artbyblastweave

[artbyblastweave]

Two doors, very crowded hallway

One guard lies. One guard tells the truth. One guard thinks he's telling the truth but operates from deeply unsound epistemological principles that were inculcated by his elders to steer him to specific predefined conclusions, he's not lying but nothing he says is as actionable as he thinks it is. One guard is honest but he's got that thing where he keeps confusing your left and right with his left and right, and even when it's just him he's always got to stop and think for a second to remember which is which, and long story short he's never once said the correct door on the first try. One guard says whatever the first guard to speak says because he's afraid of being left out. One guard claims the opposite of whoever was first to speak because he's a contrarian. One guard does that fuckass postmodern "what is truth" song and dance because he doesn't actually know which door is the correct one, he lost the briefing packet and for obvious reasons he can't pick a door to check in person. Defeats the whole point if you can come back

[artbyblastweave]

Me trying to gather high-res captures of comic book panels from certain websites in order to shore up whatever longwinded argument I'm currently trying to make about the history of the superhero genre

[artbyblastweave]

sketch commission of Rather Dashing from Peasant Quest for @arg0t! Pleasure doing business!

Get your own one of these today for the low low price of 15 dollars!

[artbyblastweave]

we shouldn’t judge people based on their sexual fantasies. We be smart enough to understand know the difference between fantasy and reality and we shouldn’t make assumptions about someone’s real life behavior just because they mentioned having a certain kink. but if someone says they like cozy farming sims then they definitely support ethnic cleansing.

[artbyblastweave]

Hmm. The premise of that Date Everything game I've seen doing the rounds lately seems deeply existentially horrifying? Like is there an animism component to this or are you the in-universe character generating those fuckable ginjinkas ex nihilo

[artbyblastweave]

Look there are cases where this is true but also if you say this is an aggrieved tone because you fell for an obvious bit I do kind of feel contempt for you. Just take the L.

[artbyblastweave]

One of my pet culture theories is that the worldbuilding energy that produced genuinely fresh settings like Star Wars and Star Trek and basically every other 80s nostalgiabait property that Hollywood has bleeding out on the cross these days has now more or less migrated to the video game space. Like that's where interesting mass market genre-fic worldbuilding is going to be happening now, instead of in film

[artbyblastweave]

Sorry to hear that this is happening to you! However this is not within my capacity to change

Here's one change made by Watchmen (2009) that's basically a microcosm of everything I dislike about the film. After the reveal that Comedian was Laurie's father, Manhattan espouses the idea that in spite of his search for thermodynamic miracles in contexts devoid of life, his detachment from humanity blinded him to the chain of remarkable circumstances necessary for Laurie to exist; he returns to save earth because Earth produced Laurie, specifically, his ex-girlfriend and superheroine extraordinare.

In the comic, Laurie points out that the unlikelyhood of her own specificity isn't actually less unlikely than the circumstances by which billions of other people came to exist- and that, exactly, is Manhattan's point. He expressly extrapolates this logic to the rest of humanity- Earth is a miracle factory by virtue of being the one place that can support humans, all of whom have the exact same kind of contradictory history and interiority as Laurie, all of which he was paradoxically blinded to due to his power-induced self-absorption.

This, in turn, ties into one of the biggest ideas that the comic has regarding the superhero genre, which is that it's necessarily myopic, because it's very difficult to tell a superhero story that doesn't on some level implicitly buy into the idea that the superhero specifically is uniquely worthy of attention- the world contorts itself around the person who's name is on the cover. Structurally, non-superhero characters in superhero stories find themselves in an orbit; supporting cast members, love interests kept in the dark, civilians to be saved. Cape stories that deliberately defy this dynamic exist- Watchmen itself is one of them!- but are visibly positioning themselves opposite the standard assumptions of the genre by doing so. Many of the other characters embody this myopia. Rorschach's whole opening spiel is about how intellectually and morally elevated he is over the teeming masses, and his mask killer theory is fundamentally motivated by an ego-flattering desire for the neutered institution of costumed heroism to be relevant enough to sit at the center of a widespread conspiracy. Comedian's gleeful amorality is a means of justifying his horrible actions as the work of a man who's fundamentally above and smarter than every convention and concern of the little people. Dan is the most "normal" and in ways the most cynical about the change-making potential of heroism, but when he finds out about Hollis's murder it takes less than a second for him to start throwing his weight around and threatening Comedian-tier atrocities against the entire neighborhood- because Hollis was one of the characters who mattered. And, of course, Ozymandias, who positions himself as above the sophomoric dynamics of traditional superheroism, is nonetheless still pursuing a plan by which he, the Big Man Of History, unilaterally sacrifices countless nameless NPCS in order to trick the rest of the unthinking hordes into behaving themselves, eschewing anything remotely involving collective action. Almost everything untoward that happens in the book can be directly tied to a failure to internalize what Manhattan did- that other people are important. That everyone who gets blown up at the end of issue 11 could have been the subject of a whole comic book themselves.

But in the movie- which, for space, axed most of the supporting cast even in the ultimate cut- Jon's epiphany stops and starts with Laurie. She's not a microcosm of the miraculous phenomena of humanity at large, no, she specifically- a badass superheroine played by a Hollywood starlet- is just so very special and worth saving the planet over. The scene is adapted almost word for word, right up until the part about "you and everyone else." I guess you can infer that bit, given that from there Manhattan is still out to preserve human life in general, but nonetheless the scene now feels like it's reinforcing the exact logic that it was supposed to be arguing against- that only superheroes matter, and that only the interiority of superheroes can move the needle.

[artbyblastweave]

So since Watchmen solely focuses on the superhero genre in America, how do you think the superhero genre fairs in the rest of the world? I know there will probably never be a Power Rangers, but do you think other nations would still have superhero franchise such as Super Sentai, or Miraculous Ladybug? Particularly in the wake of Dr. Manhattan.

This is actually something that the supplementary materials for the TV show threw around some ideas about- specifically, the existence of a genre of Afro-Vietnamese blaxploitation-styled superhero films following the annexation, borne out of critique of the role that the actually-extant superheroes of that world played in the political status quo. I think it's safe to say that nothing you've mentioned would exist in a recognizable form, all of that having been downhill of cross-pollination with a robust American superhero space that explicitly doesn't exist- but it's fun to extrapolate this logic and imagine a world in which fictional superheroes almost universally fill this kind of subaltern foreign film niche rather than being the Biggest Thing Ever as they are in our current context.

[artbyblastweave]

Sensation Comics #37 - "The Invasion of Paradise Island" (1945)

written by William Moulton Marston art by Harry G. Peter

[artbyblastweave]

Yeah similarly, as an intellectual exercise I've been wondering if there'd be any play in a well-executed lit-fic-ish slice of life story that, to the initiated, is very obviously occurring at the periphery of some heavy-duty genre-fiction shit popping off (zombie outbreak, alien invasion, superheroes as a background fact of life in the setting, etc.) but it's simply never centered or at all relevant to the protagonist's journey. Similarly, one of my biggest bugbears about Glass Onion was the apparent failure on the writers end to acknowledge that having an analogue for Musk or any of the big-boy social media platforms pushes you significantly further into alternate history territory than having one extra lauded mystery writer did in the first film.

In a cheap jokey way, all fiction is 'alternate history' as it's talking about people who don't exist, or did exist but didn't act like that. But I have before thought that a fun (if challenging) thing for a writer to do would be a short story that reads like slice-of-life litfic, is marketed as such, but soon the reader gets a drip-drip-drip of 'the Spanish-Moroccan war', 'Fleischerland' as the beloved SoCal theme park, Sears-branded smartphones, until they realize that the setting is very much an alternate universe.

[artbyblastweave]

Operating as I do from within a moral framework where it's intrinsically laudable to lie to Catholics, I agree, Etienne Lux has never done anything wrong in his life. More seriously, one of Gillen's takes on Watchmen, as communicated via Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, is that the moral and narrative logic of Watchmen's ending only functions as well as it does because of the extent to which the story is already really aggressively doing genre. On a worldbuilding level that means spending ten issues establishing that all the technology and gonzo sci-fi that enables the creation of squid exists within the setting. On a stylistic level that entails John Higgins' gaudy, stylized color palette and.... however it is you'd categorize Gibbon's style of linework, right, which is basically the best-possible execution of that classic-comic-book aesthetic. The Squid, and the lines of thinking that created it, fit in the world of the comic in a way that they could never fit into the world as envisioned by Zack Snyder, because one of the last big twists of the book is that it's actually a very-well executed, high-fidelity EC Comics sci-fi story, or an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits- the kind with a last-minute twist that changes the whole premise and really makes you think, but also maybe doesn't cohere at all if you think about it too much.

Because Watchmen has significantly more space to work with than the average Outer Limits episode, though, the ways in which the clever twist ending might eventually fall through are deliberately given a lot more room to breathe. Setting aside Rorschach's journal, and Adrian's unfounded certainty that Rorschach himself isn't worth directly addressing- the squid's not real, and he's killed the entire talent pipeline that produced the first one. How much time does one squid buy? How long can Ozymandias feasibly prevent unaligned actors from getting a look at the thing's genetics and realizing it was made from terrestrial genetic stock? Even assuming every sci-fi technology Veidt used to pull this off is proprietary, a lot is made of the fact that this is a setting where comic book technology eventually proliferates- how long before a third party starts looking into teleportation or genetic engineering or applied psionics and gets an inkling of what might have actually happened? Given that Manhattan agrees to the plan when he actually finds out about it, was driving him off-world- i.e. the single biggest reason the nuclear crisis came a decade early- actually a necessary step in the plan? Was killing Comedian- the thing that got his peers involved at all- a necessary step? He mentions that Comedian deliberately only told a guy who wouldn't understand what he was getting at, never offers further justification as to why the guy had to go, and he hated the guy on a personal level. Hell. We get two extended sequences of Nixon wringing his hands over how he really doesn't want a nuclear war. But god forbid Adrian pursue a situation that requires actually opening channels with anyone else in a position of power, right?

Ozymandias had nobody he could bounce any of this off of. He killed literally everyone else involved, right down to his most trusted and loyal servants, and his cat. He only "convinces" three people to go along with his plan- Dan and Laurie, both of whom are characterized as extremely susceptible to razzle dazzle and bad ideas delivered by a forceful personality, and Jon, a known flake who has a long track record of sort of just going along with grand designs that he knows, intellectually and precognitively, are some combination of morally bankrupt and short-sighted. He fails to convince the only guy in the room who at one point had a day job. Ozymandias did this entire thing from within a carefully curated bubble of Protagonist Logic- and, fair cop, he had the tenacity and the intelligence to successfully curate that bubble, but Dan had the tenacity and intelligence to LARP as Batman, and the book isn't really fond of that decision. They're both ultimately Just Some Guy.

All this to say that Ozy, by design, doesn't really get the same Watsonian benefit of the doubt that Etienne does, because on some level he does know that he's in a story, he's in one on purpose and he did a lot of work to get there. Much as he pretends to be above it, he still fundamentally buys into superhero narrative logic.

The Power Fantasy is foundationally hostile to superhero narrative logic; everyone involved is fighting tooth and nail to prevent the main draw of cape comics from ever happening. A consequence of its commentary on the unspoken stakes of power creep in mainstream superhero comics is that it's got a real fixation on astronaut-moon-murder-logic- moral conundrums that are less a metaphor about anything real and more an emergent consequence of taking the premise of the world at face value. What morally ridiculous things become completely justified, given knowledge of these priors and the ability to act decisively?

Accordingly, I think a lot of work has gone into making basically everything Lux does moment to moment something he can plausibly justify without it being obvious cope. He has a powerset that means all of his decisions are far more informed than Ozy's ever were. He only ever puts innocent lives on the line emergently, when far more innocent lives are on the line if he does nothing, and we've never seen one of his bluffs get called on-screen. He 100 percent called that they ought to pro-actively try to kill The Queen, and the fact he was wrong once about Masumi's danger threshold doesn't negate all the times we've seen her nearly detonate over petty bullshit. Even if it causes problems down the line, his decision to amputate his own emotions makes sense as an emergent reaction to this awful premise, a reasonable trade-off. He's being asked to make infinite coin flips like that, none of which he asked for and all of which he's legitimately one of the only ones, if not the only one, capable of making.

When he inevitably drops the ball, it most likely won't be a commentary on the dangers of grandiose uncalled-for overreach, it'll just be an emergent consequence of all the balls he's being asked to juggle despite him pointedly not actually being omnipotent. Most endearingly, he isn't jerking himself off at the thought of completing a 2,000 year old mythic endeavor started by Alexander the Great. He doesn't live in a palace full of pharaoh regalia and he didn't name himself after an egomaniac ruler who built fuckoff statues of himself in the desert. He doesn't self-conceive as The Protagonist.

Bar the eventual reveal of some deeply-over-the-line trespass informed by his reported insecurities in issue 9- his feeling of absolute powerlessness in situations where his juggling act fails and everything pops off- when he inevitably fucks the dog it's going to be very difficult for me to have any reaction other than, "it's alright, man, you did your best," no matter what the book is asking me to feel about it. Whereas whenever Ozymandias is explaining anything at all about his thought process my internal monologue is usually just the word "stupid" repeated again and again in increasingly large-point bold font.

The Power Fantasy has another interesting meta thing going on with Etienne - he's my favorite character and he gets a lot of criticism from readers, which I think is a bit... unfair. We, as readers, know that "rocks fall; everybody dies" isn't going to happen, because it wouldn't be a satisfying story. But Etienne doesn't know he's in a story, and he knows there are a lot of rocks that could fall which would kill everyone, so he undertakes a lot of manipulations to prevent that which, from the reader perspective, are both unnecessary and likely to be dramatically revealed and lead to messy complications.

But on a Watsonian level, Etienne is totally right! The calculation that his manipulations would be more likely to save the world than end it is correct in a *real universe*, and it's only by virtue of being situated within a story that he will likely be the catalyst for all sorts of terrible things happening. I think the conclusion, then, is clear: Etienne Lux has never done anything wrong in his life.

idk @artbyblastweave you might have interesting things to say on this - i could imagine similar arguments being made about Watchmen as well

[artbyblastweave]

Hero For Hire #1 (1972) Cover by John Romita and George Tuska

[artbyblastweave]

[artbyblastweave]

Vintage Poster - Undersea Kingdom

Republic (1950)

[artbyblastweave]

See the thing is that if I described the protagonist of Worm as "What if Rorschach was a Utilitarian instead of an Objectivist and also a teenaged girl," basically no part of that would be strictly accurate except for the teenaged girl part. But it would on some other level be incredibly accurate, and a funny way to trick Watchmen fans into reading Worm

[artbyblastweave]

no animal was harmed during the making of this video. not one. for the few minutes that we were shooting film, the guns of each hunter fell silent. the industrial bolt throwers observed a moment's peace and the jaws of every predator hung softly open. no fish bit any hook and the bait worms held off on drowning only until the cameras stopped. the tails of ruminants ceased to flick just as their attendant flies, in unison, landed on their flanks to catch their tiny breaths. a spider instantly stopped winding silk around a wasp, patiently waiting for the caesura to end. a young veterinarian paused with the syringe in their hand. somewhere, a colicky baby stopped biting its mother's nipple and nursed happily for the very first time. we're sorry. we're sorry it couldn't have been longer. we didn't know this would happen.