Three Reasons I Need Brian Griffin Back on Family Guy

If you are in any way connected to any form of social media whatsoever, you might have heard that long-standing sitcom and Simpsons clone, Family Guy, recently decided to ratchet up the laughs by having the family's dog killed by a car, right in front of their youngest child.

Oh, yeah, spoiler alert.

The public reaction to Brian's death has been less than favorable, to say the least. Angry blog posts and petitions have gone up across the internet from the moment the episode aired, with hundreds of thousands of people weighing in. There may be thousands of people around the world suffering from war, famine and preventable disease every day, but there's nothing like a cartoon character's death to get people fired up to rally for change.

Watch it if you dare.

Since I'm among those aforementioned bloggers responding to the death, and because I've titled this article "Reasons I Need Brian Back", you might have already guessed that I'm not exactly in favour of Brian shuffling off this mortal coil. Because I insist on substantiating everything I say with a detailed, multimedia blog post, enjoy reading these incredibly convincing arguments for why the Griffin's atheist dog deserves a Biblical resurrection.  

Now who am I supposed to relate to?

Like the millions of other people who watch bad TV for sweet, sweet escapism, I like to psychologically latch onto a character in every story. It gives me someone to root for, and it lets me know how I would fare if I were to be somehow transported into that fictional universe. In Family Guy, Brian is the obvious choice for me. He's a struggling writer. I'm a struggling writer. He's sarcastic. I'm sarcastic. He holds extreme, ideologically questionable left-wing views. I hold extreme, ideologically questionable left-wing views. He's kind of obnoxious. I'm kind of obnoxious. The list goes on and on. 

Brian, suffering the plight of all writers who aren't James Patterson.

But now that Brian's only role is to feed the worms of Quahog, who am I supposed to cling to each time I finally give in to the unique combination of boredom and procrastination that drives me to watch Family Guy? Let's see. I'm an overweight, myopic girl with a very large brother and an affinity for knitted wool caps. Who does that leave me with?

Oh, no.

That's right. Brian's demise has left me with no choice but to internalize the horrific psychological abuse endured by the unloved, unattractive, and almost-definitely-adopted Meg Griffin. Not only will my frail psyche have to cope with my own traumatic adolescent memories, but now it'll need to make room for those of a sniveling, two-dimensional punching bag. You see what you've done to me, producers of Family Guy? I just hope you're happy, Seth MacFarlane. I hope you're happy. 

We don't need endless months of bad Italian stereotypes.

Viewers who made it all the way to the end of the knee-slapping 'Life of Brian' episode without throwing their remotes through their TV screens were treated to the introduction of the Griffin family's new dog, Vinny. After moping around for a month after Brian's death, the family decides to head down to the pet store, hoping a new dog will ease their grief; there, they meet Vinny the Pussyhound (he's 1/16th cat), proving that no amount of gut-wrenching tragedy will ever overshadow the need for a good vagina joke. Vinny is voiced by Italian actor/saggy leather wallet Tony Sirico of The Sopranos fame, which tells you all you need to know about his character.

Vinny, casually undoing whatever progress the Italian-American community has made since Jersey Shore went off the air.

The problem with characters based on racial stereotypes is that there are only so many jokes you can make with them. Brian may have been based on his own set of stereotypes, but there's a lot more you can do with the common Eastern Yuppie archetype. Everyone knows at least one. You can head to a Starbucks, an Apple store and a university philosophy course, and find enough source material to power you through an entire season. Best of all, Eastern Yuppies are always changing; Brian evolved from a novel-writing prat, to an obscure-reference-dropping prat, to a social-hypocrisy prat, always keeping up with the times. Vinny's character amounts to a threatening accent and a Mafia allusion. Unless you live on the set of a Godfather sequel, you'll never meet anyone who fits his role. There aren't a lot of new directions you can go with these stereotypes; by the 4,831st time I hear Vinny threaten that someone will be "sleepin' with the fishes" or reminisce about how "Mama use-a to make-a da best pasta", I'll start cheering for Stewie to push him out in front of the next car he sees.

Remember what happened last time we let Seth MacFarlane run amok with racial stereotypes?

Really, we get it. Italians talk funny, and their #1 source of employment is organized crime syndicates. They bathe in Doritos cheese and their blood is 14% alcohol. They universally suffer from a bizarre, localized form of Tourette's syndrome that forces them to randomly intersperse all of their speech with the letter 'a'. They place 100% of a woman's value on her ability to prepare carbohydrates, and every moment of their education is devoted to teaching them to talk louder. Television has already taught us everything we need to know about the Italian race. How about we pick on someone more interesting, for a change?

Brain was the least awful character on the show. 

Let's get one thing straight - absolutely every character who appears on Family Guy is a horrible person in some way or another. The Griffins spend much of their time doing everything from making offensive comments to straight-up trying to murder each other, and their neighbors range from a sex maniac to an actual pedophile. 

Almost no part of this highlight real is not morally reprehensible.

That's not to say that Brian isn't without his flaws. In fact, he's got quite a lot of them; he's pretentious, stuck-up, alcoholic and condescending, and that's just the beginning. Though Brian was originally intended to be the voice of reason in the Griffin family, his smug self-satisfaction has rubbed more than one character the wrong way.

Brian's flaws, lovingly detailed in this rant by Quagmire.

Arguably, Brian's biggest personal flaw is his failure as a parent. Brian didn't even know of his son Dylan's existence until he was into his teens, and when the two do meet, Dylan is an aggressive, ambition-less delinquent, with no real future ahead of him. The only way the Brian manages to bond with him at all is to smoke pot with him, and once they'd developed some semblance of a relationship, Dylan went back home to his mother and never appeared on the show again. 

How a seven-year-old dog fathers a human teenager is one of TV's little secrets.

But even Brian's shortcomings as a parent pale in comparison to those of Peter and Lois. Throughout the show, Peter takes neglect and child endangerment to Olympic heights - it's a wonder that any of his children are even alive, nevermind still in his custody. Lois is supposed to be the sane, competent parent, but she's no better. Stewie - despite being almost fifteen years old - is still just a baby with a serious congenital skull defect. Infants can't be left alone for more than five minutes, lest they exercise their innate talents for choking on small parts and swallowing household poisons, yet Lois leaves Stewie alone so often that he's being raised by the family dog, and he's even managed to build a nuclear cache in his bedroom.

This is not part of the average baby's room.

Brian was one of the show's only sources of jokes that weren't based on bodily excretions, bodily noises, bodily functions or sex. He had plenty of slapstick humour to go around - part of the reason his death by car was so shocking was that he'd endured far, far worse injuries and survived unscathed, and his father-son/occasionally mildly homosexual relationship with Stewie was one of the highlights of the show. Without Brian, the combined IQ of Family Guy drops from "kindergartner chugging paste" to "decomposing vegetable". 

And not a bestiality or genitalia joke in sight.

The good news is, Brian's name reportedly appears in the titles of upcoming episodes in season 12, and Tony Sirico is only signed on to the show for six episodes, which means that Brian may not be gone for good. How do you feel about the dog's demise? Leave it in the comments.

0

The Six Outfits that Girls Wear to University

Post-secondary education is supposed to be a time for personal growth and exploration, and there's no greater way to express your individuality than with the clothes you wear. For the first time in your life, you're not constrained by teachers, family expectations, or fairly reasonable dress codes, and if your parents love you enough, you're not constrained by budget. University students can express their creativity as much as they want, and find a totally unique way of presenting themselves to the world.

So, naturally, everyone wears the exact same thing.

If you're a university student yourself, or if you just enjoy crying into your Bachelor of Arts degree at your old Alma Mater on the weekends, you're almost guaranteed to spot girls sporting one of these six possible outfits. Each has been painstakingly illustrated here by yours truly, to help you properly identify:

The White Girl Uniform:

If you live in an area that boasts a large population of the common 20-something white girl, you've seen this outfit before. It comes in many forms, but some elements are always present. For instance, no white girl is complete without a pair of Uggs boots, the only boots that combine the durability of craft foam with the ruggedness of bedroom slippers. Legend has it, they get their name from the sound you make when you inevitably slip on the ice and greet the concrete butt-first. Tights are an equally indispensable part of this ensemble; at some point, these leg coverings evolved from being mere shields to protect the world from the sight of your splotchy, veiny legs, to being full-fledged pant replacements. Of course, a lady does not venture out into the world with crotch on display, so a comically oversized sweater is a must-have for the modern modest girl.

And, of course, what's a white girl uniform without accessories? The most crucial of those is a scarf, but not just any scarf will do. No, this has to be a special, oversized scarf. Beach-towel-sized is acceptable. A scarf large enough to cover a picture window is even better. And if you can find a canvas circus tent cover with an 'authentic, vintage' print, you can wrap it around your neck and get the white girl high score. An iPhone filled with Taylor Swift songs and a pumpkin spice-flavoured coffee beverage are optional, but recommended. Having an unkempt owl's nest pinned to the very top of your head as a bizarre attempt at a hairstyle, however, is mandatory.

The Edgy: Abridged Edition:

Remember high school? When your only real responsibilities were to present a pulse, make half-hearted attempts at your homework, and avoid getting pregnant? If you had the right combination of a rebellious spirit and a shockingly permissive set of parents, high school was the ideal time to let your freak flag fly. It was easy - all you had to do was get up three hours early each day to get all of your face paint, hairpsray, studs, gloves, zippers, piercings and prosthetic horns in place, and make biweekly hair appointments to have your tri-coloured mohawk touched up. Going off to college meant you'd have more freedom - you'd finally be able to have your earlobes stretched until you can train the family dog to jump through them.

But then reality struck. When you've got three quizzes to take, four essays to write, seven midterms to study for, two group projects to lament, one professor to seduce, and three and a half bowls of ramen to devour, there's just no time to maintain that carefully cultivated 'corpse' look you had going on. Before you know it, you're throwing on two coats of eyeliner and running out the door with dishwater-coloured hair each morning, a mere ghost of the ghostly presence you used to be .

The Protector of the Earth:

This girl is so organic, her body wilts every time she walks past a McDonald's. Her biodegradable outfit has more nutritional value than your lunch, and you'd get more dietary fibre from chewing on her dryer lint than you do from your specially-formulated breakfast cereal. Her clothing has all been imbued with the blessings of the ancestors of the fair-trade workers who made it; the only thing that's seeped into your clothing is the dried tears of the eight-year-old Malaysian child slave who made it.

If you want to dress like a Protector of the Earth, the first thing you'll need are pants so large that MC Hammer would ask to have them taken in (how's that for a dated reference?). If the local bourgeoisie shops don't stock such a thing, try to make do with overpriced yoga gear - they're sure to have that. A rolled-up tablecloth worn as a floor-length skirt is just as good. The rest is really up to you. Just make sure that everything you're wearing looks like something that a concert-goer would have worn to a certain infamous music festival your parents are too young to have attended, while simultaneously inducing massive amounts of guilt in everyone who lays eyes on you. Showing a little skin is encouraged; demonstrate to the masses what a quinoa- and organic-chickpea-fed body is supposed to look like.

The Northern Neophyte:

As I previously mentioned, I go to school in Edmonton, Alberta. For those of you who haven't visited Edmonton, the intensity of its winters is rivaled only by that of the hypothetical nuclear ice age that would follow a worldwide atomic apocalypse. Those of you who have visited Edmonton are acutely aware of this, because you're probably still frozen to the ground.

Students who come from parts of Canada that can actually sustain life don't always think to check historical temperature trends before they make the big move to Alberta's capital. We're Canadians! Cold is supposed to be universal up here. What we don't realize is that for some of us, 5 degrees below freezing is enough to draw alarm, while others don't bat an eyelash until the mercury drops below -40C. Newcomers to Edmonton are always easy to spot - they're the ones bundled in every item of clothing they own, peering at the world through the gap between their fourth and fifth scarf and wondering just how in the hell everyone else is getting by with just a hoodie.

The Anatomy Major:

This girl may or may not actually be a biology student, but she's certainly giving everyone a refresher course in anatomy every time she saunters down the hall. The only dress code this girl obeys is the legal parameters for indecent exposure. One good look at her will tell you exactly how many tattoos, bruises and chicken pox scars she has. If this young lady's overexposure to sunlight ever results in the formation of a cancerous mole, random passersby will let her know about it long before she gets around to seeing a dermatologist.

Despite basic instinct and general common sense, this look is frequently worn in all seasons. Even if you live in an Arctic hell-hole that all the world's deities forgot, the only modifications you'll ever see to this outfit are the addition of mittens and a scarf. It's also worth nothing that a Jillian Micheals level of fitness is in no way required to pull this off; so long as you have the core strength and the commitment to suck in your rolling foothills of stomach flesh all day, you're all set to venture out in public. Overall, this is the perfect look for women with especially hardy torsos.

The Complete, Total Despair:

When your weekly homework can comfortably fill a standard-sized dumpster, there's no time to be wasted on appearance. This girl has more important things to do than bathe. You probably don't want to know when the last time she did a load of laundry was, either, and you're almost certainly better off not knowing how long its been since she's changed her underwear. Instead of spending endless hours fussing over her makeup and curling her hair, all this girl has to do is shake most of the obvious body lice out of her sweatshirt and get back to studying.

This look isn't something that a subset of the female student body consciously aspires to; rather, this is something that every student will eventually be reduced to, regardless of how pretty she was in high school. Students rocking this outfit are practically non-existent in the first days of school, but by the time midterms are in full swing, every other girl will be proudly displaying some variation of this. At the end of the term, when finals are fast approaching, the student body will be virtually indistinguishable from a homelessness convention. Don't fight it, female students - total despair is as inevitable as it is repulsive.

Do you recognize your own personal style here? What other kinds of outfits have you seen on college campuses? Let me know in the comments!

0

Over-Analyzing Disney: Why Gaston Isn't Such a Bad Guy After All

Quick, who's the villain of Beauty and the Beast? It's Gaston, right? Of course it is - he's arrogant, he's pushy, he's mean-spirited, and, most importantly of all, Wikipedia lists him as one. Sure enough, Gaston devotes every second of his screen time to being vapid and controlling as he relentlessly tries to force Belle to marry him and push out a basketball team's worth of copies of himself. There's no way anyone could argue that Disney's youngest villain isn't a hairy pile of pure evil with a ponytail, right?

Despite having the hairline of a 47-year-old man, Disney alleges that he's actually around 25.

Wrong! In keeping with last week's post about villains and children's cartoons from the 1990s, I decided to use this week's post to meticulously comb through a 22-year-old Disney movie to examine whether or not Gaston, narcissistic huntsman and antler aficionado, is really such a bad guy after all.

For now, we're not going to count his gratuitous chest hair as a crime.

When you're deciding whether Gaston is malicious or just misunderstood, keep in mind that:

He's illiterate. 

People who don't like books are awful, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing embarrassments to human evolution, and they deserve to be thrown into tar pits so that their preserved bones might at least have some educational value to people living tens of thousands of years from now. Any child or librarian could tell you that. And so when Gaston casually tosses Belle's precious book into the mud, that's really all we need to see to know that he deserves to be thrown off the top of an improbably high tower.

Here, Disney plays a clever game of "spot the pornography joke".*

This is where a wonderful thing called 'historical context' comes in. The movie never actually specifies what year they're supposed to be living in, but the coexistence of bookstores and chamber pots points to sometime in the mid-18th century. For those of you who spent every single history class of your life snorting cocaine instead of paying attention, the 18th century was not a particularly great time for book-learnin'. Unless you a) had a penis and a royal title, or b) had a family whose livelihood depended on knowing their ABCs, chances are, no one would ever bother to teach you to read. Gaston is a huntsman. His entire job is to shoot things. Of course he tosses Belle's book aside; her passion for reading is the 18th-century equivalent of spending all day tinkering with an obscure programming language. Belle herself shouldn't be so high and mighty about it - her own ability to read is just sheer dumb luck. If she'd been born to almost any other villager besides the inventor, her perky, illiterate ass would be parked right next to Gaston's blonde admirers on that bench. 

They're waiting.

The fact that they live in the 'pooping in pottery' era of human history aside, Gaston isn't the brightest human being to ever grace the Earth. And that's not his fault. His full name, Gaston LeGume, literally translates to "The Vegetable of Gascony", with "Gascony" referring to the real-life French province where they live. He's a few croissants shy of a dozen, is what I'm saying. His world is comprised of muscles, guns, and holding metaphorical dick-measuring contests in the town bar; books aren't even on his radar. That might make him a poor match for Belle, but can we really claim that that makes him a bad person? I posit that we cannot.

Brains are not his strong suit.

Belle should want to marry him.

The definition of an ideal marriage is a multi-billion dollar question that could be the sole subject of entire blogs by itself. No matter how you feel about couples with matching genitals, however, most people in the Western world do agree on one thing: couples should at least be able to stand each other before they get married. In fact, they should ideally be quite fond of each other. If they really want to go the extra mile, they might even find some things that they have in common with each other before tying the knot. That's what makes Gaston's proposal to Belle so ridiculous - they have nothing in common, while Belle and her true love, Prince "The Beast" Adam, bonded instantly over their mutual love of, uh... eating porridge with their faces?

Ladies, control your trembling loins.

Except, once again, the fact that Belle was born in the year "17-something-something" is an issue. In her time, marriage wasn't about finding someone to have deep conversations with through the night. It was about finding someone who was capable of preventing your ass from starving. Remember, as a Renaissance-period woman, Belle doesn't have any career options open to her that involve keeping her knickers on. If she doesn't want to end up in the world's oldest profession when her father dies, she needs a husband, and a girl could do a lot worse than Gaston. 

People who read to sheep in public fountains don't usually have great marriage prospects.

He may not be her soulmate or intellectual equal, but Gaston is more than capable of providing for her. He's popular. He's successful. In an age where the average man spends his entire life coughing up blood and chunks of lung until he drops dead from yellow fever at the ripe old age of 35, Gaston is almost unnecessarily healthy. He's not looking to love her and leave her penniless; Gaston makes it uncomfortably clear that he intends to have a life with Belle and raise a family together. If she wants her essential needs covered, with a little extra money left over for books, she shouldn't be so quick to turn her nose up at the town's most eligible bachelor.

And just think of all the antlers she'll have.

His beliefs are justified.

Imagine, for just a moment, that you wandered out of your house one day and saw the object of your unrequited affection in the arms of a four-headed green alien. Would you wait patiently for your crush to explain that the alien is actually a lovely individual and a generous lover? Of course not. You'd run screaming into the house to find the biggest projectile your little noodle arms can lift, so you can hurl it at the monster and rescue your beloved. So when Gaston's first reaction to seeing the Beast is to rally the villagers and head off on a late-night murdering adventure, is that really so hard to understand? He hunts animals for a living, he wants to marry Belle, and his IQ is room-temperature at best. How else is he supposed to react? He's the village's entire supply of testosterone; they're hardly going to be receptive to him suggesting that they embrace the beast as a source of diversity in their currently-monsterless town.

He just wants a hug.

Another one of Gaston's more questionable beliefs is his belief that Belle is the absolute ideal wife, just because she's just so gosh darn pretty. Isn't he a horrible person for choosing a spouse based on looks alone? Well, actually, he's got one imporant thing on his side. It's just basic human instinct - even without a formal education, the dark recesses of our brain have a loose understanding of how genes work. If you don't want to have potato-shaped children, you don't choose a potato-shaped mate. Your body doesn't steer you towards attractive, symmetrical people for no reason; even if you don't consciously want strong, plentiful children, you can bet that your loins do. Gaston has doubtlessly been raised to believe that wives are supposed to be decorative offspring factories, not best friends or companions. Besides, beauty is a famously subjective trait - Gaston is coveted by a set of gorgeous blonde triplets who would murder a flock of ducklings just for the chance to comb his chest hair for him, yet in his eyes, no one is more beautiful to him than the arguably-less-conventionally-attractive-Belle. Doesn't everyone think the object of their affection is the most attractive human being around?

And just look how symmetrical she is.

Besides, if you're going to throw stones at Gaston for over-valuing Belle's beauty, you'd better bring enough for the entire village. Why? Belle has no friends in the village, claims over and over that she doesn't fit in, and runs around singing about how they're all boring peasant cogs in the French provincial system. And yet, the entire village trips over themselves to talk to her and about her. They can't seem to shut up about her, even though she's done exactly nothing remarkable. And through it all, the villagers make it perfectly clear that the only reason they're putting up with her anti-social, book-reading bullshit is because she gives them something pretty to look at.

Something seriously lacking in this town.

While we're on the topic of Belle, Gaston makes his opinion of her hobbies known right from the start of the movie. Women shouldn't read or think, he says. How could he possibly justify something so outrageously misogynistic? Again, it comes down to sweet, sweet, wife-beating history. Up until the women's suffrage movement of the early 20th century, real, actual medical doctors with real, actual credentials believed that women didn't have enough blood to power their brains and their reproductive systems at the same time. If a woman was foolish enough to go to university or hold public office, it was believed that woman's womb would be so terribly deprived of blood that she would actually become sterile. So when Gaston tells her she shouldn't be doing any pesky thinking, he's not inflicting his own personal brand of sexism on her; he's concerned about her actual physical health.

Get down from there before you sprain your uterus.

He's just like the Beast.

When my small, mushy, 5-year-old brain first took in this movie, I thought that Gaston and the Beast couldn't be more different. Gaston was a bully with a mean streak; the Beast was eccentric and misunderstood. But after re-watching the film with my 21-year-old mature brain that still very much enjoys Disney movies, I gradually realized one very important thing that should completely exonerate Gaston from 'villain' status. Are you ready for it?

Gaston and the Beast are almost exactly the same person.

Let's start from the beginning. Gaston chooses Belle to be his own personal baby factory because she looks nice and she won't produce children with weird eyes and crooked teeth. Yes, by today's standards, that makes him kind of an asshole. But what about the Beast? He doesn't set his sights on her for her vivacious personality and delightful conversation. He just needs a girl to break the curse. Any girl will do. His requirements begin and end with a functional vagina. She could be three hundred pounds and covered in a delightful smattering of multicoloured pustules, but so long as he can force himself to fall in love with her, it's all good. Lumiere and Cogsworth literally refer to her as "the girl" right up to the end of the movie. The Beast can't claim moral superiority over Gaston here - she's little more than a trophy to either of these men. Who knows - if Gaston had saved her from those wolves and had his own subsequent bonding moment montage, maybe Belle would have grown to love him instead.

As if she could ever compete with the love he has for himself.

Of course, Gaston has a much darker side than his normal bravado might lead you to believe. In his most heinous act in the entire movie, he blackmails Belle into marriage by having her father, Maurice, committed to the insane asylum. If you keep in mind that this is a hellish, 18th-century approximation of an insane asylum, Gaston's actions are downright chilling. It's hard to believe that anyone other than a villain would employ such tactics. Oh, but hang on, imprisoning Maurice to gain leverage over Belle sounds awfully familiar. Where else have I seen that used?

Hint: This scene does not take place at Gaston's house.

Oh, yes. The Beast does literally the exact same thing. She trades her father's freedom in exchange for a promise to never, ever leave the Beast, which is essentially the Cliff's Notes of any wedding vow. When she's permitted to leave the castle to save her father from freezing to death in the snow, that's supposed to be a huge allowance on the Beast's part. But it's not all bad for Belle. I mean, the Beast has a sprawling, impractically gigantic library! How could a person who owns so many books not be a perfect match for Belle? There's just one little problem - those books clearly came with the castle, because the Beast is every bit as illiterate as Gaston.

Some of you might recognize this as the scene where Belle quite literally teaches him to sound out the word "two".

In fact, throughout the entire movie, Gaston is perpetually just one little script edit away from actually becoming the hero of the story. If he had been put under an ugly spell as a child instead of Prince Adam, this would be a heartwarming story about Belle falling in love with a simple villager instead of an arrogant prince, and no one's character would have to be any different in the slightest. If Gaston had believed Maurice's claim that Belle had been captured by a horrible beast, he could have easily realized that he truly loved her and rescued her from the Beast's clutches before she was neck-deep in Stockholm Syndrome - Disney has sold us on far less believable changes of heart before. 

And we know Disney has no problem with the 'pretty girl chooses handsome guy after all' ending.

Even the final scenes didn't have to turn out as they did. Again, any quasi-talented, mostly-sober scriptwriter could find a dozen different ways to turn handsome, confident Gaston into a Disney prince instead of Prince Adam. If the timing of the final battle was off by even five minutes, remember, the Beast would have remained a Beast forever. Perhaps Gaston could have had a change of heart upon seeing that the beast wasn't such a monster after all, and the Beast could have stepped aside, refusing to let Belle spend her entire life with a twelve-foot-tall lion/buffalo hybrid. Even if the original "Belle ends up with Disney's first redheaded prince" ending is preserved, there's no real reason for Gaston's story to end the way it does. The Beast proved he was a better man by sparing Gaston's life. Any reasonable fictional character would take that as a sign that it's time to quietly slink away and re-think every terrible choice he's ever made. Having Gaston subsequently stab the Beast and get flung off the roof for his efforts only works because Disney wanted a more dramatic ending, and Disney fans demand that every little transgression is punished by death.

The children demand blood. 

Gaston may be an uneducated, selfish, egotistical buffoon, but he's a far cry from the cold-blooded sociopathy of his fellow Disney villains Queen Grimhilde, Maleficent and Jafar. You want to know who the real evil is in Beauty and the Beast? How about the Enchantress, who sentences dozens of innocent people to live as sentient housewares for no other reason than they were unfortunate enough to work for a prince who's kind of an ass. 

That was not a nice thing to do.

How do you feel about Gaston? Are you convinced that he's just an idiot in the wrong place at the wrong time, or do you still think he's earned a spot among Disney's most dastardly villains? Sound off in the comments.

* In case you somehow missed it during your childhood viewings of 'Beauty and the Beast', Gaston's confusion about the lack of pictures and insistence on holding the book vertically are meant to imply that he's used to looking at old-fashioned pornographic magazines. Take that, childhood innocence.

25

Why Lady Eboshi is One of the Greatest Antagonists of All Time

Every story needs an antagonist. There has to be some kind of force that works against the protagonist, preventing her from reaching her noble and lofty goal until the story's epic climax. An antagonist can be a person, a circumstance, a force of nature, an oppressive society, a hungry bear, a glittering vampire, a tornado full of sharks, or any other unpleasant thing you can think of to throw at a character, but without an antagonist present, all you have is a plotless mess of aimless wandering and banal, asinine navel-gazing from a self-absorbed protagonist. 

And really, who would publish such a thing?

The best kind of antagonist, in my not-so-humble opinion, is a villain. It's all well and fine to have your hero struggle with poverty, or morality, or a crotch rot disease previously unknown to science, but there's just something indescribably delightful about packing all the world's evils into one kick-able, punch-able, flammable human being. Every great franchise has a great villain. Harry Potter has Voldemort. The Lion King has Scar. The Avengers has Loki. Star Wars has Darth Vader.

Game of Thrones has an inbred, mouthbreathing sociopath with a face that screams "please bludgeon me to death with my own foot and feed my remains to the dragons".

But with so many great villains running around, stealing from orphans and kicking puppies, who should claim the title as 'greatest villain ever'? I'd cast my vote (assuming such a title was awarded democratically) for Princess Mononoke's Lady Eboshi.

Seen here using her ponytail as bangs, for some reason.

For those of you who aren't familiar with late-90s feature-length anime movies, Princess Mononoke is the guilt-tastic story of a forest in danger, a greedy mining corporation putting said forest in danger, and an exiled prince who would very much like not to die from his arm-rotting curse.

Specifically, the story is about Askitaka, a young prince whose reign is cut short when he attempts to save his village from a demon/giant angry thing made of worms, and gets himself infected with a curse for his troubles. Closer examination of the dead demon reveals that it was actually a boar god driven to infectious insanity by corruption from an iron ball lodged in his side. Unfortunately for Ashitaka, the boar's curse is fatal, and will take over his entire body at some indeterminate point in the future. On the upside, while he waits to die a horrible, writhing death, Ashitaka also gets to enjoy some nifty, demon-strength fighting powers.

It made sense in the movie.

What happens when you shoot a boar with an iron pellet, apparently.

Naturally, Askitaka's villagers are extremely grateful to him for saving their lives, and they all vow to ensure that his final days are as comfortable as they can possibly be. 

Oh, no, just kidding. That doesn't happen at all. They just cast him out of the village to wander around until he dies. At some point on his aimless quest for death, Ashitaka learns that the Great Forest Spirit has the ability to cure him, and he takes off into the woods to search for him. In the process, he stumbles across Irontown, an oh-so-subtly named settlement devoted to the extraction and processing of iron. Since they aren't living in 'Treetown', or 'Happy Organic Crunchy Quinoa Earth-Hugging Commune', the residents of Irontown spend their days clear-cutting forests so they get at more of that sweet, sweet iron. Naturally, the forest gods aren't exactly thrilled about this; as a cunning, last-ditch effort to save their homes and their lives, they send a random feral teenage girl into Irontown to assassinate the town's leader, Lady Eboshi. 

Nature's last hope, seen here marveling over a shiny object.

Since the movie is more than ten minutes long, San the Wolf-Girl's efforts to assassinate Lady Eboshi fail miserably. In retaliation, Lady Eboshi just continues the clear-cutting and profiteering that she's known and loved for, recklessly murdering enormous swaths of forest in the name of the almighty dollar. If you've ever paid attention to world news, or if you've ever noticed that most able-bodied adults are not frequently at home between the hours of nine A.M. and five P.M., you might recognize this system as 'capitalism'.

This cartoon will explain everything.

So why, exactly, is Lady Eboshi so concerned with aggressively expanding her profits? Was her entire family murdered by trees? What does she plan to do with the money? Is she building herself a fortress? Hiring an evil army? Saving up to purchase herself a set of fancy clip-on bangs? Of course not! She's up to something far more sinister. You see, Lady Eboshi uses the money she earns from raping Mother Earth to care for the lepers and former prostitutes that she takes in and provides for. In fact, the lepers she cares for are so grateful for being treated like human beings, that they engineer super-weapons to help her shoot forest gods right in their tree-hugging faces. Everywhere Ashitaka goes in Irontown, residents sing her praises and hint at the unimaginable horrors they faced before Lady Eboshi saved the day.

The villainous Lady Eboshi, seen here with the disadvantaged women she single-handedly rescued from a life of sex slavery. 

And that's what makes Lady Eboshi such a great antagonist. Don't mistake her for a cuddly humanitarian - it was Lady Eboshi herself who lodged a bullet in that boar demon, and she's not particularly remorseful about what it did to Ashitaka. She's blunt, she abrasive, and she commits environmental crimes that would make the Lorax hang himself, but there's no way to beat her. If Ashitaka and Wolf-Girl choose to obliterate her, the hundreds of lepers and disadvantaged women she's rescued will starve to death, turning Ashitaka himself into the great villain of the story. If, however, Ashitaka chooses to stand by the Iron Lady's Leper-and-Whore Resort, he'll guarantee himself an early death when Lady Eboshi slaughters his only chance for survival. 

Oh, did I mention that Lady Eboshi is planning to behead the Great Forest Spirit? Because she's planning to behead the Great Forest Spirit. 

In fairness, if you ran into this thing in the deep woods, you'd probably behead it too.

Everything Lady Eboshi does, right down to lopping off the head of the Almighty Red-Faced Deer himself, is done to directly benefit the people she cares about. Yes, all villains have to have some sort of motive, but in that regard, an awful lot of other antagonists are on pretty shaky ground. The Joker is evil because he's, uh, a disenchanted lunatic, I guess. King Joffrey is evil because... inbreeding, maybe? Even the struggle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the good-and-evil struggle by which all other good-and-evil struggles are compared, can be summed up as "something, something, Dark Side".

Apparently the Death Star's employee benefits package doesn't cover visits to a dermatologist.

This isn't a case of a well-meaning, but incompetent, ruler accidentally causing mayhem, either. Lady Eboshi knows what she's doing, and she's damn good at it too. If someone needs to be thrown under the bus so that her goals can be met, she'll drive the bus over them herself, and save three dozen lives by doing so. As a character, she's a rich soup of villainous intent, heroic outcomes, and enough realistic utilitarianism to make everyone watching feel uncomfortable and ashamed. You want her to die, but you don't. You want her to stop her assault on the planet, but she can't. You want there to be some hero out there, ready to step in and save the day, but she's the best they've got.

If you're so bad at governing that you make the rains dry up and the sun burn out, you may want to consider an alternative career path.

As much as I hate to spoil the ending of a sixteen-year-old children's movie, as it turns out, there really is no way to defeat Lady Eboshi. She gets the happiest ending that we can ever expect to get out of our own forest-pillaging industries - she recognizes that she's perhaps doing a bit more environmental damage than is strictly necessary, gives the Great Forest Spirit his severed head back, and promises to do better in the future. Does she completely cease her mindless capitalism and replace iron mining with tree-planting and flute-playing? Of course not. She still has leprosy-riddled mouths to feed. On his part, Prince Ashitaka chooses to stay in Irontown and help rebuild a better, more sustainable city, making Lady Eboshi the only antagonist whose "the villain stays in power" outcome is considered a "happily ever after" ending. 

Who is your favourite antagonist of all time? Leave it in the comments.

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How to Transfer Universities

This week's blog post starts with a confession: this isn't my first blog. Before I had built up enough of an ego to title a blog after myself, I ran an anonymous site that chronicled my adventures in undergraduate education. Because that very education and all its associated midterms is what prevented me from writing a new post this week, I thought it might be fitting to resurrect one of my favourite posts from my old blog:

There comes a time in every person's life when it's better to flee than to fight.

For some people, this moment might entail an uncomfortable family dinner with at least two of their drunkest embarrassing uncles. For others, that moment might come when they find themselves confronted with a large, hairy bear chewing on the femur of one or more family members. And for people who lead much scarier lives, that moment might come when they arrive home and discover their old substitute high school gym teacher playing strip poker with the cat.

I hand-drew the pictures this week. You're welcome. 

For me, my moment to flee came in the form of a university transfer.

I should explain, partially to add context to this post and mostly to fill up space. Those of you who have hacked into my undergraduate transcripts will know that I spent my first two years as a doughy little undergraduate majoring in computer science. Now, life as a computer science major had its perks - no one says anything if you choose to replace most of your meals with canned green caffeine-sugar sludge, you can go about your day-to-day life fairly confident that you won't have to transition to a diet of dog food after graduation, and a sizable portion of your friends and family begin treating you like you're some sort of pasty wizard. For me, there was only one real downside: the fact that I would have rather launched a career in the lucrative "making money on a pole" industry than spend the rest of my life programming.

Cleaning telephone poles is a last resort for many desperate young women. 

So what was a young undergraduate in crisis to do? In all my infinite wisdom, I landed on the simplest possible solution - I would pack my bags and transfer from my gigantic undergraduate babysitting facility in Western Canada, trekking 3,500 km East to attend the smallest, liberal artsiest university I could find.

Brilliant. 

Needless to say, I was absolutely stunned when I discovered that a person couldn't just hop on a plane and stroll out onto her new campus, announcing her arrival as the university administration viciously fought each other for the privilege of kissing her feet. No, like everything else in academia, the process of transferring had to be needlessly complicated, hopelessly bureaucratic, and absolutely chock-full of lemurs. 

Just an average day in Canadian academia. 

I would say that this article is devoted to helping any of the future school-betraying cowards in my readership avoid the logistical nightmare that is transferring schools, but that's an impossible dream. Transferring is a nightmare that exceeds even that one sex dream you had about that hefty Tim Horton's employee that one time. Instead, let me simply brace you for the inevitable onslaught of academic shit that's about to hit the proverbial fan. 

How to Transfer Universities:

Step One: Sheepishly Order a Transcript.

You already got into a university once. You've proved that you're a prodigal genius on the road to curing mousetraps and building a better cancer. Why should you have to apply again? 

It's because your new university wants to check and see if the old one made a horrible, horrible mistake when they admitted you. Sure, you slept through enough high school classes and presented an acceptably hearty pulse to clear that 73% hurtle, but then what? Maybe you spent the first year or two of your degree pioneering the respectable new field of Ke$haology and solving one of the 21st century's most puzzling mysteries. Or maybe your spent that time challenging Ke$ha to a venereal disease arms race. Your new refuge from the real world has only one way to find out - they'll need to see your mortal soul reduced to a series of numbers and letters on a page. 

Looks just like this.

Yes, the almighty transcript. If you're not entirely sure what that is, I wish you good luck with that transfer, Skippy. For the rest of you who didn't major in paste-eating, you're probably vaguely aware that you'll need to get that document from your current university into the hands of your new one. Easy enough, right? Just print that sucker off your online student account and shove it into the nearest mailbox! Good to go, right?

Wrong. If you think that's all there is to it, the only form you should be printing off is the application to change your major to Eating Paste. Infants these days know how to Photoshop bigger breasts onto their baby pictures before they can walk; the new university doesn't trust you now, and they won't even begin to trust you until they've finished sucking back the contents of your bank account through a straw. No, you need to get an official copy of your transcript signed, stamped, sealed and flossed through the butt cheeks of the Registrar himself before being mailed out by your school.

At this point in your journey, it's time to get yourself down to the Office of the Registrar. Remember that building/desk/plexiglass bank window you mistakenly referred to as the 'Office of the Register' for the first semester of your undergraduate career? Go there. It couldn't be easier; you'll just need to fill out a form specifying which university will be getting your traitorous self as a student. If you're standing in a province whose primary exports are things like food and oil, you probably won't even need to pay a fee. If your province mainly exports the bottled tears of laid-off pulp mill workers and automotive factory staff, you might want to bring your wallet. 

Simple, right? Now hand your form to the lady behind the desk. She'll skim it over for a second, no doubt noticing that you're planning to jump the institutional ship and set sail for clearer waters. That's right, you and the tens of thousands of dollars of tuition money that pay her salary and feed her children and sick grandmother and quadriplegic ferret are about to turn your backs on the institution that guided you from a young naive freshman into a drunker, naiver sophomore. This place offered you a home, dammit; we were a family! We sold you the clothes on your back, we drove you to your first therapy appointment, and this is how you repay us? 

She's very disappointed in you. 

Or, y'know, you could put in your transfer request online and avoid the judgement-filled gaze of the Registrar lady. Your choice. 

Step Two: Wait.

Universities move at speeds approximate to those of glacial drift. Now that your transcript has arrived at your new school, you can expect weeks and weeks of fun-filled waiting. To fill the time, you could try taking up an exciting new narcotics addition, making daily measurements of continental drift, or actually studying for those finals exams that you still have to write. Don't think leaving makes you special.

Moves faster than the average university.

But waiting is the hard part, right? When that's over, you can pack your bags, flip your old school the bird and head off on an adventure! Not so fast, I'm afraid...

Step Three: Bemoan Your Transfer Credits.

You probably already realize that universities are not all the same (if they were, you wouldn't be transferring) and that applies to their course catalogs as well. They teach different subjects with different teachers and textbooks. Some schools offer Engineering and Nursing programs; others don't. Some schools teach courses like 14th Century Tibetan Beading; others recognize that as a colossal waste of time. Maybe the U of [Initial] has a lab component to their first year Biology course, and the U of [Other Initial] prefers to round up the students for a weekly 3-hour Hunger Games-style death match. 

What part of this isn't educational?

After you get accepted to your new home-away-from-entering-the-workforce (assuming, of course, that your application didn't send the Registrar into fits of hysterical convulsions) you'll need to be evaluated for transfer credits. This is a list of the courses that your new school has deemed not total horseshit, allowing you to count them towards your exciting new degree in Interpretive Dance. Now, if you're fortunate, the transfer credit process will simply be more waiting. Return to Step Two and start another brand new dependency on narcotics, you lucky bastard. And if you're unlucky? Hope you held on to every assignment you ever did, because a team of trained university administrators need to verify that your school isn't handing out calculus credit for crayon drawings of dinosaurs. 

Shockingly difficult to transfer.

Before you know it, you'll be emailing course descriptions of everything you've ever taken, the ISBN number of every textbook you were supposed to buy, scanned copies of the few assignments you didn't immediately burn, course readings, an exact transcription of your first dentist appointment, at least two recent letters to Santa and a screenshot of your Netflix viewing history. 

Once you've managed to send them all that and resumed the waiting process yet again, you'll eventually get an official copy of your transfer credits mailed to you. Hooray! But once you come down from the cocktail of illicit substances you've been shooting into your extremities to kill time, you might want to take a second look at that page. 

The first thing you'll probably notice is that you've been awarded fewer credits than you actually have. That's to be expected; not every school regards bagpipe lessons with the same academic reverence as your home institution. It's when you start to look at what specific courses transfer that you find yourself halfway down the bureaucratic rabbithole. If it was a simple matter of 'can we get away with refusing this course and bleeding another $500 from this student?", things would be simple. Every course would get either a 'yes' or 'no', you could have a proportionately long session of weeping, and you'd be set to register for classes. Oh, but what's this? They're combining two of your previous classes to give you a single course credit? How can that be? Does this university really believe that you spend exactly half of each of those classes watching Youtube videos while the professor drank herself into a coma? And look at this - they're crediting you two courses for just one of your old courses! Huh? Do they have firm evidence that you spent double the required time for that course reading ahead in other textbooks? What sort of scattered education do they think students are receiving at your old school? A school that dropped random reading materials and final exam papers on a crowd of undergraduate students from a crane could put together a more coherent education than what's represented in your transfer credits. 

They wouldn't transfer Introductory English, but they did transfer...this.

Step Four: Brace Yourself, First Year is Coming (Again)

Starting first year is universally awful. It's awkward and lonely and difficult. You're forced to learn a series of chants that you will literally never recite again (unless you're lucky enough to be attending wizard school) and do humiliating team-building exercises with people you will literally never speak to again for the rest of your academic career. You don't know where any of the buildings are. You don't know which professors are supervillains in their spare time. You don't know which of the campus eateries serve burgers made mostly from seahorse meat. 

Although you can probably make an educated guess.

But you did it! You survived! While your friends all abandoned their dreams of piloting space shuttles to Neptune and performing open-heart surgery on basilisks, you prevailed! You left the horrors of first year behind you, never to be repeated or spoken of again.

Only now you'll have to endure all of that again, plus much, much worse. 

Unless you're fond of chest-length beards and body lice, you're going to need a place to live while you earn that almighty Bachelor's degree. Easy enough, you'll just stay in residence. You know who else will be staying in residence? First years. By second and third year people are already moving out into apartments, but since you don't know anybody to room with, you'd have to take a chance on Craigslist and risk living with a perma-stoned trust fund baby whose sexual behavior violates at least four municipal bylaws.

I am not drawing that. 

Nope, it's easier to just live in residence among the wide-eyed newbies who won't share any of your classes and still think that being cool matters in university. To them, you'll be the mysterious creature holed up in your room doing - horror of horrors - actual studying at all hours of the day and night. To your same-year peers, you'll be that mysterious man- or woman-child still living in one of the university's 24-hour daycare centers where things like noise rules and alcohol restrictions are a thing. There's clearly no way to win, short of learning to stick your feet to the underside of the roof overhang and curl up like a bat every night. 

So good luck with that transfer, champ. You're gonna need it. 

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