Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles

Skip to content

Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

27 Comments

  1. Spacewarp
    July 9, 2014 @ 12:20 am

    Now this is where I think reviewers and crtics often want to have their cake and eat it. Vera , "the series’ most promising new character" is killed "in order to give Rex some more man pain".

    No, Vera is killed precisely because she is the series' most promising new character. Yes, she's female, but that's because RTD & co wrote a strong female character and gave the role to a strong female actor. You build your character up, ensuring that the viewers invest their interest and their time in him/her, then kill him/her off for maximum impact. You're correct that that's what they do.

    But to imply that it was only done because Vera was a girl, so Rex could get angry is frankly insulting.

    Either Vera is a strong female character in a role normally reserved for male actors, making her death more devastating, or she's simply damsel plot-fodder so why build her role up in the first place. You can't have it both ways. Especially since Esther would fit the bill far better, considering the growing relationship between her and Rex. Which of course is what does happen to her in the final episode.

    Reply

  2. David Anderson
    July 9, 2014 @ 3:22 am

    I think the argument is that these days audiences don't buy damsel plot fodder roles played straight; they ask why they should care about a character whose only function is obviously to cause trouble and emotional distress to the other characters. So if writers want a female plot fodder role they make sure to write a strong female character to put into it. But writers don't as often build a male character up ensuring that viewers put their time and interest into him, and then kill him off for maximum impact. I'm certainly struggling to think of an example outside Game of Thrones.

    Reply

  3. SpaceSquid
    July 9, 2014 @ 4:40 am

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    Reply

  4. SpaceSquid
    July 9, 2014 @ 4:41 am

    I'm certainly struggling to think of an example outside Game of Thrones.

    Rory? No, wait…

    Could we maybe build a case for Ianto? I haven't seen CoE since it was first broadcast, but there was certainly effort put into fleshing his character out early in the serial.

    Reply

  5. Adam Riggio
    July 9, 2014 @ 4:50 am

    If I can add to David's already-excellent point, the trope has become even more offensive now that audiences find it more difficult accept the existence of a pure damsel plot fodder. The pure damsel was at least transparently dull. Even though she was purposely designed to serve as a plot-motivating sacrifice to add drama to a male character's story, at least she didn't tantalize the audience with possibilities of being anything more than that.

    But now, because such pure damsels are largely seen as retrograde and sexist, the sacrificial ewe lamb actually has to be made interesting. That was the case with Vera Juarez — she was a more interesting character than Rex Matheson, Steely FBI Agent™. RTD killed a character that should have supplanted his boring protagonist for the sake of drama for his boring protagonist. Yes, Vera's death is a tragedy, and it's a tragedy not only because we've lost such an incredible character, but because losing Vera this early in the show actually harmed Miracle Day as a narrative.

    Reply

  6. SK
    July 9, 2014 @ 7:22 am

    Oh, come on, are you being wilfully obtuse? Of course if you're creating a character (ie, not using a pre-existing character) in a dramatic work whose purpose is to die in order to elicit a reaction from the audience then you're going to make the character female because, all other things being equal, the death of a women will provoke a stronger reaction in a human than the death of a man.

    It's encoded into us, cross-culturally, from back when it didn't matter if you lost half the tribe's young men in a battle with your rivals but to lose a single woman was a disaster, that women are to be protected but men are expendable.

    It's why casualty rates are higher in mixed-sex front-line combat units because the men take greater risks to protect their female comrades than they would to protect males. This innate, almost biological urge to protect the female of the species is so strong that it makes trained soldiers put their lives in danger; there is no such urge to protect males.

    And as the purpose of a dramatic work is to evoke a reaction in the audience, and as a woman's death will produce a stronger reaction than a man's, then if you are creating a character to die you should make that character a woman if at all possible. Otherwise you are not getting the strongest possible reaction from your audience.

    (Assuming the character has to be an adult, of course. You can get an even bigger reaction by killing a child, because again we are encoded to see children as objects to be protected, so their deaths are even more shocking than the death of a woman.)

    Reply

  7. Josh04
    July 9, 2014 @ 7:29 am

    biotruths! we just can't help our sexist genes!

    Reply

  8. BerserkRL
    July 9, 2014 @ 7:40 am

    where essentially the entire health care system that is not the VA system is run by private companies

    Except that the "private" companies are the recipients of such whopping amounts of state privilege that they are essentially arms of the state and only nominally private. Both the US and UK healthcare systems are systems of bureaucratic/plutocratic control differing only in the details; the last thing either system would tolerate is the return of the genuinely private, patient-run system they worked so hard to demolish.

    Reply

  9. BerserkRL
    July 9, 2014 @ 7:42 am

    Dear god no. Sociobiology is to biology what astrology is to astronomy.

    Reply

  10. Anton B
    July 9, 2014 @ 8:57 am

    To be read in your best A Writer's Tale voice.

    So Torchwood. Series four. Ideas. Went for a walk round LA. Dying for a smoke! But not allowed. Hmmph. Everyone's so health conscious here. Cancer. huh!
    WAIT! I've got it! Captain Jack, lovely Johnny Barrowman, can't die. (Jack that is, not JB unfortunately!) We've established that for three series. But what if…oh what if? A twist! Now NOBODY CAN DIE.! Brilliant!
    But why? How? Oh I don't know we'll make something up. Something about morphic fields. (What are they? I don't know. It doesn't matter).
    So lots of old grannies having to be looked after who refuse to just shuffle off. And lots of walking wounded prosthetics (what is the fx budget?) It's horrendous. HORRENDOUS!
    But wait…what if then. Then…We kill off a major character? Oh not a real one like Gwen or Lovely Johnny. No we'll make one up and then, having established no-one can die. They Die! Horribly. Brilliant. But how? I don't know can we incinerate them? In a big oven. Too gruesome? I don't know. But it's brilliant I tell you. BRILLIANT! We can get lovely Janey Espenson to write that episode. She'll make it funny and tragic and oh so heart-breaking all at the same time.
    That's it. Enough ideas. I'm going out for more fags. (Cigarettes whoops! must remember I'm in LA. How could I forget? Torchwood! In LA. Brilliant!

    Reply

  11. Daibhid C
    July 9, 2014 @ 9:32 am

    Looking at my LJ, I note that my take on the US/UK contrast was "Interestingly, the return to Cardiff is actually evidence of just how much the series is set in America: Britain's overflow camps policy is further advanced, making it the horrible example of what the US team is trying to stop."

    Reply

  12. David Anderson
    July 9, 2014 @ 9:34 am

    I think astrologers could take offence at that. Astrology looked after astronomy in its infancy.

    Reply

  13. Alan
    July 9, 2014 @ 10:20 am

    The first fictional character I was aware of who was "created to die" was actually male — Thunderbird of the X-Men, who was presented as a somewhat belligerent and reckless Native American and was introduced in Giant-Sized X-Men #1 and killed in the next issue to show that the new series was "edgy."

    Reply

  14. Anton B
    July 9, 2014 @ 11:02 am

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    Reply

  15. Anton B
    July 9, 2014 @ 11:05 am

    Ferro Lad from the Legion of Super Heroes (Adventure Comics 1966) predates Thunderbird by a good few years as a character introduced deliberately, only to be killed off two issues later.

    On TV the first major character death in an ongoing sci-fi show was surely Toby Wren, played by Robert Powell, in Kit Pedlar and Gerry Davis' Doomwatch .

    Reply

  16. David Anderson
    July 9, 2014 @ 12:42 pm

    If the plutocracy are really benefitting from the NHS, they're running a really good bluff. Possibly too good a bluff.

    Reply

  17. Spacewarp
    July 9, 2014 @ 1:31 pm

    Where is the "Like" button when you need it?

    Reply

  18. Elizabeth Sandifer
    July 9, 2014 @ 1:33 pm

    I usually refrain from this, but I'd like to explicitly note that I think SK's comment is one of the most completely and utterly wrongheaded things ever posted on my blog.

    Reply

  19. Adam Riggio
    July 9, 2014 @ 2:16 pm

    Unless it's sarcasm so pure that no one can tell anything of the genuine sentiments behind it. Which I think defeats the entire purpose of being sarcastic.

    Reply

  20. BerserkRL
    July 9, 2014 @ 5:46 pm

    The last time I checked, the NHS was run by one of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world.

    Reply

  21. John
    July 9, 2014 @ 6:05 pm

    What's always amazing about these kind of wildly sexist sociobiology theories is that they're presented as being obvious common sense that nobody could possibly dispute.

    Reply

  22. John
    July 9, 2014 @ 6:09 pm

    Man, this thread is bringing out the crank in everyone. Can you think of any differences in how health care works between now and 100 years ago that might mean that your "genuinely private, patient run system" wouldn't work anymore?

    Can we come up with any examples of your preferred system working in any country in the world in the 21st century?

    Reply

  23. BerserkRL
    July 9, 2014 @ 11:24 pm

    Make something illegal everywhere and then ask for current examples. Nice trick.

    Reply

  24. BerserkRL
    July 10, 2014 @ 10:17 pm

    Reply

  25. Spacewarp
    July 11, 2014 @ 12:47 am

    Sadly I have a worry that there may be something in SK's theory. Not because I agree with it, or want it to be true, but because as a 52-year old male who has spent several decades studying the human race (and myself), I have noticed this tendency in myself. I don't even think it's cultural, but far deeper down than that I recognise in myself the drive to protect members of the opposite sex. I have 3 children now, of ages ranging 11 to 33, and I would certainly die to protect them. I don't say that as a noble aspiration or hope on my part, but as a pure biological fact. If one of my children was about to be run over, I would be physically unable to prevent myself from pushing them out of the way and taking the hit for them. Personally I wouldn't want to do it (since it would obviously involve me dying) but I would have no choice in the matter. There have been a couple of instances where one of my kids has for a second been in danger (once from choking and once from drowning) and in both cases I felt my conscious thoughts completely supressed by instinct to protect. In hindsight the feeling was quite unpleasant. I know that if I encountered another human in danger I would attempt to help them, but if they were female the instinctive drive would be stronger, and I would probably put myself in more danger than if the person was male.

    I'm not saying this is the sole reason for the tendency to put women in peril in drama, but I do suspect that deep down we may find there is an instinctive drive that makes some of us feel that this is satisfying dramatically. It is certainly a trope that seems to be satisfying to a majority of viewers, and may even explain why attack of female characters is so prevalent in crime drama. Whenever the victims are children, success and high ratings are almost guaranteed (see "Broadchurch"). I suspect the same is true when the victims are women. It's just that we don't have a Child equivalent to "feminism" or "sexism". I do strongly believe that a lot more is hard-wired into the human brain than we would like to accept, and our instincts go a lot deeper than we suspect.

    As I like to say…"Man does not think. He only thinks he thinks."

    Reply

  26. John
    July 11, 2014 @ 3:32 pm

    Eh…I don't at all think there is any reason assume that such feelings are genetic when we have a culture that constantly reinforces these supposedly "instinctual" drives.

    Reply

  27. John
    July 11, 2014 @ 3:35 pm

    Just to be more explicit: health care is massively more expensive than it was in the 19th century because there is so much more it can do.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Discover more from Eruditorum Press

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading