SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
We’ve been enjoying the Conan board game by games company Monolith and publishers Asmodee. The game contains a vast horde of miniatures, attractive boards and imaginatively asymmetric scenarios. In each mission, the players get to be Conan the Barbarian, Shevatus the Rogue, Hadrathus the Mage or Belit the Pirate Queen. Somebody else gets to be the evil Overlord commanding the antagonists (pirates and Picts, mostly, with the odd necromancer and demon thrown in).
Conan is a fantasy of White male power. A fantasy in which White male power dominates and holds moral authority. And as Conan, you are the biggest, strongest embodiment of that White male power, able to ruthlessly cut down all your non-White enemies, surrounded by the lamentations of their women and by White women falling at your feet Hornbeck argues that the attitudes the game embodies are the reason Donald Trump got elected and if you like this game then you are colluding in the sexual abuse of women. Hornbeck’s article is worth reading, but the TL:DR is that she is either (1) a well-intentioned person making salient points about some sadly regressive attitudes towards women and minorities in the gaming industry, or (2) an idiot. Take your pick and let yourself be defined by it. Some things can be stated as facts. The base game set contains 72 miniatures – of which 2 are women and both are half-undressed. One of these is pirate queen Belit and her character board and miniature look like this. Belit's character board (left) and miniature (right, sculpted by Stéphane Simon, painted by Martin Grandbarbe) How unlike the dress code of our own dear queen. But wait, you say, isn’t this just being faithful to Robert E. Howard’s pulp stories? Isn’t that just how women in the Conan stories are supposed to look? Designers Asmodee/Monolith take this view: they pride themselves on authenticity and employ ‘Conan historians’ as consultants. In the original stories, Belit flounces around naked as a sort of radical fashion choice and lusts after young Conan in a very sex-positive way. Isn’t she just taking ownership of her alabaster body? American artist Frank Frazetta cemented the 'look' of Conan and his clingy/helpless and nearly-naked women (left) . In my youth, all fantasy novels had covers like this. So, is the game's pervy art (right) a faithful hommage or a mindless pastiche? To untangle this, it’s helpful to look back at the life of Conan's creator, Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936). A bookish Texan, Howard’s childhood was shaped by his mother, who inculcated in him a love of poetry and an ambition to write, but who contracted tuberculosis from her constant caring for sick relatives. Howard acquired an obsession with youth and physical health and took up boxing and bodybuilding in his teens. His adventure stories reflect his own fascination with physical beauty and vitality and his fear of ageing. Howard wrote his Conan stories over a short 3-year period in the mid Thirties. His previous work had been Lovecraftian weird tales and historical adventures which reflected his fascination with his own Irish ancestry. Picts feature in many of these stories as Celtic heroes and anti-heroes – not as Native American Iroquois, as Hornbeck contends. Conan’s exploits in the ‘Hyborian Age’ before the last Ice Age also feature Howard’s beloved Picts, but this time as villains. After tiring of Conan, Howard moved on to writing Westerns in the years before his death. In fact, his last (and best) published Conan story, Beyond the Black River, features battles with the Picts in a setting clearly inspired by the American frontier, reflecting Howard’s new interests and explaining the confusion about Picts being based on Native Americans. Asmodee/Monolith certainly base their Picts on Native Americans rather than Celts - but also make them rather like Neanderthals rather than humans Howard supported feminism and tried to write strong female characters. He hated the pulp conventions that forced him to insert unnecessary erotica into his stories and tried to subvert them whenever possible – as he did in Beyond the Black River, which contains no love interest or sex scenes. Howard was delighted that he got such a story into print. So, yes, Belit goes around naked, but she’s a commander of men. In the game, contrary to Hornbeck's claim that "all she does is follow Conan around and boost his abilities," her character directs a team of warriors as well as engaging in battle directly. Expansions to the game feature other female characters, some semi-nude and provocative, but others (like the warrior woman Valeria) more sensibly dressed for action. The rather righteous miniature and art for Valeria (left) - and Sandahl Bergman's portrayal in John Milius' 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, which combines the roles of Belit and Valeria into one character Howard also created the more famous female warrior Red Sonya (sic). But before you crack wise about chainmail bikinis, Howard’s Red Sonya of Rogatino is a Ukrainian female mercenary in Istanbul in 1626 who fights with flintlock pistols. The sword-wielding barbarian heroine Red Sonja (with a J) was developed by Marvel Comics in 1973, porting the character into Conan’s Hyborian Age for their comic book adaptation of Howard’s stories. The chainmail bikini is Marvel's distinctive contribution to the character. Red Sonya/Sonja: 17th century mercenary (left), under-dressed Marvel heroine (centre) and Brigitte Nielsen in the 1985 film Which goes to show that Howard’s legacy is a complicated one: you've got Howard's original conception, compromised by commercial pressure; then there's later artists and writers (notably Marvel) focusing on elements in the stories Howard himself disliked. To their credit, Monolith/Asmodee try to honour Howard’s stories in their game, rather than the comics or movies. Red Sonja does not appear in the game. But the general vibe of adolescent sexuality definitely does. Certainly, some design choices are ... unfortunate. Making nude Belit the only playable heroine in the base game instead of armoured (and better-known) Valeria is a weird choice. The first scenario tasks Conan & Co. with rescuing a drugged princess from the Picts: she is literally an object that must be carried across the board. Conan faces off against a big snake while the princess takes a nap (left) - which I'm sure Cynthia Hornbeck LOVES in comparison to the strategy board game Age of Conan (right) in which there are three rewards for Conan to earn: treasure (fine, really), monsters (trophies, I guess) and actual women! All of this in a context where the gaming industry increasingly offer gender variants for playable characters and goes out of its way to represent women as capable and autonomous. Sometimes this works beautifully, such as Mistfall’s non-objectified heroines (one a lesbian by the way). Others are more controversial, such as EA Games' decision with Battlefield V to depict a woman combatant on the cover, leading to accusations of political correctness gone mad by people who failed GCSE History (women certainly did fight in WWII in small but not insignificant numbers). Mistfall's Elatha the Misthuntress (left) and Valkea the Myrmidon (centre) offer positive representations, as does the troll-baiting cover for Battlefield V (right) This leads us back to Cynthia Hornbeck, who makes two impassioned pleas: the first ill-conceived but the second important for a number of reasons: As a gamer, start refusing to purchase or even play a game that objectifies women, excludes women, excludes non-White people, makes non-White people the enemy, etc This is ill-conceived. People don't play or refuse to play games to make political or moral statements - or rather, those that do are jackasses. Many gamers want to explore conflicts set in the world as it is (or was), not the world as we'd like it to be. Fantasy and SF gamers want to explore dystopian rather than idealised settings. An ancient-world setting will include features like slavery, for example. But Hornbeck follows this with a better point: As a designer, start making very deliberate choices about what themes you work with and how you represent people of other gender, races, and sexualities than your own ... Conan has gained lots of acclaim for its mechanic innovations and the thorough realization of its theme and setting. But why can’t those innovative mechanics and immersive gameplay be matched with a setting that treats women as something other than sexual objects and minorities as something other than enemies? She is right about this. Monolith/Asmodee missed a trick with Conan. Any adaptation of a literary product is also an interpretation of that product and the designers failed to avail themselves of the chance to interpret Howard’s female characters more positively in this game. It's a mistake on an artistic as well as a political level. I’m sure Howard himself would have approved of revisionism. He hated the limiting conventions of the adventure genre of his time and would not have wished to see those conventions still being mindlessly perpetuated 80 years later, still less justified for being in the 'spirit' of his stories. The 'spirit' was a concession to what magazine editors demanded of pulp fiction in the '30s - and it was a spirit that Howard resented and delighted in subverting whenever he could. Now don't get me started on whether they should be banning Baby, It's Cold Outside... ...
Oh all right then. The 1949 original (left) isn't as depraved as you think, because it pairs Ricardo Montalban seducing Esther Williams with a foil where Betty Garret (rather more successfully) seduces Red Skelton. Meanwhile, the 2016 version by Idina Menzel and Michael Buble (right) cleverly uses child actors and defuses some of the more troubling lines (like "Say, what's in this drink?" and substituting soda pop for alcohol) - now that's how you interpret something rather than just recycling it. Merry Christmas.
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