Month: January 2016

Nervously, the cherubic little girl inched her way through the darkness of the old house on the hill. Somewhere along the way, she had become separated from the others trapped with her: the old professor, the little boy, the jock, and the bookworm co-ed.  She’d pulled a dusty spirit board out of the cobwebs, though not without something unseen and vicious trying to bite her. Where was everyone?

Then there was a call of triumph from the distance. The bookworm had uncovered one of the two artifacts needed to allow the rightful heir of the Romanescu family to reclaim their heritage. Too bad. It was, after all, a heritage the little girl’s family had usurped centuries before, and would kill to keep. The hired assassins she had already stationed throughout the rooms and corridors would see to that, ending the heir and any of the other fools who presumed to meddle…

The above represents a somewhat dramatized version of the first half of one of the games of Betrayal at House on the Hill that we played this weekend after impulse buying it based on watching this video. Dawn and I clicked on it just by randomly seeing Ashly Burch’s face, since we like the cut of her jib, but then the game began and we were intrigued. B-movie horror theme? Modular game board, built as the players progress so that it’s different every time? A massive twist at some point where one of the players turns out to be a traitor out to get the others?

Sure, plenty of other games have traitor scenarios, but two things intrigued me here. One, that depending on an intersection of how the twist is triggered, one of fifty different horror/suspense scenarios would be played out, with hidden victory conditions for the heroes and the traitor. Two, that the traitor doesn’t know they’re the traitor until it happens. In the game above, I was just an innocent little girl exploring a scary house, and then suddenly I was a schemingly ruthless Master of Assassins bent on killing the rightful heir to my family’s fortune before they could realize their destiny. Meanwhile my wife and the other players now had to try to conceal which of them was the heir while staying alive long enough to help them… well, I had hints and thoughts of what they were trying to do but in some ways I was as in the dark as they were, even though I didn’t share their terror of taking every step as if it might be their last. For the professor and co-ed, it was, and they died to knives in the dark, but the accursed little boy and the jock (the heir) lived just long enough to foil me!

It was probably just as well or the forces of Evil would have had a clean sweep, after the redneck torture zombies and werewolves had their way in our previous games. It meant I was on the losing side each time — *fist shake* — but the game lived up to its potential as a great storytelling exercise, a journey into the unknown as full of wonderment as it was full of terror. We have but barely scratched the surface of those fifty haunt scenarios and I can’t wait to try out more. And I love that unlike most games’ traitor scenarios, you are quite literally on the side of the angels… until you aren’t.

Because of its somewhat random nature on what the house looks like, what items are out and when the haunt begins (and what the haunt is), not every game of BaHotH is going feel balanced — the werewolf, for example, sprouted early and thus made chewtoys of us in short order. But the saving grace is that playing time tends to be manageably short and the mechanics and possibilities have enough lure that a not-so-satisfying game means you just play again and something entirely different happens.

In short, I do not regret a penny of our impulse buy, and if such things intrigue you as well, I’ll just close out by saying that as of this writing Amazon still has it on sale. Happy haunting!

Last week was pretty rough for a lot of people. Both David Bowie and Alan Rickman passed on, and that caused a lot of emotion.

Me? I looked at it as both having had long, awesome careers, and the thought that 69 years old is a respectable age to check out. Could they have done more? Sure. But I shed no tears. I didn’t know either man personally, so why should I? My aunt’s death last year, of course that affected me deeply. I knew her. I knew what she meant to me and our family, and that she had just retired that year but still had so many plans and things she wanted to accomplish. Most of all, I couldn’t help the grief in my gut which would well up occasionally even weeks or months afterwards.

But celebrities? Even ones who created works that really affected me, or seemed to be snatched away while they were still young, leaving that void where you feel like they gifted us with maybe only a small fraction of what could have been? I don’t think I’ve ever had a deep reaction to their deaths. Howard Ashman (the lyricist of Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, etc.) was a guy I considered a genius who was unfairly snatched away by AIDS at the age of 40 — younger than I am now — and so suddenly that the libretto for Aladdin had to be completed by Tim Rice. I remember being upset about that in 1991, wondering why a guy like Ashman was dead while Dan Quayle persisted in drawing breath, but I didn’t break down weeping in public the way I saw people do when Princess Diana died in 1997.

I guess it’s the idea that sometimes these people become our role models or affect our lives deeply enough that their departure hits us in emotionally gooey centers, even perhaps years or decades after we stop keeping track of them. We don’t know them. We never really knew them. We may never have even met them in person, or if we did, it was while being one of thousands at a concert or shaking hands and exchanging a few words in an autograph line — hardly the stuff of intimate familiarity. Yet the symbol of who they are in our heads and hearts remains a powerful thing, powerful enough to move many to tears even if my own ducts remain dry. Perhaps that makes me the weirdo.

In any case, the work of people like Rickman, and Bowie lives on, and what good work it is. I may not get mushy about it, but I admit I may have queued up and listened to “Under Pressure” a few times last week — and if there’s an afterlife, it’s cool to imagine Bowie and Freddie Mercury finally getting to do another duet, while Rickman gives one of his serene half-smiles in appreciation.

Well, in this case actually more of a syndrome of threes. A Trinity Syndrome.

Don’t have time or inclination to read that link? Well, it’s an interesting article from June 2014 which points out an interesting aspect of how a “strong female character” can end up ultimately unsatisfying in a narrative, because in the end she ends up being sidelined or subverted in favor of the male protagonist. It’s named after Carrie-Anne Moss’s character Trinity from The Matrix, who starts off presented to us as an ultimate badass but it’s all downhill from there as Neo comes into his own. Another example brought up in the article is Wyldstyle from The Lego Movie, again introduced as someone ultra-competent that the buffoonish Emmett is awed by — but she isn’t the Chosen One, he is, and so by the end she’s relegated to a supporting role.

When you start thinking about it this is a trope that reoccurs time and time again in fiction. The bumbling nebbish of a man meets some beautiful exotic badass woman who doesn’t have the time of day for him at the beginning, but by the end he’s eclipsed her, saved the day, and almost always wins her love and adoration in the bargain. If that sounds like a fantasy scenario, oh boy howdy is it. Is there anything inherently wrong with that? Well, perhaps not, except that it’s overwhelmingly shown in that particular gender balance.

You see, the only sci-fi/fantasy example I’ve really thought of that does the same thing in reverse is the anime series Sailor Moon, where it’s the young girl who’s the scatterbrained incompetent protagonist having to be rescued at first by the mysterious and handsome Tuxedo Mask, until she eventually discovers her true destiny and ends up saving the world (and him).

Not coincidentally (as far as I’m concerned), Sailor Moon was created and written by a woman.

See, this is one of those things that reinforces my thought that men and women aren’t really alien creatures who can’t possibly understand the way the “other” thinks, because the hero’s journey works for (and speaks to) both genders if given the chance. Also, perhaps unfortunately, the Trinity Syndrome could apply in both cases, but in movies at least we still overwhelmingly see it with the man on the upward arc while the woman stays static or regresses, and at root that’s because most writers are men, writing from a male point of view.

I don’t even think it’s consciously sexist in most cases, it’s just much easier to tell a classic hero’s journey tale where everyone else is (or becomes) support. And it still resonates — but yet I fully understand the frustration that can be inherent in seeing your identified representation sidelined, especially if they were introduced looking really cool to start with. So in your own tales when you’ve got your aspiring young lad setting out towards his destiny and he meets that ultra-cool lady, maybe go over those bullet point questions in the article:

1. After being introduced, does your Strong Female Character then fail to do anything fundamentally significant to the outcome of the plot? Anything at all?
2. If she does accomplish something plot-significant, is it primarily getting raped, beaten, or killed to motivate a male hero? Or deciding to have sex with/not have sex with/agreeing to date/deciding to break up with a male hero? Or nagging a male hero into growing up, or nagging him to stop being so heroic? Basically, does she only exist to service the male hero’s needs, development, or motivations?
3. Could your Strong Female Character be seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it to help a male hero?
4. Is a fundamental point of your plot that your Strong Female Character is the strongest, smartest, meanest, toughest, or most experienced character in the story—until the protagonist arrives?
5. …or worse, does he enter the story as a bumbling fuck-up, but spend the whole movie rapidly evolving past her, while she stays entirely static, and even cheers him on? Does your Strong Female Character exist primarily so the protagonist can impress her?
6. It’s nice if she’s hyper-cool, but does she only start off that way so a male hero will look even cooler by comparison when he rescues or surpasses her?
7. Is she so strong and capable that she’s never needed rescuing before now, but once the plot kicks into gear, she’s suddenly captured or threatened by the villain, and needs the hero’s intervention? Is breaking down her pride a fundamental part of the story?
8. Does she disappear entirely for the second half/third act of the film, for any reason other than because she’s doing something significant to the plot (besides being a hostage, or dying)?

It’s at least worth keeping under observation.

The year was 1980. The month, May, and a still quite young Clint was watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time. Han Solo was my favorite, and he was proving his awesomeness with every moment — as opposed to that silly Luke who was doing all the boring stuff in the swamp with the muppet while Han dodged TIE fighters and asteroids and giant space worms.

And then, oh crap, Han got captured. And frozen in carbonite and handed over to Boba Fett. And that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was Fett’s ship taking off (with frozen Han still aboard) before Leia and Chewie and company got there. Luke had a pretty bad day, too, but in the end at least he got rescued and was safe and (mostly) sound with the rebel fleet. As the credits rolled, I realized with dawning horror that I would have to wait three years to find out the fate of my wise-cracking smuggler hero.

At the time, it was a terrible betrayal. The good guys could get in trouble, sure, but were supposed to *win* by the end of the show. That’s what Saturday morning cartoons taught! What was this cliffhanger bullshit (ooh, bad words)?

Well, here I am many years later understanding that cliffhanger bullshit is part and parcel of a lot of entertainment, including the comic I’m writing now. I’m probably one of the only folk who still smiles seeing Boba Fett fall into the Sarlacc, since there’s a small angry child inside me that definitely wanted (and still wants) that smug sonofabitch to suffer for 10,000 years for what happened to Han and the three years of agonizing uncertainty it led to in the heart of my youth.

And really, if Star Wars is meant to be in part a hearkening back to the serials of yore like Flash Gordon, then Empire represents perhaps the purest example of a “What will our heroes do now?! TUNE IN NEXT TIME!” setup. It’s still self-contained in its way, but they had the luxury of knowing there would be at least one more film to wrap up the adventure. That’s something you didn’t really have the guarantee of back in the day.

Today? That’s a different story in the wake of the Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potters, and other film franchises. Studios and stars are committing to multiple movies and writers are aware well in advance, and its let to an interesting escalation in the idea that not every plot point has to be tied in a bow by the time the credits roll. Now we’re even getting the final movies of a series split into two parts, and there might very well be cliffhanger bullshit involved. In a sense it’s getting to where it’s like the days of going to see Flash Gordon and Tarzan matinee serials in the theater have returned. Katniss just woke up to learn District 12 has been purged! TUNE IN NEXT TIME…

Is that a bad thing where feature length films are concerned as opposed to shorter fare? I’m still not sure. The development cycle has shortened to where oftentimes the movies are being filmed without much break between, so you’re not necessarily waiting for three years for your fix, not to mention all the Internet leaks and such to whet your appetite in the meanwhile. The latest example of this is, of course, The Force Awakens, which is rife with dangling plot threads and unanswered questions. Will Episode VIII scratch those itches, or just make them worse? J.J. Abrams has always been better with possibilities and potentials than resolutions, but his hand’s off the tiller now. I guess we’ll see what the next episode brings…