I want to get hold of the story and...

[beccaelizabeth]

Do you ever just get like Big Feelings for characters and want to rewrite, like, everything that ever happened to them?
... if you write fanfic, probably yes.
But just... this isn't a writing mood because I don't want a big plot to fix all the plots, it's a Big Feeling where I just don't want any of them bad things to have happened to anyone ever.
... of such feelings are no powers aus made, except then no bad things are happening to people who share at best a name with them, and it's just...
it's really frustrating, looking at canon, especially the ones with an ending
anyone's ending
sometimes everyones
and you want to get hold of it and just...

... I mean I know it was the plot and what everyone went through that made us care in the first place
but past a certain point all canon gives them is unrelenting horror and woe
and I did not want that.

I get it that they make us identify with them and put them through hell and have them come out the other side
but
not everyone makes it

and I am not resigned to that.

I want the parts where they come out triumphant.

More than that I want them to rebuild a world where the bad thing cannot happen again.



I watch the wrong genres. All the fighting, none the rebuilds. Everything gets broken down.

And it gets weird when you watch a lot of different corners and they break the existing institutions and, like, leave them that way? Like there's examples all over superhero and F&SF where they seem to be saying that the problem is having institutions and systems at all, and a whole bunch of vigilantes with no oversight is somehow better.



I miss the Justice League. Embassies all over the world. Living together, on call superheroes ready to face whatever the world throws at them.

It wasn't a perfect solution, but they got rid of it for a bunch of A listers who mostly weren't even slightly human, up in a satellite, with no way to sign up, and no mention of making a living at it. Because somehow volunteers literally looking down on us all is better?

No. Trying to build systems of law where everyone is held accountable is much better.


And yet stories keep tearing the old thing down and just... leaving it? Like that?
As if that's ... done.



I wanted a story where the Avengers setting up a training academy mattered.

I wanted a story where the Avengers were an actual team.

But no.



It just feels like existing canon is all about breaking everything, and nothing about rebuilding.
Like, sometimes you end with a smile and the potential to rebuild, possibly even the promise to do so, but the next bit of the story they show us is where the new thing breaks.
As if that's the interesting bit.


Pretty sure whole things are also interesting.

Pretty sure building them is also hard.



Maybe I need another genre.

Comments

View from a comics nerd

[philippos42]

I think something bad happened to a generation of creators, at least in comic books in the UK and the USA. They internalized tropes from writers who were interested in the idea of a cranky old man who gives up on norms and just shoot people (that is, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns). So there's a love of ad hoc teams, a dislike of authority and institutions, and a desire to grab attention with images of breakdown and cataclysm.

This goes along with the rise of one-year and two-year runs on series, I think. A writer wants to leave his mark, quickly, by breaking things, and an editor finds the writer who wants to do that.

[baronjanus]

I used to have, long ago, this fic project called 'the safe house retreat' which was basically an alt dimension where characters - as is, with their powers and storylines - were just protected and loved, and nothing bad could ever happen. There were uh, big demons all called Mary Sue who were devoted to making sure nothing bad would ever happen or so help me, basically. And people wrote stories of healing and cuddles.

There was also a kiddie version for characters de-aged but retaining their personalities (think three-year-old Tricycle Toddlers of the Apocalypse, except nobody dies and everyone get cupcakes)

In related news, current canon MCU can go bite themselves, because they have failed spectacularly at storytelling I can respect. They made characters and then just sat there and peed in their own plasteline, I don't care what they have to say.

[beccaelizabeth]

Yes

protect all the things

and actually fix what gets broken, that's the point of heroes, Mary Sue or otherwise...

[baronjanus]

Yes yes, fix all the things. Mandatory psych therapy for certain characters ;)