Red Sonja is Stupid
A flawed character from the inception
I have Red Sonja fatigue. I was never too crazy about the character to begin with. There are some art and Robert E. Howard groups on social media that have a never ending parade of Red Sonja illustrations, most by artists I never heard of. It is to me a strange obsession.
I do like a couple women warrior characters. My favorite is Joseph Payne Brennan’s Kerza the Celt. Those stories are love letters to Weird Tales and full of homage to both REH and HPL. Diana Paxson had 14 stories about Shanna of Sharteyn. I read three or four of them and liked them. C. L. Moore’s Jirel stories were overlong, over written, and boring. People like the idea of Jirel, they just don’t like reading Jirel.
I have a big problem on how Roy Thomas adapted Red Sonja of Rogatino from “Shadow of the Vulture” to Red Sonja in the Hyborian Age. Roy made Sonja a Hyrkanian.
From “The Hyborian Age:”
“The Hyrkanians are dark and generally tall and slender, though a squat slant-eyed type is more and more common among them, resulting from mixture with a curious race of intelligent, though stunted, aborigines, conquered by them among the mountains east of Vilayet, on their westward drift.”
Reds aren’t “dark.” Roy was looking at a map instead of phenotypes matched to ethnicity in the Hyborian Age. There are no red-haired Hyborians. The only red-haired people are the Vanir. Sonja is not proto-Scandinavian sounding, it is in fact the Russian version of Sophia (wisdom). There was a way to make it work.
“The ancient kingdom of Hyperborea is more aloof than the others, yet there is alien blood in plenty in its veins, from the capture of foreign women—Hyrkanians, Æsir and Zamorians.”
Hyperborea is the Hyborian version of late medieval Russia that so featured in the fiction of Harold Lamb in Adventure. Make Red Sonja half-Hyperborean and half-Vanir. Roy Thomas screwed the pooch.
Her debut was the adaptation of “The Shadow of the Vulture” in the Marvel funny book Conan the Barbarian. Turan attacks another Hyrkanian city on the Vilayet. There is no mention of other Hyrkanians principalities on the Vilayet Sea. A Turanian attack on Brythunia or Corinthia which would have been a better fit to the source material.
The character was quickly given a Marvel costume, the scale armor bikini. Then she was given super-hero powers by the goddess Scathach. I am not a fan of super-heroes. I prefer damnedest bastards without special powers, capes, masks, or spandex. Wertham was right.
I was not a fan of Marvel Comics. I never loved Jack Kirby. I did not like his art. I thought Stan Lee was goofy when he showed up on Saturday morning T.V. shows. What comic books I did have were from D.C. with art by Wrightson and Kaluta.
There was a Red Sonja movie in 1985 which was the final nail in the coffin of big budget sword & sorcery movies in the 1980s. The movie was a bomb and showing on independent T.V. stations for Saturday night movies two years later.
The character has been in development hell since then. The once stunning Rose McGowan was slated to play the character to be produced by Robert Rodriguez. Injuries from a car accident precluded Rose not to mention she went bat guano crazy. Next on the list for Red Sonja was another crazy female, Amber Heard. I don’t think we will hear from Amber again.
Hannah John-Kamen was announced and then departed. Matilda Lutz got the role for the eventual film. I watched the trailer for the movie Revenge where she looked good in that role. I have no emotional investment in the movie on way or another. I was too lazy to go to the cinema when it came out. I can proudly say I have not watched one Marvel Universe movie.
Back to the all the illustrations. It seems Red Sonja is more popular right now than ever. Tons of pictures of her curvy, svelte body with small form fitting bikini armor, generally with her weapons dripping blood after butchering a bunch of men. A psychologist could find rich fodder analyzing the art. The art is part-pin up and part male submission fantasy.
Wonder Woman was probably the preferred character 50 years ago. It is just the zeitgeist of the time where on T.V. we see 125 lbs grrl power beat up 250 lb men in hand to hand all the time. I have noticed masculine poses in our sexual dysphoric times with Red Sonja and Guyladriel from the Amazon series in man-spreading poses.
Not everyone likes Red Sonja. There was 3rd wave feminist outrage over Red Sonja being on the cover of the Science Fiction Writers of America magazine cover in 2013. Female writers said it was a sexist cover. They have a point. Red Sonja is eye candy, a masturbatory fantasy, the sassy red-head with a sword ready to dominate the acne faced, high fructose corn syrup fed gammas attempting to work up an erection in their Low T bodies with the latest issue of the Dynamite Red Sonja comic book. Here is the conundrum: The movie did not have the attractive Red Sonja for the soy-boys but the grimy, homely Red Sonja to escape feminist harpy rage.
Red Sonja is a flawed character from her inception from a Hyborian aspect. The movie was dumped on one single weekend. Someone just told me they watched it and wished they could get that time back. Red Sonja is stupid
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