Links and Updates

The last time I did one of these posts, it ended with news of Nicholas Brendon’s death. Now this one begins with news of Anthony Stewart Head’s passing, and – damn. This one hurts. That we’ve lost Dawn, Xander and Giles in such a relatively short space of time is unsettling, especially when everyone was getting excited about the (now cancelled) continuation of the show that made them famous. Hopefully I can kick my Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch into gear again soon.

But Anthony Stewart Head wasn’t only known for Buffy – perhaps his second greatest genre show was as King Uther on Merlin, in which he infused downright terrible writing with his gravitas, and never lost sight of a cruel tyrant’s humanity (which made the character all the more disturbing). That specific brand of dickishness was also used to good effect in Ted Lasso, in which Rupert Mannion was clearly a vindictive prick, but with enough charisma to let you understand how he got away with it.

He did the rounds on shows like Doctor Who, Spooks, Bridgerton, Harlan Coban’s The Stranger, Still Star-Crossed, Galavant, Manchild, Little Britain, Dancing on the Edge… that at least, is the material I’ve seen him in. People are talking enthusiastically about something called Repo! The Genetic Opera, though I’ve not had a chance to find out more about it.

In any case, he’ll be remembered best as Rupert Giles, who started as a befuddled and rather nebbish librarian, secretly moonlighting as Buffy’s Watcher, only to almost immediately start demonstrating hidden depths: his softer side with Jenny Calendar, his fatherly instincts to Buffy and her friends, his sarcasm and wit, the glimpses of his younger years as “Ripper,” his expansive intelligence – not only in the arcane arts, but emotionally as well. One never forgets his talk with Buffy at the end of “Lie To Me.” And every now and then, whenever he was pushed to anger, he would become more frightening than any demon or vampire.

Offscreen, there was never any indication that he wasn’t exactly who he presented himself as: a very chill, kind, personable and down-to-earth man. He was a stalwart presence throughout my adolescence, and in a way (and with the full understanding that he actually has real daughters) it feels like I’ve lost a dad.

So, a very sad start to the weekend. Behind the cut you’ll find a heck-load of trailers, and plenty more projects to look forward to…

Woman of the Month: Stacie Munroe

Stacie Munroe from Hustle

The feminist debate on whether or not a woman can (or should) use her sexuality to get what she wants in life isn’t anywhere near over, and most people can’t even agree on what exactly it might involve. Batting your eyelashes to get out of a speeding ticket? Or a full-blown honey trap to trick an old man out of his life’s savings?

I mean, society looks down on gold diggers and trophy wives and sex workers, dismissing them as manipulative, shallow and deceptive. But in fiction, isn’t it kind of fun to watch? And I mean as wish fulfilment for women, not as catering to the male gaze.

Stacie Munroe encapsulates this debate perfectly: she’s a grifter who doesn’t hesitate to use her beauty and sex appeal for a range of different cons. She’s posed as anything from a museum curator to a high-priced escort, and it’s almost a given that any episode featuring her will include the mark getting Distracted by the Sexy that she brings to the table as a crucial part of the con the team are engaged in. (Though in at least one episode she deliberately subverts this by wearing big glasses and false teeth… while still shamelessly flirting with the mark).

And yet there’s no denying that she’s also an incredibly intelligent woman: not only do you have to be a good actress and a quick thinker in her line of work, but she’s fluent in Japanese and Spanish, is the team member who balances the books, and often steps in as Team Mum when the boys are fighting. Her attractiveness is not even remotely the entirety of her character, and yet she’s a quintessential Femme Fatale, right down to the fair skin/dark hair combo.

Perhaps it’s better to say it’s a role she deliberately embodies rather than an intrinsic part of her nature, and the jury is still out (and will probably never get back in) as to whether a self-aware Ms Fanservice could ever be empowering or feminist. There will always be some that insist she’s giving women a bad name and reinforcing a stereotype, while others point out that if using your sexuality works, then go ahead and use every tool at your disposal.

Reading/Watching Log #126

As well as continuing with my-read through all the most significant children’s classics (this month it’s Winnie the Pooh) I also had a very important goal: to watch as many movies as I could that I only want to see once before deleting them from my hard-drive to make more room on it.

As such, this month’s viewing/reading material is very scattershot, with no unifying theme. And if it feels like I didn’t do a whole lot of reading, I’ve actually gotten though two and half books in Katherine Woodfine’s Taylor and Rose quartet (the follow-up to The Sinclair’s Mysteries). I’ll just wait until next month, and the completion of the final book Nightfall in New York, to discuss them all together. After that, I’m looking forward to tackling Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series.

Meta: Rebecca and Rowena; Part II: The Texts

Part I: Introduction

In my last post on the subject of Ivanhoe, I wrote about how female characters (especially if there’s only two in any given project) are inevitably used as narrative foils to one another, whether it’s in the role of love interest, the embodiment of womanhood, or just in general. Sometimes it’s deliberately done by the writer, though often the audience does the comparative work on their own. After all, what’s even the point of having more than one female character if we can’t unfavourably contrast one with the other?

And the binaries these women inhabit are very often based on the fact they’re women. We’ve got the Madonna and the Whore, the Good Girl and the Bad Girl, the Dark and Light Feminine, Betty and Veronica, the Tomboy and the Girly Girl – I could go on.

For example, MGM’s latest take on Robin Hood has a pretty clear-cut Madonna/Whore dynamic (albeit with a degree of nuance) at work with Marian and original character Priscilla. Marian is virginal and sweet-natured, while Priscilla is a sexually active manipulator. The show also introduces a third type: Ralph, a girl living rough in the forest in the guise of a boy, who is obviously much more tomboyish than either Marian or Priscilla, and who makes up the third point of a love triangle with Robin. That each woman exists as a direct contrast to the other two is very deliberate.

But now I want to take a closer look at Rowena and Rebecca as they exist within Walter Scott’s novel, and then William Makepeace Thackery’s parody Rebecca and Rowena. The point that fascinates me is that they are very seldom compared to each other in Scott’s original text, but Thackery’s treatment of each character is a quintessential case of how fandom (or audiences in general) is predisposed to judge women by pitting them against one another.

And in a way it’s a shame, as Scott’s text invites no such treatment of them.

Woman of the Month: Max Mayfield

Maxine “Max” Mayfield from Stranger Things

It was back in 2019 that I included Eleven on my annual retrospective of notable female characters that I’d watched across the year… which means I can stretch my rule of not having more than one girl/woman featured from a single story, since I haven’t spotlighted any other characters from Stranger Things in one of these monthly posts.

The Duffer Brothers were generally quite good with their female characters (not groundbreaking, but certainly not terrible either) though it interested me that Max ticks quite a few clichéd “tomboy” boxes when she’s first introduced, as well as getting pushed straight into a love triangle. They not only play around a little with the Seamus is a Girl trope considering she first comes to the boys’ attention as “Mad Max” on the scoreboards at the arcade, but have her ride a skateboard around town and be rather abrasive in the face of Lucas and Dustin’s interest in her. She’s a tomboy, but also a tough girl.

Thankfully the love triangle stuff passes pretty quickly, as her most significant relationships early on are with her stepbrother Billy (who is abusive towards her), Mike (who is antagonistic toward her simply because he perceives her as a replacement to Eleven) and eventually Eleven (who also gives her the cold shoulder at their introduction).

To be honest, I never had a problem with Eleven initially rebuffing Max’s overtures of friendship, as she had just spent a year watching turgid soap operas on cable television before seeing Mike engage in low-key flirting with Max after a year-long absence. I knew a friendship between the girls was forthcoming, and they get their own subplot in season three, in which they investigate the increasingly erratic behaviour of Billy and his possible connection to the Mind Flayer. Plus, their shopping montage to Madonna’s “Material Girl” is a delight.

By this point Max isn’t just there to be Affirmative Action Girl or to supplement the boys’ storylines, though it isn’t until season four that her story really starts to kick off. Her grief and depression over the death of her stepbrother makes her an emotionally vulnerable target to Vecna, who needs four victims to kill to open the gates to the Upside Down. Realizing what’s happening to her gives Max an edge, and I’d go so far to say the “Running Up That Hill” scene is probably the best sequence of the entire show. Still, that season ends on a harrowing note: Max ends up in a coma from which she might never awake.

Well, of course she does, and though I’m disappointed that more wasn’t made of her friendship with El at the time, her reunion with Lucas ended up being one of the big successes of the entire show. The scene in which she finally wakes up in his arms easily made it into my list of best film/television scenes of 2025.

I firmly believe that the Duffers did not have all five seasons of this show fully mapped out in advance – in fact we know this from various interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. But in that respect I find Max’s trajectory as a character rather fascinating. Her initial introduction as “another girl” designed to shake up the boys’ dynamic wasn’t hugely promising, and yet her bad girl persona is explained and explored in several interesting ways, and she becomes an absolute lynchpin of the narrative from season three onwards. Say what you will about the rest, but her increased presence in the plot feels very organic and elegant. Heck, I’d go so far as to say that she and Holly are more essential in defeating Vecna than any of the boys!

From a Sixth Ranger to an intrinsic member of the party with her own original moniker of “Zoomer,” Sadie Sink is now all set to become the Breakout Star of the franchise, especially since she’s next appearing in an MCU film. But I’m sure she’ll remember Max fondly, as this tough little redhead ended up being one of the understated highlights of Stranger Things.

Reading/Watching Log #125

To the northern hemisphere, April means springtime and sunshine. For us in Aotearoa, it’s the start of the grim march into the depths of winter. And though I’m fully acclimatized to Christmas being a summer holiday and can handle Halloween taking place while the buds are blooming, there’s something about Easter that demands daffodils and baby chicks, none of which are anywhere to be seen at the moment. In fact, this display at the mall caught my eye, demonstrating the incongruity of the season with the holiday’s symbols:

Pastel bunnies and autumn leaves? It just doesn’t work.

I’ve finally reached the end of watching Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland adaptations, having completed the last three this month – including the famous MGM film, which capped the whole thing off. I’ll continue with Baum’s books, as there are still plenty of Oz stories left to be read, but I’ve since moved onto a reread of Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea books. I’ve never read the very last one in the series, though for now I’m sticking to the original trilogy.

Another theme for April is Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Having seen both The Importance of Being Earnest and a Macbeth-inspired ballet at the theatre last month, I naturally had to seek out more performances and adaptations – plus, I dearly wanted to see Hamnet, especially after Jessie Buckley’s win at the Oscars.

BBC's Robin Hood: The Bechdel Test

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the BBC’s Robin Hood, which aired its first episode on the 26th April, 2006. In the leadup to this date, I’ve been trying to think up ways of commemorating the occasion, and along with linking last year’s ranking of the show’s thirty-nine episodes on Tumblr, I’ve edited together all the scenes of the show passing the Bechdel Test:

And because I’m anal retentive about this sort of thing, here’s a second video of female characters on the show not passing the Bechdel Test:

As I’m sure you know, the Bechdel-Wallace Test is a metric designed to measure the role of women and their interactions within any give media. For a work of fiction to pass the test, it requires a) two women who b) have a conversation about c) something other than a man.

It’s obviously not a fail-proof method of ensuring that your story will be a feminist triumph, as plenty of awful films can throw in a couple of superfluous lines between two women discussing local news, while superior films can fail the test by dint of having only a single female character. It is not a way to judge the quality of stories themselves, and was never designed to be in the first place. It’s no more or less than an interesting thought experiment, and a baseline gauge of how female characters are written.

I found it quite fascinating to parse Robin Hood through the requirements of the Bechdel Test, though you won’t be surprised to learn it wasn’t a sterling example of the test in action (it clocked in at seven minutes and ten seconds of women talking to each other in a show that ran for approximately 1,755 minutes altogether). Still, sometimes you have to be realistic about what a story is trying to offer. This was always skewed towards a young male demographic, and you could probably say the same for most Robin Hood adaptations.

Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the role of women in this show, which is why I put together this edit in the first place. And I have by necessity been very generous with the conditions of the test…