Fun Character Concepts #1: 10K from Z Nation

These are going to be short examinations of character concepts I enjoy. This list won’t ever be finished nor will it have some kind of ranking. I also don’t pretend to be the first one to describe these concepts nor can I guarantee that they will be free of well-known tropes. This is just for fun.

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I’ve seen him referred to as “apocalypse puppy”. This term already suggests the deeply paradoxical nature of his character: on the one hand something young and sweet and innocent and on the other hand something gruesome and brutal and decidedly not innocent. This dichotomy is what makes him as a character interesting and appealing. 

But who am I talking about exactly?

This is 10K. When we are first introduced to him, we don’t even see him as he snipes a zombie about to eat one of the others. The first time we really see him, he’s walking down the road and answers a “do you need a ride?” with a shrug. He’s noticeably young (and going back to season 1 after watching season 2 and some things from season 3, it’s especially striking how young he looks) and dressed in urban military gear complete with a sniper rifle and more weapons (more weapons than he should reasonably be able to carry as we’d see a few episodes later). He doesn’t talk much and when he does, it’s to remind the audience of how young he is and how sheltered he lived before the apocalypse (“never seen porn”). He has very limited social skills, mostly because he spent at least a year all on his own, but he has all the other skills that might be helpful in an apocalypse. As the son of a hardcore survivalist, he knows how to hunt and fish and is an expert in killing zombies, not only as a world class sniper but also with a slingshot or whatever’s at hand. The name he gives the group, and us, is ’10 000’, the amount of zombies he wants to kill and when we first hear the number, he’s already at over 1 000 (his given name, as we find out later, is Tommy, making the clash already obvious in his names).

So, in a fight he’s absolutely lethal. The one with the undisputed highest kill count (which doesn’t only include zombies, but also living people). He’s ridiculously competent in anything pertaining survival. And he’s super awkward in any and all prolonged social interactions. When forced into those, his face and body language convey discomfort or confusion. The way he deals with emotion is distinctly child-like.

All of this creates a compelling dissonance.

Furthermore, the concept presented here differs from these related ones, which I will call ‘apocalypse child’ and ‘murder puppy’. An ‘apocalypse child’ (like for example Carl from The Walking Dead) is forced to grow up quickly due to the less than ideal circumstances (mostly, however, surrounded by people that care about them). They are typically serious and emotionally distant. Only very rarely do they show signs of still being a child at all. The ‘murder puppy’ in contrast is overly emotional, mostly in a childishly enthusiastic way. They might kill without remorse (or even with joy) and smile brightly at their friends immediately after. These characters often seem unsettling due to the mixture of childishness and murder-happiness.

10K is neither. While he is more serious, he still retains some of his childish innocence (at least in season 1 and 2) despite being older than your average ‘apocalypse child’. And while he likes guns and revels in zombie kills it never reaches ‘murder puppy’ heights.

In season 2, another character says about him “he’s a child with a gun” and while it is meant as an insult, it’s technically right.

Introducing Hopepunk! - "There is good in this world and it's worth fighting for"

In different genres of media there is this prevalence of things being extremely dark. Life is hard and unfair and it turns you unfeeling and cynical. There are whole TV shows centered around the constant disillusionment with the world as a whole (Gotham, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad and House of Cards, just to name a few examples). To counter that phenomenon, popularly called "grimdark", a tumblr post proposed what they called "hopepunk". It's not about turning a blind eye to the world's problems, but about seeing and recognizing the problems and instead of reacting with tired acceptance and cynicism, reacting with activism and kindness.

This aforementioned tumblr post gave the following excerpt as sort of the definition of what hopepunk is about:


The world may be dark and it may seem hopeless, but we cannot give up. We will not allow this grim and cruel reality to steal our kindness and our softness and to turn us hard and uncaring. On the contrary, we will be even kinder, even more caring, we will fight back. We will not give up hope and we will not give up ourselves, because we believe that there is something worth saving, something good and salvageable. We trust that one day in the future, maybe not soon, maybe not even in our lifetimes, but one day in the future our fight will bear fruit.
This is the essence of hopepunk (the post elaborates on it a bit more and very eloquently).

The post also talks about real world examples of hopepunk, but I want to focus on media examples, because I sometimes have the feeling that a lot of shows, movies, etc. seem to show us that cynicism is inevitable and that softness equals weakness and hopepunk is the opposite of that.

Wonder Woman is what comes to my mind almost immediately. It is arguably about Diana's disillusionment with humanity. In the beginning she believes humans to be wholly good and innocent and puts all the blame on Ares. Then she learns that humans are deeply flawed and that killing Ares won't end the war and return the world to peace and for a few moments she is close to giving up. But what is really important about this movie, is her reaction to the disillusionment. Instead of being cynical and turning away from humanity, she continues to fight for it, because she has seen with her own eyes the potential and the good that there is in humans despite their flaws. She continues to be hopeful and kind despite what Ares wanted to make of her.

The world of Mad Max: Fury Road is post-apocalyptic and undeniably terrible. And yet the plot starts (the actual plot, not the Max part of it) because a beaten and broken woman cared more than anyone could have expected of her. Imperator Furiosa who has suffered at the hands of the cruel ruler does not continue on his legacy of cruelty. Instead she decides to risk everything to try and safe his slave brides and take them to a green and safe space. And then when the green space turns out to be long gone, a desert in its place, they turn around to topple the tyrant, because there is hope. Despite all there is hope. An old woman takes seeds with her, not because she expects to be there to see them grow, but because she believes someone will and that's all that matters.

Hopepunk is also a strong theme in the original Star Wars movies (and Rogue One, too). Hell, episode 4 is called "A New Hope". The galaxy is under facist rule, but there are people not willing to take it. They face almost insurmountable odds and in their struggle they often lose. Hope is sometimes all they have. When an imprisoned Leia sends a message with R2D2, when the rebels fly to destroy the Deathstar, when Luke tries to save his friends and so on. Characters routinely choose love over duty and in the end Luke only manages to defeat Emperor Palpatine because he still believed in the good in his father despite all evidence to the contray. All the main characters in Rogue One die, but the movie frames their stories not as failures but as successes, because while they personally might have died, their sacrifice was worth it, because it brought hope.

There are almost certainly some more examples. These are just the ones I came up with right now. Hopepunk stories are some of my favorites because they carry an optimism I often find myself lacking. That makes them so important for me. Related to that, characters that embrace the hopepunk attitude are also some of my favorite characters.

Over and out

P.S. There are some quotes I associate with hopepunk:
"Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage not weakness." - Katherine Henson 
"Be soft, don't let the world make you hard./ Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place." - Iain S. Thomas
"All this pain and loneliness and misery and it just made him kind." - from Doctor Who, a show that, too, carries a lot of optimism 

Add-on: Related to this, is the symbolism of outfitting Captain America with a shield (to protect) and the Doctor with a screwdriver (to fix) instead of traditional weaponry.

Female Villain Archive 3: Amy Dunne

(Source: https://www.scoopwhoop.com/Rosamund-Pikes-Character-In-Gone-Girl-Was-So-Frighteningly-FuckedUp-It-Was-Brilliant/#.ejhuzy9t3)

Spoiler Warning for those who have neither read the book nor seen the movie, but still want to. 

If Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), from Gillian Flynn's novel Gone Girl and the movie with the same name, is actually a villain, is up for debate. She is, however, such an interesting and outstanding character that she more than deserves the mention. In her book Gillian Flynn plays with well established thriller tropes to create something different. The female murder victim of the abusive husband is not actually dead. Not only that, but she meticulously staged the whole murder as well the history of abuse. Even though both the novel and the movie start out with the husband's, Nick's, perspective, the audience questions his innocence as he begins to look more and more guilty. When it is revealed that Amy staged her kidnapping and invented most of the incriminating diary entries, the game changes. Amy morphs from 'the victim' to an 'angel of vengeance' who wants to punish Nick for his wrongdoings. As the audience uncovers more about her past it becomes clear that this isn't a new development, that she has been like this long before she ever met Nick. Amy had always punished wrongdoings of friends, lovers and even strangers with carefully planned extreme means. Amy rejects notions of femininity while outwardly conforming to them. She is an imperfect character that suffers under the pressure to be perfect always and forever. 

Give the people what the people want (Part 2)

Aka an examination of the escalation of violence in modern media exemplified by Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead - Part 2!

Warning: more extensive discussion of violence, including torture, sexual abuse and gore

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GoT had reached peak escalation by season 5. Season 4 already featured detailed and extensive torture scenes (torture in earlier seasons happened mainly off-screen if it happened at all). The focus of these scenes was to establish Ramsay Bolton as the new person to despise (worse – of course – than Joffrey ever had been) and to raise sympathy for the previously much disliked Theon Greyjoy. The audience wanted to see him punished – I wanted to see him punished, I freely admit. But not like this, the audience (and I) cried, not like this. Here, we are forced to reevaluate our own stance towards violence and I’m not saying that people who want to see a fictional character get punished would condone similar in the real world, because I assume that most of us have a healthy fiction/real world divide and are capable of distinguishing between the two. 

Therefore, you could technically argue that the torture scenes have their justification; that they’re shown not to simply satisfy a growing lust for blood and the shocking. And I’m sure that the writers do think about what types of violence they want to include and how and why (I’m willing to give them that much credit). It’s just that in some cases they seem to have thought not very hard about it (e.g. why did we need this scene of Jaimie practically raping Cersei by the body of their dead son?) and in others they might originally have had a valid reason for the violent scenes but still manage to go overboard.

In season 5 they burn a child alive and kill another. GoT has always broken the taboo of killing children (no one likes to see children die, it is generally too upsetting to show, even Criminal Minds will not show you the murder of a child). A main character (a young woman, barely a teenager), who has had to suffer for the past 3 seasons, gets raped and is now forced to be the wife of a sadist (who they established just last season to be very into torture and hurting people for funsies). Two people we were rooting for get imprisoned by religious fanatics (I’m also not here to talk about the horrific treatment of Loras as a gay character, although I really want to… maybe as an aside at the end). A woman we weren’t rooting for gets punished in such a way that make her actions a season later understandable. Cersei’s Walk of Shame in particular was very jarring for me. 

The violence here wasn’t as obvious as Theon’s torture had been, but still off-putting in a similar way. It was also very glaringly sexualized. A thing GoT loves to do. Violence against women in GoT is most often sexual and even when it isn’t, it’s still in most cases upsettingly sexualized. (And while the books aren’t quite as bad, one thing I bemoan about Feast for Crows is that every third page the reader is reminded that, yes, women are raped all the time.) Nearly no female character is exempt from it. Daenerys is a main victim of this, starting with her introduction scene, over to her ‘marriage’ and even later when she is a queen, men are constantly sexually threatening her. Sansa, too, is a major victim of multiple forms of sexual harassment and abuse. At the hands of Joffrey, Ramsay, Petyr Baelish and others. But even Arya – who is indisputably still a child – is threatened with sexual violence. You could fill a whole term paper with how GoT treats its female characters re: sexual violence, but for now I’ll leave it at that. To get back to my main point: while GoT had always been notoriously bad at subjecting every female character to sexual violence, that, too, got amped up in season 5 with Sansa and Cersei as most prominent victims respectively.

TWD combines boring stretches of time where next to nothing happens with intense – and intensely violent – episodes. The Governor was pretty bad, wasn’t he? Torture and murder and insanity were right up his alley. What could be worse? I got it! Cannibals. At the end of season 4 the group reunites at Terminus. A place that unsurprisingly is not the sanctuary they hoped it would be. Instead, they are imprisoned and set to be slaughtered and eaten. All of the Terminus sequences are chilling and gruesome, even though they are not the most explicitly violent scenes. The half-hearted attempt to give the cannibals a justification at the beginning of season 5 is just. odd. As a justification of the horribleness that was Terminus it just falls incredibly flat, both in-universe and narratively (I admit to not having read the TWD comics so maybe it works much better there, but it really doesn’t in the show).

Of course, we need things to be even worse. This “even worse” comes in the form of the ‘wolf gang’ (is that their name?), a group of people only vaguely recognizable as people, so completely deranged that even the show admits that they’re not worth saving, and later in the form of Negan and ‘the Saviors’. Both groups don’t even have survival as their main goal but hurting others as cruelly as possible. They’re mainly there to uphold the show’s ‘no one is safe’ premise and to provide a new form of violence that the rotting corpses cannot anymore. Our heroes, too, are now forced to be more violent than they have ever been before to save themselves. Consequently, what the show has come to is a more or less senseless escalation (there seems to be some plot again in season 7, so maybe I’m wrong about this assessment, but I’m so tired and won’t continue watching past season 6).

Another thing both shows have in common is the apparent justification they offer. That being: ‘Well the world our show is set in is just so horrible. All this violence is just realistic, you know.’ GoT’s medieval-fantasy-world-at-war setting and TWD’s post-apocalyptic zombie-ridden environment are both breeding grounds for violent human behavior, I don’t doubt it. However, I would counter it with: A) People can infer that something is horrible without being explicitly shown every few minutes. And B) This is still a world you’re making up. You are 100% in control of what happens. And both of these worlds are more or less fantasy worlds. Dragons and zombies both are impossible in the real world. Therefore, using ‘realism’ as a blanket explanation is a cop-out.  

The interesting thing is, that no matter how much people might enjoy the grittiness of both shows, it has become apparent that an escalation of violence alone does not make for good TV. As I already mentioned before, people have continuously expressed disappointment over TWD’s uneven pacing. And from what I gathered online most fans of GoT were unhappy with how season 5 had turned out. So, even though the audience still expects the accustomed level of violence, it would be a mistake to pretend like that alone is responsible for the shows’ fame. Sadly, this is what a lot of media creators seem to take away from TWD’s and GoT’s success. The formula seems to be: make it bloody, make it gritty, make it violent.  Amp. It. Up.

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Add-on: re: the horrible treatment of Loras as a gay man in season 5: I’m gonna keep this short since it digresses from my main argument. There’s much to say about the portrayal of gay characters in general (like how the GoT show needlessly perpetuates stereotypes), but because my topic here is violence I’ll just quickly talk about the religious fanatics. Yes, the religious fanatics exist in the books, too, but, no, they are not actively homophobic (the way I remember it, and correct me if I’m wrong, I haven’t picked up the books in a while). So, the writers of the show actively changed some of the things that happened in the books so that they would include violent homophobia. The hearing that ends with Loras and Margaery dragged off was awful to watch. And unnecessary since the book went a completely different route. The change suggests that, of course religious fanatics who preach about purity would be homophobic and it thus rehashes the old and awful claim that being gay is ‘impure’. 

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This is the promised part 2. I hope you liked it. If you want to discuss some of the things I mentioned or you found a mistake I made, come contact me.

Discussion points in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

You know, I really enjoyed this movie. It was very weird at times and definitely unconventional (but it's Guy Ritchie, so what else would you expect) and sure it was far from perfect (I could've done with more women in main roles for example and less dead women), but it also did a lot of things right (aka this is a fantasy movie, historical accuracy doesn't matter, so we're not only gonna have white people and no romance sub plot!) and there are things I'd like to talk about with someone, only no one wants to talk with me about it, so I'll just say everything I want to say right here.

A) I want to talk about how Arthur's upbringing changed who he is as a person. This Arthur didn't grow up as a noble in a castle. He grew up as an orphan in a brothel and on the streets. It shapes how he interacts with the world. This Arthur cares about himself and the people he considers his. He doesn't care about much beyond that. He beats up guys that mistreat the women and rats out a person seeking refuge in the brothel without a second thought. (I think btw that he would've taken the risk and sheltered Goosefat Bill if it hadn't put everyone he cared about in extreme danger.) This is an Arthur who hates and distrusts authority, who was raised by women, who learned to fight out of necessity and now enjoys the power it brings him. He doesn't want this destiny they try to bestow on him. And while the 'chosen ones' are often reluctant, he isn't just reluctant, he is stubbornly unwilling, ready to fight his way out of the rebellion and back home. Only when he finds out that there is no home to go back to and he has to fight and win or there will never be a home again, does he commit to the cause.

B) I want to talk about how Arthur would have trouble being king and interacting with the nobles. As I've said in the previous point. Arthur dislikes and distrusts authority and those in power. He didn't grow up a noble and I highly doubt that he sees himself as one even after becoming king. He's a king of the small folk, he is quite literally one of them. He wouldn't care about propriety, protocols and all the rules that make up nobility and a royal court. He wouldn't care about what is appropriate and how he should behave. And the nobles in turn wouldn't respect him, because he grew up in a brothel. The people might love him, but his rule is going to be a difficult one.

C) I want to talk about the mage and what drives her. Who is she? She is just called "the mage" so she really could be anyone. She is evidently powerful and has a connection with animals and the Darklands. It is unclear if she wants to rid the kingdom of its evil king or if her main goal lies in the destruction of the mage tower. She is competent and knows what she is doing and what she wants others to do, she doesn't even let Arthur get the upper hand. But we know much too little about her. To be fair, nearly none of the characters - except for Arthur himself - got any development to speak of. I would love to know more about her or in lieu of that to make up my very own headcanons.

That's it for now. When I watch it again, I'll probably come up with more.

3) Mad Max: Fury Road

(Quelle: https://loftcinema.org/film/mad-max-fury-road/)

A movie I exclusively watched because MRA’s were urging people not to. It’s an oddly feminist movie wrapped in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world. The aesthetics are stunning if truly disgusting at times. The action is incredible and there are many wonderful practical effects. The story might not be incredibly complex, but it’s engaging nonetheless and has some important messages. ‘We are not things!’ ‘Who killed the world?’ To save the slave brides of a horrific dictator and find hope a badass woman risks everything and in the end brings upon a new age. Oh yeah and somewhere there’s Max.