Comments on: Cage Match 2013 Round 1: General Woundwort vs. The Tripods

By: Nicholas Penner

Nicholas Penner — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:12:09 +0000

@Alex: here, here. I was really rooting for Martin in 2011 too.

But anyway, this match up is just stupid. It. Is. Stupid. Suvudu. You guys put a freaking rabbit up against giant alien machines with big ray guns? I am very dissapointed in you guys, Suvudu, very. No matter how awesome or strong of a rabbit Woundwort is, he is still just a rabbit. How would he have even beaten one of the lone alien scouts? The only way was for Woundwort to spread some sort of mangy disease on the aliens, but even then he would be long dead before them.

Suvudu, you should have pitted Woundword against Tock.

By: Matt Albrecht

Matt Albrecht — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:34:58 +0000

Tom and Thomas summed up my thoughts exactly.

But on further note, when we were brainstorming characters, I couldn’t help but notice the alarming lack of female characters suited for battle in classic lit (and lamented the fact), but we can’t control the sexual politics of earlier eras. Still, we did find female combatants—and we have a very diverse crowd of both male and female staffers. I’m not sure that much more could be done in terms of fair representation, so I’m sorry to hear that this year’s theme struck you as female-hostile.

That said: Can we all have a somber moment of silence for General Woundwort? Ah poor fleshy rabbit, we hardly knew ye.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 04:42:17 +0000

As much as I appreciate the small guys in these line-ups, (I was an ardent supporter for Martin the Warrior in 2011’s match) Woundwort has nothing on mechanical creatures of the level that the Martian tripods have.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 03:07:16 +0000

@ Jeanine: I think that’s rather an overreaction, especially considering the extremely low number of female spec fic authors prior to the last forty years or so. That’s just what this genre has been saddled with in terms of history. There have been plenty of female authors represented in previous matches, however, and there are female characters in this tournament. And females doing these write-ups, as an earlier Tom pointed out. Finally…this is a tournament about characters, not authors. Given that there’s something of a dearth of “classic” fantasy written by females, does it really matter THAT much who wrote the story, or what organs they happened to have? I mean, I’m pretty sure few people even thought about the sexes of the authors. Are you really so fixated on gender issues that your first thought on seeing a beloved, iconic character is to check if he or she was dreamt up by a woman?

By: Tom Blunt

Tom Blunt — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:25:15 +0000

Jeanine, I hadn’t noticed how many of the books’ authors were male. until you mentioned it. I suppose that the pool of books determined to be “classics” of literature skews mostly mail because of the unfortunate sexual politics of earlier eras. I agree that it would have been nice to see more female authors included.

However, many of the characters featured are female, and many of the posts for this contest are written by women. My question for you is: how does that translate as “females not wanted or required”?

By: jeanine

jeanine — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:49:50 +0000

Every single match seems to have contestants of male authors. I get Suvudu’s hint :; females not wanted or required. Am unsubscribing as you “guys” want.

By: rae

rae — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:44:58 +0000

Yes, the Tripod captures him… and then he sneezes and the aliens all die of microbial infections.

By: Brettish

Brettish — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:53:27 +0000

General Woundwort for the win! Tripod steps in a rabbit hole and it’s murder she wrote. You know what is better than 3 legs? 4.