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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