Subverting the western: It’s no longer a gunslinger’s game

Subversive or revisionist westerns have been having something of a resurgence in the past few years, especially in cinema: from Netflix’s Godless and The Harder They Fall, to Prime Video’s The English (stories told primarily from the points-of-view of women, African Americans, and indigenous peoples respectively). The tradition is certainly rife in literature, with True Grit by Charles Portis, Ride with the Devil by Daniel Woodrell, and the brilliant Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. In fantasy literature, the Weird West has become a subgenre on its own. I dipped my toe in with my 2010 novel The Gaslight Dogs, and I find myself with more to explore through a novella trilogy with Solaris Books called The Crowns of Ishia. In my Weird West, dragons are an integral part of nature, and conquest and empire lead to a collision of wills, the threat of insanity, and the retribution of the natural world. But it’s in the character work that I discovered touchstones to do something different with the gunslinger/cowboy/indigenous enemy tropes.

My instinct is to treat my characters as real people, which means they don’t usually fit neatly into category boxes or personality tendencies. At least, I don’t create them with those limitations in mind. Being a lover of frontier literature and cinema, however, I am aware of the types—they have been immortalized by actors like Clint Eastwood and directors like Sergio Leone. The Western is often seen as a macho (white, straight) genre, so leading my first novella The Mountain Crown with a female point-of-view character (Méka) who possesses some of the marker characteristics of an Eastwood served multiple purposes: as an indigenous woman with an important connection to the dragons of her world (ie: nature), her presence is one of resolute steadfastness. She is quiet (“stoic” would be the word used if she were male), purposeful, and powerful—but not in the way Western (as in North American) audiences tend to think of power. She is not throwing her skills around, reaching first for her gun to end disputes, or spouting snappy one-liners to show off her wit.

Initially, she might be interpreted as passive, but as the narrative progresses, hopefully we discover that she is, instead, patient and thoughtful. These are not usually the characteristics of marquee protagonists, especially in Westerns or in fantasies, but that was the point for me. Her solid sense of being is indelibly connected to her relationship to nature and the culture of her people (the Ba’Suon), a sort of physical embodiment of the Daoist concept of wu wei (“effortless action”). She is a contained personality, slow to react, and compassionate to the core, even when the world around her is rife with violence and exploitation. It was important that the reader’s introduction to my fantasy world was through her eyes, as the subsequent books would begin to deconstruct that point-of-view to the point of fragmentation by the third novella, A Covenant of Ice. I understood this type of character might be a little opaque or difficult to access for some readers, but I was adamant to be true to Méka.

The other two point-of-view characters in the subsequent novellas, Janan in The Desert Talon and Lilley in A Covenant of Ice, are soldiers, men, and as it happens, lovers. Janan is also Ba’Suon, but fractured by his years at war; Lilley is a slave by his own people, the imperial Kattakans, who have run the Ba’Suon out of their own country. In the usual Wild West narrative, these two men would be depicted as cowboys, gunslingers, Union soldiers, etc. Tough, grizzled males that move through the world with a certain assumed dominance. This isn’t the case for Janan and Lilley. Their strength lies in their love and connection to each other, the land they revere, and the dragons who are an indivisible part of nature. Rather than men of conquest, they seek peace and recovery, and are often at the mercy of authoritarian powers. They, too, are capable of violence, but these aren’t the characteristics they lean on from scene to scene. It was important to me to depict a relationship that was both strong and delicate, emotive and self-possessed. The rough edges aren’t eliminated, as their world is harsh, but they aren’t defined by them any more than they are defined by the fact they are two men in love. In my world, this isn’t remarkable.

I tend to follow the adage “write the story you want to read.” To depict a world where a woman’s compassionate leadership isn’t questioned, and two men in love isn’t seen as unusual or a weakness, is not only the story I want to read, but it’s the world I want to live in, no exceptions. Placing my characters in a traditionally white, male dominated milieu, where violence is often the go-to solution, is my way of highlighting the fact that a different world is possible, even needed. Perhaps especially now.