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seriousficSo I finished reading The Shocker: Legit the other night and a while more indepth review is coming, since I think it is a fanfic that merits a rec-review, I'd like to stop before then to highlight something outside of the scope of a critique. It's something I've seen a lot of without thinking of it, but Legit codified it for me.
Now, all writers strive for verisimilitude, but I think lately there's been a mistaking of that for realism, which is a very specific term that some writers do not try for and shouldn't be judged by. Worse, realism has become associated with Christopher Nolan's movies, which have several other positive qualities besides the stylistic choice of portraying Batman with extreme kinda-realism. But reductive thinking have pared the two down to Nolan = realistic = good so now, as a sort of subset of the "grim and gritty" school of comics discussion, we have the meme that realism is always better.
How this manifests itself, I think, can only be in comics fandom. Comic book fans will take a certain character, decide that he's more realistic and less "silly" than other characters, and champion him on that basis. Which is ridiculous on the face of it: Sherlock Holmes, just for an example, is an insane character (he doesn't know that the Earth orbits around the Sun! He deleted it from his mind to make room for types of soil!), but that has nothing to do with how compelling he is. In fact, if he were more realistic--the fourth or fifth greatest detecting mind in London, for instance--he'd be less compelling.
But still, you'll have fans and even creators engaging in this kind of thinking. Batman is awesome because he's realistic (the guy who wears skintight gray spandex into battle, uses martial arts and boomerangs to fight, and yet despite doing this every night for years in the most crime-ridden city in America, he never falls victim to a little-heard-of technological innovation known as a gun). The Punisher is awesome because he's realistic; in fact, he could kill the entire Marvel universe if he wanted to according to Garth Ennis (the old-as-shit Vietnam vet who basically gets into a firefight every week and yet never gets killed by one of the thousands of bullets fired at him every minute). And even the most sarcastic of British writers will have a soft spot for Superman--the last time someone tried to tell a realistic story about him was Smallville, and I don't have to tell you how that worked out.
And in Legit, you have the Shocker snarking about Spider-Man being bitten by a radioactive spider. The guy who built a working superweapon in prison and puts on a quilt to use it.
Now, I get that the Marvel universe is a pretty weird place, as you'd expect for a canon that includes just about everything Marvel has ever published. And it's a ripe topic for comedy. But I think there's a snobbery at place that seems to reward the kind of thinking that gives us a thousand and one "mature" police procedurals and legal dramas, then canceled Pushing Daisies. Yeah, realism works for Battlestar Galactica, but it does nothing to grow the imagination of the audience. We end up with stuff like Supernatural, which takes the best part of monster movies (the monster, duh) and eternally reduces it to a character actor in a suit.
"Oh no! The Devil has come to Earth!"
Character actor in a suit.
"Cthulu walks the Earth!"
Character actor in a suit.
"Dragons devouring young virgins!"
Character actor in a suit.
"WEREWOLVES!!!"
Character actor in a suit.
Now, my favorite comic characters are in the Fourth World, so you won't see me complaining about the outre. But it seems to me that one of the chief redeeming aspects of comics, for all their bullshit, is there's no weirdness filter. While movies and TV are all about "what audiences will buy" and "what's too weird for general audiences," comics can straight-up give you dragons eating giant insects in outer space and no one will bat an eye. It seems a shame to want to sacrifice that so comics can be like video games--a once-vibrant spectrum of imagination and creativity reduced to bald space marines fighting shades of brown (from cover!).
Now, all writers strive for verisimilitude, but I think lately there's been a mistaking of that for realism, which is a very specific term that some writers do not try for and shouldn't be judged by. Worse, realism has become associated with Christopher Nolan's movies, which have several other positive qualities besides the stylistic choice of portraying Batman with extreme kinda-realism. But reductive thinking have pared the two down to Nolan = realistic = good so now, as a sort of subset of the "grim and gritty" school of comics discussion, we have the meme that realism is always better.
How this manifests itself, I think, can only be in comics fandom. Comic book fans will take a certain character, decide that he's more realistic and less "silly" than other characters, and champion him on that basis. Which is ridiculous on the face of it: Sherlock Holmes, just for an example, is an insane character (he doesn't know that the Earth orbits around the Sun! He deleted it from his mind to make room for types of soil!), but that has nothing to do with how compelling he is. In fact, if he were more realistic--the fourth or fifth greatest detecting mind in London, for instance--he'd be less compelling.
But still, you'll have fans and even creators engaging in this kind of thinking. Batman is awesome because he's realistic (the guy who wears skintight gray spandex into battle, uses martial arts and boomerangs to fight, and yet despite doing this every night for years in the most crime-ridden city in America, he never falls victim to a little-heard-of technological innovation known as a gun). The Punisher is awesome because he's realistic; in fact, he could kill the entire Marvel universe if he wanted to according to Garth Ennis (the old-as-shit Vietnam vet who basically gets into a firefight every week and yet never gets killed by one of the thousands of bullets fired at him every minute). And even the most sarcastic of British writers will have a soft spot for Superman--the last time someone tried to tell a realistic story about him was Smallville, and I don't have to tell you how that worked out.
And in Legit, you have the Shocker snarking about Spider-Man being bitten by a radioactive spider. The guy who built a working superweapon in prison and puts on a quilt to use it.
Now, I get that the Marvel universe is a pretty weird place, as you'd expect for a canon that includes just about everything Marvel has ever published. And it's a ripe topic for comedy. But I think there's a snobbery at place that seems to reward the kind of thinking that gives us a thousand and one "mature" police procedurals and legal dramas, then canceled Pushing Daisies. Yeah, realism works for Battlestar Galactica, but it does nothing to grow the imagination of the audience. We end up with stuff like Supernatural, which takes the best part of monster movies (the monster, duh) and eternally reduces it to a character actor in a suit.
"Oh no! The Devil has come to Earth!"
Character actor in a suit.
"Cthulu walks the Earth!"
Character actor in a suit.
"Dragons devouring young virgins!"
Character actor in a suit.
"WEREWOLVES!!!"
Character actor in a suit.
Now, my favorite comic characters are in the Fourth World, so you won't see me complaining about the outre. But it seems to me that one of the chief redeeming aspects of comics, for all their bullshit, is there's no weirdness filter. While movies and TV are all about "what audiences will buy" and "what's too weird for general audiences," comics can straight-up give you dragons eating giant insects in outer space and no one will bat an eye. It seems a shame to want to sacrifice that so comics can be like video games--a once-vibrant spectrum of imagination and creativity reduced to bald space marines fighting shades of brown (from cover!).
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 08:02 am (UTC)Yeah, realism works for Battlestar Galactica, but it does nothing to grow the imagination of the audience. We end up with stuff like Supernatural, which takes the best part of monster movies (the monster, duh) and eternally reduces it to a character actor in a suit.
Word to all this. And don't forget Smallville!
But it seems to me that one of the chief redeeming aspects of comics, for all their bullshit, is there's no weirdness filter. While movies and TV are all about "what audiences will buy" and "what's too weird for general audiences," comics can straight-up give you dragons eating giant insects in outer space and no one will bat an eye.
True, except when you have people like Grant Morrison purposely trying to do that, all while trying to wrap it up in metaphor, symbolism, and grand statements. I know I don't speak for everyone in this case, but me, that's one of the rare cases where the weirdness feels artificial and superficial compared to, say, the genuine, earnest embracing of weirdness and wackiness in stuff like Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 04:46 am (UTC)It's cool.
Word to all this. And don't forget Smallville!
You know what's less ridiculous than spandex? Hoodies! Color-coordinated hoodies!
no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 08:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 08:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 01:26 pm (UTC)>Batman is awesome because he's realistic (the guy who wears skintight gray spandex into battle, uses martial arts and boomerangs to fight, and yet despite doing this every night for years in the most crime-ridden city in America, he never falls victim to a little-heard-of technological innovation known as a gun).
Unfortunately, Beeman was not so lucky.
>We end up with stuff like Supernatural, which takes the best part of monster movies (the monster, duh) and eternally reduces it to a character actor in a suit.
And as a tradeoff we get two character actors in denim playing characters with enough submerged issues to sink the Titanic. I'm all right with that.
>once-vibrant spectrum of imagination and creativity reduced to bald space marines fighting shades of brown (from cover!).
Minecraft. Bastion. Uncharted. Batman Arkham series.* Skyrim. Portal 2. Skyward Sword. Any given Super Mario game.
Why does everyone forget the "animals with attitude" epidemic of the early 90s? Remember Bubsy? Gex? Aero the Acro-bat? No, because they were mostly terrible. The 3D platformers after Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot? This is just the latest trend, and hardly an all-pervasive one.
*Appropriately, there was a controversy about that game involving the question of realism.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 08:46 pm (UTC)At least in the Dresden Files, Butcher has the excuse of Harry being a snarky dude who is writing in his personal files; the tone is dramatically different in non-Harry stories, or the Codex Alera series.