#art invitation

[thequartzjester]

My sona, Hollu, has a mask. Since his concept is being a hallucination or figment of the imagination, anything could be under that mask! From a derpy owo to some very realistic gore

Here is my take on having nothing behind the mask

If anyone wants to draw what they imagine is umder the mask, feel free! Please tag me if you do!

[doubleaspectrum]

Something I’m trying to do is get into the horror genre. I’m having a nice time doing that; it exposes me to good and so-bad-it’s-good movies, and it works well as something to analyze when determining success or failure of writing and tropes.

Something about it that I’ve gotten attached to is the Final Girl trope. The sole female survivor who becomes responsible for killing or escaping from the villain in the end. Since I am an action fan, I can never deny the rush of a scared underdog claiming the advantage against the embodiment of pure evil. But my “horror movies are action movies in reverse” thesis can wait for another day.

I’m here for the analysis of the Final Girl herself.

When I think about what it takes to be a Final Girl, I tend towards thinking about the ones that defeat the villain and the reasons they pull it off.

What comes to mind is that most Final Girls tend to be clever. When you’re up against someone impossible to fight head-on, cleverness becomes a necessity; ambush tactics, trap setting, psychological warfare, improvised weapons, nothing is off the table for beating the villain. The key phrase I want you to notice is “nothing is off the table.”

Which leads into the next point, the Final Girl needs to be vicious to face the main villain. This can be to an equal or a greater extent when compared to a slasher. Those cheesy long-running horror franchises show that you’ve only beaten the slasher when he stays dead; and to stay dead, he has to be dead. A Final Girl who finishes off the villain doesn’t have the luxury of contemplating sparing the monster, otherwise they’ll reclaim the advantage and continue killing, starting anew with her.

All of this ties to why the Final Girl beats the slasher, but not why the Final Girl beats the slasher.

For those older movies, a trend is set where the victims who die first are bad in some way. As mentioned in Randy Meeks’ ruleset from Scream 1, they’re either promiscuous or they consume drugs or alcohol. By contrast, the Final Girl abstains from all three and is thus clean of body and soul. It very much embraces Black-and-White Morality as a survival system where the purest of heart end up surviving.

I work this understanding into a Foil system where a slasher embodies pure evil while a Final Girl embodies pure good, which I see as adding some more overarching stakes to their conflict, final battle, and status as arch-enemies. For a better understanding of my view, it’s akin to Nagito Komeada’s philosophy on Hope and Despair. Despair rises so that Hope can rise to conquer Despair and become all the stronger for it.

For those of you wondering how a pure good character can embrace viciousness and still be pure good, it makes me happy to know you’re paying attention. The truth is that such a thing makes no sense whatsoever; it’s paradoxical.

Where it all comes together is that this concept already existed before horror films. Heroes who are pure good in personality and choices while also being so unrepentantly ballsy that they don’t blink at decapitating an enemy. The concept? Arthurian Knights.

A good reference for what I’m talking about would be this video from FOBEquestria. Its narration is “The Necessity of Chivalry” by C.S. Lewis and it describes the concept well.

Admittedly, I prefer Galahad over Lancelot, but that’s not the point here.

The point is that a Final Girl can stand as an example of Arthurian Chivalry, being the purest good against the purest evil and fighting like hell to end it (hopefully for good).

It’s like the essay was saying, the Final Girl’s goodness ultimately stands out from the crowd. It almost expands the concept of being the villain’s Foil to being everyone’s Foil. It is because of that unique nature that they become the only one who can end (whether temporarily or permanently) the threat.

The only thing that’s missing is artwork of prominent Final Girls as Knights of the Round Table. Believe me, I checked.

Yes, that is an open invitation. I shared the idea with my little brother, and he added the idea that they should carry their iconic weapons.

[banffcentrelibraryandarchives]

Display Case for the week of May 14th, 2018.

[thefoldedbird]

Y’all! I got my tablet set up! Give me something to draw!

[theartjunction]

Opportunity

The Art Junction is looking for an artist or artists who would be interested in participating in an upcoming project…

Art of the Passion: paintings that examine the events of Holy Week and the Passion of Jesus Christ. Interested parties should contact Kevin Casto email: [email protected]

Christ on the Cross, 1936, Georges Rouault

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