im pushing Grue into the spring of drowned girl
Grue as a woman...........much to consider............
Wait this is actually such a genius idea. A guy with issues about manhood falling into the spring of drowned girl, with a sister who needles him about it, this is basically the perfect plot for a screwball gender comedy
TBH I think this would actually fix him more than any slow-burn long-term gender change. Also might make Brian more comfortable being bi.
🔥 magic users in superhero settings
I think it's very hard to do well unless you are A.) deliberately invoking the fly-by-night kitchen-sink aesthetics and cosmologies of the silver age in pursuit of a larger thematic point, B.) are doing a total over-the-top pisstake setting (Dr. McNinja, God Hates Astronauts,) or C.) you're trying to do a post-modern thing about how the "sci-fi" elements of the superhero genre are fundamentally just an extension of the mythic, symbolic logic powering the fantasy genre.
Option D.) is to go the Clarketech Jack-Kirby Ancient-Astronauts route- Earth X being one of the most comprehensive attempts at unifying all of Marvel's disparate power sources into a coherent cosmology- but I also think there's a fine line between pursuing that kind of coherency and functionally just not having magic users in your superhero setting anymore.
I have a horrible conundrum. A hot woman who likes kissing me wants me to read her altpower Taylor fic. Is it worth it? I come to you in my hour of need due to your expertise on Worm fandom and being a hot woman.
You absolutely should read the fic. Are you telling me you're gonna miss out on steamy make out sessions with a beautiful woman cause you don't want to read altpower slop? Grow up
What's your take on memetic organism theory? i.e the idea that certain cultural ideas function like an organism, evolving to fit its needs by natural selection, with more acceptance being the reward state and less acceptance being the fail state?
I think memetic organism theory was the first form that I encountered what I'm now calling organ thought in. There have been a few different stabs at similar concepts to what I'm talking about
Richard Dawkins spent some of his time promoting meme theory before getting scooped up into the social organism of reactionary grifting. The problem with his approach is that it implies ideas that are somehow "better evolved" which is in line with his whole eugenic worldview. In reality just like with people, ideas may have different capacities that make them better "adapted" to some contexts, but they also have resources available to them. Richard Dawkins for example was born in colonial Kenya to a family from the landed gentry, so ideas carried in his head get an advantage over the ideas carried in the head of say a black Kenyan who will be denied lifelong opportunities in a way that Dawkins will not. Thinking about the propagation of ideas through society without looking at the resources behind them is just a sort of childlike imaginative play, not any sort of critical framework.
A philosophical tradition called "organicism", (I hadn't heard of it when I called what I'm talking about organ thought) considering the universe as an intelligent living being with all things within the universe making up parts of its bodymind is a very old and robust tradition that tonnes of philosophers from Hegel to Hobbes and all the way back to Plato have talked along those lines in one way or another. Unfortunately organicism is also identified in the theory behind a lot of far right politics, essentially because chauvinism towards the social organism of your country, your people, even your political movement can lead people to think of their social organism like a sort of politics gundam trying to defeat all the others. It's the kind of brainrot that you get when you put yourself in the shoes of the social organism and think you can drive it around
Deleuze & Guattari as I've already mentioned developed Rhizomatic thought, which places emphasis on the interstices, the connections between people and groups and looks at interrelation as the primary principle of life. In A Thousand Plateaus they highlight possibilities for connection across structures that have previously been defined as separate, in a sense seeking organic solidarities that break through predefined categories. I haven't actually finished A Thousand Plateaus and I really should. It's very dense and tricky but it made Roger Scruton shit his pants and in my books that's a W.
For another point of organ thought connection, D&G reference and draw some of their ideas from Wilhelm Reich who wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism and who also believed in an organic energy created by sexual tension called orgones that flowed through everything in the universe. Reich was a whacky guy and as a side note he is the subject of the Kate Bush song cloudbusting. Anyway, as I understand it Reich analyses the 20th C fascist movements as organic phenomena, which is once again tapping into the same current.
What I think we need is a theory of organic interrelation that allows for structure building and doesn't fall prey to the sort of structurephobia that a lot of anarchist and antifascist theorists lean towards while also, obviously not creating a chauvinistic social organism that seeks to dominate. A lot of what went wrong in the USSR was a mechanistic approach to society that was trying too much at times to make a rigid machine of the state and society and at other times a far too organic approach where stalin was just basically trying to drive the gundam. We need leftists to grow the revolutionary society in their own communities by engaging in community practices which nourish both sustainability and scalability and are prepared for interrelation not by one social organism subsuming and overriding the sovereignty of another, but by joining together in solidarity. I've been describing this approach to the global revolution necessary to defeat climate change as "We don't need another Lenin. We need 10,000 Lenins"
I read Worm last year on your recommendation, and I'm a big fan of your ruminations on superhero fiction in general. One thing I enjoyed specifically was how it managed power scaling. Superpowers exist, they're powerful and dangerous, there's a great variety, but with a few arguable exceptions no one has Main Character Powers. There a few characters that are OP, but not just because the story needs them to be perfect.
I'm struggling with how to word this, but I love how in-the-trenches it feels. Not in terms of grittiness, but in limitation. No one has powers to go toe to toe with an Endbringer. No one can really outright ignore a conventional military. It walks the line between portraying powers as incredibly dangerous, but not the end all be all. Kind of like actual guns; having more advanced weaponry in war is a huge advantage and everyone wants it, but it can still be wasted, and it never makes someone invincible.
If I've articulated that well enough, can you think of any other books that place capes in a similar power bracket?
One element that slipped the net when I was doing that "everything I think that Worm does better than other cape stories" post is that I'm very hard pressed to identify many other cape stories that successfully strike the balance you've identified. And it's a hard balance to strike- answering the meta-question of "why doesn't someone just shoot these people" often veers into one of the extremes of "they get shot all the time, superpowers are flashy but useless" or "superheroes are so massively powerful and agentic compared to normal humans that conventional narrative conflict is a nonstarter." Both of which can work selectively, but not very well if you're trying to render a World Where Things Are Regularly Happening.
I think the ones that comes closest might be Absolution by Christos Gage, and Black Summer by Warren Ellis. Absolution, which is about a government-sanctioned superhero playing Dexter against criminals who dodge prosecution, depicts a superhero population that's fairly restrained to the uppermost tiers of street level- all massively individually powerful, but they're still massively beholden to remaining on the good side of the systems they participate in. The balance of power is such that when a well-regarded superhero goes rogue and claims a particular neighborhood as his protectorate, it's strictly possible for the powers that be to nail him to the wall but the political will isn't necessarily there. Black Summer, which concerns a government crackdown on superheroes after one of them offs the president, is basically one long action sequence demonstrating that the heroes of this world can be killed with enough sheer firepower, but the bodycount they rack up before you cross that threshold will be massive enough that the prudent move for the government would have been to take the L and just stay home. Neither of these works has anywhere near the worldbuilding depth of Worm- Black Summer because it's got a deliberately small cast in order to keep focus on the point it's trying to make about American military adventurism in the context of the Great War on Terror, and Absolution because it's not very good
Hi I love your analysis on superhero deconstructions but in complete opposite to that what is your favorite piece of media that is a complete buy in to superhero aesthetics and the superhero genre as a whole. Sorry if this has been asked before.
Toss up between Grant Morrison's run on JLA and Astro City, with a slight edge to Astro City. Tom Strong is a runner up.
Bendis's Ultimate Spider-Man sits in a weird middle-ground where claiming that it isn't trying to be subversive or deconstructive at all is basically wrong given its publication context but it's also a pretty straightforwardly the best-ever distillation and execution of all the best parts of the Spider-Man narrative formula, on top of being enamored panel-for-panel with the original run of ASM.
Based on how the Waynes were portrayed in The Batman and the Els in Superman, you think the Amazons or Oa are gonna get a similar treatment?
I think there's basically zero chance that the Guardians of the Universe don't get the narrative wall, given both the comic precedent of their constant misconduct and Tom King's previous viciously cynical approach to the self-presented "forces of good" in Omega Men and Mr. Miracle. The Amazons are trickier; I've discussed previously that the criticisms of Wonder Woman's mythology basically write themselves but it's nonetheless very difficult to be iconoclastic about it without coming across as pointedly Weird About Women in a way that isn't the case with her male counterparts.
It might be illustrative to examine what the iconoclasm towards the Waynes and the Els are doing in their respective works. I think that the turn on the Waynes in contemporary adaptations, most notably in The Batman, is due to the fact that it actually resolves one of the core tensions of the mythology in a way that dovetails well with the rest of the modern Batman project. How where the Waynes so singularly worthy of avenging, despite being as rich as the rest of the bastards? Simple, they weren't. The Waynes being imperfect people who Bruce overidealizes aligns perfectly with the growing consensus that Batman's a neurotic with bizarre coping strategies, and moreover it aligns with the idea that Gotham is a spiritual meatgrinder where the best intentions go to die.
But with Superman it's different. The turn on Krypton is IMO motivated, out-of-universe, by a growing and in my opinion deeply justified suspicion of what lurks under the surface of the 1930s Utopian Rhetoric that informed Krypton; the question of who built those crystal spires and who washes the togas. The idea of Superman as an emissary of a better way of life- which, several times, has textually been Jor-El's intention- rightfully sets off all kinds of alarm bells about real life situations in which similar rhetoric was deployed in the service of brutal acts of imperialism. But problems arise because people also want Superman to be an immigrant story, and fraught stuff starts happening if the immigrant in question was expressly sent to Earth to conquer it, even if what ensues is a refusal to do so! Invincible could only do "Evil Krypton" effectively because it picked a lane- it's about colonialism and toxic masculinity first and foremost, and even before the reveal, Omni-Man isn't presenting himself as an immigrant so much as a Peace Corps Volunteer. With Superman, the revisionism introduces a salient tension rather than resolving one, and while it's not an impossible tension to resolve, most movies and TV shows aren't going to have the narrative bandwidth necessary to grapple with it to my personal satisfaction. Viewed through this lens, Oa and the Guardians getting tarnished by the narrative is kind of a no-brainer- it's the intuitive direction to take the concept of an immortal council of aliens establishing themselves as the universe's policemen. "Who Appointed You Guys Exactly" is the question that should spring up in response to hearing about the basic conceit of the Lantern Corps, and it's a question that provably allows for a huge number of storytelling opportunities- refer to the Manhunters, the Red Lanterns, The Burning Martian arc, and probably a bunch of other stories I'm forgetting. You have to dig a little deeper with the Amazons to find something that sets off the same kind of obvious alarm bells for significant numbers of people. Their default state in the narrative is minding their own business, and the fairytale logic undergirding a lot of the mythos makes stuff like The Sons of Themyscira read like a misogynistic reach rather than any kind of intuitive conclusion to draw about how Amazonian society must secretly function. There have been stories that attempt to characterize the Amazons as excessively self-righteous and ideologically hidebound as a result of their isolation, but these beats range from mid to absurdly offensive in their execution. Strawwomen as far as the eye can see.
I think the most effective iconoclastic take on the Amazons to date came in the form of Kelly Thompson's Historia, which recast Themyscira not as a deliberately isolationist commune but as a prison camp established by Zeus to contain the Amazons and curb their influence on the world. This take threaded the needle of preserving what people actually like about the Amazons ideologically, while also introducing an appropriate skepticism of the idea that such paragons would deliberately sequester themselves away on a hidden island rather than actually try to change the world for the better. If you want to introduce a complication to the narrative, a machine against which the hero can rage, The Greek Gods make a much better target for that than the Amazons themselves.
And, to bring this back around to the original point of this discussion, I find this take on The Amazons structurally similar to the compromise positions arrived at by previous iterations of the Superman mythos Re: The nature of Krypton. There are plenty of stories where the writing was patently on the wall for Kryptonian society as a whole, but the Els specifically numbered among those smart and principled enough to read it, and derive from this foresight their ability to act as a plausible moral north star for their son.
Feet are so normie these days I forgot it was a fetish like Give me those fucking robot paws you piece of fuck. Robot are so normie these days
What do you think would have happened if Alloran somehow morphed in book 8 so he stopped dying of snake poison and escaped the Yeerks and the Animorphs ended up hanging out with a ruthless, terrifying war prince?
• Ax is safe from controllers for the moment, which is why Marco lumbers over to where Visser Three’s host is lying on the ground. «Come on,» he snaps, dragging the half-dead andalite upright. «Either morph and help us fight, or wait around like a useless lump for the yeerks to start using you again. Dying heroically doesn’t solve anything.»
• Unbeknownst to the newly freed War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, an intense debate rages throughout the entire forty-minute flight back to Ax’s scoop. Marco doesn’t think they should trust him with anything until they have more information. Rachel cannot wait to get him on board, given how much fighting experience he must have. Cassie thinks that they should wait and see what Alloran wants, whereas Tobias insists that if Ax worked out this well then Alloran will too. Jake and Ax, as always, stay out of the debate.
• They all go, mostly because it doesn’t seem worth fighting him about, although Marco grumbles about it the whole way home. Jake broods on the issue for the rest of the afternoon, wondering if it would be for the best for him simply to hand over leadership. He barely even notices when Tom’s gone for almost the entire day—some emergency at the Sharing, allegedly—and he doesn’t arrive at an easy answer.
• Things don’t come to a head until a couple weeks later, when Alloran flatly refuses to listen to Cassie’s concerns about the potential for logging in the woods where the andalites and Tobias live. «It’s a pity about the trees, yes, but it is not our concern right now,» Alloran says impatiently. «We need to focus on taking out the empire’s top vissers while the power vacuum from Esplin’s death remains unfilled. This silly worry about the local land is just one more distraction—»
• They work out an arrangement of sorts, wherein Jake is their field commander but Alloran gives them a lot of advice in their down time. Marco might grumble about “school all day, then homework, then what do we do with our tiny amounts of spare time? Oh goody, more homework!” but the truth is that most of what Alloran teaches them is useful. He drills them on morphing fast, morphing smoothly, morphing without losing control, and they all improve to the point where the others can almost— almost— match Cassie in skill.
• Under Visser One’s influence, the invasion of Earth grows terrifying new tendrils. Politicians in state capitols and even the White House start scheduling mysterious appointments once every three days. The Sharing gains official nonprofit status, and opens chapters in every state in the country. Voluntary hosts get offered power and wealth and fame in the New Yeerk Order if they will just agree to give up their bodies for a few years while the revolution occurs. Alloran insists that Edriss is five times the strategist Esplin ever was, and pretty soon they all agree with him.
• Jake isn’t the only one to notice that Alloran returns to the construction site where Elfangor died, but he is the only one brave enough to ask about it. It just happens one time that Jake’s walking home and sees a very familiar young man (comprised of DNA that has bits of Mr. Tidwell and Visser Three’s human shape and the Animorphs themselves) leaning against the chain link fence to look at the abandoned earthmovers.
• When Alloran arrives back at the scoop he set up not far from Ax’s, Tobias is standing there. Human. Tears painting his face. Shoulders shaking, hands balled into fists.
• Alloran thinks that they would have all made Elfangor proud, in the end. He’s a poor substitute for the commander they need, but he can guide them the best he can all the same. He’s there, in bievilerd morph and killing taxxon-controllers at top speed, when they rescue Tobias from Sub-Visser Fifty-One’s failed interrogation, and he tears Taylor’s head off her shoulders without a hint of remorse. He’s there, a nameless monster from the hork-bajir’s Father Deep, when Jake stays their hand in the face of a whirlpool filled with helpless yeerks. He’s there to witness as Edriss’s host tumbles off the face of a cliff and Marco speaks with detached calm of revenge. He’s there as Ax guides his human friends through the ritual of mourning following the destruction of the yeerk pool, and as Cassie proves to him with shocking finality that not every yeerk alive is worth destroying.
• And then, on the eve of the final battle, Jake pulls him aside for a private conversation. He speaks not as a commander to a subordinate, or even as one war-prince to another, but as a friend asking a difficult and terrible favor of a friend. That, Alloran thinks, is the truest mark of all that this boy was born to lead.
• Jake tells Toby and Eva and James—all his lieutenants—what they have planned. Toby, who dislikes Alloran even more openly than all the other hork-bajir in the valley, becomes the first to respond. “Funny,” she says, “that you are willing to die protecting so many lesser creatures.”
Have you ever tried to figure out what your power would most likely be if you were a Parahuman?
No, and I've said before that my stance is that the nature of the parahumans power system makes this an incredibly bad idea in almost all cases, similarly bad to how some people in the Infinity Train fandom were very briefly trying to do self-insert passenger-sonas before realizing that doing this with any fidelity involved turning the most traumatizing elements of their own lives into something for consumption by an audience. Some people are in the right headspace to do stuff like that, and I salute them but I'm not touching it with a ten foot pole
There’s a reason why trigger events are generally not talked about in Worm, and that the Undersiders recoil when Taylor tries to ask about theirs.
I know what mine would be, and could map out a power based on that, but frankly that is not something I would want to share with anybody on the Internet.
What's a non-Big Two cape setting that you'd like to see get Marvel Zombies treatment.
Invincible would be fun because it has the same author as the first two MZ minis; consequentially it's extremely aesthetically compatible from the word go because it uses a lot of the same techniques and stylistic flourishes (e.g the same rapid-cut paneling techniques to convey unfolding mass chaos and violence in both Dead Days and the Invincible War.) Astro City would be fun because it's got a built-up cast to play with and an anthology setup that would lend itself to a bunch of underexamined perspectives on the whole thing. The Boys would be fun on the grounds that forcing the Vought set to respond to any kind of legitimate widespread crisis is intrinsically super funny. And Worm would be good for reasons I shouldn't even have to spell out here
after reading Peter Clines Ex-Heroes pentalogy I can confidentiality say that Danielle Harris is one of the coolest heroes ever, what do you think of her?
^This lady So what I like about Danielle Morris/Cerberus is that she's a take on the Iron Man archetype in the context of an otherwise deliberately incredibly low-budget superhero universe, a setting where, with the exception of one millionaire, the superhero population consists almost entirely of working-class people in kludged-together wetsuits and motorcycle leathers who only get away with their low-rent costumes by virtue of the fact that they do, in fact, have incredibly potent superpowers. This is a hard circle to square, aesthetically, if you also want to introduce a hero who uses power armor, because that shit's expensive.
The solution? Cerberus doesn't debut after the other half of the book's elevator pitch, the zombie apocalypse, is already well under way. The fact that there's only one set of the armor despite the extensive documentation that must exist is due to the fact that the armor is a prototype, slated for eventual mass production but hastily deployed as a show of force by a rapidly disintegrating military that's at the point of just throwing whatever they've got at the wall to see what sticks. The typically-inadvisable trope of the suit's chief engineer also being the field pilot is initially justified by the fact that she's the only person left who knows how to operate it; and then by her reluctance to train a second person on how to operate it because she comes to be psychologically dependent on the physical protection it provides her. Protection that's at least somewhat illusory, to boot, because if you take a shot for every time the suit very realistically suffers a power failure or mechanical failure at a crucial juncture, you're going to lose your liver. The collapse of the logistics network impedes the armor's ability to work at full capacity almost from the start; those bracers on her arms in the above illustrations are for .50 Caliber machine guns that ran quickly out of ammo after her first skirmish and had to be mothballed. The series is very clear that Cerberus wouldn't be viable in the long run if she weren't on a team with several other superhumans, including an electrokinetic and a technopath, who can help cover the suit's weak points. Ironic, given the implication that the original point of Cerberus was so the army would have an answer to those same people. Overall, the armor is paradoxically portrayed as both viable and nonviable.
One of the really interesting things about Ex-Heroes's worldbuilding is that superheroes numbered in the dozens before the apocalypse, but supervillains only start to emerge in any real numbers after the apocalypse, when the prospect of being able to start a fiefdom or a cult of personality without someone noticing and coming to kick your shit are significantly greater; before that, criminals with powers mostly kept what they were capable of on the down low because there was no sane reason to adopt the kind of comic-book classic presentation that would call a superhero down on their heads. Thus the quiet thesis of the series is that quite a bit of classic superheroic nonsense would be actively facilitated by the end of the world and the collapse of society; the incentives and the restrictions would change, but heroism would remain pointedly necessary. Cerberus is also part of this quiet thesis. The perpetual tension of Tony Stark is that we know him to exist in a world full of cultural, legal and logistical restrictions, against which the specific fantasy of being Iron Man would inevitably run aground. Cerberus, as a superheroic identity, never existed alongside any of that. It's way easier to be a knight errant or a lone ranger if that's the only version of those things left that anyone can be.
Asking because you generally have intelligent and thoughtful posts on both of these comics, and they seem to be somewhat thematically connected: would you recommend reading Watchmen before The Power Fantasy?
The Power Fantasy and its themes entirely stand on their own merit; reading Watchmen isn't a requisite for basic project legibility the way it would be with a more direct riff like Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt or Pax Americana, for example. (I tested this on a relative by giving her TPF first and then Watchmen.) But it's also not a bad idea to read Watchmen first because a lot of the superhero deconstructions of the last 40 years are written in conversation with Watchmen and thus it can act as something of a Rosetta stone to the ideas of the postmodern superhero space.
