Author: Ross

You’ve always got to be careful writing a blog post with the words ‘fantasy’ and ‘women’ in the title lest you melt the server with the wrong sort of web traffic. What got me thinking about this was the current barrage of fanboy vitriol about the new Captain Marvel film.

To recap, Brie Larson plays Captain Marvel, the superhero hinted at in the conclusion of Infinity War last year on a 90’s style pager. In the comics Captain Marvel (in the non-Shazam Marvel iteration) has undergone a number of changes over the years. He started as a male hero called Mar-Vell who was an alien superhero from the Kree world who links with Rick Jones of Hulk/ Captain America fame so that Rick ‘summons’ Captain Marvel when he knocks his wristlets together. Captain Marvel became a popular character fighting against Thanos, and ultimately died of cancer in the comics. That fina storyline was an especially poignant and mature story that resonated with fans. After that Captain Marvel had a new incarnation as a superhero in the Avengers, an African-american female cop called Monica Rambeau. After her we had another three or four versions of Captain Marvel (one a child of Mar-Vel) until Carol Danvers took on the name as a change from her pre-existing identity as Miss Marvel. Danvers had been in the comics since the 60s, and gained her powers merging DNA with Captain Marvel in an explosion, and emerged in the late 70s as a hero, lost her powers to Rogue from the X-men, and then regained them to join the Avengers. So a well-established character, and not exactly one that’s been gender-switched as part of some illuminati plot to de-masculinise the Marvel male fan-base.

So with the first Marvel film to have a female lead you’d expect the wide Marvel/ comics fan-base to embrace this seminal moment after a decade of films with muscle-men focal characters. Ummm, not exactly. A core of ‘fans’ clearly felt that the idea Captain Marvel might be pulling Thor/Hulk/Cap/Iron Man’s butts out of the Thanos fire didn’t seem to appeal. I’d imagine it was the same group that grumbled about Black Panther being too political about racial issues…

So naturally when Brie Larson (who, after all is an Oscar winning actress who gained her accolade in a film about a rape-victim locked in a shed) stoked the dissatisfaction by making a comment about the lack of diversity amongst film critics, both in terms of race and gender: ‘Am I saying that I hate white dudes? No, I’m not. What I am saying is if you make a movie that is a love letter to a woman of color, there is an insanely low chance that a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie and review your movie.” She references the Annenburg study which analysed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and found 76% were written by males, and 82% by white critics. That a female actress known for her advocacy work should make the comments isn’t really surprising but it clearly got social media fired up, and the whole thing erupted into some quite vile rhetoric. Negative ‘reviews’ had been posted before the film was actually released.

Oddly it brought to mind the vitriol that was created when the latest Star Wars trilogy dated to have a female lead in the form of Rey. Now the Star Wars fan-base is famous for having extremely passionate fans who lament anything that falls short of the original trilogy, and I’d agree the Last Jedi didn’t really hit the spot, but back when Force Awakens casting was announced the grumbles about both Rey and Finn grew beyond any form of objectivity and descended into straight up offensive rants on social media and blog posts. This repeated concept that the world has been hijacked by social justice warriors and females is perpetuated both in the media and in the surreal world of politics, presenting the average white male as some kind of bullied and endangered species.

(And don’t even get me started about the response to a FEMALE Dr Who….)

As a fantasy reader (and writer) I’ve been interested to look at whether fantasy fiction falls foul of the same prejudices that are plaguing films. Fantasy literature evolved through the last century from the pulp fantasy fiction of Robert E Howard, and Fritz Lieber, the epic fantasy of Tolkien and Terry Brooks, and the darker work of Moorcock. The stereotype fantasy hero of a muscle bound warrior with a chainmail-bikini wearing female hanging off his pectorals was perpetuated by artwork of the period (classic Boris Vallejo).

Ove the last twenty years the stereotypes in fantasy have been eroded. In anticipation of the TV series being released I’ve finally commenced on reading the Wheel of Time series, and whereas the trio of Rand, Mat, and Perrin are the focal characters (at least initially) the female cast command equal dominance, not least due to the focus of magical power being amongst women (Nynaeve, Egwene, Moiraine, and Elayne). Jordan’s characterisation of them is enjoyable and well-rounded, if at times he falls down in their joint desires for the troubled Rand.

Arguably the most influential series of the last twenty years is George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, filmed for TV as the phenomenally successful Game of Thrones. Martin’s evident affection for his female characters in the books is greatly developed by the HBO writers of Game of Thrones. In fact the surviving male characters are often portrayed as both flawed and foolish, such as Jon Snow or Tyrion Lannister. In contrast the dominant characters now are Daenarys, Sansa, Arya, and Cersei, and all are excellently written and superbly acted. It’s encouraging when you realise the influence GOT is likely to have on commissioned fantasy pieces for the TV, which with the boom in Amazon Prime and Netflix is truly the future of the fantasy adaptation.

When Robert Jordan predeceased the conclusion of his epic series, the writer Brandon Sanderson took over the reins. Sanderson isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, some finding his style a bit light for the current vogue of dark fantasy, but I rate him highly. His first work Elantris was superb, and his Mistborn series is excellent. Sanderson writes female protagonists well: Sarene in Elantris, and Vin in Mistborn are realistic and strong female characters, and arguably the key characters in both works.

Of the other works that spring to mind, Robin Hobb is probably my favoured author for female characterisation in fantasy. Her works are superb, a succession of trilogies that advance a storyline about the return of dragons and their elderling servants to a troubled world. Her most famous books focus on the relationship between a royal bastard Fitz and the androgynous Fool, but her other works based around the use of living ships enjoy several strong key female characters (Althea in Liveship Traders, and Thymara and Alise in The Rainwild Chronicles). Perhaps unsurprisingly Hobb writes them extremely well, making them fallible and flawed, yet ultimately strong women in the plots.

From my own work, I based my female characters on much of what I liked from Hobb, Martin, and Sanderson. Emelia, the key character of Darkness Rising, struggles with mental illness as a consequence of her Wild-magic, makes poor choices for good reasons, is passionate, heroic, rash, and volatile, yet ultimately wins the day. Orla the Knight of the Air, and Marthir the Druid bot start the series as strong dominant characters who go on journeys of self-discovery, again not always making sensible and altruistic decisions on the way. I felt that they reflect the evolution of fantasy fiction to provide realistic and interesting female characters as a counterpoint to the well-established male tropes in fantasy (loveable rogue, stoical warrior).

In fairness to Marvel and Star Wars their female lead characters haven’t always been met with resistance. Rogue One’s Jyn was a great lead character, but I suspect she was received well more from her presence in a fan favourite film—Rogue One is a real nod to the Star Wars fans, a grimy view of the Empire and the Star Wars mythos. Similarly Jessica Jones, in the Marvel-Netflix series, is a grittier heroine with a drink problem, arrogance, and demons aplenty. Despite the critical acclaim of the character and series the show has fallen by the wayside with the current plans for Disney’s streaming service leading to the end of all the (excellent) Netflix Marvel shows.

So my prediction for the next series with strong female lead? The adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and the awesome Lyra. It’s being done by the BBC this year, and I’m hoping for an improvement on the Golden Compass film (which I enjoyed, but didn’t really capture the books’ magic).
And I’m hoping with Star Wars 9 on the horizon, and Marvel’s Phase 4 to feature Black Widow’s solo outing, that the respective fan-bases can take a leaf from DC (and the great response to Wonder Woman) and fantasy fiction and embrace great, well-written female leads.

The latest iteration of Spiderman arrives next week and judging by the multitude of teaser trailers and quirky vignettes for sporting events it’s going to combine all the things that have made Marvel films such as success (namely humour, straightforward plots, fun characterisation, and solid action scenes).

Yet there’s a little irritation inside me that once again, we have a re-boot of the Spiderman films. Now this time there’s a commercial reason: after all Spidey was previously out-with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and then popped up in Captain America 3: Civil War in an Incredible appearance on Iron Man’s team. Yet, for me as a 45 year old comics veteran, this is my fourth Spiderman re-boot. I started in the late 1970s with Nicholas Hammond’s Spiderman, which ran as a TV series with three feature length episodes also getting a cinema release. Then, after far too long a wait, we had the three Sam Raimee films with Toby Maguire (and a great set of villains). This, along with the X-men franchise, really paved the way for Marvel’s success with their MCU (Iron Man, Cap, Thor, and the Avenger films and spin-offs). Sony tried to get back into the game after the Spiderman trilogy had wrapped up, opting to ‘re-boot’ rather than continue onwards.

This re-boot had some great features. It took Peter Parker back to being a high-school kid, agreeably a far cooler one than my memory of him in the original Ditko comics. For two films, with the Lizard, Electro, and the Rhino (briefly) as villains we had a younger fun Spiderman, yet still one that existed outside the MCU franchise. I think these films, despite having used Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Sandman, and Venom in the prior trilogy, had great potential and I was sad to see Andrew Garside’s version disappear.

Now in the latest version we have Peter quite distinctly a kid, clearly a bit of a muppet, with the influence of the egotistical Tony Stark somewhere in the plot. I like the idea of him being a kid, and I also like the idea we don’t seem to be heading for a heavy origin story at present—in the sense that he already exists, has made an appearance, and at most we’ll have a flashback story rather than having to endure the same tale for the ?4th time.

So what am I grizzling about? To anyone under 15 the Maguire Spiderman films will be ancient history, and the re-boot would at least allow a fresh version of Doctor Octopus and Green Goblin (although they would be difficult actors to top for a new bie, Heath Ledger managed to improve upon Nicholson’s Joker). It’s the idea of having to re-boot continually. It’s pervasive in films and comics and TV now. You get a sense that there is no original ideas, that the only way to write a fresh tale is to take something that was established, with characters that are recognisable, and ‘put a new spin on it.’ It gets frustrating.

Take Batman. I’m not a huge DC fan, but I enjoyed Batman when Tim Burton did it, and indeed (after taking Prozac) when the Dark Knight films came along with Christian Bale. Yet now we have Ben Affleck (who I really like) as another Batman, agreeably as part of other films. Gah! And how many times have they tried to re-kindle our waning interest in Superman? At least Wonder Woman feels fresh, having only had a TV series under her golden lasso.

Sometimes the re-boot masquerades as ‘re-imagining’: this riles me up even more! It’s like the film equivalent of a crap cover version. Westworld, The Omen, Psycho, Footloose, Fame, Alfie, Get Carter, Magnificent Seven, Annie, Amytyville Horror, Carrie, The Mummy, Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, Ghostbusters. Some good-ish, some not so good-ish ( I leave that to your discretion).

In the pipeline we have new versions of American Werewolf, Death Wish Big Trouble in Little China, The Birds, Blue Thunder, , Don’t Look Now, Escape from New York, Dune, Jumanji, , Jacob’s Ladder, Black Hole, Splash, Flatliners Bill and Ted… the list is huge, and in some cases you cringe that a perfectly good film of its time is subject to a re-do that can’t be any better than the original. Disney’s current trick of live action versions of classic cartoons is a strange entity—not quite a re-boot, a re-make, or a re-do, but often something quite different and special (Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella spring to mind).

It can be done cleverly. Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens is, to all intents and purposes, Star Wars: A New Hope. Droids escape with secret plans; desert living teenager turns out to be Jedi material; big scary weapon in hands of dude with mask; mentor-type pops his clogs and gives inspiration. Yet the delivery felt as if a new story was being developed, and with enough references to old characters who had all aged. It ticked the box for me.

The re-boot in superhero films, which is where we commenced, isn’t entirely unprecedented. In particular DC comics flush out their backstory with an literary enema every so often. Given that some characters have had eighty years of stories, one can easily see how the continuity becomes a real nightmare. The DC Universe evolved from the late 1930s through to 1960s in a so-called Golden Era, where cross-overs occurred, team mags developed, and several versions of the same hero were written (such as Hawkman, Green lantern, and the Flash). It became hard to rationalise how Batman was seemingly younger in the early 1960s than in the 1940s, and that the character was quite different (i.e. he didn’t carry a gun!). So in the 1960s, in the Flash, the idea of parallel universes was developed. Here we had a Golden Age Flash (with winged Hermes hat) meeting Silver Age Flash. This alternate world concept was used generously over the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with an Earth-one, Earth-two, etc, etc way of labelling. Yet that simply got even more confusing, a bit like an out of control time travel story, and in 1985 DC tried to re-boot it all by having a cross-over series called Crisis. This had promise, but subsequent stories muddied the continuity, and indeed limitations of this approach, and now each decade DC has a re-boot (Infinite Crisis; Flashpoint; the New 52; Rebirth).

Oddly it was an idea that seemed to inspire the re-boot of the X-men franchise actually in series. I gave up trying to make sense of the X-men film continuity long ago. What happens in X-men 3, then Wolverine: Origins, then X-men Origins: First Class, then The Wolverine, is so higgledy piggledy that the only option left to the writers was to blitz it all with a good old time travel/ alternate reality instalment in Days of Future Past (which I must say I thought was superb); pulling together the characters from X-men 1-3 with the First Class. Unfortunately the indications are that the character Jean Grey in X-men: Apocalypse will go onto become Dark Phoenix, if the title of the 2018 movie is anything to go by… thus rehashing X-men 3…!

Perhaps what irritates most about re-boots and re-makes is that in many cases there was nothing wrong with the original that a revised version can improve upon. A lot of the films scheduled for a re-make are ones that hold a special place in our heart: I think especially of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, American Werewolf, and the Birds from that list above. In a nostalgic way we attach fond memories of ourselves and our lives to the era in which we saw the film, often repeatedly, and like a cover version done poorly begrudge the trampling of our past. And I do wonder whether the generation before me felt the same way when films such as 1984, Cape Fear, The Champ, The Good Thief, Miracle on 34th Street, and Scarface were released—all films I enjoyed in my youth, yet all re-makes (if not re-boots). And let’s not forget Hitchcock re-made his own film, the Man who Knew too Much… and when asked said ‘Let’s say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.’

It’s one of those givens for ‘bright new thing’ bands that after stunning debut albums, the second album never quite lives up to expectations. I’m sure everyone will throw out their exceptions, but for me The Killers, The Stone Roses, The Enemy, Mumford and Sons, and the Fratellis I can recall the deflation at listening to the eagerly anticipated second releases.

And films can often suffer the same issues, especially when not being planned as a series. Although loved by hard-core fans, I struggled to love Back to the Future 2 after worshiping the first; Hannibal was a poor shadow of Silence of the Lambs; Matrix Reloaded was best left without loading, and sometimes the third and beyond disappoint (Phantom Menace, Batman and Robin, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull thingy).

As a fledgling author, I can feel the pain of sequels. The first offering, especially in music, is often a synthesis of years on the road, eliminating crap songs, finding what works and what doesn’t, and the evolution of a fresh voice, a fresh way of displaying your art. We go through a similar process ourselves as writers, albeit on a more individual scale. We begin with scribbling, brainstorming narratives and styles, taking critique and refining. Some of us write short stories, dabble in genres, until we find one that suits our written ‘voice.’ And then, for some of us, that’s enough to write something more ambitious—a novella, or a novel.

I cut my teeth on fantasy fiction, first of all writing a piece based on Role-Playing Games for friends, then short stories for an on-line fanzine. The latter was critiqued by other authors, sometimes unfairly, but usually constructively, until it passed the ‘publishing’ test. Finally I worked up the bravery to write a fantasy novel, which evolve into a six book series (from a planned long single volume, similar to Stephen’s Epic Fantasy with Dragons).
In the midst of the six book Darkness Rising series, my kids nagged me into writing something lighter and more sci-fi based. Being fervent Dr Who fans (the term Whovian still rankles a little for me), I put a lot of alternate reality, televisual action into it and the kids loved it. It took a few rewrites and jiggles, but end-product—the Infinity Bridge—is probably by favourite single thing I’ve written. Naturally, the kids want more. And, indeed, having put the book up on Wattpad (the international Empire of Shaun Allen, as it shall be forever known ** proud colleague moment**) and reviewed on Goodreads, it seems there are readers not just loyal to me because I control their allowance who want to read some more of the ‘Nu Knights.’
And there the difficulty began. Although I’d written Infinity Bridge as having the potential for a series, the book is still fairly standalone. The events that occur in it, and how would they pan out in the course of time, were never fully fleshed out for a whole ongoing series. Not long after I published it, I had some great ideas for plots, and especially sub-plots of where I could take the characters, and began furiously typing these down. And as they hit the virtual page more ideas arrived, and evolved, and story arcs, and set-ups for books 3 and 4, and…

Boom. It’s written, and it all ties together in my brain, and I think ‘hot diggety, it’s ready to go.’ And then my steampunk mentor reads it, and says… ohhh—kayyyy, see what you’re doing here, but it’s like you’ve tried to do a dinner party for ten, including a vegan and someone who’s gluten intolerant, and served starters, main and dessert on one huge plate. That’s my analogy by the way, hers are far more exquisite. Too many ideas, too many characters, in too confusing a plot.

Now I’m embarrassed to say, that beyond a few paragraphs, and extra material to flesh a sub-plot out, I’ve never actually rewritten any of my work. As in never done first draft, second draft/ revision etc. Largely this was because I kind of actually just wrote as a hobby, mainly not really caring who read it, and with no expectation or precedent. Also, in a rather childish way, I get the buzz from that initial flurry of plotting, evolving the narrative and plot as I go along. It worked for Ian Fleming, why not me? So to tackle this rough diamond I have created, and refine and polish it until it’s worth putting on display is new territory for me. And I’m simply not sure how to do it—but then, when I evolved from short stories to novels I wasn’t either, and learned the best way—by others experience and mistakes, and by becoming part of a collective of like-minded motivated (and, honestly, more talented) writers.

Stephen King’s advice to new writers was to first and foremost be a reader—to digest everything on offer, in as many genres and styles as you can. In doing that you become acutely aware that some mainstream authors, usually riding on their success, have fallen into the trap of not refining their diamonds. I read some books and want to get a red pen and slash through the padding and indulgence that even top authors (and I’m thinking of George RR Martin especially here) put in their weighty tomes. And I hope it’s a sign of my progress of a writer that it’s time to do so to myself.
Nu Knights 2: The Spectral Assassin will be out this year.