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Subj: I'll admit, I'm bringing my own subtext into this one ... Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 at 08:33:11 pm EDT (Viewed 433 times) | Reply Subj: Right back atcha Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 at 05:24:45 pm EDT | ||||||
... But we'll get to that later.
The problem is that the "interesting new twist" makes him seem like a scumbag that I want to punch in the mouth.
As with any set of cultural traditions, from Native American tribal practices to American methods of practicing democracy, there was a lot that was great about the Silver Age of superhero comics, but there was a lot about them that was also unambiguously bad. As artifacts of a past era, I'm more than willing to forgive the flaws of those works, as long as they're acknowledged, but the idea that, if you like something, you should keep it frozen in amber, is anathema to me. Regardless of genre, storytelling should always be evolving and improving. This is why I love the early output of the "grim and gritty" period, with Moore on Watchmen and Miller on The Dark Knight Returns, and hate the majority of what followed, because what was once innovative became calcified into something as staid and conventional as the previous movement that it was rebelling against. Whether a story reflects the aesthetic of the Silver Age or the "Dark Age" that came later, it should be a launching pad for new storytelling directions, but instead, both eras' aesthetics are all too often used as an excuse to stick the characters into hamster-wheels, spinning endlessly in place. Plus, in the interests of full disclosure, I started wearing glasses in the first grade, and while I could believe that a man could fly, I had no capacity whatsoever to believe that anyone could fail to see past a pair of glasses.
The powers. The costumes. The mind-broadening sci-fi and fantasy concepts. The otherworldly settings. The larger-than-life personalities. Heroes who were bot admirable and accessible. Villains who were, by turns, dramatically absurd and seriously fearsome. The friendships, the grudges, and the loves that SHOULD have been. The juxtaposition of impossible characters, doing impossible things, against a backdrop that could so closely resemble the world which I knew as real. In short, everything else about superheroics. Here's the problem, though; in any given comic starring Superman, when I was growing up, 90 percent of what I saw was, "I'm Lois Lane, and I'm too stupid to see past a pair of glasses," and, "I'm Superman, and even though I love Lois, and she loves me, I'll never tell her I'm Clark Kent, because she couldn't handle it." Even as a grade-school-aged child, such portrayals were offensively sexist to me, and since I had no interest in reading about the most powerful man in existence essentially cock-blocking himself for no real reason whatsoever ... well, there you go, and there I went. I have never found unresolved sexual tension to be interesting or entertaining as an permanent state of affairs, and when it comes to my optional-expense entertainment, I've always had an exceedingly low tolerance for anything I don't like about a story.
No, it just defeats the point of this particular story. There are plenty of ways to give Peter a tough life, without turning him into an unethical, self-pitying, clueless jackass, and just because a story is written doesn't mean I have to accept it. After all, all of the current stories are built upon a foundation of declaring the past 20 years' worth of published stories to be invalid, so it's a little late in the game to be saying, "Okay, we just retconned half the character's history, but from NOW on, everything that happens MUST be accepted as sacrosanct." Then again, I've always had a slightly adversarial relationship with storytelling texts at best, to the point that I've become pathologically incapable of simply accepting anything I'm told without testing it by challenging it first. I believe that I have an obligation, if only to myself, to confront even the stories that I like.
I'd modify it and say that Peter should suffer from misfortune and his own mistakes on occasion, but I firmly believe he should come out on top at least as often as not, both in costume and in civilian life, because otherwise, why would I want to be him, and why would I want to read about him? If he's DOOMED to be a loser, then he's Charlie Brown, and Charlie Brown has always been one of my least favorite characters ever, because if I'm told that someone will ALWAYS fail, and that literally EVERYTHING will go wrong for them, no matter what, then that implies a fixed fate for them, and I refuse to accept even the possibility of such an inescapable destiny, whether in fiction or in real life. As a kid who often felt powerless, I absolutely rejected the message that such a sense of powerlessness is something that you just have to learn to endure and accept. Even on into adulthood, I've never accepted it, and I never will. On that note, irrelevant personal anecdote time, so please feel free to skip: As a socially inept nerd growing up, I was no stranger to being beaten up, from grade school, through middle school, on up to high school. When I'd come home, with my clothes torn, my glasses broken, my body bruised and my nose bloodied, my mom would call the school and say, what the fuck? In response, she'd be told that nobody ever saw me being beaten, so there was nothing they could do, and besides, they seriously doubted that students who had distinguished themselves as exceptional athletes would beat up one of their peers (apparently, the fact that I'd distinguished myself as an exceptional academic didn't count for shit, reputation-wise). At first, I wondered what I was doing wrong, to earn myself these beatings, so I changed my behavior, as many different ways as I could, but it never mattered, because somebody always needed to take a beating, and as one principal told my mom to her face, when she marched me into his office with my eye swollen shut, "Boys will be boys." You know how it finally panned out for me? I learned how to swear, and how to throw insults, and how to laugh in someone's face, even after they'd just punched me in the gut. I'd get pounded, and all the while, I was calling the guys who were punching me cocksuckers, and telling them that the size of their fists was inversely proportional to the size of their dicks. The same school officials who claimed to be unable to punish these other boys for beating me now started trying to punish me for talking shit to them while they were hammering me (although, as soon as my mom threatened to go to the superintendent about that little bit of hypocrisy, it quietly went away). I never won a single physical fight. Every time those fuckers came after me, I wound up eating the floor. And yet, I never stopped laughing at them, and making fun of them, not even when I had to laugh to keep from crying in pain. And finally, they left me alone, after that last time, back in sophomore year, when Brian Fargen was standing over me, yelling "SHUT UP!!!" And I told him I wouldn't. I told him that I would rather be dead than give in to him. And yeah, he kicked me around a little bit longer, but when I kept laughing, he finally just gave up and walked away. And after that, a little bit more each day, I found myself more accepted, and more free to be myself, and by the time my senior year rolled around, I was elected class president. I'm willing to accept a LOT in my fiction. Flying guys, fruity outfits, "science" that could in no way exist in the real world, all sorts of goofy bullshit. But, yeah, when it comes to telling me that there are certain things in this world that we just have to sit back and take, like medicine? Yeah, that's one thing I simply don't have the stomach for. Not now, and not ever. | |||||||
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