On Anakin Skywalker

On the way back from Clemson this past weekend, I listened to the soundtrack of Revenge of the Sith and I had a lot of Star Wars thoughts. That led to this Note.

Also I’m a terrible novelist. In case you wanted a NaNoWriMo update.

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The Star Wars prequels don’t do a great job of portraying Anakin Skywalker. Watch Attack of the Clones and what opinion do you get of this guy? Not a very good one, I’d wager: here’s a kid who becomes obsessed with a woman he hasn’t seen in nearly a decade, he’s arrogant to the point of stupidity, brash, loud, and just really, really whiny. We don’t really see that much of his heroic side; and when he confesses to Padme that he’s just slaughtered an entire village of Sand People, down to the last child, and at no point does someone say “That’s a dick move, man,” it’s kind of difficult to understand why Padme falls in love with him at all. He’s an unstable and violent kid, and she’s an accomplished stateswoman?? Why???

Revenge of the Sith does a bit better; he makes some sketchy choices at the beginning, but overall he seems okay enough, but before long we’re watching him turn evil, and all sympathy goes out the proverbial window once he starts murdering actual children. We don’t get enough time to really connect to Anakin before he’s evil, and he turns evil by doing the most horrendous actions imaginable, so we have no chance at ever sympathizing with him. 

The thing is that this isn’t actually the picture we’re supposed to be getting of Anakin. For starters, we’re supposed to actually like him, and when he falls to the Dark Side we’re meant to think this is a massive tragedy of a capital-H Hero collapsing into evil. Which doesn’t work at all! Part of this is due to the very nature of the story being told and the way it’s being told--in films, you’ve got to nail the big, cinematic moments of the story, and you don’t have as much time to get all the little character moments that you would in a book or television show. So we’re not getting Anakin in his everyday life, or even as a Jedi on the battlefield most of the time. We’re getting Anakin’s moments of highest emotion, most intense stress, and greatest frustrations. That’s not always a good picture to judge someone by.

Also… George Lucas’s writing was a massive problem. Which I tend to kind of excuse sometimes, because at least Lucas admits that he doesn’t do dialogue well, but in this case his direction and the general writing made Anakin as unsympathetic as humanly possible. I don’t even blame Hayden Christensen’s acting, as Lucas not doing well helping his cast is pretty well-documented. I don’t know if it would have been much better if Christensen’s acting and delivery had been better though, because the dialogue and scripting just don’t make him come across as a very good character. He’s just annoying, and I think he would have been annoying if the most talent performer on the planet was playing him.

I was very surprised then to watch the CGI animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and find myself thinking, “Hey, Anakin Skywalker’s kind of awesome.”

What the eff, man?

To be fair, there are moments in the series where Anakin seems to flirt with the Dark Side. But for the most part, you don’t get the impression that this is an emotionally-unstable jerk that’s constantly getting angry at everyone around him. Anakin, as presented in The Clone Wars, is a friendly, powerful, skilled Jedi, who often bends the rules, but usually to do what he feels needs to be done. He has a temper, but we don’t see him slaughter innocent people, and when he gets upset it is proportional to the grievance in question. He goes out of his way to help people even when it inconveniences him. He’s kind to those lower than him in the chain of command. And he seems well-liked by several other Jedi, officers, and politicians. 

Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen all of the prequel movies in a while, but when I think of Anakin Skywalker, I tend to think of the one from the show rather than the one from the movies. And I suspect that Anakin as he appears in the series is closer to Lucas’s original intention.

I ended up looking at the traits of Anakin in the animated series that I listed above: mostly friendly, gets along well with people, has a bit of a temper, a tendency to bend or break the rules if he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but with amazing power and skill, and I thought to myself… that describes a lot of pop culture heroes. 

The one that came to mind was Percy Jackson, actually. And that felt weird. That’s not to say that I think Percy’s doomed to become his series’s equivalent of Darth Vader--for one, we’ve seen no indication that Percy, even when his temper flares the highest, has ever shown any sign of being okay with hurting civilians. But I would also totally read the heck out of a story that involved Percy Jackson becoming a supervillain, because there is groundwork there, if you wanted to make it happen.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher tries to play with this too, in that Harry Dresden carries a lot of those traits, and because of certain parties taking an interest in him, the White Council of wizards sees that too, and they definitely see him as a potential threat. Jim Butcher’s made it clear in interviews that while many wizards do like Harry, the Senior Council is extremely wary of him, how powerful he is, and basically expect him to turn out to be the next Dark Lord and are preparing accordingly. Yeah, we know that he’s not that bad a guy because we’ve been in his head for fifteen books, but most people don’t have that benefit, they just see this powerful wizard who breaks rules a lot, has connections to some sketchy types, and often leaves flaming wreckage in his wake.

Because of these two examples, and with The Clone Wars I kept thinking that this Anakin Skywalker-type of character, the one that Lucas was going for, is actually a really strong character and one that could be interesting to explore even without said hero (or heroine!) going to the Dark Side. But the examples I could think of where it was done well were all shows or book serieses that gave these characters lots of time to develop. I know I’ve rambled about this before, how movies don’t often give enough time for character development, especially when they’ve got spectacle to deliver.

I’ve seen it suggested before (and I might have done so too, I don’t recall), that the prequel trilogy would have been stronger if the first film focused more on Anakin, rather than picking him up partway through. And I agree; that way we’d get more character development and we’d feel like he’s less of a violent entitled jerkface. Because that’s key to making any character likable or sympathetic: we have to have had enough time to get to know them. So even if we do see their bad sides, we see their good sides too so that we care when they turn evil. That we get it, instead of just writing them off and saying, “Well, that guy was a douche anyway! Moving on!”

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On King Arthur Stories

Marvel Studios announced this week that they’re probably going to make it so that you need to watch their Disney+ serieses to understand some of their upcoming movies, and I just wanna punch everyone involved with the money-grubbing making of Disney+ in the face.

But never mind that! YALLFest today!!

I have to have talked about this at some point, but it’s on my mind so let’s do it.

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On King Arthur Stories

I kind of hate that there are expectations for King Arthur stories. Very specific expectations. And these are usually in the shape of a triangle…

The most famous part of the Arthurian legend is the love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. That’s the part that people remember! It’s the thing that led to the whole downfall of the entire kingdom! It’s tragic, and epic, and is the sort of love story that people cry their eyes out about. Here’s the thing: it’s been done to death and I absolutely hate it.

Part of the reason I hate this is because the King Arthur stories are full of hundreds of stories: stories of love, and adventure, of monsters and battles, duels and enchantment. And yet what is the one thing that popular culture seems intent on giving us? A single love triangle. One that we’ve seen over and over again. There’s rarely any innovation, and if there is, it’s really boring.

Making it even more frustrating is that it was one of the later bits of the story that got added on; King Arthur stories have their basis in Welsh mythology, and Lancelot didn’t even exist in those days! The French added him to the stories later, along with changing the names. So we have this story cycle originally based on a legendary Celtic king with a war band of the greatest warriors of his time, some of whom had superpowers, and interacted with gods and monsters and giants, and yet… everyone just wants to talk about that one time a French knight started sleeping with the queen.

I was immensely relieved when I recently picked up The Squire’s Tale by Gerald Morris, which is a kid’s book, yes, but it is focused entirely on the adventures of Sir Gawain (from the point of view of his squire, our protagonist). Gawain? That guy who, as the Morris points out in his Author’s Note, was called the most honored of knights at one point before his spot was taken by Lancelot? Because the French wanted one of their own to be the hero of the British King Arthur stories?

What made the book fun was that at times it poked fun at a lot of the tropes found in Arthurian stories. At one point Gawain meets a knight who refuses to let him cross a stream without jousting. Gawain is absolutely baffled by this, wondering why this guy’s so eager to fight strangers and what precisely he thinks he’s guarding this stream in the middle of nowhere from. But it’s never a parody; the story reaffirms the ideas of chivalry and paints its heroes as actual heroes, rather than guys just goofing around in medieval England.

I’m not saying that all Arthurian stories need to take this route, but it was a welcome change from “Here’s another way to frame the Arthurian love triangle.” I’m not sure if later books will pick it up; it seems likely, considering that the first was built on many of the French stories and hint at things to come later. Which is a bit disappointing, but not a deal-breaker as long as the story remains good.

Because I like the King Arthur stories that take full advantage of dealing with the little stuff. There are dozens of Arthurian knights, and in the older Welsh legends warriors. And yet most of them are relegated to being either background characters or canon fodder. One of the most frustrating things about the BBC Merlin was having random redshirts be named as famous Arthurian characters, like Bedivere or Pellinore. And so many works do the same thing, just not as obviously. You have a bajillion characters to tell stories with and you just kill them off for cheap drama? So you can focus on a love triangle? WHYYYYYY

This is why when I pick up King Arthur stories, I prefer if they play up some of the minor characters, or downplay the love story, or leave it out entirely. I loved how The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwall played with reader expectations of Lancelot (and by that I mean making him overtly a terrible person) while focusing on a character most people haven’t heard of and I loved how The Pendragon Cycle by Stephen Lawhead left out the love triangle entirely in its retelling. I like how King Arthur: Legend of the Sword doesn’t have a love story at all and kind of goes nuts with the fantasy elements. 

Just… if you’re going to write about King Arthur, do something cool and different, not just the same old stupid love triangle.

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The Problem of Relationship Drama

Hallo. I have needed to do my laundry for a week but have not had the opportunity. Also, NaNoWriMo is going on, and that’s not always conducive to my mental health. So that’s another little fun bit of my life going on right now!

Hooray.

But I read some Limyaael yesterday, so that was cool.

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The Problem of Relationship Drama

OR, “Where Arrow Went Wrong”

Because that’s what happened, you know? That’s what went wrong with Arrow. Mind you it’s not a terrible show, but at its weakest moments, that’s what was holding back the show. 

So let me step back a bit and talk about what I’m talking about.

[jazz hands] DRAMA

It’s got negative associations sometimes, and for good reasons, but it’s an essential part to telling a long-running story that you hope will engage audiences. How do characters interact with each other? How do they interact with the world around them? What does that say about us, the audience? In a well-written story, the infusion of drama helps keeps things fresh and keeps the viewer viewing or the reader reading: they want to know what dramatic thing is happening next to these characters.

It’s sort of an unwritten rule of television writing. It’s why shows that are mostly goofy comedies like Brooklyn 99 occasionally have episodes that deal with things like police discrimination against African-Americans or one of the detectives coming out as bisexual. That’s not a negative criticism, as I think that B99 mostly handles issues very well, but it’s a little bit odd when you think about how it’s a comedy about a detective who thinks his life is like Die Hard and hasn’t read more than fifty books in his entire life.

But the writers of that show understand that we care about these characters, and while we love watching their hilarious antics we also want to see them grow as people, and so it deals with more serious topics from time to time. Those aren’t always from-the-headlines topics either, sometimes they’re things like breakups or annoying coworkers or the like. And they’re often done with a funny twist, but it’s still drama. And it works, because it stays true to the characters, and the show doesn’t lose sight of what its viewers actually came to watch: a funny show about goofball cops.

But for some reason, some writers think that the only drama anyone cares about it romance, and that’s… pretty terrible. And that’s where we get to Arrow.

Arrow is a TV show meant to be about the DC Comics character Green Arrow told in the style of Nolan’s Batman movies. It’s also a CW show, which means it focuses very heavily on the dramas of pretty people. For whatever reason, very few people in the show can just meet and go out or something. There’s always a lot of hang wringing and drama and it’s really, really annoying. Like, insanely annoying.

Like, in season one Ollie starts dating this cop, yeah? And she asks him on their first date about his time on the Island, where he was stranded and tortured, mind you, and Ollie, quite reasonably, doesn’t want to talk about it. And his date gets upset, and both she and the show frames this as a miscommunication thing, about how Oliver Queen needs to learn to open up to people, and how pushing people away isn’t healthy in making relationships work. Except this isn’t a relationship issue. This is a basic personal boundaries issue! I’m not love guru, but if you’re on your first date with someone who has had serious trauma inflicted upon them recently, you don’t get to bring that up and then get mad that he won’t talk about it!

Fudge, and it gets so much worse. Season three--hang on.

[goes and sits at a bar in isolation for three hours sipping apple juice]

Right, so season three of Arrow tries to frame the entire story of the show as the love story of Oliver and Felicity, which is darn annoying considering she wasn’t a love interest when the show began. Its premiere has a scene where Oliver tells her that she’s the only person he really saw as a person when he got back to Starling City, and it ends with them driving off and him saying that he’s finally happy. So much of their character arcs for the next three seasons are about their relationship with each other. This “Will They/Won’t They?” that began in season two? Lasts until season six!

THAT’S FIVE YEARS!

And remember what I said about Brooklyn 99? About how no matter what serious topics or relationship drama they did, they didn’t lose sight of what the show was and what people wanted to see? Yeah, Arrow did that, because the main audience of Arrow isn’t a cluster of people hyperventilating about the idea that Oliver and his girlfriend might [gasp] kiss! It’s an action series! About a superhero! That’s the point! That’s why we’re here!

I’m not even arguing that there can’t be relationship drama in a show like this. But I’m saying that it shouldn’t be the point. If your stunt-heavy superhero action series has five whole seasons of ship tease, and takes attention away from a supervillain with nukes in order to have Felicity complain that Ollie’s keeping secrets from her (which wasn’t his fault to begin with!!) then there’s a friggin’ problem here. 

Don’t write like this. I beg you, don’t write like this.

On Fridging

It’s Friday as I write this and my stomach doesn’t feel great. Which isn’t fantastic on a day when I’m supposed to be cooking. I figured it was just a ‘not hungry’ sort of thing, but it’s mid-afternoon and the tummy still feels a bit uneasy. Not full-on sick, mind you, but if I’m not careful I could easily tip that way.

Oh and hey, you know ‘refrigerator’ is a really hard word to spell?

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On Fridging

Are we all familiar with the idea of fridging? No? Okay, well it’s that thing that happens sometimes in a story where a supporting character, usually a female love interest is violently killed in order to further the development of the main character. After all, how do we get the hero fully invested in stopping the bad guys? By killing his love interest of course! I’ve seen some argument as to whether or not in even counts as fridging if the case in question isn’t a female character, but for the sake of this essay I’ll say it doesn’t have to be a female character, though for the most part it usually is.

The term ‘fridging’ (which is itself short for ‘stuffed into the fridge’) derives its name for DC Comics. There came a Green Lantern comic in which Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra is murdered and her body is stuffed into the fridge for the hero to find. Gail Simone popularized the term and compiled a website (titled, appropriately enough, “Women in Refrigerators”)  listing examples. Because as it turned out, there were a lot of examples in comic books of male superheroes who have violence thrown on top of their love interests to give them more character development or to further the plot.

And that’s… not great.

I’m not saying that you can’t kill characters, or even that a dead love interest or family member or friend shouldn’t ever be in the story in one way or another. But there are quite a lot of characters who exist almost solely to be fridged, or else are killed off with little ceremony in order to move things forward. It’s bad enough when you kill off side characters who have little to no personality; it’s worse when they’re meant to be important to our main character and we have little impression of them.

Part of the reason this is on my mind is because I just started a book series, and two books in this has already happened twice, where the protagonist’s love interest is killed by enemy forces, and both times it happens off-page, meaning that their death wasn’t even worth the effort of writing a proper scene for it. The author sort of walks it back a bit at the end of the second book by revealing that one of the fridged characters isn’t actually dead, but it’s still a bit frustrating that we’ve led to believe that two of the main character’s lovers were killed off-page and we’re meant to be emotional about this.

There was a recent-ish interview with the writer who was running Spider-Man back in the days when Gwen Stacy was killed off (and also made Punisher???), and he admitted that he’s not proud of how it became a thing in comics to kill the love interest, and that his reasoning was to show that the status quo wouldn’t always stay the same and that heroes weren’t immune to tragedy. And I get that, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to kill off the love interest. And not having read that storyline for myself, I can’t make a full judgment on it for myself. But I think it’s a disservice to characters, and the audience, when they’re killed off for the sole purpose of making the hero hurt. And even if you feel like you can justify it with the setting, or the tone of the story or something like that, you still can’t get away with doing it twice in one series.

How do we lessen the problems of fridging? Or at the very least, make them less egregious? Some thoughts:

-Make sure the character getting killed in question is actually a fully-developed character. If the character exists solely for the emotional impact she/he is going to have on the protagonist when killed, then that’s not a fully-developed character. Give them backstory, motivations, and maybe even a subplot.

-If it’s someone important to the main character, death should happen on-page/screen.

-Do not frame this character solely as a victim. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t a victim of violence, but that can’t be the only way the audience is meant to see the character. Is this character being killed solely for being connected to the protagonist? And if so, are they given at least a fighting chance of survival?

-Don’t relish too much in the violence of it. That doesn’t mean character death should be pleasant, or that it can’t be gruesome, but it’s one thing to have a character killed with slit throat and it’s another to go on for paragraphs at a time about all the blood everywhere.

-If you can’t think of anything else to do with this character, and killing off this character for the sake of moving forward character development is the only thing option you have… then you need to think of something better, because that’s just cheap writing.

An example of a female character getting killed off that I don’t think is really a fridging? Moira Queen in Arrow. She dies in the show’s second season, and this affects the protagonist greatly; she is his mother, after all. But she exists as a fully-developed character before her death occurs. And when she’s held at gunpoint by the villain of the season, and Oliver is told he has to choose which of these two characters (Moira and Thea, Ollie’s sister) has to die, Moira Queen stands up and says (paraphrasing here), “Screw it! I’m not playing this game. If you’re going to kill someone, kill me, but I protect my family no matter what.” And Slade’s like, “Okay then,” and kills her. 

Yes, she’s killed off, and it drives the protagonist even harder to fight against the villain. But she dies because it’s the result of a choice that’s entirely consistent with her ongoing character arc. She doesn’t have to die; there’s more that can be done with her character. She’s not killed because there’s nothing else for her to do. She’s killed because that is the way the story is going based on the choices these characters make, especially Moira herself. So I don’t think it should count as a fridging.

Maybe that’s a thin line, and maybe I’m wrong. But if I am, it’s at least better, isn’t it? If you feel you must kill a character for drama, especially a female family member or love interest, don’t make it into something that’s just there to shock the audience or galvanize the protagonist into action. And for the sake of all that’s holy, don’t do it the exact same way twice in one story, and off-page to boot.

Don’t treat your characters like crap.

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On Spoiler Culture

I haven’t slept so great these past couple of nights, and I was stressed out a bit from the job fair earlier this week. Also I’m trying to figure out a weekend to go to Clemson, but that’s becoming more difficult than I expected. 

Let’s talk about Spoiler Culture, shall we?

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On Spoiler Culture

We didn’t use to be this crazy about spoilers, did we?

I always like the idea of not spoiling movies and books and shows for other people, especially if it’s a really good twist. I still refuse to spoil the ending for Here, There Be Dragons for anyone, which is why I tell them to stay away from online summaries and just wait for me to lend them the book. So I get it: people like to keep surprises for the audience, and they understand how important those are.

But I think we’ve gone a bit too far?

When I say that, I don’t mean “people are very concerned with spoilers.” That’s not new, people freaking out about plot details they don’t want to know yet so that the story can be a surprise. But the extent to which there are people care about making sure endings are unexpected are getting weird. I realize I’m probably the last person to say this, considering the backlash we’ve had against it since Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones ending, but creators have gone to truly insane lengths in order to avoid spoiling the ending of fiction for people. 

There have been multiple interviews in which Marvel’s actors have admitted that they weren’t sure what the scenes they were in were actually about, much less who else was in it. Actors didn’t act with each other; they acted in different places and were digitally inserted in the scene together. Several actors were given only partial scripts, so that they had only their parts and not some of the other performers’. Sometimes they were outright lied to; Tom Holland admitted that he didn’t know he was in a funeral scene at the end, he was told it was a wedding.

HE WAS TOLD THE FUNERAL WAS A WEDDING.

That’s the ultimate bad example of doing your best to make sure that secrets don’t get out. And I understand that maybe some actors like Tom Holland have a habit of revealing too much about movies. But being told that the event he’s supposed to be in is actually another, one that calls for pretty much the exact opposite emotion? And lying to actors? Making it unclear to them what exactly they’re doing? This isn’t “I won’t tell them how the story ends,” this is “I won't tell them how the story they are telling is going at any given moment.”

Like, I wish that the worst problems were just writers and creators lying about spoilers. Do you remember that one time when the makers of Batman: Arkham Knight claimed that the titular Arkham Knight was a completely original character, only to be revealed to be Jason Todd? That wasn’t great. But it’s even worse when you’re so worried about the twist that you distort production.

And yeah, Endgame was probably the worst example of this massive attempt to cover up spoilers, but it wasn’t the first. Game of Thrones famously decided to film multiple endings for the show so that if anyone stumbled on the shooting then they wouldn’t know if it was the real ending or not. The producers also made a point that they wanted to surprise people more than they actually cared about the integrity of the story. Then we have Westworld, a show which supposedly rewrote and re-shot an episode midseason because the makers saw that fans on Reddit had predicted what the big plot twist for that episode was going to be.

There’s a lot of discussion about how people are worrying way too much about surprising audiences that they’re making stories unintelligible in order to make them unpredictable. You can’t guess what’s being foreshadowed if the actors don’t know and the foreshadowing was all nonsense anyway, right? And yeah, that’s not great, but I think the issue is just how much importance we’re putting on fiction in general.

Because… this is all fiction. If the next Avengers movie gets spoiled for you, that sucks, but so what? It’s a movie. Get over it. Yeah, be fans, write fanfic, cosplay, do your thing, that’s all great! But let’s face the facts: it’s not that important. It’s pop culture. It has worth, but ultimately, it’s meant to entertain and make money; especially when it comes to properties being pumped out by Disney.

Furthermore, if your fiction relies on a twist or surprise in order to make it work, it was probably never that great to begin with. Twists can make things better. But if you need the spoilers unspoiled in order to like the piece of fiction in question? Then that’s not great. A story should be good on its own merits; surprises shouldn’t be the only thing that keeps you watching/reading. 

Just quit this nonsense. Let’s go back to stories we enjoy for what they are, and made without ridiculous deceit in the production process.

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Spellslinger Thoughts

Do you have any idea how frustrating Rise of the Argonauts is when you learn the basics about Greek geography? Because half the islands in the game are based off of real places that aren’t islands. Delphi wasn’t an island! Iolcus wasn’t an island! Mycenae wasn’t an island! You would think it wouldn’t be hard considering how many islands Greece actually does have, in both real life and mythology, but nope! Go ahead and turn places you can find on a map into a geographical feature they obviously don’t have.

Anyhow let’s talk about Spellslinger by Sebastian de Castell.

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Spellslinger Thoughts

After reading his Greatcoats series, I decided to pick up Sebastian de Castell’s Spellslinger, which is a fantasy series aimed at a younger audience than his other books and a setting more evocative of the Western. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I didn’t know what a Spellslinger was, and while I loved his Greatcoats books for their plots, humor, setting and action the fact is that those books kind of beat you down a bit with how terrible of a world these characters live in. Their setting is like medieval Gotham on steroids; living there is a nightmare.

So what was Spellslinger going to be like? What would de Castell decide was the sort of thing that a teenage audience would be more comfortable reading? And about halfway through, I decided that Spellslinger was something like what the Inhumans television series would have been like had it been any good.

For reference: the Inhumans television series only lasted one short season, and it was about the royal family of a lost city of Inhumans on the Moon getting banished to Earth. What made this series really bad, other than the terrible special effects and stupid plots, was that the society of Inhumans was terrible. Basically, at a certain age Inhumans got powers. If they had a cool superpower, they became aristocrats who could have a normal life and pursue any career at all. If they had not as cool powers, they became slaves for life. And yet the heroes of this series were those who helped keep this system in place.

Not so in Spellslinger! In this series, we have the Jan’Tep, a society of magic users that must reach a certain threshold of power by sixteen; otherwise, they become Sha’Tep, second class citizens who usually work as servants or slaves in the mines. And our main character Kellen is a young man who starts out by trying to become a Jan’Tep, but as the story goes on and his powers don’t really materialize, he comes to realize that the Jan’Tep society is kind of awful and any reasonable person would hate it.

And the more you learn about it, the more you realize exactly how terrible the Jan’Tep society is, how awful its history is, and how self-deluded it is to keep building on this culture without acknowledging the past violence and oppression that led to it being what it is today.

Now I haven’t finished the series, but I suspect that its take on colonialism's going to be a bit better than the Solider Son trilogy by Robin Hobb. That trilogy ended without actually solving the issue at all, giving the main character a happy ending and then claiming that’s enough. Despite the fact that there’s still an oppressed minority and the two cultures haven’t actually been able to talk through anything. Yeah, “Solving Colonialism” would be a really cheesy way to solve the conflict, but deciding to ignore it wasn’t better. The main character ends up rejoining the sexist, racist imperialist society that rejected him in the first place without that society changing.

And yet this book, Spellslinger, which is the first book in the series, ends with the opposite of that. Not only is Kellen an outcast, but that’s what he wants to be. He’s not without some regrets; he’s got a surprisingly good bond with his sister, and the girl he’s crushing on is going to be left behind as he wanders around with Ferius, but he’s rejected the Jan’Tep society… because it sucks. Because it’s well and truly awful. 

Speaking of Ferius, she’s a lovely character. The stereotypical ‘mysterious woman who rolls into the town’ is, I think, usually a sign of the love interest, but in the case of Ferius she’s not. She’s the mentor figure, if a mentor that’s more interested in teaching by example rather than holding on to Kellen’s hand. I was very relieved by her not being the love interest, nor by any hints of that being the case further on. She’s just a badass lady that doesn’t take crap from anyone anywhere.

Also this book has an animal sidekick? And he’s not especially fluffy. Which maybe felt like it was trying too hard to not be a stereotypical animal sidekick in a kid’s movie, but he was still very fun to read, since he was a lot more practical than Kellen if a lot more concerned with getting shiny things and ripping out enemies’ eyeballs.

I’m very curious of the direction the rest of the series takes though; so much of the first book was about Jan’Tep society, and so at the end of the first novel when Kellen decides to leave it I kind of have to wonder what the rest of the books will be about. Most of the characters will probably be left behind, and while I understand why it makes me wonder how on Earth the series will carry on.

I suppose I’ll find out.

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On Superheroes and Accountability

I’m kind of in the tail end of an emotional crisis, I think? You know, one of those strings of weeks where I just keep telling myself I’ve contributed nothing to society, and can’t find a job because I’m apparently just that useless, and not sure what I can do about that.

Also my dad wants to see Joker, which is a bit of a surprise? Not that I’d mind seeing it, I just wasn’t expecting Dad to be into it.

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On Superheroes and Accountability

There was a post shared by the Texts from Superheroes Tumblr account, which itself screenshots and links to a Mashable article, that made me think about this. The gist of the article was that in The Dark Knight the resolution is hinged upon Batman using a device that accesses all of the cell phones in Gotham City to use them to locate the Joker. Mr. Fox is horrified at this, calling it an invasion of privacy, and Bruce can’t help but agree, but sees it as necessary. They shut down the device after its one use, and Mr. Fox resigns as Batman’s gadget-maker afterward.

However, in this year’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, the Plot involves Peter being given a computer system called E.D.I.T.H. in Tony Stark’s will, which also allows one to access any computer system in the world, including cell phones. It also gives someone control over an army of killer drones. The main Plot hinges on who gets control of this system. But unlike The Dark Knight, the possibility of destroying this entire system never comes up. In fact, no one really calls the thing unethical at all, and it’s more a question of who deserves this power rather than whether or not that power is too much for one person.

And that’s… kind of weird, guys.

Ever since the Marvel comic event Civil War, there’s been a lot of questions about accountability and the amount of power superheroes should have. That event is set off by a fight between D-list superheroes and some villains that led to the destruction of an elementary school, leading to people calling for superheroes being made answerable to the government. The problem was that the pro-registration side was essentially asking superheroes to be law enforcement, like police or even SHIELD agents, saying that at least that way they’d be accountable to the public for anything that went wrong.

Except… they wouldn’t be. As the past few years have shown us, in many instances there are cases where the police and other forms of law enforcement aren’t held accountable for anything they do wrong. I’m not going to be one of those people that tell you that cops are all evil, but facing the facts there are plenty of examples of bad cops who just get away with it. And even beyond that, we have things like the TSA being allowed to grope you at the airport or the terrible conditions of immigrants being detained at the border or the NSA illegally going through everyone’s phone and Internet data. Now imagine if the people perpetrating all of these abuses on the government’s behalf have superpowers.

That’s a bit terrifying, isn’t it? And according to some people at Marvel Comics, that’s the position we were meant to take: pro-registration. It’s awkward as fudge too, because there’s a scene where an anti-registration black superhero is killed by a cyborg Thor clone (just… roll with it), and all the pro-registration characters say “Well it’s what any cop would have done if faced with a threat! You can’t blame us for that.”

Put that on the list of “Things That Have Not Aged Well.”

One of the problems I had with CW’s Supergirl is that the show runs on the premise that our title character works for a government law enforcement agency, and at no point does someone have a problem with this. A Kryptonian, one of the most powerful types of beings in the known universe, is on a government payroll, and we’re all okay with this? Working for a government agency that has a database with the names and information of all extraterrestrial immigrants (and it’s only a bad thing when the bad guys steal it)?

It’s also a bit baffling because a lot of mainstream superhero fiction already has shown how these things can go wrong. Justice League: Unlimited did a much better storyline about how superheroes having too much power can be a bad thing, although to be fair in that show it wasn’t with invasive surveillance or government control as much as a giant laser gun from space. 

I understand that there’s a need to do more with superhero fiction than just “This person has powers/gadgets! And FIGHTS CRIME!” But Far From Home’s Plot involves casually handing a human rights violation to a high schooler, and the only questions we’re meant to ask are “Is Peter worthy of this responsibility?” instead of “HOLY S*** THAT IS TERRIFYING POWER FOR SOMEONE TO HAVE!”

The question of superhero accountability is a compelling one, which is why it’s come up in fiction so often. If you’re making superhero fiction, you’ve got to be thinking about it, especially in a time when we’re seeing how dangerous it is for people in power to have a lack of accountability. Just handing your heroes access to all of the private data in the world is just plain disturbing. And I’m not against the idea of superheroes working for the government, but there’s definitely has to be some work put into why this isn’t a terrible thing, why we shouldn’t be terrified of superhuman law enforcement.

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