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…

Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments of 2025

Oh dear, it’s April and this post was meant to be up at the end of last year. Not that I’ve done one of these in a while, as I simply haven’t had enough material to fill up all twelve spots in a “best moments of film and television” list since 2023.

In any case, this is exactly what it says on the tin: my twelve favourite scenes, twists, moments or concepts from film or television media that was released in 2025 (though I give myself a little bit of wriggle room and occasionally allow some material from the year before)...

Woman of the Month: Nala

Nala from Sinbad 

One of my favourite things to do on these monthly posts is to showcase extremely obscure female characters, and this may well be the most obscure one I’ve ever written about. Nala, played by Estella Daniels, appeared in only seven of the thirteen episodes of Sinbad, a 2012 show that was cancelled after only one season. So, why bring her up at all?

Despite this take on the legend being all but forgotten about, Nala left an impression on me. I’ve seen the actress since then (Death in Paradise, Da Vinci’s Demons) and despite her limited screentime in this show, she’s the focus of its best episode. “Old Man of the Sea” is a variation on all those stories about Death and the Maiden, generally revolving around a plot in which the latter is forced into matrimony with the embodiment of Death (or a fey, or even the devil himself) only to outwit him at the last moment.

But Nala is also granted a sense of history and backstory the other characters don’t, as it’s clear from the very first episode that she and her father are running from something. She becomes part of the Providence crew as the requisite highborn and educated one (like Djaq or Toph) and is guided by a sense of morality and idealism. As well as her sense of entitlement, there is also duty – the very thing which prevents her from reneging on the deal her father made with Death when he finally catches up to her.

For whatever reason, Nala was written out of the show at about the halfway mark and promptly replaced by a white woman (the optics – not great), but while she lasted she was the heart of the crew. Perhaps she would have returned in time – we’ll never know.

Reading/Watching Log #124

Autumn again. It feels we’ve had two weeks of summer and six months of winter, and now things are cycling back into cold and darkness. Still, there’s a beauty to fall, especially in clear weather. I was walking through the park in the sunshine the other day and was struck by the ambiance: there’s a strange sort of darkness to the light, the shadows feel deeper, and the leaves are just beginning to turn even though the sky was solid blue.

I’m still seeking out variations on the stories of L.F. Baum, J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll, and in doing so it was interesting to note that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz each have definitive versions (obviously, the Disney and MGM films). And yet that’s not quite the case for Peter Pan, even though he has far more adaptations of his story than the other two – by quite a far margin. I suppose that makes sense; if you’ve got what’s considered the iconic version of something, nobody else wants to compete with it.

More to the point when it comes to the multitude of adaptations, Peter Pan has been staged and retold so many times that many of the latest versions are aware of their predecessors, and so end up musing on the nature of the story itself and its history.

This is the thousandth time Hook and Peter have crossed swords, the millionth that Peter and Wendy have said goodbye to each other. She can’t go and he can’t stay, and the legacy of that is a bit like the underlying theme of Hadestown. The story has taken on a life and tragedy of its own, and so every time we tell it again, we hope it might turn out differently. But no, Peter Pan is still out there somewhere, as young as he ever was.

There’s no understating how deeply these stories have soaked into our culture. Remember when Neo followed the White Rabbit at the beginning of The Matrix? Or when Ofelia wore an Alice dress and pinafore in Pan’s Labyrinth? Or that a vampire movie could be called The Lost Boys and everyone would know the reference it’s trying to make? Likewise, we all know the connotations Kingo is making when he calls Sprite “Tinker Bell” in The Eternals – not just her eternal youth, but her unrequited love for Ikaris. The term “flying monkeys” is a recognizable term to describe people who submit to narcissists and do their bidding. Then there’s Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, which exists in a much more tragic context. These stories are everywhere.

Finally, I told myself that I would try and cut down on the length of these blog posts, as they’re getting increasingly long despite my lack of free time to actually write them. Then of course, I end up writing what amounts to three giant essays on Peter Pan. But for April, I really am truly going to try and cut back…

Standing Tall #36

Back to it!

This giraffe sculpture was a rather poignant one, as it was inspired by children who wear the Beads of Courage – that is, the unique strings of beads that children undergoing cancer treatment receive, one bead representing each milestone test or procedure they go through.

The name of the sculpture is Hero, which was decided upon after the Child Cancer Foundation put out a call for suggestions. One contributor proposed Hero as: “this is what all our children are to their loved ones.” Once again painted by Ira Mitchell-Kirk (his name pops up a lot; I can only assume he was commissioned to paint several of these giraffes) and sponsored by the Child Cancer Foundation, it depicts the large glass beads that make up these mementoes against a bright blue background.

It was situated in Merivale Mall, which was a bit of an odd venue for it (surely the hospital would have been a better fit?) but as you can tell from all the Christmas decorations, I visited during the holidays!

Links and Updates

It’s been a while and the news has been stacking up. There’s a lot of exciting stuff on the horizon, so let’s get into it…

Woman of the Month: Ellen Ripley

Ellen Ripley from Alien and Aliens

When we discuss trailblazing and iconic female characters from the eighties (or in sci-fi generally) two names spring immediately to mind: Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Way back in 2017, I watched the two Terminator films (there are only two) and always meant to follow up with the two Alien movies (also only two), as the comparison between these women is fascinating.

Everyone already knows this, but Ellen Ripley as written in Alien was originally a male character, and when the decision was made to cast Sigourney Weaver, absolutely nothing was changed. This makes sense, as gender is largely irrelevant in the first Alien film. Rape subtext aside, it’s essentially a crew of miners attempting to survive a life-or-death situation in closed quarters, and Ripley’s most defining scene is refusing to let her crewmates back on the ship when there’s the chance they could be contaminated, instead wanting to follow safety regulations.

It’s the exactly opposite of what we’d expect a Screw the Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right protagonist to do, but it’s also indisputably the right call.

It also has nothing to do with the fact Ripley is a woman, in stark contrast to Sarah Conner, who absolutely has to be a woman. The whole reason the plot takes place is because time travellers want to kill the mother of the Resistance leader fighting them in the future – before she’s given birth.

This is of particular interest since James Cameron directed The Terminator before taking on Aliens, which does have more of an interest in the fact Ripley is a woman, particularly as it pertains to motherhood. Waking up from cryogenic sleep to discover her daughter has died in the intervening years, the emotional core of the film is Ripley becoming a mother to Newt, the sole survivor of the latest Xenomorph attack.

It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that James Cameron was the man behind this change, bringing Ripley more in line with Sarah Connor, as a Mama Bear protecting her young at all costs. But that doesn’t change the fundamentals of her character: a determined, no-nonsense, tough-as-nails but fundamentally decent woman who represents the best of humanity – whether it’s comforting a little girl or going back for the cat. This is the reason for the character’s longevity: that she’s a normal woman in terrifying circumstances. No superpowers, no extraordinary talent, just grit and bravery.

(Just like Sarah Connor).

Reading/Watching Log #123

February has come and gone, and I’ve continued my foray into the worlds of Wonderland, Neverland and Oz, which I think of as the Big Three of children’s literature. Perhaps the most interesting thing about reading the original stories concerning these worlds is how much of what we think we know about them is based on adaptative material with no basis in the actual books. For instance, Neverland is always referred to as the Neverland in J.M. Barrie’s text, and before his transformation, the Tin Man was initially called Nick Chopper – not Boq, though there is an unrelated Munchkin that goes by that name.

There’s also a lot of material that never made it into any adaptation: for example, I’m sorry that Baum’s delightful Queen of the Field Mice never made it onto the screen, though I can obviously understand the limitations there back in 1939.

Likewise, there’s a lot more emphasis on the weird and wonderful events being framed as dreams in the adaptations, even though Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the only one that actually used this framing device in a book. MGM’s The Wizard of Oz famously made Dorothy’s adventures a prolonged dream, with actors playing characters both in the real world and their fantasy counterparts in Oz, something that wasn’t an aspect of Baum’s book at all. Yet the concept became so pervasive that Return to Oz used it too.

They also hinted at it in Disney’s animated Peter Pan, which ends with the Darling parents returning home to find Wendy asleep by the window, the implication being that she dreamt it all (unlike the book, where the three children are gone for a long time). Likewise, the 2003 film leans into the double casting of Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook and Mr Darling, providing a degree of commentary on Wendy’s relationship with each one.

More than that, the concept of madness barely figures into the books, but has since become an intrinsic part of these stories, with the mental facilities of the girls being called into question much more than in the books themselves. ABC’s Once Upon a Time spin-off starts with Alice in a sanatorium, with doctors trying to convince her that her adventures were a hallucination. Return to Oz starts with Dorothy (nearly) receiving electric-shock therapy, and the facility staff becoming the villains she faces in Oz. And Andy Weir’s Cheshire Crossing is a crossover graphic novel in which Alice, Dorothy and Wendy all meet at a remote research facility and sanatorium. 

It’s interesting the way these components have soaked into our understanding of the stories, becoming an intrinsic part of retellings, despite that subtext not appearing in the original texts. Sometimes these adaptations even borrow from each other: Dorothy in Return to Oz has a scene in which she appears to do some slow-motion rabbit-hole falling.

And for the record, Peter Pan is by far the best book of the three. You get the definite sense that Baum and Carroll were simply making things up as they went along, writing as the mood struck them, and though a lot of people have put a lot of effort into trying to understand or cross-examine Alice’s Adventures and The Wizard of Oz, by each author’s own admission they exist mainly to entertain. As such, they generally come across as completely random.

Baum is probably the least sophisticated of the three authors, though I still think it’s fascinating that he almost didn’t seem to understand a lot of what he was writing. There are clear feminist undertones at work (his mother was a suffragette, so this was no doubt on purpose) but although he claims to have written: “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out,” it certainly didn’t pan out that way.

There’s some genuinely scary stuff in these books, and despite the Americanization of certain archetypes (switching out the kings, carriages, knights and heraldry for tin men, scarecrows, hucksters and cornfields) he couldn’t help but retain some of the underlying components of our oldest stories (as in Coraline and Labyrinth, the conclusion of Ozma of Oz features a competition against an ancient being with impossibly high stakes).

He also manages a few nuggets of wisdom, like this from the Scarecrow: “I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed,” or this from the Hungry Tiger: “It isn’t what we are, but what folks think we are, that counts in this world.”

For the most part though, his stories (like Carroll’s) come across as pretty random. In comparison, Barrie has something important to say about the nature of childhood, the passage of time, and the realities of growing up. Peter Pan is an inherently bittersweet story, one in which its grand adventure is bookended by the anguish of parenthood and the cost of never achieving maturity.

Going forward into March, I’m leaving Wonderland and Neverland behind, but the Yellow Brick Road is stretching on for a while longer. Baum wrote a lot of these books.

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2025

It’s time for my favourite annual post: a look back at all the female characters I discovered, revisited, and/or enjoyed watching or reading about across the course of the past year. As I’m sure you know, I start every month with a post that spotlights a female character of note, the only two rules being that she has to be a somewhat inspiring figure, and that I can feature only one woman per project (though I can always include more from the same narrative universe in these end-of-year retrospectives).

But last year I decided to do something a little different and make 2025 the Year of the Villainess.

What struck me whilst selecting and compiling these twelve women is that female villains are so often twisted reflections of abnormal femininity. They are women… but wrong.

There’s the overbearing mothers (Norma Bates, Agnes Skinner, the Queen of Shadows in Mirrormask), the abusive nurturers (the Other Mother, Mother Gothel, Nurse Ratchet), the abnormally masculine (Agatha Trunchbull, Lady Macbeth; who asks to be unsexed: “come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall”), and of course – the crazy bitches (the Queen of Hearts, Daenerys Targaryen, Hexadecimal, Drusilla, even Azula in her final stretch of episodes). In that last case, it’s often the woman’s loosening grip on reality that proves to be her downfall.

Then there are the monstrous mother-figures (pick a stepmother, any stepmother from a fairy tale), the jealous harpies (now pick a stepsister, or any character that’s ever been played by Lucy Punch), the embittered crones desperate to regain their youth (Lamia from Stardust, the Sanderson Sisters, Mother Gothel again), the Alpha Bitches (Regina George, Libby Chessler), the Ice Queens (the White Witch, Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen), the Women Scorned (Hera, Alex Forrest, Isabella of Gisborne) and the Femme Fatales, who use their sexuality to get what they want (Melisandre, the Brides of Dracula – honestly, there are too many of these to name, though shoutout to Delilah, the Ur-Example).

It was at that moment Hylas knew... he'd fucked up.

Occasionally you get women that’ve been possessed by greater powers that transform them into dangerous threats (Jean Grey, Azkadellia from Tin Man), and sometimes they’re just unrelenting, unthinking forces of nature (Shelob, Eris, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, weather events that are usually given feminine names and pronouns). Oftentimes, many of these categories can overlap.

Just take a moment here to try and imagine any of these archetypes applied to a male villain. It’s not impossible, and yet it’s also much rarer. When men are villains, it’s usually to do with the corruptive influence of power, or misguided motivation born of desperation or deceit, or the complexities of the human psyche, or… ya know, a woman made him do it. For female villains it’s usually about being the wrong type of woman: a bad mother, or a manipulative seductress, or either so emotional that it disrupts her mental faculties, or not emotional enough for her to count as a proper woman.

Obviously not always, but I feel reasonably comfortable making that generalization. When one looks back at some of our earliest villainesses, the likes of Lilith and Circe and Morgan le Fay, it’s easy to see what they have in common: their own hard power (generally manifesting as magic) and a disregard for male authority. What need have they for men when they have their own inherent abilities to serve and protect them? Stories about such figures read more like cautionary tales to a male audience about the dangers that women pose than anything to do with the characters themselves; a warning not only about the sexuality they embody, which can easily lure a man to his doom, but the dangerous subversion of male power.

It’s rare that a female villain is allowed motivation that transcends gender-coded characterization (“who’s the fairest of them all?”) or which doesn’t embody the anxieties the patriarchy has about them (their sexuality, their mental state, their unchecked emotions), or refrains from commenting (even implicitly) on how she should be controlled, dismissed or ridiculed. When someone like Demona from Gargoyles comes along, who is driven by a multitude of inner demons (her self-loathing and guilt, her desire to protect her people from discrimination, her hatred of human beings), it’s worth sitting up and taking notice.

Again, I want to stress that this is a generalization. I’m well aware that the rogue’s gallery of fictional villains has its fair share of abusive fathers, power-crazy tyrants and tantrum-throwing manchildren (the concept of an incel has definitely been the inspiration for several male villains over the last few years). But are there a lot of old men who are vilified for being old and therefore undesirable? Men that are considered unnatural because they’re unfeeling or “icy”? Do we see a lot of men seducing women for nefarious ends (and don’t say James Bond – he’s not only a designated hero, but considered a stud for how many beautiful women he can bed). Are there as many evil stepfathers as there are stepmothers? And if there were, would they be regarded as being as monstrous as an unfit mother?

When there are more male villains anyway, it’s rather obvious to see how the female ones are broadly divided into several recurring categories and themes, and most of them have their roots in what it means to be an “incorrect” type of woman. Simply put, female villains are often the ones that don’t comply with the patriarchy’s expectations of them: to be nurturing, beautiful, virtuous, young, submissive, obliging and preferably sane.

I could write a thesis on all this, but there’s definitely no time for that! Just food for thought as I delve into some of the other compelling villainesses that didn’t make this year’s short list, but who are definitely worth mentioning in some capacity:

Woman of the Month: Maddy Magellan

Maddy Magellan from Jonathan Creek

Having done this Woman of the Month project for over ten years now, I’m surprised that Maddy Magellan has never come up before, as she truly is one of my favourite characters of all time. A few weeks ago I had Jonathan Creek playing as background noise while I did other things, and I was reminded again of just how vivacious she is.

Sometimes the best fictional characters aren’t necessarily the ones you want to meet in real life. Maddy is bad tempered and dishonest, mercurial and fast talking; ruthlessly ambitious in her pursuit of a story and not above tapping into people’s private phone messages or pretending to be a police officer in order to gain access to a crime scene.

She’s everything we hate about investigative journalists, but damn it if she isn’t fun to watch. More importantly, she has a social conscience. The crime exposés she writes are about miscarriages of justice, and – as she frequently likes to point out – she doesn’t get paid much for them. When the time comes to glean more of her family history, we get a sense of why she’s drawn to this particular subject matter, and she’s definitely someone you want on your side if you’re ever the victim of an impossible crime (and not just because she’s essentially the handler of Jonathan Creek, lateral thinker extraordinaire).

It’s really the sheer levels of gumption and verve that Carolyn Quentin brings to the role which makes her so enjoyable as a character. We couldn’t condone half of what she does as appropriate in real life, but her sheer audacity – breaking into houses, reading people’s diaries, going through garbage bags, lying about being Jewish, recruiting a man to impersonate a police officer in order to extract information from her close-lipped colleague – is something to behold. At one point while under arrest she frets that she’ll be injected with a truth serum. Jonathan reassures her: “it wouldn’t stand a chance.”

The show certainly lost something when Quentin left to have a baby, and then for whatever reason, never brought back again. Because the Carla Borrego mysteries are still pretty good, I include them whenever I do a rewatch, but always finish things off with “The Black Canary,” a standalone Christmas Special that I can pretend takes place after Maddy returns from America, ready to pick things up where she left off with Jonathan.

Assertive and confident and quick-witted and unapologetic, she’s someone we could never be… but would secretly like to.

Reading/Watching Log: #122

To kickstart this year, I decided to revisit some of the seminal classics of early children’s literature: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan, along with some of their assorted television/filmic adaptations.

It intrigues me greatly that three touchstones of early children’s literature involve little girls navigating semi-dangerous fantasy lands, and as a result there’s something about the characters of Alice, Dorothy and Wendy that just go together somehow.

(I’ve always felt there should be a second-tier trio to this very specific type of young heroine, but all I can come up with is Clara from The Nutcracker and Gerda from The Snow Queen – there must be a third girl out there somewhere to complete the set, but who? Pippi Longstocking? Ronja the Robber’s Daughter? No, they don’t quite fit into the same dreamlike fantasy-scape as the others. I’ll think of her one day…)

Also interesting is that two famous adaptations of these stories adopt an All Just a Dream framing device that was only ever present in one of the original books. MGM’s The Wizard of Oz is a famous example of its heroine waking up from an extended dream, but Disney’s Peter Pan ends with the Darling parents arriving home to find Wendy sleeping by the open window, also suggesting the adventures might have all been the work of her subconscious. Neither book used this conceit, but it would seem the precedent set by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland loomed large in the imaginations that followed it. 

Likewise, a preoccupation with insanity as it pertains to young women specifically has emerged around these stories, almost without anyone realizing. In Return to Oz, Dorothy is taken to a clinic where she faces electric shock treatment to help her with her “delusions” of Oz, while Once Upon a Time in Wonderland begins with Alice locked up in an asylum after she refuses to renounce the adventures she’s had.

A lot of this might just be the natural conclusion of retelling stories that are so inherently bizarre and random, but I do wonder if this theme would be quite as pronounced if the main characters of these books had been boys.

That little girls are so often traversing fantasy lands on vague journeys of empowerment and self-actualization makes it tempting to ponder if there’s a line that can be drawn between these early nineteenth century texts and the recent proliferation of romantasy, but that might have to be a longer post for another day…

(And don’t worry, across my exploration of various adaptations, I’ve spared myself Spielberg’s Hook and James Franco’s Oz the Great and Powerful. Never again!)

Recommendations: The Best of 2025

Well, the year 2025 is over and not a moment too soon (though who am I kidding, 2026 is looking equally grim). This post may be a bit late, but I always get there in the end, so here are my top recommendations for the year that’s just passed: everything I read, watched or played that struck a particular chord and which may help you escape the hideous burden of day-to-day reality.

I actually found it rather difficult to narrow things down into a reasonable list (especially given my OTT gorge of pop-culture franchise material in July), which speaks to the surprising quality of my reading/watching year.

2025 was divided into several themes, and though that sounds like it might impinge on just enjoying myself, it actually gave me the structure I needed to focus on specific interests while also finding new material in each subject, whether it be Arthurian legend, Greek myth, Tudor drama, pirates, unicorns, folk horror, or Magical Girls.

There was also a surplus of television shows that were cancelled after one season, though many of them I was watching for the second time: Crossbones, Nautilus, Around the World in Eighty Days, NBC’s Dracula, Sinbad, Atlantis (okay, that one had two seasons), The Winter King, Camelot, Cursed, Onyx Equinox – and I’ve just this month finished Emerald City. So yeah, I broke my own rule about not starting new shows until I was sure they’d be finished, but there’s still something a little fascinating about projects that get greenlit but are unable to gain enough traction for a continuation.

As it happened, my New Year’s Resolution was to avoid American-made or US-based material, which saw me in good stead for most of the year (sans July, and a few films in December) and made for a nice change of pace. The decrease in violence – specifically gun violence – on the screen was extremely noticeable, and so my viewing intake was considerably more restful as a result. Of course, this meant I missed out on a few shows I’ve been meaning to catch up on (Elementary, 1923, Welcome to Derry) but hey – they’re not going anywhere.

Blog-wise, I managed more reviews and commentary than most years (I see on the sidebar that even though my activity gradually decreases with each year that passes, I managed three more posts than in 2024). Personal highlights include a Contrast/Compare between Black Sails and Andor, an in-depth look at the treatment of Rebecca and Rowena in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, meta about the Evolution of the Vampire in projects like Dracula, Nosferatu and Carmilla, Ranking the 39 Episodes of the BBC’s Robin Hood, and reviewing every episode of MGM’s Robin Hood (still no word of a renewal on that front, so I can probably add it to the above list of single-season shows).

There was also an uptick in fandom drama this year, or so it seemed, whether it’s the tedium of the culture war, the astounding lack of media literary in your average viewer, histrionics surrounding thwarted shipping endgames, or stories once again being held hostage by the whims of the loudest online voices. I may have more to say about it in a later post, as bloody hell was it a headache.

Finally, we lost a lot of talent this year, from Robert Redford to Diane Keating, and though I always feel a little uncomfortable about noting such things on a blogpost (it feels so superficial somehow) I was especially saddened to hear of the early death of Michelle Trachtenberg at just thirty-nine years old, who I’ll always remember as Harriet the Spy and Dawn Summers. Likewise, Val Kilmer was probably more of a Han Solo to me than Han Solo himself as Willow’s Madmartigan (sorry, I came to Star Wars later in life!) and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the very sinister, but equally very compelling Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat (conversely, it would appear I went through my villain phase very early in life, at age ten or so).

And of course Rob Reiner, whose death was a terrible shock and part of an ongoing investigation. I’ve no idea what I could possibly say that could be in any way meaningful, only that The Princess Bride was a staple of my childhood, as it was for so many others.

Robin Hood: One Enemy Falls, Another Rises

My thoughts on this grand finale are super late, but that’s because a dozen other things (including Christmas and New Year) got in the way. Ah well, it’s an excuse to watch the episode for a second time, just to refresh my memory.

We start with Robin waking up in the forest next to Marian, having had a dream/nightmare about Adric and his father’s voice, encouraging him to fight to the bitter end. Mkay? Robin has spent this entire season prevaricating over what he’s going to do, how he’s doing to do it, and whether or not it’s the right thing to do, and it seems he still needs guidance from beyond the grave.

Woman of the Month: Huntrix

Rumi, Mira and Zoey from K-Pop Demon Hunters

The Year of the Villainess is over and it’s with some relief that I return to the good guys. We need them now more than ever, and the natural choice of heroines to headline January is a no-brainer. K-Pop Demon Hunters took over Netflix last year, and did so entirely on its own merits. With little in the way of promotion, it was down to word of mouth that these girls got the attention they deserved, and well – I give fandom a lot of flak, but sometimes it gets things right every now and then.

Rumi, Mira and Zoey are famous K-Pop stars: they write their own songs, choreograph their own dances, and look out for each other in the glitzy world of superstardom. But they’re also secret superheroes, lending their voices and talent to the upkeep of a magical barrier that keeps demons securely locked away.

Though Rumi is technically the lead, all the girls get their own little mini-arc. Mira finds it difficult to emote, Zoey feels torn between her Korean and American heritage, and demons are exceptionally good at playing on their insecurities. Rumi has it the worst though, for as the offspring of a demon and human, she has to hide her true self from the world.

Of course, it all gets resolved with the power of song, friendship and positive thinking. Okay, that sounded a little glib, but this is the first time that three female characters have featured in a Woman of the Month post, as I found that I couldn’t really separate them. That aforementioned blend of song, friendship and positivity is so intrinsically linked to all these girls and their relationship with each other that it forms the emotional centre of the story itself – and I honestly think that’s the secret ingredient that made this film a hit.

(Along with all the little things; details as simple as scenes of the girls being incredibly silly or stuffing their mouths with food. How often do you get to see THAT in a movie about women?)

At the start of the film, there’s a tantalizing glimpse of the women that preceded Huntrix in the line of demon hunters throughout history (I’d definitely turn up for a prequel about them) and hopefully any potential sequel will delve into how these girls were recruited and trained in the first place. Until then, we have this impossible movie to enjoy: three female protagonists, a largely women-led production, absolutely no support or promotion from Netflix, themes of mental health and the connective power of music… and it was a smash hit.