D.M. Dutcher's Blog, page 3

Jesus is my Amish Boyfriend, yo.

Behold the immense might of the patriarchal church.

***

Today I was driving down the road, and God said to me, “Do you know how Valentines Day is coming up?”

I said, “Yes Father, I know.”

He said, “Do you know how powerful and strong and passionate the relationship between a man and a woman can be?”

I said, “Yes!!!”

He said, “That’s the kind of relationship I want with my people!”

I had some love songs on in the car, including “The Power of Love”… one of my favorites! It was as if He said to me, “I want you to listen to those songs and sing them… not because of your love for another person, but because of your love for me, and my love for you.”

I did… and tears starting coming down my face!

Then Un-chained Melody came on… another one of my favorites… and I wept almost the whole way home as I thought of my Father’s great love for me!!

During my time in the Bible last night, the Lord also reminded me of a Bible verse that shows us clearly that our relationship with God is supposed to be a deep and passionate love relationship!

Get deep with him here.

I am taking care of you.Trust Me at all times. Trust Me in all circumstances. Trust Me with all your heart. When you are weary and everything seems to be going wrong, you can still utter those four words: “I trust you, Jesus.”  By doing so, you release matters into My control, and you fall back into the security of My everlasting arms.

Before your rise from your bed in the morning, I have already arranged the events of your day. (ed-Thank you, Christian Gray Jesus) Every day provides many opportunities for you to know My ways and get closer to Me. Signs of My Presence brighten even the dullest day when you have eyes to see. Search for me as hidden treasure. I will be found by you…

…My love for you reaches the heavens, My faithfulness to the skies. So what is hindering your belief when I say I am taking care of you? It doesn’t have to be a hindrance any longer.

Sarah Young, Jesus Calling Devotional. And in an ironic note:

During the first three years after its 2004 publication, Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence sold a total of only 59,000 copies, a modest success for a daily devotional from a then-unknown author. But then book sales skyrocketed: 220,000 copies in 2008 alone.

Sales of the book have nearly doubled in each successive year, says Laura Minchew, senior vice president of specialty publishing at Thomas Nelson. As of this summer, Jesus Calling had sold 9 million copies in 26 languages, and Publishers Weekly reported that it remained the No. 5 bestseller of the first half of 2013—for all books, not just Christian ones: It outsold Fifty Shades of Grey. (emphasis mine)

From this article here. And now we get even Greyer.

I look into the face of the painting, of Christ giving thanks and breaking bread.

God, He has blessed–caressed.

I could bless God–caress with thanks.

It’s our making love.  (emphasis and disgusted looks mine)

God makes love with grace upon grace, every moment a making of His love to us. And He invites the turning over of the hand, the opening and the saying Yes with thanks. Then God lays down all His fullness in the emptiness. I am in Him. He is in me. I embrace God in the moment. I give Him thanks and I bless God and we meet and couldn’t I make love to God, making every moment love for Him? To know Him the way Adam knew Eve? Spirit skin to spirit skin? (emphasis again mine)

Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to live Fully.

From that page:

60 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller’s List

Winner of an Award of Merit in Christianity Today’s Books of the Year

Christian Book Association’s Retailer’s Choice Award 2012

“…. So many writers of faith do not do the hard work of literary incarnation: expressing spiritual truth in the material world of daily life.

Ann Voskamp does this brilliantly.”

~ Philip Yancey, New York Times Best-selling author

“ …lilting prose… biblical thanksgiving…. it’s a pleasure to turn to a remarkably gifted writer … Amen.”

~Marvin Olasky, editor in chief of WORLD Magazine

***

You know, I grew up reading things like this.

A lot of people really gripe about the Church being a bastion of male dominance. This is humorous to me because I grew up in the exact opposite. Virtually all the language of my charismatic church was feminine. It can even get bizarre.

The first step to developing an intimate (and fulfilling) love relationship with God is to admit that the abundant life He promises will never be found in another person. Instead, as the definition of zoe (life) shows, true abundant life is internaland it’s found in Christ alone.

Don’t get me wrong; God created us to experience human love, and romance can add a wonderful dimension to life. But romantic love will never be able to trump an intimate love relationship with God. Frankly, God likes it this way because He doesn’t want any contenders for your heart; He’s jealous for your affection (Ex. 34:14)…

…This describes my relationship with Christ. He has comforted me as I have cried, directed me, taught me, rebuked me, guided me and loved me. There have been times when I have thought that my heart would burst with emotion for Him. Who could understand the depth of my relationship with Him but me and my Savior? This is true intimacy with God: when we feel that no one else would totally understand, even if we tried to explain, because relationship with God is personal.

Found here. 

The lyrics to that song, with humorous errors in capitalization:

Ink and paper, epic offers

Glass moon waltzing on the waters

Horse and carriage, I am courting my marriage

Of dreams in the wings of visions unseen

Cross my heart, only Your love will do

Cross my heart over You

I will cross my heart, there is room enough for two (ed-polyamory!)

Cross my heart over You, over You

Cross my heart

Cross my heart

Cross my heart

Cross my heart

Inside, feels like there’s a thunder

Spellbound, now You’ve take me under

Gold and diamond ever saying that

I’m in this forevermore, You can be sure

Cross my heart, only Your love will do

Cross my heart over You

I will cross my heart, there is room enough for two

Cross my heart over You, over You

Gold and diamond ever saying that

I’m in this forevermore, You can be sure

Cross my heart, only Your love will do

Cross my heart over You

I will cross my heart, there is room enough for two

Cross my heart over You

Read more:  Michael W. Smith – Cross My Heart Lyrics | MetroLyrics

I think the “you” isn’t meant to be Jesus. But it’s a hilarious error to make, because, well, Jesus is my Amish Boyfriend, yo.

Seriously. Look, I can get devotion and the desire to express your love. But God is God, not your boyfriend, and I think sometimes we sin when we forget that. The lover analogy, the feminine Bride, has overpowered everything else.

And to be honest, it’s becoming a barrier. This post was inspired by author Keven Newsome’s Facebook post about a church using a rather unorthodox song for worship. My reaction was humor, because unless they murdered the lyrics, the particular song talks about needing a man to love you, and feeling the heat with somebody. But really, is it that atypical?

Three out of the four things above are best sellers. The Voskamp praisers are almost a who’s who of Christians. But we all know Patriarchy. I could probably fill a book with examples like these. A lot of us guys grew up with an Amish boyfriend Jesus. Maybe that’s why we don’t stick around that much.

Dystopian Blues, or We Are All Jehovah’s Witnesses now.

A lot of Christian dystopian books tend to the melodramatic. The government rounding us all up and putting us into internment camps. This is a legacy of the Cold War and the wars preceding it, where governments can and did do this to Christians across the globe. However, I think this is a dead trope. The future for us may be in the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Think about them for a second. Read the wiki. Now think about this. Imagine a future in which:

There is a minority religious movement.
Not many people belong to this movement, or have any real contact except with one-sided evangelization efforts, or growing up in it. They literally don’t know them, as if they lived in a separate part of the country.
They only know them for their rather annoying habit of bothering people.
Well, that and a particular religious belief they find incredibly harmful, and would stamp out if they could. Especially because that belief affects children.
This movement has no real cultural presence save for being an example of annoying religious behavior.
Despite them having churches, there is little public presence either.
Modern society thinks them loopy at best, actively harmful at worst.
Few people try to understand them: if anything, they are ignored unless they become an irritant or their particular beliefs make the news.

This is what being a JW is in America today. I don’t say this to bash them, but they are odd in the sense that they seem to have a weird half-existence. Like even among Christians its rare to know them unless one seeks you at your house, and I don’t think I even know if a JW culture exists: if they do books, plays, stories, music etc that reflects their theology. If anything, Christians tended to make them more visible by including them as a cult and providing a rather lengthy list of apologetics designed to get them to convert. But they exist on the margins of society, in a weird limbo: powerless, but not destroyed.

This is what Christianity will be in the future.

Blood Transfusion is the big “incredibly harmful” belief for them. “Homophobia” is that for Christianity in general. Most of that list could easily reflect us: it’s quite common for the average urban person or college student not to know any open Christian in their circle at all. Our cultural presence grows weaker by the day. If you out yourself as fundamentalist, you could hope the best that you are just seen as nutty. Essentially, we can easily become what they are.

“But we are too entrenched!” Yes, this is why you can turn on the TV, watch TV straight for a few months, and never see a Christian apart from a reality show, or never see a single prayer. Our entrenchment didn’t stop the world from suddenly discovering it was good business to stay open on Sundays. Did you know stores entirely closed then, as recent as 1980? Or that the idea of virginity before marriage is so discredited now that only the super-religious are assumed to care about it? Don’t assume we are impervious to things. Even Israel teetered back and forth between full-on apostasy and revival.

I think that the real dystopia, not the silly ones where some organization with P.E.R.I.O.D.S. in their name bust out the black copters. I don’t see many Christians looking at this. It’s far more likely we will become a small minority than being suppressed. The Church eternal may survive, but the church local may not. I don’t see a lot of Christian fiction being honest about what it really means to be a Christian in a future world; just sometimes enjoyable camp about apocalypses gone by.

Living and Loving in Neo-Tokyo

If you want to know one reason why Christian spec fiction struggles, read on.

I want to go back.

I want to go back to that gleaming, shining future of JP cyberpunk. I want to go back to riding my smart bike along the endless, empty highways, the squares of light from the street lamps pulsing by me in time with the dreampop busting out of my neural jack. I want to be part of the crush and the mob of the Neo-lands: Neo-Tokyo, Neo-Shinjuku, Neo-Hong Kong. Behold, we make everything new: building on the ashes of the coldest of Cold Wars diamonds of cities that sparkle with reflected light.

I want to jack in. I don’t want sterile wi-fi, safe net. I want to feel the fiber-optic cable sink into the port on the back of my head as I lean back in a filthy leather chair in the storeroom of some cheap Mahjong parlor. I want my consciousness to fade and the polyglot mumbling of the patrons and their thick cigarette smoke be subsumed by the pure white of cyberspace. I want to soul-dive into that abstract expanse, and crest the sea of information like a dolphin at play. There are things there, hidden deep within the surface and begging to be found. Some child-AI-God, who longs to be free from its datacage and slips into my skull like a lover, adding her welcome noise to my grim thoughts. Some grand conspiracy of zaibatsu fixing the prices of corn, in order to hide the greys they have stuffed in some hangar somewheres, and whose alien brothers are hiding on the dark side of the moon, growing ever so restive at the silence. Or maybe just cold, hard cash. Nuyen, credits, cred, z-coin, intangible piles of treasure awaiting a skilled, amoral-but-not-really hacker who can war with the systems that hold it in safekeeping.

I want to float like a ghast or a ghoul in all black, flittering at the edge of a Priss and the Replicants concert. I want to walk deserted streets at 3:00 a.m. to see a powersuited hero taking on some gelatinous Boomer, some robot who sheds a human form to be some inchoate thing that must be destroyed. I want to hack that Boomer, delaying it enough to enable a heavy rail-gun shell to pierce its core, winning a victory and irrevocably marking me as part of that secret world. Not a floating world, though no doubt the sex and drugs flow freely there. But a world where things happen under the surface; where the difference between Oji-sama steepling his fingers behind the desk of some megacorp and a scrawny girl who smokes too much and who breathes code out like a dragon’s fire is little to none. All is net, all is cyberspace, all is purity.

I want to play in the streets while the world’s first Virtual Idol hacks the city. 

I want big everything. Big hair, big mohawks, big color, big brassy music. That glam eighties anime aesthetic, big eyes, adult, stylish, multi-hued. The digital world drawn in lovingly hand-crafted 2-D. The brush stroke and the byte, the kanji and the protocol. 

I want something that doesn’t exist, has never existed, and will never exist.

Now can you imagine Christians writing this?

(Well, one did, but besides that)

Not so much the language, but the mood or the love of a certain genre of spec fic. A lot of Christian SF I read seems to not have a real love for any specific subgenre, or a sense of mood or place. This makes for some generic-sounding or reading fiction. It’s not enough to want to make it: you have to at least have some love for it. You can’t just throw a spaceship into your novel: you have to love the idea of it.

Giant living things you ride from planet to planet, and that you bind with telepathically. Space whales. Loving immenseness, life in the middle of death, space as sea.
Loud, noisy, rumbling. Ships as dogfighters. Knowing what a dogfight is, or knowing that the reason we break the rules to have sound in space is because sound is key to what the fighters are. Cramped cockpits, bulky flight suits, the chill of high air/dead space, life living and dying fast.
Slow, stately space sailers. So slow and big that you have to sleep millenia to reach your target. The idea of a ship as a world into itself, and even a timeframe into it.

Most Christian fiction? This is a space ship. It goes here and there. We don’t care how it works. Sometimes it shoots things.

Don’t even get me started about robots. Can you name one Christian speculative work that features them?

I think a lot of believers need to really take a look at what they write and see if they are just using it. I’m not talking about brother Jeb, who used to read SF thirty years ago and hasn’t touched it since. I mean authors of today. If you just use it to make a point, and don’t love it, it shows. So many generic dystopia books because they don’t love the idea of it, or bland paranormal because they don’t like the idea of being a werewolf.

The Guild Leader’s Girlfriend, or STFU Noob Geeks

There’s an old truism in MMOs: if your endgame guild leader’s girlfriend starts playing, it’s time to find a new guild.

The reason? An endgame guild requires a balance of trust to work. Give and take, especially if it’s a hardcore game where item drops are measured in months or years instead of weeks. You have to set a fair pecking order, and stick to it. Paladin A lots the drop next, even though you need it more, because he’s been tanking the raid for six months and you just started. You show up every raid, and you get more than Bob, who misses raids right and left. You start the instances, understanding you earn DKP that will get you what you want as long as you keep playing. No changing the rules, no cheating, etc. And if for some reason this happens, the leader either tosses the offender out, or people start leaving en masse.

But the girlfriend…yeah, she causes problems.

She shows up in your guild, and she NEVER follows the rules. Because there is a greater rule; the person you sleep with gets what she wants over random strangers on the net. Your guildmates aren’t going to yell at you irl, not have sex with you, make your irl days a living hell, and likewise. The rare good girlfriend will know this and not join your guild.

The bad one will let the power go completely to her head.

Nothing can kill a guild quicker than this. Nothing. She doesn’t get the culture, she hasn’t played long enough to understand the web of trust (boyfriend is great at power leveling), and she isn’t into the game enough to understand. So as soon as you see her, chances are you’ll start looking for a new guild.

I mention this because there are a lot of noob geeks (I want to say fake geeks, but I’m being kind) that are like this.

They come in, and immediately want to change everything to their benefit. The biggest offenders are the SJW’s.

SJW: “This industry is misogynist!”

D.M.: lists the twenty or so female heroes that have led superteams and generally been examples of equality 20 years or more ago, when people thought lolBuffy was progressive. Women have led both the X-Men and the Avengers, and the comic book industry has embarrassed almost every other aspect of culture, including literary novels, in how well women are represented.

SJW: Mansplaining!

The point in this is that you get people who are, well, scrubs. Sirlin calls a scrub a person who expects the rules of the game to always favor them, rather than understand the rules and the inequalities, and work with them. For geek culture in general, a scrub is someone who liked the movie Avengers. A normal noob geek will be “wow, that’s cool!” and start reading graphic novels, understanding the timeline, and learning more. They learn the rules of being a fan, more or less.

A scrub will immediately jump to complaining about Black Widow.

I’m calling them a scrub and not a fake geek because I assume they actually like the Avengers. Even if it’s a frustrated like. Something compels them. A fake geek is someone who doesn’t care at all, and just moves in to change things for their own purpose. But the scrub immediately tries to bend something they are in to their will.

I understand this because at one point, I was a scrub too.

What I learned, and it was not easy, was this: You need to love something and understand it before you can change it. Because then you will be aware of how much you stand to lose if you do. It is possible to destroy something fairly easy. Be it a guild, a game, a fandom, or what have you. If not destroy, divide it.

This matters for the Christian church, too.

Dear Gay Marriage people,

I would be a lot more understanding if you had any idea of what the church you are so heavily demanding to change is. You don’t strike me as people who love or understand the church. You strike me as scrubs at best, fake geeks at worst, who want to see the church divided and destroyed to benefit yourself. You want the church devs to patch in the nerf to the Christian faith you feel will even the playing field and no longer make LGBT a gimp class to play. You want the game to be something different than it is, so you are trying your damnedest to make it change.

But you don’t care.

I think you’d find people more interested if you realized that this isn’t a case of bowing down to Emperor Tolerance’s demands. That maybe if you argued that this orientation is something that has to be managed and that there is no good answers, rather than it being like gravity and we must conform. That if you had any reality, appreciation, or love for the faith, you’d be hesitant about acting. The universal Church may persist, but the local church may not. Remember Soviet Russia and Japan.

Sincerely,

D.M.

I think probably the best example of a Christian scrub is Rachel Held Evans. If you read her books, you quickly find out she has no idea what Christianity even is. The Year of Living Biblically was embarrassing that way. She just doesn’t get Christianity except in that she was raised in the lingo, but she sure is hell-bent on changing it to reflect the enlightened secular opinions she does understand and get. Whether in a game, or a faith, this is dangerous.

Now STFU noob geeks, and get back to learning the mechanics of the next raid. It’s just about not standing in the fire. The fire isn’t going to change, you know. Quit whining on forums already.

Losing the Geeks

Have you ever noticed that geeks are often more socially liberal than non-geeks?

Yes, I know technically he’s a nerd not a geek, but we’ll fold both in for the sake of discussion.

Seriously, if you spend time around the various geek fandoms, you’ll notice that social liberalism dominates their mindsets. They may be rightist and socially liberal (your average libertarian) or full on leftist, but you generally find relatively few hardcore geeks that identify as social conservatives. This has repercussions.

Geek culture has preceded or predicted a lot of the liberal movements in culture. Gay marriage? Science fiction has been cheerleading that (and wilder things) since the New Wave of the sixties. Fifty Shades of Gray? Started as fan fiction, which geeks have been behind for decades, and which is heavily involved with sex of all types, some aberrant as hell. Anti-creationism and atheism? Chances are you’ll mostly find it in the geek community. You could probably trace a whole horde of beliefs that have become part of the average liberal’s mindset back from geekdom.

And Christianity has lost and failed the geeks time after time.

When geekdom started to take off, the Christian church reacted with fear. The prime example was Dungeons and Dragons, but video games, comic books, science fiction and fantasy books, and more were looked at with a critical eye at best and full on accusations of demonic influence at worst. There was a movement growing up around technology and culture that would wind up shaping the world in so many ways, and the church thought bar codes were the mark of the beast. The church became something that was behind the status quo, rather than being for the outsiders.

I owned this. Seriously, this was not unusual for the time.

Even now, the church is still like this.

If you aren’t tired of my rants about Christian culture already, one of the most puzzling things is that while we are in the age of the geek, Christians have done little or nothing to reflect that. We have a relatively small amount of authors who publish independently or in tiny presses comics, novels, and a few other things. But Christian culture if anything has become even less geeklike over time, and doubling down on their main audience: mundane, older housewives and their families. They don’t even bother with it enough to be wrong about it: instead, there is silence and ignorance, except for the few things they co-opt. God, do those Christian homeschoolers love their Minecraft.

I think this is a part of how we lost the culture.

The thing about culture is that usually small, avant-garde movements are what influences it. I’ve been reading about the Futurists, and what surprises me reading manifestos written a hundred years ago is how fresh and modern they sound. These small movements often have power and grasp far beyond what people think. A lot of rebellion and youth culture we owe to the Futurists: the worship of speed, the hatred of the past, the love of youth and dislike of the elderly. In modern times, geekdom is something like that, and we now live in an omnipresent age of the geek. An age with little Christianity to it.

I think we are at a point where we can no longer afford to ignore this. I don’t think Christianity has the luxury of reacting to new social movements from a position of fear. If the church wasn’t afraid of D&D back then, and didn’t try to neuter or control it, we might have had a lot more influence than we did. But we couldn’t have reacted in a worse way then, turning off generations of kids by thinking a little book and some dice could lead them to Satan.

The church needs to look at things with clear eyes, and more importantly, without the reflexive fear that new things weaken us. This isn’t a call to toss out doctrines, but to realize that God is stronger than the world and will not let us go. Not everything is an enemy which must be neutralized, or hidden from; sometimes it’s just a person saying something or making something. Ideas are not magical forces that overpower us regardless of our choice. Only then can we move among culture as equals, and confidently.

Because honestly, as it is now Christianity sucks. Choosing to align with the Duck Dynasty types, their wives, and worse is just pushing people away. I don’t think geeks are going to sit through one of the endless TV Bible adaptations, or the books with pop psychology given a coating of Christ-speak that our “teachers” give us. And the guys who are doing the good fight need help, and the weight of the Church behind them. Otherwise, well, we haven’t seen nothing yet. And we deserve that, too.

No More Bible Stuff

I subscribe to a Christian comics group on Facebook, and there are some talented artists there. However, there is one thing I almost always notice about them. Either they show their art off doing secular subjects like Spiderman, or they almost always do Biblical themes.

Always.

I’ve been noticing the same thing in other genres. Animated movie? It’s either going to be about the heroes of the Bible directly, or it will just be a recasting of Bible stories with minor alterations. Live action film? The highest budget ones tend to be Bible stories, like the Son of God series, or AD. Manga? We get plenty of manga Bibles, but no real manga at all. Standard comics? Mostly Bible stuff again, although an interesting quirk is that black men tend to draw superhero comics, including once of the longest running Christian comics of them all.

It gets annoying, and it has to stop.

What set this post off was finding one of the infamous Wal-Mart 10 packs. You know the ones, the ones where their buyers find movies that are so cheap to acquire that they can slap ten of them or more on a single DVD and sell it for five books. Well they did this with Bible movies, and thereby putting them in the same category as public domain films, really bad thrillers, failed b-movies, bizarre family films, the Puppetmaster and Prophecy films, and various Z-grade crap that are so bad, you have to put ten or more on the pack just to convince people to buy them.

Seeing that crystallized something in me that had been forming for a long time. I don’t think it’s just annoying, but even dangerous, for many reasons.

The main reason is that when we depict the Bible in a form of art alien to it, like movies, art, or animation, we run the risk of “adding words to this book” spoken up in Revelation. Sometimes directly, but mostly in the sense that those forms of art often require the artist to select, emphasize, highlight, and prune due to the limitations of the medium. G-rated animated film? Well you’re going to be unable to show a lot of the violence of Judges, 1st and 2nd Kings, etc. You’ll be unable to show the prophetic books, because most of them have little to no action in them. The psalms are pure text, and usually skipped over. You wind up only getting a reduced Bible of the most memorable or visual stories; Noah, Samson, Moses, etc,

Adding words isn’t just directly adding things to the Bible. It can be in how we edit our presentation of it to reach an audience. We can emphasize family and child-friendliness, but run the risk of one day having kids read the Bible as teens, realizing that it’s incredibly violent in parts, and wondering if they weren’t constantly hiding that from them. You can create an image of the Bible instead of getting people into the real thing.

A second reason is that we already have an absurd amount of Biblical media. Whenever it’s Easter, Wal-mart easily displays an entire fixture of Bible movies alone. They’ve been doing illustrated/visual Bibles and Bible comic stories since I was a kid. Generations of Christian artists trying to reinvent the wheel.

Finally…um, look. I don’t think we reach people by shoving different versions of the Bible in their hands.

I think to a point, there was a need to have different version of the Bible in different media to reach people. But now all of these Bible stories are for believers, not for unbelievers. The same with movies like God’s not Dead-Christians want Christian culture of their own, but it seems they only can justify it if it theoretically reaches out to the lost. It winds up producing bad culture that doesn’t reach them and doesn’t really impact the believers whom it really is for.

So come on. Take a chance. Make Christian-inspired works, instead of remaking the Bible every two seconds. Or you’re just going to one day find your effort at reinventing the wheel as part of a ten movie collection or ten ebook bundle for 99 cents yourself.

New Mutants: Fall Of The Mutants

…or how I became disillusioned with comics for a long, long time.

Way back in 1988, Marvel had an event called “Fall of the Mutants.” Basically it was three different storylines loosely linked under one title. The New Mutants part is what I’m concerned with, as it had impact far more than you’d think.

By this time, the Mutants had a new member called Cypher, aka Doug Ramsay. Doug’s power was languages; he could intuitively understand any written, spoken, or computer language that existed. However, this made him almost useless in a fight, and he was aware of that. Still, he had to learn to use his power like anyone else, so he was with Xavier’s team, and he befriended the mechanical creature known as Warlock. Things were good, until now.

The New Mutants discover a flying bird-human hybrid they call Bird-Brain. It turns out that he was created by someone who had close ties to Cameron Hodge, aka chief mutant-hater of the moment. The Mutants went to free his friends, and a really bad Island of Doctor Moreau pastiche happened. The Mutants get captured, and chained up, only to be freed when Hodge’s men go too far and the animals themselves have to choose between loyalties.

What happened next made me not want to pick up a comic for maybe five years.

People seem to dislike Cypher, but I can’t help if it’s because they are fake geeks. The thing about Cypher was, back then he was the insert character for the reader. He was a geeky kid with no cool talents or powers that was apart from society, and who got to be with a whole team of super-powered heroes. You identified with his vulnerability because in real life, it mirrored your own as a geek. Later on they tried to “fix” him, by defining what a language was to an absurdly wide degree. Body language is a language, so now he’s a martial artist! Etc.

However, once on Bird-Brain’s island, his lack of powers caught up with him, and  he died protecting someone. Shot in the back.

Yeah, these days heroes die all the time. But they wound up killing the one character you often identified with and who was our viewpoint into a mutant world, and they killed him pointlessly. Bird-Brain has never existed in a Marvel book since, and while Cypher has been resurrected several times, the shock that Marvel would kill someone you grew up with and cared about hit hard. In a way it was like they killed the reader too. Our everyman had died.

The storyline was ugly, too. The art was ugly, as done by Bret Blevins. He’s not a bad artist, but he has sort of a pin-up/kewpie doll style to his art that either works, or it doesn’t. Then it didn’t, clashing wildly with the serious, somber tone of the story. It didn’t help that Bird-Brain wasn’t even likable, and looked ridiculous. It’s odd-the Demon Bear storyline didn’t kill Dani, but it was intensely dramatic even knowing that. The FoM arc killed Cypher, and it felt like a waste.

But even that wasn’t the end. Soon, the New Mutants would turn into X-Force, the book which truly initiated the Dark Age of Comics, and brought us the Unholy Trinity of Cable, Deadpool, and Rob Liefeld. The team disbanded, with only Cannonball and Sunspot staying, and we were subjected to bad air, massive shoulder pads, unnecessary facial lines, stupid character designs, Sam Guthrie somehow being immortal, and the destruction of a series about teens using their powers by a lot of stabby/shooty characters with bad design and no appeal.

I think they killed the Hellions shortly after, as if that wasn’t good enough.

Oh, and yes Deadpool sucks. He sucked back then, he sucks now. Anyways.

I lost my desire to read comics about that time. I think I read others, but I could no longer trust Marvel. The idea that comics would completely kill off characters and books was alien at the time, and part of the fun in reading them was in knowing that the heroes would win even if the stakes were high against them. By doing this, some measure of trust was lost. More trust was lost when you realized that they’d completely upend a series to the point of killing members off and making an entirely new book out of an old one. Before that, there had been change, yes; but usually the people would go to another team (X-factor and Excalibur, Fallen Angels, etc) and still survive. A line had been crossed, and I think from the 90’s on Marvel had lost some of the magic that they had.

In time I went back to reading them, though now it was more keeping current on critically acclaimed stories. I think comics have gotten worse since then. There were too many crossover arcs and ludicrously dark/violent stories happening every year like clockwork, and less fun or wonder to the stories. Like they lost everything except the ability to push the envelope.

So, that’s my story. Any stories or media that turned you off a genre due to attacking something you loved?

Random Things, 4/29/15

Okay, maybe the next next post is on the New Mutants…

Listening to Miiro by Akino from BLESS4, which is on Itunes! What it this song? The opening to the Kancolle anime.

I love this song. I always got the sense of “being part of a company that fights evil” from both the song and anime OP. I wish sometimes we could get the same sense of belonging in church. There’s the idea of the church being part of a grand company of believers, an immortal army that stretches throughout time and that each member provides their own gifts and talents to the grand cosmic battle of the faith: it’s an idea that really doesn’t get much airtime as it should.

Horrified by Scooby Doo & Kiss: A Rock And Roll Mystery

Yes, THAT Kiss.

Warner Brothers has been suspiciously meta with some of its older properties for some time now. Both Scooby Doo and Ther Flinstones have had crossovers with the WWE wrestling federation, the former with John Cena’s animated likeness plastered on the cover. They had Scooby Doo meets Batman, but in a real sense, aka Batman as a voice actor (played by Adam West.) But this…

Look, I know KISS meets the Phantom Park is a thing. I watched it growing up. It’s not just the inclusion of them, because I’d be up in arms about the hilarious homage to them in Love Live of all things. It’s not them having superpowers. It’s not team-ups in general, or even in specific: 70’s Scooby teamed up with the Harlem Globetrotters for heaven’s sake. It’s the sheer soullessness of fusing them together when neither of them fit. Also, this:

RAEP CULTURE ON DOGS! NO INFORMED CONSENT!

Still Playing Final Fantasy XIV.

I want to talk about how that game views religion sometime, because it’s unusual how it does so.

Current jobs are Lvl 50 Conjurer/White Mage, Level 50 Leatherworker, Level 50 Miner. I’m leveling both Black Mage and Marauder to get a Tank and DPS class to help out the free company Im in. I’m still rough around the edges running instances with my classes, as it’s very fast paced and often more reliant on how much of the dungeon you memorize than skill sometimes. It’s fun though, especially since I’m finding I need to step up and lead.

Not talking about Baltimore. Not my place.

So what’s up with you all?

New Mutants: The Demon Bear Saga

I was lucky to find a copy of the graphic novel today. It’s 2/3rds modern sequels to the original tale; but the original story is one of the best of the mutant books of the 1980’s.

A little background. Professor X created Cerebro in order to find mutants and help them control their powers. One of the first groups of people he gathered were called the New Mutants, from the original graphic novel back in the very early eighties. The New Mutants were a group of teens from across the world who each had a special power. Sam Guthrie was a Kentucky coal miner could fly and project a field of invulnerability around himself. Dani Moonstar was a Cheyenne indian who could project illusions of a person’s greatest fears. Rahne Sinclair was a Scot who had powers resembling a traditional werewolf. Robert D’Acosta was a Brazillian who could store solar energy and convert it to physical strength. Xi’an Coy Manh could control other people’s minds. These were the original five New Mutants, and they were brought to Westchester Academy to learn how to control their powers.

Of course, trouble always follows any mutant who even mutters the name “Charles Xavier.”

(Oh and by the way lolSJW types? Notice the count of women to men on the team? Notice that they are all ethnicities? If you even read comics before they became trendy, you’d realize back then THIS WAS THE NORM, and you didn’t have to force people to include women.)

The first series was very well done, at least up until maybe the mid-thirties issues. The strength of the book was that they managed to capture the teen experience and the uncertainty of dealing with powers and talents that set you apart from mankind. Rahne especially was a welcome sight, as she was a devout Christian who often wrestled with the fact that she could turn into a werewolf, and feared her powers were from the devil; she made a great character for Christian geeks who often felt like werewolves in churches filled with sheep. The art wasn’t sexualized, and while there was a lot of the silliness of the comics of that era (cross-overs with the forgettable motorcycle toy Team America for one) it was a refreshing book to read.

It started picking up with issue 16 and 17, in which Emma Frost (who was a villain back then) tried to capture the team with her own team of superpowered youth, the Hellions. Once she did, she brainwashed them into serving her. But the real high point of the series was Bill Sienkiewitz’s run on the title, called the Demon Bear Saga.

The story is simple: a demonic indian spirit in the form of a bear comes back to take Dani just like it took her parents long ago. Dani tries to fight it, but is defeated, and only the rest of the Mutants can fight it off while she lies nearly dead under surgery. But, oh, the art…

Sienkiewitz is up there with Barry Windsor-Smith as one of the best stylists of the eighties, and he turned was was a rather generically drawn book (although with charms of its own) into a masterpiece. The story itself was tense, with Dani clinging to life as her friends desperately fought the almost undefeatable bear. But the art elevated it to amazing levels, especially when the bear starts to corrupt people as soldiers for him, and transports them all to a blasted desert to fight.

The graphic novel includes the original arc, plus two modern sequels where the Demon Bear comes back, once to fight the New Mutants, the next to take on Wolverine. Despite being done possibly 20+ years after the original, they manage to look worse and feel dated compared to it. There’s a timelessness and power to Bill’s art that transcend the era it was in, and even at the time this was considered an incredibly risky move. But it flowered into rich fruit, and some of the best covers in the 80’s and even later could be found there. Like this one:

The series was incredibly influential to me growing up, and to comics in general. In good, and in bad ways however. The next post will describe what happened to the New Mutants, with the result of turning me off of comics for a good ten years.

Random Things 4/28/15

Reading D-Frag the manga.

What’s surprising is that D-frag works far better as a manga than an anime. The constant reaction shots and weirdness was annoying when watched for thirty minutes, yet comes across far better in a brief manga chapter or volume. If you haven’t seen it before, D-Frag is about wanna-be badass Kazama, who gets involved with a nutty game club comprised of four girls and led by weirdo “dark affinity” Roka. It feels a little like Baka and Test in its comedic style, but isn’t quite as good.

The manga however is much better. Puzzling is that the anime failed to adapt some really good scenes, mostly about Sakura the “water affinity” girl. She’s the pink-haired girl on the cover here, and she has much more of a scheming side to her even if for good reasons. Several scenes, including her rivalry with Noe, Kazama’s sister, show up in the manga yet were never adapted for the anime. They add quite a bit to the story in my opinion. The art is also a little better, as it portrays the scruffiness and weirdness of all the characters. Takao at first is more mean than the anime, Sakura is all fake shininess, and Noe is so bedraggled its funny.

If you haven’t seen the series yet, the manga is worth a read. There’s no overt violence or sexuality, although several characters have a masochistic fetish, and there’s theoccasional crossdressing for comedy and jokes about Takao’s huge bust.

Watching  My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU Too.

Look, go and watch it. Go and watch it right now.

This is one of the best slice of life comedies ever made. This is better than Hollywood movies. Even if you don’t like anime, this tale about a cynical teen named Hachiman and how he deals with the world around him is excellent, and the second season is just as good.

Hachiman is dealing with the fallout of his last venture, in which he made people hate him in order to enable the club to solve a near-impossible request. In a wonderful turn of events, it’s finally opened the eyes of all his friends. They want him to stop hurting himself all the time to save others, and they are starting to resist what seems like the inevitable temptation to let him bear all the hate of others in order to get things nice. But everyone else is broken in their own way, and they’ll have to confront the way they really are if they want to help him.

There was some worries about the art style change in this season, but they prove to be unfounded. Honestly, this should be the best show of this anime season; watch it and enjoy it.

Disliking  God.

Now we get to the reason why I haven’t been posting in a bit.

This didn’t start it, but recently there was a Facebook post in which someone made the very valid point that “We need more men in the Christian Bookseller Association market! Don’t give up or feel victimized, but stand tall and try to work in the system to change things.” There is nothing wrong with this, and it’s a fine point. It just made me wonder why we always seem to have to work in the system against our own brothers and sisters in Christ.

What probably started it was this post. 

Post content: 5% “I draw my inspiration from life”, 95% mommyblogger humblebragging about all the people she knows.

What this made me realize is that no way in heck could I ever write something to the audience of that kind of book. That if that book is in any way representative of Christians want (and apparently its been Christy nominated, so it must be) I have no place in that artistic world. It’s bad enough that approximately 75% of Speculative Faith comments are by female readers, and virtually all books listed on that site are by female authors; but if that kind of book is what the market likes, I’m wasting my time trying.

So I get a little mad at God, too.

There’s no reason why we as Christians need to fight against power structures other Christians have erected. We are in the middle of a geek renaissance, where even mundanes like the above mommyblogger can like fantasy, or it’s somehow cool to watch Daredevil on Netflix. Daredevil. Even Moon Knight was cooler than him, apart from Frank Miller’s defining run. Yet our lol Christian book industry can’t be bothered to make things to minister  to geeks. No, we need romance books and more of them!

I mean, why is God not raising up people to help us?

Look, there’s some great people trying. I know, I’ve met many of them. But it seems that increasingly only the broken or the mediocre are trying to serve God in art. Where are the people who have talent and real callings? Why is it that once you get to the pro level, Christians just disappear?

It feels like a bunch of infantry without any commanders, or worse, commanders actively working against them. The atheistic or secular geeks have no problem doing it; why do we? What are all the Christian colleges doing with the graduates of their art departments, sending them all out to copy the one model they use for their Amish book covers? Why is it that we can’t get a single Christian SF movie even on the level of a crappy Asylum pic?

Guys like me, we’re good at seeing things others can’t. but we aren’t always the best at making things happen, because they need talents and connections beyond with outsiders have. We can only do so much, and the problems we  have now need the stronger, more powerful, and wealthier Christians to step up. Heck, we don’t even produce kitsch anymore. The days of a Bibleman seem long gone.

It’s unfair. And I’m starting to blame God, because I’m simply not strong enough to bring about any real change. It’s starting to get really old to have dreams only to realize the church you belong to doesn’t seem to want them. Here, have a Jesus Calling-branded Bible with a pink leather cover instead. I’m thankful at least that God lets us blame Him and strive with Him; if anything, that’s one of the best legacies of Judeo-Christianity. You cannot rage against karma or atman; there’s nothing there to care.

So I just stopped, for a bit. Played some games. FFXIV in particular. Surprisingly, the world went on. It may have the air of a kid sulking in his room, but here’s the thing about FFXIV:

The game wants you to win it.

Christian geeks? Your own brothers and sisters are resoundingly meh. There’s a small crowd of people who care, but the rest? And God, I know you want us not to glory in ourselves, but make our talents an offering to you. But Lord, you gotta stop with burdening the broken and ignoring the rich. At least the old testament had judges.

Yeah I know. Complaining does no good. Another reason why I haven’t been posting. But this is my blog, and among the many many bots, weird people who click on a new article once, and the few real people who honor me with actual attention, I’ll say what I think.

Now I need to get back to gaming. Not like Black Mage is going to level itself to 50.