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.
@7: when I was 3, 4, and 5 (in the 1960s) my Halloween costume was Spiderman. In part because the cheap plastic costume and mask fit for three years, in part because I loved the cartoon for the physicality of swinging around. As an elementary-schooler and preteen, I watched The Incredible Hulk and enjoyed it in part because what preteen can’t relate to someone whose body betrays them at the worst times? LOL. I also liked The Six Million Dollar Man, who was kind of a superhero–but the episode I liked best was when he met Bigfoot and they showed each other respect. I kind of liked Wonder Woman–I liked her, but didn’t know why she had to plaster on so much makeup and wear super-skimpy clothes when the male superheros didn’t have their bits always in danger of flopping out.
But the whole superhero craze just missed me. The plots were superficial and I didn’t care about people destroying things–we have Godzilla movies for that, LOL. As someone who had kids, I thought, “Who’s going to clean up that destroyed city?” I do know one woman IRL who likes the whole DC/Marvelverse and wants to talk about it, but most women I know are just “meh” about it. That’s what I meant about gendered. Obviously, men can be “meh” about superheroes as well. I admit this might be an age thing–I am not a Millennial.
I heard all the drama about the “woke” Superman–apparently, having basic good manners and interest in the well-being of others is now “woke”–they used to call it “PC”. The thing I was most interested in was the dog because it looks like mine, and I didn’t want to pay $12 to go look at a dog that looks like mine when I can just look at my dog for free.
six million dollar man, bionic woman, and hulk were in reruns when i was a kid. some much less well remembered shows had superheroesque stuff, like automan, manimal, man from atlantis, and misfits of science – which, in a way, featured the first tv version of jean grey, being played by baby courteney cox. i was consistently drawn to that shit, no matter how lofi.
younger ladies were probably primed for superheroism by the terf’s baby wizards and television’s the supernatural brothers, so they became an unexpectedly huge demographic for the first avengers movie, and all its muscular conventionally attractive white dudes getting loved on by the camera.
the dog was from “silver age” comics, of which i know relatively little, but i’ll always remember seeing a cover from one of those that featured not just krypto the superdog, but also a super horse and a super snake… now i can’t find it. false memory? i did find a few of the superhorse.
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For me it started as competition with my young son’s fascination in Batman. I mean, I had to contra him somehow. My wife took it to heart and made me an unofficial purveyor of much superman media and paraphernalia (plus it gave her a great excuse to buy junk at garage sales). I will admit to enjoying Reeve’s great rendition in the movies and of course Tim Daly’s absolutely perfect voice in the animated series.
So, nothing too philosophical or deep. Just good fun.
I know Manimal existed, but I was a young adult who went out in the evenings and I can’t tell you what it was about. The other two–Automan and Misfits of Science, I have no clue about. There was also Beauty & the Beast, with a young Ron Perlman who caught the bad guys while looking like a lion. I remember the ads for that but I don’t think I ever saw an episode. My kids were the right age to read the Harry Potter books and we took them to all the movies. The last couple dovetailed with Bush’s reign–remember when we all thought he was the nadir of humanity and presidents?
Supernatural was just good fun for the first 10 seasons or so, and then they ran out of ideas and just cribbed from fanfic, I think.
You are one of the more prolific posters on the FTB site and you made me realize that most of the roll hasn’t posted in quite awhile.
oh, wow…
I have very vague memories of Automan and Misfits of Science…
Not much to ad, just commenting on weird memories brought up in weird places.
I kinda like comics, and that includes a lot of superhero stuff, but I will readily acknowledge a lot of it has a strong fascist/authoritarian undercurrent. I tend to like the ones that poke at the tropes or be “anti” superhero in a way – Grendel, The Authority, The Boys, Invincible,
And sometimes it’s just reveling in the idea of ridiculous and absurd feats and actions.
dennis – that’s funny. u don’t hear about parents being contrary to their children’s interests so much as the other way around.
katydid – i liked the concept of spn more than anything i ever saw of it. only ever saw full episodes while donating plasma… there was actually a sidebar purge once, but inconsistently applied for good reasons. since then, not a lot of will to do it again. to me the tombstones are less important than the recent posts on ftb area, because the oldest post on there says a lot about how active the network is at the moment. we’re not doing too bad right now!
loch – yeaaah misfits of science! i’d like to watch it again if i get the chance, see if it’s horrible and i should be embarrassed for mentioning it. i’m not a fan of the boys. my first exposure was a comic book somebody left in a break room at the amazon campus, and its brand of edgy was too extreme for my delicate sensibilities.
@ Bebe: part of the fun of Supernatural was the relationship between the brothers. At one point, there’s something with a buzzer that one brother is playing with. The other one says, “do that one more time and I’ll kill you”…so the first brother makes the noise again. Very realistic in sibling relationships. There’s also an angel who is the only angel to not understand humanity, so when he and the brothers are posing as federal officers, he introduces himself as “Agent Beyonce”.
@jenorafeurer: LOL at the original Star Trek not being “woke”. The whole show was Rodenberry’s attempt to introduce a kinder, gentler fantasy world with societal and gender equality. I guess to people whose only notion of the franchise is JJ Abrams “things go boom” one-note scripting, they can’t imagine what the show had once been.
@Bébé:
Oh lord, Misfits of Science… that show worked, but of course it worked because it was, in the end, far more about the weird characters and their interactions than it was about the superpowers and saving the world. The best superhero stories are always more about the people in the outfits than about the raw power fantasy, anyway.
Automan‘s humour was a little too forced (and too much of it was in making Desi Arnaz, Jr do borderline slapstick), Manimal took itself way too seriously being dark and brooding, and Man from Atlantis worked, again because it was more about the people. (There was one episode where we meet the daughter of one of the recurring villain characters and she’s just so obviously embarrassed by her father’s obsession with capturing the main character.)
I’m not really a fan of The Boys either; it’s a superhero story written by someone who hates superheroes. Also, to me it runs into one of the big problems with anything along similar lines: it’s really difficult to make the fascists your primary characters without making them seem ‘cool’ or ‘sympathetic’ to at least some large chunk of the audience, and the moment they start to seem ‘cool’ the story is undermining the author’s stated purpose.
I don’t remember a super-snake… there was a super-cat, Streaky, who was actually Supergirl’s normal Earth pet cat but who got superpowers from being exposed to an unusual form of Kryptonite. And Cosmo the super-horse was actually an ancient centaur under a transformation curse, as I recall. The silver age was really weird at times, yes, and there was a whole lot of really thin plots from people who thought they were clever but were just making up ideas to get things out on a monthly basis.
My take in general is that it is really easy to do superheros badly, yes, but that’s like saying it’s really easy to do porn badly. The field as a whole isn’t bad, there’s just a lot of bad stuff that got published anyway to meet quotas rather than getting weeded out by Sturgeon’s Law first. And in both cases the good stuff tends to be the stuff that focuses on the people involved rather than solely the acts that make it part of the genre.
Jane Goodal
katyd – my brother and i were never like that, but i’m getting the impression we were outliers.
jenora – i am so freakin glad to not be the only one who remembers that fever dream tv from the eighties! thank you so much for the comment.
chigau – i know what happened there, but i have to imagine this was posted in the wrong place on accident and truncated on accident as well. at any rate, yeah, that’s some sad biz. i particularly am sad to see good people die when the world is at a very hope-devouring moment.
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