Sunday, March 1, 2015

If Robert Howard had No Soul He Would've Wrote Gor

Gor
1987



Dorkus Maximus, Tarl Cabot, is a physicist prattling on about dimensional portals opened by the ugly bling on his finger. Bling left him by some relative. After his way-out-of-his-league assistant stands him up for their weekend, he gets into a car accident and finds himself on Gor, another world. This is a place for barbarians, where people deal with daily raids, enslavement and misogyny. Sounds a lot like Earth.

Tarl trains to be a swordsman, grows a pair and helps some dirty locals recover their sacred rock. He uses the rock to get home and then puts his new nuts to use on the resident staff bully. It's a mediocre movie but here's the thing: it's based on a series of books that people have actual built their lives around. I'm not even kidding. There was (or is) a cult following of this where they strive to live by the codes in the book. We're talking about a book where caste systems and slavery are considered okay, natural, and something to take pride in. Women are literally kept in chains and live subordinate to men, who may beat them, brand them, and pit them against one another in battle.  

Fuck that noise. You'd have to kill me to kill me before I practiced that bullshit. And the guy who wrote it is like a philosopher or something. Shouldn't he know better?



1 comment:

  1. Cripes, I remember those cheesy paperbacks from the mall bookstores I used to troll when I was in my early teens. I had no idea they made a movie to boot. The author reminds me of a basement dwelling outcast wanna-be that can't land a girlfriend in the conventional manner and blames all women for it. That would make it much easier to create a fantasy land where they bow to him, rather than force him not to objectify women and treat them with respect.

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