Tag Archives: On Writing

We Have Forgotten Our Symbolic Language

Posted by natechen on

There was a time when fairy tales and myths were ways of talking about the world which were rife with mystery and symbolism. These stories served as ways to present human realities in sharp, simple and easy to remember ways. While lacking in nuance by today’s standards this symbolic language is part of what made these traditional stories easy to pass down. The people who told them were typically not literate and, even if they could read or write, generally wouldn’t have the resources to make something durable enough to stand the test of time. The average home was a very flimsy place back in the day, and something as flimsy as paper was unlikely to survive the seasons, much less the years.

So stories larger than life, stories of brave knights and princesses, dark forests and lurking predators, monsters and ghosts were spun to stand out from the day to day humdrum of life. But most all people knew that the protagonists were stand-ins for the higher callings in their lives, the dark places represented hard times or unfamiliar circumstances and the ghouls and dragons the worse parts of human nature that had to be confronted and overcome, whether from sources without or from within their own heart. This symbolic language was beautiful, effective and most of all memorable.

We’ve forgotten how it is used.

Part of this is because of the immediacy of our culture. Twitter hot takes and reddit memes have overtaken the discussion to the point where the first aspect of anything that catches the attention is what is commented on. You would think memes could fill the role of introductory symbology for our culture but so much of meme culture is rooted in irony and sarcasm that it tends to undermine the nature of symbolism – commentors are too busy trying to put their own spin on the meme to consider the original intention of whatever they’re riffing on. Symbology requires a level of shared perception between author and audience which meme culture actively avoids. Which brings us to the second issue, namely the very postmodern culture we live in.

Postmodernists are hung up on power games and oppressing people; they’re always looking for it. Almost all literary criticism in our era is rooted in postmodernism, so the people who used to keep and teach our cultural symbolism, the elders and wise women, now spend all their time dissecting it to see how it’s bad. An ogre who robs and kills travelers is no longer a symbol of human greed, it’s a racist caricature of Jews, or black people, or whatever.

This is something that’s been nagging at me for a while, but I always chalked it up to postmodernism. But the decay of meaningful symbology was really thrown in stark contrast for me by the reaction to a little work of Japanese fiction called Goblin Slayer. For those wondering, the story focuses on a man who kills goblins. Who would have guessed?

There have been two camps of people who have reacted to Goblin Slayer: people who think the show is morally reprehensible or at least posing as it for shock value and people who think it’s just a dark, gritty action fantasy tale not afraid to face harsh realities.

The primary two reasons given when people say Goblin Slayer is horrible are:

  1. The first episode contains a not very explicit but not very ambiguous rape.
  2. The attitude of the title character, particularly in his extermination of child goblins, endorses genocide.

The usual responses to these objections  given by those who just think Goblin Slayer is a dark adventure are:

  1. Rape is an evil thing that happens, and using it to establish the evil of your villains is just as valid as using murder or torture, both things goblins also do in the first episode.
  2. Goblins are presented more as a lethal pest that happens to have arms, legs and a head like a human, rather than as sentient beings. The Goblin Slayer is an exterminator who deals with the pests, not a genocidal maniac.

Both of these reactions completely miss the point.

They are not serious criticisms of the story, for two reasons. The first is that they are based on a woefully incomplete understanding of Goblin Slayer. These are not criticisms, these are hot takes, sarcastic, ironic statements made to grab attention on Twitter, not engage with the work as it stands. One episode of a thirteen episode run is not much to base an opinion on but it is plenty to grandstand on like an ignoramus. For starters, if these self-styled critics were interested in offering an informed opinion without waiting for the rest of the series to broadcast, Goblin Slayer has plenty of source material that they could have drawn on and the source books are “light novels”, the Japanese equivalent to novellas, that can be read in a few hours each. But this wasn’t about criticism or analysis, this was about finding something to be outraged about. But outrage is the devil’s cocaine, it feels good but blinds all senses, leaving the outraged to be swept along by the crowd with no real sense of what’s happening. It’s the exact opposite of the attitude a critic needs.

Worse, this easy outrage at any little thing you can call rape or racism dulls the senses. Like the cocaine addict, the outrage addict wears down their receptiveness to these issues and wearies their mind, until real outrages pass right by them without comment. But that’s not what we’re driving at today, so we’ll leave it at that. The real point is this:

Goblins are not stand ins for real world races, nor are their crimes perpetrated on the audience. In Goblin Slayer the goblins are symbolic of human evils. The narrative goes out of its way to make this point. We are told in the first chapter of the source material that a saying goes that every time a new group of adventurers is formed so is a band of goblins. A folk tale is mentioned that a goblin is formed every time someone makes a mistake. Elsewhere the Goblin Slayer himself mentions that his sister told him when you resent someone you become a goblin. The Slayer’s cunning and ruthless way of fighting is twice compared to the behavior of goblins, a fact he himself acknowledges in a speech early in the first book where he compares his own obsessive destruction to that of a goblin’s. “He who fight’s monsters should take care lest he become one” is an overused trope but fortunately not one that really applies to Goblin Slayer.

You see, Goblin Slayer is a story in the vein of the old fairytales (a very gruesome and violent group of fiction itself, I might add). The Slayer himself is an embodiment of the battle between good and evil in human hearts. He comes from a very, very dark place. It’s what drives him to exterminate the evils of goblins so thoroughly. As the only villains of the tale, goblins in Goblin Slayer fill many roles but all of them are as representations of human vice. Gluttony and greed in the form of their rapacious theft and cannibalism, lust in their abductions and rapes, cruelty and wrath in their rampant violence.

We know that the victims of evil are, sadly, the most likely to perpetuate that evil. Bullied children are more likely to become bullies as they grow, victims of domestic violence more likely to abuse, sexual assault victims more likely to rape. This truth is dark, but doesn’t leave one without hope. If acknowledged, one can be on guard. Like the reforming alcoholic who avoids any drinking situation, these victims can grab hold of their situation if only they know what to be on watch for.

While many adventurers move on past goblins and view them simply as pests, the Goblin Slayer has suffered horribly from them and so he is more on guard against them than any other. He does not allow even a scrap of potential for them to reclaim their power in his life, so he exterminates them even down to the children. He is dark and troubled, teetering on the edge of monstrousness himself at times, but in time he is blessed with people who can see how damaged he is and who will not reject him outright, and what began as a perpetual battle against the darkness the goblins cast him into begins to relent, and the support of people who care gives him the chance to begin building a life that is more than just battling his own demons.

No, Goblin Slayer is not great literature. But it is a sincere story about looking the human capacity for evil in the face and accepting that it has to be fought in all its incarnations, great and small. The way it goes about this will doubtless be off-putting to some. It’s not exactly pleasant to watch. But the point is, it is a story told in a language that was commonplace in our culture not fifty years ago but that we have somehow forgotten how to use in the time since. That’s clear from the incredibly off-base reaction to it. That’s quite sad, a whole portion of our cultural heritage lost in just a few generations. It may take far longer to recover from the loss.

Marvel Netflix Doesn’t Understand Heroism

Posted by natechen on

For some reason people love Marvel’s Netflix offerings. I don’t understand why. About 40% of these offerings is people trying to convince the hero of the story not to be the hero of the story. What happened to the days when being a superhero was all about people with extraordinary gifts who tried to use them to help others when they had the chance? Why does it always have to be a boring slog of self-reflection and self-recrimination? Why can’t Iron Fist just put the suit on, punch some Triads and make New York more safe? For cryin’ out loud, stop making your superheroes boring, self-centered naval gazers. This is not what we signed up to see.

OK, maybe some did but not me.

Sorry, that opening paragraph should have had a rant warning. But I really don’t understand what the primary appeal of these shows is supposed to be. Let’s roll back a bit. Let’s look at these shows, very, very briefly. Daredevil is about a blind lawyer who can fight like ten men and his personal vendetta with the head of organized crime in New York. Luke Cage is about a wrongly convicted felon trying to keep his head down while doing right by the people of Harlem. Jessica Jones is about a woman and her abuse – of alcohol, friends and lovers, and their abuse of her in turn. Iron Fist is about the world’s greatest martial artist feeling guilty.

All four have protagonists that seem to act for selfish reasons, prioritizing how they feel or what they’re mad at over simple, meaningful steps to help others. Of these four, Luke Cage had the most likeable protagonist who, even though he was kind of milk toast, still managed to be funny, charming and powerful as needed. Sadly, even Luke succumbed to the self-recriminations as he tried to make a living and eventually went off the deep end because apparently getting a little money made him go nuts. Iron Fist was getting close to pulling out of the rut, pairing its most interesting, relatable and best written character, Ward Meechum, with lead Danny Rand on a globetrotting adventure as a set up for its next season. Alas, after a season of playing pattycake with murderers and thugs then giving up his powers to his girlfriend for reasons the story tells us about but never shows, Iron Fist‘s audience ran out of patience and dropped it and the show has been canceled. Not without cause, mind you, although I did find it a little disappointing. I liked Ward.

Look, there is a place for deep dives into the psyche of a character, for unpacking what makes people tick and what the price of hard decisions might be. But that’s not the appeal of hero stories. Hero stories generally break down into two categories – aspirational and relatable. Aspirational heroes are people we’d like to be like. They are the Superman or Batman of hero tales, people whose qualities we know no one can ever really have but we’d still like to strive for. Relatable heroes are the Spiderman of heroic stories, people with all the trials we have but who are more on the road to the aspirational goal than we are, just a few steps ahead. Both categories make us feel a little better about what we do to make the world a better place. And they usually make us feel better about the world, too.

After all, if there are so many people putting stock in these heroes, maybe if we all take a step in towards those ideals the world will be a brighter place. These Netflix “heroes” don’t make the world a better place. They just exhaust themselves trying to fulfill their selfish emotional needs.

Many people rate the Marvel Netflix shows far above the, admittedly somewhat cheesy, DC CW shows like Arrow or The Flash. But let’s be real. The Arrow and the Flash go out, do good things for other people, and pull those around them towards doing the same. The extent to which the do it is silly, of course, and others have comment on it plenty. But the point is that they are superheroes. Everything they do has an impact that would be silly to expect in the real world. That doesn’t stop Flash from being an aspirational hero or Arrow from being a relatable one. As heroic shows they’re doing far, far better than the grimy, self-satisfied heroes Marvel Netflix offers.

I tried. I really did. Iron Fist wasn’t a great place to start. But for better or worse, it’s also where I’m ending. I’m done with Marvel Netflix. I just don’t know what people saw in it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the kind of heroism I was looking for.

Writing Men: All Might

Posted by natechen on

Welcome to the latest round of nerdy author musings. If you’re new to this aspect of my writing, it’s customary for me to make at least a few posts a year rambling about what I think of writing and musing on what I’ve studied about the art in the last year or two. This helps me get my thoughts on how to write well in order, in preparation for upcoming projects, and hopefully holds your interest for at least a minute or two.

It’s been a loooooong time since I’ve done a breakdown of a well written male character, including a breakdown of all the ways writing a man is done well in fiction. If you want a refresher of all I’m talking about you can get it by following these handy links:

 

Introduction 

Goals 

Codes of Conduct 

Waffle Brain

Breaking Stuff

Giving Up

Aloneliness

Mentoring

Mentoring Pt. 2

Semper Fi

 

Also, if you want to see the three previous male characters I’ve analyzed you can find them here:

 

Daniel Ocean

Dipper Pines

Charlie Brown

 

Today I want to talk about All Might, the Superman analog from Kohei Hirokoshi’s My Hero Academia. All Might is an interesting case study, not only because he has a deeper character history than any other male character we’ve analyzed, but because he’s a male character from a completely different culture, yet he still carries many of the significant hallmarks of male thought and action that we’ve identified so far. This lends credence to the theory that these are, indeed, universals to the human experience, and thus things that we must wrap our heads around in order to write well realized male characters. With that in mind, let’s get down to it!

Goals 

All Might has one simple goal that serves as the foundation for his life. Namely, to become “The Symbol of Peace.” The function of this symbol is to set the minds of normal people at ease, in day to day life, knowing there is a powerful barrier between themselves and danger, and in crisis, knowing that when they see him then they know things will be okay. In short, All Might wants people who face danger to think of him and be at ease, in the hopes it will make the difficulties of life a little easier. It’s a simple yet noble goal for a simple but noble man.

Axioms

In pursuit of his goal All Might lives by a few simple maxims. One is Always Smile, a thought passed down to him by his mentor as a way to put people in danger at ease. It’s one of the few useful pieces of advice he has for his own pupil, Deku.

While never explicitly stated, All Might lives by the principle of humility as well. This is evident in many ways, from the extreme deference he shows to practically everyone he meets to the ease with which he works with other public servants like the police and civil authorities, in spite of the fact that he is far more powerful and popular than they are. It’s even evident in the way he introduces himself. All Might’s catch phrase, “I am here!” uses a very diminutive form of the pronoun “I”. Without getting too far into the weeds, All Might uses the most simplistic form of the personal pronoun, even though many people with his fame and status would typically use more self-aggrandizing forms of speech. Even the Japanese title of the manga uses a more assertive form of the personal pronoun. And it’s not like All Might isn’t flashy. Most likely he uses this form of “I” as a way to show that, in spite of how dangerous he could be, as a hero he is at the service of the general public.

The third axiom of All Might is in the name of his quirk (or superpower), “One for All.” Part of what I jokingly refer to as the Musketeer’s Paradox (All Might’s archenemy wields a power known as “All for One”) this quirk is the foundation of All Might’s identity. Not his superhero identity, but who he is. Because at some point in the past the man named Toshinori Yagi disappeared entirely in the superhero persona of All Might. Everything he had was devoted to the cause, to the point that we never learn much of anything about him that doesn’t tie back to the superhero part of his life.

Compartmentalization 

This is a harder aspect to track in All Might’s life. Given his total devotion to his job, one might expect that he’d given up on all aspects of his life that didn’t tie back to his one purpose as the Symbol of Peace, and in many respects I’d say that analysis is correct. The catch is, before the start of the story of My Hero Academia, All Might suffers a grievous, near fatal wound that leaves him a shattered husk of who he was, only able to tap into his true potential for a few hours a day.

Unwilling to have his work as Symbol of Peace undone by showing the world that he can no longer serve as a pillar of society, All Might is forced to hide his weakness from the world at large. While MHA generally eschews the notion of “secret identities” so common in superhero stories in the west, this is a very close analog to it, as All Might leads a double life as a towering, musclebound titan in public and an emaciated, coughing skeletal figure in private.

Eventually All Might’s weakness is exposed to the public and this aspect of his character is gone. We might see it again in the future but, for the moment, All Might’s monomania in pursuit of the Symbol of Peace has prevented his forming too many mental compartments.

Competition

All Might and competition are interesting because… well, he doesn’t really have any. Yes, Endeavor is there and yes, Endeavor does want to beat All Might and take the spot of top hero. But the fact is, All Might is the best. No one else even comes close. That might cost All Might a few points except for the fact that this reality transforms All Might into something else – he becomes the gold standard.

Every hero or aspiring hero in the world – or at least Japan – measures themselves against All Might. Are they strong enough? Showing enough good will? Taking enough care in how they fight? Investigate? Patrol? Even the villains set their agenda by All Might. His impact on the world around him is staggering.

And it’s not like All Might isn’t measuring himself against anything. In many ways the standards of a mentor who has passed on can be even more daunting, as you can never really know how you’ll measure up to it…

Sacrifice 

It’s tempting to say All Might gave up a lot to get where he was. Giving in to that temptation would be wrong.

Real talk. Toshinori Yagi never wanted to be anything but All Might. He forged all his friendships through his efforts to be the Symbol of Peace, he took to his powers like a fish to water, he never really pulled his head out of the game long enough to get distracted by anything else. All Might never cared very much for the things he gave up to reach the top of his game so it’s hard to call passing over them a sacrifice.

The real sacrifice comes when All Might has to face the reality that he can’t keep being All Might. You see, the secret of One for All is that it is a superpower that can be passed from one person to another. Six people wielded it before All Might. When his injuries leave him with an ever shrinking window of time with which to perform his duties as Symbol of Peace it become apparent he must find an eighth person to pass his power on to.

The catch to this is, once One for All is in the hands of another All Might’s own power will begin to wane and eventually vanish.

It would be understandable for someone to spend their whole life straining to reach the peak to cling to it for as long as possible. After all, All Might earned his place there. He did far more than anyone else in the superhero business to uphold law and order, the public adored him as a hero and trusted him more than any other. But in the end All Might knew that the existence of a Symbol of Peace was more important than him being the Symbol of Peace. So he passed his power on to Deku. At least he would have a little while longer to stand in the gap as the final embers of One for All kept him strong for a little while.

Except he quickly faced the same quandary again. A few months after passing his power to Deku, All Might would face his archrival one last time, as part of a rescue operation gone badly wrong. Again, after all he’d done with the full force of his power, one could forgive All Might for holding back, clinging to the few scraps of time he had left to stand as the Top Hero and fill the role of Symbol of Peace he’d so painstakingly crafted for himself. Deku was nowhere near ready to take over, after all, and he’d do so much better with a mentor who still had the power to keep up with him as he learned the ropes.

But All Might had lived too long as the Symbol of Peace to let it lapse. All for One was too dangerous to leave at large, and besides he had casually threatened the peace of the citizenry. If left alone he would do far more damage to peace than an undertrained Deku.

So for the second time, All Might took what little time he had left in his dream job and sacrificed it so the peace of others could be upheld. Anyone would have understood if he hadn’t. Dream jobs don’t show up every day. But he chose to retire sooner than he wanted so that others could have a future. That kind of tradeoff is at the heart of heroic sacrifice.

Solitude 

All Might is a naturally gregarious and jovial person so he’s not typically alone. Furthermore, many of the reasons a story might show him alone don’t apply to him – he’s not the protagonist of this story and we don’t often see him working through the kinds of problems well served by solitude. But none the less we do get glimpses of him alone from time to time, usually when contemplating what to do about the League of Villains and the Catch 22 that leads them. Usually All Might’s solitude is an indication of what’s important to him – he withdraws when facing something that effects him on an emotional level so as to preserve the integrity of the Symbol of Peace. It won’t do for the public to see him upset, after all.

Loyalty 

While it might seem surprising to say about a boy scout superhero like All Might, the truth is he doesn’t have many real friends. But the handful he does have – Gran Torino and Detective Tsukakichi for example – command a great deal of respect and loyalty from All Might and offer the same in return. All Might’s own mentor, Nana Shimura, also commands great loyalty from All Might. Even after death All Might honors her memory in his philosophy of heroism and determination to somehow save her grandson Shiragaki from the clutches of evil. It’s not a theme of his story but it is there, never the less.

Mentoring 

The whole point of All Might in this story is to serve as a mentor, both for Deku and his friends. His career as the Symbol of Peace was legendary but ultimately it had to end. In many ways All Might’s superpower, One for All, is the literal embodiment of what he must do: Take the power of the Symbol of Peace he created and pass it down to others. However, while Deku is the literal embodiment of that process practically every aspiring superhero in the business looks up to All Might as a source of inspiration.

We see that most strongly in Deku’s frenemy Bakugo, another young man who has looked up to All Might all his life and wants to be an equal to his childhood hero. Where Deku admires All Might’s ability to save all the people who fall within his reach Bakugo admires the way All Might never loses to evil. This dichotomy is reflected in their personalities and the way they act under pressure. Neither one fully understands All Might, each grasping at only part of what made him the Symbol of Peace. If All Might can somehow knock these two into shape he can take the first step to solving the Musketeer’s Paradox.

The fatal flaw in All Might was always the fact that any villain that could defeat him would shatter his Symbol of Peace – a goal that All for One would eventually achieve, if in a roundabout way. One for All is still only one man, after all. And All for One’s horrifically exploitative personality may have tainted his power’s potential but his ability to unite people behind him gave him a depth and breadth of options that All Might’s solo career never afforded him.

But as a mentor All Might has a second chance. He can unite an entire generation of heroes all for the one goal of being the Symbol of Peace for a new age. And, in turn, with that one Symbol reflected in all who take up the banner against evil, the promise of Peace will not fall just because one man does. It turns out that, in retiring, All Might may just have found a way to make a better Symbol of Peace than he ever could have as a working hero.

All Might is a pretty simple character. And that’s fitting, as he is aimed at a younger audience first and foremost, and he’s very comfortable in his genre prescribed role. But he’s written with such zest and passion that one can’t help but be charmed. What’s more, he’s a fantastic example of how uniquely male themes can hold up a character’s story line without coming off as a stereotype or failing to resonate with a wide audience. An achievement worth studying for sure.

Schrodinger’s Book: Afterwords

Posted by natechen on

I’m often asked whether I outline my stories or not and, when I say I do, I’m often asked if I find it restrictive. I’ve never understood this question as an outline is just a general picture of how your story is paced and what needs to be in it. It’s not like there isn’t room for improvisation and improvement as you go along. Case in point: Schrodinger’s Book was outlined with an epilogue. You may have gathered that those plans have been scrapped.

The truth is, after writing the last chapter anything I tried to write for the epilogue felt deeply anticlimactic. It’s important not to overstay your welcome so I’ve just cut that part of the story. My characters have finished their arcs and Aubrey’s last words turned out to be much more satisfying that I expected them to be – at least to me. So I’m not going to beleaguer you with anything further, at least not for this visit to Schrodinger’s world.

If you’ve been reading this story since chapter one, you probably know that this story intimidated me, in part because I wasn’t sure how I would keep my enthusiasm for the project up as I poked at issues that concerned me in a setting I’ve never been terribly fond of. It turns out that the characters are what would motivate me. With the exception of Priss, the poor girl who was just around to be a foil for the two protagonists, I knew where I wanted each of the core five to end up and each chapter I wrote brought me a little closer to those important milestones.

I wanted to see Sean accept a moment of temporary pain just to live up to the principles he’d espoused. I wanted to see Lang grapple with the idea of being in command and what the consequences of neglecting that were. I wanted Aubrey to find the confines of her world and see past them to the potential of the future. And while I didn’t want Dex to die, he was too much of a boundary pusher not to wind up there in the end, especially in a world where UNIGOV ruled supreme. Getting to those goals pushed me to keep writing, pushed me to make every step there as interesting as possible so those moments of payoff would be worth it. I hope you’ve found them just as fun as I have.

Which brings me to the biggest thing I’d like to say. And that is:

Thank you. 

If you’ve been reading this blog for years, thank you for sticking with me. I know I can be a bit of a boring pedant sometimes and you really deserve more thanks than I find the time for just for sticking with me. If you’re new and you just joined in the last year or so, thank you for giving me a chance. I hope you’ll stick around now that the story that dragged you in is over. Regardless, after doing this for five or six years, I know how important an audience is, and how hard it is to keep. You folks are a treasure.

So what now?

Well, for starters, there will be no fiction for a while. Two months at least, possible not until the start of the new year. We’ll see.

This is in part because to give me time to pull my head out of the last story and prep it for the next and in part because I only really have enough time to write one post a week right now and I want to dabble in some nonfiction essays on the topic of writing covering subjects that have caught my attention. I know, I know, nothing more boring than a writer writing about writing, right? But I think it’s interesting and I hope you will to so I pray you’ll indulge me.

During this time I’ll be doing two other things behind the scenes as well. One is prepping a new project. This project isn’t directly connected to Schrodinger’s Book in any way, but I hope my readers new and old will find it just as interesting. The other is researching and prepping the manuscript for Schrodinger’s Book for translation into an e-book format. So if you’ve ever wanted to foist this story off onto unsuspecting friends and relatives you will soon have a chance to do so! More details on both of these projects will come in the future.

For now, I hope you will indulge one last request of mine, for now. I’d like to do a reader Q&A as one of my essay posts. I know I’ve not been the most audience participation focused blogger in my tenure but I am grateful for your readership and I’d like to answer any questions you may have so I’m testing the waters by asking for any questions you have about Schrodinger’s Book, the story, the writing process, the characters and world building, you name it. Go ahead and leave them in the comments for this post and if I get enough for a decent post in a by the 11th of October I’ll answer them in a post on the 18th. If I don’t I’ll be sure to leave answers to any questions I do get down in the comments. Once more, thanks for reading!

– Nate

Unexamined Metanarratives, or The Problem with Privilege

Posted by natechen on

I’ve talked about the concept of metanarratives at length before in the general context of postmodernism and specifically when applied to superheroes and Star Wars. Today I want to highlight what I believe the positive impact of deconstructing metanarratives are through a metanarrative commonly employed in modern fiction. While postmodernism deconstructs metanarratives because it believes they are a power play – an attempt to control the thinking of others by forcing their minds into preconceived patterns – I believe most metanarratives arise out of a person’s general philosophy and, while fiction can reinforce these philosophical preconceptions, it can also be used as a way to measure these preconceptions and see what about them makes sense and what doesn’t.

Metanarratives are rarely – possibly never – without some foundation in reality. The mostly happy homes of Home Improvement or The Cosby Show do exist, for example, but the constraints of their fictional setting prevent them from being explored in depth, so a number of clichés and tropes built up around these fictional families until The Simpsons came along to deconstruct them. While The Simpsons is no longer particularly relevant to sitcom formulas; for years it was ascendant and its deconstruction of the prevailing metanarrative did open up new avenues of storytelling to explore. That didn’t invalidate the old metanarratives, even if many people acted like it did.

There are a lot of metanarratives in modern fiction that could use this treatment, like the “trade in your birth family for one you build yourself” metanarrative (conveniently ignoring that if you can’t make your birth family work the odds you can build a function one are pretty small) or the “sell guns to both sides and reap huge rewards” metanarrative (a good way to get shot and, as near as I can tell, never something that’s happened historically). And perhaps this will become a recurring spot as other post ideas have, there’s certainly fodder for it. But for now, I want to look at Privilege.

The concept of “Privilege” I want to talk about is not what we normally think of as a privilege. It’s not permission to use the computers at the school you attend – unlike a member of the general public who does not have that privilege – or the privilege of using motor vehicles on government owned roads – which is basically what your driver’s license grants you. In much of modern fiction there is the notion of unearned benefits conferred to you by circumstance, particularly circumstances that favor one group over another. And that notion is encapsulated in the term “privilege”.

Let’s start our deconstruction of this notion by mentioning that the ideas behind Privilege are not new. When circumstances convey benefits no one earned there have been a host of terms for it. “Luck” is one, suggesting that sometimes the world just seems to like you more than others. “Blessing” is another, conveying the way people or, among the religious and/or superstitious, supernatural forces will give something of value to another as an expression of affection or to cement some kind of personal bond. “Bias” is a third, denoting the preference of one group over another.

And here we come to the first major construct of Privilege that must be taken apart and examined. The very use of the term marries blessing and bias. Not all blessings imply a bias. For example, my sisters and I were blessed with a homeschooling education. My parents blessed me with a social study curriculum that emphasized understanding philosophy and ideas in ways that profoundly shaped the way I think and who I am today. But they didn’t choose to bless my sisters with the same curriculum. In many ways their social studies were easier or more engaging, but they did not develop the same perspectives. And, looking back on it from a distance of some years, I can see that the curriculum I studied did not suit their personalities and interests as it suited mine. Yes, my parents exercised their good judgement in making these choices, but good judgement is not the same as bias. Nor do I feel the different educational blessings my parents shared with their children were inferior or superior to each other. They were simply chosen to best fit those receiving them. The Privilege metanarrative leaves no room for this kind of nuance.

But perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “This is a bad example. The Privilege metanarrative applies to groups, rather than individuals. Of course an education as highly tailored to individuals as homeschooling would rule Privilege out.”

If you were thinking that, then you’re correct. The second construct the Privilege metanarrative brings to the table is group based evaluation. In the Privilege metanarrative my parents’ decisions must be understood through group identity. Thus, the choice to give me an education full of philosophy must have been a result of my male privilege, as the job of men is to run the world and make sure all the other people are unprivileged (the term for this is oppressed in the view of the typical postmodernist). The fact that my parents might have looked at each of their three children’s interests and temperament individually is not relevant to the metanarrative any more than Chicago style political dramas are relevant to a Home Improvement style sitcom metanarrative.

Which is to say, they can be made to blend but one aspect will bend to the other – either the corrupt politicians must be shown as fools by the sitcom crew or the sitcom cast will become unwitting tools of the corrupt politicians, either my parents must have been driven by unconscious bias towards the favored male gender or their decisions being what they are is just a result of my being in some way stereotypical. There’s nothing wrong with this blending on the surface, by the way, but culturally predominate metanarratives tend to win out in the blending and right now the Privilege metanarrative saturates our culture. The tendency to let it win out will be strong, but a good writer must still carefully evaluate whether that metanarrative blend is what’s best for your story.

Metanarratives that operate without question quickly run out of control. Humans tend to push ideas as far as they can, usually running right of the edge of a cliff in the process. The history of the Privilege metanarrative is an interesting expression of this. The basic pieces of the modern take on the metanarrative were put in place during the Civil Rights era, when Privilege was rampant in culture and law. Recognizing it was a very important step in human progress and resulted in good things for the nation as a whole and many ethnic minorities in particular. This fact is a big part of why the idea of Privilege is so widespread in culture today. However, the idea of Privilege has far outgrown its starting context.

We frequently hear of “white privilege” in culture today. In summation this is the idea that generations of cultural expansion, tight knit families, careful investments, inheritance, emphasis on education and ethnic loyalty have catapulted white people to the forefront of the world and given them a stranglehold on the wealth and power of the modern world. In turn we see the Privilege metanarrative used to justify any number of actions to disrupt this supposed deathgrip. This has been true in pulp and pop entertainment for a while and has crept into daily discourse as well.

Again, this metanarrative is not new. The clearest example in history is how, for over a thousand years, the inherited wealth, excellent education, ethnic loyalty and powerful family ties of Jews was used as an excuse to persecute them.

This is the final aspect of the Privilege metanarrative that must be deconstructed. Like all flawed, human concepts, metanarratives can drive great evil as easily as great good. The current Privilege metanarrative casts Privilege as an evil and those that oppose it as a force for good, a direct extension in its origins in the Civil Rights movement. While this can be true, and again has been true in recent memory, it is not always the case – again, in recent memory. By the same token, Privilege is viewed almost as a universal, underpinning every situation, when sometimes a blessing is without bias, or luck is just luck. There’s no reason to say my education was a privilege over that of my sisters, as we all turned out equally well and, some might say, they are doing somewhat better than I am.

I’ve been very hard on postmodernism in the past and I stand by my belief that its approach to metanarratives is silly and leads only to confusion. But I hope I’ve shown today that the process of deconstructing a metanarrative and looking at its component parts and how it’s played out across history can give us a deeper understanding of a metanarrative, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and how it might be used in innovative ways. At the least it lets us put aside popular metanarratives for a metanarrative with less cachet at the moment but better suited to your needs.

Metanarratives are just one of many tools in the writers arsenal. Use them wisely and you get good stories. Sometimes that means breaking them down and seeing what each part has done, is doing, and could do.

Now. The throughline of this blog has been nonfiction for far too long. Come back next week and we’ll kick off a new dose of fiction with a spicy double posting followed by an exciting (hopefully) new sci-fi tale from yours truly!

Star Trek: The Long Road Home

Posted by natechen on

In January of 1995 the fourth installment of Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek franchise started out on what could have been the franchise’s greatest installment. The idea was ripe with promise but, by the end of its run, Star Trek: Voyager would prove great ideas don’t always translate to great shows. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Voyager for what it was. But it could have been more and some of us will always wonder at what could have been.

Voyager started by throwing a lot of the playbook out the window. The starship Voyager wasn’t just a ship on a mission of exploration, it was a ship lost in space. A series of events left it on the opposite end of the galaxy from Earth, with an eighty year trip home in front of it. Captain Janeway would have none of the prestige of the Federation’s name to back her or the threat of Starfleet reprisals to deter danger. No one in that sector of space knew what a human was, much less whether their government was worthy of respect. Gone also was any attempt at relevance to the current political situation – it didn’t even exist in slight nods like we saw in DS9 with the Maquis or the Cardassian occupation. The idea was to bring back the hard driving captain, a la Kirk, and the danger of the unknown and surprising.

With DS9 on route to the Dominion War and a bruising, exploration free future Voyager was something the franchise badly needed. It sought to keep Rodenberry’s dream alive while presenting us with new and exciting vistas and cultures for the franchise to explore. It succeeded only in part.

The first two or three seasons of Voyager present us with a section of the galaxy that looks an awful lot like home. There are analogs to the Klingon in the Kazon and the Ferengi in the Talaxians – and that’s just in the first episode. We even see analogs to the ancient Iconians later on in the series. If the hope was to take us to a new and fresh section of the galaxy it sure started off feeling a bit old and stale. But there were new cultures and cool new ships and new planets and new problems and Voyager tackled them all with vim and gusto in spite of its rocky start. That part was fine.

What was less fine was the attempt to shoe horn in some nonsensical interpersonal squabbling in the form of the Maquis. You see, Voyager was not the only ship stranded in the Delta Quadrant. The Caretaker, a very powerful alien who brought them to the Quadrant, had pulled in many different ships and one of them belonged to the terrorist group Voyager had been chasing. The idea was to combine these two groups and let personal conflict erupt. This was a bad idea for a couple of reasons. First, the Maquis were all Federation colonists or former Starfleet officers estranged from their government by a peace deal with the Cardassians. They had very few philosophical or moral differences from Starfleet – the conflict arose almost entirely from differences to political circumstances that, once both groups were a galaxy away from home, no longer existed. As a result there were only a few avenues for good story conflicts to explore without venturing into the realm of the truly ridiculous. Once they were all mined out the idea was dropped and Voyager functioned as a Starfleet ship for the rest of the series. The idea of two crews with shared goals but fundamental differences in morals or methods that made working together hard would be explored again, but much better, in the episodes “Equinix I & II”.

But the biggest misstep in Voyager was the Caretaker itself. Not it’s inclusion, but discarding it so quickly. The Star Trek universe has a number of mostly forgotten civilizations that travelled huge swaths of its galaxy long before humanity took to the stars. The Preservers and Iconians both controlled large chunks of the galaxy, according to the lore. But no take on the franchise has ever explored them in depth. It would have been nice to see the Caretaker tied to one of these civilizations – or perhaps even a new one – that Voyager could have encountered on a recurring basis as it made its way home. The Voyager crew as travelling interstellar archeologists would have been fun. As it was, Voyager only encountered one other Caretaker in a fairly forgettable episode. While Enterprise would play with the idea of a powerful civilization scattering artifacts throughout a section of space in its third season even the Sphere Builders wouldn’t receive that much in the way of development. It was a missed opportunity that could have really made Voyager distinct, possibly even a standout in the latter half of the franchise’s life. Alas, it was not to be. The Caretaker served as a MacGuffin to get the crew away from the Federation and was promptly killed off and ceased to be of much relevance.

Voyager did expand on the lore by adding three new antagonistic species that were interesting and fun. The Hirojen are basically the Predators for the Star Trek universe and seeing how Janeway dealt with them was pretty interesting. The Malon introduced interstellar junk haulers to the clean and tidy Rodenberry future and added a very unique spin to a number of situations that could have been very generic. And Species 8472, also known as the Undine in later spinoffs, added a new juggernaut race to the galaxy for humanity to worry about.

The showrunners also decided to bring back two big NextGen antagonists in a totally new way. The Borg returned in a big way, acting as a recurring obstacle from season 4 onwards. Everyone knew this was coming, Picard met the Borg in the Delta Quadrant after all, but the necessity of dealing with the Borg on a semi-regular basis and the fact that the series couldn’t ever let Voyager get caught stole some force from the menace of the implacable Borg. Add in the fact that the writers applied the (aptly named) Worf Effect to them in order to build up Species 8472 and the fact that we tend not to fear things we understand (rightly or not) and the Borg overall lost some of their sense of danger as the show went on.

Q also made a return, this time dealing with the internal politics of his race and the problems that come with phenomenal cosmic power. While the change to the way the Borg were portrayed probably had to come if they were to continue being an antagonist in Star Trek, the shift in Q was not necessary, needed or even very good. Once he was no longer the face of the impersonal weight of the universe bearing down on humanity he ceased to be a useful antagonist and just became a cosmic powered nuisance. It was an interesting line of thought but ultimately the story itself went nowhere.

In short, it seems as if the showrunners behind Voyager weren’t quite sure where they wanted to go. The show has no strong theme, and thus no quintessential venue. It feels much like actual exploration, in fact. We saw many things, and they were interesting. But they didn’t always connect.

After Next Generation and Deep Space Nine it may have been inevitable that the cast on Voyager wasn’t quite as strong as we were used to. They were all fine actors and had many good scripts to work with but nothing we ever saw from them equals the incredible talents of a Spiner or Stewart or the longform character development of Nog or Odo. Never the less, Kate Mulgrew as Janeway, Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine and Robert Picardo – probably the best actor in the series – as the EMH did get to show a broad range of acting talent that was greatly appreciated.

It helped that these three characters were the most interesting on the ship as well. Star Trek has a history of putting characters who struggle with humanity in the show to help push certain kinds of stories along. Seven serves that role from her appearance at the end of season four until the show’s conclusion. It’s interesting to see Star Trek, a franchise normally very vested in multiculturalism and leaving things as they are, push so hard into the realm of cultural deprogramming and reindoctrination. And make no mistake – that’s what Voyager’s treatment of Seven amounts to. In the process the show makes a sound argument for why such actions might sometimes be necessary, high minded ideals not withstanding.

The Emergency Medical Hologram, a holographic emergency stopgap that the crew activates when their living doctor is killed, is another interesting take on the “what is humanity?” shtick scifi in general and Star Trek specifically loves so much. He struggles with the very narrow scope his original programming gave him and getting the crew to think of him as a person, rather than a convenient tool. Unlike many of the characters chasing humanity in the franchise’s history, the Doctor does not have a flat, emotionless disposition. Rather, he’s abrasive and overconfident, saddled with his creator’s personality – not something particularly conductive to his job. He also struggles early on with being confined to specific parts of the ship, another kind of handicap the show has never explored before.

Last but not least comes the captain herself. I’ve always found it interesting that, even among fans who don’t consider Deep Space Nine the best incarnation of the franchise, Benjamin Sisko is considered the most human Star Trek captain. This is not at all intuitive. Both Kirk and Picard are larger than life figures, to be sure, and little time is spent with their flaws. Sure, Sisko had a hobby in his baseball obsession and a son, then later a steady girlfriend and a wife. And those were very appealing parts of his character. He also made morally questionable choices. But he tended to get away with his lapses of character without consequence, or even much in the way of guilt, which hardly qualifies as believably human in my book. Then there’s the whole religious icon thing and the Sisko as the everyman captain starts to fall apart. Especially as there’s two other contenders for the title.

Captain Archer of the NX-01 Enterprise was a much more humble man, with prejudices and moral failings. He has a hobby and deals with a fair amount of romance, although never a long term relationship. But, as you may guess given the subject of this post, I don’t give the title to him.

You see, as a captain Kathryn Janeway is a bit of a trainwreck.

Other than Kirk, no captain shows quite the same level of disdain for Starfleet regulations as Janeway. For the good captain, survival frequently came first. She wasn’t afraid to meddle in local affairs or skirt the Prime Directive to get the crew closer to home. She was also remarkably vengeful for a 24th century starship commander, occasionally persecuting vendettas against certain aliens – or even Starfleet commanders – to a degree that worried her crew. She came from a scientific background, rather than a pure command career, and her priorities were often towards the immediate care and safety of her crew rather than long term principles. But most of all, Janeway’s moral decisions are in constant doubt. While most captains made one or two difficult calls they tended to get left behind very quickly.

Janeway’s most questionable moral decision was the one that permanently stranded her crew in the Delta Quadrant to begin with. She could have gone home, you see, but that would have required leaving the Caretaker’s technology in the hands of very brutal and amoral people. Staying in the Delta Quadrant was the only way to ensure the Caretaker’s array was destroyed without any part of it falling into the wrong hands. The very harsh consequences of that decision dog her every step of the seven year journey home. That kind of heavy weight is something truly human, and it makes Janeway interesting and complex – even if I wouldn’t exactly want her to command my starship.

Like the other two shows of its era, Voyager ran for seven seasons and produced its fair share of good episodes. It also had some of the weakest episodes of the franchise, particularly in the first season or two. But even so, the good outweighed the bad. Episodes to watch include “Message in a Bottle”, “Future’s End” Parts 1 and 2, “Relativity”, “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy”, “The Year of Hell”, “Living Witness” and “Deadlock”.

“Blink of an Eye” is a masterpiece of high concept scifi like the franchise hadn’t seen for a while. It features Voyager getting caught in orbit around a planet with a different subjective time than the rest of the universe. A year passes on the planet for every minute that the crew lives in orbit. They watch civilizations rise and fall from above and, in turn, those below look up and wonder what the light in the sky means and what the people there might want with them. The concept was so good that it would get reused again in the first season of The Orville.

On the other hand, “Life Line” tells a very personal story about the Emergency Medical Hologram visiting his creator, legendary hologram engineer Louis Zimmerman. The clash of two such very similar, overinflated personalities is a tour de force, fun and witty but still emotional enough to resonate. It features the return of Reginald Barclay and Deanna Troi, veterans of The Next Generation as well used guest stars. It also features a masterpiece of acting by Robert Picardo, who plays opposite himself in most of the important scenes. Star Trek acting doesn’t get better than this unless Spiner and Stewert are on the screen.

“Timeless” and “Endgame” Parts 1 and 2 both feature the same basic premise. Members of the Voyager crew get back to Earth but try and bend time so that the dead left behind can make it home too. “Timeless” features Garrett Wang’s best performance as Ensign Kim in the series and deals in the kind of classic, high concept scifi that made Star Trek great. “Endgame” is the series finale and, in spite of the similar premise, has several key differences. For starters, this time the gambit works and Voayger gets home. Also, it features Janeway as the viewpoint character rather than Kim, and it goes to great pains to wrap up most of the loose plot threads the show left behind, making it a slightly messier – but still satisfying – tale. In a nice bit of self reference, future Harry has a ship commanded by Geordi LaForge show up to stop his time travel attempt in “Timeless” then, in “Endgame”, another future Harry shows up as Janeway starts her Both stories are worth watching for Trek fans, but “Timeless” will probably suit the general scifi viewer not interested in watching the whole series better.

The Borg always had a limited lifespan, as mentioned before, and I think the showrunners had realized that. As I said two weeks ago, the decline of the Borg really started with “I, Borg” back in NextGen but they still had some legs left in them. “Scorpion” Parts 1 and 2 sent them fully into decline with a bang, introducing a new race that even the Borg couldn’t handle and adding Seven of Nine to Voyager’s crew. This is a pretty light episode in terms of scifi but it’s solid space opera with good production values for TV of its era, and the decision making in the episode is both tense and fun to watch, even if you guess what’s coming before it happens. Seven would become a good window into the new Borg status quo, allowing us to discover all the cracks and weaknesses the Borg always had as she did, and coming to understand how an unstoppable force can actually be a stampeding herd one step ahead of disaster.

“Equinox” Parts 1 and 2 is the epitome of what many people wanted Voyager to be – two crews, each with supposedly shared values, but one turned sour by years of merciless peril. When the Equinox and Voyager meet it seems like a bright spot in a long string of trials – for both crews. But the revelation that the Equinox was under constant attack because the crew had decided to deal in genocide in a desperate bid to get home… that was a horror in itself. The punishing conflict that results is tense and marvelously acted. “Equinox” is Voyager at its best – but unlike many it’s not what I feel the entire show should have been. Still, a very clever scifi plot and a great piece of drama as well.

Voyager went off the air in 2001 with the good ship and its crew home at last. It was the last offering of the franchise’s heyday, a great concept that wasn’t everything anyone wanted from it but still acquitted itself well, packing new ships, races and spacial phenomenon into Star Trek lore with reckless abandon. It probably has the smallest enthusiastic fanbase of any entry in the franchise, at least before Discovery, but ideas introduced in it were staples of the expanded lore during the long, twelve year drought between the end of Enterprise and the beginning of Discovery. The Delta quadrant would be better realized as a location than the Gamma quadrant, and the seeds of technological innovation Voyager brought back with her would spin off into several novels. However, even with all that potential, the decisions made at the beginning of the next installment of the franchise showed how Star Trek was beginning to creak under its own weight…

Star Wars and the Road to Nihilism

Posted by natechen on

We’re going to talk about The Simpsons in a moment. But not yet.

Also, be warned that this post does contain spoilers for both The Simpsons and The Last Jedi.

Now that you’re intrigued by the notion of a cartoon series nearly a quarter century old tying in to a sci-fi franchise approaching twice that age, let’s turn to talk about The Last Jedi and why Disney decided to stop making Star Wars movies and start making Spinning You Wheels in Space.

I’m not going to lie. I really enjoyed watching The Last Jedi, more than I actually expected to based on the last two films in the franchise. It’s got some really fun and exciting ideas packed into it and the film hits a bunch of really high notes during its two hour plus run time. But it has a lot of really bad moments, too, and those can easily ruin the experience for viewers. But my biggest problem is that the nature of the Star Wars franchise has veered off course. For all his flaws, George Lucas kept his eyes firmly one idea – he wanted to tell a story about the fall and redemption of a man. The theme of seeking redemption runs all throughout the first six episodes of the Star Wars saga. Qui-gon seeks to redeem an aging order of Jedi when he brings in Anakin as fresh blood. Jango Fett seeks redemption for a life of violence when he asks the cloners to make him a son. Leia seeks to redeem the altruism locked away in the selfish heart of Han Solo. R2-D2 seeks to redeem C-3PO from his own cowardice and myopic worldview. And, of course, Obi-Wan and Luke seek to redeem Anakin from Darth Vader.

The Last Jedi, in contrast, seeks to destroy the franchise. By its own admission.

Throughout The Last Jedi there’s a theme of destroying your attachment to the past to move forward. There is a time and place for this lesson but Rian Johnson has transformed this from a conditional step to be entered into with extreme caution into a necessary step for every aspect of life. In point of fact, the movie takes it so far that it endorses book burning as a good thing. Sure, when Yoda burns the tree the Jedi texts weren’t there – we find out later Rei had taken them. But Luke sure thought they were. And this book burning is supposed to be the good thing that triggers his final character evolution and his appearance at the climax.

Rian Johnson has fallen into the classic postmodern trap we discussed when talking about – you guessed it – The Simpsons.

A quick refresher if you don’t want to go back and read the full post. Postmodernism breaks down and subverts the metanarratives that define a cultural landscape, in this case the Star Wars franchise. The problem with it is that it doesn’t set any limits on what must be broken down and subverted, and thus when it finishes with all the other metanarratives in the cultural landscape it inevitably starts subverting itself. We see this in The Simpsons with its origin as a satire of the existing sitcom formula and its eventual self-destruction beginning in the episode “The Principle and the Pauper” when a well understood character and his all-important relationship with his mother was destroyed for the sake of a throw away gag. This slow decline has continued from that episode until today.

The Last Jedi marks the beginning of this kind of subversive decline in Star Wars. While there’s nothing wrong with subverting expectations – it’s the basis for humor, for example – it has to be done with purpose. As an end goal it serves very poorly and tends to result in bland, uninteresting stories that (ironically) all feel the same. Ask any Simpsons fan. But maybe you’re not convinced. You may be thinking, what things were so subversive in The Last Jedi?

I’m glad you asked.

The most significant sign of subversion in the story is Luke himself. We were expecting a sage and a teacher, one with the skills he honed in years of battle and the wisdom of decades of Force mastery. Luke barely teaches anything and wisdom left him long ago. The endless force for optimism, the man who recovered from losing his surrogate parents and his mentor in one week, who confronted Vader twice and learned to accept the fate of his father, who faced despair and in it found he had a sister, who could run the Death Star trench and remain humble – that Luke Skywalker is subverted into a man who screws up once in training a boy and runs away for the rest of his life, who can’t look past the flaws of the Jedi Order, who can no longer put together any kind of meaningful vision for the future and so seeks to take all he’s ever stood for to the grave. He can’t even decide if he should be the last Jedi or not. Yes, there are hints he might be turning up to tutor the Force sensitive slave kids on the planet with Casino Blando but that actually makes it worse – the subversion is already set up to be subverted again.

Luke isn’t the only thing subverted in The Last Jedi though. The story also introduces the very first incompetent commander for the heroes in the form of Vice Admiral Holdo. Now this particular subversion actually has a lot of potential. The Star Wars movies have never spotlighted a truly incompetent heroic leader before – at least, not one that didn’t bumble through by dumb luck like Jar Jar. Holdo flips the script. Her bad leadership causes growing discontent among her staff and results in their taking actions that waste time and resources not to mention triggers a mutiny. Pretty poor command performance. But she heroically sacrifices herself to ensure the rest of the group gets away and redeems her failures in a noble death.

Except not. See, nothing about the script suggests we’re supposed to see Holdo as incompetent. Instead, Poe’s actions are presented as silly and irrational, as if it makes total sense to sit on a ship in the middle of the least exciting chase in Star Wars history and wait on some kind of miracle save to materialize. We shouldn’t expect script writers to have a flawless grasp on military strategy but some research into leadership isn’t unreasonable. The full details could fill a book – and have! – but suffice it to say that leaders who share the details of their plans with followers tend to get better results than those who keep secrets and Holdo’s decision to withhold details from Poe thus makes no sense. Plus, Poe had the respect of the Alliance – you can’t lead a mutiny if you’re not respected by your peers – and would be the natural candidate to carry on the plan if something happened to Holdo. The fact that she doesn’t seem to have made any allowance for something happening to her before they reach their goal is another major moment of incompetence but, again, we’re not meant to see it as such. Instead, we get a lesson about trusting dear Leader. Leaders who expect blind trust in their dictates from followers aren’t leading military operations, they’re leading messianic death cults, which is exactly what Holdo’s gamble proves to be. The Last Jedi has unironically subverted good leadership with Jim Jones and that isn’t even the worst subversion in the film.

That honor belongs to Finn’s aborted self-sacrifice at the end of the film. The build-up to this moment is very well done and emotional and, in fact, if it hadn’t been interrupted I feel it would have been the moment in the movie people talked about whenever it came up. But instead Rose crashes into Finn’s speeder and nearly kills him trying to make sure he stays alive, then delivers a confused speech about how they need to fight for things they love rather than things they hate. This is the most blatant subversion of the film, replacing the heroic self-sacrifice we expect with a confused and meaningless rescue.

And it’s this last subversion that really proves that Johnson had nowhere to go with all his subversions, he just wanted to subvert. See, when subversion is done with a purpose the subversion makes sense, as in the hypothetical arc I gave Holdo just a moment ago. She makes bad decisions but still finds heroism at the end. A peerless war hero is replaced with a failed but still noble commander. (This idea is at the core of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Valiant”, see that for more details.) But the subversion of Finn’s sacrifice is muddled and incoherent.

Why would Rose “save” Finn only to put him in a situation where they should have been killed mere seconds later? They were still under the First Order’s guns. If self-sacrifice is so foolish after all, why was Holdo’s sacrifice portrayed as noble? And how was Finn not fighting for the things he loved in the form of his friends among the rebels? He already fought and killed the things he hated when he tangled with Phasma earlier on the flagship. Rose didn’t seem to object to it then.

These aren’t the only cases of subversion in the film but they are definitely the most prominent and most clearly indicative of how confused this script is. They deconstruct the heroes, leadership and heart of the original films and replace it with purple haired messiahs and book burning puppets bent on destroying the past so they can replace it with muddled platitudes they clearly haven’t thought through. Some of these ideas are actually pretty good. I loved it when Luke said that the notion of the Jedi equaling hope for the galaxy was arrogant. But even these good ideas have the legs cut out from under them by a failure to think them through. After all – Luke’s so worried about the Jedi causing evil in the universe by their existence, but the idea that letting the Jedi die out equaling an end to those evils is equally arrogant. Disappointment all around, it seems.

It’s not that the film wasn’t fun. For all the cracks forming in the franchise’s foundation is hasn’t collapsed yet. But while I enjoyed The Last Jedi the whole time I could hear the franchise collapsing. No, none of the old films were perfect. But they told a tale about how, no matter how bad things looked, some good could be found and built into a new day. But now Disney asks us to put all that aside and trust blindly that, once they’ve burned away everything, bad and good, they’re make something new.

Well, frankly my faith in the Mouse is not strong enough to trust that Kool Aid and I’m not that interested in stories that prefer scorched earth over redemption either. Star Wars isn’t beyond saving but the path it’s on leads to very dark places. Just as any fan of The Simpsons.

2017 wasn’t a great year for scifi fans but it did mark the 50th anniversary of one of the genre’s landmark shows – a high point in the genre that could use revisiting. So come back next week and join me as we start a look at Gene Rodenberry’s vision of the future.

Super Sons: A Fortress of Attitude

Posted by natechen on

Last week we talked a little about DC comic’s latest take on Superman and how they’ve changed their take on him for the worse and for the better in the last ten years or so. To be honest, that was all set-up for what I really wanted to talk about: Super Sons.

Super Sons is a new comic line from DC that focuses on Jonathan Kent and Damian Wayne, the sons of Superman and Batman, as they strike out on their own and try to establish themselves in the family business. Many consider it to be one of the best ongoing series DC is publishing and, after reading the first collected volume of many of the DC Rebirth titles, I tend to agree. There’s a lot that could go wrong in a story about an eleven year old and a thirteen year old, one a juggernaut of physical power the other with all the training of legendary assassin and the money of a millionaire, but amazingly, Super Sons avoids it all.

The core of Super Sons is less on Jon and Damian sorting out who they want to be, as most of these coming of age stories are. As a child raised in the League of Assassins, Damian has already had to confront challenges like what it means to take a life and rebelled against one path set before him in favor of another he wants more. That part of his maturation happened very early, and is already put aside. Jonathan has his father’s unshaking sense of morality and purpose, his mother’s nosiness and thirst for truth, and the untempered optimism only the adolescent can pull off. That he would take the mantle of Superboy seems almost inevitable.

The point of Super Sons is not what Jonathan and Damian want to do. DC knows their audience has come for rousing superheroics and exciting adventures, after all, and we’ve seen the reluctant hero done to death. What Super Sons offers instead is a focus on the negotiation. Who we are is not something we decide on our own, no matter how much we’d like it to be. Other people will judge and evaluate us along the way, and while that doesn’t define a person entirely, neither is a person entirely self-made. Super Sons highlights this via the simple expedient of having Jonathan and Damian dislike each other. A lot.

To be honest, the friction between the two is as much an outgrowth of how the two characters behave – established in the Superman and Batman titles before their spinning off into their own title – as it is a device of the writing and editorial staff. Damian is arrogant, short tempered, taciturn and generally unpleasant. It’s not that he doesn’t try to understand people, he understands them just fine. He just doesn’t like what he sees and isn’t afraid to let them know it. Jonathan is humble and even tempered, considerate and obedient towards his parents. From the outset their personal codes and idea of how the world should be set them up for a clash. Neither really wants to accept the other as a superhero and their getting the rest of the world to accept them for what they want to be is, in many ways, less of a challenge than the two accepting each other as heroes.

In many ways DC has chosen to pass on the semi-adversarial relationship that Superman and Batman had in the days when they’d just met down to their kids. Again, that could come off forced but it feels more like DC just recognized that they’d created two characters who fit that dynamic perfectly and decided to bring back a relationship dynamic the audience had always enjoyed. Now DC audiences can have the rocky but mostly friendly relationship Superman and Batman currently enjoy while still also getting the fractious arguments over methods, ideals and attitude that once was.

Of course, all this could go very, very badly if the characters were badly written. Fortunately they’re not. Both Jon and Damian are smarter than their peers and they’re better trained and more emotionally in control than most kids their age. But they never act like short adults. Peter Tomasi, the writer for Super Sons, either has kids of his own or works with them extensively, because he hits the exact tone, attitude and emotional investment you’d expect from the youngest of young adults. Neither boy ever preaches, or tries to be an emotional mainstay for their parents. And, while they do occasionally challenge the limits their parents set – Damian much more than Jon – they also accept discipline when it is handed down. In short, they act like kids rather than like adults trying to show kids how they’re supposed to act or worse adults seeking some kind of childhood do-over wish fulfillment. That’s a real achievement on its own, in the context of Super Sons it’s borderline miraculous.

Super Sons is the best possible evolution of a long-running fiction brand. It keeps the existing character development while expanding and developing old characters in new contexts. At the same time it finds ways to very naturally keep beloved franchise dynamics alive and flourishing without feeling forced or growing stale. Go read it. Right now.

The Limits of Superman

Posted by natechen on

The core problem of Superman is that few people seem to understand what makes him interesting. It’s not a question of what he’s capable of, as Superman is defined by his ability to meet any challenge the future will bring. Nor is it the morality of what he chooses to do. Clark Kent’s reputation as a boy scout is undeserved, as no one I knew in Scouts was as well behaved as he is – living up to the highest moral standards is something he strives for every day and, even if he doesn’t succeed every time, he still serves as a high bar to confront. The core conflict of Superman is what he won’t do. What limits Superman will set is, and always will be, the thing that define him.

This is why the Superman of DC’s New 52 was so uninteresting. They took away his relationship with Lois Lane and made his love interest Wonder Woman. You can’t do that. Lois and Clark aren’t inseparable due to some deep spark of chemistry between the two. They’re inseparable because the nature of their characters complete one another. Lois Lane and Clark Kent are devoted to Truth and Justice, concepts that each pursue in their own ways with their own skills. For a long time Lois’ sense of moral and intellectual superiority blinded her to Clark and even now that they’re married he’s a constant reminder of the importance of the simple truths that undergird human nature. Superman may be able to do anything he wants but Clark can’t constantly watch over Lois’ shoulder or keep her from chasing truth in her own way without destroying everything he loves about her. The character dynamic there is deep and fascinating, in fact it’s at the root of some of the best Superman stories ever told, but the most important thing about it for our purposes is that the very fact that Lois puts a brake on what Superman will do is part of what makes Superman, the character, interesting.

Lois is not the only limit on Superman in the life of the character. Jimmy Olsen and Perry White both filled that role as well, offering a kind of friendship and mentoring respectively. Moreover, the very real responsibilities of a normal job and civic responsibilities kept Superman a character with dilemmas to confront, driven not by what he could or couldn’t do, but by what would be best for those he cared about. Too many modern superheroes are driven by abstract things. Tony Stark works for the future or progress but can’t hold a relationship together long enough for those concepts to have personal meaning. He stands aloof in his tower, making the calls he thinks are right, but when they go wrong the only skin he has in the game is the guilt trip that will come after him.

Maybe that’s all it should take. But it’s not interesting for very long. When the Man of Tomorrow made a bad call there was a nation, a city, and a small group of newspaper reporters who would feel it. At least, that’s how it was for a long time. But at some point the focus of Superman stories drifted to the Justice League, or alien invasions, or Lex Luthor. Superman renounced his U.S. citizenship so he could better represent the world, or something. He drifted from the Daily Planet more and more. Then they took away Lois Lane and everything that made Superman a man was gone. He was just a force of nature the DC editors constantly tried to slap a meaningful face on.

It was dreadful.

For the last year and a half the world’s first superhero has come into focus once again. Ever since the DC Rebirth event Clark’s marriage has been restored and he’s slowly returned to his job at the Daily Planet. The Justice League is still a part of Superman’s calling but once again his family is a part of that equation. But more than anything else, the thing that has defined Superman the most in the last two years is Jonathan Kent.

Not Clark’s adopted father, but his son.

Yes, Superman is a dad now. And he’s not a superdad. After countless years saving the world, earth’s first hero has to confront a new and disturbing notion: That he now serves as an example not for the abstract crowd of people that are humanity but rather a single boy who’s depended on him for everything from food and clothing to a moral code and the mindset to live it out. Clark can’t let Jon run wild, he has to respect the boundaries his wife wants put in place, he has to keep his son safe even as Jonathan tries to take his own place in the world. And Superman has to do it all while preventing natural disasters, fending off old rivals and keeping a day job. There’s never been more to do or more expectations to live up to while doing it.

There’s a charming moment in the Action Comics title where Superman actually dozes off while flying home one evening, summing up the character’s dynamic in a simple scene. This is Superman the workingman, pulling long hours and running himself ragged in the hope that the things he does and example he sets will make his family stronger and the world better. It’s all any of us can hope for, whether they have superstrength and laser vision or a normal job in a normal office. That shared limit we have on what we can hope for makes Superman a perfect character to lead DC’s heroes into a new age.

Arrow Season Six – Changing a Franchise Done Right

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Over the past few years Marvel Comics has caught a lot of flack for changing its flagship characters. The title of Iron Man is currently in the hands of RiRi Williams, a teenaged girl genius with all the tech savvy, people sense and situational awareness of boiled parsley. For about a year Captain America was replaced with an evil HYDRA counterpart due to cosmic shenanigans. And, in a move that felt much like a demotion to many fans, popular characters Falcon and X-23 were shifted into the roles of their friends and mentors, Captain America and Wolverine. The most galling thing for many fans seems to be the way these changes came out of left field, with little attempt to build them up in narrative or make them look like the actions of normal human beings.

In their ongoing attempt to prove they are better than Marvel at anything other than making movies, DC took their very popular CW show Arrow and took main character Oliver Queen out of the Arrow suit – at least for most of the first half of the season – and replaced him without any fan batting an eye. What happened? Why did it work when Marvel’s attempts at switching leading roles didn’t? Let’s take a look.

Reason number one is John Diggle. No, not the Anglican Bishop, Oliver Queen’s bodyguard, portrayed by David Ramsey. There’s been a natural friendship built up between Diggle and Oliver over the last five years, aided in no small part by the natural chemistry between Ramsey and Steven Amell, and cemented by countless saves in myriad life and death situations. They trust each other’s judgement, moral fiber and skills. That makes the passing of the torch from Queen to Diggle quite natural and believable.

Furthermore, while Diggle does have his own hero identity as Spartan it’s not as well established or deeply seated in the public’s psyche as the Green Arrow is, and I’m not just talking about the show’s audience. The Green Arrow is a symbol for Starling City in ways no one else can rival – though the Flash is just as powerful in Central City – and preserving the power of that symbol means someone must wear the hood. The Spartan can’t just step into those shoes. Diggle giving up his own superhero identity isn’t a random demotion forced on him by the script but rather a sacrifice he makes for his city and his friend.

Which brings us to point two. Oliver’s struggle with being the Arrow – green or otherwise – has been ongoing, a constant thread since the end of the first season of the show. This issue was forced to a head when Oliver’s son, introduced two seasons ago, loses his mother when she’s used as a pawn in a battle with one of the Green Arrow’s rivals. With his responsibilities as the Mayor of Star City added on top of his new responsibilities as a father and his son’s deep dislike for the Green Arrow persona which is tangentially responsible for his mother’s death, Oliver’s decision to step back from the superhero life is not only understandable, it’s admirable. The press to be in the thick of things weighs hard on Oliver but he’s not the right man for the job right now. His reasons for stepping back are well established, believable and meaningful, to the point where we’re glad he’s made this call, rather than resenting it.

But the biggest thing is this change let us see new sides of both characters. Diggle struggles with being in command. He’s led other people before but never been at the top of the command chain and it weighs on him. Worse, he’s struggling with the physical toll the life has taken on him and he’s going to extreme lengths to keep it up while keeping his allies in the dark. It’s a new kind of challenge for Diggle, but one we’re sure he’ll live up to. Oliver has new responsibilities too, to a son he doesn’t really know and a city he’s not trained to manage. And beneath it all is the constant desire to get back out in the field and make a difference on the personal level, something he has to hold in check for now if he’s going to meet all his responsibilities. These struggles and opportunities are new and interesting and, if they don’t have quite the impact of Arrow‘s early seasons they’re still well written and interesting and no doubt people will continue to tune in and see what happens.

Marvel’s character swaps rarely present anything interesting in terms of new struggles or new stories and they’ve come out of left field time and time again. In setting up their change far ahead of time and driving them by story events as much as by editorial mandate, Arrow‘s writing team has managed to pull a very impressive switch that has so far eluded their rivals. There’s lessons for all to be learned in how they’ve done it.