a sense of joy and then a panic

... this one just came out of the swamp."
- Radiohead, "Optimistic"

Orson Scott Card is no longer contributing to the Superman mythos, and people are very happy about that because of his stance on gay marriage and homosexuality in general (being a Mormon).  This being the first I'd heard about any Card/Superman shenanigans, my reaction was "Well, of course he wants to write about Superman.  Superman is probably perfect for him.  He probably thinks Superman is the perfect Mormon, just like Stephanie Meyer wrote vampires as the perfect Mormons."

This blog, for instance, explains that Card should not write Superman because "I do not think that an admitted bigot, whether bigoted for religious reasons or no, is qualified to write for the comic universe’s greatest symbol of truth, justice, and equality."  I don't read Superman or Card, but I'm sure - sure - that Card thinks he's got at least truth and justice on his side.  Most people with strong beliefs don't think they're fighting for injustice and falsehood.  Here's an example of the defunct British political party, Veritas (note their primary policy, liberals).  Here is the famous USSR paper, Pravda.  Islamist Justice Parties are all over the place, like Indonesia's own Prosperous Justice Party - and most Western liberals don't think of Islamic law as the foundation for justice.  Truth, Justice, it just sounds like a good place to start.  And a character like Superman - who to me is the boyscout superhero with an unshakable dedication to all that is good - is going to be an appealing totem for any movement that thinks it's got righteousness on its side.

I don't begrudge Chris Sprouse, the would-be illustrator, his decision not to work with Card.  I don't begrudge not supporting Card.  I don't begrudge liking Superman.  I'm not even saying there is no absolute Truth or Justice.  But Superman is a symbol anybody can claim.  Card writing Superman is not like a misogynist writing Wonder Woman, because Superman's not gay.  Superman is a boy from a farm in Kansas who just wants to help people with his incredible strength. Sounds like a good place to start.  Boys Wanna Be Him, Girls Wanna Be Him.  DBZ fandom was the same way - jam-packed with conservatives and libertarians who read totally different messages in what I thought was The Great Post-Colonial Disaster.  Stephen Chow explained it very graciously: "the airy and unstrained story leaves much room for creation."  The main reason I'm writing this is because I am familiar with the feeling of frustration you get when something you love is terribly "misread."

I also know that with that feeling of indignation is a little hint deep inside that maybe you're the the one misreading things all along.  There was once a xenophobic facebook group, for example, that used The Lord of the Rings and Aragorn's "I Bid You Stand, Men of the West" in particular as its mascot.  I love LOTR, and I love Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn, and that is not what they represent to me, but I'm not going to pretend there is no xenophobia in that story, and that the facebook group creators were totally coming out of left (right) field.  l do think there's something about simple hero epics that appeals to a more conservative - and more ideological, on either side - audience overall.  It's the absolutism, I'd guess, and the masculinity.  So I also think Superman is a symbol someone like Orson Scott Card can easily claim.  Hooray.

Also, this is why I study -isms like fascism and nationalism: because there's a reason people sign onto these things.  These are words, ideas, symbols, codes that work.

This song helped me come to terms with this.  Hope it helps:

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.

Here's something that would probably scare people who know me: I have been known to watch W.W.E. Raw. You know, the fake wrestling show. I used to watch it in college at 2 a.m. - good thing to go to sleep to, believe it or not - and occasionally I watch it at home, because it comes on after long Law & Order marathons and hell if there's anything else on. Most (if not all) people I know consider it the literal scourge of the Earth, but their arguments usually boil down to "but it's scripted!" and I always say, "yeah, duh." I like fighting shows and always have. And not for the martial arts, either. Hell, I barely notice technique. Which is probably why my own fight scenes are so god-awful.

So anyway, my point is - I was watching Raw last night and it suddenly occurred to me that for every Raw "personality" (character), I could find a corresponding DBZ character. Of course, keep in mind I am hardly an expert on Raw and I can only speak for recent personalities and I may very well be totally wrong in my assessment of them. But it started with John Cena (who is SO OBVIOUS, right down to his color scheme and fucking wrist bands), and just went from there - sometimes hilarious, more often frightening. Granted, I don't really know what to do with DX (who are so lame I don't really care) and my Jericho-Big Show analogy doesn't quite fit, but... minor quibbles. And do not ask me about the Divas, because I just haven't seen them enough (USA tends to cut them out of re-broadcasts). In and of itself, this also fits DBZ.

I wonder what that means. I could have guessed Raw and DBZ are similar - same demographics, same melodrama, same ridiculously long build-up - but are they that similar? Because maybe DBZ's live-action movie should have gone for the wrestling aesthetic instead of the horrible, misfit Saved By The Bell look. Or is it just that they both play to the same bag of fighting-character tropes? Am I seeing things that aren't there? Is this further evidence that all my entertainment eventually links together, a la Rammstein and Air Crash Investigation, or is this a case of being doomed to endure the same characters and plots until the end of time?* I should probably look into something like Street Fighter or Dead Or Alive and see if I can find similarities in a franchise I'm not a fan of. But um, that would require me to waste time on the internet, and I definitely do not do that.

*: "Because that's what hell is all about, Robbie - repetition!" - Storm of the Century