Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.
Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.
Dean has a big flaw in his argument: Conan (and also Dar) was traumatized in childhood, and then trained, so he could take revenge as a formidable warrior. Sonja experiences the violence as an adult, so it needs to be the gift of strength to take revenge, but that doesn't mean that she can't be strong, could never have become strong if she had experienced her trauma as a young girl. And the film isn't "wildly misogynist" either. When you read Andrea Wright's article "A sheep in wolf's clothing? The problematic representation of women and the female body in 1980s sword and sorcery cinema" (Journal of Gender Studies 21.4, 2012, pp. 401–11), the film still reads as "conservative" – basically Sonja's quest becomes an exorcism of hidden lesbian desire, and the killing of Gedren is what "heals" her, turns her into a "normal" woman who is able to relate to men within traditional norms. So Gedren is indeed conceived as the antagonist in a homophobic context, but it's OK within the story; only the ending doesn't land where a "progressive" author would take it. That's basically the gist of Wright's article: Sonja is a sheep in wolf's clothing, in that she sports the "contradictory" body, muscular, built, in command (the wolf), but in a snakeskin bodice, eroticized (the sheep), both subject and object. For Dean that's just optics, costume design etc., a very superficial take, whereas in Wright's analysis it is Sonja's paradoxical character construction, from which she derives the criticism that the story doesn't take Sonja all the way at the end. But that's very far from "wildly misogynist".