Heroine misfire

I was counting on making Game of Thrones my blog subject for this instalment, as I'm now completely up to speed with the series. I'd watched all of the previous seven seasons in time for the final season premiere and, thanks to an opportunistic subscription to HBO Nordic, I'm now able to see new episodes only a day or so after they air in the US. The trouble is, the latest episode threw us such a curve ball that I realise I'll have to wait until the end of the series before going off on a rant which might be rendered unnecessary by future plot twists. For now, though, I'm with the disgruntled fans who think that Jon Snow was robbed.

Instead I'll have to move to the other end of the fantasy spectrum and the sugary confection that is The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which I watched quite a while back. The theme addressed, though, will not be that far from my current issues with Game of Thrones, as it has to do with what makes a good heroine, something I've touched on earlier. Not that the heroine of Nutcracker has much in common with the supposed heroines in GoT. Her main fault is blandness, which is not something you can accuse the women of Westeros of. The way that the creators of Nutcracker have tried to "fix" the blandness, however, is symptomatic of a specific heroine trend which makes itself felt in Game of Thrones as well as in family-friendly Disney films.

The heroine in Nutcracker, Clara, is a girl who's lost her mother at a young age. Still grieving, she doesn't realise that her father is mourning too, and that his attempts to soldier on with life do not constitute a betrayal. The setting is Victorian London - which is a bit unexpected as I would have thought families called Stahlbaum and Drosselmeyer would be hanging out in Berlin or Vienna - but it hardly matters as Victorian London has seldom looked prettier. Clara is given a box which belonged to her mother as a Christmas present, but the key is missing. However, at a lavish Christmas party at her godfather Drosselmeyer's, the traditional hunt for Christmas presents leads her to the key, but also into another world where her dead mother was once Queen and where she is now hailed as the new leader.

The plot is generic fantasy stuff, reminiscent of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and a hundred yarns about the Chosen One, and there's a plot twist you can spot from a mile off. Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed the film. It was just the sort of light-hearted fluff one needs once in a while to rest one's brain, and it looks gorgeous. It was directed by Lasse Hallström, and if like me you have a fondness for his feel-good formula, you could do worse than to see it. But Clara remained a bore throughout. The scriptwriters thought it would be enough to endow her with inventive skills - the same shorthand for "see, she's brainy!" as was tried on Belle in the live-action Beauty and the Beast, and with the same indifferent result - and to make sure that she went into clinch with the Big Bad herself, climbing waterfalls and whatnot in the process. These empowerment traits just felt tacked on, and don't tell us anything about Clara as a person. Keira Knightley as the Sugar Plum Fairy, the kind of character who professes to be good but to whom you would rather not entrust as much as a pot plant (see also Galinda in the musical Wicked and the Blue Fairy in Once Upon a Time) is a great deal more fun.

This is consistent with the trend I alluded to earlier: an overreliance on making your heroine "kick-ass". Action hero stunts themselves do not make a heroine interesting - unsurprisingly, as they do not make a hero interesting either. What a heroine needs is personality. The reason I like, say, Rey in Star Wars is not that she can wield a light sabre, though admittedly it's a plus. It's that Daisy Ridley who plays her can sell her to me as a complex character with relatable feelings and insecurities. A character who has a strong personality doesn't have to kick ass to be interesting: she can stay at home and make everyone beer and sandwiches if she so chooses and still be the focus of a story. Not that I'm suggesting that heroines should stay at home and make sandwiches as a rule - that would make the plots very boring. I'm just tired of film and TV series providers taking the easy route with female characters and including "look, she fights better than a bloke!" scenes only to show us how feministically minded they (the film/series creators) are. I frankly don't care about their feminist credentials. Give me a strong plot and strong characters (ideally including a brainy villain - male) and I'm a happy part of the female popular-culture-consuming demographic.