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Archives for : Inspiration
Like most people, I don’t fucking appreciate it when someone wastes my time.
To preface this Cautionary Tale episode, I will say that I am among the minority in terms of how I feel about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I disagree with people that claim everything went downhill after Avengers: Endgame. I in fact vehemently disagree. I think the company itself has had issues with quality control for certain– *stares motherfuckerly at Ant Man 2, Loki seasons 1 and 2, Thor 4, Doctor Strange 2, and Secret Invasion* –but I don’t think they’re hacks and I don’t think everything after Phase 3 was crap. I think they simply lost the thread and need to get back on track for consistently good material instead of this wild variation between good and crap.
Well, I can say with full confidence that if they ever make another show as bad as Agatha All Along, then the people who hate the MCU are going to have a lot of future material to complain about. And I might join them at that point.
For those who don’t know, I’ll do a brief recap of the premise of what led us up to the “story” in Agatha All Along. From this point forward, I will be spoiling the events of WandaVision and Agatha All Along as well as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so if you’re behind on those works, you may want to come back after you’ve seen them.
In WandaVision, Wanda basically snapped after finding out the government took Vision’s body after he was murdered in Infinity War and were essentially trying to reconstruct him. They were unsuccessful, to a point, so she now has confirmation the love of her life is gone forever. She was crushed to come back to life after Endgame and find him gone forever, and in her grief, she created a Hex that created an alternate reality that trapped a very small town of people inside her delusional fantasy in which Vision was alive and well and she had twin boys and a picturesque life that was modeled after her favorite sitcoms growing up. Over the course of the show, she eventually becomes cognizant of what she’s done and she finally resolves to undo it all. She destroys the Hex and returns all the citizens to their normal lives except for Agatha Harkness, who turned out to be an evil witch that got close to try and steal Wanda’s powers. They have a fight and Wanda curses Agatha to not remember who she is and instead lets her live a pretend life in Westview. The events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness then occur and then this show picks up sometime after that has already gone down.
Agatha All Along picks up with Agatha still under Wanda’s spell, but a boy named Teen breaks her out of it and asks her to take him to The Witches’ Road. The Witches’ Road is a mythical alternate reality or dimension in which you are tested by several trials and if you get through them all alive, you will win the prize, which is anything that you desire, sort of like a wish at the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. In the MCU, Agatha Harkness has been rumored to be the only witch that ever made it to the end of The Road, but she was bound by Wanda and can’t use her powers, so she agrees to take Teen on the road so she can get her powers back, but they have to gather a coven first to summon it. They recruit a few other witches and the summon the Road, but they also have the Salem 7, a coven of witches that hate Agatha, and Rio, a psychotic killer witch that also hates Agatha, on their heels. They have to pass every trial alive in order to get what each of them seeks at the end.
Now, that sounds fine, right? A little convoluted, but fine. So why is Agatha All Along the subject of yet another blog post of Cautionary Tales from me?
Because I fucking hate it when a work of fiction wastes my fucking time.
Prior to the final two episodes of Agatha All Along, I was actually enjoying myself. It was nothing groundbreaking, but it held my attention and had an interesting cast. In particular, I felt Ellie and Lily were by far the best acted and written characters in the small coven. They were competent and layered characters who directly contributed to passing some of the trials on The Road. Over the course of the trials, they both die trying to save someone: Ellie dies trying to save Agatha, who absorbs her power and kills her, and Lily dies killing the Salem 7 when they come after them. It was immensely sad to see them go, but they both were fantastic characters with meaty roles, so I accepted it.
And then the last two fucking episodes happened.
To spoil, Agatha, Rio, and Teen—who turns out to be the soul of Wanda’s son Billy inhabiting a new body after the person died right when the Hex closed—have a showdown and Agatha finally lets Rio, who it turns out is really Death, kill her at last, sparing Billy’s life since they made a deal that one of them had to die. Agatha comes back as a ghost and Billy then realizes The Road was not real. Instead, what Agatha did back when she was alive in the 1700s is make up the Road to lure unsuspecting witches and steal their power and murder them all so she can have all their powers. She killed thousands of witches for centuries with this stupid fucking con. When Billy came to her, his reality warping powers that Wanda had basically made The Road real without him knowing it.
Anyone with half a brain should now be able to tell why the hell I’m so fucking angry.
The entire show was POINTLESS.
Ellie and Lily died…for nothing.
Not only did they die for nothing…they died to advance the fucking story of a fucking white woman who is a fucking mass murderer.
And the show proceeds to reward Agatha for this by letting her come back as a ghost, meanwhile the two of them had to die and go to the afterlife.
Oh, and the only black witch? She got no backstory while everyone else there got a backstory.
Again, no one reading this should be surprised that the ending of this show ENRAGED me.
How. Dare. You.
How dare you make a twist that not only trivializes the deaths of two minorities over a white woman who is a mass murderer, but how dare you then do it JUST TO DO IT. The twist does not enhance anything. All it does is subvert your expectations in an incredibly negative way. Instead of tying together ANYTHING in the previous episodes, the final two episodes of Agatha All Along take an interesting story about power, death, and the ambiguous nature of seeking power and turns into a cheap, knockoff M. Night Shymalan production.
I fiercely argue this is not an opinion, too. This is bad writing.
Do you want proof?
Fine. Here are ALL the things that have NO fucking payoff from this series with the “twist” ending that the fucking Road was never real and only Billy made it real:
-Jen’s character arc is completely unfinished. Choosing not to show us her backstory, how she was bound, why she wants power, how she survived through the centuries without it, completely makes this an Aborted Arc. Jen living at the end of the show doesn’t mean shit. You don’t get to go “oh, well, maybe if this show does well, she’ll get a spinoff and we’ll finish her arc then.” NO. If you introduced her arc and you did not finish it in this work, you have FAILED as a writer. That is not how this works. I don’t care that this is an episodic thing. You introduce it, then you fucking tie it off.
-The Salem 7 were built up as sooooo scary and contributed NOTHING to the story. They never fight them, they never trap them, and no one ever explains who they are and why only NOW they somehow found Agatha again when she’s been around in the MCU for God knows how fucking long. They die in an anticlimax after a beautiful sacrifice by Lily. Why in God’s name did you bother to even put them in? They serve NO purpose! They never catch them or hurt them or do anything at all!
-Sharon Davis, the cutesy neighbor, again, died because Agatha dragged her along to avoid having to bring Rio with them. Why was she here? She dies just to die! Why was she included at all? She adds nothing to the story and there is no payoff and her death doesn’t even affect the coven. And Rio ended up on the fucking journey anyway, so it was a waste of time and a waste of that actress’ talent considering she shows up twice and dies and it has no effect on anything.
-Lily’s sacrifice meant nothing. She died saving a woman who killed thousands of witches for her own selfish gain and who was such a low down dirty sack of shit that she taught her own fucking son to help her murder people. Why would you take this interesting, layered character and sacrifice her for a mass murderer? What about that is satisfying? What about that is meaningful?
-Ellie’s sacrifice meant nothing. She died saving a woman who killed thousands of witches for her own selfish gain. Again, why? What does that say about this fucking story that she had to die so some evil piece of shit could keep fucking people over for her own gain?
-The story starts and ends at the exact…same…fucking…place. The ENTIRE ordeal that resulted in the deaths of two innocent fucking women did not affect anything. The only thing it changed is Billy can now access his powers and wants to find Tommy. Agatha is dead, but a ghost and still alive to fuck people over, so the entire motherfucking eight hours of my life have been wasted on a story in which only TWO things have changed since it happened.
-Billy gets mad at Agatha after discovering The Road was just a con and tries to banish her, but then inexplicably he’s fine with being a murderer ONE conversation after he just tried to banish her. WHAT CHANGED!? What changed about Agatha murdering thousands of witches and you just killed two people with your magic for no reason? Why would you EVER think you wanted Agatha around after watching her admit to being a mass murderer? Why would you EVER think she could help you? Nothing she’s done has indicated she will be of any use and chances are great all she’ll do is find a way to come back to life and steal your power. It makes no sense that Billy is fine with having killed Ellie and Lily and is now besties with Agatha again after she abandoned him and just happened to have second thoughts. It was the worst attempt at a redemption arc that I have ever seen in my life. It is a pathetic, nonsensical showing of bad writing and I will die mad because I know this entire fandom ate it right up.
Many people in my life have heard my rant about what I call White Heifer Syndrome, and Agatha All Along is no different from that argument. Once again, a major studio has written a story in which a white woman fucks over hundreds of people and does not suffer the direct consequences of what she’s done, and her actions fucked over people of color in particular and that is why I am this angry at this show. I am sick and tired of watching white women in fiction fuck over hundreds of people and be treated like they’re a girlboss. Agatha Harkness is a fucking monster and I was FINE WITH IT when the show was treating her like a monster. Then the show proceeds to ignore Jen and give us Agatha’s “boo fuckity hoo” backstory and act like this literal mass murderer should garner my sympathy. Because you know, having a tragic backstory makes it all okay. All those dead witches, don’t worry about it! Feel sorry for poor, poor Agatha and her dead kid! It’s just the most crushing thing ever, isn’t it?
So what can we learn from this unmitigated fucking disaster?
Fuck twist endings. Yeah, I said. Fuck ‘em. I have completely reached a point of not wanting any major studio to handle a twist ending ever again. Stop making a twist just to make a twist. Subverting expectations only works when it is service to the story and the characters. If you do it just to avoid us predicting the outcome, you’ve insulted everyone’s intelligence and wasted their time.
Stop glorifying mass murderers and then trying to justify their behavior with a tragic backstory. A dead kid is no fun for anyone, but I am not about to excuse this empty ass bitch for slaughtering thousands to get more power all because boo hoo, your son is dead. Go to therapy, you jackass. If you’re gonna be evil, then be evil and shut the hell up about your pain because nobody cares. Like Rocket Racoon once said, everybody’s got dead people. It doesn’t give you the right to get everyone around you killed and then walk away from it with a smile, acting like you deserve anything other than misery. Stop asking the audience to treat white mass murderers like pop stars. Just stop it.
Stop killing women of color to advance a white woman’s story and then glorifying said white woman as if she somehow deserves their sacrifices. Women of color are not your fucking stepping stone. We are not your tools. We are not your Magical Negroes who advance white stories and then promptly fucking die for our trouble. Make these white women earn their keep themselves and stop forcing women of color onto their knees so white women can stand on their backs and declare themselves girlbosses. Hold these awful characters accountable and let women of color have agency of their own.
If you introduce a concept or a character, then you need to tie that off by the end of the work or you need directly address how it’ll be resolved in a future work. I don’t give a damn that Jen lived through the ordeal and got her powers back and may appear in the future. There was NO reason to focus an entire episode on Agatha being a mass murderer and shoving Jen aside when the other characters all got to have their backstories explored. Don’t think I didn’t notice the only black character got shafted, and don’t think I didn’t notice she’s a brown-skinned black woman at that and was fucked over by this story. I am not going to keep showing up to any property that cannot treat women across the board the same in terms of importance. This show was an utter disservice to these actresses and just served to glorify a woman who in no way deserves anything but hatred.
Marvel Cinematic Universe, I want nothing more than to keep loving you as I have over the last twenty years, but if THIS is the best that you can do…
You might be the next Cautionary Tale.
Get it the fuck together, MCU.
Signed,
An Angry Fangirl Named Kyoko
Come join me and other geeks talking about one of the best comic book movies in recent history, Across the Spider-Verse! All hail Burrito Peter!
“The flame might be gone, but the fire remains
And I’m stuck on a path to my own ruin
Did you see me behind the wheel?
Did you see me behind the wheel?
And the flame might be gone, but the fire…
-“Remembered” by The Dear Hunter
Sometime in the middle of last year, I heard the premise for American Fiction (2023) and thought it sounded like an absolutely genius concept completely relevant to not just my experiences as an author, but the experiences of a whole bunch of POC that I personally know. Lo and behold, upon viewing it, they knock most of it out of the park (I don’t like the final act, personally; I think it doesn’t feel cohesive and satisfying enough to end what was a REALLY good story in the first and second acts). Enough that it’s why I felt like I wanted to blow the dust off my blog for an entry. I think this movie is going to give us a lot of cud to chew as a society, and that it’s definitely a conversation worth having among black authors in particular.
Let’s get into it. Before we start, spoilers for American Fiction (2023). At the time of this post, it is still in theaters so if you want to get the juicy details, I recommend you pop out to a theater. Its theatrical run was extended thanks to the Oscar nominations.
American Fiction is about a struggling black professor named Thelonious “Monk” Ellis who is vexed by the fact that his work is actually quite good, but it doesn’t sell because it’s complex and not palatable to the masses. After a lot of misfortune, he gets the idea to write a book that’s both pandering to urban fiction readers and is a middle finger to the industry that puts out books that basically (in his opinion) reinforce harmful black stereotypes and sends it to his publisher under a different pseudonym, laughing that he will get reviled reactions to writing tripe. Well, the opposite happens! Immediately, a huge publisher says they want the book and to offer him friggin’ $750,000 for it. Monk is gobsmacked, but since his sister just died and his mother was just diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, he reluctantly decides to take the offer. Things get even more complicated when the book blows up as a number one bestseller and he gets a movie deal, despite his chagrin and embarrassment, and he struggles to reconcile the fact that the worst thing he’s ever written is now his most successful book.
So, in my family, my older brother and have a running joke about the fact that I am a fairly good writer (or at least I feel that I might be one; none of the good writers ever know it or believe it even when given evidence) but I make nothing off my books because I don’t write to market, and if I just sold out and wrote bad smut or books for basic bitches, I’d be a millionaire.
You can see why I went right out to see this film as a result.
American Fiction’s biting sarcasm and relentless exposure of the faults in the publishing world and the black community is definitely going to be remembered by all relevant parties. This film shines a light on something that the average person, regardless of race, ethnicity, and nationality, probably doesn’t know. Way too many people don’t know how the writing and publishing world works, and this film does. It truly gets it. It gets what black writers go through and it gets what the mainstream publishing world sounds like. Whoever wrote it definitely has either experienced this crap directly or is intimate with someone who does, because everything in the film proceeds exactly how it does in real life, for the most part.
And that’s what got me thinking.
If I had to sum up American Fiction (2023) in a word, I’d say it’s about responsibility.
So in the story, one of the reasons Monk decides to write the most base and pandering piece of crap novel is after having to endure watching a book seemingly just like it blow up by a black female author named Sindra. It inadvertently puts him on edge every time he has to be somewhere and see her book, given that the book just panders to every black stereotype since that is the genre expectation for urban fiction. Finally, in the third act, he and the author are in the same room and he asks her why she considered his book (keep in mind, she has no idea he wrote it) pandering, yet hers doesn’t count. She fires back that she’s writing to market and that it’s not her fault if white people or other people think that all black people behave the way they do in urban fiction. The film is basically examining personal responsibility as an author and in particular, as a black author.
And I can say for certain that is going to ring through the halls of history as relevant for decades to come.
The film has a very intelligent argument and I appreciate the living hell out of it being in a big production movie that is now an Oscar nominee. Now, don’t get me wrong—fuck the Oscars. Yeah, I said it. They’re archaic, antiquated, and utter crock. Most of the time, if a good movie gets an Oscar nom, it’s a fucking coincidence. The Academy in no way is interested in awarding the “best” movie anything; this is a room full of people that wanna be pandered to, and the harder you pander, the more they’ll pat you on the back, which is why damn near every year is the same fucking movies getting nominated. It’s aggravating as hell and it’s why they are continuously losing the public’s attention. People are tired of unknown garbage getting attention, especially since the Academy is who’s being lambasted by the very same film they nominated. The Academy doesn’t want to hear shit from POC unless it’s a story about their pain. Every once in a blue moon, you’ll get competent and joyful films winning like Everything Everywhere All at Once, but largely if POC are nominated, especially black people, it’s because it’s talking about our pain, not our triumph, and the Academy seems to think the only relevant stories we can tell are about our pain, which is exactly what is discussed in this film, and it’s handled rather well.
But I do take a departure from Sindra’s argument.
Sindra’s argument boils down to “people enjoy what I write and I’m not wrong to write to that market; it’s the responsibility of white people to not believe nothing but stereotypes.” That’s a good, solid argument…but I disagree. I understand the argument completely and I think I agree to an extent, but my problem with what’s discussed in the film is more of a long term, wider scale problem than an isolated one.
The reason that I dislike that type of writing is that it reinforces negative stereotypes about black people that affects things outside of just the reading world. What I’m concerned about is the long term effects of writing that kind of fiction. Sindra is correct; it is the responsibility of society to not reinforce negative stereotypes, but I argue that authors hold some of that responsibility too. It is for this very reason that you see a lot of popular white authors either never writing black people (even if the character LIVES IN THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING CHICAGO NOT POINTING FINGERS OR ANYTHING BUT YOU KNOW WHO THE FUCK YOU ARE) out of fear that they’ll “get something wrong” and offend POC or they seldom write them and cheat readers out of what could be an interesting character and story. If these white authors don’t have POC in their lives, first of all, that’s sad and they need to get their shit together, but second of all, they feel like they’re too scared to write POC because all they’ve ever seen are Tyler Perry movies and Worldstar and Eric Jerome Dickey books, so they have zero frame of reference for the black experience, so they skip it. While that’s an isolated problem, it’s much bigger than that. The problem I have with Sindra’s argument is that when you endorse this type of writing, there are real life consequences.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say there is a job opening for a front desk clerk at a dentist’s office. The hiring manager has two candidates that are the same age, have the same level of education, and have the same level of experience needed for the job. Both of them have great interviews, too. One is black and the other is white. For the sake of the argument, let’s say this hiring manager is white. Now, here he sits with two resumes of identical people. How does he make that decision? Well, if this hiring manager has seen nothing but Tyler Perry movies and reality TV shows, what are the chances he starts thinking about his black potential candidate as being a problem? More than likely, it’s gonna creep into his head and influence the decision, so he passes on the black candidate based on falsified evidence of what black people are like. That’s my problem with Sindra’s argument. This is of course a small situation and I’m sure that black candidate doesn’t want to work for someone who would turn him down based on him believing an incorrect stereotype, but that’s my point.
Opportunities can be taken away from black creatives based on negative stereotypes. And that isn’t just black people, too—people of color in general have to struggle with the fact that the white population is still in control of most of America’s working parts, and so we have to contend with extra stress and problems that they don’t necessarily have based on race. This is of course not to say white people don’t have problems; of course they do, they have the same problems except for the fact that when white people act out, no one blames the entire race. And that’s what black people—and POC in general—have to contend with on a daily basis. I cannot tell you how many micro-aggressions I’ve had to endure being a black woman in the South. It’s truly maddening how differently you’re treated as a black woman in America, but the South really can get under your skin and make you frustrated with how they handle everything down here. Sindra’s argument, to me, is too idealistic. I would love to live in a world where stereotypical behavior is not viewed as blamed on an entire race of people.
But that’s not the world we live in.
Someone once said that being a woman is like ballroom dancing backwards in high heels, and it is. But I would argue being black is very similar. We can’t just be as good as our white counterparts—we have to be better in every way, and even when we are better (though to be fair, better is a very subjective term for this argument), there is still an enormous possibility that we get nowhere because the person at the gate is someone who looks at us and sees nothing but negative stereotypes. We have to work ten times harder for the same reward that would’ve been considered on normal merit had we not been a POC. That’s why I don’t agree that there is no responsibility with us as black writers. I think we have to pay attention to what we’re putting out there because even if it seems like no one cares and no one’s watching, someone certainly is and they can unknowingly affect the outcome of a black person’s life based on their experiences. I’d love to say that we can get there as a society, but I’m not confident in our ability to understand complexities.
But that’s also what I like about the film. It is a complicated argument with plenty of support for both sides and I love that someone wanted to have this conversation at all. This is exactly what all low-to-mid-level black authors go through at some point, especially the indie and small press crowd. I certainly don’t feel negatively towards urban fiction; who the hell am I to judge? If y’all saw my Browser History on AO3, you’d have plenty of stones to throw into my little glass house. But what I am saying is that I think it’s still our responsibility as black authors to think before we write something that might have a Domino effect down the line, but we also need to call out the people who make shitty decisions based on stereotypes at all times. We can’t let up on that. It’s ridiculous to sum up a whole race of people based on a 90 minute movie or a season of a reality show. We shouldn’t do it to each other and we shouldn’t do it to other races, nationalities, and ethnicities. Hell, that’s how we’ve had a resurgence of fucking Nazis in America; instead of punching them in the face, people said “we should hear them out” and now we’ve got a whole ass third of the country insane enough to storm the fucking Capitol to assassinate the Speaker of the House and the goddamn former Vice President. This. Stuff. Matters.
And yes, I know that’s a huge example for such a modest film, but that’s why I feel so strongly about the argument the movie presents. It’s surprisingly the small stuff that can make a difference in the writing world. I also think that every writer, no matter how successful, should be fostering friendships and relationships to help each other out. We are not in competition. All of us should reach down and pull the person below us on the ladder up, not pull the ladder up behind us so they can’t reach out of fear. We have to uplift if we want things to change. We have to keep having these conversations to eradicate as much of that learned hatred as possible.
And I really think films like American Fiction (2023) are how we get closer to that goal.
So thank you to everyone who had anything to do with making it. Even though I didn’t feel the ending was right, I really had a good time with the first and second acts and I hope they get to bring home the (irrelevant) gold just because it would be good for America to find out just how fucking rough it is out here for black authors.
But we persevere.
Here’s to you, American Fiction. Knock those old bastards at the Academy dead when it comes time.
Kyoko
Too much of a good thing can be bad for you, and I think there is no better example than TV shows that get after-the-fact mini-series or additional seasons after their initial run, like Justified on FX. For those who are not aware, Justified was an FX show starring the infinitely talented Timothy Olyphant as US Marshal Raylan Givens, based on the book series written by the late Elmore Leonard. Givens is a modern day cowboy of the most badass variety, and Justified is a love letter to urban cowboys. I wish I could say the show was perfect, but it is far from that; in my opinion, it should only have had four seasons. I found season five to be bad except for the most epic villain death in television history (if you must know, look up “Justified Twenty-One Foot Rule” on YouTube and sit back and enjoy), and season six was dogshit. Therefore, when it was announced there would be a new mini-series ten or so years later, I remained cautiously optimistic and began to tune in each week via Hulu.
And what I found is unfortunately a lot like when Dexter ended, then returned to try and close the loop a little better the next time around.
Which is the subject of today’s episode of Cautionary Tales.
So all the way back in the year of our Lord 2015, I wrote a cautionary tale blog post about Justified’s lousy final season. To sum it up, the last season was very forced and it was apparent the writers had no more good ideas as they’d used them up in seasons 1-4, so the last season ended on a pathetic whimper and I won’t get into it because it’s a sore subject. But I knew all the way back then that there was a finite amount of talent in the writers’ room, and I had hoped that the big gap of time between the end of the original run and the revival would have given them the time to find a good story. I actually bothered to grab the book that this series is loosely based on, City Primeval by Elmore Leonard, just because I wanted a preview of what I might expect here. The book has a reputation for basically being a middle of the road title for Leonard’s career, but the reason I’ve brought it up is because of the context. This book has nothing to do with Raylan Givens. The book is actually about a character named Raymond Cruz, but the Justified producers decided to take Cruz out and plop Raylan in since the show, while never an enormous hit, had a modest viewing of two million viewers until the final season, which lost about half a million viewers after season five was NOT good and season six was even worse. They knew they had a built in audience that would likely return for a revival, so they decided to take the plot from the book and just assign it to Raylan instead.
And honestly, I think it was a mistake.
Not a huge mistake. Not a catastrophic “I hate this” mistake.
The problem is that this revival is nothing but wheel-spinning.
Let’s get into why this is today’s lesson of cautionary tales.
Naturally, massive spoilers for the ending of Justified and for episodes 1-7 of Justified: City Primeval. At the time of this post, the series finale has not aired, so this is more of a retrospective recap and discussion of where I think things went wrong.
Alright, so here’s the basic set up: in the original series, Raylan was reassigned back to his hometown of Harlan county Kentucky after he shot a mobster to death in a crowded restaurant in broad daylight in Miami. Long story short, the original series ends with him surviving Harlan and going back to Florida, which was where he was before the shooting. We pick up close to ten years later with a very seasoned Raylan dealing with his preteen daughter, Willa, whom he had with his ex-wife Winona, and Raylan catches a case that sends him up to Detroit, Michigan. Now, Raylan is very familiar with some Detroit mobsters that had a foothold in Harlan county because it’s a backwater town full of gross racist pieces of shit and so the drug trade is huge in Harlan and so is the general crime. After arriving to Detroit, he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, an Oklahoma Wildman who has no regard for literally anyone or anything. Through sheer dumb luck, the judge Raylan was working with runs into Mansell and Mansell snaps, killing the judge and his assistant in their car in the dead of night and taking the judge’s book full of blackmail material on dozens of Detroit citizens. Mansell, who is a career criminal but managed to walk on a technicality thanks to his lawyer-under-duress, Carolyn Wilder, then gets with another one of his associates named Sweetie to start blackmailing the people in the judge’s book to make money off them, citing that once he has enough, he and his side piece bimbo Sandy will retire to the tropics.
Now, that sounds like an alright idea on paper, but unfortunately, I think the bad writing from the final season carried over into this one. The biggest problem of the show so far is that while I get that Raylan is a fish out of water, none of the things that make him a great character other than that sly sense of humor and swagger are present in this mini-series.
Raylan Givens has two important things working for him as a US Marshal: he’s incredibly intelligent and observant and he’s an amazing shot. Those two traits define him as a character. Most of the fun of the original show is watching the Harlan criminals figure out that Raylan’s intelligence and perception mixed with being a crackshot make him next to impossible to evade or defeat. And what I’ve always loved about Raylan is that he is always fair. Almost every time he’s had to confront a convict or an escaped felon, he explains exactly what he’s going to do and what their situation is and he lets them make a choice. And 99% of the time, the dopes in Harlan county think they can either outthink or outdraw Raylan and they are dead wrong, pun intended. So I was excited to see Raylan in a new environment, ready to see him adjust and change and grow in this new city.
And yet I’ve gotten 7 episodes of absolutely nothing.
I’m someone who understands that a new series can mean that they make changes and I won’t necessarily always like said changes, and that’s okay. The issue I have with this particular change is that it makes me wonder why they bothered to tell this story if Raylan’s intelligence and amazing shooting skills are not at all in use this entire series. He never gets the drop on Mansell. He and the Detroit cops fumble the investigation so badly that I frankly would be annoyed if I were a real Detroit cop because they basically make them look incompetent. The decision to basically neuter Raylan and not give him any decent leads or even just use his own intuition to figure out how to get this guy behind bars is infuriating. The difference with this series in particular is that it’s not like Mansell is very clever in how he commits crimes. The guy is blatantly doing whatever he wants, but the Detroit cops are so stupid that they somehow still can’t lock him up. So forgetting the judge and assistant’s murders, he also attempts to rob an Albanian guy at gunpoint and breaks his leg when the guy doesn’t have any money for him to steal. He was caught on audio by the police trying to blackmail a civil servant. He murders his co-conspirator, Sweetie, and burns down the bar. He executes the guy whose condo he and his bimbo had been staying in, basically for no reason, in broad daylight in an upscale condo. Did you read all of that? Now explain to me how the heck the cops can’t find any hard evidence or anything to get this guy locked up?
I’ll tell you how: shoddy writing. And unfortunately, this has been a problem for as long as fiction has existed. Often, lazy writers don’t want to make a villain smart and always one step ahead of the protagonist because it’s “too hard,” so what they do instead is simply make a dumb protagonist who bumbles all the attempts to catch the villain. And that’s really the biggest issue I have with Justified: City Primeval. The writers decided to take the easy way out by making the Detroit cops idiots and make Raylan a neutered puppy who can’t anticipate any of Mansell’s moves or gather any evidence that would lead to some kind of conviction. All of the momentum of the previous show is not present in this mini-series.
And you know, I’d be less salty about it if the content we’re seeing that is not Raylan investigating Mansell was good, but it’s not. Now, I will say that Raylan and Carolyn Wilder’s fling is by far the only legitimate enjoyment I’ve gotten out of the show. You’re welcome to throw a Criminal Offensive Side Eye at me for it; I’ve wanted Timothy Olyphant to have a black female love interest for 10 years and this series gave me exactly what I’ve always wanted (just no sex scenes, grrrr) and I’m okay with my own bias in that regard, but everything else in the show suffers as a result of the show not delivering good content. The performances are good, don’t get me wrong, but nothing is even coming close to the enjoyment we had back in Harlan county with the kooky criminals and the interesting fellow marshals in Lexington. This revival comes across as a cash grab leaning on an established IP to get viewers.
And based on the reactions from the Justified fandom, I don’t think the show is hitting for them either. I’ve been hearing complaints about Raylan’s lack of police work since episode two. I personally had reserved judgment and was hoping it was going slow in the beginning, but it would pick up in the middle, but it didn’t. The needle has not moved an inch. The entire plot is only moving forward because of Mansell, not Raylan, so in the end, it makes the show feel like Raylan was the Decoy Protagonist and the show is instead all about Mansell, who is an irritating piece of shit in every regard, and it annoys me greatly that this actor’s fangirls have clogged the Tumblr tag with a bunch of disgusting simping for a man who murdered his own mother in cold blood and threatened to rape an underage girl in front of her father. But that’s a long story I’m not gonna get into.
The central fact of the matter is that if you’re going to resurrect a show, then you have to do your due diligence in—and pun fully intended here—justifying its existence. From what I read of the book, it was a decent story that was worth telling. This story is not worth telling. It adds nothing to Raylan’s dimensions as a character and the “rivalry” they are attempting to set up with Raylan vs. Mansell is weak because the show has not developed it. I went through my head and thought about how many scenes Raylan and Mansell have had together and oddly enough, it’s not very much. He gets under Raylan’s skin because he’s a slimeball and knows it and yet the laws of man somehow just don’t apply to this guy, but that’s it. There is nowhere near the history between them like some of Raylan’s far better opponents like Boyd Crowder or Dickie Bennett. They might as well have just not made this revival in the first place if the only thing that would be good about it was Raylan gettin’ it on with a smart, powerful black woman who can handle him in a way none of the skanks he’s slept with in the past ever have. (Yes, I said it. Every woman Raylan has ever slept with in the original show was a skank. Come at me, scrublords, I’m ripped. )
Some of the issue, too, is that the supporting cast is nowhere near as strong as the one in the show’s original run. Our cast of characters is too big and so no one’s getting the focus they should have in order to make them more interesting. I already mentioned that Mansell has a stranglehold on the screentime and everyone else is left with pieces. There have been two majorly important conversations between Raylan and Carolyn that were cut short that I think was a massive mistake: seeing how they hooked up for the first time, and this most recent episode when she bluntly asked him how he would get Mansell’s prints on the murder weapon. We should have seen more content for Carolyn, Sweetie, and the detective that Raylan’s been partnered with, Wendell. None of these relationships are elaborated on enough to really make us care about what’s transpiring. It’s all too much of a light touch with Mansell as the focus, and frankly, if the new show is so enamored with this douche, then you should have just adapted the book as-is instead of including Raylan since Raylan isn’t getting to do anything the entire time.
I also want to take a little aside here and mention a pet peeve of mine. Anyone who knows me knows about my theory about what I call White Bitch Syndrome. White Bitch Syndrome, in a nutshell, is when writers coddle white female characters (and 90% of the time they’re also blonde) when everyone else in a story has to pay for their mistakes and live with the consequences of their actions. The number one reason I hated the final season of Justified was because the show went full White Bitch Syndrome with a character named Ava Crowder, who basically spent all six seasons being a reprehensible piece of shit and got away with everything solely because white woman. Now, the bimbo Sandy Stanton is nowhere near the level of cunt that Ava Crowder is—and yes, I use that term sparingly, but Ava Crowder has earned it, trust me—but she is still being coddled and I absolutely despise the way that she’s been Mansell’s accomplice, but only now does she realize he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and would kill her the second she defected. It’s not fair for you to make all these other characters pay for their actions, but she gets to walk because she’s blonde, white, and female, but again, this was Justified’s MO in the original show. Ava got away with everything and Winona’s stupid ass walked out on Raylan too without a scratch on her, cementing her as one of the dumbest characters of all time since there is no man in Harlan county like Raylan and any woman with sense would jump at the chance to be with him. But I digress.
I guess, overall, the words I would use for this revival are “unnecessary” and “unsatisfying.” It doesn’t feel like it needed to come back if this was the material it returned to in the end. Is it better than the last season? Eh. In some ways, yes. There are better characters here and Raylan isn’t acting like a complete psychopath willing to throw his badge and life away just to kill Boyd Crowder, but at the same time, this isn’t a worthy story for Raylan Givens, especially if like I suspect, they kill him off in the series finale. This was not the right choice for him and it seems to have fallen into the traps like the Dexter revival I mentioned above (keep in mind, I never watched Dexter, but I knew it had one of the most hated finales of all-time and I know about the revival’s reception only because my dad watched it over winter break one year and we chatted about how it went).
Is it possible the series finale wows me and fixes all the problems I had in episodes 1-7? Yes. Is it likely? No. My guess is that they left all the action in the final episode so it’s an incredibly bottom-heavy series with an unsatisfying conclusion. Rest assured, if they kill Raylan off after an incredibly lackluster season, I will simply go into denial like I did with the original final season, as I sadly have had to do with a lot of shows I used to love.
So what can we learn from this debacle?
A few things, really. First, don’t bring back a beloved character unless you have something relevant to say about them or about any sort of important subject matter that you want to write about. Second, if you are more interested in writing about the antagonist than the protagonist, then you need to establish that right out of the gate instead of leading people on to think the story is centered on the protagonist. Third, learn what scenes need to be elaborated on and what can get cut that won’t be detrimental to the overall story. Fourth, don’t be lazy and make a dumb protagonist so the antagonist can get away with everything; do the work of writing a competent antagonist and a competent protagonist equally. Because if you don’t do that, you end up with a trope that has a name I forget that has to do with Lex Luthor; don’t write your bad guy getting away with his crimes so often that it induces apathy within your audience because Status Quo is God. This trope refers to Lex Luthor as the main example of how a conflict between good and evil can get boring if the bad guy ALWAYS gets away with his crimes so that the work of fiction can continue to be made. We all know that Lex is never going to jail—not for anything serious that he’s done and not for any significant length of time if they do get him on something eventually—and so Superman defeating him time and time again can get old if you’re not adding any new dimensions to the struggle. Lex fared a little better in Superman: The Animated Series because Supes and Lex were engaged in, for lack of a better word, a cold war. Lex does a bunch of illegal, shady shit and Clark tries to stop it or tries to gather evidence to either put Lex away or destroy his chances at future crimes, and that worked for that show’s format. You have to balance it with victories and losses for both sides or your audiences will lose interest.
And frankly, that’s about what happened by the time I finished watching episode 7 of City Primeval. I’ve just lost interest in what they decided to focus on and this isn’t a return to form for Raylan Givens nor this writers’ room. But what can you expect when the last season was also a dried turd?
If nothing else, I’ll commend them for giving Raylan an age-appropriate, interesting love interest with whom he had actual chemistry. That’s the best thing I can say for City Primeval, personally. I guess we’ll see if they somehow buck the system and stick the landing, but my guess is I’ll be just as disappointed with this finale as I was with the original one, and that’s a damn shame considering the enormous talent of the cast in this mini-series.
Better luck next time, my long legged cowboy boyfriend.
“On this lonely road
Trying to make it home
Doin’ by my lonesome, pissed off
Who wants some?
See them long, hard times to come…”
I am happy to announce that I will be appearing on this week’s Authors’ Corner hosted by ConCarolinas TV! Please join us at 7:30pm EST on August 24th, 2023 where we will be discussing science fiction. Details are in the poster above. I look forward to seeing you all there!
Edit: ICYMI, here is the link to watch the recording on YouTube:
Looking for low cost ways to market your book? Or know someone who is? Then tune in to this free podcast interview where I discuss the best and most cost-effective ways to market your book.
Episode 61 – Book Launch on a Budget: Low/No-Cost Tips and Resources
One of my earliest memories as a child is watching Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. It came out all the way back in 1993 when I was just five years old, so I have to imagine either my parents took me or we rented it on VHS. I remember being a wide-eyed youth, precocious and probably too young to understand everything, but what I did understand was the following scene:
Even at that young an age, I was captivated by Kevin Conroy’s performance as Batman, particularly this moving scene of Bruce begging his parents to forgive him and let him out of his vow and promise because he unexpectedly fell in love. It is one of the most beautiful things ever created that relates to Batman and to Kevin Conroy.
I met Kevin Conroy at a con back in 2013. I was so nervous that my hands were shaking as I walked up to his table and greeted him. I told him that his portrayal of Batman was the definitive one for all time and that his Bruce Wayne and his Batman were figures of my own struggling mental health. Whenever I became suicidal, the only thing that would stop me from killing myself was imagining Bruce Wayne telling me to be strong and live through my trauma to be a better person and a good soldier. Kevin Conroy was visibly moved by hearing that and offered me encouragement and gracious thanks before being kind enough to take this photo with me.
Later on, I attended the panel that he had and I asked him what his performance as Batman has taught him over the years. He gave the most beautiful, eloquent answer that I’m so blessed to have witnessed:
For my entire life, Batman has been my constant. He has been my pillar of strength given that I struggle with depression and anxiety. He has been my touchstone, as odd as it sounds, and Kevin Conroy is why. He is our Batman. He is the sole embodiment of good and justice and kindness and strength and love. I loved him with all my heart and I will mourn him for the rest of my days. We were so blessed to be a part of his life, to love him and support him, to share his amazing work and the work of the DCAU team. We were so inspired by the way that he lived his life. The world has lost a beacon of light and decency. It’s so hard saying goodbye to such a good man. He lived a life that was an example of the best that a man can be and we will miss him always.
Thank you for what you’ve given us, Kevin. Thank you for giving me the strength not to end my life. Thank you for inspiring generation after generation. We love you so much.
I love you so much.
Rest well, beloved.
Ever wanted to see visual approximations of the dragons from the Of Cinder and Bone series? Here’s your chance. Each dragon also has a little factual tidbit beside the illustrations. This list includes the named and seen dragons in Books 1-4, so beware of spoilers.
This is NOT for sale and no profit will be derived from this post. All artists that I was able to identify are credited in each illustration.
Have fun!
Update 7/26/22
It’s officially been three months since the release of my new novel, Of Claws and Inferno! I’m ripping the spoiler tag off and now it’s time to meet the new dragons featured in Book Five. Peruse at your peril.
Disclaimer: Do not go any further if you have not read The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, but especially not if you have not read Book 17, Battle Ground. I mean it. You’ve been warned.
So. Y’all know I adore Karrin Murphy, right? So much so that if you literally Google the character (at the time of this post, anyway), my website shows up on the first f@#king page of results for the character. That’s how much I fervently love this character and what she’s meant to the Dresden Files and to Harry Dresden himself. It’s for that reason that in light of her untimely, stupid, unsatisfying fate in Battle Ground that I am going to take time out of putting a curse on Jim Butcher and his entire line to talk about her in depth. Because she deserves to be honored before I put this series to bed for good.
And yes, I mean that. I quit The Dresden Files thanks to Butcher’s bullshit move to unceremoniously force this incredible character out of the narrative in the most disrespectful manner possible. If you need reasons, find them here and here. Warnings for foul language. (Note: it’s also worth it to read the comment threads for the latter post. There’s a whole lot to unpack about just what in God’s name Butcher was thinking and how utterly betrayed he’s made so many of his fans feel. But I digress.)
How do I love thee, Karrin Murphy? Let me count the ways.
Back in 2014, I attended a Dragon*con panel for Jim Butcher and worked up the courage to approach the mic with a question. I asked him if he had always planned for Harry and Murphy to get together or was it something he noticed as he continued writing the series. He answered that while it’s true he never truly planned out Harry Dresden’s love life to the letter, he felt it was probably always inevitable given that even their first interaction in the first book is playground teasing. You see, Harry (at least back then) had this thing about being chivalrous and Detective Karrin Murphy was a modern feminist, so she hated it if he tried to hold the door for her. The first scene with them together is of these two full grown adults racing for the door to the crime scene and Harry getting there first to open it for her, wearing the most shit-eating grin, as this is a frequent competition between the two of them. He does it just to annoy her and that was probably the first indication that I was going to love both him and her.
It’s difficult to know where to start with why I adore Karrin Murphy. I guess in the simplest terms, Murphy is exactly the woman that I wish I could be. I honestly probably idolize her as much as Harry Dresden does. If I didn’t have a mental illness and self-confidence issues, Murphy is the kind of woman that I would aspire to be. When I think of powerful, worthwhile, well-rounded female characters, she’s always been the frontrunner. It’s not about the fact that she’s a sharpshooter and an aikido champion and a badass wielder of a holy sword—it’s that she’s all of those things, but she’s also her own person in a real sense. She knows herself. She knows Harry. She knows that he is worth protecting, so she protects him. She knows that he does so much good solving cases and preventing murders in Chicago that it’s worth it to make sacrifices for him, because he would do—and has done–the same for her in a heartbeat.
Murphy is courageous, but realistic. She’s ruthless in her pursuit of justice for her city and for the victims whose murders she has to solve, but yet she is capable of being vulnerable. She is fearless, but flawed. She is so many complicated things, but all of those things add up to an exceptionally written person. She is arguably as well written as Harry Dresden is, and that’s saying something considering how he too is a layered character with so much to offer.
I think I also love Murphy because she’s also very much like the best women in my life, like my mother, my sister-in-law, or my cousin. These are dynamic, intelligent, inspiring women who have always been those same great things that Murphy is. I’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded by positive female role models since I was a kid, so Murphy is also a comfort to me because she is so much like the family members I’ve known my whole life. One of the reasons the Harry/Murphy fans are theorizing that maybe Jim Butcher based Murphy on his first wife and the divorce made him turn on her character is because it’s shocking that a white straight male author was even capable of writing a woman this nuanced and this close to what real great women are like. It may be why she felt so real to us—maybe he was drawing directly from aspects of his own marriage and that’s why Harry and Murphy’s relationship and love felt so powerful and genuine. Maybe that’s why she was so inspiring to read, is that he really did have that influence in his life.
I love this character because she embodies all the best parts of what women have to offer. She made Harry a better man and yet that wasn’t her only role in the story; she had her own path she walked as well, but it simply ran parallel to his and it never felt like she was just a tool for him to use to accomplish a goal. Harry’s inner monologue has so many instances where he’s just in total awe of her, not in a pedestal sort of way, but in a respectful, appreciative sort of way. He can’t believe he’s lucky enough to bask in her sunlight, and he made us feel the same way about her through his narration and through their adventures together. She is such a worthwhile character that it’s why I can’t fathom why Jim Butcher would coldly and callously toss her aside in the manner that he did. I’ve read and watched enough fiction to know the difference between hitting us where it hurts for the good of the narrative and a man who has turned bitter against his own creation and decided to systematically destroy it.
For now, I guess I can just take comfort in the fact that if Murphy were real, she’d break Butcher’s arm in three places so he couldn’t write anymore f**king tripe.
I’m still hurting. Quite a bit. That’s why it took me so long to sit down and write this out. That being said, I think I owe it to Murphy in her original form to get past this and forget Jim Butcher. There’s a line in the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang where the narration—coincidentally, the main lead’s name in that movie is also Harry—is talking about Harmony Lane’s favorite set of detective novels that inspired her to become an actress but also escape her abusive father, and the author of those books later came out and said they were bullshit and he hated them and just wrote them for the money, and the line goes, “He was just the writer.” It is possible to separate the art from the artist. I think I owe it to Murphy as this phenomenal character to not let Butcher’s bullshit choices ruin her legacy and cause me to feel this way about who she has been to me and what her love story with Harry has meant to me.
Hell, it’s what Murphy would want for me, I think.
And that damn sure is more important than one sorry ass writer.