Game, Bad Plot

This is a bit of a disturbing fad it seems: absolutely gorgeous and lovingly crafted productions which have at their center the most cliche riddled and ultimately meaningless fluff. Maybe I’m the only one this bothers, but it bothers me A LOT.

Bungie’s Destiny is an undeniably beautiful game with an A-List talent across the board from voice actors to animators to programers. It looks at the very least moderately entertaining, although it owes a lot all too clearly to games like Borderlands and Call of Duty. Yes these games are practically sure things when it comes to printing money and it all looks very decently polished. You might argue you can’t fault a video game for being a video game and a well composed one at that with pretty music, pretty graphics, and smooth responsive (if derivative) gameplay.

But then, if you’re me, you look at the story…

Halo isn’t exactly Shakespeare, but it had it’s own identity by doing some things differently then earlier sci-fi outings. The most prominent idea is in the title itself. The Halo is similar to earlier written works, especially the book Ring World, but it wasn’t just a habitat, it was a weapon and a prison. The Covenant were an interesting wrinkle to the alien enemy idea since they were a diverse collective of several species united by religious zeal, and The Flood were an interesting union of the Facehugger idea from Alien alongside zombie lore but with the concept of a hive mind to guide them as well. Pretty much everything in Halo was on the cusp of being familiar, but there was some twist that made it memorable and unique and iconic.

Destiny is a Halo rip-off. You can indeed rip off your own ideas if you bring nothing new to the party, and Destiny is just that: a rehash.

It’s really different…if you squint your eyes and tilt your head to one side.

Look at the plot here courtesy of Wiki:

—

‘Destiny is set seven hundred years into the future in a post apocolyptic setting following a prosperous period of exploration, peace, and technological advancement known as the Golden Age In a universe where humans have spread out and colonized planets in the Solar System, an event known as “the Collapse” saw the mysterious dissolution of these colonies, the end of the Golden Age, and mankind teetering on the brink of extinction. The only known survivors of the Collapse are those living on Earth, who were saved by “the Traveler,” a white, spherical celestial body whose appearance centuries before had enabled humans to reach the stars. The Traveler now hovers above the last safe city on Earth, and its presence allows the Guardians — the defenders of the City — the ability to wield an unknown power, only referred to as “The Light.”
Upon mankind’s first attempt to repopulate and reconstruct after the Collapse, it is discovered that hostile alien races have occupied mankind’s former colonies and civilizations and are now encroaching upon the City. The player takes on the role of one such Guardian, and is tasked with reviving the Traveler while investigating and destroying the alien threats before humanity is completely wiped out.’

—

Just…wow…

All you need to make a Triple-A video game storyline.

Could you cram any more half-baked and utterly tired ideas into one concept? This sounds like the back of an early Atari game when the plots were considered so nominal to the experience (because back then they physically couldn’t be represented in-game) that some intern would probably invent them long after the game had even been made.

Even the titles for things are unimaginative and dull. Golden Age…never heard that one before. How about ‘The Collapse’ which is so mysterious the story apparently doesn’t feel it has to be described in detail. The Traveler is the only potentially interesting aspect of the whole show, and it has little to do with the events of the game beyond providing arbitrary magic powers to the player.
The whole notion of mankind colonizing the galaxy and then these colonies all dying off because of hostile aliens is basically the plot of the Halo universe only with far less interesting opponents.

Destiny is actually a step BACKWARDS in terms of plot from the original Halo games!

It gets better. Lest you suppose I might be unfairly believing that Bungie is ripping itself off, check out the way interviews with the actual creators refer to the races involved in Destiny…
‘Destiny will center on the journey of the Guardians, the last defenders of humanity, set to protect Earth’s last city. Guardians will be divided into three distinct races: Humans, Awoken, and Exo. Humans are described as being relatable, tough, and uncomplicated. Bungie drew its inspiration for the Human race from the military, and the character designs and aesthetics of the Spartans present in their Halo franchise. Awoken, described as exotic, beautiful, and mysterious, were inspired by fictional depictions of elves, vampires, ghosts, and angels. Exo are described as being sinister, powerful, and tireless. Exo were inspired by the undead, Halo’s Master Chief, and the titular character of The Terminator. The playable races will be purely cosmetic and will have no effect on the game mechanics of Destiny.’
Every race in this game was designed based on some other property, and more than once just straight cribs from Halo! The aesthetics, the ideas, are all so shamelessly borrowed they’re mentioned in the press releases, not even as influences only but as direct copies.

It’s nice to revisit something that worked, but maybe it wasn’t too much to hope that the most expensive game in history put a LITTLE effort into distinguishing itself from even the history of the company responsible for cobbling it together? Maybe there might be some effort to push aside nay-sayers who might be inclined to call Destiny a retread of story tropes without any spark of originality?
Notice also the last line. All these derivative races DON’T EVEN HAVE AN EFFECT ON THE GAME.

This image kind of sums it all up really.

That’s right. Their entirely cosmetic. The game plays the same no matter what race you choose to play as. Essentially Bungie isn’t just hinting at the fact that their limp-wristed story doesn’t matter, they’re flat out telling you.

It goes on…

‘Players will also be able to choose a “class” to go alongside their race. There are three classes available to players in Destiny: Hunters, Warlocks, and Titans. Hunters are a reconnaissance class meant to be reminiscent of the classic bounty hunter. Bungie cites as influences Han Solo and classic characters from old Western films such as Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. Warlocks combine weapons with special powers from “the Traveler,” and are meant to be a form of “space wizard.” The Warlock class is influenced by the Star Wars series’s Jedi Knights, Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, and Morpheous from The Matrix. Titans, which favor heavy weapons and melee attacks and are intended to be reminiscent of the classic “future soldier,” were inspired by Bungie’s own Master Chief from Halo, stormtroopers from Star Wars, and other space marines from science fiction.’

Even the classes aren’t designed to suit any kind of in-universe logic: they’re a grab bag of ‘cool’ archetypes. What does a Hunter/Warlock/Titan do when they aren’t killing generic alien bad guys? I dunno…doesn’t matter. Bungie executives again all but confirm that the first thought that flew into their minds was how to justify the most stock and overdone ideas. We want something like a space wizard. How do we make it interesting? Who cares. He’s just some guy with powers because of a big Deus Ex Machina. Again and again you see the company alludes to Halo as a prime influence. You’d suppose a game company that’s already MAKING sequels to their other franchise wouldn’t cheapen it by cloning it’s ideas into another separate game, but that would require the people involved to care about plots and characters.

Who needs either when you can jury-rig a cookie-cutter narrative to lay the barest ground work for a grab-bag of game ideas?

Peter Dinklage after reading the script to Desinty.

Guardians of The Galaxy is a movie I’ve still yet to (and want to) see, but from what I’ve heard it stumbles in this fashion too. It looks fantastic, the acting is great, the music is fun, even some of the writing is clever…but the story is garbage. The assumption is that with the glitz there doesn’t need to be anything under the hood. The plot, the characterization is all secondary to conveniences that bus the main characters from one big meaningless set piece to another. That’s never been good enough for me. I will experience and even at times enjoy these empty, noisy firecrackers but I will not walk away satisfied that this was the best a film or game could aspire to be.

The writers/creators/artists/technicians deliberately settled for less.

Destiny has been in the works for years. In all that time NOBODY thought about improving the plot? No one asked themselves why anyone would care about the characters if they were all interchangeable or care about a generic looking future Earth or care about fighting faceless, nameless, generic aliens? They have lots of arms and wear capes.
That’s not a character, that’s again window-dressing to distract.

Halo opens with you battling a combo of strange small aliens who seem more afraid of you then you are of them and tall lithe warriors capable of turning invisible. It gave the game a flavor that only improved when you landed in the gorgeous vistas of the ring planet below, punctuating weird alien ruins with forests and waterfalls and plains of grass.

Destiny is the same industrial corridors and barren wastelands over and over again. It all looks very nice in high resolution with great lighting, but it also looks EXACTLY like Call of Duty, Left For Dead, Dead Island, Borderlands (minus the cell-shading), and any number of current and last generation games. There is nothing to distinguish Destiny, not from the graphics to the gameplay.

Using bolts of force to throw enemies backwards? Mass Effect.
Zooming around on hover bikes? Star Wars Battlefront and Halo.
Dark industrial corridors? Metro, Call of Duty, Dead Island and Resident Evil.
Iron-sighting guns and throwing grenades? Call of Duty, Battlefield…any and all FPS.
Multiplayer online drop-in drop out game? Again, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Borderlands.
Collecting new weapons and armor from scattered chests? Borderlands.
Upgrading weapons by swapping out pieces? Borderlands, Call of Duty, Brink.
Flying robot you can summon helps you? Killzone Shadow Fall did the same thing.

You don’t need to be totally unique all the time, but is it too much to ask for this game to justify its existence with more than just ‘I look pretty’? Some ideas work, yes, but if you decided only by changing names and the general look of things that you were going to recreate Star Wars would this make it suddenly it’s own property without question?

What if you, say, changed the light saber into a magic sword, changed The Millennium Falcon into a dragon, and changed The Force into magic? What if you set it in medieval times instead of a galaxy far far away and the death star plans were a dragon’s egg?

Would this make it a new concept no one would recognize?

No. It would make it the movie Eragon.

Your father’s magic sword. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age…

But Destiny gets away with it because it works. Fine, it works and it’s all very spiffy, but the issue I take is how ultimately lazy this vacuum at it’s core is.
Yes all the components fit together but it’s not in aid of anything. There’s no urgency, no twists or turns, and no soul to the proceedings. The unfortunate impression I get is that Bungie or Activision feels that an interesting plot would either be too much work, too risky for such an expensive project…or they felt that gamers by and large don’t care so the extra effort wasn’t needed. You don’t care as long as the scenery is nice to look at and there’s something to shoot at, right?

You don’t care as long as the music is nice and Peter Dinklage is speaking in your ear, right?

But I do. I want to have an immersive universe to explore if I’m going to spend time and money to do so. I DO care about a company that’s willing to spend the time to develop some kind of story rather than patching together a bunch of assets and after the fact slurring together a regurgitated mess of cliches. You could get away with this when graphics were flickering lights on a screen there was only three levels of play and your object was to shoot at geometric shapes. But this is a billion dollar project years in development. You don’t get to hand wave and plagiarize and half-ass your way through and still get full credit.

So by all means play Destiny if you’d like to. It looks fun and runs smooth and seems to be an entertaining multi-player experience, but NOBODY please declare it an ‘epic’ or a ‘triumph of atmosphere’ or a ‘next-gen gaming experience’ or a ‘compelling story’ because it’s not.

It’s a safe cash-in rehash frankenstein of all the most superficially successful ideas in gaming but without any of the creativity or world building we should have come to expect by now from the same industry that brought us the daring venture of Bioshock, the narrative maze of Alan Wake, the complexity of Dragon Age, and the woven character interactions of the Walking Dead series.

For a final example take a game you might not have thought had a plot, but it did.
And a deep one.

Missile Command is a classic, simple game in which you must fire rockets from your bases at the bottom of the screen at descending lines that are headed towards several defenseless cities you’re defending. The object is to stay alive as long as possible because there is no winning the game; the lines continue to descend until all your cities and bases are destroyed.

Sounds like a childish pursuit and a cobbled together distraction, but it owes its existence to the creator’s most vivid nightmares.

Missile Command is the story of the last war on Earth. From his home the creator of the game could see three large populated areas, and in his nightmares nuclear bombs fell onto these and eradicated them as well as everyone in them. Wanting to put to bed his fear he made it into a game, but one that stayed true to the horror of the idea.

Sometimes in the game you must sacrifice a city to defend a base, or vice versa. If you sacrifice a city to defend your bases you’re essentially allowing genocide to continue to play the game for just those few extra minutes. If you do the opposite however not only is the populated base destroyed but the city may still be upright…however it can’t help you except to serve as one more target before the missiles destroy everything.

The final screen for Missile Command, regardless of your score, doesn’t read Game Over.
It reads ‘The End’ and is one of the only games to do this. Literally win or lose the game, it’s all over for everyone everywhere.

So I ask you…if a game in which the graphics are piles of pixels can somehow communicate not only a full narrative but also a surprising amount of human drama…WHY CAN THERE BE NONE OF EITHER IN A TRIPLE A GAME WITH A MASSIVE BUDGET AND A LONG PRODUCTION TIME?

Destiny wasn’t rushed for holiday release. Destiny was practically guaranteed massive sales. Destiny was the next creation of two prestigious game companies who had made hit after hit.

But Destiny didn’t try. Destiny didn’t care.

So…that’s my thoughts on the matter. It might be a fun game, but that’s no excuse in my opinion for such blatant corner-cutting. I could be wrong (I often am) and if I am I’ll take back my words if a mind-blowing plot twist or compelling character crops up.

But I hope against hope this isn’t the trend. We need our stories back.

Story is a Verb

Story is a verb…or it should be I think.

The classic tale of One Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights as it’s known in some cases) concerns the framing narrative of a young woman named Scheherazade held captive by a Persian prince and threatened with death unless she tells him one story every evening to keep up his interest…and her use to him. Each story concerns a larger than life hero, but not one so invincible that they are never in peril. Peril and hardship is the name of the game: the constant hook which keeps each story fresh. Sinbad, Ali Baba, and other charismatic daredevils stumbling upon supernatural and all too natural mixups are always getting into one inescapable situation after another, and what keeps the interest alive for the tale is how they’ll find their way out of it intact.
The main attraction is not the political power games behind the scenes.
The main attraction is not complex relationships.
The main attraction is not convoluted legendary artifacts.
The main attraction isn’t flashy fight sequences.
The main attraction is not manifold betrayals and double-crosses.
The main attraction isn’t even plot twists.

What keeps these stories fresh and tellable centuries afterwards is their simplicity of form, but their complexity by virtue of their nested imaginative. A guy stumbling across a magic cave controlled by a pack of bandits is at once the easiest thing in the world to explain to anyone…but it opens the floodgates of the mind to possibilities. Likewise with Sinbad’s endless voyages. He’s a pirate/merchant/adventurer who sails around and encounters things. That’s his story condensed.
The exact nature of these encounters i.e ‘the good part’ of the story is where the rich tapestry of language is employed.

Having read these stories I can confirm that even though there are spats of backstory, these stories are told in real time and always have human interest and a driving pace.
They’d have to or Scheherazade in her bid to squeeze in all the ‘necessary’ information would have bored the prince and wound up dead for her trouble.

Story as a noun has come to mean ANY writing in a film which has corresponding events that have some association, no matter how tenuous, with each other.
The problem lies in the sedentary nature of a story which is entirely made up of exposition or telling the audience what they need to know presumably in order to understand the rest of the plot.
If you start with the words ‘3,000 years ago’ you’ve already lost a vast majority of your audience because right there, no matter how imperative this information is, it all happened so long ago it’s no longer vital in any meaningful way. Unless the story is set in that time period which then becomes the immediate focus of the story then I’m sorry. You can have the most beautiful costumes and CGI on display and the impact of this backstory will still be less impactful then events occurring in ‘real time’ according to the chronology of the movie.

Yes this also counts for Lord of the Rings. As fun as it was to watch men and elves go to war against orcs and destroy Sauron the overall emotional investment in this big opening sequence was frankly quite minimal. With the narration over the top of the events it was clear everything being seen had already happened and so there wasn’t much suspense or investment in characters.

Added to this is the problem with all exposition: you almost ALWAYS hear it twice.

Back to Lord of the Rings for a moment. Imagine the opening sequence didn’t happen and the production began with Frodo sitting under a tree reading a book. Would you still know about the heroes of the war, the ring of power, the fall of the dark lord, the orcs, the elves, and the king of Gondor?

YES!!!!!

Why would you know this? Because you have ears and eyes and, most importantly, because Tolkien was an excellent storyteller. Every aspect of the history of Middle Earth is expertly woven into the characters of the story of The Lord of the Rings. Even Peter Jackson (whom I’m afraid to say with his Hobbit films is beginning to make me doubt he’s as good a filmmaker as the original trilogy led me to believe) couldn’t get away from the fact that throughout the story all the necessary exposition is delivered in REAL TIME.

And, most importantly, when it’s relevant to the NOW.

When would we learn about the ring of doom without the opening scene?
When Gandalf confronts Bilbo about it (there’s even a veiled reference to Gollum in that scene) and later when Gandalf looks it up in the library and talks to Frodo after confirming his suspicions.
When do we learn about Isildur and the kings of man?
In Rivendell Aragorn has a discussion with his love Arwen in which he says he fears he will be ‘weak’ like his ancestor. BOOM. Two for one shot! We learn in one present scene that Aragorn is from the same lineage as the original hero of the war and that the hero did something wrong because of weakness.
How about mount doom? Mordor? Sauron?
That’s why Tolkien had the Council of Elrond in the first place in his book! Here you can get out all the necessary backstory and exposition but you do it in the form of people having a discussion, which is (in my opinion) ultimately more interesting then seeing events from the past playing out with an overlay of dialogue explaining to us what we can probably already see anyway.
People talking, walking, and doing ANYTHING in real time has more urgency then the most dramatic occurrence in the past.

Exposition is a handicap and a problem to overcome; not some kind of obligation for a story.

At worst exposition can just be an elaborate excuse for do nothing heroes to be forced into action.
This has a lot to do with bad characters but it also has to do with writers not understanding the simple demand of any average moviegoer: HAVE SOMETHING HAPPEN.
Happening doesn’t mean something is explained. Happen doesn’t mean a flashback.
Happen doesn’t mean a purposeless interlude of bickering either.
Discussions in which characters learn things or ask questions is dynamic interaction.
Bickering might be superficially humorous or melodramatic but it’s stagnant as well since neither party involved learns anything, asks anything, changes in anyway.

Exposition is the opposite of action. If you have a sequence in which a character is telling the plot then officially nothing is happening…until you include something else happening around them.

In The Princess Bride there are exposition sequences aplenty since the story is remarkably complex at times, but look at the instances they occur…

* Wesley tells about his apprenticeship to The Dread Pirate Roberts…but he does so while he’s using his sword to hack through trailing vines and periodically has to maneuver to avoid flame spurts from the Fire Swamp he’s traveling through.

*Inigo describes his painful history…but he does so WITHOUT a flashback. All of the immediacy of the sequence is maintained because the focus is not so much on what came before, but on how it effects Inigo and how it’s shaped him. In a visual touch to further imply the bridge between the past and present Inigo shows that he still has scars.

*Count Rogen describes The Machine to a captive Wesley, but the dialogue is punctuated by the machine being activated and it also is used as a moment for Rogen to display his character…his twisted, twisted character.

* The most complex bit of exposition in which Vicini describes the political machinations behind kidnapping Buttercup is intercut masterfully with his henchmen literally so bored with his monologue they begin to play a rhyming game.

This is the mark of a writer/director who understood the difference between story as a noun and story as a verb. We might like to receive a little noun story on occasion (who doesn’t like exploring further into an intriguing world or learning more about the backstory of characters we enjoy?) but chiefly the reason we pick up a book or watch a film is to experience story as a verb…as an action…as a moving, living thing.

Every moment actors are on screen in costume, even if it’s just a business suit, we want something to be happening. Perhaps they’re struggling mentally with some kind of decision or a revelation. Perhaps they’re about to meet another character and have a conversation. Perhaps they’re going to be attacked or will be inspired or receive some information they didn’t previously have which will thrust them into a new situation.

Every screenwriting book I’ve ever read (and its been many from many different eras) say the same thing: When the action of the story begins, that’s when your film should begin.

Not at the beginning of time. Not when all the backstory that will eventually be described later happened just so we can see some pretty special effects. Not when the hero or villain was a kid.

The story starts exactly the moment something changes and something starts to happen, and that’s when the film should start too.

I use Star Wars as an example a little too often, so lets consider an Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho.
The opening scene has Marion Crane and her boyfriend meeting for a tryst in a darkened room.
Why does the story start here?
Because this is where the decisions and motivations that lead to the rest of the plot begin.
They have a discussion that they’re unable to afford to be married and live in comfort. This is what leads to Marion stealing money entrusted to her at the realtors office…which in turn leads to her leaving town…which in turn leads to her stopping by a remote hotel run by Norman Bates for the night.

And the rest is hiSTORY.
(sorry)

Compare this to a lot of modern movies though. High quality or low, budgeted or not, the unfortunate trend seems to be not knowing when to start in order to avoid the draining drudge of dead space.

The Lone Ranger isn’t argued to be a masterpiece by anyone, but one of it’s stumbling blocks hits home very early. Namely the first scene.
Here we have a story which even newcomers or those too young to remember the ranger understand must eventually involve a hero in the old west. It would make sense then to start with our hero when he first became involved in the events that will lead to his adventures. Maybe we see the catalyst which will empower the antagonist so his threat spurs the hero to action.
Maybe at the very least we could begin in the old west.
But the movie decides inexplicably to begin decades after everything the movie will be about in a completely different city at a carnival where nothing is really happening and follows the mundane actions of a kid who will have nothing to do with the story at all. We eventually meet a wizened Tonto who will, throughout the course of this frame story, do nothing interesting.

Nothing momentous is happening in this opening sequence, it has no bearing on the rest of the film, and worse still it literally makes the ENTIRE FILM exposition!

You can get away with a movie which is narrated, but you have to get creative.
Noir films would include lots of films in which characters narrated nearly the entire story, notably a classic like Double Indemnity, but in that film the narration is literally happening not because the film needs exposition but because it’s part of the story entire.
The narration is because the main character is speaking into a recording machine, confessing to his crimes. Later on it’s revealed that he’s dying from a gunshot wound.
The story now isn’t just a chatty little story: it’s the last gasp of a man whose pending murder becomes one of the mysteries the film will unravel. Instead of someone telling you what happens and then you seeing it occur the story cleverly reveals several steps ahead and lets the audience piece it together.
Who is this guy? Why does he say he’s guilty of terrible things if the first time we see him he seems completely ordinary and genial? Who shot him? All these things will come to light but by degrees.
And the journey now isn’t just exposition. It’s a story.

Super Hero movies have it bad when it comes to exposition dependancy. Of all the genres to be bogged down by screeds of thunderingly dull backstory and explanations, why a film type that basically sells itself on being interesting characters have exciting adventures?
The Marvel movies stumble over exposition deposits all the time. In The Avengers there are painfully boring moments where the characters meet in not all that interesting rooms to be told the plot. They don’t interact so much as they receive instructions like robots. Over the course of this halfhearted jokes elevate the monotony a little, but these jokes are not tailored to telling us about who these people are.
In Princess Bride the rhyming game doesn’t just break up the plot, it shows that Fezik the giant and Inigo are not only far from being the dangerous kidnappers they first appeared to be but they are also long time friends.

The Avengers has characters repeat over and over again their assigned tropes as if the audience could forget them. In the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles this is a problem too apparently. Characters are considered the obstacle to get to the exposition and not the other way around so while the complexities of the plot are outlined in loving detail the characters are barely payed lip service. In the new TMNT do you get to know anything about Mike, Raph, Leo and Don other than that they have one trait apiece?
Mike is the jokester. Raph is the rebel. Leo is the straight man. Don is so literally defined by being a geek that in the new movie he wears thick glasses and is never seen without a backpack full of electronics.
These aren’t characters: they’re sketches.
But when it comes to explaining the exact specifics of the threat to New York, the mutagen, and the evil plot by the baddies there is no holds barred on lengthy flashbacks and scenes composed of Splinter or the evil tycoon rattling off exposition.

We didn’t come to see exposition. It’s not called Exposition Turtles.
I believe we’d prefer to watch teenaged mutant ninjas interacting and battling over clumsy flashbacks and lengthy sequences devoted to blabber.
What kid could stand this nonsense? In the 80s version of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles true there is exposition and backstory, but look how truncated it is. Again the focus is on characters, not on exposition.

*The first expository dump by April O’Neil about the Foot Clan is interspersed with real time scenes of these ninja thieves stealing things.

*Splinter tells the backstory of the turtles…and the flashback is literally interrupted by Michelangelo proudly proclaiming ‘That was us!’ It’s a self aware joke at the expense of the exposition, but it also doesn’t seem out of character or to be outside of logic.

*The history of The Shredder is hinted at in a brief flashback, but before this there was hints leading up to the exposition scene (Shredder is shown to have a scar on his face, Splinter is missing an ear) so suddenly this moment of plot is actually the revelation of a mystery the entire film has led to. A mystery moreover that is devoted to expanding upon the character of a hero and villain’s relationship to each other.

Character trumps exposition. If you need plot explained to help a character then the sacrifice of time is warranted. But if it’s just padding of a film, if it’s just an excuse to see something from the past, if it’s just a prod to stir a lifeless story into motion again by forcing heroes and villains to act even if they’ve no reason to do so…then you have failed to make story a verb. Story is just a flatfooted noun that will sit in the middle of your film and take up time. The audience will never thank you for explaining what’s going on unless they ask you to do so…and you have to EARN that right.

Do we ever learn the specifics of Darth Vader being Luke’s father in the original Star Wars trilogy?
There is a grand total of ONE line of dialogue from Obi Wan about this momentous development. Otherwise all of the history between Obi Wan and Anakin is inferred by the actions of characters in the moment. We don’t need to see Anakin fall to the dark side. We don’t need to see how Anakin got turned into ‘more machine than man’.
In fact when we got three movies explaining all this it all turned out to be extremely underwhelming.
George Lucas took a great, short, impactful story and spun it into three films which then literally became almost entirely exposition. This is also why super hero reboots a lot of time become snooze fests. You are literally turning the spotlight on the hero before they did anything that made them heroic, highlighting the boring times in which they didn’t make momentous decisions, didn’t have the connections they wind up having.

Alan Moore (the author of Watchmen) once wrote a series called Tom Strong which rather uniquely but compellingly concerned a superhero who had had so many adventures that every other story concerned him running into an old enemy, an old friend, remembering something he did in the past, or even something seemingly random occurring (an alien invasion, say) which Tom regarded with surprising understanding since he’d been involved in previous unseen events leading up to the occurrence. We do have sections devoted to backstory, but wisely at times the backstory is hidden from the audience because all characters concerned in the current situation already know what’s going on and feel no reason to talk about it.
In one episode Tom runs afoul of an aged super villain. They duke it out and the villain sets up deathtraps the whole spiel…but along the way they have moments where they recall to mind little hints at their earlier encounters.
Alan did not write Tom Strong is ‘order’. The first comic begins with Tom in the future with his family. In later issues parts of his backstory are revealed, but clearly the writer was thinking ‘What is the point where Tom’s adventures really begin?’
Not when he got his powers. Not when his family met. Not when he met his wife or had his daughter.
Not even necessarily when he save an inter dimensional civilization or built a perpetual power generator or encountered his arch nemesis decades before or made his connections with other heroes.
The story begins when Tom has to stop a threat to his city. All the rest of it can come into play later on, can be mentioned, there can even be backstory about it, but first and foremost to know who Tom is and who is family is we begin with a situation that allows him to show why he’s a hero, what he believes in, and how the Strongs work together.

Same with Watchmen actually. The comic begins with Rorschach investigating the death of The Comedian. It doesn’t begin when the Watchmen met. It doesn’t begin in Vietnam. It doesn’t begin when Rorschach was inspired to be a vigilante. Unlike the film it doesn’t even begin when The Comedian is murdered.
It opens with the iconic smiley badge in a gutter, soaked in blood. When Rorschach picks that badge up he has set fire to the fuse that will light up the entire story to come.

Everything else is just icing on the cake.
In order to have a story that’s a verb you have to focus on that cake, no matter how fun it is to spread that icing on top.

Focus on characters. Start when they start.
You may discover that’s the dam that’s caused your writer’s block on more than one occasion.
If you story is focused on cramming in exposition you may become as bored as your audience eventually will be as well.
But if your story is your characters, you can go anywhere and do anything. You can go backwards and forwards. You can jump from character to character. You can change a genre out from under your entire production, swap subplots, fool around with themes and tonal shifts.

The eye of the storm MUST be character.
NOT exposition.

What Makes a Great Villain?

“The enemy? His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there…in peace.
War will make corpses of us all.”
-Return of the King

I’ve been asked this on more than one occasion by more than one friend so…here’s my interpretation.

In order to be an effective, memorable villain to me a character must be just that initially…
A character.

It doesn’t matter how much nifty armor or flashy powers you pile on: nothing comes close to the impact of a person who turns to the dark side, perhaps from his own volition, perhaps because of circumstances. A villain is not exempt from having no internal motivations, no logical decision making, no personal attitude. What is a villain who just laughs maniacally and strides about intoning the plot and nothing beside usually called even by the most forgiving of reviewers?
A Stock Villain. A Generic Bad Guy.
Neither of these is conducive of a memorable foe because, quite literally at that point your antagonist could be replaced by anyone or anything that provided exposition and directed the other baddies and there would be no change to the story.
Unless you’re making a parody (and even then I’d argue) you don’t want a generic bad guy anymore than you want a generic setting, a generic hero, or a generic story to tell.
Generic is short hand for ‘boring’ because of how predictable it is given even the slightest knowledge of genre conventions. It can be fun and nostalgic to descend into a little bit of naiveté in terms of a villains motivations and attitude (laughing for no reason, trying to take over the world) but the truth is this cannot hold up to an entire full length story without some kind of unique spark to set aside your baddie from everyone else’s.
Otherwise they end up forgotten…the worst fate of all for a character.

A good story, like a good villain I believe, is also created by considering characters first.
And these characters as antagonists and protagonists create conflict, leading to the plot. The plot should not dictate over characters, otherwise the characters (including the villain) take a backseat to the most boring aspect of storytelling: rattling off impersonal details. Frankly I don’t care about the logistics of the magic or made up science so much as I care about the way the hero and villain connect and collide.
And there MUST be some connection.
Even if the baddie isn’t the hero’s father or brother or uncle there still must be at least a thematic association between the villain and hero in order for his place in the story to become more meaningful than just another obstacle for the protagonist to overcome.
If the hero and villain have never met they can still have some kind of bond. Maybe they’re in a similar profession, one representing the darker side while the other stays to the more idealistic side of the light. Perhaps the baddie is a dark mirror the protagonist can see themselves in. This can have varying levels of overtness, but I prefer the subtle concern that this seemingly crazed monster who hurts others to get what they want…is only a few decisions away from our hero. How many of us are free from temptation, past sins, or even present stumbles into the easy way out even at the expense of others? A villain can become a living memorial to the dangers of thinking ourselves free from mankind’s fallen nature because, at the best of times, they’ll have had a history where they thought they were also beyond such petty concerns. Man, especially modern man, has it in their minds that they are basically good and benign in purpose. If undisturbed by madness and poor social choices a human will not do bad things. Who but a crazy person would make bad decisions or do horrible things?
The answer is unfortunately all of us.
And a well crafted villain can be the dark mirror of not only the hero but the audience as well to see a character who fell from grace by their own volition or by chance, but none the less has become the enemy of the good.

As you can tell to me a great villain is steeped and crafted by the concepts of morality, and this seems to be a serious problem for a lot of contemporary enemies. The only thing I can find becoming a remotely unforgivable sin (since the heroes and villains are becoming more and more difficult to tell apart in stories it seems) is twofold: prejudice and greed.
Killing people? That can’t be a sin because the heroes do it as often as the baddies.
Selfishness? A great deal of contemporary heroes think about themselves a lot and blow off others for their own benefits so making this a sin would seem hypocritical.
So what we’re left with is two sins the writers seem to think themselves beyond, essentially saying that the rest of the world might be at risk of such petty matters but not they themselves.
Greed and Prejudice however are not treated like sins in the traditional sense, and this cheapens their appeal as the fuel for a villain in my opinion.
‘Sin’ does not mean ‘Bad social decision’ originally. Sin in the original Hebrew is closer to the word ‘miss’ as in to literally miss the point of something or the center of a target.
The term refers to ‘missing’ the design of God, usually by personal decisions, but sometimes thanks to the curse of original sin that plagues the human condition.
In essence: every sinner is a tragedy.
Contemporarily, every sinner is more like someone who is either ignorant or insane. They don’t make decisions to become evil. The world is either so unjust to them they become villains to spite it (which a lot of contemporary productions treat as almost a heroic action) or they assume villainous identities in order to acquire wealth not due them or to get back at people they don’t like…literally for no reason.
When’s the last time a villain needed any more fleshing out beyond ‘they’re racist’ or even received that courtesy? Bizarrely to me this trend of racism being not only an unforgivable sin but also being without cause, more akin to a mental disorder, is rampant in popular fiction. Of course in reality it rarely if ever works that way but in order for villains to be separated from villains by causes other then increasingly tenuous moral ones what we’re left with is the following…
Heroes have reasons for their actions.
Villains don’t.
How dull.

Lets think about Sin in the traditional sense again however.
Sin is an act of rebellion against God, conscious or unconscious. The whole of the species man has it in their makeup to fight against their creator because they feel that with their knowledge and their virtue they could make a better God themselves.
And therein lies the painful irony. Every dictator, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot to Chairman Mao, all of them had this perspective in some capacity. Their’s were not the random actions of madmen. They didn’t murder literally millions in order to acquire personal wealth chiefly either. All of these people were rational human beings who got it into their minds that by taking charge they could become better gods. Through their benign dictation they could direct the destinies of their countrymen to help the greater good.
And consequently anyone whose agenda did not include their own must be allied with the forces of unreason and evil.
Their deaths then was the cleansing of villainy, whether man, women or child.
Hitler was a child once, an aspiring painter who wanted to better his country with a radical vision of the future in which everyone worked together and used technology to better their lives. Stalin was convinced the rich were by their natures impossible to unseat without a rebellion from the lower orders, and that after this necessary bloodshed a new order would rise in which everyone depended upon each other for support and regulated their existence with justice and equity. How did Pol Pot kill twenty five percent of his own people? By imposing a form of agrarian socialism in order to create a pastoral paradise. Mao for all his truly cruel actions is still viewed by some as a great social reformer and role model.
None of these people were insane. None of them was particularly greedy.
But go back and see their similarities…

-They were all idealists.
-They all (initially) seemed to believe in the general goodness of humanity.
-They began poor and worked their way to positions of influence through their own efforts.
-They felt if they were in charge they could make their societies better.
-They all felt that money should not be more important than morality.
-They wanted a society in which everyone depended upon each other and all were equal.
-They wanted to stop debate and simply destroy evil no matter the sacrifice.

And they all become butchers on a scale mankind had never seen before.
But outside of those bloody deeds you can probably never see yourself condoning, let alone commanding…what out of the following above can you NOT say you yourself follow?

Therein lies the dirty little secret: these bad guys thought of themselves as the good guys.

These villains for the ages were not anomalies: if anything they were ‘heroes’ who eventually made the decision that their heroism was more important than the lives of anyone else.

And that is what separates a hero from villain, classically as apparently historically.
The hero cares for the lives of others, and puts them above his own.

On the other hand a villain decides his vision, his way, his cause is wider in scope and importance than literally any other element on Earth. Thousands can die in order to sustain this vision, but their deaths will not have been in vain if it leads to the Utopia they just know they can establish when all the obstacles are cleared away.
Here’s the tragedy of a villain as well: Good intentions without Reflection.
A villain is a hero who seems their agendas paramount to the point that eventually their lives become the focus of their existence. If they’re not alive, who is to continue the great work?
Thrusting their minions before them isn’t an act of selfishness. It’s a selfless sacrifice on their part to preserve the more important mind that will lead the people from ignorance to enlightenment.
Perhaps they are willing to die, but not for the sake of others.
They will die to secure their cause and their pathway to perfection.

You must make a conscious moral choice yourself to define a villain I feel.
As stated moral decisions are often considered too restrictive to a lot of modern writers so they just take the easy way out and distance the villain from morality in general by piling upon them completely illogical actions for the sake of making them antagonists.
But this makes them little more then playground bullies, even just parodies of bullies. When we’re little the big kid picking on us seems to be without volition. They’re just ‘mean’ clearly and were probably born that way. But looking into their pasts we can see some of the reasons they made those decisions that led them to becoming mean.
I don’t mean a bad childhood or lousy experiences will alway make someone a bully, but it can lead someone to deciding this role for themselves.

You always worship the most powerful experience in your life.
And a villain has experienced great evil…and decided to worship it.

In order to deal with an unreasoning world, a person can consciously decide they will become as unreasoning to deal with the chaos…or to attempt to master it. Someone who is afraid all the time may decide to become fearful. Someone hurt by others could justify to themselves their desire to hurt others so they are no longer the target of their most powerful experience.
These decisions are reached by logic, not by ignorance or madness.

Again, a villain is a tragedy, not an anomaly.

A villain decides to challenge the notion of morality, but finds themselves bound to it.
Consider Hitler and Stalin who may or may not have felt regret for their actions, but ultimately both were united in deep-seated paranoia. They realized from an insiders perspective how tenuous their positions as leaders were, and how cruel the actions of humans can be when they’re devoted to the cause of themselves at all costs.
They discovered the flip side of evil: that it’s extremely unpleasant to be on the receiving end.
This degrading relationship between an evildoer and moral darkness can be communicated in many different ways, metaphorical and literal. Villains traditionally would appear ugly, not because unattractive people were supposed to be lumped together with evil, but because this was an exterior representation or interior wickedness. Evil can make a person fret and frown and leer, pulling their facial muscles and wrinkling them with care. Look at the hardened face of evildoers from the past: their thousand-yard stares or humorless smiles. To them the world has become a horrible place, or worse than this a joke.
To represent this more cinematically we have villains with deformities, with facial ticks, with scars.
For a subtler approach some depict evildoers as elderly. Again, this was not traditionally to suggest that old = evil. This was to represent how wizened the soul can become overshadowed by cruelty. The evildoer dries out like a prune, loses the use of their limbs and their grasp on sanity as life wears on, but never allows that central fire of hatred and drive to be extinguished. The wrath of an old person versus the young is an indication of someone who has lived with evil their whole lives, knows it’s tricks, and has devoted themselves to the last to it’s propagation.
Why black? Why is is evil doers always wear black armor and cloaks?
Perhaps it’s become a trope now, but the original intention again was how secluded an evildoer becomes. Black is not only associated with darkness, but also with lurking in shadows. The cloak and armor is a way of concealing a villains body, wrapping their shame with cold steel or flowing robes to impose. They are hiding their doubts about themselves behind a tailored persona to frighten others, and allow them to stay behind the scenes where they orchestrate their machinations without becoming directly involved.
Evil fears exposure. The sun. Colors. Youth. All of this is representative of evil’s bane because it exposes its frailty, its weakness and banality, and its passing away.

Leaving aside personality and morality for a moment: paramount of a villain must be THREAT.

A villain without threat is no more interesting than the heroes’ entering a room with a closed door. Opening the door is no more important or momentous than pushing aside a villain who has no forethought beyond just some kind of cardboard standee to represent a writer’s pet peeves. The evil businessman might make the writer chuckle about how he’s getting back at people he personally doesn’t like, but it makes for a very lame bad guy because ultimately you have no motivation and thus no volition. A stock evil tycoon hasn’t any consideration for how he’s going to go about fighting the hero except maybe waves of goons, and when these are likewise interchangeable suddenly your big set piece battles are snore-fests as the protagonists brutally slaughter hundreds of faceless thugs until they reach the central baddie whom they either haul off and kill or allow to live long enough for karma to catch up.
Either way it’s anticlimactic.
A villain needs more than resources to be a credible threat. They need to use their minds if they can’t use their muscles. They need to match the heroes at their best, and worst.

In order to make a villain meaningful they need to not only be on par with the heroes at their best, but one step ahead.
Who do you fear? The guy you can tackle head-on and can probably deal with…or the badass who you run from because a direct confrontation would be suicide?
This threat must also feel natural instead of contrived. Sure it’s easy for the writer to pull rank and decide the villain is invincible for a confrontation scene, effortlessly brushing the heroes aside, but if this has nothing to do with who they are then it comes across as cheating…especially if a little later the heroes beat the villain soundly and nothing much has changed to warrant this victory.
Consider the strengths of your baddie as well as his weaknesses. Someone who is at heart fearful and paranoid is also likely to be incredibly brutal and concise when it comes to dealing with something he perceives as a potential problem. Someone who has decided that bullying tactics are going to become his tools will use these in his dealings; taunting, harrying, and beleaguering their enemies to distract and dispirit them even before combat begins. Someone who is vain may be able to make the heroes feel extremely disquieted about themselves if he shows true confidence despite the situation, and even someone who is greedy might fly into a devastating rage if denied what they feel is due them.
When the heroes come face to face with the baddie the outcome should not feel inevitable.
A little too often the heroes will rush to face the villain and everyone from the youngest child present on up will see exactly what must happen to follow. The villain loses. He has to because he’s planning something that will lead to very bad things and if he doesn’t lose he’ll probably end up killing the heroes, and THAT can’t happen because then the movie would be over.

But those aren’t your only options.

Maybe the villain is so skilled the heroes can barely touch him so the question becomes will the villain escape as opposed to will either side end up dying. Death (even with all the revolving doors to the afterlife out there) tends to be pretty decisive in confrontations so don’t promise what you can’t deliver upon without being anticlimactic in either direction.
Present a scenario in which the results could occur but the story would continue anyway.
Is it so impossible that the heroes might win (as they’re almost bound to) but lose something very important to them in the process? Maybe the victory will be a hollow one in comparison with some sort of dire circumstance which could effect the hero’s standing with each other, or with society.

The villain doesn’t just threaten the heroes’ lives, he threatens their livelihoods.

The happiness, families, even sanities of the heroes can be at stake even before the villain drives the final point home and end their lives. And unlike their lives their stories could continue bereft of these, even if then theirs would be tragedies not unlike the villain’s own story at that point. You’d be surprised how much more of a reaction you can get viscerally if the villain threatens something emotional about the heroes as opposed to only their lives. I think as a species we’ve mostly grown up with the concept of death as inescapable and so have come to grips with it, but sadness, despair, and even cold fury are frighteningly real.
Death is a full stop. Despair lasts and anger aches.
The next time an enemy confronts a hero suppose they don’t damage them with weapons but with words, with secrets revealed or with suspicions played upon. The villain will use any tactic, any weapon to get ahead and sees this as an advantage.

Imagine if the heroes are set up against their foe, but in order to bring them down and perhaps save many they must do deeds as bad, if not worse, then the enemy they face.
Is winning the victory worth it then?
Disturbingly I’ve seen a lot of shows and film that suggest this is the case, but this is because these stories ignore the consequences of making these choices let alone the gnawing guilt that can destroy people from inside, even the best of us. If you feel guilt because you forgot someone’s birthday, imagine the kind of astronomical guilt you’d feel being responsible for the death of someone…let alone hundreds even if they were aligned to the cause of evil.
Are all of these people facing you with weapons drawn truly evil at heart? Did they choose this path or were they driven to it? Do they believe in their cause?
Does it matter if they are striving towards a goal that will lead to the deaths of many innocents to satisfy an evil master?
These questions are faced by all with a conscience. The hero’s listen to their consciences but also struggle with them when their morals are set up against the actions of evil which twists all things into grim mockeries of themselves: loyalty becoming fanaticism, love becoming covettness, bravery becoming brutality, and wisdom becoming callousness.
For those who can’t tell the difference or believe their is no difference they may devote themselves to the cause if not the creator of the cause, and fight and die for something ultimately evil.
And these people will be on the opposite side of the field when our heroes choose to enter the fight of ideologies that will not settle without one side winning and the other losing out, although losses will be felt on both sides.
So what happens when a hero finds themselves traveling by choice or by chance the same dark path that led to their own enemy becoming disenchanted with the ways of morality and deciding any means necessary were justified to reach their goals?
I’ve honestly yet to see this concept thoroughly examined, and I’d appreciate doing so since it’s a prescient issue, as well as a means of showing that a villain’s threat is to more than a hero’s life.

A great vilain threatens a hero’s soul.

Frozen: Why is This Considered Good?

I saw Frozen. Believe me it took a concentrated effort.

A lot of people will HATE me for this, but…what’s the big deal?
I really want to know. Before you call me an idiot for disliking a movie you did, try and tell me here. What did I miss?

Might contain SPOILERS.

The writing wasn’t good at all with all the characters in this boring, generic fantasy world talking like anyone might in a modern city, using modern parlance, modern expressions and modern diction. There wasn’t even an attempt to distance the language from contemporary stylings so overall it felt like a bunch of teenagers from Manhattan reading off the lines for a community theater play rather than a film at all.
The dialogue had no noticeable inflection either, with all characters making statements rather than saying anything heartfelt and talking at each other with canned stutters and stumbling wordplay to simulate (badly) human reactions to things.
This is without a doubt one of the most fake animated features I’ve ever seen. I didn’t buy it for a second of screen time running.

The characters were all one note and I didn’t care about their fates at all. When will Disney learn that what made their earlier heroes and heroines enjoyable was that they actually represented some kind of moral decency? We see Aladdin helping out the poor because he sees eye to eye with their predicament. Mulan risks her life for her father’s. Belle charges into the possible clutches of a monster to save her father as well.
Throughout the film Anna is a manic, clumsy, dreamer who frankly displays nothing about her suggestive of anything but pure selfish desire. All of her songs are about herself or her immediate family or perspective love interest. All of her problems basically solve themselves or are nothing to be concerned about ultimately, such as falling into a frozen lake and emerging without any difficulty.
I didn’t care about Elsa (I had to look up her name on Wiki to remember it). Her mood swings were so erratic they bordered on comical, especially the so-called showstopper Let It Go in which she generically sung about how happy she was to be able to use her powers…after fleeing the palace because she was afraid to use her powers.
Her biggest issue is that her abilities are too strong and run erratic, but insultingly the solution is a combination of gaining self confidence (which she already had according to Let it Go but didn’t stop her from freezing the world anyway) and some kind of wan allusion to ‘love’ which apparently just means good feelings. Is this implying she didn’t love her sister to begin with?
Like Anna, Elsa had no problems that the film didn’t artificially create including her incarceration which was either an obvious overreaction, or later on sheer necessity depending on whether her powers are innocent and natural or nigh-demonic and uncontrollable…and this was entirely up to the whim of the screenwriter rather than some kind of natural or logical progression.

The songs are HORRIBLE. Generic, soppy, poorly worded ballads that just repeat what’s going on in the story and come and go without any build up or any immediately apparent purpose. Why sing for about three seconds to some kind of formless tune when Elsa is worried about freezing her kingdom? Having her sing about her emotions made them feel even more contrived and flat. Let it Go is a power ballad all about how great it is to be selfish. You know, for kids! Especially sinister is the line ‘Their perfect girl is gone’ referring to her parents…WHO RECENTLY DIED IN A TRAGIC BOAT ACCIDENT.
Screw you dead mom and dad, I want to make pretty snow castles!
It’s also devoid of any kind of moral imperative. Sleeping Beauty sings wistfully about dreams being wishes. Fine. She chalks it all up to wishing and nothing beside. Aladdin sings a song in which he tries to justify his actions, even to himself. Belle sings a song about how much joy she finds in books.
Elsa sings a song all about how she likes how powerful she’s gotten and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, or indeed what happens to anyone else.
‘The storm never bothered ME anyway.’
Any wonder this was originally going to be a villain song?
But everyone I know loves this song. They claim it’s memorable (which it really isn’t, just the chorus maybe) and that it expresses independence which is important for kids.
Do you know what they call kids convinced that they should express themselves and do whatever they feel like no matter what society or their parents especially tell them, shirking responsibilities because they feel entitled to do so?
Brats.

I thought the snowman Olaf was a dopey waste of space, no different than the worst annoying Disney sidekicks. He had no arc, no interesting features, nothing interesting to say, and didn’t even sing that well. I thought the reindeer was a blatant cut and paste of the horse from Tangled which was a pretty generic ‘animal acts like a big dog’ character in that too. Sven (or whatever the mountain guy was named) wasn’t compelling, wasn’t roguish, wasn’t clever, and wasn’t funny either. ‘

The villain was patently obvious because up till his sudden and completely over the top heel turn there really was no villain. Elsa didn’t count because she was shown to be completely at the mercy of her stupid powers. The snow man monster wasn’t interesting as an opponent either and the merchant guy LITERALLY declared himself a villain, indicating that unless Disney was really slipping he couldn’t be the only one in the film. ”
The heel-turn of the prince is so laughable I can’t believe anyone could see the scene and not face palm. Nothing about his actions earlier make sense after he switches his evil switch either, but that’s okay because the writers obviously hope you’re so stunned at this sudden and inevitable betrayal that you won’t remember anything that happened previously. Like his saving Elsa’s life…even though he wants to kill her anyway.

Even the animation was awful; on par with a Disney video game or a CGI children’s television show. The special effects seemed pretty tame with only a few pretty reflections here and there. The character models were the same kind of bland and inexpressive puppets that showed up in Tangled and which look like dolls made out of marshmallows. And all the snow everywhere made entire sequences look lazy because of nothing but big white expanses without detail flooding the space. The buildings were nothing special, not even Elsa’s supposedly impressive palace which has only two floors, one of which is a big open staging area for no real reason (she lives alone and seems to like hanging out on the balcony most of the time). The water looks like syrup. Crowd scenes made my eyes slide off the screen looking for something more interesting to see because every single character looks roughly the same, except for the main cast which is a collection of exaggerated stereotypes. Honestly the whole thing looks unfinished to me; like better backgrounds might be added soon by an animation team if they every got around to it. Maybe they can work on making the falling snow look less fake too?

So the music was the same shrill teeny-bopper dreck custom made for an episode of Glee, the characters had no interesting stories to tell, no arcs of character which weren’t abrupt and illogical, the comic reliefs provided neither, the villain and heroes alike were unmemorable and rote, the moral was confusing if not a little poorly thought out (love fixes everything magically and also if you want to do something potentially dangerous to others you like just go ahead and do it) and the animation looked to me like every other bargain-bin CGI kid’s fare, not all that different from nock off Pixar films made in Brazil except maybe with a few extra touch ups.

Ultimately I thought it was even less than mediocre, boarding on aggressively irritating and dull. It was a chore to sit through and I didn’t even smile more than once. It didn’t thrill, move, or entertain me.

Maybe I’m an adult whose lost the magic, but I can go back and enjoy the classic Disney fare, as late as Lilo and Stich which I thought was genuinely moving. I like CGI movies too. Up and Finding Nemo are simultaneously heartrending and uplifting and The Incredibles is a classic for the ages.

This is processed, commercial, low effort sameness that I really wish we hadn’t all swarmed to call a modern classic and given tons of rewards and cash in a desperate effort to make Disney not suck nowadays.

So I ask you fans of Frozen…what am I missing? Where was all this magic and innovation and cleverness and excitement and power? I’d settle for basic interest.

Enjoy it if you will, but I’d rather ‘Let it Go’ and good riddance.
Disney if you want to be Pixar take a tip from their best movies: TELL A STORY.
Stupid side kicks, modern pop songs, and painfully politically correct posturing is a recipe for accolades in the era, but I think history will see this shelved alongside other flash in the pan sell outs; no different than Despicable Me, Peabody and Sherman, and any CGI Barbie movie.

In conclusion…I didn’t much care for it. Humbug.

Solutions to Popular Cliches

We all know they exist, and they usually exist for a reason: to serve as the lynchpin of a plot that is either too lazy or the writer too unversed in films and stories to realize how stock they’ve made their production without intending to. Stereotypical plot turns, unrealistic but procedural character reactions, suspension of logic for the sake of following in well worn footsteps: none of this necessarily means the final product won’t be entertaining, don’t get me wrong. But what can’t be denied is that cliches cheapen a product and make story lines feel less organic and more contrived.

However in addition to pointing out a few of these classics and trying briefly to explain why they might be used, I’d also like to provide my suggestions for how to get around these road bumps in plot structure and accomplish what these placeholders are meant to, but perhaps accomplish it in a much more interesting way in service to the story, not detrimental to it.

Plot and story are not the same thing, and the sooner more people remember or learn this the better our stories might be.
-The Liar Revealed

The Purpose: This is one I was reminded of by a friend recently, and which Doug Walker The Nostalgia Critic has said several times in one of his all time pet-peeves.

We’ve all see it, mostly in children’s films.

Our lovable but somewhat neglectful/impulsive/cowardly hero is caught in a lie, or supposed to be lying. Suddenly nothing else matters in the lives of everyone around them. Their family and friends instantly turn against them. Even if there’s other things to worry about that could only be dealt with by having a larger force of friendlies (like say, an impending invasion of bad guys) the protagonists will one and all abandon their loyalties and turn away to weep ineffectually at this betrayal or even perceived betrayal. This can, and often does, occur in the most toothless and cliched way possible: a love interest overhears their significant other saying something that sounds like a proposal of love to another…but this is actually part of a conversation taken out of context.

Why go through this particular dance? The answer is multifold. One of the most cynical answers is padding out the runtime as our displaced hero tries to find his way (inevitably) back into his friend’s good graces, but another reason this might be employed is supposedly to have some poor decision have a ramification thus leading to a rather blunt-force moral that bad actions reap bad results, even when time has passed. If it’s only a perceived lie then…I guess the purpose is to drive a rift in between the hero and his friends to test their relationship? Honestly this particular idea never made much sense to me.

The Effect: This is in my opinion a trope so played out and parodied over the years that it has no emotional impact. Even children can see for miles away how weird it is that, because the hero wasn’t truthful about one thing (or supposed is not) that their closest friends would just leave them to fend or scream and yell at them. The hero ends up looking like a heel for keeping secrets, but the other characters also look tarnished because they’re so quick to cast anyone aside who does so even if that secret is not of immediate importance compared to some issue more pressing. So instead of strengthening relationships it weakens them. Instead of making the time seem more full of meaning and purpose, it drags the pacing.

Also if this event is supposed to provide consequences for the heroes’ bad decisions or actions…this doesn’t do that. Even if initially everyone turns against the hero, without fail in every situation this storyline comes up the hero will arrive in the nick of time to rescue their friends or ingratiate themselves in some way and be forgiven completely. There is ultimately no consequence but a momentary and largely meaningless parting of the ways.

The Solution: If you want more running time and a strain on the relationship which proves the core of its strength ultimately there’s a better way to do this then a contrivance which has been repeated until its become an absurd joke. In fact there’s several ways. One is to have something literally come back to haunt our hero from his checkered past: a lie unveiled which has immediate contemporary consequences. If the hero was originally involved in a shady deal, have his debtors come to collect and catch his friends in the crossfire. If he’s been living multiple lives, have these intersect with his current one. For the truly daring perhaps these resonant consequences might not even have an easy solution. What if the hero has actually broken someone’s heart, or caused something to be ended/destroyed that cannot be repaired? Even if he’s forgiven there will always be that black spot on their record: something perhaps that can inspire them to do better with their lives, even give them an edge on others who haven’t seen the dark side of themselves. As for straining relationships or separating the heroes to boost the runtime, first of all there is NEVER any real reason to boost the runtime to improve a story (The movie Dredd proved this when it told a fine story in 90 minutes only) and secondly, if you really must create a schism…CREATE A SCHISM. Don’t create a story beat where everyone leaves each other even after all they’ve been through because they have to and for no other real reason. Have the heroes literally get scattered by circumstance: obligations, ideologies, twists of fate pull them apart, even if they still care for each other. If there is a conflict of ideologies, have that conflict lead to the break so it feels like the schism comes from the personalities of the characters, not because the writer pushed the ‘plot contrivance’ button.

-The Hero Appears to Be Dead (But Isn’t)

The Purpose: Sometimes you want the big battle to have a shift in tone from crazy action to a more sedate and contemplative sensibility. A lot of writers, especially newcomers to the field, are under the impression that the more prominent a character is the more dramatic their deaths/danger will seem so what could be a more impactful way to conclude your story then with the apparent death of the protagonist themselves. In children’s films again its shorthand for instilling a blast of undiluted drama into the faces of the audience, assuming that children don’t have the sophistication to understand anything less then the hero getting killed off, but there’s several examples in more mature films as well where this gimmick has been tried. The other intended purpose of the hero’s death is to create an apparent sacrifice of grave import. No greater love is there surely then giving up life, so to allow the hero this quality, even if it’s ultimately a ruse, it seems to boost the protagonists moral justification. Also the rise from the ashes of a hero from death has the ring of something triumphant and powerful.

The Effect: The problem with cliches is that although serviceable in a general way, by definition they’ve been done so often they’re predictable. Our hero with very few exceptions cannot die literally because the plot won’t allow him to. No Country for Old Men showed rather decisively that although it’s unique for the hero to be randomly killed off screen, as ‘realistic’ as this might seem, for a LOT of people this seems to drain all energy from the production, creates a jarring sense of loss without resolve, and also end up making the story that followed feel pretty pointless. For a story to have resonance and traditional weight there has to be resolution for established ideas/plots/story-lines/character arcs, and for this to happen the hero usually has to be alive. So the audience, savvy by now in the ways of film, know in the back of their minds that as still as the hero is lying he’s still going to get up after all the other heroes have finished weeping and talking about how great they were. So these moments that should be latent with dramatic energy turn into waiting games. Their eyes are going to open, they’re going to crawl out of the pit, and all this build up is just for a completely expected and flat outcome.

The Solution: Short of actually killing the hero in some suitably dramatic way that feels right for their character and justifies or denies their ultimate purpose for heroic or tragic consequences, there are ways to get the dramatic impact without the problem of the audience sitting and waiting for the ruse to end. There’s a few movies and stories which seem to realize the limitations of killing off the hero, but settle instead for meaningfully injuring them, sometimes permanently. If the hero exits a battle but without a hand or foot it doesn’t even matter if this limb is replaced. Something has been taken from them they cannot fully replace. They have sacrificed something they cannot recover for a cause they believe in. If the hero loses a close friend for good, or has them injured or maimed desperately this too is like a blow to the hero’s core and the audience is less certain these side characters will make it to the rolling credits so there is potential for drama here. Other ideas might be the hero crossing a line in their personal code which although others might not see the big deal, means a great deal to them. If they have to do something they never thought they could be drive to, or sacrifice something they held dear and never saw themselves parting with, that changes a person.

And that change, that development, is not only largely the purpose of following characters, but its also the big impact people are looking for in the conclusion of a story. Not just an explosion which usually changes nothing. Not even just a death.

A change that sticks.

-The Doomsday Weapon

The Purpose: Bigger is better, so threatening a mass scale destructive situation equals more drama and more interest surely. Doomsday weapons serve as an all purpose, immediately understandable plot device. Suddenly the hero’s motivations are transparent and his actions can be guided without much difficulty. Why does he want to stop the bad guy? Because nobody wants to be nuked by a doomsday weapon. What will our hero do to pass the time? Track down leads, collect resources, and fight bad guys to stop this same doomsday weapon. Seems a nice blend of potential for a fraught time based plot with a lot at stake and a nice cut and dried checklist to pad out the running time with the heroes going to arbitrary places to solve the central problem.

The Effect: This is a plot idea so old that classic cartoons made fun of how silly it is. It just seems so cartoonish even if there’s an attempt to justify the bad guy having access to a real high-grade weapon like a nuclear missile, simply because its been done so many times. Again the audience isn’t stupid and has seen lots of movies before this one. The weapon will not ever discharge and if it does it will be safely away from civilians. There CAN be some drama involved in a time-based chase to locate/defuse a doomsday weapon, but this is only possible if it seems the story has potential to play against expectations. The movie Sum of All Fears is one of the few productions in which a nuclear missile IS detonated in a major population center, and afterwards because of this rather unprecedented occurrence it doesn’t seem so impossible that Russia and The USA might go to war and lead to even widespread death and destruction. Bond movies can get away with the bad guys having giant guns or missiles because they tend to play the trope as a campy joke: an entertaining premise which serves mostly as an excuse for Bond to do his spy stuff. Recent Bond films have actually wisely scaled back on the scope of the villain’s plans, but super hero films then as now consistently feel the need to end everything with a focus on the bad guy trying to blow up a city or invade the world. The problem is that nobody buys it at the best of times, and at the worst of times it ends up making anything featuring this idea seem like it’s making that campy excuse, turning everything cartoonish around the very notion of a doomsday weapon.

The Solution: SCALE BACK.

We all know New York isn’t getting flattened (especially subliminally if your budget can’t support the idea) and as Man of Steel has shown even if you DO destroy the city but provide no real context about the people living there or the greater reason any of the events should be cared about, then all we’re left with is a bunch of twisted metal and faceless bodies. No drama.

So we focus not on something too big to comprehend, but instead on something near enough to realize in our minds, something we can care about more immediately. Instead of a giant city, or a country, or even the world, settle on the life of one person we like, or at least has some kind of influence or role that could be drastically effected if they were compromised. Or, more sentimentally, consider something even ‘smaller’ but strong nonetheless: the wellbeing of a person. There are worse things then simply dying. You can have your dreams crushed, your friends denied you; you can be left alone and bereft in a cold and heartless world. And that can feel worse then just someone being threatened with death, and THAT can also be more of an understandable battle to avoid. If the president is threatened, that impacts us in a general way. If he died there would be immediate practical and negative consequences. But if a child is unhappy or threatened, a good person is made to suffer, or a person’s very reason for living falls apart that can ring a clearer tone of drama then a hundred simulated city blocks.

-Bad Guy Does Something Stupid to Kill Hero

The Purpose: They’re the bad guy. They don’t need a reason. Presumably the idea here is that a bad guy would be driven by rage and vengeance to strike out irrationally at the hero, even making stupid spur of the moment decisions to harm them or their loved ones. This also conveniently allows the writer to put the bad guy into a situation for their plans to be thwarted by their own impulsiveness, or even to get the bad guy to essentially kill themselves even if the hero is the one striking them down since in all technicality it’s an act of self defense, keeping aloft their moral high ground.

The Effect: The bad guy looks like an idiot.

As recently as the film The Wolverine there have been bad guys the hero beats soundly into submission…only for them to leap up and attack them from behind, leading to their inevitable demise via reflexive counterstrike. If the bad guy can’t contend with a hero, why make a last ditch effort to backstab them especially if the hero basically just let you go to scheme another day? It also doesn’t help that almost without fail the bad guy preparing to backstab will scream in fury as they rush forward, giving the hero ample time to prepare a response.

Other instances of this trope don’t help the perspective of bad guy as idiot. If the bad guy is in a vehicle the story better establish them as literally crazy if we’re to buy them rushing the hero at the risk of his own life. If for instance the bad guy is in a helicopter it makes zero sense for him to fly close to the ground, hoping to kill the hero with his rotor blades. All this means is that the hero can formulate a plan to destroy the otherwise inaccessible vehicle the villain is riding inside of. This goes for tanks too, slow moving, boats or planes that the bad guy randomly decides to RAM into the hero after the weapons run dry or are jammed. This is an excellent way to die having not accomplished your desperate purpose to kill the hero if they have the foresight to jump out of their own vehicle, leading to a crash in which only the villain is killed or injured.

Another thing that never works is the villain making one last draw of a weapon when the hero is discussing terms of their surrender. The villain is at a disadvantage, the hero is more often then not surrounded by armed friends, and the villain ALWAYS has to punctuate their inevitable betrayal with a veiled threat or an insincere declaration of their remorse for their evil actions that even the dumbest hero can see through fast enough make all this posturing pointless and fatal.

The Solution: Bad guys have brains. They should use them.

When the hero is confronted by a villain that is outthinking them this creates something the industry used to refer to as ‘suspense’. The heroes victory seems in doubt not because they or the villain are acting in an idiotic manner, but because one side (preferably both sides) is clearly shown to be thinking through actions, measuring responses in advance, and formulating a plan and maybe, just maybe, a counter plan. With the angles covered a bad guys doesn’t have to make a stupid move to hit the good guy because they can make a thousand smaller moves before hand to even the odds. Certainly the villain may be destined to lose, but you want to make it clear they put up a solid fight. Otherwise the hero has accomplished nothing more then beating a crazy, stupid moron, and this doesn’t seem all that heroic in the grander scope of things. If the villain is driven to a desperate action instead of using it as their first and only gambit that can say a lot about how sorely the hero has taxed them over the course of a battle, but this needs to be earned and meaningful to the progression of the story, not a cheap way for the hero to gain ground long enough to dispose of the baddie.

-War Is Hell…But It’s Also Cool!

The Purpose: Filmmakers brought up in a simplistic tradition of right and wrong as both echoing arbitrary rules, but also being relative, will usually hold two clear definitions of right and wrong they cannot see contradicting each other. The one is that war is bad. It’s wasteful, evil, and usually perpetrated by big greedy corporations against good and decent poor ethnic people. Violence is wrong too because we don’t want kids getting the wrong ideas, or parents complaining about content.

The other is that killing bad guys is awesome.

So in the same films we get people going on and on about how their lives were destroyed by being soldiers and taking human life is never, ever justified, we also have slow motion gun battles in which some time hundreds of bad guys bite the dust, sometimes in horrific ways. Many people simply don’t have a problem with this at all. Bad people deserve to die, and in great numbers. Bad-enough-to-die also usually is extended on top of another distinction so that literally its perfectly fine for our upstanding hero type to execute in cold blood an unarmed person, so long as they are something like a neo-nazi, a drug dealer, a child molester, a shady businessman, or in some cases anybody whom the filmmakers establish as unfair or just mean.

The Effect: Some might never see this as an issue, but this contradictory stance of violence being wrong, but right as long as its used against the proper socially acceptable enemies really rubs me the wrong way. It would be hilarious if people didn’t take it so seriously: nodding their heads to the prescribed anti-war screed about how guns are never the answer and people should all get along…and the next second cheering and clapping as the heroes bloodily massacre rooms full of sentient humans who may or may not be firing back. The more immediate practical effect from a story stand point beyond my own indignation at the hypocrisy however is a problem that video games side step, but movies find it harder to. In a video game you can kill thousands of bad guys and never once question where they’re all coming from. For one thing these baddies look roughly the same, for another levels go by quickly and their purpose is to fight, and for one last point the narrative is usually only loosely tied to gameplay for a lot of action/shooters. In films however, unless its a parody, the parade of faceless goons becomes ridiculous with a moment’s thought. Where are these people’s parents? Are they really getting paid to die wholesale fighting a hero who is better armed then they are? Are no diplomatic incidents or murder trials coming after someone finds a room full of men riddled with bullets? Sure you can suspend disbelief but it needs a certain touch. With James Bond you buy it because those films are, with a few exceptions, basically video games committed to screen. But with movies that take themselves seriously why is there such flippancy in the sacrifice of boatloads of human life, and how does our hero butchering these people make them morally superior?

The Solution: I think its safe to say it will seem more of a morally justified operation if the hero is in a straight up combat situation, versus just killing people he doesn’t like. It may seem simplistic but just having the bad guys fire first makes it less of a disconnect between our hero and moral values, even if he has to take lives to escape a situation or rescue someone. Also, and this is weird I have to say this, but consider the hero NOT killing everyone he sees. Maybe he comes up with solutions that are based on distractions and ruses rather then throttling people from behind or snapping their necks in stealth situations, and maybe he is quicker to threaten with a weapon then to open fire? Another solution would be to establish more of a moral through-line with consistency. If war is bad, don’t make it look good if the heroes are involved fighting it. If violence is wrong, don’t make it the solution to the hero’s problems. If life is precious, don’t have the heroes callously blow away bad guys because ‘they don’t count’. And if judgement and bias is wrong, how about proving this instead of assuming people you disagree with deserve to die horribly?

-YOU KILLED MY (Fill in Name of Loved One)!

The Purpose: Revenge is a powerful motivator undeniably. Throughout history people have moved mountains, begun wars, and ended lives in the millions for the purpose of paying back what they saw as owed. Revenge is easy to understand since its so primal. Something was taken so at the core of someone’s being now rests this desire to right a great injustice, usually by revisiting the exact same (or similar) consequences to the perpetrators, or anyone involved. A life for a life. Destruction for destruction. Ruin for ruin. This balances out presumably because now that the hero has gotten his revenge the cycle will end apparently. The baddies paid in full with interest so we can all go home secure in the knowledge that justice is done and nothing bad will happen ever again…until the sequels which will usually just reboot the cause of revenge rather then exploring any repercussions of the previous film’s rampage (NOW they killed his kid sister!). As a placeholder revenge sounds great on paper, can realistically motivate a good person to doing violent and cruel things but remain a ‘hero’ through moral justification on some level, and is quick and easy to establish. Don’t want a lengthy backstory about the relationship between hero and villain or why there’s a need for one to hunt down the other? Just have one or the other mutter ‘He killed my parents’ and there you have it: instantly established characterization and motivation in one!

The Effect: Revenge is difficult to morally justify in any meaningful way. You can argue from the perspective of moral relativism that revenge is justified because…um…the hero decides that it is from his perspective, ergo it IS, provided good and evil are entirely based on perception. But from a philosophical, religious, and legal standpoint its frowned upon pretty much universally. You do not have the right to kill somebody just because they killed someone else you knew. Most religions with few caveats argue that revenge should be the prerogative of God, not man, and philosophically to kill someone in vengeance is to become what they are: a killer driven by base desire, thereby meaning you’ve accomplished nothing. Biologically what good does revenge do? Satisfy a primal urge to repair something that can never be fixed, especially by further death?

So we’re left with something we all WANT to do (we’re only human) but CAN’T do, so we project this into a heroic fantasy. Unfortunately with the least amount of thought the fantasy falls apart.

Here we have a decent guy who is driven to kill a human being out of petty personal selfishness. Killing this guy might help others in the long run, but more often then not it comes down to the hero pointing his weapon at the otherwise defeated bad guy, snarling the name of their loved one…then blowing them away. What a hero? Seriously. From a non-religious perspective what good does killing somebody in memory of someone else do other then make the killer feel good about themselves, which can be said of any psychopath? And religiously, would a person’s spirit usually want their death to be avenged…by having their loved one kill another guy and tarnish their soul in their own name?

Our hero’s purpose is strangely hollow ultimately. With his enemy dead he’s stuck with a record, nightmares, and more often then not knee deep in criminal charges or divorced from society since he took up a weapon to murder-back someone else. One of the more famous examples of this kind of lingering doubt that remains in the wake of vengeance is oddly from a comedy/fantasy ‘The Princess Bride’ when Inigo Montoya a vengeful Spaniard reflects towards the end of the film ‘Is very strange. I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.’

And this faces our heroes after the deed is done even if they do drive off into the sunset. If not we’re stuck with a rather brutal consequence-free power fantasy which can be fun if its cartoony, but if its blood-spattered or hateful it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

The Solution: Revenge is a motivator, but should it really have the final say for a hero? Shouldn’t our struggling protagonist eventually confront his own poor decisions and have them matter? If the bad guy is usually chiefly the bad guy because he hurts/kills others to get what he wants…how exactly can we tell who are the heroes if they do the exact same thing? So I say by all means have the hero dealing with issues of vengeance which can make for dramatic and powerful emotional complications, but build on this theme in a way that seems less of a fantasy and more of a true investigation. What happens when a hero discovers themselves veering away BY CHOICE from their own principals, ultimately for a cause even their enemies might be perfectly fine with: ‘you hurt me, I hurt you’?
This motivator could be easily turned from a cliched and lazy excuse for the hero to kill and hurt people, into a dark mirror of what the hero could become despite all of their moral concerns. Imagine if instead of a placeholder to drive the plot, this motivator because the central conflict; the war not only for the hero’s life but also their soul.

After recently watching Thor the Dark World I wish someone had seen to it that their cliched placeholders were at least given some kind of twist, some kind of meaning. As stands unfortunately an action-packed sci-fi story featuring the possible end of reality left me completely bored, and I think I’m not entirely alone there.

You can have entertainment, yes, but you can also have CONTENT, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

Female Roles or Stereotypes?

For all its hoopla about racism and sexism, Hollywood is without exception the single biggest practitioner of both.
Why are there not very many minority actors? Not because people don’t want to see them, but because Hollywood won’t hire them. Why are there so few woman directors or actors playing anything but pretty distractions and generic roles? Not because there’s no public demand for better female characters, but because Hollywood sees no reason to spend the time writing any.
Female roles especially fall into one of two subgroups most often…

1: The superfluous, amiable damsel in distress there to look pretty and be rescued.

2: The grouchy, superior, businesslike, alpha-female archetype.

And these two can blend or even replace one another as time goes, but this seems to be the norm unfortunately in most major productions. Woman it seems can’t play characters, can be PEOPLE they have to represent something, either a male or female power fantasy. Men sometimes have this distinction (either as poetic lapdogs with pecs or invincible super heroes) but sometimes there are character actors who will play different characters. Males can just as easily be found as the geeky computer genius, the calculating villain, the quirky dork, and the jaded police officer as they are portrayed as either personality-lite shoulder candy or bullet-proof machismo.

However when is the last time you couldn’t pigeonhole a female, let alone a female lead, with the following statements…?

1: She is superior to every male character in the production in terms of intelligence and strength.
2: She is the only character to refer to her gender over and over again as identifying her.
3: She is not as instrumental in the plot as male characters, except perhaps symbolically.
4: She is physically attractive be she hero, villain, or ancillary.
5: She never makes mistakes that have meaningful consequences.
6: She never makes difficult choices that have meaningful consequences.

For a society convinced of its own progressive attitude, exactly why do our female characters consistently get the sideline?

I’d argue the reason is twofold. One is that few people feel that can accurately write for a female character. Men have a preconceived notion for the most part I believe that female thought processes are entirely alien to their own comprehension. A female isn’t necessarily a ‘human’ to many people, let alone one associable with a male. Not for chauvanist reasons (mostly) but for the exact opposite. Females are BETTER then males so they aren’t susceptible to the same foibles of character and their actions don’t have as grim a consequence. Female characters are most often either a purer and more morally upstanding version of humanity then male characters, or an upgraded male type who can get down and dirty with the ‘boys’ but outclasses them in every respect.
Apart from this incomprehension of female characters as characters rather then some kind of alien subspecies, the other problem is similar but not exactly akin: namely that male authors are afraid of what females may think of their own portrayal. Portray males any way you want to, the uproar of males will be minor and easily ignored. I’ve seen films attribute all manner of evil to a character by virtue of them simply being male which might be considered ‘sexist’ but only if it was in the case of a female character. And that’s the point. Female characters are sacred ground. You can’t portray a female in a poor way because then you’re at risk of being called sexist. ‘Poor’ encompasses such things as males doing anything better then females…even if quite frankly this sort of thing is scientifically infeasible. Physically woman are less strong then men on average when it comes to upper body strength by virtue of the structure of their own musculature. They are physically stronger in their lower bodies on average to men for the same reason. However writers feel that lingering doubt that they’re letting their male bias cloud their judgement if a female can’t literally hurl the heaviest muscled man around like a rag doll.
Logic takes a back seat to political correctness.

And an unintended side effect of this is that almost all female characters are now Mary Sues, or characters who are incapable of doing, saying, thinking, contributing to anything unsuccessful. Can female characters do ‘bad’ things? Sure. There’s fem fatales and evil female characters and even some female thugs in films, but none of these ever do anything unsuccessfully…unless they’re confronted by ANOTHER female character in which case it balances out. With rare exceptions the female villain will not be confronted or defeated by a male character. They’ll be taken out or disposed of by another female. Female characters are just without the capacity to do things by mistake that aren’t ultimately a boon to everyone involved or a funny little aside that’s not quickly brushed aside.

Are there exceptions?

There almost always are exceptions because people think in different ways and there’s a lot of people dreaming and writing at the same time.
Most notable among these exceptions are to me anyway. To be specific these are based on the things I’ve seen so I can say with more certainty if they struck me as deeper characters then the usual variety.
The fact it took so much effort to come up with these speaks to the sorry state of the female character today…

1: Katniss Everdeem from The Hunger Games
At least from what I’ve seen in the first film (haven’t read much of the book) this is a female character who is truly a character. The actress brings this to life beautifully and perhaps provides more depth then even the writing or directing, but Katniss is portrayed as a character/person first and a female in passing. She doesn’t constantly refer to her gender in a positive or negative light. Characters don’t immediately latch on to the fact she is a female in a positive or negative way either. To The Capital she’s just another contestant, to her family she’s a beloved sister or a providing daughter, and to her love interests she’s an equal. By no means is she impervious either. She misses with attacks, gets injured, makes hasty decisions and is allowed to show some emotions that impair her judgement without the normal Hollywood fear that women displaying emotions would seem to be sexist.
Most interesting of all to me is that she isn’t defined even by being a ‘hero’ so much as being an individual in a crisis situation. She isn’t even that adverse to killing other people her age on principal so much as she feels she might regret it at some point. In the moment she’s willing to do anything to live and to save her sister, even reprehensible actions. But the film doesn’t praise her for these even though she’s a hero and a woman doing them. If she does something wrong, she did something wrong. When she shoots the final villainous kid with her bow he doesn’t die immediately like a action movie minion, he shrieks and piteously whimpers at the pain and Katniss’s eyes express fully that even though she can justify this action in her head, the rest of her doubts if this was the right thing to do.
The film allows her to question herself, and by extension the audience to question her and perhaps their own actions as well.
A resourceful, lightly humorous, real person, she is still one of my favorite modern day female characters and an indication that some people ‘get’ that just because a character has another Y chromosome doesn’t make them a mutant with magic powers or an utterly alien mind.

2: Alice from American McGee’s Alice
This has to be one of the most daring female characters ever created. Thematic material and source adaptation aside, this is a character who is without caveat insane. She isn’t pretending to be crazy. She doesn’t have lapses. Alice has been driven into psychosis by trauma and spends much of her time in a coma in the real world. Even in the sequel she barely functions; battered constantly by nightmarish waking visions and complete breaks with reality. It’s harder to find a character who would seem to be less capable of rational decisions then one who is lost in a dream world. But Alice is sagacious, courageous, and compassionate enough to see through her own pain to try and help that of others. Since the whole of her adventure is encompassed by an inner Wonderland, she in fighting against herself, her fears, her darkness the entire time. Others may have instigated this psychosis, but Alice isn’t shy about telling herself over and over again that a majority of the reasons she remains living in the past and in her mind are caused by her fear, her inability to confront it, and her desire to ignore what is unthinkable to consider. A fighter, but not because of strength of arm but strength of will. She isn’t considered (at least in the first two games) a particularly enlightened and worldly character by virtue of her sex. She’s treated like a woman might be in her time, and reacts the same way. The thing that sets her apart is the choices she makes, the dangers she faces, and what she’s willing to do for her family and her friends. She’s also tends to be polite consciously which makes her very well spoken and cautious in her speech, and that’s extremely unusual for a hero or heroine for that matter to be.

3: Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony Friendship is Magic
She’s a dork.
This is a RARE female trait, but here it’s fully and affectionately realized. Twilight isn’t a poor, shy, shut-in who needs to let her hair down to be sociable, neither is she an infallible genius. She likes books. She like research and keeping things organized. Interestingly the best way to describe a lot about her personality is a disorder rather then a trait: obsessive compulsive. Twilight is by nature committed to complete order in her life and work, and literally has breakdowns when she runs into a snag she can’t overcome by looking it up or writing it down. She makes mistakes. She gets passionate about things and this can override her judgement. She can be open and friendly as often as she can be busy and seclusive. Twilight isn’t a coward, but she can get scared. She isn’t a fool, but she can misinterpret. She isn’t a full on ‘girly girl’ but she does periodically like to investigate the hallmarks of traditional femininity with the same intensive scrutiny she applies to everything else (such as using a guide book to hold a slumber party). Here is a person first. A person shaped by her female identity, but not defined by it. Twilight I don’t think in the course of the show has ever brought up the fact she’s a girl, nor denied it in the face of doing something ‘boy-like’. She has her attitude, her quirks, her faults, and her virtues as part of this identity.
Friendship may be ‘magic’ but it’s not taken for granted, and the evolution Twilight’s character has undergone frankly puts a lot of other shows to shame.

4: Coroline
A lot of people consider the recent Princess from the movie Frozen to be a great role model because of her willfulness, her disrespect of her elders, and ultimately her rejection of the world in favor of relying on her own abilities. I haven’t seen Frozen granted so I might be off the mark, but it seems like this from commercials and clips.
Coroline is a rather sobering example, fantasy though it may be, of one of the common consequences of this kind of acting out.
She’s a teen with her own interests that tend to run counter to her boring family. She doesn’t exactly care for the other kid in her vicinity Wybie who seems a bit too talkative and always butts in on her solitude to dream. She does pride herself however on her extensive imagination, and its there she takes refuge so often she wishes she could escape there, escape her overworked dad and tired mom, escape her dull new home with lousy appliances.
Escape life itself.
And she gets her chance. Through a magical door she finds another family, an Other Mother who (aside from buttons sewed into where her eyes should be) seems much better then her real life family in every way. Here in this world everything is built for her, placating to her. Magical wonders unfold and nothing is denied. This is so much better then reality: a place not only where she can be herself, but also where she’s appreciated and even lauded for just that.
But whereas Frozen seems to have stopped right there, Coroline continues…and thus becomes a MUCH more interesting character to me.
Coroline isn’t doing the right thing here. Not because there’s danger. Not because she’s being willfully cruel. She’s thoughtless. She doesn’t think about her parents; she thinks about herself, ironically translating this into how NOBODY thinks about her because they don’t do what she wants. She doesn’t wonder the consequences initially of having everything she dreams about. Even when she meets Other Whybie who seems incapable of speaking she states quite literally ‘It’s an improvement’. For all she’s concerned at first Whybie works better as a tool then a person: someone to sit idly by, smiling, as SHE shows off how amazing she is.
But it all comes apart. The trap of this world is revealed and THEN Coroline shows herself to be a role model indeed.
Someone willing to say, without reservation, that what she did was a mistake and it is her fault things got to be this way. Not through action exactly. More through inaction, but it doesn’t matter. People suffer. Other Father is destroyed and her real parents are imprisoned. Other Mother is to blame in part, yes, but Coroline ignored the warning signs, ignored the talking Black Cat who all but told her she was in danger. She wanted so much for it to be true she let herself be ensnared.
And when she fights back, what is her reward? Nothing. She doesn’t win a great reward. Her parent’s aren’t changed. Her world isn’t altered. Everything goes back the way it was.
The only thing to change is Coroline herself, by her own choices, and through her own sacrifices.
I was amazed this quite frankly flabbergasting characterization and story arc remained intact from book to film, but it stays true to the message: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
And in the end that same boring life doesn’t go away, SHE transforms it with effort, with empathy.
That is what makes her a hero, unsung though she may be. But Coroline has seen the price you can pay to hear others sing your praises.
Not just a great female character, a great character. And that’s the highest compliments I can offer.

So where are our female characters?

We need them. We need people, male and female, to understand that differing physical features do not mean a separate species. We need writers to realize that writing female characters who make mistakes doesn’t mean women will not enjoy or relate to these characters. It’s my belief a majority of women know they’re capable of making mistakes as much as a guy might, perhaps generally different mistakes because of their gender or their perceptions of that gender (guys are statistically less often jealous of each other’s physicality.)
Foibles, mistakes, slipups, even ruinous bad decisions allow us to see, sometimes all too clearly, a character we can peg as human, but so can virtues, good decisions, wisdom, principals, courage, and acts of love.

And ALL of these things women is as capable as a man of expressing in fiction and beyond.

If only more people were dedicated to this in their storytelling rather then suiting either a male or female fantasy of what a ‘womyn’ should be ideally.
Guess what? Not all women have enormous breasts and pencil-thin waists. Not all have luxuriant hair and perfect skin.
Some actors break down this distinction. Linda Hunt, a dwarf, has shown time and again she can play compelling characters not anchored to a Hollywood ideal. The actress Helen Mirren and Judy Dench consistently deliver great performances and draw in crowds despite being an age a lot of studios might consider ‘over the hill’ because they don’t look like the cover of a Sports Illustrated. Actresses like Ellen Degeneress emphasize humor over some kind of specific gender association, like when she played the endearingly scatterbrained Dory in Finding Nemo.

There are exceptions. They’re just few at the moment because the system, flawed as it is, seems to be working.
Keep out the ‘ugly’ actors. Keep women either subservient arm candy or grousing uberfemales.
That way those delicate female flowers out there won’t be offended, it’s politically correct so men can’t socially express their offensive if any, and we can still splash breasts on our posters to (supposedly) draw in the teen demographic.

But a lot of recent films and reviews I think show this ISN’T working.
Box office takes are relatively low, and dropping, especially for ‘surefire’ blockbuster movies. Actresses of greater age and experience are drawing crowds away from nubile models without acting talent.

If Hollywood doesn’t wake up to the fact that woman can be characters, somebody outside of it will.
And then, maybe, we’ll see much more equality of characterization and a lot more films where the heroine is a hero AND a women, not one because of the other alone and without further definition.

If it doesn’t work for a man, why should it be sufficient for a women?