Exiern attempts retcon, is still awful

Previously on Exiern, Drowemos realised he had no fucking clue where the story was going and threw in some random magical gender transformations, since he knows full well that it’s the only reason anyone reads this garbage. Of particular note was the character of Brother Thomas, now Sister Teresa.

Side effects of turning into a woman include long hair (even if you’re bald), the body of a twenty five year old (even if you’re fifty), instant nudity (even if you’re wearing an enormous baggy robe) and an obsession with shoes (even if you belong to an all-male order of wizards from a iron-age society where everyone wears leather boots or goes barefoot). This made the Drowemos’ claim that he had ‘spent some time thinking about what it would be like to live as a woman’ seem less than convincing.

Ah, but perhaps I was too hasty in my judgment! A mere four months and zero jokes later, it’s revealed that:

I’m not sure if this makes it more or less offensive. Let’s chop it down and count its rings.

• Brother Thomas spends about half a dozen pages as a man, setting a new record for Exiern supporting characters. However, at no point during these pages is it even hinted at that he wants to be a woman. This suggests that either Drowemos pulled this backstory out of his arse at the last minute after realising how misogynistic the character was, or that it was always supposed to be this way and he’s too eager to get to the money shot to bother with consistent characterisation. Either way, it’s still a truly dismal piece of writing, especially coming from someone who aspires to do this professionally.
• As a man, Brother Thomas appears to be in his 50′s or 60′s. Although we’re not shown it on the page, he’s supposedly so “different” that the other priests have picked up on it. The expediency with which Sister Teresa acquires a negligee, shoes and a handbag suggests that Thomas had been rehearsing this in his head for a while. She’s also really, really happy when it happens, so she’s obviously not breaking a taboo that’ll get her burned at the stake.  In a different fantasy world, I could potentially accept all these things, except that… gender changing is actually pretty common in Exiern, accounting for 75% of the plot points and 8000% of the filler. Considering what transgendered people in the real world are willing to go through in order to transition, the idea that Thomas reached late middle age without ever asking a wizard to zap him strains credibility.
• Of all the (human) men who’ve been turned into women in Exiern, Thomas is the only one depicted as having wanted it to happen. He’s also the only one who, upon becoming a woman, immediately starts acting like that. So if you’re a woman on the inside, you’re also an idiot bimbo Valley Girl on the inside. Thanks.
• This still fails to explain why the female version of a skull-faced middle-aged man looks like a pneumatic Barbie doll.
• We can ‘Read more about Brother Thomas in the members section’, which costs $3.95 a month to access. Even if it does tie up all of the above, and I’m certain that it doesn’t, the fact that we’re meant to take the word of some optional supplementary material over Thomas’ actual characterisation says a lot about the level of competence on display.
• Yeah, fuck this comic, seriously.

I spent most of the last post on Exiern pointing out the myriad facets of Drowemos’ hypocritical douchebaggery, particularly his rambling justification of why he has to sell nudie pictures of his “characters” even though he doesn’t want to because he totes respects women. The short version is that he’s in it for the money, doesn’t give a shit about how he portrays women as long as people are willing to pay for it, apparently feels something resembling guilt about this but still isn’t above charging his readers $90 to see attempted gorilla rape. He’s also so in love with the sound of his own e-voice that not only does he un-ironically compare himself to Alfred Nobel, who I can exclusively reveal funded his research by selling nude lithographs of the barbarian queen Jen-Tai, but he gets pissed off when people edit his rambling interview responses down to a more manageable length. It’s because of the latter that I was able to find this interview, which he complained about in a blog post he later deleted after a terrifying brush with self-awareness.

The interview is, against all odds, actually worth reading. Not because Drowemos reveals that he’s a deep, thoughtful human being and is simply incapable of translating this into comic form – he’s as painfully unfunny as his comics, dragging things out beyond all reason with a running joke about how he’s really ‘three midgets in a trench coat’ like a fourteen year old Monty Python fan writing an autobiographical essay for high school English – but because it reveals that Exiern might have been a good comic had somebody else written it. Drow describes the comic thusly:

The basic premise of Exiern is a question; “What would happen if Conan the Barbarian was transformed into a woman.”

After having read every single interminable page of Exiern, I can confirm that the answer is “absolutely nothing”, followed by “oh, except tits”. Exiern might well ask this question, but it cops out when it comes to providing an answer that’s either interesting or has any impact on the narrative beyond doubling the number of breasts involved. Bugger Conan, how would you expect any traditional male chauvinist fantasy hero to react upon being turned into a woman, possibly permanently, while trying to rescue a princess they clearly had designs on? Anger at what’s been done? Fear about what’s going to happen? Shame at what they’ve become? Dealing with these emotions would have made for an interesting story, and even a writer as inept as Drowemos couldn’t entirely ruin it, provided he had the guts to actually take the premise to its logical conclusion. But he doesn’t, so it isn’t; When the barbarian hero Typhan-Knee is turned into a woman, s/he responds by looking vaguely annoyed and then carrying on exactly as before, only with boobs. From this point on, the gender change only exists to provide motivation for Typhan-Knee, now known as Tiffany – nb. this isn’t actually clever, since the name “Typhan-Knee” is so obvious and contrived that even “Ynaffit” would have been more acceptable – to get herself uncursed, so it could be an enchanted amulet or a geas or cortex bomb for all the impact it has on the plot and characterisation. I don’t like to say “epic fail”, but some occasions seem to demand it.

But even this isn’t necessarily a total loss, because a skinny young woman with anachronistic nail polish who acts like a hulking male barbarian might still have worked as a commentary on gender stereotypes in fantasy, but only if the world she inhabited were properly developed. A woman warrior in a world that thought women couldn’t be warriors would work as social commentary. A male warrior who lives in a world that thinks women can’t be warriors, and is then turned into a woman but refuses to accept her new station in life, would work even better. So when Drowemos later says that…

That is after all what my comic is about. How our bodies shape who we are. Are we simply an extension of the flesh or there is more to us. What is the nature of our soul and how is it effect by our shape and societies perception of us?

…it’s not unreasonable of us to expect that he’s put some effort into defining how Exiern‘s world actually works. It’s apparent from reading the comic that he has put a lot of work into this, but only the bits that don’t have an impact on the story he’s trying to tell. We’re told about the world’s history, Gods, magic and how this all fits into some sort of multiverse clusterfuck, but since the last five years have been about a barbarian, a princess and a wizard fighting generic monsters and arguing with guards, this is all totally meaningless and the same story could take place in Hyboria, Faerun or Azeroth for all the difference it makes. The details of the setting that do affect the plot, on the other hand, don’t appear to follow any kind of rational or aesthetic logic: The technology appears roughly iron age, but there are also robot tentacle monsters. People wear medieval tunics, but there are shops that sell t-shirts with slogans on them. Barbarians are looked down upon and people crack sexist jokes about women all the time, but a barbarian woman can wander around a city in a fur bikini without anyone commenting on it. We never see any other female warriors, but there’s a shop that sells sexy girl armour and everyone giggles at how cute it is. The society we’re shown looks pre-industrial, yet the people have enough leisure time to worry about matching their shoes with their handbag.

And then, cyborgs.

This doesn’t sound like a properly developed fantasy world. What it does sound like, and I suspect it’s no coincidence, is an RPG setting. Specifically, a combat-centric RPG setting where the world is made entirely out of cool shit for the players to wreck. I’m looking at you, Synnibarr. Pantheons of deities, the methods of travelling between dimensions, and the rules of magic are all that really matters in a situation like that, because they govern the mechanics of the world, and that’s what the characters are going to be dealing with. In a story which the author claims is about ‘the nature of our soul and how is it effect by our shape and societies perception of us’, however, it’s not the vast cosmic picture that matters, but day to day human interaction. My problems with how inconsistent the world is aren’t just pedantry, they’re the crux of why Exiern is such a miserable failure. It’s not just that Tiffany doesn’t care about being turned into a woman, it’s that none of the other characters do, either.

For a comic that’s supposed to deal with gender in fantasy, we’re given absolutely no consistent picture of how Exiern‘s society actually treats women. We are, as I said above, never shown any other female warriors, and characters make the occasional crack about how women shouldn’t be fighting, yet the (all male) guards are still willing to take orders from Tiffany without batting an eyelid. Tiffany and the princess are able to wander around alone, without any protection, wearing a square foot of clothing between them, and absolutely nothing is made of it. Not only does nobody have a problem with a woman bearing arms and hunting monsters on her own, shops carry specially made female armour. The only disrespect Tiffany faces is the build up to a “joke” where she hits someone, and at no point is she actually discriminated against. But the women in the cast are still routinely tied up, groped, leered at, stripped and mistaken for concubines as the “plot” demands, so what, if anything, are we supposed to take from all this? I have no clue, and it’s a safe bet that Drowemos doesn’t either. Commenting on society only works if the society in question is solid enough to be commented on in the first place, but Exiern is just an abstract series of contrivances that revels in exploitative shit while claiming to be a post-modern commentary on it. It’s also not funny.

What throws Exiern‘s failures into even sharper relief is that the exact same premise was done much, much better over twenty years ago in Gael Baudino’s Dragonsword trilogy. Dragonsword, despite possessing the single least interesting fantasy novel title in the entire history of time, has had infinitely more thought put into it than Exiern, and because of this it’s able to properly explore the ramifications of a proud male warrior from a patriarchal society being transformed into a woman. Several warriors, in fact; Gryylth, the land the protagonist finds herself transported to, is violently patriarchal and damn well knows it, so when its enemies capture the super-powered magical McGuffin tree of chaos, they realise it would be more psychologically and morally damaging to transform Gryylth’s elite warriors into women than to kill them. This occurs roughly half way through the first book, and a sizeable chunk of the next two and a half is dedicated to dealing with how this affects not only the new women, but the society they belong to. Their newly female warriors’ struggle with what’s happened to them, all dealing with it in different ways – some take male lovers, some female lovers, some commit suicide, others try to just get on with things – and by proving that they’re still capable fighters, the society of Gryylth is forced to examine its prejudices about what women can and can’t do. It’s not a modern classic or anything, but it does give a good idea of how this sort of story is supposed to work.

[Supposed to work as social commentary, anyway. Dragonsword is, predictably, despised by a good chunk of the gender transformation fetish community who pay Drowemos' bills, since it doesn't credit breasts with having mind-controlling powers or portray rape as sexy. 'Unfortunately the series is marred by such heavy-handed, stereotypical depictions of a misogynistic, chauvinistic society that it seems like the author (herself female) must have a deeply misandrist, fairly prejudiced set of beliefs herself.', says a reviewer at metamorphose.org, and I just had to get a copy after reading that. Another one complains about the book's 'anti-mysoginistic message', as if this is bad thing]

One last thing, because I’d like this to be the definitive Drowemos evisceration so that I’m never tempted to write one again. Drowemos wants to write comic books professionally, but hasn’t had any success because he can’t even write them amateurishly. If he were trying hard, this might actually be sad, but it’s obvious from his output that he’s only attracted to writing for a living because he thinks it’s easier than real work, and absolutely no effort or imagination has gone into any of this tripe. His latest attempt to get published is a pitch letter and sample pages from a graphic novel he wrote called Blade Bunny. Now, you may recall that during our previous visit to Exiern, I quoted at length from an essay in which Drowemos explained, also at length, that he really wanted to write stories about strong, well-developed women whose clothing stays on for more than three consecutive panels. This is because he does not like the way society objectifies women, but it’s literally the only way for a comic to become popular so he has no choice. So now that he’s established himself, sorta, as someone who can attract an audience – to his credit, he’s substantially better at it than I am – what’s his awesome new project look like?

fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Do you even need to be told what the preview pages are like? Bunny’s a hot chick with weapons, which I’m very excited about because there are so few comics about hot chicks with weapons that this could really go anywhere. Bunny’s shtick is that she acts like a bimbo to throw her opponents off guard, which has potential in theory, except in practice it just makes her a bimbo who occasionally kills people. Her love interest is blatantly an idealised caricature of Drowemos, since he looks exactly like the love interest from Exiern, only with greasier hair. Even if the remaining 93 pages end up being ghost written by Warren Ellis, it’s still a fucking terrible idea.

Oh, wait, it turns out Drowemos elaborated on Brother Thomas somewhere I don’t need to pay to look at:

Indeed Thomas has always been a bit different but not in the way Tiffany is implying.  It has been a much more subtle thing. Anyone who met Thomas got a sense that he was out of phase not really connecting with this world.  Just a slight distant look in his eyes, a hollowness to his laughter.  While being a well respected teacher and high ranking member of the Brotherhood most of the order found being around Thomas in a social setting a bit uncomfortable.

This is not to say that Thomas ever wanted to be a woman or be anything other than himself.  In fact throughout his life most would say that Thomas has been a staunch opponent of womankind…

FOR FUCK’S SAKE THAT MAKES IT EVEN WORSE YOU TALENTLESS FUCKING WANKER.

Storylines are relatively easy.

One day, in my comic perusing, I ran across a comic called the Wotch. The Wotch was a little comic with a sort of Buffy the Vampire hunter flare. The art wasn’t great and but Anne the creator had real affection for her character and a good wit. But the thing that really made the Wotch special was the community.We all know about trolls and troll dens on the internet. Places were people get together to criticize and belittle anything different. Well the Wotch community was just the opposite. It was a very supportive and compassionate place. There are place like that on the internet. They are hard to find but when you find one it’s a place where creativity can blossom.