Category: Fandom

You’re Misunderstanding Batman

April Daniels6 Comments

People like to say that Batman’s Rogue‘s Gallery is iconic because they’re all dark reflections of himself. This is bullshit, and I’ll tell ya why–it’s because they’re actually all dark reflections of American culture writ large.

Killer Croc has nothing to say about an old money white boy with parental abandonment and rage issues. He’s got everything to do with America’s fear of backwoods people. Similarly, Poison Ivy is about when militant ecofeminism gets real, Two Face is about the arbitrary and unjust nature of the American justice system, and Clayface is about the hollowness of celebrity culture. Harley Quinn is not the most popular female character in comics because she’s a twisted echo of something inside Batman; she’s popular because lots of women identify with being in an abusive relationship–notice how she’s become steadily more sympathetic as the writers embraced the implications of her backstory. And it keeps going. Scarecrow? Drugs. Mad Hatter? Date rape. The Joker? He’s about the most fundamental American fear of all. The fear of unbridled chaos, a problem that basically never exists, but which all white Americans are taught from birth to fear, and what White America fears sets the national agenda.

Admit it: nobody really gives a shit about Calendar Man. Nobody gives a shit about Man-Bat. Hush got boring fast. Why? Because none of these characters have anything to say about America. This is not to say that the scores and scores of creators who have worked on Batman-related titles over the decades were setting out to do a long-form collaborative deconstruction of the American id, far from it. I’m simply pointing out that the villains who have staying power, who matter at all to people outside the hardcore fans who love trivia? These villains all have something in common: very obvious symbolism about the American condition. Often, characters don’t pick up this extra layer until they’ve made multiple appearances and developed an extended motif, but you’ll notice that the villains who keep coming back decade after decade become less and less like people, and more and more like symbols.

Now if only I could figure out what the hell Mr. Freeze is supposed to be.

Doctor Who Is The Most Diabolical Villain on Television

April Daniels2 Comments

The whole “Doctor’s Companion” thing kind of horrifies me. Let’s really sit down and examine what it implies.

You’re an ordinary person. Probably British. You’ve got a life worth living. You’ve got hopes and ambitions and dreams and talents, all of which only make sense in the context of the time and place in which you were born.

Then one day an old police box sets down in your vicinity, and a thing that looks like a man (also British) walks up and gives you the sales pitch. The sales pitch boils down to this:

“Hello! I’m a monstrously powerful alien, here to whisk you off on an adventure (That you cannot POSSIBLY understand well enough to provide informed consent for) to see all of time and space (until I get bored of you, or you die horribly)!”

And you, like a damn fool, say yes.

Even if you don’t die, and even if you return home to your family, you will be irrevocably traumatized by all the terrifying experiences you’ve been exposed to.

For the Doctor’s amusement.

And yet fans wish that the TARDIS would set down in their own back yards.

The Doctor has seduced an entire fandom into Stockholm Syndrome. The Doctor is pure evil. Hell, sometimes he even looks like Kilgrave! If you see a blue police box chilling out in your back yard, run the fuck away.

*Yes, I know he’s not called Doctor Who. I need those sweet, sweet SEO clicks.

A Theory About Gordon Freeman

April Daniels1 Comment

Gordon Freeman is not a scientist, but rather a US Government black ops clone. He’s a genetically engineered super soldier who has mimetic imprints for memories that give him an almost unnatural skill for violence and mayhem in a carefully controlled package.

He appears on the Black Mesa train, as if out of nowhere. (Because he was inserted out of nowhere.) He arrives at Black Mesa, and everyone recognizes him–either they were briefed that he would be coming through and they should pretend to know him, or other “versions” of Gordon have been a fixture at this site before. Either way, the player’s initial unfamiliarity with the opening level might be a subtle hint that Gordon, despite allegedly being an employee, doesn’t actually know his way around. He even has to be reminded to put on his hazard suit before entering the test chamber. This is not the behavior of someone who regularly works in that facility.

And what’s he actually doing in Black Mesa on that fateful day? His part in the experiment turns out to be a very dangerous but not very complicated job, exactly the sort of thing you wouldn’t want to risk someone who had an MIT degree on. Now as it happens, it turns out that this particular sample was too pure, the resonance cascade hit, and now Gordon–who is essentially a living flight data recorder–is stranded down in the bowls of the facility. Good thing he’s got all that subconscious combat training to help him escape and make his report! Why would you need an autonomous data recorder that can defend itself? Well, because they expected that if anything went wrong, there would be hostile aliens to contend with, of course!

But there’s a glitch in the plan. Upon seeing the Marines, his programming to approach them and announce who he is so he can be taken safely into custody fails. He begins fighting them instead. The Marines, who had been briefed on who he was, what he looked like, and to expect him to peacefully surrender, are shocked and horrified to find themselves up against a super soldier. This is why the player sees graffiti on the walls like TRAITORS DIE! How could Gordon be a traitor against them if they didn’t expect him to be on their side? How would the Marines even know his name, as opposed to the hundreds, or even thousands of other anonymous civilians in the combat area? Marine chatter, radio traffic, and other bits of graffiti all clearly indicate the Marines know exactly who they are dealing with, and are infuriated that he has chosen to fight them rather than follow his “orders” and surrender.

The G-Man, who has an unusual and unnatural interest in Gordon from the very first moments of the game, shadows Gordon as he fights his way through the facility. Was he the one who flipped Gordon’s programming? Or is he only trying to make the best of a bad situation? Either way, at the end of the game he comes in to swoop Gordon up and place him in stasis until his hour comes again.

Fuck Professor Snape

April Daniels1 Comment

Professor Snape was an abusive creeper who made life hell on an innocent child because he couldn’t get over the fact that the kid’s mother had decided she wanted to be with a man who showed he could exhibit personal growth–a trait Snape never got a handle on. Out of anger at being jilted, he joined a racist terrorist organization and participated in ghastly crimes against innocent, defenseless people.

Professor Snape is the kind of guy who gets turned down by a nice Jewish girl so he joins the Aryan Nations. Then he has second thoughts and starts wearing a wire for the Feds, but that doesn’t change the fact that HE JOINED THE WIZARDING WORLD’S VERSION OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.

Fuck Professor “I’m still mad at people from high school even twenty years later so I’m gonna take it out on someone who wasn’t even born then and whose parents were murdered by my good buddies” Snape. I spit on his corpse.