Episode 147: Transcript
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, I am still waiting for my goddamn Centipede movie. When are we gonna get the brutal tale of a tiny box just trying to survive in the mushroomy wilds with some kind of laser artillery to defeat centipedes, ticks, and scorpions?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:18] I don't know. I would watch the heck out of that movie. I personally am dying to see a gritty, dark, Super Breakout movie where a scrappy team of misfits hijacks a bouncing ball and they pilot it to break through like a wall that's been like trapping them and then they find freedom on the other or possibly they just bounce around forever.
[00:00:42] But I feel like Super Breakout needs to be a movie like, now.
Annalee: [00:00:46] Yeah and then that can play a double bill with the gritty dark Pong movie where each of the little dashes—
Charlie Jane: [00:00:54] Pong! Pong!
Annalee: [00:00:54] —is like competing to rule over the darkness and they're tossing this increasingly disturbed ball of feelings back and forth between them.
[00:01:08] I just, there's so many questions about Pong that could be answered in a cinematic experience.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:14] So many. So many.
Annalee: [00:01:17] Well, you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, society, and why video game movies need more giant centipedes. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. My latest novel is called The Terraformers, and I have a book coming out in June called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. And that's nonfiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:43] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I write science fiction and comics and sometimes other stuff. my most recent novel is Promises Stronger Than Darkness. And I also just recently published a comic book kind of compilation called New Mutants: Lethal Legion.
Annalee: [00:02:04] It's so good. You guys should all go out and pick that up. It made me really happy and being able to read it all at once is so great.
[00:02:12] So this week we're going to be talking about how video game movies defeated comic book movies.
Joining us to discuss this is the multi hyphenate author Evan Narcisse who writes for comic books and video games, as well as being a journalist and a critic. Then we're gonna talk about why so many people are obsessed with psychoanalyzing villains, and why they're flocking to stories that reveal the innermost traumas of bad guys. Why do we keep humanizing awful people? We're gonna talk about it.
[00:02:43] Also, on our mini episode next week, we will be talking about food in fantasy stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:49] Mm hmm. Yeah, it's gonna be super tasty. And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent? And we have no corporate backing. We're not part of some kind of cabal. There’s no mogul, propping us up.
Annalee: [00:03:05] Big Pod.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:05] We're not part of Big Pod. We're just scrappy underdogs and the way that we survive is thanks to you, our listeners, supporting us on Patreon. If you become a patron on our patreon, you are helping to keep this podcast going, you’re paying for our wonderful audio producer and engineer, Naya Harmon. You're paying for us to kind of keep discovering the hidden truth of everything. And you also get to be part of our community and you have access to our Discord channel where we can hang out and chat all the time. You get mini episodes every other week. Think about it. That could all be yours for just a few bucks a month or whatever you could spare.
[00:03:46] Anything you give us goes right back into helping us to just keep our opinions asymptotically more and more correct. So please find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Annalee: [00:03:59] All right, let's get started.
[00:04:00] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:04:34]And now we're delighted to have Evan Narcisse joining us. Evan actually worked with us back in the day at Gawker Media when he was at Kotaku and we were at io9 and then he was actually later at io9 when we weren't there anymore. And so it's just so great to be reunited. Evan Narcisse is a senior writer at Brass Lion Entertainment, and he's written for video games, comic books, film, and TV.
[00:04:56] He's the author of The Rise of the Black Panther graphic novel, Marvel's Black Panther Wakanda Atlas, and the New Day Power of Positivity. In games, he's worked on Marvel's Spider Man: Miles Morales, Redfall, Marvel's Avengers, Gotham Knights, and the award winning Dot's Home. He also was a producer on HBO Max's documentary about Milestone Comics called Milestone Generations.
[00:05:21] Welcome to the pod, Evan.
Evan: [00:05:23] Hey guys, good to see y'all. It's been a long time.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:26] Yeah!
Evan: [00:05:27] It feels like a little bit of a reunion.
Annalee: [00:05:30] It is like bloggers reunite.
Evan: [00:05:32] Yes, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:34] Bloggers. Man. [Crosstalk] So I wrote a piece for io9 back in like 2009 about how comic book movies were becoming like everything in Hollywood and video game movies just couldn't not get their stuff together. I feel like for 20 years, that was the case. And like, now it feels like that's not true anymore. So when do you see that starting to change? Was there a moment when Hollywood finally started to take video games more seriously as a source material?
Evan: [00:06:00] Yeah, I think it's been relatively recent, like super recent. My timeline is a little bit foggy because video game movies by and large have been so bad that I've like skipped the vast majority of them.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:15] I know. It's been like Resident Evil and that's it, basically.
Evan: [00:06:21] Yeah, and even those I've only seen like about two. But I think you only see like two or three, you get the jist.
Annalee: [00:06:25] I think the original Super Mario Brothers was pretty cool I'm just gonna say.
Evan: [00:06:32] It’s trippy.
Annalee: [00:06:32] I’m done.
Evan: [00:06:34] Okay, so, you're not going to let me get ahead of myself here. So I think the trend with video game movies being actually quote unquote “good” on a sliding scale. For me, the personal inflection point was the Sonic the Hedgehog movie from like a couple years ago, with James Marsden.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:52] Yeah, that was a great movie. It had Jim Carrey. It was actually legit.
Evan: [00:06:58] I think something that's been a hallmark of video game movies and why they've struggled so much is you get a sense that, whether it's the corporate, CEO type folks or the filmmakers don't take the source material seriously, or they treat it like a quick cash in.
[00:07:23] Or, they don't engage with the form, in this original iteration enough to figure out what you can pull out to make a video game movie good. Like, the tricky thing about video game movies, there's a little bit of an exchange because I think video games have wanted to be movies for a long time. And they could do that within certain parameters, right? You can have a good script, you can have well drawn characters… you have to allow for the interactivity, right?Player control, player agency, and a kind of nebulous sliding scale as to how much you're going to want to engage with story.
[00:08:13] Not every player wants a deeper story. Sometimes they want an enriching experience or something that mechanically feels sophisticated and textural, right? That's not something you can put in a linear movie, right? That's not something you can do. Like, Netflix is experimenting with some, multipath.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:34] Oh yeah. They did some choose your own adventure on Netflix.
Evan: [00:08:37] I think choose your own adventure is copyrighted, that's why I avoided saying it, but yeah. Basically some interactive storytelling on their platform, but by and large, it's really hard to do in the cinematic kind of paradigm, and I think that's the thing that really separates the audience engagement from the two different forms of media, right?
[00:09:04] When you sit down to watch a movie you're giving all your attention. There is like a certain kind of interactivity in terms of how you're interpreting and engaging with it, right? But it's not the same as control, right? Direct control of the narrative. So I think that's one of the reasons the video game movies have struggled. And I think the fallback position has been to be like, okay, let's make it crazy. Let's make it grimdark, let's make it goofy. But all those things are so… depending on the source material you're adapting, you might be way off the mark, you know?
[00:09:43] Nobody wanted to see a grim Uwe Boll adaptation of In the Name of the King or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:55] Right? I forgot about that movie.
Evan: [00:09:58] I think, yeah, I mean, his whole oeuvre is littered with sins against beloved franchises. But I think he’s not necessarily alone in the assumption that this is just meat to make sausage from. He put it through a grinder and apply heat and somebody will show up for it. And that's not always the case.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:26] Yeah, I mean, I think about like Dwayne Johnson's finest hour, which is the Doom movie where... that movie has everything.
Evan: [00:10:33] Yes.
Annalee: [00:10:34] I loved that movie, but I didn't play Doom. So...
Charlie Jane: [00:10:38] I did play Doom, and I was like, what the heck is this?
Annalee: [00:10:41] They were shooting tongues.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:44] I know.
Annalee: [00:10:43] That’s all you need to know. Is that in the game? Do they shoot tongues in the game?
Evan: [00:10:46] I believe so. I think some of the demons had really big tongues and there were giant faces that floated towards you on the screen. So yeah, it's been a long time since I've played any Doom.
Annalee: [00:10:56] So there you go. True to the game.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:58] But yeah, and I should clarify that besides movies, we're also a little bit talking about live action TV. And one of the things that while we were working on this episode, is thinking about the fact that in 2015, Sony was trying to turn the PlayStation into a streaming service. They were like, we're going to have TV shows you can watch on your PlayStation. And they were like, our flagship show is going to be a superhero comic book adaptation called Powers.
It's like they wouldn't adapt a video game for the video game-based streaming service. That strikes me as like a sign of how bad things were in 2015.
Evan: [00:11:29] Yeah. And that goes to what I was saying before. It's what I call, broadly, nerd shame, right? Like, I think a lot of superhero movies have nerd shame. I feel like you take a character like Superman and you make them all cynical and you interpret them cynically, right? I feel like—
Charlie Jane: [00:11:51] Can't imagine what you're talking about.
Evan: [00:11:54] Yeah, no, I'm just going to say it. I feel like most of Zack Snyder's, DC Universe, movies have nerd shame, right? Because it's like you don't want to embrace the kind of aspirational aspects of the characters, or you do so begrudgingly. And you look at it through a lens of like, okay, if this character was so powerful, how would they really act? It’s like, well, who's to say that you couldn't be a Kansas farm boy who really wants to just help people with all this power that you have. That’s just as real.
[00:12:24] Anyway, I'm not going on my tangent rant. But I feel like video games, the fandoms and people who want to adapt them, have to contend with the nerd shame, too. Which is like, okay, I can't believe the thing in this original iteration, like, how is he doing all this ridiculous stuff? And it's like, yeah, he does. And you just have to embrace that. And if you can't adapt it, then maybe you should leave it alone.
[00:12:51] I feel that's the reason that Sony went with Powers is because they're like, well, we're not going to do a Ratchet & Clank movie. We're not going to, even though they did wind up doing one years later. But they look at their own IP that they own and it doesn't necessarily feel right because it’s got these mascot characters or human protagonists that feel like so outlandish.
[00:13:15] Which is a hilarious thing to think because Powers is outlandish itself, right? If you read Powers, you remember the Cro Magnon sex, like—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:25] I forgot about that.
Evan: [00:13:25] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think Powers seemed like a thing that might have broad appeal or broader appeal than some of their own properties.
[00:13:37] But the deep irony there is now PlayStation is entering into production deals with so many people across the board to adapt their successful game franchises. They've got a bunch of things set up at places. I think they announced a Ghost of Tsushima movie, which is ironic because it's basically a Kurosawa video game.
Annalee: [00:13:59] Whoa, so weird.
Evan: [00:14:00] It’s basically a Kurosawa samurai video game. So it's like a game inspired by a movie is now becoming a movie.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:08] It's the cycle of life.
Annalee: [00:14:10] Yeah.
Evan: [00:14:10] Yeah. So they have lots of different things cooking, coming from directly within their own stable of intellectual properties.
Annalee: [00:14:18] Yeah, it's funny as you're talking about sort of trying to develop video games like into films or TV, I kept thinking about how we've actually had a bunch of really great movies that were about video games that didn't exist, like Tron, like Wreck It Ralph. Wreck It Ralph is such a great film.
Evan: [00:14:36] Yes, Wreck It Ralph is amazing, yes.
Annalee: [00:14:37] Or like Free Guy, which wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but still was a cool concept. And then now we're finally getting stuff like Last of Us. Whereas with comic books, I feel like we have had those great moments with adaptations from actual real comic books. But, as we were saying, kind of at the outset, like, it seems like it's flipped. And I guess, I wonder why? Why is that happening? Is it because superhero movies, they're just played out now. And so now we're moving to video games, or has something else changed?
Evan: [00:15:12] I have this theory that's been percolating in the back of my head for about a year or so now. It feels like video games are the closest replacement we have, in some ways, to the monoculture where we would all engage in, right? Like, you know.
Annalee: [00:15:29] Oh, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:29] Interesting.
Evan: [00:15:32] So, video games, you have to show up to a platform, right? You've got to show up on Steam, on your PCs, or, PlayStation 5, or an Xbox Series 1.
[00:15:42] The exclusivity demands an allegiance, that can feel like, oh, okay. I'm in this unique ecosystem of experiences, right? And then you have your cohort that's also with them. But the other thing too, is, they’re destination entertainment, right? They’re appointment entertainment.
[00:16:05] If you didn't see a movie in the theater, you're like, yeah, just wait for a hit to one of the streaming services, right? Like video games are kind of not like that. You can wait for a game to go on sale, for sure. But the culture on games is still like the hot, fast, new game.
[00:16:25] You take the launch of this game Pal World a couple of weeks ago, as an example, right? Like they sold like, I want to say 6 million copies within like the first two weeks. I'm probably getting the numbers wrong, but it's on that scale. And you know, it's a game that, you know, like became a meme after they first announced it because it's like Pokemon with guns. Right, that was the thing.
[00:16:45] This character looks a whole lot like Pikachu wielding something that looks like an AK-47 and people start talking about it. People show up just to be on the bleeding edge of the zeitgeist, right? And I feel like there's so little in the modern entertainment landscape where it demands such a large swath of eyeballs and you can only get it in one place. Big prestige TV shows like Succession other series like that where like they dominate the cultural conversation. But there are alternatives to that.
[00:17:29] But if you want to play like a first person shooter, you're probably playing only like one of a couple of big franchises and so are many of your friends. So it feels like it's almost replacing the monoculture that we grew up with even though there's still more fragmentation. It's a working theory. It’s evolving.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:46] That's so interesting. I love that.
Annalee: [00:17:48] I think that's true though, because there is also that water cooler aspect to it. This past season, I guess, everybody was playing Baldur's Gate in my world. And it was just like, that was, everybody was checking in, like, did you get to this part? What did you think of that?
Charlie Jane: [00:18:02] Yeah. I was just going to say, you also have people do playthrough videos. People will do live streams on like Twitch or whatever. It is a communal thing. It's communal in a way that consuming other kinds of media can't be on the same level.
Evan: [00:18:20] Yeah. And you know, in order for movies to kind of capture the same kind of chunk of the attention economy, you need to have something like Barbenheimer, right? You need to have something where these two seemingly diametrically opposed movies are coming at the same time. And what do they say about society and how we think about each other and how we think about like sexism or, you know, impossible achievements like the nuclear bomb?
[00:18:47] Like you need to have something that is that heavy to really draw eyeballs in a way that's comparable seemingly to like Baldur's Gate or Starfield and the big releases of the last couple of years. I think there's also... the level of anticipation around the big video game release is different because, there's still a lot of opacity around the way video games are made, who makes them, what they're trying to say and do.
[00:19:18] So when a game like Baldur's Gate finally drops after like seven, eight years in development, you're like, okay, I've seen maybe some preview videos. And even if you're following every little, piece of drip feed content from a marketing, perspective, you still don't know what all is waiting for you, right?
[00:19:39] I remember like when some of the videos of like when you have the skill that lets you talk to animals and some of the cat dialogue was hilarious. And that stuff went really viral is because like, yeah, you could have been watching that game and waiting for it for like five, six, seven, eight years and still not knowing that was there. So when it finally drops and then your friend reaches that point and you reach that point, everybody starts talking about it.
[00:20:03] So again, it's this thing where it's like, this show is only playing on one stage and everybody has to show up to this venue to see it. And movies and TV don't command the same kind of, engagement. And part of it is, again, the interactivity of video games at its core. It's like, okay, how you choose to play in some of these well-made games like Baldur's Gate, where there's all this variability in terms of the mechanics and how you engage with them. That is its own extra secret ingredient.
[00:20:37] And I think the last part is, the Hollywood studios are really in crisis mode in terms of like, it really seems like execs cancel stuff too fast. Don't let things find an audience. So franchises from the video game world that do have built in audiences are really attractive, right? Because you don't have to educate your would-be viewers about what it is. They know what it is already and they just want to see if it can come out in a different form.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:08] Yeah. I mean, Hollywood, it's like the quest to find source material that they can monetize. There'll be like, let's take this obscure David Cronenberg movie about twin obstetricians and like make that into a TV show. And it's like, I would love to be at the meeting where they were like this is something that's really going to catch the zeitgeist. This David Cronenberg movie from, you know, I can't remember what it's called.
Evan: [00:21:30] Wait, the one with Jeremy Irons?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:30] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:21:32] Yeah. Dead Ringers.
Evan: [00:21:34] Wait, they're remaking that?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:33] They made it into a TV series, it's already happened.
Evan: [00:21:35] Dead Ringers. Oh my God.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:37] It's come and gone. It was a TV show starring Rachel Weisz, I think?
Annalee: [00:21:40] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:40] In the Jeremy Irons role?
Evan: [00:21:41] Oh yeah, that's right. I remember this now. Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:44] It happened. It's already gone. It's already been cancelled.
Evan: [00:21:46] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:48] You missed it. I mean, you can still watch it.
Annalee: [00:21:48] Surprise, it was canceled.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:49] Okay, so you've worked in both comics and video games as a writer slash narrative designer. Can you speak to how that process varies when you're creating something that could become the source material for a TV show or a movie. And how much do you feel like people in the comics world versus the video game world are thinking about the eventual process of this is going to be something Hollywood's going to want to adapt?
Evan: [00:22:14] I think... look, most of my projects in comics and most of the people I know who make comics are not thinking about that. They're like, let's nail this story in this format before we think ahead to it being optioned or adapted, right? It has to work in its original form for any of that to happen anyway, right? It has to be good on its own merits.
[00:22:37] I will say that when you're working on big corporate owned IP, like Batman, like, Black Panther, just to name the stuff I personally have touched, there is an awareness that this might wind up providing fodder for a big budget adaptation on the screen, right? I feel like there's more of an awareness of that in comics than there is in games.
[00:23:05] I think video game to movie adaptations are heating up as a category, but I feel like there's still so very few, video games that have the kind of super broad appeal of like a Halo or Sonic the Hedgehog or even Pac-Man, not that there's a new Pac-Man thing happening, but those things are like a lingua franca, right? They’re something that everybody kind of knows. There's just not a lot of video games like that.
[00:23:40] And then you get to the trickier part of how adaptable are some of these things, you know? Like, the Grand Theft Auto series, like they sell billions of copies in aggregate, right? But how do you make a Grand Theft Auto movie that isn't just, again, regurgitating the same source material that those guys have, repurposed for the games, right?
[00:24:04] So, you take a game like GTA: San Andreas from, whatever, 10, 15, maybe even 20 years ago now. That's basically, like, the ‘90s hood flicks that I grew up on. Boys in the Hood, A Menace to Society, in a video game form, right? Like that's what that is.
[00:24:19] So how do you make a GTA: San Andreas movie that isn't just those things warmed over for the second time, right? So that's tricky. And how do you take a video game that has... maybe the thing that makes it a runaway success is its mechanics, right? A game like Tell Me Why from Dontnod, where you can kind of do a mind meld between the twin main characters, but the player's controlling when they do it and what they see, right? Like you can't duplicate that in a movie, at least not with our current kind of viewing paradigms and technology. So I think it's really tricky.
[00:25:05] So, the short answer to your question is like, I don't know how many game developers and game storytellers are sitting around thinking, yeah, when this becomes a movie, because video games, and this is something I'm experiencing firsthand now that I'm in game development full time, are so fucking hard to make, they're so multidisciplinary. Something that is a good story on the page or in a comic, or even a movie may not necessarily work in a video game because when you're writing for games, you have to always reckon with the fact that like, the player can skip past all this exposition. We have to figure out our storytelling in a multimodal way.
[00:25:45] So people always make fun of environmental storytelling was like graffiti on the wall. But sometimes that's going to be the best way to communicate to your player, right? As heavy handed as it is, because they're not going to listen to the dialogue. They're not going to pick up all the lore drops or listens to all the audio logs. That stuff is, additive and kind of build on itself. If you do engage with it all, you get a kind of world building that is really hard to replicate in other media. But you also think about like, okay, what is the bare minimum? What is the bare minimum way to tell a story here where we're still letting mechanics hit, but also delivering something with emotional affect and it’s a very mercurial form to work in because you have to think about what your level designers can do. Like, how a move feels in the player's hands. The Spider-Man games, from like, what, 20 years ago where the web swinging felt really good, that was like a eureka moment.
[00:26:51] And now the Spider-Man games that Insomniac is making, you know, I'm a little bit biased because I work on some of them. But it feels amazing. Like you can just sit in that game and do nothing but move across the city web swinging and still be like yeah I'm having a shit ton of fun, right? And like guess what? Guess what? There's no story in that.
[00:27:10] You can pepper some stuff in but the story there is the player's engagement with what you made as a meta story and they don't have to listen to one line of recorded dialogue if they don't want to, when they're doing that. And it can still be like, it's fun. 10/10, no notes. They can still come away with that feeling without engaging in any of the work that the writers in the game did. So like, it's a tricky medium in that form.
Annalee: [00:27:37] Yeah, I guess I'm wondering if there is a video game right now that you think would make a good, potentially adaptable game. I mean, whether for TV or for a movie. Because I definitely wasn't expecting The Last of Us to be as good as it was.
Evan: [00:27:56] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:27:58] And yeah. So what are you thinking for the future there?
Evan: [00:28:00] Man. So my favorite game in the last couple of years is Hades by Supergiant Games. and I think most of Supergiant's games figure out ways to tell stories in really interesting ways.
[00:28:13] The thing I really like about Hades is like, it takes, again, really well known source material like Greco-Roman mythology, and finds its own take on it. Think they create a new character as your protagonist, but he meets, you know, his dad is the lord of the underworld, Hades, right? He meets his cousins on Olympus, kind of distantly, they're trying to help him escape and he dies over and over again. And they make that part of the story and part of the mechanics. So I think that's their first big win. So like. You know, if I were adapting Hades, I’d be like, yeah, you got to have this guy just suck at the beginning, just be overwhelmed by forces he can't like possibly hope to beat. But the game is the grind and the grind is the game. The grind is part of the story. And like, again, without making a super-inflated three-hour opus, which, you know, maybe Hades deserves it. Maybe somebody will write that screenplay one day, but I think you have to...
[00:29:22] I play Hades every day and I have almost since release, right? Like, it's probably a problem. It's definitely a problem in my household, depending on who you ask. But that kind of devotion comes from how tightly knit all its elements are, you know? So I think that's a good candidate in my opinion. It’s weird to say this because we're clearly in a glut of like Spider-Man related content with like all of the Sony Spider-Verse movies, their weird offshoot thing. And the Miles Morales franchise, is its own separate thing. And live-action Spider-Man, like brought up all the old Spider-Mans together for a little reunion.
[00:29:59] But I feel like what Insomniac is doing with their Spider-Man games is really interesting because they give you a version of Peter that feels more accomplished. In the first game, he's already been Spider-Man for a couple of years. So you skip origin story stuff. He's just a guy who's been doing this thing and is pretty good at it until things scale up, right? So I think that's an interesting take on Peter Parker, where you don't have to see the origin and all that stuff over again.
[00:30:28] And, I think, again, I'm biased. I worked on the Miles Morales game, but I love that version of Miles because he gets to coexist with Peter Parker and he teaches Peter things, and that's not something you've seen in the movies a whole lot. Look, the Spider-Verse movies are amazing. They're favorites of mine, but like, Miles is pretty much on his own in those movies. And—
Charlie Jane: [00:30:55] He’s the young Spider-Man. He's like the new Spider-Man.
Evan: [00:30:55] He's who Peter used to be. And the thing I like about the Insomniac approach to Spider-Man is they let them coexist and I think that's really interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:08] Yeah, I love that. So, Evan, where can people find you online?
Evan: [00:31:12] You know, on the dying website that we once knew as Twitter, I'm !@Evnarc.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:18] Oh my gosh.
Evan: [00:31:18] But I have minimal engagement there. I'm on BlueSky, I guess. Like I really pulled back. I really pulled back my social media presence just because I'm busier than I ever have been. So that's pretty much where you can find me. You can find me in your bookstores or libraries if you want to read anything I wrote. And I guess that's it. And you can find some of the games I've worked on on the major platforms of your choice. So, that's where you can find me.
Annalee: [00:31:48] Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, that was really awesome.
[00:31:51] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:31:55] Okay, so I need to just rant for a little bit about something that's really been bugging me lately, and it has to do with the way audiences and fans right now really seem to be obsessed with villain psychology, and more specifically, trying to make excuses for villainous behavior like, I don't know, mass murder, or like, oppressing an entire kingdom.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:16] Yeah, this is something that's been bugging me, too. I feel like I see it in a lot of media lately. I see that media kind of responding to this idea that, it's this thing that every villain is the hero of their own story, which is true as far as it goes, but that, you know, I feel like that kind of gets turned into like villains need to be kind of basically heroic or sympathetic or understandable. And I've been on so many writing panels where people have said that, and I always feel like, yeah, but, not really.
Annalee: [00:32:45] And I think, so there's a few ways that that happens, like that idea of like the villain also kind of needs to be a hero. And the first one is the one that really bugs me the most. And that's when people say that villains always think that they're the good guys. And I just don't think that's true in fiction or even in real life. It's just a huge oversimplification.
[00:33:10] Like, does the Joker think he's a good guy? No. He wants the world to burn in chaos and he rejoices in destruction. That's his motivation. He doesn't think that's good. He just thinks it's awesome to destroy things.
[00:33:26] And I think that there are examples, for sure, of bad guys who are misinformed or maybe are think they're doing the will of some deity, but even then, it’s more complicated. Like, oftentimes you'll even have a villain who says, like, oh, well, it's fine to sacrifice a million people or, say, half the universe if it means getting what I want.
[00:33:51] Which, again, not a nice thing. Like, no one thinks sacrificing half the universe is nice.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:57] Yeah. And actually this kind of comes back to what we talked about in the first half of the episode about comic book movies. This is a thing that's bothered me in a lot of comic book movies where they really put a lot of effort into making the villain have sympathetic motivations. Even Thanos, who you just referenced, Marvel is like, oh yeah, but Thanos, he's just, he's actually... I feel like they really wanted us to feel like Thanos was just really sincere in his concerns about Malthusianism, and—
Annalee: [00:34:23] He’s an environmentalist.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:25] And you know, A, somebody should just sit him down and explain to him about the Green Revolution so he can stop being a Malthusianist. And B, I'm just like, no. And there's so many comic book villains or big comic book movie villains, where it's like, but he's just trying to save his baby, or he's just trying to save his girlfriend. And it's just like, sometimes, I mean, this is the thing that bugs me is that I feel like part of the point of having villains in media is to provide an antagonist for the hero. But part of the point is also to understand the nature of evil and sort of the banality of evil in sort of a Hannah Arendt sense.
[00:35:01] And, you know, it's interesting to think about the ways that people convince themselves that it’s okay to do something really evil, but it's also interesting to just think about the many, many, many cases in real life where people are gratuitously cruel to people that they have dehumanized or people that they view as like a target for their cruelty.
[00:35:24] And yeah, they're the hero in a sense, because they think these people are less than human. It's actually good for me to wipe them out because that's a good thing that I'm doing. But I feel like you have to be very careful about treating that as a sympathetic motivation or a saying that's kind of even understandable because I don't think it's something that we should, I think it's something that we should find repulsive and it's something that should not be kind of treated as like, oh, well that makes sense. Yeah, you could see how that would happen. It's like, it doesn't make sense. It shouldn't make sense.
Annalee: [00:35:56] Yeah. It's not that the person is being a good guy. It's that they're being a hypocrite or they're lying to themselves. They’re not—
Charlie Jane: [00:36:02] Or they're just swept away by like a wave of like mass demonization of some vulnerable group.
Annalee: [00:36:09] Okay, so I'm going to continue my rant a little bit because there's another—
Charlie Jane: [00:36:15] Please do.
Annalee: [00:36:15] —thing that really bugs me in this same kind of genre of things that piss me off about psychologizing villains, which is that, I think often fans will decide that an evil character is actually somehow tender inside, and therefore we should love them and view them as good.
[00:36:33] So I'm not talking about like characters on a redemption arc where, you know, a character will actually atone and earn back their good name like Xena did. You know, Xena was an evil warrior princess.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:47] She was a warlord.
Annalee: [00:36:48] She was a warlord and she stopped doing that and she started wandering the earth doing good for years and years and years, you know, before anyone would kind of make a silly ‘90s show about her.
[00:37:01] So what I'm talking about is when we're supposed to change our opinion about a character without them doing anything. So the only thing that changes is our feeling about them. And one of the places I see this a lot is like, for example, in the fandom around Rey and Kylo Ren, where we're supposed to like see Kylo. And I know this is controversial and lots of people love Rey and Kylo being together, and everything like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:27] I think... I have complicated feelings, but go on.
Annalee: [00:37:29] Reylo.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:30] I'm a little bit Reylo.
Annalee: [00:37:31] I'm not. And I think that's... And I get that Kylo is sexy, I guess, but he's also totally evil and just because one time he did one thing where he helped Rey does not make him a good guy. It just makes him practical and pragmatic.
[00:37:49] Another example was, again, to go back to the ‘90s, like the Spike and Buffy ship. Which I think of as kind of like a prototype of this impulse in fandom, where like Spike, who'd been this like horrible character who loved cruelty, suddenly we're supposed to think he's okay, and that he's worthy of our love because he has this like emo side.
[00:38:17] And often that's literally it. It's like some character or some group of fans are like, oh, I noticed that that this evil character actually has feelings. Oh, well, actually, they're good then. And they're worthy of our adoration. And it's like, everybody has feelings. Like, even bad guys have feelings. Bad guys cry, too. That doesn't make them good. That doesn't make them lovable. It just means that they have a human brain, which is fed by basic neurological processes that produce emotion.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:52] Yeah. I mean, the one I think about a lot, because I'm obsessed with Vampire Diaries, is Damon, Salvatore, who starts out as like the evil brother. And at one point they have him just like casually snap Elena's brother's neck. He’s just in a bad mood and he just murders Elena's brother, but it still keeps, I think, partly because the fans loved Damon so much. It still keeps coming back to, but Damon's just misunderstood. And it's like—
Annalee: [00:39:21] He has feelings!
Charlie Jane: [00:39:21] I feel like part of what we fall into, part of the trap we fall into, is this idea that there's two alternatives when you're creating a villain. One is to just make a villain who's a one dimensional cartoon character who's just like, wah, ha, ha, ha, soon I will destroy everything, ha, ha, ha. And there's pure surface. There's nothing beneath that surface. There's nothing in that character that kind of adds any complexity to them. And we can all agree that that can be fun sometimes, but it's not what we always want.
Annalee: [00:39:54] Yeah, it kind of sucks most of the time.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:56] There are other alternatives to that kind of one dimensional cartoon villain thing than just being like, but he's actually a really decent guy, or he loves puppies, or whatever.
Annalee: [00:40:06] Or he has feelings. He can engage in romance as well as murder, and so therefore let's celebrate his romantic side.
[00:40:15] This happened in the the show Jessica Jones, too, where she's kidnapped by Kilgrave. And Kilgrave is mind controlling her into being his girlfriend, basically, because that's his power, is mind control. There were certain fans that really got into it and were like, yeah, Kilgrave, like...
Charlie Jane: [00:40:39] I mean, it's David Tennant.
Annalee: [00:40:40] I know, I was going to say, this is part of the problem, right, is that we get these sexy people to play villains and then, we're like, well, they're pretty cute. I’d go for it. But as characters, they're evil. And it really worries me because I feel like it's a false psychologizing of these characters that it's like, we think as readers or audiences that we've discovered something “real,” quote unquote, about the character, and that there's this real, emo, tender core, and that all the bad things they're doing somehow don't matter.
[00:41:18] And especially it worries me because we're living in an era where we have a lot of charismatic leaders throughout the world who are doing evil things, but who are appealing to our emotions. And I worry that these kinds of stories are training wheels for propping up dictators who murder people.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:38] Sure. And as an axiom, the worse somebody tends to be, the more likely they are to just constantly claim victimhood.
Annalee: [00:41:45] Yeah, exactly. To claim that they've been hurt, somehow. And again, to appeal to us saying, like, I'm tender. I’m not this monster.
[00:41:59] So, I will admit that there is one way that bad guys get reevaluated that I actually like. And I wanted to end by talking about that a little bit so that we're not just, I'm not just whinging this whole time. And that's when you get a story where we discover that we've only heard one side of the story about a notorious bad guy. And when we see the story from their perspective, we realize that they actually have literally been the victim of a smear campaign. Or maybe they did like one little bad thing. And that isn't really who they are. And I've seen this a lot in revisionist fairy tales.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:34] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:42:34] Like Maleficent is a great example. The story Wicked kind of deals with that a little bit. I mean, it's a little bit more complicated in Wicked, but in Maleficent, it's definitely like she did this one bad thing and she's really sorry and she's been defamed her whole life, kind of.
[00:42:52] And I feel like that there's also, there's this campy glamour to these evil women, but also they really have been scapegoated and mistreated. And so I like a story that does that. That sort of says, you know, it isn't that we've changed our opinion about them. It's that now we know more of the context. And so we do change our opinion, but there's actually a rationale because we're like, oh. Now the anti-Maleficent propaganda is gone and we understand what really happened.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:28] Yeah. I really loved that Maleficent movie, the first one with Angelina Jolie. I thought it was actually a really well done film.
[00:43:34] And I mean, Angelina Jolie did an incredible job of kind of giving interiority to this character and it actually added a lot of layers in a way that I thought was actually really beautiful. And it did kind of, it was revisionist in a way that actually felt like it kind of was earned.
Annalee: [00:43:50] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:52] One thing I will say that I like with villains and I'm going to shock you by referencing Doctor Who because I know that I do that way too often on our podcast. But I actually like a villain who you keep thinking they're going to find redemption or they're going to turn towards the light and they never quite do. Like the Master on Doctor Who, the Master/Missy on Doctor Who, is kind of exhibit A of that in my mind.
[00:44:18] The Doctor's always trying to redeem the Master. The Doctor's always like, we used to be friends, you can still come back, you can still be my friend again.
Annalee: [00:44:25] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:25] There are moments, especially with Missy in the Peter Capaldi era, there are moments where you're like, yeah, the Master's going to turn over a new leaf and then like, whoops, nope, the football gets yanked away again.
[00:44:37] Annalee, I have a question for you. You have done something that I find incredibly difficult to do as a writer, something I find very daunting, which is in The Terraformers, you write from the POV of your villainous characters. There’s a section from the POV of, I think it's Cylindra, the evil corporate stooge who's been like torturing all the characters and murdering people.
[00:44:59] How do you get into Cylindra POV or any villain's POV without kind of being like, but she's actually a really great guy or whatever?
Annalee: [00:45:10] I mean, part of the way I did that was also by only giving her a very brief POV, so, it's really only like one chapter where we see what she's doing and kind of how she's handling her job. And she's an example of someone who, to me, is a very recognizable person, which is just, she's a corporate climber. She wants to be some kind of CEO. She's basically a VP and she wants to get higher in the ranks. And so everything to her, every relationship is just, it’s just instrumental. It’s transactional, I should say. So I didn't spend enough time with her, I think for anyone to ever...
[00:46:07] I mean, she is a little bit complex. We kind of see that she's in this web of relationships where other people are treating her like shit.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:14] Mm-hmm.
Annalee: [00:46:14] And we see that she really believes in some of the ideas of like hierarchy among creatures. She really believes that she's kind of superior to other creatures. It was, to me, fun to do that because I knew as I was writing that she was gonna really get a comeuppance and that she was gonna get fucked over. And so it’s kind of fun to like dally briefly with someone who's terrible. As long as you know that they're gonna—
Charlie Jane: [00:46:51] Yeah, and it's such an intense scene.
Annalee: [00:46:55] Yeah!
Charlie Jane: [00:46:55] Like, I just think about it a lot, the way she treats her servants who are unable to speak about anything but their work. It's just so creepy.
Annalee: [00:47:03] Yeah, they're not just servants, they're enslaved.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:06] I know.
Annalee: [00:47:06] I’ve worked with lots of people like Cylindra, who are extremely cruel people, and I've been at the receiving end of their cruelty, and I've also been in positions in jobs where I've had superiors who have invited me to be cruel in that way. And who've said, oh, but look, here's an avenue for you to torture people that work for you. Like that's what I do. And so I've seen it firsthand and I know what, it feels like to be in that role. And I've always found it super disgusting, but I had some stuff to write about. I had some feelings I needed to get out about that.
[00:47:45] But I wanted to end by just talking briefly about, the evil queen in Snow White, and Cruella de Vil, because we were talking a little bit about these characters who are kind of fairy tale women that are glamorous and campy, but turn out to have been, the victims of smear campaigns.
[00:48:09] Whereas, you know, in Snow White and the Huntsman, which is one of the most recent Snow White movies, Charlize Theron is playing the evil queen.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:21] Oh, yeah. She’s so great in that.
Annalee: [00:48:22] She’s very glamorous. She's fantastic. I mean, K Stew is also great as Snow White. And then there's Cruella de Vil, which I never quite understood why that movie existed, where it was like the 101 Dalmatians.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:36] Eh, IP.
Annalee: [00:48:38] Somehow we were supposed to kind of want to follow Cruella de Vil around. But I had this brainwave and I just wanted to see what you thought of it, which is... It was because I was looking at all these George Santos memes, like after Santos was booted out of Congress for literally lying about everything, like, I don't know if he told the truth about anything, which is kind of hilarious. He became this kind of queer icon for a hot second.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:06] I know.
Annalee: [00:49:06] And he was doing all these cameos for people and he was just, he was all over. He was just a giant gay meme. And I feel like he's the real life equivalent, in a weird way of Cruella DeVil or like the evil queen.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:25] That’s interesting.
Annalee: [00:49:25] Because we know he's evil, but we kind of love it. Like we kind of want to celebrate his flagrant evil somehow?
Charlie Jane: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it comes back to something that we kind of talked about in the episode about horror movie music where we talked about id monsters.
Annalee: [00:49:43] Oh, yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:42] I think that to some extent when we have a character who's unrepentantly evil and just stylish and fun about it, they're kind of an id monster. They're kind of like allowing us to express our id. We can kind of like revel in how bad they're being, but also kind of you know... I feel like Servalan in Blake’s 7 is like this sometimes. You could kind of revel in the badness and the campiness and the kind of larger than lifeness of the badness. And it kind of is like an outlet for all of those horrible desires that we all have that we don't want to indulge in, in real life. That's my final thoughts.
Annalee: [00:50:22] I do think that part of the reason why George Santos became kind of a cartoon character, basically, like an evil queen cartoon character, or that he was able to kind of fit into that slot for audiences was because there was that sense that he was unrepentant. And kind of, but again, this is projection, who knows what he's thinking, but like that the reason why people memed him and kind of loved him was because there was a sense that, he was being real. You know what I mean? That he was like, yeah, this is me and I'm just owning it. And so again, regardless of what he's thinking on the inside, I think that's why he became this camp icon who is basically the evil queen of Congress.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:13] Yeah. 1000%.
Annalee: [00:51:14] Congress had never had an evil queen before. And, we got one and luckily, he got booted. Because we don't really want evil cartoon characters to be running our country.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:28] I mean... well, some people do. Anyway.
Annalee: [00:51:31] So on that note, go forth. And as you think about your political choices this fine year, maybe try to avoid the evil queen.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:40] Possibly.
Annalee: [00:51:39] Just saying. Final thought. Possibly.
[00:51:45] All right. Thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. Remember that you can find us on social media. We're on Mastodon. We're on Instagram. We're sorta/semi on Facebook. But most of all, please do check us out on Patreon and consider supporting us. That's how we make this show possible.
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Together: [00:52:32] Bye!
[00:52:32] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]