![]() He yanks her along by the wrist, calls her mean things and intimates that her love was false. On the one hand, Wesley is bad to Buttercup for no reason. Taking for granted that “the attractive bad boy” is a powerful trope, is Wesley either the pinnacle of that ideal or a satire of it? Is he the Siddhartha or a caricature (Roger Zelazny’s Mahasamatman), to put it cleverly? James Dean, early Johnny Depp, young Charlie Sheen, Clive Owen, James Bond, Severus Snape, etc. The guy in the leather jacket, leaning on his motorcycle. But it’s indisputable that pop culture throws a lot of attractive bad boys at female audiences. Let’s not get into the whole evolutionary psychology angle, because that’s a foggy road with as many bad turns as good ones. Perich: So let’s examine for the moment this notion of “women want the bad boy.” (Although Inigo too has done his share of dirt, I suppose.) Stokes: Whuuuuut? Are you suggesting that Wesley is really more desirable than Inigo? Because that is not how my swash is buckled. I’d put this in the “human beings aren’t essentially good, despite our attempts to demonstrate the contrary” bucket. We want to not care these guys are murderers.Īnd women especially want it – to illegitimize it is to illegitimize a very large sector of very legitimate sexual fantasy. Yeah, take it out of the context of fantasy, show the innocent victims of the Kessel spice trade, show all the people the Dread Pirate Roberts murdered, and you make him less attractive, but it’s important to note that we want to deny these things. By making Greedo shoot first, Lucas immasculates him. This is why Greedo shooting first is so bad. One can only assume that the Dread Pirate Roberts was likewise primarily interested in protecting one of his most valuable assets: his reputation for brutality.įenzel: It’s a fantasy – in a fantasy, it is okay, even desirable, for a man to have done a whole lot of really bad shit, provided he is the most desirable man in the story – and as long as he shows signs he can be redeemed, and keeps it somewhat decorous in the presence of ladies, so to speak. ![]() The pirates have no real incentive to kill hostages, plunder loot, or otherwise cause trouble instead, they basically seize a ship and wait for the shipping company to get a professional negotiator to broker a deal at market rates… with the professional negotiator that the pirates also hired. The public perception of ruthless pirates out for blood on the high seas is pretty far from the reality, which is that it’s all fairly business-like. Lee: We actually see something similar with the phenomenon of modern day Somali piracy. ![]() ![]() After all, the grapevine of reputation in The Princess Bride is so inefficient that nobody knows the Dread Pirate Roberts changes his appearance every X years. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he is one. Perich: I think we can assume that Westley has cultivated a reputation for being a mass-murderer. “I was thinking of you every second, my dearest!” “Sometimes I miss the sunset over the waves, the cry of the seagulls, and the simple pleasure of having my way with a schoolgirl and making her parents watch.” He tells her the most horrible stories imaginable in this wistful tone. Wallace Shawn must live!īelinkie: You could probably write a really funny sketch that takes place immediately after the movie ends, where Buttercup starts to ask Westley a little about his adventures. But then, I was also upset when Westley let Vizzini drink that iocane stuff. He says, “As you wish,” and she’s like, “YAAYAYYYYYYY!” Basically just like it happens in the movie. Mlawski: I haven’t read the book in a while, but I just flipped to the section where Buttercup realizes that the man in black is Westley, and she doesn’t have any problem with it. Now keep in mind, I haven’t read the novel for a long long time. It would be like if he spent the last three years running Al-Qaeda. Westley is LITERALLY the most depised man in the entire world. Can we then assume that Westley has killed hundreds of innocent people? Isn’t it well-established that the Dread Pirate Roberts never takes prisoners? Isn’t the real story of the Princess Bride about a man who becomes a monster in order to survive? It’s basically the Black Freighter story from Watchmen – he gets back to his beloved, but by all rights, she should be horrified by him. Belinkie: Okay, so Westley spends a few years pretending to be the Dread Pirate Roberts.
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