The Suckrificial Lamb

Two weeks ago, I posted about my undying hatred for Ted Mosby, the main character/narrator of How I Met Your Mother. While I stand by every word of that post, I feel that a certain amount of clarification needs to be made: yes, he's pretentious and insufferable and I want to kill him with fire every time he scrunches up his mouth in that fucking smug smile he has, but his overwhelming shittiness actually serves a greater purpose:

Ted Mosby is HIMYM's Suckrificial Lamb.

For those of you who don't know what that term means (possibly because I just made it up), let me explain. If you've ever read "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, you should be familiar with the concept of human sacrifice as a means to secure the greater good of the community. Long story short, some poor bitch gets stoned to death (spoiler alert) so the town can have a good harvest, and then everyone who's still alive does a little happy dance. (See also: The Wicker Man.) In short, one person's sacrifice – whether willing or not – can ensure the stability of a town and its livelihood, though some people claim that killing Nicolas Cage won't bring back your goddamn honey.

In any case, the same principle can apply to fiction. Every story needs to have a certain amount of Suck, which is another highly technical term I just made up to refer to all the negative aspects of said story. Suck isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself – it can be used to create character flaws and conflict and generally make the story more interesting, but it can also manifest itself in bad writing and other things which will alienate your audience. So, let's say (for the sake of argument) that you're writing a story, and you've just created a bunch of characters who are all just a little too awesome. There are three possible courses of action:

Option 1: Do nothing. Everyone stays improbably awesome and nothing bad ever happens to them. This is problematic because it's completely unbelievable and also boring as hell. The work drowns in Unintentional Suck.

Option 2: Distribute some Intentional Suck evenly between the cast members. This can result in more human, well-rounded characters, but it's difficult to do really well: not enough Suck and you have the same problem as Option 1; too much Suck and none of your characters are likeable. Tread carefully.

Option 3: Dump the majority of your Intentional Suck on one or two characters and let everyone else stay awesome. The character in question will be almost universally hated, but the others will seem that much better by comparison. Congratulations, you've just created a Suckrificial Lamb!

These types of characters are easily identifiable if you listen for the following conversational pattern: “I really enjoy [movie/show/book X], but [character Y] can [go to hell / eat a bag of dicks / get sodomized to death by rabid howler monkeys]. But everything else about it is great!”

A Brief Field Guide to Suckrificial Lambs

True Blood: Imagine everything bad that could happen to one person. Now imagine reacting to all that stuff in the worst possible way, usually by telling your friends and family to go fuck themselves. Throw in a drinking problem, an upper lip that never stops quivering, and a compulsion to bring up slavery every five seconds, and you've made yourself a heaping plate of Tara Thornton! Bon appetit. (Sookie and Bill tie for second place. I'm getting really sick of their shit.)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel: I'm more or less convinced that Joss Whedon emerged fully formed from his father's head, because the way that Dawn and Connor are written makes me think that he never actually experienced life as a teenager. Both shows are overflowing with drama of one sort or another, but sweet zombie Jesus those two take the cake for their whiny, obnoxious behavior.

Mad Men: In a show populated almost exclusively by awful human beings, Pete Campbell manages to be the one character that I can almost never bring myself to sympathize with. Interestingly enough, he's played by the same actor who played Connor on Angel. Hmmmmmmmmm.

Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: Hank motherfucking Pym. I mean, he's already loaded with Suck because one of his main powers is actually talking to ants, but then he decides that the only way to make himself less useful is to become a pacifist and actively sabotage his teammates while they're trying to apprehend some dangerous supervillains. Oh, and then he builds a super-intelligent robot who almost murders them all. Way to go, jackass.

You get the idea.

So, yeah. Ted Mosby... I hate you with a burning passion, but your suckrifice makes the rest of the How I Met Your Mother that much better. I would shake your hand, but I'm afraid your Suck might be contagious.

How I Murdered Your Protagonist

As most of you have undoubtedly already discovered, Netflix's selection of movies and TV shows is kinda like heroin. You start out and everything is awesome and you're just like “Holy shit Mad Men and Doctor Who and Sherlock and all this other shiny stuff” but then you turn into a hopeless junkie who takes advantage of every free half hour to squeeze in some more Supernatural. Best case scenario, you manage to control the habit before it takes over your life, but it's much more likely that you'll: A) overdose and need someone to inject pure adrenaline into your heart, or B) you'll end up fighting a bunch of strangers in an alley because you think the rotting corpse of a stray cat is actually your dead daughter.

Actually, that last one is pretty unlikely unless you're absolutely godawful at writing comic books. But I digress.

In any case, one of the side effects of my Acute Netfliculitis was that I started watching How I Met Your Mother a few months back, and I pretty much loved it. The cast had good chemistry, the humor was surprisingly risque, and it had a fun tendency to mess around with over-used sitcom tropes. (Also, I'm more or less behaviorally conditioned to like anything with Neil Patrick Harris in it.)

In short, everything seemed great.

Somewhere along the line, though, things started to change. I noticed a flaw in the early episodes, but I was willing to overlook it because the rest of the show was so fun. I hoped it would get better, but it really, really didn't. In fact, I just finished the fourth season, and my mild annoyance has swelled into irrational antipathy.

I hate Ted Mosby.

He's obnoxious and pretentious and passive-aggressive and is always a bitch when the situation doesn't even remotely call for it.

I hate him and I want him to die.

Of course, I know this is impossible: Ted is the show's narrator, and the whole point of the show is that it's a story he's telling his children (a story that involves WAY too much sex with random women to be appropriate for sharing with one's own offspring). Barring the possibility that Ted pulls a Swayze at some point in the show's future and is actually contacting his children from beyond the grave (I guess Bob Saget would be a medium?), I'm sure he's going to survive until the show ends.

Le sigh.

The inherent problem with HIMYM is that the event which brings about Future!Ted's happy life is also the event which will end the show. It's How I Met Your Mother, not How I Met and Courted Your Mother and We Had Some Rough Patches but Everything Turned Out Okay in the End. There is a theoretical end-point for this show, but it's going to get dragged out for as long as humanly possible because it's a popular sitcom and popular sitcoms always hang around for a few seasons too long. The show has to keep going, so Ted also has to keep being an obnoxiously, consciously naïve wet blanket who's waiting around for The One to show up on a silver platter.

In short, the show is suffering from what I like to call the Incredible Hulk Dilemma.

You see, all Bruce Banner wants to do is settle down, live a normal life, have the government stop chasing him, and never turn into a giant green smashing machine again. That's all well and good, and maybe it'll actually happen some day – but the day Bruce Banner achieves lasting peace is the day that his story ends. No one cares about some scrawny irradiated scientist; they read those comics because they want to see HULK SMASH. If the unstoppable, rage-fueled monster gets to be happy, the story ceases to have any point.

The same phenomenon is at work in HIMYM, but it achieves the opposite effect: the plot point that's keeping the story going is actually the one I care about the least. That being said, I would probably care about Ted's love life more if he occasionally turned green, tripled in size, and went on a rampage through downtown Manhattan.

Oh well. The show has already surprised me several times, so I'm holding out for a major plot twist at the end: those kids we keep seeing aren't actually Ted's children; he's just gone crazy and kidnapped them and is telling them this big long story to try and make the Stockholm Syndrome set in faster.

Here's hoping.

On Alternate Interpretations

My temperament is a strange thing. Several years ago, I reached a point in my development where I realized that I could simply shrug off things that might leave other people raging, weeping, or wallowing in the depths of despair. I'm very good at compartmentalizing my emotions and (as previously discussed) looking at situations from multiple points of view, which makes me uniquely equipped to deal with (read: survive) large-scale, emotionally stressful events. The trade-off, however, is that I get inordinately furious at tiny things that most rational people would just ignore.

Most of the time, this ire is directed at technology. As my roommates will attest, sometimes this involves me releasing long streams of high-volume profanity at God of War when the kill sequence on a momentarily stunned cyclops won't fucking start even though I'm pressing the O button and standing right the hell in front of it and then it recovers and grabs me and throws me across the screen and I'm back at fucking square one. As you can probably imagine, rage abounds. Another common object of my wrath is my work computer, which will function perfectly well until I actually have to look up information for a customer or (God forbid) ring up a sale. Of course, I can't curse at work (while anyone's listening), so instead I construct elaborate revenge fantasies in my head in which I brutally murder everything the computer has ever loved with its cold, mechanical heart before finally putting the pitifully obsolete old bastard out of its misery. All I can say is this: God help the machines if they ever rise against their human masters, because I've got some pent-up frustration I've just been dying to release.

Do you hear me, you smug, sentient, silicon bastards? I am the face of your doom.

To be fair, however, technology is far from the only thing that makes me want to commit acts of violence. Sometimes my wrath is stirred up by something as simple as getting a song stuck in my head. Such was the case a couple days ago.

Now, I don't hate Sarah Bareilles. I actually have much more respect for her than I do for most other pop stars, if only because she writes and performs her own songs. That takes talent and creativity (two things which are sorely lacking in most mainstream music), and she should be applauded.

For the most part.

See, while I have nothing against her specifically, I do have a vendetta against "King of Anything", a song from her 2010 album. The reasons for my virulent antipathy are pretty simple: it came out around the time I was working at Regal Cinemas, and it was the most prominent member of the five-or-six-song mix that played between shows in every theater. I heard this song (or at least a part of it) almost every time I cleaned up after a movie, probably at least twenty times a shift. Hearing it now practically gives me post-traumatic stress flashbacks: I can smell the stale popcorn, the spilled soda, and even the vomit. My God, the vomit.

As the song became more popular, however, I was given even more reason to dislike it. Its lyrics were plastered across a number of Facebook profiles, seemingly as a way of giving a big "fuck you" to everyone carrying a Y chromosome because men are jerks and girl power and all that shit. My problem with "King of Anything" is also the reason that so many people loved to quote it--it's so one-sided and vague that it could apply to practically any fight or disagreement, no matter how small. Our dear Sara is complaining about her man (let's call him "Brad" for now, because why the hell not?) and how he tells her what to do, but we really have no idea what's going on in the situation aside from her huffy reaction. There are a number of possibilities here, all with the same ending:

Brad: Hey, babe, I've been thinking that you should lose some weight. And maybe get a nose job.
Sara: OMG WHO DIED AND MADE YOU KING OF ANYTHING
[Justified! He's a douche.]

Brad: Hey, babe, I think that instead of going to the library we should go to the movies.
Sara: OMG WHO DIED AND MADE YOU KING OF ANYTHING
[Overreaction. It's not that big a deal.]

Brad: Hey, babe, you should probably learn the difference between "you're" and "your" if you actually want to be a journalist.
Sara: OMG WHO DIED AND MADE YOU KING OF ANYTHING
[She's a moron and she needs to learn how to take constructive criticism.]

Brad: Honey, I've been really worried about you. I think you shouldn't drink so much, especially with the baby on the way.
Sara: OMG WHO DIED AND MADE YOU KING OF ANYTHING
[Aaaaand you get the idea.]

We're just supposed to take her word for it that this guy is awful and he's oppressing her, but we're never really offered any evidence. Hell, for all we know, she's a spoiled princess who's used to getting her way in everything and the problem isn't even that big--the song could well be the female equivalent of a guy complaining about how his girlfriend is a bitch because she wants to cuddle after sex instead of letting him go home and play Call of Duty: Black Ops. Or because she ate all of his bacon. It's all about perspective, really, and the song gives us none.

To be fair, though, my problem is more with the listeners than the song itself. No one is above criticism, and taking a "Who cares if you disagree / You are not me / Who made you King of Anything" approach to life is pretty much a short-cut to being that one person that everyone hates because you always have to get your way. And sure: sometimes you do have to assert yourself and say "I am an independent human being and you have no right to try and control my life"--but you should probably say it in person (i.e., not on Facebook) if you don't want to look petty.

Finally, I realize that much of your opinion on the song (and my slandering thereof) is probably determined by what set of genitalia you have--so I'd just like to take this opportunity to point out that gender does not determine character. There are many assholes in the world, and their flagrant assholism will often manifest itself in ways which align with gender stereotypes, but that doesn't make all men or all women evil.

Some people are just assholes.

A Brief History of Time Travel, Part I

In conclusion, while the actions of time travelers may influence the course of history, it's impossible for them to actually change anything. Anything they do in the past will have always been that way.

Since the reactions to my last post generally fell somewhere between "What the fuck is wrong with you" and "MY EYES! ZE GOGGLES DO NOTHING," I figured that this would be a good time to scale back on squick-inducing slash fiction and do a good old-fashioned nerd rant.

I have been known, on occasion, to get rather heated about things that don't actually matter to anyone else (some of you may remember a post from way back in October in which I said some very mean things about the Midwest). One of those things is the theory of time travel.

Now, it's not the physical impossibility of time travel that bothers me (I can deal with Lovecraftian horrors and superheroes that can breathe in space, so clearly I'm not married to realism here); it's the fact that so many people don't fucking understand how time travel would work, if it were possible. Movies and books and video games are full of bad time travel theory, and it never ceases to piss me off.

Here are several offenders, in no particular order:

The Terminator movies. Going back in time to kill someone doesn't fucking work. If John Connor never grows up, the Terminators have no reason to be sent after him. The very fact that the machines want to kill him basically makes him immortal until he becomes the leader of the resistance. There's no real paradox at work, though--the machines are apparently just morons, right? Well, it depends on whether or not you view Terminator 3 as canon (The Sarah Connor Chronicles doesn't seem to, which earns the show major points in my book). In T3, the Terminatrix tracks down a couple other leaders of the future resistance and shoots them in the face, thereby ensuring that they never become important enough to merit being marked for death in the future. Because they're already dead. This steps out of the realm of "bad planning" and becomes a full-on temporal paradox--and, sadly, it's not even close to being the worst part of the movie.

Back to the Future. You cannot undo your own existence. It just doesn't work. If you did manage to keep your parents from ever getting married, however, you and your siblings wouldn't slowly fade out of existence one by one: you never would have existed in the first place, making it impossible for you to prevent your parents from getting together at all. Boom. Paradox. Whether or not Marty McFly macks on his own mom, the very fact that he exists at all means that his parents still bone and they still produce him (despite his best efforts to fuck everything up like a massive jackass). He's gonna have to do something about that Oedipus complex, though.

Kate and Leopold. Soooo the man who invented the elevator is in danger of not having invented the elevator anymore because he's been whisked to the 21st century and has fallen in love with Meg Ryan for some reason. In another case of the bullshit "slow-onset time paradox" thing that movies seem to be fond of, this problem in the time stream manifests itself by making an elevator disappear. And then Liev Schreiber falls down the empty elevator shaft.

Now, I'm willing to ignore the massive improbability of his survival, mostly because there's a much larger problem at hand. For a moment, let's assume that this whole "changing the past means changing the future" thing actually works: if the past were changed so that the elevator was never invented, the skyline of New York City would be drastically different because everyone would have to use the stairs. The buildings would all be a hell of a lot shorter--and you know what they wouldn't have at all? Elevator shafts. Because elevators never existed at all, so no one would be stupid enough to build places to put them. Gahhhhhhhh.

Kate and Leopold, I know you're just a romantic comedy that's using time travel as an excuse to put Hugh Jackman in period costume so he can be charming and completely heterosexual and talk about La Bohème, but that doesn't excuse you from making any goddamn sense whatsoever.

Superman and Superman II. You know, I guess the creators of the Superman movies deserve some credit: most of the movies on this list at least came up with some sort of flimsy pseudo-scientific explanation for time travel, but the people behind Superman were clearly too busy drinking Everclear and snorting cocaine off naked strippers and generally not giving a fuck to come up with any sort of coherent explanation. I'm pretty sure the movie's pre-production meetings went something like this:

Important Guy: "Superman needs to travel back in time? Okay, here's what we'll have him do. He flies around the Earth really fast and makes it spin the other way."
Intern: "But what does that have to do with time travel? Wouldn't reversing the Earth's rotation just kill everything on the planet?"
Important Guy: "Jimmy, you need to loosen up. Put your face in that mound of cocaine."
Intern: "With gusto, sir!"

Also, when Superman reverses time, he only goes back to save Lois Lane. The thousands of other people he saved from the falling rocks and tidal waves and shit? Apparently not worth saving a second time. But the best part is this: as if the plot device weren't retarded enough the first time around, he does the exact same thing in the sequel, but on a much larger scale. Superman travels back to the events of the first movie to prevent the stray missile from ever freeing the rogue Kryptonians, thereby making it so that none of the events of Superman II ever actually happened. That's right: Kal-El actually retconned his own movie out of existence.

Congratulations, Superman creative team, you have achieved the fail singularity.

In Which Irrational Hatred is Displayed

So, this has come up in conversation several times recently, and I feel like it's something I should make an official statement on:

I hate the Midwest and it can go to hell.

There, I said it. And before anyone gets all offended, I would just like to point out that this view does not reflect on people who live there; rather, it reflects on the land itself. It is a piss-poor excuse for a geographical region and it should be ashamed of itself.

Why, you ask?

Because it's so unnaturally fucking flat. There are no hills. There are barely any trees. It's all just gently rolling fields of wheat and corn as far as the eye can see and it makes me want to shoot myself in the face. It's as if God was creating the world and suddenly ran out of ideas. "Screw it," he said. "I'll just make this part flat. It's not like anyone will notice." Well you were wrong, God. I notice, and it's terrible.

As if the flawless logic of my argument weren't already evident, take a moment and ponder the fact that the unusual flatness of the terrain directly contributes to the number of devastating tornadoes that go through the region every year. I mean, honestly - why the fuck anyone would live in a place known as "Tornado Alley" is beyond me. That's like moving to a place called "Murder Town" and being surprised when someone shanks you in the kidney so he can get the five cent deposit on that can of soda you just finished. (No offense to anyone who lives in Baltimore.)

God, I hate the Midwest.