Terminator: Genisys Teaser Trailer

I'll be back again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again is what Arnold Schwarzenegger should have really said all those years ago, way back in the now 30 year old original Terminator film. Will Terminator Genisys be a return to form for the franchise that has sadly fallen deeper and deeper into crapness since James Cameron left the helm?

I'm desperately hoping that it will be, but I, along with many others, am not convinced by much that I have seen from the marketing department. It all started off so well with the casting of Emilia Clarke as a young Sarah Connor, Arnie returning and Alan Taylor from Game of Thrones directing. The story details sound like a potentially very interesting new take and Jason Clarke sounds like a decent John Connor, even if he'll never be as cool as Edward Furlong. However, Jai Courtney better do something better for this franchise than he did for Die Hard.

The obligatory trailer tease popped up yesterday, promising the return of a T-1000-alike liquid metal Terminator into the mix. Could this be Matt Smith's role in the movie? Probably not judging by the above photo but it's a shame as I could really see him doing a tidy Robert Patrick impersonation.



And here, after a hellish long wait all day is the first official trailer:



Might I say that apart from a couple of dodgy effects, I am loving the look the look of this. I love the direction they have taken the storyline!

What do you think?

More on the Terminator franchise:

No Fate But What we Make: My initial reaction to the news of a Terminator Reboot

Feminist Analysis of Terminator 1 and 2 

Genre Analysis of The Terminator 

Iconographic Genre Conventions in The Terminator 

Dystopian Visions: The Future is Bleak 

My First 10 Years of Movies: The 80s

Feminist Analysis of Terminator 1 and 2

 Here's a look at the first two Terminator films taking a feminist approach.  This is for my BTEC Film Studies students who are currently writing up their own feminist analysis of science fiction films which I hope they will then turn into a blog post just like this!  It follows from yesterday's genre analysis of The Terminator.  Enjoy reading and please leave any feedback if you have anything to say about what has been written here.  After reading this, you may also find it interesting to read David Jackson's piece on why he thinks James Cameron is misandrist. 

The icon returns... as the good guy!

Feminism is a movement that began in the early 20^th Century with the purpose of creating equal rights for women.  At this point, women were not allowed to vote and had very little opportunities for employment or even control over their own bodies.  Women were virtually possessions for their husbands and domestic violence was even more common than it still worryingly is today.  Feminists argued for women’s right to vote and for equal rights with men in the workplace and in the home.  They were advocates for methods of birth control becoming available so women could take more control of their own bodies.

Feminist film theory is important because films are such a popular and influential medium.  Feminist theorists are particularly concerned with the role of women in films and how they are represented.  They analyse films from a feminist perspective, looking specifically at the development and empowerment of women in narratives, the relationship between female characters, the male gaze and the idea of containment of women.

Help!

In The Terminator, Sarah Connor is firstly represented as a stereotypical damsel in distress figure.  She is the princess that needs to be rescued from the evil villain by a heroic male figure.  Kyle Reese is a soldier sent back from the future to protect Sarah from the Terminator.  Sarah is represented as a weak woman and she is employed as a waitress but finds it difficult as she is disrespected by the customers.  When the Terminator finds Sarah she is scared and feeling hunted as a strange man has been following and watching her.  This turns out to be Reese who than saves her by shooting at the Terminator.  Sarah is dragged around by Reese who continually saves her from death.  He is the character with knowledge in the story and he has to repeatedly tell Sarah what is going on.

Man strong, woman weak

As the story progresses, Sarah learns how to defend herself a bit more.  The male character teaches her to make bombs and how to use weapons.  Sarah is dependent on the knowledge and skill of the male character.  By the end Sarah has become the final girl, like in many slasher films as her protector has died trying to save her.  Even before his death, Sarah has become stronger and when Reese is injured she is the one that encourages him to keep going.  Finally when Reese dies, after injuring the Terminator, Sarah must fight back and gain her independence.  She crushes the Terminator despite her injury.

Literally contained

In Terminator 2, Sarah has been institutionalised because figures of patriarchal authority such as the police and doctors believe she is crazy. This is an example of containment.  Sarah is now a strong, independent woman and she has been locked up in a mental institution for it.  Sarah is first shown as strong and in control of her body and surroundings.  She has turned her cell into a makeshift gym so that she can do chin ups.  She is watched by a team of doctors like a dangerous caged animal.  She is resourceful and intelligent and almost escapes the hospital without any help.  When the Terminator arrives with her son, she is briefly relegated again to the damsel in distress role.

Tooled up

However throughout the film, Sarah is tough, good with typical masculine weaponry such as guns and determined.  Increasingly she becomes more dependent on the Terminator as he is stronger and virtually indestructible.  In the final scene where Sarah confronts the villain, it is the ‘male’ Terminator who must finish the job when Sarah runs out of bullets.  Therefore Sarah’s position in the film becomes less prominent as the male characters become increasingly important.  On a few occasions she is actually a hindrance to the mission and has to be told to calm down and remain focused by her ten year old son.

Feminists would find the representation of women in the film to be progressive in the lack of a male gaze set up in the films.  The idea of the male gaze suggests that women are often objectified and sexualised by male screenwriters and directors.  Women are often filmed to emphasise their attractiveness to the male audience and the viewer is often positioned to look at women as if they are a male character staring at the woman’s body.  Sarah Connor is never a sex object, although in the first film there is a sex scene where her bare breasts are visible.  However for the most part, especially in the second film, Sarah is not dressed in sexualised clothes and the camera does not linger on her body or her appearance.

The male gaze

On the other hand, in Transformers and the sequel, Mikaela Banes is played by Megan Fox and is constantly dressed in revealing clothes such as short skirts and tight tops.  Though she is quite a strong character who displays knowledge of car mechanics and gets to fight alongside the heroes in the final battle, she is also objectified as she leans over a car and then a motorbike in the sequel.  The camera tilts up her body showing us the reaction of the male character as he looks at her.  The audience is invited to identify with the male hero as he enjoys the look of the female character.

The Fox

The notion of containment is also central to feminist film theory.  Often strong female characters have to be contained by the men who write and direct Hollywood films.  Even though Thelma and Louise for example try to break free of social norms, they have to kill themselves at the end of the film in a last act of defiance.  Similarly strong women are often contained by the patriarchal idea that they must be mothers.  In films from Kill Bill to Aliens to Terminator 2, the female heroes of the story are strong because they are protective of their offspring or because they take the role of a surrogate mother.  Sarah Connor is only important because she gives birth to the leader of the human resistance in the films.  Her role as mother is the most important thing about her.  She is fighting to protect her son John Connor so that he can grow up to save the human race in the future.  Her caring nature as a mother figure also means that she fails in an assassination attempt later in the film.  When a child pleads with her to not kill his father, Sarah breaks down and cannot continue in her actions.  Again, she is saved by the male characters that come to help her.

Mummy you're so badass.

This is a common way for screenwriters to assert patriarchal ideology over strong female characters.  Sarah Connor is also literally contained at the start of Terminator 2 because she has tried to fight the system and figures of authority have deemed her insane.  She is even licked by a male nurse as a reminder to the audience that she is a woman and therefore vulnerable and targeted by men.  However it is only with the help of male characters that she can break free of this containment.

Kicking ass for kids.

From looking at the Terminator films, it is clear that feminism has had an effect on the narratives and ideology of many Hollywood films.  Science fiction of the 1950s did not have tough female characters as heroes and the damsel in distress was a far more common character type.  Women were much more likely to scream and run and be the victim of the villain whereas Sarah Connor shows resourcefulness, intelligence and some independence and strength.  Many female heroes are still objectified such as in Tomb Raider and Resident Evil but there are more progressive roles for women in action, horror, and science fiction cinema than there used to be.

Can I get a hug?

Genre Analysis of The Terminator

Here's a look at The Terminator and some other science fiction films taking a genre approach.  This is for my BTEC Film Studies students who are currently writing up their own analysis of science fiction films which I hope they will then turn into a blog post just like this!  Enjoy reading and please leave any feedback if you have anything to say about what has been written here.

Arnie becomes an icon

The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) is a hybrid of genres.  It has elements of science fiction, horror and action films.  Some of the conventions that make it recognizable as a science fiction film are the use of robots and scenes that are set in the future.  It has horror conventions such as an unstoppable monster that will not die and does not feel pain.  It is also mostly set at night and has a girl being relentlessly chased by the monster/robot.  The Terminator is also full of car chases, gun fights and explosions which audiences expect to find in an action film.

Firstly, The Terminator is science fiction.  The hero and villain are time travellers from the future.  The audience knows this by the dialogue and the fact that the villain is a cyborg.  Time travel is not overly significant to the plot as once the protagonist and antagonist are in the present, they do not travel back and forth in time again.  Many other science fiction films use time travel much more with characters going to the past, the future and their present.  An example of this is the Back to the Future trilogy where the protagonist travels from 1985 to 1955 to 2015 to 1855.  This is only possible in science fiction and allows the characters to have adventures in different time periods.  It also allows the filmmaker Robert Zemeckis to make a science fiction Western hybrid in Part 3 of the trilogy.

Genre Hybrids: Back to the Future Part 3

Cyborgs are a science fiction convention that do not exist in the present.  They are robots that appear human.  Beneath the skin it has a metal endoskeleton.  This metal endoskeleton helps the film conform to genre expectations of the horror and action film.  The Terminator is almost invincible so it can survive gun fights and even explosions.  This means the heroes have to repeatedly try to kill it, leading to more action scenes.  It also means that the villain keeps rising after it appears to have been killed.  This makes it similar to the slasher films' psycho killers like Michael Myers of Halloween and Jason Vorhees of Friday the 13th.  The use of a metal endoskeleton signifies the robot's strength and power and how hard to kill it will be.  The skeleton signifies that it is dead and therefore impossible to kill.  Its red eyes and gritted teeth also make it appear angry, scary and determined.

Michael Myers just won't stay dead

The future is presented in the film through the use of flashbacks.  It is dystopian as machines have waged a war on the human race and there are few survivors.  It is darkly lit and there are flying machines and Terminator robots that hunt down human survivors.  The bleak future is created through special effects such as models of robots and ruined cities.  Humans live underground and hunt rats, showing the dire situation that the human race is in, in the future.  Technology is killing humans and this emphasises a message that humans depend too much on technology and are advancing too quickly in the present.  Science fiction films set in dystopian futures often have messages to convey about the time in which they were made.  An example of this is Children of Men that takes place in England, 2027.  The human race is infertile and London is dirtier and more polluted than it is now.  The only thing that seems to be looked after and technologically advanced is adverts on the side of buses and buildings.  This suggests that corporate power and greed remain unchanged from present times.  There is a bombing in the opening scene and lots of references to patriotic values and discrimination against immigrants.  This is clearly a reference to the post 9/11 behaviour of the British and American governments and demonstrates how genres adapt over time.  The culture also seems obsessed with celebrity as shown by their staring at the screen and grief over the death of someone they have never met.  Children of Men offers a different vision of the future from The Terminator, but still has uses science fiction conventions to represent it.

Children of Men's dystopian future London

Robots are not present in Children of Men but they feature prominently in The Terminator and Transformers.  They are futuristic as they have real human skin and hair and can sweat and bleed.  The Terminator also has a type of 'Terminator vision' created by a red tint and various bits of written information scrolling on the screen when the audience sees from The Terminator's point of view.  Like in Transformers, the robots disguise themselves; The Terminator as a human and the Transformers as various vehicles.

Terminator POV

The music and editing also helps the audience to decipher the genre.  For the action moments such as car chases and fights, the music speeds up.  The synth score sounds futuristic and the high pitched string sounds are very reminiscent of classic horror music from films such as Psycho.  Tension is created through the use of intercutting between the Terminator and his prey, Sarah Connor.  The audience is made to worry about Connor’s safety by the order of the shots.  The Terminator is also shot from a low angle to make him look dominant.  This is common for villains and sometimes heroes.

Terminator terminating.

Terminator is structured like many other horror, science fiction and action films.  It introduces a hero and a villain at the beginning and sets them up as binary opposites.  The human is vulnerable, caring and sensitive and willing to do anything, including sacrificing himself, for the good of the human race.  The Terminator is set up as exactly the opposite.  It may look human but it is made of metal and therefore hard to kill, it has no feelings and its purpose is to destroy humans.  The human and robot come into a series of conflicts together; gun fights, car chases and eventually at the climax hand-to hand combat.  The action film is often structured around a series of confrontations and set-pieces.  The target audience want stunts, action and fighting and so conversations and dialogue are scattered through the film between big action moments.

Kyle Reese: Human Hero

Terminator also subverts the expectations of the crime and action film as The Terminator drives a police car in one car chase.  This means the villain is driving a symbol of law and order.  Usually the police are a force for good in action films and this use of the police car suggests that the Terminator is the new symbol of order.  He will not stop until he catches his prey, like the determined detectives of many action films.  This is taken further in the sequel as the T1000 villain morphs into the figure of a policeman throughout the film.  It also subverts expectations and adapts to reflect more modern representations of women than were present in many of the science fiction films of the 1950s.  Sarah Connor may begin the film as a typical damsel in distress but by the end she is a strong female who must fight the villain by herself and wins.  This is similar to the convention of the ‘final girl’ in slasher films who is the last survivor of the killer and must fight back to survive.  This convention can be seen in films including Halloween and Friday the 13^th.

Sarah Connor: The Final Girl

Are James Cameron’s Movies Misandrist, and What Would he Hope to Gain if They Were?

Before I begin, there are two things I’m going to need to tackle. The first thing is that I actually really enjoy most of director James Macaron Cameron’s output (apart from Titanic, but that doesn’t mean it will escape comment!). You may have read my outright praise for Aliens in the past. His plotlines and dialogue are elegant and functional, and the action scenes which drive his movies are hyperkinetic without being incomprehensible. There’s a lot going on, but he can hold a camera still for a few seconds rather than chucking it across the room a la Transformers.

The other thing is what misandry is. I’m sure you’re all familiar with its counterpart, misogyny – the hatred of women – and all the notions that go with it, such as objectification (treating women as objects primarily for the pleasure of the so-called ‘male gaze’). Misandry, it follows, is the hatred of men. What could its possible equivalent to objectification be? Some people would say that hyper-masculine, hyper-muscular male figures are there for women to look at, but a Feminist would be partially correct in dismissing that as a male-manufactured power fantasy. But did you ever wonder why it’s a power fantasy? Because power gets you laid and, statistically speaking and apart from socially important lotharios, bigger and more aggressive men get more girls. Ask yourself, whether you be a man or a woman, how many women have you met who claim to actively prefer puny or fat guys? Are you such a woman yourself? Don’t lie, because I’ll know. And I will find you.

The masculine equivalent of objectification of women – if the argument for it being a problem for women acts as a kind of denial that it could ever happen to men, which is an utter lie – is something I’m going to have to semi-invent a term for. That term is ‘agentification’. An agent is someone or something who actively influences the world around them. How is this bad? It becomes bad when I offer you the following definition – ‘the treatment of men as agents who act primarily for the benefit and gain of women’. As with the objectified female, the thoughts, feelings and personality of the agentified male are considered irrelevant.

Our culture has even had a platitude which reflects this for hundreds, if not thousands of years – ‘man is defined by his actions’. It is an attitude so deeply entrenched in our culture that we take it for granted and it has ceased to be a problem. Think about it – surnames in most cultures are subject to patrilineal transmission, from father to son. Type that into spellcheck. Patrilineal doesn’t exist. But matrilineal does. Why is this? Hmm. I digress. Surnames are patrilineal in most cultures and what do you notice? Potter. Smith. Farrier. Wright. Turner. And so on. All names derived from jobs. A man is what he does – not how he thinks or feels. You don’t get Mr. Sympathetic or Mr. Likesicecream. Of course, if Bruce Wayne had a son, according to occupation-derivation he would be Mr. Batman, which would give the game away just a tad. If a man’s surname doesn’t come from his job (i.e it sounds posh) it is generally an aristocratic derivation referring to some place his family owned i.e De Montford.

Back to the problem. It is the problem that makes young men enlist in militaries and die for countries that don’t care about them. It is the problem that makes men aged 16-24 the absolute statistically-proven prime victims of violent crime, even though culturally we harp on about how at risk women are. It is the problem that means that the human race today is descended from half as many men as women, which means that throughout our evolution males have consistently been killed off twice as fast as females. But this is all okay, of course. This is because it is their choice (although, if they don’t make such choice, they lose their masculine agency and are less likely to be considered for breeding rights. Evolution, baby). The notion that this is okay is firmly supported in many of James Cameron’s films – but in what ways, and why?

I will start with Avatar as the most obvious culprit, and attempt to do it in summary. At its heart, this movie presents a male-driven military industrial complex (the baddies) against a female Gaia-type earth-spirit, Eywa (the goody). The milindust complex is led by the snarky (and physically slight) corporate bigot Parker Selfridge and the scenery chewing Lt. Col. Miles Quaritch. The irony is that although Quaritch is nominally the villain, he is decisive, self-sacrificing and lives up to his word which the ‘hero’ Sully is largely unable to do. Sully’s main motivations for turning against the military that employed him? His new blue body lets him walk, and helped him get a hot blue girlfriend. The hot blue girlfriend part is critical to this discussion.

So how is the above so critical? Sully is portrayed as stupid, bland and selfish – he betrays pretty much everyone. Despite constant verbal abuse and disdain from his soon-to-be-girlfriend Netyri, (“She calls me ‘skown’ which means moron”) he still falls in love with her. He starts off on the wrong side, and betrays his new blue buddies. What redeems him? Two things – that he acts upon the instructions of a female (Netyri) for the benefit of a female earth-spirit, and that (as a masculine agent) he tames ‘Last Shadow’ which is essentially a huge and deadly pterosaur. The fact that he is accepted back as a saviour under these circumstances amuses me – suddenly, all the Na’vi trust him. It is very much like me leaving in shame driving a Fiat Fiesta and becoming a hero just because I drive back in a Mercedes Benz. His feelings do not matter, the fact that he is stupid does not matter, the fact that his motivations are skewed does not matter. He is the hero because he did something cool to impress a girl.

Don't laugh mate - you die in 45 minutes' time.

Let’s examine the other male figures now. Sully’s main competitor is an arrogant blue dude called Tsu-tey who basically dares to expect a woman who had already pledged herself to him to be faithful! What a goddamn crime! How does the movie absolve him of this terrible crime? Twofold – by having him become subordinate to the ‘hero’ (who is in turn subordinate to Netyri’s genitals), and die heroically assaulting the bomb shuttle. The good old disposable male strikes again – Cameron leaves no trope behind.

Killed by your own tree, FFS!

The two tribal leaders can be compared, too. The patriarchal leader – who wants to kill Sully – is ignobly disposed of via a spare of wood when hometree is blown to bits, while the matriarchal figure, who saves Sully (stereotypically nurturing - how ironic) is spared. Ho hum.

How do men and women in the milindust complex compare? Little better. All the background female figures who remain loyal to the army have close-cropped hair like their male colleagues, while the heroic female pilot (Trudy) who turns against her employers has lovely long hair. As a strong, assertive man, Quaritch is put in a position where the audience is not meant to sympathise with him despite the fact that he’s the only consistent and trustworthy character with any power in the whole damn film. His female adversary and equivalent, the scientist Grace Augustine, whose name is just a face-palm worthy pathetic fallacy, is a total bitch to everyone. But the film tells us to like and respect her – so a behaviour changes from wicked to respectable depending on whether a man or a woman does it. In a meritocratic, equal society, we should judge people’s behaviour, not their sex. Cameron’s hypocrisy here clearly sees him judging sex. Shouldn’t a (pseudo) Feminist avoid employing the supposed tactics of the patriarchal enemy?

Anyway, Doctor Elegant Majestic wilfully pounds down on her subordinates Norm Spelman and Dr Stereotype Patel. These are the two token consistently loyal and pleasant men in the film, but they are both portrayed as nervy, nerdy, back-seat taking somewhat asexual blobs. Norm is even a drooler, apparently as Grace tells his Avatar, “Norm, you’re getting your saliva in the samples” in response to his lisping dialogue. So, Jim, you’re saying that we should be confirming the stereotype that nice guys are chumps, but bad guys can be redeemed if they subject themselves to the will of a woman while retaining their ability to act and take risks. That’s just fucking great man – game over man, game over.

"Not if I kill you first, Jim!"

Now, on to a summary of how this works in his other movies. In both Terminator films, male (or masculine-bodied protagonists such as the T-800 in Terminator 2) exist to protect the female and her offspring and then die. Kyle Reese gives her offspring, protects her, then dies. The T-800 gives the thumbs up as he commits suicide or ‘self-terminates’. As the T-800 is referred to as the ultimate father figure at several points throughout the movie, the implications are sinister. Mother-of-the future Sarah Connor says, “watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him. It would never shout at him or get drunk and hit him. Or say it was too busy to spend time with him. And it would die to protect him. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice”. Ideally, men are just self-sacrificing machines that exist only to help females and their young. What they make of it is meaningless. What they feel is moot. But we are not permitted to see them as victims of agentification.

He's just DYING to help out!

The creator of Skynet, Miles Dyson, is on the other hand a male who neglects his family in favour of his work and needs to be shown the error of his ways by a woman. He dies redeeming himself in staying behind at Cyberdyne to detonate the bomb intended to wipe out Skynet’s future. Can you see a pattern developing here? 

In The Abyss, proto-Augustine superbitch Lindsey Brigman appears and makes a fool of her ex-husband, Virgil. He makes his transition from immature layabout to hero only once he accepts that his ex-wife is right about the aliens being benevolent. The villain of the piece is unsurprisingly a male soldier -but he’s played by Michael Biehn, so I’m automatically on his side. Corporal Hicks and Kyle Reese are good-guys!

 In Aliens, Ellen is a mother-figure who essentially adopts the little girl Newt / Rebecca. Carter Burke, the primary villain, is the proto-Selfridgian corporate stooge. The nice guys, Corporal Hicks and android Bishop are both horrifically injured in the service of a woman. They accept this humbly, despite the fact they got hurt as the result of said woman taking a massive risk (trying to save someone from alien impregnation) which she had previously disapproved of herself (“You can’t help them! You can’t! Right now, they’re being cocooned just like the others”). Yet the risky hypocrisy displayed by Sully is shown to be just fine when Ripley does it. No-one needs to redeem her – her actions redeem themselves in the narrative. Granted, it is the only grave error in her otherwise sterling leadership.

So Jack and Rose get married and - nah just messin wit ya.  HE'S FUCKING DEAD!

In Titanic, Jack dies to save Rose. Oh yeah, ‘Women and children first’. I forgot. 

 

All of his men are put-up, shut-up, define-yourselves-by-your-actions types who become defined as heroes in their services to women. Self-serving men are villains, self-serving women are frequently sympathetic protagonists. His films are frequently hypocritical and misandrist on this level. True Lies is the only one I can’t figure out.

Do as I say!  Not as I do!

 But why does James Cameron keep doing this in his films? I don’t think he really believes any of this stuff. It’s all sinister marketing. Knowing that just making a kick-ass action movie won’t be enough to bring in the big dollars considering that some – though not all – of the female audience will be hesitant about seeing it, Cameron essentially enshrines women in order to put bums in seats. Does he believe in this ‘natural order’ in real-life? He is on his fifth marriage. Former wife Linda Hamilton, who ironically played the heroine Sarah Connor in both Terminator movies, is on-record as describing being married to him as “terrible on every level, he was terribly insecure that I was going to ruin it for him somehow,”(The Week Uk, March 3^rd 2010) and that  - in another blazing irony -implied he was much like Miles Dyson in that he was single-mindedly focused on his work to the detriment of his family relations. It is also suspected that he cheated on Hamilton with current wife Suzy Amis. None of this is secret, libellous or revelatory – just have a look on Google. You can make your own judgments as to whether he has anywhere near the respect for women he pretends to have in his films.

What does this all mean? Look at it all from this angle, and his movies are pick-up artists. These movies are the sleazy guy in a nightclub who sidles up to a woman and says ‘all these other guys are horrible. You should sleep with me. I’m nice. I understand. I’ll look after your interests. Come with me if you want to live’. Well, to paraphrase the awesome and now sadly perished female-fronted alt-rockers Lush: You say that women are superior to men? Well, I know the score – and I’ve heard it all before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David M. Jackson is a lecturer in English Language and Literature as well as Sociology, so he’s seen your retorts to this article coming from a mile away and frankly they’re bloody feeble. Don’t even start – you don’t want to see him get out of this chair.

When not teaching or beaming smugly from this hallowed webpage, he works on making his ‘about the author’ blurbs shorter.

By the way, he wrote a novel about a cybernetically augmented police officer struggling to maintain her humanity while seeking revenge for her father’s death against the backdrop of civil war in happy ol’ Britain. It’s called ‘Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity’ - which you may find a bit ironic. It’s out on Sunday 1^st  July 2012 via Amazon, priced at £3. Keep your wallet handy – there’s more to come.