User blog:ThatScrewyDuck/PE Proposal: Lord Roderick

This is another character who’s only recently been approved elsewhere that I wanted to propose… both to see if he’s approved here and to get some experience composing well-written and concise proposals. Oh, and just in case the question crosses anyone’s mind, no, the fact that I just did a proposal a few days ago and am already doing another one is not an indication that I’m going to start making them more regularly. It just so happens that this is a guy, along with Warren T. Rat/Cat, that I’ve meant to do for a little while, and I’m now covering both in a short period of time. That being established, let’s review our latest candidate and get a consensus on him…

What’s the work?
Jack the Giant Slayer is a live-action movie from early 2013 directed by Bryan Singer (who's primarily know for the X-Men movies, as well as the recent biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody) that acts as a modern re-imagining of the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk. Set in the fictional Kingdom of Cloister, Jack heads into town on his uncle’s behalf to sell a horse and carriage to get supplies to fix their roof, only to come across a monk who sells him magic beans, telling him they have the power to change the world. Later on, Princess Isabelle, whom he earlier defended from some lowlifes in the market, flees the castle to get out of an unwanted marriage that his father, King Brahmwell, is trying to arrange between her and his chief advisor, Lord Roderick, and comes across his house. However, one of the beans is accidently rained on and sprouts into a massive beanstalk, carrying the house and Isabelle into the sky as Jack falls to the ground while trying to get her out.

When he wakes up in the morning, he finds himself in the presence of the king and a good chunk of his army, who are in search of the princess. When Jack explains what’s happened, King Brahmwell sends a small troop of knights led by Elmont, the captain of the guard, and his second-in-command, Crawe, to retrieve her, with Jack, Roderick and Roderick’s attendant Wicke volunteering to go along. Little do most of them know, though, that they’ll be entering a dangerous realm filled with a race of giants who once invaded the kingdom and were exiled by the old king, King Erik, using a crown that was made to control them. While everyone’s heard the legends, most don’t believe it due to it all being ancient history, but they’re about to find out the legends are very, very real…

Who is he and what does he do?
Lord Roderick is the treacherous chief advisor to King Brahmwell who has earned his trust enough for him to arrange a marriage between him and his daughter, one that he’s immediately introduced admitting to Wicke he couldn’t care less about. What he does care about are his secret plans to conquer the kingdom of Cloister and much, much more using a set of magic beans and the old crown that was created to control the giants that he stole from King Erik’s tomb sometime shortly before the start of the story. When a monk steals the beans from him to prevent him from using them for nefarious purposes, he has him tracked down and captured, though not before he gives them to Jack to keep them out of his reach. He then has the monk tortured, and when he still refuses to confess what he did with the beans, Roderick personally stabs and kills him.

When he later volunteers to accompany Elmont’s squad of knights along with Wicke, he gradually has them picked off. First, when they encounter an intense storm on the way up, which gives the whole group trouble, he encourages Wicke to “lighten the load” by cutting the rope that acts as a safety harness, callously dropping several members of their search party that were pleading for help to their deaths, then framing it as an accident to the others. Shortly after reaching the top of the beanstalk, he discreetly approaches Jack and forces him to hand over the magic beans he knows he has and keep quiet about it by threatening the lives of him and his uncle. Then, when the remaining group splits up into two, he gleefully kills another loyal knight by pretending he spots Isabelle while they’re at the edge of a cliff, then shoving him off while he’s distracted. However, a couple of giants then ambush him and Wicke, with one of them snatching up Wicke and eating him, but Roderick saves himself by using the magic crown to force them to obey him, just like he was planning to all along.

He then makes his way to the giant’s kingdom where they have Princess Isabelle and Elmont captive. While they’re initially relieved and think he’ll save them, Roderick quickly makes it clear he’s got no intention to do any such thing, and declares to the now enslaved giants that at dawn, they will first attack Cloister, then move on to their neighbors, then travel overseas to conquer other lands… oh, and he gives them permission to eat Isabelle and Elmont for that night’s feast. Thankfully, they’re saved by Jack when he manages to kill the giant’s cook after evading capture earlier.

Deciding they need to hurry back and warn the king of Roderick’s treachery and his planned assault on the kingdom, Jack and Isabelle start heading back down the beanstalk while Elmont stays behind to stop him by ambushing and killing him. When Roderick arrives at the beanstalk with his army of giants, Elmont does just that, with General Fallon and the others letting it happen, since while they can’t directly harm him, they can allow him to be killed by someone else. They soon engage in a duel in a cave, with Roderick almost pushing him over a waterfall. He then slowly and sadistically starts stabbing his hands and fingers with a knife to get him to lose his grip. However, he makes the mistake of pausing to taunt him by asking “you thought you were the hero of this story”, to which Elmont responds “I may not be the hero, but at least I get to see how it ends”, after which he grabs Roderick’s wrist and breaks it, then stabs him in the chest with the knife he was holding. Roderick then crawls along the ground pleading for help before succumbing to his wound, putting an end to him and his part in the story.

Does he have any redeeming qualities or a valid excuse for his actions?
That’s a very easy no. Roderick is an unapologetically shallow, self-centered and power-hungry sleazebag with no care for anyone but himself. Wicke was his only real ally, and when he was suddenly eaten by giants, Roderick was only shocked and scared by their sudden appearance. He never says a word about him afterwards or even takes a moment to mourn his death, so I think it’s apparent he never really cared about him. Obviously, he was never loyal to the king either, and just somehow did a good enough job of gaining his trust that he never suspected his real intentions.

Is he heinous by the standards of the work?
The giants are definitely a nasty bunch, what with their penchant for eating people and wanting to invade the surface to get revenge on Cloister just for being exiled back to their own land of Gantua. However, none of them do much that’s out of the ordinary considering the nature of their species. Even General Fallon, one of the very few who’s given a distinct personality, as well as the closest thing they have to a leader/king, doesn’t individually do a whole lot; he kills and eats Crawe when he insults him, and he really has it out for Princess Isabelle since she’s King Erik’s descendant, going out of his way to be the one to eat her, then tries to do the same to Jack when he tries to protect her. However, that’s all he really has going for him outside of the desired freedom his entire race wants (not that that’s a good thing since it would mean free reign to roam and eat whatever/whomever they want).

Roderick, however, is only a human who happily murders and backstabs pretty much all of his supposed allies when he gets the chance, and had every intention of using the giants to first lay waste to his own kingdom, then all of the neighboring ones before taking his conquest global. He may have been killed off before he got to do any of that, but he still comes off as far worse than the giants, since for them, it’s primarily about having more to eat rather than power or oppression. Overall, he probably has the biggest actual and attempted body count of anyone in the film, and had bigger and more ambitious goals than the giants despite being just a regular person with a lust for power, which really makes what he does and attempts to do stand out, at least for me.

What’s the verdict?
He doesn’t win many points for originality or depth (then again, the movie itself didn’t have much of either as well… which isn’t to say I didn’t like it, I found it decent, but it wasn’t anything extraordinary), nor is he one of the most shocking or repulsive purely evil characters I’ve come across, not by a long shot, but I do think he’s a solid keeper regardless. What do you think?