“Avenge Us,” Star Wars, and Sympathetic Villains

 Hallo! I’ve been thinking about Verdi a lot lately for Reasons. I finished the second Thursday Next book, and I think I’ll be doing either Silver Chair or The Disaster Artist next.

There is probably not going to be a Saturday Note next weekend because I will be out of town.

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“Avenge Us,” Star Wars, and Sympathetic Villains

Alright I had this idea at the beginning of the week and figured I’d go with it. I suspect I was browsing the Headscratchers page for the Sequel Trilogy on TV Tropes, and thinking about how terribly-planned out it was and trying to think of some really good Star Wars media. Some spoilers for Star Wars: Rebels and Jedi: Fallen Order.

The main antagonist of Star Wars--Jedi: Fallen Order is the Second Sister, one of the Inquisitors, Force-users that are trained with the express intention of hunting down remaining Jedi and Force-sensitive individuals. Their numbers reflect their rank. Most of them appear to have been former Jedi, and the Second Sister is no exception--she was Jedi padawan Trilla Sudari, who upon finding out that her master sold her out to the Empire after extreme torture, turned the Dark Side and became one of the top-ranking Jedi hunters.

Our hero, Cal Kestis, not only fights her, but makes an actual effort to redeem her--despite her being the one hunting him across the galaxy throughout the entire game. Her goal is to grab the Jedi Holocron Cal’s after, which holds the names of a butt-ton of Force-sensitive children, in the hopes of either eliminating them or recruiting them. And yet Cal sees the good in her, and tries to bring her back to the light. And after her final boss fight, it looks like maybe he’ll succeed.

And then Vader walks in, berates Trilla for her failure, and kills her. Her last words are: “Avenge us.”

Which is… odd. Not in an ‘out-of-character’ way, but interesting and not what one might expect. 

It reminded me of Maul’s final death in Star Wars: Rebels. As he’s dying on Tatooine, having been bested for the final time by Obi-Wan, he realizes that he’s there to protect someone (Luke), and asks if he’s the Chosen One. When Obi-Wan answers in the affirmative--George Lucas disagrees, but it’s not out of the question that Obi-Wan himself thinks Luke’s the Chosen One--Maul says, as his last words, “He will avenge us.”

Now both of these cases aren’t really redemption. I don’t think anyone would ever look at Maul’s character arc and call it redemption. I think Trilla’s arc ends just short of redemption, because maybe she’s about to start down that path, but Vader kills her before she can reach it. But both of them are, in their final moments, portrayed sympathetically. Trilla gets sympathetic moments long before her end--Maul only sporadically gets those, and those mostly relate to his brother Savage. But in these sympathetic death scenes, their last words about how they would be, or should be, avenged.

This is odd.

If you’ve been paying any attention to Star Wars, unlike in most pop culture fiction, revenge is almost universally portrayed as a Bad Thing. In mainstream Star Wars media, you can probably drop the ‘almost.’ This is not what being a Jedi is about. Revenge is giving in to anger and hatred, to negative emotions. The Jedi aren’t doing the good things that they do because they want revenge, it’s because it’s the right thing to do--defeating the villains will stop oppression and bring balance back to the universe.

So we have two villains who have sympathetic death scenes, asking or hoping for something that we’re repeatedly told is a Bad Thing, a selfish act that we know (from the way the story works) won’t actually make anything better. They know that a Wrong has been done, not just to themselves, but to the balance, and something needs to be done to fix it. And so they request the one way to fix imbalance that they understand: revenge. They’re not redeemed, and these lines make it clear that’s the case, but they were reaching for it and they still want things to be fixed from the wrongs they’ve experienced, the things that have twisted them to the Dark Side.

I know Star Wars gets some flack from people as being very “Black and White” in its regards to morality. As I’ve explained before, I have never really minded this--I’m not going to complain about the fascist authoritarian government run by space satanist wizards being portrayed as Evil. But I think making the assumption that the setting has absolute Good and Evil means that there are no in-betweens, and that characters must fall into one or the other all the way is a mistake. Here we have two characters who are villains, and are quite wrong in the final wishes they express--explicitly so by the rules of the text. But they’re not portrayed, in that moment, as being worthy of sympathy.

It’s a small thing, but a really interesting bit of dialogue in both cases that shows a complexity in the characters that I think isn’t talked about enough.

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Social Media & Relationships

 You know I just discovered how to make Ubisoft Connect rewards work on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and that means that I can pick up some free stuff in-game and that’s...handy. I didn’t know this. Hm.

Don’t forget that this upcoming week is when FAT BEAR WEEK begins!

Also reminder that I’ve got a Fun Fact Friday tag on Tumblr for Fridays.

Anyway I’m going to sound like an old person and complain about social media for a bit! This isn’t about fiction/criticism as much as thing I’ve been thinking about.

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Social Media & Unintentional Effects on Relationships

I am going to talk about the possible unintentional effects of social media; this isn’t going to be about misinformation or your information being sold to advertisers or things like that. That’s kind of obviously evil and I don’t know if I’m equipped to talk about that in any capacity other than, “Don’t be a dick, don’t share false information, and the corporations are totally out for your money/soul.”

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately, now that I know so many people getting married and having children, that I don’t understand the appeal, but also more relevantly to the essay that a lot of us have stuff on our Facebook accounts and I don’t know if that’s… I don’t want to use the word ‘appropriate’ but that’s what comes to mind. I’m not talking about like college parties or that. I mean…

Okay. People have baby pictures. Your parents have baby pictures of you somewhere. Maybe they’re in a visible place in their homes! That’s probably okay, unless you specifically told them not to do that and they’re still doing it. But what I’m seeing on Facebook every so often are people taking pictures of their infant and toddler children basically every other day, if not more often, and sharing them with the world. Sometimes these baby pictures include things like “Baby’s first bath!” or “Here’s my baby wandering around naked, te-he!” 

I’m sorry, would you be thrilled if your parents started sharing pictures of you as a naked baby on the Internet? Yeah, babies are naked sometimes, and sometimes you show people baby pictures. That’s fine. But there’s something quite different between showing the person sitting next to you pictures of your baby taking a bath and it being on the Internet. Of course these things can be deleted, and I don’t know that anyone’s expecting, twenty years from now, all of today’s babies will dig through Facebook and find dozens of their own baby pictures. I’ve noticed that in general people don’t tend to look at older Facebook photos. But that also means that a lot of people are probably not thinking of deleting their old photos.

I don’t think people should be constantly posting pictures of their young children on Facebook is what I’m getting at. Not because it’s wrong at the moment, but I am worried about a generation of children growing up and realizing that their pictures have been on the Internet for decades in embarrassing moments that their parents decided to share with the world. Not just once or twice, but for basically their entire childhood. I don’t want a lot of my baby pictures out in public.

Also with people getting married, there are people’s pictures with past relationships? And that strikes me as weird. Not as bad as baby pictures all over, usually, and I imagine people who get along with their exes are probably fine. I know that some people, upon a breakup, delete all pictures that depict them with their exes. And that used to strike me as a bit much, but at the same time, this is a public platform, and I get that some people might not want to be associated with a past relationship, especially if it ended badly.

But it’s all there. It’s all recorded in Facebook. No, we can’t delete the past, fine, but there’s a difference between admitting and not covering up past relationships, and having them all on display on a public platform. And this one’s trickier than the baby pictures I think, because it probably isn’t ideal to just not post pictures of yourself with your significant other until you’re sure it’ll work out, because that seems overly like you’re terrified of doing anything close to commitment.

I don’t know how this is going to shake out, but I think some time, maybe not soon, we will start to look more and more about how social media affects people in the long-term. Not just in the ‘Facebook is actively showing me things to make me mad’ kind of way (although it is, and you should be aware of that) but in a ‘I am displaying all of my relationships to the world for as long as the Internet exists and that’s probably not healthy in the long run.’

I’m not trying to say social media is inherently evil or anything like that. There’s a lot of good that comes from it, and from being able to share parts of your life with each other and with the world. But I have concerns about how people’s lives and relationships are affected further down the line.

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The Faithful & the Fallen and Predictable Endings

 I actually wrote another Saturday Note for this week, and personally I think it’s quite good (probably better than this one, sadly), but I question the wisdom of writing and publishing something like that, and if there’s the tiniest chance that it could go horribly wrong… well, let’s pass on that.

Anyhow I started the next Wheel of Time and also reviewed the Cassandra Clare “Draco Trilogy” plagiarism debacle thing (for Reasons?). I can’t do a Note about that because I don’t care enough but feel free to go look that up.

And I need to work on my Gunpowder Milkshake review...

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The Faithful & the Fallen and Predictable Plot

So with Wrath I finally finished The Faithful and the Fallen quartet by John Gwynne. It was good. But something I said in my Book Diary post was that I found the conclusion to be more than a little predictable, but if it wasn’t clear there I want to point out that I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Just because I know some of the story beats on what’s going to happen, that doesn’t mean the story has failed.

There are a bajillion Tumblr posts about this these days because of reactions to popular media, but floating around is a notion among writers of pop cultural media that a good story is one that surprises you. And it is good when a story surprises you, sometimes, but that in and of itself is not good writing.

It’s probably… not great to quote Doug Walker given how crap Channel Awesome turned out to be towards its employees, but I remember his commentary on one of his negative reviews, in which his brother points out that the plot twist he spent a chunk of the review eviscerating, well, it is unexpected, and he certainly didn’t see it coming. To which Doug replied, “I wouldn’t have seen it coming if the movie revealed that the main character’s mother was actually broccoli, but that doesn’t make it good writing.”

I think about that a lot.

In the effort to shock you or get a reaction, sometimes media will do something really dumb. Sometimes it’s characters acting in a way that’s contrary to their natures or common sense. Sometimes it’s a villain pulling something out of his armpit to make everything worse when the story’s about to wrap up. Sometimes it’s a reveal that contradicts everything you’ve been told. It’s not good writing is what I’m getting at, but the decision was made because the story needs something that the audience didn’t predict and that’s what the writers came up with.

The Faithful and the Fallen doesn’t really do that. Not much, anyway. There are some twists, yeah, but the conclusion of the story isn’t far from what you might expect. By the end of the third book, you have a pretty clear idea of where all the characters’ arcs are going to go, and now you’re sticking around to see them get there. And because you’ve spent all this time with them, you want to see it happen.

Basically, if you care about the characters, if you’ve been following their stories, and you’ve been paying attention to the overall story, then you know where it’s going. You don’t know how it’s going to get there, but you have the general idea. When you finally reach the end of their stories, it feels like a reward. And I’m not saying that every story or character arc needs to feel like that; there’s something to be said about character arcs that end in non-standard ways. But that should not become a new standard. You shouldn’t just twist out of satisfying endings when they don’t make sense because you absolutely MUST make sure your audience doesn’t know what happens in the end.

[The biggest twist, as I said in the Book Diary post, is that Lykos lasts as long as he does. Honestly, he’s a character that outstayed his welcome and continues to be a pain in the butt. I get that it’s probably the point of his character, that the author wanted to create this absolutely detestable villain, but I just found him annoying and I couldn’t quite figure out how he wasn’t dead two books ago.]

Maybe the story could have done with more twists in it. The only really big one to the Plot happens at the end of the third book, and while it’s a big character moment for our hero, it’s not actually that much of a game-changer in terms of Plot, and I can’t help but wonder if the story would have done better without it.

If a story does insist on surprising you, it shouldn’t necessarily be with a plot twist. You can very easily surprise the audience by playing with the expected tropes; that way you’re not actually changing something in the Plot, you’re just showing a different perspective that isn’t what you usually get. The opening to the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind. It doesn’t rewrite Plot or undo any character development for it to work. That one has the advantage of being the first scene of the series so it can’t really overwrite anything that came before (except the movie, I guess?). But it’s something that sets the tone for the series and your expectations without derailing the story.

I don’t want to know how every story ends. But I like being able to read serieses and thinking to myself about what the characters’ actions mean, about how they relate to the Plot, and about how it all comes together, and then feel as if my thinking actually had merit, whether I was right or wrong. I want my thoughts on the story to actually have some weight, and not be something jerked around for the author’s fun. And it should certainly feel like the author’s been traveling down a planned road by the time we reach the ending.

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Assassin's Creed: Valhalla & Going All-In

 Why hallo, I have had a weird week, but it’s over now and I can kick back, relax, and play “Siege of Paris.” And maybe I’ll FINALLY get to watching Gunpowder Milkshake on Netflix.

Also expect an update on the Book Diary. It’ll take a while after that because I’m reading Wrath by John Gwynne which is fairly long.

Anyhow.

Saturday Note.

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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and Going All-In

I have been talking some trash about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla lately and I want to be clear: there ARE things I like about this game, hence why I’m still playing it. And there are a few things it does really well. I considered making this Note for ImpishIdea (and I still might adapt it), but given I’m going to bang on about Plot for a bit, I’m worried that I’d feel the need to explain every single Plot element and I don’t want to do that for a bunch of strangers.

What I really like about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is how all-in it is in its approach to telling an Assassin’s Creed story. I’ve complained in the past that many Assassin’s Creed games don’t want to lean too heavily on the overarching mythology and Plot because they want to attract new players. The prequel game that explains the origins of the Assassins, for instance, doesn’t really have that many overt callbacks to previous games in the series or much care about continuity. It’s frustrating. The main writer for that game is actually a newcomer to the series, which seems a bizarre choice in doing an origin story.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla doesn’t have that problem. Not only does it have veteran AC writer Darby McDevitt as the lead writer for the game, and so he crams the story with as many callbacks, references, shout-outs, and little bits of backstory and worldbuilding. We find out how the Order of Ancients is taken down and rebuilt into the Templar Order, we find out what that whole ‘Father of Understanding’ business is about, we see SO much First Civilization content in the game, we move the Modern Day Plot along, we meet Juno again...it is ridiculous how much stuff is packed in there for long-time fans. I have been questioning if this storyline is even comprehensible to players who haven’t been following this series for years, because many of the reveals rely on understanding details from previous games.

This game has callbacks to just about every major game release in the series except for Liberation (which is arguably not a major release, sadly) and Syndicate (which is downright bizarre because that one also takes place in England. Unity I think doesn’t get one until the expansion “Siege of Paris” but that kind of makes sense so I’ll count it. There are random bits like the Yggdrasil medallions that the Order of the Ancients wear, similar to the one Shay wears in Rogue. The Sage business from Black Flag. The storylines in London, Winchester, and York are pretty directly homages to the missions in the original game. The puzzles and short video and practice Animus things from the Ezio stories. And so on.

Likewise the mythology segments also have so much material? I didn’t know how they would manage to combine the binding of Fenrir, the building of Asgard’s walls, the Mead of Poetry, and Mimir’s Well into one story that’s coherent, but they did? And it all ties into the First Civilization story by making Ragnarok into a distortion of the Toba Catastrophe. IT’S SO COOL.

This is a series that repeatedly has things happen and mostly hints at bigger things to come, or that it will explain what it’s talking about, but then never actually gets to those things or explanations. It’s immensely frustrating. And then this game comes along and just says, “You know what? It’s time that you got some payoff to all the things we’ve been talking about all along.” I really appreciate that.

The whole ‘Let’s do a slow burn story and by that I mean not do any major reveals for the overarching story for years on end’ is a popular thing with long-running series because, again, they want to attract new viewers, readers, or players in the audience who would get confused by heavy continuity and would rather be comfortable slipping into the thing right in front of them without years of backstory. And that’s understandable. But if you’re telling a story in that format you have to have things moving forward, and you can’t keep delaying every reveal and major story point. Then you get things like Assassin’s Creed: Origins which dumped the series’s main villain and barely explains how it ties into already-established lore, all in hopes of not overwhelming the player.

I’m reminded of a thing, and I want to say that I heard it in a promotional behind-the-scenes video for the PS4 Spider-Man game, in which someone on the team says that in a conversation with Stan the Man, Stan Lee explained that his approach to comic book writing was this: go all-in on every issue. Put as much action, as much drama, as much COOL STUFF as you could in each installment, because you don’t know if this is the first or only installment that your reader is picking up and you want it to be as memorable and cool of an experience for the audience as you can each time. You don’t want people picking up one comic and deciding it was boring, and it was because that was a boring filler episode; you want each one to stand out and be a chance to be someone’s favorite.

And that’s a good approach to comics, and it’s a good approach to long-running series of any medium. And yeah, okay, I get it, sometimes you’re going to have to delay putting in some things for drama so there can be a big reveal later, or not everything you want fits in one installment, or there are budget issues or something. That’s okay. But you do need to make each issue, or game, or webpage, or book or whatever actually feel like it’s worth reading, especially several installments in, so that the audience feels rewarded for sticking with it this far, and newcomers get a sense of what the entire story’s like. 

Every part of the story should try to be a reward for having read/watched/played it.

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"The Only Way"

 I am currently reading Burr by Gore Vidal, which is interesting to say the least because of its view of the Founding Fathers. I have some pictures to put up of last weekend still to do. But I’m happy because I can take it easy this weekend! Not only because I’m not going anywhere, but because I don’t have work as Mondaybor Day is Labor Day!

Anyhow this was prompted by this past week’s episode of Marvel’s What If…? on Disney+. So there will be some spoilers for that, though I won’t give away the episode’s ending, I think.

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“This is the Only Way!” Is it? Really?

So this week’s episode of What If…? was good, I think, but it suffered a bit because the premise didn’t work for me. The title is “What if Stephen Strange lost his heart instead of his hands?” and it’s if he was still dating Christine, and instead of losing full use of his hands in the car accident Christine died. And he pursues the mystic arts and becomes Sorcerer Supreme and the events of his storyline continued as they did in his movie, until after defeating Dormamu he decides to use the Time Stone to try to go and save Christine. It doesn’t work, and every attempt to save her life and relive that night ends in failure. He’s told, upfront, that this is a destined event, a fixed point in time, or whatever you want to call it. This is a thing that absolutely has to happen in the timeline in order for him to become Sorcerer Supreme.

Except it’s not.

We know it’s not. Because we saw his movie. We see that this is not a thing that has to happen for him to be become a powerful sorcerer. We know this for a fact.

This reminded me of Doctor Strange’s whole bit in Infinity War and Endgame, in which he tells Tony (and the audience) that he has seen millions of different possibilities and there’s only one in which they come out victorious. And again, I have trouble buying that one because we see several times throughout Infinity War that the Avengers and friends come really close to stopping or killing Thanos several times. And if they did, it’s not like he has a contingency in place to keep his plan going. It’s not like all of the almost-got-him’s are because of inherent character flaws from the heroes--in many cases it’s basically luck that Thanos survives. If Peter Quill had decided to shoot Thanos in the head instead of punch him. If Thor’s axe had gone a bit higher. And so on.

I’m also reminded of Rumpelstiltskin’s Plot in the first couple of seasons of Once Upon a Time, in which it’s revealed that the entire story was a play by him to be able to find his son again using the one method of magic possible to travel between worlds. Except as the show keeps going we keep seeing more and more methods of travelling between worlds, some of which Rump, being an immortal sorcerer who collected artifacts and travelled far and wide, would have known about. The longer the show runs, the more ridiculous it is that the only possible way Rump could think of to get back to his son was a convoluted curse that involved temporarily losing his magic and filling a town in Maine with people he despised.

My point is this: if you tell your audience that the way the Plot is happening is the only way it could have happened, you have to sell that to the audience. You have to make the audience believe that. You can’t just say “It has to be this way” and then fail to make it evident that it’s true.

Now this doesn’t apply to times when this explanation is used and it’s obvious BS. The BBC Merlin has an episode where a sleeping curse is afflicting Camelot, and the Dragon tells Merlin the only way to fix it is to kill the source of the curse, his friend Morgana. And as he struggles to keep himself awake for hours on end, and keeps failing to find some alternate solution, he eventually poisons Morgana and refuses to give Morgause the name of the poison used until she lifts the curse. And he justifies it as being the only way, and it’s dumb, but at the same time he’s called on it a lot by Morgana, who turns evil after this because of this precise occurance. And the advice to kill her in the first place is given by the Dragon, who is not always a truthful source and has reason to want Morgana dead. It’s a dumb decision, and “the only way to fix things” may be said, but it’s arguably BS in-universe as it is out.

I have a lot of other issues with this show, and with the character’s decisions in that one episode, but I don’t think it’s too egregious.

Likewise, there’s a bit in the mythological section of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla in which, after Tyr has his arm torn off by Fenrir, Odin gives a not-apology, and Tyr replies that it was fated to happen so he doesn’t blame his BFF for making him lose his hand--it had to happen that way after all. And even though it’s not explicitly said, it’s very obvious that this isn’t true. Yes, the Aesir see it that way, because of their fatalistic view of life, but this entire business would have been avoided had Odin not been a raging douchebag so terrified at his upcoming demise that he gets trigger happy enough to try to kill Loki’s son Fenrir the second he lays eyes on him. Again, this reasoning is obviously BS.

If you tell your audience something, the thing that makes the entire story work, you’d better make sure the rest of the story backs it up. If the story tells us something has to happen then if we spend the rest of the story telling ourselves it could easily have happened otherwise… well, then it didn’t quite work. You should never leave a point in the story in which the audience is always asking why they didn’t just do it another way, if it can’t be answered by something like, “It’s how that character thinks/acts.” Because yeah, sometimes people don’t act in ways that are entirely logical. But if there are obvious loopholes to a situation, or if it all comes down to luck, you absolutely cannot tell us that it has to happen the way that it does.

Especially with that Doctor Strange example from What If…? because we’ve explicitly seen that it doesn’t have to happen that way.

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I Don't Like Vikings That Much

 I considered not doing a Saturday Note this week because I’m having a busy weekend, but it looks like instead it’ll just be late and more rushed than usual.

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I Don’t Like Vikings That Much

Alright I alluded to this in my Book Diary post on Odinn’s Child, and probably this could have been picked up in any of the comments I’ve made about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (which I have yet to review, and for that I apologize), but: I have trouble with Viking protagonists in historical fiction. And it’s probably a bit weird that I only just formulated this in my head, all things considered--one would think I would have realized this much earlier. But no, I’m not a huge fan of Vikings as protagonists, or in general.

It is a bit odd considering that I really like Norse mythology. It’s great! I eat that stuff for breakfast! I can hand out tons of Norse mythology book recommendations on the fly. It’s one of my favorite sets of mythology. But I don’t like the people who actually worshipped the Norse gods because, quite frankly, they sucked.

And a lot of people don’t want to deal with that.

I’ve said this multiple times, but the main problem that I had with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is that the game doesn’t really want to reckon with the notion that going around raiding, pillaging, and burning people’s houses while colonizing their lands makes you the villain. The Norse heroes that are leading these raids are presented not just as heroic among their fellow Norsemen/women, but to their Saxon allies as well. Odinn’s Child doesn’t do that much better in this regard, though it does lampshade that the willingness among pagan Scandinavians to fight everyone gets them in trouble more than they really need to.

Many of these examples come with unhealthy doses of “we’re hardy, real men, who are always honest and straightforward, unlike those hypocritical Christians who say they’re all about love but hate us!” And again, complaining about the Christians disliking you while you’re actively pillaging, conquering, and enslaving their lands and people is so stupid that it hurts me to read this as if it’s supposed to be sympathetic.

One of the oddest things in AC: Valhalla though is that this pillaging only takes place among Europeans? There is (spoiler) a section that takes place in Vinland, or North America as we call it now, and the Norse there have met the Native Americans and promptly… ignore them? The player character, and one other Norseman, meets and talks to them. The other guy, Olaf, is considered a weirdo and criminal for bothering to talk to the Native Americans there, and trying to establish trade. But other than that, there’s nothing. No hostility, no violence, no trade, absolutely nothing. And the anachronistic Norse colony here is set up by one of the villains, whose clan opens the game by trying to sell the protagonist into slavery. The villain has set up a work camp to excavate a First Civilization site, and he hasn’t tried to interact with the people who actually live there? Either to ask for a guide, or to enslave, or anything?

And I’m not saying he should have done that, but it’s very out-of-character.

I think there are possible ways in which one could write sympathetic and interesting Viking characters. There’s the lovely cast of Olaf’s crew in Sea of Trolls, who are memorable and sympathetic, but when they first show up it’s to raid Jack’s village, and they take him and his sister captive. And they bond, eventually, especially on a quest to Jotunheim to face off against an even bigger evil. But upon the journey’s end, they’re like, “We’ll drop you off and then maybe next time we’re raiding we’ll swing by and visit!” Jack is horrified that they’re going back to raiding, and their response is, “Yeah, we’re Vikings. That’s what we do.” And it’s again emphasized that yeah, they’re not good people.

Ranger’s Apprentice post-Battle of Skandia and the spin-off Brotherband Chronicles dodges this altogether by making it so that the Skandians (the in-universe Nordic peoples) no longer raid as part of a treaty, and instead hire themselves out as bodyguards and naval patrol.

There’s also the Skelligans in The Witcher 3, who take raiding and inter-clan feuds very seriously, and as Cerys points out, both of these have prevented their kingdom from actually developing into something other than a bunch of bullies that bother the major kingdoms of the Continent on the international stage. If she becomes queen, she reforms the kingdom into being actually productive and drops all that raiding crap. And mind you, this is already a setting that’s full of gray morality, and so none of the Skelligan behavior is portrayed as being particularly noble, in the same way that barely anyone on the Continent is.

But essentially, it boils down to this: if your protagonist is a Viking, you have to own up to the fact that he or she is someone who is part of a culture that pillages and colonizes other peoples as part of their career. Vikings are, for whatever reason, a group of white colonizers who are somehow still romanticized in fiction, and very often without any lampshading that these are, by their job description, very bad people. And when fiction tries to feature Viking characters as protagonists and doesn’t do that, especially while still keeping the pillaging and such, is dishonest and stupid and I just hate it all around.

So I wish writers would stop doing it.

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Elementary, Sherlock Holmes, & Righteous Fury

 My guts feel weird as I’m writing this but in the past year that’s become fairly normal, sadly enough.

I deliberately did not talk about the Shadow Carja in last week’s Note about the tribes in Horizon Zero Dawn because I didn’t think I had much to say about them. But the more I thought about it Saturday afternoon and Sunday, the more I thought of things I could say; however, I also had this idea that has floated in and out of my head since rewatching the pilot episode of Elementary. Once it came back at the beginning of the week I wrote it down as this week’s subject so that I wouldn't forget it again.

Also, while I will compare the CBS Elementary to BBC’s Sherlock in the approach to the character, this is not meant to be an essay saying that one is superior to the other, or to put down Sherlock. I may get the two titles mixed up; I apologize if I do that.

And spoilers for the pilot episode of Elementary.

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Elementary, Sherlock Holmes, & Righteous Fury

Towards the end of the pilot episode of Elementary, Sherlock Holmes figures out how the perpetrator, the victim’s husband, did the crime: he was not the killer (who was found to have killed himself earlier in the episode), but the killer’s therapist, who was secretly seeing him. The man prescribed steroids to his patient and secretly pushed his violent urges and obsessions, despite telling him he was giving him medication to calm him down. So when the patient was put in a situation where he was in close proximity to his (the therapist’s) wife, he killed her in a rage, and immediately went home in a confused stupor disgusted with himself over what he’d done, eventually killing himself.

And when Sherlock puts this together and confronts the man, he is furious.

In grad school I took a film class, and the professor referred to something he called the ‘Save the Cat’ moment. It’s the bit of a film in which the hero shows he’s a good person.

This is that moment.

Sherlock Holmes, as presented in the early episodes of Elementary, is a douchebag. He frequently disregards the comfort of people around him, dismissing people’s concerns because they bother him or he’s trying to make a point or something. And he gets called out on it. A lot. Mostly by Joan. A large part of his character development over the course of the series is him actually picking up on this and doing his best to be a better person by respecting people other than himself. By the end of the series, Sherlock is still abrasive and has little regard for social niceties, but he’s more openly respectful of other people and willing to accept other people’s points of view.

But right here, right in the pilot, is this moment that sticks with me. Because Sherlock Holmes presents himself as a selfish ex-junkie doing his best to keep himself busy with being a detective to pass the time, because he knows he’s better at it than everyone else. And when confronting this man he’s enraged. Not because the man has outwitted Holmes by making it difficult to find proof of his crime (although I’m sure it doesn’t help), not because of anything that this man had done to Holmes personally.

He’s enraged because this doctor took a man who came to him for help was wound up and used like a weapon. That he abused a man’s trust by drugging him and setting him on another person.

Sherlock Holmes is angry because he’s feeling righteous indignation on the way this man has treated a vulnerable human being.

As far as I can recall, BBC’s Sherlock Holmes does not do this. I will admit that I haven’t seen the third and fourth seasons since they’ve aired. He does get stunned by some of Moriarty’s more horrific actions. And he gets quite angry when someone he cares about is in danger, or gets hurt, or is threatened in some way. To be fair, this is entirely consistent with his characterization and development in that show. In Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes says in the first episode that he’s a sociopath, and it’s clear throughout its run that he has trouble relating to other people at all. So him feeling the kind of rage at the injustice some criminals exhibit wouldn’t really be in character for him.

We don’t see it with the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes either. He does show concern for other people, and he does go out of his way to help others out of danger. But the Sherlock of Guy Ritchie’s films is a bit busy. He’s dealing with cases relating to the fate of the country, or of all of Europe.

The very first episode of Elementary, on the other hand, makes a point to tell the viewer: this is a man who cares very deeply about the injustices of the world, even if he’s a bit of a tosser most of the time. Right away he’s shown to be someone Good--albeit Chaotic Good and not Lawful Good, because Sherlock’s happy to break into someone’s apartment to find evidence if he thinks it’ll help. He can say what he wants about being a consulting detective, but a huge part of what he does, and why he does it, is because Sherlock recognizes that there are problems in the world that he is equipped to solve. There are people who need help, and he can help them.

I haven’t read enough of the original stories to tell you how accurate this take on the character is. Random Tumblr posts and conversations I’ve had lead me to believe that it’s closer to Arthur Conan Doyle’s characterization than a lot of other takes. But in any case, it’s become a rather rare thing to see protagonists who are doing the right thing because it’s the right thing. More often it’s revenge or self-interest that accidentally turns into saving the world or something like that. And to be clear, these aren’t bad motivations; adding personal stakes to a story is good. It makes the character’s journey personal.

And maybe I’m misreading this interaction entirely; it does involve drugs, and part of Sherlock’s whole schtick in Elementary is that he’s a recovering addict. And maybe that’s why he reacts so strongly here and I need to watch the episode again. But it’s still him getting angry on the behalf of another person, a man abused but an authority figure he trusted and that’s just… that’s Good stuff.

More like that, please.

I should just rewatch all of Elementary.

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