Legend of Korra: Final thoughts

Part way through season three I made a few observations about Legend of Korra and its approach to thefantasy genre, and now it has come to an end I think there are a few things that can be added to my earlier post.

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in here, so don't read this if you get upset by that sort of thing.

Firstly, my ambivalence regarding the superficiality of its facade of Asianness remains. The conclusion of Legend of Korra, where it wraps up and clarifies its ideological universe shows that the framework of values in which it operates is a fundamentally American one. That aside, the way it unfolds over the course of the four seasons and how they all fit together is nonetheless an interesting one and really quite good.

Accepting that the unspoken assumption of the show is that pursuing any kind of belief to its extremes is dangerous (probably true, but not very exciting), the way it plays out that drama through its often selfish, self-obsessed, occasionally oafishly unaware, but nonetheless fiery and courageous heroine comes together very satisfyingly. Korra's supposed teacher Tenzin is himself flawed, myopic, conservative, and often preoccupied with his own problems and interests, and in fact it is her opponents who take the form of a series of dark mentors.

While the original The Last Airbender series themed each season around one of the elements, Korra takes more abstract themes. The theme running through season one is the conflict between equality and privilege; a political reading of season two could interpret it as dealing in an abstract way with secularism and religious extremism, and/or on a more spiritual level as the disconnection between the physical and spiritual worlds; season three explicitly deals with anarchism versus an entrenched and corrupt monarchy; while season four places a rise of nationalistic fascism in the power vacuum. Korra's education is carried out through a series of traumatic apprenticeships to these teachers, with Amon and Hiroshi representing an extreme extension of equality, Unalaq spirituality, Zaheer freedom, and Kuvira order.

This doesn't completely overcome the limitations of the show's adherence to a fairly conventional liberal American worldview. However, where the show is interesting is that in a way all of these villains are right, and through learning from them and adopting the changes they represent, Korra proves herself a good student even where the teachers are “bad”. Another strength of the show is how, with the exception of the two-dimensional Unalaq, the villains all retain some of our sympathies (Henry Rollins' Zaheer especially – who wouldn't love that guy?)

While in the world itself it is the problems Legend of Korra raises rather than its solutions that are the most interesting, really it's within the character of Korra herself that the show makes all this work in the end, and how the scars of each of these encounters visibly carry over from one season to another. Korra doesn't allow us to celebrate the defeats of these villains; she doesn't allow us to feel that “our” side somehow won; she internalises every struggle and by the end of the series she looks exhausted.

Much of this also has to do with the bitterly personal nature of her final struggle with Kuvira. While fans may have gone giddy with delight at all the Evangelion and Akira references that accompanied the end of the series, it was the way the personal stories were resolved that was Legend of Korra's greatest triumph. Kuvira, Korra's final opponent, is constantly depicted, sometimes more explicitly than others, as a mirror for herself: another young woman struggling against the chaos of a world that never seems to straighten up and fly right.

The show handles romance with a refreshingly unsentimental disinterest. Bataar's love for Kuvira crashes against the rocks quite movingly. Given a choice between her lover and her ambitions, the momentary and seemingly genuine pain that crosses Kuvira's face makes the ruthlessness and lack of hesitation in her choice all the more chilling – she is not an unfeeling two-dimensional monster: she is a fully realised human who can both experience and overcome pain. Leavening this is the way Zhu Li's rather touching devotion gradually wears down Varrick, which while played mostly for laughs, nevertheless depicts love as a struggle that often seems barely worth the meagre reward.

The strongest bonds the show depicts tend not to be romantic though. Utterly crushed and broken by Kuvira's choice, Bataar finds himself in the dubious comfort of his dysfunctional family with a long, hard road of fence-mending ahead of him but at least with an unconditional love at its core. The most open and unambiguous declaration of love is expressed between brothers Bolin and Mako as the latter prepares to do something suitably suicidal and heroic.

The love triangle set up in season one between Korra, Mako and Asami resolves itself far more ambiguously. The fumbling teenage angst between these three had gradually dissipated as the series went on and escalating catastrophes of global significance made their petty jealousies seem pretty inconsequential. In a sequence partly mirroring the end of Return of the Jedi, Korra drifts away from the victory celebrations and is approached by Mako who declares he will always “have her back”, implicitly confirming them as friends and comrades rather than lovers. Korra then encounters Asami, and a seemingly more minor interaction between them from earlier in the series takes on greater significance when Korra apologises for the pain she caused Asami by her disappearance. This bursting to the surface of a largely suppressed source of pain between the two reveals a depth of feeling between them that hadn't been overt before and they end the series by going off together.

I haven't been following other online discussions of the series, and I've read nothing about the series ending, but I can imagine that it raised eyebrows and caused some debate. I think it's important and again to the show's credit that it doesn't outright say anything about Korra and Asami's relationship here, letting the viewers draw their own conclusions. Based on the way other relationships are treated, it seems clear to me that the writers of Legend of Korra believe the depth and devotion of one's love is more important than its nature, romantic or otherwise, and it's easy to read Korra and Asami as a reflection of that: friends and family are the strongest bonds, and those are the bonds that are most poignantly reinforced by the final episode.

However, the visual depiction of this final moment is nonetheless unambiguously romantic, with the pair's physical proximity and body language shimmering with sexual tension as they walk off into the light of the spirit world. This is the cinematic language of two people who are going to fuck each other senseless the moment the scene fades. The show is obviously nodding to the possibility of a romance, while at the same time holding back from saying so outright, I think not so much out of coyness (there's really no ambiguity about the visual language employed) as out of the show's refusal to hold up romantic relationships of any kind as the most important thing – the depth and strength of Korra and Asami's bond is what it wants to emphasise first and foremost, rather than the nature of their sexuality.

This again comes back to the question of values and the conversation that Legend of Korra is having with itself. It's a broadly American debate, touching on many of the big political struggles the country has found itself embroiled in over the past hundred years or so, and which still inform the national debate. Even the show's attitude towards love is an American conversation, as the country gradually awakens from Disney's spell – in fact there are clear parallels between Legend of Korra and Disney's own Frozen in the way they de-sentimentalise romance and place it back into a broader context of what love means – and begins to come to terms with same-sex relationships.

That's not to say that these aren't a valuable conversation to be having, and Legend of Korra, despite its “yellow-wash” over what are essentially American concerns, explores the issues raised within its moral universe with depth, sensitivity, and a generally open mind. Perhaps as time goes by, these contemporary concerns will age the show in ways that aren't flattering, but I'm still pretty much convinced that it will be remembered as one of the greatest children's TV shows ever made, and mostly deservedly so. As a vision of another world, it is only a very qualified success, but as an exploration of an important corner of the one we're actually in, it's an unqualified triumph.

Legend of Korra: the perils of making fantasy "relatable"

There are a lot of reasons to really love Legend of Korra. Compared to the anime it takes so much of its inspiration from, its fight sequences are really nicely handled, with a balletic wuxia film style that few Japanese anime have ever even attempted to match. Its avoidance of moé character tropes in favour of a female lead who is strong, muscular, independent and beautiful, with a female supporting cast who are all treated as human beings rather than doll-like objects of male fantasy, is also a refreshing change after a lot of time spent in the otaku hell of most anime of the past 10-15 (20?) years. Legend of Korra, like Avatar: The Last Airbender before it, is also refreshing compared to a lot of American TV for its basis in non-European culture and ethnicity.

And yet is it really?

There are a lot of visual signifiers of Asian culture, and the show obviously has a lot of fun with them in its pagoda skyscrapers and junk battleships, but in those things what we're really seeing is the familiar trappings of Western (in this case American) civilisation done up in the exotic embroidery of the Orient. Where it comes across most strikingly, however, is in the characters themselves. Yes, Korra, Mako, Bolin etc. appear Asian, but they speak and behave just like contemporary American teenagers.

The world of Legend of Korra also adheres to a very American sense of history's march. There are monarchies and empires, but the show expects us to understand that a presidential republican democracy in the American model is the only natural and just progression. Other models of governance exist to be taught that they are wrong.

Even the problems with democracy reflect the common straw-man complaints Americans have of the system in that it is sometimes subject to the capricious whims of the crowd – in essence that democracy is too responsive to the wishes of its people, a bit like going into a job interview and saying, “My main fault is that I sometimes work too hard.”

Now I'm being a bit unfair here, I know. That the show even deals with the issues of governance and flaws in democracy at all is a sign of its thoughtfulness, and it's ridiculous to expect a kids' show to suddenly turn into The Thick of It or Veep, but it's worth recognising just how limited a range of views it expects from its viewers. At heart, Legend of Korra isn't really doing much more than reflecting back at its audience the core values their own society professes.

Of course given my earlier comments on Legend of Korra's representation of women, in a way I'm praising it out of one corner of my mouth and criticising its broadly American political ideology out of the other, despite both being reflections of the same thing: the show's adherence to Western, broadly liberal values. Look at international gender equality rankings and China's lingering ideological remnants of Communist equality mean that it tends to do OK (but not brilliantly), while patriarchal capitalist oligarchies like Korea and Japan prop up the bottom of the table alongside places like Qatar and Kuwait. Would we really want a kids' show that accurately reflected the gender inequality that's rife in so much of Asia?

I think there are two points here. Firstly, that such social constructs needn't be a barrier to creating strong, believable characters. Characters can live in a very conservative society and by good writing that shows them as rounded human beings in their interactions with those rules, we can still sympathise with them and root for them. The problem is when we simply assume a set of values in our viewers and lazily broadcast those values back at them.

Inherent in this is the misconceived idea that in making narrative art, it should always be “relatable”. Why should we as the audience expect to be able to relate everything back to our own lives? The human capacity for empathy and imagination is an incredibly powerful tool that allows us to step into the shoes of people with quite different lives to us and understand them and their struggles. This is also an idea at the core of the fantasy genre, which exists to do precisely that. Legend of Korra is a fantasy drama and by cleaving so closely to behaviour, language and values familiar to American teens, it fails to credit its audience with the imagination to empathise with anything more than an Orientalised version of themselves.

Once again, Legend of Korra is in the fantasy genre. It doesn't need to painstakingly recreate the Asian cultures that it draws its aesthetic influence from any more than it should be simply recycling contemporary American culture. It has a free rein to pick and mix from all over the place or just simply invent stuff of its own out of the ether. Fantasy can employ satire to reflect back elements of its reader's own culture, but it is never a straight reflection: rather it is a funfair hall-of-mirrors distortion that in its very absurdity shows up the foibles and pretensions of its target.

Yeah, I get it, there are commercial reasons why anything more complex than what it already is would have difficulty getting made, and audiences are trained these days to expect their TV sets to behave like little more than a mirror. Sure. You're right. But on a literary level, what Legend of Korra does is still limited and fails to fulfil the fantasy genre's remit of taking its audience to a truly different place, denying us the joy of exploring a new world with its own rules by simply transplanting our own.

It's still an enjoyable show, and well worth watching. Similarly, Japanese anime is often every bit as ideological in its own, often rather more unpleasant and disturbing way. Just read this as a plaintive, selfish cry from a fan and an admirer for a greater degree of anthropological rigour in my animated TV fantasy drama.

Artists and the machines of death: The Wind Rises (2013) and The First of the Few (1942)

Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises was pitched as the director's final film, and as such has an extra weight of expectation attached to it, as if it should not only match up to the rest of his celebrated oeuvre, but also somehow act as a coda, a definitive statement, a portrait of the man as an artist. It tells the heavily fictionalised tale of Japanese aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi, creator of the legendary Second World War fighter the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero”, and given Miyazaki's love of flying machines of all kinds, it's easy to see it as a metaphor for the man himself.


In watching The Wind Rises, I decided to take it in as a double feature with another film about an aviation designer, the British wartime drama The First of the Few, which told the story of Reginald J Mitchell, the designer of the Supermarine Spitfire. Between the two films, there are a number of interesting points of comparison relating to their portrayals of the engineer as artist, of the creator who makes machines of destruction, and of relationships and obsession.


Both films make it explicit that they regard their protagonists as artists, somehow above mere engineers, and they do this partly through portraying Horikoshi and Mitchell's interests in and appropriation of natural forms. Horikoshi's admiration of the elegant curve of a herring bone that he picks out of his lunch isn't of any real practical use, since the curve of a wing for maximum aerodynamic efficiency is a matter of mathematics, but his appreciation of this natural form tells us that he is not just an engineer: he is a man of inspiration, who searches not just for engineering efficiency but also for elegance.

Similarly, when we first meet Mitchell in The First of the Few, he is birdwatching during a seaside picnic with his wife. The circumstances of both Mitchell's and Horikoshi's moments of inspiration come during moments away from work, but both find their attention drawn from their food and companions by the power of sublime nature. In Mitchell's case, the focal point of his inspiration lies in the simple elegance of the bird's form which he seeks to emulate in contrast to the ungainly network of struts and wires that make up most aircraft of the early 1920s.

One big difference between the films is in the relative weight placed on dreams and reality. Horikoshi is portrayed as a dreamer and The Wind Rises frequently disappears without warning into his (and by extension Miyazaki's) fantasies. The First of the Few, however, explicitly anchors itself in reality. This contrast is exemplified by the opening scenes of the respective films.

The Wind Rises opens with a dream of the young Horikoshi taking to the skies in a homemade flyer, soaring over the peaceful countryside of early Taisho period Japan, only for the peace and purity of his airborne antics to be shattered by the arrival of a vast, German airship (Japan was Britain's ally during the First World War and fought against Germany, although this also foreshadows other aspects of the film) and a fleet of idiosyncratic flying bombs.

The First of the Few, on the other hand, rubs your face in reality. It begins right in the thick of The Battle of Britain, with newsreel footage of German conquests, genuine footage of German bomber squadrons over southeast England, and the words of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Lord Haw Haw and Churchill. The acting of the extras who trade quips and banter between sorties may seem unnaturally awkward and stilted, but that's largely because many of them were genuine RAF pilots who had been drafted into the film for propaganda purposes.

And that's a core difference between the films. Made in 1942, right in the middle of the war, The First of the Few is essentially a propaganda film, while The Wind Rises is divorced from the most immediate implications of the war by nearly seventy years. The Wind Rises has an ambiguous relationship with the war, reflecting the work of a director who hates war but loves its machinery, and Miyazaki feeds that attitude into his central character. Horikoshi experiences the destruction of Tokyo firsthand near the beginning of the film, as the Great Kanto Earthquake hits in a terrifying scene just as his train is approaching Tokyo, and this is a clear foreshadowing of the destruction from the air that is to be visited upon Tokyo from the kind of machines he is set on creating. Later on, Horikoshi's befriends German dissident Castorp, who warns him of the destructive path Germany and Japan have set themselves on, and Horikoshi must wrestle with his love for his art and the knowledge of the ends to which his work is being put. He does this primarily by doubling down on his work, immersing himself in it to such an extent that he doesn't even think about the war. Basically, he decides that art supersedes all other concerns.

The First of the Few is, in a way, by its very nature far more honest and direct in how it confronts the issue of war, but it deals with the same conflict between art and the destructive purposes to which this particular art is put. Rather than have Mitchell wrestle with it as a moral dilemma, however, the film is divided into two parts, each reflecting a different side of aviation technology. The first part deals with the Schneider Trophy and how Mitchell's Supermarine S5 and S6 designs first won and then permanently retained the trophy. The romance of the high speed air race is something Miyazaki had touched upon previously in Porco Rosso, which references the Schneider Trophy and in the name of American pilot Donald Curtis references the same Curtiss R3C biplane that is shown in The First of the Few beating Mitchell's prototype Supermarine S4 to the 1925 trophy. The second part of the film kicks off with Mitchell's visit to Germany to see one of Hitler's glider clubs. His awe at the purity of the German gliders, so close to his own vision of birdlike simplicity, soon gives way to the realisation of the Nazis' ambitions for their own military airforce, and like any true patriot, he is from then on fully invested in making machines of war.

Part of this reflects the circumstances and timing of each film's creation, but it also reflects the contrasting natures of each country's involvement in the war. Britain could easily justify its military air programme as the island itself was under immediate threat. The Spitfire was a short range, land-based interceptor, designed to shoot down enemy bombers attacking the homeland and their escorts. The Zero, on the other hand, was a carrier-based fighter, whose role included escorting bombers and projecting Japanese power far overseas, while Japan's own role in the war was offensive before any need for defence of the homeland came into play. Miyazaki acknowledges this when Horikoshi is inspecting a new bomber aircraft built by his friend Kiro Honjo and asks who it's going to be used on. Honjo rattles off a list of countries including America, China, Britain and the Netherlands that makes it abundantly clear that Japan's intentions lie in expansion. The differing circumstances are also reflected in the differing attitudes of the respective establishments to money. While Horikoshi's Japan labours in poverty during the Depression, the expansionist government pours money into the aviation industry; meanwhile Mitchell's Britain, still war-weary after the trials of 1914-18, is unwilling to fund new aircraft development during such straitened times.

It is interesting that in both films a trip by the protagonist to Germany proves an important turning point for the characters. For Mitchell, his it is what resolves him to invest himself fully into making machines of war. True to the film's propaganda origins, the Germans are portrayed as arrogant and megalomaniacal, making use of all the contemporary stereotypes that still to some degree form the core of British prejudices towards our Teutonic cousins. Significantly, the practical, unsentimental Germans also gently mock Mitchell's romantic notions of the poetry of flight as being essentially British sentimentality. In The Wind Rises, Horikoshi and Honjo's visit to the Junkers production facility in Dessau demonstrates the junior status the Germans consider Japan to hold in their partnership, and the two Japanese engineers are constantly being barred from inspection of certain pieces of technology. The only place where The Wind Rises could be called explicitly patriotic is where Horikoshi and Honjo are forced to assert themselves against the arrogant Germans, again reinforcing the film's conflicted attitude towards its protagonist's work and what it represented.

Another interesting moment from the scene at the Junkers yard comes when Horikoshi is involved in a fracas with a German guard over his wishes to more closely inspect one of the new all-metal aircraft. In that moment, the elderly Hugo Junkers himself intervenes on Horikoshi's side. This moment of solidarity from a fellow artist is given greater significance later on, when Castorp reveals that Junkers is not on good terms with the Nazis (he was a socialist and a pacifist who hated the Nazis and ended his days under house arrest). A much bigger relationship with a fellow aircraft designer is the friendship that Horikoshi strikes up in his dreams with Giovanni Battista Caproni. Caproni was prone to plenty of errors and failed experiments himself, and his bizarre Ca.60 Noviplano makes a brief appearance in one of the dream sequences, wobbling and warping as it flies. Caproni takes on the role of a sort of spirit guide, representing unfettered creativity, the dream of aviation as a peaceful technology, as well as the compromises an artist must make to pursue his dreams.

In The First of the Few, there is no fellow designer or engineer with a comparably large role, but again during the visit to Germany, Mitchell encounters one of his opposite numbers in the form of Willy Messerschmitt, designer of the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the plane which would be the Spitfire's primary opponent during the Battle of Britain. Mitchell and Messerschmitt's encounter is terse and brief, but lasts long enough to give the enduring impression of two opponents sizing each other up in advance of a fight. Other than that moment, Mitchell's only encounters with his contemporaries are in his encounters with the likes of Robert McLean and Henry Royce, both of whom are allies, who assist Mitchell in creating his masterwork.

Mitchell's primary confidant is his test pilot, the debonair ladies' man Geoffrey Crisp, whose role can perhaps best be explained by the need for a sizeable role for the eminently bankable David Niven. Nevertheless, Mitchell's wife Diana also plays a key role in supporting her husbands dreams while at the same time keeping him grounded. Diana is portrayed as an archetypal domestic goddess and dutiful wife, willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her husband's dreams. In one poignant moment, as she begs her sick husband to stop his work and go away with her, he confronts her directly with the idea that the looming war and the work he is doing is “more important than us”.

While Mitchell and Diana are presented from the start as a fully-formed couple, Horikoshi's relationship with Naoko is shown from their first awkward meetings, gradually blossoming through their courtship at a rural holiday retreat, and their eventual marriage. Like Diana, Naoko is self-sacrificing to a fault, eventually leaving for the mountains to avoid distracting Horikoshi from his work.

Both films follow the traditional pattern of studies in artistic obsession by interweaving the artist's passion for his work with the notion of death. The sacrifices the women make for their men are also harbingers of death, symbolising the victory of art and its eternal legacy over life in the present and now. In Naoko's case it is her own death from tuberculosis, while in Diana's case, it is resigning herself to Mitchell's own self-destruction via an unnamed disease (the real RJ Mitchell died of cancer, although for dramatic reasons this is not stated in the film, in order to keep the possibility of his recovery open).

Also, in both films this relationship between obsession and death takes on a mystical significance. In The Wind Rises, the wind itself takes on a metaphorical role, with Horikoshi and Naoko's meetings always accompanied by strong gusts of wind. It is the appearance of one of these gusts as he watches the successful test flight of his new plane that tells Horikoshi that Naoko has died. In The First of the Few, it is Diana who is present to see the Spitfire's test flight while the now very unwell Mitchell watches it fly over him in his garden. After the flight, Diana returns with the news and leaves him to rest in the garden, surrounded (perhaps significantly) by birdsong, and as she enters the house, she is struck by a similar psychic realisation of a life passing from this world.

These mystically-inflected moments of death link back to the mystical nature of the inspiration that Horikoshi and Mitchell themselves are portrayed as having discovered at the start of their stories. Just as the word inspire, to breathe in, can also mean breathing in the life of creativity, so its opposite, expire, can also mean death. In each case, a life must be traded for the creation of a work of art.

While The Wind Rises is an antiwar film that appears conflicted in its love for its subject matter, The First of the Few has no time for pacifism and is unambiguous about the necessity of war. Still, both films make a point of contrasting their artist-heroes with the warmongering Nazis, in the British film's case quite explicitly, while in the Japanese film's case more subtly, using Horikoshi's encounter with the Germans to define Japanese national pride against an enemy everyone can agree on. It's tempting to see this as an adoption by Miyazaki of the postwar Allied consensus of who World War II's goodies and baddies were, but it also serves to draw attention to the confused and troubled nature of Japan's involvement in the war, as a partner to a regime that saw Asians as inherently racially inferior. While The First of the Few is a propaganda film and The Wind Rises is essentially a personal work that could be seen in some ways as a partially cloaked autobiography by Miyazaki, they both follow certain generic patterns of the obsessive artist subgenre, and both are films about men who sacrifice their marriages, albeit ultimately with their women's active consent and support, in their obsessive pursuit of creating machines of destruction. In the end, Mitchell sacrifices his life with Diana for the Greater National Good, while Horikoshi sacrifices his life with Naoko for something far more abstract and intangible. Miyazaki attempts in the final scenes to show some sort of cosmic balance between the horror of the war's destruction and the beauty of the planes that Horikoshi built. The First of the Few ends where it began, in the midst of the war with the RAF pilots fighting for their lives in Mitchell's planes.

My troubled relationship with Joss Whedon

I have a problem with Joss Whedon.

I find his work pretty much universally enjoyable, ranging from at worst (early episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) acceptable timewasting visual chewing gum to at best (Firefly, the whimsical and experimental bits of Buffy The Vampire Slayer) genuinely impressive, eye-opening television, but there's always something nagging at me.

I think part of it is simply that he's so established and has such a large body of work that his interests and habits now show up too easily. Characters behave in the ways they do because they are Joss Whedon characters, not because they are themselves. In that sense, Whedon -- like other writers with easily recognisable sets of tropes and concerns, for example Haruki Murakami to name but one) is a victim of his own success.

Another part of it is his insistence on working with a big network like Fox, where every idea he has must live or die on its ability to capture a sizeable mainstream audience. It was this environment that guaranteed Dollhouse would fail before it had even begun. The idea was just too weird, and Whedon's attempts to appease the network feel like they hobbled the show and prevented it from doing justice to its own concept.

Whedon's treatment of female characters is one of the most talked-about features of his work. A lot of this comes from a feminist perspective and rightly so, but it's also clear that Whedon is not a feminist in the full-on theoretical/ideological/political sense of the word. Whedon's feminism comes across as more like the video gamer who prefers to play Mass Effect as the female Shepherd, or the anime fan who got a kick out of the way Priss could casually blow off the advances of Leon McNichol before crushing the skulls of some rogue boomers in Bubblegum Crisis. Joss Whedon's feminism feels like that of a nerd who finds it easier to identify with female comicbook characters than the butch masculinity of male heroic archetypes. A lot of other fans, both male and female, feel as he does, and the way he recognised that and persuaded the network to take a chance on it with Buffy shouldn't be underestimated.

Watching Joss Whedon's shows from a feminist perspective can sometimes make uncomfortable viewing though, both for good reasons and bad. His women get brutally beaten about, often by men much larger and more physically threatening than they are. His shows invite us to be entertained by this, and that should make anyone pause for a moment. In any real life situation, that man punching that woman in the face that hard, would be an act of sickening violence and the reinforcement of a deeply troubling power dynamic. In the context of Buffy, Dollhouse or S.H.I.E.L.D., however, the point we need to take away from it is that in the world he is showing us, where women have the power to take on men in their own traditionally action and violence-orientated roles, the flipside of that is women must take as well as dish out the beatings. Every time you see Buffy, Echo or Agent May (or indeed Black Widow as written by Whedon in Avengers) take a boot in the gut or a fist in the side of the head, and every time they shake it off and come back with a leg sweep and a spin-kick of their own, they are asserting their equality with, and as heroes this really means superiority to, their male counterparts. This isn't the kind of feminism many people want, and certainly not a sort of feminism that has a great deal of relevance in most people's daily lives, but in the limited milieu of Joss Whedon's comicbook-inspired action universe, it's at least consistent. It's an environment where the highest virtue is badassery, and the women are the baddest-ass there is.

The way Whedon treats sex is one that seems to have evolved, and he seems to have taken onboard criticisms that emerged in response to Buffy. He admitted himself that Willow's coming out as a lesbian proved so popular a move that there was no way he and his team would have been able to have her just announce, "Hey guys, I'm cured!" It's very easy for writers to say that values, ideology and "political correctness" shouldn't be allowed to impinge on narrative, but what political correctness really means in its best sense is to question why you are choosing to say one thing rather than another. Often, ostensibly positive portrayals of homosexual characters in dramas still resolve themselves along the arc of a tragedy, and that's what Whedon did to much criticism with the Willow-Tara storyline. Sensitive as the portrayal was, Tara was still "punished" for being a lesbian. Whedon obviously didn't intend it to play out like that -- he was just playing the standard comicbook card of killing off the love interest of a central character to give a narrative boost to the story -- but the rarity of lesbian characters on TV gave extra significance to Tara's role, and her demise was consequently freighted with far more significance than Whedon had intended. He seemed to recognise this as a mistake and took measures to make it good later.

Another criticism of Buffy was the way that the sexual agency of female characters often seems to be punished with tragedy. Buffy having sex with Angel in the second season precipitates a string of tragedies, and throughout the show, sex is shown to be a perilous adventure for girls. Again, it's doubtful Whedon had any particular anti-feminist agenda here. Buffy was a show as much about being a teenager as it was about monsters and demons, and the mystical significance sex takes on is a metaphor Whedon uses for the fear and confusion surrounding sex when you are a teenager. He also perhaps less consciously locks into a tradition of vampire stories as religious metaphors that paint sex as explicitly sinful. I don't think he really intends this to be the primary message, and the way the religious aspects of the story are treated elsewhere reinforces my belief -- the cross has no particular significance beyond its power as an anti-vampire superweapon, and holy water is bottled and branded like it was Perrier or something -- but it's a tradition that Buffy nonetheless falls into at points. Anya/Anyanka partly rectifies this by being a female character with a strong sense of sexual agency, although she is denied a happy ending. Faith is a more complex proposition, who goes through plenty of her own ups and downs over the course of the series. More significantly, as time has gone by, characters such as Zoe and Inara in Firefly, and May in S.H.I.E.L.D. have presented women who, whatever else we might say about their characterisation, are completely in control of their own sexuality.

What Whedon is very good at doing is anticipating a cliché, leading the audience down the road towards it, and then diverting it at the last minute. You can see this in the Firefly episode The Train Job where Mal leads the audience along the traditional track of the merciful hero before kicking Russian gangster Niska's man-skinning henchman Crow (a reference to Murakami's The Windup Bird Chronicle there?) into Firefly's engine intake. It's a surprise and by showing both that Whedon is aware of the trope and willing to subvert it, he winks to the audience that he's on their side. It also allows him to get away with letting Mal act as the traditional merciful hero for most of the rest of the series simply by showing us that he's willing to break with the trope once on a relatively minor character. Another example is in Avengers where Black Widow's interrogation of Loki follows the path of the hero whose personal demons are easily exploited by an unscrupulous villain before turning the tables and revealing that she was manipulating him (as had been foreshadowed in her first appearance in the film). And by nodding to and then subverting this cliché, it again allows Whedon to then go ahead and have Loki's plan work out more or less flawlessly anyway.

And this is perhaps one of Whedon's problems, and one that relates back to his position working in network TV and Hollywood rather than blue-chip grownup channels like HBO: for all his awareness of conventions and clichés, he still remains tied to them. Many of the things that made Buffy seem so ahead of its time were tricks that disguised an essentially fairly conventionally structured teen drama, albeit one characterised by some incredibly good writing in places, apt to fly off in all sorts of exciting diversions in form, and comparatively bloodthirsty in its attitude to killing off main characters. In S.H.I.E.L.D. those same habits are at play and seem far more dated.

The way Whedon characters often suddenly and unexpectedly reverse their personalities for the sake of a surprising twist (Boyd in Dollhouse was one of the silliest examples of this, which is ironic in a show that's almost entirely about people's personalities being changed and edited) reveals a writer who sometimes puts keeping one step ahead of the fans before narrative consistency and plausibility. Whedon also has a compulsive need to explain everything, where leaving it unexplained might make for a more satisfying experience. The way the film Serenity wrapped up the mystery of the reavers was anticlimactic, and the awakening of River as a ninja ass-kicking superweapon made her less interesting as a character than when she was this unexplained, potentially perilous enigma. These little writerly habits nag at me.

But at the same time, watching a Joss Whedon show satisfies me in a way few other things do. There's an easygoing drive to the storytelling, and the way he delights in showing you the nuts and bolts of the narrative, while often making him like he's being a bit cleverer than he really is, lends a reassuring air that he's fighting the same fight as us fellow nerds. More importantly perhaps, there's an air of attainability in what he writes. Read Thomas Pynchon or watch The Wire and you're just constantly being blown away by how rich, layered, intelligent and downright brilliant the work is. Watch a Joss Whedon show and you think, "This is good, but it's also within reach: I could do this!" This might sound like rather faint praise, but in a way, it's still further testament to Whedon's ability to show his fans a vaseline-lensed, rose-tinted vision of themselves, not in the characters and situations but in the behind-the-scenes machinery that creates and controls them.

Suzumiya Haruhi: The Case for the Defence

A harsh and well-aimed salvo from the ever-enjoyable Colony Drop at the moment which puts me in the hateful position of being by default on the same side of the argument as hordes of people for whom I feel nothing but disdain and a smidgen of pity.

Summary of Colony Drop's position: Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu is shit.

Transcription of first comment beneath the original article: your a faget

Summary my feelings about typical Haruhi fans: Sigh.

My defence of Haruhi rests largely on four main pillars. Firstly, it is a postmodernist's paradise, not just for the wealth of references to other anime (Lucky Star has more and is a worse show), but also the way it uses genre cliches not as lazy "look at this, this often happens, now laugh" crimes of self-referentiality, but as metaphors that draw analogues between oft-repeated one-dimensional pop cultural tropes and the lives of the real people that were born out of the same culture.

Secondly and relatedly, as I have talked about at length before, it is a show with big themes that takes a sharp look at genuine contemporary sociological issues in Japan and other post-industrial societies. Yes, the members of the SOS-dan are stereotypes taken straight from Azuma Hiroki's database, but Haruhi is a distorted caricature that contains something real at her core. Similarly Kyon is an audience surrogate but he succeeds as an audience surrogate by actually being a character that not only articulates the superficial characteristics of his target audience, but also embodies their deeper concerns. Modern Japanese and other citizens of other post-industrial transnationalopolises emerge from childhood and face an adult world filled with employment practices that are either hangovers from previous generations (Japan's postwar work-all-the-hours-God-gives-and-never-change-careers lifetime formula) or dehumanised neo-liberal dystopias (free contracts with no benefits and you're fired at the first hint of economic bad times). There is a massive segment of society that is overeducated and immediately disenfranchised, and it clings to its memories of childhood as a response to its missing place in adult society, whilst at the same time being too clever and aware to be able to accept those memories on their own terms anymore. The tension between these two conflicting characteristics is represented by Kyon and Haruhi, and is what makes them real as characters, as well as what gives the show it's zeitgeist punch. Haruhi and Kyon are the only characters in the show that matter, because they alone embody the show's central dilemmas -- the intertwining strands that link childhood and adulthood, the known and unknown, the expected and the desired. One can find them irritating as characters and I can't help that, but in the context of the series, their motivations come across to me as as sincere and so I can be carried along by them.

The third pillar is Haruhi's mastery of structure, particularly in how it plays the plant and the payoff. The initial out of sequence broadcast was very carefully designed to drop hints in earlier episodes of things that wouldn't be explained until later ones -- the appearance of a pile of unused laptops in one episode, with the story of how they were acquired only appearing later, for example. The new series adds to this by each new episode coming in at a particular point within the chronology of the original series and illuminating details that had previously been left hanging such as the reason why Haruhi seemed to recognise Kyon on their first meeting. In addition, the show's non-sequential broadcast emphasises its own postmodern aspects. By cutting up the plot it shrugs its shoulders dismissively at the aspects of the show that are most open to criticism and by focussing on the key points in the relationship between Haruhi and Kyon, it nods its head towards the emotional meta-narrative that is the true heart of the drama.

The fourth pillar of my support for Haruhi is a little more (subtle pun alert) vaguely defined. In some ways it is just one of a number of cartoons that have appeared over the last dozen years or so that demonstrates the emergence in the world of anime of something resembling the Nouvelle Vague/New Wave movement in French cinema of the 1960s.

Like Haruhi, the classic French New Wave film takes delight in intellectualising trashy pop culture. In fact the origin of the Nouvelle Vague was the critics' journal Cahiers du Cinema, which was precisely that: a magazine where geeks over-analysed trashy Hollywood movies and took huge amounts of delight in aspects of the filmmaker's craft that the creators of those films themselves had likely never even considered. As a result, even when the Cahiers writers were directing films that played on traditional Hollywood themes, they were never simply repeating or pandering to Hollywood tastes, because firstly they were creating from the perspective of fans, which puts a layer between them and their source to begin with, and secondly they were creating from the perspective of critics, which meant that their own work could never take its source at face value.

The end result is a lot of clever-cleverness, which is undoubtedly a question of tolerance. A lot of people find Godard and early Truffaut unbearable because of the insufferable self-referentiality of their films, but they nevertheless represent something important in French cinema of the 1960s. Their fans would argue that rather than being a cold, introverted gang giggle, the self-referentiality is part of an exhuberant expression of their own generation, where the process of filmmaking and the romance of cinema's inherent deception is celebrated. The hero of French New Wave was often a faintly detached, bohemian, 1960s everyman who was dragged, half-interested, through a cinematic looking glass and then dumped at the end of it with a nonchalant Gallic shrug. Like Kyon, he was an audience surrogate (or at least a surrogate for what the audience wanted to be), but like Kyon he was also something seperate from the genre heroes he sometimes emulated. He could exist within the action whilst simultaneously being aware of the screen that framed him. In order to relate to him then, the audience too has to accept a world that is both within the frame, but also able to view the frame from a third person perspective. In essence, the audience becomes a participant in the events of the film rather than simply a passive viewer.

The most New Wave moment in Haruhi is the episode (Episode 0) that shows the film Haruhi directed for the school festival (Nooooooo! Heavy meta overload!) What it shares with its French cousins is a love bordering on obsession with the minor mechanics of filmmaking. It simultaneously indulges practically every cliche of bad anime and tokusatsu shows, whilst at the same time dissecting, critiquing and satirising them in a way that the Colony Drop writer would perhaps find deeply annoying; however, that argument only works if you take the position that firstly the indulgence trumps the critique, and secondly that these two aspects are the only things going on. The key aspect that makes this episode such a good piece of filmmaking and writing is really the attention to detail in the way it explores the whole filmmaking process through Haruhi's inept production. We don't see her physically on screen but we get to see Haruhi herself as a character by viewing the world through her own camera lens. She is made more human by the way she gets small things wrong like the many continuity errors and the appearance of boom mics in frame, and also by her unthinking adherence to meaningless directorial cliches such as the vertical panning shot at the end of a scene. At the same time she is recognisably herself by the manic and usually unexplained plot shifts that she forces on the viewers. There's something quite Spinal Tap about the way portraying something done badly can illuminate the process by which the good stuff is also created, and there's also a sense of postmodern romance and elation at seeing a character who is so into the process of creation that they don't care or even notice how bad it is. It was the first episode I ever saw of Haruhi and it provided the lens through which I viewed the entire series.

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of French New Wave would necessarily go for Haruhi because their frames of reference are entirely different, but structurally they are doing something similar. Part of what makes Haruhi so easy to hate is that it is wilfully of its own generation, in the process driving a wedge between itself and fans of the previous generation of anime fans (or fans of the previous generation of anime). Nevertheless, shows like the execreble Kannagi also do this, without any of the intelligence and attention to the minor details of plotting and filmmaking that Haruhi does.

Summary of this blog post: Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu is good.

Xam'd: Notes on the Ending

Endings are difficult to write. Just ask Konaka Chiaki, who wrote Shinreigari (Ghost Hound), maintaining a brilliant script that unravelled catastrophically in its superlatively awful final episode. Seriously, ask him: why was that ending so bad, and what are you going to do to avoid similar travesties in the future?

The ending to Bounen no Zamudou (Xam'd: Lost Memories) isn't a travesty, but neither is it a triumph. This post should by no means be taken as an evisceration of what remains an extremely interesting and refreshing piece of work, but there are definite structural problems with its conclusion that are worth analysis.

First, there are niggling problems with the final episode specifically. Kudos to the team for having the balls to kill off Raigyo in an earlier episode, but in a number of other cases, they trivialise death with how easily reversible they allow it to be. Ishuu seemed quite clearly to have died in episode 23, and yet she appears in the final episode with just a sling and a haircut to show for her ordeal. Kakisu was shot in the face at close range and yet in the final episode he is revealed to be merely in some sort of coma. Akiyuki turns into stone after Nakiami descends into the Quickening Chamber, and yet he is able to reappear and reunite with Haru at the end in a dramatically and thematically satisfying, yet logically dubious fashion.

Rather than systematically developing all the various story threads and then tying them back together into a satisfying, unifying conclusion, Xam'd's plot, from about half way through the series, disintegrates into a series of scattershot story ideas and visual concepts that rain down, disconnected, like pieces of torn paper dropped from an open window.

It becomes pretty clear that this is what's happening from a long way before the end so it's difficult to say that the ending itself is disappointing. Flawed it most certainly is, but the sources of the flaws lie further back in the series.

Perhaps the problem with Xam'd is that the creators didn't know what the story was about. At first it is implied that the story is about Akiyuki's attempt to understand the Xam'd that has been implanted in him and help it recover its titular "lost memories", but that quest is never clearly developed and Akiyuki merely drifts from one set of circumstances to another in what are often interesting diversions, but never quite held together with the sense of forward momentum and sense of purpose that a story needs if it is to conclude satisfactorily. The other characters' subplots are similarly vague. Kakisu's role on Sentan Island and the role of Haru's sister, Midori, builds up interestingly, but it flatters to decieve. In the end it is nothing more than incidental to the rest of the story. The crew of the postal ship Zanbani write themselves out of the story half way through and, with the exception of Ishuu and Raigyo, do precious little else. Haru herself merely runs after Akiyuki -- she admits this to herself at one point, and it feels more like a desperate cry from a writer unsure of what to do with this character whose motivation has not been set deep enough; a tacit admission of the staff's own failings rather than the words of the character herself.

An interesting comparison is with Simoun, which is similar to Xam'd in the way the war is used primarily as a setting against which the character drama plays out. In both cases the cause of the war isn't deeply explored, and in both cases, the series ends realistically with the threat of war an ongoing issue. Both shows also feature plots that drift, with the characters pulled hither and thither by forces out of their control.

The key difference is the ending. Simoun has a very powerful ending, where each character reaches a conclusion that may not be what the audience wanted, but which has clear roots in the way their personalities, motivations and character development have been set up earlier in the series.

Both shows have elements of their endings that are enigmatic, but Simoun ensures that each of these elements is charged with a strong, clear emotional resonance which again has its roots in how the characters have been set up. In a sense, it is the simpler, more archetypal set of characters in Simoun that gives it this resonance. Passion, loneliness, religious fervour and love are the guiding emotions of most of Simoun's cast, whereas Xam'd's characters are more complex, more uncertain, and less melodramatic. It is to Xam'd's credit that it takes this more measured and mature approach to its characters, but in doing so they also deny themselves the dramatic options that Simoun so successfully exploited.

This brings another problem -- in fact perhaps the main problem of Xam'd. What made the early episodes so refreshing and believable was the way the characters' personalities were shown up through their interaction with the circumstances in which they found themselves, and as long as those circumstances were tangible things that the audience could relate to, there was a satisfying sense of solidity to them. As the end approached and more abstract issues such as the Hiruken Emperor and the Quickening Chamber became more central to the story, that solidity started to dissolve and the story became caught up in what I call "the spiral of hippy". Everything became winged beings of light, raining down balls of goo on the earth, ancient mechanisms that are powered by esoteric metaphysical principles, and glowing orbs that embody trans-human spiritual entities. Once a series starts trying to explain its mysteries by going along this road, it becomes contagious and starts infecting other elements of the story with the same disease. Characters are forced into either passive, observational roles, or heroic, superhuman roles, both of which distance the audience emotionally from what is going on. Nakiami will sleep for a thousand years in the Quickening Chamber, you say? Is that good? Is that bad? What does that even mean? Our bewilderment overcomes our emotional response.

By way of contrast, in Simoun Neviril and Aer's final departure to the "other world" is more emotionally powerful for its simplicity. We aren't urged to understand the mechanics of it; all we see is them fading in and out of reality, forever young, as the other characters age around us. They didn't save anyone by making this journey and its purpose isn't explored so their situation can only be seen on its own emotional terms. The key emotions of loneliness and love in its purest sense are what remain, and set against the increasingly complicated daily lives of the other characters as they grow older and become embroiled in more wars, these emotions become a reminder of what one loses as one grows older. Any kind of mechanism or psuedoscience would have complicated and detracted from the emotional power of that ending, and by retaining its grounding in the recognisable physical reality of those characters left behind it never steps off the precipice into the spiral of hippy.

In a lot of ways, Xam'd is simply a victim of what appears to be a congenital disorder within Studio Bones. Every anime I've seen from this studio is in some way hobbled by an ending that, while not rubbish, feels somehow patched together (bear in mind that I've only seen Eureka Seven and Scrapped Princess all the way through -- Rahxephon and Wolf's Rain pissed me off too much before I got to the end). Xam'd also contains the more adult worldview and mature characterisation that makes aspects of other Bones shows so interesting, and is by far the best thing I've seen out of the studio.

In October of 2008 I met the director Miyaji Masayuki and interviewed him about the show, then still in its relatively early stages. He was an extremely enthusiastic, intelligent guy, bubbling with ideas that would shoot off in all directions, and it's tempting to see the series' flaws in that context. One imagines that if he can learn to focus his ideas more clearly, his next directorial work will be, rather than wonderful-yet-flawed, merely wonderful.

On bad fantasy lit. and losing my innocence

I was lurking around a secondhand English bookshop in Tokyo last week with the firm intention of getting myself some big, chunky fantasy literature. It wasn't an idea I'd thought about much; it was just one of those whims that sweep across you like a powerful, raging storm and seize you with their enthusiasm. Going into the store, I had this image in my head of picking up a great thick doorstop of a book and losing myself in it for days as its beautiful and richly imagined world swept over me, immersing me in its details and nuances.

Of course, when I got to the fantasy section reality hit me. It's not that it wasn't well-stocked (it was), it's just that faced with the reality of what fantasy literature is actually like, I felt my enthusiasm drain from me, to be replaced within seconds by a kind of frustrated, tetchy bloody-mindedness. I would find something to inspire and lift my imagination. Nothing would stand in my way. It was my quest. My destiny.

But honestly:

In the aftermath of the brutal murder of his father, a mysterious woman, Kahlan Amnell, appears in Richard Cypher's forest sanctuary seeking help... and more. His world, his very beliefs, are shattered when ancient debts come due with thundering violence.

In their darkest hour, hunted relentlessly, tormented by treachery and loss, Kahlan calls upon Richard to reach beyond his sword -- to invoke within himself something more noble. Neither knows that the rules of battle have just changed... or that their time has run out.

Who can read crap like this without retching? Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair here by picking out Terry Goodkind as an example, since from what I can gather he's a particularly odious example of the sort of hack bollocks that seems to comprise most of the pantheon of fantasy literature, but honestly, almost every single book I perused slapped me in the face with some similarly flaccid blurb, similarly self-assured and pompous in its own blatant mediocrity.

My hunt continued...

There was a complete set of Tad Williams' Otherland series, and I seem to remember finding his Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series satisfying, with likeable enough characters and just enough playful nudging of the genre stereotypes to occasionally tip them over into unexpected flourishes of near-originality. The premise of Otherland does not fill me with dread and I had good times with the similarly-themed .Hack//Sign anime. Still, Tad Williams is the place where another of the harsh realities of fantasy literature must be confronted. His work suffers from a terminal case of stuffy over-writing.

I stumbled through the first four lines of the first page of one of the books [Edited Jun 25th 07: initially I thought it was the first book but I checked again and the first book actually opens pretty well] and nothing interesting happened. If Williams has already started padding it out at the first line, I thought to myself, what hope for the rest of the four gargantuan telephone directories that await? I foresaw interminable descriptive passages of tangential relevance to the plot, I foresaw frustratingly drawn-out setups to long-foreshadowed events left dangling ad nauseam as the word count piled up behind them, I held the book open before me in the one-handed reading pose and weighed the pressure on my little finger. I backed down from the challenge. I was not ready. Not yet.

Part four of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series was dismissed out of hand. I thought book one was excellent when a friend forced me to read it, but I refuse to touch the series further until all seven volumes are complete. Plus, what's with all that "R. R." stuff? Plain old George Martin not good enough for you? Or did your publishers think the old "R. R." in the middle gave you a bit of Tolkienesque cred that lifted you above the pack?

By this point, I was becoming more and more crotchety and cynical with the whole trashy business of fantasy fiction. I remembered that anything that reminds me of Tolkien makes me want to puke. Nothing turns me off a book better than those endless pull quotes from lazy reviewers who call every new piece of cookie cutter genre trash the "best fantasy novel since Tolkien". I remain impressed with the obsessive detail he put into the mythological and linguistic background of his world, but the casual sexism and racism, the unquestioning adherence to a system of feudal patriarchy turns me off, particularly when I see the same kind of bilious goo vomiting forth from contemporary writers who should know better. I felt my blood running a little redder and my inner Trot began to awaken.

According to China Mieville, who I admire but don't necessarily agree with as both a writer and as a revolutionary socialist, Ursula LeGuin is a full-on anarchist so her books might be politically acceptible for me. There weren't any in the book shop though so my search continued. I'd read all the Iain M. Banks that they had and the same went for the Philip Pullman.

I could go on, but Alec Austin has already outlined most of the pitfalls in his excellent Strange Horizons essay Quality in Epic Fantasy.

Nevertheless, there is a little nugget of self-discovery that came out of this whole, honestly rather small and insignificant episode of my life that I have so zealously overdramatised above. Something in the conflict between the feeling that I used to get from fantasy writing and cartoons as a child and my increasing difficulty accepting such things at face value as an adult. When people say to me, "It's just a story" and I tear my hair out and scream vile obscenities at them, this is the internal conflict that lies at the heart of the external drama. The frustration from applying grown-up critical standards to work that prefers not to recognise those standards.

So in the end, the call of the familiar drew me away from the fantasy section and into the comforting embrace of Graham Greene. Within half a page of Our Man in Havana, I was overwhelmed with a sense of joy that cancelled out the bitter sting of defeat. Why do writers of fantasy literature so rarely employ such clean lines in their sentences, such elegance and order in their structure, such beautiful, almost mechanical simplicity? Why can't such simple tools be applied to the construction of extraordinary worlds and situations?

In fact, I'm pretty sure that they can be. SF writers don't seem to feel quite so bound by the need for archaic linguistic tropes or figures of speech, and are far less prone to overwriting. Arthur C. Clarke is an endlessly readable author and there are plenty of others. As LeGuin (herself admirably economical in her prose) points out in her essay From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, fantasy works with a more old-fashioned setting, which naturally requires that the writer adopt a voice appropriately distanced from his present time and location, but there is no reason why that can't be done within a stylistic and structural framework like Greene's.

As Austin points out in his essay above, a lot of the problems with fantasy literature stem from the nature of the market, which requires sequel after leaden sequel. Such an environment inevitably benefits talentless hacks like David Eddings, and I would imagine the likes of Goodkind, Brooks and Jordan (R.I.P.) all fall into the same category. SF tends to be friendlier to the standalone novel and the science aspect of the genre naturally draws the focus towards neat concepts and ideas to the benefit of the genre, whereas fantasy, based on the creation of worlds, is more abstract, its focus less clearly defined. Perhaps this aspect, with its less obvious conclusion and greater scope for reader to become lost in the world and writer to become lost in his or her own ego, makes it more vulnerable to the dictates of a greedy market.

The greatest fantasy writer of all time, Jorge Luis Borges, never wrote a story over twenty pages and one flicker of a great imagination can say more than a thousand shelf-bending sagas.