A. Lee Martinez's Blog, page 17

Career Day (short fiction)

Super Janine

 

It wasn’t a smart move to bring Dementra, Warrior Queen of Galadron, along for Career Day. Her outfit, a chainmail swimsuit right out of a sword-and-planet cliché, must have violated every dress code rule in the place. As if being a statuesque space amazon wasn’t enough of a distraction. At least it was a one-piece, although the shimmering metallic skirt was more of a belt than anything.

“I told you to wear your battlesuit,” I said.

Dementra replied, “I didn’t think we were expecting battle.”

“You’re half-naked.”

“I’m behind on laundry,” she said.

“You could’ve borrowed something from me.”

Dementra smirked. We weren’t even close to the same size, but she was polite enough not to mention that.

We found the principal’s office, where we were greeted by the assistant principal, Ms. Wong. She cast a disapproving glare at Dementra, and I could hear her thoughts. Not literally. I wasn’t telepathic. But I’d seen that look enough to know when I’d run across someone who didn’t care for superheroes. We’d given up the spandex and colorful names years ago, but it didn’t change the image. Dementra wasn’t helping any.

“Are you the representatives?” asked Wong.

I nodded. “That’s us.”

She frowned. “For the record, I don’t approve of this.”

“Are you in a position to deny us access to our charges?” said Dementra.

“No.”

“Then I fail to see why your opinion should matter to us. For the record.”

Diplomacy wasn’t the warrior queen’s strong suit.

“We just want to talk to the kids,” I said. “We aren’t here to pressure them into anything.”

Wong harummphed. Quite literally. I’d only seen Victor Van Vanquisher harummph with equal disgust, and that was after we’d smashed his doomsday device, the Annihilatoratron. Or was it the Decimatter Ray? It all started to blend together after a couple of years.

We were led to a small classroom where three kids were waiting for us. A young man, probably only fifteen, juggled fireballs while an eighteen years old goth girl was burning holes in her desk with her fingertips. There was a kid in the back too. No indication of what he might be capable of.

I expected Wong to introduce us, but she merely opened the door and marched away.

“Do you want to start or do I?” I asked Dementra.

“Given your deeper understanding of Earthly culture, you would probably be the wiser choice.”

“They’re kids,” I said. “What the hell do I know about kids?”

The goth girl raised her hand.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “You can just talk.”

She rolled her eyes and pursed her black lips. “I don’t want to be here. Can I go?”

“Sure, I guess,” I said.

Goth girl sighed as if carrying the weight of the world on her pale shoulders. “Forget it. Stupid radioactive waste. Why couldn’t it just kill me?

Instead, it gives me acid fingers. Goddamn acid fingers. What kind of superpower is that anyway?”

“Pretty stupid power,” agreed fireball kid. He stopped juggling with his hands, and the flames kept twirling.

She raised her hand.

“You don’t need to–” I started.

“Isn’t acid fingers more of a supervillain power anyway?” she asked.

God, I hated Career Day.

“Not necessarily,” I replied.

“How much do superheroes earn?” asked fireball. “Because I plan on becoming a musician, and I’d like to know my options.”

“That’s terrific,” said goth girl. “Very altruistic.”

“Just being practical.”

“The pay is okay,” I said. “Some successful heroes swing endorsement deals. But it’s not supposed to be about that.”

“Lame,” said fireball.

Dementra smashed her fist into a desk, breaking it. Wong wasn’t going to like that.

“The glory of conflict is the only reward a true warrior needs. It is only when testing our strength to its limits that we learn what we are made of. It is only when inhaling the sweet breath of death itself that we know what it is to live.”
I cleared my throat.

“Oh, and justice, too, and protecting the helpless,” she said. “That’s important, I suppose.”

I said, “Look. I know you didn’t choose to have this happen to you, and I can’t say being a superhero is a life for everyone. Most people don’t become superhero or villains. Most people like you elect to live as normal as possible. And that’s fine. That’s their choice, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But we’re just here to give you information that might be useful.”

“You’re not very good at this,” said fireball. “The guy they sent last year was a lot more inspiring.”

“Well, he’s off somewhere stopping terrorists from blowing up the moon,” I said. “So you’ll have to make do with us. Now, do you have any other questions?”

They did, and they were all the usual. Was it dangerous? Did you need a secret identity? Why didn’t we wear costumes anymore? Why did we even need a team when Barry had more powers than the rest of us combined? And so on and so on.

We answered them as best we could. Honestly. Despite what Wong might have thought, I never wanted to encourage anyone to be a superhero. The pay was decent, but the hours were lousy. The world quickly forgot every time you saved it and always remembered your ever screw up. For every thousand lives you might save, there was one you couldn’t. And you’d never forget them. You’d see them every night, and you’d tell yourself that you did the best you could. But you’d always wonder if you could have done better.

“No offense, Ma’am,” said fireball, “but it sounds like a shitty job.”

“That’s why most people don’t do it,” I replied.

The bell rang, and the kids filed out. I gave each of them a card to call us if they had any follow-up questions, but I didn’t expect to hear from them again. We usually didn’t.

The quiet kid took the card. “My mom was on that collapsing bridge when Collosotron attacked. She almost died.”

I remembered that bridge. I wasn’t quite certain of the limits of my strength, but that day, holding a bridge up, I think I’d nearly found it.

“Glad she didn’t,” I said.

He smiled and disappeared in a blink.

“And you said you didn’t relate to kids,” said Dementra.

“Oh, I’m down with the youths.”

We quietly exited the school before Dementra’s outfit could land us in detention.

The City of Graves (short fiction)

Ernie the Hero

There were whispers of a city the undead called home. They weren’t entirely true.

It was more of a hamlet.

The City of Graves lurked in the mists beyond the horizons, and the only way to find it was to be not-quite-dead yourself. Or, in Simon’s case, to have a not-quite-dead guide.

Ernie and Simon approached the crumbling walls of the city. A pair of guards were stationed at the broken gates. One was an ogre with a dozen arrows sticking out of his chest and half of his face missing. The other was a nearly fleshless skeleton with a few bits of hair and one yellow eye set in his skull.

The skeleton looked Ernie and Simon up and down. “We don’t usually let the entirely alive through.”

Simon said, “That’s okay. We’ll just be on our way then.”

Ernie marched through the gates without looking back. Simon had been following the skeleton hero for weeks now with hopes that it would lead to grand adventures of astounding peril and exotic beautiful women. So far, it’d just been a lot of walking.

Ernie, possessing the vigor of the undead, didn’t rest often. He never said anything, never offered any words of encouragement to his volunteer squire. Even when he looked right at Simon with his eyeless sockets, it was impossible to tell whether Ernie was actually looking at him. But the one-armed skeleton had yet to kill Simon, so Simon took that as a tacit approval. And he decided all the walking was a test to see how dedicated he was to his duty.

But walking into the gray city was asking a lot of a breathing man.

“I’m with him,” said Simon as he ran after Ernie. The guards didn’t stop him.

The City of Graves smelled of old rot. The streets were a black muck, and everything was falling apart. The citizens glanced up at Simon. Some of them fixed him with hungry eyes, though most were indifferent. The fog rolled through the streets like a living thing. Tendrils curled around Simon’s ankles, and he kept moving to stay ahead of it.

“This isn’t what I signed up for,” said Simon.

Ernie turned, walking into a ramshackle tavern named The Glass-Eyed Raven. Simon followed.

“Hey, we don’t serve your kind here,” said a ghoul bartender.

Simon pointed to Ernie. “I’m with him.”

The bartender spat a glob of green and yellow phlegm into a glass and wiped it with a filthy rag. “All right, but it’s your funeral, pal.”

There weren’t many customers. A pair of vampires sat at a corner table, and an ancient lich occupied the far end of the bar. Ernie sat at a stool. Simon sat next to him.

“What’ll it be?” asked the bartender.

Ernie’s jaws parted, as if to say something, but there wasn’t so much as a whisper.

“Speak up, pal.”

“He doesn’t drink,” said Simon. “I don’t think so anyway.”

The bartender grumbled. “Typical.”

A woman floated beside Simon. “Don’t mind him. He’s just upset that most of his customers never order anything.”

The ghost was pale as moonlight with two dark black eyes. She wasn’t beautiful. Either her nose needed to be thinner or her face rounder. But she was still very pretty. She wore a typical burial gown, though when she moved it flowed as if floating in water. A bit of seaweed clung in her long, brown hair.

“We don’t get many of the living here,” she said. “You must be a lost soul.”

“I’m not lost,” he replied. “I’m his squire.”

She smiled. “Squire for a dead man. That doesn’t sound like the job of a sensible sort.”

“He’s a great hero. I’ll have you know that we saved the world once. I think. We killed a horrific monster at least.”

She ran her fingers through her hair. It floated behind her in a phantom breeze. He smelled the brackish scent of swamp water. “We?”

“Well, he did most of the work,” admitted Simon. “But I’m here to help him if he needs it. Like I could carry his sword if he ever put it down. Or I could clean his cape if he ever took it off.”

“Sounds like a wonderfully fulfilling job,” she said with a smirk.

He said, “Heroes need assistants. They can’t do everything themselves.”

Ernie turned his head toward Simon and tightened his grip on his enchanted red sword. Simon’s blood ran cold as he scooted to the far edge of his stool.

“So that’s really why you’re here?” she asked. “You just follow a skeleton wherever he might lead you?”

It did sound stupid when you put it like that.

“How did this place come to be?” he asked, eager to change the subject.

“Who knows?” she said. “Some say a curse gone astray. Some say a wizard screwed up somewhere. And some say it always has been.”

“It’s the fog,” said the lich at the end of the bar. His voice floated through the room in a slow, creeping monotone.

The bartender groaned. “Not this again.”

The lich threw back his drink. It dribbled down his rotted flesh, spilling onto his dusty robes. “I’m telling you, it’s the fog. There’s something hiding in it. Something neither alive nor dead.”

“Well, no shit,” said the ghost. “It’s The City of Graves. There’s always something like that lurking around.”

“You don’t get it,” said the lich. “Nobody gets it.” He nodded toward Ernie. “Except maybe that guy. He gets it.”

A wind howled through the city, shrieking like a thousand banshees. The banshee at a nearby table held up her hands. “Wasn’t me. I swear.”
Ernie stood and turned toward the door. The fog swirled through it. Its icy tendrils curled up Simon’s legs and yanked him off his feet. He grabbed the bar with a yelp.

“Did I mention that whatever it is hungers for the living?” said the lich. “I suppose I should’ve mentioned that earlier.”

The ghost took Simon’s hand. It was like touching clammy, wet flesh, and he lost his grip immediately. Screaming, he was pulled into the cold embrace of the mist. Icy claws ran along his body, and something sharp burrowed its way into his heart. Not literally. He was still alive, but he felt life itself dribbling out of him as whatever was in the fog sipped at his soul like he might sip at a warm drink on a cold day.

The fog fell away, and he lay somewhere featureless and gray. Even the muck of The City of Grave’s streets was gone, replaced only by rough, black stone.

A creature stepped from the fog. The white robes wrapped around its boney frame billowed. Its face was only a pair of red eyes floating in shadows.

“The living are not welcome here,” it said, sounding perturbed.

“I’ll leave,” said Simon. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

The thing in the fog growled and stepped forward. It held a wicked barbed hook in its hand.

It served Simon right. He’d followed a skeleton into a lair of the undead. What the hell had he expected?

“Your gods will not help you here,” said the thing.

Simon laughed. His gods hadn’t ever been particularly helpful though he wouldn’t have complained if they’d been saving up their divine intervention for this particular moment.

Ernie stepped from the mist, and the thing stopped.

“How did you get here?”

Ernie offered no reply. He raised his red sword and advanced on the thing.

The thing chuckled. “You seek to challenge me. Before your world was forged by the gods, I was. In the nothingness between life and death, I have always existed and shall always–”

Ernie stabbed the thing in its chest. It fell to its knees. Its robes sizzled at the edges, turning to ash.

“Do you think I will die so easily,” said the thing. “I am as eternal as twilight, as the shadows you fear in the darkness.”

“I don’t think Ernie fears shadows,” said Simon.

“Well, shit.”

Ernie beheaded the thing with a single slice of his enchanted sword. It evaporated in a puff of icy fog, and the mist dissolved under the soft light of a setting sun. Ernie and Simon stood on the muddy streets of The City of Graves once more.

“I told you it was the fog,” said the lich.

He crumbled into a pile of bones.

Several zombies lay down in the street and quietly expired with smiles on their faces. A broken down building collapsed into a pile of rubble.

“Finally.” The ghoul bartender started digging a hasty grave.

The ghost said, “I thought you were dead for sure. Or worse.”

“We had it under control the whole time,” said Simon.

Ernie stared at Simon.

“It was mostly Ernie,” Simon admitted. “But I helped.”

And he had. Mostly as bait. But it still counted.

Smiling, the ghost offered a wilted flower to Simon. “My hero.”

She planted a kiss on his cheek, and it chilled him to the bone, but it was still nice. And then she faded away.

Simon pinned the flower to Ernie’s cloak. “You earned this more than me. So do you think we could rest for the night. My feet are killing me.”

Ernie might have smiled. He started walking, and, with a sigh, Simon followed, leaving The City of Graves to crumble into the dusts of time.

The Stacks (short fiction)

They found the Machine on a long dead world. Where once it might have contained a powerful civilization, the only traces left were a few ruins here and there. Cities were nothing but indentations in the dust. Great monoliths of steel and glass were all gone. Everything was gone. Everything but the Machine. The first explorers claimed to have never turned on the Machine. They claimed it activated itself as they first approached. No one quite believed them at first, but as time went on, it became clear that the Machine was not ordinary. Nor was it merely extraordinary. It was, some said, magical, perhaps. The only truly magical object in the universe. The only thing that outright defied the laws of physics in undeniable ways. Its power source went undetected. It functioned without pause, every hour of every day. It never needed maintenance. It just spat out books, churning them out from thousands of chutes in its massive frame. Where it got the paper and ink was yet another question unanswered. It was served by thousands of small robots. The robots themselves weren’t magical. They worked like all robots did. Hundreds had been taken apart. There was nothing special about them. No one had been able to decipher their programming code or reprogram one, but when they were put back together, they functioned just fine. Where they came from? That was a mystery. How they sorted the books or if they had any sort of system at all? That was another. And so the books spread across the Machine’s world, and most people passed it by. An idle curiosity in a strange universe. But some people came. They called themselves Sorters, and they read the books. Gina opened the book. It was nothing but letters strung together in random ways. Why the books were in English was another mystery, but they really weren’t. They had English letters.  She flipped through the pages, each one. Scanning. Reading. Looking for something. Anything. A paragraph. A sentence. A word. Over the years, she’d become a master speed reader, like any good Sorter. The book was nonsense. Most books written by the Machine were. She marked the plain cover with a black marker. The bold X would let other Sorters know not to waste their time on this one. She threw it away. There was no point in trying to put it someplace different. The robots would eventually grab it and throw it on a pile. She threw some unmarked books into her pack and headed back to camp. Sorter camps dotted the planet. Ramshackle collections of tents usually, though there was a somewhat permanent city on Mount Poe. But that was a continent away. Out here, there were a few dozen people at Camp Decartes. Old Nan came limping up to Gina. Nan had been a Sorter longer than anyone. She wasn’t spry enough to go into the stacks anymore, but she held down the camp. Everyone was glad to have her. Gina could tell something was wrong right away. “What’s wrong, Nan?” “It’s Cartwright. He found something. In the stacks.” “What’d he find?” “He can’t say.” They entered Cartwright’s tent. He sat on his cot, staring straight ahead. His face said nothing. He held a book in his hands. Tightly. Almost as if he was trying to strangle it. “You all right?” asked Gina. He didn’t look at her. “I found something. Something terrible. Something wonderful.” “The Truth?” asked Old Nan. Most everyone agreed the Machine itself wasn’t intelligent, but as long as it continued to churn out books, it was hoped that one day, purely by accident and the law of averages, it would print the one book that held the Truth. Some said this was wishful thinking. There was no way to know if the Machine created random books or if there was simply a repeating pattern too large to be glimpsed, a never ending tide of nonsense. He shook his head. “Not the whole thing. Maybe a little piece of it. Maybe.” “What’s in the book?” said Gina. He glanced down at the book as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, this. This isn’t anything.” He tossed it aside. Old Nan picked it up and immediately started scanning. It was Sorter reflex. Cartwright looked at Gina, and she saw awful secrets hidden behind his eyes. “It’s not what you think. It’s not what any of us think.” “So what is it then?” He smiled. “It can’t be explained. It has to be read.” Old Nan tossed the book aside. “This doesn’t have anything in it.” “Where did you put it then?” asked Gina. “I left it out there,” he replied. She wanted to shake him, to hit him, to shout and scream. After all this time, after all these years, after all the lives spent searching, he’d simply left it. Maybe it wasn’t the Truth. Maybe it wasn’t anything. But how could they know if they didn’t see it? She stayed calm. So did Nan. Somehow, they held it together. Probably because Sorters were used to disappointment and frustration. “You have to take us to it,” she said. “I’m not going back out there,” he replied. “But I marked it. I put a red X on the cover.” He lay on his cot and said nothing else. Just stared straight up, as if he could see through the tent. As if he could see through everything. There was no point in trying to convince him. He didn’t respond. Not to them. Not to anything. He might very well lay there until he died, she thought. They exited the tent. A dozen Sorters surrounded them. Old Nan told them what Cartwright had said, and most set out to find the book with the red X. Gina restocked her supplies. Exhaustion was setting in. The smartest thing to do would be to rest. Sorters died out there, among the stacks. It wasn’t a hostile world, but it wasn’t a friendly one either. “You shouldn’t go,” said Old Nan. “Let someone else find the book.” “What if they don’t?” replied Gina. “One more set of eyes can’t hurt.” Nan chuckled. She would’ve been out there herself if she’d been able. She wasn’t the one to talk Gina into staying. “Come back,” said Nan. “The Truth will be out there tomorrow.” Some argued the Truth was never meant to be known, but those people weren’t the type to become Sorters. Gina hugged Nan and set out among the stacks.

Supergirls

I’ve been thinking a lot about Supergirl lately, both the TV show and the character in general.

One of the criticisms that bugs me about Supergirl is that she is a “masculine” ideal because she’s strong, invulnerable, and beats up bad guys. It bugs me because it assumes that superheroes (who generally kick butt as part of their job requirements) are a “male” genre. We all know the cliche of the arrested adolescent who escapes to empowerment fantasies, and while there is some small truth to that negative stereotype, that’s ignoring much of what makes the genre appealing.

There’s little point in denying that most superhero fiction, even so-called “subversive” superhero fiction, is about empowerment. Usually physical empowerment. Batman might not be superstrong, but he sure as hell can kick your ass. He can even kick Superman’s ass if the writer feels like letting that happen, and once you face down Superman and win, you can no longer claim to be a normal guy.

There is also a negative side to this fantasy, which can accidentally (and sometimes even intentionally) suggest that might makes right, that beating the hell out of bad people is the best way to handle injustice, and that being special in some way is what makes one important. Taken at face value, it’s easy to see superhero fiction as appealing to some of our worst instincts of egotism and violence. I can’t help but think of Man of Steel which attempted to make Superman relatable by making him mopey, ineffective, and, ultimately, someone perfectly willing to kill, shed some crocodile tears, and then go make out with his girlfriend and make a quip.

Much of this has to do with a shift of the target audience. Superheroes were made for kids. As time went on, the audience grew up with the medium, and that’s cool. There are some great mature superhero tales, but I sometimes feel like something was lost in the process of growing up. I think too often we apply real world logic to superhero stories nowadays and when we do, the entire genre often falls apart because it is, by its nature, completely unrealistic.

One only watch the Kick-Ass movie and its sequel to see how well subverting superhero expectations works, and the answer is it doesn’t work very well. In those films, our heroes are NOT supposed to be superheroes, yet they feature a young girl who can kill a room full of armed men, a jetpack with a rocket launcher built into it, and a sequel in which one of our heroes fights atop a moving van. Realism is not our friend here, and putting in swearing, blood, and ill-fitting costumes doesn’t make it any less of a standard superhero film.

The target audience for superheroes was originally children, and from that perspective, these stories and characters make a lot more sense. Batman doesn’t work from an adult perspective, but for a kid, saying there’s this rich guy who dresses like a bat and fights an evil clown is perfectly sensible. An alien who can fly and lift a battleship? Sure, why not? An ordinary person bitten by a spider and then swinging through New York? Seems reasonable. Kids look at superheroes the way they look at Bugs Bunny. They don’t question why these characters exist. They just accept them at face value.

Children also think more broadly. When children have empowerment fantasies, they aren’t usually about being super rich or repealing zoning ordinances. Despite what the prequel trilogy of Star Wars might have you believe, most children don’t invest in senate hearings and trade embargoes. That is why the prequels will never be as strong as the originals, which were aimed at a younger audience. And, no, ewoks were not a corruption of Star Wars. They were the logical part of a series that always had kids square in the crosshairs of its core audience, and children have no problem with space teddy bears fighting storm troopers. Kids love that kind of thing.

So we could argue that Supergirl embodies a “male” ideal, or we could say that she really embodies a child’s ideal of what it is to be powerful. Children, being mostly powerless themselves, see power as something magical. For a child, being able to catch a meteor or blow out a forest fire is a healthy and logical way of viewing power. It says that there are incredible problems out there, and they can be solved. The best superhero stories have the characters use their powers in creative and smart ways and still throw challenges at the characters that aren’t easily beaten. The best superhero stories say being awesome is great, but you still have to work at it. You can save the day if you believe in yourself and apply your best efforts.

This is the central theme of the new Supergirl TV show, and it is not subtle. But I imagine young girls watching this show and soaking up ideas that are often denied them, even in this day and age. I see a show about a woman who can handle herself, and, yes, she does so by beating up bad guys, but beating up bad guys is about as subtle as most children view things.

Like much of Superhero fiction these days, Supergirl walks a tight rope. It seeks to be appealing to younger audiences and still engaging to adults. Marvel’s movies have done a pretty solid job of that. DC’s, not so much. As an adult, some of the writing on Supergirl can be a little too on the nose for me but then I realize that this is a show about a woman who flies around in bright blue and red who fights crime and averts disaster. Subtlety may not be required.

Anyway, subtlety is often nonsense. Marvel’s more “mature” efforts like Daredevil is about as subtle as a train wreck. It merely substitutes plodding unpleasantness for child-like wonder. And Jessica Jones looks to do more of the same. That’s cool. I think the superhero genre is flexible, and while I would rarely see the point in taking something about empowerment and turning it into unpleasantness, I know there are those who do like that sort of thing. More power to them.

In any case, denying young women the right to see themselves as a force of nature that can stand against the worst this world has to offer is one of the small tragedies of this world. If Supergirl the show or Supergirl the character are around to offer that, I can fully get behind that.

And, hey, there’s always Squirrel Girl.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

The Coming Star Wars Wars

Often in life, I’m reminded of the different positions people occupy, and how it is most evident in the way they view things.

As the observation goes: “Men’s number one fear of women is that women will embarrass them. Women’s number one fear is that men will kill them.”

This is very true. I’ve rarely felt threatened by a woman, even a woman behaving threateningly. It’s not that I don’t believe a woman can hurt me. It’s just not something I’m geared to perceive, and why should I? I’m stronger than most women. I’m not combat trained, but neither are most people (women included). More importantly, it just doesn’t come up all that often. When I’m alone on an elevator with a woman, I’m not afraid she’s going to pull a knife and stab me. She could. But I just don’t imagine it happening.

So now there are dummies who claim that adding more diversity to Star Wars is somehow the equivalent of “white genocide”. Like the kerfluffle of the first Thor movie, where inserting a pair of minority supporting characters was perceived as an attack on white people (n a movie that was 98 percent white people).

So perhaps a new observation is in order:

“Some white people’s greatest fear is that the universe might acknowledge that other types of people exist and have value.”

Of course, I don’t think this is true for many (hopefully most) white people. I think most people see a few dark faces on the Star Wars poster and don’t see it as heralding the beginning of the coming race war. Hell, Star Wars already had Lando, the coolest cat in the galaxy who blew up the Death Star in Jedi, so it’s a weird fight to pick now.

The difference being that for a lot of people, the assumption of Polite White Supremacy was apparently a thing. Maybe a thing they didn’t even know they had. Just like I have a certain Male Invulnerability without realizing it. And maybe this is just the growing pains we have to go through as more voices are added to the conversation and our perception of a character’s value doesn’t automatically include Handsome White Person.

Seriously, Star Wars has Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Queen Amidala, Obi Wan, Whatever the Hell Liam Neeson’s character was called, and Porkins. It’s safe to say they’ve had a lot of white people saving the day. It’s hardly a revolution if one or two different ethnicities or (gasp) ladies show up to save the day now.

Humans: We’re not very good at this.

Sympathy for Beni

If you read only one essay devoted to a supporting character from 1999’s The Mummy this week, be sure it’s this one.

Yes, I’m often walking down the street, as I am wont to do, and random strangers will come up to me and ask, “Is there any character from modern fiction that reflects our perception of ourselves, others, and the duality of our own egotism versus reality?” And I reply, with a good-natured, condescending chuckle, “Why, yes, random stranger. His name is Beni Gabor.” And then I stroll on without offering any further explanation.

But for those who need further explanation, here it is:

It’s probably been a while since you’ve seen The Mummy. Most people have a neutral-ish attitude toward the whole series of films. For my money, they’re all solid action-adventure staples with a solid cast, solid writing, and good direction. They’re engaging and unique and fun, and it’s easy to look down upon them (because grown ups love looking down on fun things), but overall, they all hold up well.

The movie centers around our heroes Rick and Evelyn (along with Evelyn’s shady yet ultimately heroic brother Jonathan) efforts to keep the cursed mummy from rising from the grave to conquer the world. There’s also Ardeth Bay, a mysterious swordsman / guardian of secrets. The sequels introduced Alex, Rick and Evelyn’s precocious son and eventual co-adventurer. And all these characters are cool, but they ultimately speak to who we think we are, not who we actually are. No, we aren’t any of these characters.

We’re Beni.

You probably don’t think much about Beni, the cowardly, scheming, greedy sidekick of Rick who eventually becomes the Mummy’s sidekick. That makes sense. Beni is not a character we’re designed to empathize or care about. He’s not handsome (with apologies to Kevin J. O’Connor who is by no means an ugly man, but also not within the narrow definition of “handsome” required to be a leading man). He’s not particularly smart (though he does know several languages), nor resourceful, nor capable. He’s a second banana who is there to get swept up on the plot.

The thing about Beni is that he knows he isn’t the hero. In that way, he’s more aware than many of the other supporting characters. The guys who awaken the Mummy by accident are all classically handsome and devil-may-care. They have a lot in common with Rick (our real hero), but this isn’t their story. They think they’re the hero, and they perish for that mistake.

Rick knows he’s the hero. Maybe not consciously, but on an intuitive level, he behaves like a guy who knows he can take chances. He can stand face-to-face with a supernatural monster, and while he doesn’t immediately have the tools to defeat it, he also has enough plot armor to not be immediately killed by it. He rushes headlong into danger with the certainty that somehow he’ll come out on top.

Meanwhile, Beni knows his days are numbered. He actively runs from danger (which isn’t a dumb thing to do), and when confronted by the Mummy, he willingly submits to being a minion because he really doesn’t have a choice. When Rick is cornered by the Mummy, he unloads his rifle into it. When Beni is cornered, he can only pray to whatever indifferent gods (or writers) are listening.

The problem with Beni isn’t that he’s stupid or cowardly. It’s that we have been trained throughout our whole life to see ourselves as Rick when we’re actually Beni. Consequently, we have little empathy for Beni. We don’t care for him, and we don’t see him as a worthwhile person. Quite the opposite, actually. We expect him to be a victim and to suffer, and we have such little empathy for him that his life and death mean almost nothing to us.

It’s ironic that the movie actually does have some sympathy for the poor guy. When he finally does meet his end, Rick is still trying to save him. When Beni dies, Rick even takes a moment to mourn his passing. But that’s because Rick is a good guy. Rick, aside from all his other heroic qualities, has empathy for those less awesome than himself.

So what? you might ask. Why should it matter how we feel about this sort of character archetype?

It matters because it reflects how we view the real world.

We have been taught to see our world in terms of Heroes, Villains, and Victims. Because of that, we tend to view all events through that lens. More importantly, we view ourselves through that lens, and since we know we’re not Villians and we don’t want to be Victims, that means we must be Heroes. And while each of us might be the Hero of our own stories, we are not the awesome, badass, ultracapable version we are taught to empathize with.

It’s that sort of fallacy that leads people to believe they could be Batman, if only they had enough money. Yet to be Batman requires more than money. It requires a genius level intellect, superb athletic potential, good looks, and somehow enough time to master all the skills required to be Batman (which no human actually has enough time to do in the first place). Yet when we view our heroes, we tend to look to these ideals. That’s good. But we tend to also miss the point that these ideals aren’t necessarily realistic.

Beni is reality.

So when we dislike or dismiss Beni, we’re really dismissing ourselves. We’re ignoring who we often are in favor of who we want to be, and while it’s worthwhile to aspire to be like any number of amazing people (both fictional and real), it’s also important to realize that life isn’t always like that. Beni would never make a great protagonist, especially in an action adventure story. He’ll never be the guy to kill the monster or save the day, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve our sympathy. The world would probably be a lot better if we saw ourselves and those around us as Beni, just ordinary people trying to get by in an unpredictable, frustrating world.

Beni isn’t the hero.

But he is us.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

Clean Plate Club (short fiction)

Divine Misfortune

 

The goddess of the underworld stared across the table at Taavi. Hel stared at the boy with her two pitiless black eyes, and she frowned.

“Finish your broccoli,” she said.

Taavi pushed the plate away. “They’re yucky.”

“No, they’re not. They’re yummy and good for you.”
She plucked a piece of green in her long, thin fingers and tossed it into her mouth. She chewed with a forced smile and swallowed. She stuck out her tongue.

“All right, so they’re not yummy. But they are good for you, and your mom said you need to be part of the clean plate club.”

Taavi turned up his nose.

“If you don’t eat your vegetables,” said Hel. “You could end up dying, dragged down to my realm of eternal, endless night.” Two skeletal warriors sprang up behind her chair and hissed at him. “Now a bit of broccoli isn’t too much of a price to pay to avoid that, is it?”

Taavi smiled. “I liked the underworld. It was fun.”

Hel grunted. She’d only babysat one weekend, but it’d given the young man the idea that the afterlife was all bounce houses and s’mores.

Idunn stepped into the dining room. “Who wants pie?”

Hel hastily dismissed her skeletal servants, but not before Idunn noticed them. The fertility goddess shook her head. “What did we tell you about trying to scare Taavi?”

“He doesn’t scare,” said Hel. “He likes skeletons. Right?”

Taavi nodded with a big grin. “Skeletons are cool.”

Idunn set the pie on the table.

“Apple,” said Hel. “Again.”

“What’s wrong with apple?” asked Idunn. “Taavi likes apple. Don’t you, sweetheart?”

“It’s my favorite.” He reached for it.

Grinning, Hel put her finger on the pie, and it started to rot. “Eat your broccoli or the pie gets it.”

“Hey, I made that for Taavi,” said Idunn.

“And I’m teaching him a lesson. Sometimes, you have to do what you don’t want to do for your own good.”

Hel smiled and the pie bubbled and blackened and deflated. Shadows crept along the dining room walls and cackled with sinister glee.

Taavi folded his arms and sneered at his plate. “I don’t like pie anyway.”

Idunn snatched away the pie. She’d made it with her special apples, so once out of contact with Hel, it popped back to life as fresh as before. The shadows groaned as they disappeared.

“Your Auntie Hel has a point,” said Idunn. “You can’t have dessert until you’ve proven yourself worthy of it. An unearned reward will never taste as sweet as one you’ve fought for. So eat your vegetables.” She set the pie down and sat at the table, cutting a slice for Hel and herself. “Or you can just sit there until your mom gets home. It’s your call.”

Taavi sat there. He never wavered. He never even picked up his fork.

“Stubborn little shit,” grumbled Hel as she cleaned the table, leaving only Taavi’s hated nemesis behind.

“Language now,” said Idunn.

“Are they all like that?” wondered Hel.

“Demigods?”

“Nine year olds.”

Freya came home a little while later. She kicked off her shoes and sat on the sofa.

“Long day?” asked Idunn.

“Usual. Thanks for babysitting on such short notice,” said Freya.

“No problem,” said Hel. “We love the kid. But we couldn’t get him to eat his broccoli.”

Freya went to the dining room and kissed Taavi on the head. “I hear someone doesn’t like his vegetables.”

“They’re yucky.”

“Yes, they are,” she waved her hand over the plate, and the broccoli started to wiggle. “They’re yucky and gross and horrible, and they want to eat you.” The broccoli growled and jumped off its plate. “And they’ll do just that if you don’t eat them first!”

A sprout hurled itself at him. He caught it and threw it into his mouth with a gleeful laugh.

“Kids and demi-gods aren’t that complicated,” said Freya as she went to change out of her work clothes.

“Oh, I’ll go get the pie,” said Idunn as she went to the kitchen.

Hel smiled and shook her head as the broccoli shrieked as it ran in all directions, and Taavi chased it around the room, gobbling it like a hungry giant, giggling with delight.

Hoarded (short fiction)

Wren & Hess

 

The ancient dragon Vulzarnius-too-many-syllables-for-most-people-to-bother-pronouncing had been there before the city had been founded. As the decades passed and the city grew, it was assumed that one day the dragon would either move away or have to be convinced to. In the end, neither was required. The city engulfed Vulz’s lair, and she seemed not to mind. Her cave, sitting in the middle of a quiet neighborhood, no longer seemed out of place, and her neighbors never had reason to complain.

She, however, had complaints now and then. Wren and Hess were usually dispatched to take these complaints. The Tower thought that the dragon would be more at ease dealing with a lizardman, which wasn’t true, but they were constables. They did as they were told.

Hess knocked on the great iron doors mounted on Vulz’s cave. The immense dragon could be heard rustling around deep within her lair. Her every step caused a slight tremor. The flower beds framing the cave rustled as she thudded to the door and opened the slot. Her bright green eyes glared down at Wren and Hess. Her voice rumbled like a miniature earthquake.

“Who’s there?”

“Constables from the Tower,” said Wren.

The dragon studied them for a moment, assessing their trustworthiness.

“You called in a complaint, didn’t you?” asked Wren.

“Indeed, I did.” The iron doors clattered and clanged as she undid its many locks. The doors creaked open and the blue-scaled behemoth stood before them. The midday light glinted off her scales. She was a beautiful, frightening creature. “Well, don’t just stand there. Come in, come in.”

She ushered them inside, slamming the doors closed and locking them again. Light filtered around the edges of the cave entrance, but it was otherwise too dark for Wren to see a damn thing other than Vulz’s eyes, glowing in the blackness.

“This way,” said Vulz as she stomped past Wren and Hess. Something massive swung over their heads, perhaps a foot or a tail.

Wren found her torchstone and gave it a good shake. It cast a pinkish glow. Enough to enable her to get around. Hess didn’t need one. He never had any trouble navigating in the darkness. They followed Vulz deeper into her lair.

“What seems to be the problem?” said Hess, as if they didn’t know. It was always the same complaint. The only complaint a dragon willingly surrounded by a city could ever have.

“Thieves,” she said.

They walked past stacks of old scrolls and tin scraps, small mountains of rusted swords and broken axes. Dark shapes lurking in the junk retreated from the light. Rats. And other things best left unseen.

Vulz led them to a hanging cage holding two dwarves and a gnome. The would-be treasure seekers perked up at Wren and Hess’s arrival.

“Oh, thank the gods you’re here,” said one of them. “We thought she was going to eat us all.”

“How distasteful,” said Vulz.

“You ate Bob,” said the gnome.

Wren fixed the dragon with a disapproving glare.

“Well, maybe I ate one,” said Vulz. “But I assure you it was a self-defense devouring. He had a knife.”

“No, he didn’t,” said the gnome.

“He could’ve had a knife.”

“We’ve talked about this before, Vulz,” said Hess.

The dragon flapped her golden wings in a shrug. “I’m the victim here.”

“Yes, but you can’t eat every idiot who thinks they’ll make their fortune by lair raiding.”

“Yes, civilization and all that, I suppose,” she said indifferently as she unhooked the cage and set it on the floor beside a pile of moldy robes.

The thieves were let out of the cage and escorted back to the surface. Vulz gave a quick statement. The same statement she’d given countless of times before, and then the terrible dragon slammed her doors and retreated into her darkness to brood.

“I don’t get it,” said one of the thieves. “You said there would be treasure. Where was it?”

“Deeper in the cave,” replied his compatriot. “It has to be there.”

Wren didn’t bother correcting him. The great dragon Vulzarnius-yada-yada-yada had always been a peculiar sort. Her treasures were all those discarded bits and pieces of the city around her, but there would always be those who sought riches among the refuse. Even Wren thought there must be some gold or jewels hidden somewhere though the only proof was that Vulz paid her taxes somehow. Even then, it was usually in tarnished coins and costume jewelry. The Tower didn’t make a big deal of it since Vulz didn’t cause any trouble.

“I’m telling you it’s in there,” said the gnome. “I saw it hidden under a pile of wet bulletins.”

Wren and Hess exchanged knowing glances. No one had ever come out of Vulz’s lair with more than promises of wealth, but promises were powerful things. Enough to keep sending dreamers and fools to the dungeons or the belly of a mostly civilized dragon.

The Muppets

I find people’s reaction to the new Muppet show to be more interesting than the show itself. (Though I did like the show.)

There’s something fascinating about seeing the multiple and varying interpretations these characters can create. Perhaps because the Muppets have been around so long and have such a special place in many people’s perceptions, it’s only natural that everyone has their own unique idea of what the Muppets are.

Strangely, I find all those interpretations to be universally wrong. Just as when someone tries to tell me about the “Best” version of Batman. There honestly isn’t a best version. There’s a version you prefer over other versions.

So it is that people want something different from the Muppets depending on why they like them. For some, they’ll always be silly puppet characters. For others, subversive slapstick. For still others, clever wordplay and all-ages innocence.

(It doesn’t help any that the Muppets are actually two brands, the educational Sesame Street group and the comedic Muppet Show group with almost no crossover outside of Kermit. There are jokes that work for the Comedic Muppets that would never fly with the Sesame Street Muppets and vice versa.)

Even more interesting is the arrival of our own personal politics and relationship dynamics as best embodied by the varied reactions to Miss Piggy and Kermit’s “break up”. Some see it as Kermit being a jerk and leaving Miss Piggy for a younger woman. Some see it as Miss Piggy being an abuser and Kermit making the healthy decision to leave her. There’s accusations of fat shaming and shallowness, etc. It’s strange stuff when we’re talking about a frog and a pig dating.

My own thoughts: The Muppets is both NOT The Muppet Show and still very much related to it. It takes the basic premise, Muppets running a show, and updates it. It takes a popular formula (and let’s be honest, the original Muppet Show was tweaking an established formula) and tries to do its own thing with it.

Yet it feels very Muppets to me because in the end, it’s largely about the relationships the characters have with each other. Kermit and Miss Piggy have always had a contentious relationship. Fozzy has always been a bad comic, eager to please. Scooter is the clueless gopher. Rizzo is the schemer. Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem are a bunch of spacey musicians. And the dynamics at play are what makes the Muppets what they are.

Is it immune to criticism? No. And after only one episode, it’s difficult to know if the show will be able to establish its own identity. But the pieces are there, and the update’s only crime as far I’m concerned is that the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia will always make the past versions seem somehow more pure, more perfect.

But one thing is for certain. The Muppets endure because, somehow, they have more personality than most fictional characters can ever hope to have. Somehow, they feel like people we know who matter to us. We debate these things because they have life.

And that’s pretty amazing for a bunch of forty year old puppets.

20 Minutes into the Future

I don’t think people like shows set in the Near Future. I don’t know why, but they almost never make it.

If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it has something to do with the setting being both too unfamiliar and too familiar at the same time. Even if the setting is basically “20 Minutes into the Future”, it still tends to confuse your average person.

I think too it’s because your average person will start dissecting the setting for plausibility. Every little piece of technology introduced into the setting will be dissected for its believability, and inevitably, something will come across as too unrealistic for your average person.

You don’t have that problem with shows set in the Far Future. In a hundred years, a thousand, it doesn’t seem weird to have ray guns or spaceships or telepathic people. But fifty years from now…it just doesn’t feel right to most people.

Of course, it’s all looking at it from the wrong angle. The premise of these Near Future shows isn’t to create a plausible future but simply to tell interesting stories with a few fantastic elements. I look at all stories set in the future to take place in alternate universes. No more relevant to the believability of what the future will look like than Middle Earth is to how the ancient world was. But most people can’t make that hurdle.

So Minority Report had a decent premiere episode, but I don’t think it’ll make it. If it was set in the now with a man who could see the future or set a thousand years from now, maybe, but 20 Mins into Tomorrow is probably too big a leap for the average viewer to make.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE