Kameron Hurley

Stories From Another Country: Tales of wartime, immigration, and assimilation

Today, I’ve got a guest post up over at The Ranting Dragon reviews site.

Stories From Another Country

When I was growing up, the holidays meant family gatherings over rich food slathered in buttery sauces and familiar stories of life during wartime in another country.

My grandmother grew up in Nazi-occupied France, and met my grandfather, an American GI, during the liberation. Her father was part of the French resistance, and one of her most nail-biting stories was that of the evening when two members of the Gestapo showed up at her door asking questions about her father….read the rest

Tags: assumptions
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It’s not the strongest who survive… it’s those most adaptable to change

For my first book, GOD’S WAR, I had two rounds of copy edits. One from my original publisher who ended up dropping the series right before it went to layout, and a second round from Night Shade. Both were sent to me in dead tree form. They were bulky, heavy things, but ultimately quite satisfying to go over. It was what I’d been used to. I have been writing and editing copy for nearly twenty years, and I’ve always printed it out and edited it that way.

But when I switched day jobs in March, I was pulled into a system that had already become largely paperless. Everything was done with email and marked-up PDF’s. That’s PDF’s marked up with the actual electronic mark-up tools. Much of the proofing team and nearly all of the Brand Managers marked up changes to documents with Adobe. I got used to reviewing changes in Adobe and making my own within it pretty quickly. I also got used to reviewing electronic proofs for projects.

After reviewing your initial thirty or fifty projects this way, you get used to it. So when my publisher sent me copyedits for INFIDEL in electronic form, I knew I had two choices – I could print it out, mark it up, and then send it back to them at my own expense. Or I could grit my teeth, pull out my pro version of Adobe, markup changes electronically and send them the marked-up PDF. I knew sending it via email was going to be a lot faster, too. So when they said to get it to them by Friday, it didn’t mean sending it out by Wednesday anymore. It meant emailing it to them on Friday. If you’re a writer on a deadline, those two extra days are golden.

I’m not saying it wasn’t a tough thing to do, getting used to detailed reading on a damn screen, but there’s a reason I invested in a 24” HD monitor. Postal costs are going up, publishing revenues are down, and people are looking for ways to cut costs. One of those ways is to stop fucking sending boxes of 1,000 manuscript pages across the country. Oh, sure, you can be one of those old hold-outs and just print it out at your own expense and ship it back out of your own pocket. Go for it. But pretty soon, only the old eccentrics are going to be able to get away with that – the ones who sell a bazillion copies and fuck you to everyone who tells them how to write.

“But what about my process?” I keep hearing people say. “I have to print things out. I must do it my way.” That’s cool. Do it your way. For much of the foreseeable future, I will continue to print out book drafts and edit them that way before they go to my publisher, because I tend to write my book scenes out of order, and it’s easier for me to see what goes where when I have the physical pages to move around. Maybe someday I’ll have a giant, interactive, 6ft tall whiteboard-like display screen on my wall that allows me to physically move and manipulate pages. I’d totally be down with that. But until it comes, I’ll be killing trees awhile yet. But for now, it behooves me to ensure that I send the cleanest copy possible to my publisher on the first go-round, because the odds are we’re likely going to be copyediting stuff totally electronically from now on.

Here’s the thing when I hear a lot of people complaining about changes in publishing, and production, and process. It reminds me of this actor I worked with in high school who made us change one of the intermission songs because it was “interfering with my process.” They just couldn’t concentrate and “get into character” properly back stage if that song was playing. We also had to turn down the intermission music. As the actor was one of our best, we did everything they asked – despite the fact that every single other actor in the show managed to somehow put out a great performance under the same constraints.  Whenever I hear this stuff, I think, “Wow. How are you going to be able to deal with the real world when you’re not getting your perks? Are you going to be able to perform at all?

I follow a lot of professionals in writing, publishing, and dayjobbery, and it terrifies the crap out of me that so many are change-phobic. I don’t just mean technology here, either, but change of all sorts. Changes to process, to expectations, to markets. At the end of the day, the only constant is change, and our greatest asset is our ability to successfully adapt to that change. And that’s not going to happen if we look at something new and – instead of poking around at it to see the benefit or figure out how to make it work for us – we simply say “fuck you.”

Things are changing rapidly out there, and I know that in order to compete, I have to scramble to keep up. One of the big reasons I’m not unemployed right now is because – a couple day jobs back – my boss and the president of the company insisted that I learn how to use social media to drive business/engagement. This made me really angry. I raged against it. I wanted nothing to do with constant mentions and monitorings, but I already had a blog and various social accounts for personal use, and I was in the best position to take it on. So I did. I took responsibility for it and kicked and screamed my way into it. And you know what? In every job since then, the fact that I had experience building social audiences and creating content on various platforms was a huge deciding factor in getting the position.

Will being a flexible non-technophobe help my fiction writing career? Who knows. It’s traditionally a very slow and conservative sort of place, which is why the death bells had to start in before folks began to make any serious changes. There is going to be a lot of crazy stuff going on in this industry as it struggles to change and adapt and catch up. And as the folks who create the content in that industry, we’re going to be asked to change and adapt too.

And the ones who will be successful? I hate to say it, but – the ones who succeed are most likely going to be the ones most adaptable to change. Even if they have to hurl themselves headlong into it kicking and screaming.

Tags: the writing life
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Whose View? Unpacking POV Book by Bloody Book

When I first starting writing (yanno, back when I was twelve), I didn’t know much about writing point-of-view (POV), so everything was just omniscient, the way it seemed to be in most myths and fairytales and a good deal of older movies with narration attached. The narrator could just tell you what everyone was feeling, and wax on about the history of the world, and it was great.

But as I got older and started paying critical attention to what I was reading, I learned more about POV. What I thought I was writing, it turned out, wasn’t what I was writing. In fact, it wasn’t so much omniscient as it was just head-hopping between characters with no real transitions (or method to the madness). I was relating things as they occurred to me, instead of as they occurred to the characters.

Like most folks these days, I eventually fell into the rhythm of first person and close third person, and started using scene and chapter breaks to distinguish between POV shifts. It was easier this way – a lot less messy than mid-sentence head-hopping or the kind of overaching historian-as-narrator with third person style that I do hope to achieve one day for some epic project.

But with the last couple of books, sticking to close third POV and forcing myself to switch chapters every time we switch POV characters got frustrating, and made pacing really, really difficult. I broke this a couple of times with switches within chapters indicated with scene breaks in INFIDEL, but it didn’t happen often, because I was really on edge about doing it. Looking back, I’m kinda pissed that I hadn’t worked in this angle earlier in the last book, particularly there at the end during a climactic scene where we really, really needed a Rhys POV in there so he could get some closure (and to act as a nice setup for some stuff going on in book three that I’m writing now). But, alas, I chose to stick with a Nyx POV throughout, and now I regret it.

So this time around I’m working on putting together a more fluid POV experience, because I believe it will make for a more powerful and engaging book. The idea is to build the main-and-sub character POVs into earlier chapters, and then start head-hopping-with-scene-breaks instead of chapter breaks during select scenes so I can hit climactic scenes from multiple angles. Nyx is a tough character to get a handle on because she’s cut herself off so much from people, and human stuff like… feelings. Writing too much Nyx all at once gets really distancing and depressing for me really fast, and I imagine that if I wrote a whole book from a Nyx POV, a lot more readers would be throwing these books across the room in frustration.

Though there are plenty of books that do this amount of head-hopping, my template for this approach right now is actually Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. I’ve gone on about this book a lot, because it achieves a lot of what I was hoping to achieve in the first Nyx book when it comes to plot and POV. I’m not a fan of what I call “fan-fiction-y” moments, that is, when characters go on and on for pages just being themselves without advancing the plot, but I recognize that it also humanizes the characters and makes them a lot more lovable (even the shitty ones) than they would be otherwise. More than that, though, head-hopping during climactic scenes makes for a far more suspenseful read than just narrowly sticking to one viewpoint.

The key to viewpoint is to tell each scene from the perspective of the person who hurts the most. And when you’ve got a scene stuffed with different pain points for different characters, the head-hopping just makes sense. The tough part is successfully moving POV’s without losing a reader’s focus, or sacrificing pacing. If your whole book is Nyx/Rhys/Nyx/Rhys/Nyx/Rhys and all the sudden you’ve got a chapter with Nyx/Rhys/Inaya/Eshe/Suha/Anneke viewpoints, that’s a problem. So there’s a plot and pacing thing I need to address as I go along.

This requires a lot more planning than I’m used to, but if I do this right, RAPTURE is going to be much more the sort of book I envisioned GOD’S WAR to be than the one I actually got. Not the GW is all bad, mind, it’s just… different than what I expected to put together.

My goal with each book is to become a technically more powerful writer with every one. That means getting better at everything, not just the stuff I’m bad at (like plot and grammar), but also the stuff I’m good at but could always be better at (setting, characters).

I think there’s this odd expectation in some circles that once you publish a book, that’s it. You’re just going to coast on now writing the same way you always did, and you don’t have to push or improve or anything. For better or worse, it just doesn’t work that way these days. Aside from the personal drive to be better, there’s also a big professional one. Publishers are dropping authors and books left and right, and everybody’s looking for that “breakout book” – the one that gets you from selling 5,000 copies to 50,000 or 100,000 copies. If you’re not getting better and growing your audience, then get ready to change your name or switch to a really small press. That’s just the reality of the biz these days.

So. Depressing.

But, hey, on  the upside I have no interest in writing the same book over and over again, and I enjoy getting better, that that works for me. That’s another reason this is the last Nyx book (oh, I’m sure they’ll be some free shorts in the future, but I’m done with Nyx at length). When you’ve learned all you can from one project, it’s time to move on to the next…. and I can’t wait to apply all the stuff I’m learning while writing these books to my next project.

Starting, of course, with this bloody little book I’m writing now.

Tags: Rapture, the writing life
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RAPTURE: The End is Nigh!

In case you missed it yesterday, I’ve gotten official word that Night Shade Books will be publishing the third and final book of the Bel Dame Apocrypha, RAPTURE in late 2012.

This is wonderfully great and rather surreal news. It also means I now have a book due March 1st (eeeeeyyyyaaaaah).

My mom recently asked how I was digesting the flurry of good writing news: two books published this year, contracted for another next year, good reviews, positive feedback, paying off debt, and etc.

The answer is, I’m not as lighter-than-air-happy-go-lucky as you might think. The trouble is, I know a lot of professional writers who have been doing this a good long while, and I know how brutal this business is. It’s not all million dollar contracts and movie deals. I have a long road ahead of me, and probably the biggest, toughest job of all for the rest of my life – the job of staying relevant and maintaining momentum in an increasingly crowded marketplace. It means I need to write at least a book a year – a GOOD book a year – and stay on top of continued markety-type stuff. And I need decent (and preferably, ever-increasing) sales numbers to make the little book computers happy so I don’t have to change my name.

Not losing momentum is tough, and I don’t expect that I’ll achieve this all the time – there’s something to be said for a spectacular failure and a comeback. But right now I’m just powering through as best I can. Most of the time, it feels like I’m juggling a lot of plates. There’s my day job career that pays the bills and the health insurance, and then there’s the books and that whole other career, and then there’s freelancing work, which helps pay off debt, and then there’s the daily living stuff, like remembering to feed the dogs and cook food and maintain the house and try to be a good partner. I’ve got that whole chronic illness thing to manage, too, and regular workouts and trying not to let my fitness slide.

And of course, there’s the huge investments in being a better person that have fallen by the wayside in recent years – there’s the French lessons and boxing classes and world traveling and other brain-enrichment activities that help me stay sharp. Those are the things I’ve had to led slide, because I only had so many spoons at hand.

This kind of juggling will make you crazy if you think too much about it, so I try to take it one thing at a time. First comes RAPTURE, then the space opera, then another series. First comes food prep, then cleaning up dog vomit, then painting the porch.

I’m not particularly sure how I’m going to do all this, or how well I’ll do at it, or when I’ll fail at it, but for now I’m just going to keep barreling along until I crash into something. It’s all you can do, really.

Fall down seven times. Get up eight.

And all that.

*Image credit is from Bioshock: 2, of course! What? Hey, they also have a RAPTURE title, cause they are AWESOME.

Tags: the writing life
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Is Novel Writing Really Just a Pyramid Scheme?

I guess it shouldn’t be odd that such a high percentage of the people who buy books are people who want to be writers. After all, there must be a pretty big percentage of video game players who think it’d be a lot of fun to create video games. Loving an art form often means you’re interested in creating it (not necessarily that you’re any good at it, or understand the sweat involved, but love does lead one to dally in such thoughts).

While I was on vacation last week, another vacationer stopped by our breakfast table at our resort and commented on J’s shirt (she was just the first of about half a dozen who commented on it that day. It features the heads of four presidents, one with a monocle, with a collective dialogue bubble over their heads that says “TMBG.” People love trying to figure out what “TMBG” stands for). At any rate, after commenting on the shirt, she looked over at me, with my spiky 80’s haircut and bug necklace, and announced that we “Looked like steampunks.”

Geeks, as ever, are very good at finding their own, and so we talked cons and exchanged book recommendations. She recommended a book I’d never heard of right off, and wrote it down on a napkin, which I tucked away. J, being a better salesman than I, recommended GOD’S WAR (without mentioning I was the author), which she said she’d actually heard of (!). I also had the forethought to recommend HEART OF VERIDON by Tim Akers, but forgot about MECHANIQUE by Genevieve Valentine. Oh well. Next time.

At any rate, I felt a tad guilty about J. recommending my book to some random person at the breakfast table, though my parents have been shamelessly promoting the book by leaving it around at hair salons and giving it to restaurant staff who profess a love of SF (!).

But then we got home, and J. did a little googling of the title the woman had recommended…. and guess what?

It turns out it’s a self-published novel (which is why I hadn’t heard of it) and (drumroll) she was, of course, the author of said book.

Here we were, two strangers on vacation, covertly recommending one another’s books to each other.

Oh, fictionverse – you wacky pyramid scheme, you.

Tags: the writing life
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Giving Away 5 Free Copies of INFIDEL at GoodReads!

Enter for a chance to win!

(don’t worry – more chances for free books coming soon!)

Tags: infidel
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So you’ve got….

Tags: fun
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First Three Chapters of INFIDEL Now Available for Download!

Just dying to know whose head gets chopped off next?

No worries. I’ve got the first three chapters of INFIDEL right here available for download – which includes the first head-hacking scene of the book!

Enjoy!

   Download PDF

   Read on Scribd

(then go pre-order! Available October 4th! That’s, like, SOON! Note that there will be a shot at some Special Prizes for those who post reviews online in October [good, bad, or indifferent]. More details soon!)

Tags: free stuff, infidel, the writing life
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Free Short Fiction… from the God’s War Universe!

Happy 30-days-to-release-of-INFIDEL day!

To celebrate, I’ve posted two of three short stories set in the GOD’S WAR universe for free here on the blog and hosted in various places. They’re set during all sorts of… interesting time periods, and you can read them in any order, but if you’d like some direction, I’d recommend reading them in the order offered, as they are indeed linked.

(EDIT: I’ve removed Angels &Avengers from this list – it will be out in late 2012 prior to the release of RAPTURE)

Anyhow, enjoy!

Download PDF

View on Scribd

Download from Smashwords 

Purchase on Kindle  

Download PDF

View on Scribd

Download from Smashwords 

Purchase on Kindle  

(Feel guilty for getting something free? I pity you. But if you insist, do pre-order INFIDEL, which ensures the continuation of more fun stuff in this universe )

Tags: giveaways, god's war, infidel, the writing life
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The Many, Many Faces of Conan, Or: Conan the Schizophrenic

It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a Conan fan, so though the trailer for the reboot looked awful, I went anyway – naturally.

For better or worse, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Sadly, much of the badness seemed to come from the fact that the writers couldn’t really figure out what Conan was all about.

I mean, was he a mercenary fueled by money? Or a hoity-toity do-gooder who just frees slaves because it’s “morally right”? You can probably guess my answer to this (and the answer of pretty much anybody familiar with the source material). But for some reason, these guys were really working hard to make him ruled by both instinct and… morality?  

Things seem to sort of happen randomly here, and I got the impression that there was some kind of internal war in the making of this film about who the hell Conan really was. It almost felt like they were going for the “noble savage” thing (popular concept in pulp like Howard’s, offensive as it may be), but you know… Conan is not noble. He is ruled by base instinct and the “Now.” This is, to me, what makes this character so appealing to modern day folks, even though the books are spilling over with sexism and racism and great gouts of poor writing and sneering heads. The appeal of Conan is that he drinks, fucks and fights with no care for tomorrow. Everything is about getting through right now – the pleasure of the moment. For people so caught up in the desperation of trying to ensure a roof over their heads and screaming every time they look at their 401(k) portfolio during shitty times, Conan’s utter disinterest in anything but the pleasurable moment (whether that’s the high of fucking or fighting) is really appealing.   

Yes, there are all sorts of other things Conan is – gratuitous sex and violence and magic and more violence – but at the core of it, I think, the true appeal of Conan for those of us stuck in societies where civil behavior consists largely of sucking up and controlling our natural wants and desires while endlessly plodding along at jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need so we can “enjoy” ourselves in our decreptitude for twenty years of failing health and hospital visits, the barbarian life, passionately lived, looks very pretty on paper (dying of gangrene or dysentery is less interesting, but that’s why we enjoy living it fictionally).

This Conan teetered very close to the edge of that, and very close to the edge of not sucking.  But, well. Yeah.

(SPOILERS AHEAD) It opens with Conan’s birth on the battlefield. His mother – heavily pregnant – has been mortally struck down on the battlefield, where she is fighting. Before she dies, she wants to see her son, so her husband eviserates her with a sword, and poof, Conan is born and his mother dies. Which was a better botched Cesarean scene than I was expecting, but ultimately ill-thought-out. See, later on, Conan notes to his “love” interest that Cimmerian women dress as warriors. Which is cool. But here’s the worldbuilding fail and one of the schizophrenic moments– during the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which we see Conan growing up into a warrior, we don’t actually SEE any women dressed as warriors. For that matter, during the pivotal scene when he’s running out with the group’s other warrior-hopefuls, every single one of the other “warrior” hopefuls is a guy.

So here we have this nice update (because really, if you thought women in small tribal groups didn’t know how to defend themselves, you’re stupid. Hence the recent hullaballoo over the discovery that, in fact, many of the Viking folks buried with their swords were not, in fact, men [as assumed by male archaelogists. If women didn’t know how to defend themselves while the guys were gone, Vikings would have died out pretty quickly), but that update is all hosed up because the rest of the worldbuilding just doesn’t jive with what’s *said.* You can *say* something is true all you want, but until you *show* that actually playing out in your world, it’s just so much talk (remember, your audience comes to a show with their own biases, just like those archeologists. It means working harder to remind people that hey, yeah, really, things are DIFFERENT here).

This schizophrenia continues with our first view of the adult Conan, who randomly decides to free some slaves because “no man shall live in chains” despite the protestations of his partner, who reminds him that freeing slaves doesn’t win them any money or serve any real purpose. But Conan does it anyway, because he is just a moral person (?). 

What?

Anyway, it gave them a chance to surround Conan with some bare-breasted slave girls, so maybe that’s what it was about anyway. If he’d done it to get gold and freeing the slaves was an afterthought, that’s one thing, but since when was Conan all about doing things just because they’re “right”? There is no “right” in Conan. There is only “right now.”

But anyway, the schizophrenia continues when we meet our heroine for this romp, who is in some kind of monastery, all dressed in white like she’s some kind of Vestal Virgin or nun or something. When the bad guys come to the monastery to kidnap her, we find out she’s actually some kind of fighting monk, who is passable with a knife and kicking people.  Trouble is… well, again. Is she a Vestal Virgin or fighting monk? She vacillates between maiden-in-distress and passable-with-a-knife the whole time. To add further confusion, we learn that she’s the last of some bloodline, and is going to be delivered “Home” by Conan (per some prophecy) but we never learn why she was there in the first place, if she even knew her parents or even remembered “home” or if it had any significance whatsoever to her. In fact, she had no real goal or ambitions at all except to go home as her master had decreed would happen via his prophecy. She was, in essence, a blank slate around which the rest of the plot (such as it was) moved. She was, basically, just a McGuffin, and a very badly fleshed out one. It probably doesn’t help that Hollywood is moving more and more toward casting female leads who all look alike. She could have been anybody.

Her non-desires-except-as-dictated-by-plot were also on display when she goes ashore at one point and just randomly has sex with Conan. OK, it’s Conan, I realize we need a sex scene, but there is no lead up to this and no real serious interest given on either person’s part (except Conan’s statement that she looks like a “harlot” I guess, which is apparently as close as he gets to foreplay). It’s just like, “Hey, ship isn’t sailing until morning, so we might as well have sex!” And here’s the deal with that. She’s, like, a Vestal Virgin/Monk, right? So wouldn’t sex be a big deal for her? Wouldn’t there be more angst/talking about it, like “Hey, now that I’m not a Vestal Virgin/Monk anymore I want to get it on” or some crazy lame crap like that? Can she have some kind of desire/motivation for anything at all besides, “Well, you’re here… and I’m here… and the plot dictates that Conan gets some action, sooooo….” One of my favorite scenes in the first Conan was between Conan and Valeria after they’ve had sex for the nth time, and she waxes on a bit about perhaps abandoning the life of thieving and excess and maybe, you know, hooking up for realsies, because she’s gotten envious of those couples would have somebody to come home to every night. And though this could have been a typical she wants to commit/he’s a barbarian thing, it ended up being a nice little moment – she was a hardened thief with a hankering to settle down, you know, maybe. It happens to the best of us.  It gave her a little more depth.

In this one, the female lead isn’t given anything to want or wish for at all, not even a for realsies relationship with Conan, which is never even broached (in fact, it would have been a great conversation where she was all like, “You know, dude, I just want to have some sex! I’m a Vestal Virgin! No strings attached!” and she really meant it). At the end of the movie, he just dumps her off in front of a city somewhere, and she looks wistfully after him.

Eh?

Anyway, there’s a plot in here about bringing this McGuffin love interest to some place and spilling her blood into a mask so she can be possessed by some demon Queen. Ho-hum. Rose McGowan is underused here as the daughter of the main bad guy who’s less than interested in her mother coming back because she feels she’s powerful enough to rule the world with her dad. But, just like our other female lead, she doesn’t really take actionable steps to get what SHE wants. She just says she wants something (which is nice – at least she HAS wants) and then backs off and once again backs dad’s plan. Which is not only lazy, but bad storytelling, because it reduces a lot of tension at the end.

Oh well?

At any rate, Conan cuts off some heads and hands and gets revenge for the death of his father and village (not his mother, this time, as she was already dead). Blah, blah, you know the rest.

In the end, I thought maybe they would do something with the sword stuff they were doing throughout, about Conan not being ready to pick up a Cimmerian sword, and then he gets back his dad’s sword at the end, and revisits his village, and I thought for SURE he was going to put the sword back, implying that he was not yet ready, and giving us something unfinished for another day. But instead he just picks it up and yells a lot, and The End.

And I was kinda left with this weird feeling like, “Um, what did I just watch?” Was this a story about a barbarian, or a do-gooder? A fighting Monk or a vestal virgin? An evil witch child or jealous daughter? It was like they were trying to merge these archetypes into actual fleshed out characters by simply smooshing them together – but it just didn’t work. You can’t take complete opposite archetypes and just slap them together and call it a character. They just don’t smoosh right.  You have to sit down and create real, fleshed out people with real wants, desires and motivations that spring from the world and situations they’re involved in. If you just throw a bunch of crap in willy-nilly to please everybody, you end up pleasing no one.

If I had to guess what happened, I’d guess it was this: trying to please too many people. Trying to make Conan progressive/yet traditional, without having any clue about what drove him or the people he associated with. Trying to make the female lead both a damsel in distress/fighter, without creating an actual person (they even randomly threw in this thief character who didn’t become a companion, just was there briefly, basically said, “Come find me for the climax of the movie!” and then appeared later to break him into a fortress… for the climax of the movie).

And the problem with trying to please too many people is that you end up with something mediocre. During the final epic battle scenes, I found myself kind of spacing out. I realized I wasn’t really attached to any of the characters – not Conan, not the Vestal Virgin, not the witch girl, and not the big bad guy. I just really couldn’t care less about what happened to them, because I wasn’t allowed to be truly invested in their stories because they really weren’t invested in them either. About the only interesting character was Conan’s initial fighting companion, who – again – just kinda showed up randomly throughout the movie instead of acting as a constant. I was more interested in the first 20 minutes of the movie where we’re actually learning about Conan and his world than the other 2 hours or so in which we’re just kind of running around after McGuffins without doing any kind of character work (in some ways, I think pairing Valeria and the thief with Conan helped in the first one, as both were allowed to emote – another good scene is when Valeria and his thief companion try to save him from the wind demons. They are allowed to feel things and be invested in them because he is not – but SOMEBODY has to feel things. Remember when the thief says, “I cry because he cannot?” Pure gold, there).

This is a classic pairing when you want to do a character as unemotional/distant as Conan. It’s like Holmes/Watson. SOMEBODY has to be there for the audience to relate to, or to help us sympathize with our rather unsympathetic lead.  But Conan in this movie just kind of wandered around randomly, sometimes alone, sometimes with other folks, but with no constant, nobody with any drive, and certainly nobody I could care about (again, the closest being his warrior-second, who was really underused throughout).

To sum up, no amount of schizophrenic storytelling will make us love a Conan who is not even fleshed out well enough to be truly loved by his cardboard companions.

Tags: media
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