8 Great Monster Hunters Power Grid By The Mary Sue StaffOct 24th, 2012, 12:26 pm You are seeing this message because you have javascript disabled. To use our slideshows you need to enable javascript. There's no cross domain hackery or tracking voodoo, it's just some sweet jQuery animations. Please, think of the animations. In the meantime, enjoy the html version below. I guess. If that's your thing. Allow Us To Explain Depending on which universe you live in, monster hunting can be lucrative business. Or not so lucrative, as the Ghostbusters have discovered from time to time. Monsters are, well, monstrous, and not many people can claim affection for them. So what’s a person to do? Kill them, of course! Some of the hunters we've included on this list work for an organization and/or get paid for their trouble, but most hunt down creatures of the night for revenge, for fun, or for some combination of both. As usual, this list is dedicated to the runners up: Professor Van Helsing, the Grimms, the Ghostbusters, and the Monster Squad. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? Buffy Summers You can’t have a list of supernatural hunters without Buffy. She who hangs out a lot in cemeteries. Slayer, comma, The. Killing vampires, thwarting demon plots and averting the apocalypse is Buffy’s calling, but I’ve never understood why it wasn’t her literal job. As in, why the heck does the Watcher’s Council not pay her for it?! Buffy might not have needed health benefits—super healing powers tend to render hospital visits for things like broken bones and stab wounds unnecessary—but would throwing a weekly stipend her way be too much to ask? She saved the world multiple times (or “a lot,” as her tombstone says), but as far as I can tell the Council never sent a dime her way so she wouldn’t have to get a part-time job after her mom died (pause for wretched sobbing... OK, I’m good now). Really, paying their slayers would be a practical decision for the Council. A slayer without any financial obligations is free to devote herself to killing baddies 24/7, and without the stress that dogged Buffy throughout season six she’d have been much better able to concentrate. Plus, with the exception of Buffy, slayers don’t tend to live that long. It’s not like most of them would collect retirement benefits. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? Blade You can never have too many vampire hunters, AMIRITE? But I think we can all admit Blade is special. Created in the ‘70s by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, Blade was a super-cool, leather jacket-wearing badass. His original story from the comics is not too far off from the one you’ve seen in the films starring Wesley Snipes. His mom was in the midst of giving birth to him when a vampire bit her and...surprise! It gave Blade awesome powers. Blade gets all the cool parts of being a vampire and almost none of the weaknesses. He’s got superhuman strength, speed, quick healing, a prolonged life, and the ability to sense other supernatural creatures. He’s also trained in martial arts and is an expert at edged weapons. What he doesn’t have is a weakness to garlic or sunlight. Handy in his line of work. And by work we mean fun. Blade is one of our hunters who has a real passion for the job that doesn’t pay. He’s pretty angry he never got to know his mom and knows vampires are responsible. So even though he’s partly one, he’s dedicated his life to rubbing them out. And he’s pretty good at it. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? Rick Deckard, Blade Runner What is Rick Deckard, star of the seminal work of sci-fi noir Blade Runner, doing on a list of monster hunters, you ask? Well, because hunting monsters is his job. He's a Blade Runner. In the alarmingly quickly approaching setting of Earth in 2019, humanity is colonizing the stars. And can you blame them? Earth's kind of a shi -- I mean. It's not very pleasant. Most species on the planet other than us are extinct and the population is dwindling. Space colonization is only possible because of the creation of lifelike androids known as Replicants that perform menial, dangerous, or otherwise unwanted jobs, like mining, construction, and prostitution. Replicants are indistinguishable from humans, aside from needing slightly more time to form instinctive emotional reactions, and are banned from setting foot on Earth. Hence, Blade Runners: Replicant-specific bounty hunters who detect and "retire" rogue androids. "But Replicants aren't monsters!" Of course Replicants are monsters. Okay, not in the sense that they are indiscriminately destructive and dangerous, although some of them are. In the sense that they represent our worst fears about humanity and humanity's worst fears. Replicants are the technology that outpaces our own intelligence and may grow to control us some day. They're the selfish human desire to retain our own lives at the expense of others'. They're the other hiding in plain sight among our everyday lives. They're that which lacks empathy, restraint, and other characteristics of the "humane." And worst of all, they are the doom we deserve, because we created with our own lack of humanity. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? Scooby Doo’s Mystery Incorporated Scooby Doo, the most skeptic friendly monster hunting show out there. Also the most psychologically harrowing, when put in the context of our monster-hunter-lover culture. Don't believe me? You know how Scooby Doo goes, right? The gang drives up to a new town. Tumbles out of the van. Discovers the place is being haunted by a legendary ghost, ghoul, or other supernatural baddie. Has a musical interlude where folks run in and out of doors in a hallway in a way that doesn't really make any architectural sense. Eventually figures out that the whole thing's a hoax, and it was that secondary character we offhandedly mentioned in the first five minutes all along! They would have gotten away with it, too! See, in the Scooby Doo/X-Files crossover, Scully wins every time, because there aren't any actual monsters in the Scooby Doo Universe (ok, excepting some movie adaptations, etc). So why is this depressing? Because in the Scooby Doo universe... the monsters are people. Your next door neighbor. The shop owner down the street. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? Allison Argent, Teen Wolf It would be so easy for Allison Argent, girlfriend of werewolf Scott McCall and youngest of a family of werewolf hunters, to be a boring, awful character. She could have ended up nothing more than damsel-in-distress arm candy, a convenient plot device in human form so Scott could have someone to angst about and freak out over rescuing. (To be fair, he does do a fair bit of angsting about her, especially in season one—but that's just how he is.) But Allison Argent's not just arm candy. She's a kick-ass teenage girl who likes archery, pretty clothes, going to prom, hanging out with her boyfriend, and learning to be a hunter, not necessary in that order. Far from being a damsel in distress, season one saw her take charge of her own safety in the midst of all the supernatural insanity that is Beacon Hills. I could write a book on how awesome gender representation in Teen Wolf is (if you haven't tried the show out, don't let the fact that it's on MTV throw you off—it's almost guaranteed to be at least five times better than you think it is), but insofar as Allison is concerned, I'm going to let her speak for itself: "I wanna not be scared. That night in the school I felt utterly weak, like I needed somebody to come in and rescue me. I hate that feeling. I wanna feel stronger than that. I wanna feel powerful." See? She’s great! She took something of a dark turn in season two, losing her mother and being manipulated by her grandfather into becoming a werewolf killing machine… but as morally dark a character as Allison became, the fact that she was a "love interest" with a character arc more or less independent of her boyfriend is nothing less than awesome. She's been subject to a lot of (unjustified, in my opinion) backlash from fans for her actions, but I for one am looking forward to her season three redemption arc. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? Elsa Bloodstone We'll admit we only know Elsa Bloodstone from the wildly non-canonical miniseries Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., which was sort of like... actually we can't really say with confidence that it's like anything else. Imagine Warren Ellis taking a group of at best B-Level Marvel heroes that nobody who isn't really into comics has ever heard of. Then making up a fake but patently obvious allegory for S.H.I.E.L.D. called H.A.T.E. for them all to work for. Except, contrary to the title, they quit working for H.A.T.E., and it's Nick Fury crossed with Venture Bros.'s Hunter Gathers leader Dirk Anger in pretty much the first issue and spend the rest of the series actively working against H.A.T.E. It's a series where people get kicked, and then explode; Fin Fang Foom pukes up his own heart and then dies, and a tyrannosaurus named Devil Dinosaur (an actual Marvel character with more than thirty years of history) is the ultimate villain. But anyway, Elsa Bloodstone. Take Hellboy. Make him a human chick with an amulet that gives her strength and invulnerability. You're getting close to Elsa Bloodstone, who survived being raised by her monster hunter father by being able to best archdemons at less than a year old. With a spoon. Who had a robot nanny that tortured her when she failed monster-fact pop quizzes. Who carries around a guitar case with two uzis and a rifle in it. Who once decided that opening it would be too much hassle and just beat the Broccoli Men to death with an electric guitar instead. Nextwave: it's in your room, touching your stuff. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? Finn and Jake, Adventure Time Oh my Glob, guys, let me tell you about Finn and Jake. Okay, I'm not really sure what to say. As the resident heroes of the land of Ooo, Finn and Jake fight monsters, rescue princesses, perform tasks, settle disputes, and otherwise challenge themselves with feats of exploration and physical accomplishment. Finn feels an intense need to help those around him because of a traumatic period in his life when he felt without help. As an orphaned baby, Finn once "made boom boom on a leaf" and then fell on it. Despite his cries, no one near wished to associate with such a "boom boom baby," until Jake's mom came along and adopted the apparently last human in the world to raise alongside her two dog sons. And so are heroes born. Good luck against the lich, guys! Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? Ellen and Jo Harvelle, Supernatural Supernatural's attitude toward female characters is… um… problematic. Basically, they all get killed. If a female character is introduced, you can be damn sure she's going to hang around long enough to forge some sort of emotional connection to one or both of the protagonist Winchester brothers before either A) being written off the show in a way that makes no damn sense (see: Anna) or, more likely, B) dying in some gruesome way, as is the case with Ellen and Jo Harvelle. (I should note here that last season saw Bobby and Castiel, the show's most longstanding male secondary characters, get killed off as well… but that's season seven. And we don't talk about season seven.) Ellen (Samantha Ferris), the show's matriarch figure, ran hunter gathering spot the Roadhouse before it was unceremoniously burned to the ground in season two. She subsequently gets back into hunting, though she’s not too keen on her daughter Jo (Alona Tal) following in her footsteps. What's so great about the Harvelles is that, in the midst of all the never-ending Winchester family drama, Ellen and Jo had a positive, realistic mother-daughter relationship. Sure, they fought—as a headstrong mother and her headstrong daughter are going to do—but you knew they'd always do the right thing by each other. Which is what makes their death in season five—Jo is mortally wounded, and Ellen stays by her daughter's side to trigger the explosion that gives the Winchesters a chance to escape—all the more heartbreaking. Theirs was one of the only healthy family relationships in the show (say what you want about Sam and Dean, their relationship is way too codependent); losing the Harvelles was not only one of the most gutwrenching moments in a show all too full of them, it also deprived future seasons of a pair of awesome ladies who could be depended upon to take the Winchesters down a peg or two when needed. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +? [View All on One Page] Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?Pages: 1 2Have a tip we should know? [email protected] Filed Under: Adventure TimeBladeBlade RunnerBuffy the Vampire SlayerElsa BloodstoneScooby-DooSupernaturalTeen Wolf Follow The Mary Sue: Twitter Join the Conversation Load More
