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Almost Infamous: Prospects

2/29/2016

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To celebrate the countdown to the release of Almost Infamous, Matt's sharing this series of sneak peaks into the world of the supers. Keep watching here or on his homepage as the day draws closer!


Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

These are Almost Infamous: Origins.



Almost Infamous: Prospects
 
By Matt Carter
 
 
Blackjack
 
Tampa, Florida, USA



Retirement suits a lot of people.
.
The bitch of it is, I’m not one of ‘em.

God knows if anyone’s earned a good long stretch of peace, it’s me. Spend four decades as a superhero, and a century and change before then as a supervillain, and you’ve earned one in my book. This life ain’t easy on anyone, let alone the immortals, or near-immortals in my case.

And I was honestly considerin’ a good retirement anyway. Maybe write my memoirs. Maybe even give my powers a rest and just let nature do what it does to everyone else and let me age until I’m too feeble to move and my mind’s mush and sweet lady death just comes around and takes me into her embrace. There’d be statues and speeches and maybe even a national day of mourning for the loss of such a great (former) hero. I’d probably go to Hell (who’m I kidding, of course I’m goin’ to Hell), but having been there a fair few times before and made some friends, I can say it’s not as bad as everyone says.

If they’d just let retirement choose me, things’d be square.

But they didn’t.

They chose retirement for me.

Budget cuts, they said.

Times are changing, they said.

We thank you for your service, they said.

No, I doubt forced retirement suits anyone.

I’d saved up a lot from my legitimate endeavors (and some accounts squirreled away from my days of less legitimate endeavors), and they even offered me a generous severance package, so my life wouldn’t be hurtin’. The person they got to break the news, some polite little twat from the Protectors’ human resources department, really meant well. She screeched and squalled when I flipped her desk and stormed out. She looked right fearful when I took her wrist and said some most unkind things to her. She’ll likely even wonder why she’s feelin’ sicker than usual ever since I touched her.
And maybe I might laugh, like I always done when people like her try and cheat me.

When I’m sober enough to remember, at least.

The power’s fun as much as a curse. I touch her, she takes my age, my sick, my pain. I get drunk, she gets the liver problems. At least until some other poor bastard comes along and decides he needs my touch instead. Which in places like this means sooner rather than later.

Truth be told, with what I’ve been doin’ lately, I can’t say whether or not she’s still got my touch. I couldn’t tell you if I’ve been retired a couple months or a couple years. I know I’ve seen a lot of road on my bike, and as long as I can find a cheap bar, some cigars, and a place to rest my head every now and then, I’m pretty good.

Besides, if I sober up, I’m liable to do a whole lot of stupid.

Nothing good comes of me doin’ stupid.

Which is probably why everything changed in a bar where they watered down the liquor somethin’ fierce.

It was a dim little place, no dimmer than your average dive and maybe a little quieter, though that probably had to do with it bein’ 2 in the afternoon. I was goin’ incognito, no hat, no jacket, no six-shooters, hair down, just me in a t-shirt I could swear fit better when I took it off that clothesline and some blue jeans that might hold together another couple hundred miles if trouble didn’t find me. I was waving for the bartender (all right, maybe less waving and more like cussin’ him out for what he was doing with the drinks) and wondering where the hell he’d disappeared to when I heard that familiar voice behind me.

“Jill Winchester. You know, I think you get shorter every time I see you,” he said.

“Short enough to kick your ass,” I said, thinking myself especially clever. I took the stub of my cigarette from the ash tray and spun my barstool around to face Fifty-Fifty.

He was still ugly as sin, at least the right half of him, pale Gray alien, featureless and vaguely damp, unlike his left half, which might’ve been handsome if it weren’t for the right half.

Doesn’t mean we didn’t screw around for a while once some years back.

“And don’t call me Jill, Franz,” I said, putting the cigar back in my mouth.

“Sorry, sorry, Blackjack,” he said, putting his hands up in mock surrender. He tried looking casual, but I could tell he was afraid. Not too afraid, not with the group of other superheroes he had the place surrounded with.

He motioned with his four-fingered alien hand to a stool next to me. Curious what the hell he was doin’ out here, I gave him a half-nod, and he took the seat.

“You’re looking well,” he said, his words sounding weird as ever with his half-human, half-Gray tongue.

“Tell this sumbitch bartender to stop watering down his drinks, let me down a few, and I might say the same for you,” I said.

“You wound me, J- Blackjack. Besides, I come with good tidings,” he said.

“Figured as much,” I said. Fifty-Fifty wasn’t a bigwig in the Protectors, but he could’ve been, in time. He was ambitious, and much more of a shark than a lot of the people on the Protectors with shark-based powers.

“What are your prospects like these days?” he asked me. “Aside from intoxicating.”

I wanted to say not so great, but they weren’t. I was still famous, not like El Capitán or the Gamemaster, but close. I could get product endorsements and speaking engagements, find myself on the board of directors of pretty much any company I wanted, but I didn’t.

I wasn’t ready to leave the life yet.

I wanted to do that on my terms.

“Yeah, I thought as much,” he said.

Fucking Gray brain half. Reading my mind?

“Only a little,” he responded. “I thought you used to like me inside you.”

“Let me go out to my bike and grab my guns, I could put somethin’ inside of you,” I said. Sweet, beautiful drunken superhero flirting. It’d been a while.

“I come with an opportunity. One right up your alley. One last hurrah, you might say,” he said.

That got my attention. “Go on.”

“Let’s be honest, what do you miss more: being a hero or being a villain?” he asked.

There was no question, “A villain.”

“Glad to hear it. Want to be one again?” he asked.

This was a trap. It had to be. The Protectors didn’t want me making them look bad on my bender, were looking to entrap me with one of my ex’s so they could quietly kill me, or worse, send me to The Tower.

I could give him the touch, fight my way through his backup outside. I’d done it before, no sweat.

But something told me I had to listen to this. Maybe it was his telepathy prodding things along, or maybe there was just enough liquor in my body to screw with my judgment, but I said, “What’s the catch?”

“Who says there’s a catch?”

“You’re asking me to be a supervillain and you’re telling me there’s no catch?”

“Point,” he said. “You know better than any of us that things haven’t been good since the War on Villainy ended. No villains mean less need for heroes, less need for heroes means less funding, less funding means downsizing.”

“So you want me to be a bad guy again just to pad your paychecks? They’ll catch me in a second, and you know it. I ain’t that stupid,” I said.

“No, you’re not, which is why we’re going to do this smart. Some of the other guys and me-”

“Names?”

“Similarly minded folks to us. Heroes who have to worry about their heroing careers, not like the big boys. You get names if you say yes,” he said.

I glowered, but he held strong.

“Fine.”

“We’ve got something in the works. We call it Project Kayfabe,” he said.

“Kayfabe?”

“It’s a wrestling term. It’d take a while to explain. But the long and the short is, some of us are going to make a new team of villains. Hand-picked, superpowered kids, mostly ones too stupid to know what’s good for them, and answering entirely to us. We train them, we mold them, we make them the kind of villains we need. We tell them where to go and what to do, and we fight them, and we put on a good show, and the people remember how much they need us. We get money, the people feel safe, everybody wins,” he said.

“Almost everybody,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Your villains,” I said.

Most of the people folk call villains these days aren’t really the bad guys, but idiot kids who try something illegal, or just plain stupid with their powers, and need to be arrested for it. They make one mistake and get themselves a one-way, non-refundable ticket to The Tower. Sure, a lot of ‘em got what’s coming to ‘em, but it ain’t always as right as it oughta be. Don’t get me wrong, like any respectable superhero, I’ve killed myself a fair few villains.

It’s just that, knowing what it’s like on the other side, I feel bad about it sometimes.

The other heroes don’t even have themselves a sometimes.

“Yeah, well, there need to be some losers in life sometimes for the rest of the world to sleep at night. You’d rather they be people that matter? You’d rather they be you?” he asked.

“You always did know how to charm a girl. What do you want me to do?”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a maybe. What do you want?”

“Well, you know we’re good at being heroes, but we don’t have much experience being villains. You do. We want you to be the drill sergeant for these kids. We want you to keep them in line and keep an eye on them. Mold them as you’d mold any other villain. Teach them to be… every bit as charming as you.”

I laughed, sharp and loud, enough to make Fifty-Fifty jump.

I laughed, but I was tempted. It wasn’t field work, but it was something.

And it was dangerous, much more exciting than hero work had become.

“You got any kids in mind?” I asked.

Though the two halves of his mouth raised unevenly, he smiled at that, pulling a small holographic projector from his pocket, “We’ve got some prospects. Mostly local or from the Empire or Soviet, some from elsewhere.”

Was I really ready to do this?

Yeah. Yeah I was.

“Let’s see ‘em then…”



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Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Almost Infamous will be released on April 19th, 2016, from Talos Press. Find it wherever books are sold (including the Amazon link so helpfully included in the cover above).

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #1: Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

2/28/2016

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Before we get into the top entry on this list, let’s review this month’s rules: This is a list of characters who should not be liked, not as people, but as characters, for writing gaffe reasons that are insulting, insensitive, or just plain clumsy, and yet for one reason or another, they find a place in my heart.
 
(Click the links for Favorite Fictional Character That I Shouldn’t Like #2, #3, #4, and #5)
 
It’s especially important to note this week that my affection in no way cancels out those gaffes.
 
This week also gets one of these:
 
****Spoiler Alert Through Season Seven****
 
And, jeebus, I guess one of these:
 
****Trigger/content warning****
 
Okay. *Warmup stretches.*
 
If you know the show, it should be pretty obvious where I'm going with this. If not...


Why I shouldn't like him:

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This. Right here.

All right, slightly more explanation required, I guess. After all, I've got no qualms liking an unforgivable bastard of a character, as a character, if that's the intent. Fiction needs its great villains. There's nothing wrong with that.

The problem here is that's not what you're seeing above. Or at least, it's not supposed to be.

Here's the short version of Spike's storyline:

We're introduced to him in season two as our new big villain, when he displaces the far more boring vampire boss before him, and he's one hell of a memorable bad guy. As in, scary sadistic son of a bitch.


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In season four, he gets abducted by a shady government organization that implants an experimental chip in his brain to make him incapable of physically harming humans. He joins up tenuously with the heroes for protection, and for the opportunity to indulge his lust for violence, since the chip leaves him able to fight other demons, which is pretty much how Buffy's "Scooby Gang" spends a dull Wednesday night. They reluctantly accept him as much-needed backup muscle for when Buffy's hands are full, and as an informant on the demon underworld.

Spike slowly develops a genuine attachment to some of the good guys and earns the trust of most of them, to the degree that he's routinely left on bodyguard duty for Buffy's little sister, the show's go-to McGuffin and damsel in seasons 5-7.
 
Spike and Buffy have a tempestuous sexual relationship, during which Spike repeatedly professes his love and asks to make them official, while Buffy... well, if a skilled team of writers accepted a million dollar bet that they couldn't create fictional, hypothetical proof of the possibility that a situation could theoretically exist in which it might be remotely fair to call a woman a "tease," the result would look a hell of a lot like season six Buffy.

She says no, then yes, then no, then yes. She uses him, and then refuses to acknowledge him when he tries to talk to her about it, and then uses him, and then calls him worthless, and then uses him again.


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And again, and again.

When Buffy tries to break it off for good, Spike tries to rape her. (His brain chip doesn't apply to her, because magic).
 
That's not open to interpretation, by the way. This isn’t me calling out a scene for being badly presented. It’s not a Jaime-and-Cersei-Lannister case of something coming across onscreen differently from the way it might, possibly, arguably have been intended (not that that isn’t bad enough).
 
I refuse to spend any longer than I already have sifting through eroticized YouTube music videos looking for an unaltered clip of the scene to share with the strong-stomached, but if you want to hunt it down for yourself, the episode title is “Seeing Red.”

Suffice it to say, it's meticulously unambiguous. A point is even specifically made that Spike only stops because Buffy manages to hurt him enough to make him, not because of any spontaneous epiphany on his part.
 
Anyway, Buffy fights him off, cries for about a minute, and then gets up and carries on with her life pretty much as if nothing happened, going so far as to suggest keeping him as her sister’s guard, while Spike slinks off to wallow in guilt, embarks on a quest to win his soul back (Buffy vampires lose their souls in their transformation), comes back harrowed and cured of his violent urges, reconnects with Buffy on a purer, more emotional level than their physical affair, pulls himself together inspired by her faith in him, yadda yadda....

Do I need to spend words on what's wrong with this picture?

It's a rape plotline revolving around how goddamn hard this is on the perpetrator. How tragic a victim he is in all this, how sorry we should feel for him, how all he needs is for a good woman to love him, and he can change. One little soul-quest, easy as that.
 
It's also dripping with the implication that no doesn't really mean no, because in all their encounters before "Seeing Red," when Spike tells Buffy that she doesn't mean what she says, the narrative allows him to be right.

It's a story about a woman we're supposed to admire and respect as a symbol of strength, falling in love (for all intents and purposes, quibble all you want about what qualifies as love) with a man who tried to rape her, and we the audience are asked to agree.

If there's a trope in fiction that can piss me off harder than this, I don't ever want to know what it is.

Social justice aside, I'm also going to call plain old clumsiness on this whole plotline.
 
As if using a rape attempt for the purpose of motivating Spike to go get a soul weren't a terrible enough idea, it’s followed up with a season cliffhanger fake-out in which we're supposed to believe that he’s actually questing for a way to get rid of the chip. There’s lots of militantly cryptic wording about making sure "the bitch gets what she deserves," which serves the triple purpose of killing any sympathy Spike might have left at this point, if there were any, making absolutely no sense with the penitent headspace the larger storyline insists that he's in at this point, and failing as a fakeout for anyone with even a Saturday morning cartoon level of attunement to forced-cryptic phrasing.
 
And then there’s the ill-defined nature of what a “soul” is supposed to be. Buffy's had a vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend before.


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There was plenty of drama in the early seasons revolving around Angel losing his soul and getting it back, and it was always played as two people, the soul and the demon, fighting over one body. Angel, the soul, is a white knight through and through and controls the body when present. Angelus, the demon, is a stone cold psycho. It's night and day. It's not a character with issues, but two characters.
 
Yes, this dynamic was slowly retconned over time so that characters who got vampirized later on could retain some of their personality, something about the demon that inhabits the victim's body latching onto the most evil tendencies already present and unleashing them, but it's never explained in any solid, satisfactory way, so based on the closest thing we have to a defined set of rules, the show spends five seasons letting us get to know and, against all odds, like the demon that inhabits Spike's body, and then it tries to clinch that liking by handing the reins over to the human soul who, according to those rules, should be regarded as a separate person.

Everything about Spike’s plotline and his relationship with Buffy before the rape attempt gives the appearance of building toward the conclusion that Spike already has a soul for all intents and purposes, if not a human one. It hints that the black-and-white view that most of the Scoobies have of demons versus humans is overly simplistic and unfair. It seems to be leading toward some kind of pivotal epiphany on Buffy's part that will snap her out of the rampaging self-pity fest she's been stuck in all through season six and back to some semblance of the noble, fun-loving, irreverent hero we all know and love.

Nope! Instead we're told that Buffy and her less tolerant Scoobies were right about calling Spike inferior all this time, and that he does need this ill-defined magic bullet of a soul in order to be good enough to be one of them, no matter how much he might try and mean well without it.
 
What?

And no, no great revelations for Buffy, because after what Spike does, the story has the no-win choice between addressing how awful Buffy’s been, at the peril of implying that it could in any way justify Spike's actions, making this plotline even more offensive and insensitive than it already is, or letting her entire arc of unlikeability off the hook with an unsatisfying fizzle. To its very small credit, it goes with the latter.

Why I Love Him Anyway:

This is the part where all the guys in the audience roll their eyes and loudly wonder why women always fall for the obviously bad guys, and no denying, that's totally part of Spike’s appeal. I could put in my two cents on why that appeal exists at all, but, well, I tried going into it, and it nearly doubled the length of this leviathan of an article, so that's going to have to wait for a more general post of its own.

This one's about what's special about Spike, not general, and there’s a lot of special. His story is like an expertly woven, fine silk tapestry that just happens to be a depiction of a giant middle finger. If you can manage to ignore the big picture, the details are breathtaking.

I went into watching Buffy with the spoiler hanging over me that Spike was going to be a main love interest, and I wanted so much for it to be a lie. No matter how much I liked watching him as a villain or how good their chemistry was, there was just no way Buffy could fall for Spike, this predatory monster who terrorizes her friends and makes jokes that aren't jokes about kidnapping and torturing his ex-girlfriend for leaving him, without it being an insult to her character. I was convinced that no amount of progress could ever make me accept them.

And with the downright artful patience of countless tiny moments, the show did what I would have called the impossible. It made me feel for them as a pair.

There's the moment when Spike finds Buffy crying after her mother's brain tumor is found and sits with her, just sits, wordlessly, helplessly, the only way someone who cares can when a hurt is beyond expression.


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There’s the perfectly subtle moment when Willow's temporarily insane girlfriend, Tara, accidentally burns Spike by opening a window to the daylight, and instead of lashing out with his usual defensiveness, Spike brushes off Willow's apologies with honest grace, because before Buffy, he spent the better part of his undeath loving an insane person as well and knows exactly what it's like.

There's the slowly unwinding backstory, which unlike the tragic pasts of so many badboy characters that exist solely as love interests, actually feels like a living, continuing part of who he is.


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Spike's someone who's spent his whole life being put down and written off. When he was finally offered approval by a vampire woman, he threw himself, quite literally body and soul, into crafting himself into what he had to be in order to keep that approval, which, in her case, was the flashy killing machine he is when we meet him. And when even she rejects him, he clings desperately to the power that persona gave him, which slips, little by little, as he finds himself questioning whether that was ever what he wanted to be.

Nothing about his backstory excuses the inexcusable things he does, of course, but it does make him believable and relatably vulnerable, and more compelling than any quantity of abstract, detached sympathy points could make him, to a degree where he can carry a story independent of his relationship to our heroine, which is an impressive feat for either a villain or a love interest.

After the long, slow build of this, comes their big, defining moment.


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Spike gets captured by the villain of season five, an actual evil god, and refuses under torture to give up the location of Buffy's sister. We've seen him do good things and go to crazy lengths in his attempts to impress Buffy before, but this he does with no expectation of surviving to collect any kind of thank you.

Sorry, Angel, you're not special. If that's not proof of a soul, what is?

Once Buffy and Spike’s relationship, such as it is, actually begins, I'm sold. I'm Team Spike. If anything, I'm rooting for him to find the self-respect to stop taking Buffy's abuse and walk out, if she can't snap out of her own issues enough to treat him like an equal.

But Buffy’s got plenty of reason to have issues, and if anyone ever had a lot to atone for, it's Spike, so the fact that she has so much to apologize to him for in their early relationship feels like it might be just enough to put them on even footing. There’s a sense that they might be two very messed up people who might ultimately be able to find some happiness in each other if they’ll just talk out their problems.

And then...


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And then. This. Shit.

Right about here is where I hit the five stages of grieving.

Denial: This isn't happening. It's a dream sequence. One of them is about to wake up.

Anger: I defended you, you monster!

Bargaining: Okay, I got suckered. I forgot who he was. I can be annoyed that his redemption plotline went a little too far with demonstrating his capacity for selflessness if this was going to be the ultimate point, but maybe the plotline is salvageable. Maybe I had this smack in the face coming for buying in, and-

Wait, it's not finished? You're going to do it again? You're sending him on another, shorter, clumsier redemption arc after you just pulled off the near-impossible task of redeeming him once? No. Not cool.

Okay, so maybe the whole Buffy and Spike plotline I've gotten invested in is unsalvageable, but I can still keep my overall love and respect for the show, right? I mean, it’s Buffy! It's a female-led superhero show before that was even a hot issue! It’s created by the incomparable Joss Whedon! It's got a groundbreaking lesbian romance! Surely this is an isolated misstep. Right...?

Wait, hold up.

Here are all the Buffy characters I can think of who are known rapists:


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Spike: Tries and fails to rape Buffy, sexually threatens Willow on multiple occasions, later confirmed as having been an active serial rapist in his villain days.
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Veruca: Takes advantage of Oz in his werewolf form, knowing he’s temporarily incapable of human-level decision-making.
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Faith: Tries to rape and nearly kills Xander, successfully rapes Riley by appearing to him in Buffy’s body (rape by fraud).
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Jonathan: Alters the universe to make himself universally beloved and admired, has sex with multiple thereby brainwashed women. These events are not undone or even forgotten when the universe is reset.
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Willow: Erases Tara’s memory of the fact that they’re having a fight, leading to sex between them that Tara would not have consented to at the time if she’d had access her full mental faculties.
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Warren: Mind controls his ex-girlfriend into sex and then kills her when she recovers and tries to escape.

There's every chance I've missed some, and this is only counting literal rape, not any of the sci-fi and supernatural rape allegories that come up on the show all the time without involving literal sex acts.
 
And now, here's how many of those characters fight on the side of the heroes in the final confrontation with evil:


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Yeah, the show's obsession with redemption, to the point of belittling the importance of the victims' experiences and even implying that they owe their attackers forgiveness and understanding, was always a pervasive theme. It just takes that gut-turningly brutal Spike and Buffy scene to take it to a place too real to ignore.
 
So, have I made it through sadness into acceptance yet?

Well, I accept that I'll never be able to rationalize a defense for this plotline, and I accept that I'll never give up loving the many pieces of the show that are smart, emotionally powerful, and even socially revolutionary. I can't even give up loving the parts of Spike as a character and Spike and Buffy's relationship that are awesomely effective, before and, yes, even occasionally after the episode that makes them indefensible.

Has the cognitive dissonance caused by this contradiction obsessed me to a Poe-esque degree that ultimately drove me to plan an entire month of blogging around working up to cracking it open and poking its insides with a stick?

... Why do you ask?




Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #2: Pocahontas (Disney)

2/21/2016

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Once again, for February this year, I’m counting down my favorite characters who by all rights shouldn't be favorites, and yet something about them never fails to win me over.
 
Click the links for Favorite Fictional Character (That I Shouldn't Like) #3, #4, and #5.


Next up, we've got one of the beloved Disney princesses of my childhood, but she’s not here for the usual reasons Disney princesses can be difficult to defend.

Why I shouldn't like her:

Mostly because this is an incredibly awkward movie to watch once you're old enough to comprehend things like cultural sensitivity. Disney definitely gained a lot of good intentions between the days of Peter Pan and Pocahontas, but it hadn't quite gathered the competence to back up those good intentions.


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In case you ever wondered, no, there's no such thing as a blue corn moon.

Admittedly, Pocahontas isn't a story you want to strive for complete historical accuracy with, because then it would be about a woman who died of smallpox at the age of about twenty-two, after a brief political overseas marriage, and then became best known for a posthumous rumor started by a much older man about how she was totally infatuated with him back when they possibly crossed paths, when she was ten.
 
At least, we can all hope it was only a rumor.

It's the legend of Pocahontas, the forbidden-love-in-spite-of-the-differences concept, that makes a good movie.

Disney supposedly did its research before realizing exactly how much of the history would be unusable, but somewhere along the way, someone skipped over reasonable solutions like using as much accurate window-dressing that would work in a romantic children's movie as possible, or scrapping the project entirely in favor of something less problematic, and instead the strategy somehow became to include as much randomly generated imitation mysticism as could fit in the script, cloaked in somberly dignified earnestness.


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And plenty of magic leaves not native to North America.

This is the same sin of passing off made up gibberish in a fictional representation of a real-life human culture as last week's example, only exponentially worse, since this one’s connected with, you know, real-life genocide.

Okay, enough depressing reality.

Stripped of any real world context and viewed in a bubble, Pocahontas still has the significant storytelling problem that Pocahontas is always right.

Always. She has an infallible moral compass.


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See, she has it right here.

She never has anything of substance to learn from her romantic foil, only things to teach him. She's already perfect in every possible way.


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How can you even argue with lectures that come with the approval of all the cute animals?

Other characters complain about her unreliability and recklessness, but we're not seriously expected to see those as flaws when said other characters are standing in the way of love and peaceful cooperation. The closest Pocahontas ever gets to imperfection is needing the occasional pep talk from her magic willow tree mentor before making a decision, but even that demonstrates the superior wisdom she derives from her closeness with nature.

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Pictured: A Mary-Sue wrapped in a racial stereotype.

Why I love her anyway:
 
I'm going to date myself pretty dramatically here for a moment. When I was five years old, Pocahontas hit theaters. This was before Mulan, before Princess and the Frog, and way before I processed the concept that movies not made by Disney existed as anything but a curiosity for old people.
 
I missed out on the movie theater window for some reason and had to endure a five-year-old’s eternity of all my friends talking, singing, and dressing up in celebration of the incomparable awesomeness of their new favorite heroine, until the day the big display of VHS copies finally appeared along the back wall of the Blockbuster, so I could find out for myself.

At long last, I put in the tape, pressed play, and had my pink-loving, tiara-wearing mind utterly blown.

Five-year-old me wasn't an analytical fiction blogger. She had never heard the word “feminism.” She hadn't given a whole lot of thought yet to why Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella weren't quite as much fun as their younger sisters. She didn't understand the history or present of gender prejudice, no more than she knew about the rules of character development or what happened after the founding of the real life Jamestown. She probably couldn't have told you exactly what it was about Pocahontas that compelled her memorize every word, note, and image of it until she could act it out over and over again with the help of her dolls, and some furniture and couch cushions when she ran out of dolls.

But I am, I do, and I can.

Pocahontas wasn't technically the first Disney princess to rescue a prince; Belle, Ariel, and even Jasmine all sort of beat her to that distinction, but only in passing, token moments in larger action sequences, before or after their princes’ flashier, always more plot-essential rescues of them.
 
Pocahontas was the first Disney princess ever to rescue the prince as the single climactic action of the story.


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She doesn't just get her token heroic moment. Her heroism is the point.

I can explain that now, and I can't overstate the revelation it was at the time or the power she had for me because of it.

Pocahontas is brave and principled and has nature superpowers and doesn’t do what she’s told, but most miraculously of all, she never gets taken down a peg because of it and forced to wait for someone else's pardon and rescue like a good princess.
 
She’s a musical heroine who gets two ballads of her own and a powerful, determined share of the going-to-war montage song, which may be an odd point of appeal, but those songs are one of my forever soft spots, and she wins a guy whose non-saving of her in no way makes him less dreamy.

Sure, she has to give him up to become a diplomatic translator, but he asks her to stay with him, so it counts.


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Talk about dating myself, I remember when Mel Gibson's voice was wholesomely crush-worthy.

Adulthood and the study of storytelling have given me a taste for more complex, less cloyingly perfect protagonists, but that first feeling of discovering a heroine who was completely the hero of her story is something I'll never forget.

One might even theorize that it helped create the F.J.R Titchenell you know today.



Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #3: Dharma Finkelstein-Montgomery (Dharma & Greg)

2/14/2016

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Once again, for February this year, I’m counting down my favorite characters who by all rights shouldn't be favorites, and yet something about them never fails to win me over.
 
Click the links for Favorite Fictional Character (That I Shouldn’t Like) #4, and #5.

For those who don't know, Dharma & Greg is a sitcom revolving around the passionate but rocky marriage of an extremely New Age woman and a straight-laced lawyer born of old money.

It's a funny, clever, often heartfelt personal favorite of mine, but being a '90s sitcom, its thoughtfulness is often sacrificed in the name of the joke.

Why I shouldn't like her:

Dharma's the type of character who's very evidently written from the outside in, to her detriment. She comes into existence as the epitome of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" archetype, giving the instant illusion of being a special gem of a character, as women onscreen go, by pure virtue of not being bland and wooden.


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Dharma and Greg are presented as equal co-stars of their story, maybe even with a little extra emphasis on Dharma as the breakout character with Greg as her more understated straight man, but in practice, particularly in the early years of the show, her quirky wildness is clearly tailored for the express purposed of getting the desired reaction out of Greg for the sake of his emotional development, and then attached to the surface of her with krazy glue, rather than naturally extending from any organic part of herself.

In the pilot episode, for example, Dharma sees Greg, recognizes him instantly as her soulmate, and asks him out for pie... in another state. They jump on a plane, have the best date of their lives, and end up coming back married.

It's wild! It's spontaneous! It shatters the crushing weight of the rules of what's normal and reasonable that have governed Greg's suffocating existence up to this point!

And it's a completely unrealistic habit for Greg's social opposite, his economic opposite, to have.

Dharma's a yoga instructor at a struggling New Age co-op. She lives in a dilapidated apartment converted from a battery factory, but she loves her life, her parents, her work, and her friends, cares not one bit about financial success, and finds joy in everything. Contrasted with Greg, she's supposed to be walking proof that money can't buy happiness.

She's later shown to be irresponsible and impulsive with money on occasions when it falls into her lap, but the pie excursion isn't Dharma's reaction to suddenly having a rich boyfriend; it's played as a normal, semi-regular thing for her.

How?

And why is she best friends with a barely restrained psychopath?


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We're told that things that seem normal to Dharma seem normal to her friend, Jane, as well. They have a shared cultural background and long-built rapport that Greg can't break into. Yet apart from her genuine regard for Dharma, Jane's primary character traits are all somehow related to criminal malice.

Dharma's the kind of person who cries inconsolably when Greg squishes a spider and gives impassioned peace-and-love speeches to powerless city hall paper pushers in defense of her right to put coins in other people's parking meters, but it hardly seems to bother her when Jane suggests poisoning a professional rival with antifreeze in total seriousness and with the not-so-subtle implication that she's done it before.

There's never any explanation given for what their friendship was founded on or why Dharma cuts Jane so much slack, other than someone at the writing desk wanting to give her a best friend who makes Greg as uncomfortable as possible.


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Sorry for the minimalist and generic pictures this week, btw. Someone REALLY needs to release the complete Dharma and Greg in digital form, hint hint.

That's not even to mention the inconsistencies in the subcultures Dharma supposedly belongs to. Words like “Wiccan” and “Druid” and “hippie” and “New Age” get casually tossed around with no evident understanding of what they mean or how they're not interchangeable.

The show's representation of the lives of the 1% on Greg’s side may be equally erroneous, I have no way of knowing, but as someone who spent my middle school years in a Waldorf-style homeschooling cooperative, I can pretty confidently call out Dharma's lifestyle as a careless hodgepodge of half-understood mismatched elements seasoned with plenty of plain old making shit up.

Though it does occasionally hit the nail on the head...

Dharma: You know that stuff [cold medicine] doesn't do anything. It just makes you feel better.

Greg: That's what I want!

Why I love her anyway:

As a character designed to provoke a certain reaction from an outside perspective, Dharma's pretty effective. Her hopeless optimism is infectious, and her simple ability to have fun in daily life is something I want to study, isolate, and keep a syringe full of it on my person at all times.

And for a character created from the outside-in, the in part does eventually take effect as the series progresses, with Dharma becoming more consistent and less childish, and Greg's issues being played up as more extreme and trying for her, rather than average and only trying for him.

Dharma's positivity, compassion, and energy make her an influence we should all be so lucky as to have in our lives, but she’s at her best when we get to see the cracks in her faith, including in her own upbringing, with its stifling rejection of both conflict and commitment.


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"Every time I get angry, I meditate, and it just bottles it up!"

During the hellish preparations for her parents' long-awaited wedding, she loses her patience and snaps at them:

"You always told me your way was better, because every day you chose to be together. But did you ever stop to consider that there was someone else in that house who woke up every morning wondering if this was the day her parents would choose not to be together?"

Even her faith in her own supposedly predestined relationship is tested. In the make-or-break argument for Dharma and Greg's marriage in the final episode, the crux of all their differences comes out in her exclamation:

"I don't think I can raise a child like that. I don't know if I can raise a child with you."

Those are the moments when she's finally, after her shaky origins, a true co-protagonist, and when I love her the most.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!


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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #4: The Vulcans (Star Trek)

2/7/2016

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Welcome back to my February countdown of favorite characters who by all rights shouldn't be favorites, and yet something about them never fails to win me over.
 
Click here for Favorite Fictional Character (That I Shouldn’t Like) #5.

This week’s culprit isn’t a single character, but it's the consistent attributes of the Vulcan culture that I have my love-hate relationship with, more than any individual example, so I’m dragging them all into this.

For those who don't know (if any), the Vulcans are that Trek species who claim to be purged of all emotion, with all its pesky, dangerous and unpredictable side effects, and revere pure, perfect logic above all else.

The automatic response to Vulcan philosophy is pretty obvious, and as a writer of fiction, someone whose life's work revolves around making people feel things, maybe it hits me a little extra hard. Without feeling, and without the feelings of others, what's the point of being?
 
The Vulcans don't only reject the carnal kinds of feelings that so many human religions seek to regulate; even satisfaction derived from things like intellectual discovery and helping others counts as emotion and is therefore un-Vulcan, though Vulcans are expected to participate in those activities anyway in carefully controlled, emotionless ways.

What does that leave to live for?

That's how we emotional humans are supposed to respond to high-and-mighty Vulcan lecturing, however, so that's not necessarily a character failing.

Where the Vulcans really fall apart is on their own terms.

Why I shouldn't like them:

Applied pure logic is impossible.
 
Period.

Not only impossible for us poor humans with our incurably emotion-addled constitutions, I mean it's a theoretical  impossibility.

Observe:

You're in a room, a classic logic puzzle room with two doors leading forward. You can't go back the way you came. Each door offers a clue.


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A helpful sign on an empty stretch of wall reads,

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Assuming you trust the sign on the wall, which door do you open?

Door #2, of course. Right? Why?

Well, because being a creature of logic, you didn't panic and act on your first impulse to open the door promising true love. You thought things through and realized that the rules told you that neither room is empty, so the sign claiming its room is empty must be lying, and therefore both must be lying, and therefore the room promising true love must contain the tiger, and the other room, by process of elimination, must contain true love.


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Go, logic!

Except no, that's not why you picked Door #2. That's how you picked Door #2.
 
You picked Door #2 because, before you put your logician's hat on, you made the emotional decision that finding your true love is a preferable outcome to being devoured by a tiger.


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>

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Go, emotion!
You can try to dress that up as a logical decision, "Oh, I can better live up to my responsibilities if I'm not dead," or "pairing is a function necessary to the continuation of the species," and maybe that'll fly as long as the people you're arguing with are making some unconscious emotional assumptions of their own, but pure logic doesn't dictate that the well-being and continuation of your family or your species or even all life in the universe is an inherently good thing.
 
That's strictly an emotional truth.

A completely emotionless entity of pure logic would be able to figure out far more complicated puzzles than the one above, puzzles few humans could, and that's a wonderful tool, but first, someone has to tell this emotionless computer the objective.
 
The objective might be "Find true love and don't die," as in the example above, or "Arrange this wedding seating plan in a way that won't cause any blood feuds," or simply "Solve for X," but whatever it is, one has only to ask "Why?" or "So what?" enough times in order to reach a question to which the only answer is, "Because this matters, damnit!" as explained by someone with feelings.
 
So this proud, ancient, interplanetary culture built entirely on the emotionless observance of pure logic is itself founded on a logical oversight, and no one notices?
 
Or they're, what, too scared to say anything about it?

Why I love them anyway:

Like pretty much every Trek species, the Vulcans are less a believably fleshed out fictional culture than they are a caricature of a small facet of human nature, and as such, overlooking the flawed internal logic of their existence, they can be very enticing.

Who hasn't occasionally wished for the ability to switch off irrational feelings, especially fear, to make it easier to do something that seems to make obvious sense?


It would certainly make speaking in meetings easier, even if the unleashed inside of your brain doesn't look like the hell dimension from Event Horizon.

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Which everyone's does from time to time, right?

And whenever a Vulcan tells off a human for irrational behavior, part of you wants to tell the Vulcan to stop being a pompous, insensitive ass, but part of you also looks at the irrational behavior of certain less heroic real-life humans, the ones whose "Because it matters, damnit!" reactions somehow fail to trigger in defense of things like humanist fairness but work overtime on defending prejudicial hate or documenting celebrity fashion faux pas, for example, and you want to be the Vulcan.

You want to try to use logic to explain why they're wrong. It's a perversely comforting idea, that everything wrong with humanity might be nothing but a failure of logic, and therefore fixable with logic. If you're an analytical type already, as many Sci-Fi geeks are, that's incredibly tempting to believe.

Even so, much as the simplicity of the Vulcan concept can appeal, my favorite Vulcan moment comes in Deep Space Nine, the Trek series that consistently gives the most complexity and depth to even the sillier reaches of the Trek verse.
 
In the episode “Take Me Out to the Holosuite,” Captain Sisko rallies his friends to go up against his long-time Vulcan rival, Captain Solok, in a baseball game.


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Yes, this happened, in the serious years of the show.

Solok has spent the duration of his and Sisko's careers taking every possible opportunity to take Sisko down a peg, always in an academic, logical forum, of course. He enters into the baseball challenge as a way of demonstrating his superiority physically as well as mentally, which he does.

Sisko and the rest of his mixed-species team get quite thoroughly thrashed by the all-Vulcan opposition but bond over their enjoyment of working together and giving a challenge their best, in true sports movie fashion.


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When Solok sees the DS9-ers not crushed by his victory, he criticizes them in a superior, Vulcan manner for celebrating a manufactured victory, prompting a rousing toast among the DS9-ers, "To manufactured victory!"

Solok leaves in a close to a huff as a Vulcan would ever allow himself.

If you're noticing Solok's motivations (frustration, egotism, and obsessive rivalry) to be distinctly emotional, the DS9-ers catch onto that too, in spite of his collected facade.

Is it reading too deeply to speculate that the Vulcan purgation of emotion isn't half so effective as they claim it to be, and that their oh so logical self-presentation is little more than enhanced self-control and a wish of an idea that they cling to as hopelessly as any human viewer might be tempted to do so?

I do hope not.



Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!


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