Breaking down the fourth wall
There comes a time in every upright, logically-thinking person's life where one realizes that most of the content we're fed is not only bad, it's bad for us. At least, there should come a time. It helps things get done.
As a child, I consumed. Television, movies, comic books. X-Men, Transfomers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Doug, Batman, Star Trek, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Rocko's Modern Life, The Ren and Stimpy Show. I was informed by Warren Ellis and Tim Burton and Gene Roddenberry and John K. This was just how it was. Yeah, I watched Disney movies too, but I still don't think any of them were all that good until the Toy Story Trilogy and the majority of the Pixar films, but that's another topic entirely. The thing is, I ingested everything that came down the pike, and spent many a lost weekend in the movie theater and comic book store.
Big budget movies, special effects fiestas, comic book tie-ins, the grander and more expensive the better. CGI? Check. Celebrity voice-overs? Check. At least fourteen superfluous explosions? Check, check and check again. I watched so many movies, I don't even remember them all now. Mind you, this was in the mid and late 1990s, too. Long before Pirates of the Caribbean and Avatar, and all the spectacles that are jocking for box office superiority as we know it today. This was before Superman Returns and The Dark Knight, and the other expensive flops and money-making juggernauts on either end of the spectrum. This was before Michael Bay peed all over my childhood with the vicious blasphemy of the Transformers Trilogy, which is just an excuse to watch Shia Labeouf wallow in his own ineptitude while the namesakes of franchise sat in the background and twiddled their thumbs.
(I'm not saying Transformers is an inherently brilliant premise or anything. But it's a show about robots, which was then made into a movie about stupid, unlikeable, asshole people. Tell me how this makes any kind of sense. Give me the Cybertronian civil war, or get out.)
Then I reached a point, somewhere in junior high, I think, when it dawned on me. With precious few exceptions, all these movies, comic books and television shows were the same. And worse still, most of them were actually pretty awful. I don't just mean qualitatively awful, I mean detrimental to the development of modern society on the whole. Recycled plot lines, recycled racist stereotypes, recycled sexists tropes. Cliches on top of cliches, explained away because "Sex sells!" or "Middle America won't accept a non-white hero!" or "It's what people want! What are we supposed to do about it? We're just entertainers!" We're all told to want fast cars and generic white heroes and hot girls in cat-suits and a big special effects budget and Greg Land's porn-dressed-as-comics and not a whole lot else, because this is what works. This is what sells. This is what we're giving to our kids, whether we admit it to ourselves or not.
Invincible white men who do no wrong. Women who cry on command and take their clothes off when the plot calls for it, and have a tendency to be raped or killed (or both) just to ruin the male protagonist's day. Colored characters who are always the first to die or turn on the white heroes or be written off as props when there's dead air in a scene. And if you don't like it, you can get out, you're told. Find something else to watch or read or consume. We don't want you here anyway, ruining our enjoyment.
That's why I started writing as a kid, scribbling out super hero stories and chalking up rough action comics. I took my dissatisfaction for the content made available to me and used it to make content of my own. It's what I still do, when I see a void in the world for the kind of stories I want to enjoy, and set out to write them for myself. I whole-hardheartedly believe that this is what good writing is all about: Taking what pisses you off about the world, and fixing it through fiction. It may not make a lot of money or win you any awards, but it's a step in the right direction. Because if you're just writing More of the Same, just to make money or get famous, you're part of the problem. You're one of the guys putting out racism and sexism and awful stories, and passing it off as truth to kids in movie theaters and comic book stores.
It sucks to wake up one day and realize most of things you love are awful. I know, it happened to me. That's why you go to work to make it better, and support creators of content who do the same.
