VarmintCore™
"Howdy partner" is a gender-neutral greeting.
The Wild West. What is it? Just kidding what if I started my first essay for this like that can you fucking imagine.
But seriously though, what is it?
I feel like historically the genre has been a fantasy playspace for men to imagine if nobody made them wash their balls or whatever. As a big fan of the Wild West*, it’s been frustrating to see even modern interpretations of the genre entrench themselves this way by which I mostly mean WestWorld Season One, a fantastical world where the only limit is the human imagination and anything can happen, such as, uh, dehumanizing sex workers, and being able to choke women to death and stuff. Ah, the glorious future!
Oh fuck sorry, that’s a jpeg of “Tex” from HERInteractive’s Nancy Drew and the Secret of Shadow Ranch (2004). Hold on I’m fixing it.
I really really really liked Outlawed as an investigation of the Wild West as a place beyond boundaries, specifically gendered ones, where refusing to be a part of Society’s extended morality play was as simple as leaving town and holing up in the mountains somewhere. Set in an alternative 19th century America where the population’s been decimated by a flu and the country has regressed into extreme religious patriarchy focused on getting women to produce as many children as possible, the book makes our modern culture’s gender and unspoken religious baggage just sliiiiightly more upfront and unhinged, enough to present it as something you can physically escape for the low price of leaving everything you’ve ever known. The main character goes from being a failure of a 19-year-old bride, unable to get pregnant and on the verge of being put on trial for witchcraft about it, to … just a person, in the woods, with a bunch of other people in the woods, all of whom saw the cards they were handed along with their Official Womanhood Subscription and said actually fuck that.
Oh my god no, this was supposed to be an image of the cover of “Lone Women” by Victor LaValle but it appears to actually be the character of “Dave” from HERInteractive’s Nancy Drew and the Secret of Shadow Ranch (2004) instead! Something’s wrong with my keyboard, so sorry about this folks.
In Lone Women, a recently (like, very, very recently) orphaned Adelaide takes up the state of Oklahoma on its Homesteader Act, seizing a piece of land in the middle of nowhere and bringing her baggage (literally, luggage containing a Dark and Terrible Secret) with her. Here the Wild West also represents freedom from arbitrary social rules that deal an unfair hand — again and again Adelaide comes across neighbors brought to this place to live life on their terms, as well as a cohort of small-town big timers who are actually on the side of Arbitrary Social Rules and pathetically trying to ruin it for everybody.
Oh thank god, I finally got an image to upload without a screenshot from HERInteractive’s Nancy Drew and the Secret of Sha—
(The guy in the middle’s name is “Shorty.” He’s the cook. We suspect him because we found some maps of mineral deposits around Shadow Ranch in his workstation, just FYI.)
I don’t have as much to say about Jackrabbit Homestead but I picked up a copy when I was in Joshua Tree semi-recently. It’s mostly a photography project documenting the single-room homesteads that are still sprinkled across the California desert but also does document some of the real-life oddballs (including several single women!) who chose to partake in California’s Small Tract Act, making structures using stuff like coffee cans, bottles, and magazines, some of which are still standing.
I guess all that’s left to say is YeeHAw.
* Read: Repeated player of HERInteractive’s Nancy Drew and the Secret of Shadow Ranch (2004)