A. Lee Martinez's Blog, page 46

The Balding Orc

Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest is dropping into bookstores in only a couple of weeks.  It’d be super awesome if the A. Lee Martinez Action Force could do whatever they can to get people excited about this book.  To help you out with that, let’s continue the posts about the characters of the story.  I’ve previously covered Helen and Troy, and while they are the title characters, there is one other guy worth mentioning.

His name is Nigel Skullgnasher, and he is an orc.

Like most things in the story, my goal was to create a modernized version of the more traditional orc archetype.  Since the world of the story is an alternate fantasy version of our own world, this revolved around asking myself two very important questions.  Where did orcs fit in this world?  And where would they fit today?

The orcs of history were very much like the traditional model.  Brutish, war-like, and given to conquest.  While they’re exact origin is deliberately undefined, they originate from the Russian steppes, a harsh climate that bred a harsh race.  From there, they spread out in war bands, always seeking to conquer or ally themselves with conquerors.  Basically, if there was a war in our world, there was a war in this world and orcs fought in it.  Probably on both sides.  Because ancient orcs were such a belligerent group, they were generally disliked by every other nation and race in the world.  Their Us versus The World attitude was basically true because they made it true, and as such, they never managed to achieve much on their own, aside from squashing the empire of Alexander the Great (who is only known as Alexander the Macedonian in this world) in one of their more effective moments.

Fast forward a few thousand years, orcs are mostly past their savage origins.  Like most everything else, they’re more civilized, and while the carry forward certain traditions, they’ve pretty much abandoned any pretense of conquest.  Not that they had much to begin with.  They were mostly in it for the glory, which is why a proper orc nation never developed.  The modern orc is usually just a regular Joe with a few strange customs.

Nigel Skullgnasher is such a modern day orc.  He is an accountant by trade, going through his mid-life crisis.  On his weekends, he rides with The Wild Hunt, a group of weekend warriors who mostly just ride out of town and back again to feel as if their lives haven’t left them behind.  Nigel isn’t especially happy with his life, but that has less to do with his orc-ish nature and more with the ennui a lot of people feel at a certain point.

Nigel isn’t looking to change everything, but he would like something, anything, to change.  And so it is when the orc god Grog comes to Nigel and charges him with assassinating a pair of mortals, Nigel reluctantly accepts the mission.  Not that he has much choice.

“Uh huh.” Nigel took a drink, belched. “You do know I’m an accountant, right?”

“I was not aware of that,” admitted Grog.

Nigel’s conflict stems from the life he has versus the life he would like to have AND his modern civility versus his orcish instincts.  The guy just isn’t happy with things as they are, but he also isn’t too crazy about killing anyone, despite what might some might assume from his heritage. It’s a conflict we all have to deal with, in one way or another, but it’s what drives Nigel through the story and defines his actions and character.

It’s just not easy being an orc in a civilized world.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

 

Troy of Steel

Last post, I shared some insight into Helen from Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest.  Today, I’m following up with the Troy half of our questing duo.

Troy is perfect.  Let’s just get that out of the way right now.  He is a cool, smart, confident, handsome, athletic, and just all around an awesome guy.  If you’re looking for a guy wrestling with internal conflict, Troy is not for you.  He is, deliberately, great, and while some might argue he’s an unrealistic character, that’s precisely why I created him.

I’m always looking for ways to do something I haven’t done before, and I had yet to create a character who was simply, unapologetically positive.  Such characters are (usually rightly) too often viewed as unrealistic or absurd, and in an age when even Superman must be a mopey, insecure dude, Troy is a throwback to a time when heroes where heroic and admirable and the kind of people we’d all like to be.  (Most of us anyway.)

Since I wrote this book well before Man of Steel, it’s just sheer coincidence that Troy is more like a traditional superhero than the guy in that movie.  Still, it works out because the perception that a nearly perfect character is not worthy of starring in a story is one of the big reasons I created Troy in the first place.  While I get that the flaws can be what make a character interesting, I think it’s too easy to miss the unique challenges and joys such characters bring to our collective fiction.

But to be honest, Troy isn’t quite perfect.  He’s only nearly perfect.  He has his conflicts, his moments of uncertainty.  He just has a hell of a lot less than any of we normal people.

The thing about Troy is that I want him to be likable and appealing, and someone you would like to spend time with.  My goal wasn’t to create someone you could empathize with, but someone you’d just really like to know and who, by knowing them, would inspire you to be a better person.  So, yeah, strange as it may seem, I kind of wanted to create Superman without superpowers.

I’ll admit it proved a challenge.  In terms of sheer confidence and ability, I’d say only Emperor Mollusk compares to Troy.  But Emperor has his troubled moments, and he wavers between confidence and arrogance.  Emperor is his own worst enemy, whereas Troy is everyone’s friend, including himself.  To make a character like that who is approachable and worth writing about without getting saccharine or annoying about it wasn’t easy, but that’s why it was worth doing in the first place.

The funny thing about it is that, by virtue of being a regular human on a quest with a minotaur girl, Troy’s more incredible qualities often take a backseat to just being the “normal” guy.  Again, this is intentional because life is relative.  When you’re suddenly surrounded by monsters and magic, suddenly you become “the human”.  It’s all relative, right?

So it is that I dropped a fantastic (literally) young woman and a (nearly) perfect young man in a car and sent them on a quest to see what would happen.  As it turned out, a lot of cool stuff did.  But we’ll get into that later.

In the next post, I’ll mention the third protagonist (of a sort) in our story:  Nigel Skullgnasher, Orc, Weekend Biker, Accountant, and Reluctant Assassin of the Gods.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Regarding Helen

Greetings, Action Force.

As you probably know, my newest book, Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest, is coming out in July.  I thought this would be a good time to actually talk about the book and what it’s about.

Epic Road Quest is a combination road movie / heroic odyssey / screwball comedy.  That might seem like a strange combination, and it probably doesn’t help to promote it that it doesn’t fit easily into a category.  It’s come up before that I struggle with the many labels I’ve been saddled with, and this book probably isn’t going to make anything clearer.  Though I’m sure most people will just call it “silly”, and as long as they like it, that’s cool with me.

But, as usual, being silly was never my intention.  I was motivated to write Epic Road Quest for a couple of reasons, and over the next few posts, I’ll go into all those reasons.

First up, I’ve just always wanted to always write a story with a minotaur as the protagonist.  Hardly surprising, considering my well-documented love of monsters and weird creatures.  I’d experimented with stories featuring minotaurs in the past, but none of them made it past the idea stage.  It was only when I thought of making the minotaur in question a female that it finally clicked.

Helen is where the entire story started.  I’ve always loved physically powerful superheroines.  She-Hulk has been a favorite character of mine for decades.  But I’ve always also been disappointed that there is no genuinely monstrous female heroes.  Comic book superheroes are full of strange looking guys:  You’ve got the Thing, Nightcrawler, and Martian Manhunter, just to name a few.  But females are almost always traditionally attractive.  Even She-Hulk tends to be thinner and more feminine than her cousin.  That never really bothered me, of course, because She-Hulk is smart, physically powerful, and even physically imposing and that’s pretty amazing for a female character.

Still, I’ve always liked the idea of a female monster as hero, and I’ve always wanted to write a minotaur hero, so it was only a matter of time before I figured out to combine the two. And Helen was born.

Helen is a minotaur.  In the universe of her story, minotaurism is a enchanted condition passed along family lines.  Her minotuarism comes from her mother’s side, though by now, it mostly manifests in small ways like cow ears on her mother or a tail on one of her brothers.  But Helen is full blown minotaur.

(For those of you who want to get technical about it, the original minotaur had the body of a man and only the head of a bull.  I went the more modern interpretation where the condition is more like a humanoid bull (or in Helen’s case, cow).  Fur.  Cow head.  Tail.  Hooves.  I like it better that way, and it’s my book, so I can do whatever I want.  So there.)

As a seven foot tall woman with superhuman strength, Helen is something of an outsider.  Her world is a mix of traditional mythology, modern fantasy, and parallel modernity, so it’s not as if there aren’t other monsters and strange creatures in the public eye.  But even in a world where orcs and elves are common place, minotaurs are a rare thing.  Female minotaurs are even rarer.

Helen is traditionally monstrous, though I’ll admit I didn’t make her truly hideous.  She’s even supposed to be a bit cute in that way that a lot of (sigh) furries might enjoy.  Yeah, I hate to say that but there’s no denying it.  Not that I have a problem with that because, hey, I have a crush on a giant green woman who can benchpress a herd of elephants, so who am I to judge?

Going forward in the story, I had a couple of clear goals in how I wanted to portray Helen and her story.  I knew for sure that I wanted her to be confident with who she was, but still, conflicted at times.  Aren’t we all?  And don’t most of us have body issues now and then?  Helen’s are just a little more singular.  I also didn’t want to write a story where she becomes more traditionally beautiful via some magical cure all by the end.  Helen is a minotaur at the start, and she’s a minotaur at the end.  I might call that a spoiler, but anyone who has read anything else I’ve written probably already figured that out.

More importantly, I wanted Helen to be well-deveoloped mentally as well as physically.  Too often, empowering a female character is as simple as making them kick a bunch of ass while scowling.  They’re reduced to tough guy caricatures with boobs, and that can work for some characters, but considering Helen is a modern day person with modern day concerns, it made little sense to me to treat her as a born adventurer.  Helen is just a regular person, with her own outlook, her own strengths, pet peeves, and insecurities.  She has her low moments and her high moments.  But she doesn’t live or die merely by her physical strength, but by her strength of will and determination.

My goal isn’t necessarily to create a “strong female character” but to just create a strong character who happens to be female, just as I never strive to create a “strong male character.”  I try to make good characters, first and foremost.  And Helen is a character I’m very happy with.  Not only is she pretty cool, but she can punch a dragon and get away with it.

And I’m sure even She-Hulk would be impressed by that.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Forgetting the Pizza Boy

I know I’m supposed to be a “funny” writer, and my last few blog posts probably haven’t been in the “funny” vein.  I don’t want these posts to be too much of a bummer, but if there’s one thing Man of Steel did for me, it was remind me just how much Superman and the ideals he represent mean to me.  He’s always stood for not just optimism, but the brightest and best possibilities of unapologetic fun science fiction.  Basically, Man of Steel feels like a sucker punch (irony, intended).  Except I saw it coming well in advance.  Somehow, that doesn’t cushion the blow.

But don’t worry.  I’m not here to beat that specific dead horse anymore.  I’ve got an upcoming book to promote.  Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest is due out next month, and it’s pretty awesome.  I’ll be posting some stuff about it, probably doing a Youtube reading, etc.  But I also had a new topic on my mind that I’d like to get to before that.

I used to love action adventure films.  Now, they’re hit or miss, and I think it’s all about theme and presentation.  Too many films now are thematically inconsistent in how they portray violence and destruction that it’s difficult to enjoy them as adventures.  Man of Steel is a great example.  By lovingly and with great detail painting every bit of the destruction of Metropolis, it suddenly stops being this grand adventure and instead, it becomes a terrifying experience.  But Man of Steel isn’t alone in this regard.  Star Trek: Into Darkness crashes a starship into a major city with beautiful detail and then simply forgets about all the carnage less than a minute later.

Yet Star Wars has The Empire blow up a hole planet, and it doesn’t feel nearly as bloodthirsty.  G.I. Joe: Retaliation destroys London.  And Independence Day blows up so many cities, it’s hard to argue it’s all just fun and games.  Why is it, I wonder, that these films don’t leave such a sour aftertaste even while others unleash their own destructive spectacle?

I think it comes down to a consistent theme.

The modifier “Porn” gets thrown around a lot, as in Torture Porn or (the new one I keep running across) Destruction Porn.  And while I’m not a big fan of the label, I think I get where it’s coming from.  Porn is, after all, more interested in the sex and its portrayal, than in the plot or the consequences of having casual sex with a person you just met at the bank or who delivered your latest pizza.  And that’s okay.  That’s porn’s rules, and if you try to apply real world logic to pornography, you’re just going to give yourself a headache.

But the thing about porn, is that it is generally consistent in its tone.  I’m not saying all porn is shallow and vapid, but it’s all right to acknowledge that the genre knows what it wants to do and has no problems doing it.  There is the more subtle “Erotica” category, and that, too, relies on sex as its central point, just generally with a warm fog over the proceedings.

In that way, many of these new spectacle films remind me a hell of a lot less like erotica and a hell of a lot more of porn.  If Zack Snyder remade Star Wars today, the planet Alderon’s destruction would have been a horrific experience.  We would’ve had meticulous tracking shots of people screaming in the cities.  Maybe a mother holding her child as darkness falls.  Maybe thousands of people tumbling into fiery abysses.  And it would be incredibly well directed and compelling, even as it cast a shadow over the rest of the film.

Sure, it’s absurd that Alderon just disintegrates in a moment in the original film, but there’s a reason for that.  It sticks with the level of realism of the space adventure.  The Empire might have just killed billions, but it isn’t meant to bum us out.  It’s just something evil empires do to show how evil they are.  Some might argue that this is a callous way of telling the destruction of Alderon, and they would be right.  But considering Star Wars is an all-ages space adventure, I’m not sure dwelling on planetcide would ever be the way to go.

Though I’m not a big fan of presenting realism in fantasies of this sort, I can still see a compelling reason to do it.  A film that chooses to remind us of the damage and horror that is traditional spectacle scenes might do some very interesting things with it.  It wouldn’t necessarily be a story I would want to see, but it could be challenging to our notions of harmless fun and make us question how easily we can dismiss the deaths and miseries of other people simply because we’ve never met them.

That’s the real problem though.  We get the destruction.  We just don’t get the consequences.  Not really.

Metropolis is reduces to a crater.  We have just watched it crumble, building by building, in such a way that it’s impossible to feel good about it.  Superman’s struggle is a titanic battle of incredibly powerful forces that can level a city.  And we’ve seen everyone fleeing for their lives and it iy’s implied that thousands of died.  It’s pretty much impossible to ignore or downplay.  It’s a powerful deconstruction of what Superman and spectacle has stood for.  And then, it just ignores all that when the movie ends.

I’ve heard too often that movies glamorize violence, and there is definitely something to that.  But making destruction more graphic isn’t the same as removing its glamor.  Heck, for some people, it’s pretty much the opposite.

This is why Into Darkness is a far bigger offender than Man of Steel.  A spaceship the size of a small meteor crashes into San Francisco, and it literally has no bearing on the plot beyond looking cool and getting Khan to Earth so Spock can chase him.  The scene that takes place moments after shows that not even the citizens of the city seem to notice or care.  And I might even be able to play along with the movie in this regard if it hadn’t just rendered the loss of life and property damage with such exquisite detail.

But the film that has always embodied this paradox to me most perfectly is Kick Ass.  The violence in this film is ugly and unpleasant.  Blood is splattered across the screen.  Limbs are hacked off.  Death is ugly, and the people who deal in it are damaged and broken.  But, for all its darkness, it still suggest that violence is somehow fun.  We’re expected to root for its heroes, even as they dismember and kill.  And we’re expected to somehow see this film as an indictment of our violent fantasies even as we cheer.

There is more to deglamorizing violence than merely showing blood.  And I might even argue that films that soak us in gore while trying to give us an action adventure are having a hard time of it.  The previews for Kick Ass 2 only seem to be more of the same.  Hyperviolence doesn’t bother me, but the film’s desire to have its cake and eat it too does.  Thematically, it seems to be saying too many contradictory things.  And it’s an understandable paradox.  The Kick Ass comic book is a lot more violent and unpleasant than the movie (which is saying something), but the movie has to reach a far wider audience.

Ultimately, films like this give me mood whiplash.  If Man of Steel wants to destroy Metropolis in horrific detail, it is certainly allowed.  But if it expects me to just smile and laugh a minute later, it seems to seriously underestimate its visceral destruction and my short term memory.  And though Into Darkness is a bad film for many reasons, the one I find most unforgivable is how it crushes a city and then expects me to just be happy that Kirk is back alive.  And Kick Ass isn’t a deconstruction of violence just because it chooses to have swearing and gore in it.  It’s just an unimaginative superhero flick that happens to have swearing and gore in it.

That’s the catch though.  We don’t want to actually ruin our fantasy adventures.  We just want to act as if we’re more mature because we took a moment to make them unpleasant.  But then we go back to cheering and laughing.  And that can work too if we don’t focus too much on the details.  I’m certainly willing to play along when a story allows me to.  But it can’t hold me down and pour horrific death in my face and then expect me to forget it.

Of course, I don’t think that’s the point of any of these stories at all.  Snyder didn’t want to paint a more realistic version of Superman.  He just wanted to top the destruction that was in The Avengers.  Into Darkness didn’t want to make us ponder the fragility of life.  It just wanted to have a cool spaceship crash followed by a cool fight scene.  Kick Ass was never interested in portraying realistic superheroes.  It just wanted to make goofy characters who swear a lot.  And so what?  Nothing wrong with that.  Fiction comes in many forms, and we all have our own different desires and emotional needs to satisfy.  And that’s cool.

But deep stuff?  Not exactly.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Choices (The Last Superman Rebuttal)

This will probably be my final installment of The Superman Rebuttals.  Not because there isn’t a heck of a lot more to say about storytelling and Superman.  There is probably too much to say about the subject.  How we view Superman and how we view stories have always been fascinating to me, and I’ve thought about this a lot more than most people and probably even most writers.  But there’s a point where it’s good to take a break.  I have no doubt I’ll revisit the topic, but for now, let’s address one last expectation.

Superman is about agency.

This makes him something of an anomaly.  When people say they can’t relate to Superman’s motivation, they tend to be saying, “I don’t get why he helps people.  What’s in it for him?  Why would he choose to do so?”

Because he chooses to.

This is a fairly radical notion, and one that we aren’t accustomed to from most characters.  Even most superheroes, especially modern superheroes, stumble into their heroic identity.  Peter Parker was created by accident.  Green Arrow learned to be an awesome archer by being stranded on a desert island.  Even Batman was the victim of tragedy that altered the course of his life forever.  And so it goes with ninety percent of heroes.  Some accident, some quirk of fate, some moment that defines them.

Superman isn’t quite the same.  Granted, his Kryptonian heritage is a part of his background, but I’ve always argued you could remove it entirely and it wouldn’t adversely affect him.  Krypton really wasn’t meant to be important.  And it’s destruction wasn’t meant to be important either.  These are merely elements introduced (and quickly removed from the picture) to justify his amazing abilities.  In the end, Clark Kent looks human, was raised on Earth by humans, and has a thoroughly human way of looking at the world.

Once again, this is the challenge Superman poses to traditional storytelling.  In traditional storytelling, something as dramatic as the destruction of a whole world should be important.  But for Superman, it’s only a plot point and a fairly minor one at that.  Misunderstanding this, most writers seek to mine Krypton for stories on the false assumption that it must be important to understanding the character.

It just isn’t.  No matter how many people want to tell some forgotten story of Krypton, it was never meant to be important.  We don’t write Batman stories of the early years of Martha and Thomas Wayne.  We don’t generally explore the early life of Peter Parker’s parents.  Such stories are not worth telling because it’s understood how little bearing they have.  But then again, neither of these are as tantalizing as writing about a whole world and its destruction.

But this is Superman, and Superman doesn’t play by the same rules as most protagonists.

Which gets back to the idea of motivation.  Most characters, heroic or otherwise, tend to have complicated motivations.  Or rather, they have motivations that appear complicated.  Batman is a pretty simple character.  As is Spider-Man.  They have some primary emotional motivation that drives them forward.  Spidey is obviously guilt.  Batman is sometimes about guilt, but I rather like that he’s about hope for a better world.  That’s up for grabs though because we’d much rather believe Batman is crazy than a good person who seeks to protect people from the shadows.  But that’s a whole other discussion.

Superman is about care and concern for his fellow man.  (And, yes, humans are his fellows, much as other writers might like to pretend otherwise.)  There isn’t much more to it.  He sees people in trouble.  He helps.  He doesn’t do so because he feels guilty or compelled to by terrible tragedy.  He does it because he can.  Because, often, he’s the only guy who can.

Where I would argue that Man of Steel and even the original Superman fail is that they accidentally deprive Superman of that agency that is so important to him.  Instead, he becomes merely a pawn of larger forces.  Any Superman story where he becomes a superhero because someone else told him to takes the heart right out of the character.

This is just another reason why I can’t get behind Man of Steel.  Superman never really chooses to be a hero.  He just does whatever his last father figure told him to do.  He didn’t even pick his costume.  He’s basically a robot with no sense of purpose from within.  His motivations are completely from without, given to him by other people.  This doesn’t work well for many characters, but for a character like Superman, who is all about agency and empowerment as few characters are, it will always ring hollow to me.

Even the classic Superman film has this problem.  Clark Kent wanders the world searching for a purpose until he creates the Fortress of Solitude and is told to be a hero by his ghost dad.

Of course, Man of Steel takes it one step further by even creating a General Zod who has no purpose beyond one programmed into him.  Thus, the whole film feels to me less like an epic struggle between a man who chooses to protect versus one who chooses to destroy and more like a big beat ‘em up between two organic robots from space, programmed at cross purposes.

This is why I rather like Lex Luthor as a Superman villain.  It’s because he, like Superman, is a great man who has chosen his own destiny.  I’ve always felt the heart of the conflict between the two characters are founded on their similarities in this regard.  Both characters have the power to change the world.  Both see that in each other.  And both have chosen a path that leads to inevitable conflict.

But they both CHOSE.

Strangely, the closest non-Superman version of a character like that is probably Mr. Incredible from the greatest superhero film of all time The Incredibles.  Mr. Incredible is a flawed character, but his flaws stem from his overwhelming desire to help.  There’s no doubt he loves action and adventure, but he’s also there to improve people’s lives.  All of his mistakes in the film stem from this desire, and it works beautifully in making an otherwise admirable quality into a character flaw.

In fact, after Man of Steel, Mr. Incredible is even a better Superman than Superman.  Mr. Incredible chooses not to kill, even at his lowest moment, and in doing so, he ultimately plants the seeds of heroism in Mirage.  That’s great writing, showing conflict, motivation, aspiration and how they all fit together in a complex way.

While it’s often said that Superman is an old fashioned character, he has always truly struck me as an ideal.  He is beholden to nothing and no one (The American Way was added later to the character’s motivations), but he chooses to help.  He doesn’t save lives because his personal identity is at stake or because is daddy told him to.  (Or not save people because his daddy told him not to.)  He does so because he wants to, because he chose to care.

It is that agency that has always appealed to me about Superman.  I have nothing against characters with more “realistic” motivations, but I’ve always liked that Superman’s motivation is to help the world.  It’s not always easy to make that interesting, but that’s why it’s an idea worth exploring.  Indeed, the Superman stories (usually non-continuity) where Superman abuses his power that always made sense to me are the ones where he decides the best way to help the world is to take control of it.  It is the version of Superman who seizes power because he’s tired of all our senseless squabbling and foolishness that always struck me as the logical evil version of the character.  A Superman who cares, but has had enough of our nonsense.

Getting back to the overarching point of these essays, this is why Superman demands more imagination from a writer than nearly any other character.  None of his motivations, his abilities, his limitations, work in quite the same way as any other character.  It’s easy to write a Superman story where he goes mad with power and starts killing people just because he decides to abuse that power.  It’s a lot harder to write a dark Superman who is a bad guy but nonetheless still grappling with his compassion and caring.

It’s also why Krypton just isn’t important.  And why, though even the comics want to keep telling versions of Superman versus General Zod, those stories are the easy way to go.  It’s a standard way to write any character.  Confront them with something from their past to add depth.  Give them a carbon copy villain who can threaten their life.  Write a story that hits all the traditional beats.  And it works.  Heck, even for Superman, it works because we like traditional stories for a lot of reasons.

But Superman breaks tradition, and it’s why great Superman stories are like no other stories.  He’s not Batman who can fly or the X-Men from Krytpon.  He’s Superman.  He puts on those blue tights because he wants to.  And he put that S on his chest, not because his daddy told him to, but because he thought it would look cool.  And he doesn’t fight giant robots from space and tidal waves to make amends for the sins of his past.  He does it because it’s the right thing to do.

Yeah, it doesn’t always make him easy to relate to, but that’s why he’s worth writing about.  Superman shouldn’t be shoved into stories other characters can easily tell already.  He should tell stories only he can explore.  It’s not just what makes him special.  It’s what made him an enduring icon for 75 years.

And that’s a legacy worth keeping.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

One Life (The Superman Rebuttals)

We continue with The Superman Rebuttals.

In my first post, I mentioned how that writing a Superman story requires a writer throw away much of what is considered essential about good stories and how he requires a level of imagination most writers seem reluctant to exercise.  While these posts aren’t meant to specifically address Man of Steel, there’s little point in denying that the film was the final straw in an ongoing war over the perception of what is right and wrong with Superman as a character and concept.  And it’s fair to say, from my perspective, that the movie does highlight everything I dislike about cramming Superman into a traditional story arc.

There’s nothing wrong with writing a beginning for Superman or even exploring what it would mean to put on the cape for the first time.  The problem is that Clark Kent was well on his way to becoming Superman before he put on that cape.  He isn’t like Spider-Man, a character who stumbled into his powers and thus, given his background (and, if I can be so bold, terrible parenting of his aunt and uncle), it’s justifiable that he first abuses them in his own self-interest.  Peter Parker is an outsider, a broken kid.  He is, sadly, usually presented as something of a loser, which for many folks is, I suppose, his charm.

I’ve always found that a bit puzzling.  I can certainly see the appeal of a superhero who is “an ordinary person”, but as is so often the case, ordinary seems to equal sadsack who can’t get his act together.  But that’s a musing for another post.

Because of who he is and how he was born with his powers, Superman has had to grapple with this issue long before he put on the cape.  Even if we’re talking about the version where he gets his powers slowly, we’re still dealing with a character who has had to think about his abilities and how to use them for a long time.  In addition, he was raised by Ma and Pa Kent, two genuinely nice people who believe in helping people.

Of course, that’s the Ma and Pa of most traditional Superman stories.  The Kents of Man of Steel are a lot less supportive, more conflicted about their adopted son’s role in this world.  I might not like that change, but I can go along with it.  The movie even sets up Clark’s conflict by killing Pa Kent in a way that Superman could’ve easily prevented.

I would argue that the movie misses its mark at this point.  This should be the turning point for Clark.  Of course, traditional storytelling says that the great cathartic moment must come near the end, not the beginning.  But that’s why the film stumbles because it is at this point that young Clark should vow never to let it happen again.  Instead of simply being an excuse for having Clark be mopey (and to saddle him with a guilt-ridden motivation for do-gooding rather than just being a good person), the story could use it as Clark’s turning point.

The line between Clark and Superman is a thin one.  Unlike Spider-Man, who is almost two entirely different people in and out of costume, Superman is Clark Kent.  He’s just Clark without the glasses.  So it is short-sighted and simplistic to believe that Superman hasn’t wrestled with issues of his own powers, especially when the film goes out of its way to show that conflict.

Where a lot of bad Superman stories fail is their fundamental misunderstanding that a character like Superman must have dealt with these issues before, must have seriously considered them.  Don’t we all in a way?  We live in an imperfect world, and imagine if we had the power to change it.  If you or I hear about a war going on or a natural disaster wreaking havoc, we can only sit by helplessly.  Young Clark Kent had to debate every one of these reports and the limits and requirements of his ability to affect them.

The problem in this film, and in many so-called sophisticated Superman stories, is that they act as if Superman, because he is good, has never had to confront this question.  It’s almost as if because he hasn’t mentioned how much he wants to kill people that it’s assumed he never thought of it as a solution.  But surely he must have.  Many, many times.

The thing about “learning to be Superman” stories is that you might be able to convince me that Superman would consider killing someone for the greater good, but once he does, you’ve also convinced me that there’s no going back.  You’ve created a Superman who lacks the imagination or restraint to find any other solution.  Then he really is just a really really strong guy who smashes stuff.

Superman Returns gets a lot of flak (justifiably so) for being a dull, plodding film.  But one of the complaints I never understood was that Superman doesn’t punch anything.  While I sort of get where that’s coming from, I also think the few action sequences in the film showcase Superman’s true power.  The scene where Superman saves a plane from crashing is one of my favorite Superman sequences ever, and when he prevents a series of minor catastrophes in Metropolis, thus saving countless lives, he proves himself not just powerful, but creative and caring.

I do love a good Superman Punches Stuff story, but not if that comes at the cost of reducing Superman to a big, dumb bruiser who can’t think of any way to stop a bad guy other than killing him.

And yet, even all this doesn’t bother nearly so much as the fact that there’s almost no dramatic tension to be had in a Superman who doesn’t care about every single life, who doesn’t seek better resolutions than reluctantly killing his opponents.  Far from being an unrealistic impediment for the character, it is the only thing that gives him any conflict at all.

After all, a Superman who accepts casualties and doesn’t mind killing is basically truly invincible.  How can he fail?  If Metropolis is reduced to ruins and thousands are dead, but the bad guy was stopped, then by that metric, Superman has won.  But that’s why the best Superman stories realize that, even if winning isn’t ever in any doubt, the cost of victory is what makes or breaks Superman.  By refusing to accept even the smallest loss of life (even the villain’s), Superman’s stories become a challenge to him.  Otherwise, they’re just action hero adventures with a ruthless, invulnerable guy who can’t be stopped.

Basically, Superman’s powers require him to care or there’s absolutely no dramatic tension.  Superman could easily stop nearly any villain if he chose to ignore loss of life, property damage, and moral quandaries.  And in fact, in Man of Steel he triumphs because he is willing to kill rather than let a family die.  Yet how many families died already?  Why exactly is this supposed to be the breaking point?  It’s because he’s there, I suppose, and watching it happen.  Never mind that this overlooks the fact that Superman has supersenses, and no doubt, he heard every anguished cry for help below, every dying scream, every crushed civilian.  No, it’s only when he’s looking right at them that he suddenly decides it’s worth killing over.

This is really to me the moment that the story misses its Superman moment.  At that moment, grappling with Zod, Superman realizes he might have to kill Zod.  And he chooses not to.  Not because Zod doesn’t deserve mercy but because he decides there is no more death today.  Not even a bad guy.  It is Superman’s moral event horizon, and he chooses not to cross it.  Instead, he puts his hand over Zod’s eyes, and even as Zod burns him and Superman screams, he refuses to let go because Superman would rather burn in agony than allow another death.

Instead, he takes the easy way.

And make no mistake, it is the easy way.

In comparison, one of my favorite Superman stories came from Superman: The Animated Series.  It was the culmination of an attack by the evil space tyrant Darkseid, who succeeds in breaking Superman, who poses a very real threat to the Earth.  The people of Earth, confronted by this threat, stand up and say they will fight.  Darkseid, seeing they aren’t properly broken, decides to return to his world.  But not before he uses his deadly omega beams to disintegrate a single human life.  He does this, not as an act of spite, but because he realizes it will hurt Superman more than anything else he could do.

Just one life.

The stakes of a great Superman story don’t need any more than that.  The paradox of Superman is that though he’s a character who can punch asteroids, he only needs one life at stake to create a great Superman story.  Even if, ironically, that life is the villain’s.  And it’s impossible to feel as if there’s any triumph in a Superman flying over the crater that was Metropolis because there simply isn’t.  It’s a Pyrrhic victory for the Man of Steel, and there’s no sense of accomplishment.

I might even forgive such things if the movie presented it as such.  But instead, Superman flies over to Lois Lane, gives her a kiss, acts as if everything is all right now, even as he stands on the graves of thousands of Metropolis’s citizens.  Hell, even The Avengers (which pales in terms of destruction and death beside Man of Steel) shows our heroes utterly exhausted and has a montage showing the rescue efforts and mixed reactions of the citizens of New York.  And even the after credits gag shows our heroes beaten and quietly recovering with not a smile among them.

Part of this isn’t really Man of Steel‘s fault though.  Star Trek: Into Darkness crashed a starship into San Francisco with such callous disregard that none of the other characters seem to acknowledge it, even mere moments after the disaster took place.  And perhaps that’s what really happened to poor Superman in this movie.  He fell victim to disaster one-up-manship.  Destroy a section of New York?  I’ll destroy half of Metropolis!  And we’re all supposed to just act as if it doesn’t really matter.

But Superman never should.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

The Superman Rebuttals Begin

I’ve been thinking a lot about Man of Steel.  I don’t like it.  I don’t like what it says about Superman.  I don’t like what it says about us.  It seems like the final grimdarkening, the moment when the final optimistic hero has successfully been brought down in a way that even comic books in the 90′s couldn’t do to him.  But when I think about it, I realize this is a bigger issue than one movie.  There are, after all, plenty of movies I don’t like for a lot of reasons, and so what does one more mean?  I could sit here and write about why I think one movie makes mistakes, but it would be such a limited discussion.  I’m not here to counter one movie.  Instead, I’d like to use Superman himself as a springboard for some basic elements of storytelling that I think get so often overlooked when it comes to what makes Superman interesting.

Thus begins THE SUPERMAN REBUTTALS.

The idea here is that I’m going to talk about all those things people say about Superman in general, and how those things are wrong.  They’re wrong because they want to cram storytelling into a one-size-fits-all box, and if you need all the standard tropes of “good storytelling” then, yeah, Superman isn’t your guy.  He violates a lot of rules, and by doing so, he forces us to view storytelling from a different perspective.

Basically, if you want to write a good Superman story, you really have to throw away ninety percent of what you rely on in so many traditional stories.  If there is one failing at the heart of Man of Steel, it’s this.  They took a character who violates so many of the standard rules and forced him into a by-the-numbers tale, and how you feel about that will largely determine how you feel about the movie.  From what I can see, the reviews and reactions are pretty mixed.  Either you really dug the film for staying in that box or you hated it for that.

Today’s aspect we’re going to talk about is the idea of THE BOYSCOUT.

Probably the most common criticism of Superman is that he’s just too good.  Without flaws, he isn’t a character we can relate to.  The problem I’ve always had with this argument stem from two thoughts.

First of all, Superman isn’t supposed to be someone we relate to.  Superman is a character we look up to.  He’s someone we admire.  Literally, he is designed to stand above it all.  That isn’t an accident.  That’s the entire point of the character.

There is a very real problem a character for like Superman though.  We are so often told that flaws are what make a character interesting and that people who are genuinely good are boring.  I’ll admit I’ve never understood this.  I’ve never had a fascination with villains, who tend to be far less interesting to me than heroes.  Perhaps it’s because villains are so easy to relate to.  They’re small.  They’re petty.  They’re cruel and egotistical.  The Joker is simply a maniac and killer.  Lex Luthor is a man who could change the world, but it so busy indulging his own powerful ego that he wastes many of his gifts.

But even assuming that flawed people are innately more interesting than heroic people, that doesn’t have to mean every character needs to be flawed.  While I would argue it’s easier to tell an interesting story with a flawed character (though I think making a character flawed is often mistaken for making them more interesting, which I don’t always agree with), not every character should tell the same story.  Otherwise, why have different characters at all?

This is why I’ve always enjoyed the superhero genre for its incredible diversity in terms of characters and their stories.  A Punisher story is innately different than a Silver Surfer story.  They are designed to be so, and that is why I like reading the adventures of both those characters as well as many others.  They don’t just have different stories.  They have different themes, different points of view.  They represent radical and unique experiences that I can enjoy.

This is why so many people, fans and writers, don’t seem to “get” what I love about Superman.  He isn’t designed like any traditional protagonist these days.  He’s a straight up good guy with incredible power.  He is virtually flawless, and his idealism is warranted because he can make a difference.  I’ve never understood why a writer would want to write a story where Superman is like us.  Instead, a great Superman story should be one where we ponder being more like Superman.

This is why, I believe, so many people have a hard time relating to Superman as a character because he expects you to care more, to be more invested in doing the right thing, than you probably are in real life.  When someone says they can’t relate to Superman, they so often seem to say to me that they don’t want to imagine being more than they are.

Superman, more than just about any character out there, demands our imagination.  He wasn’t made to be brought down to our level.  He was made to bring us up to his level, to instill hope and triumph, and a boundless optimism about how we could all make the world a better place if we had his powers and, more importantly, his attitude.

Realism is not and has never been the purpose of a Superman story, and when someone complains that he is too unrealistic, it’s a fair complaint.  But it’s missing the point.  Not every character is meant to be realistic.  Not every universe is about creating a believable experience.  Although I’ll note that realistic and believable in this context always seem to mean dull and unpleasant, which is an objection I’ve raised before and will continue to raise in the future.

Speaking very briefly about Man of Steel, I would say this is why the film both succeeds and fails, depending on your point of view.  If you want a Superman who is like us, then he’s a pretty solid example.  Motivated by guilt, conflicted, confused, heroic but unimaginative, powerful but dangerous.  If you want a Superman who is better than that, you’ll be disappointed.

Superman, like all fictional characters, is certainly open to interpretation, and while I’m loathe to say I hate Man of Steel or that it really says much about anyone if they love or hate it, I am disappointed as a storyteller that we are so beholden to formula at this point that even Superman, a character who defies formula, is now stuck in it.  More than even the disappointment that the movie just isn’t very good from my perspective, it says to me that we’ve lost the ability to appreciate true story variety.

And that’s the real crime of every bad Superman story.  Without the imagination to believe in a better world, without a desire to bring triumph and joy, there is only the story of a guy who can fly and punch bad guys through buildings.  It might be fun to watch, but it isn’t challenging.  It’s really quite the opposite.  It’s safe and easy, and any decent writer can make Superman one of us.

But a great writer should make us all into Superman.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

A Very Predicable Post

I don’t think storytelling should be viewed as a contest between the writer and the audience.  By that, I mean I don’t think it’s my job as a writer to try to outsmart you, and I don’t think it’s your job as a reader to try to figure out what I’m doing.  The whole notion that I should be one step ahead of the audience is often contrary to good storytelling, and if the only point of a story is to surprise the audience, then it rarely works beyond that initial surprise.  More importantly, it sets up a strange competitive dynamic between the storyteller and the audience, and that is so often terrible because storytelling is a shared experience.  It relies on the storyteller and the audience to be working together, not as opponents.

This is why I am not a fan of the BIG REVEAL, where the author suddenly shows that everything you thought the story was about isn’t about that at all.  It can work, sure, and some stories need it.  But just as often, it only confuses and irritates me.  It’s also why I have a hard time when someone dismisses a work of fiction as “Predictable” because good stories usually are predictable by their very nature.

Predictability is a byproduct of consistent logic, tone, and characterization.  To make a story unpredictable often requires violating one or more of those elements.  That often feels like cheating.  Anyone can create a surprising story if they withhold information or simply change the rules at the last minute.  “Oh, you thought this guy was the hero?  Well, it turns out he’s not the hero.  He’s the bad guy.  And this story isn’t really about a bank robbery.  It’s about time traveling ninjas who want to save JFK.  Pretty surprising, right?”

Yeah, but not in a good way.

This is why, even when good stories are built on a twist, they’re also loaded with foreshadowing.  Good foreshadowing tells us something is not quite what it seems, and so when the surprise comes, it’s really not a surprise at all.  When I think of a movie like The Sixth Sense, I realize how utterly unsurprising it was in its “twist”, but then, how could it be?  If it didn’t take the time to foreshadow that twist, then it would’ve just felt hollow.  Yet even with that foreshadowing, a story built on a reveal is usually only good for one or two viewings.  Because once you know, you no longer have a reason to be invested.

Meanwhile, my favorite films tend to be spare with the surprises.  Instead, they rely on telling a predictable story well, trusting that it isn’t the twists that keep me interested.  It’s the story itself that makes it worth revisiting.  I can watch The Incredibles any time.  Really.  I’ll watch it right now if you want.  And while there are mysteries in its story, the characters and their motivations are laid out quickly and efficiently, not as some special little secret the viewer has to earn, but as an essential part of what drives the story.

Stories can certainly be too predictable, but a story where the good guy wins or where the world is saved isn’t “predictable” because you knew that from the beginning.  And a story where everything you learn in the first few minutes is wrong are more irritating than anything, more flash than substance.

There’s an old axiom that storytellers lie for a living, and while I used to think it had some merit, I think instead that BAD storytellers lie for a living.  Good storytellers tell you the truth.  They aren’t trying to deceive.  They’re just trying to give you some interesting characters doing something interesting.  When you think of the classic stories we tell over and over again, be they myths, fairytales, etc., they are almost all incredibly simple narratives that don’t try to twist their premises.  They stay exactly true to them.

Little Red Riding hood walks into the woods and runs into a hungry wolf.  Here comes the conflict.

Odysseus refuses to honor the gods for helping him conquer Troy.  Here comes the conflict.

Elmer Fudd is hunting a very clever rabbit.  Here comes the conflict.

So often, attempts at nuance and mystery work against the basics of telling a good story that I, as a writer, find it especially frustrating.  I’ve learned to be less surprising, less “clever”, but to just tell an engaging story.  My goal is never to have the reader close the book and say, “Oh, my, what a clever fellow, that Martinez is.”  Instead, I want them to close the book and say, “Wow.  I really enjoyed that.”  If I’m really ambitious, I’d like them to add “I’d love to enjoy that again.”

Perhaps this is part of my problem with movies like Skyfall, Tron: Legacy, and Star Trek: Into Darkness.  More than their rather joyless executions, perhaps I find their attempts to be mysterious more frustrating than enjoyable.  In Skyfall, the villain wants to kill M and then we find out why about two thirds into the film.  And rather than finding it fascinating, I wished he’d just be out to blow up England in some strange plot to conquer the world.  I always liked that about Bond villains.  There were a mystery, but the mystery is how will stealing nuclear submarines allow Blofeld to take over the world?  It wasn’t why is Blofeld bald and why does he want to kill James Bond for it?

In the original Tron, the hero’s goal is to escape from the computer.  Tron’s goal is to defeat Master Control.  Master Control’s goal was to defeat Tron.  All very obvious.  All very simple.  Meanwhile, in Legacy, everybody’s goals are kind of vague and the villain’s master plan is to attempt to take over the world with what looks like barely enough soldiers to take over half a city.  But it’s not really important that he can do it.  It’s just important that there’s a reveal.

I won’t even get into Into Darkness, a movie who is entirely built on SURPRISES to the point that it doesn’t even care about those surprises once they’re revealed and is quickly onto the next SURPRISE before the previous has had time to sink in.

Stories can be too predictable.  And surprises are a valuable asset in telling a good story.  But predictability doesn’t equal poor storytelling.  Surprises don’t equal good storytelling.  Good storytelling is nothing more or less difficult than telling a story well, following the logic of your setting and style, trusting the audience, and having that trust returned.

I know this might sound weird from a guy who has an average number of .75 slime monster battles per book, but it isn’t about flash.  It shouldn’t be anyway.  And when the storyteller and the audience understand this, things are just a hell of a lot more satisfying for everyone.  It’s the difference between a satisfying surprise created via carefully laid groundwork OR a cat jumping out of the shadows just because it’s time for something surprising to happen.  The former takes a hell of a lot more work, but it’s worth it.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Forget Krypton

I don’t care about origins.  For some characters, origins are important, but for many, they aren’t.

One of the reasons I’m not interested in the new Superman movie is that I couldn’t give a damn about Krypton.  I don’t need to spend much time there, and I actually prefer not doing so.  I like Krypton unvisited.  If you think about it, there’s really no reason to spend time Krypton.  Superman grew up on Earth.  He looks human.  He’s immersed in Earth culture.  He is pretty much a human being with incredible power.  Krypton is just an excuse for how he can fly and have heat vision.  Krypton’s destruction is just an excuse to avoid having a thousand Supermen running around the universe.

Apparently, I’m alone in this regard because nearly ever writer wants to write about Krypton, and every reader wants to read about it.  It’s a strange paradox that Superman himself really has far more in common with Earth but we still can’t escape the notion that where he came from defines him.

A few posts ago, I mentioned the recurring theme in my books of Identity versus Origin, and Superman is probably the best mainstream example of that struggle.  I don’t care that, technically, Clark Kent is an alien.  It is almost irrelevant to who he is, aside from giving him superpowers.  His personality stems from being raised by salt of the earth Ma and Pa Kent, who instilled in him an incredible sense of responsibility and compassion.  Jor-El is just some guy who threw his son in a rocket, launched him into space, and hoped for the best.

Superman isn’t Batman.  Batman is defined by the loss of his parents to crime.  But young Bruce Wayne was old enough to experience that loss, and it defines his motivations.  Superman’s motivations aren’t defined by Krypton, but by the human culture he is a part of.  Basically, if you removed Krypton from the equation, you could still end up with Superman.  If there was just a boy on Earth born with incredible powers without explanation, he still could become Superman if raised by the Kents.  Bruce Wayne doesn’t become Batman unless his parents are killed.

That’s a big difference, and one that is too often lost when comparing the characters.  They are technically both orphans, but Superman’s orphan ranking is a bit softer than Batman’s.  And that’s okay.  That’s part of what makes them different, and why should all characters be the same?

This goes back to a problem I often have with fiction and origin stories, prequels in general.  There is no aspect of a character that ends up being unimportant.  Instead, every little thing about them is packed with profound meaning to the point that everyone wants to tell stories about Krypton when the entire planet is a one panel throwaway meant to justify having a guy who can punch robots into the sun.

It’s why Professor X must have been paralyzed by a stray bullet deflected by Magneto.  It can’t just be a case of falling down some stairs or a rock climbing accident.

It’s why even Norman Bates gets a prequel TV series now because the idea that there’s a guy who is unstable and violent requires more of an explanation than maybe he was just insane for no clear reason.

When origin defines a character’s motivations and methods, it makes perfect sense to explore it.  But just as often, it’s just something the character has at the start of a story.  So often, if a character is unique in some way, the assumption is that explanation is necessary.  But I rather like not knowing everything about a character, just as in real life I don’t know everything about my friends and family.  I don’t need that explanation.

This is probably why I tend to be viewed as a shallow writer by many, and hey, that’s cool.  But I feel like not giving every little detail makes the story seem more realistic, the characters richer.  Rather than viewing characters as a puzzle that needs to be explained, I view them as larger than the story they’re living in.  Their lives didn’t start at the beginning of the tale, and they aren’t going to stop after it’s over.

You can see his in a lot of my stories.  Mack Megaton (The Automatic Detective) is a killer robot, and his struggle is finding a function in a world that doesn’t know what to do with him.  Robot characters almost always have some “How they were made” origin story, and Mack has a small reference to when he was first activated.  But it isn’t defining to who he is, and it is only a small part of his true origin.  Yes, Mack has a “secret origin” that only I know, but I’ve just never shared that because it is irrelevant.  It might come up sometime in the future, but, for now, it just isn’t important to the story he takes part in.

In Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest (dropping this July, Action Force), minotaurism runs in Helen’s family.  She doesn’t know why.  Nor do her parents or grandparents.  It’s just something they carry with them.  At one point, I considered revealing that Helen was descended from demi-gods, but I decided against this.  It’s expected that if Helen is a minotaur that it must be a major plot point.  Otherwise, why not just make her a regular person?  So I left the question unanswered.  Heck, it’s not even asked.  And that makes a lot of sense to me because if she was short or tall or Korean, there really wouldn’t be a need to come up with some explanation in story for those character choices.  So just because she’s a seven foot tall minotaur (in a world where such things are rare but possible), I saw no reason to make it more important than it already was.

To be sure, Helen’s minotaurism is an important part of the story, but it’s important in terms of what it allows her to do and how the world (and even Helen) sees herself.  It’s not a secret waiting to be revealed at the most dramatic moment.  It doesn’t have some super special meaning, and, aside from giving Helen a talent for grappling with a cyclops or punching dragons, it isn’t anything that the plot hinges on.

I like that about her.  It says that being different isn’t automatically a story to be told.  It says that normality, how ever you define it, is just a matter of degrees and not everything a character carries with them has to carry earth-shattering consequences.  It feels to me like being part of a larger world, not a smaller one.  And so many prequels and origins only seem to shrink their universe rather than grow it.

I get that I’m mostly alone in that, and for most people, yet another Superman story where he fights evil Kryptonians makes sense and is satisfying in a way I’ll never understand.  Probably because I view Krypton as so unimportant to Superman’s character.  Also because I never care for the evil doppelganger bad guy that always seem so obvious.  But, hey, I’m mostly alone on that too.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

A Digression on Superhero Chick Flicks

Q&A Friday is here once again, and while I’m a little late posting this, this is still technically Friday, so the universe has not fallen completely out of disorder just yet.  Another day pushing back against the forces of chaos, right?  Sure, we’re all destined one day to be swallowed up by a vast and indifferent universe, but at least for today, I’m going to chalk this up to a win.

 

I’ve heard a lot of talk recently about the lack of female superheroes in film. Regardless of where you stand on that particular issue, I wonder what female superheros you would like to see have their own film within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the new DC Film Universe they seem to be trying to make, or just in general?

The problem with superheroes is that they are traditionally a male-centered genre.  This isn’t just superheroes though.  The action adventure genre and all its sub-genres tends to be consider men its target audience.  Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a certain, “Oh, girls are icky” attitude that haunts the genre.  But really, there’s a hell of a lot more baggage than that.

Superheroes are, with rare exception, empowerment fantasies.  They represent exceptionalism at its most obvious.  If you think about it, almost every superhero story is the story of a person who carries the weight of the world on their shoulders just by being so awesome.  Gotham City is always on the brink of chaos, and it’s only the activities of a wealthy, supergenius, mega-athlete that can keep it from crumbling into the abyss.  Not the police force.  Not the ordinary citizens.  Just one guy who decided to fight crime dressed like a bat.

Superman has awesome power, and it is only through that amazing power that he’s able to save Metropolis and the earth from any manner of fantastic dangers.  Tony Stark is a powerful industrialist who can change the world in a thousand ways with his abilities, but he chooses instead to put on an armored suit and punch bad guys in the face personally.

Frankly, not many people really buy the image of the empowered female.  It’s odd because it’s not as if we’re talking about reality here.  We’re talking about bold fantasy, so even if I don’t buy many of the arguments for male superiority in the real world, they make even less sense in a superhero world.  It’s hard to argue that, in a fair fight, Captain America would need to go easy on She-Hulk or that in a universe where Batman can fight Superman successfully that there would be no such thing as a powerful female character.

Yet this perception is so ingrained in us that, even in a world of infinite possibilities, it’s hard to find great examples of truly empowered female heroes.  Even those female characters without baggage tend to be less powerful than their equivalents.  So many female characters are gender-flips of already popular characters that you would think it wouldn’t be hard to apply the same rules, but the fact is, most female equivalents of male heroes are subtly less powerful and capable than their male counterparts.

The incredible Hulk is a raging powerhouse, one of the strongest beings in his particular universe.  If he’s a bad guy, he’s impossibly dangerous.  If he’s a good guy and someone manages to take him down, it’s a sign of how powerful they are.  Meanwhile, She-Hulk is powerful and probably one of the strongest female characters in her universe.  Still, if she gets beat nobody treats it with the same shock and awe.

Yes, I know She-Hulk’s powers work differently than the Hulk’s, but that doesn’t negate the point.  It just enforces it.  Bruce Banner gets zapped by gamma rays and turns into a raging, unstoppable monster.  His cousin just gets stronger and sassier.  (Though it should be noted that I love She-Hulk and she remains one of my favorite characters in the Marvel Universe.)

Hulk and She-Hulk are a good example too because while the Hulk might be a giant beast, She-Hulk is tall and gorgeous.  She’s imposing, sure, and some artists even go out of their way to portray her as well-muscled.  But it doesn’t change the fact that she is an attractive woman, which is a burden EVERY female superhero must struggle with.  There are so few ugly female superheroes, I can’t even think of one off the top of my head.

Finally, you can add that women, like so many non-white, non-male characters in fiction, are often pigeonholed into roles based solely on their gender.  Even if they aren’t hypersexualized (as they often are), their often burdened with sexy costumes or female-centric attitudes.  Or should I say, attitudes a guy thinks a woman should have.  I’ve mentioned this before, but for many writers, women are no different than dwarves or elves.  If they aren’t defined by their beards or pointed ears (or boobs or long legs), a lot of writers just don’t know how to deal with them.

That’s a pretty big problem considering how little sexuality there generally is in superheroics.  I know that the guys are almost all hunks and ubermen, but they are rarely sexualized.  They are powerful beings, not necessarily sexual ones.  So women in comics, especially female superheroes, must somehow be both powerful and sexual.  Well, they don’t HAVE to be, but they usually are.  And why should that be surprising?  Women are constantly defined by their sexual desirability, and that’s a raw deal all the way around.  It creates a universe where Rush Limbaugh can criticize any women he doesn’t like by either labeling her ugly or, even more paradoxically, too attractive.  Meanwhile, Rush is a big fat bald guy who doesn’t exactly send a woman’s loins quivering.  That’s not even about politics.  That’s just a perception that reaches across the board.

With sexuality being such a defining characteristic of female superheroes, is it any wonder that most discussions about them are which is most desirable?  Their love lives tend to get a lot of focus, and if I had a dollar for every alternate universe story where Wonder Woman hooks up with Superman, I’d have a few extra bucks in my wallet at least.

Wonder Woman is probably the poster girl for this particular problem.  She comes from a land of women.  She is probably one of the most powerful women in her universe.  Yet when so many fans and writers envision her hooking up with someone, it almost always ends up being Superman.  Why?  Because, as powerful as she is, Superman is more powerful.  Suddenly the relationship makes sense because the idea of a powerful woman with an ordinary man just confuses the hell out of us.

(ASIDE:  This is a big part of the story in my next novel, Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest, where a physically powerful woman and a weaker man must deal with their mutual attraction and the cultural baggage that comes from it.  Excuse the plug, but a guy’s gotta eat.)

All the above adds up to a real problem for female superheroes in general, but especially for fiction.  A female superhero who acts like a male superhero will often be perceived as aloof or unlikable.  To get around it, the writers often must explicitly write moments of vulnerability that no male hero would have to act out.  And then by doing so, the female superhero stops appearing superheroic, often being perceived as weak.  It’s a classic damned, if you do scenario.

None of this really answers the original question though, does it?

I think the best bet for a strong female superhero to transition into film is probably found in the Marvel cinematic universe.  They really haven’t done this yet.  In fact, none of the Marvel movies have had a powerful female character in action yet.  Black Widow was good in Avengers but she also is safely low-powered character who has to huddle in a corner for a few moments after nearly being squashed by the Hulk.  Not that this is a bad scene, but it’s safe to say if Captain America had been in the same situation, he’d just have gotten up and gone back to fighting without blinking.

The truth is that Marvel has neglected its female characters in the movie universe in a way I sometimes find inexcusable.  At the moment, the two most powerful female characters in the movies are the one enemy agent Tony Stark fights in Iron Man 3 and a powered up Pepper Potts, also in Iron Man 3.  The enemy agent is defeated by Stark without his Iron Man armor even.  It’s a good scene, but it doesn’t help the perception that even a superpowered female bad guy is relatively easy to beat.  After all, Iron Man has to blow a hole through another bad guy’s chest, and the final boss needs to be blown up several times to be truly defeated.  Though at least it’s Pepper Potts who delivers the final blow.

This still doesn’t change that the movies have yet to feature a really powerful female hero, even though they’ve laid the groundwork for the first truly superheroic universe.  The problem though is that all the heroes featured in the movies have had their own long-running solo series, and despite having hundreds of female heroes, almost none of them have had a chance to build an audience on their own.  They are almost always defined by their relationships to a team or as supporting characters.  Basically, giving any of them their own starring role in a movie would be breaking completely new ground, and the whole point of taking a previously established character is to have that work already done for you.

Thinking about it, I see that as almost an insurmountable obstacle.  Their are only two prominent, physically powerful female superheroes in all the Marvel universe that have had their own solo ongoing series:  She-Hulk and Captain Marvel (aka Ms. Marvel).  The problem here is that both characters are gender-swapped versions of other characters.  She-Hulk would be a hard sell because Marvel really hasn’t been able to make the Hulk work very well until Avengers finally gave him permission to unleash his full might.  Ms. Marvel is a legacy of a character who is just as obscure, and her powers are pretty fantastic, making her a difficult sale to the general public.

So despite my earlier claim, I guess the Marvel movieverse has a long way to go before they can feature a truly powerful female protagonist in her own feature film.

This leaves us with DC, which has much the same problem as Marvel.  Their most prominent female characters are all supporting, and it’s why they’re so hard to make interesting on their own.  The Catwoman movie gets a lot of flak, but the truth is that without Batman to counter her, Catwoman is difficult to define.  Although she did have her own solo series for a few years, and from what I understand, it was decent.  Though, once again, Catwoman is a character that is often sexualized and really isn’t very imposing in terms of her powers.

Wonder Woman is a logical choice, but DC has never known what to do with her.  Despite decades of trying, she has had difficulty breaking into a character of her own.  Worse, beside being a woman, she’s saddled with being an Amazon, which shouldn’t be a problem but sticks her with too many guys based on Greek mythology.  None of this has to be an impossible obstacle, but it can make her seem out of touch and bizarre.  At least Superman was raised in Kansas.  Wonder Woman is an outsider without much to connect her to the modern world.  And then there’s the costume, which is always a bone of contention among fans and casual folks alike.  Personally, I don’t give a damn about pants or no pants, but a lot of people do.

So, after all that, I don’t know who would be a good female superhero to try giving her own film.  It’s not that there aren’t plenty of candidates, but they would take a lot of work to get right, and even then, despite everything, I’m not sure the audience would be ready for it.  Comic book readers have had decades to get used to the idea of powerful superwomen, and they still tend to balk when these superwomen come along.  They’re more interested in who would look better naked than who would win in a fight.  And that’s a real shame, but a long way from disappearing.

But, hey, I wrote all this and you read it, so let’s pick someone, right?

Squirrel Girl.

Sure, she hasn’t ever had a solo series.  Sure, her powers are designed not to be intimidating.  Sure, part of her appeal is her joke character status.  But the fact is, Squirrel Girl is a lot of fun and a terrific character.  I especially like how she is the direct opposite of so many grimdark heroes in mainstream superhero comics and how she is unofficially, the most effective superhero (male or female) in the Marvel universe.

Squirrel Girl could bring a lot of fun to superhero movies, and while she’s not intimidating, she is pretty badass.  She just might be able to sneak under the radar.  It might sound ridiculous, but I never thought they’d do an Ant-Man movie (or that it would look pretty badass too), so anything’s possible, right?

And if anyone at Marvel or Disney needs a professional novelologist to write the script, you can always contact me at HIPSTERCTHULHU@HOTMAIL.COM.

Catch you next time, Action Force.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee