Damsel: The Trope of Subverting Tropes

I thought we had reached Peak subversive anti Trope when Velma hit screens in the beginning of 2023 it race swapped everyone except former leader Fred who was made into a manbaby who hadn't gone through puberty and couldn't cut his own food and had a tiny penis had Daphne as a drug dealing mean girl who had a gay romance with Velma and opened with a ridiculous monologue about how it wasn't like the normal story that you're expecting strap in tight and put on your depends Grandpa because Mindy Kaling has a show so clever so subversive you might not even survive it how's it working out for you what being clever well the producers and writers over at Netflix learned absolutely nothing from Mindy's audience repellent and decided to try something physicists and mathematicians thought to be impossible a 4D nay a 5D chess move a project so creatively astounding it should come with a warning label because it might actually blow your mind they decided to tell a damsel and distress story except the damsel saves herself oh my that is shocking I am shocked right now if you were watching me on your phone I'll give you a second to pick me up off the ground and compose yourself I mean the idea of a self-saving princess is something that I don't think any of us saw coming something else you didn't see coming was me asking you to hit the like button okay I'm back folders today cuz I'm basic okay let's jump into the many failings of damsel but once we've had our laughs I want to get a little serious because this movie did have potential and I want to talk about that and also let's talk about the fantasy TV genre in general and the dynamically downward Direction it's descending distinctly due to dumb Drafting and directing so if you haven't seen this one good for you first of all but let me fill you in on the plot and the devilish deception of subverting all the tropes the movie opens with a straightup monologue as Millie Bobby Brown tells you that most stories involve a helpless damsel getting saved by her prince but not this super edgy story it's not like the other girls there are no rules in this house I'm not like a regular Mom I'm a cool mom they even named it damsel so you know who the story is about the people that made this think you are stupid so we open with Millie chopping wood because that's usually man's work right clever they weren't sure if the full-on narration from a few seconds ago was enough to clue you in that this princess is different from other princesses we get to the castle and everyone is extremely poor and we find that Millie is going to marry a prince to get money for her father's Kingdom or duy or or whatever it's honestly so unimportant they don't even go into it He's listed in IMDb as Lord bayford but this leads to our second Earth shattering subversion just when you were catching your breath from having been sent reeling by the stunning blow of this story being so different lady bayford is the step mother but she's not evil they go to the New Kingdom it's insanely Rich Millie meets the Prince she is arranged to marry and he seems like an okay guy the queen takes Lord bayford aside to discuss the bride price and that's when things seem a miss Mr bayford leaves the negotiation looking troubled saying they're going to be rich but he won't say anymore after the wedding everyone heads up the mountain to perform a ceremony where the prince and princess become Blood Brothers and the queen who seems to be running things because this story is super different remember she tells of the first king who fought to slay a dragon but had to sacrifice his three daughters to assuage the Beast for the safety of the Kingdom then in a shocking twist you definitely didn't see coming 10 minutes ago Millie gets thrown down a pit as a sacrifice for the dragon that's right in this story she won't be saved from a dragon by a prince oh no the prince is the one who put her in danger of a dragon what no I don't know about you guys but like my entire world is in shambles right now I don't know which way is up I don't know if I'm coming or going have you ever been mind effed this hard I bet Christopher Nolan watched this and cried himself to sleep because his entire filmography is but a candle next to the sun of this movie's twists and turns okay so Millie whose character is actually named named elod I should I should try to say that so Millie falls down roughly 75 ft hitting rocks and branches along the way but only wakes up a little woozy she soon realizes that there are many articles of princess's past here and that the whole Dragon Story must be real and she is the next victim and it even talks telling her that taunting her and telling her that she smells like Royal Blood so the Blood Brother thing makes sense right I know it doesn't but anyway she then runs through the caves evading the Dragon and doing some half-hearted Rambo and Predator call backs she seems to make it to safety but not really this whole sequence of her falling and finding her way through the caves using a dagger to climb a wall using a crown to climb a crystal wall all of this takes forever and it's a direct fault of the desire to showcase the strong damsel since she can't require any help lest it be like one of those dreaded Other Stories We are left only with Millie for a long stretch she also can't speak to the dragon too much less their dialogue go to you know why she was thrown in and all that can't have that conversation until later so it's just minutes and minutes of Millie grunting crying tying strips of cloth to herself and climbing this is so boring her father has a change of heart tries to rescue her but dies so she escapes her sister is then thrown down in her place so she has to go back through the caves and rescue her and confront the dragon finally she actually speaks to this talking dragon and I know this movie has already blown your mind and rock your socks off but it's not done with you yet are you ready this dragon is not evil its babies were killed by that first king and it demanded a sacrifice in return and the kingdom has been tricking it with married in Blood Brother girls she explains all of it to the dragon who doesn't even have a name they fly to the kingdom and confront the queen oh there is a king there he is he doesn't speak though the dragon burns the whole castle down in like one blow and Millie escapes with her sister and stepmother and she walks away really cool see that I don't even look back there's a huge explosion and I just keep walking they sail away with the dragon to start a new life or something I'm not really sure happy ending honestly I don't think ight shamalan could have taken us for such a twisty ride okay so obviously the premise of this movie is not great it feels like a pitch Meer except it's going to be super short because the pitch guy is just going to say we're going to attempt to subvert every Trope in fantasy all at once and the boss is going to ask if there's anything to replace all that subverted Trope and the Pitcher is going to say hey shut up and that's going to be the end of the video oh wow wow wow wow but it's somehow worse not only did they not bother to write an actual story instead relying on the audience being too distracted by the incredible anti tropes they also put in a bunch of plot that doesn't make any sense the queen tells everyone what's going on with no consequence she tells Lord what's his name before the wedding that his daughter is going to be fed to a dragon he's stressed but like that's that's it I get it that they're doing like a feminist thing where women are property and whatnot but it makes no sense for the queen to tell the fathers what's going to happen to their daughters she also does a big ceremony explaining to the new daughter-in-law about the ancient King's deal with the dragon like this is all simply for our benefit the audience because they couldn't figure out how to get that in naturally my point in all of this is that word would get around that this Rich Island kingdom is tricking Lords into selling their daughters for Dragon sacrifice this is especially true since the movie shows us the many many many girls that have been thrown to a fiery death and since we see evidence that some of them didn't even make it to write their name on this wall we're talking about a lot of girls and nobody is caught on to the game here this is a real missed opportunity I'm going to talk about that later the fact that all these princesses survive a fall of this height is silly but not worth more than this one joke devoted to the silliness Bruno what's with everyone surviving this fall it does not Millie finds a safe location that says safe on the wall because a bunch of other girls have somehow found their way to the exact same spot and there's also a handy map on the wall convenient a complete map even though no one has escaped also the girls keep going to the same spots and the dragon can't prevent this even though it lives in this cave either the dragon is incredibly sadistic and wants them to think that there's hope or the dragon is stupid and doesn't know this Cave System very well even though it's been living here for a couple 100 years they could have gone with the sadistic Dragon angle but they didn't play it up clearly earlier I mentioned how Millie doesn't try to talk to this talking dragon and obviously no other girl has either which is a very big problem especially since a few of the girls clearly starve to death in this safe location during the few days they were alive they didn't communicate with this thing not once the terror of the chase subsided it's little things like this that make movies bad and you could just tell writer Dan mazow had this singular goal in mind to subvert tropes while promoting a kind of feminist angle and didn't bother to think about how it would affect the story looking at his past work it doesn't even look like Ultra feminism is his thing just bad writing his other two credits are the poorly rated fast X and the poorly rated Wrath of the Titans but he's got a real Banger coming up it's called Cowboy ninja Viking apparently adopted from a comic of the same name starring Chris Pratt it's about a man who has multiple personality disorder and the government turns him into a super soldier with the attributes of a cowboy ninja and Viking it's so dumb it's brilliant no it's just dumb honestly it might be like a so bad it's good kind of thing is Pratt so rich that he's entering into his I don't care let's just get weird face like Daniel Radcliffe cuz I'm here for it anyway Millie's dad comes back to the caves to rescue her but he's not going to because this isn't like those other stories but again we have a major problem with the rules of this world the dragon has a keen sense of smell says that it knows Millie is of this Royal Line because it can smell her blood this old man comes in to rescue her and he must not smell like the Royal line but he's there for his daughter yet this is never explored because that would end the movie too soon the dragon can only find out about the trickery at the end of the movie when the plot says so oh we also get mly finding the dragon eggs and then she suddenly has a flashback of the original King killing the babies and agreeing to sacrifice his daughters um nobody ever tells her this she just kind of Senses it from the dead dragon babies I mean who even cares at this point the writers didn't wake me when the show starts it's already being on a while wake me when it's over however finally the script allows the dragon to discover the treachery and it swoops down and decimates the kingdom with zero resistance which begs the question are dragons such sticklers for a deal that they stick to it that strongly this dragon has never bothered to attack before why make a deal with the king at all in their attempt to overturn all the tropes they fell into a rather basic one people attack dragons just because if the dragon was peaceful why attack it and if it wasn't peaceful why would a small sacrifice appease it the plot hinges on this and it makes no sense it's kind of a big Trope in F FY that dragons have no story they simply exist to be bested and kill Warriors and hoarde treasure they're Ultra powerful so killing one is how you show a character is powerful damsel falls into this trap the dragon is simply there it's arguably one of the two main characters yet has no story it literally has no name not even in the credits it is merely a creature of Revenge judging from the overall tone of the movie and the title I'm guessing the female dragon is meant to symbolize women's revenge against men who used them you know what no I think I'm thinking about this more than anyone involved as with so many terrible Productions there are no characters here why is Millie doing anything on screen only as a reaction to the plot and what other characters tell her to do she has no motivation only reaction only survival Instinct the prince is purely reacting to what the script has for him the only characters with any motivation are the queen and Lord wat's face is there a theme to this movie no maybe something something feminism men bad women not as bad but even that doesn't hold up so I don't think it's that deep this movie is pure plot things simply happening on screen and characters reacting to them until the script says different things should happen there are so many other continuity problems with this one but suffice it to say it's real bad but it didn't have to be there is potential under this Rubble the tricking of the Dragon is a somewhat fresh idea if poorly done here typically in fantasy the dragon is evil and kills anything within a mile or so of its layer so when nearby people are moving into the area a territory fight usually happens and the dragon dies the issue in damsel is that we don't see why the king attacks the dragon at all the dragon says didn't start the fight so we're forced to assume that a glory hungry King was hungry for Glory the kingdom is clearly rich like super rich so does the deal with the dragon help them somehow these are things that could have built an interesting story why doesn't the dragon just kill them all what is in this land that makes it worth living near a dragon and sacrificing so many women to it this Cavern scene makes it look like maybe the cave is is full of gold perhaps what happens when other lands catch on that this particularly prosperous kingdom is feeding all their daughters to a dragon do they attack does the kingdom have enough resources after so many years to ward off the attack are they trading some kind of goods that are so valuable that other kingdoms look the other way to keep the trade flowing there are so many different angles to take here and damsel explores none of them I could have been somebody instead of a bum which is what I am in some small way the minimal World building they did had potential to explore the idea of greed this kingdom is greedy for something on this island the dragon is greedy for something neighboring kingdoms are greedy to know why this kingdom is so rich maybe as time goes on it becomes clear that somebody's greed is insatiable and then things come to a head that would have been good oh what if instead of killing the babies the Ancient King killed the male dragon so now the female lays unfertilized eggs like a hen without roosters what if those eggs are solid gold and they're trading the girls for golden eggs because the dragon really is sadistic and likes to watch the kingdom fall into greedy excess and lust as the years go on so much potential here even the idea of a damsel in distress being a part of her own rescue is a good idea static damsels who only need rescuing are weak characters a little more than human mcguins so yeah exploring this Trope and giving the princess something to do is just that's just good writing it's not exactly novel in 2024 but it's still a good move to have a character be more than a plot device unfortunately in their attempt to be the smartest and cleverest in the room the folks behind damsel ended up making every character a static plot device congratulations you played yourself they also failed to explore what to do with a dragon in the end Millie sails away and the dragon flies with her but where are they going is the dragon going to bring prosperity to her Homeland somehow is she going to exploit it somehow this movie is just so shallow and there was so much potential here it really is a shame it's also yet another example of the problems we're seeing with the fantasy genre on TV it's nothing more than a soap box for Western social politics damsel is trying to get feminist high fives Wheel of Time was a fist fever dream Witcher blood origin was a multi-racial Utopia such that no location looked any different from another rings of power was a multi-racial feminist fever Utopia dream all of these shows are clearly written by La amateurs who simply bludge in the audience with their social Viewpoint because it's clearly all they ever think about oh and uh they you know they toss in some magic or elves or something nerds like that stuff right the power of the fantasy genre is that it's a blank canvas that can be used to explore anything from any perspective sometimes the same thing from multiple perspectives The Stormlight Archives books are great for this there is a merchant who is used to show how different cultures in the world negotiate and what they value in communication little cultural things like that are fun to play with and fantasy settings provide the sandbox to do it like I said I think damsel would have been a great setting to explore the idea of greed how does it come about how does it manifest differently in people what are consequences with fantasy you can build a fully new fully custom world and delve into Universal human ideas in many ways but modern fantasy shows are just rehashed political talking points but with dwarves or something yay what's a fantasy series that you hope gets a TV series or what's a fantasy series you hope to God Hollywood never gets their hands on I appreciate you watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Greg Owen

Views: 46,558

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Id: Mv8VNPAhR9U

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024