alt DCU - Dark Knights and Arrows
Apr. 6th, 2012 06:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm quite liking yesterday's idea of making the Dark Knights be from India. That Order of the Star of India bit means there are Star Knights. ... in comic logic. Star Knights from India that actually existed, near enough. And there were women too. But there aren't any more. But that never stops stories about the Templars, so *shrugs*. Tempting! Also, I found an actress with the last name Dharker, and now the temptation to name at least some of my Knights that way is really strong.
I still know nothing about India or British Asians or, well, anything relevant. I'd have to look stuff up.
I've started by looking up actors for my imaginary cast. Because clearly that's most helpful.
They mostly seem to be in soaps. But then so are most actors.
If I stick with just people I recognise that'll pretty much be people who have been in Doctor Who. As usual.
I'd keep Batgirl Cass the same ethnicity as DC though. Since Bats are chosen not born there's no good reason the others are all matching anyway.
If I keep Oracle equivalent I don't think I'll keep the traumatic shooting. Some disabled people are just born that way. And then she starts from there and decides to do saving the world. It's kind of a different statement than the Oracle that didn't let it stop her.
So there's Batman, Nightwing, whatever Jason Todd is calling himself, Tim Drake, Steph, Oracle, Huntress... and lately Batwoman and Question, but I think I stopped reading before they made any place in my story brain. I don't know if I need a Catwoman equivalent. And I so don't care about the Bat spawn I forgot about him for hours.
Huntress is Indira Varma. I don't know why, but I woke up having decided that. Huntress is slightly outside, with the crossbow and the not working with the others, but patrolling the same space and dealing with the same problems.
... I need to decide on the space and the problems. If I keep it Gotham it is straight up crime fighting. Does Britain need Gotham style crime fighting?
If I set things in London any number of things become plausible. I don't know why. Where the stories live?
I tried to look up crime rates but they're complicated. Also rates are measured different in different countries, like I looked up New York crime and it's per 100,000 but in the UK it's per 1,000 I think. London has A Lot Of Crimes. Also a lot of South Asians. Though why this leads to going out in chainmail involves Comics Logic.
... the closer to real places I set things, the more trouble I have applying comics logic. It's real. That means leaving the police to deal.
Gotham police couldn't deal partly because they were corrupt and partly because the crimes were bizarre. Supervillains require superheroes.
So obviously there are some wankers running around with swords too.
Asian actors I might actually have seen in things:
Indira Varma (1973) (Torchwood, Susie), Anjili Mohindra (1990) (The Sarah Jane Adventures, Rani), Ace Bhatti (1971) (TSJA, Rani's Dad), Mina Anwar (1969) (TSJA, Rani's Mum), Rik Makarem (1982) (Torchwood, Children of Earth, Dr. Rupesh Patanjali), Meera Syal (1961) (Doctor Who, Nasreen Chaudhry, The Hungry Earth), Ronny Jhutti (1973) (Doctor Who, Danny Bartok, The Impossible Planet), Raji James (1970) (Doctor Who, Dr Rajesh Singh, Army of Ghosts), Navin Chowdry (1971) (Doctor Who, Indra Ganesh, Aliens of London), Ayesha Dharker (1978) (Doctor Who, Solana Mercurio, Planet of the Ood)
Naveen Andrews (1969), Dev Patel (1990; martial artist?), Sacha Dhawan (1984) (Being Human), Roshan Seth (1942)
Yes, that's basically Doctor Who and related shows.
I didn't get any new ideas while typing all of that out.
So that was a bit boring.
So, onwards.
Arrow family - my token white people.
... I have black Wonder Women, East Asian Supers, South Asian Dark Knights, and a few random mages and inventors. I'm still missing quite a lot of continents.
Arrows can keep their DC ethnic mix, so there's actually not as many white people as comics coloring suggests. Roy's adopted Native American, Lian is mixed race, so is Connor. ... I hate how comics bleached Connor.
I'm interested in the messy family aspects of this one. Arrows have complicated families made of adoption and mentoring and generally ill advised complex het relationships.
So I want to play with Ollie, the liberal who ignored his mixed race kid and chose a white boy. Which is unfair characterisation of comics GA, but as a seed for a story it can go places. Especially if I draft in Arrowette as his girl child he also didn't raise. Then he's a dick who only wanted a white boy and yet he's the guy who doesn't mind not being related to him. Complexities.
Arrows are Green Arrow the First, Oliver Queen, Arsenal or whatever he's calling himself, Roy Harper, plus his daughter Lian, GA2, Connor Hawke, Speedy, Mia, and for current purposes Arrowette, Cissie and her mum.
I think I want to go further into British myth than GA ever did. They're not just dudes with bows and arrows, they're the Robin Hood myth, modern day iteration. GA just wore the hat, he didn't rob from the rich and give to the poor, he talked liberal guilt but he was pretty much just another capitalist whenever I saw. Let's make them a bunch of thieving do gooders. It works for Leverage.
So for visual themes we've got bows and hoodies.
And for politics we've got, why would Robin Hood be necessary now?
Take from the rich to give to the poor is what taxes are for.
Except from reading the news there's increased homelessness, even among disabled people, there was something on a disability blog about homeless people in wheelchairs in Britain, it's messed up.
Push it a bit further so it's comics story shaped, a couple of steps more towards dystopia, and you have a setting for a Robin Hood update.
You have the very rich and the completely poor. People with nowhere to go.
Taking to the forests is the last logical step.
... the government was going to sell off the forests, weren't they? Huh.
There's eco warrior threads to pick up here. And stuff about the green spaces, parks and the way trees are mostly cultivated now. There's no big rolling forests blanketing the country, no mythic spaces.
... temptation to go a bit mystic and have there be an alternate Britain in the Green?
Don't know though. Maybe if it were a bit Neverwhere. Modern myth threads, power of names.
I want these guys to be very real and ordinary though. They're single parents, there's a history of drug addiction, one used to be a sex worker and is HIV positive. Those aren't like Thor or Iron Man problems, those are just people getting by. Do they need mystical? I think not.
So maybe it's just parks as public space, as shelter. Or maybe they're out in the woods living off the grid. Or the people they're helping are.
Occupy and forming alternate societies because you can't get this one to budge. Beauty and the Beast? Neverwhere again.
Doing the Robin Hood thing though, it's one thing with Ollie when he *is* rich people, that's the version of Robin Hood where he's a Lord who goes and helps the common people. But it reads different if it's people stories expect to do thieving in the first place. The thing with Roy and Mia is they have these rough backgrounds but they're just straight up heroes now. They're the promise there's a way out.
So if Oldest is doing the thieving and giving to the poor bit, then there's ways to meet them, but he would want them to have better lives. Be a different kind of hero?
Huh, what if they don't agree with his occasional forays into wealth redistribution? They fight, but they're defending. They think he's got the line in the wrong place.
So the GA equivalent is English, rich, and possibly upper class like some Robin Hood myths.
I thought of him played by Jamie Bamber and now I can't think of anyone else.
I don't know about the others. Different backgrounds. But I don't know which ones.
The soap opera is appealing more than the shooting things with arrows. Oops?
The initial configuration has GAI and Arsenal working together, but kind of cold to each other because this is after the time with the drugs and A is pretty sure GA was a rubbish parental type. A has a daughter, and he's raising her alone because her mum is in prison. Probably for selling drugs. I don't think we need international genocidal poisoners in this scale of story. Being a good parent is A's reason now, making a good world for her is his reason to go to work and being there for her is why he won't touch the drugs again. So he feels extra strongly about GA's deficiencies in that role, but he knows the guy wasn't his biological father anyway and didn't have to take him in, so it's complicated.
But he doesn't yet know about Connor. Or Cissie. So it's not as complicated as it's going to get.
And GA hasn't met Mia yet. So there's more complication still to go.
Quite a lot of it is sounding like I could write it as GA fanfic.
A's life in a world without the Teen Titans is very different. No peer group, more isolation.
No growing up with Nightwing-equivalent? That's just sad.
Dystopic two step world can make a good background for Knights too.
Ratchet up the race tensions a few notches, and suggest the police and security services are part of the problem. Panopticon world, surveillance everywhere, stop and search, read all your emails, listen to your calls, all of that. But targeted at specific communities ie brown people they don't like the look of. Relations break down, more crime, more race hate, vigilante groups that think they're justified and have the wink from the police. Theft aimed at specific communities, like I read about gold wedding jewelry and not being able to get safe deposit boxes for it and targeted thefts happening. Hmmm, no, I wrote that down and theft isn't really what they're about. Lurking threats of violence are what you need chainmail for. It's not Gotham yet, but it's a situation that comics vigilantes could step up to try and handle.
Putting both groups in the same country with the same background makes interlinking them tempting. So A and N could know each other.
But I haven't invented the rest of the Titans yet.
(Aqua people as island people. Where to put them?)
(Who all else was in the Titans anyway? I know the Tim Drake version. I've got three out of those, Drake, Superboy and Wonder Girl. They're just kind of in different worlds thus far.)
(I don't have any Flash family. Where shall they be from?)
It's weird, with the other characters I filed off more, gave them new faces and settings and quite a lot of new interactions. Arrows I'm thinking of mostly changing the setting, and so it's feeling more like AU fanfic than the others.
Also it's harder to reinvent them without weaving them in. I know them mostly from teams.
Okay, I'm not inspired today. All done.
I still know nothing about India or British Asians or, well, anything relevant. I'd have to look stuff up.
I've started by looking up actors for my imaginary cast. Because clearly that's most helpful.
They mostly seem to be in soaps. But then so are most actors.
If I stick with just people I recognise that'll pretty much be people who have been in Doctor Who. As usual.
I'd keep Batgirl Cass the same ethnicity as DC though. Since Bats are chosen not born there's no good reason the others are all matching anyway.
If I keep Oracle equivalent I don't think I'll keep the traumatic shooting. Some disabled people are just born that way. And then she starts from there and decides to do saving the world. It's kind of a different statement than the Oracle that didn't let it stop her.
So there's Batman, Nightwing, whatever Jason Todd is calling himself, Tim Drake, Steph, Oracle, Huntress... and lately Batwoman and Question, but I think I stopped reading before they made any place in my story brain. I don't know if I need a Catwoman equivalent. And I so don't care about the Bat spawn I forgot about him for hours.
Huntress is Indira Varma. I don't know why, but I woke up having decided that. Huntress is slightly outside, with the crossbow and the not working with the others, but patrolling the same space and dealing with the same problems.
... I need to decide on the space and the problems. If I keep it Gotham it is straight up crime fighting. Does Britain need Gotham style crime fighting?
If I set things in London any number of things become plausible. I don't know why. Where the stories live?
I tried to look up crime rates but they're complicated. Also rates are measured different in different countries, like I looked up New York crime and it's per 100,000 but in the UK it's per 1,000 I think. London has A Lot Of Crimes. Also a lot of South Asians. Though why this leads to going out in chainmail involves Comics Logic.
... the closer to real places I set things, the more trouble I have applying comics logic. It's real. That means leaving the police to deal.
Gotham police couldn't deal partly because they were corrupt and partly because the crimes were bizarre. Supervillains require superheroes.
So obviously there are some wankers running around with swords too.
Asian actors I might actually have seen in things:
Indira Varma (1973) (Torchwood, Susie), Anjili Mohindra (1990) (The Sarah Jane Adventures, Rani), Ace Bhatti (1971) (TSJA, Rani's Dad), Mina Anwar (1969) (TSJA, Rani's Mum), Rik Makarem (1982) (Torchwood, Children of Earth, Dr. Rupesh Patanjali), Meera Syal (1961) (Doctor Who, Nasreen Chaudhry, The Hungry Earth), Ronny Jhutti (1973) (Doctor Who, Danny Bartok, The Impossible Planet), Raji James (1970) (Doctor Who, Dr Rajesh Singh, Army of Ghosts), Navin Chowdry (1971) (Doctor Who, Indra Ganesh, Aliens of London), Ayesha Dharker (1978) (Doctor Who, Solana Mercurio, Planet of the Ood)
Naveen Andrews (1969), Dev Patel (1990; martial artist?), Sacha Dhawan (1984) (Being Human), Roshan Seth (1942)
Yes, that's basically Doctor Who and related shows.
I didn't get any new ideas while typing all of that out.
So that was a bit boring.
So, onwards.
Arrow family - my token white people.
... I have black Wonder Women, East Asian Supers, South Asian Dark Knights, and a few random mages and inventors. I'm still missing quite a lot of continents.
Arrows can keep their DC ethnic mix, so there's actually not as many white people as comics coloring suggests. Roy's adopted Native American, Lian is mixed race, so is Connor. ... I hate how comics bleached Connor.
I'm interested in the messy family aspects of this one. Arrows have complicated families made of adoption and mentoring and generally ill advised complex het relationships.
So I want to play with Ollie, the liberal who ignored his mixed race kid and chose a white boy. Which is unfair characterisation of comics GA, but as a seed for a story it can go places. Especially if I draft in Arrowette as his girl child he also didn't raise. Then he's a dick who only wanted a white boy and yet he's the guy who doesn't mind not being related to him. Complexities.
Arrows are Green Arrow the First, Oliver Queen, Arsenal or whatever he's calling himself, Roy Harper, plus his daughter Lian, GA2, Connor Hawke, Speedy, Mia, and for current purposes Arrowette, Cissie and her mum.
I think I want to go further into British myth than GA ever did. They're not just dudes with bows and arrows, they're the Robin Hood myth, modern day iteration. GA just wore the hat, he didn't rob from the rich and give to the poor, he talked liberal guilt but he was pretty much just another capitalist whenever I saw. Let's make them a bunch of thieving do gooders. It works for Leverage.
So for visual themes we've got bows and hoodies.
And for politics we've got, why would Robin Hood be necessary now?
Take from the rich to give to the poor is what taxes are for.
Except from reading the news there's increased homelessness, even among disabled people, there was something on a disability blog about homeless people in wheelchairs in Britain, it's messed up.
Push it a bit further so it's comics story shaped, a couple of steps more towards dystopia, and you have a setting for a Robin Hood update.
You have the very rich and the completely poor. People with nowhere to go.
Taking to the forests is the last logical step.
... the government was going to sell off the forests, weren't they? Huh.
There's eco warrior threads to pick up here. And stuff about the green spaces, parks and the way trees are mostly cultivated now. There's no big rolling forests blanketing the country, no mythic spaces.
... temptation to go a bit mystic and have there be an alternate Britain in the Green?
Don't know though. Maybe if it were a bit Neverwhere. Modern myth threads, power of names.
I want these guys to be very real and ordinary though. They're single parents, there's a history of drug addiction, one used to be a sex worker and is HIV positive. Those aren't like Thor or Iron Man problems, those are just people getting by. Do they need mystical? I think not.
So maybe it's just parks as public space, as shelter. Or maybe they're out in the woods living off the grid. Or the people they're helping are.
Occupy and forming alternate societies because you can't get this one to budge. Beauty and the Beast? Neverwhere again.
Doing the Robin Hood thing though, it's one thing with Ollie when he *is* rich people, that's the version of Robin Hood where he's a Lord who goes and helps the common people. But it reads different if it's people stories expect to do thieving in the first place. The thing with Roy and Mia is they have these rough backgrounds but they're just straight up heroes now. They're the promise there's a way out.
So if Oldest is doing the thieving and giving to the poor bit, then there's ways to meet them, but he would want them to have better lives. Be a different kind of hero?
Huh, what if they don't agree with his occasional forays into wealth redistribution? They fight, but they're defending. They think he's got the line in the wrong place.
So the GA equivalent is English, rich, and possibly upper class like some Robin Hood myths.
I thought of him played by Jamie Bamber and now I can't think of anyone else.
I don't know about the others. Different backgrounds. But I don't know which ones.
The soap opera is appealing more than the shooting things with arrows. Oops?
The initial configuration has GAI and Arsenal working together, but kind of cold to each other because this is after the time with the drugs and A is pretty sure GA was a rubbish parental type. A has a daughter, and he's raising her alone because her mum is in prison. Probably for selling drugs. I don't think we need international genocidal poisoners in this scale of story. Being a good parent is A's reason now, making a good world for her is his reason to go to work and being there for her is why he won't touch the drugs again. So he feels extra strongly about GA's deficiencies in that role, but he knows the guy wasn't his biological father anyway and didn't have to take him in, so it's complicated.
But he doesn't yet know about Connor. Or Cissie. So it's not as complicated as it's going to get.
And GA hasn't met Mia yet. So there's more complication still to go.
Quite a lot of it is sounding like I could write it as GA fanfic.
A's life in a world without the Teen Titans is very different. No peer group, more isolation.
No growing up with Nightwing-equivalent? That's just sad.
Dystopic two step world can make a good background for Knights too.
Ratchet up the race tensions a few notches, and suggest the police and security services are part of the problem. Panopticon world, surveillance everywhere, stop and search, read all your emails, listen to your calls, all of that. But targeted at specific communities ie brown people they don't like the look of. Relations break down, more crime, more race hate, vigilante groups that think they're justified and have the wink from the police. Theft aimed at specific communities, like I read about gold wedding jewelry and not being able to get safe deposit boxes for it and targeted thefts happening. Hmmm, no, I wrote that down and theft isn't really what they're about. Lurking threats of violence are what you need chainmail for. It's not Gotham yet, but it's a situation that comics vigilantes could step up to try and handle.
Putting both groups in the same country with the same background makes interlinking them tempting. So A and N could know each other.
But I haven't invented the rest of the Titans yet.
(Aqua people as island people. Where to put them?)
(Who all else was in the Titans anyway? I know the Tim Drake version. I've got three out of those, Drake, Superboy and Wonder Girl. They're just kind of in different worlds thus far.)
(I don't have any Flash family. Where shall they be from?)
It's weird, with the other characters I filed off more, gave them new faces and settings and quite a lot of new interactions. Arrows I'm thinking of mostly changing the setting, and so it's feeling more like AU fanfic than the others.
Also it's harder to reinvent them without weaving them in. I know them mostly from teams.
Okay, I'm not inspired today. All done.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 07:17 am (UTC)http://www.delicious.com/redirect?url=http%3A//www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/16/occupy-wilderness-centre-spending-cuts
already happening.
technically it's a wilderness center, and they're taking it over because of spending cuts, running it for free, but that's exactly the Sherwood spin I was looking for.