On the difficulty of making a Superman game
When it comes to making a Superman game, let alone a good one at that, it’s pretty hard to pull off in reality due to the inherent logistics found in the Superman stories alone. A game developer on a certain forum pointed out that a good Superman game would pretty much be more games in one, each one of them too disparate to mix together cohesively. I also think it’s got to do with how disparate some Superman villains are, that makes it harder to make them fit in a game this seamlessly as possible. If you take Myxzptlk, he’s an imp with the ability to manipulate reality.
Putting him in a game where Clark Kent has to struggle between his work as a journalist and his time as Superman would be really hard to pull off, because he really doesn’t seem to fit in well and would work better as a villain or boss for some other character. This gets more complicated if you add in Silver Banshee, who’s more of the supernatural variety and possibly even harder to suspend disbelief with. So much so that she’s given a more technologically inspired version in My Life With Superman, where I feel it’s one of those adaptations of Superman that could easily lend itself to video games.
An even tougher one, though he’s neither of the two, would be Lex Luthor. Without his armour and other equipment, he’s another human being who would have to survive being pitted against an extraterrestrial demigod that the only way to have him work in a video game is to make him into a protagonist, but it seems nobody wants Superman to be portrayed as a bad guy or antagonist. It would lead to a more coherent gaming experience, but it’s also something that no Superman fan would ever want. The search for a good Superman video game continues.
If a number of Superman villains are too disparate to work together in a video game, then there’s the issue of having to essentially partition Superman into two different characters. It might be possible to do a video game about Superman’s life in journalism, but there are fans who want to see him do amazing feats whilst confronting a colourful cast of villains that unless if a compromise were reached, it would be incredibly hard to do in practise. Spider-Man does seem to have some of the same problems Superman does, but he still manages to star in his own video game series suggest that it’s likely many of his villains aren’t too disparate.
To the point where it would have to be one or the other, I feel there are aspects of both the Superman stories and Superman himself that are too disparate to lend itself to video gaming. There are Superman characters that make it harder to suspend disbelief in, then there are Superman characters who would work as the protagonist far better than Superman would. Then there are certain aspects of Superman that would easily lend itself to video gaming like journalism, but people want him to also do incredible feats and get into fights with otherwise disparate villains. So a good Superman game will be one of those white whales that people want to capture, but can’t get a hold of.
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Some regional differences
This isn’t always the case with Southeast Asian geek artists and it isn’t even always the case with Japanese and other Northeast Asian geek artists either, but for most of the part there is a particular difference between most Northeast Asian geek artists and their western counterparts. With the former there is a strong tendency towards the moe school of drawing, where characters are designed to be as appealing as possible but to the point where they can be easily sexualised. The moe school from what I do understand focuses on making characters very appealing, oftentimes in a contrived or artificial sort of way.
Especially when the characters themselves tend to be assembled from a set of appealing traits such as cat/animal ears and tails, thigh high tights, twin tails, tsundere, kuudere and so on that it’s not hard to see modern day anime characters and mangaka coming from this school of thought, even if not all of them adhere to this especially if you go outside of otaku culture. This is even the case among Japanese artists where those outside of otaku culture will not adopt or do moe style characters and drawings, even if this isn’t always the case among them either.
But it is telling that when it comes to making characters moe, they have to be appealing as to be readily sexualised. Sexualisation does occur in the western school of fan art but it’s a good deal cartoonier, as in it’s closer to what regular cartoonists do than it is with East Asian moe illustrators. Some have said that moe illustrations are discouraged in western art schools, which could be partly the case with many western fan artists. But it’s also possible that moe as a storytelling school hasn’t taken much root among many western fan artists and even among western anime fans, well to the extent it does with their East Asian counterparts.
It seems among westerners there’s a stronger emphasis on worldbuilding, than it is on making appealing or interesting characters though you could argue with me here. Admittedly worldbuilding is a strange approach to storytelling and writing, where there’s more emphasis on building up a plausible world for the characters to live in. Whereas for me when it comes to creating stories, the characters always come first. Or maybe usually come first since I tried worldbuilding before, but it seems worldbuilding isn’t for me at all. But it’s not hard to come to this conclusion whenever Japanese geeks approach storytelling and illustration, as opposed to their western counterparts.
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Sadly, she doesn’t speak Scots
When it comes to minority language speaker representation in the X-Men stories, it seems like there’s almost so few, if any, characters who speak a minority language that they’re underrpresented in a way redheads aren’t, which is saying when it comes to characters like Jean Grey, Rachel Summers, Cessily Kincaid, Theresa and Sean Cassidy, Shatterstar, Mystique, Firestar, Sapphire Styx, Hope Summers and even Alison Blaire at some point, if you consider strawberry blond to be a shade of red. Within the X-Men stories, there’s practically only one minority language speaker and that’s Kate Pryde whenever she does speak a word in Yiddish at all.
It’s already pretty disproportionate that within the world of the X-Men stories there are more redheads than there are minority language speakers, you might say I’m generalising things and that some languages are harder to learn. But I personally believe the latter belief undermines any sincere efforts at revitalising a dying tongue, especially if it’s been endangered for so long and the odd possibility that somebody else would learn such a language with ease and effort. That’s from my experience bothering to learn some Scottish Gaelic, with my father finding that language difficult or something. But the thing here is that even if some languages are tricky to learn, there will always be somebody eager to learn it anyways.
But it seems almost none of the X-Men writers are minority language speakers, none of them are eager to learn a minority language which undermines efforts at using mutants as a metaphor for ethnic discrimination. Especially when almost none of the mutants themselves speak a minority language that they’re going to be really underrepresented in a way redheads aren’t, that it must be a pretty sad situation where we could’ve gotten minority language speaker representation with more mutants onboard. Rahne Sinclair could’ve been a Gaelic speaker, but I could settle for her speaking in Scots. Sadly neither language gets represented in any of the X-Men stories.
It would’ve been nice to see more mutants speaking in languages like Scots, Frisian, Scottish Gaelic, Comanche, Cheyenne, Lakota and Apache, but I suppose that’s going to take more effort and actual enthusiasm for any minority language to have it take off big time. Like I said before it’s kind of unfortunate that there’s not a lot of minority language speaker representation in the X-Men stories, which is ironic because X-Men writers love pushing the minority angle yet have no real interest in or experience with minority languages themselves. That only makes it worse really.
We could have characters sparking people’s interest in learning a minority language, like what Scottish and Irish folk music did for me before. Some characters like Rahne Sinclair again could be reimagined as speaking in a minority language like Scots, but it’s the road that’s barely ever taken by both X-Men writers and X-Men fans. X-Men writers want to advocate for minorities, but when it comes to other aspects of the ethnic minority experience language is one of the things they don’t do much so far. Even if it could help revitalise a language, so it wouldn’t hurt if she spoke Scottish Gaelic for instance. Or for another matter, have Pixie speak Welsh.
Or even Theresa and Sean speaking Irish, but it doesn’t just have to be Celtic language speakers that need representation.
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Something happened
From going to Facebook, it seemed as if Hirohiko Araki finally did a Bible comic or something. I actually prayed for his salvation and it did get answered, which got me laughing today. Let's also be thankful for that Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has lasted for as long as it did, he may not get to finish it the way he would have wanted to. But it did last long enough to build up this much lore to turn to.
He could be doing more Bible stories in the future as well as stories about saints, the more he becomes a Christian and this could mean something good for his future. He could become more devoted to God, leaving little time for the world even when he feels tempted by it. Let's pray that he continues to walk with the Lord, not backslide as it did to me before. But there's something about doing Bible comics that could make him comparable to Basil Wolverton, who also eventually did Bible comics himself.
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