Reading/Watching Log #105

It’s the ass-end of winter down under, but while going for a stroll on my lunch break, I happened across the first daffodil of the season!

Spring is on its way, and I personally cannot wait. This has been an awful winter, not just grey and wet and dreary, but also filled with bugs and illnesses. I’m a generally fairly healthy person, but I had so many days off this year, as did many of my colleagues.

Throughout this year I’ve managed to have very set “themes” for each month: epics in March, eighties fairy tales in April, Shakespeare in May, teen movies in June, Robin Hood/Ivanhoe in July... but August was definitely “miscellaneous.” Aside from finishing up The Tudors, which has been part of my ongoing Plantagenet/Tudor dynasty viewing, and finally getting to The Dark Crystal movie after going through the novels, comics and prequel show, I really just went where the mood took me this month.

For this post, keep in mind that I usually write reviews for things as I read/watch them, and that usually doesn’t make much of a difference in what order they're read. But this month the way I format everything I’ve been reading/watching (stage shows first, then comics, then short books, then novels, then movies, then shows) didn’t always match up with the chronology in which I read/watched them – for instance, I had Little Thieves finished before reading The Goose Girl, the fairy tale upon which the novel was based, and so which therefore comes first in the ranking. Then I finished up with The Tudors before getting to Firebrand, even though the film is positioned in this post before the final season of that show.

So some of these entries will feel a little out of order based on what I have to say about them, and when I got around to watching them.

Legend of the Seeker: Extinction

First of all, I have to express my excitement that Renn reappears in this episode! This came as a total surprise to me, as years ago on a message board I was informed he was never seen again after his first appearance in “Listener” right at the start of season one, and so I had assumed the character (like so many others) was a one-and-done.

I’ve no idea if the person who told me this was lying on purpose or just misremembering the show in its entirety, but it made for an unexpected treat when he returned – even though he was an awful brat the first time around. Still, I love reappearances from previously-established characters, even more so when it comes as a surprise (or at least it would have been to greater effect if the “previously on” segment hadn’t given the game away).

Legend of the Seeker: Walter

Well, this episode was an odd little detour, and I’m not even sure how to describe it. For a while it almost felt like a Slice of Life episode for a character we’ve never seen before: Darken Rahl’s body double, a lookalike called Walter.

With our usual quartet of Richard, Kahlan, Cara and Zed only appearing in the first five minutes and the final act of the episode, most of the runtime is taken up with the narrative of a D’Haran captain called Malray, who spins the tale of Walter as a comedic yarn in a public house, only for the whole thing to end with some rather disturbing implications, in which Rahl once again takes advantage of circumstances and claws his way back to the land of the living.

It provides a fun showcase for Craig Parker, who naturally gets to play a very different type of character this time around. Walter is everything Rahl is not (sans an ability to seize opportunities when they arise) and makes for a fun And Now For Someone Completely Different protagonist for the duration of this particular episode.

Which means that I told a lie way back when I did my review for “Denna,” stating that hers was the only episode named after a specific character – though Walter is about as far removed from Denna and the Mord Sith as you can imagine.

Also, KATRINA LAW! Despite never having watched this season before, I knew going in that there were going to be several familiar faces: Charisma Carpenter, Keisha Castle-Hughes, John Rhys Davies... but I honestly had no idea Katrina Law would turn up. And as a Mord Sith! Whew! This was before her star-making roles in Spartacus and Arrow, so this show is allowed to take credit for spotting her talent early. Damn, she’s gorgeous.

Woman of Month: Mariko

Toda Mariko from Shōgun

Over the past couple of months my friend and I have been making our way through Shōgun, and it’s no secret that the female characters more or less steal the show – which is impressive considering they’re up against Hiroyuki Sanada as Yoshii Toranaga, Manipulative Chessmaster extraordinaire.

When English sailor John Blackthorne runs aground on Japanese shores during the Sengoku Period, he’s thrown headlong into a dangerous world about which he knows nothing. His only avenue of comprehension is the translator appointed to him by the daimyo Toranaga who sees his value as a political asset. This translator is astute and poised and observant, and also happens to be stunningly beautiful: Mariko.

Yes, we’ve seen this story before: the white outsider falls for the beautiful princess and is gradually accepted into her culture (probably becoming better at it along the way than those who’ve been raised within it). I confess to groaning when the two characters lock eyes for the first time, as the show couldn’t have been more obvious about what was going to happen.

But then we get the rest of the story, in which Mariko’s love affair with Blackthorne plays only a very small part, and is more about her than him.

As Toranaga’s translator, she’s in a unique position compared to the women that surround her. Although they hold different degrees of their own power and agency, Mariko is at the very heart of political discussion and intrigue, for as a result of her linguistic talent she is a necessary participant in private meetings between Toranaga and Blackthorne. All communication passes through her; all the men involved are dependent on her honesty and intelligence.

She’s defined by her composure, though some (such as her husband) would call it iciness, a persona that is explained as her backstory gradually comes to light. Her father killed a daimyo in an act of treason that led to him being ordered to kill his own family before committing seppuku himself. Mariko would have been amongst the dead, were it not for her husband forbidding her involvement.

Rather than being grateful for this reprieve, Mariko longs for death. Unhappy in her marriage, estranged from her son, ashamed of her family – she’s bereft on all sides, gleaning only the tiniest bit of happiness from Blackthorne, which of course, comes with its own expiry date.

Another interesting facet to her character is her conversion to Christianity, though sadly this isn’t explored in any real depth. What was it about the religion that drew her to it? How does she reconcile it with certain aspects of the culture she belongs to? Is she a true believer, or is it a ploy to get closer to the Portuguese missionaries?

Matters of faith fascinate me, and it’s a shame we learn relatively little about what the gospels mean to her, especially when contrasted with her Death Seeker mentality and her desire to commit seppuku.

Throughout it all, Anna Sawai’s performance is captivating, in which so much is conveyed through her eyes: longing, anger, regret, sadness. Her expression remains impassive, but her eyes are windows to the soul. Heck, this story could have been vastly improved by cutting Blackthorne entirely and making her the protagonist, giving the show more time to explore the fascinatingly contradictory parts of herself.

SPOILERS

I had decided to make Mariko the subject of this particular entry a while ago, and at the time was not aware of how her story ended. In the most recent episode I’ve seen, she perished in an attack designed to undermine Toranaga, by deliberately positioning herself against a door that is about to be blown up by explosives.

I’m not entirely sure how any of this plays out in either the book or the original miniseries, but the show takes measures to avoid the usual fridging clichés. Here Mariko takes the opportunity to go out on her own terms: to fulfil her lord’s mission, to try and shield the other women in the storeroom, and to protest what’s being done to her.

It is about her duty, her tragedy, her sacrifice – what it means to her and why she does it.

Reading/Watching Log #104

What do you do when you run out of Robin Hood related material? You watch Ivanhoe!

Having read Walter Scott’s famous novel last month, I was enthusiastic about tracking down the three most popular film and television adaptations (released in 1952, 1982 and 1997 respectively) especially regarding each one’s portrayal of Rebecca and Rowena, who are going to be the subject of a forthcoming post.

It also being a story that heavily features Robin Hood, I made the time to watch several old-timey Robin Hood films that have been lurking on my hard-drive for a while now – most of them downloaded from YouTube and therefore very low on quality. Though oftentimes, that’s what makes them so entertaining.

All this was perfectly timed with me finishing up The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955 – 1959) which I must have started sometime last year, as well as my concurrent rewatch of the BBC’s Robin Hood with a friend. We’ve just started the trainwreck that is series three, and at some point I WILL finish that retrospective on the show in its entirety. A lot of it has been written already, the problem is it’s not even remotely coherent at this stage.

Reading-wise, I ended up churning through many of the Apple paperbacks I read as a kid, simply because I felt like a trip down memory lane. However, many of them ended up being supplementary books to the overarching series, and therefore the ones that I missed while growing up: tie-in novels to stuff like K.A. Applecraft’s Animorphs, John Peel’s Diadem, Caroline Lawrence’s The Roman Mysteries, the Spirit Animals saga (though those latter two came a little later in life) and of course, my two usual Babysitter Club books. I’ll read some proper literature soon, I promise. Maybe.

And I played King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder over the long weekend, so there’ll be a writeup on that in the near future. It’s so good in some respects, and yet so terrible in others.

Xena Warrior Princess: The Play's The Thing, The Convert, Takes One to Know One

We’re back from India and into an uneven mix of two comedy episodes and single a dramatic one that features Najara’s return and Joxer coping with killing someone for the first time. It kind of reminds me of his introductory episode, which was also about Callisto’s big debut – remember how crazy that was? In this case, it’s Najara who gets the short end of the stick, making her the biggest case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character of the show in its entirety.

In the season of diminishing returns, the treatment of her character is a huge disappointment. It will not be the last.

Woman of the Month: Princess Rosella

Princess Rosella from King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
 and King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride

Behold: the pixelated visage of the first playable female protagonist in a computer adventure game. I’m cautious not to say the first playable female protagonist in a computer game ever, since that honour goes to Mother Kangaroo in the Atari game Kangaroo, or perhaps Billie Sue in Wabbit, both of which were released in 1982.

But they were considered arcade games, not adventure games with structured stories and developed characters. With those criteria in place, Rosella was undoubtedly first when she appeared in King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella in 1988.

Yet even this wasn’t her first appearance; that took place back in 1986, at the end of King’s Quest III: To Heir of Human. It was not an auspicious start, as she was presented a standard Damsel in Distress who had been offered up as sacrifice to a three-headed dragon, saved at the last minute by her long-lost twin brother Alexander, who – as the textboxes are at pains to tell us – finds her super-hot.

But within hours of this ordeal, Rosella gets the chance to take an adventure of her own. Delighted at her safe return, her father King Graham decides to pass on his trademark adventurer’s cap to his children, only to keel over with a heart attack before it reaches their outstretched hands. Seizing the opportunity to be magically transported to a faraway land where grows a rare fruit that could cure him, Rosella is given twenty-four hours to save her father’s life and rescue the land of Tamir from an evil fairy.

Rosella only cameos in the next two games, not appearing until each one’s conclusion, but in King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, she once against takes centre-stage. Here she’s reintroduced as a Rebellious Princess who chafes against the restrictions of her royal standing, instead longing for excitement and adventure. She even gets an “I Want” Song in which she conveys her disgust at the idea of marriage. So like Alice down the rabbit hole, she barely hesitates before leaping into a magical portal that opens before her during a walk in the forest, though which she can glimpse a castle in the clouds...

Eight years after the release of her first adventure, the graphics and sound engines had improved exponentially, granting Rosella a level of characterization (largely due to the voice-acting and animation) that could only be hinted at earlier – though in saying that, it’s amazing how much personality a collection of pixels was able to convey in The Perils of Rosella. But The Princeless Bride depicts her as something of a Disney Princess: brave, kind, impulsive, curious, stubborn...

There is a perfect blend of femininity and gender neutrality at work within Rosella’s story: on the one hand, she’s clearly a Proper Young Lady, who kisses frog princes, befriends the seven dwarfs, rides a unicorn, and visits the island of a fairy queen, but also someone who gets swallowed by a whale, steals the hen that lays golden eggs, finds Pandora’s Box, and goes graverobbing in the dead of night in a zombie-infested cemetery.

It’s difficult to understate the importance of her existence, or the impact she had on me as a child – namely, that I took it as a given that girls could have their own virtual adventures. It seems odd that things have gotten both better and worse since then, for as creator/designed Roberta Williams said in an interview: “I knew the female lead is just fine for women and girls who play the game, but wasn’t sure how it would go over with some of the men. And you know what? It wasn’t as controversial as I expected.”

If only that were still true today!