She Kills Monsters

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Scene 3

Scenes 4-6

Scenes 7-10

Scenes 11-13

Scenes 14-16

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Prologue-Scene 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue Summary

The play begins with a cloaked female narrator, described in the stage direction as being modeled after Cate Blanchett’s film role in The Lord of the Rings. The narrator announces the setting as Athens, Ohio, in 1995, a time before the popularity of social media and online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. The unnamed narrator introduces 16-year-old Tilly Evans, one of the rare females who participates in the male-dominated role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons. Tilly emerges onstage and performs a live fight sequence and vanquishes some monsters.

The narrator then introduces Tilly’s older sister, Agnes. In a reenactment performed with shadow puppets, the narrator describes Agnes’s typical teenage interests in boys, pop music, and television as a direct contrast to the magical worlds and evil villains of Tilly’s imagination. An embodiment of everything that is “average,” Agnes doesn’t understand her sister’s hobbies, and the two sisters share little in common. On the night of her college graduation, Agnes wishes that her life were less boring, and the shadow puppets re-enact the car accident that took the lives of Tilly and her parents. The tree that the car crashes into transforms into a dragon and whisks the vehicle away into the sky. The narrator concludes that the story’s center is Agnes and how she learns to broaden her perspective.

Scene 1 Summary

The setting shifts to a role-playing game store where Agnes asks a clerk to help her decipher a notebook she found in Tilly’s room after her death. Chuck, an adolescent dressed like a grunge rocker, comically flirts with Agnes and boasts about his intelligence, gaming skills, and a girlfriend in New York he met on the Internet. He asserts that he is neither overweight nor a nerd, and informs Agnes that Tilly was popularly known in the D&D gaming community as “Tillius the Paladin.” Chuck explains that the notebook contains one of Tilly’s modules, an adventure she had written. Hoping to gain insight on Tilly’s life, Agnes recruits Chuck to help her play the module. He agrees, cautioning her that no romance can happen between them and that she is too old for him.

Scene 2 Summary

In Tilly’s room, Agnes packs away her sister’s belongings as she prepares to move in with her boyfriend, Miles. Miles offers to help, but Agnes tells him to take her belongings to their new place instead. Miles comments on Tilly’s messy room and criticizes her as being “geeky” (13) for playing with action figures and fantasy games. Agnes feigns affection and hurriedly kisses him goodbye to get him out the door.

Agnes quickly turns to Chuck, who suddenly appears from under a table with smoke and lights. Speaking as a wizard, he begins the module, and Agnes sets foot into the world of New Landia, a realm of Tilly’s creation. Inexperienced, Agnes at first doesn’t understand the rules and tries to attack a hooded figure who turns out to be Tilly playing Tillius the Paladin. Shocked and moved to see her sister again, Agnes attempts to hug her, but Tilly tells Agnes that the game isn’t a form of therapy and she needs to immerse herself in the role and the realm in order to play the game properly.

Tilly introduces Agnes to her party: the Demon Queen Lilith Morningstar, and the Dark Elf, Kaliope Darkwalker. Lilith is known for her beauty and fighting strength, and Kaliope is an agile fighter and adept tracker. The characters are sexy, dangerous, and alluring and pose like models on a magazine cover. Agnes at first thinks Chuck has projected his own heterosexual male desires onto the scene, but he assures Agnes that this is essentially how Tilly described them. Tilly announces herself as “healer of the wounded and the protector of lights” (18), and the party begins the “Quest for the Lost Soul of Athens” (18).

Agnes accompanies the party but remains skeptical and sarcastic. The other players slay monsters and head to the cave of Orcus, demon of the underworld and likely possessor of the lost soul. Agnes criticizes their costumes, particularly Lilith’s scanty outfit, and doesn’t participate in renaming herself or choosing alignments that define her character’s traits and skills. For her half-hearted participation, the party dubs her “Agnes the Ass-hatted” (20).

Scene 3 Summary

The players reach Orcus’s cave and find the horned, red demon sitting on a throne of skulls watching the television program, Friends. When Tilly and Agnes challenge him to a battle, he retorts that he is tired of being a villain under constant attack and has decided to quit. At that moment, an adventurer named the great Mage Steve bounds onto the stage and demands Orcus to battle him for possession of the Staff of Suh. Orcus indifferently tosses the weapon to the player and continues his conversation. He tells Tilly that he traded the lost soul, her soul, for a TV/VCR unit so he could continue to watch the program, Twin Peaks. Agnes is surprised to learn that the missing soul is Tilly’s, and Tilly is dismayed that her soul now belongs to Tiamat, the five-headed dragon.

Prologue-Scene 3 Analysis

The play’s prologue presents the two sisters, Agnes and Tilly, as complete opposites; Tilly is the energetic nonconformist whereas Agnes embodies all that is “typical” (8). The narrator emphasizes the ordinariness of Agnes’s life and hyperbolically repeats the word “average” to describe her. She proclaims, “Agnes grew up average. She was of average height, average weight, and average build. She has average parents and grew up in the average town of Athens, Ohio” (8). The repetition suggests that Agnes replicates the monotonous norms of the small town without much critical awareness or resistance.

In stark contrast to Agnes’s “average” existence are Tilly’s imaginative adventures as a teenager who transgresses the expected boundaries of gender and youth culture. The narrator introduces Tilly as a radical presence in the typically all-male realm of Dungeons and Dragons. A rare “Dungeon Master without fear, prejudice, or a penis” (7), Tilly is an outsider as both a role-playing game enthusiast and a female. Unlike Agnes, she is both a member of a subculture and a minority within that marginalized community. The emphasis on being without “fear” or “prejudice” reflects her layered status as an outsider and her commitment to open-mindedness and fairness. Tilly’s fascination with the “vanquishing of pure evil” (8) suggests that her campaign in the D&D world parallels her fight against the confines of traditional gender roles and, as later revealed in Scene 8, sexuality.

Initially, the two sisters represent the opposite ends of social expectations; Tilly is an outsider who challenges the status quo whereas Agnes upholds the norms. However, the prologue also reveals that Agnes has become weary of her predictable life. As the central figure of the play, Agnes will battle her own symbolic “monsters” in coping with the death of her family members and the ways her disregard for her sister’s hobbies may have contributed to Tilly’s experience of isolation.

When Agnes first plays the module, she is sarcastic and disparaging, and her lack of imagination represents a rigidity that fails to respect new and different approaches to life. She initially refuses to engage in the imaginary world, and her derision and indifference is reflected in her tendency to answer questions about her character’s name and alignment (a moral trait) with dull, real-world answers that utterly deny the spirit of imagination that breathes life into the best D&D sessions. Her choice of “Agnes” as her fantasy name, “Democrat” as her alignment, and “a regular sword” (20) as her weapon all reflect the depths of her resistance to the fantasy world that her sister deeply loved and foreshadow her later chagrin at the realization of how little she really knew Tilly. Faced with the unfamiliar realm of role-playing and her own bias that such activity is reserved only for nerds, Agnes at first remains detached from the creative immersion that the game requires. Only when she learns that the “lost soul” sought by the party in fact belongs to Tilly does she begin to consider the game’s importance to her sister and significance to real-world concerns, and from that point, she becomes an earnest participant in her own personal quest to understand Tilly’s experiences.