The outside world

Annual SPFBO Finalist Sale Happening Now

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Cover art collage of books in the SPFBO finalist sale

Cover art for *some* of the featured books

Once again, many of the finalists in the SPFBO competition have come together for a group sale.

If you pop over to the sale page for this year, you’ll find a variety of fantasy genres: epic, urban, horror, romantic, grimdark, and so on. If you see something that intrigues, give it a click. Almost all books are priced at $0.99, with only a few at $1.99.

You’ll also find that some authors have added additional books for sale. For example, Twenty Palaces, the first book in that series, is also (still) on sale at 99 cents.

So if you’re looking for new and unusual (or new and traditional) fantasy to binge, check out that page.

Fantasy tropes, character classes, and “The Rules”: Netflix’s Wednesday

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I’ve been meaning to write about the show Wednesday since it aired on Netflix, but it wouldn’t come together. Then I watched this video interview with the showrunners, and heard the interviewer call the show a comedy, and something clicked. 

I like the 1991 film in a middling way. The only parts I really enjoyed were Raul Julia’s face when he gets cut in the duel with Dan Hedaya and the scene where Morticia gives Fester a tour of the family ceremony. “We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.” Excellent. 

But the thing I remember most about that movie was a line from a review (yes, I know that’s weird and I wish I could find it now). In it, the reviewer asks (and I’m paraphrasing from memory) “What are the Addams family? Are they ghouls? Something else?”

And, yeah. I sort of wondered that myself while I was watching, while enjoying the feeling that I didn’t know and would never know. What exactly are the Addams family? Some seem to have weird powers. They welcome torture and death. They’re comical figures, sure, but how are they classified? What neat and tidy category do we put them in? 

Who cares? We might as well ask what the rules are. 

But this is how a great many people experience stories about the strange and unreal. If the story is going to venture beyond the realm of the actual, they need to know how far, and in what direction, and please provide neat boundaries to let us know what we can expect.

Some stories work better this way, sure. Some don’t, and it wasn’t until I heard that woman call Wednesday (the show) a comedy that I realized that I was putting the wrong assumptions onto it. There are many kinds of comedy that have no interest in The Rules.

(Confession time: I sometimes don’t recognize comedies when I’m watching them. See also: A Simple Plan.)

But Wednesday (the show) is also a mystery, and that is a genre that is very much interested in setting up rules. So it made sense that the show is so weirdly rigid where the other Addams family stuff is very much not.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Charles Addams original cartoons. They were fine. I didn’t love them. I didn’t connect with them. His famous “Downhill Skier” cartoon is unforgettable, and perfectly exemplifies the point I was making above about comedy and “the rules” but I knew his most popular creation from the black and white sitcom, and as a kid my favorite character was Cousin Itt, who was created especially for the show and not by Addams himself.

So I’m not what you’d call a purist. 

But as much as I enjoyed Netflix’s Wednesday, I couldn’t help but feel annoyed that the show took this weird family of suis generis characters and carefully nestled them into a setting full of stock tropes and character types that are as rigid as a cheap role-playing game. 

At Wednesday’s new school, there are four houses just like at Hogwarts, although they make much less of a fuss about them. The other students are (mostly) grouped by types—werewolf, vampire, siren, gorgon—along with a few psychics bearing traditional psychic powers.

Even the family themselves have been sorted. Now there are outcasts and normies. The normies are… muggles, I guess, who are fully aware that non-muggles exist? The outcasts are everything that’s not a normie, which reframes that weirdly affecting cemetery scene in a way that bothers me. It’s no longer the Addams family itself that must resist oppression by outsiders. It’s their entire group, their whole category, which is apparently defined by the fact that they’re ostracized.

Is it weird to complain this way about a show that I enjoyed, even though it felt at times—especially the climax—that they were filling out a checklist? I would probably have written this post months ago if the show had been a failure, but it’s been wildly successful.

And why not? The young actors are terrific. The jokes mostly land. The story races along. The whole thing looks great. Plus, the rules are clear. And maybe that’s why I enjoyed it but didn’t love it. 

Copenhagen Cowboy: A TV Series Created by a Pantser

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Back in 2001, when the deeply boring movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was released, part of the story around it (as I remember it now, 20+ years later) was that director Simon West threw out the scripts he was given (apparently the producers had more than one writer working separately and simultaneously) and, with a pair of co-writers, wrote a new one in a week or two. Apparently, he said it was not that hard.

A review I read at the time (which I can’t find at the moment) seized on this quote, because of course writing is easy if you don’t care how (or whether) the sequences fit together, or even if they belong together at all.

I was thinking about this quote as I watched Nicolas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy.

On one level, CC is a story about a woman with supernatural powers who is forced to survive in a world of ruthless mobsters. She is considered to be a “lucky coin,” someone who brings good luck/grants wishes, but no one trusts her and she gives every impression of being passive and helpless until suddenly she isn’t.

On another level, CC is an art film with long lingering shots in which nothing happens, slow circular pans in rooms where more time is spent on the wallpaper than the characters, shots full of color, and beautifully composed images.

Me, I like both of these things, and so Copenhagen Cowboy ought to have been my absolute jam. Instead, I admired it more than I liked it. I indulged it by giving it my time instead of feeling moved.

Most of the time, anyway. I certainly loved sections of it, but overall?

Nah.

There are many art films that don’t want the audience to engage with them on a literal plot and subplot level—movies where you just sit back and experience it. They don’t offer the easy engagement of narrative, because the audience response comes from something else.

Copenhagen Cowboy wants both elements, but doesn’t know how to combine them. It’s a chaotic jumble of pretty shots, images of women being degraded, rotating camera POVs, gross/grotesque imagery, and supernatural nonsense. It’s an interesting failure and little more.

Then I found this interview with him on Vulture. In it, he says that the title of the show has no relation to the show itself. He just thought it sounded cool.

Also, that he shot the series in chronological order so he could change things on the fly “based on how [he feels] in the morning”. For example, there was a scene where the protagonist talks about being abducted as a child, and he changed it at the last moment to being abducted by aliens. Why? Because he’s “always been interested in science fiction”.

In the third episode, he suddenly decided that the main character knows kung fu, so they brought in a trainer and choreographed a big fight scene.

When I read this part of the interview, it occurred to me that my experience of watching all this Dumb Pretty Art TV must have been similar to the experience of the cast and crew as they made it. What? I’m part of an intergalactic race now? Oh, we’re going to resolve this confrontation with a martial arts battle? Okay then. Let’s, um, make that happen.

And this moves the show out of the “interesting failure” category into something much dumber. I’m usually in favor of characters going all karate on each other, but it’s so commonplace that it needs a commonplace structure around it. It can’t be thrown in as a last minute change because you have no idea what should happen next.

That’s the kind of easy writing that doesn’t care how the scenes and sequences relate to each other.

But NWR can (sort of) get way with this in a way that Simon West can’t. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider has a lot of beautiful people, locations, and shots, but they aren’t beautiful in an art-house style. LC:TR is beautiful in the background while other, much-plottier stuff is going on.

With Copenhagen Cowboy, the story stops for beauty. The extended rotating pans around a 360 degree set are an intentional (and condescending) choice by the director to deny the audience the kind of editing that grabs your attention. The grotesquery is designed to unsettle. The ambiguity is meant to intrigue.

And I’m pretty sure the scenes of beautiful women in degraded circumstances are supposed to titillate.

None of this is as successful as the director’s fans hope it will be. Personally, I wanted to be one of those fans, but it’s not going to happen on the strength of this show. Not when it feels so careless.

Random comments: NWR talks about this season as the start of his hero’s journey, with a second season ready to go. However, I was sure that the sequence of images at the end of the season showed the main character dying. Ambiguity, people. It’s how you recognize Real Art.

Finally, that Vulture interview I linked above is kinda hilarious. NWR is so fully committed to his Euro Art Nerd persona that he talks about his audience as though he’s “educating children.” He also says he wept with pride often when his daughter, hired to play a critical part that was added at the last minute, refused to take his direction. Amazing.

I Don’t Have A Venmo Account

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In case anyone out there needs to hear this: I don’t have a Venmo account. Please don’t send money to me through that service. That’s not me.

I got an email on Saturday congratulating me on opening an account, and I assumed it was phishing and sent it to Spam. Then the emails kept coming, and a quick check showed they were from the actual company.

Fun fact! In their original email, Venmo included a “Not you? Click here” -style link that would remove my email address from whatever account had been created with it.

Another fun fact! That link didn’t work.

So it’s been the usual back and forth with the help people, who per standard practice skim over my initial message and offer advice that doesn’t work for me. At this point, it seems we’ve reached the stage where they have blocked that email address, but I keep asking if it has been used to trick people into sending money and somehow the support staff keep missing that message.

God, the future is stupid.

Anyway, I don’t have a Venmo account. If someone impersonated me in that service and asked you for money, please report that.

And The Killer Is… You Decide! ttrpgs, genre simulations, and game systems

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For years, I’ve been picking up the odd indie game here and there, trying to find (among other things) one that seems like it could be a great mystery game. I haven’t really found a promising option.

Generally, they fall into two categories. The first is exemplified by a teen detective game called Bubblegumshoe, by Emily Care Boss (among others) and published by Evil Hat Games. Bubblegumshoe uses the GUMSHOE game system which, despite the name, I’ve usually seen in horror games. GUMSHOE separates “abilities” into two categories. First are General Abilities, which let you roll against them and you succeed or fail in the ordinary way. 

Second are Investigative Abilities. If there’s a core clue that you need to solve the mystery, and a PC is on hand with the Investigative Ability that would acquire the clue, it’s acquired automatically. GUMSHOE doesn’t let a game stall or derail because a bad die roll, or a series of them, prevents the characters from snapping up a necessary clue. That’s an essential mechanic for horror games, because the antagonists are supposed to be overwhelmingly powerful compared to the PCs. That’s part of what makes it horror. There’s usually a very narrow path to victory for the players, and if they’re denied the information they need to find that path, the game is an automatic failure and not much fun. 

Like I said, it’s a clever mechanic. But to use it in a mystery story, you also need a GM who is capable of setting up a mystery plot, full of red herrings, fake but seemingly unbreakable alibis, and all the other tropes of the genre. And take it from me, a guy that’s tried his hand at mystery more than once, that’s a challenging skill set to acquire.

Alternately, we have the cozy mystery/cosmic horror game Brindlewood Bay, a Powered by the Apocalypse system by Jason Cordova and published by The Gauntlet. In this game, the PCs are elderly members of a local mystery book club in a small, coastal New England town. Individual adventures are cases, like an episode of Murder, She Wrote in which mystery readers nose around crime scenes, solving murders.

Except PbtA is a “Play to find out” system. The GM doesn’t create a clue trail. That’s actively discouraged. Instead, they create a story prompt and a list of generic clues like “an unsigned will” or “a photograph of the victim”. During play, the players themselves add the necessary details that will separate the clue trail from the red herrings, then roll dice to see if this is the solution.

Which is fine, but it doesn’t give the player the experience of solving a mystery. It puts them into the role of creating the mystery.

I had a similar issue with a Forged in the Dark game I actually got to play some time ago. The game was called Hack the Planet (written by Fraser Simons and published by Samjoko Publishing). It was cli-fi mixed with cyberpunk, and while I can be lukewarm on cyberpunk in general, this was a cool setting. Maybe the most interesting expression of cyberpunk I’ve ever come across. 

But I was very interested in trying out the system. FitD games were the new hotness at the time (and maybe they’re still the current hotness, I wouldn’t know) because they let people role play heist plots.

Personally, I love a good heist film. And when someone creates a heist-oriented fantasy game that not only wins awards and gets raves all over the internet, it spawns a number of clones in other genres, well, I’m interested. I really wanted to try that.

Except once we started playing the game, it turned out that the thing that makes heist plots most appealing to me—that unexpected twist where the moment everything is going wrong turns out to be part of the plan all along, and how did I miss the scattered clues that would have prepared me for that twist—is utterly neutered. The surprise of that moment is replaced by a player saying “I spend two stress.” No surprise. No thrill. 

And it sort of has to be. How else can you play out this sort of story in this medium? And the fact that I stupidly held out hope that the game could replicate the feeling of the movie has to be yet another triumph of hope over experience. I should have kept my expectations low. 

For me, without that surprise, the game was all tension and no thrill. 

I can see why people like that system. Not only does it have some cool ideas, it’s very fussy and is full of little boxes to check. It’s a game for the bullet journal/to-do list crowd. To me, it seemed underpowered and all that fussiness made it feel like a resource management game, which I hate. Cool setting, but that ruleset was actively unpleasant on several axes.

Which is a shame. I like heists, almost as much as I like mysteries. If I could figure out a way to capture the essential parts of them in a way that felt manageable in a game, I’d be pretty happy about that game. 

But I’m not holding my breath. Not every genre works in every medium. 

By the way, I have two new Twenty Palaces novels out:

The Iron Gate

The Flood Circle

Who Cares about Barb Holland: Nothing Characters and Fictional Death

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In my previous post, I said I was going to start trying to write shorter blog posts, which I would be able to finish in a reasonable length of time and which would then, with luck, actually be posted. That’s preferable to writing long, complex posts about six related topics that need to be reorganized four or five times and therefore never actually get finished.

Also in that previous post, I pointed out some errors in a particular review of Stranger Things 4, arguing (once again) that disinterest makes reviewers inattentive. But there was a section of the review that was wrong for a different reason, and I would rather talk about the issue separate from the review itself, because I’ve seen it echoed elsewhere more than once.

It’s the idea that Barb Holland is a “nothing character” and her death shouldn’t be such a big deal. 

I’m not surprised that people make this mistake. It’s commonplace for horror or thriller shows to introduce a character solely for the purpose of killing them off. It’s a clear and easy way to establish the threat the villains/monsters/whatever present. And Barb is that character. She’s dead by the first few minutes of episode three and up to that point she’d had maybe 30-some lines of dialog. 

So, a throwaway, right? Motivation for the plot, an excuse to show two frames of the monster’s face and another mysterious disappearance for everyone to scratch their heads over.

And maybe she would have been, if this show had been on the CW or something. The CW would have cast a thin, pretty underwear model, hung some nerdy/preppy accessories on her, and when she died she would have been completely forgettable. 

The Duffer Brothers went another way. They cast Shannon Purser, an attractive but overweight actor, then dressed her all the way down in the uncoolest clothes, glasses, and hairstyle they could manage. She defined Barb with in her big jeans and high frilly collar and giant glasses, clutching her schoolbooks to her chest and calling Nancy on her bullshit.

She was different. Vulnerable. Smart. Excluded. Specific. And a big segment of the viewers saw themselves in her. Barb was created to elicit sympathy in a way that the Lab Coat Guy, who appeared in the very first scene in the series, could not. Also, as Nancy’s best friend, as I’ve talked about, Nancy’s concern for her completely upends the teenage romantic plot that the show was building from the first two episodes.

Barb mattered to the characters onscreen and to the audience offscreen.

It’s not like Stranger Things doesn’t have nothing characters. Lab Coat Guy was one. The broken bodies strewn around Hawkins Lab in season two or the hospital in season three were not personalized, for the most part. They were extras dressed in blood spatters. But they didn’t have personality or specificity.

When I was writing Child of Fire, I wanted that first “death” by the side of the road to be memorable. And, judging by people’s reactions, it was.

But as much as I tried to turn it into someone no one had ever seen before–to the point where the kid doesn’t even really die–I didn’t take the time for him as a character. The circumstances of his death are memorable (as are the circumstances of Barb’s death, since it’s the first scene set in the Upside Down) but not him. I sort of wish I’d done what the show did, and gone for both.

The conversation reminded me of a comic book, number 12 in the run of Grant Morrison’s “The Invisibles” which some people have called the greatest single issue of a comic book ever. In the first issue of this run, the villain/anti-hero King Mob shoots a guard while he’s invading some facility or other. It’s a single panel (maybe two, I haven’t seen it lately), and he doesn’t even pause in his dialog. It’s a moment designed to show King Mob’s ruthlessness as he guns down a nothing character. 

The story continues until issue 12, when it stops and returns to this nothing character. It portrays his life, all jumbled up, showing the abuse he suffered as a child, the abuse he perpetrated as he grew up, the people he cared about, how he hurt those people, and how he died. At which point, he wasn’t a nothing character any more. 

And really, none of them are, but depending on the genre, the story has to treat them like set dressing sometimes, because there have been so many and we can’t delve into the backstory for all of them. 

That was the case for the kid in my book. After he’s gone, Ray and Annalise dig through his home, looking for clues about who he (and his family) were and what happened to them. After that, he faded away. He wasn’t nothing, even after the story was done with him. 

The same is true for Barb, although judging by season four, the show is not done with her yet.

In personal news, I’m working through the notes I received for The Flood Circle, making sure all the story beats are clear and every important moment has the emphasis it needs. I’m also fussing with the text.

If you’re a Kickstarter backer for these books, expect a somewhat more detailed update around the start of August.

I’m also trying to work out what project I’ll tackle next. There’s an idea that’s really nagging at me but I don’t think I’m the one to write it. Also, it turns out that my son is already tackling a very similar project, and under no circumstances should his dad bigfoot his latest thing.

Scrolling Through Your Phone and Vacuuming: a Guide to Careless Reviewing

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It has been a week since the second volume of Stranger Things season four has come out, so it’s probably safe to talk about it now. But I won’t. Not yet. 

I find myself starting blog posts all the time, and because I seldom write in this space, I find that I often try to make up for the number of posts with the number of words in a post, and that long-ass season would need an awful lot of words. 

So, instead, I’m going to try to post more often but to cover less each time.

This post contains spoilers for Stranger Things 4.

Back when season one of Jessica Jones came out, an author I like posted a negative review of it. Which is not a big deal. It would be a dull world if everyone liked the same things. But one of his big criticisms was that he didn’t understand why Jessica wouldn’t kill the villain. He thought she should just kill him and solve the problem.

After I read that bit, I thought to myself something like, Was he vacuuming during the scenes with no fighting? Because those characters debate–at length, over several episodes–Jessica’s determination to somehow capture him alive. How could this author have missed it?

Well, he missed it because he didn’t like the show and because he didn’t like the show, he wasn’t paying attention.

The same thing crops up everywhere. I was reading a review of a novel in which Our Hero has an extended part of his life where he spends his mornings training with weapons and his afternoon learning magic, and the reviewer was obviously much more interested in the magic than the weapons. After Our Hero’s first fight, the reviewer was mystified. They didn’t know how the character could win a fight, because they’d skipped over the part of the book where he trains to fight.

And like every reviewer, they did not look inward at this discrepancy. They didn’t think Maybe I missed something?

Nope. They decided the character was a Gary Stu or whatever and dinged the book for their own lack of interest.

So it is with the review of Stranger Things 4 by Freddie deBoer. (I’m not going to link to it, because links are precious gems that must be spent carefully, but you can google up the guy’s Substack if you want. Fair warning: his bio cheerfully discusses his own growing reputation as “an asshole”.)

As part of his criticism, deBoer complains that too many of the scenes are Big Emotional Moments, saying: 

Why not have Max give that tearful confession about wanting Billy to die for no discernible reason other than manufactured pathos?

Now, anyone who has watched the show and paid attention knows exactly why Max makes that confession. She’s trying to bait the season’s villain into attacking her. But if you don’t like the character and are bored with the show, you’re not going to keep track of the plot. What’s more, all those Big Emotional Moments is going to feel empty.

(In fact, at the top of his review, deBoer says, in drama, every scene cannot be climax. He then goes on to list a long string of scenes that all fall at the end of the series, and that were climactic moments for the many, many storylines in this 13-hour story.) 

But look, the guy finds most of the characters “profoundly annoying.” He hates the politics. He hates the tone. He thinks it panders to nerds.

And really, given all that, is it any surprise that he’s not moved by the big moments at the end of those storylines? Or that he doesn’t really seem to be paying attention at all?

To which I say: people, don’t watch shows that don’t interest you. Just turn them off. Your hate-watch is not interesting in and of itself, and your criticism is not going to be as insightful as you think, mainly because you’ve spent half the run time of the show scrolling through your phone, not to mention all that vacuuming. 

One other thing deBoer talks about is Barb, and he’s wrong there, too, but that’s for another post. 

Behold the Hairdo of Vecna: Predictions for Stranger Things 4

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Okay, so the full trailer for Stranger Things 4 has finally come out. Here it is:

As a followup, the Duffer Brothers did an explainer video, where they talk about the context for many of the clips, drop a few mild spoilers, and generally hype the show.

So, in keeping with my tradition of making predictions about the upcoming season and getting everything completely wrong…

Let me say it again:

+++My predictions are always wrong+++

So there are no spoilers here, only anti-spoilers.

Anyway, here goes:

  • The Victor Creel storyline partially shown in the Creel House teaser will be the opening scene in the first episode, just as the frightened scientist was in S1, Kali’s gang was in S2, and the Soviet machine was in S3.

 

  • When part two drops on July 1st, I’m guessing the flashback sequence with a very young Eleven and all the other kids will be the opening scene for that episode.

 

  • Vecna’s very human looking eyes were once Victor Creel’s. The shot of Robert Englund, already confirmed to be an older Creel, shows him scarred and eyeless, and they named the bad guy Vecna, after all.

 

  • Because this eye-theft would have happened in the 1950’s or early 1960s, I don’t think that Vecna is an Upside-Downed Brennar. Nor is he Steve Harrington, turned into a demo-vampire by the bites of the demobats he’s fighting in that segment. Nor is he Billy Hargrove, which would make no logical sense but apparently people want it anyway because they want to see a handsome actor and Dacre Montgomery is the only one. Given his general shape, he might be an altered human but could be anyone, including someone like Percy Fawcett. [Update: it turns out that imdb has Dacre Montgomery listed in the credits for three episodes in this new season, including the last one. Still, I’m betting he’s in flashback scenes, not the Vecna suit.]

 

  • Billy’s tombstone is different in different shots because at least one of those scenes is a dream sequence. They did bring in Robert Englund for a small but pivotal role, after all.

 

  • Which means that several of the shots in the trailer are from Nightmare on Elm Street-style horror dreams, most especially the rock guitar jam session inside the Upside Down.

 

  • See also Max levitating above the grave. That’s another dream sequence. It could also be an effect of seeing the clock, as the Duffers say in their video, or a result of a few particles of the Mind Flayer that (flashback!) Billy slipped into Max’s body when she sleeping or eating Wheaties or something. But I think dream sequence is more likely. It’s not because Max is the new Eleven, the psychic girl with the ability to fight.

 

  • Then again, in a shot near the end of the trailer, Max is running away from (what appears to be) Vecna and toward some sort of portal. Through that portal, in the far distance, you can see what appears to be that same scene: a figure floating above three others on the ground.
Max running toward a portal out of the upside down, but is that Max herself in the portal, floating?

Click to open this full size to get a better view of the silhouettes in that white circle

 

 

  • So does that mean Floating Max is a doppelganger? Or that she’s trying to escape into the waking world, where Vecna’s influence has her entranced and floating? I’m not sure, but maybe I shouldn’t be making predictions about that shot of her floating.

 

  • In their comment video, the Duffer brothers say that the shot of Eleven screaming and blasting soldiers away from her isn’t unconvincing de-aging cgi. It’s not a flashback. High school age Eleven is back in her sensory deprivation tank bathing suit and her… hair is shaved again? I assume it’s a little hair piece, because how she going to do Enola Holmes 2 while sporting a Furiosa. Still, I’m 100% on board with Classic Eleven.

 

  • The rest of the (young) cast are going to move beyond the bowl haircuts. All these fans who want Will to come out of the closet, get a boyfriend, etc, but all I want is for him to get himself a decent haircut. Let Vecna steal it like he took Victor Creel’s eyes. Imagine here that someone took the trouble of photoshopping Will’s bowl cut onto Vecna. Anyway that’s my prediction: Will ditches the bowl haircut but doesn’t come out as gay. (Important Note: See line above between the triple plus signs.)

 

  • But Lucas does. In S3E1, it comes out that Lucas and Max don’t spend a lot of time making out. Lucas is making fun of Mike for wanting to kiss his girlfriend, and Max says, “It’s romantic,” in a way that suggests she would like that sort of romance, too. It’s obvious Max and Lucas like each other, but Lucas doesn’t desire her in the same way. See also this tweet about one of the new guest stars on the show. What if the “shocking event” (or one of them) is that he gets caught kissing Lucas? I’m saying that, whatever they decide to do about Will’s sexuality, Lucas is gay(, too).

 

  • Will Robyn and Nancy get together, romantically? I’m going to guess that’s a no. Yeah, Jonathan’s all the way across the country, but the “See you on the other side” exchange between her and Steve has some strong sexual chemistry going on. If Robyn is going to find love this season–and she should–it will be with Vickie, the “band nerd” played by Amybeth McNulty.

 

  • Chrissy, played by Grace Van Dien, is the one holding the mummified hand (presumably Vecna’s) in that one, too-quick shot. It was hard to see the actor’s face, though, which is why this is a prediction rather than me saying Oh hey, look who it is.

 

  • What will Joyce be wrong about in season 4? Nothing, as usual. Joyce is never wrong.

 

  • There’s a gladiator scene in the trailer, where Hopper and a bunch of other prisoners face off with a demigorgon, using only axes and spears and other hand-to-hand weapons. I’m going to guess that cutting weapons will be more effective than guns, which got so many DoE agents and guards killed. I’m also going to say that the Soviets are arranging these fights because they’re hoping a wounded demigorgon will open a portal to the upside down, either to recover from its injuries or to feast on one of the corpses, and they intend to send troops through the portal after it in hopes of creating a stable gateway. The payoff to that extended gladiator scene is a frantic scramble by Soviet scientists to set up a smaller version of The Key (featured so prominently in the first shot of the trailer) so they can shoot it through the demigorgon’s little gate.

 

  • That package with the Russian stamps all over it that Joyce examines? Murray sent it. I’m thinking Murray has some reason to believe Hopper didn’t really die, either because there’s no pile of overcooked long pork where Jim was standing or because our Russian guest star for this season reached out.

 

  • Mike and Dustin are going to learn that Eddie, their new heavy metal DM, has been dreaming about the Upside Down when he incorporates it into their game.

 

  • Who is in the body bag? I’m going to guess that it’s the high school guidance counselor Ms. Kelly, played by Regina Ting Chen, if she’s been brought in to Hawkins High to help the kids deal with all the trauma they’ve suffered. If the guidance counselor is one of the California characters, which would make sense because Eleven would have a lot of trouble fitting in to high school, then I don’t have a prediction.

 

  • Who is in danger of dying this season? Let’s go through the list.
    •  Every guest star for the season, especially the guidance counselor, the new DM, the basketball star who’s life spirals out of control, every government employee/soldier making their first appearance, and the shady Russian guy.
    • Ted. Honestly, it’s time for Ted to die as a hero or as a villain.
    • Murray. Brett Gelman brings fantastic energy to the show but if he’s going to stick around he needs a new schtick. Otherwise, he should be a tragic sacrifice.

 

  • What about the deaths of Steve or Max? I guess there’s talk in the ST fandom that both are at risk, and it sort of makes sense. Joe Keery is playing a college freshmen and he’s about to turn 30. I’m guessing he’d like the show to wrap up before he starts greying at the temples. As for Max, the Duffers said that this is a big season for her, and that Sadie Sink gives a fantastic performance. If someone is going to echo Billy’s death here in S4, it would make sense to be her.

 

  • My biggest prediction is that Stranger Things 4 is going to end in loss and tragedy. Owens says there’s a war going on. We know the show will end with season 5. It would make sense for this extremely long season, which will have a much bigger scope than any season before, will end Person-of-Interest-style, with the bad guys triumphant.

And if anything I’ve said here annoys you, remember that I’m always wrong.

“There’s No Such Thing as an Anti-War Film”: Power Fantasies, Gritty Superheroes, and The Batman

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Yeah, this post is full of spoilers for The Batman. The good kind, but still.

It’s probably not the case that Francois Truffaut explicitly said that it was impossible to make an anti-war film, although the sentiment is often attributed to him. He did said that he decided not to make a movie about Algiers because “to show something is to ennoble it”. He also said, in an interview published in the Chicago Tribune, “Every film about war ends up being pro-war”.

Because it just isn’t possible to make an audience, sitting in a comfortable theater with a bag of popcorn balanced on one knee, feel the same horror and despair that soldiers feel in battle. It’s the difference between skidding off an icy road then bouncing down a steep mountain slope with your kids in the back seat, and riding a roller coaster with them. One is a moment of terror in which an uncaring universe might take from you everything you care about, and one is a noisy thrill ride that might upset your tummy if it goes too fast. The latter simply can’t represent the feeling you get from former.

THE BATMAN has a similar problem, but instead of trying to be a war movie about the horrors of war, it’s a power fantasy about the dangers of misusing power.

Bruce Wayne starts off the film believing that he can make Gotham City a better place by terrorizing criminals. With the deaths of his parents giving him an excuse to do whatever he wants, he’s ruthless and pitiless, holding onto his personal rule against guns and killing as though that’s enough to make him one of the good guys.

Except he isn’t making things better, and he’s probably making them worse. Bruce admits to himself pretty early in the film that things have only gotten worse in the two years since he put on the suit, but his only solution (here at the beginning of the film) is to “push himself.” To double-down.

To exercise more power, and to be more ruthless about it.

Then the whole rest of the movie calls bullshit on every tactic, attitude, and assumption that Bruce Wayne has brought to his vigilante crusade.

Some examples:

* He has no interest in Wayne Enterprises or any aspect of the family business that has made him rich. Then he discovers that the Renewal program his saintly father created has become, after his father’s death, a slush fund that keeps mobsters and corrupt officials in power. Gotham is more corrupt because Bruce is not paying attention to the Wayne finances.

* He has no pity for the people who are caught up in Gotham’s criminal underworld. Then he discovers that his saintly father wasn’t so saintly after all. He made a mistake in a desperate moment and got involved with a mobster. But he still remained, basically, a good person and Bruce has to accept that people aren’t all good or all bad.

* He is driven by capital vee Vengeance for the sort of people who made an orphan of him, then he has to hear what it was like to be an orphan in one of the Wayne-funded orphanages, and it is a horror show. All of Bruce’s pain and rage at growing up without his mom and dad is a very small thing indeed beside the suffering Edward Nashton endured.

* He is convinced that the tool that will win the fight against crime is terror. If only he could frighten more people, make them afraid of every shadow, they might finally go straight. Never mind that the criminals who are afraid of him still rob bodegas and firebomb banks…

Also, never mind that Bruce’s terror campaign is indiscriminate. After he stops the clown gang from beating up a random subway rider, he doesn’t ask the guy if he’s okay. He doesn’t help the guy up off the ground. He just glowers at him, while the victim pleads, “Please don’t hurt me.”

At the end of the film, when Batman is reaching out to the people trapped beneath the scaffolding, everyone is too afraid to reach back. Except for the mayor’s son. He was the only person Batman has shown any empathy and that moment, early in the film was not something Bruce planned, and it’s definitely not something he thought would make Gotham a better place.

But it does. Because once the mayor’s son trusts Batman enough to let himself be rescued, others do, too. Without that moment of empathy in the middle of a crime scene, Gotham’s new mayor and all her staff would have rejected Bruce’s help. He couldn’t have led them to safety, and he couldn’t have helped coordinate rescue efforts. He couldn’t have comforted those who were frightened and in pain.

It’s a big pivot from the Please Don’t Hurt Me guy to the woman in the stretcher who holds his hand. Because what good is all of Bruce Wayne’s pain if it doesn’t make him empathize with other people’s pain?

But I want to return to that capital vee Vengeance scene. When I first saw Batman knock out that gang leader, then say, “I’m Vengeance,” I felt the tiniest twist of disappointment. I really didn’t want another gritty superhero, willing to do whatever it takes to out-violence and out-terrorize the worst of society. Someone willing to be the one guy who can give back to the bad guys what they’ve been dishing out.

To me, that’s an asshole’s way of being good, and it wasn’t until I realized the whole movie was designed to interrogate the idea of asshole-Batman that I could put aside that disappointment. I mean, Penguin and Cat Woman both make fun of Bruce for it, calling him, “Mr. Vengeance” or just plain “Vengeance”.

Then one of Riddler’s snipers delivers the “I’m Vengeance” line and Bruce hears it from the other side. He finally hears it the way I heard it, while I was sitting in my comfy seat in the theater. That changes him, and at the same moment, I realize this is the best Batman movie I’ve seen in a long time, if not ever.

Unfortunately, judging by the social media I’ve seen and the YouTube reviews of the film, a whole lot of people thrilled to that early “I’m Vengeance” moment. It’s The Batman! He’s a badass who beats people unconscious and then says badass things!

It’s a power fantasy that’s curdled like old milk, because it’s mixed with viciousness and contempt. But people love power, and they love to be vicious when they can convince themselves that viciousness is justified. It thrills them.

And even though the movie clearly repudiates that moment, they can’t help but smile as they think about it. The power fantasy just feels so good.

So how are we supposed to show a toxic hero’s power in a way that doesn’t make him unsympathetic or a villain, and that also doesn’t also thrill people? I’ve been thinking about this question quite a bit, and I’m not sure how to find the answer.