Author Archives: natechen

Hour of Epiphanies

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Lottery numbers were the logical place to start. They were completely random, with astronomical odds, the Powerball folks still used a purely mechanical device to generate them so he couldn’t be accused of tampering with them electronically and the drawing was streamed live at a specific time and place. All Sam had to do was sit down at his work table five minutes before things kicked off, cue up the stream on his tablet and flick on the power to the relay.

In theory, anyway. But more than two hours before the drawing was supposed to take place Sam was up to his elbows in the relay’s power source, running another diagnostic in what his brain told him was part of an obsessive need to control but his gut told him was definitely, 100% absolutely necessary for the test.

He’d always had problems with indigestion.

Pure math was not his thing but after leaving grad school at MIT under a cloud he’d been determined to prove… well, something. Contrary to popular belief high concept, theoretical scientists were ruled by emotion just as much as other people. Some of them even knew how to deal with those emotions. Sam King prided himself on channeling them into his work. And so, anxiety drove him to rebuild the tachyon relay a fifth time and like it.

Twenty minutes before the drawing he was done.

With nothing better to do he switched the relay on and pulled up the Powerball app on his phone. It was hard to believe that people of the modern era, with all the education and what not it prided itself on, people were still drawn to such wasteful forms of gambling but, just this once, Same was grateful that the lottery had kept up with the times. It made this experiment really easy to run. All he had to do was push the appropriate lottery button and see what the winning numbers were, then activate the – highly modified – phone in the relay and pull up the same screen.

The numbers listed didn’t match.

Sam frantically checked the relay’s phone and confirmed it was working. There were still fifteen minutes until the drawing. “Not possible,” Sam muttered, checking the relay again. “It shouldn’t have that much range.”

After ten minutes of frantic shuffling of notes and double checking calculations he came back to the conclusion that everything was working properly. The two phones still displayed different sets of winning numbers. Sam pulled up the browser on his laptop and flipped over to the bookmarked page that would let him livestream the drawing. Four minutes to go.

The hosts were chattering about something or another but Sam tuned them out and ran over everything one more time. Then double checked his wifi router, to make sure the stream wouldn’t cut out. Two and a half minutes. There was nothing to do but drain his mug of tea, sit down in a chair, hug his knees to his chest and wait. By some heroic exertion of will he managed to keep himself from rocking back and forth while humming. He hadn’t gone that far down the nutty professor route.

Though, to be fair, he’d never been a professor.

Envy and discontent welled up in him, as it did countless times every day. As he did whenever that happened he forced it down by mindlessly running through simple differential equations and almost missed the drawing. It was only the fact that the hosts had stopped talking that yanked him out of his reverie. The small plastic ball with the first number on it was already bouncing down to the deposit. Sam leaned forward and held his breath.

Five minutes later the drawing was done. The numbers matched the display on his relay. Sam King had successfully predicted the future.

——–

Natalie jerked around, the sound of rushing waters in her ears. Pivoting frantically, she tried to place herself. Most of the world was dark, lit only by small patches of light that seemed to drift in the distance, far out of reach. Nothing nearby was illuminated but she had a sensation of floating.

The last bit gave it away, it was familiar enough. She was dreaming.

Dreaming was nothing new for her, she’d had horrible nightmares for years, to the point of insomnia, until therapy helped her learn to assert herself and dream in a lucid state. She inhaled deeply and phantom water streamed into her nose and mouth, settling in her lungs and stomach. But it wasn’t real, she told herself, and exhaled it back out steadily. She wanted to see.

Darkness took flight all around her, leaving her standing on a rough surface that was probably some kind of coral or clinging sea thing. It looked like she was in some kind of shallow depression in the side of a sheer cliff while over her head the seafloor rose up in some kind of ridges. Straight ahead there was nothing but open water as far as her subconscious had created the world. With a shrug she decided to go exploring and pushed herself off into the water, drifting away from the cliffside. She’d gotten far enough to catch a glimpse of some kind of stone wall rising up from the top of the cliff when a voice rose up through the water, loud enough that she felt it with her entire body.

“Natalie. The world bends. So few are left who hear our voice.”

She stopped her drift through the murky water and looked around frantically. Dreams of drowning in the ocean were nothing new for her – even though she’d never seen a body of water larger than a retention pond – but dreams with dialog were another story. “Who-?”

“You must find the cause.”

“Yeah, how am I-”

“You shall feel our power in your bones. Think with the minds of the ancients. Hear with our wisdom. See with our eyes. You shall be everything you have ever desired to be. Wield the power to set things right.”

The depression she’d just left spasmed, then split open to reveal an angry yellow eye with a black vertical pupil as tall as her three story apartment building. Natalie’s mouth opened but she couldn’t scream – the weight of the water was suddenly too much and crushed all the strength from her.

“Go, Natalie. More depends on you than you know.”

She jolted awake, fighting against phantoms, and found herself panting and tangled in cords and sheets. As calm returned she realized she was in a hospital bed, attached to monitors. The door burst open and a nurse hustled in, already shushing her and trying to straighten out the mess she’d made of things. “W-why am I…”

Natalie trailed off, trying to remember why she might be in a hospital. The nurse guessed the question anyway. “You’ve been asleep for the past two days. Your parents brought you to the ER when you wouldn’t wake up.”

That hadn’t happened before. “Two days?”

The nurse nodded. “That’s right, honey.”

Her mind worked to process that, then blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “I missed my math test.”

——–

As tempting as it was to just win the lottery a couple of times and retire, Sam knew that would immediately get him in trouble and the ability to predict the future was too good to waste on something like that. He wasn’t quite sure what practical implications it had just yet but, before thinking too much about that, he needed to prove it worked in as many different ways as he could.

The concept was simple. He’d built a relay that used tachyon particles to talk to itself in the past. The cost in power was pretty high, he was going to have a killer electrical bill that month, and at first it had only been able to talk to itself half an hour in the past. Not super useful.

But after a week of tinkering he’d managed to run the relay for about an hour and pull up news reports from two days in the future on it. Then the relay had blown a capacitor and was going to need serious retooling. Sam figured it was time to give it an overhaul, think about how to improve it for presentation to the scientific community. But first things came first. He’d read several news stories from yesterday twice. Once on the relay, once when they happened. So far everything had been pretty accurate. Which made today kind of tricky.

He had to go to work to pay his bills and the costs of another build of the relay. Problem was the worksite was supposed to blow up that morning. He climbed out of the car and looked over the bustling site. A huge scaffolding and gantry system supported a 3d concrete printer, laying out the shell of a planned commercial suite intended to hold six offices for dentists, optometrists and the like. Most of the place was printed already and contractors were bustling through the dried sections, running utilities and whatever else happened in there once the printing was done. The big concrete printer was still whirring away on the third floor.

The report said the explosion came in the area of the concrete printer, which was crazy. As one of the four techs who programmed, set up and supervised the printer when it was in motion Sam knew it wasn’t the kind of thing that could explode and take out half a building. Still, he didn’t have any reason to doubt the report he’d read, either. Other than the fact that it came from the future.

Sometimes new technology was more trouble than it was worth. Sam set out to find his supervisor.

As it turned out Clark was at his truck, drinking coffee and listening to the architect drone on about something or other and nodding at the right times. Clark had made foreman for his diplomatic approach to contractor/employer relationships. He usually didn’t talk when they told him what they wanted, then ignored how they wanted him to do it and made sure the job got done right. He was a better boss than some Sam had worked for in academia. Certainly more patient. Clark put up with almost ten minutes of lecture before the architect moved on. Clark let him get a good ten feet away before snorting, shaking his head and walking over to Sam.

“Morning, King.” The foreman was not a man fond of given names. “Anything I can help you with?”

Frivolity wasn’t something Clark like in any form and Sam had a feeling that mentioning news from the future wasn’t going to get him anywhere in this situation so he decided on a more practical tactic. “Do you have the last safety and maintenance inspection report on the printer? It was acting a little funny yesterday and I was hoping to see if I could find the cause.”

Or at least a reason to shut it off and keep it from killing four people when it exploded.

“Sure.” Clark went to his truck and pulled open the back door on the cab, rummaging for his box where he kept those kinds of papers. Sam rolled onto the balls of his feet, impatient. The news had said the explosion was early in the morning, although it hadn’t given an exact time. And he’d run every safety check he could think of on the thing yesterday, no telling how that might have altered the variables since he last checked the future’s news. But he still didn’t want to waste time.

He was so preoccupied with the question of what might go wrong with the printer that he didn’t notice the girl until she was standing right next to him.

“You shouldn’t have looked.”

Sam jerked out of his musings at her voice. She was short, maybe five foot, and young. At a guess, he’s have said thirteen, although she might have been fourteen. Wavy brown hair framed a solemn face and hard brown eyes. Sam frowned. “Honey, you shouldn’t be here. This place is dangerous. What-”

“You’ve seen something you shouldn’t have.” The girl pulled a weird piece of white plastic off of her belt. It looked a bit like a pinwheel. “You shouldn’t have looked.”

Sam felt the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. Something was off about this. “What are you doing here, young lady?”

“The world is bent,” she said. “I have to make it right.”

It took a moment for him to realize it wasn’t just the hair on the back of his neck standing up. All of it was. Then a bolt of light struck the girl and he was knocked back with a deafening crack.

A Quick Q&A With Nate

Posted by natechen on

Q: When are you coming back, Nate?

A: Next week!

Q: Will you be bringing essays or fiction?

A: Fiction!

Q: Get Hype?

A. The hype is real!

Creativity is a Response

Posted by natechen on

Postmodernism came about fifty to sixty years ago to insist that the only way that artists could be truly free to create was to tear down every obstacle, tradition, convention or interpretation. Prevailing wisdom had to go, centuries of understanding about art, founded by brilliant men like da Vinci or Rembrandt, was junked because there was no way those guys could have had anything relevant to say to people as advanced as ourselves. The artist was finally free to create whatever they wanted. The direct result is that modern art is terrible.

What happened?

Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: The Gathering, the world’s most popular card game, has a little saying he frequently shares with the people who ask him for advice. That saying goes, “Restrictions breed creativity.”

This saying suggests that having limits placed on what you can do leads to more creativity, not less, and if it’s true then the very notion that someone seeking to be creative must have no limits is not only wrong – it’s counter productive. And if all that’s true then the postmodern conception of art and creativity is directly responsible for the decline of the quality in creative endeavors postmodernists undertake.

All this is not to say it’s bad to toss all restrictions to the side and think about ideas in the abstract. It’s part of how we drive human thought forward. But art is meant to be shared with other people, that’s why there are museums, galleries and showings, to say nothing of the lessons, classes and even schools dedicated to the arts. There are a lot of very good, useful human processes that aren’t meant to be shared with others and personal naval gazing is one of them. The personal background that underpins such introspection makes it difficult to relate to in any format short of a dissertation when it is entirely based on personal epiphanies, which seems to be all that postmodernism leaves the artist to work with.

In short, it may not be a coincidence that postmodern art has such a bizarre fascination with human excrement. One of the boundaries it’s lost seems to be what should be public and what should be private.

Moving on.

Let’s talk about how restrictions help us be creative. Human beings are fundamentally lazy creatures, if we can make a straight line from Point A to Point B we will. But put a wall in the way and all of the sudden what a person does to get from Point A to Point B can be any number of things. Go around the wall, climb over it, cut through it or dig under it. This creativity is engendered by the limitation put in their way. It’s not even possible to climb or cut without a wall in place to act on. Yes, a person could still wander around or dig without a wall, but they’re not likely to go to all the work if they don’t have to.

And as I said before, having restrictions placed on you can give you new ways to look at the problem. Instead of going about things the way you always have, restrictions can force you to look at an issue in a new way and create whole new ways to problem solve – or to express yourself.

And a person could say to themselves, “Well, I’ll get where I want to go without using any straight lines.” But guess what? As soon as they’ve done that they’ve set a rule they have to follow in order to help them be creative. The restriction breeds creativity.

You see, rules don’t have to be limitations set on us by society, or physics, or human nature. They can just be guidelines we create for ourselves. When confronted with the seemingly limitless possibilities of a blank piece of paper it helps to have guidelines to help determine where you’re going to go with it. Are you writing a story? A poem? Painting a landscape? Or drawing a cartoon? All of those things are limits on what you are creating. Without them the possibilities would be paralyzing.

Beyond that, many rules exist to tell us what has been tried and found wanting. Yes, we could try and reinvent the wheel. But doing so is neither groundbreaking nor helpful. To go back to the original analogy, by throwing out all the rules in art postmodernists not only threw out years of conventions, that admittedly may have hindered artistic expression to an extent, they threw out all the rules built on an understanding of what makes a thing beautiful to see and easy to understand. While the occasional modern artist will stumble across something that makes their ideas accessible to others they won’t bother to share it for fear of limiting their peers. And so they keep badly reinventing the wheel when artists like Michelangelo were the artistic equivalent of interstellar flight centuries ago. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Too often people who want to be creative look at a restriction on what can be done as a block to creativity. But the truth is, creativity expresses itself however it can, overcoming obstacles and reveling in the things that should undo it. It responds to the idea that a thing should be difficult by showing how it’s a delight. Without structures, creativity is dead.

Christmas is coming up, and this is my last post for the year. So I’d like to leave you with a little gift. Here is a list of ten creative endeavors, complete with things restrictions, that you can try out. Hopefully they’ll give you a new appreciation for how your creativity comes out in response to them.

  1. Write a haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry with three lines where the first and last lines have five syllables and the middle line has seven.
  2. Write a short story in one hundred words or less.
  3. Write a review of the last movie you saw without adjectives or adverbs.
  4. Build a LEGO house using no pieces smaller than 2 x 8.
  5. Describe your day without using colors or numbers.
  6. Prepare a hot meal without using a knife.
  7. Draw a self portrait without using a pen, pencil, brush or crayons.
  8. Write your next five Facebook posts or texts without using the letter ‘u’.
  9. Film and edit a music video using nothing but your phone.
  10. Draw a portrait of a friend but lay out every line using a ruler.

Hope you’ll chose to share a few of your endeavors with me. See you next year!

The Reading List, Act Four

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See previous reading lists here, there and everywhere!

Let’s get to it, shall we?

Doomed by Cartoon by John Adler

Genres: Nonfiction, Political History

The election was tense. A controversial candidate was running for office, backed by the corrupt New York political machine and partisan journalists, only to find the way blocked by a ragtag conglomeration of other partisan writers. The final thorn in the side was a constant barrage of stinging pictures aimed to highlight the ridiculous, corrupt nature of the Democratic party. In the end, they were swept from power.

It was 1871 and Thomas Nast, father of the American Cartoon, had won his greatest victory.

After three years of campaigning “Boss” William Tweed and the Tammany Hall political machine that had bilked New York for millions of dollars was driven from public office. Doomed by Cartoon is a history of how it happened and includes every cartoon Nast drew against Tweed and his conspirators. As much a record of the formation of modern political cartooning – Nast is credited with inventing or popularizing both the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey – this book analyzes each of Nast’s cartoons, their themes and what context led him to draw them. It’s a fascinating look at an era of politics that, lets face it, we still live in.

It’s also a study in ironies both delicious and tragic. A must for anyone who loves politics.

Irredeemable by Mark Waid

Genres: Comic Book, Superheroes

Volumes: Ten in total

Comic writing legend Mark Waid wrote this tour de force to explore the question of what happens when the man the whole world counts on goes bad. This series isn’t tied to either DC or Marvel’s comic universes, although it takes strong cues from the lore of DC. It focuses entirely on the central conceit and never shies away from the idea that sometimes people who have legitimately earned our love and respect can be come reprehensible villains. The question we must answer is, are they irredeemable?

Not to spoil anything – it’s never a plot point in much debate – but the Plutonian, who was the Superman of his world in both power and moral character, doesn’t go bad because of mind control or coercion. He just makes a choice to stop being a protector and start being a destroyer. Worse, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy with why he did it.

But the Plutonian’s swath of destruction takes a horrific toll and the people who used to support him are faced with hard questions. How far do you go in fighting a friend? When is he no longer the person you knew? Is there a point where mercy for a criminal is the greatest crime? And how do you take the measure of a man who is both the world’s greatest hero and it most despicable villain?

Incorruptible by Mark Waid

Genres: Comic Book, Superheroes

Volumes: Seven in total

The companion to Mark Waid’s Irredeemable, Incorruptible gives us Max Damage, perpetual anarchist. Few people on earth hated the Plutonian as much as Max. To Max, he was the symbol of everything keeping the little guy down – morality, social acclaim and order. Unfortunately for Max, he was there the day the Plutonian went mad.

If the Plutonian was the world’s greatest pillar of order his fall from grace was the world’s greatest moment of chaos. Max saw that and it doesn’t look like he enjoyed it as much as an apparent hardcore anarchist should. After a month off the scene Max comes back, burns all his illegally obtained cash, turns his gang in to the police and sets himself up as the new protector of his home city of Coalville.

People are naturally skeptical. For a long time he was a vicious and self serving man. Worse, Max’s superpower makes him stronger and tougher in proportion to how long he’s been awake. While the nature of his unique metabolism spares him the physical fatigue of staying awake his mind still goes loopy – and who wants a superhero suffering chronic sleep deprivation?

Still, Max is sure he can handle it. He was one of the world’s supreme supervillains for years. All it takes to be a hero is to do all the villainous things in reverse.

…right?

Pegasus Bridge by Stephen E. Ambrose

Genres: Nonfiction, Military History

Bridges are probably the most important structure in warfare. Without them it is difficult, if not impossible, to get all the things an army needs where they need to go. In medieval times a bridge could be held for hours or even days by a handful of people with the right armor, enough supplies and strong nerves. In modern war they can be taken by the same. Only a few people have done both in the same day. If you’ve ever read about Operation Market/Garden (a recommend book on the subject is A Bridge Too Far, mentioned in one of my other reading list posts) you know how badly it can go when an airborne division paradrops into enemy territory to do just that.

But you probably haven’t heard the story that proved that, as badly as Market/Garden went, what they were trying to do was more than plausible. It happened successfully just months before.

Operation Overlord was the turning point of the battle for Fortress Europe, the beginning of the fall of the Nazi war machine. The first stage of the journey was called Operation Deadstick, a simple operation by the British 6th Parachute Division. All they had to do was precision land their gliders full of gear near a river, rush across a bridge rigged to explode before anyone blew it up, kick the Nazis off and not let them drive their tanks up and get the bridge back.

And the Sixth did just that.

Pegasus Bridge is the story of how they did it and how the people in England and Normandy helped. It’s the story of courage under fire. And it’s an explanation of why a bridge came to be named for a flying horse – the same flying horse the soldiers who took the bridge wore.

Angelmass by Timothy Zahn

Genres: Science Fiction

Sequels: It stands alone

Premise: A handful of worlds in the galaxy lie clustered around a microscopic black hole from which emanate unique particles called angels. These worlds work together to harvest these particles and distribute them to as many people as they can, particularly leaders in politics, military and law. Why? Because angels make people nearby good.

Nothing sinister to see there.

Okay, there’s probably something sinister there. To the point that the government outside has sent in a military ship to seize the black hole, known as Angelmass, and deal with the local government. Meanwhile, a physicist has gone in to study the angels and try and figure out how they work and a down on her luck drifter takes a job with an angel harvesting crew in the hopes she can pick up an angel and make a quick buck. By the time the dust settles, nothing that people thought they knew will hold true.

Angelmass is a fun, fast tale about free will, morality and the ways people get in touch with their better angels. While hardly a home to Zahn’s most inventive ideas or his twistiest plots, it is a great introduction to the work of one of SciFi’s most prolific and zany authors.

Frequency – A Show Don’t Tell Masterclass

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Make no mistake – Frequency is not a perfect show. It’s not the best show airing right now. But it might be the best new show of the season. The actors are not going to win awards, although they’re solid enough, and for the most part I think the writers take the show more seriously than anyone else ever will.

But it does one thing right, and that’s – you guessed it – show don’t tell.

The basic premise of Frequency is that detective Julie Sullivan, a modern day NYPD detective, lost her father Frank Sullivan, also an NYPD detective, at an early age. Then an old HAM radio is struck by lightning, allowing it to communicate with itself 20 years in the past. More to the point, allowing Julie to speak with her father shortly before he dies. The two quickly set out to use cross-time communication to save Frank’s life and fight for justice!

The wonkiness of the plot was enough to intrigue me into watching the pilot. The ability of the pilot to pack information into a single episode convinced me to stay, at least for this season. Frequency manages incredible information density through show don’t tell in three specific areas. First, in establishing the show’s split time periods. Second, in establishing that the linked timeframes are synchronous (and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second). Third, in showing causality and chaos there. And it does all of this without an exposition dump or unwieldy “sciency” character. Not that such characters are always bad, but putting one in this story probably wouldn’t have served the plot very well.

Let’s start with the way the show frames itself. The story has two timeframes, 2016 and 1996, both of which are established before they cross paths. The modern era is established by just showing us things that we take for granted – modern cars, smartphones and current music. The past is a little trickier, but still pretty easy to do. We see Frank watching the 1996 World Series as he’s first introduced and, a little while later, we see former President Clinton on TV at some kind of official function where the announcer introduces him as the leader of the free world – implying that he is, in fact, the president at the time. Add in little things like CRT TVs and out of date cars and it’s pretty easy to make a rough estimate of the time period. Of course, there’s also Julie herself, who we see as a young girl in this era, and who’s birthdays – eighth and twenty-eighth – are mentioned as touchstones to hammer down the exact timing shortly before the first father and daughter cross-time talk.

The second thing established is how events in 1996 and 2016 are synchronous, and until Frank does something new in his era Julie won’t see the results of it in hers. We see this in two separate incidents. The first is probably the most ingenious. When Julie and Frank first speak Frank is so weirded out he sets his cigar down and misses the ashtray. It burns a hole through the wooden top of the HAM radio – a hole Julie sees appearing in her time in real time. The hole has not always been there, as it would be in some time travel stories, it appears before Julie’s eyes as she’s watching and she asks about it, prompting Frank to pick the cigar up and put it back in the ashtray then brush the coals off the top of the radio. The hole stops growing in Julie’s time period. In much the same way, Julie labors under the impression her father is dead until the moment that history changes and her father’s life is saved.

Finally, the show demonstrates causality and the “butterfly effect” not by having someone explain it to Julie but by having her live it. After saving her father’s life she hurries to keep a date with her fiance and his parents only to find that he doesn’t have any idea who she is. Then she discovers that her mother is dead – the result of her going to the hospital to visit Frank there after he survives the shooting that should have killed him. In the process she becomes the target of a serial killer rather than the victim he had originally selected. Again, this is a sequence we see happen and it drives home that this is the consequence of what Julie and Frank did far more than just hearing about it.

With all this basic, world building exposition happening along side of the character building dialog the first episode of Frequency does an amazing job of establishing the world, it’s rules and the people who we’re going to watch play by them in the confines of the forty three minutes most network TV shows have to work with. It’s worth watching for the pure craftsmanship even if you don’t like time travel or police procedurals. What’s more, most of what the show does would only work on the screen, meaning the writers were giving careful consideration to how best they could use their medium, which many writers neglect. All together this makes the pilot alone worth watching, even if you choose to pass on the rest of the series. Don’t deprive yourself.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

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Saitama doesn’t enjoy life.

He used to. Three years ago he set out to become a part time hero, saving people to get an adrenaline rush that would let him shake off boring everyday life and really live, if you know what I mean. Problem is, after three years Saitama has become so good at fighting evil he always defeats it in a single punch. It just isn’t satisfying anymore.

Then he bumps into the cyborg Genos while swatting a mosquito (long story) and suddenly finds himself with an aspiring apprentice. Like most people suddenly faced with unexpected responsibilities, he tries to walk away. The problem with people (or cyborgs) is that they can follow along with you.

One Punch Man is the story of Saitama’s search for fulfillment. After three years of winning difficult fights against every stripe of evil you’d think he’d have made some progress on that front, but nope. He’s still living in a small, rundown apartment by himself in a mostly abandoned part of town. He joins a hero team and chases fame but satisfaction eludes him. The fights still aren’t challenging and most of the other heroes are jerks. Saitama gets that being a hero means fighting to protect people but he doesn’t seem to grasp why that’s important, just that it is.

The heart of the story, the moment when Saitama starts to see a glimpse of what’s wrong, comes with the appearance of the Sea King. It’s a neat bit of symmetry, we first got a full understanding of why Saitama was so frustrated in his brief  encounter with the Earth King, now the Sea King offers us the solution to the problem, but I digress. The Sea King could serve as a master class in how to build up a villain, as most of his story arc is dedicated to his ascendancy, but the part that’s important to us comes at the very end of his story.

The Sea King has defeated heroes of every type and level of power and is about to wipe out a shelter full of bystanders when he’s brought up short by Mumen Rider. Basically an over glorified bike cop, Mumen Rider is technically Saitama’s superior, although the only category Mumen might outclass him in is book smarts. The chances that he could defeat the Sea King are nonexistent. Mumen fights anyways, throwing everything he’s got at the Sea King. In turn, the Sea King brushes him off like a gnat.

As Mumen falls to the ground Saitama catches him and lays him out gently.

Of course, with Saitama on the scene the fight is essentially over. The Sea King is defeated between animation frames with a punch so hard that it blows rain clouds away and the day is saved. The twist comes after the villain is dead.

Remember that Mumen Rider is considered to be a better hero than Saitama, although the only aspect Mumen is ahead of Saitama in is book smarts. In all other categories Saitama is, by the rules of the story, the most powerful being in existence by a wide margin. As a result, Saitama’s easily defeating the Sea King makes Mumen Rider – and all the other, much more powerful heroes who confronted the Sea King – look pathetic. So Saitama throws himself under the bus, saying that the Sea King seemed incredibly weak after fighting all the other heroes in rapid succession in order to salvage the reputation of his fellow heroes.

Later, Saitama gets his first piece of fan mail, thanking him for saving the anonymous sender’s life. With it comes a couple of other letters, calling him a fraud for stealing glory from other heroes who did all the work for him. Later, Saitama stumbles across Mumen at a food stall and we learn that Mumen Rider was the source of Saitama’s one piece of positive mail. The two heroes, one the best of the weakest the other the best in the world, pause to share a moment of camaraderie and for the first time in a while Saitama finds something he’s been missing – a sense of satisfaction.

Many young people set out to do something for their own satisfaction but the fact is, most humans find satisfaction not when they’re focused on themselves but when they’re focused on others. Fiction rarely tackles the challenge of showing how that particular aspect of a coming of age comes about. But under the over-the-top action, slapstick humor and biting satire One Punch Man tackles that question with surprising gusto. While the evolution is by no means complete it is an interesting story to watch.

The Burden of Being Normal

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Let me wax philosophical about one of the greatest heroes I’ve seen recently. His name is Reigen Arataka and he is a master of the salt.

No, he’s not the main character of Mob Psycho 100. But he is it’s heart. The titular character, Mob, is a taciturn, antisocial kind of person who is hard to relate to. That’s kind of his schtick. But Reigen is his mentor, his source of morals, his emotional core. He frames Mob’s understanding of normal people and, as such, tends to serve as the audience’s point of view into Mob’s mind as much as he’s Mob’s view into other people.

Which is initially terrifying, since Reigen is an atrocious con man. Mob is a legitimate psychic with telekinetic powers, the ability to see spirits and who knows what other kinds of absurd abilities and, as an elementary student, he comes to Reigen’s entirely fraudulent psychic medium business in the hopes of finding some help in understanding his powers and abilities. What he gets instead is a very simple principle to live by – psychic abilities are talents just like athletic ability and academic skill. It’s an interesting point of view, especially given who it comes from.

Reigen fits an anime mold I like to call “The Omnicompetent”, a person who has literally every skill a given situation calls for other than the skills the rest of the cast bring to the table. He gives perfect massages, photoshops brilliantly and out cons conmen in between helping Mob keep his powers under control by diffusing the emotional time bombs that cause them to run rampant. There’s very little that can keep Reigen from getting what he wants besides his own rotten personality.

Reigen is not a great role model for Mob. He is a con man, after all, and no amount of good life advice changes the fact that he’s using Mob as ludicrously underpaid exorcist for the occasional client with a real supernatural problem. Reigen lacks honesty and purpose, beyond being life coach for a middle schooler of apocalyptic power, and that’s why he hasn’t moved beyond being a simple con man and actually made something of himself.

Reigen is normal. In spite of all his unbelievable number of professional level skills, he is normal. Changing, becoming someone truly exceptional, would require hard work, sacrifice and other hardships that he can’t bring himself to make. At least, not on behalf of himself. Mob is a very different story.

When the two first meet Reigen tells his newly minted pupil that his powers are just like the ability to study, to sing or to run fast. They are a talent, and they can be nice to have, but they don’t make him special. Psychic powers will let him do some things, but they aren’t a panacea.

Mob takes this lesson to heart and sets out to achieve his goals by developing whatever set of skills will take him that way, rather than bulling his way through with psychic powers. He wants to be charismatic and get a girl to like him so he joins a bodybuilding club and starts trying to understand how people work in spite of his own insular nature.

This dynamic is written large when, at the show’s climax, Reigen winds up as Mob’s surrogate against a group of super powerful espers who seek to rule the world (of course!) and be worshipped for how special their powers make them.

“Normal” versus “special” might very well be the central conflict in Mob Psycho 100. It might strike you as odd, then, that the protagonists, who are one in a million deviations from the norm, are making the case for normal. But as Reigen weilds Mob’s powers, strolling effortlessly through dozens of building wrecking attacks, and lecturing us on how anyone who is so arrogant as to think they’re special and entitled to anything hasn’t lived in the real world we can’t help but find his argument compelling. After all, he’s many times more powerful than they are and still a commoner.

Reigen has a very simple message, and in our day and age it’s a useful one, too. If you think you’re special you haven’t lived yet. If you fail it falls to you to improve. That’s the burden of being normal. And it’s what makes the dedicated commoners who work to change, little by little, truly special.

For a story with a nuanced message – but absurd action – Mob Psycho is worth a look.

My Hero Academia and the Art of Subtly

Posted by natechen on

 

At it’s most fundamental level, My Hero Academia is a manga about a young man, known as Deku to his friends, who sets out to become a hero in a world where a whopping eighty percent of all people have superhuman abilities and costumed superheroes are a fact of life.

Deku, of course, has no powers of his own.

The role model Deku fixates on is the nation’s top hero, All Might, who is renowned for daring rescues, his care for the common people and his unflinching stance against evil. Deku’s story is not how a person with “nothing special” becomes a hero, however. Instead, it’s a tale of legacy. It turns out that All Might carries the one superpower – or “quirk” in the story’s parlance – that can be passed from one person to another. And after a devastating battle left All Might with chronic wounds that made it impossible for him to use his powers for more than a few hours a day he set out to find a successor. Naturally, that successor turns out to be Deku.

That probably doesn’t sound like a very unusual story, and really, it’s not. My Hero Academia is a very good, well written coming of age story about a young man who has to live up to a heavy burden and who struggles with what that means and how much it will cost him. It’s fun and has heart. But nothing would be particularly unusual about it, other than how well it executes it’s story, except for one little fact.

All Might is from the United States of America.

American characters aren’t exactly uncommon in manga, but the medium is fundamentally Japanese so they aren’t usually that central to the plot. There’s a long standing trope of a Japanese person who’s live overseas a great deal and behaves very differently because of it and there’s also plenty of characters who have a Japanese parent and a parent from elsewhere. But for the main character’s mentor to not Japanese is so rare as to be outrageous.

Yet All Might, in spite of having a Japanese name for his civilian identity, is undoubtedly American. He’s identified as a foreigner by several characters at various times. He calls his plan to prepare Deku for hero life “the American Dream plan.” His special attacks are named after cities and states in the U.S. His personality is brash and grandiose, traits the Japanese (and many others) associate with Americans. So why?

The author of the work has never shown any particular Anglophilia. It’s true that superheroes, the concept at the heart of the work, are an American invention but there’s no need to import a mentor character for the series. Personally, I believe there’s something more going on here.

For decades Japan’s relationship with the U.S. has been defined by the Second World War. After a crushing defeat the popular understanding of America has been that, as a nation, it’s defined by it’s military might. Perhaps that’s an understandable impression, all things considered. But there’s always been a political undercurrent of desire for that kind of strength in Japan. With the constant bickering with China that’s come to characterize the eastern Pacific in the past decade that desire has been gaining cultural and political steam.

In that light the thought of an American hero passing his power down to a Japanese person is pretty interesting. Consider the timing of All Might’s decline, which is pegged at about five years before the start of the manga. The timing lines up curiously well with the rise of the Islamic State and growing American uninvolvement on the world stage. So is this apparently simple tale of a young man aspiring to greatness actually a suggestion that Japan needs to step up on the world stage, set aside it’s own insular tendencies and try to become a force for good in the world? Would that be a bad thing?

If this notion is true, one thing that’s clear is that it’s not a polemic against the U.S. Deku’s rival, Bakugo, is another loud, brash character like All Might, with a dose of supreme confidence and ego thrown in. He could very well be the avatar for American Exceptionalism. While Deku and Bakugo don’t see eye to eye, probably don’t even like each other very much, they also don’t see each other as working at cross purposes. Bakugo doesn’t seem to think Deku’s cut out for the superhero life at first but they manage to find a grudging, working relationship. Even if USA World Police are gone, the manga suggests, there’s still great advantages in working with the U.S.

But is it even okay to wrap such an idea up in a bright, shiny package and run it in a publication aimed primarily at young, impressionable boys?

That’s a thornier issue. My Hero Academia treats the dangers, responsibilities and moral aspects of being a superhero very seriously, surprisingly so for a story aimed at adolescents. Deku’s life is not simple or easy, he faces hurdles that require more than a carefree grin and superhuman power to overcome. The mere fact that these questions are raised points to a deeper, more nuanced view of issues than simply smashing in the door and rounding up the bad guys – although that does need to happen sometimes and the story readily acknowledges that, too. Point is, getting people to ask these questions is an improvement all on it’s own. If Japan ever does have a debate about their place on the world stage an understanding of subtle questions will be as important as a firm grounding in larger issues. While My Hero Academia might be seen as pushing for one side of the issue it never goes out of its way to demonize those who might go the other way, and that is commendable.

Ultimately, the whole line of inquiry is speculative. And that may be the biggest lesson of My Hero Academia. It has a very simple, well explored premise. But, by writing with subtly as well as passion it brings a layer of depth and nuance that is not easily explored and will probably keep those on either side debating it for a time to come. What more could a good story hope for?

The Art of Evil Never Dies

Posted by natechen on

It’s been a long journey to get here but we’ve finally finished a quick tour through the art of building an effective villain. I hope this exploration of villainy will be useful to you as you seek to build a compelling villain your audience will relate to. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about that in this series, rather than talking about how to design their looks and backstories. Classic sources of villainous gambits like Machiavelli’s The Prince or Robert Green’s The 48 Laws of Power have been pretty much absent (though do read them) in favor of getting at your villain’s motivation and persona.

The reason for this is simple. Villains are a part of us in a way we rarely like to acknowledge. People do love villains, they like the feeling of someone who will do whatever it takes to get what they want, but they don’t like the contradictions that destroy villains nor are they entirely comfortable with the depths of depravity that villains can sink to. Heroes are the uncomfortable, challenging but ultimately more edifying alternative to villainy. In many ways the hero vs. villain narrative we love so much is a study in two sides of ourselves, highlighting the conflict between things like selflessness and depravity that every person faces.

Unfortunately for fiction today villains are cranked out as totally bland, featureless, cackling mischief makers. They don’t represent parts of ourselves that must be challenged by our better selves, they’re just obstacles for protagonists to overcome. As villains have lost those shreds of humanity that made us fear them less as an existential threat and more as a glimpse of our inner demons heroes have lost something as well, becoming meaner, more vindictive and thuggish, until sometimes it feels like the hero’s victory boils down to a crowd cheering as one bully beats another bully into the pavement.

For a long time I didn’t understand the people who liked villains more than heroes. It wasn’t until I’d done a lot of introspection that I realized how much of what I hated about myself I saw in villains and  how profoundly the ways heroes responded to them had influenced me. It didn’t just change the way I thought about villains, it gave me much greater compassion for those people from my life that I could have easily considered villains.

The failure of villains in modern fiction goes far beyond it’s literary implications. Fiction is an opportunity to face our darkest depths and see the ways they can be overcome in ways that are healthy and safe. Without fictional villains to let us face our worst parts of ourselves we start to see our worst traits everywhere, even places where they might not really exist. Without relateable villains to let us build empathy we start to think anyone who shows us even the slightest specter of evil deserves to be shunned, loathed and possibly even hunted and destroyed. When our cultural landscape is empty of truly great villains we must face our worst natures in the here and now with no preparation in the safety of our imagination, with none of the edge blunted by the lessons great art can teach.

A villainous generation of flat caricatures, one dimensional monsters that bear no resemblance to anyone who has ever lived, has deprived us of the nobility and compassion that should define our greatest heroes. We’re the poorer for it.

Mankind is dark. Our capacity for evil is staggering in scale and history has confirmed it time and again. No matter what hero rises up to face it, the problem will never be defeated. Each person must come to grips with the problem, as each person embodies it. So today, I make the case for the villain. Each person deserves to face their worst and try to overcome it and the fictional villain is a time tested way to start. Weigh the villains you encounter, take their measure and seriously consider what makes them human and how they come undone and you’ll eventually find the way to write your own. Yes, it will probably mean facing your own dark side. Consider it a side benefit.

We’ve spent a lot of time on villains. Two months, to be exact. Next week let’s flip the paradigm, look at the other side of the equation for a bit. Until then, go forth and think evil. For greater good.

The Art of Evil – Double X

Posted by natechen on

Your villain is probably male.

That top ten list? (Parts one and two.) Seventy percent male. Most villains in modern fiction are male. I’m not saying yours shouldn’t be female, but girl villains come with hurdles to overcome that boy villains don’t, and that makes writing them well and getting your point across more difficult, so many authors just don’t bother. The obstacles aren’t insurmountable but some stories just don’t have the space to devote to it or the villain may not be important enough to the overall story to justify the extra work – and writers do have to ration out their work or they will burn out, which helps no one.

So what are the pitfalls of a female villain? In short they fall into three broad categories, two of which are rooted in human nature and one of which is more of a modern societal construct.

The first quirk of human nature to address is the simple fact that no person, man or woman, likes to see a woman in danger. Consider this social experiment, conducted by two actors in a public park in London:

Notice how people broke up the argument where the man was threatening, sometimes before he did more than raise his voice, while the man being threatened was basically ignored the whole time and sometimes people even celebrated. People don’t like seeing women in danger, and danger is where most villains have to go in order to get what they want. You might think that people are willing to look past this in the interest of good storytelling but the fact is they aren’t.

Two recent examples of this protective instinct manifesting on behalf of fictional female characters include the protests over the treatment of Daisy Domergue in The Hateful Eight and the complaints surrounding the billboards and posters showing a confrontation between Apocalypse and Mystique in X-Men: Age of Apocalypse. Both times there was protest for women being placed in scenarios that wouldn’t draw a second glance if faced by man.

Some people would assert that this is a result of culture and conditioning but the fact is, keeping women away from violence is a common thread in world cultures so it makes more sense to me to consider it universal. We can’t really expect it to go away any time soon, especially since the people who claim to most oppose these kinds of “gender roles” – namely, feminists – are exactly the people who protested in these two examples.

Point is, there’s little to nothing an author can do about this directly. You could strive to keep your villain out of physical struggles entirely, or keep such things brief or even have them happen off screen, but that limits what you can do with your villain. The alternative is to put your female villain through the wringer and take the inevitable scolding, a la Tarantino. Or, you could just avoid the quandary and make your villain a dude. On the whole, as statistics suggest, authors chose the latter.

The second reason villains tend not to be female in modern fiction is because women, on aggregate, are risk averse. Again, with villainy being a role that brings a certain degree of risk with it, it becomes a thing that we expect more of men than women. Risk taking is something most ladies choose only when circumstances drive them to it. There’s certainly a place for villains who find their calling when pushed to the wall but, again, it’s a limiting factor in how you can use your villain in your story.

Yes, your villain could be a very atypical woman, but that undercuts her utility as a good connection point for your audience. That doesn’t mean you can’t break this stereotype, or even write a story where the restrictions of demographic averages are in full effect, but in either case you’re left with another set of restrictions on what you can do, restrictions that may not serve your story. In many cases it will be simpler to make your villain a man.

These first two hurdles to a female villain are simple facts of life, easily observable in day to day life. They are neither good or bad, they simply are, and anyone trying to tell a story needs to begin with a solid grasp on the way things are before they set pen to page or they risk running afoul of verisimilitude. Sure, fiction lets you depart from reality to an extent but if you’re not brutally honest about how far from convention you’ve gone you risk overstepping what your audience will expect.

It’s also never wise to try and force characters to be something other than what their nature calls for. Breaking convention for the sake of breaking convention may seem innovative but it frequently comes off as a lazy attempt to seem creative. but it If your character isn’t fitting well as a woman then write them as a man. This goes double for villains, who demand to be taken on their own terms.

But what about the societal reason?

This is a much touchier subject. (And it’s not like the previous two were contentious.) The third reason I think female villains are uncommon in modern fiction is because society puts women in a position of moral authority.

This may come as a bit of a surprise to you, most people are taught that we live in a society where men run everything but even a cursory examination suggests something much different. Most teachers for children under ten are women, most major colleges have women’s studies departments and just a quick Google search shows a number of articles explaining why the treatment of women is the gold standard for morality (examples one and two). This attitude is seen in action when a mere accusation of violence got Auburn University student Jovon Robinson expelled simply by accusing him of a single act of violence, with no evidence or police inquiry.

There is an extent to which women get to measure who is good and bad in modern society. If a villain has the power to define whether what they do is good or bad then, by definition, they cannot be a villain.

Writing a female villain within the confines of the moral authority society gives them, usually the authority to brand the men in their lives (fathers, brothers, bosses and boyfriends for the most part) as violent or degenerate, pretty much impossible. You can write a gripping thriller about a villainous man who murders, or tries to murder, his spouse but make him a woman and anything but a sympathetic portrayal becomes almost impossible today.

Once again, this imposes a limit on what can be done with the female villain, and, notably, not one that existed in the past. In days of yore it was considered equally feasible for a woman to be an aggressor and a bully towards the men in her life as the reverse. Lady Macbeth, anyone? Today those kinds of villains are much less common.

One thing you shouldn’t do is hear me saying don’t write female villains. You should, when the time is right. But there are factors that make female villains more difficult to take on and you need to know them, weigh them and decide whether you’re up for them and whether your story wants to deal with them. Writing a story, getting all the pieces in position and understanding all the characters is a major undertaking. Sometimes you just don’t want to toss all those extra variables into the mix. If you don’t you’re in good hands. Many great villains came about without needing to tangle with them. Plenty exist in spite of them, too. Honestly, this shouldn’t be the biggest factor in your thinking by a long shot. But it’s not something you see discussed much, so hopefully this has been a help to you. See you next week when we wrap up this series with a few final thoughts about villains, why modern villains fail so badly and what comes next.