#gbu rawhide meta

[bleak-nomads]

War: BAD, and other ill-defined themes

An intertextual analysis/meta/whatever the heck this is of Rawhide, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and The Incident of the Two Hundred Thousand, fanfiction by @thatdeepandlovelydark

Fic Links (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Ao3 LINK 

Part 4/4: On Endings, and fandom as it pertains to shifting them :)

(Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)

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Hi all! Welcome back to the last installment of Syb talks fanworks meta. In the first two installments I gave some discussion as to the plot and characters of the three works above, and in the third installment I discussed 

Fittingly, this last essay will talk about endings, specifically examining the ways in which GBU accomplishes a very complete feeling ending given its internal logic. Then following that, contrasting with how it's difficult to imagine anything genuinely good to come of the ending. From that lens I will discussion the ending of The Two Hundred Thousand, and the story it suggests following. 

In my mind there are really two components to a satisfying ending; the first being that the internal logic of the story is pulled together neatly, and the second being that there is some plausible notion of what comes next. Unsatisfactory endings to an otherwise good story often end up as ground zero for fanworks (here "unsatisfactory" might not mean that the ending is bad, but it may not be the ending the audience was hoping for). 

There's a lot that's archetypal and expected about the ending of GBU. First, of course, "the Good" kills "the Bad", as was in some sense promised by the title of the film. But the film doesn't walk away without re-establishing "the Ugly" in his place as court jester. In a gesture that restores their original partnership, Blondie forces Tuco to get back in the noose, 

I will take a self indulgent moment to describe my reactions to this ending, which will hopefully frame my thinking about it. So first, despite Angel Eyes being my favourite character, I love the GBU ending for him, and think it's absolutely what the bastard deserves. So despite having written an extensive series on the topic of the Mexican standoff going the other way, I think that moment does have pretty sound internal logic. 

Tuco getting strung up in the same way he did at the start, my reaction was more "huh, Blondie's really going there eh?" -- I was rooting for him to come back, as he did, and for Tuco to get his share of the gold. But in terms of this moment, I saw it mostly through the lens of "Blondie isn't a very good person now, is he?" 

Now I think that's partially the framing of the movie, which doesn't emphasize the way Tuco suffers in his role and treats it as farce, and then partially that as a white viewer, I had no trouble writing off noose shenanigans as more aesthetical violence. It wasn't really till I spoke with @thatdeepandlovelydark till I started to think about the horrible realities of being part of a grift like that. 

Which sort of brings round the main reason that makes GBU such a compelling fandom to write for, at least to me: in a lot of ways, the human motivation for the things that the Trio does are totally lacking. The human impact of the events of the film just roll off their shoulders. By necessity, writing a story about the GBU trio, either an au or commentary on canon, must address the question: what do they think about all this? 

What they intend to do with the gold is a question left by Leone as something that merits no answer -- it's gold, of course they want it! But of course, for most humans, gold tends to be means for something rather than an ends. If it is an ends though, that's a pathology in itself once they have it. 

I once wrote a short fic that was canon-compliant about Blondie's fate at the end of GBU. It wasn't peaceful, nor kind. But it was I think, on tone with the general attitudes of the film. 

The Two Hundred Thousand, rather than focusing on the gold as an ends unto itself, holds tantalizingly the questions of what it's pursuers intend to do with it. In the last segment I discussed how Angel Eyes approaches the gold, wondering whether it's worth anything at all to him without his partner to share it with.  There's a really gutting contrast in how Blondie/Rowdy turns around on the gold as something he doesn't want because it's tainted, and how Favor sees the gold as a means to restoring his lost honor:

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“Well, take it off. You’re not a thief.”

“We’re going to be, aren’t we? All that gold?”

“Of course not. We’ll bring it right back to its rightful owners, Carson’s regiment. I think,” Favor pronounces, looking very nearly happy, “I think that amount of gold could wipe out more than a few bad moments. We’ll be back herding cattle again as though we never quit.”

It’s on the tip of his tongue to splutter, to ask stupid questions, but Rowdy holds off and won’t let himself say anything until he’s got it all straight in his head. “Just like nothing had changed.”

“Exactly.” Favor’s frowning at him, and for once Rowdy simply has no idea why- that quick and easy sympathy between them completely lost. “Poncho.”

Even holds out his hand for it. Rowdy fingers the dark tassels, has it over his head and noticing the chill evening wind before he stops short.

“Mr Favor…” it comes out of him in a calm, dispassionate voice, one he had no idea he possesses. “You need to understand. Things have changed.”

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And I'd say the motivation for Tuco is consistent with GBU canon (Tuco is probably the only one who is hinted at having a very slightly deeper motivation for wanting the gold, to escape the poverty of his family at last). There's kindness, in what Tuco wants for the gold, and forgiveness as well. To himself, for choosing the life of an outlaw over what his brother did, to his partner for everything Angel Eyes has no doubt done and more. And to Blondie/Rowdy, that he presses on him in an effort to get him to forgive himself. I want to linger on the details of this particular ending:

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“Can’t have that. I won’t be killed in my bed by some angry gringo who was cheated out of his third of a fortune- hey! Hey, Blondie!”

When Blondie doesn’t turn, Tuco starts running towards him, loping over the grass in that silly way of his. “Blondie, get back here! You know what you are-”

There’s a moment when I’m convinced that Blondie is about to shoot him out of hand.

But it passes. And he comes riding back towards us at a gallop, willing if confused.

“What the hell is it?”

“You look like a smart boy, do some sums for me,” Tuco smirks. “What’s a third of two hundred thousand? We just need to dig it up, that’s your share.”

“It’s blood money,” Blondie says. “Keep it. I don’t think it’ll do me any good.”

Unbelievable; but then, a hundred thousand is a nice tidy sum, and one I won’t object to.  

Tuco shrugs. “Okay. If you say so…but hey, at least stick around for supper. Green pepper chili, to match that poncho? Angel now, he can make one that’s sweet and spicy both.”

Blondie’s weakening, visibly. “Tuco…I don’t deserve that kind of forgiveness. Yours or anybody else’s.”

“Then maybe it helps, that we don’t either,” Tuco says softly. “Anybody innocent would have never made it here alive, Blondie. We’re just the ones who survived.”

“I have to- I have to learn how to make it alone. It’s the only thing that Favor ever wanted from me.” He’s fragile but so resolute, and I can see Tuco’s soft face crumpling against that flinty desperation- my partner needs kindness too, and there’s only so much of it I can give him.

Maybe that’s what’s always broken us apart, before.

“Well, forget about what you want,” I say, calm and tranquil. “I have a soup to make. And a bullet with your name on it, if you even think about leaving before you’ve finished a bowl.”

Blondie’s imperturbable facade finally cracks; what’s left is a boy laughing at my idiocy. “If I don’t try your soup, you’ll shoot me? That’s the stupidest…just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard…”

“He takes his soup very seriously,” Tuco tells him, gravely. Starts helping Blondie off his mount, delicately adjusting the folds of that blood-streaked poncho. Blondie watches him with split attention, half of it still directed at me in incredulity.

Hmm. Something of a proposition, this.

Still.

*

(ok I know I backquoted the whole thing but listen. it’s really good). 

First, I want to wax poetic about the symmetry, and yet total rejection of the canonical cruel ending of GBU. Rather than anyone getting trussed up and shot down, Blondie/Rowdy is tenderly led off the horse to someplace different entirely. Where GBU ends with the status quo restored, albeit two hundred thousand dollars richer, The Two Hundred Thousand has completely transformed Blondie/Rowdy. Transformed him into a person he believes Favor, whom he admired and loved, would have wanted him to be, but someone who he himself is not all that all right being. What Tuco offers is a chance to keep looking, then, for the person he wants to be. 

The ways in which Tuco and Angel embody two separate parts of what Blondie/Rowdy looks for in Favor is deeply interesting to me. There’s love he’s looking for from Favor, for certain -- but there’s also a sense of comfort and confidence in his own skin. The ability to be his own man. Say what you will about Angel’s morals, he has that in spades. So there’s this nice sense to which Angel is going to be some kind of decent influence on him. At worst you can say it was Angel’s insistence that pulled him back to the ending we got -- and that’s something beautiful, really.

All and all, I’m more confident that the ending of The Two Hundred Thousand has a better chance for growth and happiness for the characters. And that’s part of what fanworks are about just the same-- carving out a space in the narrative for the stories and endings we want to tell. 

So in summary, I hope you’ve enjoyed this chatter series on GBU, sort-of Rawhide, and the fic The Two Hundred Thousand. More than that, I hope this set of thoughts has encouraged you to watch GBU, watch Rawhide, to read the fic, and to create for yourself the stories you want to see in your fandom. Thanks for reading!

[bleak-nomads]

War: BAD, and other ill-defined themes

An intertextual analysis/meta/whatever the heck this is of Rawhide, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and The Incident of the Two Hundred Thousand, fanfiction by @thatdeepandlovelydark

Fic Links (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Part ¾: War: BAD, and the question of GBU as a war film 

(Part 1) (Part 2)

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Allo and welcome back to Syb writes essays on fanworks. In the first episode I gave a summary of the three works this essay series/meta/ramble on the internet focuses on. In the second I gave a summary of the characters from the two canon works, and the way those characters are shifted into the blended setting of the fanwork. Now I’m going to talk about the original reason I set out to write this: war themes in GBU. 

With my apologies to fans of Rawhide, this essay is going to focus near exclusively on the interplay between GBU and The Two Hundred Thousand, since I haven’t seen near enough war focused episodes of Rawhide to comment on it. I will however take this moment to recommend the fanfiction Bleak Midwinter by Elfbert, in case there are Rawhide fans interested in seeing a more intimate take on war set in that verse. 

Here I’m going to focus on the oft lofty cited comment on GBU as a “war film”, discuss the ways in which it succeeds at that endeavor and the ways in which The Two Hundred Thousand translates those scenes. Then I will bring into question the specificity (or lack thereof) of the war in GBU, and discuss the ways in which subtly making the war that particular war makes The Two Hundred Thousand more of a war story. 

First, on compassion towards war victims as an ongoing theme in GBU. Though the main trio have, with a few exceptions, mostly violence and vitriol towards each other in the film, it’s the wartime strangers they meet along the way that get the most of their humanity. Blondie in particular has two moments that cement his role as “the good” more than a kitten in a hat ever did. 

I already spoke a bit about Blondie’s passing of the cigarillo in the last segment on characterization, and the ways in which getting inside Blondie/Rowdy’s head in The Two Hundred Thousand shifts that moment. Specifically, I want to highlight that in GBU proper this is probably one of the best things that the character ever does, and it’s not something that anyone will ever really know about. I’ve in the past been fascinated with Blondie’s relationship to his own morality in my own writings. The Two Hundred Thousand puts a take on Blondie/Rowdy’s own attitude towards the situation that’s consistent with the grey/dark attitudes of GBU Blondie:

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The hill of Sad Hill Cemetery is the highest point around for miles. Enough to see clear to the river in one direction, far into the west from the other.

Rowdy doesn’t like it much. Feels too exposed.

“We’ll camp here for the night,” Favor says, lighting the fire. “Dig up the gold in the morning when we’re fresh, head out for home- where did that poncho come from? You look ridiculous in it.”

“Stole it from a corpse.” He’s much too tired to make up stories any more.

“Well, take it off. You’re not a thief.”

“We’re going to be, aren’t we? All that gold?”

*

It’s simply clear from this that Blondie/Rowdy doesn’t believe what he’s done is fundamentally good, or has made a difference at all. To a greater depth, I think that even if he did explain the moment to his taciturn partner Favor, the man wouldn’t provide any further comfort or understanding of this senseless death in a bleak landscape. 

Another key moment of Blondie’s kindness in GBU is his decision to blow up the bridge between the Union and Confederate camps, at the behest of a drunk, dying Captain Clinton. Now one can argue that this is in part self-serving– he and Tuco need to get over the water, through that camp, and for that they need a distraction. 

But he does share a moment with Captain Clinton over it, and it seems like the closing of that particular chapter of the war means something to Blondie. In The Two Hundred Thousand, it’s Angel Eyes who takes out the bridge as a trade to Clinton. And what’s more (he believes) it loses him the one person he genuinely cares about:

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Tuco-

(I would falter, were there any witnesses to see it; but there can’t be now.)

Tuco would have wanted it that way. Would have wanted me to win this little skirmish with Favor, never mind the morality of it. Two hundred thousand dollars.

I can’t, honestly, say I know what I’ll do with it, without a greedy partner to suggest how to spend it. Perhaps Pablo’s monastery could do with an unexpected benefactor, masses for a soul-

that much I surely owe him, but how does anyone tell a man he’s been left orphaned and brotherless in the same week?

Shut up, Angel. You get the money first, then you worry about me.

*

Angel Eyes in The Two Hundred Thousand is a delightful variety of restless and disaffected, and his relationship to the war is far more agnostic than Rowdy and Favor’s. But there is this awareness in him that this was a good deed that came back on him, and there’s a bitter irony in that. 

I’d say a lot of the mood of the original film towards war is that there are no winners. An important case in point, is that these two of Blondie’s good deeds, relatively close to each other in time, are given to opposite sides of the war. Clinton is a Union captain, the dying soldier a Confederate. 

A charitable reading of this framing would say that Leone is emphasizing that in war there are no winners – each side suffers and that suffering is senseless. I think there’s a place for that kind of framing, but it’s interesting how that ages from a modern perspective. I’d say most of human wars have their nuance and fault on both sides, but of all the wars to choose from, the American Civil War has more of a case than others that there’s a “better” side to be on. Hint: it’s not the Confederates. However, Leone’s framing of the event almost takes out the historical context entirely. I would argue that from the films text alone, there’s no distinguishing features of the backdrop of “war” to make it the American Civil War. The overarching theme is simply “War: bad”. 

Moreover, this use of war as a backdrop can be framed uncharitably just as well. One could argue that the war serves just as much to illustrate the senselessness of violence as to lend gravitas to the spite, greed, and senselessness of the main trio. Leone seems to ask “in a world with this kind of violence, wouldn’t it seem reasonable to just want to be a Cool Cowboy Who Wants Gold”? Certainly compelling feeling from a story perspective, but not much of a moral stance. War as a backdrop allows the Good to seem, well – better than he is, by the majority of his actions. 

And I say this again not to critique GBU, but rather to see it for what it is– a gorgeously shot film about vague sketches of greedy assholes who make me ask “what was really going on in their head there?”. That make me want to answer those questions in many, many different ways. 

I started writing this essay series featuring The Two Hundred Thousand since it’s the first fanwork for GBU that actively makes The American Civil war a central part of the conversation. Specifically, southern notions of Confederate honor lost run right to the core of Gil Favors characterization:

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This is the kind of thing he was fighting against.

What that gold was meant to be used for, too.

And he’ll do his damnedest to keep it from falling into the hands of a Yankee thief and a Mexican bandito, for so long as there’s still breath in him…

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The ongoing theme of how much Favor has or has not given up his Confederate roots is the central push and pull that keeps The Two Hundred Thousand grounded in the Civil war specifically. But true to its roots in GBU, even Favor gives up his affiliations when it counts:

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And Favor. And Favor, grinding out words as though it’s tearing his heart out to say them. 

“I could not accept such a surrender. I’m a deserter from the Confederate Army, and deserve no rights nor privileges.” 

“Headquarters is always in the market for a practical traitor,” Clinton says, blinking in bewilderment. “You want to cart your prisoner down there and take your thirty pieces of silver?” 

“I’ll have none of this war again, your side or mine,” Favor says, evenly. “Keep your Captain Mortimer, maybe he’ll win this bridge for you. He’s just the bastard to do it.” 

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When push comes to shove, Favor is just as willing to throw the war aside as the canon trio. He’s not unaffected by it – but whether by cowardice or by disillusionment, he’s not shedding blood for it for now. 

The other element to which The Two Hundred Thousand is much more powerfully a war story than GBU is comes from Blondie/Rowdy. In GBU our trio is apart from the war– they may run into it, express pity or indifference to it – but they are never revealed to be in any way invested in whatever the conflict may be. 

Rowdy/Blondie, by contrast, can hardly turn a blind eye to the realities of the war:

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None of this makes sense, and he’s going to die. 

Apparently there comes a point when a body can get used to that. 

Rowdy shivers, throwing himself down in the grass. He’d like to play dead, look like one of the corpses scattered across this part of the countryside like mile markers; but he’s too cold or scared or plain nervy to do it. The shaking will give him away to anyone who sees him; and he’s not even sure that matters anymore.  

This isn’t like the war he remembers being in, with Favor. That’d been lofty and romantic, full of sweet chivalrous ideals about the Confederacy, and more to the point, no deaths. Herding cattle to the slaughter, he understands that. Not men.  

Not a whole army of men, two of them, charging across a bridge-

He hears a low, moaned cry and wonders vaguely which side the sufferer is coming from, aware all the time it wouldn’t make a difference. Union or Confederate, he can’t let his tired body sit by when someone’s pleading like that, bubbling up tears and terror that sound so familiar he can hardly credit that they aren’t coming from his own mouth. 

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The intimacy of that reality through writing – Rowdy seeing himself in the dying soldiers, wondering if they ever experienced the same idealism that he thought the war was really about– is a stark contrast to the disaffected way we see Blondie on screen. The most fascinating thing about all of this is the story keeps it still believable that behind those eyes there could be a scared boy, wondering if there was ever anything beyond suffering in this war he’s found himself adjacent to. 

Here I’ve given my case for why GBU isn’t really much of a war film per se, and talked about the ways in which The Two Hundred Thousand shift the narrative to be more war-focused. Next and last essay, I’ll chat about the ending of GBU, which is exceptionally satisfying according to its own propositions of how the world works, and then talk about the human angle to all of this, to which the ending of The Two Hundred Thousand has more resonance with me. 

[bleak-nomads]

War: BAD, and other ill-defined themes

An intertextual analysis/meta/whatever the heck this is of Rawhide, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and The Incident of the Two Hundred Thousand, fanfiction by @thatdeepandlovelydark

Fic Links (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) 

Part 1/4: Introductory Material and an ode to fandom’s love of half-broken stories.

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Hello, whoever the heck else has decided to read this!

So I usually like to leave long rambly comments on fics that I love to death, and while I did love this recent fic to death, I kind of felt like a different sort of commentary was merited. So I’m going to do a very clumsy analysis of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Rawhide, and this remarkable blending of the two of them. 

This first post is meant to give a brief summary of all three of the pieces, not just on the incredibly unlikely off-chance that someone who hasn’t engaged with one of them is reading this -- but also because it gives me a chance to come clean on my take and familiarity with all three.

So starting with the one I’d say I know rather intimately at this point:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a 1966 Italian Western directed by Sergio Leone. The film follows three characters: Blondie, “the good”, a wandering cowboy without a name who works a scam with Tuco “the ugly”, a Mexican bandit. Angel Eyes “the bad” is on the lookout for two hundred thousand in ill-begotten civil war gold. When Blondie and Tuco get wind of the secret, he’s on their trail. Cue a three hour epic cowboy flick while these mercenaries try to get one over on each other and get their hands on that sweet sweet gold, all with the backdrop of the civil war. 

It’s considered iconic, one of the best films ever, blah, blah, blah. 

From my perspective, the film is one of the most breathtaking visual experiences I’ve ever seen. But its depth and ability to capture my attention comes from its ability, as @thatdeepandlovelydark once put it to me, to walk that fine line between specificity and just letting the visuals and action and sheer scope of the film tell the story. When you put the characters to scrutiny, it’s really only Tuco that has much of a coherent motivation or character. Angel Eyes and Blondie are at best vague archetypes, and their actions are sometimes a bit curiously inconsistent. The overall choice of backdrop of the civil war is more or less incidental-- one could switch out “American civil war” for any war of around the same general period and nothing would be lost from the story. 

These are not to critique the film at all -- but rather to indicate that this rare marriage of compelling, yet vague, makes it one of the most fertile grounds for fanworks out there. There’s not a lot of specifics in the film itself about the characters -- so there’s a lot, and I mean a LOT of wiggle room to write self-consistent fanwork. 

Now Rawhide is compelling from a fanworks perspective for similar reasons -- only rather than a scant three hour body of work that leans heavily on landscape and the particular crags of our hero’s faces -- we get eight seasons of somewhat inconsistently written stories. Ostensibly the story is about a young, twinky Rowdy (played by Clint Eastwood), trying to make it as a ramrod under his tough-but-savvy trail boss, Gil Favor. 

The show also has a charming cast of other drovers, and is, unlike GBU, actually about being a cowboy. It was put out in the 1959-1965s, and has rather 50s...values. If there’s any overarching theme to the episodic nature of Rawhide, it’s that Rowdy needs to learn to be less happy-go-lucky and kind, and more like his tough boss Favor. There’s episodes that support this, and episodes that contradict this (and some episodes which just make no bloody sense). 

In this case it’s this inconsistency makes Rawhide fertile ground for fanwork for different reasons: one can pick and choose the elements of the whole that makes the most sense for the story one wants to tell in a fun and engaging setting, with a lovely cast. 

This brings us nicely to The Incident of the Two Hundred Thousand, a fanwork written in 2019 (literally just now, lmfao), by @thatdeepandlovelydark. Two Hundred Thousand reframes GBU where now Rowdy is taking on the role as the taciturn Blondie, and tagging along is his overbearing (to put it kindly, more on character interpretation later) trail boss. Tuco and Angel Eyes remain present in this retelling of GBU, but they’re allies (rather than Blondie and Tuco being allies). And what’s more, the dangerous scam that led Tuco to put his neck on the line, has been all but removed.

In this essay I will… (no but no joke this is kinda going to be an essay), discuss three aspects of the intertextuality of these works: the initial framing and characterization of the main characters of these works, and how it pertains to the different medium that they’re told in; the role of war as a backdrop, and as a central moral conflict; and finally, the sense to which each of the works defines closure, and I’ll leave a few personal comments on fanworks as closure to works (or opening to them!). 

Thanks for reading this and! Hope you enjoy!