this is about to go off!, a.k.a. fuck yeah!

At io9 there's a fun little what-it-says-on-the-can article, "Good Character Development Includes The All-Important "F*@% Yeah" Moment."  I enjoyed reading this - I think everyone knows exactly what is meant by a "fuck yeah" moment, even if (like me) you don't know most of the examples cited.  The article says, "It's harder to root for characters who don't have [fuck yeah moments]. In fact, I'd say it's hard even to identify with characters who don't ever make you go "fuck yeah.""  But y'know, the more I thought about it, the more I came up with exceptions to the religion of Fuck Yeah. 

(I'm going to just go ahead and talk about things where I know what I'm talking about, and stay away from say, American comics, which dominate the io9 article)

1.  DBZ is like 70% Fuck Yeah moments, yes?  And when I was in middle school this was obviously A for Awesome, but when I re-read in late high school I started noticing how sad a lot of these moments are.  In particular, there's the moment the article calls "Outnumbered or totally pwned, but the hero still won't give up" - these moments ceased to be awesome for me.  You start getting into the territory of Martyrdom Culture (warning: tvtropes) and then it becomes straight-up depressing: intense, yes, obviously, but harrowing.  Kind of sick.  I had discovered Radiohead by then and I remember acutely just how much "I Will" shifted my paradigms, so to speak.  And now what I notice is all the stuff in between Fuck Yeah moments, and it's like, wow, I am actually reading social horror! 

2.  The best Fuck Yeah moment in the X-Files, for my money, does not belong to Mulder or Scully.  It belongs to Skinner.  After spending the entire series up to this point kowtowing to the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Skinner reveals in "Paper Clip" that he's not just a middle-manager drone, and he actually has the drop on CSM.  Though the smoking gun cassette has been stolen from him in a mugging, he reveals that he's had codetalker Albert Hosteen and his buddies memorize its contents.  CSM says, indignant, "What the hell is this?" and Skinner replies, "This is where you pucker up and kiss my ass."  Oh, fuck yeah!  This moment made Skinner one of my favorite characters right down to the end.  But this is a moment that only Skinner the Bureaucrat could have had, especially because it shows he cares for and believes in Mulder and Scully after all.  Mulder, by contrast, does the Middle Finger to the Lord pose all the time, but he became a character I rooted for in "One Breath."  Scully is comatose in the hospital after being abducted "by aliens," and Mulder is waiting for bad guys to show up at his apartment so he can kill them in revenge.  Her sister shows up and convinces him to go see Scully - when he returns, he finds his apartment trashed.  He sits down and cries, for many reasons.  Hardly Fuck Yeah.  Better than Fuck Yeah.  In other words, Fuck Yeah =/= Rooting for a Character.  And Fuck Yeah only works when it's characteristically appropriate.  Oh and, Fuck Yeah =/= Violence, in case that needed to be said.  Skinner's moment would have been a joke if his "big surprise" was punching CSM instead.

3.  I can think of no Fuck Yeah moments in my favorite books.  There may be some late in Catch-22, but they made no impression on me.  What cut to the quick in that book was: Snowden dying in the plane, saying, "I'm cold"; Yossarian realizing that the world is just mobs with sticks; the preceding conversation with Aarfy where Yossarian can neither get Aarfy to understand that raping and killing a hotel maid is wrong, nor get the army to arrest Aarfy.  Sad, enraging moments - the last one made me so angry I had to put the book down.  The Sound and the Fury enters the sublime during Jason Compton's chapter, because Jason is such a total piece of utter fucking shit.  Just thinking about it makes my blood run - with rage.  My mother and I call this reaction "puke sneeze," because my mother used to get this really hilarious nasal tone in her voice when she was talking about things she read in the paper that pissed her off.  In terms of adrenaline and passion, let's not forget the power of the Fuck You! moment.

All that said: as an adrenaline junkie raised on kung fu movies, I of course appreciate a good Fuck Yeah moment, sometimes in spite of myself.  I loved the second half of Hot Fuzz (though mostly because of the Midsomer Murders in Hell angle).  And one of my top-played songs on iTunes is "Iche Will" (which does not mean "I Will"!), which gives an adrenaline boost while still noting: what the fuck is really going on here?  Good old Rammstein.

p.s.  My icon was made for this post.

kick ass

Well, that was weird.  Not too sure what to say because I'm not too sure what the movie was trying to say (if anything). 

The violence is there, in all its Kill Bill-esque gory glory.  People get microwaved, limbs get amputated, bazookas are fired.  None of it is particularly remarkable or horrific, even when it's being delivered by a 10-year-old girl.  I dunno, maybe anime ruined the big "shock" of this imagery for me.  In the beginning I was more squirming out of the discomfort that we basically have a heroic band of WASPs fighting (and beating up) lower-class minorities.

Then there's the sort of... satiric?... aspect of it.  I'm not sure it works because it's kind of lacking in the whole self-reflection thing.  In The Loop is good satire.  Complete, thorough, spare-no-one brutality.  Kick Ass is like... hey, I'm doing this superhero thing tongue-in-cheek, and by tongue-in-cheek I mean I take tropes of superhero movies and turn the dial up from 3 to 5, and then - get this - I don't push it to its logical conclusion.  Oh and, the 10-year-old girl and her revenge-obsessed father's "half" of the movie is pretty... not sarcastic. 

Then of course there's the white-male-dweeb perspective on the whole thing, because what movie is complete without this perspective?  (answer: movies I like).  Unfortunate when the most engaging character is the 10-year-old girl.  This is one reason I stick to mainstream action movies, see, even bucket-o-fail ones like Clash of the Titans.  I don't constantly feel like I'm getting shoved out of the tree house. 

There are some genuine moments in this movie, where it does seem to look back on itself and what "this all means."  Like when the titular hero looks at himself in the mirror and sees that he is utterly bloodied and battered.  Or even the first time he's beaten up.  In moments like that you do see a great, genuinely disturbing and dark movie lurking underneath.  But there's very little commitment to this vibe.  It's kind of like that obligatory moment of silence and then the quick rush back into whatever it was we were doing before.  Hey, since he got beaten up he's got iron plates to make him withstand pain!  Oh.  Well then.

I don't know.  If you liked Zombieland, you'll probably like this.  I am pretty much totally with Tim Brayton: "the most sickening part of the whole circus is the film's palpable desire to be seen as beyond the pale, just the right thing to shock the squares while all the cool hip kids get to assert their aesthetic superiority over the moralising blue-hairs... If Kick-Ass were genuinely outrageous, that would be something, at least; but by and large, it's just effing dull... It wants to be edgy and nasty and delightfully cruel, but that very certainty in its own cleverness forbids it from being anything else than so much clockwork."