i’m in position to be knocked off the sidebar, and while this is good for ftb – it means a lot of people are posting, and what inspired my now defunct streak of daily posting was a ghost town vibe on the network – i cannot abide that ignominy. i post now just to stay in the sidebar. watch me burn!
i had a thought recently i wanted to hold onto. it has a few attached thoughts. this is a memo to myself; make of it what you will, or disregard. i’m cool with that.
-i remembered while listening to Princes of the Universe that once upon a time highlander made me feel some kind of feelings. it’s a kind of magic yo, and you have heard too often how i feel about magic in fiction. i’m into it. the thing i don’t want to forget – i’d like to remember what i felt about the show, so long ago, and without necessarily injecting immortality as a theme, put that quality into something i write.
-i relate the feeling of these powerful transcendant characters like paul atreides and connor mcleod to the powerful emotion created by surreal fiction like the works of david lynch and leonora carrington. my husband would get the latter but very much not the former, because the highlanders and space messiahs are power fantasies, like the superheroes he couldn’t relate to as a boy.
-srsly he related to wesley willis singing about how batman would kick his ass, because he saw a big buff representative of the dominant social order beating on weird outsiders and saw himself in the villains. therefore, he will never see the potential of a profound impact from fiction with messianic peeps.
-is that connected to his bad self-esteem? if so, could i give him .005 self-esteem points by helping him feel such a narrative? how could i play up that aspect of what i feel in those narratives, what sets them apart from superhero stories? i think of li mubai in crouching tiger hidden dragon and how he died, forever denied love by his heroic lifestyle. i dunno. i think about the ending of woo’s a better tomorrow II, where the guys have a heroic gunbattle and sustain a surely lethal number of gunshot wounds, living just long enough to have a cool pose for the closing shot.
-that’s the main shit. i think there was more, and if i remember, i may edit it in or drop it in comments. i should take notes more often so i don’t forget these things.
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edit one:
-the messiah thing. i wonder that this sense of profundity from heroic narratives relates to the way christians and their ilk feel so cool about jeezy peets and their respective special boys. if i gets a tear watching a the crow meet his ghost wife at the end of the movie brandon lee died to make, is that what they feel when they see yahweh’s meat puppet twitching on the cross?
-i have immortal characters and a notion of including demigods in my big gay RPG project. wonder if these notions could find a place in there…
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Well, that’s given a lot of food for thought. Now I’m thinking about the people I know IRL who love superheroes…and they do tend to be Christians (or at least say they are). But that doesn’t explain the non-Christians who also love superheroes. To me, that phase just seemed endless.
I was an adult when Twin Peaks premiered. Like most of America, I watched it and got invested in just Who Killed Laura and figuring out the surreal clues. I was an adult when The Highlander movies and tv series came on, so I think I saw it differently than the way you saw it. I liked the series and the movies, but I didn’t feel particularly moved in anyway. I’ve got several Queen albums on my playlist and that includes Princes of the Universe. When I hear it, I just think about Freddie Mercury’s once-in-a-lifetime talent.
Anecdotal counterpoints: My mother was an avowed catholic and thought the whole superhero shtick was utter nonsense. Myself as an avowed atheist and old man, I’ve collected all the superman media I can find and still sleep under a big S blanket.
@ Dennis K: maybe the tendency to revere superheroes runs more on gender? I don’t know, just spitballing ideas.
@3 — I wonder if it has to do with the social justice aspect of most superheroes, especially in ye olden days. Siegel’s Superman in particular would be labelled woke antifa by MAGA if he was just starting up today.
i post now just to stay in the sidebar.
Eh wut? My quick scan counted 18 sidebar denizens who haven’t posted squat in a year or more.
Those blognames might as well be carved in granite rather than projected in pixels.
(Pls read this as a plea for more postings, not for a purge!)
@Dennis K:
Heck, Superman’s latest movie was rather loudly labelled ‘woke’, by people with no sense of irony.
(Just like ten or eleven years ago when the whole ‘Sad Puppies’ thing was building up steam, someone managed to complain about how science fiction was going ‘woke’ and then use Star Trek as an example of the ‘good old spaceships and rayguns’ SF. There was a lot of ‘Dude, did you even watch the original Star Trek? Let That Be Your Last Battlefield? The show with the first inter-racial kiss on American television?’ in response.)
Meanwhile, I’m an atheist and I like superheroes, and yeah there is a lot of power fantasy involved, but at the same time I prefer stories that focus on the people involved rather than just the fight scenes. Superman was one of those characters who was incredibly easy to write badly because of his power level, but the best writers focused on him, his sense of morality, and the fact that he understood that strength isn’t useful without the wisdom about when and where to use it. (Which was part of why Mr. Mxyzptlk is one of the great Superman adversaries: give Superman someone who can only be defeated by being outsmarted.)
katy – i was still a child first time i saw highlander, i think, and that mystic element took a hike pretty quickly. never got the same feeling off the tv show, tho i did enjoy it as well. that’s why it was a trip randomly remembering that lil moment in time. i distantly recall my dad finding it all very cheesy, even as he enjoyed it. my first girlfriendish situation was big into twin peaks and i didn’t get what was cool about it til a lot of years later. godda love freddie tho.
my husband ain’t an archetypal he-man but he is a man, and non-super-likin’. the gender divide might be more typical for pre-millenials but a bazillion avengers gif posts on tumblr don’t lie about girls getting across that bridge nowadays.
dennis – what’s your favorite superman movie? or media in general? superman appealed to me well enough when it was christopher reeves and i was six, but i don’t remember quite what that felt like anymore. no disrespect. i’m interested in what other people like about a thing, might help me see it differently.
pierce – i mean the “recent posts on FtB” area. gotta differentiate myself from the gravestones. i may start posting more often in a bit, tho it’s the kind of content people have historically not found interesting, haha.
jenora – i sometimes feel i’m close to the end of my interest in power fantasies, but once you’re into that, how can you ever fully lose it? i felt it before, i’m sure i’ll feel it again. at the moment tho, i’m feeling very circumspect about them, meta and abstract too. i dunno.