Uncharted Discussion

Hullo! I have finished The Fires of Heaven (that’s the fifth Wheel of Time book) by the time this Note comes out, so go check out the Book Diary for the post on that. 

I have also just read the library copy of Hexed for the next sporking; don’t know when that’ll go up, or if I’ll get another copy in order to do the sporking. Who knows! But that is being worked on, which is good because ImpishIdea right now is kind of… dead.

I Go Off On "Gone With the Wind"

I’m starting the fifth Wheel of Time book (again), as I’m finishing up the Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection on PS4. After that? Rage of Dragons and Witcher III: Wild Hunt, I think?

Also tomorrow is Father’s Day! And my mom’s birthday!

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I Go Off on Gone with the Wind

HBO Max decided, due to recent controversy, to remove Gone with the Wind from their library. And I don’t know why--they said it was a temporary thing, and they’re bringing it back with an introduction talking about the context in which it was made, so the people shouting about erasing history can just chill out. But I’m also confused because there are people who think this is a great movie, and it’s really not.

When discussing this film, or criticism of it, there’s always this defense of something like, “Hey, this film is a product of its time! Of course it’s not politically correct by today’s standards! Give it some leeway!” But look, I think wherever you stand on any moral-socio-political spectrum, there is a line between “Not Politically Correct/Socially Insensitive” and “Flagrantly Racist.” Let’s not cut the crap here; Gone with the Wind is racist. I’m not saying you’re racist if you like this movie, but I do question your taste in movies. Gone with the Wind is a film that at best glorifies a rigid, sexist, racist, violently-enforced class system based while only barely glossing over how sexist, racist and violently enforced it is; at worst it tries to justify violent, racist extremism.

I wouldn’t say I hate the movie Gone with the Wind. But I sure as heck don’t like it, and I’m baffled by people that do. When I watched it as homework for film class, I made a list of Things That Are Not Okay, or TTANO for short, in my notes for the course. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find said notes, because I am a worthless mess of a human being, but it turns out that it sits on the shelf right next to my bed, so thankfully I have it available. The list goes up to seventeen, if you’re curious, with the last example being that time Rhett rapes Scarlett. 

Most of these are from Scarlett. And to be fair, Scarlett is supposed to be terrible. That’s part of the point, and I acknowledge that. The story’s showing us that in a strictly patriarchal society, a woman has to do terrible things, especially by that society’s standards, in order to get what she wants. But look, you’ll excuse me if I can’t really get behind a protagonist who spends the entire story lusting after a married man, all the while marrying other men whom she doesn’t love because they’re means to an end. Yeah, it makes sense in the context of the story, but that doesn’t mean I like it, or that it makes her any more likable as a character.

I sometimes see the defense of “The first Oscar-winning performance of an African-American actress is in this movie!” Which… okay, I’ll concede that. But most of the people saying this generally have nothing but disdain for the Academy so using them as a defense here seems… selective. And despite Hattie McDaniel being awesome, this film doesn’t have a great depiction of African-Americans in general. It gets some credit in that doesn’t use blackface, but that’s like saying I’m a good guy because I didn’t slap your mother. The protagonist and company seem to think that any African-American who wants to have equal rights is just a delusional loser who doesn’t know his or her place. The African-Americans the movie paints as sympathetic are those who will gladly work to defend the Confederacy and those values--which, I remind you in this movie, are built entirely on their continued abuse. It’s like saying, “The good ones are those that know their place!” and I want to boot all of these white characters into a fire.

It is, I think, very difficult for me to like any of the white main characters in this film. I do appreciate the ambition of using the Civil War as the setting for a massive, sweeping historical epic, and maybe, just maybe, I could have been able to bear that story with Confederate protagonists. But this would not be the way to do it. Because the white characters of Gone with the Wind are all the upper crust of the Confederacy. Tara has peacocks on its grounds. Even if I could look past the issue of slavery in this film (which I assure you, I CANNOT), we are still faced with the notion that we are meant to be sad that there are bunch of rich people who are audacious enough to be horrified that now they have to work. 

In his writings, Booker T. Washington had a bit where he feels sorry for former slaveowners after the Civil War, because they have no life skills to do the labor necessary to support themselves, having bought into a system where they have unpaid workers do all of those things for them. Cooking, farming, housework--they were up a creek and had no idea how to do those things. That doesn’t mean he wanted to be a slave again, obviously, but it was an odd sort of observation. But the characters in Gone with the Wind aren’t lamenting that they don’t know how to do this work as much as that they have to do it at all. And that makes it difficult to sympathize with these guys.

Speaking of the guys, we know that they’re Klansmen, right? The book is apparently more explicit on that point, and the director to his (minor) credit, removed explicit references to the Klan, and their role in the story as heroes, with the Klan actually threatening his life about this because they wanted more positive press and a big budget Hollywood movie with their grubby fingerprints on it. TV Tropes tells me that the movie claims the men are explicitly not in the Klan, but I don’t recall this at all, and in any case this doesn’t change that they all go out as a gang and carry out vigilante justice on a group of black men that attacked Scarlett. What else are we supposed to assume from this? If they are not meant to represent the Klan, they are something very much like it, just with the name changed. I’m going to say that I’m not thrilled with a movie where several main characters are unrepentant Klansmen.

Speaking of the men, Rhett Butler is garbage. Not only does he spend the entire movie trying to harass and bother Scarlett at every turn, we also get the lovely scene towards the end where he threatens to kill her, and then rapes her. Which, to be fair to fans of this movie, isn’t presented as rape in the film because she wakes up seeming to have enjoyed it (mega yikes), but he takes her to the bedroom as she struggles against him, and, uh… look guys, do I need to say that this is a problem? I’m not saying there can’t be rape in stories, but the narrative doesn’t treat it like a bad thing. And that’s not even remotely acceptable. 

Racism, classism, sexism… we’ve just got the whole chalupa here, don’t we!

I’m not saying this movie needs to be banned; I understand why it might be viewed in film courses or the like. It is, after all, one of the biggest movies in popular culture of all time, and I don’t think that should be underestimated. As an artifact, I think it’s interesting to look at and I can understand why it’s worthy of study. This is a film that changed the way entertainment was made and distributed. And like I said, I admire its ambition. But do I like this movie? Nope. Do I think it’s a masterpiece that I just don’t appreciate? Fudge no. 

So when HBO Max said that they were (temporarily, I remind you) taking this down, and people got up in arms about censorship… look, I don’t get it. This movie’s not good. You can still easily find it in other formats without looking too hard. For one single service to decide that it doesn’t want this piece of garbage in its library without some kind of disclaimer at the beginning, pointing out that they don’t remotely endorse any of the values the narrative espouses… that’s not even actual censorship. That’s them giving more much graciousness than is deserved to a movie that could be locked up in archives for all I care.

Screw this movie. I didn’t mind watching it for a film class because of its cultural impact, but I have no intention of sitting through this bloated monstrosity again.

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Fablehaven and Writing Creatures

New season of Kipo this weekend! The first season was delightful so I’ve been looking forward to the second. Also I’m on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves which is great fun, even if I’m very bad at it.

So I haven’t finished this series, so maybe this is a bit premature. But I’m one book away from finishing, and I’m scared if I put this off I’m going to forget about this idea altogether, especially since I have so many other books that I’m going to be reading in the meantime: Map of Time, Fires of Heaven, and Rage of Dragons, to name three.

So anyhow.

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Fablehaven and Writing Magical Creatures

I kind of avoided reading Fablehaven for a while. I saw the covers, and it looked cool. But the last time I picked up a book about a preserve for magical creatures I was underwhelmed (I cannot for the life of me remember the title of it, which tells you something; it had a green dragon on the cover is all I recall). Further, as I was getting more into mythology, I liked the idea of themed fantasy, rather than a big jumble where authors threw all sorts of mixed things together for funzies. And since no one I knew was reading them, I couldn’t help but think I wasn’t missing much. I did eventually put it on my to-read list on Goodreads, but I didn’t have much urgency in getting to it. It wasn’t until I started making an active effort to clear through my to-read list that I put Fablehaven on hold and picked it up.

Fablehaven is surprisingly good? I remember reading the first book and thinking to myself that I didn’t know that all of the heroes would make it to the end of the story. And it’s not that unusual in children’s book serieses nowadays for characters to get killed off; Percy Jackson and the Olympians kills a few of the campers once the action gets rolling. But in the very first book? And not as a dramatic backstory or ‘mentor sacrifices himself’ moment, just… killing off the characters. And that struck me. Aside from the two leads, I was convinced that any of these people could bite it at any moment, and that’s a feeling I got through the rest of the series too. Brandon Mull doesn’t disappoint either; characters do die.

I’m not suggesting that this is the Song of Ice and Fire of children’s books, because it’s really not. But this was a book aimed at middle schoolers published in 2006, and this is a book that’s not afraid to say, “Look, there’s a magical world and it’s cool and all, but it’s also incredibly dangerous and the stuff here will happily kill or exploit you without a second thought, so you better not forget that.”

Because many of the creatures of Fablehaven are… well, they’re nonhuman creatures. Many of them are as intelligent as humans, but there are some that are not. Very many, while intelligent, are malevolent towards humans, and yet the Sorensons, and others who run their own magical preserves, are very keen on making sure that these creatures have a place to live. Which kind of baffles me; why on Earth do the keepers at Lost Mesa keep a bunch of zombies around? 

I think, too often with magical creatures, there is this inclination in fiction to put them on this sort of spectrum: either they are tame, or they are enemies to be killed. Sometimes they go from the latter to the former. There are obviously exceptions to this, but what made Fablehaven interesting to me was that it kind of acts more like these are animals and people--yeah, they’re not the best neighbors (to put it lightly), but they deserve a place in this world as much as we do, don’t they? And sure, defend yourself if you have to, but you can’t blame a creature for its nature.

Yeah, a lot of theses creatures will kill people, sometimes just for funzies. In the first book we’re introduced to the nyads, who are water nymphs who get their kicks from luring people to the edge of their body of water and dragging them down to drown them. There are trolls that eat people. There are dragons that see human beings like we view mice. There’s a witch that 

There’s a conversation in one of the books when it seems like a creature has killed one of the kids, and Grandpa Sorenson compares the creature to a wild bear. If you are killed by a wild bear for invading its territory, you can’t exactly blame the bear: it’s just doing what a bear, by its basic nature, does. Likewise, a troll isn’t vicious to you because it has made an active choice, that’s just the way it’s wired. One of the other characters shoots back that if he’s being attacked by a rabid bear, he will shoot to kill, and Sorenson concedes that it’s a fair reaction; but still, you have to understand that an animal is only acting on its nature.

You know how crazy this is? In kids’ literature? The idea that animals are dangerous? Like I feel as if a lot of fiction aimed at children seems to paint the natural world as being capital-G Good, where if you’re nice to the wildlife it will either be helpful to you or leave you alone. It’s common in a lot of adult literature too. The people who work with animals have a joyful time frolicking with all the creatures of the wild.

Not so in Fablehaven! Yes, the Sorensons love their job, but it’s work, and they’re constantly on their guard, with tons of safeguards in place to make sure that they don’t get killed. It’s not just a Plot thing, though that doesn’t help--their lives aren’t in danger just because the bad guys are out to get them. Their lives are in danger because they’re working with dangerous creatures every single day. There are examples all around them of people who held the same job and slipped up to get killed or cursed in horrible ways.

Which isn’t whimsical, but does seem like the kind of things kids need to learn about dangerous professions involving wild animals. There are a lot of children’s books that try to paint their imaginary worlds as dangerous places to live, but not all of them succeed because they make it sound so goshdarn cool and don’t give us that many examples of harm happening to people. But Fablehaven? Right out the gate it’s a dangerous place to be.

Which is different and good and I like that.

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Dragonlance is Basic, and That's Just Fine

Being a mega-fan of Raistlin is out, in this house we’re fans of FIZBAN because he’s fabulous. Also I played Journey because I got it when it was free on the PS Store, and now I’m on Uncharted, which I have very little knowledge about and am not very good at! But it’s fun.

Let’s talk about Dragonlance because it’s been in my head for a while. And for the most part, I’ll be sticking to Dragons of Autumn Twilight, because that’s the one that’s the one I just read.

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Dragonlance is Basic, and That’s Just Fine

Dragonlance is, for the uninitiated, a specific setting in the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game. It was made into a series of novels by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman, starting with Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first in the trilogy that kicked off the bajillion books that came afterward. It goes like this: a group of old adventuring buddies meet up at their favorite tavern after spending years apart to talk about where they’ve been, and of news they’ve heard about trouble brewing up. But they get jumped by bad guys, and they find themselves on the run and on a new quest that happens to involve the fate of the world.

If this sounds like the beginning of a DnD campaign, I haven’t even gotten to the cast, which is made up of different races and classes each with their own specialties: the half-elf ranger, the human cleric and her bodyguard, the dwarf fighter, the mage and his twin the fighter, a human paladin, and a kender (halfling) thief. I remember reading it for the first time and thinking that this seemed as if it was based off of someone’s roleplaying session. It made a lot more sense when I found out that Dragonlance is an actual DnD setting.

And I recall thinking, “Wow, this is going to be a pretty run-of-the-mill high fantasy story,” and it kind of is? But it turns out that that’s not a bad thing?

I would think that most writers today, upon visiting this setup, would think that the way to make this story stand out would be to include massive twists into the story. Someone in the group, out of the blue, will turn out to be completely evil for no discernible reason, or get killed out of nowhere, or that kind of thing. And that’s not remotely what happened. I don’t know if that’s because of the book being written and published when it was, and that the whole idea of trope subversion wasn’t as all-encompassing as it is now, or because the authors consciously decided that they wanted to make this a straightforward fantasy story.

Which works for what it is. There are parts that I think are more heavy-handed than they really need to be. Raistlin, for instance, is cackling in a corner and has ‘WILL TURN EVIL’ printed on his forehead in big letters. At one point he talks to Tanis and says something along the lines of “One day you will all recognize my genius MUAHAHAHAHAHA!” and I think that’s a bit over-the-top.

But I think it still doesn’t hurt the narrative because everyone in the party reacts to that. It’s not like one of those situations where the reader knows something and the characters should but they don’t. No, everyone else knows very well how emotionally and morally unstable Raistlin is, but put up with it (or don’t!) for their own reasons. Whenever it seems like there’s going to be a traitor in the group, Sturm, the paladin, clearly thinks they should just kill Raistlin and get on with it. The other group members are clearly uncomfortable around him, except his brother Caramon. And Tanis, the team leader, is courteous to him because of their past friendship, and also because he knows that he needs him.

Also Tanis wants to sleep with Raistlin’s older sister which probably contributes something to it.

And I think that may be why Dragonlance works: its fully-developed cast. Sure, they’re DnD stereotypes, if we’re being honest, but they’re developed versions of those characters. Sturm is a strict, Lawful Good paladin, but he’s got backstory, and conflict with the other characters, and his own personal vices beyond his character archetype. Flint is a gruff dwarf character, but he’s got his own backstory explaining why he does or doesn’t like certain things (like boats), and he’s explicitly an old man, even for a dwarf. And so on and so forth.

That’s something a lot of authors miss out on when they’re writing fantasy of any sort. They apply the archetypes to characters and move on with the story, without stopping and developing those characters to make them likable, and make the story work because of it. And in some cases you can get by without developing characters too much--for as much as I love it, I don’t think Here, There Be Dragons has great character development, but the Plot moves fast enough that it isn’t too much of an issue. But as that series goes on, and the cast expands exponentially, it starts becoming more egregious.

Dragonlance, to my knowledge, doesn’t have that problem. I’ll get back to you when I finish the trilogy again, but from what I recall, it never felt like it was juggling too many characters, or that I didn’t get a sense for a lot of characters, or that the cast became faceless figures to help one or two protagonists.

Dragonlance is not surprising, but it is fulfilling. It tells the story it set out to tell. Maybe you don’t like all the ways it went, but it ties itself up, taking the characters where they were meant to go and not making you wonder about too many loose ends. You don’t feel cheated by the story; you don’t think it would have made more sense if it had all gone completely differently. And maybe that’s a YMMV thing, and maybe I’ll change my mind upon re-reading the three books. But as for this one, it had an ending that felt right. 

I know I’ve written about Spoiler Culture before, and that creators being so obsessed with making sure their Plot Twists stay as twists often warp things too much or treat their audiences or cast members like crap just to make sure you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s gotten pretty infuriating at times, and it’s nice to read a story that cares more about being enjoyable than about being a surprise. Perhaps it’s a bit too ‘safe’ to be on a list of greatest fantasy of all time, but it’s a good comfort read if nothing else.

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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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