The Man who was not his Walking Stick

Warning: This post contains one some spoilers for Pacific Rim. If this stops you reading the post, then that means that you haven’t seen Pacific Rim. What the hell?

I watched Pacific Rim a few weeks ago. It was an awesome movie. It had giant robots punching giant monsters, and that alone would have been enough to make it great, but it helped that it had a large cast of cool characters. They were fairly archetypal, and none of them were particularly deep, but they were still interesting screen presences, and when I gave it some thought, I realised I was having a tough time picking my favourites: perhaps the heroic and inspirational leader that was Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost, or it could be the quiet determination and courage of Mako Mori, maybe the tragically under-exposed badassitude of the Kaidonovskys. I thought of them all, but then I realised the character I liked the most was this guy:

Hermann Gottlieb, Kaiju researcher and scientist in the Pan-Pacific Defence Force. I think there are two reasons why I liked him so much. 1: he’s a massive nerd, and so am I, and 2: he’s physically disabled and has to walk with the help of a cane, and the movie never makes a big deal of it. That doesn’t sound like much, but think about it: he’s a disabled character in a big Hollywood blockbuster, and the big Hollywood blockbuster (a type of film usually awash with stereotypes and lazy trope usage) does not make a big deal of this.

If you asked me to list Hermann’s character traits, I would probably come up with the following: mathematical genius, aloof and a bit condescending but still cares enough about others to work against the Kaiju, has a soft spot for melodrama, slightly neurotic, brave enough to drift with a Kaiju and strong-willed enough to survive the process, he’s fairly young but he dresses and acts as if he’s  much older. And, yeah, I guess, he walks with a cane. OK. That’s not a big deal, is it?

That was the thing about Hermann that makes him a rare thing among disable characters in Hollywood movies. He has a limp and he walks with a cane, but Pacific Rim never does the lazy thing of making this the one thing that defines who he is. In fact, his disability is never actually mentioned in the movie; he’s introduced to Raleigh and the reaction seems to be ‘he needs a stick to help him walk. Okay, now it’s time to listen to his important bit of news that will be useful for saving the world from skyscraper-sized murderbeasts’.

Too often in movies, it seems to be if a character is disabled then that’s their most prevalent, important feature. In the last big sci-fi blockbuster to prominently feature a disabled character, James Cameron’s Avatar, the paralysed main character, Jake Sully, is driven almost solely by his desire to walk again and his character arc is shown to be complete when he does. If these characters don’t overcome their disabilities then they usually gain some mysterious, mystical power instead; wheelchair-bound Professor Xavier has mind-control abilities, while blind characters almost always have some kind of supernatural sight or powers of prophecy. Sometimes, yes, it’s got right, or while the character is affected by their disability it’s not a big sign worn around their neck which says “THIS CHARACTER IS DISABLED.” More often than not, however, they do it wrong.

Not so with Hermann. He walks with a stick, but it’s never really remarked upon, other characters still listen to him and respect him and they do so, not because he’s physically disabled, but because he’s saying things worth listening to. His arc isn’t him overcoming his disability through some act of will or display of strength (an all-too-common occurrence in movies that carries the downright insulting insinuation that disabled people are innately weaker for their disability), but instead his arc involves him using his brains and courage to help save the human race. He starts the movie with the walking stick, he goes through the entire movie with the stick, he ends the movie with the stick, and it’s never implied that him having the stick makes him less of a person. A worse movie than Pacific Rim would have simply taken the easy option and made his defining characteristic his walking stick, but in Pacific Rim, Hermann is not his walking stick and Hermann is never his walking stick. Hell, he would have worked just fine as a character without the stick, and the movie wouldn’t have been affected by it at all; it was a detail that added depth and nuance to him, but it was not his one defining feature.

That isn’t to say that his disability wouldn’t affect him as a person. A person with a disability will almost certainly have their lives affected by that disability. From my personal experience, my sister’s kidneys failed when she was young and she had to have them removed; as a result, she must hook up to a dialysis machine every night so that the machine can ‘clean’ her blood in the way her kidneys do. At one point, she spent almost an entire year in a hospital. It affected her life, and it affected our family as well. But if I were asked to list her defining characteristics I would probably say something like: she’s funny, compassionate, hard working, intelligent. She does work for charity, she enjoys dancing, she likes horse riding and wishes she had more time to do it.

The dialysis machine is there. The dialysis machine affects her life, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all of her. The key word in the term ‘disabled people’ is not ‘disabled’; a disabled person is not their disability. My sister is not her dialysis machine. Hermann Gottlob is not his walking stick. The person wheeling themselves along the street is not their chair. This is what Hollywood needs to realise; a disabled character will be affected by their disability, but they are not just their disability. Hollywood needs to learn this. Hollywood needs more Hermanns.

Saga Issue 13 – A Review

It’s about damn time.

After a 4-month hiatus, Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples’ science-fantasy epic has returned, and it’s great to see it back. Marking the start of another six-month run, Issue 13 of Saga picks up about a month before the timeframe of Saga Issue 12, and after Saga 12 focussed entirely on Prince Robot IV, deals with what Marco and Alana have been up to, as well as showing what The Will and Gwendolyn have been up to since their run-in with the black hole foetus monster in Issue 11. If you haven’t been reading the Saga series (seriously, what the bloody hell is wrong with you?), then I assure you that you did not read that last sentence incorrectly; there is indeed a black hole foetus monster. And it hatched from a planet. And it’s fucking awesome.

Issue 13 has a strong feeling of consolidating affairs and refamiliarising readers with events after the long hiatus and the aforementioned gap in the timeline. There are a couple of new plots hooks set up, including one which seems to suggest that The Will (easily the best anti-hero and sympathetic antagonists I’ve read in any comic) is beginning to go just a little crazy. Fiona Staples’ vast talent for drawing incredibly imaginative vistas and character designs is shown once more in this episode to great effect, while Brian K. Vaughn’s scripting and characterisation are once again damn-near perfect, though I’ll admit that saying Saga has really good artwork and excellent writing is about as redundant a statement as saying that things fall down when you drop them.

The issue, however, does feel rather ‘fillery’. The stuff that goes on in it is important (aside from one fun, but ultimately redundant, fight scene), and like I mentioned there are some subplots that appear here which look like they have the potential to be very interesting, but it’s all playing catch-up to fill in the time gap between Issue 12’s plot and whatever will happen in Issue 14. Is it a bad issue? No, not by a long shot, but as far as I feel it’s the weakest in the entire run, and this is compounded by the fact that Issue 12 ended on a massive cliffhanger and Issue 13 does nothing to resolve that, which left me reaching the final page and feeling just a little dissatisfied. 

That said, it’s still Saga. It’s still bloody good, and if you haven’t read any of it yet the first 12 issues have been published in two separate volumes which you owe yourself to pick up. It is without a doubt one of the best comics I’ve ever read, perhaps the best, and it’s great to see it back once more. I just wish that issue 13 had done a little more.

Obsidian & Bloody Brilliant

The next installation in Female Writers’ Month is here, and you get a review of not one novel, not two novels, but three novels! In one review! Aren’t I generous?

OK, so the books are a trilogy, so maybe that’s being a little liberal with the definition of generous, but shut up.

Obsidian and Blood is a fantasy novel, but one that takes a departure from the normal through its setting; Aliette De Bodard sets her novels in a fantasy world that is essentially a hybrid of both Aztec history and mythology. Historical locations are used, and in this world the same gods that the Aztecs worshipped historically are worshipped here. The key difference is that, in terms of theology, the people in the Obsidian & Blood world were bang on the money, and they share their world with bloodthirsty gods, demons, evil spirits, marginally-less-evil spirits and magic. De Bodard absolutely excels at worldbuilding, and does it in the two best ways; by packing the setting with rich layers of detail, and using character actions and interactions to tell the audience about the world rather than dumping exposition on the readers’ collective heads. As a result, Obsidian & Blood often feels like an well-researched historical novel with elements of fantasy thrown in, and it really works.

The novels are certainly helped by the fact that De Bodard populates it with well-rounded and three dimensional characters; Acatl, the novel’s narrator, is a complex character with his own motivations, and he’s surrounded by a cast of equally memorable and notable characters, with my personal favourite being his sort-of apprentice Teomitl.

Each book is a self-contained story that takes place within a broad narrative arc, and by and large this approach works quite well. While events are mentioned from the novel before, and the storyline of the third book uses the conclusion of the second as a springboard, I get the feeling that you could pick up book two or three and follow them without too much difficulty. All of the novels start with a mysterious death, and follow Acatl trying to unravel the causes of it and uncover the perpetrators, hampered by the efforts of the killers and by political intrigue and Machiavellian machinations. All of this, combined with the first-person narration and the rather grim, gloomy setting, means the books get a rather Noire feel to them. Aztec Fantasy Noire, that’s what I’m saying the genre of these books is, from now on.

One of my favourite things in the novel, and one that I feel deserves a special mention, is the magic used in the books. In the Obsidian and Blood world, spells work by drawing on the power of the gods, and as a result these spells are cast through chanting hymns and giving offerings, often through spilt blood or animal sacrifice (these books are not vegetarian-friendly, not by any means). There are dozens of these chants throughout the novels, and they are an absolute joy to read; I can’t say whether they were lifted from Aztec religious practise, but if De Bodard made them up then she displayed a real talent for making them feel like genuine prayers.

The primary issue with the books for me, however, was probably Acatl himself, specifically Acatl in books two and three. He is by no means a bad character, as I said earlier, and he is three-dimensional, flawed and engaging, even if he does occasionally feel like that only sane man in the novels. However, by the time the first book is complete, Acatl’s character arc is largely complete; he faces down and defeats his personal demons by the end of book one, and from then on in terms of character development he just kind of coasts. This probably wouldn’t be so much of an issue for me, but as all of the books are written in first-person from Acatl’s perspective, and when he’s surrounded by characters in later books who are having arcs of their own, he feels even more stuck and static. It’s hardly ruinous, but it’s a fly in the trilogy’s otherwise excellent ointment.

That said, the Obsidian and Blood trilogy is still excellent, and is a strong contender for the best book I’ve read so far in Female Writers’ Month. I would gladly recommend it to somebody who wants a good mystery novel or a fantasy novel that’s a bit different from the rest.