Assassins, Bounty Hunters and Lovable Rouges for Hire

Everyone loves an unscrupulous rogue. Our pop culture features entire space fleets worth of bounty hunters, enough hired guns to fill an armoury and a half, armadas of pirates and assassins everywhere; there are whole creeds of the buggers. It’s an assassination fascination. What exactly draws us to these dangerous and unlawful archetypes? Surely, by all logic, we shouldn’t sympathise or hold such an interest in people—fictional or otherwise—who could and would kill or bundle us off to our enemies if someone paid them to.

Though, as previously discussed, everyone loves a villain, and people deliberately disobeying the laws and moral values we’ve had ingrained in us are fascinating to watch precisely because they’re so removed from the everyday life we lead and the stuff that we ourselves would do. Then again, the fictional mercenary manages to be wrangled into a sympathetic kind of person a good two thirds of the time. It’s amazing how often hired killers or thugs can be turned into the heroes (or at least the enjoyable protagonists) of the stories we love. Maybe, even before we discover a potential tragic bloodstained backstory, we feel an immediate connection with someone on the other side of the law, since it immediately makes them an underdog—especially if The Law is evil and scary, like the Alliance in Firefly, and our rouges-for-hire are imbued with a much better sense of humour and badass coats. It’s pretty easy to start tugging the strings and make us switch our traditional notions of who to root for.

Of course, there are plenty of terrifying and genuinely villainous assassin and hunter characters about, but it’s interesting to note how fond we are of taking this career umbrella—killing, harming and evading the law and everyday morals for money, something most of us audience-folk would find unthinkable—and turning them into lovable good guys. Hell, they’re even the stars of comedies. Think Grosse Point Blank for romance, about a hired gun at his awkward high school reunion. Think Cowboy Bebop for a flatshare comedy: essentially about a group of clashing characters crammed into a small space(ship) and forced to work together with various episodic hijinks along the way. The basis for any dramedy, except that it grabs your attention by promising two out of five of these conflicting roomies to be bounty hunters, con artists and ex-killers (the other two, for reference, are a fluffy-haired hacker and a corgi).

The Twisty Business of Story Endings

[PSA: This post is about plot twists. It may contain spoilers the way packs of salted almonds may contain nuts.]

This week, in the groggy overlit haze that only traversing time zones in midair can bring on, I watched three movies. Dozing on and off with a starchy airline-provided pillow propped awkwardly under my head, this blogger half-dreamed half-pondered about twist endings.

For some perspective on that segway, the first movie was Cloud Atlas. I read the book earlier in the year—it is split between six seemingly unconnected storylines in different eras, genres and styles, my favourite of which I have to admit (almost a tie with the science fiction awe and terror of Somni’s) was the story of Robert Frobisher, a delightfully snarky, poetic, most likely manic depressive young composer in 1930s Europe. His story is told through his letters to his friend and highly implied lover (note: the movie doesn’t even bother with ‘implied’, but goes the full monty. Bless it), and the final instalment and crushing ending is his suicide note.

I finished Frobisher’s section on the bus, and was caught gulping back the kind of embarrassing shocked tears that will only attack you when you’re inescapably in public. The same thing happened on the plane, but at the start instead of the end. The adaptation, it seemed, began Frobisher’s tale with a foregone conclusion, leaving the rest of the movie to the business of seeing how he got to making that decision. I thought this was an interesting device, caught between thanking the film for some kind of mental preparation for the tragedy and wondering if it was really a good idea to reveal one of the most heart-wrenching shock moments in the book from the get-go.

Either way, this is one of those character deaths I will never be okay with

Fantastically Racist and Scientifically Offensive

In fictional worlds of boundless possibility and imagination, why are they so often riddled with the prejudices of the real one?

Fantasy and science fiction have a serious problem where it comes to equal representation… which, from my humble point of view, is offensive first of all but mostly just bizarre. I mean, the definition of fantasy is that anything is possible, and science fiction shows us a world that we can strive towards in the future. So why are we so limited to the thought processes of the modern (and the not-so-modern) world?

The most obvious example of this is that fantasy worlds are commonly very, very white. This is a topic of much discussion all over the Intertubes and beyond, and a pretty prickly issue. It’s also really weird if you think about it. If the world itself is completely made up, you can do whatever you wish with it. You can have floating mountains and creatures with six heads and people turning each other into frogs. Your main characters could live in a world covered in volcanoes or hanging over the cliff to different portals of existence, your fantasy landscape designed with any level of implausible ridiculousness in mind. The same goes for the people who populate it… yet most of them seem to look overtly European.

Well, there is some solid reasoning behind this: first of all, if you make your world and its populace too bizarre it won’t be relatable and it will be more difficult for your audience to connect with, whether through a question of empathy or just them going “This is silly” and tossing the book aside. This, and a combination of the infinite inspiration lying wait in history, leads to the Fantasy Counterpart Culture, fantastical or alien civilisations with traits we can recognise in societies that exist or have existed in the real world.

The most common example is the fantasy landscape based on Medieval Europe. This is basically Tolkien’s doing, when it comes down to it, seeing as The Lord of the Rings and company were the first books to really make the fantasy genre cool, and thus authors that followed have looked to their master for example. The fantasy archetypes that we’re comfortably and stereotypically used to all come from Tolkien, from the landscape to the Orcs to the armour to the big dangerous faceless force of evil.

And that’s okay. Let it never be said that The Lord of the Rings isn’t amazing. However, with everyone following Tolkien’s archetype we’ve ended up with a market swamped in Europe-esque fantasy worlds, leaving things suspended in a rather absurdly Caucasian persuasion.

Kicking Ass in Pink High Heels

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Fashion Concious AND able to Hurt You!

There is a trend in characterisation known as THE DEMONISATION OF FEMINENITY which is a bunch of scary big words reeking of social justice and the topic of this week’s post.

We all remember the good old days right, where women were proper ladies who hid beneath their bonnets and occasionally got kidnapped and let the heroes do all the work? I mean what use is a woman in a fight or an adventure? All those graceful lily white hands are good for is needlework and tea sipping, and of course carrying around her sixteen children. The heroics are the man’s job, and his damsel shall stay on the sidelines being distressed.

Somewhere along the line, it was decided that this wasn’t as capital an idea as people thought, since there was this little thing called the Feminist Movement that politely kicked down the door to the great House of Stories and said “Excuse me, good sirs, but where the f*ck are all the badass ladies?”

So they were granted badass ladies and all was well. Now it was not just the menfolk who could save the day with their rippling abs but the women as well, no longer banished to the background and romance roles to swoon and weep and occasionally die of consumption.

But another problem arose in its place. With these new female heroes (“heroines”, like the drug, because they made everyone deliriously happy) came a new stigma which was the reverse of the old one, much as if when the feminists kicked down the door they had hit the stereotype and belted it inside out. In place of the idea that women should never act like men, there came a new trend, and it forbade women from acting like women.

Art of the Ship Tease

Humans have a deep-set desire to watch people fall in love but a pathological upchuck reaction to watching couples. Thus, fictional love stories must traverse the middle ground for want of avoiding projectile fan-splurk and negative energy that could unbalance the universe, and this is where we find the ship tease.

For the uninitiated, “ship” is (supposedly) short for “relationship” and has become a verb of its own. To ship a pair of characters is to want to see them get together (the nature of this is not crucial; whether they are settling down to adorable domesticity or engaging in casual angry copulation is up to the individual).

In almost every piece of fiction you will find some semblance of a love story. There are whole genres for romance of course, be they comic or tragic, but it seeps into every genre and medium. Basically, we’re in love with love. I’m sure there are countless psychological papers laying out reasons for this. Maybe we want to instil hope in the world and receive warm fuzzies. Maybe we want to imagine that one half of the couple is us. Maybe we just like excuses to gush at our TV screens/books as we cry into our cats about how truly alone we are.