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Simmering Down

Seventies rather than nineties? I’ll take it. I’d rather be in the forties or fifties, but it’s technically still 🌞Summer🔥.

🐒🙈 Joementum 🙉🙊

If you can’t convince them, confuse them. ~Harry S Truman

POTUS46 did something unbelievable, even for him.

He gave what he intended to be a historically memorable speech, on par with MLK’s “I Have A Dream” or even the Gettysburg Address.

What actually happened was a dystopian freak show.

With a blood red background, he stood before the nation to decry about half the population as semifascist and a threat to democracy.

Why?

Because they have the temerity to not be brainwashed Democrats.

It would probably have raised a bigger ruckus if any of the major networks had bothered to cover it.

Most played their regular programs because Joe is so addled and pathetic, that the best way to maintain the imaginary reputation of the current administration is to refrain from giving him airtime.

Dude is beyond senile under the best of circumstances.

So, why would they roll this pathetic fool out like this?

Because they’re as nuts as he is senile.

If there’s a threat to democracy, it’s the people who are actively trying to literally destroy this country during their tenure.

So, that’s what we mean by Joementum. It’s kind of like terminal velocity, but with a dozen kinds of collateral damage to go with it.

That’s the state of the union these days.

Hopefully, the election in November will take care of this.

Unfortunately, given all the other BS going on these days, we’re likely to have a repeat of 2020.

That will certainly be a problem.

The solution? Who knows?

The rules don’t seem to apply anymore. We’re stuck in Clown 🤡 World anymore.

🤡 Why So Serious? 🤡

Superheroes Have Gotten Worse | VIDEO ESSAY

Clown 🤡 World isn’t my preferred genre.

People wonder why I have always preferred fantasy.

Why? Because if 💩 gets too weird, you can put the book down or turn off the TV.

There’s no getting away from the nonsense these days.

We need a hero at some point because we’re neck-deep in villains now.

While the guy in the video above raises some good points about how superheroes aren’t particularly heroic, I’m among those who enjoy the theatrical schadenfreude delivered by ultra-violent antiheroes.

It’s all nice and well for heroes to be aspirational beacons of hope, but we’re well past Silver Age campiness.

Everybody knows heroism is situational.

Doing your best to do your best is certainly a goal, but it’s an unattainable goal.

Nobody is perfect.

Perfect people are boring and don’t make for engaging fiction.

People want nuance and believability. That’s what they’re getting.

You can bemoan the trend all you want, but there’s an appetite for darker and edgier stores.

Even so, I think there are plenty of projects around that don’t fall into this category.

The current run of She-Hulk on Disney+ has been lighthearted and comic booky. There are still a few episodes left for it to go down a darker road, but so far so good.

I also enjoyed Secret Headquarters. It was targeted as a kids’ show, so it’s naturally lighthearted and fun. Even so, they did an interesting job of addressing the trope of the lonely hero.

There’s notion in superhero genre that being a hero necessarily leads to a miserable, solitary existence.

Projects like Secret Headquarters, Miss Marvel, Shazam and the Justice Society of America turn this on its head by suggesting that family can be a source of strength instead of a potential liability.

What a radical notion.

Happy families provide an atmosphere where the trials of life can be processed and recovered from?

Wow, who’da thunk it?

Well, anybody with a loving family.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a given. Some people come from broken homes, abusive family members, dangerous environments.

Even this can be assuaged with a group of real friends or even “found family“.

Things don’t need to be gritty and hostile in order to be interesting or narratively instructive.

Genre Awareness

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. ~E. O. Wilson

There are oodles of ways to tell a story.

Whether it’s variations on a theme or variable interpretations of the very same story, fiction is the place for experimentation.

It’s what you bring to the story that matters.

If you want to tell a version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears featuring the Care Bears, the Bad News Bears or even the Chicago Bears, you can.

What you need to do is to let people know which type of story you’re telling.

Some people want to hear certain kinds of stories and not others.

I’m one of them.

Granted, sometimes I’m in the mood for a bit of variety but I don’t generally go out of my way to watch horror movies.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with them. Lots of people like that.

Certainly, jokes depend on subverting expectations, but expectations are that you’re going to tell jokes that are appropriate to the setting and the audience.

And there’s the thing.

In order to do what’s appropriate to the audience, you have to identify them.

Typically, the primary audience is the author.

Unless you’re doing a creative writing assignment for a class, you’re probably going to be writing the kind of story you’d like to read.

Some people can be completely mercenary and write to a set audience because it’s the latest thing, but most people write what they like with the expectation that they’re not the only ones in the entire world who like that.

And, frankly, the world is a huge place.

It takes all kinds and there are surprisingly large numbers of people who like seemingly niche genres.

The good news is, unless you like something extremely weird and obscure, you are not alone and can probably find a decent number of readers for your work.

For me, as I’ve said before, it’s superheroes, high fantasy and space opera.

Are there people who like the superhero genre? Ask the accountants at the MCU, DCEU, CW, Sony, Amazon and tons of other studios of varying size.

Yes, superhero media has been in full swing since at least the 1960s. Can you say Spider-Man without the 1967 theme song playing in your head? Spider-Man, Spider-Man! Does whatever a spider can!

Between this classic animated series, the Bixby/Ferrigno Hulk series, decades of Saturday morning cartoon series and decades of live-action series such as the Batman iterations of Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson, we’re only scratching the surface of the genre.

This is a large and profitable genre that’s currently in vogue.

Westerns, war and vampires tend to come and go, but superheroes have had some TV and movie presence for over 40 years.

Why?

As the guy in the video above mentioned, it’s modern mythology. Superheroes are archetypal.

Well, they are if that’s how you choose to portray them.

Personally, I like my heroes to be more on the believable end of the scale.

Granted, superpowers are fantastical and comic book tech strains the bounds of believability, but I’m talking about the characters.

I want my characters to seem like people you’d actually be able to have a casual conversation with.

People in our real lives who we write off as just some guy or the lady who rings me up at the grocery store may have experienced adventures. They might be gold medal winners, veterans or refugees of terrible wars, celebrities in their own venues or survivors of natural cataclysm.

We don’t generally feel super, so it’s not typical to assume that some random passerby is extraordinary.

Fact is, even if they are, they aren’t. They need to breathe, eat and excrete like anyone else. They have feelings. They have basic needs, opinions and goals.

That’s how I want The Sentinels to be. I want them to simply be people who happen to have super powers.

Some will be nice. Others, not so much. They’ll have needs and wants. They’ll have to work out how to have those appropriately addressed among themselves while also dealing with societal circumstances.

That’s the plan, anyway.

In the meantime, I have to get my September monthly finished so I can get to work on this year’s Holiday Season Serial Romance.