Immune Female Protagonists

This is going to be a rough one, but stick with me and I promise that we’ll get there in the end.

A Chosen One is a character that has been chosen by fate or destiny to save the world. It’s a great set up for a story protagonist because it allows for unconventional characters to be the centre of the narrative. Why is Luke Skywalker from the original Star Wars trilogy going to be the one to bring down The Empire? Because the Force chose him. Why is the Dark Lord going to be defeated by Harry Potter in the Harry Potter series? Because He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named heard a prophecy of a child that would kill him. Why is the Dragonborn suddenly shouting in the Dragon-Tongue? Because they were blessed by Akatosh.

You get the idea.

There’s another type of Chosen One, specifically for stories that are more realistic or based around science rather than magic, someone who is biologically chosen – The Immune. Typically these characters are the protagonist of a story because they are biologically immune to some threat that is ravaging the world. Why is Dr. Robert Neville immune to the vampire virus in I Am Legend? He was just born that way, kind of lucky when you think about it, right? Why didn’t Alice turn into an Infected in 28 Weeks Later? Not sure, it's possibly got something to do with her heterchromatic eyes… pity it didn’t protect her from being killed by her husband whom she just infected. Why is Mitch Emhoff immune to the outbreak in Contagion? He’s just lucky.

You get the idea.

Being biologically chosen is mechanically the same as being chosen by fate or some god, just without the mystically woo-woo. It allows you to have unconventional characters be the heroes of the story, because they’re the only ones who *can* be the heroes. It’d be great if we had some SAS guy going after the zombie cure… but all we’ve got to rely on is this high school drop-out slacker, because he’s immune for some reason. The Immune is a great trope, but it does come with a pretty serious storytelling issue that a few notable stories have bumped into.

Ellie from The Last of Us is a primary character in the series because she is biologically immune to the Cordyceps Brain Infection. While she can still be killed by the Infected, she can’t be infected with the virus they carry. Haniwa from See is born into a world of the blind, as one of the few people that is actually able to see. While the apocalypse that ended the world and left the survivors blind is centuries past, the world has moved on without sight and Haniwa has to learn how to navigate a world not designed for her.

In stories about saving the world, the characters need to be both strong and brave, and able to take on danger at every turn in service of humanity. Both Ellie and Haniwa are fierce warriors who have adapted to a violent world that wants to kill them at every turn, it’s why they make great protagonists. As uncomfortable as it is, the key issue is the fact that they’re both women. This is because the problem with The Immune, as opposed to The Chosen One, is that a biological problem is going to have a biological solution.

In a world where immunity is the only thing that’s going to save humanity from the virus that’s threatening to wipe them out, then logically the best thing the hero can do is spread that immunity. Characters in both The Last of Us and See tackle this in their own way. In The Last of Us, a group of freedom fighters/terrorists plans to harvest Ellie’s brain so they can generate a cure for the virus. In See, a sighted man named Jerlamarel is going around knocking up as many women as he can, to sire children who can see.

The problem with female characters who are protagonists simply because they are Immune, is that the most logical thing they can do to save the world is stay at home and have babies. Realistically, if you wanted to save the world and you had access to one of these Immune females then you’d do everything in your power to make sure they’re passing on this immunity. Now, the Fireflies in The Last of Us had a stupid plan. If they were going to go full on supervillain and sacrifice a child, why harvest her brain when they could harvest her eggs? If you’ve got the capability to do brain surgery in a post-apocalyptic world, like they do in The Last of Us, then just get a hundred women and artificially inseminate them with Ellie’s fertilized eggs. Boom, instant population of Immune and things only get easier when you’ve got Immune who are men. If humanity has taken more of a tumble and isn’t as advanced anymore, like in See, then just find a woman who’s Immune and move heaven and earth to make her as comfortable as possible as she pumps out Immune kids for as long as she can.

Despite the fact that this course will save the world, it’s not glamorous, it’s not action packed and it’s not viewed as good story telling. Thanks to biology, an Immune male protagonist could spawn hundreds of Immune children in a year and still go on all sorts of story-worthy adventures. But an Immune female protagonist? Nobody wants to play a video game about a woman who stays in a zombie-surrounded compound having kids for all her child bearing years. Beyond that, could you imagine the uproar that’d result from a modern story that revolves around a woman staying at home and having kids?

In an age of stories where men are being told to grow up, stop going on carefree adventures, shoulder some responsibility and settle down with a family, women are being told to go out and live their best lives, initiate boss-bitch mode and take on the world. Immune female protagonists only seem heroic, because the real heroic thing to do (for any Immune, male or female) would be to put aside their ambitions and adventures in service of humanity… because that’s what an actual hero does.   

So, what do storytellers do to avoid this plot hole? How do they justify the Immune female protagonist, cradling the salvation of humanity in her womb, rushing off into danger and putting herself and the future of humanity at risk?

It's simple, they make her a lesbian.

The Immune female protagonist isn’t interested in having Immune children with a man because she’s not interested in men. Being a lesbian isn’t enough to get them around the whole egg-harvesting scenario, but it’s enough to insure they can stay out in the world and maintain their status as protagonist of an action story. Not that any woman would ever really aspire to being a baby factory, but it would be particular abhorrent for a lesbian in a world where artificial insemination isn’t an option. Passing on their Immunity through procreation just isn’t an option for them, so they don’t even bother with it. Writing Immune female protagonists as lesbians is justifiably enough of an excuse to allow them to get out of taking the most obvious course of action to save the world.

So, if you were ever wondering why Ellie from The Last of Us and Haniwa from See are both Immune while also both being lesbians, it might have less to do with representation and more to do with writers trying to escape a gaping plot hole they’ve created for themselves.

Setting the Record Straight

So I haven’t updated this blog in a while, despite everything I’ve said in previous posts. Plans change, boo-hoo. Despite this though, the blog has still been getting a bit of attention, although not in a manner that I’m all too happy with.

A while back I started watched the Van Helsing series, and I began writing a few blog posts about the show. I didn’t like how they handled a lot of things, but it’s Post-Apocalyptic so I kept watching and I kept writing. The problem is that these posts gained a lot of attention with the wrong sort of crowd, and even though I haven’t been here in a while - they’re still the main source of traffic to the site. So a TV show that I’m not even that fond of, is bringing the majority of people to my site.

Not happy.

The worst part, though, is that due to the nature of my critique I seem to be getting a lot of angry guys who hate the show. I can only assume they Googled the show after watching and thanks to the metrics my blog posts came up first… and so instead of taking their rage to a forum, or something, they just dumped it on my blog. This has happened a few times now and along with not being the sort of constructive discussion I’m interested in, these comments are a constant reminder of my lapsed obligations as a blogger.

So, to set the record straight - this is not an anti-Van Helsing site. This is a site for all things Post-Apocalyptic and more broadly, stories in general. I’m not going to play the SEO game with Google and start pumping out rage bait to try and capitalize on one post that became popular for all the wrong reasons. If all you’re bringing to my blog is a hatred for a TV show, kindly fuck off.

I’ve got nothing against strong female protagonists, as long as they’re handled fairly, realistically and consistently. I actually want them, because having well rounded characters makes any story better. Just do it in a way that doesn’t involve dragging guys down, and I’m as happy as a pig in shit.

Scarlett Johansson was a literal tank in Ghost in the Shell.

Sigourney Weaver was a Xeno-killing machine in Aliens.

Gina Carano was a beast in Deadpool… along with anything else she’s in.

Jennifer Garner is an absolute badass.

Charlize Theron was historic on the Fury Road….

Do I need to keep going?

Chances are that if you came toe-to-toe with any of these ladies - they would royally fuck your shit up. Deal with it.

A few episodes of Van Helsing were trashy due to mishandling a message, big deal. Overall the show is actually pretty decent, and it’s kept me watching and I’m keen to see how it ends. It’s not that great, but then how many shows these days are? I’m watching it to learn about the crafts of writing and storytelling, learning what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t like it, and you’re not getting anything else from it, then why are you still watching?

Don’t go full swing in the other direction here, either. I’m not some SJW cuck looking to virtue signal…. but I’m not some Alt-Right Incel nutjob either. Just make great stories, with well-written characters. Because if you don’t, then I’m going to learn from your mistakes.

To close, here’re some women being badasses in quarantine.

Gears 5 - Something Old, Something New

I’ll open with a disclaimer - I didn’t buy Gears 5, I haven’t even played it. I’m in a foreign country for an indeterminate amount of time and I can’t justify buying a whole new console just to play a single game… so I watched the four hours of cut-scenes on YouTube. Does that count as dishonest, or in poor taste for an Indie-Author? Maybe, but I’m made of neither money, nor time, and so I did what I did. It was either that or wait till I’m back in Australia this time next year, which just won’t do in today’s internet environment. Who will care about Gears 5 in a years time?

Gears 5 is an interesting beast, because in typical Gears fashion the ‘Beautiful Destruction’ aesthetic is visually amazing, and the combat is as intense and solid as ever, but then there’s a few narrative and design choices that left me scratching my head. To further add to this, while JD Fenix couldn’t escape the shadow of Marcus Fenix in Gears of War 4, it’s almost as though Gears 5 can’t escape the shadow of the original trilogy. Over the course of Gears 5 you return to Ephyra, which was in the original Gears of War, the New Hope Facility from Gears of War 2, as well as Azura from Gears of War 3. Along with this, I think Gears 5 only introduced two new characters - Lizzie Carmine and Fahz, and one of them dies real early on. If you’re a Gears fan, you’ll see the names and know which one I’m talking about. Besides those two characters, everyone else has appeared in at least one other game, and most of them were from the original trilogy or Gears of War Judgment. The old antagonists make a comeback too, we see Queen Myrrah in these psychic attacks that Kait is suffering, and we even cross paths with proper old-school Locust and Sires.

It’s almost like the developers were so concerned about other drastic changes they were making that they doubled down on the nostalgia to compensate. They added extra of the old ingredients to help mask the taste of the new ingredients. The developers continually talk about how complex and multi-faceted their new characters are compared to the one-dimensional characters from the original trilogy, but then the originals are all still there. The new heroes are running around trying to make a name for themselves while the old guard are still there, handling everything just like they’ve always done. Hell, you literally build a mural to all the characters that have died so far in the series and you end up seeing their ghosts. So in a weird sort of way, Gears 5 is something sort of fresh but also something very old at the same time.

It does work in one weird kind of way though, because there’s this sense of decaying history to the world. All the old and battered heroes running around the old and battered ruins of a second apocalypse does ground you in the story and it’s setting. Nothing new lasts, it’s just the old that lingers on. While Gears of War 4 added the Dee-Bee’s as the latest technology in use, Gears 5 takes a step back and has you scavenging for the last remaining Hammer of Dawn satellites - because they just don’t make them like they used to. The Dee-Bee’s are cool, but nothing makes a story feel Post-Apocalyptic like scavenging for Pre-Apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction. It’s the simple fact that nothing made after the apocalypse could compare to the super weapons that were built before it.

Kait was a fine protagonist, and there wasn’t any of the girl power rah rah rah schtick that we so often see in media these days. She’s got her internal and external motivations for chasing after the Swarm, and so she’s driven and she’s always invested in the events of the story. My only problem, still, is what I said when Gears 5 was first announced. Kait being the protagonist of the new trilogy’s second game weakens JD as a protagonist of the first. Now, that’s nothing inherently weakening about Kait, it’s just that swapping protagonists weakens every protagonist, I’d be saying the same thing if their roles were reversed. Having one protagonist over three games will always result in a stronger and more well-developed character than three protagonists who each get one game, that’s just what all that extra time in the spotlight does for a character. Which brings me to my main big issue with Gears 5.

Gears 5 introduces the game-play mechanic of player choice in regards to the narrative, which is just a weird fucking move. Kait is given a choice of who to save, JD or Del - and whoever she doesn’t choose ends up getting their necks snapped. But why? This is the strangest thing I’ve seen in a video game series. Why would you suddenly add in player choice in the fifth game when it’s never been part of the series? How will Gears 6 work out? In a narrative driven series, only one character can live and so how will this choice play out? Which choice will be considered canon? And if it’s only going to be one choice, why bother with the choice at all? I’m actually shuddering at the thought of the choice being made null and void by the other character simply dying at the start of the next game as well, allowing the developers to have their cake and eat it too.

It’s a weird choice also, because to me it sets up a lose/lose situation. If JD is killed off, then he never managed to escape the shadow of his father and he’s just left as this failure of a character - both in terms of the story and in the series as a whole. But if Del dies, then he can’t be the protagonist of the third game and so not every member of the three-piece team will get a chance to star in their own game. And what would you be left with then? A trilogy where one main character gets one game, another main character gets two and the third just dies? That’s a very strange design choice…

Moving on, I have to say that I’ve never realized how repetitively banal Gears boss fights are. While actually playing the game, and fighting the massive Kaiju monster from beneath the surface of the world, you’re a bit too wrapped up in the action to notice. But while you’re sitting back and watching someone else play, you see that it’s just this back and forward loop of shooting small glowing bits off the big bastard before going in for a king-hit. Wash, rinse and repeat and that’s basically how every boss fight in a Gears game has worked.

Next, the emotional levels are all wrong in this game, too. We’re following Kait on her journey and you see her and Del grow as friends, but then she’s being mentally manipulated into doubting him. It flares up in one scene but then doesn’t really go anywhere. She get’s her brain toyed with and suddenly the visions stop and she instantly trusts Del again. Kait is shown to be more emotive and an emotionally well-rounded character, definitely more so than the guys, but she’s still pretty blasé about character deaths. She gets a bit upset but she still charges on. And as someone who’s been through multiple family deaths already - I can tell you that that’s not how it works in real life.

The early deaths are handled well, although they’re characters that we’re not really invested in so it’s still a bit meh, but then there’s this really weird stretch at the end where character deaths and handled really poorly. Either JD or Del are killed, and the characters are sad, but it’s nothing on the deaths of Tai or Dom from the first trilogy. Then Cole has a fake death that’s sort of brushed past, because it’s fake. He’s being his usual idiot self, whooping and leaping about in a giant robot instead of being an old man who’s perhaps grown and evolved beyond such behavior. But then when a robot dies, in the exact same way the robot in Gears of War Judgment died, the sound fades away and the sad music starts up. A main character dying, nothing. A main character from the original series (fake) dying, nothing. A fricking robot dies, bring out the orchestra and start peddling the feels.

I feel at this point I need to say something good things about Gears 5, because I’ve just been tearing it apart up until this point. Like I said at the start, the visuals and gameplay all look amazing, but there’s a lot more too. The lore of the series is being expanded, and we’re finally given answers to some very old questions. Who was Queen Myrrah? What’s her connection to the Locust? Along with this, we’re able to further explore the world, and despite visiting a lot of previously visited locations we also get to see a lot of new places too. The world of Sera is become a lot more fleshed out, and it is decidedly pissed at humanity. Super-massive wind flares attack cities, razor sharp hail storms dice those without protection and lightning strikes create large fulgurite structures in the desert sands of an evaporated ocean bed. It’s like the very planet of Sera is trying to eject all life from on, and beneath, it’s surface because it’s simply sick of all the shit that sentient life gets up to. Every time these people; Human, Locust or Swarm, go to war, it’s the planet that suffers the consequences.

Just to wrap things up, I’ll point out this interesting moment that’s probably more of a comment on how the military is portrayed in video games. In series such as Gears of War and the Halo, female characters were often relegated to an officer position. It got female characters into the game, but it tended to keep them out of direct combat roles. The problem was when you had front line grunts, Privates, Corporals and Sergeants, telling a female officer where to shove her orders because they know how to properly handle a situation. Halo did it in Halo: ODST with Captain Veronica Dare taking a back seat to Sergeant Major Avery Johnson. It happened in Gears of War 3 with Sergeant Marcus Fenix ordering around Lieutenant Anya Stroud. It was cool to see chicks in the game, but it didn’t make much sense for the power dynamics to play out like that. That’s just not how the military works.

Gears 5 actually addresses this, somewhat, at least to the extent that we can put the complaints to rest. Fahz, a First Lieutenant, is constantly complaining that nobody is listening to him despite him being in charge, and is eventually told to “shut the fuck up” by a Sergeant. Along with this, we’ve got all these male characters of varying ranks following Kait’s lead, despite the fact that she’s only a Corporal. A character of significantly higher rank than her just flat out tells her that she’s good at leading others. If nothing else, this should show that it’s the protagonist of a game that get the final say, regardless of their military rank and even in spite of the gender. It was never about power dynamics between men and women, it was narrative dynamics between protagonists and side characters. Thanks to Gears 5, it doesn’t matter what you’ve got between your legs, if you’re the protagonists then it’s your story and you take the lead.

I’ve had a lot of complaints about Gears 5, they took it in a new direction and while I applaud a lot of their efforts I think it’s been somewhat hit and miss. Don’t even get me started on how they whored out the series for cross-promotional purposes - I’ll do another blog post on all that of that. All up, I’m glad I sat down and watched the cut-scenes. I’ll still buy a copy of the game in a year or two when I get back to Australia and settle down in a location a little more permanently, because I still want to play through it on my own. I love the Gears series, and I’m interested in seeing where they take it next. They’ve managed to stay afloat this long, so I’m keen to see how this second trilogy finishes up. At the end of the day, we’ve still got Gears of War Tactics coming out… which, as you can see back here, is something I hypothesized months before it was announced. So I am very much looking forward to that game.

Captain Marvel - Feminism Done Right

I figured I’d wait until all the hubbub around Captain Marvel died down before I threw my two cents at the matter. I’m only coming at this from a storytelling perspective, since it’s not a Post-Apocalyptic film, but I’ve done enough posts on times when feminism has been done poorly that it felt warranted. While I think Captain Marvel was a good film, the main point here is that it delivered its message in a perfectly palatable, and inoffensive, manner.

I’ve made plenty of posts about shows like Van Helsing, Wynonna Earp and Orange is the New Black, about how they’re posing as vehicles of social change when in reality they’re just riding the wave of popular opinion to make some cash. The first two are female power fantasies, where women are given super natural strength to dominate the world around them, while the later is a character drama where all women are victims and men are ineffective losers at best and tyrannical oppressors at worst. They’re feminism done wrong, because they preach to the already converted. They’re made for people who already hold the views they’re purporting to push, which in turn makes them unpalatable to anyone they’d seek to change the opinion of. Making content for a target audience is fine, we all do it, but these shows are catering to the current populist trend of social justice and victimhood. So while they’re appealing to certain peoples sensibilities, they’re not actually contributing anything to their cause beyond “Muh Representation!” and they’re resorting to shit storytelling to do it.

So basically, that whole paragraph was to show that I’m not a fanboy, I’m not a soyboy and I’m not an ally or anything of the sort. Chicks are cool, gays are cool, I don’t even care about any of that shit, I just want well crafted stories that are water tight. All this pandering to extremists tends to create characters that are two dimensional Mary Sue’s, and narratives that are contrived and cliched. It’s boggled my fucking brain from the get go, because such hamfisted storytelling doesn’t help anyone beyond the creators who can make a quick buck off the moronic herd-minded tribalism that’s so popular these days. I put that last paragraph there to show that I’m not the sort of person who’ll just blindly swallow a cheesy moralizing feminist flick, and that I’ve written enough about such flicks that the following endorsement should carry some weight.

Captain Marvel was actually pretty good, and there wasn’t anything in the film that had me rolling me eyes or wanting to leave. There’s been a lot of negative press and controversy around the film, primarily surrounding the lead actress Brie Larson and her outspoken views on straight white men… but I don’t care about any of that external stuff. Chris Evans says some pretty on-the-nose stuff that’s in a similar vein, and while I haven’t seen any of the Captain America films, I do enjoy his work in the Avengers films. People are allowed to do and say some stupid shit and it doesn’t have to seep into the film. Tom Cruise is a bit of a dick but I watched him in Oblivion and thought “god damn, that man can act!”

I’ll admit that I agreed with people’s initial assessment from the trailers, Brie Larson did look bored. But as someone with Blunted Affect, I get how fucking irritating it is when you’re told to smile all the time. In the movie though she’s actually quite emotive, so maybe the trailers just focused on the scenes where it’s more serious. There’s a decent amount of humor in the story too, and I found myself laughing with my friends. (Yes, I have friends IRL.) There were several well written female characters, with strengths and flaws, but there were also multiple well written male characters who weren’t nerfed into cuckoldom just to make Captain Marvel look good. This is something that other aspiring feminist films could learn from - making your male characters weak doesn’t make the female lead look stronger, it' just makes her surrounded by a bunch of ineffectual losers and undercuts any achievements she might accomplish. What’s more impressive, a woman playing Rugby against the All Blacks and winning, or a woman competing against the Under-7’s Special Needs division and winning?

I know there’s one scene where her friend says something along the lines of “Let’s go show these boys how it’s done!” But you’ve got to ask yourself, what else was she going to say? They were the only two female pilots, they were surrounded by men and “Let’s go show our coworkers how it’s done!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Also, as a guy who works with just one other male, at a certain point you do start spending a lot of time with that person simply based on their gender. Along with this, there’s this montage where there’s a bunch of men in her life telling her that she can’t do things because she’s a girl. Her dad freaks out because she was in a go-kart crash, which is understandable, and her fellow trainees in boot camp are heckling her. I never got to join the military, but it’s a pretty dude-centric institution… and the film is set in the 90’s, so again - what else where her fellow cadets going to say?

But none of it really seemed on the nose or forced, none of it rubbed me the wrong way - it was all just adversity that she’d had to overcome to reach that point in her career. And it worked too, because they had to show that she was pretty formidable before she got her powers, not just someone who went from zero to hero - like Shazam. The cat seemed a bit weird, but they managed to tie it into the humor of the film. Honestly, the only part of the film that sort of jarred me was the reveal about the Skrulls. I read the Secret Invasion comic arc when it came out a few years back, and I don’t know how this is going to mesh with that. They sort of seem at odds with one another, but maybe Marvel don’t plan to explore that story line in which case it’s not even an issue.

So yeah, despite what people may have assumed - I went and saw Captain Marvel and I actually enjoyed it. I think most of the hate for this film has been spurred on by the lead actress’ comments, combined with people just wanting to hate it because it’s got a female lead. But just like Den of Thieves needs to be recognized for it’s accurate exploration of Toxic Masculinity, Captain Marvel needs to be accepted for doing a female lead in an action film the right way. Captain Marvel is strong and capable in her own right and she doesn’t drag men down to build herself up - that’s all I’ve ever wanted. If we can’t even acknowledge when honest and earnest attempts to bridge the gap from the other side are being made, then we’re never going to get anywhere.

I’m pretty stoked to see how they’ll include her in Avengers Endgame, since she’s on the same level as Thor and Hulk in terms of power. I get the concerns about having such a powerful late-game addition to the roster seeming like a deus ex machina moment, but she seems to be on par with characters that’re already present. I’m hoping at best she’ll be just enough to tip the scales in their favor, rather than have her win the day outright. An addition of someone like Wolverine isn’t going to do shit against Thanos, but someone like Captain Marvel most certainly will. Along with this, we’ve already got two super powered dudes, so why not mix it up and make the third a chick? I’ll admit that it can go sideways in a lot of ways, but after the masterful stroke that Marvel pulled with Black Panther (wherein it was basically Trump vs Hitler) I’m pretty hopeful of what they’ll do with Avengers Endgame.

They’ve been building up to this for over a decade, they can do almost anything with it… the only thing they’re certainly not going to do is fuck it up.

Van Helsing - Really That Bad

So, I sat down and watched season 3 of Van Helsing and despite what I said in my last blog post on the subject - it’s doubled down on the man-hating social justice rhetoric and become a clusterfuck of a show. Along with the ridiculous propaganda it’s peddling, the storytelling of the show has devolved into absolute absurdity. It’s not trying to appeal to a broad audience anymore, it’s not even pretending to appeal to a wider audience, it’s purely a radical feminist girl-power romp through the post apocalypse.

Vanessa Van Helsing is a fucking joke of a protagonist - she snarls and stomps her way through this season. I guess they’re trying to show her devolution into a vampire-like being, but she’s just an absolute arsehole. As an example - Axel, the marine with multiple tours of combat duty before the vampire outbreak, is trying to enter a building with some form of tactical awareness, but Vanessa just gives him the finger and waltzes inside. I get that they’re trying to portray her as an experienced combatant who is also superhuman, but this “badassery” would be described as “toxic masculinity” if it were in a male character. She literally kills an innocent man, just to drink his blood, and then forgives herself in the next episode and it’s never brought up again. She even admits that she killed a guy in the first season despite knowing he wasn’t the murderer in their group, simply because she wanted too. To put it as bluntly - she’s just a cunt of a human being.

And the show has totally reverted to it’s original anti-male narrative, where if something bad is happening then it’s typically a man’s fault. A male nurse hits on a side character, who rebuffs him because she’s a lesbian, and he ends up attacking her in a psychotic rage. Both those things already happened in the first episode of season one, but they decided to reuse it for some bizarre reason? If the leader of a group is male then they tend to be evil, or they’re gay and get killed, or they’re female. It’s a female prisoner, who is chained to a really weak and effeminate male, who stages a riot on a prison bus which allows everyone to break free. Axel finds his long lost sister, just like Vanessa found her long lost sister… just like Mohammad found his long lost sister… and it turns out she was kidnapped and used as a sex slave by some guy who ends up having memory loss.

And the worst example, the one that nearly had me evacuating my bowels out of sheer outrage, was the castration. There’s this twitchy vampire that’s been awkwardly convulsing his way through the series and in this season he’s decided that he wants to join this sisterhood of badass vampires… and they decide to let him join, but only if he has his nuts taken off. As ridiculous as that is, the worst part is that he actually fucking begs them for it…

“Yes, do it. Make me like you. Make me a sister.”

Sorry to break it to you, but having your nuts taken off doesn’t make you a woman - it just makes you a shitty male. And not only does he have his nuts chopped off to join an all-female order of vampires, they go ahead a lop off the sacks of a whole bunch of other male vampires they force to join their ranks. They’re fucking undead, they don’t even procreate. I guess there’s the symbolic gesture of it, but what’s the point of the castration in terms of the story beyond some appeal to a batshit insane form of feminist extremism? How about I write a story about women being forced to get hysterectomies in order to join a gang… let’s see how long I survive after writing that.

Beyond this inane pandering to an ideology of victimhood, the storytelling itself has completely gone to shit. All the main cast of characters are either immortal or immune to the vampire plague, even though there’s multiple strains of it now. Someone is even healed from near death by being bitten by a vampire, despite also being immune to the virus. The vampires can’t figure out if they’re burning in the sunlight or if the clouds provide enough cover for them to walk around without protection… but it doesn’t even matter anymore because there are “Daywalkers” now. And no, despite making a joke about the shows similarities to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they couldn’t even give a nod to the fact that they stole the term from Blade. I guess Buffy gets a nod because that had a chick lead, but since Blade was a dude then he can get fucked.

The secret organisation Blak Tek also plays a bigger role in this season but they’re just as stupid and just as mustache-twistingly evil. They’ve set up a safe zone in Denver but it’s all about experiments on unwilling human test subjects and forced labor in prison camps. There’s a bunch of elder vampires who are two dimensional and a prophecy being told by some literal hag who just appeared this season, and it all ends with an ascended Sam standing off against Vanessa and her newly resurrected Van Helsing ancestor. And you just know that the fight isn’t going to happen at the start of season 4 because it’ll be forestalled somehow and dragged out for the entire bloody season.

Van Helsing at least appeared to be correcting it’s course by the end of season 2, but it totally reverted in season 3. It’s shit storytelling combined with a failed attempt to pander to ideologues that’s created this absolute abortion of a show. Vanessa Van Helsing isn’t a strong female character, she’s a shitty male character being played by a woman. There’s still a few half decent characters in this show, but they’re few and far between… it’s like wading through an ocean of shit to find a dime or two.

I’m sure I’ll see season 4 at some point, because it got renewed for some reason, simply for closure more than any interest in seeing where the story goes. It’s clearly not written for people like me, it’s a show that preaches to the already converted under the guise of trying to illicit social change… and it can’t even tell a half decent story. But for some bizarre reason these Van Helsing posts are some of my most popular content - which both perplexes and irritates me to no end. Gotta give the readers what they want though, even if it’s a crazed rant about a lame-ass show. I’m just glad I haven’t had to pay to watch this tripe…

The Ultimate Career Goal

So I’m sitting here thinking about all the different apocalypses that I want to bring upon fictional versions of Earth, or some other human-inhabited planet, and I got to thinking about my long term career goals. What do I actually want to do in terms of being an author, especially one that focuses so heavily on the post-apocalyptic genre?

Well, I wrote a writing guide for the genre (which can be found here), so that’s one milestone already done. But something else I can do, is put my time/money/sanity where my mouth (or fingers?) are and actually write a story for each and every post-apocalyptic scenario that I listed in the guide. That’s a grand total of 36 different possible scenarios to work with. Now, planning to write 36 books is a hell of a lot easier than actually writing 36 books, but as the saying goes - anything worth doing is going to be bloody hard work.

Or maybe that was just my old man’s version of it?

Anyway, as I’ve said before in various locations - you rarely get just one single type of post-apocalyptic scenario at a time, there’s a cascading effect that tends to ripple through the system. For instance, you’re always going to get an Economic Collapse and Social Decay scenarios when you end the world… that’s just a natural byproduct of everything going to shit. Now, I can try to tap into this and use those ripples to get ticks in multiple boxes from a single story, but that’s not really what I’m going for.

With that in mind, although it’d certainly be easier, I’m looking at the long term achievement of having a story written in every single scenario. By the time I’m done, I’m hoping to have a catalog of post-apocalyptic stories that cover every possible scenario imaginable. I don’t want to write EMP or Zombie Apocalypse stories over and over - I want what variety I can get while also staying within the genre.

And to be honest, each of those 36 scenarios has some serious fucking wiggle room. That’s a lot of different ways for the world to end, and I’m confident that I can bring something unique to each and every scenario there is. As always, the only real issue is time. It’s not gonna happen overnight, but it will happen.

Why a House Can't Always be a Home After the Apocalypse

You see it in Post-Apocalyptic stories all the time, people living in anything and everything except houses after the world has ended. It’s not just for shits and giggles, though the reasons are not always readily apparent either. Why would people choose to live in a baseball stadium, a hotel, an office building, subway stations, military bases, shopping malls, prisons, casinos or a dam? Why not just live in a house like a normal person?

Well, the answer is because Post-Apocalyptic times aren’t normal, and neither are the people who live in them… and they certainly don’t have the same needs that we do in a pre-apocalyptic world.

The thing with Post-Apocalyptic times is that there’s generally something out there that wants to kill you. If it’s not radiation, zombies or mutants then it’s other people. For that reason, a simple house just won’t cut it as a base of operations. You need something that you can easily defend and most modern houses aren’t built to protect you against determined assailants, let alone radiation. Windows are a massive weak point, and even a dead-bolted door isn’t going to save you. And this is all assuming the house is still relatively new as well, add a few years before the apocalypse, let alone after, and you’ve got a seriously insufficient structure on your hands.

Next, you’ve got resources to consider. Chances are that running water is going to be a serious concern for your survivors… primarily because they’d like to continue being survivors. Most modern houses, oftentimes whole towns or sometimes even cities, aren’t build close to fresh water. With our modern water network, people can live in the middle of a desert and still have fresh, clean water at the turn of a tap. That kind of luxury generally dries up once the apocalypse kicks in. Once the taps stop working and all the bottled water runs out, you discover why towns were historically founded on river banks.

Now, it’s entirely possible that you live in a remote town with a river running through it - the zombies don’t know where you are and you’ve still got a reliable source of fresh drinking water. Good for you, you get to keep living in your home. Maybe you can shore up your defenses; board the windows and make some kind of wall… but whatever is out there will likely get through eventually. Why not just move into the local super market? It’s a lot closer to the river, it’s packed full of food and it’s a massive building made from steel and concrete. Besides not having that “homey” feel to it, it’s got everything you’ll ever need.

There’re a lot of things to consider when choosing where to live after the world ends; space, resources, defenses. You’ve got to weight each of these things against the others, because each site will have it’s own pro’s and con’s, and their viability will depend on what sort of apocalypse you went through. What’s good in a Zombie Apocalypse won’t be as effective in a Nuclear War scenario, and vice-versa.

You’ve just got to find the best place you can, then settle in. The primary paradoxical problem is that the better the location is, the more likely it is to be a target for other survivors. Which is just another factor to take into account when choosing your Post-Apocalyptic housing.

The Bastard's Curse

On the first of September last year, I did a Twitter poll, asking people to help me come up with a random plot. As with any kind of crowd sourcing, it turned into an absolute clusterfuck and spiraled out of control. And so here we are… 166 days later… and the project is finally being released.

It took way longer than expected, but there was a fair amount of real world drama and the core idea changed a fair few times… but it’s done.

Writing in the 3rd person was actually a pretty big challenge for me, it took an interview with the main-man Evan C. to figure it out - but I usually write in the first person because I have a background in oral storytelling. So yeah, 3rd person was difficult, but I’m happy to report that feedback has been good and I’m content with sending this out to the public… for free.

Well, kinda free? I’ll give it to you, for free, if you sign up to my email list… yeah, that’s what’s happening here.

If general opinion of the story warrants it, then I’ll be happy to write other short stories in this world. It actually turned out to be a pretty unique setting, and I’d like to explore it further. Combining Lovecraftian Horror with the post-apocalyptic genre came with some interesting challenges.

Feel free to rip the shit out of it, as always I’m always more interested in getting better than having my ego stroked. This is a slight step outside my wheelhouse, so I’m more than willing to take on some creative criticism in order to get better at it. Whether you love it or hate it, let me know what you think!

Anyway, without further rambling - if you’d like to collect your free copy of The Bastard’s Curse, then just click here!

Let me know if there’re any drama’s with the links… I’m no good with this high tech wizardry.

"That Would Never Happen"

When it comes to Post-Apocalyptic stories, the nay-sayers are pretty quick to point out how unrealistic a scenario is. There’s always some factor or instance that, they think, would undercut the apocalypse and forestall subsequent doom. The problem with this view is that the Post-Apocalyptic genre isn’t stories of the world almost ending, it’s blatantly about scenarios where the world hasn’t ended.

It’s far more likely that the world doesn’t end in some apocalyptic event, that’s a given. If we woke up every day and had to deal with the dread of some random apocalypse transpiring, we’d never get anything done. We wouldn’t have even moved out of our caves, why would we have bothered? The point is that 99.9999% of the time the world will not end, but Post-Apocalyptic stories are about that “perfect storm” scenario where it does. The catastrophic clusterfuck of an apocalypse is found in the insanely infinitesimal.

Nobody cares about an averted zombie apocalypse. One guy gets turned undead in a lab experiment, breaks free and then infects the scientist, the zombies run rampant through the top secret military complex but they’re eventually taken out by special forces, or a nuke… it doesn’t matter. A recently killed woman rises from her grave and hunts down her murderer, but a local deputy sees her shambling corpse and blows her head off then drags her back to her grave and buries her again. The Post-Apocalyptic genre isn’t about how the world is almost destroyed, they’re your simple Action/Thriller/Drama/Horror stories. The Post-Apocalyptic genre is about the cascading failure that does, despite all odds, result in absolute destruction for humanity.

Sure, there’s enough security around highly virulent diseases that the chances of one of them breaking free and causing a pandemic are slim, but this is about the time that the precautions in place juuuust weren’t enough. There’s a crash while the vials are in transport, the vehicle’s containment cases weren’t locked properly, the virus gets out. A fire causes a black out and the old generators fail to kick in, all the doors unlock due to the fire, the virus gets out. A scientist caught his brother sleeping with his wife, he goes to work and thinks “fuck the world” and… the virus gets out.

A lot of small things need to happen for an entire world to collapse, and total ruin could potentially be averted if any of them fail to happen. Go Google those times that the world was nearly drowned in nuclear hellfire because of a flock of birds, or because of some sunlight refracting off of clouds. As difficult as it is for an apocalypse to eventuate, in spite of all the precautions, it’s often in the cracks of absurdity that it slips through.

It’s not about how unrealistic the scenario is, as long as the author has put in the work to make it as realistic as possible, then it’s as realistic as it needs to be. If you’re working on a Post-Apocalyptic story, don’t think of it as destroying a functioning world but instead think of it as creating a destroyed world. Think of how it could happen, don’t get bogged down in all the ways it couldn’t. Sometimes simple bad luck can ruin your life, and it can do the same to the world.

Berserk and the MCU

I watched Avengers Infinity War last August and then wrote this post but totally forgot about it. There’re trailers for Endgame coming out now and it reminded me to actually finish what I started, so here we go. I actually enjoyed Infinity War, I thought it had a great story and it balanced it’s massive cast of characters really well. The ending had the sort of somber gut punch that I've only found in one other series, Berserk. I know a anime from the early 2000's doesn't seem like it would have a lot in common with the latest Marvel Comic Universe film, but just bare with me and I'll bring it home. 

I'm not shy about the fact that I've moved away from comic book movies over the past few years. It's not just the fact that I was a massive comic nerd in my younger days, and the shift of nerdy interests becoming mainstream irked me to no end. My interests becoming popular doesn't make up for the thousands spent on therapy bills from the days when they weren't popular. No, it's also because I’ve just become burnt out on comic movies. Hugh Jackman was Wolverine for seventeen years! That's a long time to be invested in a character... and for a while it looked like there would be no pay off to that investment. 

We first met Wolverine on the big screen in the year 2000. To put that in perspective, the Twin Towers were still standing when Hugh Jackman first popped his claws. I remember that they actually had to change the first Spider-Man movie because originally he'd caught some criminals in a web between the towers and they'd just been destroyed in real life. That's how long ago these films started appearing, they’re older than the War on Terror. It took them seventeen years, but Wolverine finally died in 2017 in one of the best Marvel films to date. 

I haven't seen any Captain America films, I never saw Doctor Strange, I haven't seen any of the TV series and the only Thor movie I've seen is Thor Ragnarok. I have watched the Avengers films though, because that's where it all seems to be coming together. The first Avengers film came out in 2012, and if you want to get technical then the first film about an Avenger came out in 2008 with Iron Man. That's 10 years from Iron Man to Avengers Infinity War, which is one hell of an investment in these characters. 

Avengers Infinity Wars was already great, but when Thanos snapped his fingers at the end it went into overdrive. All the characters we'd invested in over the years; Bucky, Black Panther, Groot, Scarlet Witch, Drax, Quill, Spider-Man... they all disintegrated. And their deaths were indicative of what was going on not only all across earth, but all across the universe. Half of the universe's population was disintegrated in an instant, and we experienced that through the loss of these named characters we've invested so much in. 

I've only passably been paying attention to these movies for a while now. I’d go to the cinema if someone else wanted to, but otherwise I just watched them on the small screen. Even with my own half level of interest, the death of all these characters was executed in such a supreme fashion that it still left me stunned. Black Panther disintegrating as he goes to help Okoye. Rocket staggering over to Groot as he dies, again. Stark futilely asking quill to stay as he's already vanishing, and then having to watch Peter Parker, who had basically become his surrogate son by this point, fall apart in his arms. And finally, Captain America gasping "oh, god" as he realizes the greater implications of their failure to stop Thanos. 

It was fantastic, and it's got me hooked for Endgame later this year. My only issue is that I know that all these characters will come back by the end of that film. Comic creators have this issue with not letting their creations stay dead; death is more of a break than a true end for comic book characters. That's my issue with all of this, this fantastically impactful end to Infinity War is going to be undercut and undone by the next movie. On its own, Infinity War is a great story about failure and its costs, but as part of a series it doesn't even matter. If all these characters are going to be brought back, why not bring back Gamora, Loki, Odin, Quicksilver, Killmonger, Wolverine, Heimdall, Peter Parkers parents... the list goes on. If you can bring back some, why not others?

So, Avengers Infinity War did it pretty damn well, but it's going to be undone later on. A series that got it right, however, is Berserk. I started watching this anime back in 2003, where the six DVD's were released in Australia a month apart. I loved the first few episodes so much that I actually watched everything I had all over again in the week leading up to the release of the next DVD. So by the time the final DVD came out, I'd seen the first four episodes six times, the second four episodes five times, the third four episodes four times... and so on. 

Needless to say, that at the end of the six months, I was fairly invested in these characters. And I don't want to go into too much detail here, because this is going to get it's own blog post at some point... but in the last episode someone pulls a dick-move and pretty much everyone else is killed in a single, horrific event. I literally sat there on floor in front of the television, mouth agape, just staring as the credits began to roll. It was the craziest thing I had ever seen. If all stories are an effort to get you to feel something, then Berserk was a prime example of a successful story. It got you invested in all these main characters and side characters... then in one fell swoop they're slaughtered in the most brutal of fashions. And then it ended. The world continued, obviously, but that was the end of the series.

A key component of this is that it didn't feel contrived or forced. Marvel got this right with Infinity War too - as much as it was a horrifying ending, it was still a satisfying end to the story. It hurts but it still makes sense because it feels like the natural progression of the characters involved. In both Infinity War and Berserk, it feels like the mass slaughter at the end is the only place that it could have ended up. You can look back at the story in hindsight and realize that it was never going to end anywhere else, all the choices and all the mistakes were leading up to that single event.

I'm not even sure I want to see Endgame, simply because of the fantastic end of Infinity War that it’s going to undo. But I know that it's getting made and I know I'll probably just happen to see it eventually. In closing though, if you’re looking for a great series to sink your teeth into then check out Berserk. I’ll do a write up of it later on, at some point.