Why I'm Not Seeing Ender's Game (It's Not Quite What You Think)

Hello everyone! Remember back when you were 11 and you read Ender's Game, and it blew your mind because you somehow didn't see the twist coming, and you would have killed a baby goat to see a movie of it?

Yeah, that was me.

I was the archetypal audience for the book. A gifted child--and didn't I know it, as part of a gifted program at school and alienated by my terrible lack of ability at sports--and a bookish one, and one who had one older sibling who, if I squinted, could seem tyrannical, and a similarly sympathetic younger sister. This was a book about ME. More or less. Minus the part where I got recruited for war.

It's a refrain Card was to take up. His introduction to the "Author's Definitive Edition" ten years later talked about how the book stirred the hearts of alienated, "gifted" kids everywhere.

Also, it's a book about videogames. About strategy, with strategic decisions that put the Hunger Games to shame. (The enemy's gate is down!) Looking back, I liked the book for many of the same reasons I liked the more juvenile Redwall. Redwall is also about a young, gifted but isolated individual who has to reason through a series of puzzles in order to fulfill his destiny, although the Abbott never tricked Matthias into committing genocide.

In the last few years, Orson Scott Card's politics have seemed entirely out of step with his sympathy for the unloved and alienated. This article from Salon makes for some interesting speculation, but ultimately we can just presume that the guy, like all people, is a crazy mess of contradictions.

But let's talk about the book. And about the absolutely spec-fraking-tacular trailer that dropped a few weeks ago. Oh man, my 11-year-old self did backflips inside. I promptly went online to share my joy--and quite rightly, got questioned.

After all, if you scroll down this blog three mere posts, you will read my public repudiation of Card. I don't want anything to do with the guy, although I bear him no personal ill will; it's his political activism I find repugnant.

Truth: I can lapse enough to see one movie. It's one thing to not want your name to appear in print as a representative of him; it's less (or so I thought) of a moral compromise to pay nine dollars to partake in a piece of entertainment made by a huge group of people including Card. I don't like that he's involved. I don't like his politics. But I'm human. I want to see the damn movie more than I want to make a statement by withholding nine dollars.

Until I realized something else. And in that realization, it all unraveled.

Ben Kingsley is a British actor of Indian descent. In the film, he's cast as Mazer Rackham, a character of Maori descent. He wears a set of Maori facial tattoos.

I don't know much about Maori facial tattoos. I work on an Indian reservation (or Native American or First Nations--the truth is that most of my students and fellow faculty still use the term "Indian") and I know a lot about indigenous issues.

None of my students like Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, or Last of the Mohicans (except for the fact, which we all will admit, that the last has stunning music). None of them want to see a white person adopted by Indians saving the day. They roll their eyes and groan at the casting of Taylor Lautner as a Northwest Coast Native, and then his silly ad hoc rationalization that he's got a tiny bit of Native blood in him somewhere. They've all heard the old chestnut "My great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess!" (Proper response: "You too? That Cherokee princess sure got around.")

They do like movies like Thunderheart, where the complication of Native ancestry is acknowledged and explored, and modern Natives, with the modern rez issues, get screen time instead of their romanticized ancestors. They want to see their race portrayed as normal modern human beings who still hold onto their unique culture, by Native actors, or in the case of Val Kilmer, actors whose parts acknowledge their Native ancestry without laying claim to tribal identity.

A quick Google search of "Maori facial tattoos meaning" produces this:

Ta moko - traditional Māori tattooing, often on the face - is ataonga (treasure) to Māori for which the purpose and applications are sacred.

I don't know what justification the producers of Ender's Game can offer, but I can't imagine a justification that would explain to me why an actor whose qualification is "more or less brown" gets to wear tattoos specific to one people's sacred traditions. In a multimillion dollar movie. Because why? It seems to be solely to show how Mazer Rackham is a badass.

The tattoos were never described in the book, IIRC. Card is famous for not describing how people look, but you'd think he would mention facial tattoos!

Can't give up the tattoos, Summit Entertainment? Then find a Maori actor who is rooted in the culture and language and people of New Zealand. There's no shortage of Maori actors on those islands!

This points to a much greater problem. This problem encompasses Card's politics, Hollywood's lack of respect for indigenous people, and really, all the things I didn't see in Ender's Game when I was eleven.

John Kessel has it right in his provocative essay, "Creating The Innocent Killer." Ender's Game skirts responsibility, because it assumes that Ender's motivations carry the morality of the day. Ender kills two boys in cold blood because he wants to win. Each murder, of Bonzo and Stilson, is astonishingly sympathetic.

I imagine that the desire to pay service to the story is, to the minds of the Hollywood elite painting Maori traditions on an Englishman's face, a noble justification on its own.

In the novel, nothing is really Ender's fault. He's being used, because he is so talented and so alienated, in order to create the perfect weapon. This resonated with me because I felt distanced, bullied and used.

Shockingly, in all the discussion of this book, I've never heard anyone say "Well, how could Ender have stopped it?" Very easily, actually. Ender knew, throughout the book, that he was being used by a corrupt system and all he had to say was "no, I'm done." At several points he tries, half-assedly, to stop it.

But in the end, Ender's inherent goodness justifies things.

Why didn't he just say "no?"

I'm not going to lie. Telling me I was "gifted" led me to genuinely see myself as better--more noble, smarter, with a great destiny--than every other person around me. All eleven-year-olds carry around major fallacies. But with Ender's Game, we seem to have extended that fallacy, justifying Ender's actions because he was part of the system of the "gifted." He was told over and over again "you are our only hope" and he was somehow, despite his brains, not smart enough to see that this might be one more lie in a corrupt system.

We use this attitude to feed privilege. The kind of privilege that says sacred facial tattoos can be appropriated to sell a movie.

If teaching has taught me anything, it's that the idea of "gifted students" is utterly poisonous and was one of the worst influences on my childhood and my mental health. I'm not gifted. I think I have a great capacity for learning, especially in certain areas. But all my students have capacity for learning. Particularly on the rez, where college education and literacy are not held at a premium, "gifted" is a misnomer. My students who succeed are the ones who work their asses off.

They are the ones who don't let the deaths and drug abuse and poverty in their family stop them from turning in papers, who read and discuss works at a college level when they may not have read a book until last year, ever. They are the ones whose recent life trajectories are: rehab, clinic, GED, college.

I am damn proud of them.

And here comes this movie all about this special kid whose motives are so pure that he can't see through an obviously corrupt system, and he doesn't protest, but is used to commit genocide and just can't stop it because the system is too big. And in order to sell the movie, it's okay to violate the inherent sacredness of Maori tradition, to sell a big Westernized movie.

This is a movie about how certain people are special, about how certain people are inherently virtuous, and about how certain people have a profound understanding of humankind and their inherent goodness cannot be taken away, even if they commit genocide.

I call bullshit.

In Kessel's words, "No one is that special. No one is that innocent."

So you're human and you loved the book and you want to see the movie. I don't blame you. Until a few days ago, I was with you.

Now, I see Ender's Game as another bucolic childhood dream, with its reality as far removed from the truth of human interaction as that of the talking mice and evil rats in Redwall. The difference is, there's not a multimillion dollar movie campaign trying to convince you that mice are inherently noble.

Story! "The Skin of the Lesser God"

Hey, I'm alive!

I've been teaching for two schools, getting read to have a baby, and have had my brain EATEN ALIVE by a novel idea. I made it to about 78,000 words before hitting a Horrible Middle and slowing down. The pitch for the novel is thus: The Cuban Missile Crisis as an epic fantasy. Two bloated, over-armed empires face each other down over a little spit of land... and our main character is the nuclear missile in question.

I am racing Seamus Bayne in this endeavor. Both of us are sitting in the dirt trying to decide who is the tortoise and who is the hare, and not moving.

BUT.

I have a new story up at Michael Moorcock's New Worlds!

You'll have to register with them to see, and pay a bit of money to your British overlords. But it is worth it just to see the amazing cover art Tom Hunt came up with.

"The Skin of the Lesser God" started from a phrase in an old novel. I had tossed around the phrase "godskin" meaning "god's kin." Someone rightly asked me whether I meant "god skin." And of course, I wondered who in the world would go around skinning gods and, as one might, wearing the hides.

Then I figured out who.

Aztec, Norse, and African myth all collide in this one. This is one that has an unusual lack of direct female characters, but since they are all gods and thus archetypes, I think you are free to see them as at least somewhat sexless, or transcending gender.

I have another, very different story coming from Toasted Cake later this year as well. Enjoy!

Lots Of Pageviews

I decided I should write a post because my last post got a lot of views.

The mood at the party, ya see.

Uh... damn, the M&M jar is out again. Let me refill that.

Have a scotch.

Have a non-affiliated-with-Orson-Scott-Card cookie.

Seriously, thanks for the support, and the polite disagreement. I want to reiterate: a lot of what the man said has been cherry-picked and taken out of context, and he supports things I support, but... he's affiliated with National Organization For Marriage, and there are your boss's annoying opinions and then your boss's activism.

Thanks so much to the people who sent me leads on other places to put a column. No bites yet, but I think something is coming my way.

Anyway, if you're interested in more opinions on Mormonism and gay people, I wrote a long response to the infamous viral post by Josh Weed. Here it is again.

On a totally different subject, I have fallen deep into the hole that is the early 1960s and Don Draper's fragmented psyche. Season 3 now, and I just cannot leave Mad Men alone, even though I suspect it makes me a little depressed about life and money and things.

It's like they have everything, and they talk about having everything, and they're miserable. And it's like an extensive explanation of This Is Why Baby Boomers Did The Stuff They Did, Because Their Parents Actually Were Messed Up. And it's like, it kind of makes sense.

I grew up with parents who burned draft cards, partook of "substances" and generally raised hell. I don't love the topical aspect of the show so much as the way it reflects the mindset that gave birth to my parents' mindset, and gave birth to my generation, who lived through a troublesome decade of our own and were mostly... confused. More thoughts as I watch the show. Which I'm getting back to now.

Also, the one movie scene that could make any man cry.

I Resigned From IGMS

Phew.

Here we go.

I have resigned from writing columns about graphic novels at Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. In addition, for whatever it's worth, I won't be submitting any more short stories, even though I had a wonderful experience when they chose one of my stories for publication.

This is because I do not want to be associated with the anti-gay-rights views that Orson Scott Card has become synonymous with.

This was a hard decision.

Scott Card was my favorite writer through most of high school, until I replaced him with Octavia Butler, who I learned about through one of Scott Card's books, How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. At the time I was far from the controversies that would dominate public discourse about Card. I didn't know he opposed gay rights. I didn't know that I supported them!

I didn't know my sister was gay. I didn't know that my parents, loyal California voters that they are, would support Proposition 8 in 2008, choosing the requirements of Mormonism over the vocal protests of their daughter and son. I didn't know that I would not blame my parents for their decision.

But I did know that I wanted to be Just Like Orson Scott Card.

The man was one of my heroes.

He had promoted his faith through his writing without soft-pedaling his work or rating it all G. I even admired his complex treatment of a homosexual in a heterosexual society in the Homecoming series. I don't admire that part of it anymore, but I will still defend that series as a great piece of writing.

He was great at writing misanthropes and people who didn't fit in to a society they were supposed to fit in to. Ender was too smart and persecuted. Nafai was too connected to his spirituality. Jason Worthing was too aware of the foibles of his society.

As a missionary, I served in his ward and got to have dinner at the man's house. He signed books for us, cooked us salmon, and was a perfectly lovely host.

In 2005, I attended his writing workshop, where he was again a wonderful host and a great mentor.

I'm sorry, people who hate him. He's done a lot of nice things for a lot of people with no hope of reward.

And thus it was easy to ignore the fact that, when he began writing columns for The Rhinoceros Times and The Ornery American, his political views were very far from my developing ones. He was a vocal supporter of President Bush and the invasion of Iraq. I didn't like either; in fact I found Bush's behavior shockingly irresponsible. Big deal; I disagree with lots of people I respect.

He was surprisingly opposed to gay marriage, considering the rather sympathetic treatment of homosexuals in his work. Oh well. I supported gay rights. My best friend in high school was gay, and although she hadn't come out, I more or less knew my sister was gay. I had always and would always support gay rights. I could work with, be mentored by, and read the works of people I disagree with.

After I attended his 2005 Boot Camp, I got the opportunity to write comic book reviews for his fledgling magazine, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. I cannot express enough how grateful I am for the experience. For five and a half years I got to write about comics and get paid for it! They asked for the work sight unseen, having only seen my work in Card's 2005 workshop, and praised the columns.

In 2011, IGMS published one of my stories, and the experience, working with editor Ed Schubert and assistant editors Eric James Stone and Scott Roberts, was really wonderful.

But. Here's the big but.

Scott Card is not just a vocal opponent of gay rights, he is an activist against them. He sits on the board of the National Organization For Marriage, one of the big supporters of movements like Proposition 8.

By writing for the magazine, I associate my name with the name of someone who represents the National Organization For Marriage.

In this he is following the lead of the LDS Church, which also supported Prop 8. And if Prop 8 drove me out of the Church, I had to ask myself if I could remain visibly associated with an anti-gay-rights-activist.

The conflict in my family over Prop 8 was... well, we never get intense in the Ellsworth house, but it was a conflict. My sister and I were against it. The rest of my family voted for it, or at least abstained.

This was particularly difficult for me to watch. My father was in a high place in Church leadership, but was a supporter of gay rights. To speak his conscience would have meant that he would lose his calling, possibly his membership, and of course his "eternal blessings."

It was his name. His name on a roll in Salt Lake City, and what it represented, that he could not lose.

Adulthood is full of compromises. I can't hold my father's decision against him. I've made lots of compromises in order to stay employed, feed the family and save face. And he didn't support Prop 8; he just laid low.

But in the words of Arthur Miller's John Proctor: "It is my name, and I cannot have another in my life."

(Well, unless I pay 80$ at the courthouse. But you know what I mean, semanticists.)

Looking at what Card has said, I can't compromise on this one. I cannot put my name next to his. I cannot put myself in a place of constant compromise.

I don't know where it might lead me.

It's not just gay marriage. It's the comment that "there is a hierarchy of suffering," which violates the principles I teach every day in a tribal school on an Indian reservation. It's the fact that Zdorab, the sympathetic homosexual in Homecoming, was essentially cured, feeling only "the memory of a youthful desire," which is something most people seem to forget when they focus on Card's typically sympathetic homosexual characters. I won't go as far as John Kessel in ascribing a dangerous interpretation to Card's fiction, but Zdorab's character arc is only complete if you understand that he really was supposed to have been "cured."

As to whether or not he should write Superman... actually, I think that one's rather silly, considering that just about every variety of people in history have written about Superman, and if you're going to go after DC Comics, encourage them to demand more accountability for labor practices in the factories that make toys of their characters in China, where abusive conditions are rampant. You get what I mean.

There is much debate within the sf field about the ethics of submitting to Card's magazine if you support gay rights. For the record, I've known a queer author who published fiction with queer characters in IGMS and never heard a peep; in fact his work was in their year's best. Card takes a giant financial loss to support a magazine of short fiction.

However, that author, like me, still has some trepidation about the name at the top of the page, and what it means to his name.

I loved writing that column, and I loved getting paid for it. This is the hardest decision I've made in years. I wish everyone involved with the magazine, including the Cards, the best. And I sure would love it if anyone out there is looking for someone to write about comics and contacts me.

It is my name. And I cannot have another in my life.

A Letter To Spencer, Circa 1993

Without further ado, I give you this.

Dear Thirteen-Year-Old Me:

I just read the ending of The Wheel of Time.

"Aha," you say, "I must be receiving this missive [don't know about emails, do you?] from three or four years in the future. Perhaps I'm a junior in high school. But no, it couldn't take THAT long to finish the series, could it? There's already five of them!"

I know what else you are thinking. "I have to know. I want to read the end so badly. I love these books so much."

You are even thinking "if my house was on fire, the first thing I would save would be those books." Yes, I remember thinking that.

I'm sorry.

I'm really sorry.

I am thirty-three years old, TYOM.

I have two children and a third on the way, I live in Washington, and I'm a teacher.

And no, I'm not a professional writer. Kind of close. I have been published. But I have not published any of the massive fantasy volumes I have slaved over.

There's one that I think I will send off soon. It's short and it's pretty funny. It's got economics in it.

Wait! Don't cry!

Seriously, don't cry. I remember crying that much. It's weird and makes people uncomfortable.

(Although, for what it's worth, the depression and lethargy is not just from puberty, it's partially a complication of your celiac disease, and as annoying as it is, you really, really need to stick to a strictly gluten-free diet, kid. Like, entirely. Not even Postum, damn it! Listen to me.)

So, how was the book?

Pretty good. Some stuff was amazing. Some stuff really deserved a little more time. Some stuff was boring and I wish the author had spent less time on it.

What part of the ending do you want to know? Yes, Rand wins. What did you think would happen? Does he die? Um, kind of.

He also has hot foursomes with his three wives. At least, it's implied. What does "foursome" mean? Changing subject!

You have to understand that there are now fourteen of these books. Robert Jordan is dead. He wrote eleven books and died and they drafted someone else to finish the series. They got really bad. I hate to tell you this, but you're not going to even like books eight through eleven.

And another guy wrote the last three. His name's Brandon Sanderson. They're pretty good books. Gets the series back on track for the most part.

I met Brandon Sanderson once. He's a really nice guy.

Yeah, it wasn't me. I know what you're thinking. I would have thought the same thing, had I had this conversation at your age. Who else but the fabulously brilliant, talented Spencer Ellsworth would be drafted to finish the series? After all, I'm 33 and haven't I've had years to write tons of fantasy bestsellers?

You have, after all, just decided that you will focus all your energies on writing. You sat down at Dad's Macintosh Plus and said "I will be a writer." I remember that decision, and I remember the novel you started as soon as you made that decision.

You'll finish it, TYOM. You'll finish it and you'll write another one, a huge one, before you finish high school!

Hell, you'll have an actual girlfriend for a while, and she will even ask to read it, and her determination will outlast the relationship, even. I know, because she just turned up the manuscript when she was moving and she wrote me a Facebook message... it's kind of like a letter... to mention it. And your wife, who is awesome, will start your relationship by breaking into your room and reading all the copies of your stuff you have lying around.

You will never ever went back on that resolution. You have just made a decision that will change the rest of your life.

It's just that you won't be a famous author like Robert Jordan. At least not by 33.

Ah... shit, you're crying again.

Yes, I swear a lot. It's one of the few advantages of being an adult.

The truth is, writing is really, really hard. 

You know it's frustrating. But what you don't know is that writing is REALLY frustrating. Like when your sister won't stop berating you frustrating. Like when a cold hangs on for a month. Which is also related to the celiac autoimmune issues. Writing is hard. Like when Mom brings home a bunch of Costco muffins that you can't eat, and you are supposed to just stay away from them because you can't eat them.

I've written some stuff that I thought was really good. Even as good as The Eye of the World, TYOM. I published some fantasy stories that I think you might really like, if you read them.

But TYOM, I know you don't want to hear this... life throws you curves. I didn't expect to have kids this young. I did and I love them and they need my time. I didn't expect to feel this exhausted from working a day job and being a dad. I do. Every day I feel more tired than I ever thought possible.

I didn't realize how much rejection was involved. Call me stupid, but I still hate it when I think about how much stuff I've written that got a billion rejections that I finally threw away.

Also, the universe is not really handing out contracts to finish a multivolume bestselling fantasy series. We didn't have Mat Cauthon's luck for that one.

On top of that, there are not a lot of Robert Jordans in the world. In fact, I even worked in the publishing industry, TYOM, and mostly an author gets famous through luck, not skill. They write a book that people didn't know they wanted.

And, also, I suspect I've never been that good.

Shit, now I'm crying. Give me a tissue. I know you have a cold. Gluten-free diet, damn it!

It's a wonder I got through that stupid book--all fourteen of those stupid books--these last few months with this existential crisis on the heels of the reading.

Truth is, TYOM, you will save yourself a lot of pain and a lot of therapy bills if you realize, right now, that writing is its own reward. Telling a story is fun. But the big famous author dream hasn't happened yet, and may never happen, especially because of how the entertainment industry faces its own Breaking of the World and Last Battle called file-sharing... never mind. You're bored. Point is, when you sit back down at the Mac Plus, think less about your name in print and more about the characters.

Think about how much you love Rand al'Thor's frenzied journey, and then create a character you can love as much as Rand al'Thor. Then follow him. Or her. You'd be surprised how misogynist you unintentionally are, TYOM.

Life is better than you can imagine, TYOM. There is even decent gluten-free food in the future. See, I brought you back a muffin. Tastes like the real thing, eh?

Just be happy with who you become. Much like The Wheel of Time, life has all kinds of derailments, oddities, stupid plot twists, and endless delays. It also has unexpected wonders, and times when everything seems new again.

Write your way through it.

Only Four Million Words Till The Good Stuff!

When I was thirteen, nothing was more important than reading the ending of The Wheel of Time. Yeah. I was one of those thirteen-year-olds.

There is now an ending. I have not read it.

Bear with me. There will be a test. (We're talking about Robert Jordan. I'm gonna have to be verbose.)

Everyone has that author. The one who, for better or for worse, got you when you were twelve, and led you around by the hook of the nose for years and inspired your taste and made you go all dumb and drooly... and who you realized, years later, was not really that good.

Christmas 1993 and The Eye of the World consumed my brain. When I reread it last year, it consumed me again. A dark, harrowing chase story through a rich and dangerous world. The Great Hunt is similarly dark and thrilling. Book 3 is a bit of a dud but 4 and 5 are quite epic, expanding the world while maintaining the thrills.

And I was thirteen, therefore all flaws in entertaining writing could be forgiven.

So I didn't understand at the time that men and women didn't actually interact like this, didn't spend most of their time making maxims about how the other gender was crazy, or that the Aes Sedai could never rule the world while acting like grudge-hoarders on a planning committee at the local Presbyterian church. I didn't understand even some of the skillful parts of his writing, like the fact that Rand al'Thor really was crazy by Book Seven, genuinely, unalterably nuts. He seemed misunderstood. Of course, I didn't understand that because Jordan, after Book Seven, never committed to any subplots, instead throwing out constant new ones.

And of course I didn't understand that the man was ill from 1997 on. (Also an issue with another author who grabbed my imagination, Octavia Butler.) With all the old-guard military upper lip he could muster, Jordan insisted he was fine while his writing struggled. As my good buddy Jay Lake will tell you, even the most prolific, absorbed writer can be deferred by chemo. (Love and writing power to you, Jay.)

Book 7: A Crown of Swords (on of the better titles) came out when I was fifteen. Most people quit around books 6 & 7. I drank it up. At eighteen, I sucked up Book 8, which was particularly bad, considering it lacked any mention of Mat Cauthon, every nerd's favorite scoundrel since Han Solo shot first.

I also had severe acne and no girlfriend and by this time was writing my own massive Jordan imitation. You know.

But folks, this boy joined a punk band, found a social life, and kind of grew up, at least in reading taste. After my Mormon mission, I was pleasantly surprised that Book 9 went somewhere. Then Book 10 undid all that goodwill by having exactly one, one plot twist, and ignoring Rand, our main man, in the same way book 8 ignored Mat. When 11 came out, I more or less enjoyed the book, but it was clear that between sickness and attempts to manage his unwieldy subplots, Jordan's writing had devolved. I could see the cracks. Also, why did it take until book 11 to bring Rand's dad back into the story?

He died and the series went to Brandon Sanderson. I loved Sanderson's debut novel Elantris. I found his recent offering The Way of Kings to be too much of a slog and never finished it. Plus, having lived in Utah, all his characters sound Mormon to me. All shades of Mormon, true. Ex, liberal, mystic, conservative, but they all sound Mormon. Which will be interesting in the Wheel of Time, where all the characters sound like old parishioners in said Presbyterian church.

But. Not there yet. I am determined to reread the entire series one last time before the ending. Closure won't be the same without it. Even if it's a bit of a chore.

I am pleasantly surprised that parts of his writing hold up. His characters act ridiculous, true, snippy and backbiting, and I can't buy any of the plot twists involving Aes Sedai. No one that incompetent could last in politics. But he's really good at some things.

In particular, I really like the Aiel this time around. In younger days, I never knew why Jordan spent so much time with them. They were the veiled desert culture off to the east. A standby for fantasy. They had different humor and different customs and oh man they figure so largely into the story.

Now, speaking as a white guy who works on an Indian reservation, I'm pleasantly surprised by all the consideration Jordan puts into the Aiel. They're a little Bedouin, a little Plains Tribes, a little other thing, but they're not cribbed from one culture. They're defiantly tribal, and of course super-warriors, but at the same time their way of life is just as viable as "civilized" folk.

Their culture is full of foibles and nobility yet degraded by those of Jordan's Western culture. They even have to suffer cultural appropriation from young noble men and women who are looking for meaning to their empty lives, a rather true-to-life twist.

So. There are some things worth studying in the horrible middle of the Wheel of Time series. More as I go along, I hope. I owe this to my thirteen-year-old self, who does not yet understand the sacrifices of adulthood, like reading the crappy parts of a fantasy series for one's thirteen-year-old self's sake. Or going to work, which I should probably do now.

Fixing A Hobbit-Hole

I saw the Hobbit! And absolutely nothing else happened this weekend. Certainly nothing that sickens me to think about and could have been easily prevented by better legislation and...

Point.

Writer-brain is fascinated by "broken" movies. My friends have heard me go on and on about Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. That movie had a fantastic premise, and some amazing acting, and incredible sets, locations and actors, but it thuds around a lot of the time, saved only by a few transcendent bits.

It's a hard movie to diagnose, other than some obvious flaws. Scott should have cast someone other than Orlando Bloom who could carry more gravitas, and given the villain more depth and less scenery-chewing. It would still be an impossibly complex and hard-to-tell story.

Other movies are easier to diagnose. Although I'm tempted to say The Phantom Menace was impossibly broken, the structure actually holds up with one simple rewrite. Have Darth Maul kill off Qui-Gon early on, and make it Obi-Wan's story, about an apprentice trying to protect a princess and a "chosen one" on a dangerous desert world. Ramp up emotional stakes by having Anakin ripped away from his mother. Crucify me for saying this, but even Jar Jar could have been saved. We never got any sympathy for him, nor any admiration, throughout the entire film. Even at the end, he turned and ran. Have him do something heroic and he starts to redeem himself.

This is a good thing for writer-brain. I still can't rewrite my own stuff to save my life, but at least I can use the intellectual exercise.

So The Hobbit interests me. It was as padded-out and wandering as I thought it would be, and call that a self-fulfilling prophesy, but I actually did enjoy a lot of it. It just needed a good cut.

The film would have been more satisfying in the original two-part format, ending at "Barrels Out of Bond" when Bilbo's really proven his heroism. But this three-movie format could even work... at two hours. If Jackson had chopped thirty-five minutes, he'd have a movie the length of Star Wars! Jeez, man.

Somewhere on the Internet I saw a prediction for the film that would have been a huge improvement; replace or augment the Radagast sequence with the Barrow-Wight sequence from The Fellowship of the Ring. Post-encounter-with-trolls, the dwarves and Bilbo wander into a land of nasty fog and open crypts. Gandalf is distracted by the suspicious open crypt of the Witch-King himself. The dwarves make for the treasure in the tombs (which actually makes more sense than when the hobbits in FotR wake up wearing the jewels) and Bilbo has to hack a Barrow-Wight's arm as Frodo does. This would introduce the idea of the Witch-King's rebirth. We could still get a chopped-down sequence of Radagast and the spiders.

Mostly I kept seeing stuff that could be cut. Everything in Bilbo's hobbit-hole was great, but it needed to be chopped down! Dwarves arrive, make a mess. Thorin arrives. Bilbo reads the contract. Bilbo faints and has his talk with Gandalf. The dwarves sing. The intros: cut old Bilbo and Frodo, or give them a brief montage, and reveal the Arkenstone later.

This is an entirely different subject, but I could have lost the PG-13 violence. There's nothing in the book or the appendices that would make The Hobbit more than PG, although the Barrow-Wight sequence could have worked on a PG-13 level.

On the subject of long and Tolkien, though...

If you've got forty-five minutes to spare, which Peter Jackson obviously did, take a look at my Tokienesque pastiche Blade and Branch and Stone. As you can tell from my self-recrimination, I can see its flaws, but it was an attempt by me to complicate and twist some of Tolkien's themes of environmentalism and colonialism: http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=1116