Artemis Fowl and the Villain Protagonist

I finished the main story on Shadow of Mordor, and am currently on the second main DLC, Desolation of Mordor. Which is SCARY because Baranor has no magic or Ring of Power, so if I die I am screwed.

Also WE’RE REREADING DRAGONLANCE PUNKZ!! That’s not what this note is about, but I’m very excited about it.

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Artemis Fowl: Introduction to the Villain Protagonist

With the upcoming film coming out, and the trailer looking very… different from the book from which it is supposedly based on, I can’t help but think about Artemis Fowl. And I get that there are probably a bajillion posts out there explaining the problems with the trailer, on a fundamental level...we’re going to talk about this series anyway because it’s a random thing on my mind and I’m a bit worn out from all the rain.

Alright let’s take it front he top: inspired by a photo of his brother in a formal wear as a child, Eoin Colfer decided that it’d be really cool if there was a Bond villain that was an actual child. So he wrote Artemis Fowl, a story about a preteen named Artemis Fowl, the heir to a wealthy Irish crime family. Since his father, Artemis Fowl Senior, disappears and his mother locks herself in her room and refuses to come out. This leaves little Arty to come up with his own way to get back the family fortune and find his dad. The solution he comes up: fairies.

See, fairies are a real, if technologically advanced, civilization in the world of Artemis Fowl that was forced underground in the distant past. Artemis finds out that there is truth to the old legend that if you catch a leprechaun, you get a pot of gold: there’s ransom money paid to whoever manages to hold onto to Lower Elements Police Recon officer (that’s LEPrecon) gets a butt ton of gold. So Artemis kidnaps Holly Short, the first female LEPrecon officer when she’s short (ha) on magic and what follows is Artemis and Butler trying to fend off attempts to rescue her, Holly’s own quest to escape, and power struggles in the LEPrecon hierarchy in what’s an unprecedented crisis.

As Eoin Colfer put it, “It’s Die Hard with fairies!”

Artemis Fowl strikes me, upon reflection, as one of the strange children’s books of the early 2000’s that felt unique. Most books you feel as if you can trace a lineage; there are a bajillion children’s books that are fantastic in their own ways, but it’s not hard to see how they were inspired by Harry Potter or Chronicles of Narnia or whatever. And to be fair, Artemis Fowl has the very clear lineage of James Bond, Die Hard, fairy tales, and cop movies. But that wasn’t something that people saw a lot of in literature for children. And what made it really stick out was that it leaned so heavily into these tropes without pulling too many punches, AND the Bond villain is the protagonist.

Well, one of the protagonists. I think it’s fair to call Holly Short co-protagonist.

This was a lot of people’s first introduction to the idea of a villain protagonist. Because Artemis Fowl is the villain; you get his reasons, and he has noble traits, but he’s the villain. The entire thing starts because he decides he’s going to kidnap someone and hold her for ransom. We can try to handwave it away with him wanting his father back, his sick mother, or whatever, but it’s still there. And Artemis does get better, and becomes a good person over the course of the series, but that’s through several books of being the Token Evil Teammate and character development, and he still works a lot through subverting usual hero tropes. Even when he’s not evil, he’s more the Chaotic Good, who breaks the rules and does whatever he has to do in order to help the people and causes he cares about.

I have seen a couple of children’s books since that have tried this formula: H.I.V.E. is the first that comes to mind. But they tend to gloss over the idea of their characters being villains and it’s frustrating because they don’t really deal with the consequences of that, other than give them really cool gadgets and snarky personalities.

[I’m a bit on the fence as to whether Nathaniel from Bartimaeus Trilogy is a villain protagonist, and if that series is even for children.]

So you can probably imagine why it’s frustrating when fans of the series see the trailer for the new movie and it’s a straightforward Hero’s Journey, about a young boy who finds out that his destiny is to protect the fairy world or something. Yeah, a lot of the elements in the trailer are straight out of the book, but the spirit of the thing is completely gone. I understand that the change is probably because it doesn’t seem that safe a bet to make a movie for children about a child criminal. I heard (and have yet to see a source on it, so take this with a grain of salt) that someone involved with the production claimed that the reasoning was that he needed to start as a more innocent child so that you could identify with him. Which is dumb because the entire point is that he’s not an innocent child.

I wouldn’t say that Artemis Fowl is THE perfect villain protagonist, but he’s one of the better ones, and among the ones that appear in children’s literature he’s certainly the best one I can think of. He’s delightfully fun to read because he’s terrible. The whole idea is that he has to learn to not be terrible, one step at a time.

And dang, the idea of a Bond villain that’s a kid is loads of fun. It’s disappointing that someone at Disney didn’t see the appeal of that. Maybe the film will be good! I don’t know; basing an opinion on a sole trailer that I’ve only seen once isn’t something that I try to do. But the fact that they marketed it the way that they did makes me think they didn’t even begin to understand the use of a villain protagonist, or Artemis Fowl in general.

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Jurassic Park and Author Rants

‘Sup, punks. I finished re-reading Jurassic Park and have moved on to re-reading The Killer Angels. Military history was never really my thing, but I had it in my room and thought it might be worth a re-read; last time I read it was for AP US History class. So it’s been about a decade since I last thought about it in any capacity.

I have a lot of thoughts about Jurassic Park, mostly about how stupid Hammond is, but about some other things too. Like, Grant is the only guy in the book who manages a kill streak on velociraptors? Just sayin’.

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Jurassic Park and the Author Rant

Michael Crichton is many things, but subtle he is not. If you pick up one of his books, it’s plain to see that he has opinions. In some cases, they’re about which characters you’re meant to like and dislike: villains and traitors are often unlikable from the start, and while they may have reasons for their actions, they still give off bad vibes. Dennis Nedry, for instance, is the computer guy for the park in Jurassic Park, and while he is given backstory justifying his betrayal of InGen (being blamed for things not his fault, not being given details on what he was building, forced to work without pay), he’s still depicted as an unlikable lazy slob, and Grant, our protagonist, instantly dislikes him on sight.

[Fun fact! In one of his novels Michael Crichton mentioned a throwaway character with no page-time after a critic who gave him bad reviews. Said character was a pedophile with a small penis. No, I’m not making this up.]

But sometimes, it’s not enough to tell you to dislike a character and like another. Sometimes, he decides he’s going to preach to you. And Jurassic Park does that through the mouth of Ian Malcolm, a mathematician and expert in Chaos Theory. He’s the main naysayer to the idea of the park, and after he gets wounded by the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Malcolm spends about half the book on morphine trying to recover in a room talking about the dangers of misapplied science, our treatment of nature, why we shouldn’t play God and other cheerful topics.

While I don’t see a lot of fans of the book complaining that much (though I don’t interact with the fandom that much either, so maybe I’m just missing it), it is something people have pointed out. Here’s a book about dinosaurs going wild and munching on people, and there are pages dedicated to Malcolm telling the characters about the right way to approach science and life and all of that. It’s a bit… odd.

This never bothered me that much when I first read it. Maybe it was because I was a pretentious middle schooler at the time, but I think in part because it functions a bit like comic relief? It isn’t comic relief, don’t get me wrong--it isn’t as if anything Malcolm says in these bits is particularly funny. And that’s good, because it’d be weird to switch from Arnold being ripped open by a raptor to a wacky comedy bit. But it is a relief; there are large sections of the book that are incredibly tense because the characters are exploring an island that’s full of creatures that would happily kill and eat them, desperately trying to get control of the situation. Because of this, having short chapters where that’s not happening is a relief to the reader, and a chance to catch one’s breath.

But yes, it is very preachy. And that makes it a bit difficult to justify. I could try to argue that it helps get across the themes of the book, and how everything went wrong, but that should be self-evident from the story itself. Just because I thought it worked okay doesn’t mean it’ll work okay for everyone. And Michael Crichton’s method of sandwiching the Author Tracts between bits of suspense and violence is something that a lot of authors don’t do. 

Raise your hand if you’ve read a book, watched a movie, or watched a show where the narrative just stops in order to deliver a point about a topic. Not even necessarily exactly what Crichton does, where it’s switching between scenes, just a bit where everything stops. It happens more often than it should. Yeah, it’s not great. People aren’t always reading (or watching, or what have you) to be preached at. I’m not saying you can’t weave themes or messages, even heavy-handedly, into a story. Stories can teach; that’s fine. But it feels quite a bit different when the story has sections completely dedicated to that teaching, where it feels less like the author’s telling the story and more like he or she copied and pasted bits of his or her personal manifesto into the text.

This doesn’t make Jurassic Park a bad book; I think, on the whole, it’s a very good one. But again, while I didn’t mind Crichton telling me what he thought about the world through Malcolm’s words, that doesn’t mean I thought it was necessarily an objectively good writing decision. Yeah, he has opinions, and yeah, he wants to share them. But I think there were better ways of including that in the book than having a character sit down and spell it out to the reader in his own words.

As Limyaael said, if you want to write a pamphlet, then write a pamphlet. 

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Bad at Being Bad

How does a freaking olog come back from decapitation?! Look, I’ve been playing Shadow of War and it’s throwing me for a loop when a Nemesis cheats death even after I’m absolutely sure that he’s gone.

Anyway right now I’m re-reading Orcs (because I’m also playing Shadow of War and it seems like it fits), but I think for the next book I’ll try something a little less high fantasy? Probably another ‘Ology’ book and then Jurassic Park’s overdue for a re-read or Pirate Latitudes (by the same author), or maybe I’ll take a crack at Killer Angels (retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg)? Someone tell me what they’d prefer.

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Bad at Being Bad

I think, aside from the word ‘bad’ being in the title, it’s not much to do with last week’s.

I’m re-reading Orcs by Stan Nicholls, which I noticed doesn’t have that many good reviews on Goodreads compared to some of the other books I pick up. And I think it’s alright, but a complaint I saw a number of times in reviews that I can’t help but agree with is this: the villains are really stupid.

A short while back I did a Note on something I called ‘Stupid Evil.’ It’s when someone writes villains that aren’t just capital ‘E’ Evil, but they’re really bad at it? They’re pointlessly cruel in ways that will come back and bite them. The example I gave in that Note was the Empire in Star Wars: Battlefront II’s story mode, in which after the Emperor’s death, they’re given his contingency plan titled “Operation Cinder” which is to use these weird superweapons to torch as many of their own planets as they can. Admittedly, deciding that if he can’t have the planets then no one else can is perfectly in-character for Palpatine, I don’t understand why the Imperial officers in charge go along with it, considering that they’re burning their own home planets in the Core Worlds for no other reason than because the dead Emperor said so. It is cruelty for no reason other than the writers to say that the bad guys are EVIL. It’s stupid, it makes no sense, and it makes more problems than it solves.

This plan, of course, backfires when Inferno Squad, the elite Imperial black-ops team, sees this happening and no longer wants any part of the Empire, defecting to the Alliance and telling them all they know so that they can destroy the superweapon before it damages any more worlds. Because obviously the leader of Inferno Squad is going to have a problem when they torch her home planet.

I was reminded of that kind of thing while re-reading the book Orcs is about a warband called the Wolverines that renegade on their evil overlord, Jennesta, to go and decide their own fates while collecting important magical artifacts. It’s a fun plot, but there are some things that undermine its efficiency. The main one is that the villain, Jennesta, is incompetently Evil. She’s reprehensible, oh sure: her first scene is a rape and ritual murder rolled together. But she’s really bad at being a villain.

The reason the Wolverines leave her service is because they’re a few days late in their delivering the artifact, and they all know that she would have them executed just for that. She’s constantly torturing and executing people for no reason, or as punishment for perceived failures. When underlings point out that what she’s asking for is physically impossible given the resources they have, she just murders or tortures some more until they trail (and fail) to get what she wants done. When her forces start defecting in large numbers to follow the Wolverines, Jennesta’s only solution is to try having dissidents executed, not understanding that maybe fear of her isn’t keeping people in line as much as she thought. And when leading troops into battle, there’s no talk of strategy or maneuvers; the only thing she cares about is numbers, and when her general points out that the enemy has several thousand men on their side, she just handwaves it and doesn’t even consider how to approach it other than throwing more bodies at them.

Why is she like this? [shrugs] I dunno. She just is. She has another sister who’s an evil queen, and one that’s good but locked up in a castle. She doesn’t want anything other than power, as far as I understand it. She’s not got some deep backstory that explains why she’s a terrible person. Jennesta just is.

There’s another enemy faction, the Unis. They’re fanatical Christian fundamentalists. That’s it and that’s all. They have no deeper motivations behind that, there are no moderates among them that we see (although one character mentions them). They rant and rave about how God wants them to murder all of the Elder Races and the pagan Manis because, uh, that’s what they do, I guess? Seriously, there’s even less characterization to them. There isn’t any missionary work or conversions that we see, just crusades. They’re happy to murder people for the sake of them being Not Them. There’s not even much cursory dialogue explaining that they believe the Elder Races or the Manis do human sacrifice or are bringing down society or something, they’re just murder-happy. Because Reasons. Y’know.

I’m not saying that villains need to be sympathetic; they don’t. But they should at least be interesting, and if nothing else, at least competent. Because these villains… aren’t. And that’s a shame. I like the heroes of Orcs, and I want to see them succeed. But it’s not until they’re cornered that I really have concerns about that, because the villains can’t keep up. The heroes are running circles around Jennesta and the Unis, but not because they’re that smart, because the villains are just that bad at coming up with a plan to counter them. Or coming up with rational thought in general.

If you want the heroes’ victories to feel real, they need to have villains that stack up to their own courage or intelligence or skill or whatever traits you want to emphasize. Jennesta isn’t that. She’s a Stupid Evil Queen that somehow doesn’t get that murder isn’t the solution to every problem, and can’t think her way out of a cardboard box. Yeah, I can still enjoy the story, but that enjoyment is hampered by the fact that the villains are stupid; of course the heroes win, because they’re smarter than a box of rocks.

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So Good, He's Bad

I am, as I start this essay, re-reading The Once and Future King by T.H. White and I find… that I don’t actually like it all that much? I don’t like how a good chunk of the novel is laser-focused on the love triangle, and I don’t like how it tries to portray Lancelot and Guinevere’s actions as sympathetic when they’re kind of terrible. Having now read adaptations that brutally deconstruct or satirize the Lancelot/Guinevere relationship, seeing it played straight and the central part of the story feels…

I just kind of hate it. Not the book, overall, just this plot element. But the book doesn’t endear itself to me.

Anyhow this is something I’ve been thinking about since I started my Wheel of Time re-read last year.

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He’s So Good, He’s Bad

Something that bothered me in Wheel of Time during my re-read is the way Galad is depicted. Galad is one of the members of the royal family of Andor, and the brother of one of the main characters Elayne. Both Elayne and her brother Gawyn (yes, there are a lot of Arthurian-themed names in this series, go with it) don’t really get along with Galad because Galad’s a bit of a goody-two shoes, always turning them in if they do something wrong and being a stickler for the rules. This is framed as Galad being “too good.” He’s not a good person, he’s too good of a person. And this leads him to joining an extremist group called the Children of the Light, or the Whitecloaks, who are more or less what you’d get if you crossed the Inquisition with the Teutonic Knights on steroids, without any sort of Church or government that they owed allegiance to. In theory they stand against the Dark One, but they tend to label anyone they don’t like as Darkfriends and are so hypocritical that they hardly notice when their own ranks are infiltrated by Darkfriends, as they’re too busy pursuing the heroes.

And to be entirely fair to Robert Jordan, this statement of him being “too good that he’s bad” come from Elayne and Gawyn, who are his siblings. They hardly have an objective opinion on the matter. And Gawyn turns out to be even worse; by the end of the fourth book he’s a murderer who betrays his allegiances because he’s mad the good guys are keeping secrets from him, more or less. But Galad’s characterization bothered me a bit, because it seemed to imply that if someone was too concerned with doing the right thing, he or she will turn out evil. And that bothered me, because it was like a condemnation of the Lawful Good character type.

I don’t know; maybe I’m reading too much into it. I haven’t finished this series yet either, so I don’t know where Galad’s character arc will go. 

But then this past week I’m re-reading The Once and Future King by T.H. White, and I had some of these thoughts again because White… is actually incredibly cynical. He helpfully informs us that if Lancelot hadn’t been brought up to care about chivalry or morality or trying to do the right thing, he could have just run off with Guinever and the whole tragedy could have been avoided. White sees the knights who obtain the Holy Grail in a way that makes it seem like he doesn’t like them very much: Galahad is too perfect, that no one can really relate to him, Bors is explicitly a misogynist (a trait White keeps telling us but giving very little proof of other than that he’s a bit rude to Guinever), and Percivale is almost childish in how innocent he is. Percivale comes across the best, in White’s eyes, but it’s still kind of condescending that he equates this level of innocence with being childish.

To be a saintly person, White seems to say, you must be completely detached from reality in some way or another. And this… bothers me.

Again, being fair, Lancelot does come to the defense of his son Galahad by pointing out that Galahad is apparently someone born without sin; or at least, without the capability of committing mortal sin. You wouldn’t expect an archangel to act like a normal person, would you? And Arthur accepts this explanation, pointing out that the knights who Galahad bothers are the most worldly of them all. 

It’s not made any easier because very little of these characters is ever shown to us; Percivale is entirely off-page through the entire story. Their exploits are usually relayed to us by different knights, reporting back on what’s going on during the Grail Quest. So all we have to go on are these reports from others saying, “These guys? They’re just too perfect that they’re a pain in the butt to even be around.”

Like, imagine if there was a Marvel story that portrayed Captain America as a massive douchebag, not because he’s doing anything wrong, but because he’s too Lawful Good. That he’s so out of touch from the world and so neither the author nor the characters in the story care about him.

Oh wait, that did happen during the Civil War arc in the comics. A reporter accused Steve Rogers of being a hypocrite because he didn’t know what Myspace was. Rogers was flummoxed and stunned into shamed silence. And it was as stupid as it sounds. 

No really, this happened.

I’m not suggesting you can’t play around with Lawful Good characters, nor am I suggesting that cynical takes on them can’t happen. I’m not saying that all the heroes need to be Moral Paragons! I don’t want that and you don’t want that. But I’m not thrilled with this idea of saying, ‘Oh this character is a paragon of what is Good and Righteous? Then he or she must actually be a colossal dick, or a social reject, or else I must find some other way to take a dump on this character and on the idea of morality.’

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Samurai Jack Final Season Talk

We have an announcement for a new Assassin’s Creed! That’s something positive, at least. 

There is a possibility that I won’t have Netflix in the coming months, so I’m trying to finish at least the first season of Community. But I did finish Samurai Jack, and that’s what we’re going to talk about here today!

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Samurai Jack: The Final Season

There be some spoilers here, ahoy!

Let’s start with: I thought that the final season of Samurai Jack is great. It ties up the story in a way that satisfactory, it contains a lot of great action sequences, and is a strong conclusion to a story from over a decade ago. The fact that we got a final season that finished the show at all is almost miraculous, because I didn’t expect it to happen ever.

It’s good. It’s satisfying. Buuuuuut---

In many ways the final season doesn’t feel like Samurai Jack. I get that by necessity, it can’t; one of the things that was signature to Samurai Jack was that it was almost entirely standalone episodes that didn’t relate to each other, with very little need of continuity. A conclusion to the story, by its very nature, would feel an aberration, because it would need continuity. No matter how it came about, it would need to take all these bits and pieces and put them together in the finale to be something that the fans would love. I suppose you could do a Samurai Jack finale without referencing the Guardian, or the Scotsman, or the three gods who made the sword, but I think it would feel a bit empty.

So fine, the Samurai Jack finale was never going to feel like the rest of the series. Let’s accept that. But the final season has a few elements that don’t feel like Samurai Jack, most notably the reliance on dialogue throughout. I suspect much of that has to do with the fact that the final season is only ten episodes long, and it is more convenient to deliver that information by having the characters say things rather than just showing it to you. But I don’t think it had to be. We didn’t need to have all of the dialogue during the training of the Daughters of Aku; there is quite a lot that would have been picked up from scenes with much less dialogue. Jack’s internal struggle is displayed with him arguing with voices in his head, alternate personas that manifest to tell us what he thinks. But it doesn’t need to do that either, at least not to the same extent; the show very easily could convey his despair, loneliness and conflict through other means.

It doesn’t help that one of the big conflicts of the first few episodes rings hollow to me. In the first battle with the Daughters of Aku, Jack tells himself “They’re just nuts and bolts,” and becomes horrified when he kills one of them and discovers that she’s a human woman. In his conversation with himself afterward, he says that he’s never killed a human being before.

Even if we assume that in the fifty years he’s been wandering as an ageless samurai, he’s never killed a human being before (which okay, he’s a bit of a badass, so let’s give that one to him), what bothers me more is that it apparently never even occurs to him that Aku might send minions or bounty hunters that aren’t robots. Which is bulshimflarkus. He knows this isn’t true. He’s fought plenty of opponents that were flesh and blood before this point. And even if that weren’t the case, many of the robots we have seen have been intelligent, rational beings that seemingly have their own personalities. This angle, this whole, “Now he has to kill for the first time to survive” thing doesn’t feel right at all.

Compounding that, the final season seemingly contributes a lot of elements only to drop them unceremoniously. In the episode that brings him back halfway through the season, the Scotsman declares “We have to find Jack,” only for this to not be an ongoing subplot; he appears in the final battle, and he’s AWESOME, but despite teasing that he and his would be searching for Jack throughout the season, this doesn’t happen. Likewise, Scaramouche’s attempts to go inform Aku that Jack has lost his sword feel wasted, because by the time he does it, Jack has already reclaimed his sword.

[This last one is a bit more forgivable, because Aku going after Jack when he learns this does go somewhere, just not where it said it was going.]

Finally, there’s the Guardian, a plot point set up in the original series. Jack comes upon a time portal protected by a mysterious Guardian, who won’t let him through because he’s not the one destined to use it. We, the audience, find out that he is, but he isn’t yet; that at some point in the far future, Jack will be ready to go back to the past. This is dropped like a hot potato, where Jack comes upon the place where the portal used to be, and finds the Guardians glasses, implying that he’s dead.

And yeah, of course the show has to address why this thing didn’t happen, but… why didn’t this thing happen? Why bring it up at all in the original series if it wasn’t going to go anywhere? It just feels wasteful.

I suspect that a large part of why these problems occurred were because the final season was rushed. They were only given ten episodes, instead of the usual thirteen, and I suspect that if this story had been spread out over a couple of seasons it would have felt, if not more organic, then more Samurai Jack.

Like I said at the essay’s opening, I still think it’s a very good finale. We got a finale to Samurai Jack in 2017, and if you’d asked me a year before if I ever thought that was going to happen, I’d tell you ‘no.’ But we did, and I’m thankful for it. I found myself cheering during the final battle, and that’s not something I usually do when I’m watching cartoons by myself these days. It’s certainly worth watching if you’re a fan of the series, though I can’t help but think it could have been something more.

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