Accept No Imitations: Red Sonja

Alex Ross's Red Sonja is my favourite

When it comes to the matter of Red Sonya & her cousin Red Sonja, I find two wolves barking at one another in my mind.

One barks "Red Sonja was inspired by Robert E. Howard's Red Sonya of Rogatino. Her first adventure was an adaptation of the only Robert E. Howard story Red Sonya of Rogatino appeared in. She inhabits the Hyborian Age, the setting created by Robert E. Howard. Therefore, Red Sonja is ultimately a Robert E. Howard creation, should be acknowledged as such, and Robert E. Howard should always be considered in any discussion with the character."

The other howls "Red Sonja shares her sex, hair colour, swordsmanship, & 7 out of 8 letters in her name with Red Sonya, and that's it. Everything else - origin, setting, religion, equipment, philosophy - is different from Robert E. Howard's character. Even the Hyborian Age she inhabits is ultimately different from Howard's Hyborian Age in several important ways. Therefore, Red Sonja is ultimately not a Robert E. Howard creation, should not be acknowledged as such, and Robert E. Howard should only be considered in any discussion with the character in terms of the differences from his original creation, Red Sonya of Rogatino."

This internal debate is probably why I'm so deathly dreading the new Red Sonja, the new film from the director of 2011's Solomon Kane (which I also had significant issues with)

Everything Old Is New Again

Seems so long ago all those Rose McGowan posters were all over the internet...

Obviously, I’m a fan of Robert E. Howard, and I know the original Sonja(sic) from the short story he wrote ("The Shadow of the Vulture"), where it’s a completely different Sonja.  And then in 1973 Roy Thomas created it for Marvel and gave us the iconic barbarian-woman-in-chains bikini. 
 - M.J. Bassett

There comes a point where one has to ask, where is the line between a new version of a character, and a new character inspired by but distinct to the old? Criticisms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Thor based on differences from the comic are one thing, but it seems misguided to criticise Chris Hemsworth not having red hair like the "original" Thor. So, sometimes, I wonder if there's even any reason for me to criticise anything to do with Red Sonja, because she isn't Red Sonya - not really, in any case.

To reiterate my longstanding mantra on adaptations: adaptations do not have to be faithful to the source material, & fidelity to the source material does not make an adaptation good. What I do demand is that adaptations are as faithful to the source material as they set out to be. If you say your adaptation is not faithful & it isn't, then that's just you doing what you say, which I respect entirely - but if you say your adaptation is faithful & it isn't, we'll be having words. And, of course, if I find aspects of an adaptation superior to the source material, I will happily say so - John Hammond's characterisation in Jurassic Park, or Camina Drummer's expanded role in The Expanse TV series, being particular points for me. It's just that has never been the case for any Robert E. Howard adaptation.

So even though Red Sonja is (and isn't) a Robert E. Howard creation, there is no such ambiguity about the Hyborian Age, the world in which Red Sonja lives. So while I don't have any particular investment in Sonja as a character, I do feel invested in her world - as it is, nominally, the world Robert E. Howard created. So I can't completely divest myself of Red Sonja, since Howard is never far away.

Unfortunately, it means we have to put up with stuff like this.

And director M.J. Bassett — who previously made the solid, entertaining Solomon Kane, based on another Robert E. Howard character — does an admirable job of updating the material to make it less about the male gaze.
 - Jeffrey M. Anderson

We first meet Sonja as a young girl in the thriving land of Hyrkania in the early Hyborian Age (a fictional, mythical era created by writer Robert E. Howard), who is separated from her people after a barbarian warlord conquers the area.
 - Jeff Ewing, Collider

So, with this history, expectations had to be low for a new version of Red Sonja. But, in a pleasant surprise, it’s found a novel way to avoid the Robert E. Howard curse: it doesn’t try to be a Howard adaptation at all... This adaptation does take place in the Hyborian Age, in a recognizably Howard-esque world of unrelenting violence and mystery, but with a more modern sensibility, jettisoning many of the more retrograde ideas in the Howard, Milius, and Thomas source material in favor of a more feminist take on the character. 
 - Sean Gilman shocks us all by implying we've ever had an actual Howard adaptation outside of "Pigeons from Hell" (or... shudder... Kull the Conqueror)

Aspects of her Robert E Howard/Roy Thomas origin have been swept away, including rape and sexual abuse.
 - Rich Johnson, who really should know better than to even inadvertently imply either of those elements were from Howard

“Conan the Barbarian,” based on Robert E. Howard’s timeless pulp novels, more or less marked the high watermark... Like Conan, she was orphaned as a child when her village was wiped out by barbarians...
 - Christopher Lloyd

“In a time before history …” It as a period of peace and harmony during the Hyborian Age (Robert E. Howard’s fictional era, during which the Conan epics also took place), until barbarians begin their campaign of terror, razing settlements to the ground, forcing people to flee and become separated from their families.

 - Mike Massie

Set in the ancient world of creator Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, young Sonja (Sofia Weldon) enjoys a peaceful life with her Hyrkanian tribe deep in a lush forest.
 - Julian Roman, Movieweb

M.J. Bassett, who eventually ended up in the director’s seat, tries to utilize the same solemn and serious approach to the material that John Milius used in the original Conan...
 - Peter Sobczynski

Red Sonja is very loosely a Howard creation, as he had a pirate character by that name
 - Luke Y. Thompson, who can be forgiven given how terrible Google is now

Filmed in Greece and Bulgaria, the movie recreates Howard's Hyborian Age in beautiful locations.
 - Fred Topel

Do the times call for a lady Braveheart? I’m not sure they do, but that’s roughly what we’re getting in M.J. Bassett’s underpowered Red Sonja, the latest reimagining of a character originally conceived in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian... This new Red Sonja doesn’t have much to do with the earlier movie, nor with Marvel, who lost the rights to the character in the 1990s – and as a kind of ecofeminist parable, it also probably wouldn’t have won the approval of the famously reactionary and bigoted Howard.
 - Jake Wilson, who seems to know as much about Howard's highly progressive views of women & his deep disdain for rampant industrialisation as he knows about William Wallace

(Admittedly I don't tend to swear, I just can't resist a Simpsons reference)

Lost in the debate over Sonya vs Sonja is something that's just as important to me - that of Howard's Hyborian Age to the pop-culture "Hyboria."

Contrary to what you might think from my usual Howardian diehard stance, I like Red Sonja - much as I like the Marvel Conan quite a lot. But like the Marvel Conan, I feel Red Sonja is best served as part of her own universe, one that's distinct from Howard's. It's like science fiction versions of The Wizard of Oz, or film noir versions of Macbeth: good fun, but deliberately different rather than being faithful exercises (even when they're near word-for-word translations). It's much easier to do that with Big Red. She is, after all, a quintessentially Métal Hurlant-style heroine, one who dwells in a Hyborian Age more akin to the wild world of a Burroughs or Mœbius, with inhuman mutant hordes swarming a warped planet, bird-winged men riding giant dragonflies from their crystal sky-castle, and gargantuan mechanical tortoises devastating the landscape. 

And the occasional hair-metal fire-demon wearing skintight metal leggings. Both the Howard fan and the Heavy Metal fan in me are screaming, albeit for entirely different reasons.

Howard certainly didn't shy from non-human races, but the few kingdoms left were very much hidden, liminal beings even in Kull's time: by Conan's time, there were barely any kingdoms at all, with most populations located in single lost cities, subterranean lairs, or deep and inhospitable environs. With the sheer number of ant-men, various ape-men, bat-men, beast-men, bird-men, blood-men, cat-men, green-men, hawk-men, snake-men, and witch-men, it's a wonder humans got a word in edgewise. Don't get me wrong, I love that sort of high Sword-and-Sorcery full of non-humans and wild creatures - I just don't like it mixed with the more grounded Howard.

"They are gone," said Brule, as if scanning his secret mind; "the bird-women, the harpies, the bat-men, the flying fiends, the wolf-people, the demons, the goblins—all save such as this being that lies at our feet, and a few of the wolf-men. Long and terrible was the war, lasting through the bloody centuries, since first the first men, risen from the mire of apedom, turned upon those who then ruled the world.

"And at last mankind conquered, so long ago that naught but dim legends come to us through the ages. The snake-people were the last to go, yet at last men conquered even them and drove them forth into the waste lands of the world, there to mate with true snakes until some day, say the sages, the horrid breed shall vanish utterly." 

- Brule, "The Shadow Kingdom" 

In Howard's cosmology, non-human civilisations were gone by the time of Kull, 100,000 years ago, let alone the time of Conan: indeed, aside from the Serpent Men & the wolf-men, many were outright exterminated. Howard's Hyborian Age is thus tonally as well as literally distinct from "Hyboria." The Hyborian Age is pseudohistory mixed with magic; it's the grim reality from which modern myth & legend drew, where modern tribes & peoples could trace their ancestry, & tales of gods & paragons are really accounts of horrors & warriors. It is not an age where non-human civilisations and fantastical physics-defying cities can be explored around every corner (or on floating orbital landmasses), like "Hyboria." 

"Hyboria" is the realm of Red Sonja.

Of course it's a Michael Fleisher creation, it was either him or Bruce Jones.

The Hour of the Dill Pickle Dragon

And that's just the overt fantasy elements. Even a look at the synopsis for 2025's Red Sonja show that this is a very different Hyborian Age from the one Howard created:

As a child, Sonja's homeland of Hyrkania is invaded by barbarians, slaughtering most of her people and forcing her to flee into the wide, mysterious woods nearby. Separated from the remnants of her tribe, she grows to adulthood and searches for other Hyrkanians while worshipping the forest goddess Ashera.

When mercenaries enter the forest and butcher animals for their horns, she tracks the men and discovers they are collecting exotic creatures for gladiator games honoring Emperor Dragan. When Dragan visits the camp to inspect the animals, Sonja uses the distraction to attack the hunters as punishment for their cruelty. She is discovered by Dragan's men and knocked unconscious by Karlak, Dragan's general. Dragan orders that Sonja be taken to the capital to fight in the games.

Dragan is in possession of half of a Hyrkanian book which has given him ancient scientific knowledge, allowing him to power the capital with arcane energy. He reveals that he is searching for the second half of the book to learn the remaining secrets and spread the reach of his power across the world. He hopes that Sonja's map of the uncharted forest will lead him to the exiled Hyrkanian refugees who possess the missing text.

Sonja joins the slaves who will fight in the gladiator pit, and they face off against a giant cyclops, whose emotions are controlled by one of Dragan's mystical devices. Sonja climbs to monster's body to rip off the device and communicates that Dragan is its real enemy. The cyclops attacks the spectator area, injuring Dragan. Before fleeing the capital, Sonja destroys Dragan's energy device.

Sonja and the slave fighters escape to the mountains, pursued by Dragan's soldiers and his lover Annisia, a deadly warrior who suffers from schizophrenia. Dragan promises Annisia that he will marry her if she succeeds in bringing him Sonja's head. Sonja attempts to separate herself from her new allies so that Dragan will target her alone, but the fighters insist on staying with her. They decide to attack the town that supplies Dragan with his creatures to draw him out. As they prepare, Sonja is found by the missing Hyrkanians, who reveal that they possess the second half of the holy book Dragan seeks.

When Dragan arrives with his forces, a battle begins. Dragan's army defeats the Hyrkanians and he gains the second half of the book. Sonja and Annisia face off in combat, and Sonja is mortally wounded. She is saved from a killing blow by her horse, who knocks Annisia away and brings Sonja to the statue of Ashera in the heart of the forest. In a state of near-death delirium, Sonja sees Ashera speak to her in the guise of her dead mother. Ashera heals Sonja's wounds and sends her back to battle with the mission to bring justice to the evildoers.

Sonja returns to her allies who thought her dead, and they attack Dragan once more. Dragan confronts Annisia, who had told him that Sonja was killed, and Annisia learns that Dragan created her schizophrenic condition by giving her fake medicinal potions. In a lover's quarrel, they stab each other and Dragan flees into the wilderness.

Sonja tracks Dragan and confronts him as he takes his dying breaths. He decrees that the second half of the book is worthless since it focuses on healing and nature instead of the power and energy knowledge in the first half. Sonja reveals that she knows he was also a child refugee of Hyrkania, and she feels responsible for his dark turn in life because she lost her connection to him after the disaster. Dragain dies holding her hand and the ripped pages of the book are lost in the wilderness.

Sonja leaves the forest to explore the world. In an epilogue set years later, one of her fighter allies finds her in a tavern and tells her that her help is needed. She gathers her weapons and leaves for a new adventure.

(Shoosht, you, Simpsons references are my therapy.)

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age would see several enormous divergences.

• Put aside the incompatibility of Red Sonja being a Hyrkanian as Howard conceived them, which has been covered to death elsewhere (short version: Howard used hair colour very specifically, so if he ever wrote about a woman warrior with red hair & green eyes, then they would have to be of Vanir rather than Hyrkanian ancestry). The idea of even a single tribe of Howard's Hyrkanians being "invaded & slaughtered by barbarians" as if they were happy peaceful villagers is just as risible to me as when that was applied to Howard's Cimmerians. Howard's Hyrkanians are the ancestors of the Tatars, Huns, Mongols, and Turks, who were the conquering nightmares of history: five hundred years after Conan's time, they were the eastern curtain which closed over the Hyborian kingdoms, with the Picts to the west, only the great Nordic drift sending them back eastward. These Hyrkanians are clearly not Howard's Hyrkanians, as it is inconceivable one of Howard's Hyrkanians would struggle at all to find another of her people. 
• Hyrkania is a land of steppes; while forests surely may exist somewhere in the vast landscape, it seems unlikely that they would have a forest goddess (especially one with a name more Shemitic than Hyrkanian)
• There is an empire already existing in the vicinity of Hyrkania - Turan - as well as the Golden Kingdoms, Iranistan, Vendhya, Ghulistan, & Kosala. The kings of Turan during the Conan stories are Yildiz & Yezdigerd. It is difficult to see room for such an empire as Dragan's existing in Howard's Hyborian Age, unless one went past the Sea of Vilayet to the Eastern Desert.
• Karlak is some sort of baboon-man, evocative of the many beast-people of the Marvel comics. The idea these clearly non-human beings are common enough to mingle among Hyborian humans is as tonally incompatible with Howard's Hyborian Age as seeing a half-naked purple giant that's supposedly a Hyperborean in a Zamorian inn.
• Howard's Hyrkanians were descendents of Lemurian slaves who rebelled against the pre-Stygians in the east: it's difficult to imagine they would have ever developed "ancient scientific knowledge" unless it was in fact pre-Stygian (which seems deeply unlikely given later revelations)
• I cannot say anything bad about the giant cyclops, because I love my big Harryhausen monsters (& given Howard loved King Kong, he must've loved Harryhausen's mentor Willis O'Brien). Howard never specifically mentioned cyclopes in the Hyborian Age, but it is the sort of thing he might have as a very rare occurence in some remote wilderness
• Not in the Wiki synopsis, but gleaned from other sources: Osin is a "Prince of Shem." That may be for the film, but with that name & background, he certainly isn't a Prince of Howard's Shem.

I could actually watch the film & do a "filmgoer's guide," but at this point... why? I never bothered to watch The Rings of Power, or Foundation, or any number of other adaptations of some of my favourite worlds that I know diverged wildly from the source material, even if folk say they're enjoyable enough "as long as I switched my literary brain off." Folk should know by now that they ask the impossible - I learned my lesson from Conan the Barbarian in 2011.

It's... it's just different. It's not Howard's Hyborian Age. In and of itself, that's fine - you just can't say it's Howard's Hyborian Age, which is the impression people get from media. None of this is new, of course. I've been evangelising Howard's original works since this blog started, so I'm used to all the old wars over Uberboreans & Aquiromians & Nemedian Navies & GIANT MECHANICAL TORTOISES. It was bad enough back in the Rose McGowan days. But there comes a point where it seems completely redundant to say "wait a minute, this is different from what I was expecting," like people who complain about anything that happened in any Star Trek series released after Star Trek Discovery - dude, if you didn't like it the first time around, why would you expect anything after it to be different? I let everyone who watched Discovery enjoy it in peace, I went back to the Trek I enjoy, & we all got on with our lives.

Though I don't think I'll ever get over GIANT MECHANICAL TORTOISE

As such, I'm quite happy to treat Red Sonja as a fun & bombastic part of that mad Marvel Conan world that had limitless kingdoms of beast-men, boundless sorcery, and unbridled excess - a woman in a mail swimsuit doesn't seem that strange when she's fighting snake-haired dragons alongside a barbarian warrior wearing less than she is, does it?  

The Body as Armour

Love Krenkel's work, but his take on Howard's "Sonja" is quite a bit more ragged & wild than Howard's depiction.

Folk miss the point whenever they bring up the lack of armour coverage on Frank Thorne's iconic gear for Sonja, & I couldn't count the number of reviews who seemed to think it was simply the height of intellectual metatextual analysis to say "I say, that doesn't look like it could do much for protection, does it?" It isn't meant to be functional armour in the first place! Any idiot can see that a few triangles aren't going to offer much protection, why even point it out? 

Like the comic Conan, Sonja's body is her armour - evoking the heroic age of Greece, where classical sculptors depicted mighty warriors entirely nude save for shield & weapon, with maybe the distinctive Corinthian helm alone to indicate their status. This was to indicate their divine, or superhuman, nature, that they are either outright invulnerable to mere mortals, or are simply too skilled for their foes to even land a blow. Comic Sonja and Conan are Achilles, Theseus, the Dying Gaul, & in the Renaissance, Michelangelo's David, Rubens' Hercules, & Jacques-Louis David's Leonidas. That is the tradition Comic Conan & Sonja are part of - the fact they are strategically covered by scant garments is a concession to modern considerations about modesty. 

This sculpture of Achilles & Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, depicts both completely lacking in "sensible armour" apart from their helms.

"Absolutely outrageous, why can't Conan wear some reasonable armour like that nice lady beside him..."

Ironically, it is that same concession to modesty which perpetuates the pervading opinion of Sonja's costume being purely about the "male gaze." There is undoubtedly an element there, as there is in many things - but it is not purely & solely to serve such limited perspectives as "because adolescent boys like it." This is illustrated well in Howard's work, where his nudity is very equal opportunities, & serves a variety of functions beyond the sensual - it indicates cultural divergences, class differences, strength and weakness in different contexts, spiritual purity and debased debauchery, humanity in its greatest prime as well its abbhorent worst. Sonja's armour or lack thereof may not be directly analogous to Conan's armour or lack thereof in the comics due to modern society's warped & unnuanced treatment of sex in general, but Sonja is always depicted first & foremost as a warrior. It is a shame to deny that because of preconceptions about her appearance.

In any case, if Howard were to write about a Hyrkanian warrior woman who could only take a man who could defeat her in combat, then I'd wager she'd resemble Khutulun more than Sonya.

Even people who have an idea of the source material have interpretations that I... disagree with:

On the scale of storytelling ambition, Red Sonja is pure pulp, exactly like the fiction it is based on by Robert E. Howard, who invented the sword and sorcery literary sub-genre 100 years ago. It is meant to entertain on the basest level of high adventure, founded on the notion that splitting heads is fun.

Here, it is way more difficult to measure faithfulness to the source material, as Howard’s character was a musket-packing mama in 16th-century Turkey. It was in the 70s, when Marvel comics had a license on Conan from the Howard estate, that the modern version of Red Sonja came to be.

Comic writer Roy Thomas transported her thousands of years back in time to the Hyborian Age for Marvel’s Red Sonja series, while artist Barry Windsor-Smith stuck her in the famous chain mail bikini. As this imagery is her pop culture imprint, it was jarring at first to be asked to accept Lutz as the famously statuesque barbarian.

 - Michael Talbot-Haynes, FilmThreat

I'll be kind & just say that just because Howard only meant to "entertain on the basest level," that doesn't mean that's all there is - certainly it's not why I still read & promote his work. (Though I will give props to Michael, as well as John Dodge, Brian Eggert, Sara Michelle Fetters, Bob Foster, Keith Garlington, Gil Macias, & Matt Morrison, for also actually doing due diligence.)

So after much hemming & hawing about Red Sonja & her place in the wider Robert E. Howard universe, I think I've arrived at an amicable conclusion - she is part of it, distantly, but there all the same. Same for all the different Conan "universes": Conan the Adventurer, Dark Horse's Conan, the two cinematic Conans. All are distinct planets in their own right, sometimes crossing each other's orbits, occasionally seeing some astrally projected cross-pollination - but all life on those worlds is sustained by the light of one star.

Red Sonja's out on-demand. There's always the hope people have learned how to research since the 2010s, but alas, I have my doubts. I guess I'll just have to bear the Red Sonyja Antiszyzygy, of a she-devil that is & isn't part of Howard's remarkable ouvre, in a world that is & isn't Howard's creation. 

Accept No Imitations.

Just so everyone knows the score... (I jest, of course: Sonya & Sonja would probably just have a good drink together in the Tavern At The Edge of Time, maybe having a girl's night with Brigette Nielsen, Angelica Bridges, & Matilda Lutz. Ach, throw in Rose McGowan while we're at it, she deserves it!)