Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • A Game of Thrones and the Misogyny of Imagined Worlds

    I have just finished the immensely enjoyable Game of Thrones TV series, which is a thoroughly excellent and engrossing viewing experience and a fine addition to the genre. I don’t really have any substantive criticisms to level against it, except that it was too short. Oh, and that it was awesomely misogynist, and this misogyny was clearly intended as part of the fabric of the setting. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe it’s my terrible bleeding-heart leftism, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to ignore this kind of thing in TV and movies. Not in the “I refuse to give those bastards my money” kind of way, but just in the “I can’t help noticing it, and I’m a bit sick of it,” kind of way. I’ve noticed this in a few TV shows recently and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say two things: a) it didn’t used to happen and b) it’s a particular problem in modern interpretations of imagined (i.e. fantasy or historical) settings. There might also be a bit of c) modern writers think this is essential to establishing “authenticity” in non-contemporary settings, but whether or not I touch on this we’ll decide as the rant continues.

    Before I discuss this in more detail, though, a few points about A Game of Thrones. I don’t know how true the TV show is to the books, how much swearing and foul language there was in the books and how much Martin’s work was intended to be “gritty,” “dark” or “realistic.” I get the impression it was meant to be all these things, but I don’t know because I haven’t read the books. I’m guessing there must be something in the books to spur this kind of interpretation in the TV show, but then again – when the Sci-Fi channel made A Wizard of Earthsea they swapped the skin tones of the main characters, and Studio Ghibli completely fucked up the underlying philosophy of the same book, so … anything can happen in TV. So in discussing the TV show I’m going to talk about it largely on its own merits.

    So, let’s have a look at the misogyny in A Game of Thrones and the way it establishes the setting, and its essential unreality; we’ll look at some other modern creations (Deadwood, The Walking Dead and True Blood) for comparison, and then we’ll take some old ideas from Susan Faludi to examine whether what we’re looking at is a generational phenomenon in the TV/movie industry. Or is it just HBO? And maybe we’ll call on Rosanne Barr for support.

    The Misogyny in A Game of Thrones

    This TV Show (henceforth referred to as ‘Thrones) is rich with misogyny, primarily expressed through the language used by the main characters, though supported by the nature of the depictions of sex and the prevalence of certain industries (sex work and slavery) and their depiction in the show. There is a further element to the language used, though, which elevates the misogyny beyond mere deprecating language to create an atmosphere in which the female characters are constantly viewed in terms of their sexual vulnerability, and reduced to little more than sexual organs. This is the essence of misogyny – it’s not just bad language, or sexualized language, but an atmosphere of simultaneous sexualization and victimization of the female characters. In ‘Thrones this is very useful for setting the context of, for example, the Khaleesi‘s behaviour (or that of Stark’s youngest daughter, Arya), so that their resistance to suppression and attempts to rise above their status as women are all the more valiant for the fraught context. It also, however, creates a very unpleasant and exhausting environment for the viewer – something which on the one hand is quite good, as it makes the setting richer and more alien, but on the other hand is quite horrible since it leaves you thinking all the male characters are worthless scum, and makes it harder to sympathize with them.

    It is this atmosphere of sexualization that I’m primarily interested in here, though the use of words like cunt, bitch, slut and whore continuously throughout the series is a type of misogyny in itself. A couple of examples of the use of language to create a pervasive and detailed atmosphere of misogyny are:

    • Sex as a conquest metaphor: when approaching the Aerie, a castle on a promontory, someone in the approaching group says “This is the aerie, it’s said to be impregnable.” Of course, impregnable has multiple meanings, but someone else in the group has to make the sense of sex-as-conquest explicit by redefining the particular meaning of impregnable in this case: “Give me 10 men with grappling ropes and I’d get the bitch pregnant.” A perfectly natural choice of phrase at this point would be “I’d capture it” or “I’d take it” (or even her), which leaves the sexualized nature of pregnability implicit, or even chooses not to use it. There’s nothing inconceivable about these alternative choices of phrase. But the chosen phrase changes the meaning of the original statement, and sets an atmosphere of sexual menace over the simple task of visiting a castle (this isn’t helped when we witness the breast-feeding activities going on in the castle, but that’s a separate story…)
    • Degradation of the conception process: “Boy, you were nothing until I squirted you into your mother,” one lord tells one of his sons, in a meeting with Stark’s wife. This choice of words is both brutal and very pithily expresses the relative roles of lord, lady and younger son. It also brings to the fore the role of woman as penetrable or as a vessel – something that commonly happens in the dialogue in this show. They don’t just talk about “having sex” or “conceiving” or “fucking,” but about going inside, being inside, penetrating. They revel in explicit discussion of the nature of the cunt. But it also denigrates that place and its role, using crude or everyday language to reduce the sexual and conception process into mere plumbing, crassly expressed. What is a woman, but a bucket you squirt into?
    • Explaining the cunt: at one point, a guy who has been signed up to the Nightwatch tells another member “I’ll never be inside a woman again.” Again we see the man describing the sexual process explicitly in terms of the nature of the cunt. He isn’t just talking about not getting to have sex; he is talking about the details of the process. And he isn’t talking about women as a desirable thing in and of themselves (“I’ll never touch a woman again,” “I’ll never enjoy a woman in my bed,” etc). He’s talking about the one part of a woman that has any value in this show.

    Simultaneously with this language, ‘Thrones also sets out a world where women are extremely vulnerable and sexual predation is the norm. We see this in many ways throughout the story, and some of them fall into classic misogynist tropes:

    • The threat of child rape: the most shocking example of this is Arya, a girl of about 10, being told she will be raped if she doesn’t make herself look like a boy. But it is also implicit in the treatment of her older sister at court, who from the moment of her promise to Joffrey begins increasingly to seem like a girl at risk of being used, rather than treasured
    • The omnipresence of rape: The Khaleesi‘s story starts as rape, though it changes later; criminals on the Wall are often referred to as rapists, perhaps more often than is strictly necessary given the relative proportion of these crimes in society; basically every time the dol’thraci go to war they commit mass rape, and it is accepted and ignored by all involved (and spoken of as if it were merely scratching an itch). This is a vision of a mediaeval society where rape is a standard accoutrement of masculinity
    • The rock-star vision of sex work: sex workers (or “whores” as they are universally referred to) are a continuous presence in ‘Thrones, and they are treated in much the same way as they are imagined in the world of rock stars. In this vision, sex workers are all very beautiful, very sexually excited, very engaging, they love their work and everything they do is done just like a lover, only with more energy. No one ever gets any diseases from them, and they are all young and pretty. They also all love having sex with each other. This is pretty far from the reality of sex work, and there is way too much sex work in this show to start with – it’s as if the writers think that the entire world consists of housewives or sex workers, and there’s so many that every nobleman can find 6 to play with at the drop of a hat – and they’ll all be pretty and willing. It’s a rock-star’s vision of an industry that, I have no doubt, most of the producers have never experienced first hand. This madonna/whore stereotype is a classic sexist trope, which serves to establish “good” women in their place, who men in any case don’t like having sex with and “squirt” themselves into for the sake of heredity; and “bad” women, who men actually enjoy spending time with but sneer at for their fallen status. It’s an unrealistic and misogynist vision of women.
    • Death as sex: In one telling conversation, the King and his mates are swapping remiscences about their “first,” which turns out to be the first man they killed. The conversation is set up so it seems they’re talking about sex until they elaborate a little, and it’s clearly intended to equate death and sex. Have the producers been reading Andrea Dworkin? Or did they just feel like giving her (hugely controversial) theories a massive leg-up?
    • Unmatched sexual depictions: the only time we see a cock in 10 episodes is on a spy being dragged to death on a horse, and on a very old man who is clearly being depicted as a bit silly. Yet we constantly see tits and arse. This is a common representational inequality used when the viewer is assumed to be male, and serves to preserve the power of men as characters separate from their sexuality, while constantly reminding us that women are only sexualized.

    So this is the atmosphere of ‘Thrones: a combination of classic sexist and misogynist imagery and story components, combined with intensely misogynist language intended to define women as sexual objects and to render them continually sexualized whenever they are onscreen. This is the world that our producers have imagined for us. But in many ways it is a highly unrealistic representation of the way men talk and think about women. Not only is the sex work as depicted here completely divorced from reality, but the language the men use is not language that ordinary men use in conversation with each other. When was the last time my male reader(s) said to another man “I like being inside a woman,” or talked in anyway about women in terms of inside and outside, or even described any aspect of their cunts? How many of my readers would take the word “impregnable” as an opportunity for a rape reference? Has anyone here ever met the kind of man who would talk about “squirting” into a woman? Now, it might be argued that this is the language of the times, that men were different back then – if so, how come Eddard Stark never once uses language like this, and eschews “whores” due to a single historical mistake? Stark is clearly the character we the viewers are most meant to sympathize with, and he has clearly modern values. The other character we most sympathize with is the Khaleesi. She has values that are out of step with her own culture’s (witness her brother’s behaviour, or that of the men at court) but also of her adopted culture’s (she protects women from rape while the women around her ignore it as a necessity of war). This makes me think that the producers know that their viewers will be uncomfortable with the values they are presenting for their world. So why do they go to such lengths to create this environment?

    Misogyny in Other Creations

    I originally thought of titling this post “A Game of Thrones and the Misogyny of HBO” but I checked their past programming and they have a wide and diverse range of shows, some of which are very non-misogynist. Some of their other shows are, though, and I think the one that springs to mind quickest is Deadwood. Outside the HBO fold some good examples of very sexist (if not misogynist, for those who wish to make the distinction) shows are Mad Men and The Walking Dead. In the case of Deadwood, the producer has defended his use of words like cocksucker and fuck even though historical evidence suggests that the word cocksucker is a post-WW2 invention, and in the era of Deadwood men did not use sexual terms in non-sexual contexts. i.e. this whole image of fucking and sucking cocks as a derogatory concept is much more modern than these shows would have us believe. In The Walking Dead we see modern folk cast into a very pre-modern world, living as hunter-gatherers in a zombie apocalypse. They largely retain modern values about language and its use, but revert to very traditional gender roles.

    I think what we’re seeing here is a belief that “authenticity” requires misogyny and sexism, and a subsequent exaggeration of the nature of this misogyny, or even an imposition of modern understanding of what misogyny is onto a very different world and setting. This is most obvious in Deadwood, where we know that historically most swearing was blasphemy-oriented, but in the show the blasphemy has largely been dropped in favour of sexualized insults. It’s gangster-rap as a template for historical sexism. We’re not seeing a historically authentic brand of sexism, but the producer’s image of how men behave when they’re given complete power over women. I think this says more about the writers and producers than it does about the historical setting they are imagining. As further evidence, consider True Blood, which imagines a perfectly modern setting steeped with magic and violence. Here we occasionally witness misogyny and hear this type of language, but largely we see a world where women prey on men and women, men prey on men and women, and all’s fair in the war of the sexes. Obviously one could say this is because vampirism equalizes gender differences, but the decision to adapt these books to TV was a choice made: and I note that when people choose to make fantasy stories in the modern era (such as Buffy, or the soon-to-be-released American Gods) they choose novels that make it easy for them to tell stories that don’t require misogyny or sexual violence. I have a suspicion that the writers of these shows choose very carefully so that the imagined worlds they create are misogynist, but the fantasy stories of modernity are not.

    Why do they do this? I think that they do this because this generation of writers is more misogynist than their viewers. We have a lot of evidence we can call on to examine this possibility, because we can compare modern stories with older stories, and ask ourselves what has changed.

    Trends in writing, and the Backlash

    Susan Faludi’s Backlash describes the trend in 80s and 90s cultural products (particularly film) towards sexist and/or misogynist stories that are much worse than the material produced in the 70s, and she characterizes this as the result of a backlash against the feminist gains of the 60s and 70s. This backlash occurred across society, but is most easily seen in the movies and TV shows of the era. I think this backlash is still ongoing, but as men of a new generation have become increasingly used to women’s workplace rights, perhaps it becomes increasingly evident in the one area where laws can’t affect our relations with each other – cultural representations of sexuality. As women become more equal in bed, some TV shows increasingly try to react against this through a specifically misogynist, sexualized backlash.

    Susan Faludi described the particularly vehement response to the TV comedy Rosanne, which I recall as being a quite funny and very realistic look into the ordinary lives of ordinary Americans. This show was noteworthy for being very popular, but also being an extremely realistic insight into real life. It had fat characters, it treated inter-racial friendship as normal, and the family was a working class family completely disconnected from the fantasy of shows like Beverly Hills 90210. Faludi’s description of the backlash against this show is interesting, because it shows a range of highly gendered language used to attack Rosanne Barr, and also a great deal of discomfort about the idea of TV shows reflecting real life. Rosanne Barr herself describes the writing process of the early 90s as extremely sexist and openly degrading to women, and it’s no surprise that this persists into the modern era.

    This may seem counter-intuitive, since we’re supposed to have come far since the 60s, but consider a few simple comparisons. Which is more sexist – Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones? It could be argued that this is a fault of the genre – LoTR is high fantasy, while ‘Thrones is meant to be all dark and gritty and realistic. I don’t think this defence works, because Robin Of Sherwood was envisaged as a gritty and dark take on the Robin Hood stories, and it managed to completely eschew any sense of misogyny while carefully constructing an extremely authentic representation of a sexist mediaeval world. I also think it can be argued quite reasonably that women are better represented in the original Dawn of the Dead than they are in The Walking Dead. I’m willing to bet (though I haven’t seen it) that The Wire is much more misogynist than Cagney and Lacey. Choices are being made about which stories to show and how to show them, and somehow between the 70s and now, the concept of authenticity in post-apocalyptic or fantastic worlds has come to be equated with misogyny. I think this is a generational change, and its origin in the 80s and 90s is well described by Susan Faludi.

    The implications

    The really frustrating aspect of this is that we don’t have any control over the political messages that are put into the work we watch, and in general, because we’re rational adults, we tend not to boycott shows that are misogynist or politically very unpleasant if they’re also very well made (which most of the shows I’ve referenced are). We enjoy them despite their political flaws, especially if they’re in a genre (like fantasy) that has historically been mostly crappy. I think the writers know this, and they know that they can present whatever political vision they like if they’re doing a good job on the show itself. So we continue to sit through the unnecessarily vile language, the misogyny and the unnecessary rape- and sex-work stories (and, in fact, the unnecessary sex scenes and gore) because we’re watching the show for non-superficial reasons.

    The best example I can think of for this is internet porn. Internet porn is free. We watch it because we like porn. But (for Western porn, anyway) the majority of the free downloadable porn is full of vile misogynist language and some stuff that, I think, most men don’t care to see and wouldn’t ask for if they could commission their own movie – dp, face fucking, etc. But we watch it anyway, because we want to look past that stuff to see what we’re fundamentally interested in: pretty girls fucking. The people who make this stuff know this, so they present us with their politicized vision of sex, and we sift out the politics so we can enjoy the sex. Because it’s free, and in any case the market is saturated with these images, we have to tolerate all this stuff we don’t want in order to see a good fuck. The same is true of a good fantasy story or post-apocalyptic world. But it doesn’t have to be that way – it’s just that we have no way to send the message to the producers except to not watch what is, otherwise, excellent stuff.

    I imagine a lot of people will mistake this for a PC rant about sexism in art, and assume I’m calling for some kind of boycott or censorship or something (this is the internet, after all). It’s not, and I’m not. It’s not that I don’t or can’t watch this stuff, it’s just that I’m sick of watching shows where all the female characters are hysterical or weak; I’m sick of being told that women exist only to be fucked, or that any world where women don’t have the same rights as men has to be necessarily imagined as a sexually torrid and rape-centric barbarian’s paradise. I’m sick of people mistaking swearing for toughness (just as I’m sick of rock videos where people mistake tattoos for rebellion). This shit doesn’t represent the real world, or real relations between men and women, and I don’t think it’s particularly representative of the historical reality of how people lived their lives before women could vote or control their bodies. I hate being told by defenders of this kind of stuff (like the producer of Deadwood) that it’s authentic, and therefore must be unsettling or confronting, when even superficial investigation reveals it’s not authentic, and it’s actually an ahistorical impression of the writer’s imagination of how a sexist world works. I don’t need to be reminded that women have cunts. I’ve had sex with lots of women, I like cunts very much thank you, and when I see a pretty girl I am certainly capable of wanting to fuck her; but that doesn’t mean I see women as cunts, or think of them only in terms of their cunts and of being inside them, or that I want to watch stories about a world where women are constantly vulnerable to being fucked. I can imagine a perfectly good sexist world without being reminded about the pervasive (but very low) risk of rape for those women.  Rape is nasty, and I don’t need to be reminded of it every time I want an hour’s escapism in a fantasy world. This doesn’t make me squeamish, and I don’t need some idiot from Hollywood who can’t have sex without paying for it telling me that I don’t have the cajones to think about reality. Because none of this is meant to be reality, and I don’t watch TV stories about dragon-summoning Khaleesi so that I can be reminded of the worst aspects of reality, especially when those worst aspects are probably largely in the imagination of some woman-hating dweeb.

    Also, I like to be able to watch TV with my partner, and sometimes she gets a bit sick of being subjected to show after show in which she is told that, as a woman, she is weak or hysterical or vulnerable or good only for sex. Maybe one day she’ll stop watching fantasy, historical drama, and sci-fi shows if they keep being like this, and then I’ll have to watch them by myself, which is not as much fun.

    So, if you’re reading this, TV writers and producers: can you try and do a bit better? I know it’s really hard for you to understand real women, and it’s easier to make a world superficially authentic with a bit of swearing and blatant misogyny, but it’s a mark of your skill as a writer if you can do better than this. So why don’t you give it a go, you might surprise yourself. You might even find that people respect you a little more.

  • Explaining the London Riots, Japanese Style

    Defective young men and women…

    So I was at the gym this morning doing a quick AM session before heading off to see the Ghost Scrolls, when I saw a daytime TV show doing a special report on the “London NEET Riots” (イギリスニート暴動). This was a classic daytime TV formula, consisting of a studio set with a panel of 3 pretty young women, a slightly older female host, and an expert (in this case, male) drafted in to explain the situation. Like most experts on Japanese TV, he had a whiteboard divided up into many small segments, with which he would explain various aspects of the troubles. Each segment contained a question or quiz to be asked of the panel, who would attempt to guess explanations. Sometimes there would be footage from the riots, with a little cutaway showing one of the panel-members nodding and ooing and aahing. So this is how the discussion unfolded, after the initial background report.

    Child Rioters and The Police Commissioner’s Quiz

    First the expert discussed the presence of teenagers in the riot. The teenagers were presented on the whiteboard, of course, as cute little anime-style pictures of two archetypal hoodies, one white and one black. They were both wearing masks, dark hoodies, and they had their hands tucked into the pouches at the front of the hoodie. Both had the faces of children, but wearing the kind of ferocious frowning expression one sees on angry anime children. The panel were of course shocked that such kids would be involved, especially when the presenter revealed that about 10 primary-school children had been caught. The expert then went on to describe the Police Commissioner’s request for all parents to find out where their children are and not let them outside, and asked the panel why they thought this was. He unveiled two possible answers, one at a time: “because the children might run into danger” was revealed first, and the panel asked if it was true or false. He then revealed the red cross for “false” and followed this up with the next option: “because the children might do something dangerous,” followed by the green circle for “true.” There was, of course, stunned incomprehension on the part of our panel.

    The Cause of the Riots

    The expert characterized the riots as being the work of NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training). This is tying the riots straight back to the biggest fear of Japanese society, that sometime in the future their own pool of NEETs may grow in size and troublesomeness. Given that the current stereotypical Japanese NEET is a nerdy kid who stays home and refuses to leave his or her room, it seems they have a long, long way to go before they become a London-style not-so-neat NEET. But given the gulf in culture between Japan and the UK (oh god, looking at these riots the gulf certainly seems very wide!) this characterization probably gives the average Japanese person a reasonable point of reference. For most Japanese, the UK is a distant land of beautiful buildings and gentle manners, so they probably find it very hard to comprehend this current spate of ungentlemanly behaviour. Enter everyone’s bogeyman, the NEET… but more information than that is needed before the Japanese can understand the difference between the British and Japanese conception of the NEET.

    Who is Doing It, Anime Style

    The expert then produced a hilarious graphic depicting the three main identifiable groups involved in the rioting – or perhaps the three main types of NEET (I didn’t stay long enough to see him explain anything about organized crime). Again, the anime graphics come out, first the graphic describing the two teenagers, then a graphic describing “second generation migrants” (移民２世）. These second generation migrants were depicted as a black kid, a Sikh kid (Japan always represents India symbolically as a turban), and a white kid (maybe European). They weren’t wearing particularly street-y clothes and didn’t have quite the same ferocious expression as the previously-mentioned schoolkids. Then the expert moved on to the third graphic: The Chav. That’s right, I just witnessed a whiteboard, on TV, in Japan, with the word “Chav” written on it, beneath a picture-perfect depiction of a male and female Chav. White, the man twice the size of the woman, his fist pointed out of the picture with dollar signs tattooed on it, his hair disarrayed, a stupid and slightly confused expression on his face. The woman was looking hard-faced and a bit slovenly, her hair tied back tight and up, both of them wearing jewellery and sports suits. Perfect! Next to it the translation: delinquent young white men and women (不良白人少年少女）。Perfect!

    Beneath each picture was an explanation of their basic lifestyles in terms the Japanese can grasp easily: The teenagers aren’t in school or work; the second generation migrants aren’t going to school; the Chav’s are not in regular or stable employment. The panel had to guess each of these categories before the expert revealed them.

    So there you have it, a canned description of the state of English society for those of you who live somewhere civilized. Given the events of the last 24 hours I’m not sure if you could characterize second-generation migrants as a big part of the riots (unless being killed by rioters in a hit-and run accident counts), and I’m not sure if “delinquent” is the best description of a Chav (or the best translation of 不良 in this instance; “inferior” or “defective” also applies, haha). But I think we see here the essence of the problem. Get an education and a job, you arseholes.

    Update: I found a screenshot of the picture of Chavs on Reddit…

  • Current Viewing: Super 8

    It’s ET for the noughties! This movie, by JJ Abrams (who apparently made Lost), reproduces many of the major themes of that classic alien encounter movie. It has the energetic and investigative children, the military moving in to cover up the situation, parents who don’t quite get it, and bicycles everywhere. It’s even set very close in time, though one gets the feeling that Super 8 is actually a kind of follow-up to an alternate universe where the military gets its way.

    In this movie, a group of pesky kids are filming a movie for an amateur directors’ competition when they witness a massive (and excellent!) train crash. Aware that something is terribly wrong in the aftermath, they flee as the military swoops in to start securing the site. In the ensuing days people start going missing, bizarre things start happening, and the pesky kids start to realize that something very unreal and disturbing is happening. The movie follows the various shenanigans as, being just children, they slip under the military’s gaze and begin investigating the disappearances. Their investigations and the military’s activity lead to a tense climax, resolved through the kids’ innocence and basic good sense.

    The movie is darker than the original ET and more adult, but retains many of the same themes of friendship and discovery. It’s tightly scripted and the plot is tense and engaging, and the child actors are excellent. There seemed to be a few flaws in the ending and the resolution which were slightly less than satisfying, but I didn’t care because it had all moved so smoothly up to the finale and we all know roughly what was meant to happen, even if it didn’t quite seem as clear and coherent as it should – in situations like this, with a good movie that held your attention and kept you engaged in the characters, you can overlook quite a few flaws near the end.

    If you enjoyed ET as a kid and are interested in a more adult, more modern reimagining of the same ideas, infused with a slightly darker and more paranoid cultural background, then this movie will suit you very well. It’s tense, exciting, well acted and well scripted, with good special effects that are used very carefully to avoid overkill. Well worth seeing at the cinema, and a good addition to the alien encounter genre.

  • Jedi, Stats and Me

    The Australian census is due soon. In 2001, 0.37% of the population wrote “Jedi” as their religion. Will Yoda triumph this time around?

  • Current Viewing: Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides

    I really like the Pirates franchise: it’s got pirates (sometimes undead), swashbuckling, ships ‘o the line, monsters, magic, necromancy and demonology, back-stabbing, swindling and mincing ponces getting out of trouble by the skin of their teeth. It also has Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush playing parts they seem to really love, which is a joy to watch. This one has the addition of Dan McShane from Deadwood as Blackbeard, and a host of evil mermaids. It’s also dialled back on the double-crossing and plot twists from part 3, which is good – colour me old-fashioned, but I like my action movies to be sparing on plot and heavy with good dialogue and action. On Stranger Tides delivers this with its old passion, giving us a healthy run of piratical interchanges, some entertaining fight scenes, some excellent swash-buckling escapes, and the usual sinister context of black magic and evil.

    The basic outline of the plot is very simple: the Spanish, the British and Blackbeard the Pirate are all making an attempt to get to the Fountain of Eternal Youth, and Captain Jack Sparrow has been caught up in it all, along with Barbossa. Everyone has their own very distinct agenda and purpose for the fountain, which we aren’t going to discover until the final confrontation; all the way through we’re kept guessing at people’s motivations, without the thankless task of trying to keep track of the threads of all their betrayals and swindles. To get what they want from the Fountain they need to get some components for a ritual, so the middle part of the movie is all about the contest for the parts, a contest that is at times more than a little deadly and at other times surpassing cruel; the last quarter or so is where all the disparate plots come together and we find out what everyone’s really up to. It’s about 2 hours long but with a better pace than parts 2 or 3; you get a few breathers in the middle, which I think helps to contribute to the sense of a less needlessly complex plot.

    We don’t learn much more about Sparrow (though we get some tales from his past); we do get to find out a lot more about Barbossa, a character I really like, and we get to see a very nice vision of the Fountain of Youth. We also get a nice helping of new magic, mainly that under Barbossa’s command, and get to enjoy Sparrow in a new setting (London, as far as I could tell). Overall it’s a nice addition to the series, and makes me think there’s life in this old seadog yet. I reckon it’s good for another one or two instalments before it dies in the arse; I recommend checking in on this one because, in my opinion, it’s a slight improvement on the previous two, and it is fun in and of itself.

    And I wonder – would it make a fine role-playing setting? I think it would!

  • A Post-colonial Reading of Tolkien

    The Guardian has a very cute article about reading Lord of the Rings in Lagos, at age 13, by Claire Armistead. Trapped for 6 months in the sweltering Nigerian capital, her mother set her the book to read to keep her out of trouble, and she has since always associated Tolkien’s world with the mangrove swamps and rivers of Africa. She describes imagining Ents as Baobab trees and Nazgul as vultures, and sees spies of Sauron in the crabs in the mangrove swamps. It’s a testimony to the power of personal experience to shape the way we imagine someone else’s worlds, and also shows how important context (cultural and physical!) is to interpreting any text.

    And, of course, it’s a strong testament to the power of Tolkien’s world-building, that it holds its magic even in the minds of children reading it in a completely different place and time.

  • I’m 100% Behind this Litigation Claim

    Because one day, I aim to sue for injuries incurred having sex at work as well!

  • Propaganda, and Labelling Terrorists “insane”

    With typical alacrity, the islamophobic right have moved from claiming the Norwegian terrorist was a muslim, to claiming it was a “false flag” operation to claiming he is just a lone madman. The reasons they have to do this are obvious – labeling him a terrorist places him in a political context, and the political context in this case is scum like this, who have been peddling exterminationist anti-muslim, anti-“marxist” propaganda with increasing stridency in the past few years.

    Recently on this blog I’ve been examining the role of propaganda in driving Allied and Japanese atrocities in world war 2, based on my reading of the book War Without Mercy. The “lone madman” excuse is relevant to this, because a lot of the people making this claim are doing so purely on the fruits of Bleivik’s work – that is, anyone who would kill 70 unarmed people must be a madman – and I don’t think history tells us this is a valid logical approach. The right-wing shockjocks and anti-“cultural marxists” are unable to point to his writings as proof of his insanity, since they are basically a quite lucid reproduction of the works of Pam Geller, early Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, Glenn Beck, Andrew Bolt and Melanie Phillips. So instead they point to his actions as evidence of his insanity (just as they also point to his actions as evidence he can’t be a christian).

    But the history of war – and even recent wars, in Vietnam and World War 2 – show us that you don’t have to be a madman to kill a lot of unarmed people. The atrocities depicted in War Without Mercy were carried out by otherwise quite ordinary people who returned comfortably and without difficulty to ordinary lives after the war. Machine-gunning lifeboats, murdering unarmed sailors floating in the water, shooting significant numbers of prisoners in cold-blood, calibrating your flamethrowers so it takes the enemy a while to die, cutting out their fillings while they’re still alive, making them dance to your shooting before you finally tire of the game and kill them, throwing them from planes, or forcing them to fight after they try to surrender – all in a day’s work for some ordinary Allied soldiers in the Pacific War. So are we to conclude that these ordinary soldiers were also mad? We can’t conclude they were driven mad by war, since none of these things were done in significant numbers in Africa or Europe, even when the Allies were losing. Why should only Allies in the Pacific theatre be mad? Some selection process?

    No, the answer is that they weren’t mad, and they were doing what they believed was necessary. For another example of the same, consider the “order police” described in Richard Browning’s Ordinary Men. These soldiers, mostly too old to join the regular army, usually married and with children of their own, participated in large-scale extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe over a 2 year period during world war 2. They were offered at first the chance to avoid these duties, many of them had to get drunk to do it, and often they tried to get local collaborators (e.g. Tiwis) to do the worst of it. But many of them still did it, even though it sickened them. They were doing what they thought was necessary, and they thought it was necessary because the propaganda told them so. History provides us many many examples of people who did terrible things from a position of lucid sanity, and there is no reason to judge the Norwegian terrorist by any different standard.

    If he is mad, he will be judged so on DSM-IV criteria by a physician, not on the basis of this action. Similarly, if he is christian he should be judged so on his participation in christian rites and acceptance of Jesus, not on the basis that “no christian would kill 70 unarmed people.” And whether or not he was insane, the islamophobic right needs to accept that he picked his targets based on their propaganda. Whether he chose to kill 70 people because he was insane or because he thought it was a necessary first act in a war, the people he chose to kill were identified for him by the right-wing propagandists whose ludicrous paranoid rantings he was so obssessed with. He is a terrorist of the right, and the right needs to accept the crucial role their propaganda played in prepping him and identifying his targets.

  • New Monster: Kagura Dancing Maidens

    Whatever happens next won't be as pretty as they are

    On Friday night I attended the Kagurazaka Festival in Idabashi, Tokyo. In this famous festival, groups of performers dance their way around a course through the streets of a famous part of old Tokyo; the most significant part occurs on the famous “Kagura Slope” to a backdrop of drumming and Japanese pipes. The procession alternates between groups of men carrying lanterns, and groups of women in the outfits shown above, whose dance primarily consists of movement of their hands and a strange, shuffling walk on the tips of their geta shoes – an extraordinarily difficult dance to maintain for two hours, especially given the oppressive heat of this season. The crowd of onlookers is drunk down to the last tottering young lady, and the dancers are carnivalesque, leaping on members of the crowd in a group or giving lewd and suggestive movements to admirers in the crowd. At times the women draw up into a phalanx such as the one pictured, and the men dance around them; or the women themselves suddenly surge forward to wave their hands at the crowd. The rhythm and style of the dance can be viewed here, and some interesting pictures here. As ever with Japanese drumming, the full force of the drums are not captured in amateur film. A slightly more professional depiction of the same dance from the seventies can be viewed at the 10’05” mark of the movie Sans Soleil, which is viewable here. Notice how in the first video the dancing girls bunch together into a tight phalanx of kimono, pointed hats and arcane hand movements.

    Seeing this, I asked my friend Sergeant M (who used to role-play with me) how he thought a group of my players would react if, in the midst of a battle-scene, the serried ranks of their enemies parted to reveal a group of these women, moving slowly forward on their tip toes, arms moving in strange patterns, seemingly completely unarmoured or unprotected in any way, perhaps followed by a group of drummers, whose rhythms had preceded the girls onto the battlefield. Packed into a tight phalanx, staring at the characters and apparently in the midst of some powerful invocation, what exactly would my players think? The sergeant broadly agreed with me that, given the general lack of trust that my players have for me as a GM, their general expectation that nasty and infernal things are going to happen, and the ongoing fear my players usually have that more is going on than quite meets the eye, they would greet the arrival of a phalanx of dancing girls like this with extreme trepidation.

    From this I imagined this monster, consisting of a group of these fiendish young ladies, their magical power enhanced by the tight group membership, the mysterious combination of hand movements, the ritual garments and the music. Perhaps sometimes they are led by a wild-eyed man in festival clothes, carrying a pole-arm decorated with a lantern, and followed by a small band of musicians. They fight exclusively with magic, but so tightly coordinated and close-knit is their unit that killing any one of them makes no difference to their morale or powers. To win a battle against the Kagura Dancing Maidens, you need to kill all of them before they can complete their invocation. Of course, with dancing lantern-man fighters surrounding them, and a shield of protection drawn by their musicians and their own magical powers, killing even one of them is not easy. And woe betide the hapless group of adventurers who experience the full brunt of their completed invocation … or the army that faces a full dance troupe adequately protected.

    Perhaps also they have powers of magical fascination, their weaker-willed opponents brought to a halt by the sight of those strange, dancing hands; maybe they are accompanied by the spirits of the forest and the servants of the gods they serve; and perhaps they are equipped with a range of powerful protective items (the straw hats, the pouches hanging from their obi, the obi itself…) The beleaguered adventuring group needs to find their weakness and exploit it ruthlessly – perhaps they are vulnerable to a particularly charming man, or wither in intense heat, or cannot run faster than their strange tip-toed walk allows them; maybe their entire power depends on the drummers who follow them. Or maybe they are just a very powerful, arcane opponent, that only the most powerful of adventurers can defeat…

    The last dance

    The mystery of the ritual and the massed women gives this opponent lots of power to unsettle players and confuse them, particularly the first time they encounter it. Played well in the right setting, I think it could provide a disturbing and exciting encounter.

  • Retro Hobbies: Subbuteo

    In amongst the horror and carnage and corruption that is modern Western Europe, the Guardian has a quaint report on the table soccer game of Subbuteo, which apparently is still going strong and has its own fanatical retro-games following. The world final concludes tonight in Palermo, Sicily, and the report includes reminiscences on the popularity of the game in the 80s and early 90s. Just like D&D, its popularity was driven by its huge popularity amongst primary-school boys. I remember playing in a league at my school (and not coming in the bottom), and arguments with friends at home – I hadn’t thought of this for years, until I read this report.

    Note also the photo of the humble abode of a 70s football club manager. You wouldn’t see anything like that now!