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So... Comic-Con... right?  Big deal, big news, announcements about movies and games and all sorts of shit.  Maybe this is just me getting older, wiser, more worldly and bitter... maybe this is the sound of my soul slowly dying, wheezing like a popped tire as it deflates... but so much of this shit is so stupid

Most of my friends are... well, they're eclectic people, but all of them would gladly call me nerdy in an instant.  I can talk at length about Dragon Ball, I know the Sailor Moon theme song by heart, I can rant about the decay of the JRPG between the SNES era and the current gen... I use the phrase current gen when talking about videogames, for fuck's sake.  But I don't really think of myself as a nerd because the substance of that term has changed so much in the last two decades.

Being a nerd once meant being a social cripple whose only escape from confronting their own inadequacy was fantasy.  Whether it was videogames, escapist literature, tabletop games, even just obsession over the latest tech, nerds bonded over their shared eclectic interests in their tiny local covens.  And then the internet happened. 

Don't get me wrong, the internet is absolutely one of the greatest advancements of our lifetime, and its consequences for the future of communication, for our concepts of society and identity, are and will continue to be monumental.  For nerds, some of the first people to really embrace the web, it became a cohesive force that elevated them from a vast assortment of discrete fringe groups to a more easily exploitable consumer demographic. 

Hippies and punks once had ideals and passions that brought them together, they were part of counter-culture movements, dissent campaigns.  But where money goes, idealistic erosion follows.  They kept the drugs and the poor hygiene, but they're just fashion elements now (not that being dirty and drug addled make you a hippy or a punk, but the latter promotes the former with a very particular discourse).  Counter culture is the culture, as any hipster would gladly demonstrate.

'Nerds' and 'geeks' are no different now, they're just another fashion trend.  That's why we can have a movie starring Michael Cera with a tagline like "An epic movie of epic epicness" (or whatever it is), littered with Nintendo noises that audience members can cling to with superficial nostalgic comments to validate their authenticity as nerds.  Because it's all about authenticity.  Knowing the obscure bands, trends, fashions... there's always a need to demonstrate ones' passion as authentic, with real investment, lest one be ousted as a frail social animal seeking acceptance in the herd.  XKCD isn't funny, but you'll love it because it's the voice of the counter culture; that stickman, he's your Jerry Falwell.

There is so much stupid shit at Comic-Con, which is like the Woodstock '99 for the subculture, that people just eat up like it's candy.  What struck me as the bluntest piece of shit in the last few days (and note, I haven't been inspecting every turd, this... like everything I spout, is absolutely subjective) was the Thor movie.

And now I rant:

You can suspend your disbelief, and invest yourself in a narrative if what you're surrendering is somehow enumerated in a cohesive way. For instance, the basic premise of Inception is that people can enter one another's dreams--alright, we encounter that in the first ten minutes of the film and we accept it, and the particulars that follow seem reasonable or rational given that initial acceptance. In Terminator, a robot time travels from the future in the beginning of the film, and that's really been the foundation of the series. While I didn't see the fourth, I am aware it has robots doing a hell of a lot more than time traveling, but whatever abilities they do have are in line with the basic rationale of the canon.

This is the problem with comic books, but adaptations and reboots can adapt--though, for some reason they rarely do. To clarify: Batman is a millionaire gone mad and he's waging a personal war against Gotham city's criminal underworld. There doesn't seem to be much sense for him to fight aliens or magical creatures, as that would be incongruous to both the themes of his character, his journey, and his catharsis, but also to the world of Gotham city. Gotham isn't a battleground for the superpowered, it's a relatively grounded reality. We walk in, we accept that there are people who put on costumes and do all sorts of wacky shit, and then we proceed as normal. The plot can go on to have emotional resonance and be meaningful and interesting.

Superman is a humanoid alien who has every fucking power in the catalog. He fights aliens and gods and all sorts of silly shit. Well, see, crossovers sell so lets team him up with DC's other iconic big seller, Batman... aannnd... whoops, shit just got stupid. Real stupid. Iterate some more (Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern...) and we've got Batman fighting Greek gods, superpowered alien warlords, wizards, hyper-intelligent apes, the Westboro Baptist Church... whatever.

This is was a severe problem in Iron Man 2. Marvel's writing staff, which fucked it up on oh so many levels... missed the boat on assembling that Avengers storyline. It was absolutely tacked on instead of intelligently integrated. The original Avengers comic was scrapped together from these separate storylines haphazardly, because comic book readers don't really have a ton of discretion and Marvel certainly wasn't going to spend the time to reboot all of the characters and establish a cohesive universe when a simple team-up was a far faster cash-in. But with the movies, made decades later (that's many many many many hours of hindsight), there aren't any excuses. When Tony Stark makes a new element, or rediscovers it based on his father's designs, why can't it be the shit Captain America's shield is made out of? What if the Captain America project was partly his father's work? What if some moral qualms that he had with it resulted in his seclusion and alienation of his son? Suddenly this nonsensical collage of a story ideas begins to mesh into a cogent narrative. Hell, we have a reason to be invested in this whole SHIELD garbage because it has real emotional stakes for our protagonist and even future relationships, such as Tony Stark and Captain America's, begin to develop in subtle ways.

This is why the Thor movie, as this article describes, is fucking moronic. Between Iron Man and its sequel, and the Incredible Hulk movie, the three existing films in the Avengers canon, not once do we see aliens or gods. And yet here we are; instead of some tech-powered, deluded, crazy-but-benevolent human Thor (which in itself would be a tremendous source of dramatic tension, if he were, for example (and this is straight from the ridged insides of my ass), a SHIELD scientist gone crazy off of an updated or modified Captain America serum, outfitted with experimental tech, who needs to be taken down but whose aid is invaluable in conquering some greater threat...), we get a humanoid alien from a planet inhabited by Norse gods.

I'd just like to say, if you yourself are a writer and if you absorb even one thing from these rants, humans as aliens was a concept that was long outdated by 1970. Star Trek got away with it because they had a church choir budget, but what the fuck is Marvel thinking?

But back to the point of this tremendous ass-pull:

Could you imagine, Terminator 5: John Connor, fleeing from a pack of raging robots, stumbles into a crystal cavern where he meets Gaia, the spirit of the Earth. She tells him the machines, running on gasoline and seal blood, are poisoning the planet and that he, and four other scrappy freedom fighters, must band together and harness the power of the elements to destroy the techno menace. Each is given a ring... fire, water, wind, earth, and heart... and when their powers combine, they summon a cool, green-mullet wearin' dude who appeals to the 8-14 year-old demographic, who defeats the evil machines. I'm pretty sure everyone in the theater would drop their popcorn and say "what the fuck is this shit?!"  Wizardry is not a part of the established Terminator universe; hell even if Cameron had included it in some secret series bible in some vault somewhere, the audience still wouldn't buy it.

We checked our disbelief-coat at the door, guys, we don't have... a second, under-coat of bullshit detection that we can just hand you again. I honestly thought this was some cardinal rule of writing... like if you even took that joke of a high school creative writing elective, you know where you had to hear all your classmates' fruity poetry about how sad and lonely and boring and suburban those assholes were but they still managed to look up at you from their banal narcissism and criticize your shit for being too experimental but really they all just have lumps of rotten dogshit where their brains should be... if you took that fucking class, suspension of disbelief, universe consistency, that's day 1 stuff.

If your IQ is in the triple digits, Marvel does not want you writing their movies.

And to a greater point: you can hate this shit, guys.  You can have discretion.  You don't have to like this because all the nerds in the audience are popping boners.  You don't have to fit in.  This goes for subcultures, cultures, religions, academic trends... whatever.  I know it's hard to just be a person, sans labels, you've got to either be really apathetic or really introspective, but I think it's intellectually worthwhile.  

--End Transmission--

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