Poetry Time

A poem I wrote for a competition somewhere. 'ave at it:

Dante chooses his shapes well

Circles, I retrace my footsteps;
Backwards and forwards, both meanings lost;
Just this line, never crossed.

Going around in circles, this rut I wear
In the earth below my feet.

Loops, and I am back again;
Patterns appear, unrelenting formulism adheres;
Manifestations of my fears.

Fanficcing ahoy!

So I've launched my other blog, Mostly Fanfics, and posted the first part of Day in the Dumpster (a Dr Who fanfic) and a short Digimon one I wrote a while ago. Neither have been redrafted, so they are pretty rough, but if you are curious go check it out.

Recent Marvel movies, and thematic conversations, pt. 1

Just seen Captain America, and a review shall shortly be forthcoming. I shall say I greatly enjoyed it, and it continues a trend of Marvel movies being terrifically well handled. However, it continues a trend that I very much approve of - thematic linking of the antagonist and protagonist. This, I figure, deserves a look on its own. Keep in mind I've not seen Iron Man 2. Warning: minor spoilers ahead!

Firstly we have Iron Man. This is the weakest of the films in my opinion, and this is reflected in the relationship. Tony Stark decides to become a man of charity, redeeming him from his beginnings as a super-millionaire weapon weapon dealer. His antagonist is a man who embodies the greed of his past life. By fighting against a man who is this, he's actively battling all of what he used to represent and thus helping to reduce what he used to represent. It's easily the worst example, however, because it's a rather unimaginative and often seen in most action movies. The link somehow doesn't feel as personal, and thee bad guy is not well fleshed out. He feels like generic baddie No.7, a man that, really, could be anyone.

Secondly, we had Thor. This is where things get interesting: in music there is this thing called contrary motion. Contrary motion describes when two melodic lines move in the opposite manner to each other, and in Thor that is exactly what we get. Thor and his brother Loki go on the opposite journey, ending up where the other was at the start of the story. Thor is Odin's golden boy, but he was also a violent, impatient and hotheaded. Not only is his wiser and more considerate brother looked over, but he is not even Odin's real son! Loki tries to emulate Thor, to become like his errant brother, and as such hope that this'll make him usurp Thor in Odin's eyes. Whilst Thor's intensity was down to naivety, Loki's are part of his very capable machinations, and as such they go too far. Thor, on the otherhand, goes to earth and learns humility, being taught that he must consider his actions and that violence is not really an answer.

Like Iron Man, by defeating Loki Thor is exorcising his earlier flaws and defeating them, but more than that the two have real relationship. Loki is jealous of Thor, and rather insane, but they are still brothers and they are brought into conflict by their relationship with their father. Loki, in this respect, is the far more complex figure to look at than our archetype of a hero, but their complex and very understandable conflict brings a thematic depth to the movie that really raises it above your average.

Captain America has an antagonist that is, in marked departure from Loki, basically fucking evil. Red Skull has no real motivation beyond "POWER!" - no, not exactly like Jeremy Clarkson. Actually, both are linked strongly, despite meeting only twice, by their similar physical enhancement at the hands of the same scientist. Both interpret their gifts in differnet ways. Before his superpowering up, Captain America was physically weak but personally the manifestation of compassion and heroism, and he uses his physical enhancements as another to express and fight for these concepts. The Red Skull, however, is the manifestation of bullying and self-centric egomainia. It is only implied, but he sees his scientific intelligence as something that makes him better than everyone else, and when he is physically enhanced it proceeds to persuade him that he has risen above humanity. They represent the opposite in moral philosophy and application of power, and there is a very personal link created by the fact they are the only two super soldiers.

Also, and this is very much in implication only, I like the idea that two have dynamic that somewhat resembles the Thor/Loki one. Both are the product of physical enhancement by the same doctor who definitely functions as a sort of father figure to Captain America at least. He is responsible for both of their physical enhancements - and moral enhancements that are mentioned - and Red Skull's actions could be seen as a way of trying to prove that his ideas are correct, jealous of the way that his morals were rejected but his superhuman brother's was fully embraced. It's not canon, but neither is it particularly contrived, so I think it adds a bit more depth to the movie.

So yeah, that's it for the first part of this analysis. Next time I'm going to be looking at X-Men: First Class and counterpointing it with The Dark Knight, and talking about the practise in general. Hopefully been interesting so far.

Some productivity, some news

Had a lot of trouble sleeping last night. On top of the normal problems (a specific issue that often keeps me up and general insomnia), I'd slept a bit during the day because of my work getting me up at a ridiculous time. What really hit me, however, was a strange, irrational fear of getting eaten alive by a snake. For some reason the image of the snake swallowing me whole and slowly, painfully digesting me would not leave me alone.

*shudder*

But yeah, finished the first part of that Dr Who story I wrote about a while ago. When I start posting other stuffs and have given it a bit of an edit, I'll share it with you lot. Got to edit chapter 5 of the Harry Potter too, try to eliinate the "sketchiness" it falls into, make it's structure a bit more fluid. Been using M'Word so much that everytime I finish a sentence I hit cntrl + S. It's a good sign.

Finished The Unsinkable Walker Bean a moment ago: very good comic, childish but not immature and a bloody good story all round. Will likely check out pt. 2 when it comes out. Also gonna write a perspective on Green Lantern from Rebirth - Sinestro Corps, including both GL and GLC. That's one blog entry really wanna do.

Finally getting round to watching Sherlock. Final episode this wednesday, and expect a review of the three episodes after that. Some more thoughts on Torchwood are likely too.

So yeah, got a lot I want to do. We'll see how much I get done. Peace peeps.

Some notes on symbolism and the literal minded

So I enjoy wasting oodles of time on an internet site named That Guy with the Glasses - it's filled with reviews and videos of people making fun of Z-list movies. It's an engaging and easy way to lose plenty of hours. One of my favourites is Linkara, whom I like as much for the way he covers important DC events and comics, thus I often learn quite a lot about comics from his videos. As a medium, it certainly has it's fair share of rubbish to make fun of too.

But there's something of a problem with his critique of storytelling - he's very much a literalist, and, as such, has shown a rather grating habit of nitpicking things he doesn't understand. Recently he reviewed Rise of Arsenal, and this is a bad comic. Coming out of the much maligned Cry for Justice, I'd read numerous things about the comic before I watched the reviews. Not the actual source material though. Whilst watching, however, I could not help but feeling bugged at how off the mark Linkara seemed to be in much of his criticism.

If you can't be bothered watching the reviews, then let me summarise the comic: Arsenal is a bow wielding superhero who, in a recent event, lost his arm and his daughter. He was a single parent and used to have a drug problem, and this miniseries shows him falling back into drugs and failing to cope with his daughter's death. It's not handled very well, and despite the very sympathetic situation, the writing and execution of his breakdown shows him in a very narcissistic and petty manner, reducing his very powerful pain to rather less than it deserves.

This series is full of symbolism, some of it rather blatant and ham-fisted, but at times genuinely hitting a good moment. At one point he's practising archery with his new robotic arm, and as he fails he stares accusingly at his new arm. Linkara happily points out the thing wrong with his technique would most likely be his flesh arm as that was the one doing the aiming. Here, we have what is known as "fundamentally missing the point". Arsenal lost his arm to the same supervillain who was responsible for his daughter's death, and thus they are linked. He isn't shooting well because of his troubled mind, and the arm is a big reminder that some part of him is missing, cut off in a more metaphorical sense, and his inability to shoot is because of his own perceived inability to save his daughter. He looks at the arm because it's a metaphor, and a damn good one at that.

Another thing later picked up on is the way that visions appear to him. A literal explanation, as Linkara assumes, is that these are hallucinations that he really is seeing. Once again, I'm pretty sure they aren't: often in media, we see people's inner struggles represented in an external manner. Arsenal may be seeing his old drug dealer or dead daughter, but really this is a narrative way of representing the what he is feeling inside. His dead daughter is his guilt and a need for vengeance, and represents how his misery is twisting his memories of his daughter into something negative and destructive. The drug dealer represents his wish to turn to that darker and simpler time, when he did not worry about such things.

Not that I'm saying these things cannot be criticised. Certainly, they are cliched and inelegant and lend an inevitability which tries too hard to evoke tragedy. However, criticising the literal problems with having hallucinations appear is missing the point - these aren't meant to be things he's really seeing.

At the end Arsenal locks his vision of his dead daughter in his house and burns it to the ground. Linkara questions why the ghostly daughter can't just float through the walls of the house, and makes me want to hit my head off of something hard. This moment represents Arsenal's choice about how to deal with the death of his daughter: tearing down her memory and the life he lead with her. He rejects who she used to be and his memories of her, because he can't bear to be in a world where she's dead. Far better to live in a world where she never existed.

It's likely I've made this comic sound better than it actually is. So, in order to remedy this, I offer you up a picture from the comic:

It is indeed a man cradling a dead cat, who he thinks is his daughter. Try and take it seriously. Go on.

But, really, I'm getting at a wider point here. In both writing and critiquing fiction, it's best to remember that nothing, and I mean nothing, is the same thing as it is in real life. In fiction, we see a representative idea, an interpretive concept. A lot of writers try to make these concepts as closely evocative as they can to reality, to deepen the connection we have to the narrative and give the story the appearance of substance.

I don't think such measures do actually lead to more substantive stories or help us engage with the stories, but each to their own and all that. Good storytellers know that people are seeing representations of events and characters, and can manipulate things so that they tell a story with more depth through symbols and metaphors and underlying connotations. Good storytellers also make it clear that these are symbols, so that it doesn't come across as contrived or alienate people whose minds don't work along the same path as theirs. When being critical about narrative, this is a pretty fundamental point.

Linkara is entitled to his opinion, of course, just as I'm entitled to point out that his opinion is based misunderstanding. I don't mean to rail against him as a person, as he comes across as both pleasant and charismatic, or even his intelligence, as he makes a concerted attempt to break down and analyse the things he reads and offer insights into them. Rather, I feel these two videos are a good showcase of the pitfalls with being too literal minded in an approach to fiction.

A return

So I have this dream, and there's these machines digging down to the centre of the Earth. No, not the Earth - I'm somewhere new and strange and yet I seem to know the place well. I'm down in some caves, watching as screens show me the inevitable descent, the drills turning their way towards the centre of the planet. And I know they need to stop. What sleeps down there must not be awoken. Then the drills reach the bottom and stop, and it's free.

This dream did not act as the catalyst for Citizen Alpha, but it's the damned nearest I can get to identifying the one moment that kicked off my first ever real project. Citizen Alpha was a swirling storm of ideas and daydreams and concepts that had existed in my head for a good long while. We had people who could, through a computer, gain access to different worlds. There was a maze of corridors beneath the world of Citizen Alpha that was inexplicable in origin, and below that the drills worked. The whole city was an artificial environment below the surface of the planet, unbeknownst to its inhabitants, and at one point some was going to turn off the sky. A prophecy seemed to control the actions of the characters that moved through the pages, and a dragon was going to destroy the city. Demon-esque people, too, were involved. People with strange powers ran through the city and evoked a discrimination exploration very much reminiscent of that seen in any X-Men film. The story was driven by events that happened before the story took place, and old grudges and feuds informed the plot at every step.

Citizen Alpha was a veritable riot of ideas, a mess of such convoluted ambitious that I cannot help but admire the writing audacity of my younger self. Through my experimentation and attempts to push myself, my writing identity has been lost it often seems. I can't help but feel that it's about time I recaptured some of that lost spark.

Strong female characters, and the Mary Sue

In the UK we have this thing called "The One Show" - it's an early evening show with a variety of features on a varied selection of subjects, and it runs every day of the week monday - friday. Each day there is a special guest, and one day a while back they had Jackie Collins on. Interested in what a famous and successful writer has to say, I decided to watch a bit of it. It's important, I reckon, to listen to what writers outside of your chosen genre have to say about writing. Gives you a sense of perspective of your habits and trends. Collins' words of wisdom? "I love strong female characters".

And, sure enough, there is a very good argument that fiction needs more of such characters. We've still got a very patriarchal society, with the bias of misogyny still going strong. Good, strong female protagonists help counteract the tendency of storytellers to cast women as the prize to be won or damsel to be rescued.

Whilst this is still very true for Hollywood, personally I’d argue that its not such a problem in the novel medium. Women writers have always been better represented than in other mediums - to this day only one film directed by a woman has won an Oscar, but many women have won a Nobel Prize in Literature. The NYTimes fiction charts show that the top three bestselling paperback fictions are by women, and two out of five in the hardback fiction list, although this week the mass market paperbacks appear all to be men. Women are, on the whole, better represented.

But I knew the type of character that Collins was talking about and winced. There has been a trend in female written literature to characterise their female leads in rather a too positive manner, over compensatory even. Whenever I venture into female fronted stories with female authors, you can almost feel the world warping around them. This, I am afraid, is what you call a Mary Sue.

At this point I should mention I’m not saying all female writers do this. It’s most likely that I have just been unlucky with my novel choices, and I can name a few that are very good at not doing this. Hell, J.K. Rowling doesn’t fall into this trap.

It’s important to clarify what a Mary Sue is. Mostly, it is used to criticise a character without flaws and sometimes even just used to criticise boring characters. As I see it, for a character to actually be a Mary Sue, there needs to be more than these. For a character to be a Mary Sue, the world has to be wrapped around her finger. Everyone loves her, and anyone who doesn’t is evil beyond rehabilitation. The character doesn’t necessarily need to be all that skilled at anything, but they’ll never fail. It’s nothing innate to the character that confers Sue-dom, but rather the way narrative treats them. It was this type of character, a character unashamedly worshipped by the text, Collins was referring to.

The best example that springs to mind is Wolverine in the first three X-Men movie. He is almost the quintessential Mary Sue, and you can almost hear the writers orgasming every time he walks onto the screen. A big part of this comes from the way he is counter pointed. The leader of the X-Men and boyfriend of the romantic interest is Cyclops, thus a rivalry is set-up. And then the movie goes onto demonise Cyclops so incredibly thoroughly that he becomes something of an anti-Sue. He is arrogant and rude and stupid and boring and, frankly, a bit shit at fighting. He’s so incredibly dislikeable that Wolverine appears to be so much fantastic. On this point alone I’d happily class Wolverine a Sue, although the movie certainly has more than enough other material to back up this claim.

I’m not opposed to strong women. Hell, my favourite fictional character not written by Terry Pratchett may just be the Alien franchise’s Ellen Ripley. I am, however, opposed to this trend that seems to want to embrace womanhood - a strange, post-feminist thing - to the point in which a women is basically portrayed as the centre of the universe. Men do this too, don’t get me wrong. Hell, my example was of a male character.

If you want to avoid  Sues, just giving your characters flaws isn’t enough. Look at how they are represented in the narrative. Do other characters make them look like Sue in comparison? Do they fail? Are they shown to not be good enough? Separating a character from the story their in is not an easy thing, so if you want to make sure your character more interesting, look at the story.

Beyonce, Pyramids and Politicans

Last night I passively caught part of Beyonce's Glastonbury performance. If it's your kind of music, I guess I can't criticise it. The odd song had a nice energy and there was one catchy tune in there, although which one, exactly, has long since faded from my mind. They tried to make a performance, more than just a series of songs. Between songs music never stopped playing and the songs faded into one another. It was a landmark occassion, too, with it being the first time that a member of the female gender has headlined the festival.

Pity it was such an unremittingly overproduced borefest, meandering and padded by covers. If you took into account the Destiny's Child songs (and her collaboration with Lady Gaga) as kind of half covers, the amount of Beyonce original songs was likely equalled by the amount of songs not originally by her. Not that I'm opposed to covers, but when it makes up as large a chunk of your set as your own material. Also, it's just not music that benefits from the live treatment, so reliant on studio production. There was a sort of grandeur to the lighting that the music just didn't seem to deserve. This is club music, not festival music. If you like that kinda stuff, all the power to you, just never seemed to do justice to the attempt at spectacle. Then again, I missed a bit of it whilst a friend introduced me to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, so maybe I missed something essential.

But yeah, past few days have been good to me. Not sure if I have mentioned it here before, but a mate and I are co-authoring a Harry Potter fanfic. We decided that the world of magic was too stuffy and boring; HP could do with excitement and romance of politics. So we've got a rough outline, a lot of ideas and are doing a chapter apiece. I just finished chapter 2 these past few days, and will post it somewhere once it has been edited and shizzle. Look out for that.

I wanted to have a review for Gears of the City up by now, but the damn book has disappeared. Could review the first two thirds, but some I doubt that'd be doing the book justice. Ah well. Expect another villain study or something soonish.

Musings on the Three-Act Structure

So in my 20th Century Boys I made reference to the Hollywood three-act structure, and it got me thinking. Because, when it comes to writing, I’d be loathe to assert that the Hollywood formula is the pinnacle of writing, I’ve been thinking about what films successfully go with something different.

No Country for Old Men  - The Coen Brothers are quite good at this as a whole. It's been too long since I saw Fargo or The Big Lebowski to comment, but NCfOM is a terrific example. For much of it's time on-screen, it seems to be more or less typcial thriller with a western taste to it. Everyone talks with that deep south parlance, but otherwise it is a thriller about a man being chased by a cold and ruthless killer. At his home a detective tries to work out what happened, why this man is chasing them and who else is involved. But what is actually happens in this story is that the old sheriff is main character here, and it is his story we are following. Thus when we get to the third arc, suddenly it's all change and all of the pay-offs are wrong and the film's final scene is, well, unexpected. There's a couple of fake arcs in here, but this is a very unconventionally structured story.

Pulp Fiction - Pretty much all of Tarantino's films have convention breaking structures too, and Pulp Fiction is the easiest and most obivous one. We see our heroes' journeys in the wrong order, and getting resolutions before and after journeys. If you've seen the movie, this one is pretty self-explanatory really.

And suddenly I'm scrambling for examples. Trainspotting probably does this, but I'd need to rewatch it to refresh my memory. I remember lots of people claiming that Scott Pilgrim Versus the World doesn't follow the three-act structure, despite the fact that I see three very clean cut and obvious acts. Hell, Ramona even changes her hair colour to tell you that a new act has begun.

There is a common trend in writing to embellish the three act structure with a very short fourth act. Only highlight the following text if you've seen Alien, which has a very good example of this: When Ripley has gotten off the mainship, escaped onto that shuttle - there is a cool down, a drop in tension. The movie feels finished. Then it turns out that she can't just escape the alien, she has to defeat it too, because the alien has followed her off the self-destructing main ship. Basically, this establishes that the supposed climax of the movie was misdirection, and now we get to see the real climax. It's fairly common and abide to the the three-act rule pretty hard and fast, so it doesn't really count as breaking out of that structure. Christopher Nolan seems fond of doing this too, what with Inception and The Dark Knight both doing this.

So am I overlooking some obvious ones? Are there any better film examples of unusual structuring? Is this a big gap in my knowledge, or is it rare to see good movies not using the three act structure?