bbctol

There is an interesting and under-analyzed difference between Tolkien and the mythology he drew from: his POV characters are largely separated from the Norse myths he drew from. The Shire is much more English and modern in tone than the rest of Middle-Earth: hobbits check their clocks and drink tea, rather than fighting dragons and winning treasure. Tolkien wasn’t just inventing new myths, but inventing myths from a distinctly different perspective, myths which incorporated characters that had our culture and values into an ancient Norse world. I’ve heard he was inspired not just by William Morris’s translations of Icelandic sagas, but the journal of the very English Morris traveling through the wild Icelandic landscape by pony. (Burns, M. J. ‘Echoes of William Morris’s Icelandic Journals in J. R. R. Tolkien’, in Chance (1991), pp. 367–73)

I always interpreted THG as very deliberately playing up the way it put the reader in the villain’s shoes. The point of the books is that as much as you’re supposed to root against the Capitol, seeing the forced romantic tension and danger as tools of oppression, those are exactly the reasons why people are interested in the books! They make the readers complicit in the objectification of their subjects: if it’s a sign of cruelty to be entertained by children fighting to the death, well, everyone who watched the movies must acknowledge their cruelty.

Whether or not this is a good thing is up for debate: taken most charitably, it’s Andy Warhol sticking it to society by mocking them and being celebrated for it, under a harsher lens, it’s Jeff Koons “ironically” making millions by fully embracing a capitalist system in the name of art. It may well be the case that THG should have “stuck it to the man” more, but I do think the choice to play the drama, glamour, and romance that oppress Katniss as entertainment was a deliberate and morally complex one. (It’s also entirely possible I’m reading too much into it, but isn’t that why we’re on this site?)

With the focus on comic book adaptations, it’s worth examining how the structure of serial comics affects the way villains are constructed. Comic book villains are undeterred by setbacks in part because they have to return in future installments; Lex Luthor can never be truly beaten by Superman, because the readers want him to come back next year with an even cooler plan.

Iconic heroes and villains in comic books both need to be unstoppable, or at least ridiculously persistent, because their story arcs are open-ended. The interesting thing is the way authors adjust the readers’ perception of their persistence: the hero’s story keeps going because he’s so noble and strong that he never gives up, while the villain keeps going because they’re a sociopath with no remorse or care for casualties.