Consideration of Works Past: The Broken Sword

 

I had trouble with Lord of the Rings.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Fantasy often just escapes me. I rarely find it compelling. This is my own character flaw, and I don’t suggest it’s any kind of literary judgment. Everybody’s different. 

 

I was in college, and my friends (both of them) were all saying how I had to read Lord of the Rings. It would make me grow three inches taller, improve my love life, and allow me to reach enlightenment. I went to the bookstore, looked on the shelves, bought The Two Towers, went home, and read it.

 

I know The Two Towers is the middle section in what was intended to be one, very large book. It’s like starting King Lear with Act II. Surprise: I didn’t find it compelling. In my own defense, you have to read Lord of the Rings and Appendix B all the way through to understand the scale of the work. I was in college. Hm. Read Lord of the Rings or study thermodynamics. Every week a quiz, every week a chance to fail. Or read three hundred thousand words of fantasy. 

 

Thermodynamics, every time.

 

Then, I happened on Henry Beard and Douglas Kinney’s very fine parody, Bored of the Rings, which I very much enjoyed. But, as I hadn’t read Lord of the Rings, I didn’t get it in depth. So, I went back to Lord of the Rings and read it using BOTR as a reader’s guide. Okay, now I understood what people were trying to tell me. I still wasn’t a Lord of the Rings fundamentalist. (I never finished The Silmarillion, for example. I’ve read the Bible, thanks. I don’t need to read it twice.) 

 

That said, Lord of the Rings had all of the things about fantasy I have trouble with: angelic elves, noble princes, valiant peasants, and a dark evil lord. I really liked the dwarves and how Legolas and Gimli became close friends despite the long antagonism between elves and dwarves. There’s a novel I’d like to read.

 

That’s not a problem with The Broken Sword. (See? This is a post about The Broken Sword.)

 

Note: I’m going to discuss some essential spoilers.

 

The Broken Sword is a fantasy by Poul Anderson that is, at minimum, inspired by Norse mythology. It is the story of Skafloc, a human child taken by Imric the elf lord before he can be christened. He is replaced by a half-elf, half-troll changeling who is named Valgard. The broken sword of the title is a mythic weapon delivered by the Aesir (Possibly Odin. It’s not so clear.) as a birth gift to Imric for Skafloc. Imric is not keen on this. The gifts of the gods are often two-edged.

 

First, the morality of the elves is not even close to angelic. Leea, Imric’s wife, nurses Skafloc as a baby and later is his lover. In a magical ritual, Imric rapes a troll woman he has kept prisoner for close to a thousand years, creating Valgard. 

 

There are three main characters in the novel. Skafloc, the foster child of the elves. Valgard, the changeling son foisted on Orm and his family. And Freda, one of the daughters of Orm. 

 

The story resembles a Greek tragedy in that by the end of it, no one is left standing. The hint is that the entire tale is a product of the Aesir plotting to get the broken sword remade. The destruction of the three main characters and all of the elf and troll kingdoms is just collateral damage to their machinations. 

 

And they are so destroyed. Valgard finds out his heritage and throws in with the trolls in their long enmity with the elves, sacrificing his family in the process. Skafloc leads a raiding party against the trolls that proves disastrous, but he manages to escape with some of his troops and Freda. The two of them fall in love. (Yes. They are brother and sister. Which doesn’t mean much in elf culture.) 

 

The trolls attack the elves and win. Valgard becomes a lord in the very same kingdom that Imric had ruled. But his own knowledge of who he is eats away at him.

 

Skafloc and Freda discover who they are and it breaks their relationships. In despair, Skafloc manages to get the broken sword reforged and uses it with great success against the occupying trolls. The sword kills anyone nearby whenever it is drawn. Freda goes back to her village and, now pregnant with Skafloc’s child, manages to begin a new life. Then, Skafloc shows up and his sword kills her new possible husband. Freda throws him out of the house and subsequently gives birth to Skafloc’s child. Odin comes and takes it away.

 

With nothing left, Freda decides to seek Skafloc out after all. Skafloc, meanwhile, is locked in mortal combat with Valgard when Freda finds him and calls out his name. Distracted, Valgard kills him. But the sword, tossed from Skafloc’s dying hand, kills Valgard. Freda is left alive but mad.

 

There is nothing left of these people’s lives but ground glass.

 

Now, remember, I read this right after I read Lord of the Rings.

 

Anderson, here, was the anti-Tolkien. 

 

The Broken Sword was considerably shorter than Lord of the Rings. It was also nasty, brutal, and bloody. For all the bloodshed in Lord of the Rings, it’s an astonishingly clean fantasy. The Broken Sword is filled with disembowelments and the cleaving of skulls. The deaths of your brother troops are unfortunate but expected—there’s little mourning. There is also no redemption. People do bad things, enjoy bad things, and often succeed because of those bad things. 

 

Let us recall the setting of this, as far as I was concerned. The Broken Sword was first published in 1954—the same year that Lord of the Rings started being published. Anderson rewrote The Broken Sword in 1971. 

 

I read Lord of the Rings in 1972. Subsequently, I read The Broken Sword. The Vietnam War (US version) had been going on for years. (1972 was, coincidentally, my year for the draft. I was not drafted.) The accounts of the My Lai Massacre were published in 1969. The Pentagon Papers were published in 1971. Every night, Walter Cronkite reported the events of the war on the news. (Nixon’s reelection also happened in 1972, but that was after I read these two books.)

 

Is it really such a surprise in that particular context that I wasn’t quite so interested in Lord of the Rings but gravitated to The Broken Sword? In The Broken Sword, war was portrayed graphically. There was nothing noble about it on either side. This was not the forces of right against the forces of darkness. These were brutal grabs for power from both sides. There was no moral high ground anywhere to be found. 

 

I have rarely written of any sort of war. For one reason, I don’t feel qualified. 

 

For another, I think it’s hard to write about war without romanticizing it, either for the good—see Lord of the Rings—or the bad—see The Broken Sword. 

 

We’re seeing that right now. Orange Voldemort and his ilk are describing utterly brutal acts as if the perpetrators were merely defending themselves against evil, paid agitators. I like what Stephen Colbert said about them. The Nazis weren’t afraid to show their faces.

 

Cheese Ends, 20260113, Depression Edition

*Sigh.*

 

Normally, I try to put up optimistic, interesting science up. Things that show how important the human brain is to understanding, medicine, health, food, shelter. Good things, you know?

 

But so much bad stuff has been coming across my desk that I haven't had the heart to represent it.

 

Until now.

 

After all, we need to understand the bad stuff right along with the good, right?

 

It's no secret that Orange Voldemort doesn't like wind projects. Maybe he was scared by a whirligig as a child. Regardless, he's been going after wind projects ever since his first term. 

 

At the beginning of his second term, he tried to stop wind projects. Courts reversed him. He declared them a menace to national security. One of them, Revolution Wind, was run by a Danish company, Ørsted. They took OV to court and as of early January, won in court. Cheers all around. However, it's not clear if the Ørsted's court victory supersedes the Department of Defense shutdown. So, yay? Oh, no? 

 

Going on in that vein, it's been pretty clear the big pollution offender in power generation is coal. How forty thousand coal workers manage to over balance close to 300,000 jobs in solar and a comparable number of jobs in wind (both are the fastest growing part of the jobs economy) is beyond me. Maybe we don't have enough lead and mercury in our diet. 

 

But, OV said he'd bring back coal power whether or not we needed it. It's pretty clear we don't. But facts don't sway this administration and the OV has ordered a Washington plant and a Colorado plant to remain open. Both were scheduled to be retired. They don't have to even burn coal. They're just there for emergencies. After all, just because coal is the second most expensive source of power (right after nuclear) and by far the dirtiest, that's no reason to not to keep them open. Right?

 

But OV wasn't done yet.

 

Probably the most important single organization trying to address the climatastrophe is the IPCC. It has its flaws—not as many as its most ardent critics seem to think but it is a human run organization in the semblance of a democracy, so it has flaws. But the OV is withdrawing from it. Along with a whole bunch of other similar organizations. 

 

It's amazing how that Chinese hoax keeps making the ocean hotter.

 

The OV has his allies both in Washington and elsewhere. Recently, Utah is trying its darndest to limit solar farms. Utah has been estimated to require a lot more energy in the next five years. Solar has been shone to be the most economical and battery cost keeps going down. But the Utah legislature (aided by the governor) has decided to make using solar more difficult. I have some coal plants to sell them. But the customer has to pick them up.

 

A good portion of the new power requirements are coming from data centers who are supplying powers to LLMs. LLMs are trained on relatively good data. They're not trained on the entire internet with all its lies, misinformation, bigotry, and hatred. (What a surprise we get LLM hallucination.)

 

Well, more good news. Big uptick in publications. No increase in quality of material.

 

I have my own ideas about how effective LLMs can be and how they are being used. I haven't talked about them here because the subject is incredibly polarizing. If I'm going to get pilloried, I want to get pilloried for something important.

 

But putting out slop in science is everybody's problem.

 

I can hear my two readers say: enough, already. There must be some good news.

 

Yes, there is.

 

When the OV tried to break the backs of university research by cutting back NIH overhead fees, it was taken to court. An appeals court just agreed that he couldn't do that. See here. The OV had tried to restrict grant applications from anything that hinted of diversity. (E.g., research into prostate cancer for African Americans.) The ACLU has announced a settlement has been reached. The grant applications have not been approved but they must be reviewed a bit better. 

 

And, finally, a sulfur-sodium batter has been demonstrated in the lab that has a good repeat rate and high charge density using incredibly cheap materials. The downside? It's in China.

 

I really liked the country we used to have.

 

State of the Farm: Winter

One of my two readers recently complained about the cold where she lived and wondered why the hell we live in the Bitter Hellhole that is the northeast. She's not alone. My sister asks the same thing. She wants to retire to Panama.

 

Well, I was born in Southern California near Los Angeles. This makes me lucky since I have no federal or state requirement to want to live there.

 

I'm not a fan of the cold. My residence pattern starts near Los Angeles, jumps to north Alabama, skips up to the Pacific Northwest, drops to Missouri, and ends up here in said Bitter Hellhole. 

 

Winters in Missouri are not to be sneezed at. (Unless, you are experiencing it there. At which point, one's nose drips continuously and the winter is, in fact, sneezed at.) The wind rolls down from Manitoba and the Dakotas along with Iowa and Minnesota and will peel your skin like an orange. I found this out the first winter I spent at college. I had only a cloth coat and could tell which way the wind blew by the way my nipples crinkled up. 

 

I spent a portion of my tuition money at the Army/Navy Surplus and wore a snorkel parka suitable for McMurdo Station. After that, I wasn't cold any more.

 

Which is, in part, my point. Cold is something that can be managed. Snow is something that can be managed. Once I got the hang of it, I found I like the winter here. It's a matter of technology and engineering. 

 

Today, for example, we are in a temperature downswing. We got up to 27F and it's going below 20F by sunset. The wind has been averaging about 5mph with a peak so far of 23 mph. We started the day with falling snow that stopped around 10:30 AM and I went out to snow blow.

 

Snow blowing takes about two hours. A little more if we were stupid enough to leave the cars out. I've been here for coming up to fifty years and my wife is a native and we still sometimes forget. 

 

Upper twenties but strong wind. That meant I wasn't going to use jeans and a jacket to snow blow. Instead, I'd use the insulated coverall—what I call the "spacesuit." But it was too warm for insulation inside. Just a hat and a hoodie. 

 

I find the problem is usually getting too hot rather than too cold. In this case, I used a regular baseball cap and good gloves—good gloves are probably the most important component. And boots.

 

Here's the picture: we have a good 150 foot driveway, two turn arounds, a path to the wood pile, a path to the greenhouse, a path to the vents for the furnace and the heatpump. Plus, a couple of paths here and there that I don't immediately need—to the brush pile, the garden, the different trees I have to prune, etc. The idea of the latter is that you cut the trails you'll need eventually on the chance there isn't a thaw between now and when you need them. I've been hard schooled on neglecting winterly duties.

 

We have the Rule of Two in our household: any essential appliance, service, or capability needs backup. We need power—when we first moved into  our house we lost power about every other month. So, we have a backup generator that we can plug into the house circuit. We also have a wood stove to cut down on burning gas as much as we can. We have two cars. We have two snow blowers. Each snow blower has both electric and crank start. I check them every year.

 

We have a checkered history with snow blowers. Our first one was gifted to us by my father-in-law when we moved into our house. It was small. The impeller was engaged with a foot lever and ran until it was physically disengaged. It was only about 10 inches tall and 18 inches wide. That winter we had snow storm after snow storm. They were still skiing up in New Hampshire in June. The following year we bought the Dynamark, a big 8 horsepower machine that we've kept in good repair for better than thirty years. But one winter, it had problems and we were back to using a snow shovel and our FIL gift. I figured we would need another one.

 

This time, I thought, we'd buy the best one we could. We bought an Ariens and for nine years it was essentially a back up for the Dynamark. It either quit working, needed repair, or just wilted in the face of real snow. We sold that one and tried a Toro. That one just whimpered.

 

I finally found review articles that talked about the way the different snow blowers were built and their intended weather. That pointed us to a Troy-Bilt about five years ago. Troy, New York, is just north of Albany and a little higher latitude than we are. It is just within the lake effect band from the Great Lakes so we figured it would be close to the same weather we have. Sure enough, we got it and haven't looked back.

 

This is not anything approaching an endorsement. My point is that to get the right snowblower for us required research and effort. Like finding the insulated coverall. Like finding the right gloves. Like deciding on the Rule of Two.

 

After snowblowing, I came in to lunch and a fire in the wood stove. Messed around and then came up here to write this down.

 

Living in our corner of the Bitter Hellhole takes thought and effort but it's a task I enjoy, so it's not much effort at all. 

 

But this is how such things are done. You have a problem. You try a solution. The solution fails or is inadequate. You refine the solution. If that doesn't work, you find a new solution. I didn't have much money and so I found a coat at the Army/Navy store. The coats I had weren't adequate for snow blowing so I found a coverall. You fix the problem. You don't discard the entire effort and say "winter is a Chinese hoax." 

 

That said, we're financially secure, own our own home, and can plan for these sorts of things. Many people in Massachusetts and other areas of the North East are not so well off. The weather is one of many things that requires resources people may not have. However, Massachusetts does have a welfare system and heating supplement plans. The government puts its money where its policies are. Obamacare was originally Romneycare which derived from Nixoncare. Massachusetts is not anywhere close to a perfect state—it's too damned expensive, for one thing—but it is also as good a state as I've lived in anywhere and better than most. 

 

I fret about other states where their representatives don't seem to care about who they represent. Mike Johnson in Louisiana, for example. Or Tommy Tuberville for Alabama.

 

But good things happen, too. Like the red tail that I accidentally scared out from the chestnut until he landed in the persimmon tree, shaking his tail and glaring at me. Eventually, he figured I was beneath his notice.

 

Brother to Jackals, Book Two: Women's Country

Is now released! You can go to the website or...

Universal Book Link. 

 

Book View Cafe Link.

 

Print Link. 

Vaccines

Today I’m going to talk about vaccines. Just because I don’t have enough controversy in my life.

 

(Pictures from here.)

 

From what I’m seeing in the media these days, there are a lot of people who neither know what a vaccine actually is nor what risk actually is. So, let’s talk about that.

 

Your body is the culmination of the following evolutionary trends:

• 3.5 billion years since bacteria came about
• Roughly 2 billion years since, Eukaryotes—cells with mitochondria and a nucleus evolved.
• About 1.5 billion years since multicellular life evolved
• About 600 million years since animal life evolved (Ediacaran)
• About 500 million years since the earliest vertebrates evolved
• About 300 million years since mammals evolved
• About 63 million years since primates evolved
• About 8.5 million years since humans split from chimpanzees
• About 3 million years since the evolution of genus Homo
• About .5 million years since the beginning of Homo sapiens. 

 

Once life began, other life began to attack it. At first, it was single-celled organisms against single-celled organisms, but then it was single and multicelled organisms against multicelled organisms. My point is that every organism has had to defend itself against other attacking organisms since the beginning of life. 

 

That defense is deep.

 

For our purposes, our main line of defense against pathogenic organisms—mostly single-celled pathogens or some multicelled parasites—is the immune system. The immune system is ancient and derives from our constant war with pathogens. There are intracellular immune responses—responses individual cells present against an invader—and extracellular immune responses, where the immune system external to the cell attacks invaders.

 

It's a good system. People who have had some diseases, such as smallpox, don’t get them again. The immune system remembers the smallpox virus. People who get other diseases, such as coronaviruses, get some immunity, but for reasons not well understood, their bodies forget that immunity. In addition, both viruses and bacteria are living organisms, too, and respond when attacked. For a virus or bacteria, an immune response is an attack. After all, they were just sitting there minding their own business, eating the host, when out of nowhere, a bunch of white blood cells eat them in return.

 

My point is that bodies are in a continual state of attack. Sure, there are good bacteria, but they aren’t what we’re talking about. There’s no scenario when a staph infection is a good thing.

 

Because pathogens have been attacking us and being repulsed, they are always working on ways to subvert our defenses. In addition, novel pathogens may not be quickly recognized by our immune system.

 

Vaccines are mechanisms to tell our immune system to wake up and fight invaders, even when those invaders have not yet been encountered. After all, it’s better to meet smallpox with weapons ready than wake up and discover you’re already at death’s door.

 

And we are talking about death here. All of the pathogens for which we have vaccines have death counts associated with them. Some are close to 100% deadly—rabies, for example. Some are less. Measles has a death rate of 1-2/1000. However, blindness, seizures, and brain inflammation can also occur. Besides, measles has the lovely trait that it wipes out immune memory. All that built up immune response? Gone.

 

So, we should not just concentrate on death rate. Other complications are also troubling.

 

Polio is another fun experience. Like a lot of viral diseases, once infected, there’s not much in the way of treatment. Most infected patients have no symptoms or a mild illness—they’re still infected, mind you. But .1-.5% (1-5/1000) develop some kind of paralysis. This is a big deal since, for paralyzed patients, fatality is 2-5% in children (20-50/1000) or 15-30% (150-300/1000) in adults, depending on the age of the patient. But that’s just death. Those who live have lifetime complications.

 

I grew up knowing children who had survived polio. Children without function in a leg or an arm. Or both legs—President Roosevelt couldn’t really walk because of polio.

 

If you look at those graphs at the top, you can see something interesting. It presents death rates for smallpox, polio, and measles. Note that the slope remains constant or increasing until vaccination enters the picture. For modern vaccinations, the death rates—and the rates of disease complications—plummet as soon as a modern vaccine is introduced. Even in the case of smallpox, when Jenner’s vaccine was introduced—as primitive as that was—deaths immediately sloped downward. In all three cases, when modern vaccines were introduced, the death rate went close to zero.

 

I’ve heard about the whole autism issue. It’s bogus. Even the original author who started this mess has recanted. I can understand that people might be concerned about the “inactive” ingredients. So take them out. But tossing vaccines themselves out because of it is idiocy. The CDC recently blamed the COVID vaccine for 10 child deaths out of 96 between 2021-2024. From what I’ve read, these are also bogus numbers, insofar as they present no real evidence to back them up. 270,227,181 people had at least one dose between 2021-2023. That’s .0000037%. According to this source, 30 million kids have been vaccinated, yielding .000033%. The risk of being struck by lightning is 1/1000000 or .0001%. I’ll take those odds.

 

Hell, I did take those odds. I did. My wife did. My son did. Most of my friends did. Not all of them. Some I knew that didn't, died. 

 

Every medical procedure, every drug, every drive in the car, every waking day is a risk. You have to look at these risks and evaluate them. Which means looking at reputable sources—which pointedly does not include Orange Voldamort or Brainworm Boy and any associated with them.

 

But going forward.

 

The mRNA vaccine wasn’t really intended as a vaccine for COVID-19. It was a whole field of technology known as RNA therapeutics. It came out of some studies in the 90s where RNA encoding specific antigens was injected into tumor-bearing mice to induce an immune response. This was successful. The tumors were, in fact, suppressed. This went on to become an original approach for treating melanoma.

 

That’s right. This technology was first pointed at cancer. It was redirected into making a vaccine against an infectious disease, but it was always intended to target cancer. There’s been success in pancreatic cancer treatment as well.

 

It’s not a magic bullet—it’s beginning to look like there is no magic bullet for cancer. But it’s a very effective treatment for some cancers and may be useful in many more. It’s even been found to be effective in some kinds of tissue regeneration.

 

My point with this whole post is that we let idiots scare us. It is getting harder and harder to find original material to evaluate. It gets swamped in all the comments, remarks, and editorializing about such things. Recently, there were some congressional Democrats who made a video reminding members of the military how they were obligated to disobey illegal orders. Regardless of what you might think about what they did, it took thirty-five minutes for me to find the original video buried under commentary.

 

But that doesn’t release us from the obligation to make the effort. I spent eight years studying biology of one sort or another and the next forty deep in the software industry. Reading about in vitro and ex vivo transmission, T-cells, and antigens is more familiar to me than most. People who don’t work in a given field and try to argue about it are not necessarily reliable—me, included. But a lot of people who demonstrably have zero qualifications—like Brainworm Boy—like to spout off like they’re an authority.

 

They are not.

 

The mRNA technology is very exciting. It’s some of the first actual treatments for things like pancreatic cancer. Yet, this technology is under fire—along with most NIH and NSF funded cancer research—by people who either don’t understand it or are being driven by an agenda.

 

Don’t fall for this. Go find people working in the field. Look up the Wikipedia articles and then go through the references. Weigh the different opinions. If you find six scientific authorities and five of them say one thing and the sixth says another, sure, number six might have something. But the odds are against it. For every stalwart Ignaz Semmelweis or Alfred Wegener, there are a hundred thousand cranks. Make sure that people who make claims have the brainpower to make them. Random Ph.D.’s don’t count. Celebrities don’t count. I think Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks excellent astrophysics. I get skeptical if he starts discussing immunology. Still, he’s better than Brainworm Boy.

 

Who does these things: here, here, and here.

 

One Week Warning: Book Two of Brother to Jackals

In one week from today, book two of the Brother to Jackals trilogy, Women’s Country, will be released. This will include three links: Book View Café (BVC), print, and Universal Book Link (UBL). The UBL is live now. The other two will go live next Tuesday. Enjoy.

 

Here is the back cover copy:

 

One night with reporter Tamar Longren changes everything. Exposed to the world, gorilla Lethias becomes an overnight sensation—and a political weapon. The Oregon Initiative would make his existence illegal. Religious zealot and presidential candidate Melissa Adenour brands him abomination incarnate.

 

Thrust onto the campaign trail for incumbent President Shuman, Lethias discovers that politics is a blood sport. Between rallies and speeches, an impossible dialogue emerges across the divide—two people speaking to each other through speeches, a conversation disguised as combat where every phrase carries the weight of desire and betrayal.

 

On their hidden island, the ape colony’s situation grows desperate. Marcus arms his apes with guns, preparing for the coming war. But in Women's Country, scientist Carroll Sims and gorilla Jefferson are conducting experiments that could change everything and could save them or destroy them.

 

The question isn't whether the world will discover the breeding colony. The question is what the apes will become before it does.

 

Women's Country expands on hard SF concepts of biology and physics while diving deep into the brutal machinery of American politics, exploring what it means to be human when humanity itself is no longer alone.

 

Book 1, Descending from the Moon, and all of my other work, is available on my website. 

 

Book 3 of Brother to Jackals:Appalachian Winter, the conclusion, will be out in June 2026. 

 

Curse You, Inevitable Romantic Subplot!

I am not a romantic writer.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

It’s not that I’m against love or sex or romantic entanglements. I just have problems when they seem bolted on, like a goose glued onto a wombat. Maybe this is a function of being (*ahem*) older. But it seems like most works have to have some kind of romantic subplot.

 

This came home to me recently as we were finding a series to watch. We first looked at Invasion (Apple), then Dark Winds (Netflix), and finally The Diplomat (Netflix.) In each case, we’re going along with a really interesting plot, good characters, intriguing mystery, when a (in my opinion, unnecessary) romantic subplot shows up. We finished Dark Winds and The Diplomat but not without yelling at the TV a fair amount. 

 

(Note: in discussing this, I will be mentioning spoilers. So, if that bothers you, stop here. I’m not sure which of my two readers is going to be bothered by this. And, if I insult a show you like, well, everyone has their own opinion on such things.)

 

Again, I’m not against a relationship showing up in a work of fiction but I want it to come out of love, not a contrived romantic narrative. I mentioned recently The Thin Man and Charade. The Thin Man shows what I would consider a truly loving relationship and Charade has a budding romance between Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant at the very heart of the film. Both films are excellent and stand up to repeated viewings.

 

I just get antsy when it seems like the subplot was added against its will. 

 

(Perhaps, there should be regulation on subplot abuse where writers or production houses insist on inappropriately including them in works. I have this image of the romantic subplot on the witness stand in a harassment suit, tearfully recounting how it had to be forced to play in a thriller. “It was horrible,” sobs the witness. “Having to stop the plot to work out relationship kinks while everybody on set was staring at me. They just wanted to continue filming the action, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t!”)

 

Part of it, I think, is laziness. If you introduce a dangerous romance—which includes all three of the shows I mentioned at the beginning of the post—it pretty much has to dominate the story. If it doesn’t, it’s neither truly dangerous nor as consuming as the plot indicates. 

 

The Diplomat is a particularly egregious in this regard. There are two romantic subplots, one when Kate Wyler, first as US Ambassador then as Second Lady, has close sexual calls with the UK Foreign Minister. The other is when she has a full-on affair as Second Lady and Ambassador with a British spy. Both of these are incredibly risky and shows Kate either as compulsively impetuous or stupid—neither of which is supported by any other part of the show. 

 

If one takes these romantic subplots seriously—which the show doesn’t—then the main character risking the integrity, honor, and credibility of the United States should be center stage. But, no, it’s bolted on.

 

Within the confines of the show, Kate Wyler is married to Hal Wyler and they alternate between love and hate beautifully. The portrayal of the broken marriage is superb. They are an incredible political team even when they are at cross purposes. That relationship should always be center stage and never diluted by external factors. But I think it scared the writers. The relationship drama was too good. I had this feeling they said to themselves, if we continue this we’re actually going to have to work for a living. And they introduced someone else to take the heat off.

 

Which, I think, happens a lot. Oh, no! We have an incredibly dark situation between a woman and her husband with the world falling apart. Quick, add a quick sexual encounter in a hallway to distract the audience. Or, we have a woman working border patrol who’s stumbled onto a terrible drug plot. There’s no one she can trust—oh, wait! She sleeps with a guy. Now, she can trust him.

 

When I first started thinking about this, I thought that maybe they were doing a Tristan and Iseult: two people caught up in all consuming, divine passion. They must fulfill their love or die. I mean, it’s not my idea of a good time but I understand it. I’m more in the Parzifal wing where the Parzifal and Condwiramurs have three nights together without knowing what to do. only to discover things almost by accident.

 

But, no. These relationships are put in place to serve a purpose. It’s marketing, pure and simple. My problem with all of these is they try to fit complex human situations into neat little boxes so they aren’t investigated in depth. 

 

I had a friend that once suggested that Americans really only had three relationships: parent to child, friend to friend, and lovers. There’s even a romantic comedy about how a friendship between a man and a woman was impossible: When Harry Met Sally. 

 

I remember when I watched Hidalgo. There is a scene where a young woman, Jazira, and Frank Hopkins are talking in a tent and they’re discovered. While I watched the scene, I kept thinking Don’t kiss. Don’t kiss. Don’t kiss. And they didn’t. They remained friends and the film was stronger for it. 

 

There are some really interesting films without a romantic subplot: The Imitation Game, Edge of Tomorrow, Wind River, Elementary/CBS. The best relationship in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Hawkeye and Black Widow which is never romantic but has more love than I’ve seen in many romcoms. 

 

I think humans are incredibly interesting, complex, and capable of greatness. We should be portrayed better than being stuffed into these little boxes.

 

Oh, and before I leave, countries that have DEI and laws against hate speech are now violating human rights. The incredible risk of COVID-19 to pregnant women and their babies has been documented even while pregnant women are no longer advised by the CDC to get the vaccine. And Orange Voldamort wants a bigger ballroom. Compensation, I suppose.