We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Samizdata quote of the day Here’s a newsflash for Marvel: race-baiters and gender warriors who complain endlessly about the “lack of diversity” in comic books don’t buy comic books. They’re interested in identity politics, not fun. When your customers — lifelong comic fans — pick up the latest issue to find a smorgasbord of irrelevant, hectoring social and pop culture commentary, they probably won’t buy the next issue. Not because they’re sexists and racists, but because the stuff you are publishing sucks.
– Charlie Nash at Breitbart.
PS. I haven’t yet seen the latest Captain America film but it is on the list of ones I do want to see. Any recommendations?
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Havent seen that. But make sure you skip the batman vs superman movie. Televisual equivalent of vogon poetry.
Part of my misspent youth was spent reading Marvel comics, though I don’t seem to remember this level of indoctrination into political correctness. Sadly, if this approach continues, Marvel shall not receive my support any longer. I condemn their flagrant pandering to political correctness.
I’ve seen all three of the big superhero group films this spring. Captain America: Civil War was excellent; beyond just action and fighting, every single character was given clear motives for their involvement in the action, and there was a genuine conflict going on. X-men: Apocalypse was worth seeing; I’ve seen people saying it wasn’t as good as Days of Future Past, but I actually found it more coherent, though the plot and characterization could have been better focused. Superman v. Batman: Dawn of Justice had good scenes for Wonder Woman (played by Gal Gadot), but on the whole it was a major disappointment. I was sitting through the big action scenes wondering, “How long is this going to go on?” I have to say that I was hoping DC would have figured out how to do a superhero team film, after many examples from the two Marvel cinematic franchises, but it sure doesn’t look that way.
I’m somewhat hopeful for Dr. Strange, and fairly skeptical about Suicide Squad, based on that experience.
I have to say that The Incredibles is still in the running for best superhero film ever.
You haven’t heard about the new Ironman? She’s a 15 year old black girl. A super genius being mentored by Tony Stark. Ok. WHY do we need another Ironman?
Goes along with Captain America being connected to Hydra.
Marvel apparently has a death wish.
I remember a few years ago, when DC comic book fans were complaining about Batgirl being replaced by a lesbian and Blue Beetle being killed to make way for a Hispanic.
Though, oddly enough, Jaime did a good job for a while as the new Blue Beetle (although after the reboot, he lost a lot of his comedic charm).
Oh, and Captain America: Civil War is definitely worth seeing.
Gosh, a film involving superheroes. Amazed.
You couldn’t remake Brideshead Revisited these days without the main characters being able to see through walls or fly.
To be fair, Marvel has always been infected with this BS. The late 80’s early 90’s, when I collected most of the X series (X-Men, X-Factor, etc), mutants were portrayed as entangled in a civil rights struggle, Dr. X was an MLK type and Magneto was a fire breathing Malcom X type. There was even a story line with South Africans setting up an apartheid system for mutants. The SJW moralizing, even then, was pretty heavy handed.
You clearly didn’t read any X-Men, then. That’s a 40-year long love-letter to the concept.
To be fair to Marvel, many of their original characters were outsiders, e.g. Peter Parker was a bullied nerd, Matt Murdoch was blind, the X-men a bunch of outcasts. I just wish they could invent new super heroes with the “deficiencies of the day” (I mean that in jest) rather than turn Iron Man and Captain America black, Thor into a woman; and there are also calls for Captain America to be outed as gay. Next thing we know Wolverine will be outed as a Remain campaigner for Christ’s sake.
@ OP:
> race-baiters and gender warriors who complain endlessly about the “lack of diversity” in comic books don’t buy comic books.
Analogously: virtually none of the petitioners demanding a referendum re-run on the grounds that people were deceived by the Leave campaign’s dodgy claims were actually deceived into voting Leave themselves. Safe bet.
I have to say I have enjoyed the DC movies more than the Marvel output to date. All the Nolan Batman movies were pretty solid, and in my book Man of Steel was probably the best executed superhero movie to date (except perhaps the second Raimi Spiderman movie). Not seen any of the latest movies you mention.
I was never much interested in American comics, was more of a 2000 AD, Dan Dare, Judge Dredd and Métal hurlant fan.
Indeed. Superb.
PeterT,
Leaving aside my personal distaste for Superman (there is just no possibility of jepordy to make him interesting), the DC films work best as standalones like the Dark Knight trilogy, whereas Marvel seems to be able to create a fairly coherent universe on film.
DC’s problem is that any attempt to unify Superman (effectively a fantasy God) and Batman (a realistic character best portrayed with realistic enemies) into one film is not going to work for them – hence the panning Batman V Superman got.
And as to the political correctness, stop complaining – one of the joys of comics is that they are constantly playing with their leads in various ways, and some of the changes might be entertaining. Others might be awful. But the one thing they cannot do with characters is stand still, or we get the Golden Age situation where audiences stop buying to effectively read the same story over and over again…
Civil War is definitely worth seeing — for those who like that sort of thing; and that includes me. I think i spotted a couple of glaring plot holes, but maybe i was not paying enough attention. There was no social commentary. There was a Black superhero, but he has always been Black: not a White man turning into a Black woman. Maybe Marvel prints comic books only to keep SJWs quiet, while raking in the dough with the movies.
Batman vs Superman seems underrated to me. It is true, though, that the final battle was a bit cliché. The same holds for Apocalypse.
If i had to pick my 3 favorite movies of 2016 to date, they would probably be:
Spotlight
Eye in the Sky
Book of the Jungle
in the order i saw them.
The Incredibles was great, but it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Snorri,
Actually Civil War had three black superheroes: the Black Panther, the Falcon, and War Machine. The Black Panther dates to the era when every black character’s name had to begin with “black,” of course, but other than that he’s generally a well portrayed character. What was lacking, and what is generally lacking in the MCU, is any trace of south or east Asian superheroes, which I think has to be put down to American ethnocentrism: In the US “minority” prototypically means “black.”
What I found lacking in Dawn of Justice was any clear sense of the heroes’ motives, or of how they differed. In Civil War I felt I always knew why every character was there and what they were doing.
Maybd they should make up some new stories then
Nah, all the stories have been used up, along with all the fun, during the 1980’s. The future will be nothing but gonzo Bollywood dance numbers and endless Castle re-runs. Comics? Lost art form.
The Social Justice Warriors may seem like a joke – but they are not.
Their attitudes control much of the media and virtually all of the education system – including many private schools.
They are the “philosophy” of our age.
Frankfurt School Marxism (which is what “Critical Theory” actually is) has been astonishing successful.
After all do what to be cruel to black people? Or to women? Or to homosexuals?
The Marxists have noted the tolerance of the West (whilst denying that the West is tolerant) and turned this tolerance into a weapon against the West.
And the resistance to it is often Nazi – another form of collectivism.
“So the left do not want us to be racist – let us be racist then!” is the position of this form of “Smash Cultural Marxism” (and other Nazi front groups.S
So ordinary people (who just want to go see a film or whatever) are trapped between the devil and the sea.
Between the Marxist Social Justice Warriors with their endless screams that everyone is a “racist”, “sexist” “homophobe” and the Nazi “resistance” to this which holds that everyone should in fact be a racist, sexist, homophobe.
Solution?
I do not have one – not whilst the education system is in place.
Although the collapse of the international economy will give some relief.
Then the Marxists will go back to the more traditional tactics of “kill the rich” “destroy big business” – blaming the terrible poverty that will exist on these elements.
And the Nazis will go back to demanding “death to the Jews” (“the Rothschilds are behind this globalism!”).
All very depressing.
The average mainstrem comics reader only does so for about 8 years, and then moves on to more adult material. That cycle has repeated for decades and starts out with a new iteration of the old cliches – which to the new readers are new and fresh, this is followed by the superhero team ups/cross overs, the superhero “civil wars” followed by the superhero farce comics.
The final phase in the attempt to keep the older readers is the politically correct “Cause” superheros – so the readers who are just about to bail on what now appears juvenile can be kept around for a bit more time. Then the cycle starts over again. During the 70s, Captain American went anti-Vietnam war protestor. During the 90s and the Clinton administration “gurrl power” was a big deal including anti-rape diatribes. When Disney bought Marvel they were virtually kaputt after coming out of bankruptcy.
Subsequently the beginning of the cycle was new and fresh to the entire audience. The franchise has now gone through the phases and the audience is getting restless – hence the effort to make them politically “relevant”. If history repeats, the “new” socially aware comics will soon herald and dip in comics buying followed in a few years by a new rebirth. But since a huge audience was emersed in the present cycle I think superhero movies and comics will become much more obscure in the next few years.
The TV Series are quite good, I’ve been following Jessica Jones and Daredevil and looking forward to the Luke Cage series. If Marvel want more female and black superheroes there are oodles to choose from, why not promote Photon (a.ka. Pulsar, Spectrum) instead. There are plenty of kick-ass female superheros, like Psylocke (now in X-Men Apocolypse), no need to feminize existing ones, who needs a girl Thor when you’ve got Valkyrie or Sif ?
William:
Quite right! i should have checked the cast rather than go with what came to mind. And there were 2 women too: the Black Widow (who is actually a White redhead, and has always been) and the Scarlet Witch (who is also a White redhead).
If superheroes continue to be predominantly American, it would make more sense to add a few “Hispanic” superheroes.
I don’t know … i found it strange that Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne harbored such strong suspicions about each other, but that is not the same as not having a sense of their motives.
I also disliked Bruce Wayne as a drunken philanderer btw.
How about a new franchise for super-heroes?
ATFMan, he goes around drinking, smoking and shootin’ his way to victory.
FDAMan, he goes around messing up Big Pharma labs, making drugs cost more, or destroying them altogether.
FBIMan, although he can’t see a breach of Federal Law right under his nose, he makes up for it by attacking the sinister Branch Davidians.
Fish and Wildlife ServiceMan: He wrestles ‘gators.
AmtrakMan: He burns huge piles of cash.
HUDMan: He lays whole neighbourhoods to waste.
FAAMan: He can’t fly, so he tries to stop everything else from doing so.
Superheros have never been the same since F. G. Superman was Bicycle Repair Man. That was the apotheosis of the genre. There’s been nowhere to go after that, which is why it’s all been downhill since then.
I’ve never been much of a comic fan, and when as a child I had a moderate interest in the genre it was DC I preferred. Marvel was always loaded up with ever more outlandish superheroes with stupid names and ridiculous* powers, and they have long had a penchant for jumping on trendy social-issue bandwagons. And adding legions and legions of pointless new characters, most with thin or nonexistent persona and, in the end, either indistinguishable or not worth the effort of trying to tell them apart. If Marvel is falling on hard times, I will shed no tears.
* Yes, I appreciate the irony of considering any superpower anything other than ridiculous per se! But even among this nonsense there are degrees.
Whatever happened to Slaine?
Psylocke is also British (Captain Britain’s sister) having had her mind transposed into an asian woman’s body…so that is certainly a minority. Hopefully she will turn up in Deadpool 2 or the eventual X-force movie.
Have we scared the women off this thread?
I think they genuinely believe they’re increasing the fan base. They’re wrong, of course – teenage girls are not going to read Iron Man comics in anywhere near the numbers of other readers who’ll be turned off. But the comic books themselves are sort of irrelevant. These days the comic books are really just a way to get a movie franchise started, so the real question is how the movie franchise does.
Dunno. I’ve been reading comics since the mid-40s. Got to see Mickey Mouse battle the Phantom Blot. Was there when the Silver Age began, and with a bit of luck I managed to find and purchase (for reasonable prices) all the way back to the beginning of the Golden Age. Quit buying in the mid-90s when my collection grew too large to deal with. Also, those were the days when you’d have to hunt down and buy five variant covers of the same issue to have a complete collection. Bah, humbug!
Bought the first issue of Spiderman off the newsstand (several copies) for 10 or 12 cents. Sold it for $23,000 in the 90s, and that wasn’t all inflation. Did comic strips for Star Studded Comics (fanzine, but a damn good one) back in the 60s, Doctor Weird and Defender. Among other things.
It would take Rob Liefeld or Bill Sienkewicz to scare me away from comics.
As movies go, apples and oranges. The Incredibles for animation, and I’m leaning towards Deadpool for live action. I wonder how much CGI you can have before it doesn’t count as live action?
In anime, for tame swordplay I’d take Revolutionary Girl Utena (not the movie) and for batshit-insane swordplay, Kill la Kill. Who needs mecha? The two series on my current viewlist are One Punch Man, and Princess Tutu.
“Got to see Mickey Mouse battle the Phantom Blot. Was there when the Silver Age began,”
Ha! That made me think of this. (Although actually I always preferred this version.)
I prefer the Stones’ vocal, but BS&T’s instrumental.
Fair enough, Ellen. Perhaps RAB will favor us with his opinion, too.
hollywood is the worst of the worst .. haven’t set foot in a theater in 30 years nor will i ever
give them your money so they can give it to politicians who will screw you .. stupid stupid stupid
Ask anyone and they will tell you that the best current Marvel book is Tom King’s “Vision”.
The MCU generally has a much better handle on the characters than the comics, frankly.
Because lazy retconning is not available to Feige and co, they are less reckless and more thoughtful.
Much of what we see today in Marvel’s comic division was driven by two men: Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada.
For quite alot of comic fans, Brian Michael Bendis’s character assassination of Scarlet Witch (and John Byrne’s preceeding it) just over a decade ago is a source of real grievance. She was pretty much banned from comics for years due to the fallout.
Wanda’s an extremely important example of this because the character is seen by some as “pre-feminist”, and only has a solo book and continued presence due to her MCU counterpart (and note how she was absent from early Civil War promo art and most AOU promo art due to Fox rights shenanigans).
To the Russo Brothers, Kevin Feige, and Joss Whedon, (and Dan Abnet and James Robinson),she’s a complex, fascinating character, but to many of Marvel comics current “progressive” guard, she’s just not “modern” or “tough” enough.
Look how many of these new female characters are “legacy” genderswaps:
Female Thor
Female Ironman
Female Wolverine
Then you have
Falcon Captain America
Miles Morales Spiderman…
And those ones are off the top of my head.
Promoting their current female or racially diverse characters, or…I know this sounds crazy…creating new characters? Nah, why do that when they can lazily just gender/race-swap and cynically use their old IPs.
Just don’t let the SJWs catch wind of Psylocke’s convoluted backstory. A British woman occupying a Japanese woman’s body? That’s got to be some sort of imperialsm, am I right?
x-23 is a different character from Wolverine. I quite like the character, as do many others.
Ellen, I wish more women were like you…
There are more these days, but they are so young.
Ah, comics. Truth be told, I haven’t read a single Western comic – other than the Archies – since the 1960s… and I was born in the 80s.
Well. Except the British Commando series. But I don’t think I’ve read any of the modern ones (just the ones from, well, the 1960s or thereabouts).
Manga, on the other hand, is a different story. I think that Eastern comics are a much better medium altogether. Absolutely nothing resembling PCness or SJW storylines whatsoever – on the contrary, they actually go ahead and do unbelievably controversial storylines. Like brother/sister inc-er, relations, for instance.
Gregory,
My own favorite manga series is A Bride’s Story, which starts out with an arranged marriage between a young woman of 20 and a young man of 12 in 19th-century Central Asia. Both the age gap and the very concept of arranged marriage freak out many Western readers, I think.
But there are a number of US comics writers and artists doing excellent work. Two who come to mind are Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo) and Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise, Echo, Rachel Rising). Terry Moore’s use of line and form in his comics is quite stunning.
I was a big fan of Judge Dredd and 200AD and the offshoot the Megazine. Lots of great stuff, too many apocolyptical battles though and it started to put me off. But I remember a new magazine some of the Artists put out (early 90’s?). I did not pick up at first, that it was to be political left wing anti globalist etc venture. It started out okay and the Britain it portrayed in the future was only seemed slightly more right wing than now, but had Thatcher being lionised on TV (hah, what fantasy is this!). But as it went on it got more and more political and Britain seemed a barely 1st world country with the poor ground down by the facist state etc etc. I soon stopped buying and a few months later I heard it went bankrupt.
I can’t help feeling sometimes that the tone in which these things are discussed by libertarians is unhelpful to the cause of spawning new libertarians. Perhaps this isn’t one of your causes, but it feels like it ought to be.
For me, I have to confess to not having done the homework before coming to samizclass – I studied some philosophy and politics but economics interested me more. I’ve been exposed to very little of what you might call libertarian stuff except for Ayn Rand and I found her screeds a bit like being smacked repeatedly about the face with a ladle. Shakespeare it isn’t. However, from a first principles standpoint, I don’t see many bits of human interaction where starting from a standpoint of maximising human liberty isn’t pretty healthy, so here I am – reading voraciously, commenting very occasionally.
But when I see libertarian websites talk about SJWs etc. I get a trifle uncomfortable – I think your admin expressed it best in his post about Brexit when he/she said ‘what I mostly see in this blog are vestiges of British schoolyard class warfare’. If what you say is true and you cleave to the religion of free speech and free markets, why doesn’t one of you open a comic book franchise for straight, white, musclebound blokes with implausible abilities and put Marvel et al out of their misery sooner than you believe they otherwise will be? Marvel isn’t publicly owned – there isn’t a tragedy of the commons because Wolverine might swing both ways or because Green Lantern likes other white, musclebound blokes with implausible abilities.
For me – your argument with the SJWs here should be laser focussed – and it can be because you’re supposed to be working from a position of intellectual coherence. You ought to have no issue with a private company doing whatever it wants to do – only its shareholders and those of popcorn manufacturers ought to bear the risk of its failure. Too often it seems like commenters here and elsewhere on libertarian sites enjoy riling the people the SJWs purport to protect, when instead, considered objectively they (we – since I’m gay) are your natural allies – since many minority groups have felt the oppressive hand of big government and could therefore become much more enamoured of your attempts to limit it, than, dare i suggest, straight, white (probably not very musclebound) blokes who spend too long reading comic books and commenting on libertarian websites, but otherwise do pretty well out of the pseudo- competitive environment which passes for an economy in our society.
I once realised that I had a mutant power, but it’s not the kind to get much of a T.V. series, or comic. I can just chat to an ordinary girl for five minutes, and she’ll turn into a lesbian. I thought about calling myself Nick (nice-guy) Gray. They’d often tell me, ‘You’re a nice guy, Nick, but I’m a lesbian’.
Anyone else out there with some weird talent?
Jon (July 10, 2016 at 10:40 pm) asks some interesting questions. I’ll present my take on one in some detail.
Jon suggests a sufficient solution to the problem would be our (or someone’s) writing non-SWJ comics because “there isn’t a tragedy of the commons because Wolverine might swing both ways or because Green Lantern likes other white, musclebound blokes with implausible abilities.” To me, this is a huge missing the point.
In Seattle, a few years back, the progressive theatre company put on “A Midsummer Nights Dream” but with a tweak to the text: Lysander had become Lysandra, so one of the two couples could advocate for gay marriage. How transgressive – or rather, how boringly predictable. During the interval the very slightly nervous director (this was a quite few years ago, you will realise – that he could be even slightly nervous) hung around in the auditorium to enlighten any subscribers who were not completely with the programme. What became obvious (in part laughably obvious, in part truly pathetically obvious) was that while he could (sort of) understand political disagreement, he was utterly incapable of understanding the anger of several who came (and paid) to see a Shakespeare play and who thought his messing with the text raised a quite different moral issue. Some who also disagreed with his politics were yet far more angry about his corrupting the play. Some who genuinely did not disagree with him politically were unhappy about the play. He could not comprehend either.
These comic characters are not Shakespearean – I think everyone on this blog can laugh at the big bang theory, even as we channel its male characters in this thread. But the same logic applies. The complaint is not that we are unable to create new characters but that they (who BTW are so much better placed to do so) have not the honesty nor (one must rationally suspect) the ability. The problem (to those who give a damn about him – ‘fraid he was never part of my reading) is not that Green Lantern might swing both ways! – it’s that Green Lantern! might swing both ways. I can’t imagine anyone here being shocked (or even much surprised 🙂 ) if new character Green Yes Very But Not So Sure About His Sexuality were launched by Marvel / Disney / Whoever. We might laugh. After reading Orwell and C.S.Lewis about the effects of political partisanship on the quality of literature, we might make a bet that it would be crap – if we knew an SWJ honest enough to pay up. The question is whether you can invite readers to care about a character – shakespearean or crude – and simultaneously say: “We own him; tomorrow he (or it may tomorrow be she) will have the same name but will be literally anything we want. This character actually has no character whatever. He is an empty vessel into which we will pour whatever the political needs of today require – and tomorrow we will pour it out again and pour in anew.”
The artistic problem is compounded by natural resentment at manipulation and dishonesty. Readers are realistic about the true limitations of their genres. Every long-running SF series has its “non-canonical” episodes. When StarTrek next-gen time-travelled back to “The Trouble with Tribbles” they faced the problem that Klingon makeup had become so much better in the intervening decades. “Are these Klingons, Mr Worf”, asks an incredulous Dr Bashir. “What have you not been telling us?” “Um, actually, they are Klingons, “replies the embarrassed Worf. “We do not like to talk about it.” No-one minds this kind of thing because it is innocent – a handling (in this rare case, actually an apologetic handling!) – of the writers’/genre’s inadequacies. But the more it comes across as “We own these characters – and your thoughts!”, the more obviously it is not innocent.
From “Roe v Wade” to “gay marriage”, opponents include those who also dislike the decisions – and surely include some who only think that – who would accept equally unconstitutional rulings if they liked the result. But for the credit of the human race, I hope that a healthy number hate the unconstitutionality, and that those haters include some who do not hate the decisions. I can’t imagine a more damning condemnation of either position than to say all those who support it also support the court rulings – that the politics that lead to the one require the other. There’s a big bang spoof episode in the fact that people who care about that can also be found in this thread moaning passionately about the danger to Green Lantern’s character, of all things; we should laugh at ourselves. But I quite see how, in our case, the politics that lead to the first will overlap with the geekiness of the second – though fortunately caring about the second is not actually necessary. 🙂
Sorry Niall – you lost me at ‘laugh at the big bang theory’… I think I’ve managed a couple of wry smiles when stuck on long plane journeys with nothing else to watch and sought to allocate my time elsewhere when possible 😉
Provided your Shakespearean director had advertised that he thought his own writing superior to the Bard’s – I don’t see how you can complain. If he didn’t – it’s merely false advertising rather than political chicanery – I doubt many people left the theatre thinking – ‘you know what, I was against gay marriage, but now some plonker has put on a play and massacred Shakespeare, I’ll probably change my mind’. So what did he achieve, other than to burnish his pointless pseudo credentials?
As far as I can tell, your objection is the emotional energy you vest in a character and therefore resent the lost sunk cost when they become less than they were, or used for some purpose other than you think they should be (in your eyes). Can you therefore make the leap of empathy to see how it may be valuable for some characters to possess similar traits to those of people who aren’t straight, white guys so that others may invest the same emotional energy more freely? I’m not proposing a proportionate re-allocation of existing characters or anything as draconian (and I can invest emotional energy in characters who are different to me pretty easily – but I recognise I’m pretty awesome like that) – but if there aren’t any at different characters at all all – a. what’s the point of having more than one character, and b. don’t we end up like the Daily Mail bemoaning the use of Indian names in maths problems when I was at primary school – i.e. howling at the moon, to as much effect?
I guess what I’m trying to say is – should Wolverine not take one for the team, so to speak, so that libertarian geeks can avoid compromising their intellectual high ground, and welcome eager new recruits to the cause of liberty, sacrificing only the timeline of economic futility of re-writing kids’ comic books?
Jon, I fear your reply is merely demonstrating my point. You have more in common with that Seattle director than I realised from your first post.
I’ve made my point and you have replied clearly to it. I suggest we both let others in the thread comment or ignore as they wish.
I think maybe I misunderstood your point then.. but happy to step back! For clarity are you able to summarise it for me?
Jon, Niall can obviously speak for himself, but to me part of the point is that just because you or I want something to be done differently, is not a good-enough reason to force the change on everyone else. If say, you as a gay man wanted King Lear to be gay, or I as a woman wanted him to be Queen rather than King, or someone wanted him to be a black African tribe chief, rather than King of Britain – then, as you rightly suggested, each one of us is free to write and produce our own versions of the play. But what we are not free to do (morally, as we are not discussing the legal aspects of the matter here) is to present it to the audiences as Shakespeare’s “King Lear” – because it is not.
Alisa – I agree wholeheartedly. As I said above – the theatre director in question ought to re-examine whether he should even advertise the play as Shakespeare since it has so clearly deviated from the text, and the author isn’t around to grant permission.
But since the matter in original question is whether Marvel’s X Men or whatever is being devalued by being re-written with characters of different ethnicities etc. and since Marvel is still around and the owner still appears in his own movies, I guess we can assume he’s happy with the direction the franchise is taking. The choice as libertarians is whether to continue to give our attention to the output, or whether indeed we spy an opportunity to compete with the output if we believe it to be drivel.
Neither of these matters really addresses my main issue, which is that the tone of debate around these issues in libertarian circles seems to tend towards the school yard, rather than anything very high minded, and in doing so, alienates people who might otherwise be drawn to a critique of overbearing government. It just seems like a missed opportunity.
I agree, and that is often the case because the tone has been set to begin with by the Other Side, at least in my experience: every time a reasonable objection has been made, the objectors (libertarian or not) have been immediately labeled as homophobes/misogynists/racists (as may be applicable). You may say that “we” should not descend to that level of debate (if one can call it that), and you may have a point – but we are living in a real world, where the so-called minorities are not the only ones who have emotions and limits to their patience. I wish it wasn’t so, but here we are.
When performing Shakespeare, Othello must be black, and Shylock must be Jewish. Those are two of their most important aspects. I’m willing to allow some freedom with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, though their history as childhood friends of Hamlet makes that perilous. But who cares deeply what ‘second attendant’ is?
If playwrights insist on changing things, it should only be at the margins — or, if thoroughly done, renamed — “West Side Story” may have “Romeo and Juliet” in its ancestry, but it just ain’t the same.
This is one of the possible beauties of Green Lantern. It’s a job title, not a name. There’s Guy Gardner (usually a jerk), Hal Jordan (a fighter jock), John Stewart (black), Kyle Rayner (a newbie) Kilowog (the bruiser you want on your side), Ch’pp and Gnort (strange aliens from another planet), and Mogo (another planet). And there are plenty enough Guardians that some can be assholes, and others decent. They could do almost anything with a cast that varied.
So — they make Alan Scott gay. That’s dumb. From his history, he likes women. And he’s not one of the standard Green Lanterns — he’s a one-off. They could have had some respect, and made him bi. They could tell the same story, and had even more dramatic tension to play with!
Creative folk should know and respect the material they’re working with.
And Hamlet must be a cigar.
Jon, as you specifically ask me to reply, I will, though reluctantly. I suggested that I (and you) should let others comment because it is more likely that another’s view would explain my point to you (or yours to me) better – how likely is it that what was not clear in my first (which i tried to write with care) will be clearer in my rehash of it? 🙂 Further, I do not know a better way to clear a thread of all but two people than for those two to write alternate long increasingly-specific comments, so that anyone else coming to the thread has 15 pages of stuff to read before they can provide any input on the point(s) at issue. (Luckily, some have already input.)
However, you courteously asked for more, so, emphasising this should be my last, here’s an attempt to say it all from a different direction.
A) Imagine I’m the theatre critic of Seattle reviewing three successive plays in successive seasons.
– Season 1: Midsummer Night’s Dream with Lynsander as Lysandra: my review includes what I said above.
– Season 2: The Merchant of Venice. Without changing the text (or engaging in wildly heavy-handed direction), the play conveys that Antonio has an unrequited passion for Bassanio. His melancholy is caused by this. Even as he self-sacrificingly helps Bassanio woo Portia, he yearns for the least return of his feelings: “If your affection for me does not bring you, let not this letter.” (I quote from memory – and apologise if my faulty memory has made me take liberties with the text 🙂 ). This sadness makes Antonio indifferent to death, which is why his friends must rescue him from Shylock – he himself can hardly summon up the will.
My review says this is a defensible interpretation of the text. It is not what Shakespeare intended – but to know that with confidence, I must go beyond the text to draw on my understanding of the Elizabethans. Today (or at least recently, to the PCers), being gay was something you just innately were, whereas being sad was something more often seen as secondary, that called for explanation, e.g. caused by being a gay whose object of affection wasn’t. In Shakespeare’s day, melancholia was seen as primary, and homosexual inclinations secondary, e.g. caused by earlier misery (see, for example, Dianna Wynne Jones short-ish story, “The True State of Affairs”, inspired by a narrative of King James I of Scotland). My review affirms that the interpretation is right to treat Antonio’s depression as important – it is a crucial element in making the final climax work. It is the reason why Antonio accepts the risk in the first place, and is why he cannot (does not) save himself. And nothing in the text debars this interpretation.
I also note that this interpretation contrasts Antonio’s minority status with his hostility to Jews; a good opportunity for a classroom discussion (with maybe a bit of Proust thrown in) if only the SJWs could endure the confusion of narratives involved. Sadly, I doubt today’s SJWs could.
– Season 3: someone suggests Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” Rejecting this (because Stoppard was a cold war warrior), the Seattle director instead writes his own play, entitled “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are more than just Friends”. The other characters appear, utter Shakespeare’s lines and exit again, just as in Stoppard’s play, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern duoliloquize on the Elsinore court’s cruel indifference to the needs of minorities.
My review says:
a) this play has as much right to exist as Stoppard’s, and, unlike two seasons ago, its title gives honest indication of what the audience can expect
b) it’s crap (or else, I make an honest admission of how amazed I am to find artistic merit in it 🙂 ).
Relevant to this (for both Stoppard and the lookalike play) is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are utterly undeveloped characters – genuinely empty vessels into which something must be poured for them to become characters.
B) Now go downmarket to comics. Even three decades ago, when I sat for hours on the floor of my university town’s comic store, or slept overnight on cushions on the floor of its owner, leafing through her stacks of not-yet and no-longer on-shelves stuff, I met alternative hero(ine)s – everything from men reincarnated in women’s bodies through all the other ideas you could imagine – and some you couldn’t. 🙂 And this was not that new back then. Some were successful in their niche AFAICS. Others rapidly died a deserved death like the “Wicked future Britain where Thatcher is respected” series mentioned by a commenter above.
So, with every opportunity to usher in their own characters – to have created and maintained ones with literally decades of comic backstory, nurtured within a far-from-hostile publishing environment – why would the SJW’s be reduced to stealing existing non-alternative characters, with their existing name recognition? To ask the question is to answer it: the SJW’s are doubling down on failure. It was hard for them to persuade when they knew in their hearts they should have been authorised to compel. It is now hard for them to respect boundaries – of art or of honesty to customers – when they know that we readers should have started thinking their thoughts and stopped thinking ours a long time ago.
The original poster of this thread argues that the attempt will fail on commercial grounds. I hope he is correct. My points are rather
– the artistic damage
– the betrayal of customers
that failure to respect long-standing characters makes unavoidable.
C) The final paragraph of my first comment elevated the tone again – all the way up to the SCOTUS. If you read far enough into this very old post of mine on the death of Alastair Cooke, you will see Cooke (and I) commenting on an SCOTUS decision (that was chronologically mid-way between the two I mention above) where both Cooke and I are utterly indifferent (in every sense) to the court’s decision as such. I offer this as an opportunity to study my point in a pure state.
HTH. If not, maybe best agree to disagree.
Lastly, Nick’s power (Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker!) Gray, July 11, 2016 at 1:20 am) seems ideally suited for SJW exploitation. 🙂 Mr PC-inducing Man may be coming to your town. He drives a bright mauve van, license plate RU12, and after you meet him, you will be. (With credits to “The Two Ronnies”).
But my power is hardly one to excite kids and sell comic-books! I wonder if I should start a semi-hero club, and see what weird powers other people think they have. We would do good deeds, and charge nothing, hence our motto, “Good, for nothing!”
I’m a spark, not a super, but I do good, for nothing, as the Computer Fairy. Which means I help people with their computers. I have more than half a century of computer experience, so I can often help the geezers and geezettes around here. I grew up with computers. Most people my age did not.
As with Perry, I’m a squaxx dek Thargo
rational: “Crisis?” I still have a couple of those upstairs. I got as far as issue #2 before I stopped. I was by no means the fiery-eyed libertarian then that I am now but you can tell when it’s being laid on with a trowel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_(Fleetway) by the way.
I thought Revolver had some interesting stuff. At some point I have a lot of catching up on back issues of 2000AD to do though.
This.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead is pure genius. It is a cleaver cultural riff. However a female Thor is just parasite marketing. It is just an attempt to use an ‘established brand’ for something else, a bit like creating a new marmalade and calling it “Marmite” just because they own the Marmite brand. Indeed the spluttering outrage caused is part of the viral marketing campaign (which in truth I doubt really works) 😀
That said, as even the male “Thor the comic” is so far removed from “Thor the norse legend”, I find it hard to get overly worked up at such cynical laziness. But as I said, most US comics are just not to my taste anyway and never have been.
Personally I was rather entertained by the later heretical iterations of Dan Dare, which rather than just being daring-do were actually quite political (anti-Thatcher and anti-Blair depending on the iteration).
The latest Captain America film is good. Do watch it.
As to the diversity debates. This B.S. is all being fought over P.R. campaigns, not the comics themselves. The same with Ghostbusters.
But people with agendas make a stink, and rile up people with a different agenda, in a never ending feedback loop encouraged by culture war profiteers on both “sides”.
Marvel in many of these “diversity” moves have created some damn good comics. But some lousy P.R. campaigns that seem only to focus on the gender, ethnicity, or religion of new characters, that unintentionally kicks all this off.
Flashback to the new female Thor. That a new Thor would exist, and be a woman was made a big deal of. It reeked of being a gimmick. But the story itself, in which Jane Foster, a long time supporting character, took up the Hammer, while in her normal life, was beginning to succumb to the ravages of cancer, was interesting, but those facts never made the light of day until the media blitz was long over.
Other people have taken on the mantle of Iron Man before, this could be just a gimmick, or the story could have some weight to it. But some people are more invested in perpetuating outrages of one form or another than actually caring about the comics.
True enough. Euro comics seems much less prone to such things (although it is not unheard of, such as the kerfuffle over Tintin in the Congo being pro-colonialist… but such ructions over comics are a primarily an American thing, particularly these days).
Personally I was a huge fan of Valérian and Laureline back in the day, and am looking forward to Luc Besson’s take on that! The Grumpy Converter better feature or there will be… trouble.