Green Arrow first turned up on television as a rare bright spot in the mostly problematic sixth season of Smallville (well, problematic if Lex Luthor and Lana Lang hooking up gives you the jibblies, as it should). Two years later, he was added to the main cast, as the show adjusted to its post-Lex identity.
In the months that followed Smallville calling it a day, rumours began to circulate that the CW network was looking to fill the Smallville-shaped hole in its schedule with a show about Green Arrow, since the Smallville fans took to him so well.
However.
This would not be a spinoff of Smallville, they made clear. Justin Hartley would not be returning to the role. This would be about Oliver Queen’s early days, in a world without other heroes (at first).
I’d been a fan of Green Arrow since Kevin Smith relaunched the character in 2001. That he might get his own TV show seemed astoundingly improbable: that it would actually be legitimately good seemed miraculous. And yet here we are: Arrow is the gold standard for comic book TV shows.
Correction: LIVE ACTION TV shows.
Which isn’t to say the show is flawless. It is not. But as season two improved on the freshman year, so too can season three build on that momentum. Here’s some thoughts as to how.
Challenges: don’t get sucked into old habits
No series embraced “the illusion of change” like Smallville. This is a storytelling trick familiar to anyone who reads superhero comics: you change things up in a major way while still leaving the door open to put everything back the way it was when you need to. Examples include the Death of Superman, Bruce Wayne getting his back broken in Knightfall, Dr. Octopus taking control of Peter Parker’s body in Superior Spider-man, or introducing a new, more diverse Avengers line-up that totally won’t be tossed out the window when the classic line-up hits movie screens in May.
Only two of these people are in the next movie, and one is the guy they’ve made even whiter.
But Arrow… Arrow is at its heart a show about evolution. In the flashbacks to Oliver’s time on (or nearish) the island of Lian Yu, we see how he changed from spoiled playboy to the deadly vigilante, known as “the Hood,” we met in the pilot. And in the main storyline, we watch Oliver grow from murderous vigilante “the Hood” to would-be legitimate hero “the Arrow,” and presumably from there to Justice League member Green Arrow.
So this is a show that embraces change. In the vein, here’s some tropes from Arrow’s first two seasons that maybe we could tone down a little.
1. Someone is insufferable
Mostly Thea. I know, you’re on the CW, and the network of Gossip Girls who keep Vampire Diaries about the Next Top Models seems to require a certain percentage of YA melodrama. Thea Queen, Oliver’s younger sister, takes the brunt of this, making her the first season’s least likable character, including the guy who’s master plan was “kill all of the poor people.” Sometimes she improves, but she keeps falling into that “angry pouty brat” place. And when she isn’t? When she’s actually likable? Laurel or Roy just take her place. Someone always seems to be irrationally pissed at the world, especially the part of the world that’s Oliver, and maybe this could be fixed by a five minute conversation, but that just brings us to the next issue…
2. Felicitous interuptus
Any time Oliver has to have an important personal conversation, be it an attempt to salvage a relationship, protect his company, or prevent his family from collapsing under the weight of the latest soap opera twist, you can bet that one of his team, Digg or Felicity, is going to show up with news about this week’s villain. And he’ll have to miss another fundraiser/board meeting/intervention to go shoot arrows at Count Vertigo, because he’s a hero and responsibility and all that.
Guys… I’m your biggest fan. I absolutely am. But even I think it’s getting old. Whatever your lead, Felicity, I’m sure it could have waited five god damned minutes.
3. Oh no! The team’s collapsing!
Again, YA melodrama demands a certain amount of tension between the leads. But elsewhere on the network is Supernatural, which really only has two leads. And let me tell you… Sam and Dean splitting up and getting back together (as a demon-slaying pair of brothers, don’t get ideas) once per season is getting tired.
I’m not saying Oliver, Digg, Felicity, and Roy have to stay best of friends every week, but… there’s a middle ground. Community found it back in season two, when they buried “the gang splits up” as a possible threat once and for all.
Opportunity: get weird
You’ve done something you never did before. You’ve added something that was never there. And it’s something that’s a guarantee against going stale.
With the debut of the Flash, super powers now exist in the Arrowverse. The line was sort of crossed with the introduction of mirakuru last season, but now there’s people who can run faster than sound and control the weather. Sure, most of that’s currently happening in Central City, but that’s no reason not to let it bleed into Starling.
How would Oliver deal with legitimate super powers? He had enough of a struggle with mirakuru, what would he do against someone legitimately bulletproof? In a world with the Flash, Firestorm, and the Atom, is a guy who’s good with a bow still relevant?
Which is exactly what I wanted to see last year, but couldn’t, because that would have meant connecting Arrow to Man of Steel, and that’s been declared as off the table. But now that we have open talks of seeing Firestorm on Flash, and Brandon Routh talking about having seen concept art for his Atom costume, we are clearly off to the races.
Go ahead and work the non-powered villains like Cupid, Komodo, and Captain Boomerang. Bring in non-powered heroes like Wildcat, Manhunter, and Katana. But remember that your big bad this year is an immortal, and your sister show is filling itself with people who have or will have super powers. So go nuts. Embrace the larger world that Flash has opened up, and then shoot arrows at it.
Tomorrow, we’ll wrap this up with a look at the last man to the party (in terms of airing dates), John Constantine.
Way, way back in 1990, in the wake of the massive success of Tim Burton’s Batman, CBS launched a TV show based on DC superhero the Flash. And 14-year-old me couldn’t have been more thrilled. It was the one thing I most looked forward to watching every week. But sadly it didn’t last beyond one season, breaking my puberty-riddled heart.
And now, 24 years later (you go to hell remorseless march of time, you go to hell and you die), the Flash is coming back to TV, this time as part of a larger televised DC universe, the Arrowverse.
Which is ultimately going to be an awkward name for this thing but since it all grew out of the TV show Arrow, here we are.
At least eight Easter eggs in this poster.
From the trailer, it’s looking hell of solid. So let’s talk about how they can go the distance this time.
Challenge: biting off more than you can chew
One of my concerns two years back, when Arrow was starting out, I was a little concerned about how the fight sequences would go. You see, we were just coming off of ten years of Smallville, a series that habitually half-assed its action sequences. For a show that never looked low-budget, Smallville surely didn’t know how to do a fight scene.
Seriously, they spent all of season eight building up to a climactic battle between Clark and Doomsday, and when it finally happened, it lasted less than a minute. Boiled down to a few punches from Doomsday and a charge-tackle from Clark that disposed of Doomsday off-camera. Which would be bad enough, but the season 10 fight between Clark and Darkseid was even worse.
Now, Arrow has it down. Their fight scenes are spectacular. But a fight scene on Arrow only needs choreography, stunt men, and some arrow work. A fight scene between Flash and Captain Cold involves super-speed effects and ice blasts.
And that’s just one of the Rogues, Flash’s primary band of villains, threeofwhich have already been cast. We’re talking flame throwers, ice guns, people jumping in and out of mirrors, the Trickster might not be so tough, but you see my point?
And that’s just the Rogues, who I feel I should point out ought to be recurring villains for basically the entire series. In the pilot alone, two other villains and a major DC event get hinted at. First of all, in the flashbacks to the death of Barry’s mother, we get a glimpse at what is clearly supposed to be the Reverse-Flash. Not so hard, it’s just more super-speed effects. If they can make Barry move at super-speed (they can), Reverse-Flash is just a reversed colour palette.
Second… Grodd.
The murder ape.
Grodd, for those who don’t know, is a hyper-intelligent telepathic gorilla from a hidden society of super-advanced apes called Gorilla City–yeah. Comics are weird. But he’s a blend of telepathy, genius intellect, animal savagery, and a fanatical devotion to gorilla supremacy that elevates him from “evil talking monkey” to one of Flash’s deadliest foes. There’ve been two Grodd-related Easter eggs in promos for the Flash (check out the sidewalk on the lower left of the poster up above), and one pretty clear shot from the pilot that indicates they want Grodd to show up eventually.
Kind of hard to misinterpret.
The producers have straight up admitted that they haven’t figured out how to do Grodd on TV yet, but that they hoped Dawn of the Planet of the Apes might do some of the heavy lifting there. We’ll see… Arrow dropped hints and name-dropped Ra’s Al Ghul for two seasons before having him turn up, so they’ve got some time to figure this out.
And third… in a twist-end scene I shan’t spoil, they clearly refer to what remains the biggest, boldest, and possibly best event book in DC history: Crisis on Infinite Earths. They use the word “crisis” and refer to “red skies,” one of the hallmarks of Crisis on Infinite Earths and its follow-ups.
Guys… Flash producers… I love you all, but that is not a term you should throw around lightly. Because some of us… mostly me… possibly only me… want to see Crisis on Infinite Earths adapted to some sort of screen, but let me be clear: a Crisis on Infinite Earths that doesn’t combine the Nolan Batman movies, the current Justice League/Man of Steel crew, the Arrowverse, Gotham, Constantine, and what the hell, Superman Returns and Smallville into one worlds-spanning epic is not worthy of the title. So while you have bought yourselves until season nine before you have to worry too hard… tread carefully.
These are all big, expensive things, and they are all things that you are name-dropping, not just things on my Flash series wishlist (although they are all on that list, they really, really are). And I worry about the expense involved in doing them right because the climax of the pilot, in which Flash battles a proto-Weather Wizard (the real Weather Wizard, I maintain, is yet to come), comes down to a two-minute showdown based around Barry running really fast in a circle.
You’re going to have to do better than that when Grodd shows up.
Opportunity: embrace science
One of Flash’s catch-phrases used to be “Flash fact.” He’d use science as a weapon, figuring out how to use his speed to save the day through an understanding of physics, and then explain how it worked through his Flash facts. That was very much a silver age thing (since Barry Allen spent the first two and half decades after the silver age being dead), but one of the first things he said when he was brought back from the dead in Final Crisis (don’t ask, we don’t have time) was “Flash fact.”
And on the show? He’s already a science nerd. He got more excited about the potential of the Central City particle accelerator (which looks spookily similar to the Vancouver hockey arena) than seemed healthy. He’s a forensic scientist (as Barry is in the comics). And in his Flash duties, he works with a physicist, a biologist, and an engineer. This shouldn’t be a show afraid of being smart.
Not all of Flash’s fights have to boil down to “run really fast and punch bad guy in the face.” I gave you a hard time about a climactic battle involving running really fast, but actually, that is what I’m talking about. Using his speed in creative ways to beat the villains and save the civilians. Just don’t go to the “run in a circle” well too often either.
And it’s not just Flash: his villains are creative too. Captain Cold’s gun doesn’t just shoot ice: it can slow molecular movement. This makes things cold, sure, but it can also make fast things move slower, a key ability to have when you’re fighting a super-speeder.
Not to mention the fact that his future nemesis best friend Harrison Wells is a leading particle physicist. If you’re not at least trying to make science look good in this show, what are you doing?
Next time: what am I hoping to see as Flash’s parent show, Arrow, moves into season three?
Continuing my look at challenges and opportunities facing geek TV shows, we move on to one that I spoke out against in the past, yet now find myself weirdly excited to watch.
I am more excited to watch Gotham, the Batman show without Batman, than I am to watch the new Kevin Smith movie. I don’t even recognize myself. And yet everything I’m hearing says that the pilot nails it. I did not see that coming.
So apparently Gotham is lurching from “show I’m going to watch every week but hate myself for it” to “show I might authentically enjoy.” But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some pitfalls ahead. And not just over the fact that Bruce Wayne is only 12 in season one, although they continue to get a little mocked for that. But let’s talk specifics.
Challenge: We all know where this is going
The biggest challenge with prequel stories is that there aren’t a lot of surprises to be had. We know Anakin Skywalker will become Darth Vader. We know the tenuous peace between man and ape can’t last in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, because it isn’t called Dawn of the Planet of Apes and Humans Getting Along in Harmony.
So we know, going in, what’s going to happen here. Oswald Cobblepot will graduate from henchman to sadistic criminal overlord. Edward Nygma will become the Riddler. Jim Gordon will be appointed Commissioner. And eventually, Bruce Wayne will be Batman.
The challenge, then, is making the road to these inevitable destinations worth watching for however many years you run. And this is no simple matter. Let’s consider Smallville, you and I.
Smallville had no plan. Year after year they’d have hints and allusions to Clark’s greater destiny. Year after year Lex Luthor slipped a little further into darkness. But without a clear end date in mind, they had no idea how long they had to stretch this out. When should Lex cross the line from Clark’s best friend to his greatest enemy? When should Clark get into journalism? What season arcs can we have that SEEM to advance these plots but don’t? Or at least, only advance things in a way that we can undo with a Red Kryptonite episode?
Smallville’s “Get out of character development free” card.
Eventually, they started pulling the triggers on the big moments because they were in their seventh season and had nowhere else to go. Also, Lex and Lana didn’t renew their contracts.
And this meant that by the last two seasons, what we had was a Superman show that was just afraid of saying “Superman.” Clark worked at the Daily Planet, with Lois Lane, who he was dating, while fighting crime on the side in a costume with a code name. It’s just that his costume was more of a red leather jacket and his code name was “the Blur” because he moved too fast to be clearly photographed, only leaving a red-blue blur in the image (later just red). They were Lois and Clark with less camp and better villains, but still asked us to believe that there were still steps left between Clark and becoming Superman.
And this is the problem you face, Gotham. At one point are you just doing whatever you can to keep the balls in the air? Six to five and pick ’em, if Gotham lasts long enough, Gordon’s going to lose his badge. Suspended, demoted, something, the corruption in the GCPD will overwhelm him, and we won’t really care because we know it can’t last. At one point, Bruce Wayne will reconsider his plan. Maybe when he starts liking girls. But that too can’t last, because there’s Batmanning to be done.
But therein lies your opportunity.
Opportunity: Gotham is an epic tragedy
There is one area in which knowing the outcome doesn’t hold you back, and that is in proper, deep, Shakespearean tragedy. We know from the prologue that Romeo and Juliet aren’t going to grow old together (or at all); Troy is going to fall by the end of the Iliad; and as I said before, we know that Caesar, leader of the apes, will be betrayed and his peace with the humans will crumble. This doesn’t have to rob these moments of their power.
James Gordon is fighting to save Gotham, a city collapsing into crime and corruption, while trying to pull young Bruce Wayne back from the brink of darkness. And the thing is, he can’t. Sure, he will be Commissioner, he will begin to at least reduce the corruption of the GCPD, and he might even put Fish Mooney behind bars (although I doubt it. Five bucks says she meets an umbrella-related end at the hands of her lackey Oswald Cobblepot), but he can’t save the city. Because if one good cop could save Gotham, Gotham wouldn’t need a Batman. And it will. In the end, it will.
So Gordon will ultimately fail, or at least be only partially successful, in his efforts to redeem Gotham, but his failure to “save” Bruce Wayne will accomplish what he couldn’t: creating the man who will be able to stand up to the Riddler, the Penguin, the Joker, and the rest.
And there’s still fun to be had. Who does Gordon convert? Who will his allies be? And how does he manage to rise above the corrupt heads of the department? There’s definitely narrative meat on those bones.
Plus, can I just say this, Gotham? In the right hands, Edward Nygma is fascinating. Read any Scott Snyder story featuring the Riddler. So be those hands. Show us that the Riddler is more than Jim Carrey overacting in green tights.
You had my curiosity, Gotham. Now you have my attention. Don’t waste it.
Tomorrow, my favourite super-hero show gets a spin-off. What do I want from the Flash?
We rumble ever closer to the dawn of the new TV season, which will feature no less than six TV shows based on or connected to comic properties, some of which won’t even get cancelled between now and Christmas.
Obviously I’d prefer none, but life has been really drilling in the message that I can’t have everything I want lately.
So to try and keep the number of geek TV cancellations down (and pave the way for the rumoured Supergirl and Titans series I’m hearing about), here’s the first of several posts as to what I see as the challenges and opportunities for some of the key players.
(No, I don’t have any sway over the various showrunners, but when I wrote one of these two years ago about dos and don’ts for Arrow, they did nearly everything on my list, so what the hell.)
Agents of SHIELD: don’t spin your wheels (any more)
Not my actual advice.
Okay. It was a bit of a close call, but Agents of SHIELD is back for season two. It’s possible that the corporate synergy of Disney-owned ABC running a Disney-owned Marvel show made renewal more assured than we thought, but the second season pick-up came awfully late.
Challenge: pick up the pace
When we last left you, Agents of SHIELD, SHIELD had ceased to exist and Agent Coulson (who appears to have a hint of the space madness due to his life-restoring possibly Kree blood transfusion) and his merry band were tasked with rebuilding it from the ground up. Also Agent Ward, the blandest character on a show whose overall characterization could be called lackluster, had finally become interesting when they revealed he’d been a Hydra sleeper agent all along.
The last six episodes were legitimately good, with actual stakes and actual tension and real uncertainty about what would happen. And Patton Oswalt, which is always welcome. It didn’t pull your ratings up, but the fans you still had surely appreciated it. You need some more of that to kick off this new season. Because the fact is, you don’t have enough viewers left that you can afford to lose half of them in your first seven episodes again. And the most important thing you can do to avoid that? Don’t spin your wheels for half a season.
When season one kicked off, we had three big mysteries: how did Coulson come back from the dead after Avengers, what’s the secret in hacker Skye’s past, and some people called Centipede were trying to make their own super soldiers out of a witches’ brew of Marvel movie references.
And then all three plots just sat there until Christmas.
Once per episode you’d remind us something was up with Coulson (and name-drop someone from the movies, which was 95% of your connection to the Marvel cinematic universe for a while). Every once in a while you’d say “Ooo, Skye’s past is mysterious,” or have Centipede pop by and continue being crude knockoffs of the bad guys from Iron Man 3. And so it remained for your first dozen episodes, while you hemorrhaged viewers and good will.
So don’t do that again. We’ve now had a few hints at Skye’s past and Coulson’s resurrection, go somewhere with it. Get into what freaky alien stuff is happening in Coulson’s head, let us know who Skye’s dad is, and have a season arc that doesn’t take 16 episodes to get out of first gear.
Also, Ward’s finally interesting. Don’t let what I assume is going to be a big redemption arc push him back towards bland and dull.
Opportunity: stand on your own
Real talk, Agents of SHIELD. This season? Your biggest weakness is also your greatest opportunity.
Last season, you had two big Marvel movies to tie into: Thor: The Dark World, and Captain America: the Winter Soldier. Now, for all the hype about having an episode directly tied to Thor, what we actually got was The Well, an episode which featured vague glimpses of Ward’s childhood (at the time, Ward was still as interesting as drying paint) as the team fought the most one-dimensional, least inspired villains of not only the whole season but of the entire Marvel cinematic universe, in a plot based around Asgardians with zero connection to Thor, Loki, or any of the events of either movie.
The villains from The Well made this guy look like Hannibal Lecter in comparison.
Then, in April, Agents of SHIELD was kind of forced to respond to the events of The Winter Solider, since they left SHIELD in ruins. And suddenly everything kicked into action. The stakes were high, Coulson’s secret was (partially) out there (even if it only raised further questions), Deathlok had been introduced, and you finally, finally, had a villain who was any fun to watch.
The argument by pro-Marvel pundits (I’ll refrain from calling them apologists) is that you couldn’t do most of this plot until after the Winter Soldier. And that’s true. But guess what, team? There’s nothing to wait for this year.
Guardians of the Galaxy came out a month ago, and while it’s still popular, there is really no way for you to tie it into Agents of SHIELD beyond Coulson’s Kree-blood space madness. It’s not like we’re expecting Star Lord to pop by and explain what Coulson keeps writing on the wall. He’s busy protecting the people of Pawnee. And the next Marvel movie, Avengers: Age of Ultron, isn’t until May. By early May, you’ll need to be ramping up to the finale. You won’t have time to throw an Ultron-based monkey wrench into everything.
So on the one hand, you won’t have Marvel movie tie-ins to boost ratings. But then that only worked once. The bait-and-switch Thor “tie-in” led to a two-week ratings spike, but the Winter Solider had no real effect. Well, as Mr. Peanutbutter said… “Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, fiddle-dee-dee.” No, wait, that’s not right… David Cross, what’s the expression?
Sorry, got sidetracked there… my point was, you can’t count on the movies to boost your ratings, but you’re also not beholden to them in terms of story. You don’t have to do a half-assed episode about Asgardian whatnots because Thor 2 just came out (seriously, Hawaii Five-O consistently writes better villains than the ones from The Well). You don’t have to schedule all of your interesting plot developments around Age of Ultron. You can tell a proper season story.
Joss Whedon’s name is still on this thing. I know you know how to make a seasonal arc worth watching with villains not pulled out of the NCIS reject drawer. So do that.
Tomorrow: Gotham had my curiosity. Now it has my attention.
A while back I thought it might be worth doing to occasionally blog about “items of joy,” things that made me happy even when happiness felt illusive. I had a harder time than I expected coming up with said items of joy, but it evolved into “My New Favourite Thing,” so that’s okay.
Anyway, the one item of joy post was about Doctor Who, which despite being one of my favourite shows and the thing I turn to when I’m feeling down (Day of the Doctor makes me happy every time), is notorious for tearing out the hearts of its fans and stomping on them. And yet I called the fact that it will break your heart three times a season a selling point, because why invest in a show if it can’t do that? I even borrowed a line from the show itself, from the classic (as in good, not as in classic series) episode Blink: “Sad is happy for deep people.”
Between some personal disappointments and the season’s first taste of snow, it’s a grey and downbeat day here in Parts Unknown HQ, so that quote suits my mood today. As such, here’s some downbeat quotes from some generally upbeat TV shows and why I think they’re brilliant moments. Many of them are going to be Doctor Who related, let’s just accept that.
Also, some videos of things that bring a smile to my face no matter what, because balance is important.
Bojack Horseman sums up the human condition
Buddhism teaches that desire is the root of all suffering. And nothing has really driven that point home for me like the cartoon horse who’s a faded sitcom star from the 90s.
I’ll avoid spoilers as best I’m able here. In the first season finale of Bojack Horseman, Bojack wonders why, after getting what he thought he most wanted, he’s still not happy. At which point, we get this exchange between him and his former ghost writer:
Denise: “That’s the problem with life, either you know what you want and you don’t get what you want, or you get what you want and then you don’t know what you want.”
Bojack: “That’s stupid.”
The sad fact is, that really does sum it up. Being content with what we have doesn’t drive us out of the cave to slay a mammoth and perpetuate the species, so instead we’re driven by always wanting the next thing, the next challenge, the next prize. We know what we want, but we can’t have it, and that makes us miserable, or we have everything we want and still aren’t satisfied, and don’t understand why.
And Bojack himself puts it best… that’s stupid. But if you can’t shake off the cycle that, again, is written into your brain from the day you’re born, and learn to be happy, that’s life. Which brings me to my next quote… after this musical interlude from the New Pornographers, because MAN do I love Brill Bruisers.
Achewood reminds us we’re stuck like this
Achewood is a bit of an acquired taste, but if you can get past the unusual tone, often simplistic art, and bouts of experimental storytelling, it’s hilarious, moving, and addictive like few other comics out there. It seems to have drifted to a halt, which is sad, but its archives are still filled with gems, such as the MoviePhone Defense, the saga of the Great Outdoor Fight, or the most gentlemanly death threat ever.
And then there was the day Michael Jackson died.
Two of the cast are talking Michael Jackson, and how his death is affecting them, and they’re a little confused as to why, since they weren’t even big fans. Until Cornelius Bear, the cast’s elder statesman, explains: losing Michael Jackson was losing their “Elvis,” and with it, “the private lie that someday you will be young once again, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure. In other words, you two died a bit today.”
And then he finishes off with the line that drives home the real tragedy…
“Welcome to the only game in town.”
Getting old isn’t pretty. Knowing that the things of your youth are farther and farther away stings if you let it. The missed opportunities, the things you never did, they weigh on you more and more if you let yourself dwell on them. But life doesn’t really present another option. Tomorrow becomes yesterday whether you like it or not, and that’s all there is.
Jesus. I thought I’d be able to find something uplifting here. Not so much. This calls for puppets singing Space Oddity with astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Doctor Who quotes and plenty of ’em
Exchange the first. Backstory: in the Time War, the Doctor was forced to wipe out his own people, the Time Lords, in order to end the war between them and the Daleks that was burning all of time and space. In The Doctor’s Wife, the Doctor thinks that on a rock outside of space as we know it, there may be surviving Time Lords. He explains to his companions, Amy and Rory, that if there are, maybe he can explain to them why he had to do it.
“You want to be forgiven,” says Amy. The Doctor freezes mid-stride, looks back, and with just a hint of sorrow in his voice betraying the deeper sorrow in his heart(s), replies…
“Don’t we all?”
I always liked that line. I didn’t understand how powerful a moment it was until a dream showed me that I, too, on some deep level, wanted to be forgiven for a stupid thing I did a long time ago. And that desire to be forgiven becomes a deeper wound when forgiveness is impossible, be it because there’s no one left to offer it, or the person you wronged hasn’t been a part of your life since 1994, and probably hasn’t thought about you in years.
At which point, there’s really no choice left but to forgive yourself, and maybe beat yourself up less.
Exchange the second. At the end of his first episode, the 12th Doctor re-establishes his relationship with his companion, Clara, who’s been having a hard time accepting his change from the youthful, energetic Eleven to the older, dour, Twelve.
“I’m not your boyfriend,” he says.
“I never said you were,” she replies.
“I never said it was your mistake.”
With (literally) new eyes, the Doctor sees his relationship with Clara, now more than ever the most important person to him (Eleven may have been twitterpated with her, but he never truly recovered from the loss of Amy Pond), and understands it was never what he thought it was. Take it from me, that can sting like a mother. Even two years and change later, learning that one of your most valued relationships was never what you thought, could never be what you hoped… it hurts. But it’s important. Because not seeing the truth, embracing what is ultimately a delusion, and then running into the painted wall you thought was a tunnel hurts far worse than just accepting your reality.
That last paragraph got away from me a little. But I’m not going to elaborate.
Exchange the third. Let’s wrap this up with something ultimately a little more hopeful: the signature quote from Vincent and the Doctor. In this episode, the Doctor and Amy share an adventure with Vincent Van Gogh. As a special thanks, the Doctor takes him to the present, to a Van Gogh exhibit, to show Vincent that he wasn’t the failure his own time claimed him to be. He would be remembered, treasured, for generations to come. In the end, Amy hopes that this will help Vincent overcome the depression that plagued him throughout his life, prevent his suicide and cause more Van Gogh masterpieces to be painted.
She’s wrong.
But as she realizes that depression is a harder monster to fight than the literal monsters they’d faced together, the Doctor says this…
“The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.”
In this case, the tragedy of Vincent’s end doesn’t necessarily detract from the joys they shared with him.
Now, from here, I should make it clear that I am NOT discussing clinical depression or any sort of mental illness. I am not an expert on depression and cannot pretend to be one. I’m talking about sadness, and however deep sadness becomes, it is vital to understand that feeling sad and suffering from depression are not the same thing.
That said.
When you’re sad, it’s hard to imagine being happy again. Every reassurance, pep talk, reminder of better things feels hollow and empty. The thing that’s made you sad, the thing that’s broken your heart, that is all there is or ever will be.
But it’s an illusion.
It’s like when I’m sick, properly sick, and my world is consumed with nausea and suffering. The very thought of eating food turns my stomach. Not just in that moment: the thought that I may ever eat food, or ride in a car, or anything of the sort seems like the fever dream of a madman (my own fever dreams are just aggressively boring). But the next day, the nausea fades. Sleep comes easier. Car rides are no problem. And pretty soon I’m not just hungry, I’m ravenous.
So it is with sadness (again, NOT depression). Soon you smile again, soon you laugh again, and eventually the things you couldn’t be around because they re-opened the wound fade. Threeish years ago I couldn’t deal with season three of Scrubs: JD’s arc of pining after Elliot while she’s in a relationship seemed custom-built to destroy me. Now I can watch it no problem… except JD is still being a complete tool. Nothing changes that.
So the key is to take those reassurances, put them in a box, and remember them when the clouds begin to part. Because even if you’re not ready to hear them, they may well have still been worth hearing.
Because the bad things don’t make the good things unimportant.
Thanks for bearing with me, folks. Those of you that did. As your reward, allow me to share with you 32 seconds that can make anyone smile.
It’s Thursday, things are slow, I’m listless and a little agitated. This would be a perfect time to lose myself in another hilarious and slightly heartbreaking episode of Bojack Horseman, My New Favourite Thing… only I’ve run out. There are no more. Not until next year. And I don’t seem to have the attention span for much else.
So let’s chat, you and I. Let’s pass some time on these here interwebs by discussing things that wouldn’t fill a full blog. Which might be difficult because apparently I had 2,000 words’ worth of things to say about the new Sin City movie, when “Two hours of sub-par to terrible Sin City fan fiction” would have summed it up.
But this will spare all of you from getting an earful about Bojack Horseman. It’s hilarious, it’s got a surprising amount of heart and emotion in the back half of the season, Will Arnett and Alison Brie are both in it, just go watch it already.
New Doctor!
Check it!
Part of loving Doctor Who is learning to accept new Doctors, even if you’re not ready to. I was just a kid when I heard that Tom Baker was leaving. I was taken completely by surprise when Colin Baker changed into Sylvester McCoy (despite it having been a rerun… this was pre-internet, there weren’t easy ways to learn these things). I was heartbroken when I learned Christopher Eccleston was only doing one season… and those were the easy ones. I may have actually screamed “NNNOOOOO!” out loud when word got out that Matt Smith was moving on.
But now the new guy, Peter Capaldi, aka. Twelve, has had two episodes to establish himself. And I think he’s doing okay. He has a sterner style, which sets him apart from Ten and Eleven. He wants to be a good man, but isn’t sure he is (something he has in common with Bojack Horseman–sorry, sorry, it just slipped out). And Clara’s finally getting more to do, after the whole Impossible Girl story kind of prevented her from being properly developed. All in all, Capaldi’s crushing it, and they still have my devotion.
But I haven’t figured out his theme music yet.
Not the opening credit theme, of course I know that. The in-episode theme music. Nine had The Doctor’s Theme, Ten started with that, then switched to The Doctor Forever in season three before returning to an amped up Doctor’s Theme in season four. The Doctor’s Theme played for the last time (well, until the 50th anniversary) in Ten’s final moments, and when Eleven began his tenure in the 11th Hour, so too debuted I Am the Doctor, which later evolved into The Majestic Tale (of a Madman in a Box). And as someone who clearly thinks about background music in TV shows a lot, those two were my favourites.
I don’t know the 12th Doctor’s theme yet. Sure, there’s some Youtube videos claiming to have it, but I need to hear it in action. I need to hear it against the Doctor telling the Atraxi to run, or facing down the Silence alongside River Song and the Ponds. I probably have, I just haven’t figured out what it is. Guess I should rewatch Deep Breath and Into the Dalek when I get a chance.
There are worse fates.
Shazam’s getting a movie!
This has been running around the web for a while, but the rumours and suggestions have finally been confirmed: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will be playing Black Adam in an upcoming Shazam movie.
Seeing a lot of blank looks out there. What? You didn’t know reading my blog activates a camera in your computer/phone? I am always watching.
Erm… by which I mean, what, you don’t know Black Adam? Let me explain.
When I say the word “Shazam,” you think of Captain Marvel: a kid named Billy Batson who shouts the word “Shazam” and turns into an adult with magical powers that make him a nigh-equal to Superman. Black Adam had the powers of Shazam centuries earlier, but his more… forceful way of defending his home nation of Khandaq (think ancient Egypt turned into modern day Iraq) got him shut down by the wizard who made him his champion (that wizard being Shazam). But when Captain Marvel comes onto the scene, Black Adam finds a way to come back. So, Captain Marvel is the kid-turned-hero, and Black Adam is his nemesis.
That’s the classic stuff. Fast forward to today. Now Billy Batson’s alter ego is just called “Shazam,” because DC got tired of never being able to put “Captain Marvel” on the cover of a book thanks to their competitors, and decided that if everybody mostly knows him as the Shazam guy, they may as well call him Shazam and be done with it. I still haven’t fully adapted to that but it’s happened.
Black Adam, meanwhile, is still a primary nemesis of Captain Mar–Shazam, but he’s not always a straight up villain. While writing Justice Society back around the turn of the century, Geoff Johns altered the character: no longer was he a modern day thief who accessed the powers of Shazam to become Black Adam, but was instead the original reborn in the modern era. And the original never saw himself as a villain, simply the protector of the Khandaq who draws a different moral line than some prefer. In the last fifteen years he’s crossed the line to hero almost as often as he’s been a villain. He served in the Justice Society for years, possibly outlasting Captain Marvel*. Most recently, in the event book Forever Evil, when the Crime Syndicate (an evil version of the Justice League, I’ll spare you the explanation) wiped out most of the superheroes and conquered the Earth, Black Adam was the first of a small band of villains to step up and try to bring them down.
So Black Adam isn’t a mustache-twirling, magic-space-rock-wielding world conqueror like so many other superhero movie villains lately, and talk from Dwayne Johnson and the studio is that they’re going to keep him on that blurry line between villain and anti-hero, which I for one am excited to see.
Less excited by the rumours that Shazam will not connect with Justice League, but… well, we’ll see.
*Interesting story with no connection to Black Adam: Captain Marvel left the JSA in disgrace after his budding romance with teenage hero Stargirl (who had discovered that he was actually a teenager himself) was discovered by either the golden age Flash or Green Lantern, who, not knowing that Captain Marvel was really teenager Billy Batson, obviously disapproved. Cap left the team rather than reveal his true identity/age, because “too many people know, and it always changes things.” Sad story, but interesting reading. Anyhoo.
Supergirl back on TV?
New in the rumour mill: DC may be shopping around a Supergirl TV series. Now, this is a very young rumour, and even if it is totally accurate, a lot can go wrong between here and being given a series order, if two failed pilots for Wonder Woman and one for Aquaman teach us anything. But I like the idea. There is a risk that, even though the CW is currently believed to have passed, the makers might embrace the teen soap opera that defined Smallville and remains a part of Arrow. But you know what? Let ’em. As I said in an earlier post, Supergirl (well, Kara Zor-El) has never been better written than when they were targeting her towards younger women/girls. So I say, even in the face of ten years of Smallville striving to prove me wrong, it can work. But maybe try to make it more like Arrow and less like Smallville. In fact, always do that.
But making it appeal to girls without becoming female-oriented-Smallville, or Gossip Girl with super strength, is only challenge one. Well, challenge two, after getting a network to bite.
Next challenge: is this another stand-alone like Constantine? Or will they tie it into one of their other properties? And that’s a trickier question than I like. Because I don’t know that I want a Supergirl series set in a world where Superman doesn’t exist.
Don’t get me wrong: Supergirl’s been around long enough that she deserves an identity of her own, rather than being defined as “Superman’s cousin.” The current writers of her book are trying, but her more famous relative is never that far from her narrative. A weekly series (or Netflix series) might give her the chance to be her own character as well. So I’m not saying I need Henry Cavill to pop by on a regular basis, but… Superman should still exist. Putting each character in their own box, where no other DC character is allowed to be, is something I’d hoped DC was moving past.
So that means I also don’t want Supergirl to join the Arrowverse, something that feels alien to say. But it’s true, for the same reason I don’t want Nightwing showing up: for all the characters that they’re adding to the Arrowverse, Superman and Batman aren’t on the list, and Nightwing without Batman doesn’t even make sense. Ra’s Al Ghul, okay, fine, he can exist without overt references to Batman, but not Nightwing. Why not use any other similar character, like Blue Beetle or the Question or Manhunter? Oh, right, they are using Manhunter… no not the Martian one, one of the other 20 DC characters named “Manhunter.”
Right, sorry, Supergirl. There may be super powers in the Arrowverse now, thanks to the Flash, but no aliens. And if we’re going to add Kryptonians, let’s start with the big guy. Or if you want a Supergirl type, introduce Wonder Woman, or Hawkwoman, or Big Barda–no, no, bad call me, you do NOT want Apocalypse and the New Gods on TV, you want them in the Justice League movies. That last bit might not have made sense to you. But you’re reading this on the internet, and I assume you know how Google works. Must I hyperlink everything?
That said… there are worse characters you could introduce in Justice League…
Anyway. A Supergirl TV series that ties into Man of Steel and Superman V. Batman: Dawn of A Thousand Internet Complaints may be too much to hope for. But a Supergirl series where Superman is nowhere to be seen is like, I don’t know, making a TV series about Batman’s daughter where Alfred is a main character but Batman himself is never seen or heard from.
Hint: that didn’t work.
The New Pornographers have a new album!
Finally… if you can listen to this without feeling at least a little happy, I feel sad for you.
Until next time, have a good day and WATCH BOJACK HORSEMAN.
It was nearly ten years ago that Sin City swept into theatres, and man alive was it a sight to see at the time. From the way Robert Rodriguez took the exact images from Frank Miller’s original comics and brought them to stark, mostly black and white life, to the way the incredible cast made the pulp dialogue sing. I loved Sin City, and used to watch two of the four stories over and over again from the booth of the Moviedome. So naturally I was thrilled at the talk of a sequel, since there were still Sin City graphic novels very much worth adapting. Which meant that talk of Frank Miller writing new stories to include in the sequel was a little discouraging. First of all, because that lowered the odds of them using the stories I wanted to see on the screen, and second of all, because Frank Miller has lost it.
No, seriously, he’s lost it completely.
Frank Miller did some good comics work in the 80s, but these days he’s gone around the bend, and nothing proves that more than his attempts to revisit past glories. I would have thought that The Dark Knight Strikes Back would have proven that for everyone, but apparently we needed more evidence, and now we have it.
But instead of a fresh installment of what has always been an anthology series, what we got was a movie trying to remind us of the original, by re-using as many of the characters as possible.
Included in the movie are two stories from the comics: Just Another Saturday Night, a short featuring Mickey Rourke’s Marv, back from the first movie’s The Hard Goodbye (the very first Sin City story), and the titular A Dame to Kill For, featuring Dwight from the original’s The Big Fat Kill (played by Josh Brolin, as this story takes place before he had plastic surgery to instead resemble Clive Owen… no, really, that’s what happens). Added in are one new story featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a card shark targeting Senator Roark, who you may remember from the first film’s That Yellow Bastard, part of the Roark family which controls Sin City and keeps it the pit of crime and corruption that it is, and the long-discussed direct sequel to That Yellow Bastard in which Nancy the stripper (Jessica Alba) is out to avenge her savior/lover Detective Hartigan (Bruce Willis, back as a ghostly presence in Nancy’s life), who killed himself in the hopes that it would spare Nancy from Senator Roark’s anger over the death of his horrifying, serial killing, child molesting son at Hartigan’s hands.
Okay. Let’s break this down entry by entry.
Just Another Saturday Night
This is meant to be a quick intro back into the world of Sin City, as Marv goes after four frat boys for setting hobos on fire, ending with two of them being taken out by the army of prostitutes that rule Old Town (because Frank Miller loves him some whores).
What it actually does is underline the problem with this entire movie. Where the first film’s cold open, The Customer is Always Right, provided a perfect intro to the noir storytelling, visual style, and general lack of what you’d call happy endings that we the viewers could come to expect, Just Another Saturday Night shows us that Rodriguez and Miller don’t fully recall how the visual style worked last time while shouting “Hey everybody! It’s Marv! Remember Marv? We all liked Marv vengeance-murdering his way up the criminal ladder last time, right?”
In other words, it’s Marv without the thrills, occasional wit, and “I can’t believe they just did that” winces of The Hard Goodbye. They brought back the characters we loved, with none of the reasons why we loved them. Roll opening credits, and try to lower your expectations.
The Thing With Joseph Gordon-Levitt
I don’t know what this one’s called. I do know that I’ll watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt in practically anything, because he’s awesome.
Sadly the material doesn’t always rise to his level.
Johnny is an interesting character, and his motivations and methods for taking down Senator Roark are unexpected, but this story has the same issues as the rest: it’s a little too grim. I mean, they’re all grim. That’s the point. But the first film had lighter moments. This installment comes closest to recreating that, if only through Johnny’s undeniable charms, but there’s still not a lot of smiles or laughs to be had, and a lot of asking ourselves “Why are you showing this illicit poker game how good you are at manipulating cards, do you want them to know you’re cheating?”
It’s… okay. It would have been the worst if it had been part of the original, but here it’s almost a highlight.
Also Marv is in it. Because heaven forbid we have even one entry without Marv this time around.
A Dame to Kill For
Now this entry had every possible advantage it could. It’s a prequel to The Big Fat Kill, my favourite of the original entries, and (of course) also features Marv as Dwight’s emergency muscle. It has the most returning characters, featuring Rosario Dawson’s violent madam Gail, twin prostitutes Goldie and Wendy, and a re-cast deadly little Miho giving us our only taste of the blood-splattered “holy shit” action sequences of the first film, just with less charisma than when it was Devon Aoki (who had to bow out due to pregnancy). And it has the film’s real breakout performance, Eva Green as Eva Lord, the so-called dame to kill for that’s getting Dwight into more trouble than a trunk full of dismembered cops did last time around.
But it’s pretty clear this was a later entry in the Sin City graphic novels. The narration already feels forced and less engaging. Two minutes into the story and I was already getting tired of Dwight narrating about how hard it was to keep himself under control. And again, there’s less fun, less endlessly quotable moments, less to enjoy here than in its predecessor. It’s still the most fun, the most interesting, and the best written story of the entire movie, but you’re probably starting to get the impression that that isn’t a huge accomplishment.
As to Eva Lord. She might well be the most compelling and powerful female character either movie managed to present (even if her motives become a little cliche and two-dimensional), and Eva Green plays the hell out of her… but it’s hard to deny one little sticking point.
She is naked a lot. I mean, a lot. Which, depending on your perspective, could read as an endorsement rather than a condemnation, I suppose, but here’s the thing. I saw this with several female friends, and the fact that Eva might have been exposed more often than not really started to feel awkward. I could picture other women I know asking how necessary this was, and I didn’t have a good answer.
Now, a certain amount of nudity works well with this role: Eva Lord uses her sexuality to control men, it’s her primary tactic, and she’s adept at it. But I’m just going to admit… they could have dialed it down a touch. One could argue they were just sticking with the imagery from the comics, but if one were to argue that, I would ask one to recall how naked Nancy the stripper was supposed to be, and how many fucks Jessica Alba gave about that.
The answers are “Very naked” and “Zero fucks.” So there were other choices they could have made.
Still, if one were to watch this movie, A Dame to Kill For is going to be your one big highlight. It’s all downhill from there.
Fun fact: Clive Owen was going to reprise post-surgery Dwight, but he had a schedule conflict, so they used prosthetics to make Josh Brolin look like Clive Owen’s Dwight. Which, frankly, is probably better for the story. Less confusing for new people. Not there’ve been many of those.
Nancy’s revenge
And here, at the end, it all falls apart.
That Yellow Bastard wasn’t my favourite of the first film. It’s the one I rewatched the least. Well, after The Customer is Always Right. But it wasn’t bad, it was just bleak. The (possibly) one good cop in Basin City (get it?) goes to prison for lethally defending a young girl from a vicious predator, simply because said predator’s father was Senator Roark, who basically owned the police, and wanted his child-murdering son to be President some day. Roark uses freakish medical science to save his son’s life and regrow some bits that Hartigan shot off, son becomes That Yellow Bastard as a result, uses a released Hartigan to find the girl (Nancy, now a stripper, as I’ve mentioned), Hartigan and the Yellow Bastard face off one more time, Hartigan shoots himself in the hope that Senator Roark won’t go after Nancy if Hartigan’s already dead and unhurtable.
Like I said, bleak. Sin City isn’t a place where a grizzled ex-cop and the much younger woman who’s loved him for half her life get to ride off into any sort of sunset. But apparently that ending wasn’t good enough, so Frank Miller wrote an all-new story in which Nancy, four years later, is still filled with rage and despair, and is trying to work up the nerve to kill Roark for revenge.
And it serves as the final proof that Frank Miller has lost whatever talent he may have had, because it is terrible. Hartigan’s ghost wandering about in torment, Nancy’s narration, the general sluggishness of the plot, shoehorning in Marv to be Nancy’s backup, none of it really works. By the halfway point I found myself just picking apart the continuity issues that having Marv in this story created, as Marv’s presence puts this solidly before The Hard Goodbye. Examples:
By the end, Nancy’s lost her love of dancing, died her hair black, has several cuts on her face, and is a vicious killer. In The Hard Goodbye, she’s blonde, unscarred, dancing, and seems happy and well-adjusted. So I’m forced to assume she gets over everything, because no part of the Hard Goodbye could have happened before this story.
Also I assume that the Basin City police have zero luck finding either of the people who broke into stately Roark manner and left a trail of bodies in their wake. Nor the Secret Service, who are typically called in to this sort of thing. I know this because Marv and Nancy are just living their lives in relative peace by The Hard Goodbye, which once again, must logically take place after this.
Still, you’d think that after Senator Roark was killed in his own home, Cardinal Roark might have had better security.
All in all, having Marv in this story creates a huge pile of narrative problems, and the rest of the story just isn’t good enough to allow me not to notice them. Nancy turning from stripper to assassin and teaming up with a popular character to give the audience the justice-murder they were denied last time plays like bad Sin City fanfic, and the fact that it’s from the original author is just sad.
But what’s really sad, is that since this sequel was such a disappointment and, probably as a result, is tanking at the box office, I’m never going to see an adaption of the Sin City story Hell and Back, which at one point features the protagonist assaulting an enemy compound while high on powerful hallucinogens, meaning it would have been written like Sin City but shot like Spy Kids.
And I wanted to see that. Oh well. Maybe I’ll just find a way to rewatch the original Sin City this week. Or Guardians of the Galaxy. One of those.
Okay, before we get into this, an apology regarding my last post. When I was picking backlash movements to speak out against, I chose Kony 2012 because some of the complaints I’d been hearing at the time made no sense to me (specifically the “He’s not even in Uganda” thing, which is still a stupid excuse for a counter-point). However, that meant trying to duck around the biggest complaints against it, those of dramatically over-simplifying the issue (“Just go get him. Why didn’t we think of that. Oh right we did,” said the African Union) and of being the very model of ultimately pointless slacktivism.
What I should have done in order to demonstrate how joining a backlash can ally you with the wrong people is go after the “people,” if we’re going to use that word, attacking Anita Sarkeesian for daring to talk about how women are represented in video games. Because the last few weeks have demonstrated that this bandwagon is filled to the brim with disgusting misogyny, and if you’re going after Ms. Sarkeesian for stating that Princess Peach doesn’t exactly have a lot of agency instead of going after the assholes sending her death threats, you are on the wrong side. Which, sorry Invisible Children, just can’t be said about people pointing out that Kony 2012 didn’t exactly accomplish a lot.
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s all watch me tear apart something I wrote eight years ago. Quarter Century, ladies and gentlemen!
What’s it about?
In short, the quarter-life crisis, which I thought I’d come up with myself but was a full fledged Thing by the time I wrote this.
It’s about a group of friends at various points in their 20s: Xavier, or Avi, is a freelance writer married to Miranda, who just got hired by a major law firm right out of law school. Riley, Xavier’s childhood best friend, has recently come back to Calgary after grad school out east. Theresa, Miranda’s older sister, is a psychologist who frequently gets stuck dealing with everyone’s emotional crises while trying to attract the eye of Bobby, the group’s youngest member, who can’t seem to settle on a job, major, or girlfriend.
Xavier’s frustrated because he and Miranda are growing apart, as she’s swamped with her career and he’s busy fighting against becoming a proper grown-up. When Riley’s friend from grad school Angela shows up in town, things get complicated. She and Xavier start to bond over their mutual disdain for being what everyone thinks they should be (or what they think people think they should be–well that sentence got away from me), which starts evolving into something that could ruin everyone’s lives.
Also which involves Bobby being set up on a date with a guy, which he ultimately enjoys, and is very confused about that.
So why’d that happen?
Why’d I write a play about a twenty-something writer struggling against being a grown-up? Because I was a twenty-something writer struggling against being a grown-up. I looked at the awkward difference between growing up and growing old, and thought there was a story there. I took it out, put it away, dwelled on it, dusted it off, kicked it around, and finally got a draft together during U-Boat of the Soul.
And at the time, I was rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer from start to finish, so I attempted to let a little bit of Whedon-style wordplay slip into it.
How’d it turn out?
That’s… a trickier question.
Well, for starters, one of the biggest Whedon-homages worked out pretty well. Based on the Angel episode where an argument between Spike and Angel about who’d win in a fight, astronauts or cavemen, infects the whole group, I had a running gag in which the gang is arguing about who’d win in a fight, Santa’s elves or Snow White’s dwarves. I think it’s still pretty funny.
Moving past that… there’s an inherent problem in looking at something you wrote about how hard it is to be in your mid-20s when you’re entering your… this hurts to type… late 30s. Xavier’s complaints do not ring as true as I once might have believed.
Which isn’t the worst thing in the world. I don’t think they were ever supposed to ring true. This was my first dalliance with tragedy, after all: Xavier’s Peter Pan complex is his fatal flaw, just as Macbeth’s was ambition. Often in tragedy you’re supposed to know that what the protagonist is doing is a horrible, horrible mistake.
Some of Riley’s dialogue is clunkier than I’d like. That was something I struggled with for a while: I let the Joss Whedons and, more importantly, Kevin Smiths of the world influence me in the wrong way, and what I thought would be a clever and sophisticated style of dialogue just gets clunky in places.
I think Angela still works. I hope she does. Angela loathed being the perfect high school teen so much it drove her into self-destruction mixed with self-mutilation. Her and Riley seem like nice people, I wish they didn’t hate themselves so much. But I guess if they didn’t there wouldn’t be much of a story there.
There are parts that work, there are, but… well, no avoiding it now… I hate, I hate, I HATE the ending.
Xavier and Angela almost have sex, Riley catches them, at which point we learn that Angela and Riley love each other but never told each other, hooray for them, that I don’t hate so much. Xavier and Miranda then have it out, at which point, out of god damned nowhere, Xavier decides to skip town and wander the South Pacific until he finds himself.
Which, okay, is something someone might do, but… what? It just… the plot finally gets moving somewhere, and I pull the plug and exile the lead character to the Phillipines or whatever? Where did this even come from? The plot just got out of first gear only to throw down a smokebomb and vanish, leaving nothing but a series of kind of forced farewells at a bus terminal and curtain call. Did I just get bored? Is that what happened?
Would you stage it again?
Okay. Having had some time to come down and reassess, there may well be a may to fix this one. First of all, Xavier’s gonna have to be rewritten fairly substantially. “I don’t want to be a mature grown-up, I don’t know how” just doesn’t work as well as it once did. Even Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen have stopped going to that well. Instead, focus on a less empty, whiny motivation: Xavier and Miranda’s life to kicking into high gear, with adult jobs and parties and talk of children ramping up, and Xavier’s suddenly remembering all the things he said he’d do by the time any of this started happening. Running off to the South Pacific will be less of sudden bombshell if it’s established that he always planned to travel more before he settled down.
Second, is that all I want this story to be? Xavier destroys his life? Because right now other than a bunch of side-chats, that’s all that’s happening. With some streamlining (which, sadly, might mean cutting Bobby, even though I really wouldn’t want to) I can get this down to a tragedy in one act, or possibly a comedy in two. People have said that that’s what this story is missing: a second act, set six months later, where we see what happens when Xavier comes home. Can he win Miranda back? I honestly don’t know. But maybe that would make this a more complete story than it is right now.
Ultimately, this feels like a few good ideas and decent characters wrapped up in a story that I kind of half-assed. And maybe it deserves better.
Next time, either the worst first draft I ever wrote, or the best. Depends on which script I decide to look at.
Repeated theme alert
Man and woman cannot be friends: Of course Theresa has a crush on Bobby and Riley and Angela are secretly in love with each other. Why wouldn’t they be.
Fun with pop culture: Miranda works for the firm of “Birch, Shore, and Wambaugh,” named after three of my favourite lawyers from TV shows by David E. Kelley: Alan Birch from the first season and a bit of Chicago Hope (before he, Mandy Patinkin, and David E. Kelley all left the show and I stopped caring about it), Alan Shore from Boston Legal, and the undefeatable Douglas Wambaugh from Picket Fences. It would have been Cage, Shore, and Wambaugh (using the other lawyer David E. Kelley wrote for actor Peter MacNicol, John Cage from Ally McBeal), but someone at a workshop said “Because her work is a CAGE. GET IT?” and that had to go.
All in all I prefer it when I let Aaron Sorkin influence my writing style. Nothing against Joss Whedon, I just can’t do his thing very well.
At the risk of slipping into “cranky old man” mode here… what exactly is so great about cynicism? No, hang on, that isn’t even old man mode… my generation was defined by cynicial detachment not so long ago. We embraced it the way the 50s embraced mistaking patriarchy-driven nuclear families for values and morality. But I’m here today to tell you… it is getting out of hand.
We are cynical about everything now. A thing happens, and people across the internet jump up to stomp it down. And I don’t understand what the appeal is. What is so great and noble about responding to an idea with “That’s stupid” and nothing else? What is backlash actually accomplishing?
I put it to you that internet backlash accomplishes nothing. In fact, it’s about as far from accomplishing something as you can get without a warp drive and a time machine. Here’s some reasons why.
Backlashers aren’t contributing anything
Casefile number one: the Ice Bucket Challenge.
It was July when the ALS ice bucket challenge went viral. Dump a bucket of ice water over yourself to spread awareness of ALS and encourage donations. It was mid-August before I became aware of it, thanks to Stephen Amell of Arrow. And his co-stars, Colton Haynes and Emily Bett Rickards, stressed the need for donations on top of spreading these drenching videos. And like all things, it’s drawn its share of internet backlash. People accused this trend of just being the new internet meme, slagging it as hashtag-slacktivism. Just one problem with that label.
If that’s “slacktivism,” what else is? Movember? The Ride For the Cure? Anything shy of picking up a test tube and trying to cure a disease yourself?
And even if it were, “slacktivism” actually can serve a purpose: it creates a sense of community. Check out this article, written by someone suffering from ALS, for a more insightful look, but the basic premise is that things like Movember or the ice bucket challenge make a person feel like they’re part of something greater when they donate or participate, something that merely giving money quietly and anonymously doesn’t do, and that generates momentum like nothing else.
Others point how few people actually die from ALS as compared to cancer or heart disease. Well, okay, sure, but the fact is that’s partly why the ice bucket challenge was necessary. Because ALS affects such a small percentage, it receives far less funding from governments, and pharmaceutical companies don’t take much interest because the profit margin would be too small. So they need something like this to gain awareness and raise funds, because however few people it affects, they all die, and right now we don’t know why and there is nothing we can do about it. The person dying from ALS doesn’t matter less than the person dying of heart disease, so don’t tell me that fighting this disease isn’t important.
And some say “But it wastes so much water! And hundreds of millions of people desperately need water!” Okay, point taken. Clean, drinkable water is our most precious resource, because we need it to live, there’s only so much of it, and we can’t replace it with something else, unlike oil, coal, or gold. But when it comes to wasting water in North America, the ice bucket challenge is barely, excuse the expression, a drop in the bucket. That fountain outside the Bellagio hotel, you know, the one in the middle of a freaking desert, wastes more water than ice buckets. We could and should do more to conserve water, and on that note, here’s how Matt Damon completed the ice bucket challenge while making a statement for his own charity, water.org.
Feel free to throw them some money if you’re opposed to the ice buckets.
And that’s ultimately my point about cynically discarding something like this because you spot a fault. What are you actually accomplishing? What is complaining about ice buckets doing to make the world better? Not a god damned thing. Blind cynicism is actually worse than slacktivism. At least slacktivism is encouraging people to do something. Trying to tear down causes for being too trendy, or too viral, or for not doing enough for what you define as the right things, is attempting to stop people from doing something good.
Don’t like the ice bucket challenge? Donate to water.org. Plant a Tree For Groot. Eat less meat. Volunteer at a shelter. Do something. But if all you’re doing is mocking a cause because you don’t buy into it, well, you’re just… this.
It boils down to this, if you choose not to click the link or watch the video: the inventors of solar roadways developed a plan to replace the asphalt that covers roads and parking lots with solar cells, that could be used to power cities. That’s the basics. They could also be fitted with LEDs, allowing them to light up in specific ways, such as adaptable, customizable traffic lanes or parking lot layouts or basketball courts or basically whatever.
The fact is, we need a solution to fossil fuels and we need it soon. Electric cars? Great start, except for the fact that the electricity that powers the cars currently comes primarily from coal. We need solar, we need wind, we need some sort of renewable energy that doesn’t change our climate and turn cities into smog-choked hellscapes like Beijing or LA. The solar roadways team thinks they’re onto something that can power and light up our cities, revolutionizing civic infrastructure, and they successfully raised over $2 million through crowdfunding.
But some people didn’t agree with solar roadways as the silver bullet to fix our energy future. And their complaints are actually fairly valid here.
What about the light pollution? All those LEDs add up, especially on highways.
Sure they’re designed to melt away snow, but what about the heavy snowfalls we get up here in Canada? Can it handle them?
Who’s maintaining the solar panels on rural highways?
How are we connecting these panels to the power grid? Wouldn’t conventional solar panels be easier?
Like I said. All of these are valid questions. But the problem is they were all held up as ways that solar roadways were doomed and shouldn’t be backed by Indiegogo patrons. But the way you find answers to these questions is to fund the project.
As a better writer than I once said, in the history of everything that works, there was a time when it didn’t. The light bulb, the telephone, the Tesla electric car, they all faced hurdles and challenges, and had prototypes that didn’t quite work. But with time, effort, and money, they got there. And maybe so can solar roadways. Or maybe they’ll be one more crowdsourced project that took a bunch of people’s money and didn’t do anything with it. But I hope not.
But that’s not really the point. The point is that no idea arrives fully formed. There’s early drafts and experiments and attempted solutions that don’t work out, and all of those have to happen, and most of them require money. So when people see this new idea and say “But they haven’t accounted for northern snowfall, so don’t support them,” that is harming progress. Don’t just tell me not to support that idea, point me to the idea that will work. Show me how to kickstart more solar farms, but until then, maybe let’s give the people trying to accomplish something a chance.
And you don’t want to be the guy who’s shown the future and screams “Burn the witch.” That is helping precisely nobody. In fact, maybe you should think about what your backlashing is saying about you…
It puts you on the wrong side of things
Now let’s really court some controversy. Casefile 3: Kony 2012.
Remember this? The group Invisible Children put out a video whose goal was to make everyone aware of Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony, and specifically his tactic of indoctrinating children as soldiers. The video went viral, kits were sold for people to spread anti-Kony stuff around their towns, and a huge “poster everything” event was planned, with the hope of wallpapering the western hemisphere with anti-Kony posters.
And then came the backlash.
Much like ALS above, out came the accusations of slacktivism, and this time they were well earned, since while the end goal of Invisible Children was, in principle, the arrest of Joseph Kony and an end to children being used as soldiers, the only tangible result that Invisible Children were able to create was awareness. Which is, at best, a good first step. Invisible Children never seemed to manage the second.
People picked at how Invisible Children spent its money (primarily travel and video equipment, which isn’t that weird for a company whose primary activity is travelling the world to champion a cause with videos). People said “But Kony isn’t even in Uganda anymore” in an attempt to dismiss the video’s entire message. Which had just two problems as a nitpick: a) the video said he wasn’t in Uganda anymore, and b) in exactly which country is it okay to commit atrocities with child soldiers?
And then the public face of the campaign went a little nuts and was caught masturbating in public and that was about that.
Sure, if the Kony 2012 campaign is remembered at all, it’ll be as a definitive example of slacktivism: shit-tons of awareness raised, nothing actually accomplished. But there was one thing about all the backlash that bothered me.
While they did take an incredibly, soul-crushingly complicated issue, specifically the political realities of post-colonial Africa that allow rebel warlords like Kony to exist, and try to make it far too simple (share this link to save the world!), Invisible Children’s goal was to end a horrifying practice, that being child soldiers. It was Invisible Children vs. Joseph Kony… and Kony didn’t end up as the bad guy. No, according to internet backlash, Invisible Children were the enemy because they weren’t doing enough.
My question is this. If it was child slavers vs. slacktivists, and internet cynics decided to take up arms against the slacktivists… are they not, in some way, picking the side of the child slavers?
No, think about it, nobody was saying “Invisible Children isn’t doing enough, so let’s take the awareness they raised and run with it,” they just said “Why are you spending so much money making videos” or started parody Kickstarters. They weren’t trying to solve the problem Invisible Children wasn’t able to solve themselves, they were just mocking Invisible Children for speaking up.
Kony’s still active, FYI. And the African Union is trying to catch him exactly as hard as they were before. So conrgrats on that, internet backlash. You and Invisible Children finally have something in common: neither one of you has done anything to stop child soldiers.
Ugh. This is getting heavy. Let’s end with something lighter.
It’s just mean
Casefile four…
You know who you are.
The fact is that all of these internet backlashes, whether they’re sort of defending a war criminal or accidentally announcing “We do not care about people with ALS” are small potatoes. Even Occupy Wall Street will pale in comparison to the day they finally cast a new Iron Man.
You know I’m right. Nothing makes the internet explode more than casting news on geek-targeted movies. A day will come when Peter Capaldi steps down from Doctor Who or Daniel Craig films his last James Bond movie, and when that day comes, we will once more be drowned in Tumblr/Twitter posts decrying the TV/film industry as racists for not casting Idris Elba as the new Doctor/Bond, as well as posts from a much worse group screaming bloody murder over the mere suggestion of casting Idris Elba as the new Doctor/Bond. We saw the social justice crew go nuts over another white male (worse, an old white male) being cast as the 12th Doctor, we saw internet racists (who claim they’re not racists, they just care deeply about character canon) go berserk over black actors playing a Norse god in Thor and the Human Torch in next year’s Fantastic Four movie… and that’s not even what I’m talking about here.
I’m not calling out racism or misogyny or those who campaign against them. I’m instead calling out the nerd rage crowd, the ones who shouted that Heath Ledger could never be a good Joker, or that called Daniel Craig “James Bland,” or who now throw around the term “Batfleck” as a pejorative. Because putting aside the fact that these nay-sayers have been wrong far, far more than they’ve been right (have they ever been right?)…
It’s just mean.
Take Ben Affleck as Batman. Ben Affleck started strong, with an Oscar for writing and a string of action hits. Then he dated Jennifer Lopez, made a few bombs, and was damn near run off the planet because of it. So he pulled back, took some time off, and slowly worked his way back into Hollywood, starting as a director and ultimately returning to the Oscar victory podium as the director and producer of Oscar champ Argo. And for this, for this hard-fought return to respectability, he was rewarded. Warner Bros., the studio he won an Oscar for, gave him one of their most high-profile gigs: he was the next Batman.
And the internet reacted with all the grace and dignity of a prison riot.
Peter Capaldi has been a fan of Doctor Who longer than I’ve been alive. Longer than most current fans have been alive. He watched William Hartnell, the first Doctor, in the role when he was a kid. And now he gets to take on the role himself.
And the internet either shouted “Too old!” or acted like casting another white man was a return to Jim Crow days.
Ben and Peter, lest we forget, are real people with real feelings. Maybe Ben was excited to be trusted with this role. Maybe he was excited to get another spin as a superhero in a (hopefully, please gods let it be) better movie. Maybe Capaldi was thrilled to get a chance to fly the Tardis. And maybe they don’t need jerks on Twitter saying their casting is terrible news because one of them was in Gigli over a decade ago and the other isn’t diverse enough.
In conclusion. You won’t agree with every trend that hits Facebook. Not every viral campaign will speak to you, and some will downright annoy you, but maybe think it through before you decide to tear it down. Ask yourself: what am I actually accomplishing here? Is there a more productive way I could express my disagreement with this cause? Who else is on my side of this argument, and do any of them enslave children? And, most importantly, am I being a jerk? Or, to put it simply…
Seriously, though… go plant a tree for Groot. Before someone starts complaining about that one too.
So. In the wake of Guardians of the Galaxy, a meme hit the intertubes claiming to describe the difference between DC and Marvel, through a fake internet chat in which DC is awkwardly trying to explain their failure to do anything cool while Marvel screams excitedly about everything it’s doing. This one here.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
It’s popped up enough times that I’m no longer able to resist the need to point out that, while funny, it’s not what you’d call… accurate. By any stretch of the imagination. So I now present an open letter to the meme’s writer. And at the end, I’ll be including a link to a video in which puppets make fun of the internet, because you’ll all have earned a break. And because Glove and Boots is very much my New Favourite Thing.
Must we do this
Hello there, Marvel fanboy who made this. I feel comfortable calling you a Marvel fanboy because, well, your little internet joke here exists to crow about Marvel while inventing reasons to take cracks at DC, and that’s not something you typically find in impartial fans of superhero stories.
First, may I just say, I don’t see why this is necessary, this continuous animosity between us. I was like you, once: I read DC almost exclusively, derided and mocked Marvel with their clone sagas and overexposure of Wolverine. But then a day came when I realized I was only hurting myself by shunning one of comics’ two largest publishers. Hell, by shunning any comic, movie, or TV show because I felt a need to take a side. Now, while I still prefer DC, because on the whole I find their comic storytelling more fun and engaging, I read plenty of Marvel. I own the Avengers Phase 1 special edition Blu-ray pack, which means I own a copy of Thor but not Dark Knight Rises.
And I know you can’t say the same thing about DC, sir (I’m also pretty sure you’re not a “Ma’am,” as we’ll soon cover). You’re hardcore Marvel. No time for the other brand. Which is sad. Geek culture should be the ultimate culture of inclusion, where people who’ve been outsiders for most of their life have a place to share their passions with like-minded people. But instead we keep getting bogged down in this petty, pointless Marvel vs. DC, XBox vs. Playstation, Mac vs PC, Us vs Them bullshit.
Also rampant, rampant misogyny, but nothing in this Marvel vs. DC post of yours makes me suspect you’re guilty of that, so we’ll leave that be for now. Suffice to say, fanatical brand loyalty is certainly not as bad as sexism, racism, or other forms of discrimination, but it’s still stupid. It’s pointless.
But since we’re here anyway, allow someone who HAS read a DC comic since the Clinton administration to correct you on some of your so-called points.
Black Widow is not the first female supporting character
I’m not sure you understand your own points. Or words in general.
Um. Okay.
I’m hesitant to speak on behalf of feminists for reasons that seem obvious, but… replying to “Making a movie starring Wonder Woman is tricky” with “Marvel is letting Black Widow be a supporting character in a male-driven action movie!” is weak sauce, man. No, it does not seem that Warner Bros. has been particularly motivated to make a live action Wonder Woman movie ever since they pulled the plug on having Joss Whedon write one (a move that earned that executive kicks in the junk until the end of his days). But Marvel’s not exactly racing to put together a Black Widow solo film, are they? Or Captain Marvel, one of the other new faces people have been saying should be in phase three?
Pretty much Starbuck with super powers. You would watch that, admit it.
Yes, Black Widow had a large role in the Winter Soldier. They even gave her a few things to do in the big explody climax (not as much as the Falcon, but hey). But I can say the exact same thing about Catwoman in Dark Knight Rises. Selina Kyle had “a ton of screentime and major asskicking skills” there as well. Okay, fine, Dark Knight Rises is not as good as the Winter Soldier, but Marvel’s not winning any diversity medals because they finally found something interesting to do with Black Widow the third time they made her a supporting character in a male-driven movie. Especially since they are on the record as not considering female-led movies a priority.
The fact is, neither of us are winning this race. The next big female-driven superhero movie won’t star Wonder Woman, Black Widow, or Captain Marvel. It won’t be from Warner Bros. or Marvel Studios. It’s going to come from Sony, and will probably star the Black Cat as part of their ongoing desperate attempts to weave an Avengers-level franchise out of Spider-man and his amazing friends. And the problem with that is that based on everything else Sony’s been doing in that world, Black Cat is going to be terrible, probably fail, and give everyone who holds up Catwoman and Elektra as proof that “female driven action movies don’t work” one more bullet in their idiot gun, and Wonder Woman and Natasha Romanov will be supporting cast only for another decade.
Plus without Iceman, what’s even the point?
In conclusion, letting a woman be a supporting character in a male-driven movie is not the same as doing a female-driven movie, don’t pretend that it is.
DC does not hate lesbians
In your next point, you claim that DC is forbidding Batwoman from marrying her fiancee, Maggie Sawyer, because they refuse to allow lesbians to get married. But hey, check out the gay wedding on the cover of the X-Men!
Don’t be an ass, guy.
First off, yes, it’s great that Marvel let one of their D-list X-Men get married, and made a big deal out of it so that everyone could see how gosh-darned progressive they are.
However.
Saying that DC is forbidding Batwoman from getting married because they hate the gays would be like me saying that Marvel annulled Black Panther and Storm’s marriage because they hate black people. I mean, sure, there isn’t a second high-profile black couple in Marvel comics, but the decision to split them up was not born out of racism any more than the decision to stall Batwoman’s nuptials was born out of homophobia.
Batwoman isn’t getting married any time soon for the same reason Spider-man isn’t married anymore: because she’s a superhero, the title character of her book, and married superheros are fewer and farther between these days.
And it’s not like they’ve pushed her sexuality into the background, here. She didn’t sell her marriage to the devil or something idiotic like that. She’s still being a kickass hero, capable of giving the Batman a run for his money in a fight, who is also an out-and-proud lesbian in a stable if complex relationship with police captain Maggie Sawyer (who, by the way, has been out and proud as a supporting character of Superman and Batman since at least the early 90s).
I know, fanboy, you haven’t actually read a Batwoman comic, so you’re unaware that Batwoman’s origin is an indictment of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. You’re probably unaware that it’s started examining child custody challenges faced by the LGBT community. You couldn’t have known these things, or when you were shouting to the rafters about how awesomely diverse Marvel’s being lately (we’ll get to that), you wouldn’t have brought the most high-profile gay lead character in comics into your argument.
Kate Kane, aka Batwoman, is here, she’s queer, where she’s at, she’s a Bat, and she’s awesome. If she’s having a long engagement, it’s because comics are nervous about marriage of any kind, not because Kate Kane loves the ladies.
“Dark, mature, and cynical”
I will grant you: Loki did go speed-dating in his new book. And it was amusing. But you probably shouldn’t bring it up as a counter-point to accusing DC of making everything dark, mature, and cynical, because Loki going speed-dating was the follow-up to evil Loki murdering his younger, more heroic self and taking his place (see the excellent Journey Into Mystery: a Comedy in 30 Parts or a Tragedy in 31).
I will also grant that DC movies leaned too much into the dark. DC saw the success of Nolan’s Batman and learned the wrong lesson, and as a result, Man of Steel was darker than it should have been (although I would still describe Man of Steel as ultimately hopeful rather than cynical). But the comics have been trying to build a sense of fun ever since the New 52 relaunch. Even the horror books have a sense of humour. Whereas Marvel’s endlessslog of massive crossovereventbooks have been embracing “grim” in record quantities. Hell, the Ultimate books seem to exist solely to watch the world nearly end in high-casualty catastrophes over and over (well, that and Ultimate Spider-man, and they day Brian Michael Bendis leaves that book the Ultimate line may finally fold completely).
But since the New 52 relaunch, high-flying adventure or epic sagas have been the order of the day. Okay, yes, Forever Evil wasn’t all sunshine and roses, but it wasn’t as oppressively dark as some Marvel events. Read Larfleeze and tell me it’s all dark and mature. Or the new eagerly anticipated Batgirl run. Or Harley Quinn.
DC could stand to make their next round of movies less dark and grim, sure, just like Marvel could get more creative with their plots than “Guy gets his hands on a magic space rock and uses it and his army of faceless minions to rule/destroy the world for reasons that are vague at best.” But accusing the entirety of DC’s product line of making everything dark, mature, and cynical is foolishness.
Not sure you’ve been watching Phase II
Now your next point goes beyond “Not knowing anything about DC” and into “Have you even been watching the Marvel movies?” Let’s review:
Your exact words. Your exact stupid words.
First, a couple points about your shot at DC. Marvel fans attacking DC for changing actors is beyond the pot calling the kettle black. Marvel has recast three characters so far: James Rhodes in Iron Man, Fandral in Thor, and Bruce Banner in Avengers. And that’s fine. Don Cheadle, Zachary Levi, and Mark Ruffalo were all excellent choices. Probably going to need a new Iron Man eventually, and that’ll be okay too. Just like bringing in a new actor for Batman, when it’s a different continuity than Nolan’s Batman, is not only fine, it’s expected.
And also, unless you wrote this last year (you didn’t), Wonder Woman is not “maybe doing a cameo” in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Embarrassing Subtitles (see? I can make fun of my side). Wonder Woman is happening.
And she’s gonna be hardcore.
That said, let’s examine why your boast about Marvel is shockingly divorced from reality.
“Everyone is in everyone’s movie.” Wow, that’s just… no. No, not at all. Which movies have you been watching? Because in the sum total of Phase II, excepting Age of Ultron, there have been two, count ’em, two Avenger cameos in other Avengers’ movies. Bruce Banner popped up in the end credit scene of Iron Man 3 (not to do anything, he was just there), and Loki briefly impersonated Captain America in Thor: the Dark World. In the four Phase II movies thus far, there have been two cameos totaling less than two minutes of screentime.
Hardly “everyone appearing in everyone’s movies.”
If everyone were in everyone’s movies, we wouldn’t be asking why the Avengers and SHIELD gave zero shits that terrorists blew up Tony Stark’s house and then kidnapped the president off of Air Force One. We wouldn’t be asking why Captain America didn’t think Tony Stark or, say, the goddamn Hulk might be useful in taking down three flying aircraft carriers filled with heavily armed hostile soldiers. Or hey, forget them, where the hell was Hawkeye? SHIELD is revealed to be compromised, Cap and Black Widow are on the run, and Black Widow doesn’t think it’s worth at least trying to contact her partner and friend Clint Barton, the guy she signed on with the Avengers to save from Loki?
I mean, “ain’t no stopping us now” seems to be fair, at least until we see how Ant-man does, but let’s keep our boasts within the realm of reality, shall we?
“A few” people of colour?
Again, your exact stupid words:
I’m not going to say anything negative about the new Muslim American Ms Marvel (except that Muslim isn’t an ethnicity, and last I checked Americans didn’t need to be sorted by their faith). This is partially because I haven’t read her book, and as I’m trying to make clear to you, you should always be familiar with things you criticize, lest you just look like an idiot. Also because the character seems pretty cool and like a good idea, but I really wanted to remind everyone how shockingly little you knew about DC when you wrote your little screed.
What I will do is remind you of the “one or two” people of colour DC introduced prior to the new Ms Marvel turning up.
Simon Baz, the Arab-American (think that might be the term you wanted) Muslim Green Lantern, still playing a key role in Justice League
John Stewart, the black Green Lantern who’s still the primary character in Green Lantern Corps
Jason Rusch, the black Firestorm, who remained a key part of the character following the reboot
Jaime Reyes, the latino Blue Beetle, who’s had the publisher’s support for nearly a decade despite low sales, and was even written into Smallville
Miiyahbin, aka. Equinox, the Cree teenager joining Justice League Canada
Batwing, the Batman of Africa
Nightrunner, the Muslim Batman of France
Fan favourite character Wally West, formerly the Flash, finally being reintroduced into continuity, but as a mixed-race teenager instead of a white redhead
Ryan Choi, the asian Atom, confirmed as still existing in the New 52 (but only partial credit, if/when the Atom is introduced to the New 52, it’ll probably be Ray Palmer, because Arrow)
And that’s just off the top of my head. You’ll notice a few marquee names in there, like Green Lantern, Flash, and Batman. But hey, the only way you could’ve known any of that is by making even a token effort to understand the thing you’re criticizing.
Ain’t reading Batman? Don’t talk about Batman.
There’s not much I can say about accusing Batman’s personality of being “like wet cardboard.” I could say that clearly he’s never read a single issue of Scott Snyder’s excellent, game-changing run on the book. I could say you’ve missed Peter Tomasi’s exploration of Batman the grieving father, pushed to the edge as he tries to move past his son Damien’s death. But that’s all pretty clear. None of the things you’ve written so far indicate knowledge of anything that happens in DC comics, so why start now?
I could also stoop to your level, and reply that you must be confusing Batman for Captain America since Rick Remender took over the book. But that would be petty.
Also, nobody cares about street-racing latino Ghost Rider. That book will be gone by this time next year. But for the record? “Latina” is female. I know reading a Batman book, or realizing that Marvel characters are also capable of being bland as hell, is difficult, but try to at least get that part right, could you?
Speed round
It gets purely stupid from here, so let’s bring this in for a landing.
“We can’t mention any superhero titles in our movies?” I don’t… what? What are you even talking about? What movies are you watching? Surely not the Dark Knight, everyone knows the Joker’s line about “Simple… we kill the Batman.” Not Man of Steel. They waited a while, sure, but he’s going by Superman by the climax. Are you miffed that they trusted that if they called the movies “Dark Knight” and “Man of Steel,” audiences might recognize the nicknames that have been around since World War II and know which characters they were referring to? If so, does the upcoming movie title Superman v. Batman not help you out?
Guardians of the Galaxy was amazing, I’m not gonna fight you on that, but could you possibly refrain from just making shit up out of whole cloth? If you don’t want to watch DC movies, fine, but maybe just leave them alone instead of dreaming up imaginary offenses. ‘Kay?
Claiming DC just panders to white males? Ballsy, after the creative team of Batgirl, one of their more high-profile books, openly said he’d rather attract one teenage girl than twenty white dudes. Also, do me a favour and remind me how many people on the poster for the Avengers aren’t white dudes. Is it still just one? And she’s sexually posed? Right. And Age of Ultron… one added woman, everyone else is a white dude? Okay then. And Justice League will have at least two characters who aren’t white men, Wonder Woman and Cyborg? Three if they use John Stewart instead of Hal Jordan? Care to crunch the numbers on that?
No, you’d rather just bring up the female Thor and Falcon taking over as Captain America again. I covered this last time, but just to recap… when Bucky took over as Captain America, it was also only ever going to be temporary, and they didn’t pretend it was some new huge progressive change. They didn’t scream from the rafters “Captain America is an amputee now, aren’t we the best.” But sure, there they are, she-Thor and Falcon-as-Cap. Remind me to revisit this topic with you in May 2016, when Marvel needs everything back to normal before Captain America or Thor’s next movie comes out.
Now, as to your claims that Agents of SHIELD is amazing and the DC TV shows are… wait. Hang on… can’t… can’t seem to find anything here about Agents of SHIELD…
Huh. Guess even delusional Marvel fanatics are running out of ways to pretend Agents of SHIELD wasn’t a disappointment, and that Arrow isn’t the best superhero show on TV. Imagine that.
Look, Marvel fanboy… I respect that you like Marvel. And, cinematically, this is a great time to like Marvel. But it’s okay to also like DC, and if you’re going to claim otherwise, maybe try to know even a little about the Distinguished Competition, okay? I don’t know if there’s an easy way for us to find common ground, but I guess the important question is…
Do you want to see puppets make fun of Jim Carrey’s webpage? Because in the words of John Oliver, you sure as shit have earned it.
Take this cool shit, because this lifelong DC fan be outie.
