This is really great. You know those things in science museums that are like a wide, deep bowl with a hole in the middle, and you drop in a marble and it goes round and round the upper bowl showing both the science of inertia and gravity and gravity always ultimately wins? The gravity is psychological realism. Fantasy isn't given any special pleading against this gravity just because it's genre. Every story has to have an understandable psychology. This is why my daughter who was young at the time was so freaked out when the Joker in Dark Knight burns the giant pile of money. To have episode 1 show a Disney dragon ride with Jon and Dany and 4 weeks later she's firebombing Dresden isn't so much subversion as bullshit and everyone is rightly calling them on it. They used to be good at it. The murder of Robb Stark and his bride and mother and the Viper/Mountain head squashing were earned subversions of genre set pieces. Anyhow... your post is great.
Psychology? I dunno. My memory of the actual lines she spoke was that they were usually pretty fucked up - we just forgave that because the end seemed to justify the means at the time. Having the main obstacles to her army-gathering be slavers worked as camouflage, a bit like how having the main obstacle to Walt’s retiring with his already-earned drug money be Gus did. But her magical protagonist *presentation* amounted to a kind of psychology: she was young, pretty, victimized, brave enough to overcome her victimization, hated the right people, loved the right guy, was subjected to undeserved betrayals, escaped danger after danger etc. None of those qualities prevent one from mass murdering folks
( ... )
Comments 5
Reply
Reply
Nobody could track that arc because it wasn’t made in good faith. Abandoning her POV on a POV show was unfair and obvious and dumb.
Reply
Off topic - have you seen the Westworld trailer yet?
Reply
Leave a comment