"Clark, what the hell are good villains?"
Jan. 19th, 2011 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI used to play one of those clicky "games" on Facebook, one that revolved around superheroes. Not Superhero City, but another one.
It's dressed up as a superhero game, but it could be anything. The real point of the game is for you to come back and click on things several times a day so you can earn the right to click on more things more often. There isn't much to it for someone who wants to actually develop and create a superhero character and there isn't much of a fantasy element to it. There really isn't much to the game at all. But it takes seemingly so little time and effort to keep up with a game like that, so I kept up with it, though at some point I stopped paying attention to any of the specifics.
Then one day I happened to look at what I was clicking on, and realized that the mission I was returning to the site every hour to click on a few times was labeled "Prevent a mass genocide in Africa."
Oh.
This mission exists alongside things like super-soldiers going rogue, humanity being beset by zombie plagues, rebuilding the earth following a "global earthquake", and preventing a 4th World War. All of these labels are just that: labels. There's no actual difference between any of them, or the street crimes that you confront in the earlier levels of the game. You click a button and it tells you if you succeed or fail. And then you do it again until you've mastered the mission or run out of energy.
Yes, not only can you solve the humanitarian crisis in Darfur by clicking a button, you can do it so often that you become a real pro at it.
I don't play that game anymore.
That was back in December, a bit over a month ago. I'll come back to this whole thing in a bit.
The subject line on this post is one of my favorite lines of dialogue from a superhero comic, and I was very glad to see it make it into the animated adaptation (Superman/Batman: Public Enemies) It's sort of the meditation at the center of Gift of the Bad Guy, which employs a different approach to the superhero genre than I've taken before.
The story's not ready for public consumption, but Jack's been reading it as I go because I'm useless without an audience. In discussing it with him, I've been trying to figure out where exactly the story had its genesis, as it (like Tales of MU before it) started off with no plan and no forethought. DCUO seems like an obvious suspect, especially as I've mainly played the villain side, but there really aren't a lot of similarities I could point to. Having watched all of Venture Bros. just before the holidays probably made a bigger contribution to the story's birth.
I don't think there's much of the same "vibe" as Venture Bros. has, or a really similar sense of humor. I'm certainly not going for a VB-style story.
I believe that Kick-Ass has something to do with it, too, though I've neither read the comic nor seen the movie. But there was a conversation on somebody's LJ revolving around it, and the related phenomenon of "real-life superheroes". I stumbled across a forum of the same when I was first writing the first version of my Star Harbor stories... someone had copied and pasted some of my stories to the forum, which might have been bothersome enough on its own even without the fact that they'd presented them as educational/inspirational materials.
And of course, I also feel that the Facebook game I describe above and my sudden disillusionment with it helped the story come into being.
I consider superhero stories to be a subset of fantasy. My preferred term for the genre, in fact, is "superheroic fantasy". It doesn't matter if the character has no powers, like Batman or the Punisher, or if all the powers and high tech stuff are carefully couched in scientific terms. It's a fantasy story by its very nature.
It's a fantasy to imagine that you could fly by flapping your arms, even though humans do have arms and there are animals that can accomplish flight through the use of their forelimbs. It's a fantasy to imagine that Batman could go out and do what he does, even if armored cars and computers and martial arts and detective skills are all real things. Batman is not more grounded in reality than arm-flapping flight is. Not even if Christopher Nolan is directing him.
Gift of the Bad Guy is fantasy, to be sure. It's a low-powered and down-to-earth sort of superhero story, but it's not about "real-life superheroes", and it isn't founded on the conceit that a story is automatically more interesting for depicting things that could really happen. I'm not even trying to depict the way things would really happen if superpowers were really real. But in some ways, its writing is a reaction to the fantasy of the superhero, to the idea that solving bloody civil wars and humanitarian crises can be as easy as the push of a button. Not a deconstruction, but a reaction.
In some ways, Gift of the Bad Guy is a story about a villain, as the title suggests. But in other ways, it's a story about the stories we tell about superheroes.
It's dressed up as a superhero game, but it could be anything. The real point of the game is for you to come back and click on things several times a day so you can earn the right to click on more things more often. There isn't much to it for someone who wants to actually develop and create a superhero character and there isn't much of a fantasy element to it. There really isn't much to the game at all. But it takes seemingly so little time and effort to keep up with a game like that, so I kept up with it, though at some point I stopped paying attention to any of the specifics.
Then one day I happened to look at what I was clicking on, and realized that the mission I was returning to the site every hour to click on a few times was labeled "Prevent a mass genocide in Africa."
Oh.
This mission exists alongside things like super-soldiers going rogue, humanity being beset by zombie plagues, rebuilding the earth following a "global earthquake", and preventing a 4th World War. All of these labels are just that: labels. There's no actual difference between any of them, or the street crimes that you confront in the earlier levels of the game. You click a button and it tells you if you succeed or fail. And then you do it again until you've mastered the mission or run out of energy.
Yes, not only can you solve the humanitarian crisis in Darfur by clicking a button, you can do it so often that you become a real pro at it.
I don't play that game anymore.
That was back in December, a bit over a month ago. I'll come back to this whole thing in a bit.
The subject line on this post is one of my favorite lines of dialogue from a superhero comic, and I was very glad to see it make it into the animated adaptation (Superman/Batman: Public Enemies) It's sort of the meditation at the center of Gift of the Bad Guy, which employs a different approach to the superhero genre than I've taken before.
The story's not ready for public consumption, but Jack's been reading it as I go because I'm useless without an audience. In discussing it with him, I've been trying to figure out where exactly the story had its genesis, as it (like Tales of MU before it) started off with no plan and no forethought. DCUO seems like an obvious suspect, especially as I've mainly played the villain side, but there really aren't a lot of similarities I could point to. Having watched all of Venture Bros. just before the holidays probably made a bigger contribution to the story's birth.
I don't think there's much of the same "vibe" as Venture Bros. has, or a really similar sense of humor. I'm certainly not going for a VB-style story.
I believe that Kick-Ass has something to do with it, too, though I've neither read the comic nor seen the movie. But there was a conversation on somebody's LJ revolving around it, and the related phenomenon of "real-life superheroes". I stumbled across a forum of the same when I was first writing the first version of my Star Harbor stories... someone had copied and pasted some of my stories to the forum, which might have been bothersome enough on its own even without the fact that they'd presented them as educational/inspirational materials.
And of course, I also feel that the Facebook game I describe above and my sudden disillusionment with it helped the story come into being.
I consider superhero stories to be a subset of fantasy. My preferred term for the genre, in fact, is "superheroic fantasy". It doesn't matter if the character has no powers, like Batman or the Punisher, or if all the powers and high tech stuff are carefully couched in scientific terms. It's a fantasy story by its very nature.
It's a fantasy to imagine that you could fly by flapping your arms, even though humans do have arms and there are animals that can accomplish flight through the use of their forelimbs. It's a fantasy to imagine that Batman could go out and do what he does, even if armored cars and computers and martial arts and detective skills are all real things. Batman is not more grounded in reality than arm-flapping flight is. Not even if Christopher Nolan is directing him.
Gift of the Bad Guy is fantasy, to be sure. It's a low-powered and down-to-earth sort of superhero story, but it's not about "real-life superheroes", and it isn't founded on the conceit that a story is automatically more interesting for depicting things that could really happen. I'm not even trying to depict the way things would really happen if superpowers were really real. But in some ways, its writing is a reaction to the fantasy of the superhero, to the idea that solving bloody civil wars and humanitarian crises can be as easy as the push of a button. Not a deconstruction, but a reaction.
In some ways, Gift of the Bad Guy is a story about a villain, as the title suggests. But in other ways, it's a story about the stories we tell about superheroes.