zarohk

[zarohk]

going on pinterest and commenting “hmm… i find this really.. pinteresting…!” on every single post i see

[zarohk]

i used to say i hated the beach as a kid because i hated the feeling of having sand everywhere but then i realized my problem was that i just turn into a fucking dog or something at the beach and i just roll around in the sand and the water and have too much fun and lose my mind then when we get back to the car im like how could this happen i hate sand i hate the beach

[zarohk]

"this thing is rare and only affects 1% of the population" dude that's 80 million people can you shut up

[zarohk]

sneam soon

[zarohk]

[zarohk]

*youth pastor voice* You know who else was a 33-year-old socialist?

[zarohk]

[zarohk]

i used to say i hated the beach as a kid because i hated the feeling of having sand everywhere but then i realized my problem was that i just turn into a fucking dog or something at the beach and i just roll around in the sand and the water and have too much fun and lose my mind then when we get back to the car im like how could this happen i hate sand i hate the beach

[zarohk]

there are two kava bars near me within 40 miles of each other, at one you'll find a bunch of field biology grad students with to play among us or talk about birds with, the other you'll find unvaccinated people wearing deerskin pelts opening their chakras and bragging about how they traded two silver rings for a bow and arrow that one time

[zarohk]

Real life doesn't have nearly enough "enemies to lovers" and way too much "lovers to enemies".

[zarohk]

so i wore a pride flag pin to work the other day and the kids were all interested (obviously) (find me a classroom of preschoolers who are not obsessed with rainbows) (i'll wait) so they crowded around to see.

"aww!" they said, "it's a flag!!"

but the thing is: they're little. a lot of them don't really have a handle on all their mouth sounds yet.

such as, notably, that tricky tricky "L" sound.

[zarohk]

Procrastinating getting out of bed because that means I have to move a million books to the car somehow which means I have to tape together boxes in which to transport said books and then I have to drive to the used book store and carry all the boxes from my car into the store and that’s probably gonna be multiple trips and then I still have to take back the books they won’t buy and donate them.

[zarohk]

babe wake up, full canon accurate and up-to-date map of the star wars galaxy just dropped

[zarohk]

Whenever you get into a new thing that I am also familiar with I eagerly await to hear your thoughts on it because you always have some interesting observation (but also that one anon has a point, not much sci-fi art around here anymore :P).

(vaguely re) Aw thank you! Very flattering to hear.

re: the art - look I can't say I use my time better overall now, but at some point spending a few hours a week going through and curating reference/inspirational art for things just stopped being appealing.

[zarohk]

So there's something different for today...

[zarohk]

There was some discussion on the discord about how most "superhero fiction" gets tainted by the fact that there are such established things as "superheroes" and "supervillains" in these settings, and that this then taints everything about these pieces of fiction because wide swathes of psychology and character immediately get swept to the side. There's a flattening effect to that, I think I would agree with that, and anyway, it's well-mined territory.

So instead, you could write a superhero novel (or comic) where the entire concept of "superhero" doesn't actually exist, in the same way that zombie movies don't recognize the concept of zombie.

And I think that this would be interesting, but would also immediately introduce a few constraints of its own:

The timescale is relatively short. There's very few imitators, and not enough coverage/traction that people have started to say "hey, these guys are all kind of like each other".

The scope is relatively narrow, probably not more than ... ten characters? And they can't overlap with each other all that much. Maybe you can have small clusters that expand the cast, I guess, a recognized subset of the unrecognized superhero.

This works best in a novel, not in a webfic, because webfic loves to sprawl (and this is one of the best things about webfic).

So to game it out a bit, you have all these different characters, and none of them thinks of themselves as a "superhero". We're pretending the whole concept doesn't exist in this universe. We're making no sweeping generalizations about superheroes, because they're just not a thing here.

Instead, we draw from as many different genres and ideas as possible.

People aren't wearing costumes, there's one guy who's wearing a costume, dressing up like a mascot. Someone else is wearing a uniform. Another guy is wearing a disguise, totally different thing meant to protect his identity, nothing more. There's a guy who summons armor around himself, a guy that transforms, they have distinct individual powers that come from different places, there's nothing that unites them except that they come into conflict with each other. There's no ethos of superheroism or supervillainy.

Part of the idea is that you cannot sort these people into typologies, each of them is individual, except maybe there's a brother-sister couple in there, or a group of five super sentai types or whatever, because we also don't want to make a rule that each and every person is a unique individual.

I think there's a lot that you could get from this. Normal superhero fiction tends to have a lot of ideology in it, and here, because these people don't recognize each other as being the same thing, you have more room to move around. No one is doing things because it's expected of them, except the people who are, who are fighting crime because this is part of their family legacy, or the guy who's a space cop and this is just literally his job. There's greater room for intersectional discussion if you drop "superhero" from the vocabulary.

And it's much closer to what superheroes used to be, before the genre calcified and congealed, when everyone was just their own weird person with their own weird agenda. There is something fresh about that, I think, something that I haven't seen very often, a way of writing superheroes that tries to be in the genre by being outside of it.

I'm not sure I have any ambition to actually write something like this, but I do think that it's probably worth doing. (And I also imagine that if I had infinite depth of knowledge on superhero fiction I would be able to point to three specific pieces of media that did this exact thing.)

[zarohk]

tuttlesinger