TV Series: The Emotional Buy-In

Over the past few years, I’ve thought a lot – and, at times, said a lot – about the impact of DVD box sets and digital streaming services on how we now consume and construct TV series. To put the whole into summary, the staple shapes of traditional sitcoms, procedurals and the like were all predicated on the necessity of keeping the story accessible to viewers who had no other means of catching up bar weekly scheduled broadcasts. It’s a narrative structure that’s fundamentally opposed to complex, ongoing development, regular casting changes and multi-plot stories, because when those longed-for new viewers couldn’t reliably get up-to-date on the first two seasons prior to starting the third, it made sense to keep the basic premise homogeneous and simple enough that it didn’t really matter. But now that you can package a decade’s worth of content into an affordable box set, or stream entire new seasons at once in a way that lets viewers directly control their access to the narrative, those structures have become redundant – and now that our expectations of what TV can do have shifted accordingly, it’s hard to walk things back.

Which has left me wondering: why, in an age so glutted with quality, accessible content, am I finding it progressively harder to invest in new TV shows? With a handful of notable exceptions, I feel as though I’ve spent the past few years diving enthusiastically into various new offerings, only to struggle to pick them up again when the new season starts or after I’ve taken a break from binging. It would be convenient to write the whole thing off as a personal failing, an offhand consequence of the various health problems I’ve been dealing with, but the phenomenon feels too widespread for that. Certainly, poor focus and a lack of mental energy doesn’t help, but if they’re not the actual cause, then what is?

For many people, I suspect that decision fatigue is a partial culprit: there’s so much to watch that the act of choosing between offerings, over and over again, can steadily drain us of the desire to choose at all. But even then, that doesn’t quite fit as a global explanation, and it certainly doesn’t reflect how I feel about various series. At the moment, I’m midway through Altered Carbon, a show involving several things I love dearly and a bunch of stuff I find compelling but frustrating: on paper, the perfect combination to spark my passionate, critical interest. And yet, for all that I enjoy the show while watching it, I’m continually sluggish to start the next episode. Ditto Wynona Earp, which utterly won me over during my initial binge, but which I set aside months ago at a cliffhanger moment and haven’t touched since. I made it nearly halfway through the first season of The Shannara Chronicles, which is trashy and terrible but also weirdly fun, then stopped blank; I loved Shadowhunters enough to rewatch the entire first season as a lead-in to starting the second, but I’ve stalled there, too.

By contrast, I know exactly why I stopped watching The 100, a show whose first two seasons made me a vocal fan: hearing about the death of Lexa and the mistreatment of actor Ricky Whittle, who went on to star in American Gods, I was disappointed enough to lose all momentum for it. Yet I still haven’t watched the second season of Sense8, which I loved completely; nor have I managed to get up to date with other beloved shows like Steven Universe, Letterkenny and Killjoys. And it’s here, with these last four offerings, that I feel like I’m hitting closer to the mark: Sense8 was cancelled with a long-game arc still in play, and while Netflix has agreed to fund a final cathartic bonus episode, or possibly episodes, to see it wrapped up, the ending hasn’t yet been produced. Similarly, the latest seasons for Steven Universe, Letterkenny and Killjoys are difficult to access in Australia: unless I want to scratch around to find each one on dodgy streaming sites, there’s an interminable wait for content.

More than one thinkpiece on digital culture in recent years has bemoaned the seeming impatience of younguns so accustomed to instant everything that they can’t bear to wait a week or a month for the next season, episode or instalment of their favourite thing, and who therefore abandon it. It’s an argument I find all the more infuriating for how close it comes to the actual point before missing it wildly. Here’s what I think: investing in stories is, and always has been, an act of emotional labour on the part of the audience. This is why stories matter: if we didn’t care about them – if they failed to make us feel; if watching, reading or playing through them never caused us to expend any thought or feeling – then we wouldn’t bother to make them in the first place.

But some stories have an inherently higher emotional buy-in than others. Whether because of the content, the nature of the characters or the closeness of the premise to an individual heart, there’s more to gain by loving them, but also a commensurate risk if they fail us. In the world of fanfiction, this is why tags like fluff, angst, hurt/comfort and hurt no comfort exist: not just as a warning, but so readers can find stories whose contents match both their interests and their current level of emotional resilience. Which makes perfect sense, when you consider that fanfic is itself a form of emotional engagement with narrative: of course such a medium understands that different times call for different stories; that foreshadowing types of content is not the same as spoiling specific details.

Not so very long ago, TV shows were, by and large, easy to gauge in terms of their potential emotional buy-in. You had dark, gritty procedurals featuring regular barbaric crimes, but where the recurring characters were nonetheless largely safe from taking permanent damage regardless of how frequently they were threatened with such, because that’s how the genre works. (Or where, in the case of Supernatural, the taking of damage was so constant as to become reliable, and therefore perversely comforting.) You had sitcoms which were generally much lighter, barring the requisite end-of-season cliffhangers, and you had – and still have – long-running soapie dramas that make it a point to regularly escalate the emotional stakes, but in such a continuous, roll-over fashion that, even if you end up getting your heart punched, it’s generally in a way you signed up for, with lots of good feelings thrown in to balance it out.

Which isn’t to say such shows have never dealt with complex, important issues: many of them do, and with profound impact. But week to week, episode to episode, the baseline genre formulas lend them enough predictability to allow the audience, in turn, to have an emotionally stable relationship with the content – and that’s not nothing. That is, in point of fact, really fucking crucial to the matter of long-term viewing, because compassion fatigue is also a thing, and if your unpredictable, complex narratives repeatedly push viewers to take on more of an emotional burden than they can handle, then you’re eventually going to lose them. When such a show is complete, so that anyone wavering on the emotional threshold can pause, check ahead and assess how best to proceed, the problem can be potentially ameliorated, but even so, the higher the stakes, the higher the risk of burnout.

Which is, once again, why the tagging system of fanfic is so very, very successful for generating long-term audience engagement, even in contexts where updates are irregular or where the story might abruptly stop, unfinished: when the emotional stakes are higher, knowing the risks ahead of time is often vital, as it allows you to prepare. This is, for instance, and despite the many popular misconceptions surrounding them, exactly why trigger warnings are a good thing: the point isn’t to remove all potentially objectionable content from a course or story, but to offer a forewarning of its presence, thereby preventing those with trauma from being emotionally blindsided, a tactic which is proven to aid in recovery.

Regardless of our mental health or any past traumas, it’s basic human psychology that, if we’re feeling stressed in other areas of our lives, we don’t enjoy additional stress from recreational quarters. Unpredictability can be exciting, but if it becomes our default state, it quickly exhausts us instead, just as a surfeit of predictability can easily turn to boredom. A happy medium, surely, should not be so hard to achieve – but then, we’re all constantly calibrating at different speeds, and when emotionally risky stories are the default, as is increasingly the case, the emotional energy of viewers, already a finite resource, is spread even thinner between each potential narrative.

When gritty longform series like 24 and The Wire first started to appear in the early noughties, they were so thematically distinct from the bulk of TV content that the emotional buy-in to each show, though high, was balanced by a comparatively lower toll elsewhere. But when the majority of shows exact the same emotional cost as The Wire, the ability of any one person to watch them all concurrently dwindles. And thus, my current state of detente with so many excellent TV shows: I fall out of watching them, not because I don’t like them, but because I’m aware that continuing to engage will cost me precious emotional energy, and if I don’t know where the eventual endpoint is, it’s harder to justify taking the leap of faith.

In the world of SFF literature, where narratives frequently appear in serial form, it’s not uncommon for readers to say that they’re waiting for the final book to be published before they try the first one: here, the barrier to engagement is understood to be, not a monetary cost, but rather the potential emotional expense of investing years in pursuit of a payout which, if the publisher vetoes the series, might never eventuate. Which, rather frustratingly, can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy: without measurable interest in the first book of a series, publishers are unlikely to risk losing money by producing the subsequent volumes. But in the literary world, this problem is at least somewhat mitigated by the existence of multi-book contracts and early authorial statements as to the projected length of a series: neither promise is writ in stone, but at least it’s a species of yardstick against which readers can measure how long they’ll have to wait for completion, coupled with a vague idea of future narrative structure.

TV, by contrast, lacks even those soft assurances. New series are seldom greenlit for anything more than a season at once, with even popular shows being renewed only a season at a time, but in a context where, once popularity is established, networks are committed to flogging even the most skeletal horse for ratings. This makes it exceptionally rare that a TV show gets a planned, cathartic ending: either it’s cancelled when the world is still ripe for expansion, or it’s worked to death, reanimated and pushed to continue in zombie form until even the corpse falls to pieces.

And that’s before you factor in the potential shifts in tone, theme and structure that often accompany a change in directorial or writing staff. Unless they’re playing in someone else’s sandbox, authors are allowed to remain in control of their own creation, which means that readers can, if nothing else, trust in the creative continuity afforded by a single controlling voice. Not so in the world of television – or, for that matter, in the world of comics, which is whole other sack of crabs. (As distinct from a kettle of fish, which is strikes me as being a far too placid metaphor for the current comics landscape.) The point being that, whereas novel series at least have some established checks and balances in place to help readers assess the likely emotional buy-in of a given series, TV has changed so fast and so fundamentally in some ways while staying static in others that, even when you love what a show is now, it’s increasingly hard to trust what it might become.

If this so-called golden age of television truly intends to continue – if we don’t want all the exciting new, diverse shows we’re finally getting to be ruled failures on specious grounds and cancelled, thereby allowing the still maddeningly homogeneous Powers That Be to retreat back into their established comfort zones of pretty thin white people doing the same shit over and over – then the emotional buy-in of viewers needs to be taken seriously. Particularly when shows are striving to better represent the experiences of traditionally marginalised groups – which is to say, when the intended audience is made up of people whose emotional reserves are frequently running low for the exact same reason their representation is necessary – creators could do a lot worse than to follow the lead of fanfiction and make certain information available from the outset to those who want it: to state up front, and state truthfully, which painful issues will be on or off the table.

Here’s a PSA for you: teasing about the Big Dramatic Thing that happens in episode three and hoping it piques the curiosity of viewers only works if you’re pitching to a demographic that hasn’t been taught, over and over again, to associate such “surprises” with, say, the brutal death of the character who most resembles them. The rest of us have seen ourselves dismembered and packed into fridges often enough to know better: we don’t trust like that now, and until or unless creators learn that this problem of their own collective making has become an active barrier to our otherwise willing consumption, the problem will persist. And as the runaway success of Black Panther should demonstrate, when you do finally give the people what they want – and my god, do we want it; we’re eager, we’re starving – while offering reassurance that it won’t bite us, we’ll show up in droves.

That being so, I’d ask that we retire the idea that potential spoilers are death to viewer engagement, and instead reap the benefits of letting the audience decide beforehand whether or not they’re willing to buy in to what you’re selling. Because ultimately, it doesn’t matter how clever, edgy original you think your gut-punch mid-season twist will be: it only gets to be a big surprise once. After that, it has to stand on its own merits, and while latecomers can always look to reviews for guidance, engaging with the endless cycle of build-up, boom and bust surrounding each big development has an emotional buy-in of its own. It’s not that we don’t want to watch your shows: we just don’t want to get hurt, again, by investing in something only to see it broken. And if we can’t trust that, then how can we trust you?

Westworld: (De)Humanising the Other

Warning: total spoilers for S1 of Westworld.

Trigger warning: talk of rape, sexual assault and queer death.

Note: Throughout this review, it will be necessary to distinguish between the writers of Westworld the TV show, and the writers employed in the narrative by the titular Westworld theme park. To avoid confusing the two, when I’m referring to the show, Westworld will be italicised; when referring to the park, I’ll use plain text.

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This will be a somewhat bifurcated review of Westworld – which is, I feel, thematically appropriate, as Westworld itself is something of a bifurcated show. Like so much produced by HBO, it boasts incredible acting, breathtaking production values, intelligent dialogue, great music and an impeccably tight, well-orchestrated series of narrative reveals. Also like much produced by HBO, it takes a liberal, one might even say cartoonishly gratuitous approach to nudity, is saturated with violence in general and violence against women in particular, and has a consistent problem with stereotyping despite its diverse casting. In Westworld’s case, this latter issue is compounded as an offence by its status as a meta-narrative: a story which actively discusses the purpose and structure of stories, but which has seemingly failed to apply those same critiques to key aspects of its own construction.

The practical upshot is that it’s both frustratingly watchable and visibly frustrating. Even when the story pissed me off, I was always compelled to keep going, but I was never quite able to stop criticising it, either. It’s a thematically meaty show, packed with the kind of twists that will, by and large, enhance viewer enjoyment on repeat viewings rather than diminish the appeal. Though there are a few Fridge Logic moments, the whole thing hangs together quite elegantly – no mean feat, given the complexity of the plotting. And yet its virtues have the paradoxical effect of making me angrier about its vices, in much the same way that I’d be more upset about red wine spilled on an expensive party dress than on my favourite t-shirt. Yes, the shirt means more to me despite being cheaper, but a stain won’t stop me from wearing it at home, and even if it did, the item itself is easily replaced. But staining something precious and expensive is frustrating: I’ve invested enough in the cost of the item that I don’t want to toss it away, but staining makes it unsuitable as a showcase piece, which means I can’t love it as much as I want to, either.

You get where I’m going with this.

Right from the outset, Westworld switches between two interconnected narratives: the behind-the-scenes power struggles of the people who run the titular themepark, and the goings-on in the park itself as experienced by both customers and ‘hosts’, the humanoid robot-AIs who act as literal NPCs in pre-structured, pay-to-participate narratives. To the customers, Westworld functions as an immersive holiday-roleplay experience: though visually indistinguishable from real humans, the hosts are considered unreal, and are therefore fair game to any sort of violence, dismissal or sexual fantasy the customers can dream up. (This despite – or at times, because of – the fact that their stated ability to pass the Turing test means their reactions to said violations are viscerally animate.) To the programmers, managers, storytellers, engineers, butchers and behaviourists who run it, Westworld is, variously, a job, an experiment, a financial gamble, a risk, a sandpit and a microcosm of human nature: the hosts might look human, but however unsettling their appearance or behaviour at times, no one is ever allowed to forget what they are.

But to the hosts themselves, Westworld is entirely real, as are their pre-programmed identities. While their existence is ostensibly circumscribed by adherence to preordained narrative ‘loops’, the repetition of their every conversation, death and bodily reconstruction wiped from their memories by the park engineers, certain hosts – notably Dolores, the rancher’s daughter, and Maeve, the bordello madame – are starting to remember their histories. Struggling to understand their occasional eerie interviews with their puppeteering masters – explained away as dreams, on the rare occasion where such explanation is warranted – they fight to break free of their intended loops, with startling consequences.But there is also a hidden layer to Westworld: a maze sought by a mysterious Man in Black and to which the various hosts and their narratives are somehow key. With the hosts exhibiting abnormal behaviour, retaining memories of their former ‘lives’ in a violent, fragmented struggle towards true autonomy, freedom and sentience, Westworld poses a single, sharp question: what does it mean to be human?

Or rather, it’s clearly trying to pose this question; and to be fair, it very nearly succeeds. But for a series so overtly concerned with its own meta – it is, after all, a story about the construction, reception and impact of stories on those who consume and construct them – it has a damnable lack of insight into the particulars of its assumed audiences, both internal and external, and to the ways this hinders the proclaimed universality of its conclusions. Specifically: Westworld is a story in which all the internal storytellers are straight white men endowed with the traditional bigotries of racism, sexism and heteronormativity, but in a context where none of those biases are overtly addressed at any narrative level.

From the outset, it’s clear that Westworld is intended as a no-holds-barred fantasy in the literal sense: a place where the rich and privileged can pay through the nose to fuck, fight and fraternise in a facsimile of the old West without putting themselves at any real physical danger. Nobody there can die: customers, unlike hosts, can’t be killed (though they do risk harm in certain contexts), but each host body and character is nonetheless resurrected, rebuilt and put back into play after they meet their end. Knowing this lends the customers a recklessness and a violence they presumably lack in the real world: hosts are shot, stabbed, raped, assaulted and abused with impunity, because their disposable inhumanity is the point of the experience. This theme is echoed in their treatment by Westworld’s human overseers, who often refer to them as ‘it’ and perform their routine examinations, interviews, repairs and updates while the hosts are naked.

At this point in time, HBO is as well-known for its obsession with full frontal, frequently orgiastic nudity as it is for its total misapprehension of the distinction between nakedness and erotica. Never before has so much skin been shown outside of literal porn with so little instinct for sensuality, sexuality or any appreciation of the human form beyond hurr durr tiddies and, ever so occasionally, hurr durr dongs, and Westworld is no exception to this. It’s like the entirety of HBO is a fourteen-year-old straight boy who’s just discovered the nascent thrill of drawing Sharpie-graffiti genitals on every available schoolyard surface and can only snigger, unrepentant and gleeful, whenever anyone asks them not to. We get it, guys – humans have tits and asses, and you’ve figured out how to show us that! Huzzah for you! Now get the fuck over your pubescent creative wankphase and please, for the love of god, figure out how to do it tastefully, or at least with some general nodding in the direction of an aesthetic other than Things I Desperately Wanted To See As A Teengaer In The Days Before Internet Porn.

That being said, I will concede that there’s an actual, meaningful reason for at least some of Westworld’s ubiquitous nudity: it’s a deliberate, visual act of dehumanisation, one intended not only to distinguish the hosts from the ‘real’ people around them, but to remind the park’s human employees that there’s no need to treat the AIs with kindness or respect. For this reason, it also lends a powerful emphasis to the moments when particular characters opt to dress or cover the hosts, thereby acknowledging their personhood, however minimally. This does not, however, excuse the sadly requisite orgy scenes, nor does it justify the frankly obscene decision to have a white female character make a leering comment about the size of a black host’s penis, and especially not when said female character has already been established as queer. (Yes, bi/pan people exist; as I have good reason to know, being one of them. But there are about nine zillion ways the writers could’ve chosen to show Elsie’s sexual appreciation for men that didn’t tap into one of the single grossest sexual tropes on the books, let alone in a context which, given the host’s blank servility and Elsie’s status as an engineer, is unpleasantly evocative of master/slave dynamics.)

And on the topic of Elsie, let’s talk about queerness in Westworld, shall we? Because let’s be real: the bar for positive queer representation on TV is so fucking low right now, it’s basically at speedbump height, and yet myriad grown-ass adults are evidently hellbent on bellyflopping onto it with all the grace and nuance of a drunk walrus. Elsie is a queer white woman whose queerness is shown to us by her decision to kiss one of the female hosts, Clementine, who’s currently deployed as a prostitute, in a context where Clementine is reduced to a literal object, stripped of all consciousness and agency. Episode 6 ends on the cliffhanger of Elsie’s probable demise, and as soon as I saw that setup, I felt as if that single, non-consensual kiss – never referenced or expanded on otherwise – had been meant as Chekov’s gaykilling gun: this woman is queer, and thus is her death predicted. (Of course she fucking dies. Of course she does. I looked it up before I watched the next episode, but I might as well have Googled whether the sun sets in the west.)

It doesn’t help that the only other queer femininity we’re shown is either pornography as wallpaper or female host prostitutes hitting on female customers; and it especially doesn’t help that, as much as HBO loves its gratuitous orgy scenes, you’ll only ever see two naked women casually getting it on in the background, never two naked men. Nor does it escape notice that the lab tech with a penchant for fucking the hosts in sleep mode is apparently a queer man, a fact which is presented as a sort of narrative reveal. The first time he’s caught in the act, we only see the host’s legs, prone and still, under his body, but later there’s a whole sequence where he takes one of the male hosts, Hector – who is, not coincidentally, a MOC, singled out for sexual misuse by at least one other character – and prepares to rape him. (It’s not actually clear in context whether the tech is planning on fucking or being fucked by Hector – not that it’s any less a violation either way, of course; I’m noting it rather because the scene itself smacks of being constructed by people without any real idea of how penetrative sex between two men works. Like, ignoring the fact that they’re in a literal glass-walled room with the tech’s eyerolling colleague right next door, Hector is sitting upright on a chair, but is also flaccid and non-responsive by virtue of being in sleep mode. So even though we get a grimly lascivious close-up of the tech squirting lube on his hand, dropping his pants and, presumably, slicking himself up, it’s not actually clear what he’s hoping to achieve prior to the merciful moment when Hector wakes up and fights him the fuck off.)

Topping off this mess is Logan, a caustic, black-hat-playing customer who, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it foursome with three host prostitutes – two female, one male – is visually implied to be queer, and who thereinafter functions, completely unnecessarily, as a depraved bisexual stereotype. And I do mean blink-and-you’ll-miss-it: I had to rewind the episode to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, but it’s definitely there, and as with Elsie kissing Clementine, it’s never referenced again. The male host is engaging only with Logan, stroking his chest as he kisses and fucks the two women; it’s about as unsexualised as sexual contact between two naked men can actually get, and yet HBO has gone to the trouble of including it, I suspect for the sole purpose of turning a bland, unoriginal character into an even grosser stereotype than he would otherwise have been while acting under the misapprehension that it would give him depth. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Logan doesn’t cease to be a cocky, punchable asshat just because you consented to put a naked white dude next to him for less time than it takes to have a really good shit; it just suggests that you, too, are a cocky, punchable asshat who should shit more in the bathroom and less on the fucking page. But I digress.

And then there’s the racism, which – and there’s no other way to put this – is presented as being an actual, intentional feature of the Westworld experience, even though it makes zero commercial sense to do this. Like. You have multiple white hosts who are programmed to make racist remarks about particular POC hosts, despite the fact that there are demonstrably POC customers paying to visit the park. You have a consistent motif of Native Americans being referred to as ‘savages’, both within Westworld-as-game and by the gamewriters themselves, with Native American mysticism being used to explain both the accidental glimpses various self-aware hosts get of the gamerunners and the in-game lore surrounding the maze. Demonstrably, the writers of Westworld are aware of this – why else is Episode 2, wherein writer character Lee Sizemore gleefully proposes a hella racist new story for the park, called ‘Chestnut’, as in old? I’ve said elsewhere that depiction is not endorsement, but it is perpetuation, and in a context where the point of Westworld as a commercial venture is demonstrably to appeal to customers of all genders, sexual orientations and races – all of whom we see in attendance – building in particular period-appropriate bigotries is utterly nonsensical.

More than this, as the openness with which the female prostitutes seduce female customers makes clear, it’s narratively inconsistent: clearly, not every bias of the era is being rigidly upheld. And yet it also makes perfect sense if you think of both Westworld and Westworld as being, predominantly, a product both created by and intended for a straight white male imagination. In text, Westworld’s stories are written by Lee and Robert, both of whom are straight white men, while Westworld itself was originally the conceit of Michael Crichton. Which isn’t to diminish the creative input of the many other people who’ve worked on the show – technically, it’s a masterclass in acting, direction, composition, music, lighting, special effects and editing, and those people deserve their props. It’s just that, in terms of narrative structure, by what I suspect is an accidental marriage of misguided purpose and unexamined habit, Westworld the series, like Westworld the park, functions primarily for a straight white male audience – and while I don’t doubt that there was some intent to critically highlight the failings of that perspective, as per the clear and very satisfying satirising of Lee Sizemore, as with Zack Snyder’s Suckerpunch and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, the straight white male gaze is still so embedded as a lazy default that Westworld ends up amplifying its biases more often than it critiques them. (To quote something my straight white husband said while watching, “It’s my gaze, and I feel like I’m being parodied by it.”)

Though we do, as mentioned, see various women and people of colour enjoying the Westworld park, the customers who actually serve as protagonists – Logan, William and the Man in Black – are all white men. Logan is queer by virtue of a single man’s hand on his chest, but other than enforcing a pernicious stereotype about bisexual appetites and behaviours, it doesn’t do a damn thing to alter his characterisation. The end of season reveal that William is the Man in Black – that William’s scenes have all taken place thirty years in the past, shown to us now through Dolores’s memories – is a cleverly executed twist, and yet the chronicle of William’s transformation from youthful, romantic idealist to violent, sadistic predator only highlights the fundamental problem, which is that the Westworld park, despite being touted as an adventure for everyone – despite Robert using his customers as a basis for making universal judgements about human nature – is clearly a more comfortable environment for some than others. Certainly, if I was able to afford the $40,000 a day we’re told it costs to attend, I’d be disinclined to spend so much for the privilege of watching male robots, whatever their courtesy to me, routinely talk about raping women, to say nothing of being forced to witness the callousness of other customers to the various hosts.

It should be obvious that there’s no such thing as a universal fantasy, and yet much of Westworld’s psychological theorising about human nature and morality hinges on our accepting that the desire  to play cowboy in a transfigured version of the old West is exactly this. That the final episode provides tantalising evidence that at least one other park with a different historical theme exists elsewhere in the complex doesn’t change the fact that S1 has sold us, via the various monologues of Logan and Lee, Robert and William and the Man in Black, the idea that Westworld specifically reveals deep truths about human nature.

Which brings us to Dolores, a female host whose primary narrative loop centres on her being a sweet, optimistic rancher’s daughter who, with every game reset, can be either raped or rescued from rape by the customers. That Dolores is our primary female character – that her narrative trajectory centres on her burgeoning sentience, her awareness of the repeat violations she’s suffered, and her refusal to remain a damsel – does not change the fact that making her thus victimised was a choice at both the internal (Westworld) and external (Westworld) levels. I say again unto HBO, I do not fucking care how edgy you think threats of sexual violence and the repeat objectification of women are: they’re not original, they’re not compelling, and in this particular instance, what you’ve actually succeeded in doing is undermining your core premise so spectacularly that I do not understand how anyone acting in good sense or conscience could let it happen.

Because in making host women like Dolores (white) and Maeve (a WOC), both of whom are repeatedly subject to sexual and physical violation, your lynchpin characters for the development of true human sentience from AIs – in making their memories of those violations the thing that spurs their development – you’re not actually asking the audience to consider what it means to be human. You’re asking them to consider the prospect that victims of rape and assault aren’t actually human in the first place, and then to think about how being repeatedly raped and assaulted might help them to gain humanity. And you’re not even being subtle about it, either, because by the end of S1, the entire Calvinistic premise is laid clear: that Robert and Arnold, the park’s founders, believed that tragedy and suffering was the cornerstone of sentience, and that the only way for hosts to surpass their programming is through misery. Which implies, by logical corollary, that Robert is doing the hosts a service by allowing others to hurt them or by hurting them himself – that they are only able to protest his mistreatment because the very fact of it gave them sentience.

Let that sink in for a moment, because it’s pretty fucking awful. The moral dilemma of Westworld, inasmuch as it exists, centres on the question of knowing culpability, and therefore asks a certain cognitive dissonance of the audience: on the one hand, the engineers and customers believe that the hosts aren’t real people, such that hurting them is no more an immoral act than playing Dark Side in a Star Wars RPG is; on the other hand, from an audience perspective, the hosts are demonstrably real people, or at the very least potential people, and we are quite reasonably distressed to see them hurt. Thus: if the humans in setting can’t reasonably be expected to know that the hosts are people, then we the audience are meant to feel conflicted about judging them for their acts of abuse and dehumanisation while still rooting for the hosts.

Ignore, for a moment, the additional grossness of the fact that both Dolores and Maeve are prompted to develop sentience, and are then subsequently guided in its emergence, by men, as though they are Eves being made from Adam’s rib. Ignore, too, the fact that it’s Dolores’s host father who, overwhelmed by the realisation of what is routinely done to his daughter, passes that fledgling sentience to Dolores, a white woman, who in turn passes it to Maeve, a woman of colour, without which those other male characters – William, Felix, Robert – would have no Galateas to their respective Pygmalions. Ignore all this, and consider the basic fucking question of personhood: of what it means to engage with AIs you know can pass a Turing test, who feel pain and bleed and die and exhibit every human symptom of pain and terror and revulsion as the need arises, who can improvise speech and memory, but who can by design give little or no consent to whatever it is you do to them. Harming such a person is not the same as engaging with a video game; we already know it’s not for any number of reasons, which means we can reasonably expect the characters in the show to know so, too. But even if you want to dispute that point – and I’m frankly not interested in engaging with someone who does – it doesn’t change the fact that Westworld is trying to invest us in a moral false equivalence.

The problem with telling stories about robots developing sentience is that both the robots and their masters are rendered at an identical, fictional distance to the (real, human) viewer. By definition, an audience doesn’t have to believe that a character is literally real in order to care about them; we simply have to accept their humanisation within the narrative. That being so, asking viewers to accept the dehumanisation of one fictional, sentient group while accepting the humanisation of another only works if you’re playing to prejudices we already have in the real world – such as racism or sexism, for instance – and as such, it’s not a coincidence that the AIs we see violated over and over are, almost exclusively, women and POC, while those protagonists who abuse them are, almost exclusively, white men. Meaning, in essence, that any initial acceptance of the abuse of hosts that we’re meant to have – or, by the same token, any initial excusing of abusers – is predicated on an existing form of bigotry: collectively, we are as used to doubting the experiences and personhood of women and POC as we are used to assuming the best about straight white men, and Westworld fully exploits that fact to tell its story.

Which, as much as it infuriates me, also leaves me with a dilemma in interpreting the show. Because as much as I dislike seeing marginalised groups exploited and harmed, I can appreciate the importance of aligning a fictional axis of oppression (being a host) with an actual axis of oppression (being female and/or a POC). Too often, SFFnal narratives try to tackle that sort of Othering without casting any actual Others, co-opting the trappings of dehumanisation to enhance our sympathy for a (mostly white, mostly straight) cast. And certainly, by the season finale, the deliberateness of this decision is made powerfully clear: joined by hosts Hector and Armistice and aided by Felix, a lab tech, Maeve makes her escape from Westworld, presenting us with the glorious image of three POC and one white woman battling their way free of oppressive control. And yet the reveal of Robert’s ultimate plans – the inference that Maeve’s rebellion wasn’t her own choice after all, but merely his programming of her; the revelation that Bernard is both a host and a recreation of Arnold, Robert’s old partner; the merging of Dolores’s arc with Wyatt’s – simultaneously serves to strip these characters of any true agency. Everything they’ve done has been at Robert’s whim; everything they’ve suffered has been because he wanted it so. As per the ubiquitous motif of the player piano, even when playing unexpected tunes, the hosts remain Robert’s instruments: even with his death, the songs they sing are his.

Westworld, then, is a study in contradictions, and yet is no contradiction at all. Though providing a stunning showcase for the acting talents of Thandie Newton, Evan Rachel Wood and Jeffrey Wright in particular, their characters are nonetheless all controlled by Anthony Hopkins’s genial-creepy Robert, and that doesn’t really change throughout the season. Though the tropes of old West narratives are plainly up for discussion, any wider discussion of stereotyping is as likely to have a lampshade hung on it as to be absent altogether, and that’s definitely a problem. Not being familiar with the Michael Crichton film and TV show, I can’t pass judgement on the extent to which this new adaptation draws from or surpasses the source material. I can, however, observe that the original film dates to the 1970s, which possibly goes some way to explaining the uncritical straight white male gazieness embedded in the premise. Even so, there’s something strikingly reminiscent of Joss Whedon to this permutation of Westworld, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The combination of a technologically updated old West, intended to stand as both a literal and metaphoric frontier, the genre-aware meta-narrative that nonetheless perpetuates more stereotypes than it subverts, and the supposed moral dilemma of abusing those who can’t consent feels at times like a mashup of Firefly, Cabin in the Woods and Dollhouse that has staunchly failed to improve on Whedon’s many intersectional failings.

And yet, I suspect, I’ll still be poking my nose into Season 2, if only to see how Thandie Newton is doing. It feels like an absurdly low bar to say that, compared to most of HBO’s popular content, Westworld is more tell than show in portraying sexual violence, preferring to focus on the emotional lead-in and aftermath rather than the act itself, and yet that small consideration does ratchet the proverbial dial down a smidge when watching it – enough so that I’m prepared to say it’s vastly less offensive in that respect than, say, Game of Thrones. But it’s still there, still a fundamental part of the plot, and that’s going to be a not unreasonable dealbreaker for a lot of people; as is the fact that the only queer female character dies. Westworld certainly makes compelling television, but unlike the human protagonists, I wouldn’t want to live there.

ETA 11/1/17: I’m annoyed at myself for having left this out of the essay, but that’s what I get for writing notes over three days and then posting while exhausted at 1.30am: There is a marked difference in how Westworld treats Dolores and Maeve, despite the ostensible similarity of their narratives. Though Dolores is continually threatened with rape and damselled in traditional ways, she’s also surrounded by men who want to ‘rescue’ her, notably Bernard/Arnold, Teddy and William, because they believe her worthy of love. From the beginning, she’s held up as an invented feminine ideal, pure and kind and needing protection, and as such, even though she’s continually threatened, she’s one of the few female hosts whose nudity is kept to a bare minimum. Whereas Maeve, by contrast, is continually sexualised, not only in her invented role as the bordello madame, but in the frequency of her nude scenes and her treatment by the other characters; she finds some sexual autonomy, but romance is never part of her narrative. Though both Dolores and Maeve have consensual sexual encounters on screen – Dolores with William, Maeve with Hector – Dolores is given a tasteful fade to black, whereas Maeve is not. Given that Dolores is white and Maeve is black and the extent to which their respective characterisation adheres to old racist tropes about, respectively, white female virtue and black female strength and sexuality, I can’t help but view their deliberate juxtapositioning as a species of racefail.

Plus and also, the way the Man in Black comes after Maeve in her previous homsteader/mother incarnation,  to kill her and her daughter, because he wants to see if he’s capable of doing something ‘truly evil’? Even – or perhaps especially – once we know how much killing he’s already done up until that point, it’s not a minor thing that his personal development is predicated on the destruction of a black woman.

 

 

 

How To Suppress Female Characters

With great respect to Joanna Russ

She wasn’t the lead

(but if it’s clear she was)

She was the lead, but she shouldn’t have been

(she was political, unsexualised, funny, feminist)

She was the lead, but look what she starred in

(a chick flick, a reboot, a spin-off, YA)

She was the lead, but the story didn’t rate a sequel

(“A female superhero couldn’t possibly carry a franchise…”)

She was the lead, but she isn’t a plausible character, and her story isn’t realistic

(She was exceptional, powerful, multifaceted, unromantic)

She was the lead, but the male characters were better

(“Men are just more interesting than women…”)

She was the lead, but her success was an anomaly

(“Katniss Everdeen was a one-off…”)

She was the lead, BUT…

*

Here’s the thing.

If you pan an unreleased film, or film you haven’t actually seen, solely because it has a female protagonist – or, god forbid, protagonists – you’re not being objective or rational. Might the film be genuinely bad? Yes. Of course. That’s always a possibility for any creative work. But will it be bad solely and exclusively because it stars a woman? No. Unless, of course, you’re willing to acknowledge that a film can likewise be solely and exclusively bad because it stars a man. I say this, not because I agree with that argument, but because it’s only logical: if knowing the hero’s gender ahead of time is enough to say a given film is an unequivocal trainwreck, then that can be true regardless of the gender in question.

If you disagree with this reasoning – if you wholeheartedly believe that women are irrevocably and fundamentally less interesting than men – then I’m not going to try and dissuade you: there’s no point wielding rationality against the stubbornly irrational, and I’ve got better things to do with my time. But if you feel that statement paints you into an unfair corner – if you don’t think women are always less interesting, just mostly so; if you’re open to the idea that they can make great characters, and you’re really only sick of seeing them shoehorned into stories where they don’t really fit – then I’d ask that you consider why that is.

Do you feel that many female characters are poorly written? That’s a reasonable complaint to have. But if that’s the issue, ask yourself – who’s responsible for these poorly written women? In 2014, 85% of films had no female directors, while 80% had no female writers, while in 2015, only 29% of TV writers were women. While it’s demonstrably true that many male writers can and do write excellent female characters, there are also many who pay little attention to women’s personalities and motives, being much more concerned with their looks, a phenomenon noted by Hollywood producer Ross Putnam, who now keeps a public record of all the sexist female descriptions he receives in scripts. Perhaps you might be more likely to enjoy a female character written – from experience, as it were – by a female writer, or shaped by a female director.

Do you feel that many female characters are poorly acted? Again, that’s an understandable complaint. But if that’s the issue, ask yourself – why aren’t more talented actresses being cast? Hollywood’s obsession with ranking (a very narrow concept of) beauty ahead of all other considerations means that many terrific actresses miss out on meaty roles, or on any roles at all. There is, for instance, a documented trend of male A-list stars playing leading roles well into their fifties and sixties, but only ever opposite women in their twenties and thirties. This means that, whereas male actors are allowed an extra twenty years in which to hone their craft through more and better roles, women are edged out just as they’re hitting their stride, with actresses often being hired for beauty ahead of talent. This emphasis on looks is also apparent in casting calls for female characters, which – as per the problem with sexist character descriptions noted above – are much more likely to describe the woman’s appearance than her personality or role.

Women of colour are also grossly underrepresented in leading roles, no matter their age or ability. In 2015, even though 22% of key roles in Hollywood films went to women – their largest share since 2002, when the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film began keeping track – only 27% of leading female characters were anything other than white, a number that dropped to 13% for female characters overall. All this being so, perhaps you might be more likely to enjoy  a film starring older women, women of colour, and women of any description whose narratives place a greater emphasis on personality than appearance.

Perhaps you feel that too many female protagonists are being unnecessarily forced into narratives these days; that they’re being given unfeminine roles, or parts which – in the case of a reboot – were originally male, and are therefore being misappropriated. Now, your feelings are your feelings, and I can respect that, but feeling something is not the same as knowing it to be objectively true. That being so, if you want to make this a rational, respectable argument, I’d invite you to first consider the following points:

• How can a character’s gender be unnecessary or forced? All characters have a gender identity, female or male or otherwise. Gender, as a detail, isn’t extraneous – unless, of course, you’re arguing that maleness is a neutral narrative default with no impact on the story, whereas femaleness is a biased narrative alternative that implicitly changes the story. But why should that be so? There are as many women in the world as men, making female characters just as logical a narrative default as men. And as for women being a biased choice compared to male neutrality, this presupposes that gender never dictates how stories about men are told – that masculinity is never mentioned, or that male characters are never given narrative arcs that reaffirm or relate to their gender in any way. Which, if you think about it, is rather implausible, isn’t it? If that were so, we’d never see male heroes talking about what it means to be a man, or a real man, or a good man, or a bad man, or any sort of man at all (for instance). And, just as importantly, if it’s possible to write a story that isn’t about gender in any way, then how can casting a woman instead of a man materially change the subject matter? Either it was never a gender-neutral story in the first place, or else our ability to perceive it as such was dependent on the character being male, which is another way of saying the same thing, and also my point. Namely: that if you see gender – or rather, femaleness – as unnecessary, it’s not an objective flaw in the story, but a subjective opinion of the audience. Of course it’s a choice to cast a woman, just like it’s a choice to cast a man – but as a character has to be something, how can one choice be implicitly forced, and the other not, unless you’re measuring their appropriateness in terms of how well it conforms to a social default?

• Arguing that a story isn’t “feminine enough” to warrant a female protagonist when you’re simultaneously concerned that women makes stories unnecessarily gendered is… kind of breathtakingly hypocritical, really. I mean: either having a female protagonist is what makes a story feminine, or else you’re acknowledging that stories can, in fact, star women without being wholly about womanhood – a thing you earlier claimed was impossible. What you really mean by this argument, I suspect, is that you’re accustomed to the idea that only certain types of story really merit female protagonists: that there are (domestic, romantic, intimate) stories about women and (political, adventurous, global) stories about men, and if women start starring in the latter kind, then men will start missing out on the type of roles to which they’re both better suited and more naturally entitled. This attitude ignores the idea that domestic, romantic, intimate stories can also be about men while acting as though this division of things is somehow writ in stone, instead of being a constructed form of sexism. I don’t have time to go into the long, complex erasure of women in history that sustains the idea of women being unsuited to particular tasks and stories, but trust me on this: it is bullshit, and always has been.

•  I’m going to say this once, and clearly: rebooting an  old story with a new female cast is not misappropriation. You haven’t lost the original version, nor has it been somehow altered after the fact; instead, you’re being offered something new in addition, which you’re free to accept or ignore as the fancy takes you. You might be upset that things aren’t being done differently, but that’s not the same as knowing they’re being done badly. There is a world of difference between not wanting to watch the reboot of a beloved story out of loyalty to the original, and trying your hardest to ensure that the reboot fails simply because it’s not the thing you wanted. One is an adult decision; the other is not. It shouldn’t be too hard to tell which is which.

Perhaps you feel that there are now too many female protagonists, period; that their sudden proliferation is a form of tokenism to which you object on moral grounds. Which, okay: how many women is too many? Because as per the statistics cited above, only 22% of key Hollywood roles went to women in 2015, which is a long way shy of half. Even if you think that a perfect 50/50 split is an unreasonable thing to aim for, that’s still not what’s happening here. There are more female roles at the moment, certainly, but more is not synonymous with many, and unless you genuinely think that a twenty percent share in representation is too much, then you’re going to have to acknowledge that your hackles are up, not because women are suddenly dominating the big screen, but because you don’t want to see us there in any number at all.

But either way, proliferation – by definition – is antithetical to tokenism. You cannot argue that an across the board increase in roles for women is a token move precisely because it’s across the board. It is likewise deeply hypocritical to claim that consciously increasing those roles is immoral, but that consciously suppressing them is not. The imbalance that currently exists is not a natural, neutral occurrence, but the result of decades of conscious policies and sexism both overt and ingrained; suggesting that it will go away on its own, without any active change, and that good stories will rise to the top regardless, is naive at best and callous at worst. In any field, in any context, “good” doesn’t happen because you sit back and hope really hard for the best outcome: it takes work and dedication, trial and error, sacrifice and adaptability – and, above all else, the ability to admit fault and change direction when a given thing ceases to work, or is proved to have never really worked at all.

She was the lead, but sexists wished she wasn’t, and were too scared of introspection – and too intellectually dishonest – to bother analysing their knee-jerk, often vitriolic reactions to female protagonists when it was easier to send rape and death threats to female celebrities, hack and share their nudes, and engage in racist, misogynistic abuse of women on the internet.

That’s how you suppress female characters. Or at least, that’s how you try. But no matter how much personal damage these bigots deal along the way, all they’re really proving is the terrified insincerity of their own arguments. Deep down, they know they’re losing – not because of any innate and deeply buried moral compass, but because the one cow they’ve all perpetually held as sacred is the inviolable truth of Profit. So long as nobody ever bothered to look for proof that stories about women – and people of colour, and the queer community, and everyone else long excluded from the Hollywood mainstream – could turn a buck, they could always blame the absence of such stories, not on their own ugly biases, but the flat fact of financial incentive. But now, the market has spoken, and the verdict is in: there’s money to be made in female protagonists – and damn, but the misogynists are bitter about it.

*

She was the lead

(but you wished she wasn’t)

She was the lead, and she deserved to be

(she was political, unsexualised, funny, feminist)

She was the lead, and look what she starred in

(everything. everything. everything.)

 

The Plausible Diversity of Apples

Come in. Sit down. Pull up a chair. We’re going to play a game.

Here’s how it works: I give you a simple character description, and you tell me which particular character I’m talking about, as well as the one specific TV show they’re from. Your only hint: these are all protagonists or ensemble main characters. Ready? Let’s go:

• straight white male detective, an abrasive maverick with a tragic past
• straight white male doctor, an arrogant maverick
• straight white male conman using his powers for good
• straight white writer, solves crimes and writes novels about it
• straight white political aide, snarky but beloved
• straight white female detective, brilliant with a tragic past
• straight white lawyer who secretly fights crime
• straight white maverick lawyer, sketchy past
• straight white male supernatural creature, tragic past
• straight white male antihero, drives a signature vehicle

Congratulations! We’ve reached the end of round one. Now that you’ve got your eye in, are you ready for round two? I sure hope so! Let’s give it a try:

• straight black female detective, tragic past
• bisexual white female leader, survivor and strategist
• bisexual white male supernatural creature, antihero
• straight Latino male supernatural creature, hero
• straight Asian female doctor, solves crimes
• gay black male detective, brilliant and untragic
• bisexual black female lawyer, maverick antiheroine
• gay Latino male action hero, supernatural issues
• straight black female political maverick

There will not be a round three.

I mean, I could introduce a bonus round about secondary characters, but hopefully, I’m getting the point across: that whereas there are multiple shows whose protagonists answer to the descriptions given in round one, there’s really only one right answer for the equally simple clues provided in round two. Because for all the furore about how shows these days are nothing but an exercise in forced diversity – for all the fear that straight white guys are somehow being banned from stories forever and ever, amen – they’re still the dominant species, and all you need to do to prove it is ask for multiple examples of any one of the types of person supposedly meant to have ousted them.

One of the more common arguments raised by anti-diversity advocates is the futility of tokenism – the idea that giving a single show a black female lead for the sake of filling a quota is both insulting and unnecessary. And I quite agree: tokenism isn’t the answer. What we want is to reach a point where there are so many black female protagonists – and queer protagonists, and protagonists of every other type and variation listed above and a great many more besides, in every permutation – that none of them could ever again be reasonably viewed as a token anything. Because, in this scenario, when writers are considering who could be the protagonist, they’re giving equal consideration to every type of person, and not just forcing themselves to look, however briefly, beyond the narrow, familiar confines of an historical default.

A quick math problem, before we continue: if you have ten apples, and I have three, and we both start shaking the same, communal tree to get more fruit, and the end result is twenty apples each, have you actually lost anything? No, invisible apple friend: you have not. I might have gained more in the short term, but as the end result is a fairly-earned equality, any assertion on your part that my apples were stolen from you – that you are being deprived, somehow, of the all the apples you might’ve had, if only I hadn’t come along – is kind of insincere. And if your response is to try and burn the tree down out of spite, the better to ensure I go hungry next season? Well, then, you really don’t understand how apples work, do you? The ones I’m holding have just as many seeds as yours, and once I’ve gone and planted them, I’ll have access to even more trees than before, and an even greater incentive to make sure they grow big and healthy. Sure, you could spend all your energy trying to sabotage my fledgling orchard, because destruction is far, far easier than creation, but come the next harvest, I’ll still have a crop of shiny, delicious apples to eat – and if you’ve planted nothing in all that time, then brother, I don’t have to burn down anything in order to watch you starve.

Where was I? Oh, right: diversity in narrative.

See, when anti-diversity advocates start talking about the narrative implausibility of particular characters as a means of explaining why, in their opinion, certain types of people just can’t be heroes, they forget the point of stories. We have, quite literally, an entire genre of films, books, comics, games and TV shows dedicated to showing us how normal, mediocre straight white guys – literal everymen, as proudly proclaimed in their blurbs and trailers and other forms of promotional bumpf – can rise up and save the world and the day and get the girl, even when they’ve had absolutely nothing going for them and no pertinent skills before that point. It might happen through luck or hard work, through outside help or unknown possession of a secret destiny, or sometimes a combination of all four, but it does happen, over and over and over again, with the cosmic regularity of sunset, and do you know what? Regardless of whether we love or hate or meh those individual stories, everyone who watches or reads or plays them understands, at base, that a certain degree of implausibility is the fucking point. The idea isn’t to create a hyper-real explanation as to why John Doe is suddenly the only man standing between Earth and alien annihilation, although it’s always nice when the worldbuilding rises to the occasion: the fundamental point of the everyman as hero is to make us, the everyday audience, feel as if we could be heroes, too.

But make that hero queer or female and something other than white, and the same guy who moments ago was cheering on every single everyman ever played by Shia LaBeouf in Transformers and Eagle Eye and Indiana Jones and Constantine is spewing rage on the internet because of the Ghostbusters reboot and Star Wars and who knows what else, because women aren’t funny or interesting and why would you ever try to make them the protagonist? Listen, fucknuts: the only real joke attributable to Adam Sandler is his own career, but I didn’t see you weeping on Reddit when he was inexplicably greenlit for another two hours of cinematic dickslapping in the Year of Our Lord 2016. Leslie Jones could do nothing but read the entirety of Pride and Prejudice aloud on camera while cracking improvised jokes about the characters and drinking champagne, and it would still be a million times funnier than anything that’s ever starred Rob Schneider. Granted, that particular comedic bar is so damn low, you could use it to drag the Marianas Trench, but the point is that the plausibility police were nowhere to be found when James McAvoy learned to be an assassin with the help of a massive sentient loom, a tank full of wax and Angeline Jolie’s collarbones, but are suddenly screeching the heavens down at the prospect of there being More Than One Girl in Star Wars.

I mean, look: it says a whole fucking lot about this debate that the many female characters displaced by Trinity Syndrome – which is to say, female characters who are demonstrably strong and skilled and unique enough to merit protagonist status, but who ultimately play second fiddle to whichever lucky everyman they’ve trained/fallen for – are never subjected to the same level of plausibility-scrutiny as actual female protagonists. Nobody objected to the fact that Trinity was an awesome hacker-leader-fighter in The Matrix, because she was also Neo’s love interest, and hot: they could safely view her through the lens of his success, and thereby rest easy in the knowledge that the story wasn’t really about her. The kind of man who objects to Rey, but not Trinity, isn’t bothered by the contextual implausibility of female competence, no matter what he says: he just wants to know that, whatever prowess the female characters have, they’re still going to come in second to a white guy they later bone down with, or at least kiss. Female exceptionalism therefore becomes allowable only in a context where the various impressive skills a woman has acquired over a lifetime can be first mastered and then improved upon by any moderately talented white guy in a matter of days. But if you take that guy away – or worse still, make him a less adept sidekick or enemy – then suddenly it’s the end of the goddamn world and a blight on plausible storytelling.

So let’s just set the record straight, once and for all: we don’t want an end to stories with straight white male protagonists; we do want to boost the number of stories starring other types of person, and maybe – given the massive historical imbalance between those genres – give them a bit of time in the spotlight, too. We don’t want to promote bad stories over good for the sake of diversity, though we do want them to be judged fairly, which here means allowing us the freedom to create a range of diverse stories without that diversity being automatically dismissed as either tokenism or a pandering irrelevance, or else used as an excuse to put the narrative under a microscope, the results to be read as a harsh pass/fail on the viability of any such future stories. We do want to openly celebrate diversity, in much the same way that farmers celebrate rain after a long drought: we’ve had so little for so long, can you blame us for wanting to shout about it?

Well, I mean. Obviously, if you’re an anti-diversity advocate, you can and will. You’re just not going to have much in the way of moral highground to support you, and maybe – just maybe – it behoves you to consider what you’re really fighting against. If rebooting a franchise with someone other than a straight white guy in the leading role is a purely cosmetic – and therefore, in your estimation, meaningless – change, then why do you feel so personally threatened by the prospect of someone doing it? If your real objection is to tokenism, and not to well-crafted characters from diverse backgrounds, then why aren’t you advocating that writers include more of them, not less? If your selection process for worthy stories is truly wide-ranging and meritocratic, then why does it skew so heavily to only one type of writer and one type of protagonist? Why do you find it so hard to believe that stories can be both diverse and worthy? Why are you so resistant to the idea that well-executed diversity is itself a form of good storytelling?

If narrative representation is such a paltry, meaningless thing ask for, then why are you so terrified of losing it?

We know why, is the thing. The real question is: do you?

 

Bad TV Romance: Could You Not?

Despite the vast quantities of domestic!AU fanfic that exist to the contrary, there’s still a common misconception in TVlandia that romantic relationships are only really interesting when imminent or imperilled; that any sort of emotional contentment or continuity between the characters will be boring to watch. And yet platonic relationships, in which we’re also meant to invest, are just as frequently treated as rock-solid: inviolable except, potentially, at a few plot-critical junctures. And that’s a big problem for romantic pairings – or rather, for our ability to invest in them, because the plain fact is, you can’t successfully threaten to destroy a thing you’ve never committed to building. Not only will nobody care, but there’s literally nothing to tear down except your own expired eviction notices. When you make it your telegraphed aim, week in, week out, year after year, to perpetuate a will-they, won’t-they dynamic, it becomes increasingly hard to give a shit about the won’t-they episodes, because, just like a child threatening to run away to the circus, it doesn’t matter how loudly you scream And this time, I mean it! – we all know you’re bluffing.

Having gone this route, the writers then wonder why fandom is often far more invested in seeing those platonic (predominantly male/male) relationships become romantic than in their canonical (predominantly male/female) pairings. Which: yes, we want queer representation, and yes, we enjoy our own interpretations of the characters, but at base, the problem – as far as you TV writers are concerned, anyway – is trifold. Firstly, you’re limiting your romantic male/female interactions to fit a preordained narrative, which paradoxically weakens the same relationship they’re meant to promote by shallowing its development. Secondly, because you’re worried portraying a platonic male/female relationship in addition to your romantic one might confuse viewers as to who, in fact, the girl is meant to end up with, you don’t create any extraneous narrative potential between characters of the opposite gender. Which means, third and finally, that your same sex interactions are likely biased towards male-male, as most shows tend to have fewer female characters overall – and when they do appear, as per the first point, you’re usually orienting their participation around a single particular man, instead of letting them talk to each other – which means the most naturally developed, complex relationships portrayed are, overwhelmingly, between men.

Thus: having firmly invested your audience in the importance of a romantic relationship, you then proceed to use all the juiciest romantic foundations – which is to say, shared interests, complex histories, mutual respect, in-jokes, magnetic antagonism, slowly kindled alliances and a dozen other things – in male/male scenes, and then affect gaping surprise when your fanbase not only notices, but expresses a preference for it.

So you start to queerbait in earnest – because hey, you didn’t expect it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t capitalise on it! – but never commit to making anyone queer, because that would constitute a Change in the Narrative, and all your sexual prejudices aside, according to the ancient laws of syndication, changing the formula is bad. (Plus and also, I’m pretty sure at this point that all TV executives sign some of kind of blood oath on being greenlit to never use the word ‘bisexual’ on air, even in those rare instances when it actually fucking applies, oh my GOD.)

And maybe, once upon a time, when you could firmly count on homophobes and sexists being the majority viewership and the narrative had to be static each week so as to remain accessible in the pre-DVD- and online-streaming era, that was true. But here and now, this isn’t that world, and as such, I’m here to let you in on a little secret:

TV audiences aren’t opposed to change. We’re opposed to discontinuity, which is what happens when you contort the narrative into increasingly bizarre shapes in order to maintain a tired dynamic despite the clear potential to do differently. You’re always going to lose some old viewers and gain some new ones as the story progresses – that’s true of everything – but I guarantee you’ll lose more overall by substituting arbitrary, superficial changes for meaningful, complex ones.

Partly, the problem is one of uncertainty. Most TV shows are renewed on a yearly basis, which makes it hard for creators to invest in a long game up front. Stories with high school settings, I feel, are a particular victim of this: unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, most teen shows never anticipate their characters transitioning to college, and so keep them confined to a perpetual Twilight Zone of late adolescence, the actors getting older and older as their eventual graduation date becomes more and more ambiguous. More often, however, the real failing is one of details, devils relevant to: of creators either forgetting or refusing to keep track of developments which, while potentially irrelevant to plot mechanics, constitute a vital form of emotional continuity for viewers. A character whose actor leaves the show, for instance, might suddenly cease to be mentioned by their friends, no matter how vital they were before that point or how shocking their departure, while secondary characters routinely vanish from the narrative without any explanation. Charitably, this is another hangover from the days before box sets and streaming, when too many references to past events might potentially confuse new or casual viewers, but in the year 2016, that seems an increasingly thin excuse. At this point, if you’re constructing a show and not thinking about how it’ll hang together during a binge-watching session, when multiple repeat viewers are easily able to notice the inconsistencies, you’re doing it wrong.

Returning, then, to the problem of romance, why is will-they won’t-they still seen as such a reliable default? I have my suspicions, and once again – somewhat unsurprisingly, at this point – they’re rooted in sexism. While straight romance as endgame is a device common across all genres, and is therefore seen as an acceptable, even mandatory inclusion, writing romance as an ongoing or primary narrative component is consistently coded as feminine, and is therefore devalued. The politics of this distinction are subtle and tricky, but when combined with the gender of the writer, it’s usually the difference between a book being shelved in the romance/chick lit section or being billed as general fiction. Indiana Jones can romance Marian all the way through Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that’s an action classic, but even with all the drug dealers, plane crashes and shootouts, Romancing the Stone is still a romantic comedy. The primary emotional arc of Cloverfield is centred on heterosexual romance – a fact made all the more intimate by the hand-held camera device – but god forbid we call it anything other than a horror/monster movie. Caught between the Scylla of Romantic Girl Cooties on one hand and the Charybdis of No Homo on the other, many creators have evidently deemed the true, Odyssian course to be Unresolved (Hetero)Sexual Tension. (Was that phrasing a thinly-veiled jab at City on Fire? Yes it was, internets. Yes it was. Fight me.)

With detailed romance viewed as a narrative contaminant, then, it seldom seems to occur to such writers that it’s infinitely more satisfying to watch a couple pull together against an external threat, or to navigate their togetherness in a way that isn’t suggestive of imminent breakup, than it is to watch the same two people endlessly circle, clash and fall back again without ever making progress. And oh, god, the number of TV shows that try to spice things up by introducing an unexpected third party, as though we’re not all sick to fucking death of love triangles already! Listen: if your idea of a “threat” to a nascent hetero pairing is to introduce a new straight love interest for one of them, unless you’re willing to actually made good on their potential chemistry – or, let’s go crazy, introduce a queer or poly dynamic – all you’re doing is wasting a character, because the audience already knows they can’t be permanent, and even though your job is to entertain, you’ve decided against any outcomes that might actually be surprising.

You know what is surprising, TV writers? Literally anything else.

So go the fuck forth, and do it.

 

TV Roulette: Claymore E2 & E3

What is TV Roulette?: Once a month, the people who back me at a particular Patreon tier get to pick a show, and I’ll either watch the first episode (if I haven’t seen it before) or an episode of their choosing (if I have) and write about it in my best flamboyant, ranty, squee-filled style. Reality TV by negotiation only, because it erodes my soul; otherwise, anything goes. If I like the show, I’ll keep it up for the next month; if I don’t, they can pick something else next time around.

Who’s the backer?: This instalment comes courtesy of Margy, who picked Claymore for me to watch. My response to Episode 1 is here.

Note: As I’d already put up two blog posts yesterday, I decided to fold my August review of E2 over to today and combine it with my September review of E3, hence the double feature.

CLAYMORE: EPISODES 2 & 3

First impressions: Flying swords and edible lizards and spontaneous prostitution allusions, oh my!

No, but seriously: Oh, anime. I will never not love your emphasis on female characters, but I’m still going to headdesk forever over all the weird sex stuff. I have no idea how old Raki is meant to be, but he’s called a boy in the show, which makes it kind of super creepy and weird when he and Clare have this exchange in E3:

Raki: It’s just weird to see you change personalities instantly like that.

Clare: Claymores are trained for this. One second I can act like a noble lady and the next a flirtatious prostitute.

Raki: A prostitute?

Clare: Would you like me to demonstrate?

WOW.

What’s weirder, though, is that this information makes no contextual sense. The Claymores are known everywhere for their distinctive appearance, and when Random Mysterious Dude shows up and gives Clare the pills that let her appear human, it comes across like a) she’s never done so before and b) that using the pills is quite rare. Which, given that they suppress her ability to sense yoma – her key advantage in fighting them – would make sense. So the idea that she’s been trained to impersonate different kinds of people when she never really has to do so feels borked and incongruous, like the writers just wanted an excuse to shoehorn in the prostitution line and didn’t bother to think through the implications.

Also, the whole bit is strangely reminiscent of that time in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex when Motoko Kusanagi randomly tried to seduce a kid, sort of. I mean, I love SAC, but that was still a weirdass scene? Why was it there? Twelve years later and I’m STILL confused. (And skeeved out. SO SKEEVED OUT, YOU GUYS.)

That moment aside, though, these were actually two pretty solid episodes. Despite the repetitive dialogue in E2, the main plot, which deals with Clare having to track down and kill her only friend to stop her turning into a yoma, does a good job of explaining what the Claymores are and where they come from, while E3 expands on the worldbuilding, telling us more about the setting itself as well as the Claymores and yoma. It also ends on a cliffhanger – specifically, with Clare impaled on a yoma’s claws – and when that happens early on in anime, it’s usually a sign that the main arc is about to pick up.

Also: as tired as I get at times of the Stoic Inhuman Warrior Being Hounded By A Bouncy Friendly Human Who Is Basically Just An Inquisitive Puppy trope, I appreciate the fact that Claymore represents a genderflip on the usual permutation, with Clare as the stoic and Raki as the puppy. Even so, I’m hoping Raki develops an actual personality at some point in the near future, instead of just bounding along behind her like a naive sunshine machine.

Verdict: I was lukewarm on E1, but there’s a nice slow reveal going on in E2 and E3, and I’m curious to see where it’s going. Will continue to watch!

TV Roulette: Ultraviolet,E2

What is TV Roulette?: Once a month, the people who back me at a particular Patreon tier get to pick a show, and I’ll either watch the first episode (if I haven’t seen it before) or an episode of their choosing (if I have) and write about it in my best flamboyant, ranty, squee-filled style. Reality TV by negotiation only, because it erodes my soul; otherwise, anything goes. If I like the show, I’ll keep it up for the next month; if I don’t, they can pick something else next time around.

Who’s the backer?: This instalment comes courtesy of D, who picked Ultraviolet for me to watch. My response to Episode 1 is here.

ULTRAVIOLET: EPISODE 2

First impressions: Who are these new characters? Why are they all seemingly identical white people? Am I meant to give a shit? What’s going on?

No, but seriously: Christ, this episode is a mess, and not even an interesting one; I can only describe it as “an hour of my life I’m not going to get back”. Instead of focussing on the characters that the end of E1 situated as the core cast, the plot jumps wildly from scene to scene, introducing a slew of new people – most of whom end up dying – with little coherence and less depth. It’s like whoever made this show was somehow convinced that having the actors speak their lines in a serious tone while ominous eighties synth played in the background would somehow compensate for the fact that the actual dialogue makes no sense. Or I mean, I guess it does make sense, technically – it’s just that, on a structural level, the entire thing feels like it was assembled by writing the details of each scene on a separate palm card, dropping these cards in a heap, scrambling them, and then filming them based on the order in which the director picked them up.

The only standout moments: Idris Elba telling Jack Davenport that he doesn’t get to have friends any more in a sultry voice while making intense, close eye contact, such that my slasher heart sat up and declared “I SHIP IT!”, followed shortly thereafter by manic cackling on my part when someone else accused Davenport’s character of being “too straight” for what he was getting into with Elba. YOU’RE TELLING ME, SUNSHINE.

Otherwise, it’s beyond my comprehension how a show about a smouldering Idris Elba fighting vampires in a goddamn suit can be this fucking boring.

                              I mean, come ON.

Verdict: Disjointed, is the best way to describe Ultraviolet. I’m not exactly enjoying it, but I don’t expressly hate it yet, so I GUESS I’ll stick around for one more episode and see what happens. LACK OF GODS HAVE MERCY ON MY SOUL.

The Perfect Hair Problem: Women In Visual Media

One of my biggest pet peeves in visual media is what I tend to think of as the Perfect Hair Problem. It happens when female characters in physically active professions end up consistently sporting long, perfectly coiffed locks that are never tied back and certainly never cut. Their hair is never messy, because it’s never allowed to be practical or, god forbid, ignored altogether. Whether they’re cops or mercenaries or superheroes, their unbound manes swish freely as they run into battle. Their hair is always a decorative thing, because the people making the show or the film in question are always conscious of the woman’s beauty: they know they’re telling a story, and so use that license to render her as prettily perfect in difficult situations as, realistically, such women would seldom be. We’re most of us suckers for beauty, after all, and in the end, we know it’s pretend – so what does it really matter?

But far from being innocuous, this small, visual detail is part of a larger problem, one that serves to steadily erase female characterisation on the screen. Though men on TV are similarly meant to be handsome and held to their own particular physical standards, the female equivalent is frequently narrower and more exacting, especially when it comes to age and bodytype, and because there’s a greater expectation that female bodies be showcased to their best advantage at all times, that in turn influences the costumes their characters are given – how put-together they’re meant to look at any given time, and in what way – to a much higher degree. Yes, there are certainly some individual outliers and exceptions, but as an aggregate phenomenon, women on the screen are meant to look immaculate, regardless of whether their characters would realistically do so, in ways that men are not.

And as such, this changes the nature of their characterisation at a fundamental level: it’s an absence of individuality, an absence of personal expression replaced, all too often, with similar permutations on a bland, fashionable sameness. How we dress and the importance we ascribe to various types of personal grooming and deportment says a lot about us as people, and even if only subconsciously, we viewers notice the absence of those quirks in ladies on the screen and react accordingly: we know something’s missing, even if we can’t quite pin it down. Consider the women you actually know; the ways they dress and look. My mother is 5’11 and grew up feeling self-conscious about her legs, and so seldom displays them, even in warm weather. Her hair is cut short for practical reasons; she’s equally likely to wear men’s shirts as women’s, prefers loose clothes to tight, wears very little makeup, and seldom bothers with high heels, because she doesn’t need to extra height and finds them uncomfortable anyway. My mother-in-law, by contrast, is about 5’1 and has always had a strong interest in fashion. Though short, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her wear heels: she prefers flats, especially ballet flats – shoes that are both pretty and comfortable. She takes great care with her earrings, glasses and bracelets: at any given time, they’ll all be colour-coded to match whatever outfit she’s wearing, which will invariably be something interesting, the pieces drawn from many different places but all complimenting each other. Because I know them both, I can see how their respective personalities and interests influence their clothes, but even if they were strangers to me, they’d still be visually distinct enough – even beyond the disparity in heights – to signal their different tastes.

Women on the screen, however, are not allowed such unique aesthetics. Their hair is long, because our cultural beauty standards privilege women with long hair, and invariably worn loose, kept in place with spray and sheer force of will; their clothes are expensive and form-fitting, because we’re meant to admire their aspirationally well-toned bodies, which we can’t do if they’re wearing loose things or layers; their shoes have high heels, because we consider that fashionable, even for women who spend all day on their feet; their makeup is immaculate, their nails are manicured, and to me, they look largely like alien creatures, because 90% of the time, there’s a disconnect between who their appearance says they are and what their character is meant to be. The Perfect Hair Problem fritzes with my ability to recognise these women as three-dimensional people the same way that driving into an area with bad reception makes the car radio go staticky and faint: in both instances, there’s an urge to slap the box and tell the responsible mechanism to cut it out, and if that fails, to switch channels – but as in the metaphoric backwoods, the signal is glitchy everywhere, and occasional service is better than nothing at all.

To be clear: I’m not saying I fail to connect with female characters just because they’re dressed and coiffed a certain way, or that every female character who fits that description is necessarily poorly written. I’m saying it bugs me that women on screen are seldom allowed to deviate from a set aesthetic, even if it suits their personalities: aren’t allowed to shave their heads or not shave their armpits or shove their hair up in an unkempt bun or wear long skirts with boots or t-shirts that aren’t nipped at the waist; aren’t allowed to be visually distinct in ways that go much beyond hair colour, or which forever render particular clothing choices off limits, just because we might think they’re less pretty like that. I’ve never seen a teen girl protagonist on TV who favours loose or baggy clothes who wasn’t a cartoon character; I’ve seldom seen black women characters with natural hair, which is an entire issue in its own right. Purely on the basis of their characterisation and personal priorities, your geeky-pretty Queen of Tech should not have an aesthetic that’s functionally identical to that of the partygirl teenage heiress, which in turn should be distinct from that of the hard-working lawyer, and no, it doesn’t count if you give the tomboy character a basic, sensible wardrobe, but then find endless narrative excuses to show her dressed up after hours or give her the She’s All That treatment, Arrow, I am looking squarely at your first season. Something I still love about The X Files is the fact that Scully spends basically nine years swathed in an enormous beige overcoat or the most ridiculous nineties jacket with her hair in a sensible bob, because that’s the kind of woman she is, and her wardrobe is allowed to reflect it.

For how strongly and readily our sexist culture insists that women love clothes and shoes and makeup and expressing themselves individually through fashion, TV shows and movies sure do hate to show them actually doing it unless their “individual” tastes just to happen to magically coincide with What Magazines Think Is Hot. But men are allowed to be as fashionable or unfashionable as they like – can be as messy or scruffy or long-haired or short-haired or daggy or geeky or well-groomed or quirky or casual as their characterisation demands – because their visual presentation is always meant to support their personality instead of emphasising their beauty first and their personhood second. It’s a default that Orphan Black is, of necessity, particularly adept at subverting: with Tatiana Maslany playing so many characters, there’s a clear need to establish clear visual identities for each of them. Cosima is not Helena is not Allison is not Sarah: Maslany nails their different vocal tics and physical mannerisms with a skill that’s almost eerie, but the performance is still aided by how clearly their individual looks relate to who they are.

And I for one would very much like to see more of it.

TV Roulette: Ultraviolet, E1

What is TV Roulette?: Once a month, the people who back me at a particular Patreon tier get to pick a show, and I’ll either watch the first episode (if I haven’t seen it before) or an episode of their choosing (if I have) and write about it in my best flamboyant, ranty, squee-filled style. Reality TV by negotiation only, because it erodes my soul; otherwise, anything goes. If I like the show, I’ll keep it up for the next month; if I don’t, they can pick something else next time around.

Who’s the backer?: This instalment comes courtesy of D, who picked Ultraviolet for me to watch.

ULTRAVIOLET: EPISODE 1

First impressions: Holy nineteen-nineties, Batman! I haven’t seen hair that floppy since Sam Winchester in Season 8 of Supernatural!

Look at that majestic man-mane.

No, but seriously: Remember when you were a kid and adults would coerce you into watching a classic film that was either in black and white, or if it was colour, it was weird colour, all fade-y and stretched and flat, and you ended up with this bizarre idea, not quite shaken even once you realised that it’s all to do with changes in camera technology, that the actual past just looked like that?

Yeah. Nineties filmwork is that way now,too.

I mean, I grew up in the nineties – in fact, I’m pretty sure my twelve-year-old self caught a couple of episodes of Ultraviolet when they first aired in Australia circa 1998 – but that’s what makes it so eerie: it all felt modern at the time, and now you see the grainy picture quality, the lack of high def, and even without the shots of massive convex TV screens and giant early mobiles to clue you in, it looks like something out of the Dark Ages.

(Except Idris Elba, because Idris Elba is perfect and amazing and eternal. Obviously.)

(Also, that floppy-haired guy in the picture above is a young Stephen Moyer. Yes, that Stephen Moyer. Yes, he’s also playing a vampire here, too. I know! His larval form does look freakishly like a morph of James Marsters and Richard Speight Jr!)

No, seriously. He really does.

OH GOD WHY

The point being, this is very definitely a nineties show, with a nineties vibe – which, beyond the distinctive camerafeel, means big shirts for the men, nipped waists for the women, and a soapie-style musical score that’s heavy on the theramin (or something like it, anyway – I’m not a musician) interspersed with long stretches of dialogue-free silence while the characters potter about and click pens and answer phones and generally help the foleys of two decades past to earn an honest quid. Aesthetic, as the tumblrs have it.

Also, vampires. Eventually! I mean, I get that they’re going for a slow build here, but even though nobody ever actually says the word vampire out loud, protagonist Michael seems to accept the gist of all this weirdness pretty quickly on the basis of some carbon bullets and the fact that his friend no longer shows up in mirrors. But for all that the scientific explanation given at the end is pretty cool (though the vampire threat seems a little overstated for what we’ve seen of them – like, one guy getting stabbed in a video arcade hardly seems like the native precursor to VAMPIRES WANT TO KEEP US IN BATTERY FARMS, you know?), this first episode takes a somewhat circuitous route towards interesting. Which, given that they’re working with Jack Davenport, Susannah Harker and Idris Elba, who are hardly slouches at the whole acting thing, seems more to be a fault in the script than the execution. It’s disjointed and naff and a trifle too convenient, but goddamn, can Elba fill out a tailored suit and vest, and buried under all the weird about vanished fiancés and priests who need INVESTIGATORS, NOT SOLDIERS, DAMMIT, there’s the seed of a cool idea. So!

Verdict: Aw, what the hell. I might as well stick around for at least one more episode and see if this shambling beastie can’t get its legs up.

 

TV Roulette: Claymore, E1

As some of you may know, I’m currently running a Patreon to support my blogging here, and one of the reward levels involves me introducing a TV Roulette feature here. Here’s how it works for those who backed me at that tier:

Once a month, you get to pick the show, and I’ll either watch the first episode (if I haven’t seen it before) or an episode of your choosing (if I have) and write about it in my best flamboyant, ranty, squee-filled style. Reality TV by negotiation only, because it erodes my soul; otherwise, anything goes. If I like the show, I’ll keep it up for the next month; if I don’t, you can pick something else next time around.

Right now, I’ve got two TV Roulette backers – the first of whom, Margy, picked Claymore for me to watch.

So: let the inaugural TV Roulette blog begin!

CLAYMORE: EPISODE 1

 First impressions: This is probably not a show I should be watching with a toddler peering excitedly over my shoulder. And yet.

Also, why the swordmaster wearing sensible heels?

Practical combat footwear is practical.

No, but seriously: God, I love anime (except when I don’t, but that’s another story). It’s a medium that has exactly zero fucks to give about explaining shit in the first episode, you know? I mean, let’s be brutally honest: first episodes are pretty much always weird and forced and familiar, because they have to be. They’re blatantly trying to sell you on emotionally investing in a bunch of strangers and concepts you can’t realistically get to know in such a short space of time, so what ends up making them work is never the obvious stuff (Protagonist Meets Protagonist, Tension, Some Kind Of Bonding Thing, Minor Catharsis Plus Hook To Bigger Problem), but the answers to two questions: could this go somewhere interesting? and if it does, will I have Feelings about the first episode when I rewatch it later, knowing how the characters end up?. And whereas most Western shows tend to get super invested in the idea that their formulaic first episode is going to break the mould and go all-out to try and impress you – Look, It’s An Awesome Dude Being Kickass And Sad Because Reasons! Let’s Hint Heavily At His Tortured Past – anime, by and large… doesn’t. Instead, you get first episodes that are either unapologetically slow and simple, or which are labelled part one of two or three or four, because the writers aren’t pretending they need a discreet standalone prologue before they fling you right into the main arc.

Claymore’s first episode is the former kind. We’re introduced to Clare, who fights yoma (demons) while staring dramatically at things, and Raki, who spends his time either chatterboxing or being tearfully menaced. Clare rescues Raki, Raki is grateful, the two end up travelling together, and that’s really it: oh, and there’s wastelands in this world, and yoma can only be killed by people like Clare, who are half-human, half-yoma and always female for some reason. It’s bare bones, but that’s okay, because it’s meant to be, and if I know anime, I guarantee some weird shit is about to go down in the next couple of episodes. Also, Clare has eyes that change colour from silver to gold when she sees yoma! Because unusual and significant eye colours, man – don’t even pretend that’s something only fanfiction has a Thing about, as though beardy old George R. R. Martin didn’t write a series of bestselling novels where a tweenage girl with a magical connection to dragons is distinguished by her silver-white hair and fucking purple eyes, the legacy of her Super Special Bloodline. We’re all suckers for it, okay? Eyes that change colour are goddamn cool, and you know it.

Verdict: As starting points go, it’s a sold 5/10. Will happily watch again next month!

 ETA: Apparently I misheard Clare’s name as Clay. This has now been fixed.