Year: 2013

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You’re not Alexander the Great

Gameological alerted me to this peculiar project to create even more crappily written novellas based on video games released for the Nintendo Entertainment System console. Well, there’s nothing demanding that the submissions be terrible but apparently the original editions were really bad. I wondered exactly what kinds of stories would be submitted so I started looking through lists of NES games, then one thing led to another and before I knew it I was writing a fanfic for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. An excerpt:

Mike versus Mac

Most of the people reading this weren’t alive during the Moon landings. Most of the people reading this weren’t alive during the Kennedy assassination. A few might be too young to remember 9/11. Somehow, history refuses to be conveniently accessed. Somehow, history happens without us being there.

I think about this as I drive through Los Angeles on my way to a certain house in Carson. Most of the people in the neighbourhood are Filipino, and I even pass Jollibee, a restaurant franchise which has almost all of its locations in the Philippines. Finally I pull into the driveway of a modest home and before I even open my car door the owner comes out and shakes my hand. How are you, he asks. How was the drive?

I’ve never had an interview subject so eager to talk to me. Before I know it, I’m ushered through the house and into the den. “This is where I keep my old stuff,” says my apparent new best friend. There might have been several things on fire in that room, but I don’t notice because my eyes are drawn to a poster on the wall. It’s screaming about a boxing match set for October 5, 1987. Two men, one white, one black, face off with grim determination. Mike versus Mac, it says. The Battle of the Decade.

We’ll see if my inspiration will continue. I’ll have to read some Sports Illustrated articles to check the writing style.

Edit: Hmm, I hadn’t realized how much of a first draft this was but it really needs some revision. Still, the seed has been planted, I just need to build on this.

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The resurrection of Jessica Jones

Cover image for Alias #23

I posted quite a while back about the Alias comic book series being developed for TV. The series is about a superhero washout lurchingly eking out a living as a private detective in New York. The comic book was actually heavily influenced by Sex and the City, of all things, what with its foul-mouthed protagonist living the single life in The Big Apple.

Anyway, the news about TV show was all the way back in 2010 so I was afraid that deal fell through like so many things in the entertainment world. But guess what? Netflix is producing the Jessica Jones series along with TV shows for Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist.

I’d been wondering why the street level superheroes were absent from Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD (and may I remark that I greatly dislike the unnecessary reminder of which company owns the franchise in the title of the show?). It seems like a no-brainer to have low-ranked costumed vigilantes in a TV show. The kind of superheroes who fight bank robbers and purse snatchers instead of alien menaces or vast armies of evil minions are also the kind of superheroes who don’t have flashy powers that would be expensive to fake decently on a TV show’s budget.

So it turns out Marvel was saving Stilt Man and The White Tiger for these TV shows. I’m just hoping they’ll be able to do something like what Arrow did for DC’s street level characters, because then I might die of a massive nerdic superhero overload.

Or the shows might turn out to be like House of Cards but with superheroes. Which would still be pretty entertaining.

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Hail to the King

You catch a clan member stealing food - what do you do?

I’ve recently gotten into the computer game King of Dragon Pass. You play as the chieftain of a clan of Iron Age barbarians. It’s set in a fantasy universe with dragons and whatnot but it’s still very well-researched with regard to the attitudes and material life of your people. The broad mishmash of Celts/Gauls/Saxons/Norse that the game is drawing inspiration from feels realistic. Wealth is measured in cattle and you must continually propitiate the gods for political legitimacy. Also you can do stuff like take out a lawsuit on a ghost haunting a house.

The game society’s gendered division of power is not so overwhelmingly patriarchal but it doesn’t feel like a sop to political correctness. The way it’s presented in the game feels perfectly plausible and shows that the developers studied their history and/or anthropology. Using female slaves as currency like the Irish did would have been kind of interesting, though – "You want misogyny? Have some goddamn misogyny you unwashed neckbeards!" I imagine the developers shouting.

It’s a very unique take and practically a game in its own genre. How does one classify this? A strategy roleplaying fantasy game, perhaps? There are no real time elements and when you’re not picking what crops to plant then you’re just clicking on choices in dialogue trees. But the roleplaying narrative the game creates for you is so involving that you feel the need to keep going just to see how your clan will fare.

Still, despite my enjoyment, lately I’ve plateaued on the game. I’ll be back and at it soon enough, though. There are trolls out there that need slaughtering, and who else is going to do it?

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Feminist horror films

Horror films and feminism don’t tend to go together. There’s nothing inherently misogynistic about horror if you simply go by its technical description: a film genre seeking to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience’s primal fears. What’s misogynistic about scary things happening? However, in practice horror films reinforce gender stereotypes and punish nonconformity.

But why should this be so? Why are horror films full of sexually licentious women being murdered as karmic punishment for their sins? Why is emasculation and violence such a large part of horror movies? Why do horror movies inevitably begin with a stereotypically peaceful and content nuclear family as a representation of the normal before having this singular perfection disordered by outsiders? Because at their core, most horror movies are based on what horrifies men.

I could go into a long screed about how Hollywood is male-dominated and how the male perspective is the default and unmarked viewpoint in most mainstream cinema. However, you should already know this, and if you don’t, then I’m telling you now that this is how it is. That isn’t what interests me right now.

Instead, I simply want to assert that this hegemony cannot apply everywhere. Surely there must be horror films where women are not mere victims. Surely there are horror films which a feminist can watch.

Of course, to have redeeming value it’s not enough for a horror film to simply have Strong Female Characters. They’re everywhere nowadays, which is rather tiresome. More importantly, they’re all the same. So what if a woman is good at violence? Is this something that’s necessarily positive? They’re not so much characters as stereotypes, and boring ones as well.

So what follows herewith is my own attempt at making a list of feminist horror, omitting those with Strong Female Characters. In no particular order:

  1. Ginger Snaps
    • The first example that springs to mind because it was specifically made to meet the challenge of making a horror film that wasn’t misogynistic. It succeeded, in spades. Briefly, it’s a werewolf movie that explicitly compares the monthly cycle to menstruation, a premise which in retrospect seems rather obvious.
  2. The Descent
    • An all-female group of spelunkers encounters monsters underground. The characters are strong and female, but they’re not Strong Female Characters. They have private griefs and unvoiced guilt and burning drives and passions. In short, they have inner universes and human feelings. I liked how subtle the movie is regarding the motivations of the women.
  3. The Company of Wolves
    • The movie is about the Little Red Riding Hood story but foregrounding the sexual terror, which to be fair is so prominent in the original that it’s barely subtext. The film ends with an admonishment towards girls to beware of men, just to remind the audience exactly what the whole thing was about.
      • “Little girls, this seems to say
      • Never stop upon your way,
      • Never trust a stranger friend,
      • No-one knows how it will end,
      • As you’re pretty, so be wise,
      • Wolves may lurk in every guise.
      • Now, as then, ’tis simple truth:
      • Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth.”
  4. Byzantium
    • A mother and daughter pair of immortal vampires in hiding make their way to a small English town on the beach. Like the previous movie, this one was also directed by Neil Jordan, though it has a more straightforward narrative and is less in the camp of magical realism. Sadly, the movie sunk into nowhere when it was released, but hopefully it’ll be discovered by more people over time.
  5. Jennifer’s Body
    • A girl is murdered by a rock band and comes back to take her revenge. It wasn’t the greatest thing ever but it wasn’t as terrible as the online consensus was saying. Probably it’s some kind of latent nerd antipathy toward Megan Fox’s presence in the cast. I’d say the movie was solid enough.
  6. Alien
    • This has an actual strong female character but is otherwise a monster movie about an alien stalking the working class crew of a starship. It doesn’t have any specific examination of feminist concerns but Ellen Ripley is now a classic character as far as female horror protagonists go so this movie gets a pass.
  7. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    • A stereotypically vain and vapid cheerleader becomes a champion against the supernatural. The movie is explicitly about female empowerment but of a specifically white and middle class type of female empowerment. Still, the attempt was made, so here it is on the list.
  8. Carrie
    • This last example I’m iffy on because I haven’t seen the original or the remake. However, I feel it would be remiss of me not to at least mention this movie. I even know the gist of the story: bullied girl with psychic powers takes a bloody revenge on her tormentors. Thinking on it now, the story doesn’t seem to address specifically feminist concerns. I’ll have to make this listing provisional until I’ve actually seen the movie.

Anyway, this list should be a good starting point for a marathon. One of these days I’ll try watching these all back-to-back and see how I am come out on the other end.

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Punch It

One-Punch Man and Friends

I recently main-lined the manga One-Punch Man, about a superhero who’s so idiotically overpowered he annihilates his enemies in one blow. By the start of the story he’s actually pretty bored with his work. The series is freaking hilarious, it’s got an indie comics sensibility with wacked out heroes like Licenseless Rider, whose only “superpower” is riding a bicycle, and villains like Fuhrer Ugly and a thinly-disguised refugee from Dragonball Z. I feel like I’m reading a Japanese version of The Tick except the story is actually going somewhere.

Anyway, I suggest checking it out.

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The curse is lifted

So you know what I said about only watching mediocre anime lately? Well, I just saw the first two episodes of the anime Bakemonogatari (Ghost Story). So now what do I say?

I say, “Holy fucking shit.”

Seriously, this show is incredible. I could tell you what it’s about – a high school guy helping female classmates remove curses from themselves – but a story is more than its plot. Bakemonogatari has style oozing out of every pore. The dense symbolism, the quick flashes of meaning which forces me to play quick draw with the remote, the peculiar camera angles: it’s all in the service of a larger aesthetic mission. Bakemonogatari actually has something to say, and I appreciate that fact even more when I think back and realize that it’s been so long since I was able to say that about an anime.

It’s even got fanservice, which normally I would consider a bad thing. I would define fanservice as stuff added to a narrative purely to gratify the audience and with not much regard to how it fits into the larger story in terms of theme, character, and so on. Mostly, fanservice refers to gratuitous depictions of female sexual signifiers, which is to say, tits and ass. Plus all those other female things that heterosexual men are supposed to salivate over, like, I dunno, ankles. However, the show portrays the female form so blatantly (and from such off-kilter perspectives) that it removes the stink of prurience from the act of beholding the feminine.

Normally, the term “shameless” is a pejorative description. To be shameless is to be without a proper sense of what is appropriate behaviour (propriety being a relative concept, of course). Bakemonogatari is not shameless about its frank and upfront display of the female body. It is, instead, unashamed. The show is not afraid of the female body, and because it’s unafraid, it can show exposed female flesh as being the same as exposed male flesh, which is to say, an everyday and unremarkable sight.

Therefore, I was mistaken when I said that this show has fanservice. Fanservice is gratuitous. Bakemonogatari is merely honest.

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Familiarity breeds addiction

I’m addicted to mediocre storytelling. Well, not always, but it seems to be a thing with me lately.

Recently I got caught up to the latest issue of Nisekoi, a middling manga full of clichés and lazy stereotypes. It’s got decent art but the story itself has nary an original twist to it.

However, that’s exactly the point. The series is your basic high school romance-comedy full of misunderstandings and secret crushes and ridiculous coincidences. Trust me, series like this one are a dime a dozen.

Because it’s predictable, though, it’s also comfortable to read. There’s not much that needs to be done besides turning the page. Theme? Symbolism? Emotional truth? This is just a story about a boy and a girl pretending to date so that their rival gangster families won’t go to war but which quickly turns into a story about the couple hanging out with their high school friends. Nothing to see here, just move along. And don’t think the too-familiar plot can carry the series on its own, either.

It’s not just this manga, either. I’ve already mentioned that I’m a sucker for flashy yet empty giant robot anime, but I’m also reading Magician’s End, the final book in Raymond Feist’s progressively crappier fantasy book series. Mostly I’m finishing the books out of a weird sense of duty to my younger self.

Meanwhile, the critically acclaimed, though somewhat heavy TV series Orange is the New Black and Les Revenants are waiting for me to finally get back to watching them. But wait, I still haven’t caught up to the latest episode of that TV show where the Headless Horseman runs around killing people with a machine gun.

I’m reminded of what this scientific study claims, that human brains like novel music as long as it’s mostly predictable.

So don’t blame me for my tastes, I’m only a human being.

And in case you were wondering, that Headless Horseman show is called Sleepy Hollow.

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Happy Belated Ada Lovelace Day

Skeevy fact about computer programming: The programming language ADA was named after Ada Lovelace, she without whom I would not be typing this blog post and you would not be reading it. In reaction, the later programming language LINDA was named after Linda Lovelace. To recap, one programming language was named after a feminist pioneer in the field and in response another programming language was named after a famous porn star who happened to share the same last name. Keep it classy, programmers!

And just to keep things extra depressing, see Mother Jones for a list of smart dames who got screwed out of receiving credit for their inventions.

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Reboot Rebooted

Remember Reboot? Remember that it was set inside a computer, like Tron? It was the first fully CGI cartoon ever produced? It took forever for new episodes to appear? Not ringing a bell?

Well, just take my word for it that it existed. But guess what? Some company or other is remaking it.

Granted, that link is just to a press release and any number of things could happen between now and when funding is cut for the series. But hey, it’s potentially more Reboot. What’s to hate, besides the possibility of the remake being complete shit?

Also, apparently next year is going to be the 20th anniversary of the series. Boo to the inevitable passage of time pushing all of us closer to our eventual deaths.