There are many things I love in life. I love my parents. I love my friends. I love playing online Tetris for free. I love a tall, ice-cold pint of beer. I love that the space bar will pause Youtube, Hulu, and Netflix Instant viewing.

I love all of these things and never have to defend that. But one thing I occasionally do find myself defending is my love of fantasy.

In a way, I get it. Fantasy is, on its surface, a genre packed to the gills with elves, dragons, and wizards — not exactly grown-up fair. How can a story with magic spells and dashing princes compare to the very realistic plays of Tennessee Williams, the written works of Jack Kerouac, or the films of Gus Van Sant? What makes fantasy so great?

In a word: metaphor.

For those not too proud to explore a work of fantasy and not too dense to look beneath its surface, the fantasy genre is a rich addition to the literary, film, and television canon because it explores very real human problems and desires by creating allegories through which to explore them.

Name any fantasy work that has withstood the test of time, and you will find in it a fable full of lessons of all too real applicability.

Michael Ende’s landmark novel, The Neverending Story, which was turned into a decent movie in the ’80s, is about a young boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux, who is neglected by his father and bullied by his schoolmates. He finds a book that transports him into another world called Fantasia, a world that is the embodiment of all the dreams and fantasies of the real world, which is being destroyed by an enemy called the Nothing.

The story is moving and absorbing not due to its host of magical creatures, but because it taps in all of us that longing to be a child again, to be able to lose yourself in worlds of your own creation, before the dark, unimaginative specter of adulthood falls upon us.

This theme of the wonder of a child’s imagination is explored many times over in fantasy, from The Wizard of Oz to The Chronicles of Narnia to Labyrinth.

While passionate, romantic love is a theme explored in virtually every genre imaginable, has there ever been a better representation of the honest, pure love between friends as there was in The Lord of the Rings? The entire sprawling epic that is Tolkien’s masterpiece essentially hangs on a single conceit: that we as an audience accept that Sam will do anything for Frodo.

This is a hard sell for some, because the notion of the power and beauty of platonic love is not a prevalent idea in our culture. Their relationship isn’t romantic so there’s no promise of sex. Frodo is hardly royalty so there’s no allure of vast treasures. Sam is committed to Frodo, with no reward expected, because that’s just the kind of person he is, and who wouldn’t want a friend like Sam? Who wouldn’t want to be a friend like Sam?

Toss in the fact that it’s two lowly hobbits, humble and small in stature, who succeed in saving the world, and you have a classic for the ages. It takes a story about hobbits to make us see the wonder in our fellow man.

This past year, the high fantasy television show Legend of the Seeker came into its own when episodes began appearing that were not necessarily part of the larger plot, but instead focused on characters by throwing them into fantastical situations that mirrored real life problems.

Kahlan, a young woman who was torn between her sense of duty and her love for her companion, Richard, was in one episode magically split into two people, and through this spell we came to learn much about her and how difficult her burden really was.

Another episode featured Cara, a woman who was abducted and brainwashed and turned into a killer. As she attempted to regain her humanity, she was turned into a Baneling (basically a sentient zombie), thus making her metaphorical fight to be a regular person quite literal.

The point is that we could have simply watched biopics of Margaret Thatcher or Patty Hearst, and I’m sure some would be content to do just that, but those projects are limited to the real and mundane. By steeping a story in allegory, you have a much larger canvas on which to paint.

I suppose the fantasy genre will always be overlooked by those who wish to appear highbrow. After all, magic and flights of fancy are a hard sell to the academic.

But for those of us in the know, fantasy has a way of engaging our suspension of disbelief by accessing the emotional truths in stories about hobbits and goblins, and reflecting the realities of our world through a supernatural lens. Like opera and musical theater, which engage our emotions through music rather than realism, fantasy will forever be a step removed from reality, but never so far that we can’t recognize it. And it’s because of that very distance from reality that the genre is able to remark on it so keenly.

A couple of weeks ago, we here at TheTorchOnline.com argued that the “superhero” and “vampire” media trends are both rapidly coming to an end. In the “comments,” some people agreed with us, but others took issue with some of our various arguments.

Now TheTorchOnline.com reader TomB has used “xtranormal” technology to animate the debate!

What do you think?

This is it! We’re officially calling it: the “vampire” and “superhero” media trends are forever after over.

I’ve long made my opinion known that while I am, or was, a fan of both fantasy genres, there’s also such a thing as overkill.

Since 2000, an astounding 42 big-budget superhero movies have been released, nine in 2008 alone — this from an industry that only releases 50 or fewer mega-budget movies in any given year.

It’s not just that there are too many superhero movies for the market to sustain; there are too many superhero franchises.

As for vampires, by my count, there have been thirteen vampire TV series just since 2000 — and four (True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, The Gates, and Being Human) are still on the air!

And this doesn’t even include shows like Supernatural that regularly feature vampire characters.

As for the movies, I count 24 major vampire theatrical releases just since 2000 — and literally hundreds more that were made-for-TV or went direct-to-DVD. There are at least 14 vampire movies currently in production.

Now we’re even getting the inevitable wave of parody movies — for vampires, that means Vampires Suck, coming in August, and for superheroes, the (latest) movie-parodies are Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World and Megamind, both coming later this year.

When the parodies come, you know it’s time to stop.

Seriously. The madness must end. For every new vampire or superhero movie or TV show that gets greenlit, that means some other movie or TV show does not — which also means some other newer, fresher genre or story continues to be ignored.

Worse, everything interesting that could possible be said about superheros or vampires has long been said. For example, every possible use of vampires as metaphor has already been done: the power of sexuality (Dracula), homosexuality (Anne Rice), assimilation (True Blood), teenage angst (Buffy), immortality (The Hunger), delinquency (Lost Boys), boring suburbia (Fright Night), teenage love (Twilight), even the Israeli/Palestinian situation (Underworld) and the unsustainable exploitation of the environment (Daybreakers)!

And regarding superheroes, we get it: with great power comes great responsibility — and yeah, we’re all superheroes in our own way, with our “secret” identities.

Either that or superheroes are exactly like us, with all our same flaws, despite the colorful costume and superpowers. Or maybe superheroes are just a metaphor of elitism, either good like in The Incredibles or bad like in Watchmen.

Whatever you’re saying, it’s been said.

Even though the superhero and vampire media trends are now officially at an end (because we say so!), here are a couple of things this doesn’t mean:

It doesn’t mean there will never be another superhero or vampire movie. I wish it did, but there are (a) a number of popular franchises, like Twilight and Iron Man, that are still playing themselves out — quite successfully, I might add, and (b) there will still be the occasional extraordinary superhero or vampire project from time-to-time. Just because westerns have been dead since the 1970s, that didn’t mean Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven wasn’t a fantastic movie.

And, of course, there will always be the die-hard superhero and vampire fans, people to whom these genres speak on a deeper level, and they will keep the flames of these genres forever flickering in the form of books, graphic novels, and other less expensive media. More power to em!

But our official announcement does mean that vampire and superhero projects will no longer be given the cultural benefit of the doubt. From this point on, they won’t be considered hip and trendy and zeitgeist-y, and won’t automatically be greenlit by TV or movie executives.

No, the pre-existing bias will be that vampires and superheroes are tired and derivative — unless their creators somehow prove differently.

Basically, the All-Vampire-All-the-Time Era (and the All-Superhero-All-the-Time Era) are, thankfully, blessedly, over.

There’s absolutely nothing more to see here, folks, so let’s all move on.

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I’ve just about had it with Fringe.

If it weren’t for the fact that this Thursday’s episode, “Jacksonville,” promises to shed major light on the series’ overall William Bell/dual dimension plotline, I think I’d be done with it completely.

What’s the bee in my bonnet? Two things about the show are driving me absolutely bananas:

First, there’s the fact that Dr. Walter Bishop was apparently intimately involved in every experimental research project ever conducted and is the world’s top expert in dozens of disparate scientific fields.

This is despite the fact that he’d spent the 17 years prior to the start of the show in a mental institution. In the real world, scientific knowledge reportedly doubles somewhere between every five and ten years. In the world of Fringe, not so much.

I understand how he would be privy to knowledge about the show’s central mystery, since he and William Bell were the one’s responsible for creating it. But does his previous research have to be the driving force behind virtually every mystery the show confronts? When did the man sleep?!

But mostly what’s driving me crazy about the show is that its science is just so unbelievably bad.

Here’s the thing: I am far from a science “purist.” I always tuned out the blowhards who criticized the science of Star Trek, since they clearly didn’t understand that, first and foremost, the show existed to entertain. Clearly, it also tried to provoke thought about issues both scientific and social, but I actually think it was (mostly) a good thing that they never let themselves get too bogged down in science, because it made the show accessible to a broad audience.

But in spite of all of Star Trek’s inaccuracies and inconsistencies, I believe they at least gave the science some thought. And the visionaries behind Star Trek clearly had a deep love of both science and the future — which is precisely why so many scientists claim to have been inspired by it.

By contrast, it’s clear that the producers of Fringe don’t give a f*** about science.

I understand that the gimmick of the show is that it deals with the paranormal which, by definition, stretches the boundaries of science. But they clearly want to highlight the simplest, most attention-getting (and most dumbed-down) “scientific” phenomena possible — and they don’t give a whit about actual science.

Consider:

• In “What Lies Below,” the January 21st episode, Walter confronts a preposterous “thinking” virus that infects his son, Peter, but in less than an hour, despite having no lab and very little equipment, he’s able to isolate the virus and concoct an antidote out of horseradish from a refrigerator — horseradish! — that immediately works on everyone infected.

• In “Of Human Action,” the November 12th episode, a researcher is conducting an experiment that would allow pilots to control planes with their brains, and when his son takes the “enhancement” drugs, it gives him the ability to psychically control other people — because, you know, the human brain is just “another kind of computer.” Fortunately, Walter is able to prevent the mind-control by creating special headphones (!!!) for the FBI agents to wear.

• In “Unearthed,” the January 11th episode (an unaired episode from the first season), a dying girl is “possessed” by an evil man who just happens to be dying at the same time. His spiritual energy didn’t dissipate due to, um, previous “heavy radiation exposure” while in a Russian sub, and he “jumped ship” to the dying girl.

• Despite the fact that the structure of DNA wasn’t even identified until 1953, in “The Bishop Revival,” the January 28th episode, it turns out that the Nazis (and Walter Bishop’s father, working as a spy) had developed an air-born toxin that attacked specific genes and could immediately kill anyone who had them.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

It’s like their not even trying — not even bothering with the fig leaf of Star Trek’s techno-babble to cover the nakedness of their pseudo-science.

Basically, Gilligan’s Island took science more seriously when they had the Professor making a car out of bamboo and coconut shells!

Hey, whatever. So there’s no love or deep affection for science on Fringe. So they’re even cheapening it — cynically flashing science’s most attention-getting elements, like dancers flashing body parts in some bawdy burlesque show, acting without nuance or elegance. They’re not the first to do this, and they won’t be the last.

But Fringe is not Gilligan’s Island. It pretends to be serious speculative fiction.

Basically, they’re making it impossible for me to enjoy the show. My knowledge of science is limited at best — hey, I was a social sciences studies major! But increasingly, I find my eyes rolling out of my head by the stupid and sloppily-conceived premises of most of their episodes.

Thursday’s episode better be spectacular. Because if it isn’t, I am so outta here.

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Throughout its six seasons, Xena: Warrior Princess featured an enormous array of world mythologies, but my absolute favorite was the four-episode arc dealing with Gabrielle’s spiritual quest in India, which is why that particular storyline earns the most esteemed award we here at TheTorchOnline can bestow:

The India Storyline

Five Torches (Out of Five)

The first episode, called “Paradise Found,” takes place before they even arrive in India, but introduces the element that most affected me: Gabrielle begins to feel peace by focusing on her breathing and practicing Yoga. Sure, it sounds hippie-dippie and new age-y, but anyone who’s truly thrown themselves into the practice of Yoga understands its healing and soothing effects.

Unfortunately, Gabrielle is guided along the beginning of her path by a guru named Aiden, who is actually a demon who feeds off the goodness of the people who come to his island paradise. As his victims sink deeper into a meditative state, they turn into blue stone and he absorbs their essence.

So, that part’s not so great. But the Yoga? We’ll keep that.

When they finally arrive in India in “Devi,” they encounter a man who will be very important to them: the Christ-like Eli,who at first glance seems to be just a street magician. Gabrielle is possessed by the demon, Tataka (man, can’t Gabrielle ever catch a break?) until eventually being rescued by Eli.

The next episode, “Between the Lines,” showcases a theme that will continue on for the remainder of the series: Xena and Gabrielle are more than just best friends. They are soul mates, and this is evidenced by the fact that every time their souls are reincarnated, they always find each other. They learn about the concept of karma, and how everything you do in this life affects what happens in future lives.

In this episode, they are sent into the future where Xena is the “Mother of Peace,” and Gabrielle is a male warrior. They fight the sorceress Alti in the future, before being pulled back into the present for a grand finale smackdown. (In this tussle, Alti grabs onto Gabrielle’s hair, and Xena uses her chakram to free Gabrielle of her grip, thus giving Gabby the short haircut she would wear for the rest of the series. Unfortunately, this is also the haircut that Xena keeps seeing in an earlier Alti-inspired vision of her and Gabrielle’s deaths.)

Finally, in “The Way,” Xena and Gabrielle again meet up with Eli, who we discover is being hunted down by the demon Indrajit. Eli teaches Gabrielle about The Way, a philosophy that emphasizes love and non-violence over all else. Gabrielle soon learns that this is not an easy pursuit in a world torn asunder by violence. After all, how do you defend yourself if you can’t ever fight back?

When Gabrielle and Eli are captured by Indrajit, Xena must do something she’s never done before in order to rescue Gabrielle: pray.

Unlike the petty, all-too-human Olympian gods, when Xena encounters the Indian deity Krishna, she finds him to be noble and serene. He explains to her that the way to purify her karma and rescue Gabrielle is to be true to her own Way, which is the Way of the Warrior (in this life). He endows her with the spirit of Kali, the goddess of destruction, allowing her to defeat Indrajit and rescue Gabrielle and Eli.

Aesthetically, the show never looked better, incorporating the exotic beauty and majesty of Indian culture into the set and costume designs, and of all the “looks” that Gabrielle sported throughout the series, her sari costume was my favorite.

At this point the show was at a creative peak. As could only happen on Xena, the writers took the simple art of mehndi, the beautiful body art made with henna, and gave it into a supernatural element, thus showcasing a real element of Indian culture with a truly Xena-twist. Cliche images like flying carpets were incorporated into the story as props in action sequences. And though the number of gods in the Indian pantheon is literally in the hundreds, these episodes allowed us to glimpse a few, when so rarely are Indian gods even acknowledged in most fantasy stories.

Aside from being a fantastic yarn (and they make excellent repeat viewing), it was this batch of episodes that gave me two gifts. The first was the doorway into Indian mythology, which for a myth-geek like myself, weary of Greek and Norse legends, was a true prize. And the second was an introduction to Yoga, a practice that to this day remains a large part of my life.

Fortunately, I never had a teacher that tried to turn me into blue stone.

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I know a lot of people have busied themselves haterizing on Dollhouse, but I’m here to take a stand.

I really dug that show.

And with the news that it’s been canceled, I find myself disappointed, for once again the world has been deprived of what could have been.

I say could have, because I think we can all agree that Dollhouse never really rose to the apex of Joss Whedon’s talent for storytelling.

But the potential was definitely there. Dollhouse is the Jerry Maguire to my Renee Zellwegger — I love it for the show it wants to be and I love it for the show it almost is. And I even made my face all scrunchy and squinty when I said it!

But like Firefly before it, Dollhouse has been given the axe too soon. (Of course, the difference is that Firefly was instantly a clearly great show, but I digress.)

It seems that the two most common criticisms of the show were the following: Eliza Dushku wasn’t a good enough actress to pull off the part of Echo, and the show took far too long to establish the greater story arc, instead focusing on too many “one-shot” episodes. I’d like to take this time, before the corpse is even cold, to offer my rebuttal.

Sure, Eliza Dushku is no Meryl Streep, but few are, and I think people had made up their minds about her not having what it takes long before they saw a single episode. In fact, there were a few times she really impressed me. (And personally, I have a theory that indifference to this show stemmed from a lot of Buffy fans’ resentment of the fact that Dushku and Whedon were working together but NOT in a Buffyverse-related project. That, however, is a topic for a whole other article.)

Focusing on her also conveniently allows haters to overlook the solid talent of some of the other players, particularly Amy Acker, Fran Kranz, Olivia Williams, and the impressively chameleonic Enver Gjokaj, who in the part of Victor really did seem to be a different person with each new assignment.

As for the season-long story arc that we’ve come to expect from Whedon (a tactic he used on both Buffy and Angel), I believe he was trying something different. With Dollhouse there was no season-long storyline, but rather a series-long storyline. Each season didn’t contain a Big Bad — the corporation responsible for the Dollhouses was the nemesis, and the vanquishing of that foe meant the end of the series.

Therefore, Whedon allowed us a great deal of time to live in this world, to soak up every little detail of it, so that when the plot changed significantly there would be no confusion. But while crafting this sort of slow-drip exposition, he gave us fun little adventures each week, and with his true flair for storytelling, they bounced liberally between drama, comedy, action, and horror.

The individual episodes weren’t setting us up for the ride. They were the ride. But many Whedonites, too busy looking for the Big Bad and the overarching story, failed to see that, and grew frustrated.

Of course, this is all just my opinion. What one likes is entirely subjective, and I can understand how for many people, Dollhouse just wasn’t their cup of tea. But I enjoyed it. I genuinely liked the characters, and wanted them to eventually find their way out of the Dollhouse. But now, sadly, I’ll never see that happen.

Sorry it didn’t work out, Joss and Eliza. I was with you guys.

Um…if you’re looking for something else to do, though, there’s always that Faith show! Just throwin’ it out there…

An attractive, telegenic, charismatic leader shows up out of nowhere, promising change for the better and universal health care, and charms millions of Americans, while others refuse to jump on board the love train, and some even go so far as accusing the new leader of being a covert terrorist.

Sound familiar?

It should, because it it’s a fairly accurate (if overly-concise) account of President Obama’s campaign. It also happens to be the plot of the new show V, minus a little tidbit about reptilian aliens.

According to this article, the similarity is a little too perfect to be ignored. The author states his opinion that the show is a “barbed critique on Obamamania that will infuriate the president’s supporters and delight his detractors.” If that’s true, than we have a high-profile primetime series being used as an outlet for seething anger towards the president, not only taking aim at his supposedly specious ability to charm people, but also putting forward the belief that he is truly here to harm good, upstanding American citizens.

So, is it true?

Nope. The show obviously uses the political language of the day — a character directly, without coding, says that the aliens can offer “universal health care” — but that’s because television dialogue always reflects the language of the present culture. V doesn’t strike any eerie realistic chords with its political rhetoric anymore than The West Wing did.

Thanks to 24-hour news channels, which have made celebrities out of partisan political commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann, politics have infiltrated pop culture like never before, and have become completely infused with entertainment. Given this merge, is it any surprise that pure entertainment is based on political secrecy?

V’s source material — the 1980s mini-series and series — used similar references — and it was obviously created decades before anyone even knew Obama’s name.

Liberal or conservative, whatever your stance may be, feel free to enjoy V as a fun, if slightly silly, bit of escapist television, and leave the politicking to the professionals. Sometimes science fiction and fantasy can be used more effectively than any other genre to make social criticisms, because they allow us to step away from naming names and speak clearly, if through the lens of metaphor.

But sometimes it’s just for fun. And such is the case with V.

So here’s the thing. When I was a kid, I would go on and on about how there needed to be a movie version of Thundercats. I felt that the world as we know it would not be complete until Lion-O and the gang came to the screen in a full-blown, effects-laden mega-blockbuster, a la Jurassic Park or Independence Day.

(Yes, those references are dated. I was a kid.)

The point is, life wouldn’t have true meaning until we could see up there, in celluloid, the strength of Panthro, the speed of Cheetara, the disappearing act of Tigra, and the cunning of Wily-Kat and Wily-Kit … oh, and Lion-O’s stuff, too.

In my head it would have looked something like this:

Then one night, when I was in college, the RAs in my hall thought it would be fun to throw an anti-drinking party and show episodes of Thundercats for a fun night of nostalgia, sans underage booze-hounding. I goaded some friends of mine to attend, being desperate to bask once again in the glory of Thundercats. (We may have drank after.)

In the hours leading up to the showing, I reminisced about the deep, dense mythology surrounding the feline heroes: their expulsion from their native planet of Thundera; the death of their leader, Jaga; Lion-O’s tragedy of aging physically while being dormant, thus missing out on the formative years of his life.

It was like Hamlet with cat-people.

Then I watched a few episodes. Um, yeah. Not really that deep.

The reason why many people my age went gaga for the likes of Thundercats, G.I. Joe, He-Man, and, of course, Transformers, is one simple reason: children are easy to impress.

But in truth, the source material has all the depth of a bit of spittle drooled onto one’s shirt. These stories were meant to entertain kids, not adults, which is a strange thing, considering the demographic they’re trying to reach with the Transformers movie is men between 18 and 35.

Do kids younger than me really care about Transformers? By the time they were cognizant enough to watch cartoons, the world had moved on to Doug.

Terrifyingly, I’m now of the same age as the guys in charge of green-lighting what movies are made. (On the younger side of the scale, mind you. Like, REALLY younger side of the scale, okay? But still.)

And what’s happening is that those studio execs are banking on the same nostalgia that drove me to watch episodes of Thundercats and waste some perfectly good beer-time.

I first felt the sting of this grown-uppedness some years ago when I watched a commercial for 1-800-COLLECT. (Remember that?) The two characters featured in this particular ad were bastions of 80s cheese: Hulk Hogan and Alf. I realized that they were targeting my age bracket with a healthy dose of nostalgia.

Transformers has come upon us, and now we are faced with its inevitable sequel, because these days, a movie isn’t a success unless it’s part of a franchise.

It’s all about franchises.

And the first of what’s surely planned to be the G.I. Joe franchise will be hitting theaters before long. For anyone who’s seen the trailer, it looks like your standard lots-of-things-blowing-up and a-few-half-hearted-fistfights actioner.

A He-man film has been in the works for a while, although it seems stuck in development hell.  (IMDB, however, has a listing for a film called Grayskull, and even a year of release — 2011. This will apparently have no connection to the Dolph Lundgren He-man film.) Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was, for a time, rumored to be playing the lead.

He-man is another show best left to the halls of your memory. He-man, is of course, the secret identity of Prince Adam of Eternia. How no one realizes they’re the same person is beyond me, seeing as how they look exactly the same, and no masks are involved. To become He-man, Adam just does some wonky spell with his sword to make all of his clothes disappear, which means he is now He-man.

That’s not a super-hero transformation. That’s just streaking.

And yes, a new Thundercats movie is coming, allegedly due out next year. Unlike the other cartoon-to-movies jump, however, it will be CG. No doubt some Gollum-esque motion capture will be employed. Not sure I like the sound of this, though. I mean, did you see Beowulf? Yikes.

It seems that only more 80s-cartoon properties will chug along to the big screen. What saddens me most is the lack of imagination involved in any of these projects.

On the other hand, I can’t wait for the big screen, epic adapatation of the Smurfs.

I won’t go so far as to say that the film versions of The Lord of the Rings changed the world, but I think it could be posited that they changed the world’s perceptions of fantasy. All of a sudden, those who never knew a dungeon from a dragon were discussing hobbits, wizards, dwarves, and elves. The films made fantasy fans out of those who knew nothing of fantasy.

Of course, there was a steadfast group of Tolkien devotees who knew of the story as a book before it was a film trilogy, many of whom took umbrage at the fact that their — THEIR — story was now filmic fodder for the unwashed masses. These Tolkienites appointed themselves watchdogs of the epic, challenging everything they read on the internet about the films’ progress during production. However, when the films debuted, they were, for the most part, satisfied at the immense achievement of the director Peter Jackson and the entire team who brought the films to life.

There was, however, one problem. And it got very ugly.

As discussed in a previous article, there was a brief scene in the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, in which a minor character, Glorfindel, is replaced by another minor character, Arwen (played by Liv Tyler), in a roughly three-minute long rescue sequence. She comes on horseback, picks up the wounded hobbit Frodo, is pursued by evil wraiths, and calls upon the power of Rivendell to cause a river to wash away said wraiths.

A little later, as in the book, she has a quiet romantic moment with another hero, Aragorn. Then the titular fellowship leave Rivendell, and we don’t see her again. Her part is a cameo at most.

And when a certain subsection of fans saw this, they went ballistic.

But why? Having Arwen sub in for Glorfindel is far from the only change made to the story. There are others that are far more obvious: the absence of Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Wight sequence, Frodo’s reduced age, the lack of music and poetry that make the books so charming, and the completely revised characters of Merry and Pippin.

So why zero in on Arwen in particular?

The answer is obvious to everyone except those who hated the changes to Arwen’s character. And that answer is simple, old-school sexism.

Tolkien didn’t put many women into his epic. Of the scores of characters in Lord of the Rings, only four of them are female, and one of those females is a giant spider. It’s a boys’ story, where men perform all of the major action, with the exception of Eowyn’s slaying of the Witch King. And it seemed like a lot of anemic nerds wanted it to stay that way.

In the extended version of The Two Towers, Merry and Pippin are about to be swallowed up by the wicked Old Man Willow when Treebeard, the Ent, arrives in the nick of time and saves them, saying to the beastly Willow, “Eat Earth…Dig Deep…Drink Water…Go to sleep.” This moment also occurred in the books, but rather than Treebeard, their savior was Tom Bombadil.

This is exactly the same as what happened in the first film with Arwen, yet not a peep was heard from the fans. Why? Because Arwen is a woman, and Treebeard is a…well, okay, he’s a walking tree, but he’s a walking tree that’s also a dude.

The elf Legolas, an extremely minor character in the book The Return of the King, had a ridiculously huge hero moment in the film version of Return, in which he toppled a Mumak (basically an elephant the size of a skyscraper). He climbed up the side of its body using the arrows that had pierced its hide, slew numerous enemies riding atop it, killed the beast, and then surfed down its trunk as it died, naturally landing on his feet. This is not a revised episode from the book, but rather invented wholly from scratch for the film. And what was the reaction of those same people who called for the beheading of Liv Tyler for sullying the pristine beauty of Tolkien’s work?

“Dude, Legolas is AWESOME!”

What amazes me is the number of excuses I’ve heard people make to allow the filmmakers their wiggle room, and yet Arwen consistently gets thrown to the wolves. When you step back and look at the films, you realize that the only plausible reason for people to single out that one, small alteration among many is because it cast a woman in a more proactive, heroic role, and that is clearly a mortal sin.

So I’m calling you out, nerds. It’s time to knock it off. If you ever want to actually get a girlfriend, you need to get with the times, and backing off of Arwen is a good place to start.

Incidentally, in the original script, Arwen was written into the battle at Helm’s Deep, arriving with Haldir’s troops. This allowed a brief reunion for her and Aragorn, before the film kicked into high gear with its awesome climax. I only wished they had kept this is in the film, because personally I would have loved to see Arwen and Aragorn fighting side by side, laying the smackdown on some Orcs. Alas, it was not meant to be, although they did film some of it. (Andif you have a keen eye and a few minutes to spare, you can catch a glimpse of footage of this in the bonus features on The Two Towers Extended Edition. You’re welcome.)

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When I was a kid, the country went through a full-fledged Dungeons & Dragons hysteria, where the fantasy role-playing game was accused of everything from turning kids onto Satanism to encouraging them to kill themselves.

Decades later, we’ve now reached a point where D&D is seen as sort of a harmless, if incredibly geeky pastime.

But isn’t there a third option? Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a dangerous, evil force in the world, nor is it just harmless fun; it’s actually one of the most worthwhile activities ever created, and there is literally nothing better for turning a kid into a thoughtful, creative, passionate, open-minded adult.

Almost everything I know today I learned from Dungeons & Dragons. And almost everything I’m passionate about, I first discovered while playing the game.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons at age twelve, when my friend Tim asked for, and received, a “starter” box set of the game for Christmas.

I immediately loved it. It gave a focus to all those lazy afternoons with my friends. It was something for us all to be passionate about, an endless countryside for us to discover and explore — endless because we made it up ourselves.

But it didn’t just focus those afternoons with my friends; it focused the rest of my life too.

Before the game, I’d had little interest in reading for pleasure. For me, books were something that were assigned in school — staid, musty tales that said nothing about the things I was interested in and had absolutely no relevance to my life.

But because I was so enamored with the world of D&D, I started reading fantasy books. For the first time in my life, I realized, “Hey, books aren’t necessarily boring! Sometimes they can even be really, really interesting!” It was a revelation. In months, I was devouring every fantasy book I could get my hands on — even long, complicated sagas that I wouldn’t have looked twice at before (Stephen R. Donaldson was, and still is, my favorite author).

In school, I’d always hated history. It had always been presented to me as nothing more than a long list of dates to be memorized.

But in the world of D&D, in the adventures we were concocting for each other, history came alive. And why wouldn’t it? We were literally living it! And like almost every virgin D&D player, I immediately embarked on my own extracurricular study of weaponry, of myths and fables, of medieval life — even castle-building.

Philosophy and ethics? At my Catholic grade school, that meant just another list to memorize, this time of picky little rules to follow.

It was while playing D&D that I discovered the notion of “alignment” — the idea that everyone has a point-of-view in life, and that few people think of themselves as “evil.” Instead, ethics necessarily follow from one’s perspective. This acknowledgment of the obviously relative nature of all things made my head feel like a balloon; I could almost feel it expanding on my shoulders.

Even better, by implicitly granting me the right to make my own ethical choices, and by having me role-play different choices and then forcing me to accept the consequences of my actions, I think the game made me a much more ethical person. It definitely made me a far more broad-minded one.

In school, I had absolutely no interest in debate or public presentations. My sixth grade presentation was on Bolivia, and I literally could not have cared less.

But because D&D involves such an elaborate set of rules, many of which are, uh, ambiguous, an essential part of Dungeons & Dragons means arguing a case, both to your fellow players and to the dungeon master.Year later, in college, professors would always say, “You did debate in high school, didn’t you?” I never knew what they were talking about — until it finally occurred to me that I had, in fact, spent every weekend of my high school years engaged in passionate debate with some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.

Before D&D, I’d never thought of myself as a storyteller, or a performer in any way. But when you’re the dungeon master, you’re required to be a performer, acting out the role of the narrator and dozens of other characters — and you’d better be an incredibly quick-thinking performer at that, since most of what you do is improvisation in response to something your players did that you didn’t expect.

If you write your dungeons yourself, as we usually did, you’re also forced to confront the notions of character motivation, the importance of a good antagonist, of theme, of rising tension and resolution.

In short, if he’s going to keep the attention of his players, a dungeon master must quickly intuit all the elements of dramatic structure.

Best of all, you tell your stories in direct engagement with your audience. If that doesn’t tell you exactly what does, and doesn’t, work when it comes to storytelling, nothing will.

Finally, there’s math. I didn’t like that either as a kid — more memorization, natch. Truthfully, I still hate it, but when you spend countless hours adding up dice-rolls in your head, you’re suddenly a whiz  — and when your character’s life is at stake, you pick up statistics pretty quickly too!

Dungeons & Dragons would have been worth playing even if it built no “character” whatsoever — if it did nothing but entertain. And maybe this essay will do nothing but make today’s generation of kids less likely to play it; that’s probably how I would have reacted.

But the truth is, the game does so much more than entertain, and it’s about time it got credit for it.

As an adult, I’ve done a number of things for a living: teach at the high school and college level, and write novels, plays, and screenplays. Now I edit this website.

If it weren’t for Dungeons & Dragons, I couldn’t have done any of these things well.

If I hadn’t found D&D, would I have discovered some other passion as a kid? Video games? Sports? Horticulture? It’s possible. But it’s almost impossible to imagine that any of these activities would have given me such a long and varied list of skills and interests.

As an adult, I occasionally run into parents who mention that their children have discovered Dungeons & Dragons. They usually roll their eyes and shrug, as if to say, “At least they’re not out robbing liquor stores.”

I always tell them they’re wrong to dismiss the game so casually; I try to tell them all the things I’ve written here.

They never listen to me. They always say something stupid like, “What kind of game is it if you can’t ever win?” The stereotypes run too deep. To them, D&D means being silly, dressing up like an elf and rooting around in sewers. They can’t dismiss it fast enough.

In a way, I’m sad — sad that they don’t appreciate and support the passionate, creative, intelligent, interesting kid they’re probably raising (no thanks to them).

But mostly I’m sad that they themselves have to go through life with such a narrow, limited perspective. That wouldn’t be the case if one of their friends had ever introduced them to D&D — but now, of course, it’s probably too late.

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Okay, so maybe the Evil Dead movies aren’t really the best movies ever made. But they are sort of like my generation’s version of the Kennedy assassination: we all remember where we were on that bloody day we first saw Evil Dead.

For me, it was during a blizzard. I was living in Albany, New York, and some friends and I, aware of the coming monstrous snow storm, loaded up at the grocery store with food and beer, and hunkered down in an apartment to wait out the storm together. For entertainment, we had rented three films none of us had ever seen before: The Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness.

Or, as horror geeks know them, the Holy Trinity.

The clouds came in early, blotting out the sun. (Then we will watch in the shade!) In no time at all, there was a complete whiteout, snow whipping around, the wind howling. It may not have been dark as night, but it was pretty darn eerie. We popped in the first DVD, and watched as the cheesy goodness of Sam Raimi’s early masterpiece unfolded before our eyes.

The Evil Dead is dated (1981), super low-budget, and too over-the-top by modern standards to be scary scary, and yet the film works magnificently: not as a so-bad-it’s-good guilty pleasure, but a so-good-it’s-freakin’-awesome cinematic gem. For one thing, it was a very early performance of Bruce Campbell, a man who made his career in cheesy B-productions, and it’s fun to see him young and subdued in this film. Also of note, writer/director Sam Raimi created the formula that was followed by The Blair Witch: a small budget, several game actors, and a good idea can be all you need to create a horror masterpiece. Oh, and luck, too. You need a LOT of luck. Which, fortunately, he had.

The plot is simple: five college kids go on vacation and stay at a cabin the middle of the woods. They stumble upon an evil book, which in the sequels is referred to as The Necronomicon (a name borrowed from horror author H.P. Lovecraft), and, one by one, the kids become possessed. Something awful happens to one of the women, which is so grotesque I can’t bring myself to describe it here, but it’s something only a man would come up with, and if you’ve seen the film you know what I’m talking about. Characters turn into zombie/demons, and begin hacking away at each other.

Only Bruce Campbell’s character, Ash, is not corrupted by the Evil Force that is the antagonist of the film — unusual for horror films, which typically feature a Final Girl as the hero (although, interestingly, his character’s full name is Ashley).

The movie is, for the most part, a splatterfest, filled with blood and guts and gore, oh my. It is sick and twisted and a great deal of fun, and I highly recommend it. But if you’re squeamish like I am, you might want to skip the part where Cheryl is lured into the woods.

At this point in our blizzard-induced film festival, we took a break and shook off the mild heeby-jeebies that one gets from such a film. We all agreed we had allowed ourselves to exist as uncultured mouth-breathers for not having seen this classic film earlier. We joked about the cheesy effects and talked about how Sam Raimi was finally getting the mainstream success he deserved as the director of the Spider-Man movies. Previously, I had been familiar with Sam Raimi only as a name in the credits for Xena: Warrior Princess, and had put two and two together and figured he was related to Ted Raimi, the actor who played Joxer. But I had had no idea just how cool he was. Oh, what lessons I had before me!

We popped more corn, grabbed more beer and put in the next DVD, Evil Dead 2. It’s an interesting film in that’s it’s kind of a sequel, and yet kind of a remake. The first ten or so minutes essentially replayed all the major plot points of the first film, not as a flashback, but as a quickie do-over. It seemed to assume that no one in the audience would have seen the first film. Evil Dead 2 is even more over-the-top than the first film, and in it Bruce Campbell truly begins to embrace his campy style of humor, going so far as hacking off his own demon-posessed hand and attaching a chainsaw in its place.

Yummy.

Both the gore and the comedy is amped way up, as is often the case in horror sequels, and the film ends on an exciting cliffhanger, with Ash being sucked through a portal and ending up in a medieval kingdom, where he’s hailed as a hero for killing a zombie, which the medieval people refer to as a “Deadite.”

One look outside told us we weren’t going anywhere any time soon. Not only were our cars completely covered with snow, so was everything else. It was a white world outside, so we delved into the black world of the third film, Army of Darkness.

Filmed 12 years after the first film and with a greatly increased budget, the film is a wholly different animal than the first two. It takes place entirely in the medieval world, and Ash has become an almost superhumanly cocky caricature of a movie hero. Bruce Campbell chews the scenery with panache, and the wacky slapstick makes for a funny, silly time. There’s no attempt at the scares as with the first two — in fact, this film mostly resembles one of the sillier episodes of Xena. It also boasts one of the best endings in all of film, when Ash returns to the present, and must do battle with another Deadite. It’s the cheesiest of the cheese, but will bring a smile to pretty much anyone’s face with a shred of a sense of humor.

I honestly can’t remember if we left that night or if we all crashed at my friend’s apartment, but I do know we did all get out of there before we had to start chowing down on each other, Alive-style. I have a blizzard to thank for a huge chapter in my horror film education, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

Incidentally, a few years later, I caught Evil Dead: The Musical when it was playing off-Broadway. The show was insanely good — it captured the feel of the first two films, had great, catchy songs, and dumped gallons of blood on the first two rows, known as the “splatter zone.”

The show still tours, and if you can catch it, do yourself a favor and go.

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A number from Evil Dead, The Musical

It was a miracle that David beat Goliath, right?

After all, in the famous Biblical story, Goliath, while not the giant he is sometimes made out to be, was still the Philistines’ standard-bearer: a mighty, seasoned warrior decked out with a sword and armor. Meanwhile, David, while not the boy he is sometimes made out to be, was an inexperienced young man, unarmored and carrying only a sling with five stones from the stream.

According to the Bible, David had at first been fitted with armor and a sword. But he said, “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it.” So he ditched the armor and sword and turned to the one weapon he, as a shepherd, could employ with perfection: the sling that he’d long used to fight off wolves.

When the fight was joined, David immediately pressed Goliath, no doubt catching him off-guard. Then, using his perfect aim, he sent a stone to Goliath’s head, knocking him over. And using Goliath’s own sword, David cut off his head.

In short, David did absolutely nothing that Goliath expected him to do: he didn’t wear armor, he picked an unconventional weapon, he played offense.

And that’s why he won. In retrospect, it was obviously the perfect strategy for David to employ.

Indeed, it’s the only kind of strategy that would have succeeded.

Had David fought Goliath on Goliath’s terms — with a sword and armor, playing by all the expected “rules” of combat — Goliath would have won the bout hands down. But knowing he didn’t have a chance playing by the Philistines’ rules, David invented new ones — ones that favored him.

In other words, it was absolutely no miracle that David won. In fact, political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft looked at every war from the last 200 years between stronger and weaker opponents. The weaker opponents won almost 30% of the time (which is remarkable enough given that in some cases, the “powerful” opponent was sometimes ten times more powerful).

But when Arreguin-Toft isolated just those battles where the “weaker” opponent forsook the ordinary rules of engagement and tried some unconventional new strategy, their margin of victory rose from almost 30% to 64%.

In other words, the underdogs didn’t just hold their own; they won most of the time.

It’s all documented in “How David Beats Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating article in the most recent issue of The New Yorker.

Another great example of this phenomenon, the author tells us, is the leader of the Arab uprising against the Ottoman empire, T.E. Lawrence — better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence, leading a ragtag, untrained band, most of whom had never fired a rifle, was about as much an underdog as a military opponent can get. But in fighting the “superior” Turk army, he broke virtually every accepted rule of combat — avoiding a direct attack on their stronghold, for example, and instead raiding the mostly unguarded rail line to Damascus that kept that massive army fed and armored.

But Lawrence’s greatest victory came in his attack on the port of Aqaba. The Turks prepared for the expected attack by water from British naval forces (who were aligned with the Arabs). It literally never occurred to them that anyone would attack from the east, which was a vast, unforgiving desert teaming with cobras and vipers. But Lawrence and his army of several hundred crossed the “uncrossable” desert and did just that — wiping out 1200 Turks with only two casualties.

Did the Turks call foul that the rules of engagement had been so thoroughly violated? Probably. But Lawrence, like David, was an outsider through and through. He couldn’t have cared less about offending the sensibilities of the “establishment,” because he wasn’t part of it.

By contrast, General George Washington, who had once dreamed of fighting in the British army, almost lost the American Revolutionary War because of his stubborn insistence that his soldiers give up the guerrilla methods that had characterized earlier victories.

Washington “couldn’t fight the establishment,” Gladwell writes, “because he was the establishment.”

It’s a good thing General Washington won anyway. In Arreguin-Toft’s studies, if an underdog doesn’t fight like David or Lawrence of Arabia — if he doesn’t think outside the box — he loses 78% of the time.

Read the entire New Yorker article.