A. Lee Martinez's Blog, page 30

Needs (short fiction)

She didn’t want to go out tonight. She never did.

“You could stay with me,” he said.

Snow swirled outside the window. It was a cold, dark night, but she’d seen colder and darker. They both had.

She started getting dressed.

“They’re waiting for me,” she said.

“One of these nights, you won’t make it back,” he said.

He was right.

“They need me.”

“I need you too.”

She closed her eyes. “I can’t have this conversation again.”

“Then stay. You’re just delaying the inevitable. You’re not doing them any favors.”

He was right. She hated him for it. She hated him. In a different world, she’d have had nothing to do with him. But that was the old world. Things were complicated now.

He took her hand and kissed it. “Stay.”

“And what about them?” she asked.

“What about them?”

She wished she could bring them here, but it would never work out. They weren’t welcome. He’d made that clear.

She pulled away. “I have to go. Don’t make this harder.”

He shrugged. “Okay. When will I see you again?”

“I don’t know.” She eyed her bag of scavenged canned goods. It’d last a week. Maybe ten days if they rationed properly.

He rolled over and went to sleep.

God, she wanted to stay. It was warm. He wanted her, but he didn’t need her. He could survive on his own. He was a luxury. Not a responsibility, not a lost cause. Everyone measured survival in days now, but with him, there were more days ahead. She was being stupid, throwing away what little was left of her life for them.

She couldn’t leave them.

She bundled up and trekked through the endless winter. It didn’t snow much anymore, but the snow never melted. She trudged through the gray, making it back to her home. It wasn’t as warm as his. The roof sagged. It’d fall in one of these days.

She opened the door, and the three dogs came running up to her. They danced around in circles and yipped. They needed her in a way he never would.

She shared a canned of corned beef with them by the dying fire.

. . . For a Dollar (short fiction)

There was a fortune waiting out there, just waiting for the right person to come along and find it. Brisby had spent decades scouring the darkest, most obscure corners of the universe in search of his. Those places nobody thought worth much because all the worthwhile places had been claimed. But the universe was big, and Brisby refused to believe that all its secrets had been discovered.

Optimism had always been his greatest asset. His only asset, really. He wasn’t smart or handsome. He wasn’t skilled or talented. He got by, but always he believed, there was something better waiting for him beyond the next jump gate, on the next forgotten world. He would always believe it.
It wasn’t always easy. Like these moments. He’d gone too long without picking up food, though he didn’t eat food anymore. Food was too expensive, and all his money went to fuel and ship maintenance. He subsisted on ration discs and protein gruel. Now he was even out of those, so he was down to scavenging for edibles.

He disembarked his ship and started digging up wurbs. According to the only previous party to land on T432X-B, the large, black Platyhelminthes were disgusting but edible. Poisonous to the native life forms, they’d never developed a defense to anything that might be willing to eat them. He scooped them out of the ground by the handfuls and dumped them into his pail.

You couldn’t cook them. They melted into inedible goo when heat was applied. They had to be eaten alive, raw, and room temperature. Brisby had done a lot of stuff to survive, and he would do this, too.

He took a wurb in hand and holding his nose, slurped it down. It was surprisingly easy. Ration discs and protein gruel had obliterated his gag reflex, and it’d been so long since he’d eaten real food that the wurb almost tasted good. Almost.

A native sapient, a lanky bird-like humanoid, stepped from the underbrush and approached Brisby. It turned its head to and fro as if studying a puzzle. It blinked its wide blue eyes and chirped. The sapient knocked the bucket over and tried to induce vomiting by pulling on Brisby’s head.

He pushed it away. “No, not poisonous to me.”
He swallowed another cold, wriggling wurb and smiled. “See? Safe.”
It fell silent as he ate a third. The wurbs weren’t tasting any better. He kept a forced smile so the sapient would understand.

The sapient cawed with a strange cackle, almost like laughter. It kicked another wurb toward Brisby, who held up his hand. “No, thanks. I’m full.”
The sapient shrieked, running back into the underbrush. Brisby dropped to his knees in the muck and gathered his meals for the next six to eight weeks. He’d loaded three bucketful when the sapient returned. It tossed a small black stone at his feet. The scanner on his hip pinged.

He wiped the stone clean. Gold.

The sapient snatched back the rock and gestured toward the bucket of wurbs.

“I’ll eat that for a dollar,” said Brisby. He slurped down a wurb, making a big show of it for the sapient. Chewing and smacking his lips and belching with a wurb-eating grin.

The sapient threw him the gold and, cackling, ran into the woods. Brisby pocketed the stone. It wasn’t much but it was promising. He was ever an optimistic soul, but it was nice to get some positive reinforcement now and then.

Dozens of sapients burst from the brush. They dropped bits of gold, silver, and other precious metals before him and waited, wide-eyed, silently.

There was a fortune out there, just waiting for the right person to come along and find it.

Brisby never told anyone how he made his.

10,000 Times (short fiction)

Jana flicked stones while she waited. She reached into the bucket of small, flat pebbles, took aim at a spot in the wall, and with a snap of her fingers, flung them against the wall, one by one. Always hitting the same spot. In the space of thirty minutes, she’d knocked a small dent in the wall.

The door opened. Her second entered.

“They’re ready for you,” he said.

Jana didn’t think about what she’d be facing or what was at stake. She’d learned to avoid thinking about those things. They would only distract and confuse her. She grabbed a handful of stones and stuck them in her pocket. She walked down the long hall with her second, who also said nothing.

They entered the arena. In all her training, she’d never attempted to visualize it. And now that she was here, she was glad she hadn’t wasted her time. It was an unremarkable pit of stone and dirt, stained with the blood, stinking of death. The audience gazed down in indifferent silence at this slight woman stepping into their Ring of Trials.

This was her people’s last hope. Or it was where their tombstone would be planted. She pushed aside the thought, rolled a stone between her fingers.
Proclamations were made. She didn’t listen. The ceremony was nothing more than a disguise of civility to be thrown over the brutal madness that was the Ring.

Her second tapped her on the shoulder.

Jana raised her head. Someone had been talking to her.

“Are you the champion of your village?” asked the arena master, a thin figure in red robes.

“Yes.”

“And you accept the infallible judgment of this Ring?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t, but she didn’t have a choice.

The master and Jana’s second left the arena. Jana stood there alone. The gates were thrown wide and the Wrath of Gods lumbered forth. There were those who said it was a dragon, older than any, with scales so thick as to be invincible and a mind lost to the ravages of time. Others believed it to be the discarded hate of the gods themselves, thrown to the world of mortals as punishment for its sins. And others said it was nothing but death itself.

Nobody survived the Wrath of Gods.

It lumbered forward on stiff legs. Its baleful white eyes studied her with cold rage. Its twisted, tattered wings flapped as if trying to carrying it aloft. It was a horrible thing, but Jana saw it too as pitiable. How long had it been trapped in this pit, feeding off the scraps of lost souls who dared face its challenge in their final moments of desperation?

She was grateful for the pity. It would make this easier.

She rolled the stone between her fingers.

The Wrath of Gods charged.

Jana flicked.

Dead Guy (Nanowrimo)

Here’s another excerpt from Dead Guy, my experiment in Nanowrimo.

She was hideous. There was no other way to describe her. Colorless, almost transparent, skin. No nose. Blood red eyes. Pointed teeth. Just enough thin hair on her head to be not bald. Dangerously thin, like a bundle of sticks brought to life.

“Are you the dead guy?” she asked.

“I am,” I said.

She smiled with her crooked mouth, chewed on a cigarette tucked between barely there lips. “You don’t look very dead to me.”

I didn’t. Not compared to her. Compared to her, I was the picture of health. If the two of us went walking down the street, side-by-side, I wouldn’t be the one people noticed. I wouldn’t make babies cry and grown adults recoil.

“I’m dead,” I said.

“So am I,” she replied, as if I hadn’t guessed already. “Sucks, right?”

“Sucks,” I agreed.

She came closer. There was a way she moved, like she was stalking something. Her long thin limbs swayed like snakes attached to her torso. Her skinny jeans weren’t skinny enough, held in place by a belt she’d had to punch holes in. I got the impression that, despite it all, there was a hypnotic presence to her walk. Like a tiger’s steady stride as a gazelle stood transfixed by the coming doom.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” she asked.

“What’s to talk about?” I replied.

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Should I be?”

“You? No. You’re the dead guy. Why would I hurt you? Not that I could. Nothing hurts you, right?”

“Nothing so far.”

She chuckled. “What’s it like? Being invulnerable?”

I shrugged. “Can I help you with something?”

“Just thought I should introduce myself, seeing as how we’re neighbors. I’m Rhonda. Like the song, if that’ll help you remember.”

“What song?”

“Oh, come on. You have to know the song. Everybody knows the fucking song. Beach Boys. Help me, Rhonda. Don’t make me hum it.”

She waited for me to say something.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself? It’s the polite thing to do.”

“Charlie,” I replied.

“Like the song?”

I nodded like I understood.

“Charlie Brown,” she said. “He’s a clown.”

“I thought he was a comic strip character,” I said.

“He can be both.”

I stepped inside my apartment. Rhonda glanced over my shoulder. “Nice place. Are you going to invite me in?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“Come on, Charlie. Two dead people. We should hang.”

“Maybe some other time,” I said as I closed the door.

“Sure. Some other time.”

The door clicked shut.

“See you around, Charlie,” she shouted from the other side of the door. It sounded like a threat, and somewhere, deep down, where a little piece of me was still human, I dreaded it.

Dead Guy (nanowrimo experiment)

Hey, everyone.  In case you didn’t know, Nanowrimo is a thing where people try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month.  I just finished a project and thought I’d play around with it.  So here’s my beginning.  I doubt I’ll finish it in that time because I have a few other obligations this month, including Windycon in Chicago, where I will be the Author Guest of Honor (so you should probably check that out).

Anyway, here it is.  Hope you enjoy it.

The bad news was that I was dead.

The worse news was that I wasn’t quite dead enough.

They had a room in the county morgue where they kept not-quite-dead people. It wasn’t much. Just a couple of chairs and a rack of old magazines. I flipped through a five year old copy of People without reading it and waited. I’d hoped being dead meant my waiting days were over.

A man in a suit entered. He had the demeanor of a person in charge, but not in a bludgeoning manner. He was calm, like a guy who had seen it all and knew how to deal with it. You only had to be smart enough to listen to him.

“Hello, Mr. Harker,” The Specialist said. “Having an interesting day, I see.”

“Yes.”

He sat in the chair beside me.

“You’re aware you died?”

“So they tell me. I woke up in a drawer.”

I hadn’t believed them at first. Until I noticed the stillness. A living body makes a lot of noise. Squishing. Gurgling. Whooshing. Thumping. All that was gone now. You don’t notice a heartbeat. It’s always there. Until it isn’t. It’s disquieting when it’s gone.

“I understand how strange this must be for you, but rest assured, there are protocols in place to help with your transition.”

“Great,” I said. “So am I a zombie?”

“Zombie is a pejorative term,” he replied. “Also, it’s not even accurate. The original word comes from Haitian voodoo, and means a person stripped of their free will to act as a slave. Popular culture would have you believe any dead person walking around is a zombie, but that’s an oversimplification. And let’s not even get into the craving for human flesh cliche.”

“I’m not going to eat people then?”

“Not unless you want to. Do you want to?”

“No.”

I didn’t want to eat anything. Eating was something living things did to keep on going. I wasn’t alive.

“What am I?”

“You’re a revenant, a formerly living person returned to a semblance of life through sheer willpower.”

“I am?”

That didn’t sound like me.

“Can you tell me why you’re here?” he asked.

“I thought you were here to tell me that.”

“No, I mean, can you tell me what you want to do. Right now.”

I thought about it for a few moments. I didn’t have a goddamn clue what I wanted to do.

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “Interesting.”

He said it with pity, like commenting on a three-legged dog hopping around.

“There’s nothing on your mind?” he asked again.

“No.”

“I see.”

“Is that bad?” I asked.

“No. Unusual, but not necessarily bad. Revenants usually have a singular focus on whatever compelled them to return from the grave. It’s what drives them, often to an all-consuming obsession.”

I searched my soul (assuming I still had one) for that thing that compelled me. I dug deep into the depths of myself, and I came up empty.

“Shit.”

“I wouldn’t worry, Mr. Harker,” he said. “These things sort themselves out. According to the coroner’s report, you were found in your room, victim of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. Your death was ruled a suicide, but now that we know this isn’t true, we’ll look into it.”

“How do you know it isn’t true?” I asked.

“Revenants and suicide don’t mix. A pathological will to live is what defines a revenant. So perhaps it is a desire to see your murderer brought to justice that returned you to life.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“Just the same, do you have any suspects in mind?”

“I know who killed me,” I said.

“Terrific. Give us a name and we’ll see what we can do about it.”

I stared at my pallid hands holding the magazine that I’d been flipping through without purpose. The cold, dead fingers of a cold, dead man.

“I did.”

###

They didn’t believe me at first. Nobody who killed themselves came back as a revenant. People who had sacrificed their lives in pursuit of a goal and those who had died by their own reckless endangerment, sure, that was always possible. But in order to come back from the dead the way I had, you had to want to live.
I’d never wanted to live.

I hadn’t always wanted to die, but passion for life, I’d never had that. Blame it on my childhood or bad brain chemistry or what have you, but even as a kid, I’d viewed life as something to be endured. I’d walked the line between apathy and depression for as long as I could remember, and depression had finally won out.

And now I was back. Back to that thing I’d never liked that much to begin with. The peace of the grave was out of my reach, and when I asked if there was a way to get it, the city’s specialist said the only known method was to achieve the goal that had brought me back.

I didn’t have one of those.

“What about a bullet to the head?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Fire? Decapitation? Stake through the heart?”

“Sorry.”

“There has to be a way,” I said.

“Only two. Achieve that goal that brought you back. Or lose your will to live.”

“I don’t have a will to live.”

“Apparently. It’s a conundrum.”

“So I’m alive. Alive-ish. Forever.”

“Forever is a long time,” he said. “But it’s theoretically possible.”

It was the final cruel joke of a universe that had always been fucking with me, and I laughed. Genuinely amused. Maybe for the first time in my whole life and whatever this was.

The Book of Life (movie review)

The Book of Life is a good movie and one that I recommend.  Before I get into a more in-depth exploration of my thoughts on the movie, take that away from the top.  The movie has some problems, but they aren’t insurmountable and only distracting in retrospect.  We’ll start with the negatives first.

There’s one big problem with The Big of Life.  There’s simply too much plot going on in this film.  There is easily enough here for two or three movies, and while the over-stuffed plot manages to not be distracting, it does short change each of these elements.  This could best be illustrated by asking what is the central conflict and theme at work here.  Is it a love story?  Is it about learning to be true to yourself?  Is it about the temptations of power?  The strength of the common people to rise up against bullies? Respect for the dead (and our past, by extension)? Finding the courage to struggle against impossible odds to overcome incredible obstacles?  Animal cruelty? Family?

Yes.  It’s about all these things.

That’s a lot to cram into a story.  Especially an all-ages story.  The reason I tend to enjoy all-ages media is that, when done right, it seeks to simplify storytelling, to cut right to the heart of what makes a story work.  Book goes the opposite way, accidentally or intentionally piling on a number of themes that, while not quite getting in each others’ ways, don’t do each other any favors.

The love story could work on its own.  Or the journey through the underworld.  Or the journey out of the underworld.  Or the struggle against banditos who threaten the town.  And so on and so on.

In addition, there’s a completely superfluous framing device where the story is being told by a narrator to a group of children. I don’t know why this was put in. Perhaps it is there to justify the visuals of the movie or to have the narrator simply tell the audience what the stakes are. It smacks of focus grouped nonsense, an over-explanation and justification for things we don’t need.  The story could be told via its puppet aesthetics without having to explain why it chooses to do so. And there’s a great underestimation of the audience to stop and tell the audience why a plot point or scene is important. These could be removed entirely and the movie would definitely be stronger for it.

But in the end, I still think this is a very good movie, mostly because of its unique visual experience and some interesting design choices. The most obvious and compelling are its wooden puppet aesthetic. All the characters resemble puppets. Except for the bandit king, who actually looks as if he’s made of iron. Being a fantastic version of the real world, the characters and their world is full of amazing life. From the land of the living to the lands of the dead, this film is a visual feast.

Furthermore, the Mexican musical flavor is sprinkled throughout. The story’s choice to use mainstream pop songs could be disappointing, but by taking the familiar and tweaking them with a Mexican spice, it manages to be both familiar and new at once.

Visually and musically, this film is a unique marvel. It has way too many stories going on at once, but they aren’t too distracting. A story edit would’ve ended up with a stronger film, but what they ended up with was good and well worth our time.  Highly recommended.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

 

The Dangerous Inner Lives of Superheroes

So the new Age of Ultron trailer is out, and it looks like standard stuff at this point.  Being the middle part of a planned trilogy, it has elected (unsurprisingly) for The Empire Strikes Back route, going darker, more serious, and, yes, even a bit pretentious.  I know I’m in a pretty small minority when I say Empire is easily my least favorite of the original trilogy.  It might be the “darkest” of the original trilogy, but as I’ve said before, “dark” doesn’t equal “maturity”.  It’s safe to say that the theme of this one will be the Avengers getting their comeuppance after the triumph of their previous film.  In the original comic books, Ultron is an evil robot built by Hank Pym and one of Pym’s greatest mistakes.  No doubt, this new Ultron will be a creation of Iron Man, and the Avengers, instead of sweeping in to save the day will be stuck cleaning up their own mess.  I would be incredibly surprised if it doesn’t end with the Avengers being officially disbanded and a strong downer (read “mature”) element.

But then I remember that, despite that, this is a movie featuring the Hulk fighting Hulkbuster Armor (which to my knowledge has never ever beaten the Hulk, so maybe he should call it Hulk-irritating Armor), where a god, a supersoldier, and a guy who is really, really good at archery all team up to keep an evil robot from destroying humanity.  Low expectations aside, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is incorporating every gonzo element of the superhero genre, and this looks to continue expanding that idea.  If it pulls an Empire, I’ll probably be cool with it if the Vision shows up and is really awesome.

With the continuation of superheroes into the mainstream and no sign of it slowing down, this is as good a time as any then to share my thoughts on the superhero genre.  It is perhaps my favorite genre.  It’s definitely the one I grew up with, like a lot of young fantasy fans.  It isn’t without its flaws.

I’m not the first (or the millionth) to observe that superheroes often represent a strange brand of heroism.  One of might makes right and preservation of the status quo.  They accidentally (or even on purpose sometimes) equate physical power with justice, and most superheroes, by their nature, are devoted to keeping things from changing.  They usually have good justifications for that, but it doesn’t change the fact that it isn’t unfair to call much of the superhero genre escapist power fantasies devoted to the defeat of anyone who dares to break societies taboos.

This isn’t always a bad thing.  If Dr. Doom wants to enslave all of the Earth to his iron will, then when The Fantastic Four stop him, it’s a black-and-white issue.  Lex Luthor (even in his current corrupt executive form) is a guy with questionable ethics, willing to do whatever he thinks he can get away with, in pursuit of his own power.  Bad guys like Loki or Galactus operate on such a different scale that much of the real world parallels fall out the window.  Yet even when these villains are clearly wrong, the message is always the same:  The systems in place are already as good as they’re going to get and any change is a bad thing.

As a longtime Thor fan, Loki has always been an interesting character to me.  I’m not talking about the movie version, which is okay, but way too whiny and insecure for my tastes.  The comic book version of Loki is a complex character wrestling with his own egotism, insecurities, and incredible power.  He seeks the throne of Asgard, and yet is constantly told he is unworthy.  Meanwhile, he watches everyone declaring Thor’s awesomeness as Thor continually turns down the throne when offered to him.  That has to hurt, and one can hardly blame Loki for finding that insulting.  This is Marvel’s Asgard, after all, where Ragnarok breaks out with surprising regularity.  And Loki has been a great ally on more than one occasion.  And let’s not pretend as if Odin has always made the right decisions.

Okay, so a lot of this is accidental politics.  The reason Loki isn’t on the throne is because he’s more interesting as a villain than as a king.  The reason Thor doesn’t claim the throne is because he’s more exciting running around the universe, fighting bad guys, than serving as chief administrator for a kingdom.  But accidental or not, the message is clear.  Odin sits on the throne, and any0one who thinks it should be different is wrong.

The parallel could be drawn with my favorite villain: Dr. Doom.  Doom is a supreme genius and believes he should run the world.  There’s no doubt that Doom is egotistical and power-hungry, but the question of whether he would be a good ruler isn’t an easy one.  Some writers have presented his home country of Latvaria as a prosperous, relatively happy place where everything is fine as long as nobody does anything to piss Doom off.  The problem with this portrayal is that it often undercuts the notion of Doom as a nefarious villain.  It’s not as if the leaders of real world countries are not capable of atrocities, egotism, and corruption.  Sure, Doom enforces his will with robots and death rays, but that’s superficial differences really.

I have no doubt that Doom has little care for his fellow humans, but the guy does enjoy playing at being “regal” which means noblesse oblige.  He’s also smart enough to realize feeding people is easier than suppressing constant rebellion.  To be sure, if Doom took over the world, there would be a massive rise in the number of Dr. Doom statues across the world and certain freedoms would be lost, but Doom would most likely be a benevolent overlord in his own fashion.  I’m not endorsing Doom for President, but given the dysfunctional nature of our own real world, I’m not sure how radically different it would be.

Yet this status quo remains even on a smaller level.  Batman won’t ever kill the Joker.  The story reason is that Batman doesn’t kill people.  The practical reason is that it’s hard to have a recurring villain roster when your hero kills his rogue’s gallery.  (The Punisher has never maintained a stable of recurring villains for exactly this reason.)  So Batman, protector of Gotham City, spends most his time maintaining a very deliberate status quo.  Sure, he’s Gotham’s protector, but he’s also its enabler.  This isn’t even getting into the real world questions of whether all the money he’s spent as Batman might be better served improving quality of life in the city itself or the rather absurd philosophy that it’s okay to beat the hell out of people just as long as you don’t kill them in the process.

None of these questions were ever meant to be asked of the superhero genre.  Some writers have asked them anyway and written some interesting stories by doing so.  But real world issues popping up in superhero stories is difficult territory, often better left unexplored.  I don’t need to watch Batman beat up on muggers because muggers are a real life problem, created by real life societal failings.  But killer clowns with deadly laughing gas, that’s safely in the realm of absurdity.  It’s not that the stories need be goofy or irrelevant to our own lives.  It’s just that the relevancy should be tangential, not in your face.  It runs the risk of belittling real world complexities and making superheroes look stupid.

The truth though, if we can admit it, is that there IS an aspect of power fantasy at work in nearly all superhero stories.  We are almost always asked to identify with an individual of great power who is the only one capable of righting wrongs and saving the day.  Bruce Wayne doesn’t stop the Joker by calling the police.  No, he dives in, fists first, and beats some justice into him.  And while I enjoy the action adventure and superhero genre, there are times when even I find that notion uncomfortable.  The Avengers is a great flick, but it boils down to a story about an army of evil outsiders invading the world and only a handful of righteous asskickers being capable of stopping them.  As escapism, it works.  As character studies and thrilling adventure, it works.  As a format designed to showcase a bunch of cool superheroes with amazing powers in cool fights, it works.  As a great way of dealing with real world problems, well, that’s a bit trickier.

True, there are times when physical force is required.  There are times when the only way to protect ourselves is with violence, and there’s little point in denying it.  The evil alien army that invades Earth in Avengers isn’t interested in discussion or negotiation.  They’re here to destroy us, and so we can destroy them in turn.  But what about the scene where Thor and Iron Man fight it out?  These are our heroes, and instead of talking, they immediately start duking it out.  This is superhero tradition, and it’s mostly there because it’s a cool reason to have a fight.  But it also highlights a problem with superheroes.  Even when dealing with each other, their first instinct is to punch and zap each other.  Even among themselves, violence often takes the place of otherwise civil discussion.

Avengers gets away with this a bit because Captain America shows up, puts an end to the fight by pointing out how ridiculous the fight is, but even then, this is more to highlight Cap’s leadership abilities rather than any comment on the assumed virtue of violence among these warrior gods.

It’s easy to say this is all overanalysis.  Indeed, it is.  But it’s only through overanalysis that we can safely enjoy fantasy.  Understanding the fantastic and ridiculous nature of Batman allows us to enjoy his stories without (hopefully) buying into the worldview presented.  The evil aliens of Avengers are a plot device, intentionally and cartoonishly evil, and we shouldn’t apply the same simplified Kill-Em-All attitude toward real life enemies.  We should be able to enjoy watching Thor and Iron Man fight it out without having to endorse the notion that the power of one’s fists determines the strength of one’s argument.

We should.

Sadly, this isn’t always the case.  Even deconstructions of these power fantasies often fail to leave the right impression.  There are people who read Watchman thinking it would be cool to be Rorschach, though the story is unapologetic in its portrayal of Rorschach (and indeed all its characters) as troubled, deeply flawed, and unworthy of admiration.  There are still writers who love to write stories where Batman beats the hell out of muggers, even after the muggers have been subdued.  And in the end, there is a visceral thrill in watching the Incredible Hulk smash cars with his bare hands and Superman punch a spaceship through a building.

It is, I’ll admit, a difficult nut to crack.  Violence is a part of who we are, and indulging those tendencies in stories is a healthy outlet.  There’s also something really awesome about stories about fantastic beings in strange adventures.  It’s a very real sense of wonder that I think is worth preserving.  One of my favorite comics of all time is an all splash page battle between Thor and the Midgard Serpent.  It’s epic and titanic and full of amazing, glorious adrenaline fueled fury.  But it’s not the real world, and I never thought it was.

In my own stories, I find violence to be less enticing.  Too often, a hero’s virtue is found in their ability to kick ass.  This is why Nessy and Emperor Mollusk rank among my favorite characters.  Nessy, the kobold housekeeper from Too Many Curses, is defined by her organizational skills and positive, pragmatic attitude.  Emperor, the evil genius space squid from Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain, is certainly capable of violence, but he’d much rather solve problems with his intellect than destruction.  Though the two elements are often tied together in an admittedly unhealthy manner in his case.

(Excuse the plugs.  I do have bills to pay.)

And here’s where we get to the real issue.  We like violence.  We like to believe, on some primordial level, that if we just punched all the bad people the world would be a better place.  We have always been (and perhaps always will be) convinced that if we bust enough heads everything will be just fine.  Not to drag real world issues into it, but everything from politics to crime prevention to the countless wars across the globe are built on this notion that intimidation, threats, and power in the right hands are how to solve problems.  I don’t blame superheroes for instilling a simplified worldview in us.  Rather, I note that superheroes speak to the simplified worldview we already have within us.

The final question then is this:  Can we love our superheroes without feeding that simplified, might-makes-right attitude?  I honestly don’t know.  I, like most most people, like to believe that being a fan of superheroes doesn’t mean I have to believe in their most commonly presented philosophy?  But doesn’t everyone?  Don’t we all have our blind spots?  Don’t we all have someone, some person, some group that we’d like to punch until they stopped being a thorn in our sides?

We are, after all, only human.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

Maybe (short fiction)

He wondered who she was. He didn’t know. He would never know. In a city of millions, she was just another nameless face, lost in the crowd, devoured by indifference. He often wondered, if he’d met her while she’d still been alive, if she would’ve liked him, if he would’ve liked her.

Probably not. He’d met plenty of runaways before, and they were damaged goods. They only saw him as a cop who hassled them, and they weren’t wrong. He did hassle them. He shooed them away from the places they weren’t supposed to be, even knowing that it just drove them deeper into the shadows, the forgotten places. He tried, every so often, to help one. It never worked.

Damaged goods.

He didn’t know why this one mattered to him. He’d seen dead people before. Kids and old people, junkies and the well-to-do. Everybody died. He tried to convince himself that it was just the way it was. It didn’t matter how you died. It matter how you lived.

She hadn’t lived well. She’d been used up, broken, tossed aside. By the time he found her, crying in that alley, it was already too late. She was dying. Finishing up dying. She’d been dying for a long time.

She had looked up at him with those sunken eyes, and he’d seen nothing but pain and tragedy, of a life filled with bad decisions and bad luck. Just another discarded soul.

“You need to get going,” he’d said to her.

She’d stood on trembling legs, and he’d thought about offering her some money. He didn’t. But he thought about it.

He found her dead, in the same alley, two days later. He wondered if he could’ve helped her. He wondered if any of it mattered. Since then, there wasn’t an hour when he didn’t see her face and regret not trying. Hadn’t she at least deserved that? Hadn’t she been a goddamn human being, and so what if he offered her a hand and she chose not to take it? It was her right.

He’d taken that away from her.

It was eating away at him, but damned if he could change it now. He had to let it go. Otherwise, he couldn’t do his job. But he didn’t want to let it go. It was the only thing inside of him that kept him human. Without it, he was only another machine walking these empty streets.

“Hey, man,” said a kid, couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. “You got a buck?”

He considered the kid. Not many street people talked to cops. This kid must’ve been new. He’d learn.

“I got five bucks.”

He handed the kid the money, knowing it would be wasted, knowing there was nothing to do with it but waste it. What was the kid going to do? Start a savings account? No, he’d blow it. But it least it was something. At least it was an acknowledgment from one human being to another.

“Hey, thanks, man.” The kid walked off as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

He smiled. He couldn’t save the world. He couldn’t even save one kid, but maybe that wasn’t what mattered. Maybe guilt wasn’t the right thing. Maybe he could carry the weight of past sins without being burdened by them. Or maybe it was all bullshit.

But as the kid strolled the corner, whistling, he thought to himself, maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t.

Prequel Checklist Syndrome (culture)

 I don’t care for prequels.

Let me amend that.

I don’t think anyone should care for prequels.

I’m not talking about the original definition.  Originally, a prequel was simply a story that took place before a previous story.  The Temple of Doom is a prequel in the chronology of Indiana Jones’s life.  Jungle Tales of Tarzan is a midquel for the Tarzan character, taking place between the beginning of the first novel and Tarzan’s first run in with Europeans later in that same novel.  In both these cases and many others, prequel was simply a story designed to fit somewhere within the already established continuity of a character or a universe.  I have no problem with those sort of prequels. 

But as we all know, the definition for prequel has changed and not for the better.  It’s come to embody a cloying, unimaginative attempt to add depth to a character / universe by obsessing over the smallest details of a character’s life.  Perhaps it’s just the nature of our world today, where we gather in chatrooms to discuss everything ad nauseam, but characters and details aren’t allowed to just exist.  If a character has a limp, you bet your ass it has some dramatic origins.  If John and Jane have a history, you can bet it is a painful one and that it has some relevance to the current storyline in some shocking and mysterious way.  Nothing just happens.  Everything is important.  And every character has shaped the life of the other characters (even unknowingly) in some radical and preposterous way.

Part of this is the Conservation of Detail.  Fiction tends to make everything important by its design.  If a character is adopted, that’s probably a plot point.  If Chekov took the time to put a gun above the mantle, somebody will probably get shot by it.  A small conversation characters have will have some importance to the larger story and characters all exist with some purpose.  It’s basic storytelling, and it’s even satisfying when done properly.

But in a larger universe, it can become a problem.  It can make everything seem so small and uninteresting if EVERY character has some sort of relationship with EVERY other character, if EVERY quirk a character has is IMPORTANT, and if EVERY event was somehow related to ANOTHER important character.  One of the problems I’ve always had with Spider-Man’s universe, for example, is that though he lives in a city of millions, every villain he faces has some connection to Peter Parker.  This wasn’t always true, but with each adaptation, his universe shrinks.  The newest Spidey movies tie everything, even the original death of his parents and the motivations of Electro, to Peter and Spidey.  It works fine for creating drama, but it also makes New York seem like a city of a dozen or so people with a few million extras walking around in the background.

In The Wizard of Oz prequel we learn that The Wicked of the Witch only became evil because she loved the Wizard and her vulnerability to water is because of a broken heart.

The new TMNT movie ties everything to April O’Neil with a convoluted series of circumstances.  Technically, not a prequel, but a similar problem.

But where this tendency to obsess over details is currently most present is in Gotham, the new TV series on Fox about Gotham City before Batman.  Never mind that there’s not a heck of a lot to distinguish Gotham City from any other crime drama without Batman and Supervillains present.  The show’s real sin is that it suffers serious Prequel Checklist Syndrome.  EVERYTHING is important in Gotham, and every shot should end with a freeze frame and a footnote explaining why this is important.  It’s the laziest, most ridiculous form of foreshadowing, except foreshadowing is meant to give hints of what’s to come so that when the audience gets there, it can seem like the thing that should’ve happened all along.  But we already know how this is going to turn out, so it’s less foreshadowing and more backshadowing.

Yes, that’s a term.  I might have just invented it.  Who knows?

The show is laden with backshadowing, and most of it is either silly or unnecessary.  Edward Nigma loves riddles.  Oswald Cobblepot is already called the Penguin.  Selina Kyle goes by the nickname “Cat” and wears goggles that look a little bit like cat ears.  None of it is particularly inventive or interesting, but it’s not meant to be.  Foreshadowing is subtle.  Backshadowing is obvious.

Prequels answer questions we never asked in the most boring, predictable manner possible.  Of all of Batman’s foes, the Penguin is probably among the most well-adjusted.  So naturally, Gotham decides he must have a deranged mother and some built in mania.  Could Deranged Mother as Justification be any more of a cliche at this point?  It doesn’t fit well with the character, but then again, neither does the nickname he’s already earned.  Burgess Meredith walking around in a top hat and monocle, squawking while committing bird-themed crimes, that guy is rightfully called the Penguin.  Gotham‘s version is just a guy who everyone seem to know will become a bird-themed supervillain at some point.

Of course, Selina Kyle witnessed the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents.  She’s also a runaway because we all know international cat-themed thieves all come from troubled backgrounds.

The Riddler loves riddles.  Young Poison Ivy is seen holding a potted plant because it’s just easier that way.  Why bother anything subtle?  And Poison Ivy needs to be there because . . . shut up, that’s why.

I’m not the only one to point out that Bruce Wayne’s parents dying has become such a common scene that it bears almost no psychological impact at this point.  We’ve taken the death of two innocent people, the orphaning of a child, and deprived it of even the smallest weight, reduced it to a checklist.  But that’s what prequels are at this point.  Just a list of references to be made, backshadowing to be done.

Yet none of this genuinely answers why we should care?  Like the Star Wars prequels, Gotham trades on our nostalgia and loyalty to much more interesting material without adding anything interesting to it.  But we’re fooled because we think we want these answers.  We love feeling like we’ve discovered secrets, and those secrets allow us to log into our chatrooms, our fan pages, our whatever, and talk about stuff that isn’t really interesting but sure looks like it should be.  It’s storytelling as hobby, not experience.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

 

 

A Symphony of Echoes (culture)

Hello there, Action Force. I know I haven’t posted much lately, but I’ve been busy finishing up my latest work in progress.  Deadlines, y’know. I really should be doing that now, but sometimes, a novelologist has something he needs to talk about with you, his adoring public. I know how you depend on me for thoughtful dissection on cultural issues. Where would this world be without me to come along and tell everyone how terrible Godzilla and Star Trek: Into Darkness are? It’d get along, but it’d be a much poorer place for it, I’m sure we can all agree.

So what’s the deal with not putting two spaces after a period anymore? It just doesn’t look right. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but still . . .

Not what I’m here to talk about today, but just something I wanted to get off my chest.

The truth about our world that few of us acknowledge is that we are constantly being shoved into easy-to-categorize boxes that diminish us, but whenever we try to get out of those boxes, we are berated for doing so. It stinks.

One of the boxes I’m stuck in is that of a Comedic writer. The catch is that as a Comedic writer, I am writing fluffy nonsense by default. Any time I write something that isn’t strictly funny though, the rebuttal is that the story is Too Serious. It’s a classic Catch-22, and it’s everywhere.

Women who are too sexy are diminished. Women who aren’t sexy enough are minimized.

We create an “urban” culture (i.e. black), and when people conform to those expectations, we use it as proof that they are thugs who deserve to be dismissed. But if they dare to step out of those expectations, then they are “forgetting who they are”.

We love everything in neat little categories, and we’re all poorer for it. The truth is that life isn’t neat. It’s messy and complicated, and we do a disservice to everyone (including ourselves) when we play to those desires for simplicity.

What’s even more frustrating to me is that we never actually wonder where all those boxes came from in the first place? We just take them for granted.  We assume they are true because we are reinforced over and over again that they are, and we’re usually so busy leading our lives that we don’t have time to fight against them. Easier to go with the flow. Easier to be a category than to step outside of those narrow parameters.

I like writing funny stuff, but I won’t pretend it hasn’t held me back because a lot of my stuff isn’t funny. No matter how ridiculous my stories might seem from the outside, I always take them seriously. I always want them to be amusing, but also endeavor to have something interesting to say. I never want to write something forgettable. But for many people, forgettable is the innate nature of what I write.

It’s tempting to blame one’s critics for that sort of thing, but it’s bigger than that. Far bigger. It’s built into the foundation of how we view the universe. Whether it’s something truly terrible like racial profiling and our relentless, oppressive desire for social norms OR little things like wanting every book to be defined by a simple category, we don’t decide these things. They were decided for us, long ago.  We carry them forward without a thought.

It’s a common refrain of mine at this point, but it’s worth repeating:

It’s all so much bullshit.

The older I get, the less tolerance I have for it. It’s the same phantom force that decides anything with a non-white, non-male protagonist belongs in a sub-category, no matter how mainstream it becomes. It excuses heinous acts by famous people, while simultaneously, harassing those same famous people for meaningless infractions like getting old or putting on weight. It has no respect for blockbusters films (often from neither the creators nor the audience) and yet says we should all flock to see them. It’s shocked (over and over again) that women play video games and then questions whether the games they play still count as video games because (eww) girls.  In short, it tells us not to question, but to live our lives by impossible standards, to miss out on what’s interesting in favor of what’s familiar, and to excuse our own inhumanity in favor of certainty.

The system (any system) seeks to maintain itself, and we seek to maintain it. Maybe because to step outside of our own boxes and biases means drawing attention to ourselves. It’s a hell of a lot of pressure. And there’s constant reinforcement. Everyone can tell you why Superman is boring because they’ve been told he’s boring a hundred thousand times. Everyone simply KNOWS that Godzilla movies are stupid. No need to argue the point.

But these are not their opinions. These are the opinions given to them by a world. The only way to counter it is to understand this. We are not parrots, screeching borrowed thoughts and shallow expectations. Or we need not be.

But what the hell do I know? I’m just a funny writer, right?

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE