#indian pulp heroes

[maxwell-grant]

Hi. Just found your blog--greatly enjoy your writing! Now, a question: Are there any popular female pulp heroes? What were they like? Thx in advance.

 Thanks! Well, popular is a strong word, most people start with asking "were there any female pulp heroes? like, at all?", the answer to which is, Yes!...Nowhere as much as there were male ones, and not in the traditionally accessed avenues for "pulp heroes", but yes, there were, I wrote a bit about them here. Not counting the female sidekicks of male pulp heroes because that's cheating, the most popular female pulp heroes are the ones that exist by proximity to that American pulp hero “scene”, which I must stress again, doesn’t really have that much to do with what pulp fiction was actually like during it’s heyday, but rather that amorphous concept of what people imagine a pulp hero to be like.

In that regard, a popular female pulp hero would have to be a character that managed to break through in some form and inhabit that pop culture archetypal space in some form, or at least linger around in some noteworthy fashion. To an extent, this is something that was achieved more by female villains, in particular H.Rider Haggard’s Ayesha as well as other characters like Shamblau, Black Margot / Princess Margaret of the Black Flame, and Irma Vep who made for memorable, impactful villains of popularity and status approaching that of the male heroes.

With that in mind, upfront I’d argue that there’s at least six unambiguously popular female pulp heroines, and those would be:

The Domino Lady, a masked Gentleman Thief who was a rare example of a female masked vigilante who was actually published in 1930s American pulp fiction. The Domino Lady is, predictably, the least popular of these, but she’s historically significant and fairly popular in her own right and usually featured in stories or images that place all the masked avengers together.

Pat Savage (illustration by Dan Schkade), Science Adventurer Doc Savage’s rowdy tomboy cousin, and Dejah Thoris, the famous princess of Mars from the John Carter saga (key progenitor of the Planetary Romance subgenre), who are kind of on the sidekick side of things, but there's been enough solo outings for them, and the two of them being fairly significant and influential characters in their own right, that I’m obviously not gonna leave them out.

Red Sonja (illustration by Donato GIancola), famed badass of Sword-and-Sorcery. She’s maybe the most famous by far pulp heroine of them all, the only one of these for sure that you could reasonably expect most people to at least know by name or imagery. And she is a 1970s Marvel Comics character who borrows her name from an unrelated character in a non-Conan Robert E. Howard story and her characterization from C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry (1934). Another character we can add to the ever-growing pile of “characters who define the term pulp hero despite never actually appearing in pulp fiction” next to The Spirit, Buck Rogers, The Phantom, The Green Hornet, etc.

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle: Here also standing for the general popularity of Jungle Girls in general who usually take after her in some ways or inspired her in the first place they all just kinda blend together at some point

Barbarella: (no idea what archetype taxonomy I could use for her). You all know or have heard of her at some point and she gets grouped with these characters so often I couldn’t really omit her either. I’ve never seen the movie but I know it is an Italian production based on an erotic French comic that shoots for an American comic book style, and that strangeness is part of what made it fairly memorable. I’ve read a couple of Tales of the Shadowmen collections that feature stories with her as well.

Having named these, I’m also going to name six other pulp heroines who do not follow that mold so strongly and don’t overlap with these, and who were popular and significant in different ways:

Hunterwali: Hunterwali is one of the most significant action heroines in film history, as she was the premier starring role for Fearless Nadia, the most iconic action hero of 1930s Indian cinema and the archetypal action actress for Indian films, really one of the earliest and most significant action movie actresses period. Inspired by the Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood serials, Hunterwali (1935) was a record-breaking blockbuster, with the character said to be “the most popular character of its time” and listed as "Bollywood's best loved character" in 100 years of Indian cinema by CNN-IBN”.

The character is a swashbuckling princess who dons the guise of Hunterwali, "protector of the poor and punisher of evildoers", to become a swashbuckling Masked Avenger bent on rescuing her father and beat up the evil prime minister villain. She runs around on horseback performing stunts like jumping over moving carriages, jumping a horse from a bridge onto the top of a moving train, and defeating 20 soldiers in one sweep with her whip (Fearless Nadia did her own stunts, mind you).

Brigitte “Baby” Montfort: Brigitte Montfort was a highly popular Secret Agent pulp fiction character in Brazil, probably the most straightforward “pulp hero” we have as the star of cheaply printed pocket edition books that arose in the 60s as an alternative to the paperbacks. Brigitte is the daughter of a 1940s feuilleton character (yes, the feuilletons were published here as well) named Giselle Montfort, a Mata Hari-esque spy who bedded Nazis for intel and was eventually killed via firing squad. Brigitte was a globetrotting reporter who secretly operated as a cunning, cutthroat CIA agent, a bikini-clad James Bond. The stories went so in-depth that it was a common rumor at the time that they were written by a CIA agent employed by the editors, and Brigitte lasted about 30 years with circa 500 novels to her name, making her one of the most long-lived pulp characters.

Ethel King: Ethel King was a rare, prototypical Great Detective who debuted in German dime novels and was subsequently published all over Europe for the following two decades. Driven to fight crime by the loss of her father and fiance, she was referred to as “the female Sherlock Holmes” as well as “the female Nick Carter” for French and Italian publishing, and she takes after the two of them in a way.

Like Holmes, she employs brilliant reasoning and goes around with a wisecracking assistant (in this case her governess), and like Carter, she’s also assisted by a younger sidekick (an orphaned cousin she raised on her own), she gets into gunfights and has a tough attitude, and she deals with a massive Rogues Gallery of horrid villains with wild names and even wilder characters (including three evil doppelgangers). She would go on to become a formative influence not just on future female detectives, but also the German hefteromanes that spun out of the dime novels.

Nila Rand: Perfume, pistols and mystery in one package, she was created by Hedwig Langer under a pseudonym, one of the only two characters in this list created by a woman. Nila Rand was a thrill-seeking adventurer Femme Fatale featured in Scarlet Adventuress who dabbled in arms dealing, smuggling of stolen goods and gunfighting.

"She did not know which intrigued her the more, the alluring promise of exotic love, or the threat of terrible and violent death. The last was as necessary to her as the first. Nila Rand had played too long for high stakes and it needed the element of danger to make the game a thrilling one." - The Shanghai Stakes (1935)

Nila is a key example of what separates the femme fatale in the pulps from the films (far more frequently protagonists, rarely the sidekicks or girlfriends but instead solo operatives or leaders of their own gangs, rarely deliver on actual sex and instead manipulate men's desires to their advantage), but far more important than that is the fact that she was openly acknowledged to be bisexual, which goes without saying was extremely rare in any form to find in the pulps in any form.

Even in these spicy/erotic pulp magazines that were all about sneaking stuff past the radar (and thus a place where, for better or worse, writers could play around with topics other magazines would shy away from and would be unthinkable outside of pulp magazines). Finding a queer pulp hero from any period prior to the 1970s, let alone a protagonist and not an outright villain, is bordering on impossible, but it exists and here she is.

Lu Siniang: A lot of Wuxia/Nuxia storytelling is born from similar undercurrents of working class escapism and anger and desire for justice that led to many of pulp fiction’s most prominent heroes, and Lu Siniang is a particularly powerful embodiment of that. She was spun out of real life circumstances involving the execution of Lu Liuliang and his entire family for  “literary crimes” against the Qing government, and the subsequent  death of the Yongzheng Emperor, and said to be Liuliang’s daughter who had managed to survive away, learn martial arts and join/form a group of revolutionaries in a mission of revenge that culminated in her skewering/beheading the emperor. No Wuxia/Nuxia protagonist had dared to go that far before.

The story was reprinted several times following it’s inception, becoming particularly popular in the 1910s-1940s as the character would star in the   Lu Siniang  / Fourth Madam Lu serials starting in 1940, that comprised the first Chinese film franchise and film series about a fictional character, as well as one of the first action film series focused on a female protagonist alongside Hunterwali mentioned above.

Pussy Fane: The only other character in the list created by a woman. She was created by prolific romance writer and editor Jane Littel, who was repeteadly stressed  to be the "longtime companion" of another pulp romance writer Margaret Wallace (one of the pseudonyms Margaret wrote under was called "Margaret Littell", make of that what you will), with Pussy Fane being a short-lived attempt to combine crime and romance.

Pussy Fane is a Proto-Superhero from 1931, a beautiful escort/party girl who grew up in the circus among jungle cats and is forced to deal with blackmailers and gangsters. She regularly douses herself in perfume to mask their scent, and is burdened with regret and sorrow over her upbringing and nature, repeteadly hearing others refer to her as inhuman and more than half cat. She is also superhumanly strong and athletic, said to have the strength of 20 men, and she also regularly rips off the arms of would-be-rapists.

Yes, it’s a tragedy you’re only just now hearing about this character, it’s a damn shame the stinky classy-yet-feral woman who runs around ripping off the arms of grubby rapist gangsters missed her call in pop culture stardom as did so many of these.

So here there are, 12 female pulp heroes all encompassing different archetypes, as well as different genres and countries of origin. There are more, yes. They are difficult to find enough info to write about, yes. Is the effort worth it? You bet. I find it imperative to shout to the world that these characters and others like them existed, that plenty of them were popular and acclaimed in their own right, even in ways that overshadow the American characters and defy our pop culture preconceptions of what pulp female characters all have to look like.

There was no archetype or type of story available to pulp heroes that was closed off to the women, not now, not a hundred years ago when Ethel King established new paradigms for the Great Detective and dime novel fiction before Hunterwali made action film history doing everything Douglas Fairbanks was doing and then some, not even well over a hundred years ago when Lu Siniang was beating The Count of Monte Cristo and all the ensuing dramatic masked avengers to the punch in backstory and over-the-top revenge. We only stand to lose confining these to the dustbins of history and standing by such a shallow perception of what could be done, and what was done, back then with pulp heroines.

#replies tag #pulp heroes #pulp heroines #pulp fiction #film serial #domino lady #pat savage #dejah thoris #red sonja #sheena #barbarella #hunterwali #fearless nadia #brigitte montfort #ethel king #nila rand #lu siniang #pussy fane #american pulp heroes #indian pulp heroes #german pulp heroes #wuxia #nuxia #brazilian pulp

[krinsbez]

Random Thought

Does anyone else remember the film adaptation of The Indian In The Cupboard?

Am I correct that there’s a bit where Omri’s class are reading from their journals and one of his classmates talks about collecting Punisher comics?

#Random Thoughts #The Punisher #Pulp Heroes #The Indian In The Cupboard

[vintagegeekculture]

One of the most bizarre military books ever written for nerdy History Channel loving Dads, this one is about an Israeli mercenary tank officer, with nuclear powered tanks with laser gatlings, working for the US government to pacify rebellious Texans, who have kidnapped the president of the United States. Along the way, he meets American Indians on horseback with the Volkswagen logo painted on their chests, battle Cubans trying to invade Texas in a Reverse Bay of Pigs, a sexy female Israeli tank commander who is our hero’s ex, and the finale is a tank blitzkrieg to dismantle the Texas Air Force and rescue the president. 

I’ve always liked techno-war novels, but they derive their immersion from believability. Even though this was a pulp paperback that came and went, I can’t help but feel that it represents an alternate path for these kinds of stories to go, for techno-war novels that are absolutely farfetched situations that push things as far as they can go being weird, with Indian cavalry, laser tanks, and a revival of saber combat. 

[obsidian-sphere]

Lesser known Pulp Heroes.

Flash Casey (sometimes Flash Gun Casey) by George Harmon Coxe, a tough-guy newspaper photographer, the first “hard-boiled” mystery character, along with appearing in Black Mask, the character was also in B-movies, radio, and a short-lived Timely Comic book.

The Domino Lady by Theodore Tinsley, she fought crime and/or evil while wearing a black mask and white gown.

The Crimson Clown by Johnston McCulley, the creator of Zorro, C.C., was a modern (the 1930s) crime fighter, who used skills learned in W.W. I,, a .45, and a syringe full of a knockout/truth serum (later a gas gun) To rob from the unjust rich and give to the poor.

The Moon Man by Frederick C. Davis, the one who went into battle against crime with a glass bowl over his head.

Captain Satan by William O'Sullivan was sort of a harsher version of The Shadow and Doc Savage; only all of his aids were criminals and not reformed ones, who feared Cap. S more than the law, and who regularly died during the stories as more were added.

Senorita Scorpion by Les Savage Jr. is a Western character who came from a gold-filled valley that had been sealed off from the world for more than 100 years, After an opening appeared she defended it from various Western baddies.

The Patent Leather Kid little known kinky crusader character of Erle Stanley Gardner.

Masked Rider by Paul Chadwick, the M.R. was a pulp published by the company that would become Marvel Comics, an early high-concept character. He was a blend of The Lone Ranger and the Shadow, later, he was sold to Popular Publications, who redesigned him toning down the “shadow” bits, but keeping the mask and his Indian side-kick Blue Eagle.

Thubway Tham, Johnston McCulley again. Tham was a grumpy older pick-pocket with an exaggerated lisp, who, while ill-tempered and a crook, had a well-hidden heart of gold and ended up helping the innocent against big-time crooks most of the time.

#pulp hero

[popculturebuffet]

It's Not the Years, It's the Mileage: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Commission for WeirdKev27)

Welcome back all you happy archeologists, to "It's not the Years , It's the Mileage", my look at the indiana jones films… and my return to reviewing after a brief sabbatical!

Yeah long story short a combination of burnout and a mounting move soon got to me and I needed a week to recharge. And now my atomic batteries are to power and turbines to speed enough, we can get back to indiana as we cap off the original trilogy.

We last left our hero with the uneven as hell temple of doom: the action beats, Harrison Ford and Kim Quay Quan's acting, and the cinematography were all top notch, as was the darker atmosphere, but the rampant racism including, as I feel needs repeating making the British colonizers of India the GOOD GUYS and them slaughtering a wave of Indian cultists one of the rare big damn heroes acts that's also a massive uncomfortable hate crime and misogyny baked into the character of willie scot.

So while the film once again made a binload of money, it was one both men were ashamed of… particularly Stephen Spielberg. Spielberg was in a much better place, having both the giant money piles from the first two films and a happy relationship with Kate Capshaw as a result of the last film, one that's lasted to this day.. but it's clear the fatigue of doing a big franchise, the only one he'd do , was getting to him and he was fine with asking Lucas to stop the bus and get off here because he's a factory. And given he had to give up on both Big and Rain Man to do this, it's not hard to see why: While Indy is a great franchise and it's largely Spielberg's deft direction that made it so, he had other things he wanted to do and I can't blame him.

So the two launched into creative mode and a panoply of chaotic first drafts the like of which i've never seen and may have to cover on their own at some point.

Inaitially Lucas once again brought up the Scottish Castle Idea, which i'm BADLY hoping someone used in a comic or something because it's damn good. It's clear that Speilberg wasn't the only one who read Carl Barks as a Kid. But I can't fault Speilberg for not wanting to do it, both due to being similar to poltergeist.. and because a haunted house film just dosen't fit indy that well. The previous films were globetrotting afairs and even with Doom largely set in one country it still had a lot of travel before we settled into the final location.

Lucas then wanted to use the Holy Grail and while that would eventually come back, in this version it's a pagan artifact for some reason which is also in africa, for some reason, and involves Sun Wukong FOR SOME REASON, called "Indiana Jones and the Monkey King" because George Lucas is apparently physically incapable of waking up in the morning without doing something shockingly tone deaf. And yet somehow

Because he then handed it off to Chris Columbus, the one people actually liked.. at least before the mid 2000's. This isn't as weird a move as it sounds as while Columbus has only written a handful of his own films, before he became a director he wrote Gremlins and the Goonies, both produced by speilberg, both classics, both super succesful, and since the Goonies did have a similar adventure vibe, if more of the plucky group of kids variety than the pulp adventure, it did make sense.

To Chris' Credit, he did make some adjustments to make this ten page idea george lucas had into an actual story: while the story was still in Africa, he specified the country to Mozambique, and while still oddly involving Son Wukong despite his journey to the west not remotely touching africa, he at least changed the artifact to the Garden of Immortal Peaches, a chinese myth that explains why the gods live forever. He still proved to have his own brand of accidetal racisim as he included a sterotpyical cannibal tribe and a 200 year old pygmy, but, so he's not entirely off the hook, but it's still more ignorance of the time than.. whatever George Lucas is. ti'd also include a new love intrest, the Kathrine Hepburn style Dr. Clarke, Scraggy Brier, an old friend of Indy's, a nazi cyborg because apparently Arakai wasn't the only guy to think of that, though at least this one isn't a hero, Kenzure, a pirate , and Betsy, a student suicidally in love with indy because THAT'S A FUN TWIST ON THAT JOKE AMIRITT. Also Indiana Jones came BACK from the dead thanks to the monkey king, yet the pirate dies because he's not pure of heart. Had.. had Chris watched the other films?

Chris did get a second draft that did thankfully remove betsy and added an interesting new rival, Dash, an expatriate bar owner working for the nazis. The Monkey King was also a villain now, zombies were included, and one of the big set pieces is Dash and Indy playing chess with real pieces and the losers would really die. So while it was marginally calmer, it still needed to lie down a bit.

To their credit.. Lucas and Speilberg realized the film was a touch racist and more than a touch bannnanas, with Speilberg admitting it made him feel too old to direct it. It's clear that whatever else I could say about Temple of Doom, and I did.. Speilberg did take it's faults to heart and worked to correct them when given the chance. Lucas admitely did too.. it just didn't seem to stick.

It was here the film started to really take shape, as going back to the grail, Spielberg suggested an addition: Indy's Father and a focus on their relationship. This came from a personal place: Spielberg was estranged from his own father, the two not having had the best relationship. Thankfully much like INdy and Henry the two would, with capshaw's help, reconcile soon after this film.

Lucas was worried it'd pull focus from the grail, but Speilberg rightfully convinced him that it'd add an emotional core to the film. While the locations were diffrent for this draft, a lot of the core of the story came into focus: the addition of Sallah, the holy grail. As is the trend for this film's early history ther'es still some batshit to be worked through as Indy stabbed a demon with a holy dagger. I mean it's no stabbing a dog reincarnated with the soul of hitler but even Indania Jones can't be brock sampson and he's fine with that. Also Henry ascends a stairway to heaven because of course he does To finish the job, Speilberg brought in Jeffery Boam. BOam is a writer I hadn't heard of but has a pretty stacked resume having written The Dead Zone , The Lost BOys, Innerspace and Funny Farm, the last two i've only heard of but have a great rep. He also wrote the witches of eastwick, but I won't hold that against the guy. He's done more than enough good to make up for that and if his film work wasn't enough he also made The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., a western starring bruce cambell I haven't seen.. but i'ts a western starring bruce cambell. It's gotta be great or at least cheestastic. And given Kev shipped me the complete series of jack of all trades , I don't think this one is out of the question either. Sadly Boam passed in 2000 from heart failure and will be dearly missed.

Boam decided to emphasize the father angle, moving up Henry's introduction and feeling that's where the heart of the film lied. After all the last two films ended with our hero finding and getting the artifact. While he lost it in some way, the Goverment took the arc and he willingly gave the stone to the village, It was still the crux. Boam instead gave the film it's truly heartrending resolution.

After this the next few rewrites wer ebasic stuff: elsa was moved from a nazi villianess to her currnet role as colaberator, more characters were added and the film went into production, with said production being fairly brisk and uneventful for a change. The main challenge was doing the train scene as the mechanical effects supervisor noted "You can't just stop a train if it misses it marks. It takes blocks to back it up. " They also, horrifyingly ordered 1000 disease free rats for the catacombs scene and got 5000. That's. that's more rats than i'm comfortable with. Unless it's this rat

So 5000 rats, several rewrites and one sean connery later the film was a MASSIVE success, commercially and once again critically.. there were a few negative reviews, because of course, but the one Wikipedia spotlighted was Hal Hinson of the Washington Post who described the film as "They've carried their series deeper-Deeper into hooey". I could go deeper into the pretentiousness of the review, but I think that clinches it. So with that Indy road off into the sunset.. for a few years till Young Indiana Jones Premeried. And as you can probably guess.. i'll be skipping over it. I'ts not bad, but the fact is it's 20 film length episodes, in a project that's both time sensitive and is already costing Kev a bit to commission. Neither of us wanted to do that. Now would I be willing to visit episodes of the series? Absolutely. Feel free to commission them and I might even find one to review pro bono at some point. But I just don't have the time or review space to cram it into this project

What I do have the time to cram in is the rest of the review under the cut.

Family Truly is the Greatest Holy Grail Of All

Last Crusade's biggest strength and biggest improvement from the last film is it's focus on Indy and his dear old Sean Connery. One of my complaints last go round was that there was no character arc for indy in temple after getting a truly riveting one in raiders, but I can see why it might of been an issue: Indy's arc was mostly done: he started robbing temples to get by and ended with his love of the craft back. So reaching into his past instead, looking past who he is as a person and into one of the people who made him such a cranky bastard in the first place was genius.

The intro brilliantly sets it up and is in general a masterful bit of work. Like Indy's distant relationship with his dad, Indy being a boyscout comes directly from Lucas' life, with him having become an eagle scout in good distinction, as was harrison ford. So having the start of the cold open not be indy but him as a teen was a genius way to set up Indy's distant relationship with his dad by showing it to us: the later arguments wouldn't of been nearly effective if we hadn't seen Indy nearly die trying to save a priceless artifact from some shady archeologists, only for his dad to be too deep in his grail research to notice… or to care when the cops force indy to give it back because cops have always been dicks who believe rich men. Honestly hearing the ending to this little adventure ahead of watching it, as i'd forgotten this cold open, I was dreading it, feeling it was a depressing end. But what makes it work is a mysterious man in a hat, who despite being Indy's compettiton not only encourages the kid but give shim his iconic fedora. He may of lost today.. but there will always be a tommorow

There's a lot of little origins to how Indy does things baked into this intro. None are really necessary but their done in a neat enough and subtle enough way to be just fun origins instead of SEEE SEE THIS IS WHERE THE THING CAME FROM. Unlike some prequel bits in more recent projects. SImple things like Indy using a whip to get a lion to backoff, getting harrison ford's real life scar from the whip, and falling into a snake bin just seem so seamless. While it's clear this was a very formative day for indy, none of it feels forced. He clearly already had a love of archelogy, some skill and had the fearlessness to fight the criminals. Who indy was was there, and there was still years of experience to be gained> This was simply an interesting chapter. This intro was so good in fact Speilberg actually wanted to do spinoffs with River Phoenix, who was picked due to having played Ford's son in Mosquito Coast before this and looking near identical, but pheonix's sad passing meant this never happened, even if we did eventually get the similar young indania jones. And the cahtarsis of seeing a modern day indy finally get the cross of Coronado back and into a museum… which probably isn't exactly where it belongs but it's still better than in a sweaty rich mans hand.

We also get another classroom scene like raiders, which brings us to another little detour: this film borrows Raider's plot structure to a point, and it was deleberate: after their disapointment with Temple of Doom and their dodged bullet with The Monkey King, the two wanted to get back to basics. You get the thrilling opening, indy selling the fruits of that cold open to marcus brody, his class filled with women in a trite gag straight out of the 40's, an offer from a person to go on the adventure for a holy artifact, some nazis to punch in the face because every decent human being likes seeing a nazi get punched in the face, and one of the vilians getting melted.

Yet it's really.. only on the surface. The pieces are there.. but their all rearranged so differently. The biggest example of this.. is Indy himself. Part of Temple's lack of emotional core.. was INdy didn't have one since Raiders hadn't happened yet. This time around we're back in a moving timeline, so we can actually see how Indy's doing post character development. Indy's cold open in Raiders was an attempt to squeak out some money in a fairly shady way and then having it all stolen by someone even worse. His class was filled with people not really interested in what he had to say, and his life was kinda hollow. While he lost marion between films, which i'd be angrier about if they didn't course correct that next time, he's still doing really well. While his class is still full of fangirls because a large part of George Lucas is still 12, it's clear many are paying attention to his lecture as much as his physique and when he goes back to his office, he find sit packed with assistants and students. The scene's not only incredibly funny it subtly shows Indy has TONS of students and has likely taken on more classes. Granted he could've easily had a bunch of classes we never saw in the first film, but the intent with that scene was to show his academic career was only doing marginally better. It's also a nice show of just how much Indy truly loves what he does: he's an adventurer sure, but he's an academic just as much. He's just a hands on one. It's also nice to get that refresher before we meet someone even nerdier than him in his dad.

It's the same scene with the same purpose, showing what Indy's life is like between adventures, but it shows a very diffrent indy, one whose genuinely happy again and doing well. It also makes his reluctance when called upon by famed philanthropist and business man Walter Donovan to go on a grail quest like his dad make a ton of sense: in the first film while he did it for the right reasons, Indy badly needed the big adventure and jumped at it. Here he just got done with achieving a lifelong dream, getting the cross back, and has no time for his father's shit. He only decides to take up the mission when it's clear his father is missing. It also nicely sets the stakes: Indy isn't on this mission for the Grail, he's not even sure his dad's actually found it at first as Henry has been looking for the grail since before Indy was born, he just wants to make sure his dad is okay. It's a perfect portrayal of an estranged parent relationship, i've been there: you may not be really on the same page with your dad but if he got hurt or was in real danger you'd drop everything to help. Indy may be fed up with his dad, and as we'll get to for VERY valid reasons, but he still loves the guy.

The next chunk of the film shows just how much the father-son aspect is vital… as it's the weakest part. It feels like a weaker retread of the snake pit from raiders but without the tension. It has more rats but that's about it. The film dosen't pick up again till we get to the castle their holding Henry in, a fun way to likely recycle some ideas from Lucas' castle pitch. We also get overly scottish indy in one of the films funniest bits.

Once Henry enters though the film hit's it's stride. The casting was genius: Sean Connery was an action star himself, having started the Bond franchise and had previously been in highlander just a few years before this. And while I may not cover the franchise as a whole, depends on if someone wants me to, that is a film that i'd love to tackle sometime. It has sean connery as the cool mentor, clancy brown devouring every bit of scenery while still being intimidating an da soundtrack by queen. What else do you need? It also inspired both one of the venture bros best gags and one of it's best episodes.

Reluctantly putting Highlander aside, Sean Connery was a huge enough name that he'd not only be able to go to to toe with harrison ford without being overshadowed, but was just as much a draw as the headliner, something needed since while he comes in about a third of the way in, Henry is the films deutragonist, being just as important as his son. While the Ark was a personal goal for Indy, this is one for his father. The grail is his life's work.

The real genius though was that Connery plays mostly against type. He still has that connery charm: a lot of the comic bits were his idea, he genuinely charmed Elsa, and he's smart. But Henry essentially Indy's professor side , I realize as i'm typing this the way Indy conducts a class may be trying to emulate his father and the only way he does, without the punchy two fisted hero: he has all the charm and smarts, but is essentailly if a real life archelogist who just so happens to end up on a pulp adventure, unlike Indy who seemingly can't get five minutes before he gets a lead on his next globetrotting escapade. There's similarities: their both stubborn, they both have an easy way with women, and their both smart, but their very different people and it only further explains why the two grew so far apart.

It also allows for a LOT of great comedy. While he had some moments in highlander I had no idea Sean Connery was THIS funny. The film in general is really damn funny, something me and jess noticed when we watched. I could spend all day pointing out the great bits from both jones responding when a yes when someone asks for "dr. jones", to Henry subtly revealing that he slept with Elsa too with "she talks in her sleep" a line connery adlibbed. The film has a sense of humor about it that really helps keep the energy up and Connery and Ford just play off each other perfectly: indy gets annoyed at his father's lack of field experince, obession with the grail, arrogance and the fact their now weiner cousins, while Henry is entirley baffled that this is what his son does on a weekly basis. Despite being a non action person there's a LOT of scrooge mcduck in henry: the arrogance, the tendency to double down when called out on his shit, the obsessiveness. Maybe Stephen Speilberg's dad is just like scrooge mcduck. I don't know. What I like though is that Indy's conflict with his dad. Sure it's in parts your standard father son film drama :

But it works well in the specifics: Indy resents Henry so much because his whole life Henry has ignored him, somethign the intro set up well. Indy sums it up perfectly during a discussion later in the film

"What you taught me is that I was less important to you than people who'd been dead for 500 years in another country…and I learned it so well, that we've barely spoken for 20 years"

While Henry is arrogant enough to assume he was a good parent… Indy spent his life after his mom died basically alone… and as we learned earlier fully blames his dad for it. That last part.. feels like Speilberg putting his own life out there, if exagerated slightly: as shown by his most recent film the Fablemans, a fictonalized but still mostly accurate account of his life, Speilberg was VERY close to his mom, while his dad wrote off his filmaking for some time as a hobby. The two reconcliled, I evne found out while researching this his dad funded close encouters of the third time, but at the time they were estranted once again and you can feel Speilberg still felt on some level his dad pushed his mom away. And like with Speilberg himself.. the truth is way more complicated.

To quote the scene. "This is an obsession, Dad! I've never understood it. Never! And neither did Mom." "Oh yes she did. Only too well. Unfortunately, she kept her illness from me until all I could do was mourn her.:

It's such a cutting, raw scene because in a film with snake filled crypts, tank fights and melting buisnessmen, it's so realstic: Indy never forgave his dad for his mom's death.. and it's clear Henry never forgave himself.. and that despite his obession with the grail… he would've dropped EVERYTHING if he could've. It's two men in pure pain. While there's plenty of great banter.. at the core of the film is a son who resents his father and a father whose too much of a proud arrogant ass to admit that he loves his son. IT's only when indy seemingly dies that Henry breaks down the walls a bit, truly mourning his son and realizing he (nearly) lost him because of his obession with the Grail. Indy came out here to save him despite everything. It feels like the real turning point in the character: While the jones men never stop bickering, it's in their blood, Henry dosen't come off as dismissive.

Indy similarly has his walls break down when Donovan shoots Henry , using him as a barganing chip to get the grail. Ford's acting, much like connerys in the tank scene, is truly hearbreaking, as he begs for his dad to pull through. Despite all the crap between them, all the bad history, all the obession.. these are a father and son that love each other and indy went through hell to make sure his dad lived on.

This all cumilates in the climax: when Elsa, and we'll get to her and walter shortly don't worry, tries to take the grail out, the temple collapses and she dies unable to let go of it.

Indy however reaches for it. It's a truly powerful scene, as Indy reaches for it, both to make Elsa's death mean something.. and to make his dad's LIFE mean something. This is his dad's life work and no matter how many times he choose it over his boy.. it's still important. But then… for the first time in his life.. Henry Jones.. chooses wisely… and begs his son to let it go. Henry also sums it up beautifully after they escape.

"Elsa never really believed in the Grail. She thought she'd found a prize." "And what did you find, Dad?" "Me? Illumination."

It took far too long… but Henry found what was really important was right in front of him. Sure the two bicker about indy's name on the way out, but it's in a far less bitter way, a more relaxed way with Henry just casually revealing Indy's name is actually Henry Jones JR the two's bond is restored and while Crystal Skull confirms Henry passed sometime between this film and 1957, the two at least had whatever time henry had left together. And that truly is the greatest treasure of all.

Piggybacking on Hitler

Something intresting about The Last Crusade is how it handles it's Nazi's. Their threat is still assured and we get an extra chilling scene in their home turf, watching them burn countless books. indy even gets the worlds worst autograph from hitler. But unlike Raiders where they were the main driving force and Belloq, while certainly one of the big bads, was working with them, both villians in Last Crusade are simply playing them. Neither actually care about the nazi cause or even want to work with them, but their willing to if it advances their goals. It's an interesting way to use the third reich, a sentence i'm GLAD I don't have to type all that often: their basically mooks with no named officers this go round, though speilberg again takes steps to assure us that no, these guys are still the worst evil the world has ever known with the book burning.

It's also the smart option: while Toht wasn't the standout villian of the two from raiders, he'd already filled the position of cold nightmarish nazi badguy, and while not a nazi mola ram had also given us a rather cold, intimidating monster to fight last time. It made sense to pivot to two more fleshed out villians ala beloq instead and have the nazi's still be a huge threat, but simply more for what they are and what hitler could do with the grail than being the main focus.

My faviorite of our two is easily Julian Glover as walter donovan. Donovan enters the film as a seemingly harmless philantrohpist: Indy has heard of him as a big name donating to countless museum and trusts him with no question. It's only later when their at the castle does the mask come off: Donovan is really a man who will gladly work with whoever or whatever it takes to get what he wants. He's a smug rich bastard, while still being somewhat charming. The nazis are a means to the end: if they get the grail, who cares? As long as he can use it first what does it matter. Donovan reminds me a lot of belloq, both being smug rich bastards, but contrasts him well enough to not be a boring retread: Belloq really just stole whatever he was hired to, while still having a passion for the thrill of the chase adn the game with indy. In contrast while Doonvan is just as cordial to Indy, this isn't a game to him: the grail is his key to never growing old and he will have it. If he has to work with Nazi's so be it. He lacks Belloqs talent, but has a drive rene never struck me with: Rene went after things because of the challenge. Doonvan is OBESSED with the grail as much as henry is and it does him in. I also gotta admit his shooting henry was a brilliant if utterly horrifying gambit.

The other side of the coin is Elsa. Elsa is interesting because like Belloq and Doonvan she sold out, like henry she's obsessed.. but like none of them she regrets it. The book burning horrifies her, she genuinely loves both jones men. So then why does she sink to these lows? Simple… that obsession I mentioned. Like Henry she badly wants it, but unlike henry it's for the glory and not simply to keep the thing safe from those who would use it. You can say a lot bad about Henry, I certainly have.. but he's not wrong that the grail CANNOT go to the nazis and that while they certainly weren't around the whole time he was looking for it it's not like humanity's ever lacked for dickheads with a power complex, he still fully registers how much of a world ender i'td be for the nazi's to get the grail. Elsa.. dosen't care as long as she gets her prize, just like doonvan.. and like that it does him in. While she tricked him with a false grail, her refusal to see she can't have the grail dooms her. She's easily what Herny could'v ebeen had this journey not changed him and serves as a nice parallel: Henry realized over the quest what he'd done wrong, while Elsa just can't ever seem to understand what she's done to people or that saying sorry or feeling bad isn't enough to repair the damage. She feels bad.. but not enough to leave the quest or help our heroes. In the end she's left with nothing not even her life while Henry had the rest of his ahead with his son by his side.

Odds and Ends

There's a bunch more to talk about,but since I either couldn't or forgot to fit it in above, here's the various other bits about the movie that stuck out to me.

First is the other characters: Marcus Brody is a great addition, not only revealing he' san old friend of Henrys but that he's just as inepet abroad, if not more so. The cutaway to him hoplelessly lost after Indy hypes him up, as well as Indy having to somehow explain to Marcus oldest friend that he was bluffing, is fucking gold. We also get a great bit where Sallah tries to rescue him but it takes a few minutes

Sallah is back and.. he sure is there. John Rhys Davies is as good as ever, and while a person of middle eastern descent should be playing him and i'm honestly suprised with that he's comign back, he still does a fine enough job. He's just not that vital to this one: he feels like he was brought back because he was popular in the first one and while they thankfully avoided shoving himin more scenes than necessary, he feels weirdly out of place.

The Grail Knight is fucking awesome. Robert Eddison does a fantastic job, and heartwarmingly enough.. the guy was actually really nervous about it often asking if he did okay despite being a vetran stage actor. "He choose.. .. poorly" is a meme for a reason. The set pieces as usual are great: I will say of the films so far this has the weakest.. but ti's really ionly in comparison: the fun castle fire, tank battle, the traintop opening and the cool as hell temple sequence in the climax are all bangers, and what isn't is still pretty solid. Overall.. Last Crusade is truly excellent and out of the films thus far is easily my faviorite: having Raiders breezy pace, some great action and humor and thankfully sallah is the only questionable bit in the film. It's a well done action film with a hell of a character arc , taking what Raiders did right and making it even better.

Next time we dive into the penultimate film in this retrospective.... and easily the most hated> It's time to nuke some fridges, meet some actual cannibals shiah le bouf and get some shiny skulls, it's Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull!

#indiana jones #indiana jones and the last crusade #henry jones #stephen speilberg #george lucas #sean connery #harrison ford #allison doody #sallah #elsa schnider #river pheonix

[very-grownup]

Book 67, 2023

Lloyd Alexander is best known for his coming-of-age Welsh-inspired Prydain Chronicles but one of the great things about older children's authors is if they weren't shackled to a ghostwritten forever series, they could just follow their bliss. I read one of Alexander's French revolution inspired books earlier this year and "The El Dorado Adventure" is from yet another series which has nothing to do either either of those.

The Vesper Holly books are historical fiction about an orphaned Philadelphian heiress in the 1870s.

Who goes on wild film serial and pulp novel adventures with her anxious guardian.

And has a evil genius arch nemesis.

It's everything a ten-year-old girl could want.

"The El Dorado Adventure" finds Vesper the inheritor of mysterious land in made-up-central-American-country and there's roguish riverboat captains and daring train escapes and untrustworthy land developers and a VOLCANO and feminism and how if your choice is between white guys and Indigenous people with firearms you should support the Indigenous people AND A VOLCANO.

It's a fast little book, almost every chapter ending in a cliffhanger, with an attitude towards Indigenous people that are nuanced and respectful, considering this is a children's novel by a white American published in the 1980s.

You know what else was a popular children's novel in the 1980s (and into the 1990s because I know I read it)? "The Indian in the Cupboard".

Vesper's enthusiasm and openness to the native-people-of-made-up-central-American-country, her instant empathy and certainty that their land belongs to them and shouldn't be taken from them by anyone, feels like a big deal, even if she does end up saving the day. I think some of the edge is taken off the potential white saviour vibe by the fact that it's made clear that Vesper exists in a society where she's constantly underestimated and her opinions aren't taken seriously by most people. She brings up the idea of women being equal members of the tribe with the chief and she's very frank about the fact that America hasn't figured equality out yet either.

Alexander also lets Vesper have the children's novel version of worldly/exotic love interest that the hero gets to have in the male version of these stories which feels incredibly progressive for, well, now, although I see that Alexander published a Vesper Holly novel in 2005, just a couple years before his death. Maybe Vesper has acquired a token boy companion and love interest by then.

It's just nice when a children's author lets a girl have wild and dangerous adventures with a devil-may-care attitude without any kind of moral or instructional subtext.

Let girls break windows and smash people over the head with random items of furniture.

#2023 books #lloyd alexander #vesper holly #the el dorado adventure #children's fiction

[esonetwork]

'SATURN’S CHILD And Other Tales' Book Review By Ron Fortier

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/saturns-child-and-other-tales-book-review-by-ron-fortier/

'SATURN’S CHILD And Other Tales' Book Review By Ron Fortier

SATURN’S CHILD And Other Tales By Mark Allen Vann Xepico Press 211 pages

Writer Mark Allen Vann has the marvelous talent of spinning old familiar genres around until they appear like something totally fresh and new.  He does this to perfection in his latest collection of stories, “Saturn’s Child And Other Tales.” There are a total of seven and each is wonderfully presented with seven new and original heroes battling all manner of villainy.

Saturn’s Child kicks off the collection wherein Vann does a flip on a classic Edgar Rice Burroughs off-world yarn. In this case, it is the beautiful Saturn Princess Xian Xenn who, while fleeing assassins, is magically transported to the planet Earth. Specifically Los Vegas in the 70s where she encounters mobsters, and berserk bikers and ultimately has a meeting with none other than the King. We’ll be nominating this one for a Pulp Factory Award.

Secondly “Bad Medicine at Blackstone Gulch,” is a weird western that introduces us to Marshal Hollister Payne charged with bringing the deadly four Yancy Brothers to Silver City to be judged for their many crimes. Along the way, they encounter the ghost of an Indian Shaman set on delivering his own blood-oath vengeance.

“Dented Halos and Dirty Faces.” Angel City was once a thriving metropolis protected by the Justice Squadron. Then the vampire invasion fell upon it and the heroes were defeated. Now the citizens cower in fear every night as the bloodsuckers seek out their new victims. Private Eye Jana Dhark, the former super-hero Jett, is hired to find a missing teenage girl by her father. But to do so will mean assembling a new team with the courage to enter the Dead Zone and confront an army of the undead.

“They Call Him…Iron Mask” is a really charming twist on the Superman origin, only this time the rocket ship that crash lands in Martha and Elroy’s farm backyard is carrying a humanoid-shaped robot with good intentions. What happens next is both amusing and endearing. A story we personally love and will be another award nomination for sure.

“The Lion of Llanaxa” begins well enough but simply doesn’t deliver its conclusion. It’s a tale that goes nowhere and thus is the weakest one in the book.

“Through Fog of War” has World War II Navy sailor Colton Kendricks shipwrecked on a strange deserted island in the South Pacific. What he discovers on that island defies all reason and logic, but proves to be a very good opening chapter to what we hope is more to come.

Finally, Vann wraps it all up with “Stalker in the Shadows,” the tale of Rick Mordane who lives in a world where the dead have come back to life. Well at least as visible, interacting ghosts if you will and he’s a private eye better identified as a Poltergeist Negotiator. What a hot looking redhead comes to him saying she’s being stalked by a former lover, Rick finds himself unable to resist her charms even though the case itself has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese. A really wonky, fun story.

And there you have it, four terrific yarns, two genuine gems and one lackluster affair. Meaning this is another well-crafted Xepico Press offering by a writer whose talent is only growing with each new collection. You don’t want to miss it.

#book review #ESO Network #ESO Network Book Club #Geek Book Review #Mark Allen Vann #Pulp Review #Ron Fortier #Saturn&039;s Child #Sci-fi book review

[dailyadventureprompts]

Less an adventure request and more a Monsters Reimagined one- orcs are one of the baseline assumptions in most D&D campaigns, and yet are rarely major movers and shakers on their own merits. Have you any opinions on them, or thoughts on what you'd do differently?

Monsters Reimagined: Orcs

I think if we’re going to talk about orcs, we’re going to talk about a looming divide in the TTRPG fandom, colonialism, and a lot of other heavy topics that I can’t just brush aside if I’m going to engage with this honestly. Orcs are sort of a litmus test to see whether you’re “with it” when it comes to understanding how the media you love can have problematic elements, or whether you want to live in a blind nostalgia space where you can indulge your “Cowboys and Indians” fantasies without anyone calling you on it. 

Also there’s a lot of other diverse voices out there talking about colonialism in d&d, so if this wets your apatite, I encourage you to seek those out and educate yourself. This is just one non-authoritative take from a socially conscious whiteguy who’s been increasingly offput by the cringeworthy legacy of racism that’s baked into the foundations of his favorite hobby. 

With all that out of the way, lets get to the TLDR:  While Orcs don’t necessarily stand in for any one ethnic group, their implementation in the history of tabletop rpgs and associated fiction has almost universally cast them as “The Savage Other”, an underpinning trope of the colonial mindset that justfied exploitation and genocides across the globe.  Abandoning this trope is easy, and all it requires is that we move orcish cultural default from “Savage horde”  onto the role of “Noble Warrior Race”, while aknowledging that these people are thinking individuals with the power of self determination, and not genetically and spiritually inferior brutes who exist only to be cut down.  Also, if orcs arn’t defaulting to evil,  there’s increasingly less reason to have “half orc” as its own ancestry option: Just make them the default orcs and have any mixed ancestry children use whatever stats fit best. 

An analysis of the fucked up tropes that form the orcs, and some unexpected mythological basis for their awesomeness continues below. 

What’s wrong:  To explain why we need to change how orcs ( and most other “default evil” humanoids) are handled, we first need to understand  that for most of human history, people thought war was a good thing. It was the general consensus that those born into other lands and other cultures were both lesser and antagonistic, and that their defeat and ultimate annihilation could only be a net good for their own exitance.  Every expansionist empire has treated its enemies as such, and used their neighbor’s “sinful” nature to justify why they must be subjugated as a way to protect their own “righteousness”. 

Even those of a more pacifistic, “understanding” types got in on this conquest, exchanging massacres, enslavement, and territorial expansion for campaigns of conversion, cultural hegemony, and residential schools. 

Orcs, and other creatures like them began to exist around the dawn of the 20th century, when it became increasingly “less cool” to have your hero go around massacring people left and right. You can see this with characters like Conan: sometimes Conan is fighting lizard people, sometimes he’s fighting swarthy skinned slavers, sometimes he’s fighting evil foreign wizards, sometimes he’s fighting lizard people.  As the years go on, the idea of having a (almost universally white) hero chopping their way through hordes of brown people is an increasingly bad look... so the lizard people and the ape men and yes, the orcs, take a greater presence on the stage. 

This is where the mid-80s pulp fantasy orcs comes from, taking their names from the transmogrified and corrupted elves of Tolkien, but channeling the energy of innumerable “subhuman” foes that existed only to be fodder along the great (white) hero’s path. If you read what old d&d had to say about orcs , it sounds like something out of a colonizer’s field report, with “the savages” living in filth and squalor, practicing all manner of barbarisms ( slavery, rape, twisted spiritual practices). Every detail is there as a justification for WHY these people should be conquered and their lands appropriated by “civilized” people, and this racist propaganda metastasized into the “always chaotic evil” label that d&d orcs typified for most of their existence. 

Think about it like this: As a modern audience, we might balk at someone saying “ These people have the wrong skin and are worshiping the wrong god, you need to go kill them and settle their land”, but “These things are born of evil, they serve demons and we need to cleanse their blight from the world” is literally the plot of several world spanning fantasy franchises. 

This is emblematic of how orcs (and other “monster races”) are in modern fantasy fiction, all the tropes of colonial era propaganda made literal so as to absolutely justify the colonial power fantasy that a lot of d&d adventures are rooted in, and attempt to assuage any moral misgivings players might have about wanting genocide. The current edition even has gone so far as to make its orcs soul-slaves to evil, reality destroying gods and its gnolls ( a subject for another time) cannibalistic demons given flesh. 

How do we fix this: I think the fandom has largely managed to pry orcs away from the “always chaotic evil” archetype they were shackled with when I came into the hobby, and they’ve comfortably settled into the “Big, boisterous, stronk friend” role that serves them best. 

What I think orcs lack, stripped from their racist origins, is a new baseline mythology that can be socketed into any campaign like dwarves have “ Honor and ancestors” and elves have “ ancient lore and nature”. So here’s what I got: 

Just as the dwarves were made to craft and the halfings to tend the fields, just as the humans were made for cities and the elves were made for beauty, So were the orcs made for the fight. Sown from dragon’s teeth or carved from iron mountains when the gods and heroes of the dawn age needed an army, the Orcish people find their origin in those first glorious and terrible wars, born with weapon in hand and no fear of pain or death. 

No one conflict created the orcs, as each regional tangle of clans can generally trace their ancestry back to a single legion, cadre, or even warband called into existence for some important task of divine violence.  Sometimes wicked, sometimes righteous, the memories of these mythic deeds echo down the orcish lines, granting them the supernatural toughness they are famous for today. 

#Anonymous #orc #prompt postage #racism #colonization #monsters reimagined

[st-just]

22 in 22

Rules! Choose 22 books you want to read or goals you want to achieve in  2022. That’s it! It can be a mix of books and goals, or 22 books, or 22 goals…. it’s up to you. Then tag some friends to play along.  

Tagged by @wearethekat (..several weeks ago, but thank you anyway!)

So, goals

1. Read 1 book a week/52 this year 2. Expand my horizons a bit and acquire some culture, read one piece of literature/non-genre fiction/Classic a month 3. 12 pieces of history/rigorous nonfiction, ideally about areas I don’t actually know much about already 4. Read three books not originally written in English

And, specific books

5. Madeline Miller’s Circe, because I absolutely adored Song of Achilles 6. The Murderbot Series. Just, all of it. (number 5 in line for Artificial Condition, soooon) 7. Children of Ruin by Adrian Techaikovsky, because I loved the original and am profoundly curious where he goes with a sequel 8. Rhythm of War, because a friend lent me their very nice hardcover edition with the gorgeous illustrations almost literally a year ago and I should give it back at some point 9. Cyteen and the Faded Sun trilogy and more Cherryh generally 10. She Who Becomes The Sun, which I’ve retained quite literally zero information about except that people have recommended it to me. 11. The Bone Clocks, blind on a rl friend’s recommendation 12. Servant of the Underworld, because I really should give de Bodard a try at some point 13. Gunmetal Gods by Zamil Akhtar, for the title as much as anything tbh (but actually mostly because I got recommended it as a well done sort of flintlock/early modern fantasy) 14. Nona the Ninth is so obvious I actually forgot about it while writing until now 15. Some Jane Austen that isn’t Pride and Prejudice - have olds out for Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion now 16. The Causal Angel, because I liked the other two Jean le Flambeur books and really should find out what hilariously gonzo tranhumanist pulp heist plot the third one is 17. The Jasmine Throne, which I know nothing about but have a positive impression of, and anyway you basically never see Indian-inspired fantasy settings in any detail 18. Hero of Two Worlds, because while I may have essentially zero interest in the Marquis de Lafayette, I like Revolutions enough and enjoyed Duncan’s first book enough to give it a try 19. The Chosen and the Beautiful, because I did quite like The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and I’m strongly in favor of weird genre-bending retellings of public domain classics (I think this is the great gatsby one, anyway?) 20. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, because who can resist a subtitle like ‘a biography of cancer’? 22. Hummingbird Salamander, because I loved Annihilation enough I am going to read every other thing Vandermeer writes until I die. 

And tagging uuuh @stinkybreath @lifeattomsdiner @booksandchainmail @circletofcircles @prometheusascendant, having zero idea if any of you were tagged in the last month/are reading much this year.

#books #tag game #thanks for the tag! #<3 #wearethekat

[larkandkatydid]

Really Great NEW horror for Halloween 2020

All these books are relatively new (published within the past year and a halfish*), all are of them are by people of color. 

Empire of the Wild by Cherie Dimaline. A woman, her nephew and an elderly neighbor band together to help rescue her husband who they eventually come to believe has been stolen by a werewolf-like rogarou. It’s a great monster-hunter story and reminded me how much I love the kind of horror that’s about a scrappy group of ordinary heroes fighting a monster that came to their hometown.  In that way, it’s got the feel of a working-class Métis version of Dracula. 

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is a big, extravagant haunted house book where the characters wear nothing but extremely cool clothes and smoke extremely cool cigarettes and there are terrifying fungal ghosts and extremely gross set-pieces. 

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones.  I can’t stop talking about how much I love this book.  If you love slasher movies you have to read this.  If you ever wondered what Scream or Cabin in the Woods would be like if they took their riffs on Men Women and Chainsaws utterly fucking seriously, you have to read this. If you’re scared of hoofed mammals, you should read this with the lights on. 

The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson. I previously described this book as Riverdale does The Crucible and if that appeals to you, then you’re in! However, it also reminds me charmingly of an John Wyndam’s The Chrysalids, which was one of my favorite pulp novels as a teenager.  It’s such fun read and it has some incredibly scary spooky forest sequences. 

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora.  This is probably the most serious, literary book on this list but I will stand firm in insisting that it is a gothic horror novel in it’s soul. A community of formerly enslaved people live near the burnt-out ruins of the old plantation house in the years just after the end of the Civil War, with on-going flashback to the year just before the end of slavery. This book doesn’t follow any of the expected rules of a gothic horror; it explodes them in ways that just took my breath away.  This is a book of incredible humanity and it reminds me, in some ways of The Others, primarily in the sense of the gothic setting as a kind of purgatory, full of people who did terrible evil and had terrible evil inflicted upon them. 

Catherine House by Elizabeth Thomas.  I was a little hesitant to recommend this one because it does just collapse into a hot mess about 2/3 of the way through.  But you can’t be a real horror fan if you don’t love several books and/or movies that collapse into a hot mess 2/3 of the way through.  You also get some very creepy scenes and some pretty cool dark academia worldbuilding (I especially love that the prestige of this creepy institution is mainly self-reinforcing:  people want to go there for access to the elite alumni network)

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.  I’m reaching here in two sense: first this book is 20 years old but was only translated into English last year.  Second, does it count as horror? Are any of the characters ever horrified by the slows disappearance of every thing....literally everything? Maybe? Not really? But the setting of the book is so beautifully grey and empty that it felt like I was in a horror novel.   

[maxwell-grant]

Excuse Me what is pulp and why is it importan?

Good question! And probably one I should have answered sooner. Time to put on the historian hat for this one.

"Pulp" is a term used mainly to describe forms of storytelling that sprang out or were dominant in 20th century cheap all-fiction American magazines from the 1900s to the 1950s. The pulp magazine began in 1896, when Frank Munsey's Argosy magazine, in order to cut costs, dropped the non-fiction articles and photographs and switched from glossy paper to the much less expensive wood pulp paper, hence the name. The pulp magazines would mainly take off as a distinct market and format in 1904, when Street & Smith learned that Popular Magazine, despite being marketed towards boys, was being consumed by men of all ages, so they increased page count and started putting popular authors on the issues.

It was specifically the 1905 reprint of H.Rider Haggard's Ayesha that not only put Street & Smith on the map as rivals to Argosy, but also inspired other companies to start publishing in the pulp format. Pulps encompassed literally everything that the authors felt like publishing. Westerns, romance, horror, sci-fi, railroad stories, war stories, war aviation stories. Zeppelins had a short-lived subgenre. Celebrities got their own magazines, it was really any genre or format they could pull off, anything they could get away with.

Nowadays, although they came quite late in it's history, the American pulps are most famous for it's "hero pulps", characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage that are viewed as a formative influence on comic book superheroes. The pulp magazines in America lasted until the 1950s, when cumulative factors such as paper shortages, diminishing audience returns and the closing of it's biggest publishers led to it dying off, although in the decades since there's always been publishers calling their magazines pulp. That's the American pulp history.

But pulps are a phenomenon that spans the entire world and has a much bigger history to it, because pulps have become synonymous with cheap fiction magazines and those have a much bigger history. In America, before the pulps, you had the dime novels, the direct predecessors of the pulps, as well as the novelettes. England had it's penny dreadfuls and story papers, and continued publishing pulp-format magazines past the American 1950s, and that's how we got Elric of Melniboné. France and Russia arguably got to it first with it's 1800s coulporters, chapbooks and particularly the feuilletons which lasted all the way to the 20th century and created characters such as Arsene Lupin, Fantomas and The Phantom of the Opera. The Germans published pulp under the name hefteromane. Japan also published pulp magazines both original as well as imported, and the current "light-novel" phenomenon started off as an equivalent of pulp magazines (it's even on the Wikipedia page). China has wuxia, Brazil has cordel, Italy has gialli. There were Indian, Persian, Ethiopian, Canadian, Australian pulps and much more. Look anywhere in the world and you'll find examples of "pulp" happening again and again, under different circumstances and time periods.

Even if we stick to American fiction, it's impossible to state that all pulp heroes must come from the 1900s-1950s pulp magazines, because that forces us to exclude some of the most popular pulp heroes like Indiana Jones, Green Hornet, Rocketeer and The Phantom. Pulp may have once been a term meant to refer to pulp magazines exclusively, but it's morphed and lost structure and it's become the closest thing we have to a general umbrella term that allows us to try and consolidate these under a shared history. It's a lot, as you can see, and it's why several pulp historians that broaden their scope outside of 1930s American fiction have adopted Roland Barthes's definition of pulp as "A Metaphor With No Brakes In It", which is still the closest thing to a true working definition we have.

Why is it important? You tell me. I don't like to stake claims about stuff being "important", everyone's got their own priorities in life. Surely a lot of people would scoff at the idea of old populist fiction published in what was functionally equivalent to toilet paper having any sort of "importance". On the other hand, some people definitely want to talk big about the pulps as a cultural bedrock of fiction, something that's baked into the lifeblood of all fiction as we currently know it. Which it is, mind you, but I don't like to talk about pulp fiction's value being derived mainly from merely the things it inspired.

There is definitely a historical importance to be had in cataloguing them. According to the US's foremost pulp researcher Jess Nevins, 38% of all American pulps no longer exist, and 14% of all American pulps survive in less than five copies. Many libraries have very scant, if any, records on them, many collectors are hard to locate and are uncooperative when it comes to sharing information and letting outsiders view their collections. A lot of them are bound up in legal complications that prevents them from taking off in the public domain, and a lot of them ARE public domain but are completely inacessible as research material. And that's the American pulps, foreign pulps have fared far worse in posterity, with records inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the language or locations, many existing merely in mentions on decades-old records, and hundreds if not thousands of them being completely gone beyond recovery or recall.

Gone, dead, wasted, destroyed. They can't be found in barbershops or warehouse or bookstores, not even in antique stores. Hundreds, thousands of characters, stories and creators, gone. Time and posterity have crushed them to dust, forgotten and ignored by their successors. Unfettered by pretenses of respectability that repressed their glossier counterparts, in packages meant to be destroyed after reading, proudly announcing itself as trash. Things that should have never even lasted as long as they did have died many times now. It's heroes peripherical shapeshifters, nearly all of whom seem dead, quite dead, as dead as fictional characters can possibly be.

But they do not die forever. Many of them have, maybe most of them have, but many of them linger on.

"The strange red flickering of 1930’s fiction seems distant now.  You hold in your hand the product of a time too remote to recall, and feel a slow stir of wonder.  The smell of pulp pages, an illustration, an advertisement, these fragile things mark the slow hammering of time and display what it has done.  About you are today’s machines, today’s shadows.

Outside the window, leaves hang against the sky, as did leaves during the 1930’s.  The sound of voices are no different then than now.  You hold the magazine and feel something quite delicate slipping past. These solid forms surrounding you are all insubstantial. Time’s hammer will also pass across them, leaving little enough behind." - Spider, by Robert Sampson

Many of the things people call dead are just things that have been sleeping for a while or haven't had the chance to be born. Pulp fiction is dead on the page, inert, unless your imagination breathes live to it, and every now and then, one way or another, these characters dig themselves out of dustbins. Maybe it's a brief revival, maybe it's a successful reboot. Maybe they find publishers, or maybe the public domain allows them to find new life. Maybe new creators do interesting things with them, and maybe, just maybe, they live again because some won't shut up about them online. Some curious impulse led you to me, did it not? 

We all have our Frankensteins to obsess over, and these are some of mine. As someone who's lived a life perpetually restless over pursuit of knowledge, pulp has lured me like a moth to flame, because I literally never run out of things to discover within it, I never run out of possibilities. As the years pass and the public domain starts being more and more open to the public, more and more narrative real state is brought forth for writers and artists and creators to play around.

Pulp is the dark matter of fiction, the uncatalogued depths of the ocean, the darkest recesses of space. It's the box of your grandfather's belongings, the treasure you find in an attic, a body part sticking out from an old playground. It's the things that don't work, don't succeed, the things that don't fit, that are out of place. That shouldn't live and succeed, and did so anyway. The things that slither in the cracks, the shadows behind the curtain.

Aren't you interested in peering on what's behind the curtain?

The exquisite workmanship of the head, of a pre-pyramidal age, and the hieroglyphics, symbols of a language that was forgotten when Rome was young–these, Kane sensed, were additions as modern to the antiquity of the staff itself as would be English words carved on the stone monoliths of Stonehenge.

As for the cat-head–looking at it sometimes Kane had a peculiar feeling of alteration; a faint sensing that once the pommel of the staff was carved with a different design. The dust-ancient Egyptian who had carved the head of Bast had merely altered the original figure, and what that figure had been, Kane had never tried to guess.

A close scrutiny of the staff always aroused a disquieting and almost dizzy suggestion of abysses of eons, unprovocative to further speculation. - The Footfalls Within, by Robert E Howard, quoted by Stuart Hopen’s The Mythic American Culture

#replies tag #pulp heroes #pulp fiction #argosy #h rider haggard #ayesha #robert e howard #solomon kane

[ghostfriendly5]

A key theme of Attack on Titan, Berserk, Claymore, Hellsing, and practically every zombie movie is that humans have an entry in the monster manual. Humans murder, rape and betray; he who fights with monsters may become one. I can't but think that a strong consciousness of the soul destroying inevitably and futility of violence, more prominent still in Gundam, was bequeathed to Japan by the trauma of World War II. Although it was the US that in some ways became a monster in the course of the war, facing the monstrous political insanity Imperial Japan had tragically progressed to.

Even Is it Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? shows humans as real monsters, in their cruel treatment of Lili. It does it better than Goblin Slayer, which is why Goblin Slayer is just about the most worthless commercial story created in Japan, or any other country.

Calling Goblin Slayer an anti-hero is laughable, his actions are antisocial and imperfect but practically nothing he does is presented as unvirtuous. He would be a laughable male harem fantasy if monstrosity in his world wasn't as firmly othered in the evil of humanoid monsters as in trashy pulp fantasy's answer to the Turner Diaries.

Other humans may be arrogant or foolish, but not 'the real monsters' even for a moment. The incompetence and indifference of the Guild and government is squarely responsible for the rape and death of countless adventurers, but this is passed over as natural, inevitable indifference for Goblin Slayer to indifferently and unsystematically begin to reform, between his unending orgies of mindless race-based violence. The strong message that humans like us are the real monsters, which Attack On Titan and Gantz delivered so well, is lost under the ubiquitous miasma of the green-skinned savages' evil. Just as the 'dark skinned rapist' demonisation covered over the British massacres of Indians.

Goblin Slayer is a break from the fine and decent traditions of almost every dark manga written, in the worst possible way. Its core message is that the real monsters are a human-shaped race that don't look like us. The ugly people with the wrong shaped noses, who don't share the values and inner humanity of the BLOND, FAIR-SKINNED, CULTURALLY JAPANESE HERO AND HEROINE. Green-skinned subhumans, who cannot be reasoned with, only guiltlessly and virtuously genocided. I'm telling you in all seriousness; throw every copy of Goblin Slayer down the privy and read Neil Gaiman instead

#goblin slayer #anime #manga #racism #light novel #attack on titan #gantz #berserk #Hellsing #zombie movie #claymore #danmachi

[the-outer-topic]

El Coyote

Introduction for non Spanish readers

For a quick summary, use a web translator to read the wiki article, for my own description, read on:

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Coyote

As the name suggests, this was a postwar long series, of pulp western novels numbering about a hundred issues, by a Spanish author, a remake of the Zorro character of novel and film, in fact in the story the hero draws the inspiration from the example of the earlier hero and moved forward in time to the Far West times of the California Gold Rush and later decades (1849-1879). In fact they are the best Western novels I have read, and told from a Spanish perspective. El Coyote starts as a defender of the local Californian Spanish and indians against the abuses and violence of the American gringo invaders and criminals in the wake of the Gold Rush, and later on becomes a crime fighter, as law and order are established and the native Californians get equal status as US citizens, often helping  American people and not just the Spanish speaking Californians, up to the point that despite his sympathies for the Confederacy, he strives to keep California loyal to the Union, if only to spare its population the ravages of civil war, and later on at one point renders a good service to President Ulysess Grant.

For a hack writer, Mallorquí, the author, was a very good writer with a great culture, knowledge of the history of the West and California, and a flair for character relationships, and a wide variety of plots other than the usual topics of Western films, including action packed shootouts, murder mistery, courtroom drama, and political intrigue to name a few. Since he wrote so many novels to pay bills, the quality is uneven. Some are great, others formulaic, and most of them just a entertaining, pleasant reading, in itself not a mean achievement.

About the character, the merit of Mallorquí is about making the Coyote a more complex character than the Zorro, and his  public persona, that of wealthy, peaceful if not downright cowardly, bon vivant, and cynical landowner César de Echagüe and his family life as interesting as his heroic exploits as a masked avenger, combining in one man the duality of the Spanish character with its virtues and vices, half Quijote, half Sancho Panza.

Don Diego de la Vega is a fop, but it’s just an act to avoid suspicions while Don César de Echagüe, while also pretending to be a weakling,  is a highly intelligent man, that makes him a hard realist and he sees the futility of the struggle against the new American order, but he fights injustices and abuses as El Coyote anyway out of a sense of justice and Christian morality but also as a thrill seeker in his youth, and driven by a death wish in his mid-life crisis after the death of his first wife while giving birth to his son.

Had Mallorquí been born in the USA he would have became famous, as it was, in his lifetime his books were published in other European countries and were very popular, of all places, in Finland.

These wonderful covers are from a reprint in the 1980s for nostalgic middle aged people that read them in their youth in the 1940s, and to save printing costs, they combined two novels in each volume. As a teenager I found the artwork gorgeous and the books mind blowing, and highly inspirational as they presented for me a Spanish hero as a counter to the American Hollywood culture that steamrollered over Europe, and on a personal level I was fascinated by one female character that appeared as one of the various lovers of El Coyote, an  American adventuress that pretended to be a Russian princess made me feel intrigued and interested in that far away country and among other things lead me later in life to meet my Russian wife, who by a coincidence has the same name as the fictional princess.

It took me about twenty years to complete the collection as my older brother hadn’t bought them all when they were first reprinted, and I had to find them by chance  throughout the years in flea markets and found the last ones thanks to the internet. Reading them in maturity, they don’t have the same impact as when I was impressionable uneducated teenager, and a few of them are formulaic and trite, but I still find them great reading, though I was shocked by the casual killing and the grisly realism of depictions of death, even though it doesn’t indulge in sadism, though torture is often mentioned as a matter of fact. Just like violence in the American Western movies, come to think of it.

Looking back, I must have been a bloodthirsty psychopath in my teens (so what has changed you may think). On the other hand these novels were written in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War for a generation that had gone through war and mass political murders and repression so I guess readers, children included, were desensitized to killing and brutality back then. Though one thing that makes them apart from the American films and novels, is the strong moral values throughout. Not the American values of law and order and the Protestant work ethic, but Catholic values of justice and equality. El Coyote is a violent man that takes justice in his own hands, but also a Christian and there are strong injuctions against social divide, racism and exploitation of the poor by the rich.

And that’s all I can think of. I will try to scan and post more of these covers if there’s interest.

PS: dor some reason and due to the vagaries of color printing, the Mexican "charro" costume of the Coyote appears in these covers in a range of shades from purple to blue and with gold trimming. Actually both in the novels and the original period covers the suit is black, with silver piping, wich makes sense since the Coyote, as an outlaw usually acted at night and the black color made him a harder target. One has also to bear in mind that a eye mask and a sombrero were enough disguise at  a time when there was no electric lighting and nobody could get a good look at his face.

#spanish pulps #pulp art #western

[krinsbez]

Random Pulp Hero Thoughts

Currently, I am reading the first installment of Sanctum Book's "Doubles" reprint series of the 1930s pulp magazine revival of Nick Carter (a detective created for dime novels back in the 1880s). The volume includes two "book-length novels*", a transcript of an episode of the Nick Carter radio program, a story from a Nick Carter comic book, and essays to accompany each. Thus far I've read the first of the two "novels", Marked for Death by Richard Wormser (though like all Nick Carter stories, the byline says "Nick Carter"), which was the main feature of the first issue of the relaunch. It's a reasonably good story, though there are some internal continuity issues (EG, at one point, as part of an impromptu disguise, he ditches his hat. A scene later, he's putting away the hat and musing about ditching his overcoat) and typos, and according to the essay some continuity errors with original stories (asides from the obvious setting update stuff), which obviously I wouldn't have caught. That said, there is an interesting bit of tension between the fact that Wormser has chosen to cast Nick as a Hardboiled Detective, but he still comes with many of the trappings of his previous existences as a Great Detective (such as being world-famous, an expert at Jujitsu, a master of disguise, and having unique cigarettes he has custom made and imported from Turkey) which produces a lot of odd tension. Also, this thing has no brakes, with Nick killing at least half a dozen gangsters, and several bravura action setpieces that are kinda nuts, especially the ending which...wow (this is not a bad thing, mind you) Plus, of course, the expected bit of occasional cringe (which ss, but what can you do?). Currently reading the second "novel", The Impossible Theft by Thomas C. McClary, which, both according to the accompanying essay and what I've picked up thus far, ditches the hardboiled stylings. I s’pect it’s also gonna be hella cringe, given that it’s focusing on an East Indian “idol“. *They're both less than sixty pages. Although, for reasons I'm not gonna go into, I own two separate reprints of a different Pulp Magazine "book-length novel", one by Sanctum, one by another company; the former is 55 pages, the later 120. I'm reasonably certain it wasn't abridged, so I'm not quite sure how this was accomplished; I'm assuming it's a combo of smaller font, larger pages, and fewer illos.

#Random Thoughts #Nick Carter #Pulp Heroes

[limonium-anemos]

tomarrymort fic rec list

6 / 8

machiavelli

God of Nothing (WIP)

The other orphans avoid Tom Riddle like the plague. He lounges on his broken throne, watches the whispers fade around him with sharp, dark eyes.

Nobody can quite work out why he seems so fascinated with the new boy, who walks in smelling of smoke and hasn't said a word in three days.

Honey, Smoke and Shiver (WIP)

Harry - Omega, only son of Lord Potter - is nothing more than a playing card in a political game of power and money, one that is traded gleefully to buy the social and financial capital of the famed Tom Riddle: powerful, enigmatic, pureblood alpha.

Unsurprisingly, Harry loves being underestimated.

Field Theory (WIP)

The other boy let go of a wrist and gripped his hair, tugging his face closer. "I know you think you can run from me, Harry. But there are consequences." They were both panting lightly, one with anger and one with frustration.

"What are you going to do Tom?" Harry snarled as he felt tears gather in the corner of his eyes from the pull on his scalp. "Kill some students maybe? Burn down the potions classroom-" He let out a yelp of pain as his mocking was interrupted by the other boy's mouth. Tom bit down on his bottom lip, hard, before withdrawing, and when he pulled back Harry could see his own blood staining his mouth.

"You always did have a soft spot for Longbottom," Tom sneered, "maybe I'll start with him."

Maeglin_Yedi

The Darkening of Your Soul Series

The Darkening of Your Soul (WIP)

Harry is betrayed. Harry gets a second chance to do it all over again. There is just one catch. If Harry gets to keep his memories from his previous life, so does Voldemort.

The Gem Cannot Be Polished Without Friction)

Harry has a saving people thing. It props up during the weirdest times. Like during a pandemic.Set in the Darkening of Your Soul universe. Read that first or this will make little sense.

The Serpent That Devours Us (WIP)

When Harry Potter, magical zoologist and Britain's only parselmouth hears the rumour of a basilisk named Voldemort living in an Indian forest he rushes to investigate.

What he finds is more, much more, than he could ever imagine.

Maevi

There are More Things in Heaven and Earth… (WIP)

Hera; Uncertain meaning, possibly from either Greek ‘ηρως (heros) "hero, warrior"; ‘ωρα (hora) "period of time"; or ‘αιρεω (haireo) "to be chosen".

Hera Potter was tired of only surviving. She wanted to live. So she took the chance when it presented itself.

MaidenMotherCrone

The Fairest Saga series (WIP)

Fairest

In a world called Albion, there were four rulers; fair and just. That fairy tale is over; a new one begins.Harry Potter is an orphan-boy, wandering through the world alone, ignorant of the power that dwells deep within him. But, when the Dark Lord arrives to rip his heart out for the Queen, he learns that he is the rightful heir of a kingdom lost.

Cinders

"Kill the boy, Harry Potter, and let the man live." In a world called Albion, there are two Kings; one fairest and one cruelest. This is their war. Born of ashes, King Harry Wildfyre of Houses Potter and Gryffindor fights a war that he never wanted but has inherited all the time. As the Fairest of Them All and allied with the Dark Lord Voldemort, power fills every vein and he will use it all to take the throne that Draco Malfoy and Narcissa Malfoy have stolen from him. Even if it means burning the world to the ground.

Grymmr (WIP)

In a world called Albion, there is only war. Harry Wildfyre is the Light, the Wyrdfod, and the King, but more than anything, he is Fairest. He has loved and he has lost. His best friend is hiding something from him, his lover is a terrible man that he can't help but loving, and he is full of rage. The mirrors whisper truth and his heart is a bloody pulp in his chest. He doesn't know which way is up, which way is down, but it doesn't matter. There isn't any time for that. There is only war. By fairest blood, it is done, by fairest blood, it is undone. This is the end.

Diagnosis: A Medical Dramedy series

Diagnosis

Harry Potter is screwed. With a penchant for Firewhiskey and late-night parties, he had no idea that he would find a handsome man in his bed the next morning, when he wakes up; already late for his first day at St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies as a Healer trainee. He also had no idea that his mom’s ex-boyfriend would have an axe to grind, the most eager girl would follow him around like she’d been hit with a Permanent Sticking Charm, or that the handsome man in his bed that morning was his boss, Tom Marvolo Riddle, Head of Spell Damage. Like I said, Harry Potter is screwed.

Remission

In which Bellatrix learns how to stop being ‘in love’ with Tom Riddle, and lets him be for-real in love with someone else.

MayMarlow

The Train to Nowhere (WIP)

In a world where Voldemort's victory brought forth the golden age of pureblood supremacy, young Harry - an average Durmstrang student - grows surrounded by the same propaganda that has become the gospel truth of the Wizarding World. Injustice is a norm and racism is not only accepted, but actively encouraged. Embracing the status quo becomes harder when Harry finds himself in a train station where the living should not dwell, and a dangerous friend who goes by the name "Tom". 

Don’t Fuck With Florists (They’ll Fuck You Up)

Unsatisfied with his post-war life, Harry decides to get to the root of all of his problems when that root was still working at Borgin and Burkes shop in the late 40s. He’s the Master of Death, damn it, he can do what he wants for once in his life.

Tom Riddle isn’t particularly happy about working at a small, dingy shop for magical artifacts, no matter how interesting those artifacts are. He’s even less happy when an insufferable stranger sets up the most obnoxious flower shop right across the street.

What follows would be a romantic comedy, if it weren’t for politics.

If Them’s the Rules (WIP)

Unable to accept the aftermath of the war, Harry decides to travel back in time to become the parent Tom Riddle obviously should have had. Except that things don't go as planned and Harry finds himself part of a game with hidden rules, trying to survive while raising a boy whose understanding of family has nothing to do with love.

Nekositting

Datura

“Are you afraid of me, Harry?”

His mouth opened, but no words came. His mind blanked, his cheeks draining completely of whatever color had stained them in response to the curious note of Riddle's voice. It sounded innocuous enough. Harmless with how casual she’d asked the question, but Harry knew better.

Swallow the Screams

“Yes, Harrie. Your little friend had nearly murdered you. Perhaps, unintentionally, perhaps not. But that hardly matters now, does it? My rebirth is imminent, and you—” Voldemort crooned, stepping so close to Harrie’s shaking body that there was hardly a centimeter of space between them; Voldemort’s breasts level with her own pallid face. “—will facilitate this, my little lion.”

Harrie felt her vision swim when the locket tightened further, cutting off what little air could pass through her obstructed windpipe.

“Eternity you have sought, and eternity you shall receive. Your life spared but another taken,” Voldemort whispered before digging the wooden stick against her quivering throat, teasing along the chain biting against her neck.

Reliquary

Tom chuckled into his ear, seemingly sensing Harry’s fruitless struggles, before Tom’s hand tugged at the locket against Harry’s chest lightly and spoke against the shell of Harry’s ear. “He has abandoned you, forsaken you…” The words were muddled, but Harry was not so far gone that he couldn’t understand the heavy implication in the man’s words.

“From this day forth, you put your faith... in me.”

Undertow

There was no fear when his foot went forward. There was no hesitation when the shouts began to grow louder, when they began to sound more discernible in spite of the rich tenor urging him to submit.

Harry. Come to me.

He closed his eyes, and before he knew it, before he could think to stop, he was falling.

Angel’s Trumpet

“What a lovely start to the new year,” Riddle purred, and Harry slumped with relief when Riddle finally pulled away to start the car.

No , Harry thought as Riddle’s eyes flickered to his before pulling out of the parking lot, it was the makings of a nightmare.

All wrapped up in a beautiful package named Tom Marvolo Riddle.

#tomarry #hp #tomarry fic rec list

[desbianherstory]

“The 1983 film Mandi hinted at a close relationship between the female protagonist, the madam of a brothel, and one of her prostitutes. Razia Sultan, an Urdu film released in the same year, also hinted at a lesbian coupling.

After a long stint of silence on the topic of queer women, Bollywood tried to take on lesbianism in the sensational film Girlfriend, released in 2004. Though controversial, the film passed the Indian Censor Board — perhaps due to its portrayal of lesbianism as male fantasy instead of a legitimate sexuality divorced from the male gaze. The phrase “male gaze” is not enough to accurately describe the thinly veiled lesbian male fantasy of the film. Tanya and Sapna are roommates and old friends from college. They are inseparable until Tanya leaves town for work. The male hero Rahul pursues Sapna and the two fall in love. Tanya returns, and jealous lesbian rage ensues as she tries to get Sapna back from Rahul’s hetero clutches. Not only does the film cast childhood sexual abuse as a cause for lesbianism, but it also features a delightfully psychotic killer “butch” who is obsessed with her object of affection. Add in the made-for-men raunch and you get a flop of a film that garnered criticism for its portrayal of lesbians.

Another iffy attempt at portraying lesbianism head on, the 2006 release Men Not Allowed features protagonists Tanya and Urmila, both of whom are fed up with men. Tanya is an advertising exec from a wealthy family. Tanya’s lesbianism is attributed to her disillusionment with the womanizing men around her (her father and boyfriend). Urmila is a model who is assigned to Tanya’s ad agency. Her lesbianism is attributed to repeated childhood sexual trauma perpetrated by an uncle (who she lived with after her drug-dealer father and addict mother die), and later by men at the orphanage that takes her in. The two become lovers and raunchy skin scenes ensue for the delight of the male audience.

The 2011 thriller Shaitan featured an on-screen lesbian kiss between two of its leading ladies, one of whom is again named Tanya (don’t ask, because I don’t know). The murder film Monica, released in the same year, has homosexual overtones surrounding the female protagonist and subject.

After the flop of Girlfriend and Men Not Allowed, the next film to explicitly tackle lesbian relationships came in 2012. 3 Kanya, a.k.a. Teen Kanya, is a Bengali psychological thriller that shows a lesbian flirtation (sort of) between two of its three female protagonists. It has the potential for a solid film, and none of the characters is named Tanya. Unfortunately, the plot line spins out of control, and the lesbian angle comes off as a sloppy attempt at sensationalism, or maybe just at making the story make sense, which it doesn’t. One of the women in the lesbian coupling has some sort of dissociative disorder (portrayed in a clichéd, non-nuanced way), and ends up killing a bunch of people. The other half of the couple, an officer in the Indian Police Service, is super-glam to a point of unbelievability.

Bollywood is known for being a little campy and kitschy, though often non-ironically. These are all reasons why we love the genre. Not to mention the songs, the exotic costumes, and the dance sequences that are now taught to white people in absurdly expensive classes at local yoga studios everywhere. But when it comes to queerness, and queer women in particular, the male-dominated industry sweeps aside the real stories of queer women in favor of sensational lesbian male fantasies and 1950s-lesbian-pulp-fiction-esque tropes of psychotic murderers and sexually traumatized queer roots.”

—SJ Sindu, from “Where Are All the Queer Women in Bollywood?” [x]

#films #sj sindu #writing #history #lesbian films #south asian lesbians #south asian wlw #south asian queer #desi lgbt #queer desi #desi wlw #desi lesbians #razia sultan #mandi #girlfriend #men not allowed #shaitan #teen kanya #3 kanya