GFT Retrospective #55: Hard Choices

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Feeling Retrospective.

We're at the next big milestone, Ticketholders!

You know, besides Just the Ticket hitting 100k views....

The Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective has been a long time in the making, and will continue to be a long time in the making because I'm not going to stop here.

That said, the review itself (as I drafted it some years ago) has enough introduction built in, so please remember to like and comment down below, subscribe to my blog, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter for the latest news on my content.

GFT #50: Hard Choices

So it’s finally here.

After something like a hundred issues of Grimm Universe awesomeness and nonsense, the main series hit fifty issues, and it is huge in both page count and implication.

It starts with a flashback to Germany in the year 1806, with two children who are clearly Sela and Thomas. Sela is a little girl again, now wearing glasses because continuity is not Zenescope’s strong suit yet. This puts Sela’s age in the present at roughly 205 years (assuming in-Universe present is the same as year of release), but again, details don’t matter because Zenescope. Speaking of continuity problems, Sela addresses the man with them as “father” before he leaves them alone in a cart in the middle of the woods to meet with some business associates who turn out to be the Dark One and Baba Yaga. We learn that his name is Drago, a.k.a. Freidrich (Mathers?), and that he is a Mystic and former member of the Dark Horde (Darkhorde?). There are any number of ways to explain this away, since Shang clearly told Sela that she was the only pure Lowborn Guardian in the history of the realms. Maybe that’s what Sela believed was true. Maybe she and Thomas were adopted. Maybe Shang knew about Drago and lied to spare her feelings and/or make her feel more special. Or maybe everything is true and Zenescope really, really sucks at remembering their own lore and continuity. Whatever the case, it’s a decent setup for the title and theme of the issue. Baba Yaga sends one of her knight avatars to head them off and drive Drago’s cart over a cliff, putting Sela in the middle of a dilemma: save herself and let her (foster?) father(?) fall to his death, or try to save him at the expense of both their lives. We won’t get to see the outcome until the end of the issue, but you can probably guess what happened from Sela being alive for the next two centuries (give or take a death).

Picking up where the exposition last dumped us, Sela watches as the recently discovered love of her life handily kicks Shang’s ass and murders a bunch of good knights (termed "Realm Knights" as both a group and an offshoot Zenescope brand) in front of her and magicks her into her Snow White costume so he can kill her in it for some kinky reason. But a few panels and Sailor Moon tropes later, it’s revealed that the Piper had been controlling him all along. So, after being a manipulative hero figure in the Christmas special, Prince Erik makes a sudden, ironic transition to puppet before the Piper magically renders him unconscious, reducing him to a plot device for the next twenty-five issues, and disappears through a portal he makes with stolen Casket energy.

In Los Angeles, we breifly catch up with Belinda and Baba Yaga, following events we haven’t read yet, vowing revenge against an ominously unnamed “Him” with the MacGuffin they recovered.

Then focus shifts again, this time to my least favorite characters--Cindy, the Dark One, Fenton, Pinocchio--and their slightly more interesting associates--Orcus and Death--who are still in Las Vegas because getting actively involved in your own world-domination scheme is no way to succeed. Sarcasm…. While the Dark One stands back and does nothing, Fenton observes everyone with a slimy, suspicious look in his eyes, Death (introduced here as Morrigan for the first time) exposits to Cindy about the Dark One’s generic villain plan to invade and enslave the Earth, and Cindy predictably expresses childish boredom until there’s a chance she might get to kill people. So, basic one-dimensional villain writing.

Back in Myst, the heroes are finally taking steps to destroy the Casket of Provenance--which takes some plot-convenient magical weapon, which takes some plot-convenient time-wasting fairy magic to build--while Sela distracts everyone unnecessarily by brooding over Erik’s unconscious body like a first generation Disney princess, just in time for the Dark One to have used the rest of the Piper’s stolen Casket energy to transport himself and his Vegas crew to Myst, round up his army, and storm the Realm Council’s stronghold. With Sela still acting hopeless and helpless (even though she’s saved a bunch of lives, beaten Belinda in a Pokemon battle, almost beaten Belinda in two sword fights, helped defeat an army of giant rat demons on Christmas, and survived human stupidity for two hundred-plus years), it’s time for the person who’s supposed to be ritualizing a Casket-destroying magic sword into existence to engage Sela in a lengthy dialogue about…you guessed it…Hard Choices. Except that when the choice is between crying over an unconscious man you’ve only known for ten minutes and taking up arms against the Devil’s army to prevent your entire race from being enslaved and murdered, the only thing hard about the choice is the skull of the person who thinks they have a choice to make at all.

The other heroes (Thane, Blake, Hakan, and Shang) manage to hold their own against Morrigan, Orcus, Cindy, and Pinocchio…until the Dark One summons bugs. 

Really?

You’ve got Death, a demon king, a bloodthirsty tits-and-assassin with a magic katana, and a shapeshifting tree monster working for you, and the tide doesn’t turn in your favor until you summon bugs?! That’s just stupid.

On the other hand, Pinocchio murdering Hakan gives Nissa the time she needs to finish magicking up a Casket-smashing sword for Sela to, well, smash the Casket of Provenance with. Which she does. And nothing happens.

But remember: there are two other ways to make a portal to Earth. One is Sela’s book, which, again, why not just use Belinda’s book instead? And it’s supposedly bound to her soul, so if anyone destroys it, she could die even though she’s the heroine of the series, but hey, Sela? Umm. We’re stupid because writing and things are getting desperate, so if you could possibly risk killing yourself--again--and save the world for us, that would be super-great, ‘kay? Thanks!

Ticketmaster's Note: This review was written in the late 2010s, at the peak of Presidential idiocy, but not yet in the depths of global viral tragedy, so the following analogy is a bit of-its-time. It is fitting, and I couldn't come up with anything contemporary that is as good, so I'm leaving it in. Enjoy, or otherwise express your feelings on the subject in the comments down below.

Here’s an idea: how about just killing off Shang instead because--again--calling him a mentor is like calling…Donald Trump the President of the United States. It might be true, in that these are titles bestowed upon them by other people, but they’re both inherently terrible at exemplifying what their respective titles actually mean, everything they say or do has the potential to--whether inadvertently or on purpose--cause the destruction of the human race, and the main thing they are good at is allowing massive collections of words to come out of their mouths, many of which don’t make sense or aren’t realistic until someone else either retcons or analyzes their meaning in a cynical, sarcastic way. Huh. I guess that makes me the late night talk show host of the Grimm Universe. Cool.

Getting back to the ways Grimm Fairy Tales supervillains can invade the Earth, there’s the Casket of Provenance, which Sela unceremoniously smashed, there’s Sela and her book, and there’s Nissa and that whole “fairies are one with the fabric of the Universe” business. So Sela, being the hero while also being maybe a bit suicidal, stabs her book with the Casket-killing sword, which unleashes a splash page of blinding yellow light that…does nothing.

Except give Cindy a chance to be useful for the first time in forty-eight issues. Not only does she stab Shang in the back so Orcus can cut off his head (alright! Shang’s dead! Time to sing and dance with the Lion, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lollipop Guild! Ding, dong, everyone!), but it conveniently turns out that her sword (which was supposed to be super-powerful and instrumental in the end of the world, but really just made Cindy into “white-washed martial arts bimbo with sword” up to this point) actually was instrumental in this one, highly specific instance of the bad guys trying to end the world. When she touches Nissa with her sword made from one half of the horn of the last surviving unicorn who was murdered on its one hundredth birthday, it turns Nissa into Smoke or Noob Saibot or something--again, I joke--because she gets infected with dark energy and the Dark One uses that influence to make her open a portal to the Nexus, promising Cindy--in that half-manipulative, half-serious, half-infatuated way that pretty much covers all Satanic aspects of his character--that she will be the "Queen of Earth."

Just. No.

No, not just no.

No and why?

But before we can fully witness the end of the world that is my brain, we cut back to Sela, who enters into yet another dialogue about Hard Choices with the now-tainted Nissa before running her through with the Provenance-breaker sword and shutting off the portal. Cindy and the Dark One make it through with a few monsters and nondescript lackeys, leaving Morrigan/Death, Orcus, Pinocchio, and presumably Fenton (though I don’t immediately recall him showing up again in the series’ future publications), stuck in Myst. With his forces severely depleted, the Dark One lashes out at the city around him, only to be interrupted by Belinda and Baba Yaga, who use their recovered MacGuffin to suck up the Dark One’s army like a Master Ball in Pokemon. What is it with this series and Pokemon references? Following a predictable, defeated villain monologue by the Dark One, we return to Sela, whose new default pose seems to be kneeling with a dead, dying, or unconscious person in her lap, as she ponders the latest of her Hard Choices this issue and flashes back to that moment on the cliff with her father(?). It, and the issue as a whole, end as expected, while tagging on the series’ recurring message about one person’s ability to make a difference in the world by sharing their goodness (in this case, by making the right choices--or at least, the best choice possible when said Choice proves to be Hard) with others. An impactful issue on first read, with plenty of action to hold interest--and plenty of content to switch between when interest wanes or a tonal shift is required. But from an analytical standpoint, its plot relies too heavily on convenience, stall tactics, one-dimensional characterizations, and highly specific situational action of the kind you might have to slog through when completing an escort mission or uncovering a secret boss in a video game. And that made the issue feel like a slog upon this second reading.

Next week, Volume 8 wraps up with a Short Story, which was also the story from the 2010 Swimsuit Edition. Perfect for summer! Just not perfect. But what is perfect anymore? Let me know in the comments, remember to like and share this post, subscribe to my blog, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter for the latest news on my content. Also, click those ads as you read so I can make easier choices, and maybe afford something a bit closer to perfection.

Ticketmaster,

Retrospective,

Past,

Present, and

Future Imperfect,

Out of Commas.