(no subject)

Reposted from comments;

Most of why I haven't gone to see the new Conan movie is that I know it's about the (Arnie movie version) vengeance deal, rather than anything I know from reading the stories. I feel a little sheepish complaining about film Conan because immediately I think about EGG complaining that real Conan would never resort to traps and snares, but I gotta agree with Uncle Gary about the whole origin story deal. What I'd really like as a Conan film would be a lot more like Indiana Jones (hey, pulp character). You'd start with a condensed version of "The Frost Giant's Daughter" as a short introduction, then the rest of the movie would either be derived from "Red Nails" or "The God in the Bowl." Some more involved story set elsewhere in Hyperborea, thus establishing our hero as this seasoned globetrotter. ("Frost Giant's Daughter" has some implications of rape which I don't like, but if you remove those, what you have is a really compact introduction to how Conan is badass; he wonders what's up with a beautiful nearly naked woman in the middle of near-zero temperatures on a battlefield, and his curiosity leads him right into a trap, whereupon he fights and beats two enormous frost giants.)

I really hate how movie characters get origin stories. It's as though the accepted formula feels obliged to give us a reason why someone would wander the land with a weapon, or why someone has superpowers - as though us viewers or readers are unfamiliar with the idea of weapons or superpowers and need a coherent explanation first. It's like some bizarre evolutionary endpoint to Chekov's comment about guns from the first act showing up in the third.

What we as viewers want is cool characters doing cool things and as immediately as possible. Part of the appeal of the cool character is that we don't know their origin story and are working backwards. There are a thousand seriously cool possibilities for how Boba Fett got his armor, or as an example from different media, how Wolverine first manifested mutant powers. As soon as we know that Boba inherited his armor and ship from a father killed by Jedi, or that Wolverine started life as a frail upper-crust boy in the 1890s, we are now down to one possibility each and that's not as cool.

And once Our Hero has confronted and killed (and it's always killed; there's never a "okay, but I'm more ethical than that - you go to Arkham and get some treatment, willya?") the man who killed his father/parents/uncle/the man who summoned him to earth to end the world, what's left that won't be anticlimatic? What do you do in the next movie? The fixation on origin stories seems incredibly bizarre when you think about the episodic nature of sequels.

What's so hard to get about this?

and then I thought of something nightmarish re: origin stories

I was bitching about how Conan doesn't need an origin story. And then I realized that, were to be a film adaptation of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, you can bet that F & GM wouldn't just be guys with eccentric wizardly patrons doing adventuresome things worldwide.

Instead, the movie would feature Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser orphaned by mysterious raiders in different parts of the world, and adopted by Ningauble and Sheelba. Initially the two wizards were expecting only one Chosen One, but since there are two boys tattooed with the Brand of Destiny, Ningauble teaches the boys wizardry and Sheelba teaches them swordsmanship. Instead of facing their fated roles, the young men run off to Lankhmar where they fall afoul of the powerful Thieves' Guild, and must carve out a bloody vengeance. Although there's a side-plot where both men want to be exclusive with this hot ghoul chick (because we're obliged to have a love interest and indicate that our duo are Not Gay, plus having someone with barely-visible flesh means more CG), friendship triumphs in the end. Together with ghoul babe they find that the Thieves' Guild were just pawns of the Gods of Lankhmar (not the Gods in Lankhmar), who are;

• actually the wizard order that cast out Ningauble and Sheelba centuries ago and
  
• the power behind the mysterious raiders
  
• and there'd be the inevitable faux-fatherhood, join-the-dark-side line about how the Gods of Lankhmar really made Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser

Then there'd be a huge fight over a lake of boiling acid, or they'd be saved at the last moment by the sea dragon intended for the Time Zoo, or whatever. Everyone bad would die. Everyone good would live. There'd be some pithy comment and an "easter egg" after the credits.

That plot of course assumes that the villains behind the Thieves' Guild aren't the Rat God and his followers, or that the writers don't churn out something only vaguely tangential to Lieber canon.