Origin Stories: man-sluts, meth and masked villains

my advice on how to avoid writing lib-coded cringe

Every story has a beginning or otherwise where would it start?

When I was 19 years old my parents kicked me out of home and I deserved it. I went to live in a part of my town a more poetic writer would describe as “the wrong side of the tracks.” While I lived in this place I sold weed and made friends with criminal wiggers, Asian wiggers (chiggers?) and other unsavoury characters. They had a neighbourhood community, every body knew every body.

I was open minded, but it didn’t take me too long to recognise that most of these people sucked. I still wanted to sell some weed and have someone to smoke it with, but I started to tell my friends I’m not too fond of so-and-so and not to bring him around next time they come see me. After I eliminated all the bad vibe wiggers from my circle, only three hoodrats remained. There was nothing external I could point to that distinguished these guys from the other locals, they went to the same school, spoke the same lingo, dressed the same and they all listened to Biggie and Tupac. One of them had a really hard life: his mother had killed herself his dad was in prison for robbing a bottleshop (liquor store for you Americans). He admitted to me that he had committed crimes in the past, real crimes like muggings, assaults and break and enters. He seemed to feel bad about it and like it was out of character for him. Maybe that was why I didn’t immediately want to avoid him.

So I lived in this place for two years and during this time, all three of my hand picked homies became addicted the meth. I never touched the stuff myself and I tried to be a positive influence but unsurprisingly this had little impact on their life choices.

You can probably guess what comes next: They spiral further and further out of control. They lose all their teeth. Graduate from smoking to injecting. Begin committing petty crimes to pay for their next fix. Stay up for weeks on end and start to develop the early symptoms of psychosis.

Except none of that happened. They only smoked as much as they could afford with their welfare payments and weed sales. They never committed any crimes that directly victimise someone and often told me stories of how the other meth heads they were hanging out did these things and they didn’t have the heart to join in. All three of them, even the orphan.

My intuition was spot on. There was something good in all of them that couldn’t be corrupted by their environment. Or by drugs. I don’t know how I picked up on this when I first met them or whether I’d trust my own judgement again 99 times out of 100 but these three guys were sheep in wolves’ clothing.

Most people will tell you that’s not how things work, especially if they’re “educated”. Our liberal education system teaches us to deny, or at least devalue the idea of an intrinsic personality that isn’t shaped by experience. This anti-nature brainswashing bleeds into art every time a hack writer pens a convoluted “origin story”. Origin stories often make otherwise compelling characters weak and boring.

If you write fiction, I’m going to convince you to think twice before you write another eye rolling prologue about a protagonist’s “dark past”.

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There’s a question every writer has to ask that isn’t to be taken lightly. “What do I need to spell out and what can I just imply?”

No one can answer this question for you, everyone has a different balance point where they’re comfortable.

Before I went on Walt Bismarck’s podcast last week, I gave a lot of thought to what I would say wabout my stories. Would I ruin my stories if I explain too much about my intentions? Am I even completely sure of my artistic intentions? When the time came, I dodged the questions by just telling the story of how I got the idea for the story (origin stories for my stories, ironically).

Walt is a masterful conversationalist. He gave me lots of options in the dialogue tree so the conversation had room to evolve naturally in any direction. It was fun but definitely challenging being asked about my ideas on art and culture and especially if what I’ve been writing is “right wing art”?

I don’t feel like listening to myself talk any time soon, but I’m sure it was fine content and have had good feedback. I stand by all of my answers to those questions even though I was just shooting from the hip (like a certain protagonist of mine). It got me thinking all week about whether I have anything to say that needs to be said about writing and “right wing” writing.

Every time I think about whether I have any strong opinions on the matter I come back to the same thing: I have a fight to pick with “origin stories” in fiction. Here’s why they ruin everything.

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You think you’ve seen a Conan the Barbarian movie. You’re wrong. Conan movies are like Communism. A real Conan movie has never been tried.

When I was in my early 20s I was working security at construction sites at night. Doing nothing but staying awake. I bought two compilations of Conan stories by the original author Robert E Howard which put together covered every single word he had written about the character, including unpublished works. I read them within a month.

The Conan stories were pulp short stories mostly published in the Weird Tales magazine that (I think?) also published HP Lovecraft. There are later Conan stories written by other authors including a novel by Robert Jordan of Wheel of Time fame, but Howard only ever wrote short stories. Or I think some might have been very short novellas. I’m not looking it up, this isn’t a history in literature blog. The point is they were all quite short and I read them all.

The Conan character basically jumps off the page at you because he has so much energy. He is a noble but brutish wild man who travels around basically doing what he wants in a fantastical ancient land. Sometimes he’s a hired sword or a bandit. Sometimes he kills an evil wizard to save a village (mostly because he feels like it, he’s not some do-gooder). He always gets the girl even if many are reluctant to admit their attraction to him and need a little persuasion.

He has the most bad ass origin story you’ve ever heard: his mother gave birth on the battle field. His mother gave birth on the battlefield and… Nothing. That’s it. His mother gave birth on the battlefield. The battlefield is where he was born. However you want to rephrase it, it’s a one sentence origin story. I don’t know whether its that way because it was a deliberate decision to make the character more mythical or because short stories have word limits and you can’t be wasting them on boring stuff like the protagonist’s relationship with his parents. But both seem to me like fine reasons to imitate this whenever possible.

Now, I read all of the stories before I saw the Schwaznegger movie and that movie is ok but it’s just not quite Conan to me. I understand that they felt they had to give the character an arc by having his dad give him a special sword and his mum get her head cut off by the invading army and have him become a slave so we can feel sorry for him or whatever. But to me personally, the arc removes the impulsiveness and anarchy that drew me to the character to begin with.

The Jason Mamoa Conan movie from the 2010s is even worse, starting with this wanna be Lord of The Rings intro about “forces of evil” and having Conan wander around freeing slaves like he’s the Kevin Sorbo Hercules. The vibes are totally off, like its for 12 year olds.

I watched the Mamoa version recently because I need ways to kill my braincells since I stopped drinking. It really made me appreciate Schwaznegger’s Conan more because he at least still does Conan things like getting black out drunk and punching a camel. But the Marvel comics Star Wars hero’s journey gobbledy gook is still in there just wearing the skin of masculine adventure and that never quite sat right with me.

The character Conan the Barbarian has a special archetypal quality that is dishonoured by excessive back story, character development and relatability. And this quality has a name.

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There is a movie I have never seen that had an enormous impact on how I approach fiction writing. To be “right wing” you have to have the courage to make harsh judgements about things without needing experience them directly, so I am going to be true to my values and make a definitive statement that Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake is terrible.

Here is a description from ChatGPT:

Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) reimagines Michael Myers' origin, exploring his troubled childhood in a violent, dysfunctional home, which leads to his descent into psychopathy and eventual murder spree. The film blends psychological horror with brutal violence, offering a grittier and more humanized take on the iconic slasher villain.

Sounds exciting doesn’t it? The creator of the original Halloween movie, John Carpenter, had this to say about the remake:

“I thought he took away the mystique of the story by explaining too much about [Michael Myers]… He’s supposed to be a force of nature, he’s supposed to be almost supernatural.”

I don’t remember where or when I read this, but I never forgot the use of the phrase “force of nature” to describe the killer in Halloween. That’s an amazing three word phrase. A character that is a “force of nature” is not just like you or me. They are a hurricane or a tsunami, coming through with no warning and leaving utter destruction in their path. Since I’ve learned this concept I’ve begun to see it every where in film and fiction, especially villains.

In my time, Heath Ledger’s depiction of the Joker in the Christopher Nolan Batman movie The Dark Knight was a big deal. He turned a silly cartoon villain into a dark force of chaos complete with ugly scars. One of my favourite lines is when the Joker, dressed up as a nurse in the hospital says to Harvey Dent:

"Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just... do things."

In this case the “force of nature” is his total chaos and impulsiveness. But what made him this way? Could he just be lashing out because he had a hard life? This version of the Joker has horrific hypertrophic scars where his face was cut open to make his demonic smile. Maybe the story of the scars has something to do with the story of how he became so evil?

Thankfully, the Joker is quite forthcoming about how he got the scars. He tells the mob boss in the first half of the film that his alcoholic father used to beat him. One day dad attacked him with a knife saying “Why so serious? Let’s put a smile on that face,” and carving the smile into him.

So that puts that to bed. The Joker was abused by his alcoholic father and that’s why he is the way he is just like every other stock character written by a hollywood liberal. Pretty straight forward, the moral of the story is don’t be mean to your kids.

Only later on he tells a different story. He says that he had a wife who got into trouble with loan sharks and they disfigured her face. To make her feel better he cut his own face to look the same, but she couldn’t stand to look at him so she left which “hurt more than physical pain”.

The Joker reveals himself to be an unreliable narrator because sometimes psychopaths tell lies. And so we never know if either story is true. The origin story is subverted and treated with the contempt it deserves.

Part of me wonders whether they did this to do the “Joker is Batman’s Jungian shadow” bit. Batman has the gayest most Freudian back story of any superhero, maybe they wanted to make the Joker the opposite in a profound way by giving him an “anti origin story”? All I know is I’m a fan of the result.

Ten years later Hollywood decided to ruin it with an entire Joker origin story movie that took place in a mental institution of something (Joker interrupted). Its also high up on the list of movies I know suck without having to watch them. The internet right appropriated soy Joker as one of the most forced and least effective memes of all time. Origin stories are cancer.

As far as I’m concerned the Joker died with Heath. He was one of the greatest actors I’ve seen in my life time, and as a fellow Aussie it makes me genuinely sad what happened to him.

At the same time he died after achieving one of the greatest accomplishments and artist can achieve: creating a “force of nature” and becoming it.

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There are two kinds of [heterosexual] men in the world:

1) those who tell you they would enjoy sleeping with a lot of different women (even if they chose not to) and

2) liars.

When the globe trotting adventure character also beds a different woman every week it adds another element of excitement to the story. James Bond, Harry Flashman and Conan the Barbarian all did this and no one ever thought it needed to be explained why. It’s part of our psychology, the “coolidge effect”: we might as well enjoy the fantasy in a story with other things we like like action and colourful settings.

The seductive protagonist, or “rake” is all about freedom to live completely in the moment. We intuitively understand that having our adventurer have a wife and kids behind at home (or a wife and kids he actually thinks about at least) limits his movement, his ability to take risk. So the womanising and the adventure go hand in hand.

When the rake is a man of action on a mission and the woman happens to be there at his moment of peak testosterone, it’s satisfying because our biology says it as the ideal moment to consummate that union. When the rake is a stressed out professional on a cable TV show who uses his womanising to escape his unhappy marriage and his dark, traumatic past, it’s a lot less fun in my opinion. But it’s still a valid form of artistic expression and if that’s what you like to write I’m not going to try to stop you.

No one, not a single soul has ever asked the question “how did this male character get so horny” because that is a pants-on-head retarded question. So why do TV writers insist on answering questions nobody would ever ask?

My wife was binge watching the show Madmen last year. I had better things to do like being mean to people on the internet but I kept getting glances and asking her for updates on what was going on the show to break down the writing. When they decided to do a flash back to show a teenage Don Draper being groomed by an older female prostitute, I became the real mad man. Don Draper, like Conan the Barbarian, is a mostly self-interested rugged individualist who bangs a lot of broads and occasionally does something for the greater good, but not often. I get that he’s a tragic character on a never ending self destructive spiral, but why can’t he just be like that because he is? It’s not like he has some mysterious niche fetish like fin dom or getting pegged, hes a guy who likes to bang broads. If I enjoyed the show (which I don’t) I don’t see why I’d need to feel sorry for the anti-hero in order to continue enjoying it.

The “force of nature” is denied. The fire in the story smothered. Women and low testosterone men know they’re not allowed to like the forceful, brutish and horny man unless you reduce him to a poor damaged child who just needs hugs.

It’s disgusting. Right wing writing must make a stand against “poor baby” character origins. The impulse to overdo back stories shifts the story in the direction of being more effeminate, more winey and more cringe. But it’s more or less impossible to avoid writing a character back story at some point so here are some ways to keep it dignified.

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The audience doesn’t want to be in this annoying corporeal world we inhabit where conflicting feelings and obligations are tied into knots, where nothing is pure or immediate and where tensions are never resolved. They want to travel somewhere where, for the most part, everyone has a role which they embody completely. A place with mythic momentum.

Anything that sounds like the story of a Greek god is sure to have momentum. Someone wronged the character, so he takes revenge. Someone becomes the object of desire so he pursues. A rival makes him envious so he engages in competition. So what if it’s been done before? Save your contrarian impulses for another part of the story. I’m pretty sure even the most avant garde architects aren’t finding ways to subvert the foundations of the building (but if I’m wrong about that I welcome angry comments from architecture fans).

Another acceptable practice is the pseudo-origin story. This is where something happens that you could argue started the character on their journey but it’s trivial. He goes to a baseball game with his father and that’s the moment he decides he’ll become a professional baseball player. Its a good moment to inject some symbolism and foreshadowing, but it’s not beating the audience over the head with environmental determinism.

My personal favourite type of anti-Freudian origin story is just to use straight up magic. A magical object or event immediately changes the character’s personality. In the anime series Death Note, we are introduced to the main character Light at the moment that he finds the book that kills whoever you write the name of in. He develops a god complex as a result of the book. Later on, he loses the book and all the memories of it and we discover he is a completely different person to the megalomaniacal Light who we’ve known up until this point. The Netflix adaption started with Light being bullied and principal at school talking about him “having it tough at home”. I nearly roundhouse kicked my TV when I heard that.

I’m not much of a weeb, but I love the way the Japanese lack the Western obsession with character complexity. It makes for delightfully absurd “force of nature” stories such as Akira where the young runt of a biker gang becomes a telekinetic supervillain and his fellow gang member chases him to the end of the earth, determined to prevent him thinking he’s too big for his boots and put him back in his rightful place. That is FUN. Therapy sessions in fiction form are NOT.

So, keep it simple, keep it brief. No more self indulgent prequels, I’m begging you. Sure, sometimes people do bad things because they have a hard life, or do good great things because they’re trying to escape from internal torment. But once you realise orphaned meth heads can be great people you start to see that “hard life” bit for what it is: filler getting in the way of the actual story.

What’s the worst “origin story” you’ve ever read, seen or heard? Let me know in the comments.