Some links may be affiliate links. I may earn money if you buy something or take an action after clicking one of these links on this site.
Rob Knowlan is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Blind As A Batman
🦇👓 The eye doctor visit turned out rather less well than I anticipated. 👓 Maybe I’ll roll with an eye patch and a monocle. 🧐🦇
🦇 Invisible to the Eye 🦇
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
At this point, darned near everything is invisible to my eyes. I can’t focus at all with the right one. It’s like looking through a window that’s been smudged with vaseline. The left one can focus with the assistance of reading glasses but I’m still getting a secondary image with a slight offset.
So, yeah, I’ve turned into Mr. Magoo.
It’s said that as one sense goes south, the others dial up to compensate. I’m hoping that’s true. The hearing aids have helped to a large extent, except where it comes to Kelly. She’s a low-talker and it’s hard to understand her even with the hearing aids in.
What does that leave? Olfactory, gustatory and tactile senses. Seems like I’ll be appreciating food even more than I already do, if what they say is true.
Of course, they say a lot of things so who really knows? Whoever the hell they are…
🎼Focus 🔎 Music🎶
Focus Music for Work and Studying, Background Music for Concentration, Study Music
Something that is becoming increasingly difficult for me both visually and conceptually is being able to focus.
I have absolutely no capacity for either. I can’t see jack diddly and my mind is just floating in an ocean of blah.
I was hoping that getting my blood sugar back under control would help matters but I don’t seem to be reaping the benefit of that yet.
I wonder if I ever will. I’m not looking forward to decades of physical pain and mental decline.
It would be nice to have some kind of hope to hold on to. I guess we’ll see how it all turns out.
Birthing 🦇 Shadows
Shadow owes its birth to light. ~John Gay
Well, while I still have some modicum of creativity left in my addled brain, I still have to tackle the subject of the adversaries in my superhero series.
As I mentioned before, my intention is to do a character arc for the team as a whole that mirrors the various ages of comic books. The Sentinels start off as a fairly low-power group as superhero stories go these days. As their adversaries become more powerful, so will the members of the team.
At the beginning, they’re basically assisting the SWAT team on gang raids. As matters develop, they’ll become aware of the existence and danger posed by The Conclave and by the other-worldly beings they summon to do their bidding.
Once that begins going full bore, the characters will become progressively more powerful to combat the trouble that results.
The thing about actual, classic comic books is that they were originally designed for kids and, to some extent, for battle-weary soldiers on the fronts of WWII. They could afford to have cardboard villains who were evil for the sake of being evil.
Modern fiction isn’t so forgiving of flat characters. It’s all about the prose version of Method Acting anymore.
Everybody has to have complex motivations. Gone are the days when comic book villains would knock over a bank just for the money. The money has to be for something really deep and nuanced.
😈🦹♂️☠️
Evil for evil’s sake is passé.
☠️🦹♀️😈
Okay, fair enough. Classic comics and silver screen serials weren’t big on the deep dive into character motivations. Ming the Merciless, Fu Manchu, Killer Kane, Queen Cleolanthe and other B&W villains had no other raison d’etre (pardon my French) than to simply be baddies.
Certainly, it’s good to move past cardboard antagonists but when you look at real live baddies, their motivations are typically not that complex.
Some people just suck!
There are a whole range of motivations for bad actors.
Perhaps
- they were mistreated as children
- they have naturally low self-esteem
- they have mental disorders
- they’re just greedy assholes who think that it’s their right to take whatever they want from whoever has it
- they’re just miserable cretins who get off on harming others
- they’ve been lured into a cult or other harmful belief system (like voting for Democrats…)
There are tons of motivations for people to do bad things. Most of them don’t even think they’re bad. Jeez, Hitler thought he was the good guy. If they’re doing what they believe to be good for very much the wrong reasons, an antagonist can be very hard to combat.
The classic exchange between Daredevil and the Punisher in the second season of Netflix’s excellent series centers around this very concept. Frank (Punisher) believes that Matt (Daredevil) is a half-measure. Beat them up and send them to jail and they’ll just come back again, worse for each visit to the system. When Frank puts them down, they stay down. Watching the series from his perspective, he’s not entirely wrong. Some people are extraordinarily bad (because of reasons, as always) and are possibly quite beyond redemption. Matt, a staunch Catholic, believes that everyone is capable of redemption and should be given the chance to make that change.
Clearly, Matt’s is the more classically heroic perspective but Frank isn’t entirely wrong. If Matt sends someone to jail (or even just the hospital) and they come back to do more harm, is Matt somehow complicit in that harm because he didn’t put a mad dog (of a person) out of its misery?
Punisher also has a very clear code that he picked up from his time in the service. He doesn’t do collateral damage. He doesn’t kill innocent civilians. If he puts a bullet in someone, it’s because he knows for a fact that they’ve earned it. It’s rough and it’s absolute. Not a lot of time for nuance when you’re hosing down an entire organized crime syndicate with precision gunfire. His doubts are resolved long before he pulls the trigger.
So, is he a hero or merely a vigilante? The same question can be asked of Daredevil. Who appointed him the authority to beat the living snot out of the people he encounters? Is he a hero or merely a vigilante?
It always depends on perspective.
I think that’s what I need to keep my characters from being shallow and cartoony. They need to have highly skewed, yet completely understandable perspectives. You have to know how they got to where they are as bad guys. Whether it’s something as simple as basic greed or as nuanced as someone who found themselves on a slippery moral slope of poor choices, the bad guys need to be guys who became bad one way or another.
Whether we find out how/why in the narrative is another matter entirely. The important thing is that I need to know in order to properly characterize them.
That’s it for the weekend. Time to go make myself some dinner, 🍽️🍲 assuming I can still see the stove… 👓🦯