Been reading more things with Punchline and it's only fueling my desire to make her an representation of the absolute worst true crime fans. I'm making Shivers Punchline terminally online, this girl gets into tumblr discourse with teenagers. This girl needs to be the Gotham equivalent to that one bone witch. This girl needs to be turned into the Batman version of gottiewrites.

Session 0

Welcome to Hypercritical Hit, the best place on the internet to roll a 20 on your investigation of Table Top Game Design. One of my favourite parts of the internet (and I guess the real world) is tabletop roleplaying games. There are so many games out there: from the ones that fit on one page, to the ones that have twelves books. You might wonder how there can be so many games, aren't they all just “roll dice, succeed or fail, repeat?” Maybe. At the essence, you would be right (though even this is a broad statement — many games don't use dice), but there are so many small mechanics that make each game unique. People often overlook these small mechanics, but they are so often the make-or-break parts of the game. These tiny mechanics are what the designers pour over for hours on end, looking for the right way to communicate something to the players, just so then you can look at it for half a second and think “oh cool, when can I hit things.” Each fortnight we will look at how a single mechanic explores a theme, helps create a narrative, or moves representation forward in gaming.

When I was thirteen my friend's father introduced the game of his childhood — Dungeons & Dragons — Quickly we started a campaign of loot and adventure, this is where my obsession began. While I still believe D&D is a great game, the more I explored the roleplaying game community I quickly found the wonderful world of Indie Publishing. These are the games that really grabbed my interest as they could explore so many modes of play. Quickly my game library expanded, and I got more interested in not just playing these games, but the mechanics of these games and how they were designed. So I researched and learned quickly that "the community" was active on Twitter. There were so many wonderful people (people like Adam Koebel, DC, and Kira Magrann) who made games and more importantly loved analyzing design decisions. Why these decisions were made, what effect they have on the game, and what effect they have on culture at large. The more I read and watched, the better of an understanding I developed on game design — the massive impact the use of a single word can have, or how failing a dice roll interacts with the world.

The world of game design is extraordinarily vast and can truly affect so much. I hope that with each post I make; you learn more about how games need not just be bread and circuses, but can also help us communicate and discuss troubling parts of our society, such as power dynamics, decolonization of thought, and how we deal with failure.

If you have a game you want to us to look at please, use the Ask me Anything page. I hope you come back next fortnight for our first dive into a mechanic. (Hint it's from this game)

MONDO FunnyBooks: Bunker Down.

Were you a recent visitor to the wonderful world of comics fandom and discussions between professionals in the business, you might have the idea that comic customers were essentially a superstitious and cowardly lot.

Current sources of outrage, retweets and outbreaks of delusional authority run riot have been ranged from the fairly embarrassing to the downright worrying. Arguments in this writers memory have been about: 'Is The Joker doing something not very nice to a human being?', 'How dare a movie studio choose to cast who they like in the film they're paying to make without consulting US first?', 'This man who draws and has been drawing people in a particular fashion has drawn this person in his particular fashion. How dare he?' We reached peak David Icke/Alex Jones levels of hilarious Othering this week when an X-Men artist referred to SJWs as 'Nazis'.

Irony and Satire have apparently given up on humanity and gone for a pint.

The usual conservative, tribal viewpoints of people who've confused an artistic medium with a constant stream of politically free distraction designed only to anatheize rather than engage and stimulate thought, then. It's more important to harass Ruby Rose for being cast as 'Batwoman' until she feels compelled to leave Twitter or be upset at the news of Michael B. Jordan playing Johnny Storm for reasons that were absoultly nothing to do with racism but rather the...uh...misportrayal of the modern American family which defintly traditionally couldn't contain a black man. Also something something tradition or something.

When we've brought this up before, we're usually countered with something like 'Oh, you should see Harry Potter/Overwatch/Hunger Games/Fortnite fandoms, they're JUST as bad.' Which we are willing to assume is true, having seen YouTube comments, but it does seem that the entertainment industry has a bad habit of emulating the worst excesses of the comics industry.

Whether it's Empire or TV Guide running variant covers, Toy producers doing convention exclusive figures and then selling them at a premium afterwards or even, HighFather Keep Us From Laughing, the application of the words 'Limited' or 'Collectiable' to a product to imply both a scarity that requires instant purchase and a possibilty of high resale value when in fact those are words that could be applied to any physical product ever.

We can almost guarantee that there are only a limited amount of copies of 'Night Rocker' by David Hasslehoff in the world and should you decide to purchase one or more copies, you have collected them, but neither fact is hard evidence that anyone will offer you more than you paid for them ten years in the future.

This is a rather..odd state of affairs to have come about. With the exception of poetry or graffiti, Before the medium was hijacked into becoming one more vehicle to sell corporate superhero products, work like George Herriman's 'Krazy Kat' explored the nature of language via abusive animals against the unrelenting tedium of the desert. Little Nemo In Slumberland by Windsor McCay was a continous attempt to map the subconscious in a strip adaptable to any format thrown at him by publishers. Sigel and Shuster commericalised the Jewish notion of a charismatic Golem who would maintain balance against an American society that had been taught to hate them. Fly By Night publishing types would use the form to glamourise the world of true crime and vaguely condemning tales of drug abuse to create an entire sub-culture by showing a willingness to adapt to the times.

These were the early days of comics and sequential story-telling and by now there ought to be work making these masterpieces look like the plinkings of Woody Gutherie against the all out assault on the cortex that is an Atari Teenage Riot. Instead the front end of the medium seems more concerned with dotting the I's and lining the t's of it's previous output (our favourite example being Marvel's 'Secret Wars Too: A comic that explained to readers why the comic it was parodying would be late. They charged money for this, as well.)

Comics were long considered the Outlaw Artform, so capable of shaping the public psyche that the content and distribution were brought up in Congress to see if it was necessarily to regulate the avalibilty of them to children. It's a longer story than will run here but the essence of the events is that while the 1954 hearings saw Congress conclude that comics were NOT a harmful product that would negatively influence children's minds, the comics industry decided that it would be best to settle public hysteria by establishing 'The Comics Code Authority', which would impose a series of standards and regulations upon comics seeking to be distributed on the newsstands.

Ironically, one of the people on the earlier incarnations of the board that would make up The CCA would be John Goldwater, one of many who takes credit for the creation of Archie Andrews'.. This writer likes to think Mr Goldwater was probably a little resentful of EC Comics's Archie parody 'STARCHIE!' (MAD Magazine Issue 12. Remains funny but now also looks like any episode of 'Riverdale'.) and was more than happy to choose the phrasing of a code that also happened to regulate the key words in EC Comic's top selling comics out of publication. All the resentful little men in comics complaining about being mocked are 'Happy Days''s Howard Cunningham wearing his Grand Poobah hat in our head.

We say 'ironically', because the current Ickeian theory is that comic sales in the direct market are so low due to Marvel and DC 'giving in' to the demands of the 'SJWs'. What with their unreasonable demands for more realistic representation in mainstream comics, we can see how 'Could you produce more comics we'd be willing to buy?' would definetly be an agenda designed to bring down the entire comics industry.

Because we are given to facts, we can't dispute a lot of the problems the new comics industry faces. Sales on New Comics to The Direct Market ARE down.

It would take the same sort of mind that blames Barack Obama for his Presidential inaction during Hurricane Katrina to think that the problems of new comics are the work of those damned SJWs, though. Not unless Heidi MacDonald has a time machine.

Unless Laurie Penny staged a hostile takeover of The Marvel Editorial Summit and said 'Right. Here's what we want: Please keep raising the prices of your comics by roughly about a dollar every few years, do more $150 crossovers that will have no significance in about 4 years or so. Please spin off as many comics as possible from one of your prime brands. Make sure your top staff behave like Obnoxious King Nerds on social media whenever possible.Instead of focusing your sales team on promoting the comic as a good read, keep pitching your comics as must buy investment issues aimed at speculators who won't be back for the next issue. As soon as your readership have begun to settle into a book, it's direction and it's creative team, that's probably the best time to relaunch your titles.

Be sure to confuse readers and retailers by pretending each relaunch is a 'Season' without ever referring to which season is currently published in advertising or trade dress. Come up with any justification whatsover to publish an anniversary issue that's triple the price of a regular comic as frequently as possible. Try to devalue the contribution and sales cache of your creative team over the amount of variant covers offered to retailers. Have your top writers actively and vocally hostile to the notion of second printings and finally publish no comics that even vaguely resemble the TV and Movie versions of your characters so new readers can come into a shop after seeing "Avengers Assemble" and be offered 7 books called "Avengers" but they'll mainly be about some men chatting at a table.'....then the reasons why new comics are failing aren't at the hands of SJWs.

They're at the hands of the publishers. The above list is the main reason for the decline in sales of new comics in specialist shops that we saw in our days behind the till. All things we were saying over a decade ago at retailer meetings with Marvel and DC. We were brushed off in order to try and wave shiny new 3D variants back then.

A few years later, when it was apparent that the law of diminishing returns was in full effect, was when finally The Big Two turned to the 'gimmick' of appealling to a wider audience. When oddly, that half-hearted effort to win over a new readership by publishing the books in the same venues as usual didn't work,with little support from their publicity and advertising departments both Marvel and DC quickly threw these efforts under the bus as proof that trying to expand your salesbase beyond a Wednesday crowd was a waste of time.

Except that''s nonsense of course. Any analysis of pre-order charts will tell you that the sales have been in heavy decline since 2007's 'Civil War' from Marvel. The constant attempts to repeat that success in that format are the problem. Marvel and DC trying the 'Social Justice' route and it's subsequent failure is a shameless attempt to rewrite history for the benefit of an agenda of tired Poobahs scared of time and their limited views of the comic medium making them irrelevant.

In fact, Marvel's recent attempt to appeal to Muslims,AND teenagers (imagine.) at once was quite late in the game with 2013's 'Ms Marvel' while the 'Feminazi Bible' Mockingbird wouldn't begin threatening Poobah Egos until around late 2016. Meanwhile, Archie Comics had smelled which way the wind was blowing several years earlier....

Archie Comics were always smarter than the ongoing superhero titles because they never set themselves up to tell an ongoing story, but rather worked like an extended cartoon strip. If you read three random issues of any Archie comics, you were probably as clued up on the cast of Riverdale as you were going to need to be to understand the dynamics of what was going on. Archie was perptually out of sync with the world around him, Betty was goal driven and meant well, Moose wasn't quite sure what day it was but loved Midge more than anything, etc. etc. All you had to do was set up a situation, add two or more of the characters and let the rest play out.

Even better, since the characters weren't obliged to be a certain age given the backstory (Peter Parker can't be worrying about teenage problems since he's been around long enough to get married, be a lecturer, etc.) the backgrounds and fashions could simply be updated to reflect the times of publication.

So no awkward retcons such as Reed Richards and Ben Grimm starting off as veterans of World War 2 and suddenly having gone through The Gulf War instead, prompting questions like 'Which comics have and haven't happened, then, because The Avengers definitely went to Saigon in the 70's but the existence of The FF precedes The Original Avengers finding Captain America in the block of ice and Cap turned out to be fighting Richard Nixon during The Secret Empire Saga so...argh!'

Archie managed to stay on the newsstands long after the self absorbed and inside baseball nature of superhero comics rendered them unsaleable in your average W.H.Smith's or Wal-Mart, since any issue of Betty & Veronica could be read by anyone with no need to check out previous issues. It was very rare that any one tale would run more than one comic and the few times it did, it was with fantastic results. We'll get to that.

In 2010, Marvel was wasting everyone's time and money on 'Siege; or 'What If Asgard wasn't in space but in Oklahoma instead?' while DC insisted on spreading the myth that people who grew up in Liverpool talk like they're from Shoreditch by adding John Constantine to the line up of 'Brightest Day'.

During the same year, Archie dragged mainstream comics kicking and screaming into the future with 'Kevin Keller', a comic featuring an openly gay male lead out in the real world and everything. This annoyed some American Mary Whitehouse wannabes called 'One Million Moms!'. They campaigned against the title being sold in children friendly areas such as Toys R Us but only really proved their basic inability to count to 1 million.

In the same year they published covers featuring Archie kissing Valerie, the black bassist from Josie & The Pussycats. If this doesn't strike you as a big deal for a comic being published in the mid-west of America, well, you might be one of those guys suggesting that there's always been adequate representation in comics.

They didn't sell as many comics in specialist shops, but while The Big Two continued to tread water, Archie kept moving forward, kept looking to crossover with big name brands, parodied the biggest comic crossovers, featured the likes of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, paid homage to EC Comics and got Adam Hughes to draw covers. They even explored exactly what WOULD happen if Archie finally chose Betty. And Veronica. And heartbreakingly, how deep Archie's love for his fellow man ran in the conclusion to the marriage stories in 'The Death Of Archie.' Oh, and he also met the Predator.

Then they stepped everything into higher gear with our second favourite horror comic of the 21st Century with Afterlife With Archie. It was a book we'd recommend to new readers as a good alternative to the horrendously overpriced, badly drawn horror or just too boring to be scary books glutting the market with 'Torture Porn Variants'. AWA would feature at least one chilling moment per issue likely to stay with you long after you finished reading. One issue of tie-in book 'Sabrina The Teenage Witch; is worth 3 or 4 'Walking Dead' trade paperbacks in terms of actual horror instead of people talking around a trailer park.

If you had been a fan of the Archie world before and hadn't read it for a while, though, our glee would be magnified. While the horror/jump scare bits of AWA are genuinely well done and actually quite intense, the bits between undead assault are where the real horror lies as relationships between all the characters are twisted forever, new angles and revealations would stop you ever being able to see Midge, Cheryl, Reggie and more in quite the same light.

This moving with the times meant that the Archie readership were quite capable of seeing the characters they loved for so many decades in different modes of storytelling and art styles laid the groundwork for two things: The relaunch of the line in 2015 with high profile creators such as Mark Waid, Fiona Staples, Chip Zdarsky and Adam Hughes doing new and interesting takes on a universe we all knew so well (A bit like The Ultimate Universe but with a point and a plan.) and also the hit show 'Riverdale'.

It will not surprise many of you to learn that the Grand Poobahs Of Comics (TM MONDO FunnyBooks 2018) hated 'Riverdale' and frequently grumbled 'Not MY Archie.' but then, by folding their arms and threatening to hold their breath until the artform of comics goes back to being what THEY want, they've proven time and again that they're constantly wanting to find a straw man to blame for the world moving on without them. These were the same people who moaned about 'Archie Vs Punisher' for not taking Frank Castle seriously enough and thought the parody crossover 'Love Showdown' (Which promised that Archie would finally choose a permanent girlfriend) would break the Archieverse once and for all.

There are lots of ways to improve the state of comics. Indulging the whinging of grumpy old men and refusing to believe the rest of the world might be interested in comics are not on that list of ways.

And as a wise man once said 'The people want BeBop. And who I am to tell them that BeBop is wrong?'

🔥 The TV show... (Because I really want to know exactly why you don't like it [or hate it?] because i'm so freaking curious. Also I think in general a Constantine TV show would do best on AMC rather than NBC... FEEL FREE TO COMPLETELY RANT. I WANT TO KNOW. Please.)

Unpopular Opinion Time!

Oh boy. Hooooo boy. I’m still going to be relatively gentle, because honestly, I’m saving my true vitriol for the times that I must defend my choice not to RP it or for the hysterical consensus opinion from the fandom that TV show was an improvement over the film (lol nope, aside from Matt Ryan “looking the part” but that’s a whole other can of worms). 

Note: Cut for length and maybe a bit of brutality in my honesty.

*sighs* Ok, I’ll first preface this with that I still have like four episodes to go. Obviously, I have massive issues in the needless changes made to the adaption of comic canon. It was unnecessary to make Chas American while retaining the fact that he’s John’s oldest and best of friends. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but who knows. Maybe it’s explained a little better in one of the last few episodes, but you know. My hopes aren’t high. I don’t like Chas’s virtual invulnerability, not just because it takes away the stakes of the danger he’s putting himself in, but also? It’s a plot device scarcely used? So why make that choice if it’s not going to be capitalized on with meaningful frequency? I hated that Zed was portrayed as a novice, and that the teeth were taken out from the Newcastle Incident. Now obviously, I understand why they’d have to alter a bit of it due to Network censorship, but at the same??? I mean child abuse and sexual violence are nothing new on shows like Law and Order: SVU and Criminal minds so…Idek, it kind of comes off as an excuse. It’s not a child’s show. Maybe it could be argued that it was marketed toward teenagers, but it’s not like they’re ignorant to those horrors in the world. I’m not asking them to show Astra’s rape, just to acknowledge the true horror of the situation instead of making it all about John’s failure. So yeah, I was annoyed by the occasional attempt to adapt source material and completely mucking it all up.

Now to begin with, I completely get the SP/N’s fandom bitterness more than ever. Before watching it I thought they were just trying to be like “whaaaat, another show about magic and exorcism? Of course it’s a ripoff because don’t you know our fandom invented those things?” I honestly believe the crux of the issue is that NBC clearly wanted their own SP/N as well as to cash in the popularity of comic book based media, so there’s that. To me, it comes off as a shameless cash grab. I honestly believe if I felt like there was some kind of passion from its creators, I could have dealt with some of those changes, but I don’t get that. It’s been a soulless experience overall. Like it’s not been a matter of me nitpicking like “oh this is wrong, this has been changed, boo hoo, it’s not all existential horror and fucking and drugs.”

Because frankly...I just think it’s a bad show. It’s poorly written, poorly made, poorly researched, poorly acted, it’s just bad. The main issue I have with it is that it’s a lot of telling and not showing. There’s not a lot of tension or foreshadowing, just “boom this is how it is” and so much exposition. John, for example, about half of his dialogue in any given show is verbal exposition. It’s frustrating, tbh. Like, it doesn’t make sense for me in this day and age for a TV show, even on a network channel, to be this bad. Over the past several years, television series have improved exponentially in content and writing. It’s not shameful anymore to start off on TV anymore. We’re in a very exciting time that television and cinema are almost completely on equal par of perceived quality. So yeah, it’s been an even greater disappointment for me because it’s not just that they fuck with the source material but because on top of that it’s literally a bad show. I’m not one bit surprised that it wasn’t renewed because there just...Isn’t enough to like about it. It’s not faithful enough to the comic to secure that base of fans and it’s not good enough to be taken for face value. 

The other massive issue I have is the portrayal of magic, which honestly extends to DC’s handling of Hellblazer and John as well. See, what you have to understand is that predominately, throughout the Vertigo series, it’s clear to me that most of its writers either have some awareness of how magic works or at least have done their research. I can follow the logic and ritual in what he’s doing. ​Let me tell you a little something about magic. It's all about focus and will. You can do and say whatever the hell you want as long as you're putting your intent behind it. The ritual of spell work, use of candles, crystals, incense, chanting, incantations, etc. are meant to be the focus of a magician's energy and will on a particular result, but it could be attempted without as well. To explain it in more fantastical terms, in Harry Potter casting without a wand is considered impressive. This implies that the wizard's focus and will is so strong that they no longer need a wand to draw out their intent. Now I get it. By this understanding magic doesn't make good TV viewing (I guess...), but my main concern with this series is there's no attempt to portray an iota of witchcraft's reality along with the fantastical. Now part of this problem is that they've removed a great deal of John's innate ability. He can no longer see spirits/ghosts and there is no mention to his connection to synchronicity (as far I’ve seen, mind). Instead of happening to end up where he needs to be or what have you, he's following a map, and he uses a lot of artifacts and other implementation to get the job done. Which bothers me on a few levels. For one, it imbues the focus, not the caster with the power, which is not how magic works (at least in the sense of portraying gritty urban fantasy), and for two, it's very much against character. Let me give you an example: In the two part story Newcastle Calling, at the end of it, John hands a dying man a twig, telling him it's the finger bone of St. Cavartigan and that it's known to bring relief to those in need. He tells him to squeeze it tightly and focus on the pain going away. Near the end of the scene, the young man tells John that it's working. A couple things can be taken away from this scene: John's will was that the dying man would believe as he was told and his instructions were rote ritual. By contrast, in the series, John would probably had actually given him a Saint's fingerbone. You see the comparison takes the power of the scene away, as well as the mystery. Is the power of John's suggestion so strong that he could make the guy believe by holding that twig his pain would do away? Or was he so desperate to believe in order to not die in pain? You can interpret it either way. Hell, I could invent other interpretations, but going by what I believe would happen in the show, it can only be interpreted in the most literal sense. Now, to be honest, most television shows portray magic poorly. Even movies do a better job while keeping fantastical elements. The Craft, for all it’s 90s cheese, is a great example of this. So I suppose I could be blamed for getting my hopes up to be dashed because it’s just following the formula of 95% of all TV shows that feature a magical element or theme, but I mean...it’s not like Buffy or Charmed that was working without a script, so to speak. The TV series had a ready made blueprint and still chose to take the mumbo-jumbo bullshit route. Now, I have a lot of theories on the why for this, but that’s another post altogether and this has already gone on for way too long and I still have more to say.

Now, I guess I should, at least briefly, touch on the elephant in the room: Matt Ryan as John. What did I think? Because a lot of people have told me that he’s the shining beacon of this show, even literally admitting that yeah, it’s a poor representation of Hellblazer but that Matt Ryan man, he’s great! The problem that I have is that it’s not a good a show, and so no, I don’t like him in the role. I’m not going to compare him to Keanu because that’s not fair for a number of reasons, and maybe I’m a little biased because I adore Keanu (there’s also that can of worms I mentioned earlier, which is honestly yet another separate post lol). The way John’s written for this show, he’s positively insufferable. He’s not charming at all, which is find the most offensive, because one thing that can be said across all series and iterations of the character is that John is magnetic even despite xyz (he’s dangerous, he can be an asshole, he’s unreliable, etc.). Here he’s just a know-it-all, condescending prick. Now I do think with better writing, in a better representation of John’s character and Hellblazer in general (and maybe with a voice coach or director to discourage that Welshy intonation because yeah, his accent does irritate the shit out of me, but I’ve been very vocal about that before and honestly, at this point, I’ve come to realize that Ryan’s vowels are the least of this show’s problem), I think he has potential to be a fine John. As it stands in the media he’s portrayed John in so far (idk, maybe he was good on Arrow, but I’m talking the TV Series here and the JLD animation, which I’ve admittedly not seen, but I hated the comic so I’m not real likely to give that a chance considering my disposition toward the source material), I’m not entirely sold on him. Like if they tried another TV series for Hellblazer and didn’t cast him in the role, I wouldn’t be upset over it. 

I do agree that it probably could have been better on another channel, but here’s the rub, all the blood and gore and sex and loose censorship in the world could not save that show without better writing and direction. It could have been a fine show even on network if it had been crafted with some degree of caring. Let me give you an example off the top of head, namely the handling of the Newcastle incident. It was laid out pretty plainly within a few episodes. Alterations from canon aside, it doesn’t portray the horror of it at all and is one of the show’s many missed opportunities to really play up the scarier, more mysterious elements of John’s backstory. For example, instead of laying it out in a sloppy flashback with a laughable puppet, picture this scene instead: ​John is having a chat with someone, maybe Zed or Chas or some b-plot character. Something reminds him of the Newcastle incident and he gets a far off look in his eyes. The folly drops away to an eerie silence as the camera comes in tight on John's expression. Filling up the silence is a little girl's scream, then the voices of his friends, perhaps some sounds of violence, an inhuman sound or voice, it all blends together to become a hellish cacophony of sound as John's expression becomes more strained. Then suddenly the other person calling his name snaps him out of his reverie. The screams stop, the folly returns, and the scene appears jarringly normal. John shakes his head, makes a joke, and they move on. Yeah, that kind of scene has been done before, but the reason for that is it’s effective without giving away the whole story. It shows that this is a man haunted by something horrible. It’s also cheap and doesn’t necessitate straining the no doubt thin budget of a TV show that has yet to prove itself worthy of having more money thrown at it. 

Honestly, the issues I have with this show are innumerable and I’m just scratching the surface here and laying out my biggest problems. I could nitpick for days, and that’s the reason I’ve stayed mum about my opinions. There are people that follow me and that I write with that really like and care about the show, and I don’t want to make them feel...you know, bad about it or that they can’t talk to me or whatever. You know, if they found it enjoyable more power to them. I just didn’t and that’s maybe on me. By no means am I trying to bash the show here (because lord if I wanted to, I could), but to offer up what was requested, and that’s my undiluted opinions and feelings about the series. Of course I’m sorry that I couldn’t share the joy and that I couldn’t even like it on a similar level that I do the film (as a very solid AU, which people have tried to sell the show as to me, knowing my previous understanding of some of the changes made that deviate strongly from canon. As I said, maybe if it had been better made and written, I could, but as it stands currently, I can’t and unless real changes are made in the future, I’m unlikely to alter my opinion of it).

So yeah that’s it. Apologies that this got so very long, but as you can tell, there’s been a lot that I’ve been holding back.

Batwoman should have used the Bad Blood story line: Fight me

Arrowverse has always been a strange entity for me. On the one hand, it gives screen time and recognition to (at times) underrepresented comics and comic characters under the DC banner, especially to groups of people who might otherwise never pick up an interest in comics. On the other hand, Arrowverse really loves two things: queerbaiting and ignoring comic-canon. 

So with 5 intertwined shows currently airing on the CW, it was no surprise to me to know that their most recent lore expansion comes in the shape of Gotham’s Batwoman.

There is a lot that The Batwoman show is restricted by; not only in the sense that DC has declared Bruce Wayne/Batman as “off-limits” to the CW, but because of how the entirety of the CW universe has unfolded over the past – what – eight or so years? 

Now, this isn’t a ‘Felicity Smoak doesn’t exist’ type of rant. It’s a show, on a low budget network whose target audience is women ages 18 to 34. I get that there will be changes, new characters, and storylines will be manipulated however the team feels best to tell the story they’re trying to tell. This is me yelling about the changes they made that they really didn’t need to make at all in order to tell an origin story they don’t need to tell because they already had the perfect storyline for the “no batman allowed” problem.

But before I get into that. We need to talk about the core differences established between the two universes as I believe that without understanding Comic Kate, this argument i’ve decided to make has little ground to stand on.

(source:https://www.dcuniverse.com/encyclopedia/batwoman/)

In the Silver Age, Batwoman (known as Kathy Kane) was introduced as a sort of hybrid between Batman and the first Robin. She was wealthy, she was acrobatic, and most importantly, she proved that Bruce Wayne was not gay.

She has since made appearances in four essential storylines and timeline reboots as Kate Kane starting in 2006.

Her introduction as Kate Kane came at a time in which DC was rebooting series with the intention to diversify their character roster, and it is here we see the “I’m just here to make homophobes feel better" crime fighter come into her own,  badass, identity

The basis of her background goes like this: Kate and her twin sister are born into a military family of which her father is the brother of Martha Wayne, Bruce’s mother. One year, on her birthday, Kate, her sister, and her mother are taken captive by enemy agents and despite her father’s best efforts, only Kate was saved.

Later, in an attempt to please her father, Kate enrolls at West Point where she fell in love with her roommate, Sophie. When caught, Kate protects Sophie and avoids outing her, earning herself a dishonorable discharge. Despite this, her father is nothing but supportive and Kate’s life (now boosted thanks to her father’s marriage to Catherine Hamilton) becomes that of a hard-partying socialite. She is eventually apprehended by Renee Montoya, a GCPD officer. They begin a relationship, but it eventually ends with Renee dumping Kate after she learns that Kate, still with no direction or life goals, has dropped out of school.

It isn’t until she is rescued by Batman from a mugger that she finds her purpose. She operated for a year at this point by using stolen military equipment before her father discovered what she had been doing. It takes some convincing but her father, still, the most supportive and loving father any superhero has ever had, arranges for her to train with some of his contacts to hone her skills. When she returns, he presents her not only with the Batwoman suit, but with a headquarters of her own, where he offers tactical support to his daughter in the field.

For Arrowverse, this has changed quite a bit.

Kate lost her sister and mother in a car crash gone wrong in which Batman failed to rescue them. This failure to rescue his only living family is noted by Luke Fox later in the episode as something that haunts Bruce to this day. 

We haven’t seen a whole lot into Kate’s time at West Point, but we know the CW plans to expand on this. So far, the main thing worth noting is when the academy finds out about their relationship, Kate defies the orders of her superior officers and quits the academy while Sophie agrees to the terms and the two break up.

It is also hinted several times that Kate’s father isn’t nearly as supportive of Kate as he is in the comic. It is pretty clear that they want her best family relationship at this point to be to with Bruce, not her dad, but that’s beside the point. The strain on her relationship with her father is marked by him sending her away to train with survival specialists with a promise (later revealed to be a lie) to enlist her in his private security, CROWS, upon her return.

Her foray into crime-fighting comes only when Sophie is reported to have been taken hostage and Kate, determined to help, stumbles into the Batcave and arms herself with her cousin’s gear that he has for some reason left behind.

Obviously, these storylines are very different from one another. 

Where Kate in the comics had to earn her place in the Batfamily, Kate in Arrowverse finds herself operating as the only member of the family in a Gotham on the brink of collapse without Batman. This is supposed to be because The CW can’t use Batman and their desire to tell something along the lines of an Origin story for Batwoman. 

But, the thing is, we had Batman: Bad Blood (based off the Leviathan arc)  where, you guessed it, Batman isn’t around and the remaining members of the Batman Family are left to pick up the pieces.

It doesn’t make sense to me that they would have introduced Kate already operating as a vigilante last season only to backtrack track to a newbie a year later where they then proceed to tear apart her origins for the sake of their own story. One that, quite frankly, doesn’t hold up as well by comparison.

Bad Blood is different from the comics too, but it has a solid backbone that could have made a perfect skeleton for the Arrowverse storyline

Kate is already established as a crime fighter. Bruce knows who she is, is keeping tabs on her and doesn't want her getting involved in anything that can get her hurt. Kate doesn't care and does whatever she wants. They don't get along. But Bruce still saves Batwoman and is hit with an explosion that seemingly takes his life. There is so much story potential for a TV series here that could span one really good season and be sprinkled in throughout several more revolving around her blaming herself for his disappearance/death.

There is more pressure on Kate from the beginning to succeed. At first, Batwoman will be placed up a pedestal for filling the gap created by Batman's disappearance. Tieing in her guilt for her hand in this takes that away, giving her the underdog effect often found in origin stories and encourages us to root for her.

It’s a better explanation for why Bruce isn’t around. There’s no logical reason as to why Bruce would up and disappear or why Batman would apparently abandon Gotham. At least one that doesn't involve people believing he’s dead.

We don’t have any of this ‘unsupportive’ father garbage. We get a good supportive father/daughter relationship. We could have happy family holidays of Kate and her dad celebrating Jewish traditions together, we have great representation of a military man fully embracing his daughter despite being dishonorably discharged because of DADT, also lots of potential scenes of him being worried/helping her out in the field instead of doing his own thing with the CROWS.

Also why CROWS and not MCU? MCU means Maggie and anyone who read the comics back in 2013 and remembers the bullshit DiDio pulled would appreciate Kate being that much closer to meeting Maggie Sawyer (who was very well received by the arrowverse fandom) and idk...maybe not doing Kate dirty this time around.

And i mean, if not, Renee is badass and we like her too, and she’s actually in the Bad Blood storyline.

The entire concept of making Kate the ‘female Bruce Wayne’ is dumb. Especially since she’s spent her entire vigilante career forging her own path and doing her own thing bc batman is a narcissist and a control freak and she has no intention of mindlessly following his orders.

Bad Blood introduces Luke Fox as Batwing so there’s a whole storyline to follow there since he’s in the pilot episode and we know they have the ability to use him.

It allows for Talia to cross over from Arrow to Batwoman and introduce Damien if they feel like it.

It doesn’t interfere with Arrowverse Canon. They can very easily tell a story about how Batwoman goes from a relatively new vigilante under Batman’s shadow to a fully realized crime fighter without contradicting any of the arrowverse continuity. 

I get that they’re limited and that’s totally fine. You can’t expect things to be perfect. But CW is really missing an opportunity for good storytelling all for the sake of “she’s the female Bruce Wayne” concept and its extremely disrespectful to the character to equate her to nothing more than being a female version of another character when she has already established herself as her own person and her own hero.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

ASSESSMENT

TO THE BOOK COMMUNITY: GO FUCK YOURSELF. AN ANTI-APOLOGY.

JANUARY 31, 2019

CORREIA45

75 COMMENTS

First off, to know what I’m talking about, read this: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/amelie-wen-zhao-learns-to-love-big-brother/?fbclid=IwAR0i1oKfiJuO2RErEnwam0kFcgddzSaFLN8hiErGvcSlYOnKFZLR_tOhtrw

Basically an internet lynch mob of Social Justice Warriors hounded an author into not publishing her book. They brow beat her. They shamed her into compliance. And now she has pulled her book, apologized even though she’s done nothing wrong, and begged forgiveness.

Seriously, read those excerpts from her blog, where she talked about her hopes, and dreams, and artistic vision… And then read about how they all got crushed in the name of Social Justice.

As an author, this makes me want to vomit. This nefarious shit is why I’ve been loud and incessant about this topic for the last decade.

So now here is my letter to the “Book Community”.

To the Book Community: Go fuck yourself.

You people aren’t a “community”. You are a fucking cancer.

People who like to read books? That’s a book community. Bullies who exist in a perpetual state of being offended, eager to silence artists, you’re scum.

If you had an ounce of self-awareness, you would be ashamed of yourself. But you don’t. So instead you pat yourself on the back for ruining yet another artist’s career, for silencing another voice, for crushing more dreams.

Fuck you. Fuck your feelings. And fuck your ridiculous claims. Fuck your perpetual offense. Take your smug, entitled ignorance, and cram it up your ass sideways, you worthless sacks of crap. You goose stepping morons should try reading books instead of burning them.

People wonder why I often fisk the bad social justice writing advice articles from places like the HuffPo or Tor. Those articles are always Don’t Do This and Don’t Do That and Write The Way We Tell You Or Else. They’re all fucking bullshit. They are maggots feasting on the dinosaur carcass of mainstream publishing.

I fisk those bad advice articles because if I can save a single young aspiring author from falling into your wretched, soul crushing trap, it was totally worth it. My goal is to expose your con, to show that your gate keepers are nutless humps, and that your Outrage Of The Day is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Thankfully lots of people have caught on. They’ve learned that bullies only have power over you when you allow them to.

Sadly, it looks like Zhao never caught on, and she let you assholes ruin her dreams.

You create nothing. You can only destroy.  You are miserable failures, and like the demons of CS Lewis, your misery makes you want to drag down everyone else too. You give one star reviews to books which haven’t come out yet, which tell us a lot more about your weird personal issues and neurosis than they do about the book you’re supposedly reviewing.

You get away with this abusive shit only because most artists are sensitive, caring types. They don’t want to offend people. They don’t want to hurt feelings.  Only you lie to them. Manipulate and use them. You don’t care about their art. You don’t care about entertaining people. You don’t care about kids reading or people enjoying themselves or even the group you’re supposedly championing today.

You only care about control.

That’s why your rules are so illogical. You want—no, need—people to break them. Your rules are nonsense gibberish that changes day by day. That way even when people try to placate you, it doesn’t matter, because you just find something else to be offended by instead.

Fuck you, you goddamned communist puritans. The sooner society realizes SJWs are a suicidal dead end like unto the hippies, and everyone starts laughing at your childish tantrums, the better.

Sincerely,

Larry Correia  – bestselling novelist who actually makes a good living at this business, unlike you useless parasites.  

P.S – Go back to Goodreads and give me another one star review, you fucking mopes. Each time you do I sell more books to actual decent human beings who are sick of your shit.

##

To Writers: Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists

Brothers and sisters, please do not fall for this con.

Artists should never let a bunch of thugs tell them how to make art. Down that road lies madness, and dreary, shitty, boring books that nobody wants to read.

These people do not care about making the world a better place. They do not care about whatever marginalized group they claim to speak for this week. They only care about bossing you around.

Saying that someone is having fun wrong empowers them. So they will always be able to find somebody having wrongfun.  

Their rules are arbitrary and capricious. You will inevitably violate them.

GOOD. BECAUSE FUCK THEM.

If you write about your own culture, then they declare you are erasing another. If you write about a culture that isn’t yours, then they declare you are guilty of cultural appropriation. They demand you put in a certain kind of character, but when you do, they’ll inevitably declare you wrote them “wrong”. With “right” being a perpetually moving target.

For example, in one of my books the bad guy was a charismatic psycho criminal mastermind villain. He was also gay. Eddie turned out to be an extremely popular character, and the audience loved him. But of course I got screeched at by some Social Justice Howler Monkeys because I had a homosexual villain, and that was homophobic and blah blah blah… But fast forward a few years and the same crowd was circulating a petition demanding that DC take the Joker—a charismatic psycho criminal mastermind villain—and make him gay. Because “representation”.  

Or another, I got attacked for another fantasy novel because it was set in a world loosely based on India, and how that was the dreaded cultural appropriation. Except the book sold well and was popular in the English language fiction market… IN INDIA.  

Plus, these SJWs are incredibly ignorant. One of them screamed at me because in Son of the Black Sword, I had someone eating a rice ball, and HOW DARE LARRY CORREIA ASSUME THAT ALL ASIAN CULTURES ARE THE SAME AND HAVE RICE BALLS REEEEEEEEE!!!!!  And my response was the google image search for “Indian Rice Balls” which was like 20 pages of deliciousness.  Because let’s face it, every culture that can grow rice has at some point in time discovered it is convenient to squish it into a ball.

I got called racist for having Imperial Japan be the bad guys in the 1930s (well, duh).  I got screamed at for having characters be intolerant in 1932 (even though the hero of that part was the black dude who had to eat at a separate lunch counter)… but I guarantee that if I had pretended Jim Crow or the Rape of Nanking never existed, I’d get screamed at for that too.

Over and over, so on and so forth, it doesn’t matter what you actually write, because the screaming doesn’t need to make sense. So they’ll scream no matter what you do, even when they’re factually wrong about it, or your sins are imaginary, and whatever it is they’re butt hurt about today, tomorrow they’ll be butt hurt in the opposite direction.

When the game is rigged, the only way to win is to not play.

These social justice assholes are just like the little kids who throw themselves on the toy aisle floor at Wal-Mart and kick and scream and cry, purple faced and tears streaming down their cheeks, because Mommy won’t buy them a Power Ranger.

You don’t give them what they want, because then they’ll just do it again next time. You don’t reason with the hysterical child. If they’re not your kid, you ignore them and keep on walking. If they’re your problem, you say shut up you little brat, you ain’t getting shit, because you know giving in to bad behavior leads to more of the same.

Zhao just bought them the entire Power Rangers play set and Megazord.

In this case, the purple haired tantrum throwers were wailing on the ground screaming YOU CAN’T WRITE ABOUT SLAVERY IN A FANTASY WORLD!  And the author said, but it is based upon the history of my own culture and actual current events, but that didn’t matter, and the horrid brat just yelled  NO NOT THAT WAY!

If you give veto power to anyone who is offended, then guaranteed, somebody is gonna declare they are offended. When being a victim grants power and social status, then you’ve got no shortage of people saying they’re victimized.  The actual facts don’t matter. You just gave random assholes a license to mess with you, they’re going to do it, simply because they’re assholes.  

Basically, they can only hurt you if grant them the ability to do so (or your publisher is a spineless coward, but that’s a whole different problem!) .

This transcends politics. It doesn’t matter who is screaming at you, an abusive bully is an abusive bully. Don’t let abusive bullies run your life. That’s not just true for writing, but life in general.

You want to be a creator? Good. Then go create. Make art. Make people happy. Tell the story you want to tell. And if people like your stuff, they’ll give you money for it. That part is pretty awesome.

Sincerely,

Larry Correia – who is living proof that you really don’t need to fear social justice lynch mobs, because despite how much they’ve whined about me, I’m still selling books.

P.S. To hell with the haters. Go write what you want. Have fun. Get paid.   

http://monsterhunternation.com/2019/01/31/to-the-book-community-go-fuck-yourself-an-anti-apology/?fbclid=IwAR0QWeUnqptFV7D66N9gLuqooZakFaIDfBUcw0BUs8Yo0XYTDHwIwjWCKBU