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[gamerchick]

Here are some things I have been watching, reading, and playing recently:

Supernatural: I thought that the season 5 finale was pretty resoundingly mediocre. There's a part of me that wishes they had just killed everybody off for good and ended the show, since it would have made for a much more exciting conclusion - but at the same time, there's

Comments

[nekomata]

Almost every part of this post is relevant to my interests. I'm 5 eps behind on Supernatural, Descent 2 is next in my netflix queue (I bought the first one and I -never- buy horror movies), I've just finished Avatar Season 1 and I loved the Mistborn series.

You're so awesome. :}

[gamerchick]

Thanks. You are awesome too. (c:

[skipperdee]

Bechdel Test! Thank you, I have been trying to remember the name of that for days. Also, good to know re: Sanderson -- and I'm a sucker for plucky urchins, so that will likely be on my reading list soon.

[gamerchick]

Yeah, Vin is a really good character. She outgrows the cliche really fast and her development throughout the book is well-paced and believable. I also appreciate that Sanderson wrote her as a person, rather than A GIRL OMG, which is a trap that a lot of male fantasy writers fall into.

[gamerchick]

I'm not too excited about the movie myself (M. Night Shyamalan + terrible casting + apparently changing the look and feel of the world a LOT = probably not seeing it), but I'm glad that I will probably be the Cool Aunt with this purchase. (c:

[innocent_man]

"that black guy who is the first to die" is a cliche as well,

It's a cliche for reasons I can't quite fathom. Name a movie where it happens.

I mean, there are a few, but there seriously aren't that many that I've seen, and I watch a whole mess of horror movies.

[gamerchick]

I'm pretty sure it happened in Scream (not counting the opening scene) because I'm pretty sure they made fun of the cliche in that movie. I think this is one of those tropes that directors are actually consciously getting away from, because it got made fun of so much.

[innocent_man]

Nope. Scream had no black victims at all. Drew Barrymore and her boyfriend, Rose McGowan, the Fonz, the cameraman (who was Hispanic, but hardly the first to die), and then of course the two killers buy it at the end.

Scream 2 leads off with Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps dying, yes, but amidst a lot of commentary about how the horror genre ignores black people. Besides which, that movie came long after the "cliche" was established.

I agree it gets made fun of a lot. Hell, almost all of the (bloody awful) Scary Movie series does it, and just about every loosely horror/sci-fi movie in the world to feature a black actor references it. I just wanted to know where it came from, because I'm seriously hard pressed to think of a horror movie made before all those cliche references came up in which the black dude actually does die first.

[gamerchick]

It must have been Scream 2 that I was thinking of then - it's been years since I saw either movie so that must have been how I got them confused.

Also, I hate having to do this, but there appear to be a lot of examples at TVTropes? Most of those examples are from well into the point at which the trope was already being ridiculed, though.

I also thought this page was pretty interesting. It seems to think that 1968 was the start of it, but also points out that some films also subverted it - Night of the Living Dead being a great example.

Also, for what it's worth, my google search turned up a lot of people who seemed skeptical of the actual existence of this phenomenon, so you're not alone!