The Purge Season 1

The Purge is an IP that seems to be in a perpetual state of wasted potential. The first movie infamously squandered its fascinating premise on a rote home invasion plot, but even the sequels always felt like they were failing to really make good on the promise of the franchise’s central idea.

Enter the Amazon Prime series of the same name. With nine to ten episodes a season, can this extended Purge finally succeed where the movies didn’t?

The premise, for those not familiar: it’s some vague number of years after an authoritarian group called the New Founding Fathers have taken control of America, and one of their big innovations is the Purge, an annual “holiday” where for one night all crime is legal. This is supposedly aimed at reducing crime by letting people get all of their crime urges out in a semi-controlled manner, but its actual purpose is to reduce the population of homeless, poor, minorities and other people the NFFA considers a drain on society.

So just like in the movies, it’s Purge night and a diverse cast of characters find themselves, for one reason or another, out on the streets and in danger. This time around we’ve got a teenage girl looking to sacrifice herself at the behest of the Purge cult she’s joined, her estranged Marine brother who would rather that didn’t happen, a finance executive who hires an assassin to kill someone and then gets cold feet, and an upwardly mobile young couple who attend an NFFA party in hopes of securing funding for their business ventures.

Right away we’ve got a more interesting selection of protagonists here than “person whose car breaks down ten miniutes before the Purge siren goes off.” A big reason for this is that the expanded scope of a series lets the show take its time getting the characters out of the safety of their secure enclaves rather than rushing to the action as soon as possible. In fact, one of the multiple plotlines takes place almost entirely behind fortified doors, the show making the point that holing up somewhere isn’t necessarily any safer than being out on the streets if you can’t trust the people you’re holed up with.

Having four different viewpoint characters whose storylines don’t intersect until the end of the season (in quite an elegant twist, I might add) lets the show take a more expansive look at what kinds of trouble a hapless citizen can get into on Purge night beyond just being chased by machete-wielding killers in masks. One of the constant criticisms of the movie franchise is that it focused on murder to the exclusion of all other kinds of crimes, and the series remedies this to an extent. 

Yes, we still mostly have people in zany costumes killing each other for funsies, but there’s other illegal activity highlighted like human trafficking, contract killing and—in probably the darkest and most disturbing scene the franchise has ever featured—sexual harassment. The show uses an admirable level of restraint when it comes to that last topic rather than going as over the top as it does with the violence, which if anything just makes the sequence more horrific than it might have been otherwise.

In a show with four main characters who mostly operate on completely separate story arcs, some are inevitably less interesting than others. My personal choice for the most disappointing protagonist is Jane Barber, the finance exec who sets out to stop the assassination she put into motion. For most of the series she was actually my favourite character, but in the last episode she delivers a speech about how the Purge is bad actually–a conclusion she had already reached by episode three–tries and fails to stop the bad guy, and then gets unceremoniously killed. I kind of get the feeling the writers ran out of things to do with her before the end.

In the past I’ve advanced the idea that the Purge movies are aimed primarily at angry American liberals. Given that this is a franchise featuring—in an entry released in 2016–supporters of a far-right US regime rioting after their candidate loses an election, maybe that’s fair enough. I still wish they were a bit more subtle about it. Like, I know rich dipshits in real life don’t pay taxes, but having the rich dipshit just blithely announce that he doesn’t pay taxes is a bit on the nose.

Despite these issues, this first season is for my money easily the best Purge-related piece of media that’s been released. Unfortunately the franchise seems to have reached its apotheosis just as its appeal started to wane, as the series was canceled after the second season. So, let’s see if the inevitable reboot in ten or so years can keep the momentum going.

Scheduling note

I’ve slipped into a little blog lull which is likely going to continue for some time due to my health issues and dealing with some personal business. Content will resume in a few weeks, hopefully.

The Grace Of Kings

Note: Going to take December off blogging, and possibly some of January as well, whilmst I work on some longer blog posts

My search for the Good Fantasy Series continues with Ken Liu’s The Grace Of Kings, book one of the Dandelion Dynasty series. I’ve previously enjoyed Liu’s editorial efforts in Broken Stars, but how’s his original fantasy? Let’s find out.

The Grace Of Kings is about the island land of Dara, long been divided into constantly-warring Tiro states but as of the beginning of the story is united under the reign of Emperor Mapidere following the conquest of the rest of the continent by the kingdom of Xana. The people of the former Tiro kingdoms appear to have made peace with their subjugation (or are smart enough to pretend that they have), but the desire for rebellion still smoulders beneath the surface, as demonstrated by an audacious attempt on the emperor’s life in the book’s opening chapter.

When the aging emperor enters a terminal decline, the carefully-maintained order of Xana’s authority quickly unravels and all of Dara is soon in open rebellion. Among the figures that rise to prominence in the next few years, two stand out: Kuni Garu, a shiftless gangster turned unlikely populist rebel leader, and Mata Zyndu, last scion of a distinguished clan and a near-superhuman warrior. The two start out fighting together to support the rebellion, but as Xana’s fall draws nearer, it becomes apparent that Kuni and Mata’s wildly divergent ideas about what the post-rebellion world should look like will lead them into inevitable conflict.

The Grace Of Kings is a bit different from the standard template of western political fantasy bricks that you might be familiar with. Written more like a semi-mythologized work of history than a novel, the story takes in a panoramic view of the events unfolding in Dara, freely bouncing around between viewpoints and skimming over mundane events to get to the important moments. This is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means the book cuts out all the boring shit that usually clogs up fantasy novels: events that in other stories could easily take up an entire novel are dispensed with in a single chapter, while a chapter’s worth of material often goes by in a single paragraph. You’re not going to find any long travel sequences or interminable battles here.

On the other hand, the book’s pacing can sometimes get a little bit too fast, feeling as though it’s speeding through an abridged summary of its own story. Kuni Garu becoming the leader of a bandit group literally happens in a few sentences; towards the middle of the book, huge reversals in the fortunes of entire nations get even less than that. Characters rise to positions of power or lose everything between chapters, often with very little description. On balance I prefer this approach to wading through multiple volumes of side-plots that don’t have anything to do with the main story, or pages upon pages of pointless worldbuilding, but at times it can make the whole book feel a little sparse.

Speaking of worldbuilding, I liked the relatively low-fantasy setting of the book. Apart from the usually-oblique intervention of Dara’s gods and the occasional prophetic dream, there really isn’t any magic here to speak of, certainly not the kind that an army commander can reliably call on to turn the tide of a battle. Even Mata’s superhuman strength and double-pupilled eyes are unusual, but treated like a natural occurrence that just happens from time to time.

(This was going to be longer but migraines, bottom line book pretty good, would check out sequels)

Books I Really Didn't Finish: The Witchwood Crown

We’re navigating new frontiers of not finishing books with this one. Soon I’ll be writing posts about not reading books at all, and then my blog will spontaneously merge with r/books.

As an experiment, I recently walked into my local library and picked out the chunkiest, heftiest fantasy tome that I could find, without bothering to look at the synopsis or even the title. That book turned out to be Tad Williams’ The Witchwood Crown.

This was an inauspicious choice for a few reasons. Firstly, my only previous exposure to Tad Williams is The War Of The Flowers, which is to this day one of the dullest books I’ve ever tried to read. Second, The Witchwood Crown is actually the first book in a sequel trilogy to Williams' Memory, Sorrow And Thorn series from way back in the 80s, although the author forward states that it was intended to stand alone so I didn’t let that stop me.

I girded my loins, cleared my busy social calendar, opened the book...and made it four chapters in before I gave up and swapped it out for something more interesting.

I just...I can’t. I can’t even, with this shit.

The first chapter opens with a woman named Tanahaya, part of a race called the Zida’ya, musing to herself about how humans are as mayflies compared to her people, who live for centuries in their serene forest homes and they’re elves, they’re just Tolkien elves with a different name and a vaguely Japanese cultural aesthetic for some reason, Jesus Christ what is it with the fucking elves

I honestly don’t understand how people can write this stuff without falling into a coma. Reading it is excruciating enough, God knows what it would be like to have to live with Shan’anda’landa’land’alar, First Zephyr of the Elv’en people or whatever in your head for several years. 

Granted, this is a sequel to a fantasy trilogy that started in 1988; maybe these tropes didn’t feel quite as played-out 33 years ago as they do now. Maybe, after years of gritty grimdark fantasy, people are hungry for wispy elves giving thanks to Mother Sun and riding horses named Spider-Silk. I guess it’s possible.

After the elf chapter we get a wise kingly king and his rambunctious princely prince son, and this is the stuff that made me drop the book. The elf shit is at least entertainingly bad, but sombre kings being all wise and sombre and kingly is perhaps the least interesting subject in the world to me. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to see eye to eye with the epic fantasy genre until it gets over its fawning attitude towards monarchy, and there’s absolutely no sign of that happening any time soon.

For all that I mock grimdark fantasy (like I did two paragraphs ago), it at least tends to be a lot richer and more interesting than this hokey nonsense.