100th Post and Final Push!

Happy Friday everyone, and happy 4th of July and long weekend too!!! Can you smell the fireworks in the air? The 4th of July is pretty flippin' awesome, so I hope you have a good one!

Here's 4th of July trivia for you (because I love US history, srsly). Did you know both Jefferson and Adams passed into the great beyond on July 4, 1826 within hours of each other? Adams' last words were something to the effect of "Thomas Jefferson survives," but actually that was not true. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, no?

This post is sort of MOMENTOUS because it's A Nudge's 100th post! Amazing! Seriously, for us this is a big deal because there was a long while where this blog just sat around. Now it's sort of consistent enough to have 100 posts (and lovely readers like you to boot!). I think this calls for ice cream!

Lastly, many of you by now know that the casting controversy surrounding the film The Last Airbender is an important issue to me. I've briefly mentioned it here before, so I don't want to harp on this again too much. This is, however, opening weekend for the movie (and a long weekend at that - perfect timing for a wannabe summer blockbuster), which makes it time for a big nudge on the topic.

• When you go to the movies this weekend, please consider NOT going to the The Last Airbender because whitewashing is not cool. If you must go (because I know a lot of people are excited about it), please consider going after opening weekend. Thank you.

I found there are so many people who have already said what I want to say about all of this much better than I ever could. So I leave you with a few links, a few of my bullet points, and a comic because comics are fun.

Why I Won't Be Watching the Last Airbender Movie by author Gene Luen Yang.

Link: Facepainting - A well-written essay about the TLA controversy and the history of ____face. Plus, it addresses many of the arguments made in defense of the movie.

Link: An Open Letter to Racebending.com Detractors - Michael Le of Racebending.com explains racebending.com supporters' concerns and tries to clear up the misunderstandings surrounding the protest.

Quickie bullet points on some of the concerns I've heard:

• Why shouldn't I see this movie? Giving this film your dollars sends the message that whitewashing is okay and/or that we tolerate it enough to reward the studio for perpetuating glass ceilings for actors of color. The movie's success would also tell studios that they can get away with such practices, and would reaffirm the assumption that White actors are more marketable than actors of color.

• The best actors were cast for the role. It's disingenuous to say this when open casting calls asked for actors who are Caucasian - or any other ethnicity, phrasing that indicates preference for Caucasian actors. Would you audition or apply for a job that asked for blonds - or any other hair color if you weren't blond? At least, it would make you think twice about applying. Also, comments by the casting director show an offensive level of cultural insensitivity.

• There are Asians in the film, including in leading roles. The original cast had White actors in all the main roles (3 heroes, 1 antagonist). Dev Patel replaced Jesse McCartney as Fire Nation Prince Zuko. The casting of the Fire Nation was subsequently adjusted to match Patel, making it a nation filled with actors and extras of darker skinned ethnicities. Also, populating the background with extras who are actually Asian or Inuit does not make the movie "diverse."

• It's a fantasy. The cartoon characters' race isn't explicit / their look is ambiguous. Lord of the Rings is an epic fantasy as well, populated with characters whose race (other than if they're human, elf, hobbit, etc.) isn't necessarily explicit either. It's implicit from the world-building, the tradition of the story, and the intents of its originator. I don't question why Middle Earth seems mostly populated by Caucasian people even across species because I understand that the story is meant to be like a European fairytale/myth. It pays homage to the grand Nordic and essentially Western sagas and epics and the folklore of Tolkien's heritage. The Last Airbender cartoon series does this with Asian and Inuit cultures and traditions. It pays homage to them and uses themes and settings based in those cultures. I know culture doesn't equal race, but when you see an "ambiguous" bald kid with a name like Aang who looks like a monk, does martial arts, and writes in Chinese calligraphy, do you really assume he's White? And ambiguous or not, Sokka and Katara, at least, are clearly dark-skinned in the show. Taking the Asian and Inuit settings and traditions but making the representative characters of those things White says to me, "Hey, your culture is cool, but your face isn't."

• It's just a kids' movie/ it's just a movie. It's for entertainment. First, the film is marketed as a summer blockbuster, and like another "kids'" series, Harry Potter, it has cross age-group appeal. Second, movies are a way of disseminating culture. Yes, they're for entertainment, but they reaffirm and sometimes challenge our societal beliefs and systems. Even so-called throwaway, no brainer movies say something about who we are as a society because they are products of our society. Yellowface and whitewashing has existed for so long because it keeps getting reaffirmed; kids learn to expect White as the default race. So The Last Airbender film might be more of a "big deal" in its role as a "kids' movie"; think about what it's subconsciously teaching the kids.

LASTLY, all controversy aside, it just seems like a terrible movie. It's gotten awful reviews (the Rotten Tomatoes meter is at a dismal 9%), including a HALF STAR from Roger Ebert. I didn't even know that was possible. And I do feel bad, especially for the young actors and for the original series, which will have to bear being associated with what sounds like a trainwreck.


From the fan side of it, fans are saying it's a horrible adaptation - too much exposition, bad pacing, clunky dialogue, uninspired fight scenes, and crappy effects (even worse in 3D). Worse than that, apparently characters have had all the heart and soul sucked out of them to the point where key aspects of who they are are underrepresented if shown at all. That's bad story-telling, my friends.


So yeah. If you want a family film to take your kids to this holiday weekend, take them to Toy Story 3, which is actually worth your time and money. Pixar understands compelling storytelling and genuine emotion. Better yet, watch Avatar: The Last Airbender, the original cartoon series, which I hear is up in its entirety (3 seasons) on Netflix. ;)

As always, I point you to www.racebending.com, especially their short video primer (it'll only take like 5 minutes of your time), for more information about the subject. They're civil, clear, and concise.

Thanks for sticking through that! I wish you sun and relaxation for this weekend! HAPPY 4th!

Allusions and Intrusions: Pulled Out of the Narrative

(Edit from Krispy: OMG, it's an Alz nudge!!! Yay!)

Ever had it where you're reading a book and you're really into it, utterly absorbed and fully enthralled, and suddenly crash-bang-slam you're rudely yanked out of the narrative due to an out-of-place allusion, word, or narrative device?

On a whim, I recently began to reread Elvenblood by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey, book two of the Halfblood Chronicles. I experienced this jolting displacement 40 pages into the book—better sooner than later, I guess.

Now, Elvenblood by itself is not a great book. The first half is fairly well done, but it soon digs itself into an improbability pit well-seasoned with retconning and lined with plot devices lurking like landmines on every page. Well, all right, if you just read the book, it's not quite that glaringly bad, but the amount of glib worldbuilding and continuity errors is appalling once you take a good look at the details.

But if you just read it through, it's standard fantasy fare, with its good points and its bad points and no real wow-factor. Elves are the ruling race, few in number but cruel and powerful and long-lived, and they have long since enslaved humanity, collaring humans and locking away their mind magic. The offspring of human and elf is forbidden because these so-called "wizard" halfbloods have human mind magic in addition to elf magic and are therefore super powerful; naturally because they are forbidden, you can be sure there are a heck of a lot of them secretly born and spirited away to await future storylines. Oh, and there are shapeshifting magical dragons who don't want the elves to know they exist, fearing that the elves, being cruel bastards with a taste for pretty things, will want to skin every dragon alive for the sake of their sparkly skins.

At any rate, in Elvenblood, there's a noble elf household featuring the lord cruel father Treves who is like unto a marble statue in a blizzard in terms of coldness, the lady secretive mother Viridina, and their two presumably-teens-or-older children: son and heir Lorryn and disposable daughter Sheyrena. Lorryn is a halfblood, born to Viridina and masked as a fullblood elf from birth by his mother. Sheyrena is the true daughter of the house, but only Viridina and Lorryn know the truth. Naturally the situation turns sticky when the High Council decrees that all male heirs of a certain age must undergo illusion-breaking spells…

But lo! Sheyrena's maid is actually one of those sparkly shapeshifting dragons, changed into the form of a human maidservant, and she has plans for Lorryn, whom she knows to be a wizard. Plot will follow.

Standard fantasy fare, right? Fairly intriguing, right? I was feeling pretty well into the world and the book until the point where Sheyrena, dressed for a fete and annoyed with her gown's long train and how people will tread on it, thinks, "All very well if you are someone like my mother, with prestige and presence—or if you're a real beauty, like Katarina an Vittes" (27-28).

At which point I paused thoughtfully and went, "Huh. Reminds me of that figure skater Katarina Witt."

And I dismissed it as coincidence and read on. Until a few pages later, where it switches to Myre's point of view as she goes to tell another slave to await their mistress's return from a fete, which means sitting in a boring room all alone for hours on end. The slave she chooses is named Tanhya Leis, "a particularly nasty piece of blond work that Myre had been longing to get stirred into mischief for some time now" (39).

Turns out Tanhya is an ex-member of Lord Treves's harem because when her brunette rival Keri Eisa became the favorite, Tanhya fought dirty to try to knock her out of the running. Myre thinks, "You'd think she'd have known that stupid cook's helper of hers would be caught. And that he'd talk once he was caught. I don't care how good you are in bed, that's not going to keep your paramour from telling everything when his tail is in the fire? After all, it was trying to seduce one of the guards into spoiling Keri's looks and making it look like an accident that got her sent down here in the first place" (40).

And that was where I crashed to a halt. The blatant reference to ice skater Tonya Harding conspiring with two men to attack Nancy Kerrigan and keep her out of the 1994 Figure Skating Championships jolted me right out of the story. And nothing else about this "cook's helper" is ever explained either; he exists solely to indicate there were two men involved in the attack. I don't remember making the connection when I read the book the first time, but maybe I wasn't paying as much attention—because this entire little anecdote about Tanhya and Keri is entirely that: anecdotal. It has no effect or import upon the plot whatsoever and, in fact, is not mentioned again. Neither is Katarina Witt Katarina an Vittes, except to briefly mention that she is in fact so beautiful she becomes betrothed to a very sought-after elven lord. Nor are there any other bizarre ice skating or other real-life-references or allusions anywhere else in the book so far, and I've been keeping both eyes so peeled I could use an entire bottle of Visine right now.

In this case, I think the author (or authors) thought she was being clever at inserting an ice skating allusion into the story. There is no narrative or artistic benefit except as an inside joke; clearly I glossed over it the first time and it made no impact, but this second time, the impact is considerable, as is my judgment, which I am fond of casting about like a rock. If this were a book focusing on ice elves or a fantasy skating competition, I wouldn't mind quite as much because the allusion would have a clear connection and reason for being—but ice skaters becoming one-liner harem slaves in a book about elves and dragons and wizards?

Please. Either have a little more context for any real-life allusions you're going to make in your fantasy novel, or don't make your allusions so blatant. Be like Tamora Pierce when she wrote Lady Knight, the fourth book in the young adult series the Protector of the Small—if I recall correctly, there was an afterward from the author explaining that the destruction in a particularly brutal scene was in fact inspired by the 9/11 attack, and a wish to convey the senselessness of the devastation to a younger audience. But when I read the book, the thought of 9/11 had never crossed my mind because Tamora Pierce did not thinly mask the event and insert it into the novel as a pointless aside; instead, she wrote a captivating, intense scene that belonged exactly where it was in the story: in the heartrending heart.

The Importance of Interstitial Histories

People that know me know that I'm a super laid-back person. I'm also a 9 in the Enneagram of Personality, which basically means I really, really dislike conflict. No, really. There are few things that get me riled up enough to compel me to discuss them outside of my closest friends and family. So you won't see a lot of posts like this about charged topics, and plus, that's not really the focus of this blog. Nonetheless, this is something I think is important.

Arizona has been a hot topic in the news of late largely because of its controversial new immigration law, SB 1070.

Not as well known is the bill the Arizona legislature passed soon after SB1070 became law. This other bill would ban ethnic studies programs from being taught in the state. Why? Apparently, ethnic studies programs "advocate separatism and racial preferences" and "are designed to promote ethnic chauvinism."*

(EDIT: Oh wait, HB2281 was just signed INTO LAW yesterday. This just gets better and better, doesn't it?)

There are many things I can say about those statements, but it will probably degenerate into sputtering noises, F-bombs, and general speechlessness. That's why I ranted about this first with my sister and let it all simmer for a few days before I blogged about it.** I want to present in a coherent and intelligent manner why ethnic studies is important and why both of those statements completely miss the point of ethnic studies.

History is essentially a story with many, many moving parts and perspectives, and obviously not all of it is going to be represented. That's fine and is indeed necessary to create a coherent and meaningful common past. History, with a capital H, is the most important people and events (the importance of which is itself subjective to one's location) strung together in chronological order. It's meant to give us a general understanding of who we were and where we came from, so that we can see who we might become and where we might go.

But History is written by the winners of conflicts and by those in power.

Think back to your grade school history classes and try to recall how much time was given to covering the experience of women and people of color in America. Ask yourself from whose point of view is the overarching narrative.

Ethnic Studies is about giving voice to and understanding the experience and histories of people of color. It is for this same reason that we have Women's Studies as well. These - what could be called 'niche' - studies exist to give representation to traditionally under-represented groups. These programs and courses aren't about superseding or replacing History as we know it. They are about complementing and supplementing our general knowledge. They are about providing a broader perspective, so that we can create a more complete picture of the American experience.

The reasoning behind the Arizona law banning ethnic studies programs in schools is that ethnic studies "advocate separatism and racial preferences" and "ethnic solidarity instead of treatment of pupils as individuals." The Arizona State Superintendent for Public Instruction sums it up like this:

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Horne called passage in the state House a victory for the principle that education should unite, not divide students of differing backgrounds.

"Traditionally, the American public school system has brought together students from different backgrounds and taught them to be Americans and to treat each other as individuals, and not on the basis of their ethnic backgrounds," Horne said. "This is consistent with the fundamental American value that we are all individuals, not exemplars of whatever ethnic groups we were born into. Ethnic studies programs teach the opposite, and are designed to promote ethnic chauvinism."

My response to these statements is that yes, American education should unite students, teach them to consider themselves Americans, and teach them to treat each other as individuals/judge each other by character, but education should also educate. We DO NOT live in a post-racial world. We can, do, and should teach that everyone should be judged by the content of their character, but that still doesn't change the color of my skin and what some people might think about it. I'm not an exemplar of my ethnic group, but that doesn't stop people from making judgments about me based on my ethnicity.

To ignore that race and racism still exist, to pretend the struggles of minority groups didn't happen or to gloss over them is to marginalize those historical narratives. History is sometimes ugly, but the point is that we've struggled and continue to struggle to overcome the ugliness, to be better.

Ethnic Studies acknowledges race and discusses it in the context of how it shapes history and society. It takes a piece of the American societal puzzle (i.e. the experience of a specific ethnic group), examines it, and then puts it back into the larger puzzle. It is NOT about isolating/separating the piece. It highlights the piece and shows how it is part of the whole.

The new Arizona law allows for the continuance of courses for Native American pupils and English as second language classes. "It also does not prohibit the teaching of the Holocaust or other cases of genocide." I'm guessing teaching the whole Civil Rights Movement is still okay too. The thing is these specific historical events, integral to the dominant historical narrative, have a lot to do with specific ethnic groups. It seems a little disingenuous to say we can teach token bits of ethnic history, but we cannot allow any in-depth classes dedicated to any individual ethnic group and their history in America.

Of course, I'm not asking for History classes to integrate everything. Like I said, it would be impossible to teach (much less learn) it all in a coherent, meaningful way. History is a good, working summary of our past, and that's what it should be - a summary. BUT don't take away the opportunity for people to learn about other narratives, especially if those narratives speak to them and show them how they fit into the fabric of our diverse nation. You hear all the time from students in school, Why should I care about this? What does this have to do with me? Why is all this stuff important?

What if, maybe, all they need is an event or person or movement or story they can relate to?

For some of these students, ethnic studies might be a way to find that - to find an experience that more closely resembles their own, so that they can begin to see how they fit into and belong in History at large.

The United States is a diverse and multi-cultural, multi-ethnic nation. Is it so much to ask for the opportunity to learn about what makes it diverse? Is it wrong for me to want to learn about what the people who came before me went through and what they fought for to give me the rights and privileges I have today?

Ethnic Studies isn't about promoting resentment among ethnic groups or racial preference or separatism. It isn't about how one group struggled or suffered or achieved more than another. It isn't about supplanting the dominant American Historical narrative.

It's about showing that people of color struggled and triumphed and dreamed in America too, and that their experiences helped shape the nation we are today. It's about showing that minority groups DO have a place and role in American History. It's about HOW these groups FIT INTO that narrative, showing them that they're part of the making of this nation too, that their stories are also important.

If anything, Ethnic Studies is about showing us how we are all American, despite our various journeys to get here.


I hope that made sense. Thank you for reading.


P.S. "HB 2281 bans schools from teaching classes that are designed for students of a particular ethnic group, promote resentment or advocate ethnic solidarity over treating pupils as individuals. The bill also bans classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government."

The implication that Ethnic Studies promotes treason against the U.S. government seriously offends me. I'm American. Please don't make it seem like programs about American ethnic experience are somehow UN-American.

*All direct quotes can be found in the linked articles.
1. Arizona Legislature Passes Bill to Curb 'Chauvanism' in Ethnic Studies Programs from FoxNews.com
2. Arizona bill targeting ethnic studies signed into law from LATimes.com

**I heard about the bill last Friday and let myself absorb the news and calm down. Yesterday, when I came to finish this post, I found out about its becoming law. My cooling off period now seems a little pointless because I had to make A;KLLSKA;JFLI@#(*LS;AJF noises for a while before I could straighten my thoughts back in order.

Say No to Author Insertion Fic

Of late, I have been talking to people about books that I read back in the day, which lead me to a topic that, well, kind of drives me up the wall. Call it literary snobbery or even jealousy, but I hate Author Insertion in fiction--probably more than I hate Mary Sue. You could probably put Author Insertion as a subcategory of Mary Sue, which only makes me hate it more, but there you have it.

Let me backtrack and explain exactly what I mean. A Mary Sue in fandom is usually an original character, who is then inserted into whatever fandom and inexplicably loved and adored by all who gaze upon her lovely visage, but especially by the Big Players of the borrowed world. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word "inexplicably" because sometimes the writer does bother to explain just why Mary Sue is so awesome, but when you read it, it sure feels like it's inexplicable. Sometimes it's just bad characterization and development: you're told that Mary is beautiful, that Mary is kind, that Mary is to be pitied to be loved, that she is noble, funny, athletic, etc. etc. ad nauseum. You never really see the evidence to back this up or all the evidence is dumped on you suddenly like being ambushed at the Prom with a bucket of pig's blood.

From the description, you can see that Mary Sue also exists in the realm of original fiction. She (or he, though I'm not sure what the term would be here) may be slightly more difficult to identify because you might not have the tell-tale sign of Main Characters falling all over themselves over her (or him), but she's still lurking around.

This brings us finally to my main point: author insertion in fanfiction and in original fiction, but especially in published original fiction. I'm not talking about writers having a distinctive voice or putting a little bit of themselves in their characters (I mean, they are putting themselves in the character's shoes or becoming the characters in some cases). I'm also not necessarily talking about writers who put a fictionalized version of themselves into a story in order to do some kind of literary soul-searching. I'm talking about a specific kind of author insertion--the Mary Sue kind, where the character in the story isn't just based off of the writer; the character IS the writer albeit very thinly disguised.


It's annoying enough to see this is fanfiction, but it drives me up the wall to see it in published fiction. Why? Because it's being inflicted on the paying public and these people should know/write better than that. Let me give you a general example to avoid singling out anyone and no names of course because I don't kiss and tell. Also, I realize everyone has done things that are/could be embarrassing, and I'd certainly appreciate it if people didn't bring up my transgressions. So I'm going to be discreet.

Main Character of the novel seems to be very much like the writer. S/he shares the same likes and dislikes as the actual writer, looks like the writer (except possibly fictionally airbrushed), shares very similar background history to the writer, and/or has the personality/habits/quirks of the writer. Yeah, yeah, writers may do a bit of superficial matching up of the MC to him/herself to help them get a better grasp on the character, but there's a line that once crossed, I--as the reader--can no longer suspend my disbelief that these similarities are just superficial. Now, I can appreciate a tongue-in-cheek joke like a reference to something the writer did in real life or maybe the MC's favorite book is something the writer's published. It's another thing when the MC does everything the writer's done with the addition of having the zomg-awesome luck of being in the world of the writer's books. The MC is the writer living the dream, having adventure, and hooking the hot Romantic Lead.

Sure we all are guilty of vanity, and hey, who doesn't want to take a romp in the world they've so lovingly created? But does the public have to be subjected to this bit of vanity press?

Joyriding through a new world with the writer at the wheel is great; I mean, that's what we do as readers. We go along with the characters for what is often the ride of their lives, but I don't want to watch the writer go joyriding off on his/her own. It's one thing to invite me into the fantasy. It's another to make me sit and watch you indulge in your own fantasy and go romping off into the sunset with your One True Love.

I don't appreciate being left in the dust.

On Plausible Villainy

Iago of Shakespeare's Othello is widely touted to be the epitome of villainy. Why? Because he's just so damn evil. The dude's got it down on Othello and wants him to suffer, suffer, suffer, and suffer some more for good measure, and manages to contrive Othello's downfall with a smiling face and everyone's full trust. Why does he do this? Because somebody else got promoted, not him, and Othello gets to take the brunt of the blame. There's not really much reason beyond that given for his absolute hatred of the Moor. Dim-witted Othello trusts Iago completely which fact of course Iago takes shameless advantage of in order to manipulate and betray his "friend", and this is supposed to be why Iago is the quintessential evil villain. And because Shakespeare is revered as such a noble figure within the realm of English literature, and he's been dead for centuries, and scholars say so, it seems to be one of those general "facts" of the academic world.

Iago's kind of one-dimensional if you just take him straight out of the play.

No, seriously. Think about it. Iago haaaaaates Othello and wants to nail his tender bits to the wall and to make him suspicious of and despise his wife so that he'll smother her with a pillow and then feel terribly, terribly guilty about it when she finally dies of it a half-dozen agonized soliloquies and dialogue exchanges or so later. Cassio got promoted instead of Iago, and this fills Iago with vitriolic rage and loathing for Othello's littlest skin particle, never mind the rest of him. Speculation as to why he hates Othello so damn much is all well and good, of course, and ripe pickings for fanfiction (leave the temptation to slash alone, please, oh gods please leave it alone), but within the bounds of the actual play itself—let's face it, there's no real concrete reason given why Iago loathes Othello so much. We're just supposed to concentrate on the fact that Iago feels betrayed, the loathing is there, and now he's acting on what he feels and doing what he does best: being a manipulative bastard. He can gain dimension for possible reasons, and this is where the analysis and interpretation takes place, but there are characters who come off to me as deep and full of inner conflict and motivations and twists and turns of psychology that form an elaborate pretzel-knot, and then there are those who just leave me going double-you-tee-eff. Needless to say, Iago's one of the latter.

An Iago-type villain holds thin water nowadays, having become a stereotype: "You passed me up, so I'm-a kill you, you son of a bitch." I mean, most villains seem to be ambitious and aspiring towards power (for either destructive I'll-show-them-all-and-destroy-the-world or constructive I-can-make-the-world-a-better-place purposes), or because they've got vengeance cooking hot on their brains (this is Iago, who takes it to an extreme), or they lust after fame/infamy, or they're lusting for somebody that they can't have or want to impress, or they're just insane (which though it can be done well is more often used as a cop-out, like the typical oh-it-was-all-just-a-dream trope), or sundry other reasons. But it's a rare villain indeed who exists simply as a plot device of Sheer and Absolute Evil for the Sake of Hating So-and-So For a Reason of Some Kind. I mean, check out the Wikipedia section talking about Iago's possible motives—about the only clear and text-citable reason for hatred is that he was passed up for promotion. (Granted, it's been a while since I've read Othello, but I'm pretty sure I remember Iago having not very many clear reasons for his absolute hatred of Othello.)

Thus there are "evil" villains. But there are also villains who are not so much villains as antagonists, opposing the protagonist without necessarily being what you'd nominally call "evil". Look at the works of Hayao Miyazaki. His films are notorious for having villains who turn out to be not quite so villainous after all—they may not exactly be paragons of pure goodwill and altruism, but they tend to have a decidedly human air of reasonability about them. Check out the invading force in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Lady Eboshi of Princess Mononoke, or Yubaba of Spirited Away. I'll not post spoilers here, but they are human (or have humanizing qualities) as much as they are villains, and they're not pointlessly evil—or even exactly evil at all, since "evil" becomes a matter of perspective. As characters, they come off more multi-dimensional than Iago right off the bat without a great deal of analytical or interpretive work—and to my mind, if you need to work really hard to even identify (much less deconstruct) a villain's motivations and mental workings, then that means you're probably stretching things.

Want an example of a more one-dimensional "evil" villain? Check out Baron Von Rothbart of Mercedes Lackey's The Black Swan. He's a magician with a vendetta against unfaithful women—but why? The blurb on the back of the book says it's because he considers his wife's death some years previously to be the ultimate betrayal, but this isn't mentioned anywhere within the pages of the actual book, and it's a sad, sad day in literary heaven with the analytic angels of fiction weeping tears of blood when we have to turn to the summary on the back of a book in order to figure out character motivations within the story. (I mean, come on—I'm pretty sure the authors frequently have very little or nothing to do with the blurbs on back covers and on the insides of dust jackets, and there's been more than one occasion where the back blurb actually got facts about the story inside wrong.)

But back to Von Rothbart. The only hint we have of this wife's death = ultimate betrayal thing is a brief passage from Von Rothbart's daughter's perspective concerning violets. Yes, violets. Apparently Lady Von Rothbart loved violets (which the daughter Odile vaguely remembers) but there are no longer any violets growing on Von Rothbart's land because he has every patch of flowers found rooted ruthlessly out. (The poor woman doesn't even get a name—by calling her "Lady Von Rothbart" I've already given her more name than she gets in the story.) As far as I recall, that's the sole mention of any kind of wife-related angst, and the only possible hint of motivation for his going out and stalking young women to see if they're unfaithful, transforming them into swans when he finds them cheating on their men, and then kidnapping them away to his estate where they spend their days as swans and their nights as women clad in thin silk dresses. (Personally, I think Von Rothbart is a power-mad pervert with a major fetish for swans and cheating wives and way too much time on his hands, but I sadly have the feeling that my interpretation right there is giving him more character than is really there.)

So what of Krispy and I? We've been working on the "villains" lately. Motivation, background, and personal history, ambitions and deceptions and relationships with other characters. Several times we've had to back up and rethink character structure and motivation, and we're probably going to be zigzagging back and forth for a good while longer yet. Developing a plausible villain is tough work, particularly when there is a surfeit of villainous clichés lurking like potholes to trip up unwary feet. We want more dimension than simply single-minded ambition or a single life-changing tragic incident in the past, and I don't think either of us has brought up madness as a suggested motivational force or excuse for a character's actions. These elements can be present, but they have to be well-done and they can't be reason enough alone—not without turning said characters one-dimensional, or two-dimensional if they're lucky.