Why Fantasy Keeps Going Nowhere
I would kill for a good fantasy TV show. I have often argued, and I still maintain, that fantasy as a genre has as much potential for creativity as science fiction. The people who make it are just much, much lazier. The history of fantasy on television reflects this, as all fantasy television shows are bad. Even the good ones are bad (forgive me, Xena). The thing is, fantasy has what sci-fi doesn’t: a collection of tropes so well-known, so recognizable, so easy to plug and play that they tempt the slothfulness of any writer, whether that writer is talented or not. Everybody who writes fantasy knows at the back of their minds that if they throw together a Dark Lord, a Beautiful Maiden, a Simple Farm Lad and a Prophecy involving a Magic Sword, they can just call it a day and no one will think twice about it. We just expect it at this point.
Something got me on this kick, of course. I checked out Legend of the Seeker, a relatively new show with a very impressive budget, considering its genre.1 Lots of hope to be had here, although I didn’t let my hopes get that high. There wasn’t much of a chance for that to happen, though, as the pilot consisted of the exact plot of A New Hope run through some sort of medieval fantasy translator. We’re talking a show where a person can literally watch the scenes go by, say in their head “I bet Simple Farm Lad here will find his parents dead and his cottage on fire in exactly five minutes,” and be right on the money. There was literally not a single thing in the pilot that could not have been randomly generated by a mildly retarded AI after it finished absorbing every paperback in the world to feature a sword, rose, castle or dragon on the cover.
Chronicles of Moronia, Book One.
Our hero, the Simple Farm Lad, is brash but stupid (of course). He runs into a Beautiful Maiden with the personality of a grapefruit who is annoyed by yet intrigued with him (naturally). He’s the long-lost object of some kind of Prophecy even though he’s a complete dunce, she’s far more skilled than he is but somehow can’t just go defeat the bad guy herself, the maguffins multiply and we all drown in seas of explanatory dialogue. The show’s best characters by far are the Wise Old Mage, who is at his heart also a cliché but played by a delightfully competent actor, and the main villain, who doesn’t have much to him beyond “dark and brooding” but looks a lot like the Prince of Persia. These two guys I enjoy watching, when the story centers on them.
As for the other characters on the show, I have a theory. A bus of Calvin Klein models, on its way to an underwear exhibition or something, overturned and crashed. The survivors, having gone feral, were discovered months later by a traveling Renaissance Faire, which clothed and fed them (well, clothed them anyway) and returned them to humanity. This not only explains why the characters spend most of their time standing around looking equally bored and confused, but also why they must constantly narrate their own lives through a stream of simplistic dialogue as though they would otherwise forget what they were doing mid-action. They wear quasi-medieval clothing and jaw about poor peasant’s tasks, but their body language suggests that they were never taught how to do anything but lean half-naked against things and glare intensely. At least Lucy Lawless always seemed at home plunging weapons into people’s vital organs.
It might seem like I’m being too harsh, but it’s hard to understate how much efforts like this disappoint me. This one has a budget, for god’s sake–-there are great sets and props and special effects that don’t look like someone drew on a filmstrip with a crayon. But none of this saves the tired, tired story and the Keanu Reeves-esque characters. Here’s the big secret seemingly kept from TV producers: great characters are what make or break a show. Programs like Star Trek and my still-beloved Xena had silly costumes, crappy props and often ludicrous storylines, but the characters were what made us want to watch. Their feelings, and the actions that resulted from them, seemed real to us. It’s on these kinds of connections that true fandoms are built. I know fantasy could do more of this if it wanted to. Just stop taking the easy way out.
- I know it’s based on a series of books by Terry Goodkind, but fantasy writers of both prose and live action share the same originality problems, so my complaints still apply. Besides, I didn’t want to read the damn books. [↩]
I Get to Rant About Avatar, Too
I didn’t want to watch Avatar. I knew I wasn’t going to like it. But too many people insisted I should, and I can’t properly criticize something I haven’t seen, anyway. And I must admit, there were aspects about it that I greatly enjoyed. Very rarely these days can visual effects be truthfully referred to as “groundbreaking,” but Avatar earns that compliment and then some. This film is the future of computer animation in cinema. It’s majestic to watch.
Visually, I mean. The story pisses me off.
This has already been pointed out more than once, but I have to say it in my own voice. Anyone who thinks this movie is a credit to Native American cultural portrayals is failing to grasp what it’s really about. I have no tolerance for Noble Savage bullshit, and neither should anyone else. In this day and age, the person who creates it usually means well by it, and so everyone joins in the cheering and people don’t realize that it’s just another form of dehumanization. But Avatar isn’t just a story about perfect people with a perfect culture, who sing with all the voices of the mountain and paint with all the colors of the wind, oh no. Enter the Essential White Hero, who will of course become their greatest warrior and wed the Chief’s Daughter and BLAH BLAH BLAH, even though he’s presumably never heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon or anything. This guy is a device to assuage the guilt of white people, and absolutely nothing more than that.
Have no fear, woodland creatures!
My problems with the script aren’t all ideological. Simply speaking to strength of narrative, this film had sucky characters (“sucky” being the professional term describing characters whose personalities consist only of a single trait, if that). Our hero appears to have no connection to humanity whatsoever, even though he’s, like, 26 and has presumably kissed someone and shared a candy bar with someone and played Mario Kart with someone and otherwise been privy to the nicer bits of the human race. This isn’t a Last of the Mohicans scenario, where the man has been raised by the natives and sees them as his family. He just literally stumbles into their world and is not only able to sever his previous identity without any difficulty, but will later become the perfect embodiment of their cultural ideal. Yeah, right.
The other characters are even worse. The Na’vi are a collection of various stereotypes, even down to the Young Brave who is already betrothed to the Chief’s Daughter, hates our white protagonist at first, finally recognizes him as his brother and leader, then dies valiantly in battle. You know, the guy who was probably supposed to be the actual hero of his people, but gets shunted aside to make room for a clumsy, clueless outsider, because we’re really more comfortable if the white guy does it. Then there’s Sigourney Weaver’s character, whose motivations are all over the map and whose sole purpose is to die, a collection of human buddies who are also only dimly defined, and a smattering of bad guys (pictured below) who I actually have no complaints about. Subtlety is the watchword here.
The script was obviously afraid that we’d have no idea what the movie was trying to tell us unless it held our hand the entire way, which is annoying in and of itself. But what got to me the most was that precisely zero of the human characters acted like humans. I’ve already mentioned how the hero appeared to have been raised in a sensory deprivation chamber judging by the emotional bonds he displayed towards the civilization that birthed him, bonds that, if possessed, might have actually created some tension for his character. The rest of the cast does no better–-the character played by Michelle Rodriguez, who understandably chokes when asked to commit genocide, later turns on the humans and kills dozens of them before going down. She’s a hardened marine, and many of these people were presumably her friends, whom she was willing to die beside the previous day. I just can’t buy her conflict-free turnaround. Finally, the part that really had me groaning was the very end, in which most of the remaining humans were herded onto their ships to return to Earth, never to be seen again. They will never, ever return to bother the Na’vi or bombard their planet with nuclear weapons against which they would have no defense, because it’s not like persistence is a major part of human nature or anything. We are, in fact, known galaxy-wide for our gracious acceptance of defeat.
I'm going home now.
All sarcasm aside, it’s true that there should only be one possible outcome to this plot: the flaming death of all the Na’vi. In many ways, that would actually be fitting. After all, the thing that makes white people’s history with Native Americans tragic, poignant and emotionally distressing is the fact that we succeeded in destroying them. That this movie insists on depicting a highly contrived victory, all made possible by a converted white dude no less, is just insult heaped upon insult. Avatar is not an homage to the beauty of Native American culture, but a white boy fantasy of living without guilt. Nobody should be inspired by this.
Look, I understand the desire to make the white guilt go away forever. I struggle with it myself. But indulging in daydreams about pure absolution, assimilation and acceptance into ethnic culture that is more than just acceptance, but complete and utter vindication: all this is a lie. The world isn’t fair, and if Native Americans have to watch their own culture slowly fade to nothing after centuries of abuse, then we can handle a little white guilt. We certainly aren’t going to redeem ourselves through pretending that we can just cast it off like an old, hole-ridden shirt because hey, we’re the best! We’ve got to accept this part of ourselves, because it will always be there. Life goes on, guys.
