Telling Stories from the Villain's Perspective

 I sent a guy to Hel in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla; in my defense he absolutely deserved it after deciding to Blood Eagle a dude for kicks and backstabbed a friend of mine. I’m still mad at him, and this happened last Sunday.

Anyhow, I got my first covid vaccine, which is a thing to be thankful for. 

I had thoughts on Zack Snyder again, about how he sees his protagonists as mythological heroes rather than superheroes, and thus he takes his characters in a direction that most superhero filmmakers are afraid to go to, but that’s not necessarily a good thing and he doesn’t seem to get that not everyone is onboard for his Hot Take.

Last night I dreamed I was still in grad school but I was skipping classes. And also I was New Game+ing the Witcher 3? Fighting off rotfiends? Except it was life, I think? [shrugs]

Also I think I’ve written something like this before but we’re doing it anyway because that’s what is on my mind and I couldn’t think of anything else. There was going to be a bit on Testament of Loki I think, but I wasn’t sure how to put it in.

---

Telling the Story from the Villain’s Perspective

Very often, there come trends of telling stories from the perspective of the villain. The problem with this is that very often these retreads is that they often try to make it so that the villain is actually the hero. This is… not a great way to do these stories.

The main example that leaps to mind here is Maleficent. I said this in my review of Maleficent back after I saw it in theaters, but the main issue with the movie is that it doesn’t want Maleficent to be the villain. The movie turns Maleficent from a villain to a straightforward hero (if one with bad publicity) and doesn’t have her do anything too villainous, lest you decide you don’t like her. Her curse towards Aurora is switched from death to eternal sleep.

Also she doesn’t turn into a dragon which is LAME.

The whole point of telling the villain’s story isn’t to rewrite it so that the villain is actually the hero. It’s to tell the villain’s story--it’s to give us a perspective on the story we already know that we didn’t consider before, adding circumstances and characterization that gives much more context. In an age when stories are much more character-driven, many people don’t like the idea of a villain that’s evil just for the sake of it, a character who acts a certain why because “that’s just the way this person is.”

But Maleficent rearranges the entire story so that not only is Maleficent sympathetic, but she was never really wrong to begin with. She hardly did anything wrong. And the people who don’t like her are mostly jerks anyway, so it’s alright. Her casting a murder curse on a child is wiped from the story, as is her calling on the powers of Hell and having an evil army at her side.

You know what did a great job of telling the villain’s story? Once Upon a Time’s first season.

Look, after season one, Once Upon a Time was… not good, but I still maintain that it’s first season was brilliant and very well done. Everything I’m about to talk about relates to that first season and any complaints from afterward don’t apply here.

[Side note: even after I had publicly given up on this show, and I hated how critics seemed to love it, I never minded its fanbase? Because this show was bonkers, and the fans all knew it, so I couldn’t hold that against them.]

Regina is a terrible person, and the show doesn’t pull back from showing us that. And yet there is an entire episode dedicated to showing how she got there--her abusive mother, how she blames Snow for something bad that happens, and how it all spirals from there. The show doesn’t justify her malice, but it gives that character context that makes you understand why she got the way she did.

Now granted, this is a show and not a movie, and thus has a lot more time to develop characters, but the reveal of why Regina hates Snow so much is in one episode near the end of a season--an episode that’s shorter than a movie’s run time. And given that Sleeping Beauty already exists, I think Maleficent easily could have done a better job.

Telling the villain’s story should give us much more, but it shouldn’t make the villain into a hero (unless it was already a story with moral ambiguity, which is another thing entirely, I think).

I’m thinking about this in part because I recently reread Boxers & Saints which actually starts with the villain perspective, and although Little Bao (a fictional leading character in the Boxer Rebellion) begins the story sympathetic it devolves until he and his followers are essentially a nationalist terrorist movement slaughtering men, women, and children across the Chinese countryside. The author has talked about how he’s writing a protagonist that’s all but said in-story to be a terrorist (and this book came out in the early 2000’s I think??). The story isn’t making him out to be a good guy. Just… a guy with good motives that does some terrible things to try to make it happen.

Very rarely do I like the ‘Villain was actually the hero’ kind of story. There’s Twisted from Team Starkid, but that’s deliberately a parody of Wicked, Aladdin, and also the relationship between Disney and Pixar.

I am very wary of the upcoming Disney Cruella movie, because I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was another movie doing this exactly the wrong way as outlined above. That, and as is pointed out in Twisted, it’s very difficult to do a sympathetic take on a villain whose stated goal is to skin a bunch of puppies to make clothing out of.

Complex characters are fine. But just switching the villains into being the heroes isn’t the same as having complex characters. It’s just switching the labels and hoping that’s enough to make a new and compelling story. Which it generally isn’t.

Also you know just tell more original stories.

---

Age of Unreason Discussion

 Storm on Thursday was kind of a dud, which is good. Also in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla the Ostara Festival event is going on!

I have some Thoughts that are circulating around my head about Zack Snyder and all, but as I have no intention of watching the Snyder Cut (I have no HBO Max so I have no legal way to do it right now anyway), and I don’t think I have enough material for a full Note on that, we’re going to talk about this book series I just finished instead.

---

The Age of Unreason Discussion

Some spoilers ahead. I don’t think anyone cares, but thought I’d put that out there.

The Age of Unreason by J. Gregory Keyes is a quartet that runs on this premise: instead of the late 1600’s leading to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Sir Isaac Newton’s forays into alchemy bear fruit and blossoms into an explosion of alchemical science that takes the world by storm. Through alchemy, people are able to send messages across the world, create more efficient firearms, build flying ships, and in the case of Louis XIV, extend one’s natural lifespan. However, the use of aetheric science has grabbed the attention of otherworldly spiritual beings, and most of them don’t seem to like humanity very much! Realizing that the best way to destroy humanity is to get us to do it ourselves, they quickly find ways to turn nations against each other wielding weapons unlike anything seen in the real world.

It’s pretty hardcore sometimes? 

It is one of the weirdest alternate histories I’ve heard of. I picked it up after trying Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson and getting disappointed, because I really like the idea of a story about alchemy in the Enlightenment, and that one was just really boring. This one, on the other hand, dispenses with realism pretty quickly and just throws a bunch of historical figures in as characters. From the get-go, one of the protagonists is a young Benjamin Franklin, who naturally becomes an adept at alchemy and journeys to England to escape an evil warlock.

Also I really like alchemy. Not enough to go too deeply into it, but enough to draw alchemical symbols all over my notebooks.

I imagine that this series would be even more rewarding if I were more of a scholar of the time period, in the same way that Here, There Be Dragons is incredibly delightful to readers well-versed in classical fantasy and science-fiction. Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Charles XII, Peter the Great, James Oglethorpe, Voltaire, Tomochichi, and Louis XIV all appear sooner or later. The second book has Cotton Mather team up with Blackbeard of all people. The author’s clearly having fun throwing these characters together and seeing what happens.

Perhaps one of the interesting things about this series is it’s portrayal of colonialism. Obviously I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t happen anymore, because it definitely does even in this alternate history. But as the story goes on, and the conflict grows bigger and more unavoidable, the barriers of race and nationality start to break down. With resistance, but by the end of the series they’ve reached a point in which all men are more or less viewed as equal (still sexism though!). I thought this was maybe more optimistic than maybe history merited, but then again, maybe it’s not optimism--it takes the coming of the END OF THE WORLD for the people of this time period to realize that slavery and genocide is bad…. Well, that’s a ‘Better Late Than Never’ sticker if I ever saw one.

Mind you, while a couple of Native American characters take center stage, I don’t think any of the leads are black, even when freedmen make up a large portion of the forces fighting against the villains. So points off there.

I very much enjoyed that the nature of the spirit beings in the story is kept kind of vague. There are some answers, and characters do get some progress in classifying them--Isaac Newton decides to start calling them ‘malakim’ after Biblical angels and Adrienne and her students start working from there. But their nature, their relationship to God, if there even is a relationship to God, is all left muddled with theories, half-truths, and confusion. One of the malakim admits she doesn’t remember their origin for sure. Leaving it up in the air for this kind of story was the smart move, on Keyes’s part.

I did think that the story also has some things I really didn’t like. Adrienne, one of the main characters, basically has everything constantly dumped on her all the time, and it’s kind of tiring and exhausting. Which is part of the point, I think, that as a woman scholar in this time period who is suddenly thrust into the spotlight she keeps getting what she actually wants taken from her, but really? She gets raped by the King of France, falls in love with a guard who then dies shortly after they sleep together, and then falls in love with a married man who (predictably) dies before the story’s over. There had to be a way to convey her story other than making the character go through all of that, I think. She is a strong character, and I like where her arc ends, but I’m not sure that it was necessary to go through all of what she did to get there.

The series also ends with all of the alchemical science no longer working. Which is a bummer, I think, because all of that stuff was cool. I didn’t mind too much however, because we see that Ben Franklin and a few others are interested in pursuing what is probably real-world science, and the geo-political landscape of the world has changed so much from our own timeline that the world as presented in the books still feels like a fantastical one. I would be interested to know what happens afterward, though in broad strokes rather than another novel or series; after all, without the magic, I don’t know that there’d be much point to the story.

I liked these books. They were mostly fun, though they weren’t perfect. The author took his premise and ran with it, and had as much fun with it as he could while it lasted. And I think that’s something more authors need to try. Yeah, Peter the Great invading Venice with a fleet of airships is ridiculous, but it’s also one of the coolest things I’ve had the pleasure of typing, and that’s only one of the insanely awesome things that happens in this series. The series begins with the French plotting to nuke London, and it only goes weirder from there.

--- 

Robin Hood Adaptations

 So I’ve begun the next sporking chapter but I can’t promise that there will be any quick progress. There’s also someone’s story I’m supposed to be proofreading some more, and Camp NaNoWriMo is next month (EEK). So we’re in for a fun time, I think. Also, I should do my taxes, shouldn’t I?

I’m not sure how I landed on this as a topic, other than I’ve been seeing video updates on the upcoming heist game Hood: Outlaws and Legends and I figured that I don’t think I’ve written a Note on Robin Hood. And if I have, it’s deep in the archive somewhere and I only know of a couple people who want to go digging through that, and I’m not sure that I’m one of them.

---

On Robin Hood Adaptations

Alright boys and girls, let’s talk about Robin Hood.

Robin Hood adaptations have had a rough time of it lately. The last movie, starring Taron Edgerton was… not great, and apparently Edgerton himself wasn’t happy filming the movie, as he felt like it was a completely different thing than what he signed up for. It uses some very interesting design choices to not-so-subtly give you modern overtones about the story, and they got Lars Anderson to be the archery consultant for the movie.

Lars Anderson, the “I’ve only just discovered this method of historical archery that no one else has ever noticed and I’m the only one doing it right” guy. Yeah, him.

There was a Tumblr post that postulated that the problem with Robin Hood film adaptations is that they’re all trying to make the Robin Hood story into a social commentary on modern day, into this massive clash against The System, in which Robin leads the underdogs into a battle against the status quo. And it doesn’t work because that’s not what the story is. We know that’s not how the story goes, because most adaptations set the story at a specific point in history and if you have a grasp of English history, you know that oppressive monarchy wasn’t overthrown around the time of the Third Crusade.

He’s not even really the right build for it, is he? He’s not leading armies, he’s leading a group of guerilla fighters. The movies that really, for me anyway, sold a big battle at the end were the ones like Adventures of Robin Hood where he’s giving backup to King Richard, not just going in to save the country by himself. He’s less Superman and more like Batman (or Green Arrow, but that is an intentional parallel on DC’s part)--he deals with crises, but he’s not exactly battling to save the world. Or the country. He has his one cause he cares about (admittedly a big one with all its various facets) and that’s what he takes care of.

[Side note: look up essays on Robin Hood and its influence on Arrow.]

And it’s never as if Robin is even that much of a revolutionary. Yeah, he’s fighting for the people, but not to like, end the system. It’s to end the rule of Prince John, at most, and that’s so Richard can come back and take his rightful place. It’s not about overthrowing the monarchy or feudalism or anything of the sort. Not that it has to be, but it’s hard to argue for a revolutionary hero when the only actual change he advocates is who is wearing the crown.

Which reminds me, by the way: all of this “King Richard vs Prince John” business isn’t even necessary to the story? Look, most of what we know about the “legend” of Robin Hood and its popular depictions are heavily influenced by the novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. The Third Crusade setting, the Saxon vs Norman conflict, the loyalty to King Richard, the association with the word ‘Locksley’--while I don’t know if Scott introduced these elements, he’s the one that codified them, and the interpretation we see today comes heavily from the novel Ivanhoe. A lot of the older stories don’t mention these elements. They’re either set in a non-specified point in history, or mention King Edward.

There’s no reason that Robin Hood adaptions need to have the usual setup of the Crusades. It got popular in the last twenty years because the parallels to a certain war in the Middle East was too much for some writers to pass up. And to be clear, I don’t necessarily mind--the 2006 BBC series brought up Robin’s time in and disillusionment with the Crusades a lot, and while it was very heavy-handed and built on pop cultural ideas of the conflict rather than any deep dive into history, I think it’s good for there to be a mainstream character who says hating Muslims for being Muslim is Bad. This was a much bigger deal when that series came out.

But when done badly it’s just awkward. The 2018 film tried way too hard to draw those parallels by making the ballista fire and sound like machine gun turrets, and the Crusaders’ armor look suspiciously like modern combat gear. There’s even a character calling in an airstrike, except it’s catapults.

Also the Saracens have a deal with the English Church to keep the war going for Reasons I’m sorry this movie was mostly really dumb and I’m just saying you don’t even need to do any of this. Stephen Lawhead’s King Raven is Robin Hood as a Welshman in post-Conquest England, and it works while adapting many of the elements to that setting. I would very much like to see more screen adaptations do something like this. Most of them do the usual story for the sake of it. The past couple try to be origin stories for sequels that no one wants.

Before Ridley Scott picked up his Robin Hood movie, the script in development was apparently called “Nottingham” and was centered on a sympathetic take on the Sheriff solving medieval murder mysteries that Robin Hood had been framed for. That didn’t happen because the production crew didn’t think it would sell--and to be fair, I don’t know that they’re wrong. 

Still, you can make this a smaller movie. You don’t need a Robin Hood movie to be an epic battle about the fate of England. This is where I think a television approach generally works better--although, as we see with the 2006 Robin Hood on BBC, it can also go very wrong if the writers care more about dramatic twists than telling a good story. But movie or show, I think a Robin Hood movie would be better if it was more episodic, more interested in telling smaller stories about how the Merry Men met and various missions.

I don’t need a battle for the heart and soul of England. Those are okay, but I don’t think they’re what Robin Hood really needed. He certainly doesn’t need a movie to be a prequel/origin story. If he did, we have plenty of those anyway. I want more movies of Robin Hood as the scrappy guerilla fighter. I want to see him have adventures in the woods. I want to see him pulling off medieval heists. I want to see plenty of ridiculous but completely possible trick shots. It doesn’t even need to be a light-hearted story (although I would like that I think), but I think these stories would be better if they just tightened their focus to something smaller.

Anyway that’s my two cents.

---

Plot Over Character

 Good day! I probably have the song “Hunger” by Florence + the Machine stuck in my head because that’s a thing that’s been happening recently. Also I keep seeing headlines about cancel culture and what it means and this is weird because we started this conversation on Tumblr at least half a decade ago and now it’s entering mainstream--not for the first time, but on a much 

Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the Obsidian Trilogy. Which is pretty darn good, despite the fact that I’m going to be somewhat critical of it today.

---

Plot Over Character

If you’ve taken a writing class, or read writing advice books, or just picked up someone’s rant on the Internet, you’ll notice that today, there’s a tendency to prize good character writing above all else. We have to understand the characters we read and watch or else we won’t care about their adventures. This isn’t actually the approach every author has taken to writing a story throughout the history of literature and art.

To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s okay for writers to forget to give their characters distinct personalities. But character development is a secondary to the Plot, or that character motivations aren’t what drive the Plot forward. And that’s fine.

The really big example is something like the film Excalibur, a retelling of Arthurian legend that’s not very concerned with character arcs. Oh, they’re there, but they’re not the focus of the story. The movie’s less concerned with getting into any of the characters’ heads and more into portraying the King Arthur story as cinematically as possible. And because of that, it’s able to cover, however briefly, a lot more material than most Arthurian adaptations. There are a few movies that cover the beginning, or the ending, of Arthur’s reign. There are a butt-ton of these movies that are laser-focused on the love triangle (and to be clear, Excalibur tells that part too). But Excalibur goes from Uther’s reign to the end of Arthur’s.

Likewise, right now I’m reading the Obsidian Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory. Character is not the series’s strongpoint. Which again, isn’t to say that it has terrible characters. It has some pretty great and memorable ones, actually (SHALKAN!). But it isn’t a character-driven piece, and the story isn’t too interested in developing those characters in a way that feels as if it’s driving the story.

For instance, our hero Kellen finds out that he’s a Knight Mage towards the end of the first book, and at the beginning of the second book he’s admitted to the Elven battle school so that he can learn how to use tactics and strategy along with his newfound combat prowess. We don’t actually see a lot of this training, because the Plot kicks in, but it does happen. But it feels a bit jarring that he rapidly becomes a very prominent officer in the Elven army, one with a pretty solid grasp on strategic maneuvers. In part because of his powers, I guess. But mostly because Plot said so, so we can’t bother stopping and asking too much about how his knowledge of these things develop, we’re busy fighting the Endarkened.

Again, this is in part explained by his powers, and in part because he’s had some training off-screen, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s been developed. It feels as if the character’s development has taken a backseat to making him do what needs to be done for the Plot. And it’s a good Plot, but I’d like to have seen how he gets this good, rather than him just being this good.

Likewise, we have Vestakia, a character who looks like a demon but has a human soul, and grew up in isolation because her mother and aunt wanted her to not be killed by demons, but also because everyone’s going to look at Vestakia and think she’s a demon. Despite this, after the initial prejudice is overcome by most of the people who meet her, she doesn’t really have any issues about this? And when she finds out that Kellen’s avoiding her because he finds her attractive, and he’s in the middle of a one-year-long vow of chastity/celibacy, she just finds it amusing. I found this a bit weird, as I figured someone who grew up alone from society and being called a monster by most everyone who looked at her would have more of a reaction to finding out that there was a guy who thought she was hot.

Also considering she’s Kellen’s love interest, for most of the second book, there is surprisingly little in the way of building their relationship? After that bit at the beginning they hang out together just fine without any awkwardness or really that much between them. And this is a bit weird, considering they end the trilogy deeply in love, and also this entire main story takes place within a year. This should be developed here!

And so I think that this is a good fantasy trilogy, it’s a bit lacking in the department of character writing. There are novels that work very well without being very character-driven too. American Gods (the novel, not the television adaptation) is also very Plot-driven, and while Shadow’s got character, a huge chunk of the novel is just him passively observing the weird stuff around him. A lot more happens to him than he actually does to the characters or world around him. He notes that after finding out his wife died while cheating on him, everything else is a bit less of a surprise. The television series deliberately changed his characterization to make him a less reactive protagonist.

American Gods is more of a showcase of American culture, a roadtrip through Americana. A story like Excalibur is a film that’s retelling a legendary story that’s been told a bajillion times over again and is covering tons of material. It’s more noticeable in Obsidian Trilogy because A) I’m rereading it years later and also B) because it’s framed as a character-driven story in its setup and style, but it’s really not. Being more Plot-driven is fine, but the story has to be geared that way, with a Plot. It has the time to have more character development, as they’re novels, but they just… don’t.

Learn what works and what doesn’t. Learn which stories are better suited to being Plot-driven, and which are better character-driven. And remember that being the former doesn’t give you the excuse to not have strong or interesting characters.

---