Archive for February, 2025

movies, TV, Books, writing

Heroes and Villains

Some of the recent author discourse online this week has involved the nature of heroes and villains and the author’s responsibility in writing them. This stemmed from a statement from one of the writers of the TV series Breaking Bad about how maybe writers needed to think of the implications of what they wrote, after viewers seemed to have missed the point of that series. I didn’t watch it because it’s very much not my sort of thing, but I understand it’s a series about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and to provide for his family (possibly because insurance is bad and he won’t get good benefits?), he starts making and selling meth. Since he knows chemistry, his meth is superior to that made by trailer park junkies, and he becomes a sort of drug kingpin. This writer talked about how audiences saw him as a sympathetic figure who was doing what he needed to do to care for his family in an unjust system, but the writers thought they made it clear that this was just an excuse he used, while he actually ended up doing it for the power and money.

I have to say that this writer sounds pretty naive. You have a character in a respected profession that’s often seen as an underdog in society, dealing with something a lot of people can relate to (struggling with health insurance and finances), so people are going to sympathize with him and relate to him and try to justify his actions.

However, it doesn’t take a teacher with cancer dealing with health insurance for audiences to sympathize with bad guys. I’ve been around online discussion of various fictional things (TV, movies, books) since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much for certain members of the audience to like and sympathize with the villain, even if they have to make up reasons to do so. You could have an unrepentant puppy murderer, and there would be people claiming he’s really just a softy, and he only murders puppies because the good guys were mean to him about his puppy murdering (especially if he’s attractive or charismatic). He could be saved and changed if only someone treated him right.

There’s what I call the hero/villain double standard. A villain doesn’t have to do much to be hailed as heroic. He just has to do one good thing, or sometimes even refrain from doing something bad one time. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like the most evil thing a hero can do is try to be a good person, so that even the slightest failure to live up to that ideal is worse than any evil the villain does. And yet, actually succeeding in being good makes him holier than thou and boring, and audiences want him cut down. The puppy murdering villain can be hailed as a hero for letting one puppy go, while the hero will be vilified for taking the largest brownie (but also criticized as holier than thou and too good to be true if he takes the smallest brownie).

But you can’t write for that audience because they’ll never be happy. They’re suspicious of people who try to be good and they think they can save villains.

I think writers may unintentionally feed into and encourage these views, though. While a villain redemption story can be satisfying under some circumstances, too many of them and you start to perpetuate the myth that all villains are actually good inside or doing their evil for selfless, good reasons. Writers like to redeem villains because it makes for a big, dramatic character arc — from selfish and evil to heroic. Meanwhile, the arc for a good guy usually isn’t so dramatic. At best, you get the farmboy to hero arc, where he’s not so bad at the beginning and all he really does is level up to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The way you get more drama is to tear down the hero and find his flaws.

In the world of series, especially long-running types of series like on TV, the structure of a series encourages the villain redemption arc. The villain is probably one of the more popular characters, but if you keep the same individual as the foe for too long, both the hero and the villain start to look incompetent if neither manages to defeat the other. You really can’t permanently defeat the hero of a series, but you don’t want to get rid of your most popular character. The answer is that you redeem the villain and bring on a new villain, so in later installments, the original villain is at first a reluctant ally with the heroes against the new villain, and gradually turns into a full-on hero. Viewers learn to look for the reasons that any villain will eventually become a hero, and as the villains and former villains remain popular characters among outspoken viewers, writers start focusing on them, sidelining the original heroes and not writing for them, so the heroes become more boring.

I’ve also seen people theorizing that Americans tend to go for underdogs who fight the system and challenge the status quo, but most of the heroes are defending the status quo, while the villains are the ones fighting the system (never mind that they’re often doing so for selfish reasons). I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, since there are way too many examples that go the other way around. In the Captain America movies, the most upright, pure of heart Marvel superhero is fighting the system and going rogue. He’s going against orders to do what he thinks is right, going against what he believes to be a corrupted organization, and even going against the other superheroes when he thinks they’ve sold out. (And, of course, a lot of fans vilified him when he finally made a selfish choice for his own happiness.)

Most of the Star Wars movies and shows have the heroes being rebels or resistance fighters against an evil system. The exception would be the prequel series, which was odd because the real villain was controlling both sides to undermine the system while the heroes were fighting to defend a system that they didn’t know had been corrupted. The least successful series so far, The Acolyte, was the one with the villains rebelling against the “good guy” Jedi system that was questionable. They find a middle ground in the shows centered around the Mandalorian, where the good guys aren’t really a part of the establishment and are sometimes in opposition to it while they’re also fighting outright villains, which puts them on the same side as the establishment.

And people still sided with the bad guys when they were the ones representing “the system.” I remember 1977, before Darth Vader had a sympathetic backstory, long before anyone imagined he’d be redeemed. In that first movie, he was mostly just a henchman supporting an evil bureaucrat, and he was an extremely popular character. There were “Darth Vader Lives!” t-shirts. Really, he was a cool costume and an awesome voice, and he had power he wasn’t afraid to use. Who hasn’t wanted to Force choke someone during a staff meeting? But none of the usual rationales for why people side with villains applied to this character in the original movie. He was mostly just intriguing and looked cool.

I think the answer isn’t to stop writing cool villains, lest audiences sympathize with them. It’s to write better heroes. Push audiences to sympathize with them. Don’t be afraid to make them human or flawed, but highlight where they’re good and heroic. Make them cool enough that people might want to be them. The writer has to like the good guys before the audience will.

movies, Books

Out of Order

Last Friday, I figured I should celebrate Valentine’s Day with something somewhat romantic, but I wasn’t in a very romantic mood, so I ended up watching 500 Days of Summer, a somewhat anti-romantic romantic comedy. I’m not super-strict about my definition of “romantic,” so I’m okay with a hopeful ending, even if it doesn’t involve the main couple in the movie.

This is a rather unconventional romcom that questions a lot of the premises common to the genre. It’s told in a non-linear way, starting with a breakup and bouncing back to a first meeting, then ahead to an established relationship, then back to starting to get together, etc. Tom is a hopeless romantic who’s looking for “The One” who’ll complete him. Summer is a free spirit who doesn’t believe in love and doesn’t want to be tied down. Tom meets Summer and is sure she’s The One when he learns she likes his favorite band. They argue over the issue of love, and his hopes are dashed when she tells him she doesn’t believe in it, but then she kisses him, they start dating, and everything is perfect, until it isn’t and he doesn’t know what to do.

I recently saw some online discourse about the movie (which is probably why it caught my eye). Apparently there’s some debate over which of them is in the wrong and the bad guy. Is she bad for telling him she didn’t believe in love, then dating him anyway, or is he bad for expecting her to fall in love with him when she told him she wouldn’t? Is she a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or is he trying to cast her in that role? I would say they’re both at fault. She sent seriously mixed signals, saying one thing and then acting another way, but he was in love with an idea, and she happened to be the person he cast in that role.

But the main thing I like is the nonlinear structure that makes the audience have to piece things together, where we don’t see how it all fits together until toward the end. I love stories that do that sort of thing or that play with narrative structure in fun ways.

In the romantic comedy space, there’s Sliding Doors, which has parallel timelines — we see the heroine miss a train after losing her job, leading to her getting mugged, then because of that she gets home late enough that she doesn’t catch her boyfriend cheating on her, and her life becomes a struggle. But then we also see the heroine barely catch the train, so she gets home in time to catch her boyfriend, which leads to her starting her life over, starting a business, and starting a new romance. We cut back and forth between the timelines. Which one is the “good” one and which is the “bad” one, and how will it work out?

Or there’s The Very Thought of You, which plays with perspective. We see the same events multiple times through the perspectives of three friends who all meet the same woman on the same day, and we only realize what’s really happening when we put them all together and know what’s happening in the background of each of the scenes.

I’m With Lucy starts with the ending — the heroine is on her way to her wedding. She got there after a time when she said yes to every blind date. We go back to these dates and the relationships that came from them, jumping around a bit in time. Which of these guys is she marrying?

Getting away from romcoms, there are movies like Memento, which is told in reverse order, and Inception, with the lines between dream and reality blurred. The first season of Once Upon a Time had dual timelines, with flashbacks going mostly in reverse chronological order gradually showing how the present-day situation came to be, while the characters worked to resolve the situation in the present (the flashback format continued through the series, but it mostly became thematic, showing an incident in a character’s past that reflected the character’s present).

I haven’t seen it done so often in books, but there’s a time travel book by Connie Willis that plays with this, Blackout/All Clear. It’s a story in which time traveling historians from the future go to the time of World War II to study it, but something goes wrong, and they’re stuck there as the Blitz begins. But there were other previous missions involving some of the same people to different times in the war, and since they took on cover identities and the story is told using the cover name, we don’t know which characters are the same people at different times until later. There’s also the mix of what’s happening chronologically within the war era and what the timeline is in the “present,” which can mean that a person from earlier in the present might be later in the war than they are in the current mission that started later in the present. This is a kind of storytelling that would be less effective in a movie because it would be more obvious that they’re the same person. In the book, there are a lot of “ohhhh” moments of realization.

I have ambitions of writing something like this, either out of order or otherwise nonlinear. The closest I’ve come was my Christmas novella, which was similar to Sliding Doors, except the heroine was living both timelines and aware of both of them, so she had to figure out which life she wanted and how to stick with that one instead of living both of them. I have an idea that might fit into the nonlinear category, with flashbacks where you don’t know which present character is the person in the flashback, but the whole idea hasn’t really come together yet, and the concept is more ambitious than I feel up to tackling right now.

movies, TV, Books, writing

Shipper Bait

Happy Valentine’s Day! I should probably talk about something romantic, but I’ve come to realize that both as a reader/audience member and as a writer, I’m more of a shipper than a romantic.

For those who aren’t up on Internet talk, “shipper” is short for “relationshipper.” As far as I can tell, the term originated in the X-Files Usenet newsgroup back in the mid-90s. If you wanted Mulder and Scully to get together, you were a relationshipper, or shipper. (The other faction was the No-Romos, who wanted them to stay friends and partners but not get involved romantically.) From there, the term spread. “Shipping” is wanting two characters to get together, looking for evidence that they might be developing feelings, imagining how they might get together and what it would look like if they did, sometimes even writing fan fiction about the characters being romantically involved. If you say you ship a couple, you want them to be romantically involved.

While some shippers really do want to see the couple get together, the real fun is in looking at the subtext and trying to figure out where things might be going. I think this is why I prefer to get my love stories in genres other than romance (and now romantasy). I have the most fun trying to read between the lines and figure out what the characters feel based on their actions. Romance novels are a lot more up front about the attraction. Even if the characters are denying it, you know where it’s going and it’s still pretty obvious. I think a lot of the “Moonlighting Curse” is due to this. Once the couple is together, you know where things stand and there’s no more room for imagination. (Though there were other things going on with Moonlighting, so it wasn’t just them getting together that killed the show.) This also makes it a lot harder to do in a book than in movies/TV. When you can get inside the characters’ heads, there’s little guessing, unless they’re utterly oblivious.

As an example, I’ve always said, not entirely jokingly, that Aliens is one of my favorite romantic movies. It’s fun to analyze the way Ripley and Hicks interact and see the way he looks at her and figure that they were falling for each other, and later they’d get together (the third movie Does Not Exist, so there). I was vindicated in this when I heard Michael Biehn say on a convention panel that he played the whole movie as though Hicks had a huge crush on Ripley.

I like to say that I write shipper bait instead of romance because the romantic relationships in my books tend to be fairly subtle and leave the impression of there being a lot more romance than there is because there’s so much material for the reader’s imagination. I’ve even had a book that didn’t have a kiss in it rejected by a fantasy publisher with the recommendation to send it to a romance publisher because it was too much of a romance.

I’ve been trying to think of my favorite fictional romances, or at least some that I think were handled well. I’ve got more from movies and TV than from books. Connie Willis probably does my favorite book romances, though she writes science fiction. Ned and Verity’s relationship in To Say Nothing of the Dog is quite lovely and has a swoonworthy conclusion. There’s also something pretty epic in the Blackout/All Clear duology that involves time travel and an outcome worth cheering out loud for. Lately, she’s been writing all-out science fiction romcoms, and they have just the right mix of romance and action. You want the couple to get together, but it’s not super obvious where things are going.

I think Jim and Pam’s relationship on The Office worked pretty well (aside from some iffy stuff in the final season). It helped there that the mockumentary format meant that we only saw what the camera crews were there to see, so even when they started dating it wasn’t entirely obvious what their status was and there was still room to guess and imagine.

Possibly my favorite TV romance was Nathan and Audrey on Haven, which had all kinds of supernatural stuff going on, plus one of my favorite paranormal tropes, the “in another life” thing in which the same people keep running into each other in different timelines, sometimes not knowing each other, but always falling in love when they meet.

Shipping isn’t limited to couples that actually do end up getting together or who are on that trajectory. I’ve even seen people ship characters from different fictional universes. It’s really common to ship non-canon relationships, sort of an amusing what if. My personal favorite there is that I figure things would have gone very differently for the galaxy if Obi Wan had ever turned to Padme and belted, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.” Seriously, an Obi Wan who looked like Ewan McGregor was right there, and she went for the whiny kid? I’ve seen some unhinged fan theories that this is what happened (well, maybe without him acting out Moulin Rouge), and Obi Wan was Luke and Leia’s real father. Anakin does get really jealous of Obi Wan having anything to do with her toward the end.

Somewhat closer to possibility is Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso in Rogue One. That lost opportunity is even sadder after the Andor series, which makes it look even more like she’s just the person he always needed, and they found each other just a bit too late. There are some pretty loaded looks they exchange. In my mental happy place, the Enterprise flies by and beams them out right before things go boom.

There’s a lot more room for romance in fantasy now that romantasy is the hot thing in the market, but I’m not sure I write enough outright romance for that. My shipper bait is too much for fantasy but not enough for romantasy.

writing

Superman or Underdog

One of the mental rabbit trails I found myself going down recently was considering where characters fall on the Underdog/Everyman/Superman spectrum and how that affects the story being told.

In general, characters — and particularly main characters/protagonists — fall along a spectrum. At one end are Underdogs, those who are weaker or less powerful than your average person. This would be the Cinderella type character in the “rags” stage where they’re essentially powerless. Audiences are encouraged to sympathize with or pity the Underdog and cheer for them as they try to rise above their situation, against all the odds.

In the middle is the Everyman or Average Joe, the person who’s at about the same level of power and ability as the average person. This is the girl/boy next door character, a staple of the romantic comedy. Audiences are encouraged to relate to or identify with this character. If a character is referred to as “relatable,” they’re probably an Everyman.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Superman, the person who’s more powerful than the average person. Most superheroes would be considered Superman characters (in one case, literally), but it’s not just about superpowers. The power could also be political or social status or great wealth, or it could involve high-level skills from intense training or experience. James Bond is a Superman character, along with kings and presidents. This is an aspirational character audiences are encouraged to admire and look up to.

Usually, this is all relative based on context. In a world where few people have magical powers, even an inept wizard would be a Superman, but in a setting where everyone’s magical, the inept wizard would be an Underdog. In superhero team-up movies, the scale may shift so that among people with superhuman powers there are some farther to the “Superman” end and some that count as Underdogs within that group. A character may also shift position as the context around him changes. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is an Everyman while he’s in the Shire. He doesn’t have special skills, power, or authority, but he’s also not at the bottom of society and needing to rise up. But once his quest begins, he becomes an Underdog. He’s smaller than most of the people around him, he doesn’t have the kind of training or special skills that others around him have, he’s mostly ignorant of the world he’s dealing with, and he’s up against an enemy with great power and resources.

Characters can move around on the spectrum. In fact, the story’s more interesting if the character does move around a bit. In a lot of superhero origin stories, the hero may start as an Underdog—like Peter Parker or Steve Rogers—until something happens to give them superpowers so they become a Superman. A character like Peter Parker may have a slower move toward Superman status because it takes him so long to adjust to having powers, figuring out what to do with them, and learning to use them without causing a disaster, so they may be an Underdog or Everyman who can do cool stuff. Or a character like Steve Rogers can simultaneously be both a Superman and an Underdog. Pre-Captain America Steve may be an asthmatic 90-pound weakling, but he’s already a Superman inside—smarter, nobler, and braver than the average person. He’s an Underdog because no one takes him seriously, but when he gets superpowers he doesn’t really change. He just gets a body to match his spirit.

Characters can move down, too. Whenever Superman is exposed to kryptonite, he temporarily becomes an Everyman or even an Underdog as he has to struggle to deal with situations without his usual strengths. Or there’s the common sports story arc, starting with the athlete at the top of his game until he gets injured and becomes an Underdog and has to fight to rise again.

I started thinking about all this when I started my rewatch of the Star Wars movies and shows and found myself analyzing yet again the issues with The Phantom Menace. One thing I realized is that all the main characters are clustered around the Superman end of the spectrum, without a lot of movement. As a Jedi Master, Qui Gon is at the far Superman end. Obi Wan is just a bit behind him, as an apprentice. Padme is a queen with political power, so she’s well past everyman, even if she’s not as far down as the Jedi with their powers. Anakin may be a kid and a slave when he’s introduced, but we don’t see the slavery affecting him that much onscreen. Instead, we hear all about how he’s more powerful with the Force than even Yoda, he’s the best at building and fixing things, and he’s the only human who can compete and win at pod racing. He’s definitely in the Superman area and doesn’t have much room to level up. The only Underdog in the main cast is Jar-Jar, the comic relief. You end up with a not very interesting story if everyone’s a Superman and they’re mostly static. It doesn’t even feel like they shift the curve so that within the Superman area there are Underdogs and Everymen. Anakin is constantly presented as too awesome to be an Underdog, even if he whines about not getting his due.

Contrast that with the original movie. Luke Skywalker is introduced at the Underdog side of Everyman. We don’t yet know that he might have any special powers or abilities. He’s young, inexperienced, and naive, and he’s entirely unprepared for the adventure he finds himself on. During the course of the movie, he learns enough and does enough to gradually move to the Superman side of Everyman, then during the course of the rest of the trilogy he levels up toward Superman. Meanwhile, we have Leia on the Superman end of the spectrum (as a princess and rebel leader), though she becomes something of an Underdog for a while when she’s a prisoner where her status doesn’t help her and she loses everything. Han starts just on the Superman side of Everyman, since he has great skills as a pilot and owns a spaceship, then he moves up a bit when he learns to be less selfish and becomes a hero.

Now I find myself looking at my own casts to see how they stack up, though it’s complicated by context in a lot of my books. The wizards in the Enchanted, Inc. series may have magical powers, but they exist in different parts of the scale compared to each other, and things may change when they’re away from work. Katie’s an Underdog in some ways but is considered a Superman by some of the wizards because she can do things they can’t.

Books

Fantasy or Science Fiction?

I just read a book that wasn’t what I expected it to be, but that I’m very glad I read. Before the winter storm hit, I went to the library and stocked up on reading material. I grabbed a book that was displayed face-out. It had a very cozy fantasy-style cover and the library had put a unicorn “fantasy” sticker on the spine, so that was what I was expecting. It turned out not to be fantasy, really. It was closer to science fiction (though with some elements that could be either mystical or scientific, so I’ll let it slide). But it’s not spaceships and robots science fiction. It’s more like Jules Verne science fiction, about underwater exploration, but in a very Victorian way, even if some of their technology is far more advanced than in the Victorian era, possibly in some places more advanced than ours. I suppose you could call it cozy science fiction, though, since it’s low-conflict and there’s no villain, no evil, just people fascinated with nature.

The book is A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall. It’s an epistolary novel, told entirely through letters and documents. There’s a framing story in which some disaster has happened about a year ago that seems to have killed a man and a woman. In the present, the man’s brother and the woman’s sister begin corresponding as they try to piece together what happened to their siblings. As they write to each other, they share whatever information they have, including the letters their siblings wrote to each other, letters they wrote to their siblings (and vice versa), journal entries, correspondence with other people, etc. In the past story, we see a reclusive and anxious woman who lives in an undersea house write to a scholar about something she observed, and the two of them strike up a friendship and eventually fall in love through an ongoing correspondence. Meanwhile, her sister is part of a deep-sea exploration mission and sends reports back home. In the present, the brother and sister are investigating based on what they uncover, and they share their thoughts and findings.

The fun thing about an epistolary novel is that the reader has to make the connections and put together the puzzle pieces to figure things out. The writers don’t discuss much about their world and society because they take it for granted. There’s no narrator to explain things to the reader. The book has a very Victorian tone, and the bits of their society we see seem to reflect that. It appears to be on another world that’s not our earth, and we don’t see what (if any) connection it has to earth, whether this is in our past or in a distant future (which may be why it has a fantasy label on it—it may be secondary world fantasy with or without overt magic).

It’s not a page turner in the usual sense, with lots of action and peril, but I found myself drawn through the story by curiosity about what happened, and I felt a lot of intimacy with the characters, since I was reading their private letters. The scholar fits the mold of the kind of “adorkable wizard” I tend to write, and I found myself identifying way too much with the reclusive woman. Reading between the lines, I got a sense that she has a degree of OCD, which makes me wonder if I should have myself evaluated. There was a suggestion that she was known to be not well, but I related a lot to the way she thought and acted, so she seemed perfectly normal to me. It does take a while for the story to really get going, as we’re following the characters getting to know each other and starting to discover things. Then it picks up in pace and intensity as the pieces start coming together—only to end in a cliffhanger just as things take a turn. I’ll definitely be looking for the sequel. Per Amazon, it’s coming in May.

The promo text on Amazon refers to these books as “magical academia,” which would make it fantasy, so I guess the library wasn’t wrong. It’s definitely on that blurry, hard-to-categorize line. I guess I was expecting a more traditional fantasy setting based on the cover and the unicorn sticker, so it threw me a little to start reading and have underwater habitats and submarines, but it gave me a lot of the same vibes as a cozy fantasy book.

Anyway, I think a lot of my readers would enjoy this. If you liked my Rebel Mechanics books, you might like the Victorian style, and if you like my adorkable wizards you’ll love these characters.

movies, fantasy

Fantasy vs. History

Last summer, I ran across a video about how the aesthetic of “medieval” fantasy is actually more early modern, from the 1600s up through the Victorian era (with pre-Raphaelites and the Gothic revival). The usual adventurer outfit with the high, cuffed boots and long coat is mid 1600s, as is the typical Renaissance festival wench outfit. The fantasy tavern is a 1600s-1700s coaching inn, etc. I posted about it then. Ever since then I’ve been looking at fantasy movies in a different way, and I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the video made it sound. The medieval fantasy movies I’ve been watching lately are pretty medieval. I’m no expert. I’ve just done some research on the topic and I read a lot of expert commentaries about historical things in movies, but I have a general sense for what fits into each period.

The Princess Bride is mostly pretty true to a medieval period, with some exceptions. Westley does have a bit of Leading Character Costume Syndrome, in which the main character wears less historic, more “normal”-looking clothes. He’s a bit closer to 1700s, with the slimmer breeches and loose shirt. He’s just missing the long waistcoat and frock coat. Inigo is similar, though he has the waistcoat but is missing the coat. Vizzini’s outfit is kind of Renaissance, as are some of Buttercup’s princess dresses, and Buttercup’s red dress is hard to place (per Frock Flicks, it’s a decent 15th century dress). Otherwise, the look is actually pretty medieval for most of the characters and the settlement outside the castle. There’s even an open hearth in the castle’s hall, and the female extras have their hair covered and are wearing wimples.

Ladyhawke also has some Leading Character Costume Syndrome, with Navarre and Isabeau wearing more fantasy-type clothes rather than anything true to any period (her dress at the end looks rather 1980s), but everything else in that movie is at least aiming at medieval rather than early modern (though they’re apparently not accurately medieval).

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is pure fantasy. I can’t identify any particular period they’re trying to hit. There are bits and pieces of things thrown into a blender. And that’s okay. This is a fantasy world, so they may as well make up their own thing. The costumes for The Huntsman: Winter’s War are also more fantasy than historical, but the dwarf women do seem to be in the Renaissance festival type outfits, so 1600s. The rest are a lot of leather “adventurer” looks that don’t belong to any particular period. I think the original thesis of that video that started this line of thought was more about people thinking they were doing medieval but missing it by several hundred years.

The Lord of the Rings movies do something interesting, with each culture being from a different time period. The hobbits are pretty much 1700s with the style of clothing. They’ve got the long waistcoats and frock coats. They also have cast-iron stoves and fireplaces. Then we get to the elves, which are basically pre-Raphaelite meets Gothic Revival, so they’re medieval through the lens of the Victorians. Then we get to Rohan, which is essentially Land Vikings. Their clothes and general style are a mix of Viking and various eras of medieval, except for the pants the men wear (men’s pants in fantasy movies are almost never anything close to period, since they aren’t wearing hose, they don’t do the short balloon-type pants of the late 1500s-early 1600s or the big, baggy pants of the 1600s, and they don’t have the tight front/saggy butts of the 1700s-early 1800s. Men’s pants throughout history are pretty weird to modern eyes. I’ll admit that even in my mental costuming for my books, I go with more modern pants because it’s my fantasy world and they can look the way I want them to). We get the open hearth in the hall, too.

I guess that makes the elves most advanced, since they’re Victorian (cosplaying as medieval), and then the hobbits are more advanced than the men if the hobbits have iron stoves and the men still have open hearths.

I’m sure for film, one reason you get period attire rather than going pure fantasy is that they may rent costumes for the background characters instead of making up their own thing. I didn’t pay too much attention to what the people in crowd scenes were wearing in Honor Among Thieves to see if they were likely in rented costumes and, if so, if they were from a particular period. But I would guess that some of the costumes for The Princess Bride and Ladyhawke were rented or possibly from the BBC costume stores. It would be cheaper to rent a lot of costumes designed for costume dramas for the extras than to design fantasy costumes, and that’s going to give you something reasonably authentic for a period. The main actors get costumes made for them, so they’re more likely to go “fantasy” rather than being period, for various reasons, including the actors wanting to have a certain image. A macho movie star may refuse to wear hose or those balloon shorts with hose. Female movie stars are likely to want to either look sexy (and thus flowing hair rather than pinned up under a cap or veil) or be a Strong Female Character in leather pants, regardless of historical accuracy.