For those of you who missed the CONsole Room convention this weekend in Minneapolis (which I'll excuse this time, but 2015 is just around the corner!) we had a very wonderful convention. ATB Publishing was there, talking about their forthcoming projects now that they've sorted out their reorganization and are ready to follow up their debut project, the really wonderful 'Outside In'. (Which I participated in!) And the publisher himself, Arnold T. Blumberg, announced one particular project that I've been waiting to say something about for a while now--they will be bringing out a compilation of my Storytelling Engines columns!
This will include every single one of the comic-related Storytelling Engines, revised and expanded to include the feedback I got from my readers. In addition, there will be about a dozen brand-new columns exclusive to the book, including such topics as the "Hard-Traveling Heroes" era of Green Lantern, the Adams/O'Neal era of Batman, Solomon Kane, Amethyst, the Marvel Cineverse, and more! And while I'm certainly proud of my original columns, I think that they benefited greatly from a chance to revisit them, polish them, and in at least a few cases incorporate material that simply wasn't available to me when I posted them those many years ago. (Spider-Woman, for example, got an examination of the Claremont and Nocenti runs in the back half of her series, which wasn't collected when I first wrote the piece.)
So if you've liked my Storytelling Engines, I hope you'll be interested in picking up this volume when it's released. There's no official date yet, and I hope everyone understands that small press publishing doesn't exist in the same linear relationship to time that the rest of us do (which reminds me, 'Rip Hunter, Time Master' is going to be in there) but I also hope you'll watch this space for further announcements as we get closer to finalizing the release. I'm really very proud of this book, and I hope that you'll all enjoy it.
Showing posts with label cult fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cult fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Thursday, January 09, 2014
Five Things That Really Surprised Me In DC's 'Showcase Presents' Collections
If I said that I was surprised at being considered "knowledgeable" about Marvel's history, that goes double for DC. I never even read DC Comics until I was in high school, having utterly rejected the output of the company as a child, based primarily on Superman #337, which made so little sense to my four-year-old self that I pretty much gave up on everything associated with the company. (If you don't know who Don-El and the Superman Emergency Squad are, the thing is sheerest gibberish.) It wasn't until my future brother-in-law told me that DC had really improved its output that I decided to take a flyer on their comics...and promptly ran headlong into 'Armageddon 2001', right after deciding that 'Hawk and Dove' was my new favourite comic. (DC Comics: Proudly crushing the dreams of its fanbase for over two decades.)
And yet, here I am, having read most of the Silver Age output of DC and a good chunk of the Bronze Age as well. What really surprised me about it? What do I want you to know? Well...
1) Some of their best material wasn't superhero stuff. Before Julius Schwartz kick-started the Silver Age by recreating most of their superhero properties with a sci-fi twist, DC was surviving the lull in interest in guys in funny outfits by publishing a wide variety of comics in a number of different genres. And even after the superhero genre took off, DC hedged their bets for several decades. They published war comics, westerns, horror and romance...and they produced a lot of brilliant, iconic material. House of Secrets and House of Mystery were both excellent, especially under Joe Orlando, and Joe Kubert's Sergeant Rock and Enemy Ace were both legitimate works of high art. Jonah Hex was such a brilliant, ahead-of-its-time western that it's a damn shame that it produced such a loud, stupid, anti-quality movie. And they even produced some good fantasy comics, like 'Warlord' and 'Amethyst', before it became apparent that the audience for comic books had diminished to superhero fans and nothing but. Changing audience tastes were as big a part of the problem for DC as anything else.
2) The Bronze Age was really rough on DC. One thing I've noticed about reading Marvel vs reading DC is that I look more and more forward to reading Marvel's books as they get into the Bronze Age (and even beyond, into the Eighties and Nineties)...but DC's superhero books got weaker and weaker as they went on. Part of it was the way they went deeper and deeper into their own over-complicated mythos; the aforementioned Superman #337, which involved a renegade member of the Superman Emergency Squad escaping Kandor and being attacked by a whole gaggle of supervillains who were all Superman in disguise, was a classic example. It also served as an example of the way that they got more and more obsessed with gimmick plots and bait-and-switch "twist endings"; every issue seemed to revolve around creating some impossible situation, then coming up with a contrived explanation for it all. (And all in twenty-two pages...DC took a long time to adapt to the concept of the "multi-parter", and it shows.) But mostly, and I think Chris Sims has also said this, DC was trying so hard to be Marvel that they forgot how to be DC. Marvel was "hip", it was "relevant", and it catered to teenagers and young adults...and so DC wrote all of their comics like they were going through a mid-life crisis, using the slang that all the teeners were into and chasing the hip trends. And there is nothing guaranteed to feel more awkward than watching someone in their forties try to act like a teenager. The Bronze Age was full of DC comics that were trying too hard, and it showed.
3) DC's second-tier heroes were second to nobody. That said, DC had some of the most fun back-ups and second-tier superhero titles in the business, especially in the early Silver Age. The Doom Patrol, the Metal Men, Metamorpho, the Elongated Man, Hawkman and Adam Strange were all great titles worth picking up and plowing through in a single sitting. Even supposedly ultra-lame characters like Aquaman had surprisingly great solo titles. They all floundered a bit in the Bronze Age, when DC wasn't sure what to do with themselves (actually, now that I think of it, Marvel floundered in the mid-Nineties the same way when faced with a challenge to their teen-cred from Image). But they had some great material in there.
4) DC did a better job of imitating Marvel when they used Marvel writers. Admittedly, there's not a lot of material from the Eighties in the 'Showcase Presents' series, primarily due to royalty issues, but the stuff they did put out shows that when Marvel writers crossed over to DC, they produced some fun material. Batman and the Outsiders, while not an instant classic, was a solid title with a lot of Eighties team book energy, while Booster Gold deserves a lot more credit than it got for trying something new and interesting with a character who wasn't your typical superhero. And although it doesn't have a black-and-white volume, the Teen Titans absolutely exploded in that era.
5) Comics in the Silver Age were freaking mental. Between the super-compressed storytelling that necessitated very sudden plot developments (one issue of Aquaman announced, in the span of one panel, that there was an ancient city filled with evil demons that only came into alignment with our universe once every thousand years, and this was one of those periods of alignment--this would have been about ten issues of foreshadowing and build-up in a modern comic, but Aquaman got it out of the way in less than half a page), the abrupt conclusions that returned everything to the status quo, and the assumption that they were writing for an audience of small children who accepted arbitrary rules to their stories much better than adults, DC wrote some of the craziest stuff you can imagine. Superdickery makes fun of it all, primarily because it does look pretty silly when you imagine it as part of the same line of comics that gave you 'Identity Crisis', 'The Dark Knight Returns' and 'Watchmen', but there's a certain perverse glory to it all if you just take it as an a priori assumption that it's not going to make a lick of sense and let it all flow over you. You really do have to read DC's Silver Age work differently than you do modern comics...most of the complaints from modern fans are from people who either can't or won't do exactly that.
And yet, here I am, having read most of the Silver Age output of DC and a good chunk of the Bronze Age as well. What really surprised me about it? What do I want you to know? Well...
1) Some of their best material wasn't superhero stuff. Before Julius Schwartz kick-started the Silver Age by recreating most of their superhero properties with a sci-fi twist, DC was surviving the lull in interest in guys in funny outfits by publishing a wide variety of comics in a number of different genres. And even after the superhero genre took off, DC hedged their bets for several decades. They published war comics, westerns, horror and romance...and they produced a lot of brilliant, iconic material. House of Secrets and House of Mystery were both excellent, especially under Joe Orlando, and Joe Kubert's Sergeant Rock and Enemy Ace were both legitimate works of high art. Jonah Hex was such a brilliant, ahead-of-its-time western that it's a damn shame that it produced such a loud, stupid, anti-quality movie. And they even produced some good fantasy comics, like 'Warlord' and 'Amethyst', before it became apparent that the audience for comic books had diminished to superhero fans and nothing but. Changing audience tastes were as big a part of the problem for DC as anything else.
2) The Bronze Age was really rough on DC. One thing I've noticed about reading Marvel vs reading DC is that I look more and more forward to reading Marvel's books as they get into the Bronze Age (and even beyond, into the Eighties and Nineties)...but DC's superhero books got weaker and weaker as they went on. Part of it was the way they went deeper and deeper into their own over-complicated mythos; the aforementioned Superman #337, which involved a renegade member of the Superman Emergency Squad escaping Kandor and being attacked by a whole gaggle of supervillains who were all Superman in disguise, was a classic example. It also served as an example of the way that they got more and more obsessed with gimmick plots and bait-and-switch "twist endings"; every issue seemed to revolve around creating some impossible situation, then coming up with a contrived explanation for it all. (And all in twenty-two pages...DC took a long time to adapt to the concept of the "multi-parter", and it shows.) But mostly, and I think Chris Sims has also said this, DC was trying so hard to be Marvel that they forgot how to be DC. Marvel was "hip", it was "relevant", and it catered to teenagers and young adults...and so DC wrote all of their comics like they were going through a mid-life crisis, using the slang that all the teeners were into and chasing the hip trends. And there is nothing guaranteed to feel more awkward than watching someone in their forties try to act like a teenager. The Bronze Age was full of DC comics that were trying too hard, and it showed.
3) DC's second-tier heroes were second to nobody. That said, DC had some of the most fun back-ups and second-tier superhero titles in the business, especially in the early Silver Age. The Doom Patrol, the Metal Men, Metamorpho, the Elongated Man, Hawkman and Adam Strange were all great titles worth picking up and plowing through in a single sitting. Even supposedly ultra-lame characters like Aquaman had surprisingly great solo titles. They all floundered a bit in the Bronze Age, when DC wasn't sure what to do with themselves (actually, now that I think of it, Marvel floundered in the mid-Nineties the same way when faced with a challenge to their teen-cred from Image). But they had some great material in there.
4) DC did a better job of imitating Marvel when they used Marvel writers. Admittedly, there's not a lot of material from the Eighties in the 'Showcase Presents' series, primarily due to royalty issues, but the stuff they did put out shows that when Marvel writers crossed over to DC, they produced some fun material. Batman and the Outsiders, while not an instant classic, was a solid title with a lot of Eighties team book energy, while Booster Gold deserves a lot more credit than it got for trying something new and interesting with a character who wasn't your typical superhero. And although it doesn't have a black-and-white volume, the Teen Titans absolutely exploded in that era.
5) Comics in the Silver Age were freaking mental. Between the super-compressed storytelling that necessitated very sudden plot developments (one issue of Aquaman announced, in the span of one panel, that there was an ancient city filled with evil demons that only came into alignment with our universe once every thousand years, and this was one of those periods of alignment--this would have been about ten issues of foreshadowing and build-up in a modern comic, but Aquaman got it out of the way in less than half a page), the abrupt conclusions that returned everything to the status quo, and the assumption that they were writing for an audience of small children who accepted arbitrary rules to their stories much better than adults, DC wrote some of the craziest stuff you can imagine. Superdickery makes fun of it all, primarily because it does look pretty silly when you imagine it as part of the same line of comics that gave you 'Identity Crisis', 'The Dark Knight Returns' and 'Watchmen', but there's a certain perverse glory to it all if you just take it as an a priori assumption that it's not going to make a lick of sense and let it all flow over you. You really do have to read DC's Silver Age work differently than you do modern comics...most of the complaints from modern fans are from people who either can't or won't do exactly that.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Five Things That Really Surprised Me In Marvel's 'Essential' Collections
It still surprises me, sometimes, that I'm kind of sort of maybe just a little bit of an expert on Marvel Comics. I mean, I don't really feel like one; I've read the first 100-300 issues of the Avengers, the Defenders, Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Wolverine, X-Factor, and Daredevil, along with a smattering of obscure titles like Man-Thing, Spider-Woman, Howard the Duck, Ghost Rider, Godzilla, and Son of Satan...but that doesn't feel like it should make me an expert. That feels like it should make me an obsessive reader with a good memory. And yet, when I go to conventions, I invariably wind up on panels where I explain the backstory of Marvel characters (and DC as well, for that matter) to comic book fans. This weirds me out. I feel like they should recast me for these things.
But I do appear to be settling into a mantle of expertishness. And so, having read more comics than any sane person probably should, I figure I should pass along a few of my more unexpected responses to you, the reader, so that you can then pass them along as received wisdom to a bunch of people who will tell you I'm full of it. I feel that it's only fair.
1. The Defenders really went catastrophically downhill around issue #125. The thing about the Defenders was that it was a great title for a very long time. There was great chemistry among the cast, they played off the quirky, counter-culture concept really well for a very long time and did fun things with the idea of a team as a social grouping rather than a family or an organization (the two directions explored by the FF and the Avengers, respectively). Doctor Strange worked perfectly as a guide and mentor rather than a "leader" per se, and they had a nice mix of headliners like the Hulk and interesting B-listers like Valkyrie and Hellcat...although I'll admit, Nighthawk never worked for me. The bigger a role he got, the less I liked the series.
But then J.M. DeMatteis, a writer who I generally like and respect a lot, decided to write out Doctor Strange and the Hulk and turn the series into a vehicle for Angel, Beast and Iceman, and to turn them into an official team. The headliners were written out, and most of the new additions felt charisma-free. Suddenly, the book felt like an amateur-league group of Avengers, rather than a social grouping of powerful and interesting characters, and the series went into a slump it never recovered from. This is a shame, because the reboots have all tried to go back to the very basic concept (Doctor Strange, Hulk, Namor and Silver Surfer) rather than to the middle period that worked so well, simply because of the stench of failure that clung to the later efforts. I'd love to see a modern Defenders reboot that kept Doc Strange and maybe added "non-team" heroes like Spider-Man, Luke Cage, and Wolverine. (Yes, I know I'm describing Bendis' Avengers. Your point?)
2. Stuff actually happened in Thor. I know, this shouldn't be as surprising as it was, but I really never touched Thor as a kid. Even Walt Simonson's legendary run barely impinged on my consciousness, other than the bits they mentioned in Avengers where every bone in his body was broken inside his armor. I knew the very basic stuff, like the Warriors Three and Odin and Loki, but I had no idea that this was where Ego first showed up, and where Galactus' origin was first revealed, and where Firelord made his initial appearance. It was surprising to me to find out how much cosmic space adventure occurred in a comic that was ostensibly high fantasy mixed with Earth-bound superheroics. (It still didn't wow me for a lot of the run, I'll admit. The whole always felt like it was less than the sum of its parts. But it was an interesting look at a piece of Marvel history I never heard of.)
3. Howard the Duck really captured the zeitgeist of the Seventies. To be honest, it captured the zeitgeist of the Seventies so well that it really doesn't work as a modern comic; you have to read it as a piece of history, a record of the mood of a particular time to be able to enjoy it. But Steve Gerber got it perfectly; the fads, the crazes, but more than that the sense of palpable disaffection and disorientation that the Sixties had produced. People had spent a decade searching outside the norms of society for meaning, and the Seventies was where they realized that they still hadn't found it and weren't even sure what they were looking for. There was a sort of existential despair that permeated the era, and Howard ("trapped in a world he never made"--aren't we all?) hit it perfectly.
4. Some of these series really work as stories with beginnings, middles and ends. I don't actually think that anyone intended any of their series to have endings. Endings in comic books, save for a few notable exceptions, come about due to low sales and not due to any kind of overarching intent. But many of the comics that were collected into big, thick Essential volumes turned out to have really good endings that summed up their whole series. Ghost Rider, for example, had a finale that finally brought together all the revelations about the character's past and gave him something he'd never had, a meaningful nemesis who was a match for him in his final battle. Godzilla had a truly epic conclusion, featuring a huge battle against the Avengers in mid-town Manhattan that was everything you could hope for. Killraven turned out to be the story of the Second War Against the Martians, from first strike to the final human victory. And Super-Villain Team-Up was the fore-runner of the modern crossover, pulling in the major players of the Marvel Universe in a war between Atlantis and Latveria that spanned two years of comic book history. Had these titles not been canceled, they might have had to do very different things to keep going. But the ends they had cemented their reputation.
5. Marvel deserves more credit for their horror books than they ever got. Most of the praise you hear for horror comics is for horror anthology books, specifically the EC comics of the Fifties and the later DC horror renaissance under Joe Orlando. But Marvel had some excellent continuing horror series, something that was amazingly difficult to achieve given the natural tendency of the genre to end in the death of the protagonist. They had an amazing werewolf comic, Werewolf by Night, and an underrated Monster of Frankenstein series that went back to the character's roots. And Tomb of Dracula is one of the best things Marvel ever produced, bar none. Even their lesser lights, like Man-Thing, Son of Satan and Satana, had some great stories in there. (I will not work too hard at defending Brother Voodoo, though.) They really deserve a critical re-evaluation by enthusiasts of horror comics, because they had some amazing stuff in there.
I could probably go on longer--I've barely even touched on Spider-Man, which seems criminal--but I've got five already and I haven't even touched on DC's output. But that seems like a good topic for next time...
But I do appear to be settling into a mantle of expertishness. And so, having read more comics than any sane person probably should, I figure I should pass along a few of my more unexpected responses to you, the reader, so that you can then pass them along as received wisdom to a bunch of people who will tell you I'm full of it. I feel that it's only fair.
1. The Defenders really went catastrophically downhill around issue #125. The thing about the Defenders was that it was a great title for a very long time. There was great chemistry among the cast, they played off the quirky, counter-culture concept really well for a very long time and did fun things with the idea of a team as a social grouping rather than a family or an organization (the two directions explored by the FF and the Avengers, respectively). Doctor Strange worked perfectly as a guide and mentor rather than a "leader" per se, and they had a nice mix of headliners like the Hulk and interesting B-listers like Valkyrie and Hellcat...although I'll admit, Nighthawk never worked for me. The bigger a role he got, the less I liked the series.
But then J.M. DeMatteis, a writer who I generally like and respect a lot, decided to write out Doctor Strange and the Hulk and turn the series into a vehicle for Angel, Beast and Iceman, and to turn them into an official team. The headliners were written out, and most of the new additions felt charisma-free. Suddenly, the book felt like an amateur-league group of Avengers, rather than a social grouping of powerful and interesting characters, and the series went into a slump it never recovered from. This is a shame, because the reboots have all tried to go back to the very basic concept (Doctor Strange, Hulk, Namor and Silver Surfer) rather than to the middle period that worked so well, simply because of the stench of failure that clung to the later efforts. I'd love to see a modern Defenders reboot that kept Doc Strange and maybe added "non-team" heroes like Spider-Man, Luke Cage, and Wolverine. (Yes, I know I'm describing Bendis' Avengers. Your point?)
2. Stuff actually happened in Thor. I know, this shouldn't be as surprising as it was, but I really never touched Thor as a kid. Even Walt Simonson's legendary run barely impinged on my consciousness, other than the bits they mentioned in Avengers where every bone in his body was broken inside his armor. I knew the very basic stuff, like the Warriors Three and Odin and Loki, but I had no idea that this was where Ego first showed up, and where Galactus' origin was first revealed, and where Firelord made his initial appearance. It was surprising to me to find out how much cosmic space adventure occurred in a comic that was ostensibly high fantasy mixed with Earth-bound superheroics. (It still didn't wow me for a lot of the run, I'll admit. The whole always felt like it was less than the sum of its parts. But it was an interesting look at a piece of Marvel history I never heard of.)
3. Howard the Duck really captured the zeitgeist of the Seventies. To be honest, it captured the zeitgeist of the Seventies so well that it really doesn't work as a modern comic; you have to read it as a piece of history, a record of the mood of a particular time to be able to enjoy it. But Steve Gerber got it perfectly; the fads, the crazes, but more than that the sense of palpable disaffection and disorientation that the Sixties had produced. People had spent a decade searching outside the norms of society for meaning, and the Seventies was where they realized that they still hadn't found it and weren't even sure what they were looking for. There was a sort of existential despair that permeated the era, and Howard ("trapped in a world he never made"--aren't we all?) hit it perfectly.
4. Some of these series really work as stories with beginnings, middles and ends. I don't actually think that anyone intended any of their series to have endings. Endings in comic books, save for a few notable exceptions, come about due to low sales and not due to any kind of overarching intent. But many of the comics that were collected into big, thick Essential volumes turned out to have really good endings that summed up their whole series. Ghost Rider, for example, had a finale that finally brought together all the revelations about the character's past and gave him something he'd never had, a meaningful nemesis who was a match for him in his final battle. Godzilla had a truly epic conclusion, featuring a huge battle against the Avengers in mid-town Manhattan that was everything you could hope for. Killraven turned out to be the story of the Second War Against the Martians, from first strike to the final human victory. And Super-Villain Team-Up was the fore-runner of the modern crossover, pulling in the major players of the Marvel Universe in a war between Atlantis and Latveria that spanned two years of comic book history. Had these titles not been canceled, they might have had to do very different things to keep going. But the ends they had cemented their reputation.
5. Marvel deserves more credit for their horror books than they ever got. Most of the praise you hear for horror comics is for horror anthology books, specifically the EC comics of the Fifties and the later DC horror renaissance under Joe Orlando. But Marvel had some excellent continuing horror series, something that was amazingly difficult to achieve given the natural tendency of the genre to end in the death of the protagonist. They had an amazing werewolf comic, Werewolf by Night, and an underrated Monster of Frankenstein series that went back to the character's roots. And Tomb of Dracula is one of the best things Marvel ever produced, bar none. Even their lesser lights, like Man-Thing, Son of Satan and Satana, had some great stories in there. (I will not work too hard at defending Brother Voodoo, though.) They really deserve a critical re-evaluation by enthusiasts of horror comics, because they had some amazing stuff in there.
I could probably go on longer--I've barely even touched on Spider-Man, which seems criminal--but I've got five already and I haven't even touched on DC's output. But that seems like a good topic for next time...
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Living in the Footprint
I was reading some old 'Savage Sword of Conan' last night, and it suddenly struck me what has always seemed strange about Conan as a fantasy character (and Hyboria as a fantasy world, for that matter). Conan was riding in on some adventure or other, getting ready to fight some slithery monster, and I suddenly realized--he has no elven friends. No dwarven friends either, for that matter.
That's not because Conan is racist, or anything. Sexist, yes. Racist, no. (Sexist, oh GOD yes. Robert E. Howard didn't just have issues with women, he had entire climate-controlled vaults filled with complete collections dating back to Gutenberg.) But the point is, he didn't have elven or dwarven companions because these were adaptations of fantasy stories written before Tolkien. It explained for the first time to me why I'd always felt like 'Conan' stories felt a little "empty"; the number of elements I'd actually associated with "fantasy" in my head were surprisingly few.
The implications of that thought were kind of unnerving. I mean, I'd felt for a long time like fantasy authors aped Tolkien a bit too much, but it was only when I realized just how out of place it felt to a reader who'd grown up after 'Lord of the Rings' to see a fantasy novel without elves, dwarves, dragons and long-bearded kindly wizards that I realized just how much of an impact Tolkien had made on the genre. (There were wizards in Conan's universe, of course, but they were almost universally decadent and in league with unholy forces. Magic was something the bad guys used, and Conan defeated them with his strong right arm and his trusty blade. I could write a frigging dissertation on the underlying psychological implications of Howard's work, starting with the anti-intellectual symbolism of magic as a tool of evil and going on from there.)
It's scary, when you think about it. Tolkien's ideas were so powerful that they left a permanent imprint on every single fantasy writer who ever followed him. Those writers, in turn, deepened the imprint--I don't think you'd see nearly as many Tolkien pastiches if 'Dungeons and Dragons"' hadn't given us all a framework of "rules" for the fantasy genre, complete with a list of official Protagonist Races. But still, the sheer memetic power of Tolkien's work has warped the entire mental fabric of the conceptual space we think of as "fantasy". Maybe that's why I've never been as much of a Tolkien fan as most fantasy enthusiasts; I'm a little nervous about something that's taken over that much headspace over such a short period of time.
Or maybe the problem isn't so much that Tolkien conquered all the territory as it is that it was primarily virgin land to begin with. Prior to Tolkien, the only really major "high fantasy" writer in modern literature was the aforementioned Howard, and we still see a lot of his staple ideas to this day as well. (Barbarian heroes, decadent nobles plotting and counter-plotting, degenerate monstrosities from lost races, women treated either like meat or scheming harpies by a sexist and misogynist author...) Perhaps it's not so much that Tolkien has made it impossible to escape the fantasy framework of elves, dwarves and humans going on a magical quest guided by a kindly wizard; maybe it's just that we need the next Tolkien to come along and add something entirely new to the mix. If Tolkien has shown us anything, it's that one book can definitely have that kind of impact.
That's not because Conan is racist, or anything. Sexist, yes. Racist, no. (Sexist, oh GOD yes. Robert E. Howard didn't just have issues with women, he had entire climate-controlled vaults filled with complete collections dating back to Gutenberg.) But the point is, he didn't have elven or dwarven companions because these were adaptations of fantasy stories written before Tolkien. It explained for the first time to me why I'd always felt like 'Conan' stories felt a little "empty"; the number of elements I'd actually associated with "fantasy" in my head were surprisingly few.
The implications of that thought were kind of unnerving. I mean, I'd felt for a long time like fantasy authors aped Tolkien a bit too much, but it was only when I realized just how out of place it felt to a reader who'd grown up after 'Lord of the Rings' to see a fantasy novel without elves, dwarves, dragons and long-bearded kindly wizards that I realized just how much of an impact Tolkien had made on the genre. (There were wizards in Conan's universe, of course, but they were almost universally decadent and in league with unholy forces. Magic was something the bad guys used, and Conan defeated them with his strong right arm and his trusty blade. I could write a frigging dissertation on the underlying psychological implications of Howard's work, starting with the anti-intellectual symbolism of magic as a tool of evil and going on from there.)
It's scary, when you think about it. Tolkien's ideas were so powerful that they left a permanent imprint on every single fantasy writer who ever followed him. Those writers, in turn, deepened the imprint--I don't think you'd see nearly as many Tolkien pastiches if 'Dungeons and Dragons"' hadn't given us all a framework of "rules" for the fantasy genre, complete with a list of official Protagonist Races. But still, the sheer memetic power of Tolkien's work has warped the entire mental fabric of the conceptual space we think of as "fantasy". Maybe that's why I've never been as much of a Tolkien fan as most fantasy enthusiasts; I'm a little nervous about something that's taken over that much headspace over such a short period of time.
Or maybe the problem isn't so much that Tolkien conquered all the territory as it is that it was primarily virgin land to begin with. Prior to Tolkien, the only really major "high fantasy" writer in modern literature was the aforementioned Howard, and we still see a lot of his staple ideas to this day as well. (Barbarian heroes, decadent nobles plotting and counter-plotting, degenerate monstrosities from lost races, women treated either like meat or scheming harpies by a sexist and misogynist author...) Perhaps it's not so much that Tolkien has made it impossible to escape the fantasy framework of elves, dwarves and humans going on a magical quest guided by a kindly wizard; maybe it's just that we need the next Tolkien to come along and add something entirely new to the mix. If Tolkien has shown us anything, it's that one book can definitely have that kind of impact.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Why I Love My Job
I was asked to write the following quiz up by my boss, to distribute to the new hires. Let me repeat that: I was asked to write this by my boss, to distribute to the new hires.
in1. My ideal spaceship is:
a) the size of a small city, and capable of traveling at Warp 9
b) able to make the Kessel Run in less than two parsecs
c) blue, rectangular, and bigger on the inside
d) like a leaf on the wind; watch how it soars
e) don't know/no opinion
2. Who would win in a fight between these characters?
a) Kirk
b) Luke Skywalker
c) River Song
d) Buffy
e) Um...you know these are all fictional characters, right?
3. Which is cooler?
a) a phaser
b) a lightsaber
c) a bow tie
d) a wooden stake
e) an electric guitar
4. Vampires are:
a) aliens that draw the salt out of human bodies
b) dark Jedi that feed on the Force
c) fish people with perception filters
d) soulless monsters that drink human blood (with two notable exceptions)
e) sparkly and popular with teenagers right now
5. The handiest tool in the universe is:
a) a tricorder
b) an astromech droid
c) a sonic screwdriver
d) another wooden stake
e) a Swiss army knife
6. Telepathy is possible...
a) sure! Lwaxana Troi has it!
b) With the Force, young Padawan, all things are possible.
c) Yes, but don't make a habit of it.
d) Yes, but it drives you insane. (Unless you live on a spaceship.)
e) No. Don't be silly.
7. The scariest thing in the universe is:
a) the Borg.
b) the Death Star.
c) a Dalek.
d) a giant snake that used to be the town's Mayor.
e) a king cobra.
8. When someone dies...
a) You have to return their body to their home planet.
b) They get a blue ghost body.
c) They regenerate.
d) Joss Whedon marks another notch on his writing desk.
e) Let's not discuss that at work, shall we? It's a very serious topic.
9. A good length for a series is:
a) Seven years.
b) Three movies. That's where they should have stopped.
c) Fifty years and counting.
d) Seven years. You hear that, FOX? Not one, not two. SEVEN.
e) I don't know, it depends on the series. Which one were you talking about?
10. The best movie ever made is:
a) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
b) The Empire Strikes Back.
c) Doctor Who and the Daleks.
d) Either Serenity, Cabin in the Woods or Avengers. Don't make me choose!
e) Citizen Kane.
in1. My ideal spaceship is:
a) the size of a small city, and capable of traveling at Warp 9
b) able to make the Kessel Run in less than two parsecs
c) blue, rectangular, and bigger on the inside
d) like a leaf on the wind; watch how it soars
e) don't know/no opinion
2. Who would win in a fight between these characters?
a) Kirk
b) Luke Skywalker
c) River Song
d) Buffy
e) Um...you know these are all fictional characters, right?
3. Which is cooler?
a) a phaser
b) a lightsaber
c) a bow tie
d) a wooden stake
e) an electric guitar
4. Vampires are:
a) aliens that draw the salt out of human bodies
b) dark Jedi that feed on the Force
c) fish people with perception filters
d) soulless monsters that drink human blood (with two notable exceptions)
e) sparkly and popular with teenagers right now
5. The handiest tool in the universe is:
a) a tricorder
b) an astromech droid
c) a sonic screwdriver
d) another wooden stake
e) a Swiss army knife
6. Telepathy is possible...
a) sure! Lwaxana Troi has it!
b) With the Force, young Padawan, all things are possible.
c) Yes, but don't make a habit of it.
d) Yes, but it drives you insane. (Unless you live on a spaceship.)
e) No. Don't be silly.
7. The scariest thing in the universe is:
a) the Borg.
b) the Death Star.
c) a Dalek.
d) a giant snake that used to be the town's Mayor.
e) a king cobra.
8. When someone dies...
a) You have to return their body to their home planet.
b) They get a blue ghost body.
c) They regenerate.
d) Joss Whedon marks another notch on his writing desk.
e) Let's not discuss that at work, shall we? It's a very serious topic.
9. A good length for a series is:
a) Seven years.
b) Three movies. That's where they should have stopped.
c) Fifty years and counting.
d) Seven years. You hear that, FOX? Not one, not two. SEVEN.
e) I don't know, it depends on the series. Which one were you talking about?
10. The best movie ever made is:
a) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
b) The Empire Strikes Back.
c) Doctor Who and the Daleks.
d) Either Serenity, Cabin in the Woods or Avengers. Don't make me choose!
e) Citizen Kane.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Trying Not To Talk About Babylon 5, But...
Here's the thing. I am currently going through and mainlining Babylon 5 into my brain, for a secret writerly reason of which I cannot speak at this moment. (Because it is secret. And writerly.) I never watched the show when it was on, for a wide variety of reasons including the fact that I am very apathetic about popular culture as a whole: My general philosophy is that if it's still fondly remembered by the time I get around to watching it two decades after the fact, it's probably very good and well worth waiting for. If it drops completely off the radar and everyone scorns it for being a failure that started off promising and proceeded to head downhill like a rocket-powered toboggan, it's probably 'Heroes'. (But I kid the series!) Seriously, if it's not worth watching, I probably will find out about it in the decade or so before I get around to it. It's the Planetary philosophy: "We're archaeologists. We'll dig you up and work it all out in a couple of years."
(The best part of this philosophy is that by the time I get around to watching it, the DVDs are cheap and I don't have to wait through the offseasons.)
So the point is, I have a lot of thoughts about Babylon 5, many of which I am restraining myself from saying due to writerly secret reasons. But one thing I do keep thinking about, and am allowing myself to talk about even though I'm shutting up about a lot of it, is, "Why did the series never come back?" I have heard from my lovely and intelligent wife that JMS, creator/producer of the series, doesn't really have an interest in doing more on account of how hard it was to get the first series made, and how many of the actors have unfortunately passed on, and how he's more or less told the story he wanted to tell. And while those strike me as true (because I know my wife and in addition to being lovely and intelligent, she knows metric tons about 'Babylon 5'), they also strike me as good things to tell yourself, if you're a former producer of a science-fiction series with a small-but-devoted fanbase that can't get renewed. It does seem to me that there has to be at least an element of falsehood there...because 'Crusade'. Clearly, JMS at one point felt like there were enough ideas floating around in the B5 universe to sustain a second five-year series. That series was canceled with four years of stories left untold. That suggests to me that there are more stories he at least was willing to try to tell.
The question is, "Why can't he?" Because let's face it, we live in a very different era than we did in 1999 (when the series was canceled.) Shows with cult followings and long tails now routinely make returns, from 'Family Guy' to 'Doctor Who' to 'Futurama' to 'Serenity' (which itself is probably due for another return a few years from now. Big Red Button, guys!) We live in an archival culture now, where quality television is not dependent on the vagaries of an inconsistent syndication schedule to gain a following among science-fiction fans. So why is it that Babylon 5 nostalgia isn't leading us back towards a revival of the series and an explanation of the Drakh war? At the very least, Dark Horse should be putting out a comic book of this stuff.
I think the answer is that the very thing that Babylon 5 fans loved has given the series a reputation that prevents it from gaining that kind of return following. Everyone talked, during the period the series was on the air, about its intricate continuity and long-running storyarcs. About hints that began in the pilot and slowly unfolded over the course of five whole seasons. (I used to have a button that said on it, "Doctor Who explained, Babylon 5 predicted, Star Trek...apologized for." It's funny if you're an obsessive Doctor Who geek.) The problem with this is that it intimidates people away from the show. Even in an archival era, where the series is ten bucks a season and you can get through the whole thing in a couple of months if you work at it, Babylon 5 is legendary for requiring an investment to get through. (And it's also got an entirely undeserved reputation as having a long slog of dull episodes to get through before you hit the "good stuff", by which fans tend to mean the metastory-heavy shows. Personally, I think that Season One's standalone episodes are plenty good...but I'd never have known that if I'd listened to the people telling me to watch the show.)
The long and short of it is, we are now in an era where practically every series takes its model from B5, and sci-fi fans should not be scared away from a series with storyarcs. But because it was so innovative at the time, and because so many people talk about nothing but the arc plots, I think people somehow assume they're going to be harder to follow or require more attentive viewing than any other series, and they don't know if they want to put in the effort. Which prevents the show from developing the kind of following that sells DVDs, comics, merchandising, and other stuff that would make the bean-counters in Hollywood stand up, take notice, and shove a dump truck full of money in Straczynski's face and say, "Is this enough to make the kind of show you want?" Which is probably what it would take to overcome his reluctance to dive back into it all.
Basically, what I think I'm saying is, "If you've been waiting 20 years to watch 'Babylon 5' because you were worried about having to mainline the whole thing into your brain over the course of a month or so, you don't need to be. I'm not doing that because it's the only way to watch the show. I'm doing it for secret reasons. Shhhhhh."
(The best part of this philosophy is that by the time I get around to watching it, the DVDs are cheap and I don't have to wait through the offseasons.)
So the point is, I have a lot of thoughts about Babylon 5, many of which I am restraining myself from saying due to writerly secret reasons. But one thing I do keep thinking about, and am allowing myself to talk about even though I'm shutting up about a lot of it, is, "Why did the series never come back?" I have heard from my lovely and intelligent wife that JMS, creator/producer of the series, doesn't really have an interest in doing more on account of how hard it was to get the first series made, and how many of the actors have unfortunately passed on, and how he's more or less told the story he wanted to tell. And while those strike me as true (because I know my wife and in addition to being lovely and intelligent, she knows metric tons about 'Babylon 5'), they also strike me as good things to tell yourself, if you're a former producer of a science-fiction series with a small-but-devoted fanbase that can't get renewed. It does seem to me that there has to be at least an element of falsehood there...because 'Crusade'. Clearly, JMS at one point felt like there were enough ideas floating around in the B5 universe to sustain a second five-year series. That series was canceled with four years of stories left untold. That suggests to me that there are more stories he at least was willing to try to tell.
The question is, "Why can't he?" Because let's face it, we live in a very different era than we did in 1999 (when the series was canceled.) Shows with cult followings and long tails now routinely make returns, from 'Family Guy' to 'Doctor Who' to 'Futurama' to 'Serenity' (which itself is probably due for another return a few years from now. Big Red Button, guys!) We live in an archival culture now, where quality television is not dependent on the vagaries of an inconsistent syndication schedule to gain a following among science-fiction fans. So why is it that Babylon 5 nostalgia isn't leading us back towards a revival of the series and an explanation of the Drakh war? At the very least, Dark Horse should be putting out a comic book of this stuff.
I think the answer is that the very thing that Babylon 5 fans loved has given the series a reputation that prevents it from gaining that kind of return following. Everyone talked, during the period the series was on the air, about its intricate continuity and long-running storyarcs. About hints that began in the pilot and slowly unfolded over the course of five whole seasons. (I used to have a button that said on it, "Doctor Who explained, Babylon 5 predicted, Star Trek...apologized for." It's funny if you're an obsessive Doctor Who geek.) The problem with this is that it intimidates people away from the show. Even in an archival era, where the series is ten bucks a season and you can get through the whole thing in a couple of months if you work at it, Babylon 5 is legendary for requiring an investment to get through. (And it's also got an entirely undeserved reputation as having a long slog of dull episodes to get through before you hit the "good stuff", by which fans tend to mean the metastory-heavy shows. Personally, I think that Season One's standalone episodes are plenty good...but I'd never have known that if I'd listened to the people telling me to watch the show.)
The long and short of it is, we are now in an era where practically every series takes its model from B5, and sci-fi fans should not be scared away from a series with storyarcs. But because it was so innovative at the time, and because so many people talk about nothing but the arc plots, I think people somehow assume they're going to be harder to follow or require more attentive viewing than any other series, and they don't know if they want to put in the effort. Which prevents the show from developing the kind of following that sells DVDs, comics, merchandising, and other stuff that would make the bean-counters in Hollywood stand up, take notice, and shove a dump truck full of money in Straczynski's face and say, "Is this enough to make the kind of show you want?" Which is probably what it would take to overcome his reluctance to dive back into it all.
Basically, what I think I'm saying is, "If you've been waiting 20 years to watch 'Babylon 5' because you were worried about having to mainline the whole thing into your brain over the course of a month or so, you don't need to be. I'm not doing that because it's the only way to watch the show. I'm doing it for secret reasons. Shhhhhh."
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Possibly Interesting Question
Currently, copyright law in Britain puts the expiration date of copyright at 70 years from the death of the author. (The same holds true in America, although it's 120 years from creation/95 years from first publication for works for hire, although that isn't germane in this particular case for reasons that should become obvious shortly.)
Sax Rohmer, creator of Fu Manchu, perished in 1959. This means that in 2029, a relatively short sixteen years from now, Fu Manchu will go into the public domain. (unless his Fu Manchu novels were done as work for hire, which means that the copyright wouldn't expire any later than 95 years from 1913, date of publication of the first Fu Manchu novel. Since Fu Manchu didn't go into public domain five years ago, I think we can assume that it wasn't work for hire.)
My possibly interesting question is: Do you think that people will make use of Fu Manchu once the character becomes public domain? On the one hand, the "Yellow Peril" stereotype, which Fu Manchu exemplifies and arguably created, is at this point an embarrassing legacy of an era in which racial stereotypes were common and accepted. Pretty much any story involving Fu Manchu, in any medium, is going to be analyzed with a very skeptical eye by anyone who has any interest in racial sensitivity. These days, that's a lot of people (which is something I'm tremendously heartened by, honestly.)
On the other hand, modern sci-fi/fantasy is a descendant of the pulp novels like the Fu Manchu series, and in some ways is inextricably linked to them right at the roots. Anyone trying to make a serious exploration of the racial politics of cult fiction has to take the Yellow Peril stereotype into account, and if you're going to do that, what better symbol to use than the original Yellow Peril himself? (To say nothing of those people who just can't resist making use of an iconic character simply because he is an iconic character. There's already been at least one "Fu Manchu Versus Sherlock Holmes" novel, and I can imagine that it might be hard to resist the temptation to do a Fu Manchu/Dracula team-up, or a "Fu Manchu and the Cult of Cthulhu" story.)
I do believe there will be some use of the character starting in 2029; but given the problematic nature of the character, I'll be very interested to find out how much.
Sax Rohmer, creator of Fu Manchu, perished in 1959. This means that in 2029, a relatively short sixteen years from now, Fu Manchu will go into the public domain. (unless his Fu Manchu novels were done as work for hire, which means that the copyright wouldn't expire any later than 95 years from 1913, date of publication of the first Fu Manchu novel. Since Fu Manchu didn't go into public domain five years ago, I think we can assume that it wasn't work for hire.)
My possibly interesting question is: Do you think that people will make use of Fu Manchu once the character becomes public domain? On the one hand, the "Yellow Peril" stereotype, which Fu Manchu exemplifies and arguably created, is at this point an embarrassing legacy of an era in which racial stereotypes were common and accepted. Pretty much any story involving Fu Manchu, in any medium, is going to be analyzed with a very skeptical eye by anyone who has any interest in racial sensitivity. These days, that's a lot of people (which is something I'm tremendously heartened by, honestly.)
On the other hand, modern sci-fi/fantasy is a descendant of the pulp novels like the Fu Manchu series, and in some ways is inextricably linked to them right at the roots. Anyone trying to make a serious exploration of the racial politics of cult fiction has to take the Yellow Peril stereotype into account, and if you're going to do that, what better symbol to use than the original Yellow Peril himself? (To say nothing of those people who just can't resist making use of an iconic character simply because he is an iconic character. There's already been at least one "Fu Manchu Versus Sherlock Holmes" novel, and I can imagine that it might be hard to resist the temptation to do a Fu Manchu/Dracula team-up, or a "Fu Manchu and the Cult of Cthulhu" story.)
I do believe there will be some use of the character starting in 2029; but given the problematic nature of the character, I'll be very interested to find out how much.
Saturday, January 05, 2013
Should We Know Who the Enemy Was?
This is sort of "old business", and very Who-related, so I apologize in advance for those of you who come here for other things and don't care much about pre-Eccleston Who. But before there was the Time Wars that destroyed the Time Lords, there was the War. Same basic premise--the Time Lords were fighting a war against a time-active power just as powerful as they are, but with two key differences--one, the war occurred in the Doctor's personal future, starting the day he died as Gallifrey's enemies finally felt safe enough to move against them. The glimpses the Doctor got of the War (starting with 'Alien Bodies') were scenes from his own personal future, but simply knowing about it warped it and brought it ominously closer.
And two, which is more relevant here, the enemy wasn't the Daleks. In fact, the enemy's identity was never satisfactorily explained. Lawrence Miles, who wrote most of the significant novels in the War arc, intended them to be someone other than the Daleks, but the novel in which he finally intended to reveal their identity was never published. Instead, then-line editor Stephen Cole co-wrote a novel called 'The Ancestor Cell', where they were explained as a collection of technobabble from the dawn of time shortly before the War arc, and Gallifrey, were neatly excised from the line never to be mentioned again.
Lawrence Miles, in turn, went on to write a spin-off series in which the Time Lords and the War are carefully changed just enough that he can use his own concepts freely, called 'Faction Paradox'. In it, the enemy is simply known as The Enemy, with the details of their identity being described as "irrelevant".
As a fan of both Doctor Who and Faction Paradox, I'm not sure this was the right move. At this point, I think that the identity of the Enemy risks drifting gradually into irrelevance if not revealed, while revealing it might drum up useful publicity for a somewhat cult spin-off. I'd really like to see Lawrence Miles (ideally) write a book that explains who the Enemy was intended to be, or if that's not possible due to rights issues (it was hinted at as being an old foe of the Doctor's in some way, shape or form) at least get it out in an interview who it was originally intended to be so we finally can put the question to rest. However, I'll admit that part of my desire just stems from being a fan who hates unsolved mysteries, so I can't say I'm unbiased here. Anyone else remember the Enemy? And do those people want to see it come back and get finally answered? Feel free to make your thoughts known in the comments!
And two, which is more relevant here, the enemy wasn't the Daleks. In fact, the enemy's identity was never satisfactorily explained. Lawrence Miles, who wrote most of the significant novels in the War arc, intended them to be someone other than the Daleks, but the novel in which he finally intended to reveal their identity was never published. Instead, then-line editor Stephen Cole co-wrote a novel called 'The Ancestor Cell', where they were explained as a collection of technobabble from the dawn of time shortly before the War arc, and Gallifrey, were neatly excised from the line never to be mentioned again.
Lawrence Miles, in turn, went on to write a spin-off series in which the Time Lords and the War are carefully changed just enough that he can use his own concepts freely, called 'Faction Paradox'. In it, the enemy is simply known as The Enemy, with the details of their identity being described as "irrelevant".
As a fan of both Doctor Who and Faction Paradox, I'm not sure this was the right move. At this point, I think that the identity of the Enemy risks drifting gradually into irrelevance if not revealed, while revealing it might drum up useful publicity for a somewhat cult spin-off. I'd really like to see Lawrence Miles (ideally) write a book that explains who the Enemy was intended to be, or if that's not possible due to rights issues (it was hinted at as being an old foe of the Doctor's in some way, shape or form) at least get it out in an interview who it was originally intended to be so we finally can put the question to rest. However, I'll admit that part of my desire just stems from being a fan who hates unsolved mysteries, so I can't say I'm unbiased here. Anyone else remember the Enemy? And do those people want to see it come back and get finally answered? Feel free to make your thoughts known in the comments!
Friday, December 21, 2012
Why Doctor Who Doesn't Work In Fantasy
Someone (I believe it was Paul Magrs, but I'm not entirely sure) once said that the TARDIS isn't a machine for traveling in time and space, it's a machine for traveling between genres. This is certainly in evidence in the new series, with the Doctor wandering through Westerns and horror stories and all manner of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, but it's been a part of the series almost since the beginning. Sometimes the story is a comedy, sometimes a tragedy, sometimes out and out horror, and yet somehow the Doctor seems naturally to fit into all of them. It's one of the things that has made the series so refreshingly renewable over the years; the Doctor has been able to essentially borrow from whatever's modern to make himself seem relevant.
And yet, when you look at the few attempts to blend in with fantasy, they've almost always been dreadful failures. 'Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark', 'Autumn Mist'...really, about the best of them was 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice', and that keyed on the idea that there was no such thing. Even Paul Cornell's take on "The Doctor does a trip into a fantasy universe" was his weakest novel, and he's sodding brilliant. Why is it that the Doctor can't go into a high fantasy novel the same way he can wander into a Western or a crime caper?
The most obvious answer, of course, is that Doctor Who doesn't do fantasy. It's firmly set in a rational universe with an orderly set of scientific rules, even if they are handwavy "psychic paper" and "sonic screwdriver" and "anti-plastic" type rules. People will point out that a sonic screwdriver is basically just a magic wand with a different name, but that misses the point. It's the name that's actually important. Doctor Who states that everything is explicable, even if we aren't smart enough or experienced enough or knowledgable enough to understand the explanation yet. That's a pretty key difference from a world where High Prophecy and gods simply tell you that this is the way things are.
That means that whenever the Doctor enters a fantasy universe, one of two things has to happen. Either first, he has to come up with a scientific explanation for it all. These are usually leaden and dull, and tend to reduce the whole thing to an exercise in mapping handwavy science fiction explanations onto handwavy fantasy explanations. There's nothing intrinsically exciting about a horse with a horn on it, even if it's a horn with extra brain in it that gives the horse telepathy. Fantasy is all about the poetic and the symbolic, not the literal; things are not necessarily meant to have an explanation.
The alternative is that the Doctor surrenders his narrative primacy, acknowledging that yes, this is magic and cannot be understood, even by a Time Lord. This is in some ways the far worse alternative, because the thing that's special about the Doctor when he travels to another genre is the way he warps it about himself. The Doctor is fun to read about in a Western because he doesn't carry a gun and he wanders off to talk to the Native Americans and comes back as an honorary member of the tribe. The Doctor is fun to read about in a crime caper because he wanders into the head office of the local mob boss and says, "Hello, can I have a spot of tea with you while we chat about the murders you've committed?" The Doctor is, in a good story, the center of the narrative. That doesn't happen when he goes into a fantasy story. Instead, he has to follow the rules of that world. The Doctor is never fun when he's following the rules.
I won't say that it's impossible to do a Doctor Who story that involves fantasy elements--'Battlefield' pulls it off by suggesting that a future Doctor will be the one to square the circle and deal with magic on its home ground--but for the reasons above, I think it's far riskier to try and there's less payoff. My advice to future Doctor Who authors would probably be, "If you want to write a high fantasy novel...go have fun. There's plenty of publishers out there who take 'em."
And yet, when you look at the few attempts to blend in with fantasy, they've almost always been dreadful failures. 'Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark', 'Autumn Mist'...really, about the best of them was 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice', and that keyed on the idea that there was no such thing. Even Paul Cornell's take on "The Doctor does a trip into a fantasy universe" was his weakest novel, and he's sodding brilliant. Why is it that the Doctor can't go into a high fantasy novel the same way he can wander into a Western or a crime caper?
The most obvious answer, of course, is that Doctor Who doesn't do fantasy. It's firmly set in a rational universe with an orderly set of scientific rules, even if they are handwavy "psychic paper" and "sonic screwdriver" and "anti-plastic" type rules. People will point out that a sonic screwdriver is basically just a magic wand with a different name, but that misses the point. It's the name that's actually important. Doctor Who states that everything is explicable, even if we aren't smart enough or experienced enough or knowledgable enough to understand the explanation yet. That's a pretty key difference from a world where High Prophecy and gods simply tell you that this is the way things are.
That means that whenever the Doctor enters a fantasy universe, one of two things has to happen. Either first, he has to come up with a scientific explanation for it all. These are usually leaden and dull, and tend to reduce the whole thing to an exercise in mapping handwavy science fiction explanations onto handwavy fantasy explanations. There's nothing intrinsically exciting about a horse with a horn on it, even if it's a horn with extra brain in it that gives the horse telepathy. Fantasy is all about the poetic and the symbolic, not the literal; things are not necessarily meant to have an explanation.
The alternative is that the Doctor surrenders his narrative primacy, acknowledging that yes, this is magic and cannot be understood, even by a Time Lord. This is in some ways the far worse alternative, because the thing that's special about the Doctor when he travels to another genre is the way he warps it about himself. The Doctor is fun to read about in a Western because he doesn't carry a gun and he wanders off to talk to the Native Americans and comes back as an honorary member of the tribe. The Doctor is fun to read about in a crime caper because he wanders into the head office of the local mob boss and says, "Hello, can I have a spot of tea with you while we chat about the murders you've committed?" The Doctor is, in a good story, the center of the narrative. That doesn't happen when he goes into a fantasy story. Instead, he has to follow the rules of that world. The Doctor is never fun when he's following the rules.
I won't say that it's impossible to do a Doctor Who story that involves fantasy elements--'Battlefield' pulls it off by suggesting that a future Doctor will be the one to square the circle and deal with magic on its home ground--but for the reasons above, I think it's far riskier to try and there's less payoff. My advice to future Doctor Who authors would probably be, "If you want to write a high fantasy novel...go have fun. There's plenty of publishers out there who take 'em."
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Horror Movies Are Made To Be Snuck Into
Horror movies have changed a lot since I was a kid. Or at least, the way they're marketed and sold to their target audience has. When I was young, the perfect rating for a horror movie was 'R'; kids knew that any horror movie that had a 'PG' (or later, 'PG-13') had skimped out on the real scares. We all knew somewhere that didn't check IDs, or someone older who would buy us a ticket, and if that failed, we could always find some independent video store that would rent without looking too closely at who was renting. (I was ten years old when I watched 'Return of the Living Dead' for the first time. I rewatched it as a grown-up, and commented to a friend that I was surprised at how vividly I remembered the film. He looked at the screen, where a naked punk played by Linnea Quigley was being eaten alive by a horde of ghouls. I looked back at him and said, "Yeeeahh...we, um...we weren't very well supervised.") We were always able to get access to the 'R'-rated movies, and movie studios knew it. They amped up the scares as hard as they could, even releasing some movies unrated when the MPAA squawked. 'Evil Dead 2' and 'Dawn of the Dead', two of the most iconic horror movies ever, were unrated.
But all that changed because, in the immortal words of Helen Lovejoy, "Won't someone please think of the children?!" Independent movie theaters and video stores were driven out of business by the big chains, who proved to be more susceptible to pressure from parents' groups. Those groups forced theaters and video stores (notably Blockbuster, who began their upswing slowly but inexorably in the late 80s and early 90s) to start enforcing the 17-and-up part of the 'R' rating...which drove profitability for 'R' movies way down. The producers responded by slowly, but inexorably weakening their product to qualify for the teen-friendly 'PG-13'...but therein lies a little twist.
Because this is also the point at which first home laserdiscs, then DVDs really started to take off. The era, if you will, of the 'Director's Cut'. More specifically for horror movies, the 'Unrated Director's Cut'. Because you can make it hard on kids to go into a theater, or to rent a horror flick for the night...but once you're selling these things, then anyone can get them. Even when Wal-Mart started enforcing the ratings and refusing to sell unrated films to kids under 17, it was about as meaningful a restriction as putting a chain-link fence up to stop a river. The theatrical product became nothing more than a loss leader, a suggestion of the truly scary stuff that was to come on DVD.
And, to some extent, that's as it should be. Because when I was a thirteen-year-old, I was the perfect audience for a horror movie ostensibly aimed at seventeen-year-olds. That age between thirteen and seventeen is an age where you're starting to edge out into the deeper waters of adulthood, and you don't always get to choose where and when you start dealing with things that are intended for children. Your body is changing (sort of like in 'The Fly'), you're starting to think about sex and it's a little bit scary (like in 'Shivers'), and you're having to deal with a whole new world that you're not ready for.
Just about every really good horror movie out there is, in some allegorical way, about this mystical, alchemical transformation from childhood to adulthood...and on an emotional level, it makes sense that you should have to access it through a means forbidden to you by adults. Because adults forbid these things to children because they're only intended for grown-ups. They only let the "safe" things be seen by children, and part of growing up is learning that sometimes the unsafe things fall into your lap whether you want them to or not. The forbidden knowledge is the knowledge you need, usually before adults are willing to accept you need it. If you don't have to sneak into the movie, it's not telling you about the things you really need to know.
Does this mean I'm going to let my daughter watch and/or read whatever she wants to? No. (Especially not now--she's not even seven yet.) But I'm aware that part of the ritual of growing up is me telling her, "You don't want to watch that movie. It's too scary for kids..." And the other part of the ritual is that she'll watch it when I'm not around. Because as sad as it makes me, she's going to stop being a kid before I'm ready for her to stop being a kid.
But all that changed because, in the immortal words of Helen Lovejoy, "Won't someone please think of the children?!" Independent movie theaters and video stores were driven out of business by the big chains, who proved to be more susceptible to pressure from parents' groups. Those groups forced theaters and video stores (notably Blockbuster, who began their upswing slowly but inexorably in the late 80s and early 90s) to start enforcing the 17-and-up part of the 'R' rating...which drove profitability for 'R' movies way down. The producers responded by slowly, but inexorably weakening their product to qualify for the teen-friendly 'PG-13'...but therein lies a little twist.
Because this is also the point at which first home laserdiscs, then DVDs really started to take off. The era, if you will, of the 'Director's Cut'. More specifically for horror movies, the 'Unrated Director's Cut'. Because you can make it hard on kids to go into a theater, or to rent a horror flick for the night...but once you're selling these things, then anyone can get them. Even when Wal-Mart started enforcing the ratings and refusing to sell unrated films to kids under 17, it was about as meaningful a restriction as putting a chain-link fence up to stop a river. The theatrical product became nothing more than a loss leader, a suggestion of the truly scary stuff that was to come on DVD.
And, to some extent, that's as it should be. Because when I was a thirteen-year-old, I was the perfect audience for a horror movie ostensibly aimed at seventeen-year-olds. That age between thirteen and seventeen is an age where you're starting to edge out into the deeper waters of adulthood, and you don't always get to choose where and when you start dealing with things that are intended for children. Your body is changing (sort of like in 'The Fly'), you're starting to think about sex and it's a little bit scary (like in 'Shivers'), and you're having to deal with a whole new world that you're not ready for.
Just about every really good horror movie out there is, in some allegorical way, about this mystical, alchemical transformation from childhood to adulthood...and on an emotional level, it makes sense that you should have to access it through a means forbidden to you by adults. Because adults forbid these things to children because they're only intended for grown-ups. They only let the "safe" things be seen by children, and part of growing up is learning that sometimes the unsafe things fall into your lap whether you want them to or not. The forbidden knowledge is the knowledge you need, usually before adults are willing to accept you need it. If you don't have to sneak into the movie, it's not telling you about the things you really need to know.
Does this mean I'm going to let my daughter watch and/or read whatever she wants to? No. (Especially not now--she's not even seven yet.) But I'm aware that part of the ritual of growing up is me telling her, "You don't want to watch that movie. It's too scary for kids..." And the other part of the ritual is that she'll watch it when I'm not around. Because as sad as it makes me, she's going to stop being a kid before I'm ready for her to stop being a kid.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Storytelling Engines: CSI
(or "The Old Reliable")
Let's start by specifying which "CSI" we're talking about. We're not talking about the CSI TV show that's been going for twelve seasons, nor the other CSI TV show, nor the other other CSI TV show. We're talking about the CSI comics that are based on the CSI TV show that spun off two other CSI TV shows, both of which had impressively long runs as well. So you can already tell that we're talking about a pretty successful storytelling engine here. (What you may not be able to tell, and I'm not going to assume you know, is what "CSI" stands for. It's "Crime Scene Investigations".)
But why? What makes this the kind of storytelling engine that sustains so many stories so easily for so long? Do the comics contain some sort of clue that the TV show doesn't? Actually, it's hard to tell just what the storytelling engine is from one volume of the CSI comic book collections; the "decompression" effect of modern comic books is quite graphically demonstrated (if you'll pardon the pun) with these series. A trade paperback that's over 300 pages long really only contains three individual stories; that's barely enough time to put names to faces, let alone give you a really detailed look into what makes the series tick.
Fortunately, one of the things that the CSI TV series show is that it doesn't really matter who's doing the investigating. All three shows have rotating casts, in addition to having three complete sets of casts, and it doesn't seem to dent the popularity of the shows or the ability of writers to come up with new story ideas. It's the jobs the characters do, not their personal lives, that drive the engine of a police procedural; the occasional episode or storyarc might come from the characters' pasts or personalities, but usually the easiest way to get a police protagonist involved in a story is to call 911. (Depending on the series, of course; 'Criminal Minds', for example, tends to run its one-off stories as basic procedurals and base its longer arcs on the backstories of the people involved. Neither approach is "right" or "wrong", but one definitely lends itself better towards casting changes.)
And likewise, it's not the location that's important; the CSI that the comics are based on happens to be the Las Vegas CSI, but New York and Miami offer no more or fewer storytelling opportunities. Pretty much any big city has a high enough crime rate that you can believably imagine one interesting murder case a week. CSI: International Falls doesn't work quite so well, but you could easily imagine them spinning off the franchise into Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, or Atlanta without any real difficulty.
So if the people don't matter, and the place doesn't matter...what makes this such a workable storytelling engine? Surely if 100+ previous entries have taught us anything, it's that those things are usually pretty important. Why is CSI evergreen without any of it mattering?
The answer, I think, has to be the crimes. Sad to say, there is an endless variety of human misery out there, ready to inspire us to create art that examines its meaning. Meaning that there's never going to be an end to the inspiration for police procedurals; as long as there's crime today, there will be a story tomorrow that imagines those criminals being brought to justice. That's enough material to supply a hundred police procedurals for a hundred years...which is probably something I shouldn't say too loud. I might give the CSI people some ideas.
Let's start by specifying which "CSI" we're talking about. We're not talking about the CSI TV show that's been going for twelve seasons, nor the other CSI TV show, nor the other other CSI TV show. We're talking about the CSI comics that are based on the CSI TV show that spun off two other CSI TV shows, both of which had impressively long runs as well. So you can already tell that we're talking about a pretty successful storytelling engine here. (What you may not be able to tell, and I'm not going to assume you know, is what "CSI" stands for. It's "Crime Scene Investigations".)
But why? What makes this the kind of storytelling engine that sustains so many stories so easily for so long? Do the comics contain some sort of clue that the TV show doesn't? Actually, it's hard to tell just what the storytelling engine is from one volume of the CSI comic book collections; the "decompression" effect of modern comic books is quite graphically demonstrated (if you'll pardon the pun) with these series. A trade paperback that's over 300 pages long really only contains three individual stories; that's barely enough time to put names to faces, let alone give you a really detailed look into what makes the series tick.
Fortunately, one of the things that the CSI TV series show is that it doesn't really matter who's doing the investigating. All three shows have rotating casts, in addition to having three complete sets of casts, and it doesn't seem to dent the popularity of the shows or the ability of writers to come up with new story ideas. It's the jobs the characters do, not their personal lives, that drive the engine of a police procedural; the occasional episode or storyarc might come from the characters' pasts or personalities, but usually the easiest way to get a police protagonist involved in a story is to call 911. (Depending on the series, of course; 'Criminal Minds', for example, tends to run its one-off stories as basic procedurals and base its longer arcs on the backstories of the people involved. Neither approach is "right" or "wrong", but one definitely lends itself better towards casting changes.)
And likewise, it's not the location that's important; the CSI that the comics are based on happens to be the Las Vegas CSI, but New York and Miami offer no more or fewer storytelling opportunities. Pretty much any big city has a high enough crime rate that you can believably imagine one interesting murder case a week. CSI: International Falls doesn't work quite so well, but you could easily imagine them spinning off the franchise into Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, or Atlanta without any real difficulty.
So if the people don't matter, and the place doesn't matter...what makes this such a workable storytelling engine? Surely if 100+ previous entries have taught us anything, it's that those things are usually pretty important. Why is CSI evergreen without any of it mattering?
The answer, I think, has to be the crimes. Sad to say, there is an endless variety of human misery out there, ready to inspire us to create art that examines its meaning. Meaning that there's never going to be an end to the inspiration for police procedurals; as long as there's crime today, there will be a story tomorrow that imagines those criminals being brought to justice. That's enough material to supply a hundred police procedurals for a hundred years...which is probably something I shouldn't say too loud. I might give the CSI people some ideas.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Is River Song Sexist?
Actually, I'm not even sure if "sexist" is the right word here. The predominant criticism of River Song isn't so much that she's sexist, although you do get a good few people in there engaging in the popular pastime of "faux-feminist slut-shaming"; it's that she's nothing but a gigantic Mary-Sue that Moffat has inserted into the story. According to this contingent, Moffat is making all the plots revolve around River Song, to the point where she's better than the Doctor at everything and all the important plot points involve her.
To some extent, this is simply a case of not knowing what words mean. A "Mary Sue" is a somewhat vague term, but is generally taken to be an overly idealized, absurdly talented, one-dimensional author surrogate, who is improbably lucky and succeeds where the main character fails, and who is the center of the story even in a canon that has not previously included her. That's the basic definition, as crowdsourced by the Internet.
Now let's look at River song. Since her first appearance, she's been in nine episodes. Out of 37. (Technically ten, if you want to count her cameo at the end of "Closing Time".) If this is a series that "revolves around" her, it's in a very eccentric orbit to say the least. Yes, she features prominently in the Silence arc. That's because the Silence's plan was to use her to kill the Doctor. She failed at that pretty much completely...which pretty much takes care of "improbably lucky and succeeds where the main character fails", too. The only thing she really succeeded at was at getting electrocuted better than the Doctor.
Is she more talented than the Doctor? Many people point to the fact that she can fly the TARDIS better than he can...which would be a totally excellent argument to make if it wasn't a 49-year-long running gag that for all the Doctor's Time Lord training and experience, he's actually a lousy pilot who can't get the TARDIS where he wants it to go better than one in three tries. It's the same joke they did when Romana joined the cast, and that was quite literally before lots of current fans were born.
Overly idealized, one-dimensional author surrogate? Um...unless there's something fairly important about Steven Moffat we don't know, I don't think that he really wants to be a sexy woman who shoots well, rides horses and has hallucinogenic lipstick. He wrote her as a love interest for the Doctor, yes, and he assumed that any love interest for the Doctor has to be something more than a simpering damsel in distress for him to rescue...which is a GOOD THING...but he definitely worked hard to make her more than one-dimensional. Her backstory is interesting, complicated, and paints her as more than a little damaged. Idealized, she ain't.
Which ultimately leaves us with, "She seems to know more than the Doctor. She seems to be as good at things as him. She's talented, and that makes her threatening." Which is, when you break it down, kind of a sexist argument for disliking a character. Not that this is anything new; pretty much any talented female character in fiction is going to get tagged with "Mary Sue" at some point, because women who are good at things and are admired within the story for it are always Mary Sues. (Somehow, Captain Kirk is never considered to be a Mary Sue.) Some people will always seek to tear down any female character who seems skilled and competent, because they view this as exclusively the purview of male characters. They might dress that up as concern, but it's fundamentally a sexist point of view.
Oh, plus she is naked in some scenes and thus has lady parts that she displays without shame, which makes her a Bad Person. (See previous essay.)
So is River Song sexist? Weeeeeeelll....maybe a little. Because while the Doctor's story definitely doesn't revolve around her, it's become increasingly clear that her story revolves around the Doctor. She didn't become an archaeologist because she was interested in old things, as we originally thought; she became an archaeologist to track down the Doctor. She loves the Doctor, she goes to jail for the Doctor, she occasionally attempts to kill the Doctor...there's very little in River Song's story that she does simply because she wants to. It's hard not to argue that this is a somewhat sexist angle on her character, and that she was more interesting before she became the Doctor's "bespoke assassin". Does that make her "sexist"? Probably not by itself. But it's certainly problematic.
But unfortunately, as with Amy Pond, the most sexist thing about River Song is the ways that people find to complain about her.
To some extent, this is simply a case of not knowing what words mean. A "Mary Sue" is a somewhat vague term, but is generally taken to be an overly idealized, absurdly talented, one-dimensional author surrogate, who is improbably lucky and succeeds where the main character fails, and who is the center of the story even in a canon that has not previously included her. That's the basic definition, as crowdsourced by the Internet.
Now let's look at River song. Since her first appearance, she's been in nine episodes. Out of 37. (Technically ten, if you want to count her cameo at the end of "Closing Time".) If this is a series that "revolves around" her, it's in a very eccentric orbit to say the least. Yes, she features prominently in the Silence arc. That's because the Silence's plan was to use her to kill the Doctor. She failed at that pretty much completely...which pretty much takes care of "improbably lucky and succeeds where the main character fails", too. The only thing she really succeeded at was at getting electrocuted better than the Doctor.
Is she more talented than the Doctor? Many people point to the fact that she can fly the TARDIS better than he can...which would be a totally excellent argument to make if it wasn't a 49-year-long running gag that for all the Doctor's Time Lord training and experience, he's actually a lousy pilot who can't get the TARDIS where he wants it to go better than one in three tries. It's the same joke they did when Romana joined the cast, and that was quite literally before lots of current fans were born.
Overly idealized, one-dimensional author surrogate? Um...unless there's something fairly important about Steven Moffat we don't know, I don't think that he really wants to be a sexy woman who shoots well, rides horses and has hallucinogenic lipstick. He wrote her as a love interest for the Doctor, yes, and he assumed that any love interest for the Doctor has to be something more than a simpering damsel in distress for him to rescue...which is a GOOD THING...but he definitely worked hard to make her more than one-dimensional. Her backstory is interesting, complicated, and paints her as more than a little damaged. Idealized, she ain't.
Which ultimately leaves us with, "She seems to know more than the Doctor. She seems to be as good at things as him. She's talented, and that makes her threatening." Which is, when you break it down, kind of a sexist argument for disliking a character. Not that this is anything new; pretty much any talented female character in fiction is going to get tagged with "Mary Sue" at some point, because women who are good at things and are admired within the story for it are always Mary Sues. (Somehow, Captain Kirk is never considered to be a Mary Sue.) Some people will always seek to tear down any female character who seems skilled and competent, because they view this as exclusively the purview of male characters. They might dress that up as concern, but it's fundamentally a sexist point of view.
Oh, plus she is naked in some scenes and thus has lady parts that she displays without shame, which makes her a Bad Person. (See previous essay.)
So is River Song sexist? Weeeeeeelll....maybe a little. Because while the Doctor's story definitely doesn't revolve around her, it's become increasingly clear that her story revolves around the Doctor. She didn't become an archaeologist because she was interested in old things, as we originally thought; she became an archaeologist to track down the Doctor. She loves the Doctor, she goes to jail for the Doctor, she occasionally attempts to kill the Doctor...there's very little in River Song's story that she does simply because she wants to. It's hard not to argue that this is a somewhat sexist angle on her character, and that she was more interesting before she became the Doctor's "bespoke assassin". Does that make her "sexist"? Probably not by itself. But it's certainly problematic.
But unfortunately, as with Amy Pond, the most sexist thing about River Song is the ways that people find to complain about her.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
What Is "Artron Energy"?
Frequently in Doctor Who, both in the new series and the old, there's mention of something called "artron energy", a form of energy that saturates time-travelers, in particular the Doctor but also Amy Pond, Rose Tyler, River Song, and at one point Mickey. It seems to be something that can be harnessed for power, something that has harmless (or possibly benevolent) mutagenic effects, and something that (possibly) provides resistance to strange temporal effects. But what is it, and where does it come from? Usually, people just assume that it's a form of background radiation from the Time Vortex. But because I'm more pathetically geeky than that, I'm going to suggest a stranger alternative.
The key is in the phrase occasionally used to describe the Doctor, "Complex Space-Time Event". Presumably, this differentiates him from a simple space-time event, which gives us a hint as to the nature of a CSTE. Because a simple space-time event is one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you were to be able to draw an outline of it in four-dimensional space, it would have a single continuous shape; even though it moves through three-dimensional space, it is always connected in four-dimensional space. (If I move ten feet to the left, and you could see through time, you would see me as sort of a weird John-shaped tunnel through time.)
Think of it like a stylus moving on a seismometer. The stylus moves up and down erratically, but the line is always contiguous, and always moving forward. That's a simple space-time event. Always contiguous, always in one direction.
But the Doctor doesn't. He can, for lack of a better analogy, lift his stylus up and move it back to an earlier point on the paper. The shape of the Doctor in space-time is not one long line winding its way through three dimensions, it's a series of apparently unconnected shapes in various parts of the graph. He cannot be described with the normal geometry of space-time. He is, in short, a Complex Space-Time Event.
It's my suggestion that the act of traveling in time, moving in ways that are discontiguous, builds up a "charge" almost like shuffling across a carpet builds up static. (At this point in the explanation, my lovely wife reminded me of the exchange from the series itself: "Is that really how it works?" "No! But if that makes sense to you...") Normally, it evens out because you're properly in synch with space time. But Complex Space-Time Events don't dissipate the charge normally, they build it up...and that's artron energy.
Make sense? No? Good. At least I got it off my chest.
The key is in the phrase occasionally used to describe the Doctor, "Complex Space-Time Event". Presumably, this differentiates him from a simple space-time event, which gives us a hint as to the nature of a CSTE. Because a simple space-time event is one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you were to be able to draw an outline of it in four-dimensional space, it would have a single continuous shape; even though it moves through three-dimensional space, it is always connected in four-dimensional space. (If I move ten feet to the left, and you could see through time, you would see me as sort of a weird John-shaped tunnel through time.)
Think of it like a stylus moving on a seismometer. The stylus moves up and down erratically, but the line is always contiguous, and always moving forward. That's a simple space-time event. Always contiguous, always in one direction.
But the Doctor doesn't. He can, for lack of a better analogy, lift his stylus up and move it back to an earlier point on the paper. The shape of the Doctor in space-time is not one long line winding its way through three dimensions, it's a series of apparently unconnected shapes in various parts of the graph. He cannot be described with the normal geometry of space-time. He is, in short, a Complex Space-Time Event.
It's my suggestion that the act of traveling in time, moving in ways that are discontiguous, builds up a "charge" almost like shuffling across a carpet builds up static. (At this point in the explanation, my lovely wife reminded me of the exchange from the series itself: "Is that really how it works?" "No! But if that makes sense to you...") Normally, it evens out because you're properly in synch with space time. But Complex Space-Time Events don't dissipate the charge normally, they build it up...and that's artron energy.
Make sense? No? Good. At least I got it off my chest.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Is Amy Pond Sexist?
It may be shocking for you to hear, but...well, some people don't like Amy Pond. (Yes, I know. Take as much time as you need to wrap your head around that idea and then join me at the next sentence.) Despite being a great companion, possibly the best so far in the new Doctor Who series (and cue flamewars in three, two, one...) some people really can't stand her. They say that she's just one more example of why they consider Moffat to be a sexist writer. Amy Pond, according to them, is a stereotypical female character of the worst order, a misogynist caricature of real women that Moffat created as an object of fanboy lust, nothing more.
Is it true? Let's look at Amy. She's clearly not a passive character, which is always one of the big red flags for sexism. Amy makes her own decision to travel in the TARDIS, and she is determined not to give up on it; she's been inadvertently gaslighted for most of her life, being told that the Doctor was just an imaginary friend that it's past time for her to give up on, but she hasn't stopped believing in him for a moment. (And she's avoided winding up in a mental institution despite all that, which indicates that she's socially and emotionally well-adjusted despite dealing with issues that would have sent a lot of people into a rubber room.) She acts as more than just a passenger in the TARDIS, making decisions on matters from space whale survival to whether her husband will get to travel along.
And speaking of her husband...anyone who is trying to claim that Amy is sexist will have to deal with "Mrs. Pond". Amy is very clearly the decision-maker in that relationship, and it is not depicted as dysfunctional or shameful. Rory is not henpecked, he is in awe of his wife's determination and he respects her decision-making ability. While he is always there to reinforce her when she needs it, he does not try to enforce a patriarchal authority over her, because he loves her for who she is and that includes her forcefulness. Amy and Rory's relationship is just about the least sexist, most well-adjusted relationship in any genre series ever.
And Moffat has never put Amy into sexual peril; unlike, say, Peri, the villains do not lust after her body and want to keep her as a trophy bride. Amy gets put into her share of danger, just like the Doctor and the other companions, but it's not represented as specifically due to her gender. (Arguably, she is not a capable fighter, which is apparently a prerequisite for "strong female characters" these days, but neither is anyone else in the series, with the possible exceptions of Ian, Leela, and River Song.)
No, the main reason I think people call Amy "sexist" is...well...not to put to fine a point on it, but she has sex. And she enjoys it. Amy has been known to talk about sex, to ogle men she finds attractive, to ogle women she finds attractive, and to even have enough of a hint of kinkiness to enjoy dressing up in costumes. In short, Amy Pond has genitals and isn't ashamed to say she enjoys using them. To some people, this immediately makes her a terrible slut unworthy of inclusion in the same genre as decent women.
Think I'm exaggerating? Go look at the recaps on TV Without Pity. (Can't link to the site from work, but you should be able to find it with the help of Google.) Until his head exploded from having to talk about women who actually admit to enjoying orgasms, Jacob the recapper inserted constant comments about how Amy's career as a kiss-o-gram showed how damaged she was as a person, and how the Doctor wrecked her by coming into her life and leaving and now all she does is have emotionless flings in order to make money. As a KISS-O-GRAM. God alone knows what he would have said if she'd thrown hugs into the deal.
There is, at heart, a fundamental belief that women who have sex for anything other than procreational purposes are bad. This has been dressed up in countless other beliefs over the eons, and the claim that feminists should be prudes is just one more disguise for it. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as exploitative sexualization or titillation; of course there is. But a female character shouldn't have to wear a burqa in order to be free of criticism for her feminist credibility, and it's frustrating to see people try to pass off their slut shaming as feminism.
And that doesn't even get into River Song...
Is it true? Let's look at Amy. She's clearly not a passive character, which is always one of the big red flags for sexism. Amy makes her own decision to travel in the TARDIS, and she is determined not to give up on it; she's been inadvertently gaslighted for most of her life, being told that the Doctor was just an imaginary friend that it's past time for her to give up on, but she hasn't stopped believing in him for a moment. (And she's avoided winding up in a mental institution despite all that, which indicates that she's socially and emotionally well-adjusted despite dealing with issues that would have sent a lot of people into a rubber room.) She acts as more than just a passenger in the TARDIS, making decisions on matters from space whale survival to whether her husband will get to travel along.
And speaking of her husband...anyone who is trying to claim that Amy is sexist will have to deal with "Mrs. Pond". Amy is very clearly the decision-maker in that relationship, and it is not depicted as dysfunctional or shameful. Rory is not henpecked, he is in awe of his wife's determination and he respects her decision-making ability. While he is always there to reinforce her when she needs it, he does not try to enforce a patriarchal authority over her, because he loves her for who she is and that includes her forcefulness. Amy and Rory's relationship is just about the least sexist, most well-adjusted relationship in any genre series ever.
And Moffat has never put Amy into sexual peril; unlike, say, Peri, the villains do not lust after her body and want to keep her as a trophy bride. Amy gets put into her share of danger, just like the Doctor and the other companions, but it's not represented as specifically due to her gender. (Arguably, she is not a capable fighter, which is apparently a prerequisite for "strong female characters" these days, but neither is anyone else in the series, with the possible exceptions of Ian, Leela, and River Song.)
No, the main reason I think people call Amy "sexist" is...well...not to put to fine a point on it, but she has sex. And she enjoys it. Amy has been known to talk about sex, to ogle men she finds attractive, to ogle women she finds attractive, and to even have enough of a hint of kinkiness to enjoy dressing up in costumes. In short, Amy Pond has genitals and isn't ashamed to say she enjoys using them. To some people, this immediately makes her a terrible slut unworthy of inclusion in the same genre as decent women.
Think I'm exaggerating? Go look at the recaps on TV Without Pity. (Can't link to the site from work, but you should be able to find it with the help of Google.) Until his head exploded from having to talk about women who actually admit to enjoying orgasms, Jacob the recapper inserted constant comments about how Amy's career as a kiss-o-gram showed how damaged she was as a person, and how the Doctor wrecked her by coming into her life and leaving and now all she does is have emotionless flings in order to make money. As a KISS-O-GRAM. God alone knows what he would have said if she'd thrown hugs into the deal.
There is, at heart, a fundamental belief that women who have sex for anything other than procreational purposes are bad. This has been dressed up in countless other beliefs over the eons, and the claim that feminists should be prudes is just one more disguise for it. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as exploitative sexualization or titillation; of course there is. But a female character shouldn't have to wear a burqa in order to be free of criticism for her feminist credibility, and it's frustrating to see people try to pass off their slut shaming as feminism.
And that doesn't even get into River Song...
Monday, March 12, 2012
A Collective of Borg
On Sunday, as I was driving my wife home, we were discussing the collective nouns for different animals. (Starting with "an unkindness of ravens" and "a murder of crows", two of the most evocative.) From there, of course, my mind naturally leapt to Mike Nelson's musings on the collective noun for zombies, as delivered in his commentary track for 'Night of the Living Dead'.
"A shamble,"I said aloud. "A shamble of zombies."
She nodded. "And a halitosis of vampires. And a sparkle of Cullens."
From there, it progressed to Doctor Who, with me suggesting "a shout of Daleks", and her coming up with "a mojo of Judoon." (I remember she also suggested "a mold of Autons", but some of the others escape me.)
Of course, I also think "a collective of Borg" is worth mentioning, if for no other reason than it sounds so utterly literal as to be perfect for Borg.
Needless to say, I someday want to write this into an actual Doctor Who script, with the Doctor musing on what the proper collective noun for Daleks would be. When they start screaming at him, he'd suddenly exclaim, "A shout!"
Any of you have collective nouns for fictional creatures you'd like to share?
"A shamble,"I said aloud. "A shamble of zombies."
She nodded. "And a halitosis of vampires. And a sparkle of Cullens."
From there, it progressed to Doctor Who, with me suggesting "a shout of Daleks", and her coming up with "a mojo of Judoon." (I remember she also suggested "a mold of Autons", but some of the others escape me.)
Of course, I also think "a collective of Borg" is worth mentioning, if for no other reason than it sounds so utterly literal as to be perfect for Borg.
Needless to say, I someday want to write this into an actual Doctor Who script, with the Doctor musing on what the proper collective noun for Daleks would be. When they start screaming at him, he'd suddenly exclaim, "A shout!"
Any of you have collective nouns for fictional creatures you'd like to share?
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Fun Factoid of the Day
The first proper, official mention of the Time War comes during the novelization of 'Remembrance of the Daleks', when the Special Weapons Dalek recalls fighting in "the time campaign, the war to end all wars". This carries with it the interesting implication that for the Imperial Dalek faction at least, the Time War has (in part, at least) already happened. Meaning that perhaps this is the incident that Dalek Caan rescued Davros from...and the Seventh Doctor is participating in events out of synch with the Gallifreyan timestream. (Which is strangely in keeping with the Seventh Doctor's persona...)
It also confirms my general belief that the novelization of 'Remembrance' is actually the starting point for the 2005 series, conceptually if not actually. Which, in turn, confirms my general belief that Ben Aaronovitch is freaking metal.
It also confirms my general belief that the novelization of 'Remembrance' is actually the starting point for the 2005 series, conceptually if not actually. Which, in turn, confirms my general belief that Ben Aaronovitch is freaking metal.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Top Ten Missing Episodes
For those of you who haven't heard the wonderful news, two more episodes of 1960s-era Doctor Who were recovered today ('Galaxy Four' Episode Three and 'The Underwater Menace' Episode Two), bringing the total of recovered episodes to 36 and reducing the number of missing episodes down to 106. As always, this is a day of rejoicing for Doctor Who fans; as I mentioned in my post over at Mightygodking.com, no other fandom can really understand what it's like to not be able to sit down and watch every episode of their favorite series.
Interestingly enough, one article (full disclosure, written by a friend of mine who has a very good blog called "The TARDIS Erudotorum") cited these episodes as "not on anyone's Top Ten list of episodes to be recovered." Which led me to the interesting question, what exactly would the Top Ten list be? So, I thought, why not give mine? Keeping in mind, of course, that we have to keep it to individual episodes (so no "All of 'Marco Polo'") and also that, suckily enough, we can wish as hard as we want but that won't make it happen. So here are my picks for the most desired recoveries, should a benevolent deity grant our wishes.
10-9. The Invasion, Episodes 1 and 4. This one is the most interesting, even though it's at the bottom of the list, because it's the most likely. Rumors have persisted for years, started by none other than the late Nicholas Courtney, that a private collector has copies of the two missing episodes of this classic late-Troughton story, but that they're holding the BBC over a barrel and demanding an exorbitant fee before they allow the Beeb to "recover" them officially. (Courtney claimed to have actually seen copies of the film, which had picture but no sound. The BBC, as with all missing episodes, has sound but no picture. Any A/V club geek could resolve that problem.) Of course, this one is already "restored", in the form of Doctor Who's only (canonical) animated episodes, but it'd be nice to be able to watch the story as interpreted by the actors and not the creators of "Danger Mouse".
8-6. Power of the Daleks, Episodes 1-3. This is actually one I'd love to have in its entirety, but I'm trying to stick to the "individual episodes only" rule, and I just don't have the space for the full serial. And from the sound of things, to be honest, all the good stuff really happens before the Daleks give up on being cunning manipulators and just start killing people; the first few episodes are filled with tense political intrigue and the Daleks actually being clever and subtle, which is such a twist for them that I'd love to see it. Couple that with Troughton's first three episodes in the role, and I would love to see it come back home.
5. The Tenth Planet, Episode 4. And speaking of "regeneration stories", this is probably a lot of people's Number One missing episode. It's certainly of tremendous symbolic significance; the final appearance of William Hartnell, the first actor to take the role, is a major cultural touchstone among fans of the series. But I suspect, having seen the first three episodes, that it's more interesting as a "religious relic" than as an actual story, which bumps it a bit below everything else on the list.
4. The Massacre, Episode 4. Yes, I know. It does seem a bit odd that I'm actually prioritizing the first appearance of Dodo over the final appearance of Hartnell, but I really want it for all the bits prior to that. This is, by all accounts, a remarkably intense episode, with a shocking and devastating climax to the events in France followed up by a genuinely emotional confrontation between Steven and the Doctor. It would be well worth the small price of Dodo's near-nonsensical introductory sequence to get the scenes preceding it.
3. Mission to the Unknown. This has always sounded like one of the truly fascinating, quirky episodes of the series; a one-part story in an era where six and seven-parters weren't at all unusual, a story that features absolutely nothing of the Doctor, not even a mention, and a story that ends with the nominal hero dying at the hands of the Daleks, the Doctor's arch-enemies, with his dying message lost. I don't think it'll ever have the impact that the original story had (especially when it was followed up on with a four-parter that had nothing to do with 'Mission'...for almost five weeks, fans watched the show with the lurking knowledge in the back of their heads that the Daleks were out there, getting ready to conquer the universe, and the Doctor didn't even know about it.) But I would dearly love to see it.
2. Evil of the Daleks, Episode 7. This is another "Dang, I want every one of the missing episodes of this one!" story. But if you can only have one on the list, then it's got to be Episode 7. Absolutely got to. The Doctor's final gambit against the Dalek Emperor, the revolt of the humanised Daleks, the civil war on Skaro...this was epic stuff, and we've been denied it.
1. The Daleks' Master Plan, Episode 12. And speaking of "epic", this was a freaking twelve-parter. That's almost a whole season, one of the grandest and most ambitious stories ever done in the history of 'Doctor Who'...and the climax, involving the death of a companion (well, possibly, depending on how you count these things) and the destruction of worlds and Daleks melting from existence and great big huge exciting stuff, is gone. Possibly forever. **sniff** Could we have it back, please?
Interestingly enough, one article (full disclosure, written by a friend of mine who has a very good blog called "The TARDIS Erudotorum") cited these episodes as "not on anyone's Top Ten list of episodes to be recovered." Which led me to the interesting question, what exactly would the Top Ten list be? So, I thought, why not give mine? Keeping in mind, of course, that we have to keep it to individual episodes (so no "All of 'Marco Polo'") and also that, suckily enough, we can wish as hard as we want but that won't make it happen. So here are my picks for the most desired recoveries, should a benevolent deity grant our wishes.
10-9. The Invasion, Episodes 1 and 4. This one is the most interesting, even though it's at the bottom of the list, because it's the most likely. Rumors have persisted for years, started by none other than the late Nicholas Courtney, that a private collector has copies of the two missing episodes of this classic late-Troughton story, but that they're holding the BBC over a barrel and demanding an exorbitant fee before they allow the Beeb to "recover" them officially. (Courtney claimed to have actually seen copies of the film, which had picture but no sound. The BBC, as with all missing episodes, has sound but no picture. Any A/V club geek could resolve that problem.) Of course, this one is already "restored", in the form of Doctor Who's only (canonical) animated episodes, but it'd be nice to be able to watch the story as interpreted by the actors and not the creators of "Danger Mouse".
8-6. Power of the Daleks, Episodes 1-3. This is actually one I'd love to have in its entirety, but I'm trying to stick to the "individual episodes only" rule, and I just don't have the space for the full serial. And from the sound of things, to be honest, all the good stuff really happens before the Daleks give up on being cunning manipulators and just start killing people; the first few episodes are filled with tense political intrigue and the Daleks actually being clever and subtle, which is such a twist for them that I'd love to see it. Couple that with Troughton's first three episodes in the role, and I would love to see it come back home.
5. The Tenth Planet, Episode 4. And speaking of "regeneration stories", this is probably a lot of people's Number One missing episode. It's certainly of tremendous symbolic significance; the final appearance of William Hartnell, the first actor to take the role, is a major cultural touchstone among fans of the series. But I suspect, having seen the first three episodes, that it's more interesting as a "religious relic" than as an actual story, which bumps it a bit below everything else on the list.
4. The Massacre, Episode 4. Yes, I know. It does seem a bit odd that I'm actually prioritizing the first appearance of Dodo over the final appearance of Hartnell, but I really want it for all the bits prior to that. This is, by all accounts, a remarkably intense episode, with a shocking and devastating climax to the events in France followed up by a genuinely emotional confrontation between Steven and the Doctor. It would be well worth the small price of Dodo's near-nonsensical introductory sequence to get the scenes preceding it.
3. Mission to the Unknown. This has always sounded like one of the truly fascinating, quirky episodes of the series; a one-part story in an era where six and seven-parters weren't at all unusual, a story that features absolutely nothing of the Doctor, not even a mention, and a story that ends with the nominal hero dying at the hands of the Daleks, the Doctor's arch-enemies, with his dying message lost. I don't think it'll ever have the impact that the original story had (especially when it was followed up on with a four-parter that had nothing to do with 'Mission'...for almost five weeks, fans watched the show with the lurking knowledge in the back of their heads that the Daleks were out there, getting ready to conquer the universe, and the Doctor didn't even know about it.) But I would dearly love to see it.
2. Evil of the Daleks, Episode 7. This is another "Dang, I want every one of the missing episodes of this one!" story. But if you can only have one on the list, then it's got to be Episode 7. Absolutely got to. The Doctor's final gambit against the Dalek Emperor, the revolt of the humanised Daleks, the civil war on Skaro...this was epic stuff, and we've been denied it.
1. The Daleks' Master Plan, Episode 12. And speaking of "epic", this was a freaking twelve-parter. That's almost a whole season, one of the grandest and most ambitious stories ever done in the history of 'Doctor Who'...and the climax, involving the death of a companion (well, possibly, depending on how you count these things) and the destruction of worlds and Daleks melting from existence and great big huge exciting stuff, is gone. Possibly forever. **sniff** Could we have it back, please?
Friday, July 15, 2011
Utterly Shameless Plug, 2011 Edition
Naturally, it goes almost without saying that in addition to my general pop-culture savviness, I also happen to be an erudite scholar of the first order. As such, it should surprise virtually nobody that I am featured in an academic publication of the highest order, from the textbook publishers at University of Ottawa Press.
Called "Braaaiiinnnsss! From Academics to Zombies", and edited by Robert Smith? (the mathematician who made a media splash a while back by modeling the spread of a zombie virus mathematically), this textbook features a variety of academic essays on the truest and most vital topic of the age: the zombie apocalypse. Mine is but one of a veritable cornucopia of scholarly discussions on the zombie problem that faces the world today, a humble contribution on the epidemiology of the zombie plague.
The book is available at a variety of outlets, such as:
http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/braaaiiinnnsss
(or, for those of you who would prefer to read the essays in French, at: http://www.presses.uottawa.ca/livre/braaaiiinnnsss)
and of course, Amazon has it at:
http://www.amazon.com/Braaaiiinnnsss-Academics-Zombies-Robert-Smith/dp/0776607707
So remember, it's three a's, three i's, three n's, and three s's. "Braaaiiinnnsss"! Be very careful about asking for it by name.
Called "Braaaiiinnnsss! From Academics to Zombies", and edited by Robert Smith? (the mathematician who made a media splash a while back by modeling the spread of a zombie virus mathematically), this textbook features a variety of academic essays on the truest and most vital topic of the age: the zombie apocalypse. Mine is but one of a veritable cornucopia of scholarly discussions on the zombie problem that faces the world today, a humble contribution on the epidemiology of the zombie plague.
The book is available at a variety of outlets, such as:
http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/braaaiiinnnsss(or, for those of you who would prefer to read the essays in French, at: http://www.presses.uottawa.ca/livre/braaaiiinnnsss)
and of course, Amazon has it at:
http://www.amazon.com/Braaaiiinnnsss-Academics-Zombies-Robert-Smith/dp/0776607707
So remember, it's three a's, three i's, three n's, and three s's. "Braaaiiinnnsss"! Be very careful about asking for it by name.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Why Smallville Is Not Doctor Who
It's been a while since I've watched an episode of Smallville; I haven't actually checked, because I don't care that much about the show, but I think the last episode I watched in its entirety was the third or fourth episode of Season One. But when I heard that the last episode would be airing on Friday night, I felt that there'd be a certain poetic symmetry in watching only the first(-ish) and the last episodes. Plus, given the reputation that the series has gotten over the last ten years, I figured that I'd be onto something good by skipping the ten seasons of hinting, teasing and stalling and getting straight to his transformation into Superman.
You may now laugh.
As it turned out, even the grand, huge, epic "finale" to Smallville was an exercise in drawing out the thin gruel of a story it had been subsisting on for the last decade. Everything was about not changing, about not surprising, about giving its viewers as close to the same experience as they could get without violating the show's mandate of demonstrating how Clark Kent became Superman. There were reset buttons a-plenty, retcons and reappearances, and massive dodges (I someday want to explain to television writers that legally, you're married when you sign the marriage certificate. Failure to say, "I do" means diddly-squat in the eyes of the law.) And in the end, we never really even got to see Superman; there were a few CGI sequences with the character shown from a distance, but in the end, they were driven by the need to keep things the way they'd always been. "No tights, no flights," the unbreakable rule of the series.
And then, the next night, I watched "The Doctor's Wife". And while I won't spoil anything, because the episode is very wonderful, very surprising, and many people probably haven't seen it yet, I will say that it is the epitome of everything that Doctor Who is and everything that Smallville isn't. Instead of being an "epic game-changer" that really doesn't change anything, not even really the things it's obligated to change...this was a normal, everyday, stand-alone non-arc episode that just happened to transform everything you thought you knew about forty-eight years of the series. And it did it almost casually.
Doctor Who is, and always has been like that. It's never been afraid to reinvent itself, not even after forty-eight years. It's a bold, inventive show that has no boundaries, no self-imposed rules, and no orthodoxies to uphold. That's why it attracted a writer of the caliber of Neil Gaiman, whereas Smallville has had to content itself with Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb. That's why it's still going and why I don't think it'll ever stop. Because it's a show that can do anything...and one that will do anything.
You may now laugh.
As it turned out, even the grand, huge, epic "finale" to Smallville was an exercise in drawing out the thin gruel of a story it had been subsisting on for the last decade. Everything was about not changing, about not surprising, about giving its viewers as close to the same experience as they could get without violating the show's mandate of demonstrating how Clark Kent became Superman. There were reset buttons a-plenty, retcons and reappearances, and massive dodges (I someday want to explain to television writers that legally, you're married when you sign the marriage certificate. Failure to say, "I do" means diddly-squat in the eyes of the law.) And in the end, we never really even got to see Superman; there were a few CGI sequences with the character shown from a distance, but in the end, they were driven by the need to keep things the way they'd always been. "No tights, no flights," the unbreakable rule of the series.
And then, the next night, I watched "The Doctor's Wife". And while I won't spoil anything, because the episode is very wonderful, very surprising, and many people probably haven't seen it yet, I will say that it is the epitome of everything that Doctor Who is and everything that Smallville isn't. Instead of being an "epic game-changer" that really doesn't change anything, not even really the things it's obligated to change...this was a normal, everyday, stand-alone non-arc episode that just happened to transform everything you thought you knew about forty-eight years of the series. And it did it almost casually.
Doctor Who is, and always has been like that. It's never been afraid to reinvent itself, not even after forty-eight years. It's a bold, inventive show that has no boundaries, no self-imposed rules, and no orthodoxies to uphold. That's why it attracted a writer of the caliber of Neil Gaiman, whereas Smallville has had to content itself with Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb. That's why it's still going and why I don't think it'll ever stop. Because it's a show that can do anything...and one that will do anything.
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Why Syndrome Makes the Perfect Nemesis
I've been watching The Incredibles a lot lately; this has something to do with the fact that my daughter comes home from preschool with the words, "Can I watch The Incredibles?" practically bursting from her lips. It's actually displaced Toy Story 2 from the top of her "never sick of watching" list, which I didn't think was ever going to happen. So I've seen it on a near-daily basis, something that's afforded me a few opportunities to think about what Brad Bird was saying with the movie.
One of the things that's interested me is the way that Syndrome, Mr. Incredible, and Dash all seem to have different surface motivations, but the same basic underlying drive. Mr. Incredible, of course, insists that he's being genuinely altruistic; he feels bitter about the public reaction to superheroes (which is actually a matter for another post, because the idea of "superheroes getting sued into retirement" is kind of a handwave, to be honest, but I'm digressing here) and wants nothing more than to go back to the way things were.
Syndrome, on the other hand, is bitter and resentful about the lack of emotional support from Mr. Incredible when he was younger. He wants to show Mr. Incredible that he's a better hero, and that if he'd been allowed to be Incrediboy, he would have been a huge asset to the cause of good--to prove that Mr. Incredible was wrong to dismiss his gifts.
And Dash? He just wants to show off. He wants the world to acknowledge his specialness, and to receive the adulation he feels he deserves for his amazing abilities. Which is a little childish, but then again, he's ten. When he grows up...
...he'll wind up either like Mr. Incredible or Syndrome. Because underneath their surface motivations, that's exactly what they want too. Bob Parr doesn't want to save people anonymously, just because they need saving; he does do that over the course of the movie, but only because he can't go out as Mr. Incredible anymore. He only really comes to life when he's wearing his super-suit, performing amazing feats for an admiring audience (even if that audience is just Mirage and her mysterious benefactor.) Deep down, he really wants things to be the way they were when the world looked upon him with quiet awe and adulation.
Syndrome, of course, makes a second career out of self-justification in the movie. Looking at his actions, he's a pathetic, needy child who needs everyone to praise him for his gifts. As Mr. Incredible points out, he's killing real heroes in order to create a fake villain that people will praise him for stopping. While he claims that he's doing it all for Mr. Incredible, there's never been anything to stop him from using or selling his inventions to make the world a better place; it's just that doing so won't give him the emotional rush that comes from crowds cheering his name. Deep down, he and Mr. Incredible are two sides of the same coin, which is why he makes such a perfect nemesis. (And thus I make good on the implicit promise in the title...)
The real hero of the film, of course, is Elastigirl. She's the only one who can put aside her costume easily, because she wasn't ever in it for the glory; she was a superhero when the world needed one, and only when the world needed one. She's tried to pass along to her kids the belief that it's what the world wants ("the world wants us to fit in") and not selfish personal needs that are important; nonetheless, when her family needs Elastigirl, she proves to be easily the most competent of all of them.
One of the things that's interested me is the way that Syndrome, Mr. Incredible, and Dash all seem to have different surface motivations, but the same basic underlying drive. Mr. Incredible, of course, insists that he's being genuinely altruistic; he feels bitter about the public reaction to superheroes (which is actually a matter for another post, because the idea of "superheroes getting sued into retirement" is kind of a handwave, to be honest, but I'm digressing here) and wants nothing more than to go back to the way things were.
Syndrome, on the other hand, is bitter and resentful about the lack of emotional support from Mr. Incredible when he was younger. He wants to show Mr. Incredible that he's a better hero, and that if he'd been allowed to be Incrediboy, he would have been a huge asset to the cause of good--to prove that Mr. Incredible was wrong to dismiss his gifts.
And Dash? He just wants to show off. He wants the world to acknowledge his specialness, and to receive the adulation he feels he deserves for his amazing abilities. Which is a little childish, but then again, he's ten. When he grows up...
...he'll wind up either like Mr. Incredible or Syndrome. Because underneath their surface motivations, that's exactly what they want too. Bob Parr doesn't want to save people anonymously, just because they need saving; he does do that over the course of the movie, but only because he can't go out as Mr. Incredible anymore. He only really comes to life when he's wearing his super-suit, performing amazing feats for an admiring audience (even if that audience is just Mirage and her mysterious benefactor.) Deep down, he really wants things to be the way they were when the world looked upon him with quiet awe and adulation.
Syndrome, of course, makes a second career out of self-justification in the movie. Looking at his actions, he's a pathetic, needy child who needs everyone to praise him for his gifts. As Mr. Incredible points out, he's killing real heroes in order to create a fake villain that people will praise him for stopping. While he claims that he's doing it all for Mr. Incredible, there's never been anything to stop him from using or selling his inventions to make the world a better place; it's just that doing so won't give him the emotional rush that comes from crowds cheering his name. Deep down, he and Mr. Incredible are two sides of the same coin, which is why he makes such a perfect nemesis. (And thus I make good on the implicit promise in the title...)
The real hero of the film, of course, is Elastigirl. She's the only one who can put aside her costume easily, because she wasn't ever in it for the glory; she was a superhero when the world needed one, and only when the world needed one. She's tried to pass along to her kids the belief that it's what the world wants ("the world wants us to fit in") and not selfish personal needs that are important; nonetheless, when her family needs Elastigirl, she proves to be easily the most competent of all of them.
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