After E.E. Smith’s hiring as director but before he’d read the script, an unknown source leaked an early concept painting of the blonde villain Imperatrix Ur. Fundamentally aryan, recognizably female, clad in golden armor, descending upon a child with her blade. The death’s head mask did not hide her sex. The child, meanwhile, clearly the innocent victim, yet bearing horns and scaled gray skin. Here were all the symbols of the Light, the one metaphor all religions agreed upon, covering a villain as it attacked a child. Here was a child, covered in reptilian scales and the horns of a goat, her victim. Here was a woman, bearing all the power and implications of being the primary antagonist. Behind them, in a glass casket, a young woman of color sleeps with a single rose in her hand.
The logline that accompanied it read:
After his tribe is slaughtered by the Aurean Empire, a young boy is conscripted into their ranks. To redeem his wicked deeds as an adult, he plots to topple the Empire by …
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