The Politics of BATTLE FOR THE WASTELANDS, Or Putting "Punk" In Steampunk

As most of my regular readers know, I officially became a steampunk writer with my novel Battle for the Wastelands and its companion novella "Son of Grendel." Although those two books came out relatively recently, I'd been tinkering with them and pitching them for years (I completed the first Battle draft sometime in 2012) and I'd attended the Atlanta steampunk convention AnachroCon in 2014. One common concern I've heard re: steampunk over the years was that it was becoming too focused on aesthetics of parasols and dirigibles, with the "punk" angle (subversion of norms, challenges to authority, etc) neglected. In particular, the late 19th Century on which steampunk is based involved a lot of labor/class unrest that was supposed getting ignored in favor of fashion.

Between those comments I'd seen around and reading Killing For Coal in graduate school, I decided to make labor issues part of the worldbuilding in the Wastelands world. If you haven't read Killing For Coal, it's a fascinating look at the 1913-14 "Colorado Coalfield War" and its aftermath. Although it's mostly remembered for the Ludlow Massacre, in the aftermath of the massacre the striking miners proceeded to hammer the state militia (what would soon become the National Guard) for several days and workers in other trades began holding military drills and the like. That and the Battle of Blair Mountain were the closest incidents to outright socialist revolution in the United States I can think of. This is referenced in Battle when, in a meeting with his warlords, the villain Grendel talks about putting down strikes and the various commanders keeping forces at war footing--despite the vast expense--to avoid dumping hundreds of thousands of young men who know how to use weapons into the labor market. One reason the striking Colorado miners were such effective fighters is that many were veterans of wars in Europe. Although the first lord of the Northlands doesn't know about the coalfield war (I'm keeping it very vague as to whether this is our future, the future of a similar world, or something else entirely--think Stephen King's Dark Tower), he doesn't want similar incidents breaking out across his empire.

(Not only are Grendel and his cronies afraid of strikers being effectively able to resist the local police, the armies of lesser lords, or even Grendel's elite Obsidian Guard, but they're also concerned about their own soldiers following orders in the event they're sent against former comrades. The first Russian Revolution broke out when the soldiers refused to suppress food riots in St. Petersburg, after all. The film In Pursuit of Honor begins with a group of cavalrymen refusing to attack the Bonus Army outside of Washington D.C. because they'd served with those men in France, although I'm not entirely sure if that incident actually happened.)

Another plot plot in Battle is a small-scale war between two of Grendel's warlords that starts out over a labor dispute. One of Grendel's warlords is a straight-up mutant cyborg who breeds armies of mutants in the shadow of an "Old World" nuclear reactor. As part of a trade deal, he'd offered another warlord some to work in mines alongside more "normal" workers. The other workers went on strike and took to the hills with guns rather than work alongside "freaks," much like how racial violence accompanied labor disputes when black workers were brought in to replace striking white ones. The film Matawan covers one such incident, while I remember reading about a number of such instances in Making A New Deal. This ultimately escalated into a war between the two that sets Grendel looking for an outside enemy to keep everybody busy, something that will have consequences throughout the entire series.

Another "punk" element that's worked into the Wastelands world is the Jim Crow practice of convict leasing, chronicled in Slavery By Another Name. When Grendel united his homeland of Sejera through a dynastic marriage (and jackbooting those who objected), he made a very big deal about formally ending chattel slavery. But what dictator doesn't have forced labor? In addition to the usual labor camps and mines for political troublemakers and common criminals, both Grendel's overarching regime and private companies also lease convicts from lesser governments for forced labor. Convict leasing began after Reconstruction and continued all the way through World War II, a nice bit of period-appropriate dystopia. And considering how convicts under Jim Crow were viewed as more expendable than slaves (and in-universe there are references to convict laborers dying at high rates on certain projects), I imagine there'll be rebellions and the like should the opportunity arise.

Finally, part of the backstory for the defeat of the Merrill family--the last major independent power in the Northlands--was labor disputes. James Merrill, who was leader at the time, was preoccupied with mediating the concerns of business owners and workers and paid little heed to Grendel's growing military threat until it was too late. It's an underground labor movement that keeps his son Alonzo and his rebels supplied with equipment and trying to find a way to fairly deal with both capital and labor will become a problem for the son as much as the father in the second book.

The historical steampunk era was not just known for labor and class problems, but also an increasing push for women's rights. The first country to allow women to vote nationwide was New Zealand in 1893, while women won voting rights state by state throughout the 19th Century in the U.S. until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 guaranteed the right nationwide. This is touched on a bit when our oblivious hero Andrew Sutter, son of a prior mayor in his hometown, wonders why nobody asks his twin sister Sarah's opinion on anything the way they ask him and Sarah points out this should be rather obvious. 

(Although I didn't go into a lot of detail about how government in Andrew's town works, there aren't any women attending the town meeting on how to deal with the coming assault on the town by the extortionate Flesh-Eating Legion. This would strongly suggest women were either legally not allowed to participate in formal politics or it was Simply Not Done, since the town has been broadly self-governing since the Merrill dynasty fell but must provide tribute and conscripts to the Flesh-Eaters when asked. This might not be universal, since the surviving Merrill armies do field female soldiers and nobody seems to view that as particularly remarkable. To cite Eowyn's conversation with Aragorn in The Two Towers, those without swords can still die upon them.)

However, the main feminist plot point (so far) is the deconstruction of "it's good to be the king" in regards to the harem Grendel started up after the death of his wife. One of his concubines is Catalina Merrill, daughter of James and sister of Alonzo, who really, really doesn't like it. She exhibits some fairly overt symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from Grendel's attentions. Meanwhile, there's constant catfighting between the women and rival sons of different mothers plotting against each other, something that polygamous societies like the Ottoman Empire or ancient Israel were known for. This will only get worse later in the series. Although none of Grendel's women could be credibly described as 19th Century feminists, this does show how incredibly destructive this situation is. King Conan and his "luscious concubines" this is NOT.

Missed Opportunities For The Women In FROM DUSK TIL DAWN

As part of our Halloween vampire month, the merry crew of misfits at Myopia Movies decided to do From Dusk Til Dawn, a Quentin Tarantino hybrid of Natural Born Killers and a Mexican vampire movie. Here's the episode itself. The following discussion elaborates on some thoughts I had during the podcast. Spoilers for the canonical film coming...

Although I hadn't seen the movie before, I'd seen some discussion online that made vampire stripper Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek) seem much more important than she turned out to be in the film. At least one person claimed the vampires at the strip club Titty Twister were a matriarchal society that preys on the vices of men, the television series based on the film develops this whole mythology about the vampires and other evil supernatural forces, and Pandemonium herself even had a prequel movie dedicated to her origin. However, Pandemonium and the other major vampire characters get killed off three-fourths of the way through the movie and the rest of the film consists of the surviving humans trying to survive against the zombie-horde of vampire reinforcements gathered outside.

Meanwhile, although we see preacher's daughter Kate Fuller (Juliette Lewis) grow from being this nice, timid girl who can't bring herself to stake a corpse to being a hard-core vampire fighter willing to kill her vampirized adopted brother Scott (Ernest Liu), the film ends with her out of nowhere asking to stay with the other survivor, bank robber Seth Gecko (George Clooney) in Mexico. To his credit, he turns her down, saying he's not that bad, and flat-out tells her to go home. He goes off to retirement in El Rey with the proceeds from his last robbery, while it's implied Kate takes the money that Seth gives her and returns to the United States in the family RV.

Put these two together and there's some serious missed opportunities for both Santanico and Kate.

*Kate and Scott are on a road trip with their father Jacob (Harvey Keitel), a pastor who is losing his faith after the prolonged and ugly death of his wife in a car accident. Although Kate does love her father and brother, she's also a teenage girl who's realistically going to want more independence from her family. This would especially be the case if her father and brother default to relying on her to fulfill her late mother's responsibilities. We see her going swimming by herself at the hotel pool rather than hanging out with the folks and perhaps we could throw in that she really doesn't want to be on the trip in the first place. If we see friction before the Fullers get taken hostage by the Gecko brothers, well, that's a thread that can be followed.

*Seth's brother Richie (Quentin Tarantino), who broke him out of prison before the story begins, is mentally unstable and sexually perverse. He kills several people unnecessarily, rapes a bank teller he and his brother had taken hostage before killing her, and he clearly lusts after Kate. He hallucinates that she'd propositioned him and later he leers at her (particularly her feet). Seth uses the possibility he might try to rape Kate to intimidate her father, but he has enough moral sense that when Jacob tells him that he'll kill Richie if he touches Kate, Seth's response is "fair enough." Kate manages to deflect an early attempt by Richie to perv on her, but she has to be aware he's dangerous beyond the fact he's a twitchy kidnapper. Even though she likely doesn't know about the bank teller, the man reeks of creepy.

*Kate's alienation from her family can be combined with improving Santanico's role if, rather than being killed by Seth during the vampires' opening attack that kills most of the Titty Twister's patrons and all but a few of the original vampires, Santanico leads the survivors in a retreat deeper into the club (which the credits reveal is actually the top of an enormous Aztec-style temple). The vampire reinforcements massing outside break in earlier, forcing the human survivors to retreat in the same direction. Santanico, seeing Kate as the lone woman among the survivors, tries to cultivate her as a traitor. At this point Richie is dead, but since she knew he was Seth's brother (got his memories by drinking his blood?), she might know about his creeping on Kate. 

She could use this as a lever to get her to betray the others and join Santanico's matriarchal vampire society that preys on immoral men rather than living in fear of them. Christopher Moore's vampire trilogy, although it's primarily comic, very seriously touches on the same theme with the character Jody. She comes to enjoy being a vampire because she realizes that as a woman she'd lived in a low-level state of fear her entire life before becoming a vampire--now she can effortlessly annihilate any man who bothers her. Although Kate is too nice and too Christian (despite his perversity, she warns Richie about an attacking vampire and later uses her cross necklace to kill another) to fall for it, she might be tempted. This would especially be the case if the human survivors include another male character who'd behaved sexually aggressively toward her. Per TVTropes in the television version the sleazy Sex Machine (Tom Savini) hit on her, so he might be an option.

(To get this to work, the film would have to depict those killed by vampires as staying dead rather than rising again as new vampires as the canonical film does. Perhaps only Santanico, being the vampire queen, can make new vampires. You could also emphasize the Christ-perverting nature of the vampires by emphasizing becoming a vampire as a parody of Communion--like in Interview With A Vampire, "drink from me and live forever." As a Christian, Kate might take particular offense at that.)

*Although she might have offered to join Seth in Mexico because her whole family is dead and she's vulnerable in a foreign country without a strong protector (when the Geckos bring the Fullers into the club, the comically-gross hype man says some very ungentlemanly things), as I said earlier that came out of nowhere. It would make more sense if she had some idea--even if it's a completely wrongheaded one--that Seth would be interested in having her around. That Kate has any friendly feeling toward Seth could be chalked up to Stockholm Syndrome (he's a gentleman in comparison to his sicko brother and has some, in TVTropes terms, Pet The Dog moments), his notion that vampires existing means there must be a God and therefore her father has spiritual power as a preacher she might interpret as a conversion to (or at least interest in) Christianity, the two are the last ones standing against the vampires, and she might further sympathize with him upon seeing the demonic Santanico's infamous threat to enslave him, but what's going on with Seth?

*Well here's an idea. When Santanico threatens to enslave Seth and make him "lick the dog shit from my boot heel," his response in the canonical film is to tell her he's been married before. Perhaps he has a daughter Kate's age and when Richie starts getting pervy, he tells Richie that he wouldn't act that way toward his niece (Seth's daughter) and shouldn't act that way toward Kate. Given how Seth had been in prison for years before Richie broke him out (and was likely divorced before that, given how he compares marriage to slavery), he probably hasn't seen his daughter in some time and might start using Kate as a substitute.

(Per the almighty TVTropes, in the TV series when Kate tells her father that Sex Machine hit on her, Seth pulls a gun on him as well. I would expect a father to be protective of his daughter, but why does a career criminal like Seth care?)

This could especially apply once Jacob is vampirized, since now her actual father is out of the way. Psychologically there's also something called Lima Syndrome, where a captor starts to feel sorry for their prisoner and that can be a factor too. The fact the robbers and the hostages both have a common enemy in the vampires likely helps.

*This all comes to a head in the final battle where the humans realize dawn is near and try to make a break for the exit, fighting both the vampires between them and the sun and a counterattack by Santanico and her minions. One by one the human survivors fall until only Seth and Kate are left to face Santanico and the last vampires. Santanico makes another recruitment pitch aimed at Kate, who when faced with the alternative of simply being killed, is tempted again, but it's Seth who convinces her it's better to die fighting. Then Seth's criminal friend Carlos arrives, smashing open the doors and frying the vampires en masse with the sun. Santanico, stronger than her minions, manages to make one last attack on Kate and Seth, but together they finish her off and meet with Carlos in the parking lot. After all this, it makes a lot more sense that Kate would want to stay with Seth, but Seth knows how bad an idea this is and sends her home.

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Another "Bittersweet" Alternate Ending for GAME OF THRONES

The other day I had another idea for a "bittersweet" (per George RR Martin's stated plan) ending for the Game of Thrones television series that draws on the scripts of Alice Shipwise. In one of her "Battle of Winterfell" episodes, she depicts the Northerners--who had earlier been skeptical of Danaerys Targaryen due to her foreignness--converting hard-core for her after seeing the dragons in action against the White Walkers. This seems a lot more realistic than what happens in the actual show where the Northerners hail Jon Snow as "a madman...OR A KING" for riding a dragon, much to the ignored Danaerys' irritation.

(Seriously, she's been doing this for years and much more effectively, yet Jon who I don't think was very successful at commanding Rhaegal in battle is the one getting all the glory. Yes, they know him better than her, but still.)

Things broadly follow the television series until the attack on King's Landing. The city begins ringing its bells in surrender, but the Lannister die-hards continue firing on Danaerys from the Red Keep. Danaerys goes full dracarys on the Red Keep itself (not on the hundreds of thousands of non-combatants trying to surrender), only to accidentally trigger the wildfire stashes her father Aerys had stashed throughout the city. This leads to King's Landing going up like in the show, only with Danaerys watching in horror from atop Drogon as Jon, Grey Worm, Arya, etc. flee the city in a panic rather than her gratuitously murdering hundreds of thousand of helpless civilians and then making a megalomaniac speech about conquering the world afterward.

(I came up with a similar scenario around the time of the series finale and Twitterati Jacob Budz came up with a more detailed version and created a meme for it, which you can see here. Or just see below.)

Danaerys and her allies come together afterward and realize they have a massive mess on their hands. Not only do they have an enormous humanitarian crisis to deal with, but word is rapidly spreading in the South of the "Mad Queen" who murdered King's Landing, on top of the xenophobic nonsense Cersei had already been spreading earlier. Even though they all know that this isn't what happened, what matters is what people will believe. Danaerys isn't going to be accepted as a liberator from the White Walkers (most of Westerosi doubt they actually exist) or Cersei "I blew up the equivalent of the Vatican" Lannister. She will have to conquer most of Westeros with fire and blood. Although earlier in the series she'd made all sorts of threats to do exactly that (as people who defended her evil turn at the end of the series love to point out), seeing firsthand what this will entail on top of the losses she'd taken earlier (both personally and in dead soldiers) have soured her on the whole proposition. Bonus points if it turns out that, as Jon Snow pointed out earlier in the series, that witch wasn't a reliable source and Danaerys is pregnant with Jon's child.

(This is perhaps where Bran can come in, as Danaerys might not know she's pregnant at this point. This is another idea I borrowed from Ms. Shipwise, as it might make Jon agree to a political marriage even if he finds the idea of sleeping with his aunt gross.)

So what ends up happening is that Tyrion Lannister, who is once described as standing "as tall as a king" despite his dwarfism, ends up succeeding his sister Cersei as the king of everything south of the Neck. Jon retains his title as King in the North with Danaerys--whom the Northerners now adore even though people in the South view her as a monster--as his queen. To secure peace between the now-sundered halves of Westeros, Sansa's marriage to Tyrion is re-instituted.

(EDIT: A friend pointed out this could potentially undo Sansa's character development from a prince-obsessed bimbo into Littlefinger 2.0. This would need to be handled carefully--perhaps it's her idea, to immediately terminate the war rather than risk the rise of an anti-Targaryen leader in the South? The fact she and Tyrion both worship the Seven while Jon follows the Old Gods and Danaerys is irreligious might be helpful in heading off a Faith-inspired holy war against the pagan and the atheist. You could have Jon find it horrifying but ultimately agree to it.)

Like my scenarios earlier, this would meet Martin's goal of a "bittersweet" ending:

*The war ends with the victory of good over both supernatural and human evil, but enormous numbers of innocent people die anyway. Shades of Hiroshima.

*Danaerys wins the war but loses the peace purely by accident (as opposed to the contrived "everything goes wrong and she goes crazy" scenario we got in the show) due to other people's ignorance and bigotry. She gets to marry the man she honest-to-God loves, but it's a shotgun marriage with Jon's enthusiasm rather lacking given the revelation she's actually his biological aunt. Danaerys might not be bothered by the incest part, but she only has one-eighth (two-eighths if Yara Greyjoy and the Iron Islands come along) of what she sailed west to fight for--and it's the poorest and most backward section too. And although the fact she brings the world's only living dragon with her and Jon is a fairly mild personality means she's not going to be mistreated and will realistically have a large say in things, she's still a consort to a less-talented man rather than ruling queen.

*Although Sansa does get her childhood wish to be queen, it's to a man that, although she trusted him enough to spill the beans about Jon being a Targaryen and respected him due to his unwillingness to consummate their forced marriage, she has no romantic feelings or even physical attraction to whatsoever. And who is probably twice her age to boot. Of course, Tyrion does respect her intelligence and this would likely be some kind of Rule of Two situation rather than some kind of "unattractive nerd power fantasy," but still.

(My original idea featured Sansa remaining in the North, which means a future of catfighting with Danaerys, but this wouldn't be much fun either and it would give her even less opportunity to show off her intelligence and political savvy.)

A Less Lame Fate for John Connor in TERMINATOR: DARK FATE

When Terminator: Dark Fate was slated for release, I really wanted to see it. They were bringing back Linda Hamilton for Sarah Connor and Edward Furlong for John Connor, which was pretty cool. Of the Terminator films I've seen, Terminator and Terminator II: Judgement Day were the best ones, with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation being kind of meh. I didn't even bother with Terminator: Genisys due to awful reviews and the whole "John Connor gets turned into a robot" part, even though the idea of a Terminator raising Sarah Connor to be a bad-ass after an evil Terminator tried to kill her as a child seemed kind of cool.

Then I learned that in Dark Fate they basically kill off John pretty early on and the future leader of the resistance against the machines--this time a new being called Legion instead of SkyNet--is a Mexican woman named Dani Ramos. I can understand the desire by many in the entertainment industry to appeal to more diverse audiences and make it so not every hero of every story is a white male, but killing off John Connor to make way for a Mexican female leader of the resistance is about as subtle as hitting the audience in the head with a sledgehammer.

So here's an idea I had that would allow for a younger, more diverse cast to take the stage without showing contempt for John Connor, who it turns out wasn't that important after all. It's based on this deleted scene from a special director's cut of T2:



In a world where Judgement Day never happened, John Connor is now a U.S. Senator and as such has access to all sorts of classified information, which he passes onto his mother, who uses it to fight SkyNet incursions. This is similar to how the "Carl" Terminator that killed John Connor but ultimately learned to love and fight for humanity secretly sends Sarah information to help her fight other SkyNet incursions. Perhaps in defeating one such attack, Sarah captures a Terminator and reprograms it to help her fight other Terminators, thus leading to this world's version of "Carl."

Ultimately, like in the canonical film, SkyNet and its future are ultimately erased, leaving "Carl" stranded in our world as the last of his kind. However, the new evil AI Legion emerges later and the whole "time-traveling machine war" starts up again, with Dani as the prophesied leader of this new resistance much like John Connor was the prophesied leader of the old one.

This solution seems like it would please everybody--it keeps the more diverse and female-centric cast that many people liked about Dark Fate (John doesn't even need to be physically present for the action--he could send Sarah information that allows her to find Dani and Grace before the new Rev-9 Terminator kills them) while at the same time avoiding a rather bone-headed attempt at being "woke."

HELLRAISER as...a Lifetime Original Movie

In mid-October I watched Clive Barker's horror film Hellraiser for the first time in several years for the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. Here's the podcast for your listening pleasure.

Although I saw the film as an adult rather than a child or teen like most of the movies we've done, it didn't hold up as well as I'd thought. One of the big problems was pacing--the film could really stand to use a trimming. And then podcast host Nic made a comment that I can't really refute--Hellraiser came off like a Lifetime Original Movie.

(For those of you who aren't Americans or aren't super into television, Lifetime is a television network aimed at a female audience. It has a reputation for overdramatic low-budget movies focusing on women in peril from the latest in-the-news danger and/or dramatizing real-life incidents like the woman who killed her child's molester in court. Here's an article discussing the phenomenon; it even has an amusing TVTropes page.)

And if you stripped out the supernatural elements, it would seriously look like a "teen girl in peril" film more appropriate for Lifetime than, say, the horror streaming channel Shudder. Seriously, Kirsty could be an older teen (in the original script she's only twenty and she could easily be 18-19) who moves with her father Larry and disliked stepmother Julia to a new town and finds the situation so intolerable she rents an apartment of her own and gets a job she doesn't particularly like to pay for it. She finds a new boyfriend and things seem tolerable at least...until she learns that Frank her pervert uncle has escaped from prison. He's hiding in the attic of the family home and is canoodling with Julia, encouraging her to commit crimes to get money so they can run away together.

Furthermore, some of her uncle's criminal associates are looking for him (Frank in the book and film is referenced as owing people money) and if they can't have him, they'll gladly recoup their losses by taking Kirsty away for sex trafficking (with human trafficking being a major news topic I could definitely imagine a Lifetime movie about it--and I'm pretty sure they've covered this before) instead. She bargains with them by offering to give them her uncle (whom she discovered and who attacked and injured her) instead. This they go along with, arriving at the family home to find her stepmother and uncle have already murdered her father. The criminals kill both of them (or, like in the film, Frank kills Julia by accident before the criminals kill him), then renege on their deal and try to kidnap her anyway. Fortunately she's found her father's gun or managed to steal one from one of the criminals and disposes of them all like a Final Girl in a slasher film.

What do you all think? All of these elements generally line up with what happened in Hellraiser, minus the whole "resurrected by blood from sadomasochistic Hell," "evil Rubik's Cube that opens dimensional gateways,"  and "leather demons" parts. And given the greater awareness of sexual assault (Frank's rampant perving on the teen Kirsty and the very rapey flashbacks with Julia) and human trafficking, this would definitely include Lifetime movies' "ripped from the headlines" tendencies.

Furthermore, Kirsty would be a good protagonist for a film intended for female audiences. She isn't reliant on or obedient to any male character (she gently disregards her father's wish that she live with him and Julia and chooses to support herself), she fights off the rapey Frank by herself upon their first encounter, she's able to bargain with the Cenobites (or in this case a bunch of human criminals) when she can't physically overpower them, and although the film never explicitly depicts her having sex with boyfriend Steve, one of them is definitely staying over at the other's home and yet she doesn't suffer Death By (Possible) Sex like many female characters in slasher films do.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Deep Blue Sea (1999)

As some of you may know I'm an Eagle Scout, having earned the rank in 2001. As part of my experiences with Boy Scout Troop 1011 in Marietta, GA, I visited the Scouts' major oceanic campsite Sea Base in the Florida Keys twice, once to go sailing and once to go SCUBA diving. During the first trip, several of my peers and I decided to go see the movie Deep Blue Sea after we got back. I remember really liking it at the time, but how well did it hold up? That's what Myopia: Defend Your Childhood is for.

Here's the episode. And now for the review...

The Plot

Dr. Susan McAllister (Saffron Burrows), who took care of her Alzheimers-afflicted father during his dying days, presides over a laboratory in which mako sharks with enlarged brains are being bred to harvest for a compound intended to treat degenerative brain disease. After the escape of one shark makes national news, she brings Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson), her chief investor, to her oceanic lab in a bid to prevent it from being shut down. There he meets other members of the staff, like parolee "shark wrangler" Carter (Thomas Jane) and "Preach" (L.L. Cool J), a former clergyman who's now the facility's cook.

Unfortunately having a larger brain-to-body-size ratio means that these sharks are more intelligent than the norm, and they want out. As a hurricane bears down on the facility, the sharks enact their plan to escape...

The Good

*The concept is pretty interesting. In shark attack movies, the default "bad shark" is almost always a great white simply due to the being the biggest overtly-predacious sharks (the larger basking shark and whale shark feed on plankton and krill). I think there was at least one horror movie depicting a tiger shark as the villain and the upcoming sequel depicts bull sharks (which are much more likely to be aggressive toward humans) as the villains, but other than this movie, I have never heard of mako sharks being movie monsters before.

*This being a monster movie, there are some pretty creative kill scenes. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail to avoid spoilers, but one involves a gurney and the other involves a character being torn in half.

*There's some decent acting, especially from Samuel L. Jackson. Burrows does a decent job with McAllister's intensity, although I would have expected more emotion from her when recounting her father's last days.

*The only real villains in the film are the sharks, and they're just animals acting according to their nature rather than being truly malicious. It's true that McAllister's poor judgement and excessive zeal caused the problem in the first place, but given the back-story where she had to care for her dying father, that she'd be so monomaniacal in pursuit of her goal of curing degenerative brain disease makes a lot of sense. She's not evil or malicious.

*The sharks in this film's greatest danger isn't their destructive physical power, although there's plenty of that, but their intelligence. They're dangerous smart creatures and put our heroes in jeopardy quite a bit. Seriously, given some of the things they pull off in the movie, one could make an argument that these sharks are smarter than humans.

*This is something I got some pushback on from other members of the podcast, but I liked the depiction of Preach as a Christian character. He's not a preening holier-than-thou jerk, a domineering authoritarian fundamentalist (think Escape from L.A.), or a hypocrite loudly condemning some sin that he secretly practices. Nor is he unrealistically perfect. He has a drinking problem (cooking sherry!) and admits having failed as a preacher, a husband, and a father, but when things go down, he's the one who keeps it together and even leads other characters in prayer. At one point he compares his own situation to Daniel being thrown into the lion's den.

*I liked the brief interplay between Preach and Russell. I've taken a class on portrayals of different ethnicities in movies and they riff on the "black guy dies first" trope that comes up quite a lot.

The Bad

*The CGI used to create the sharks has not aged well since 1999. Although I said on the podcast that this is something to be expected, the more I think about it the less valid an excuse that is. Jurassic Park, which came out several years earlier, had vastly superior CGI, as did Men in Black. It might've been better to use more practical effects, or Jaws-style "don't see much of the sharks until the end" to get around this, especially if the poor CGI was a consequence of its budget rather than incompetence.

*The middle part of the film kind of drags.

*There's a scene involving McAllister needing to get out of her wetsuit that is pretty ridiculous fan-service.

*Although I liked Preach, there is a little too religious anti-science for my taste. Preach at times becomes convinced the shark is a straight-up demon (i.e. a supernatural evil entity) and Carter criticizes McAllister for giving God's greatest killing machine "will and desire." Pursuant to my next point, McAllister's only straight-up sin I can think of was dishonesty about just what she was doing with the sharks. Bad judgement, even the kind that deserves legal sanction (I'm thinking there'd be a lot of charges of reckless endangerment in her future, and since several people died, not just due to the super-sharks existing, but due to her actions when one of them attacks a scientist, probably involuntary manslaughter too) doesn't equal immorality. And moralizing about "playing God" aside, I am not aware of any strong religious justification for opposing genetic engineering, cloning, etc.

(I used to be a member of an Internet forum dedicated to the Left Behind novels and I remember someone online claiming that human clones would not have souls. I cannot think of any biblical justification for that statement.)

*Per the above, there are strong anti-intellectual and Science Is Bad vibes in this movie, as TVTropes would put it. Again, although McAllister wasn't being honest about what she was doing to the sharks, it took a series of unlikely events for the sharks successfully break into the facility and start hunting the people. Even though McAllister prevented a shark that had attacked another scientist from being killed (which Nick pointed out was Not A Good Thing), it took a problem with the helicopter nobody could have foreseen for the next events to happen. Yet when things go wrong, it's the "street smart" but less-educated characters like ex-con Carter and the facility's cook Preach who are more effective than the scientists, especially Janice (Jacqueline McKenzie).

Yes, many people are book smart and lack good judgement and common sense or are prone to panicking, but still.

*To that end, one could also argue that the way "book smart" and "street smart" break down, the female characters end up portrayed worse than the men. Janice is panicky and hysterical and it was McAllister's poor judgement that caused the whole situation in the first place. Meanwhile, Carter and Preach are the ones who save the day. I am NOT accusing anybody of deliberate bigotry, sexism, etc. but that's still the vibe I got.

The Verdict

Another one of those "see it once" films. 6.5 out of 10. There is a sequel coming out this year, which seems to go even further into the "man was not meant to play God" mentality than this one and looks like a bad-CGI direct-to-video schlocker on top of that. I don't think I'll be seeing it.

Adapting Mercedes Lackey's "Werehunter" for Film

A few years back I attended a panel at DragonCon featuring author S.M. Stirling in which he said that short stories make good movies, while books make good miniseries or TV shows. Although I don't watch nearly as much television as I used to, The Stand and Moby Dick are good examples of books adapted to 3-4 hour miniseries and Game of Thrones and The Expanse are excellent of examples of making each book in a series a season for a television show. I even plotted out a nine episode adaptation of my novel The Thing in the Woods as a short TV series in the vein of British shows.

At my various day jobs I typically run YouTube videos to have a soundtrack while I work. The other day I found the song "Golden Eyes" by Heather Alexander, which is an adaptation of Mercedes Lackey's short short "Werehunter." Here's the music video for your entertainment:



I remembered what Stirling said about short stories making good movies when I read the story. "Werehunter" tells the tale of Glenda, an impoverished and friendless young woman who, pursued by some young men with bad intentions, ends up at a creepy old house presided over by a "crazy" woman. Said woman offers her the chance to go to a different world if there's nothing for her here, an offer that she obviously accepts.

Soon after arriving in this new world she learns that thanks to a ring passed down to her by a mother she never knew (she was raised by an unpleasant aunt who didn't like her brother's choice of a wife) she can change her form into a leopard. She finds life as a leopard a lot better than living as a human, but the villagers whose livestock she preys on soon hire a hunter with secrets of his own.

"Werehunter" could be adapted as a film. From the beginning of the story (her getting turned down for welfare from a clerk who clearly has better things to do) to her arriving in another world and her first transformation into a leopard could take fifteen to thirty minutes. There could be a montage of her learning the ropes of living as a predator and how to outwit the villagers and their dogs by using her shape-shifting ability to confuse her tracks and scents.

(That could make adapting it in a movie tricky, as until the very end whenever she appears as a human she'd be naked. The nudity wouldn't be sexual in nature, but that would still jack up the rating for a movie that could otherwise probably be PG. Unless, of course, it was shot at clever angles.)

However, in terms of material resources needed to adapt the film, you wouldn't need that much. Glenda and the hunter are the most distinctly described--Glenda is brunette and plain with odd yellow-brown eyes (and given the nature of the role, the actress would need to be rather...adventurous) and the hunter is a brunette man and strikingly handsome. The welfare clerk, the "crazy" woman, some thug types, her unpleasant aunt for flashbacks, and some peasant-villager types get much less description, so there's more flexibility in casting them. The beginning would take place in the student ghetto in what sounds to me like the Pacific Northwest, but most of the book would take place in the forests and plains of a fantasy world. There're references to a war being fought in the past with "strange" technology that could imply a Dark Tower-like situation that could make flashbacks more expensive if the creators decide to "show" and not "tell" the hunter's back-story. However, if the money's not available or if it's too distracting, that could be elided over or left out completely.

The movie could also be very timely--Glenda ends up the situation in the first place due to predatory men and chooses to spend almost all of her time as a leopard because as a woman alone in a strange world she's vulnerable, but as a leopard she's a fearsome predator. It's a #MeToo fantasy movie, but it wouldn't beat the viewer over the head with a message and thus possibly alienate people.

What do you think?

New Comics Podcast: THE FANBOY AND GEEK GIRL POWER HOUR

The other day I learned that my friends James R. Tuck and Danielle Tuck have got a new podcast, THE FANBOY AND GEEK GIRL POWER HOUR. The podcast is focused on comic books and comic-book-related pop culture (that latter bit I didn't initially notice). I'm not a major comic-book junkie even though I'd seen the recent Marvel and DC movies and own Gareth Hinds' Beowulf and Watchmen graphic novels, so I didn't initially think I'd like it.

Well, I was wrong. The banter between the two of them was really engaging and they brought up a lot of interesting topics. I'd thought it might be them talking about comics I'd never read or wasn't interested in, but they made discussions even about those really interesting.

Some highlights of the first two episodes:

*Discussion of Image Comics as a company whose creators ultimately own their intellectual properties. Image just produces the comics in exchange for a cut. In contrast, DC and Marvel own the IP and hire people to write stories for them. If I had a hot IP, I'd be more willing to work for Image (or Icon, Marvel's creator-owned imprint) because I tend not to want to let go of my ideas. Image Comic even has a page of submission guidelines. Hmm...

*Some thoughts on the representation of women in Mad Max: Fury Road vs. Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The most damning indictment of Michael Bay for objectifying women comes in how two different movies handled Rosie Huntington-Whitely. In Mad Max we can see that she's actually a very capable actress and despite the nature of her character she's NOT objectified. However, in Dark of the Moon she's mostly there to be looked at, and how they introduced her is particularly obnoxious.

(And to make matters worse, she and her male co-star have no chemistry at all, even though they're supposed to be lovers. I was not a fan of Dark of the Moon and not a fan of her replacing Megan Fox as the franchise's female lead, no matter what offensive comments Fox made. I'd thought Huntington-Whitley wasn't a good actress and was simply chosen for her looks. Mad Max proved me wrong--she's not just eye candy and she really can act. If the writers give her something to do and the director puts in the effort, of course. George Miller clearly did in Mad Max; Michael Bay clearly didn't.)

*Discussion of the adaptation of the Kingsman graphic novel into the Kingsman: The Secret Servicefilm and some commentary on some stuff that didn't work. I really enjoyed The Kingsman, but I admit I thought they took a joke at the end of the movie too far. I wasn't as offended by said joke as much as James and Danielle were, but it went on for far too long. It was funny at first, but then as the joke progressed, it just got crass.

*Discussion of the Old Man Logan comic (Marvel) and the rebooted JLA (DC). There was also some criticism of Man of Steel that I didn't agree with and some concerns about the upcoming Batman vs. Superman (that it would be too GrimDark) that I did.

So if you're a comics fan, a film fan, or a cultural connoisseur in general, check out this podcast!

Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Just got back from seeing Mad Max: Fury Road with my friend David. Although I'd never seen any of the prior movies (except for a bit of the ending of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and something from probably the original involving a bad guy handcuffed to a car that's set on fire, all on TV), the reviews were really, really good. I figured the Mad Max films were kind of episodic in nature and so I wouldn't need to see the earlier ones, so off I went...

The Plot

In the desolate future, the tyrannical Immortan Joe (who looks like a post-apocalyptic version of Mortal Kombat's Shao Khan with the Dark Knight Rises's Bane vocals) rules over an isolated citadel where he controls the water supply and has a harem of some of the few remaining attractive women. His concubines--two of whom are pregnant--escape with the help of Joe's honored warrior Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and are soon joined by the wanderer Max (Tom Hardy), who had been taken captive and used as a blood donor. Joe and his barbarian horde are soon on their tail and the women--and Max--have to brave a gauntlet of other barbarians to find the mystical "green lands."

The Good

*The movie starts out quickly, with Max getting captured by the forces of Immortan Joe and making an abortive escape attempt before the title appears.

*Max and Furiosa are pretty impressive, skilled characters and I like both them and the actors that played them. They're both very Genre Savvy in terms of how prepared they are for trouble and how they recognize traps. And although I didn't like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's performance in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (although that might've had a lot to do with the fact I didn't like Carly replacing Mikaela as the female lead), she does a good job as Angahard, Immortan Joe's favored wife.

*Speaking of Immortan Joe's concubines, it was realistic that once they've escaped the citadel and learn firsthand how harsh and horrible life outside is some of them would want to go back. Harriet Tubman had to threaten runaway slaves with a rifle on occasion who'd gotten cold feet on the whole "escape from slavery" thing.

*You don't need to have seen the previous movies to see this one.

*The film is visually pretty awesome. There're warriors who attack big rigs and larger vehicles using grenade-tipped spears ("car-poons"?) like whalers on the hunt. Immortan Joe's army including a truck that's got a gigantic array of drums on the back and a guitar player hanging suspended on the front. Said truck also provides some of the more impressive parts of the film's soundtrack.

*Speaking of the soundtrack, the music is generally quite good. A lot of metal and drums, which given the world this is set in, works well.

*I like what they did with the eager but sickly warrior Nux, who worships Immortan Joe. He goes from just another Mook to an interesting character in his own right. Immortan Joe and his son Rictus have a couple softer moments as well.

*One of Immortan Joe's concubines reveals she's pregnant and bitterly remarks her child will probably be ugly. One new character they encounter (not going to go into more detail for reasons of spoilers) gently points out the child could be a girl. Given some of the graffiti they leave behind when they escape (more on that later), the idea their children would be anything other than Warboys-to-be seems to have never occurred to them.

*Although Immortan Joe's wives have shades of the notion that to be feminine is to be pacifist (the graffiti they leave behind implies that the pregnant ones rebelled at the thought of their children growing up to be warlords and they insist on no unnecessary killing during the escape), their kindness does prove useful in redeeming one of the villainous characters. And they're willing to push this aside when killing proves necessary.

The Bad

*Way too many fade-outs. It was like back when I was watching The Return of the King and wondering if the movie was over...until it wasn't. Granted, these were in the middle of the movie and so I knew it wasn't over, but it was a poor decision on the part of the editor, the director, or whomever was in charge. This was the single biggest flaw in the movie.

*It's implied that one group of baddies are trapped and left at the mercy of another group of baddies, but this isn't explained very well. I was able to figure that out, but it would have been better if we at least saw the beginning of what I imagine happened once their pursuit of the heroes was stopped. I shouldn't have to come up with explanations on my own.

*Some of the dialogue isn't very good.

*It's hard to figure out many of the characters' names. I had to read reviews in order to learn most of them. Max, Imperator Furiosa, Immortan Joe, Rictus, and the allied villain People Eater were the ones I was able to pick out, but the names of the wives and various minor characters, nope.

*Max has too many flashbacks to a little girl who's probably his daughter. These become very important during the climactic battle, but they could be reduced in number somewhat.

*A villain is killed off-screen with just some explosions in the fog. I felt slightly cheated.

*If you don't enjoy the grotesque, you might not enjoy some parts of this movie. Between fat women farmed for breast milk, a deformed little man who operates the citadel's telescopes, etc., there's some stuff weaker stomachs might find kind of gross.

*The movie kind of dragged a bit in the middle.

The Verdict

See it once. It's entertaining, but flawed. 8.0 out of 10.0.

In Defense of Joss Whedon (But Not The Marvel Swag Department)

The other day, I learned that Joss Whedon has left Twitter and some people attributed it to attacks on him by feminists and "social justice warriors" (a term I use solely to refer to belligerent vicious cyberbullies who happen to have socially left-wing views, not legitimate opponents of racism and the like). Here's a link to a Storify someone made depicting some of the nasty things they said to Whedon, including possible legally-actionable threats. Their major beef seems to be the Black Widow storyline in Avengers: Age of Ultron, although some are mad about about the deaths of certain characters and Whedon's tendency to throw snark into everything.

Whedon himself has recently said that it wasn't feminists who have driven him off Twitter--he points out how various social movements are constantly attacking each other and him--but because it was proving to be a distraction from his real job, writing awesome stuff. Social media is a massive time-waster, so let's hope he's getting a lot more productive. However, given how feminists have written that dealing with Internet harassment is taxing to female writers and might deter them from writing, surely Internet harassment of a male writer is bad too, though I doubt someone as successful as Joss Whedon is going to give up on his dreams over this.

(According to one article I read people talking trash about Whedon are getting death threats themselves. Given how SJWs often claim their harassment, attempts to get people fired from their jobs, etc. are nothing more than "consequences" of "hate speech," the fact they're reaping the consequences of their own odiousness is quite appropriate.)

And now here's where I dispute the claims that the Black Widow's depiction in Age of Ultron is sexist...

*Natasha Romanoff's reference to herself being a "monster" is not solely about her infertility (sterilization being the final phase of the "Red Room" training program for female assassins), but about how they trained her her entire life to be a killer. The sterilization--to avoid the possibility of something one of their assassins would love more than the mission--is played up alongside images of the young Romanoff using a bound, hooded man as live target practice. It's all part of a greater dehumanizing process to make an ordinary girl into something that exists for the sole purpose of destruction.

*It was Bruce who brought up his inability to father children -- either the radiation bombardment that made him the Hulk has left him "shooting blanks" or he might "Hulk out" during sex, something implied in The Incredible Hulk -- first. She then revealed her own problem as a means of connecting with him.

*Even if she views herself as a monster due to being unable to have children, that doesn't mean Joss Whedon thinks women who can't or won't have kids are monsters. S.M. Stirling put it well when he said there was a term for someone who thought a character having an opinion meant the author shared it--idiot. That obviously doesn't hold true in all cases--see obvious Author Tracts like neo-Nazi The Turner Diaries or most stuff by Ayn Rand--but Joss Whedon is not one of those people. A character hating herself for something that's not her fault is called a character flaw. Someone doesn't have to be perfect to be a strong female character. There was an article I read online yesterday I can't find at the moment (maybe it's on my phone) that points out this latest wrinkle is further building on the character we've seen several times before.

*Although being infertile obviously sucks for her, it made her relationship with Hawkeye's family and how his children (especially his daughter) view her as a beloved aunt all the more poignant. She might not be able to have (biological) children of her own, but she has found a family.

*Her getting kidnapped by Ultron does not make her a Damsel In Distress. She could have escaped from that dungeon at any time--in The Avengers she's tied to a chair with three big strong Russian mob types standing around her and she takes all of them apart--but instead she stuck around to get hold of a radio and transmit Ultron's location to the rest of the team. Her remaining "imprisoned" prompted Bruce to "rescue" her himself, thus allowing her to "trigger" the Hulk (by shoving him off a cliff). Knowing how Bruce fears that side of himself to point he attempted suicide sometime before the first Avengers film and how before she was terrified of the Hulk, the fact she was willing to trigger "the other guy" for the sake of the mission shows a lot of strength on her part. Furthermore, during the Red Room flashbacks, her trainer comments on how she "pretends to lose." There's a TVTrope for this--Wounded Gazelle Gambit. She uses people's (or snarky robots') notion that because she's a woman she's not a threat to her advantage.

*I'm not the only person who's seen Romanoff as a feminist character in all this. See this article here. This article here also defends the baby-issues plot and Romanoff as a character.

However, there is at least one legitimate criticism to be made on feminist grounds. Something I noticed in the stores is that the Black Widow has not been included in Avengers merchandise; this is something that's been going on for years. According to the Legion of Leia, only three out of the sixty promotional products for the movie at present feature her at all.

Ahem? In terms of seniority, she's got most of the team beat. Based on her dialogue with Loki in the first film, I'm guessing Hawkeye was the first member of the modern Avengers and he recruited her after he "made a different call" when sent to Russia to assassinate her. This would have probably been before Tony Stark became Iron Man, or possibly soon afterward given that her first appearance in the Marvel movies is in Iron Man II. Although The Incredible Hulk was the second Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, he did not become an actual Avenger until the events of the 2012 Avengers film. The same with Thor, even though he was introduced earlier. So basically she's either the second or the third member of the team, before Thor, Hulk, and Captain America.

Do the powers that be in the realm of merchandise think that boys won't play with Black Widow toys or want Black Widow on their backpacks? Or do they think people will complain about the tightness of her clothes? I admit I was rather sexist back in the day, but that was in the early 1990s. From my observation of little kids these days, boys and girls seem much more willing to play together--and even if boys still disdain Barbies, they'd still love the Avengers. And social conservatism has been in decline, so I don't think there'd be as many complaints as there might have been in the 1990s or 1980s.

In any event, as female geek organizations like the Legion of Leia, Heroic Girls, etc. have pointed out, there're a lot of girls who'd love a Black Widow toy or Black Widow swag who aren't happy campers. See these two disappointed little munchkins here. Furthermore, Mark Ruffalo (you know, the Hulk) agrees.

So yeah, SJWs need to lay off Joss Whedon himself, but it looks like whoever's in charge of marketing needs a bit of a kick in the pants. Lack of action-girl/geek girl role models for little girls who haven't drunk the princess Kool-Aid strikes me as a much bigger problem than whether or not the Black Widow mourns the fertility the Communists (or, given that she's depicted as a teen in the Red Room and Winter Soldier states she was born in 1984, the Putinists?) stole from her. Here's a petition you can sign to help let Marvel know they need to do better. Lest anybody disdain signing petitions, Change.org has racked up some big successes over the years. And Marvel is already listening.