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 Can’t Believe It’s She-Ra.
I found it. Deep in the primordial ooze of my infant memories, right next to Land Before Time, The Last Unicorn and The Brave Little Toaster, I always knew there was a cartoon blonde woman who rode a pegasus and wielded a sparkling, identity-switching greatsword. And like them, she was stamped indelibly in my subconscious. That’s right, there’s no telling how much influence She-Ra: Princess of Power has had over the person who is now me. We’re not talking about something I obsessed over when I was nine. This is no Power Rangers or Captain Planet. I must have been four or five when I encountered this thing.
I don’t know how I ended up watching it on the internet. But from the first few scenes, I was convinced I’d found her. I didn’t remember the name of the character or even much about the cartoon itself, but I’ve always remembered how it made me feel. Even from the time I was very little, I noticed how unfair gender roles seemed in the entertainment I consumed. Women just never seemed to be doing anything. My favorite genre, fantasy, sparked my imagination and transported me to other worlds, but the main character was invariably a man who I didn’t identify with. This meant that the few times I did encounter an animated fantasy centered around a woman, I’d latch onto it and never let go. I’ve always carried a memory of that brightly colored VHS tape sitting on the lower level of a wooden rack in the tiny video rental store in Navajoland–we were still living on the Rez, which is how I know I must’ve been really young–and that I begged my mother to take it out for me again.
Now, I know it was She-Ra.
After watching a few episodes, I also know why I remember my mother rolling her eyes and sighing when I went up to her, clutching the video. It’s literally the most unsubtle thing I’ve ever watched, and I watch Walker, Texas Ranger.
Later he'll stare down a bear.
There are some things from our foggy childhood memory-ooze that deserve to be enjoyed again as we grow up (the three films I mentioned in the second sentence of this post are excellent examples), but even as I watch this cartoon and torment my poor husband with the horrible voice acting, I know that the thrill I’m getting from it is entirely related to my memories and not the show itself. It’s just an animated advertisement for some toys, after all, with utterly ridiculous characters1 and cludgy moral messages. But I can take comfort in the fact that what it helped me to believe when I was very young, that it’s possible for female characters to ride around on horses swinging swords and being the main focus of a story, is worthwhile. Sometimes, something doesn’t have to be good in order to matter.
It’s also very gratifying whenever I discover that a piece of media I remember from long ago actually exists and isn’t just a figment of my imagination. I’m still holding out hope that that weird Alice in Wonderland ripoff that has mind control in it and a villain who lives in a bowling ball house wasn’t just a dream I had once. I mean, the kangaroo ninjas turned out to be from a real movie, and they were a much stupider idea! If anybody ever watches something that has a guy who lives in a bowling ball, they need to let me know.
- My favorite character description from the Wikipedia page is this: “Sweet Bee is a bee-woman from an intergalactic bee colony who came to Etheria seeking Bees and a new home when her race of Bee’s homeworld is destroyed by Wasps.” [↩]
