"Discern the Twin Shadows of Selfishness and of Fickleness"

"Shoot myself to love you

If I loved myself I'd be shooting you"

 

Marilyn Manson - Fundamentally Loathsome

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"Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no more than a b c to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness in any language, except English. She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline. Poor men. There are so few of you who know even Hebrew; you think it something to boast of if, like Bolingbroke, you only “understand that sort of learning and what is writ about it” and you are perhaps adoring women who can think slightingly of you in all the Semitic languages successively."

 

George Eliot - Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (1856)

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"Does she know my film isn't a musical?"

"She has this theory that deep down, every film is a musical."

 

Ozy and Millie - 2007-02-02

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(Note: Spoilers should be minor except for Blade Runner 2049.)

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On a lazy, sunny spring Sunday, methought instead of... okay, in addition to playing games, let's watch a movie. Being a sucker for space colonization, let's try The Colony. That would be The Colony from 2021, not The Colony from 2015... or The Colony from 2013... or the one from 2007... or 1996, or 1995 or y'know, hang on a sec:

"plantation, outpost, territory, camp, protectorate, habitation, diaspora, dependency, possession, post, mandate, exclave" - and that's just from Merriam Webster's online thesaurus. What'cha got against "exclave"? "The Exclave" would make an amazing movie title!

Anyhoo, "Tides" as it's also known looks decent if disjointed for its first few minutes. A space colony space crew consisting of a male, a female and a male corpse crashland on a desolated Earth in the future among storm-wracked mud flats. Striking sparse scenery.

Hope you enjoyed the movie.

Then they're captured by natives and the remaining, injured male cyanides himself so as not to slow the woman down. Yeah. You can probably tell where this is going, and you've seen this musical a thousand times before. The heroine displays superiority over the first new man she meets, is spared from death by a little girl who is then kidnapped by evil men. Then the heroine teams up with another heroine (the little girl's mother) against an evil man and his evil male second in command, summarily seduce and kill the second, find the main heroine's useless failure of a father, shoot, stab and beat up various male redshirts and vanquish The Man! All rendered in state of the art, dimly lit, fog machined, foot fetishist jittercam montages. For the most concise synopsis of the whole mess, try the cusp of the story, a woman's line "he made us into his family" delivered with the same emotive heft and vector as "in space no-one can hear you scream" and conveying every expectation that the audience should view this as the ultimate condemnation of villainy.

If expecting a primitivist angle to match the feminist, Tides shan't disappoint. See, the space colony can't have the space babies 'cuz space rays. The natives can breed but have fallen back on bronze age / Thunderdome tech. The colonists' return is treated as unthinkably calamitous and to be prevented at all costs, despite representing the only realistic chance at rebuilding civilization. Naturally anyone who thinks the star trekking keepers of the sum of human knowledge would run a better mud flat than a gaggle of utterly ignorant, rapidly degenerating simian dregs must be a space-nazi kidnapping little girls as sex slaves. There is no middle ground!

Not like those nubile young maidens would ever want central heating or food that's not laden with nematodes.

Or an epidural.

 

Somethin' off about all that. Was it the mud flats? Well then switch to ice flats.

 

(Two) Against the Ice is an adaptation of the real-life account of a ca.1910 Greenland expedition. As the title indicates, it boasts no less than two main men and lots of ice. Not the best executed flick, as it presents episodic events journal-style,  consistently failing to build up or exploit each happening's practical or emotional impact. Nevertheless it plays well enough on the sourdough and greenhorn's conflicting personalities and their resilience in some of the direst straits on the planet. The two men pass the time mooning after a picture of the graduating class of Schoolmarm U., brave privation, loneliness, the pitiless elements, wild peril and despair to earn their happy ending. For the finale, a historic love interest welcomes them back to civilization. The men greet her with choked, heartfelt anticipation and respectively respectful acquaintanceship.

 

Still, not satisfying. I mean, aside from passively obstructive Danish bureaucracy it even lacks villains. Let's see, villains, villains, where can we find some more villains... I know, demons!

While Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous improved noticeably in writing quality over its predecessor, Kingmaker, it still stumbled in its interpretation of alignments and twisted its characterization in knots struggling to pander to snowflake idiocy, most visibly in its infuriating roster of NPC companions. Take Ember, a cloyingly cutesy little brat gifted of such charisma as to be able to turn bad people to the side of good by no more erudite or structured an argument than telling them to be good. This includes creatures that are literally evil incarnate, like demons. It even includes one of the multiverse's greatest forces of evil, Nocticula, who also happens to be female. We're even explicitly told Nocticula's male peers Deskari and Baphomet fail where she succeeds, just to drive that point home. Just to drive that point homier, on your way to convert the demon queen you meet some lesser demons. The ones with tits see the light and turn to good. Those beyond redemption just happen to be male.

ARE YOU GETTING THE VERY SUBTLE MESSAGE HERE!?!

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

The spoken or implied rationale behind such overt misandry runs something like balancing the cosmic karma. We must, simply must bash men at every turn to counterbalance all that abuse of women from older works. ORLY? quoth the wolfe, nose to ancient trails. What warrants such retribution in our power fantasies? Is it because Rodney Dangerfield complained his wife (among others) gives him no respect back in the '70s? When he said "take my wife, please" did I miss the part where he said "take her apart an inch at a time with a chainsaw" and is that meant to equivalate to Milla Jovovich hacking asunder men by the hundreds as the titular Evils in Residence? Stacked up against even a single year of filmographic feminism, how many flicks can you remember, ever, in which men are all brilliant, hypercompetent, beneficent martyrs righteously and effortlessly triumphing against woman after woman who are all nothing but filthy, sadistic, bumbling, useless, destructive, moronic slags? How many TV series really applaud men for beating down women? How many books? Comic books? Games? How many songs, paintings, temples. Limericks? Can you not even locate the windmill from which you claim to be rescuing us all?

Old folk tales ran on a simple premise: bogey-men threaten our tribe's status quo; summon the plucky young prince/farmboy/farm-prince to vanquish them. The protagonist was almost always male... and so was the villain. The princess mostly sat around doing nothing, but nobody argued the a priori assumption that she deserved rescue (plus a crown) for sitting around doing nothing. Women later demanded bigger roles in such stories... but only as heroines. They kept the undeserved crown. Villains must stay male, and women must always be shown as superior in every possible way over men. It's not like the market for such tripe just opened up now, either. George Eliot ranted mid-19th-century in reaction to the extant (and unchallenged) proliferation of inane Mary Sues. Even stories like Against the Ice which ostensibly concern men return constantly to men idealizing and pining for women... whereas in the far more popular Colonies, a heroine is one who racks up the highest male body count.

And what's men's rejoinder? Fire back? Girls stink, boys rule? Perish the thought. Wouldn't be gentlemanly, wot?

Allow us, mistresses, but a meek intimation that three years in Northern Greenland may be preferable to putting up with your shit. The polar bears are gentler company.

 

While not commonly going this route, masculine adventure stories can take place beyond the boundaries of family units. A lone explorer or band of brothers set out into the great unknown, battle wild men or just the wild itself and discover something amazing. Women's presence is not required. You're free to go off and do your own thing (except you don't want your own thing, you want our thing to be yours.) The Hobbit is an exemplary such story within the young adult variety, and in its treatment by Hollywood you can see how much the female power fantasy is threatened by independence. It had to be taken over by women. It needed a Tauriel to bask in admiration, and women shaming men for not being manly enough.

Where male protagonists can act independently, female fantasies absolutely require the presence of men as scapegoats and punching bags. If you'd like to see why, take a look at two last films. Blade Runner 2049 is the story of a man scraping and suffering through an entire plot only to be told at the end almost verbatim: what, did you think you get to be the hero, no, you exist to do all the work so the princess who's been living in safety this whole time takes credit. Mad Max: Fury Road more blatantly pushed its angelic females at the mercy of a cruel ugly male and the titular character himself sidelined by a new heroine. Take special notice though of Nux the third wheel, derided for being disposable cannon fodder in service of the villain ("just a war boy at the end of his half-life") but who is allowed to redeem himself by... becoming disposable cannon fodder in service of women, which is obviously better.

 

#KillAllMen is a smokescreen. Dead slaves are unproductive. The idea is rather to fabricate a life debt to women, men being possessed of some primordial guilt, some original sin to be expiated only by surrendering their lives to the fairer sex. The central message of feminist media is not only the endlessly reiterated "man bad, woman good" but that men's lives are women's to dispose of. Good men serve women. Evil men are against women. And there is No. Middle. Ground. No independence, no individuality. Men are to be permitted nothing of their own. The results are so predictable you can call the final boss fight by level 2: thanks for building up the kingdom and taking all the risks and blame, now let a queen take over. Seeing how many popular old geek staples were taken over by feminists (Tolkien, Ghostbusters remade with all-female cast, Thor-ette, etc.) sets one wondering if women are basically Morgoth: an impulsively avaricious force capable only of perverting their counterparts' creativity toward their own self-aggrandizement, spawning endless tortured and twisted devolved mockeries to plague our cultural wasteland.

They will take endlessly until there is nothing left of you. Stop giving. If Mikkelsen and Iversen really did spend their Greenland sojourn staring at a picture of women, leave that out of the story just as you leave out their bathroom habits and snoring. Your life is not hers. The princess' fate is not your responsibility, rando' farm-prince. Outgrow the primitive fairytale of going down to hell and back (Journey to the Center of the Earth jumps to mind) only to justify yourself as suitable mate.

 

Know one classic SF yarn that called it truer than most? You've heard its name, you know the basic plot, but likely have never read the original:

The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle

We open with the narrator almost literally called to adventure by his intended, who turns down his marriage proposal because only a man of great achievement would be worthy of her. So off he schleps to wrestle dinosaurs on her whim. Upon his successful return from prehistory to the lands of the living, she greets him with utter coldness, having already married... some nondescript solicitor's clerk. We end on the following note:

 

"I'll use my own [share of the loot]" said Lord John Roxton, "in fitting a well-formed expedition and having another look at the dear old plateau. As to you, young fellah, you, of course, will spend yours in gettin' married."
"Not just yet," said I, with a rueful smile. "I think, if you will have me, that I would rather go with you."
Lord Roxton said nothing, but a brown hand was stretched out to me across the table.