The problem with villains

I have figured one reason I'm having a problem thinking up villains. I no longer believe in them. Or in problems that can be solved by hitting. Or things where super strength is going to be particularly helpful. Or significant difficulties that can be solved in 45 minutes or less.

I mean, the Lex Luthors of the world aren't inventing green and purple armour, they're just making bigger bullets and selling them to governments perfectly legally. And if someone goes on the rampage and smashes up shops lately, they seem sort of understandable. Its a symptom of never believing anything can get better, ever, at all, not believing ones own efforts can get one anything one seriously wants, knowing that however hard you try to play the game by the rules given, you're going to get absolutely bugger all out of it. The house always wins, and it is not your house. So, you know, crash smash, with lots of shouting. Not helpful, but, going all vigilante on their arse would not be helpful either. As a number of comics have already pointed out. It's just bigger gangs and more fear. And while stories of uber evil assassins and swish spy stuff have clear bad guys in them, really, how relevant is that? The most realistic comic I can think of right now is the one with Superman vs Domestic Violence, where he could do basically sod all, or at least nothing Clark Kent couldn't do. So I can't believe in superhero stories where they tie it up neatly in the end, get the bad guys, and make a difference. The Wayne Foundation does a ton more good than Batman ever would. And I don't know how to write a comic about that.

So I end up with all these characters who are smart and strong and magic, and then I look at the actual problems of the world, and... it's like Buffy trying to get a job. Superpowers aren't actually helping with her actual problems.


Trying to figure out the economics of the underground societies implied in most urban fantasy... Vampires make a great metaphor for capitalism, demons can be any number of problems like addiction and depression and all that, werewolves have that rage issue, but when you try and figure them out as people and reckon what their day jobs could be, the story just... turns into Being Human, actually. Where it's not superpowers, more disabilities.

There's a lot of story in that, but again, nothing a superhero can fix by hitting it.



So then I go to science fiction and start designing colonies.
Try and invent a utopia.
But the basic story with a colony is how we can move to a brand new planet but we're still the same old humans.
A darkness carried in the heart cannot be cured by moving the body.
:-(


I can see why there's a lot of stories that set up a bad guy so bad you can just blow it up and feel good about it. It's simple, tidy, and kind of satisfying. It's just a really big lie.



My ghost stories still make sense to me. They're all about the ghosts you carry with you, the darkness in the heart. And they get fixed by talking to people and working together and all that hugs stuff. And the people who think they can fix things with hitting are (a) bad guys and (b) wrong, because when your problem is ghosts then violence can only increase the problem.

So I should probably write those.

... it's kind of a problem that the genre where I can think of happy endings is the one where it's all about death.



I think *actually having a plot* beats out the being rather depressing.

Mimicry, parody, and protest

So in class at the moment we're studying the Victorian period, and specifically the shift from colonialism to imperialism, from business going out there to get stuff for Britain to Britain going out there and saying it's all ours. Last lesson was about legitimation and the stories the white guys told themselves that made them think it was the right thing to do. Mostly, they reckoned they were the only civilized and rational beings on the planet, so it was their responsibility to go out and educate the rest of the world. ( Read more... )

So from the not-the-boss point of view you could just keep doing what you were doing, keep trying to ignore boss culture as worthless, get punished and get held up as an example of why people need to be stomped on for their own good; or you could try and copy and know that the boss people would never, ever, ever admit the mimicry was successful, because then the boss justification goes boom.

From the boss point of view, of course everyone is trying to copy the boss, it's the only worthwhile way. They just need instructing on how they're doing it wrong.

Reading about the Occupy protests lately, I've read a lot of people saying they should get organised, get a message, get a leader. Basically saying they should play the game the way everyone already in charge is playing it. Mimic. ( Read more... )

I've read a few cultural studies types trying to read Occupy, or just read the Guy Fawkes masks, with insufficient context. It's all ink blots. You learn a lot about the writer, maybe nothing about Occupy or Anonymous. I think there's a problem with a discipline that bangs on about the death of the author and how the reader makes the meaning, that makes it irrelevant what the author was trying to do. Sure, applied to books by dead dudes, you can get at some possible reasons why people are still reading them, what people get out of them. But applied to a bunch of people doing politics? Problem. They're busy trying to write themselves, not be read. Can maybe say something about the media writing about the protesters, but is on much shakier ground talking about what the protesters are communicating, let alone what they mean.

... and now I'm one step away from trying to do cultural studies stuff on the cultural studies dudes, and then we have a tail eating competition...

What I mean is though, I don't know what Occupy is doing, I know only that this is the stuff I thought up having read some newspapers, some critics, some blogs, and some postcolonial theorists in lit lessons on Friday. So I write it down and go play computer games.