Doing the Krypton Crawl

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Jaz Jacobi

Noah Berlatsky brings up some interesting points in his essay “Why Do We Love Batman But Hate Superman?”, observing the Superman v Batman trailer as yet another incarnation of society’s desire to see “normal guy” Batman kick Superman’s “alien other” ass. But Superman’s journey from Man of Tomorrow to lame old-timer represents a complicated trail, the character walking a razor’s edge between the ephemera of junk culture charm and the drive to make superhero stories—and likewise their creators and devotees—seem “mature.” There’s a tension: expecting a fictional character to continue to serve as DC Comics’ figurehead, often in the face of public indifference, while constantly facing reinvention in a struggle to maximize corporate gain. If someone can be heard rattling off a list of favorite Superman comic book stories, odds are he or she is over 60 years old. Conversely, my wife, who was 8 years old upon the release of the Tim Burton Batman movie that in many ways is ground zero for mass-marketed superhero cinema, often tells me her peer group “never thought Superman was cool.” (I’m ten years older, so I got to see Superman become a movie star firsthand.) Much like when rock fans speak of Elvis Presley, there seems to be a fear of sounding like an uninformed clod if you don’t pay polite lip service to notions of Superman’s “importance” and “influence,” yet the particulars of just why the Man of Steel had such resonance, and to whom, has become an increasingly distant cultural memory.

Superman maintained a unique position among the raft of superheroes that arrived in his wake, not only enjoying a media profile beyond comic books (newspapers, radio, cartoons, television, stage, movie serials), but also being one of the very few to remain in publication through the Forties and Fifties. Editor Mort Weisinger oversaw the character’s renaissance beginning in the late-Fifties, with enduring concept seemingly introduced every few months (within a year and half: the Bizarro World, Supergirl, the Phantom Zone, Red Kryptonite, the Legion of Super-Heroes, “imaginary stories,” the Fortress of Solitude, the Bottle City of Kandor). The comics took on a sense of craft and charm reminiscent of the Forties’ top-selling superhero, Captain Marvel—fitting, since many of these concepts were originated in the scripts of Otto Binder, looking for work after CM was driven out of circulation by DC’s litigation. In the 1960s, the top 10 selling comic books in America regularly contained all seven Superman titles: the perfect entertainment for 8 year olds, full of arctic hideouts and robot doubles and a city in a bottle and an imperfect duplicate of Earth and bizarre transformations and outlandish coincidences, packing more plot into 8 page stories than some 6-issue “arcs” do today. But the very strengths that made these comics appeal so much to children—whimsy, fairy tale-style fantastic sweep, enchanting emotional drama, majorly unpredictable weirdness—became an Achilles’ heel to the expanding comics fandom who didn’t feel the need to outgrow comic books, but also didn’t want the public to think less of them for their tastes. Many of these young fans became the generation of comics creators who filled the shoes of those who wrote, drew and edited such “kids’ stuff” as they moved on or passed away; the young crowd knew things had to change.

After Weisinger retired in 1970, the difficulty was finding an adequate encore. Current Superman comics were seen by an increasingly older comics audience as bland, workaday filler; no better or worse than the majority of Seventies superhero books, really, but nothing to write home about either. Marvel’s rise to dominance through the ’70s was sold on Stan Lee’s hype job that Marvel was the “collegiate, intellectually complex” superhero line, and DC was increasingly seen as juvenile and tiresome. “Realism” was the buzzword of the day, from Marvel’s strategy of angst-ridden “superheroes with problems” to Neal Adams’ grimacing poses. But the easy appeal of those ‘60s Superman comics shows up the misguided thinking in subsequent attempts to graft contemporary ideas of “character development” or slambang action onto the series. The Marvel-style approach has often been compared to soap opera: heavily continuity-driven, with suspense built by ongoing angsty personal lives and dramatic installment-to-installment serial rhythms. Whereas Silver Age DC stories are closer to the model of the situation comedy, starting at the same default “normalcy” each time, presenting a disruption in that comfort zone, and returning to the starting point upon denouement. Squareness was the point of old-school DC: instead of heroes with feet of clay, these square-jawed, confident crimefighters were most put out by humiliation. Just as likely as villain-of-the-month conflicts were cover gimmicks promising the latest violation of the hero’s sacred dignity (the infamous Flash cover with the thought balloon, “I’ve got the strangest feeling I’m being turned into a puppet!”). Red Kryptonite or a Mxyzptlk curse or a flask of potion could turn Superman or Jimmy or Lois into any number of beasties, grant a third eye, make them fat, what have you—the angst in Silver Age DCs is all about “how do I get through the day without someone noticing my face is a living mood ring,” much more entertaining than Hank Pym’s marital strife. (I wish I could remember which of my friends to credit with the astute observation that, when you hear people complain about DC’s “cardboard characters” in relation to Marvel’s “fully rounded personalities,” it sounds more like they’re speaking of Hanna-Barbera’s TV show Super Friends than actual familiarity with the comic books.)

As of the mid-1980s, notions of DC’s second-class-citizen status mostly held steady with the fan populace, but with an increasing view that Batman was the exception that proved the rule. Morphing from corny Caped Crusader to menacing Dark Knight, Batman was seen as a rare example of a “badass”/”complex” superhero amongst DC’s largely cool/cerebral personalities—DC’s only real competition for Marvel’s “dangerous”/”gritty”/”street level” Wolverine/Punisher types in those pre-Lobo times. DC’s few thriving sellers tended to be from the dustier corners of their continuities, spun on the appeal of the X-Men-style team book dynamic—Teen Titans, Legion—and the Superman/Flash/Green Lantern DC mainstream that was so appealing during the ’60s seemed to remain in print more out of habit than honest enthusiasm. The Crisis on Infinite Earths “event” was designed to “clean the cobwebs” from DC’s backlogged continuity (read: eliminate the goofier aspects to prevent fan embarrassment). Superman and his pals were presented as having the biggest need for this push, so away with Supergirl, pets with capes, Bizarros, and so forth. “Post-Crisis” attempts to reinvigorate what came to be known as the “Big Three” did wonders for Batman, via the efforts of Frank Miller et al, but even the appointment of fan favorite creators couldn’t reverse the lasting impression that Superman and Wonder Woman were for squares.

By the ’90s/21st century, the party line on Superman within an increasingly influential fan populace was that he was to be condemned as “the Big Blue Boy Scout,” a clueless, morally-uptight fossil looking lost in a time of antiheroes and fashionable ultraviolence. A counterrevolutionary, if you will. Younger fans tended to observe Superman as an empty personality-free shell merely occupying a necessary merchandising trademark, like they might with Mickey Mouse. From the distance that I observed the megaselling “Death of Superman,” those millions of comics seemed to sell to A] aging former readers of Weisinger’s comics who hadn’t touched the stuff in years and/or B] investors eager to resell these comics—actual enthusiasm among current comic book readers seemed difficult to pinpoint. And of course, the press releases implicitly sold the line to a cynical public that Our Hero’s worth had been exhausted in this cold, hard world, and it was time to do away with the poor old relic. (Veteran comics readers had been led down this garden path a few times and knew better—he wouldn’t “stay dead” for long.)

Today, selling fanboys on the idea that Superman is at all interesting, let alone “cool,” always seems to involve some menacing, “intense” image, all gnashed teeth and smoldering laser-beam eyes; a far cry from the placid, smooth Curt Swan model of prior decades. The occasional well-received effort, like Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman, seems to have an easier time gaining traction with older readers—and, tellingly, invoke the long-abandoned tropes of those still-intriguing ’60s stories, with their reliance on “silliness” like super-pets and signal watches. Another take is to remove as much of the superficial resemblance to the franchise as can be achieved—the marketing for TV’s Smallville (and the producers’ pithy mantra, “no tights no flights”) seemed designed to scream, “This is not your father’s Superman.” 2006’s Superman Returns consciously attempted to wipe away memories of the ill-received third and fourth Christopher Reeve films by following up plot threads of Superman II—perhaps not coincidentally, just about the last point in time the larger public’s finger was on the pulse of a Superman story.

The frosty reception for Superman Returns seemed to be painted by some as evidence of the character’s lack of appeal or relevance to modern audiences, leading to that major overhaul in the face of commercial panic, the “reboot.” (After Hollywood was caught off guard by the blowback over Michael Keaton’s casting as Batman, making fandom unhappy has been seen as the quickest route to monetary oblivion.) The Man of Steel movie gained much controversy over its fatal climactic moments, with much online debate about “destruction porn” and proposing ways the story could have been led to avoid Superman taking deadly action. But the makers of the film seemed to coldly calculate exactly the effect they were looking for—giving audiences who aren’t wired to like Superman the shock effect of a Man of Steel who kills. Inserting Batman into MoS’ sequel seems like a box office insurance clause as much as a response to any desire to see the two duke it out; the view that DC has spent decades following Marvel’s lead isn’t abated by the impression created by cramming four more heroes into what is nominally “a Superman film,” just so Warner can fast track their own “cinematic universe”.

Striving to navigate the appealing fantasies of childhood into escalating “darker” territory keeps leading to nastier dividends. Witness Identity Crisis, a miniseries that proposed that, behind the veneer of kiddie-comic cheeriness, those buffoonish villains in tights you read about as kids hid rapist impulses; it was truly depressing to overhear the comics-shop water cooler conversation turn to this being the way “DC should have done it all along.” The cliché goes that audiences like Batman because anybody can work out and build gadgets and blow stuff up (as long as you’re a millionaire who lives in a fantasy setting, I guess), but supposedly nobody can relate to Superman because he’s “too powerful” (the usual complaint about past incarnations of the Man of Steel is that he could “juggle planets,” even if nobody can offer an example of this actually happening). It becomes about the usual concerns of “who can beat up whom,” the appeal of Superman assumed to be that he’s stronger than everybody else while struggling to maintain drama by coming up with somebody strong enough to fight back.

Almost every reboot attempt goes further in making Superman less connected to his Kryptonian heritage, more a “regular guy” like Batman, depowered to reduce those godlike abilities and make for more thrilling fisticuffs. But the “childish” fantasy of Weisinger’s Superman—who could destroy planets with a sneeze or perform plastic surgery with his fingertips!—didn’t make for less interesting stories; that “anything can happen,” wild card element led to the most outlandish and unpredictable plots imaginable. Those looking to recapture the appeal of Superman could do worse than learn from the successes of the past, rather than refute them.

P. Marie, Zoe Samudzi, and Julia Serano on Feminist Exclusion

Posted on April 27, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week I wrote a piece about Laverne Cox’s nude photoshoot for Allure and how various feminisms have often failed black women and trans women. The piece was in particular a response to a post by Meghan Murphy in which she criticized Cox in what I argued were transphobic, racist, and cruel terms.

For my essay I conducted several interviews — but as often happens, I was only able to use little bits of them. The interviews were all really thoughtful and enlightening, though, and it seemed a shame to waste them. So I asked folks if it would be okay to reprint them here, and everyone (including Playboy) kindly agreed. All the interviews are below, from shortest to longest responses, more or less. My questions are in italics; answers are of course by the interviewees.
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P. Marie is a former sex worker; she blogs a mix of trash, nail art, and selfies at pmariejust.tumblr.com and @_peech on twitter.

Why has feminism and radical feminism had trouble respecting black women?

As far as I can see, the problem can be boiled down to (among many things) entitlement and a sense of ownership. For decades, white feminism has said things like “being a voice for the voiceless” – essentially taking ownership of the voices (and bodies) of Black women, sex workers, and Transgender people through exclusion and subscribing to violent, racist, and transphobic rhetoric.

While at points in history, speaking up to protect others was necessary and desired by us from them, it’s now turned into a clear case of overbearing entitlement and greed for the spotlight. Opportunistic hatred is published quickly and easily by both news houses and blogs with large followings, giving bigoted white feminists a platform to share their trash with a digital megaphone.

The shame in all this is how difficult it seems for feminists as a community to see this happening as often as it does.

With dangerous ideas like “women born women”, the new emergence of the “rescue industry”, and anti sex work and anti black feminists these newest waves of feminism are going on the offensive and becoming more harmful by the day. The problem blooms larger when the actuality of “being the voice for the voiceless” is comprised solely of ignoring people who are willing to speak for themselves. Feminism isn’t helping anyone anymore – unless helping yourself to take the stage by way of abusing women you don’t like counts, and I don’t think it should.

Could you talk just briefly as a black woman and a sex worker what your reaction to the Laverne Cox photos are? Is it empowering or satisfying to see black women recognized as beautiful in that way? Do you see sexualized images of black women as a problem at all, or does it depend on agency/the situation?

As for my reaction to Laverne’s pictures, I feel a sense of happiness for her. She’s done interviews and spoken about her self esteem/appearance, and to see her be able to have those photos done and (very obviously) look and feel so beautiful, what a happy moment. It helps me as an individual when I see any Black woman feeling beautiful and sharing that with the world – reminding people we ARE beautiful, desirable, feminine, and strong – which is exactly, thankfully, what Laverne Cox has done for us.

When it comes to sexualized images of us, for me it’s all about agency! Did we consent? Are we respected? Is this our choice? Is this a collection of body parts or erased humanity? There are a lot of questions that run through my mind at that intersection of sex work and being a Black woman.

What Laverne Cox did put a smile on many faces and some hope in a lot of hearts. I think there are very few better things a person could do in life.
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Zoe Samudzi is a researcher and activist; she’s a project assistant at UCSF. You can follow her on twitter, @ztsamudzi.

Could you talk just briefly about how some strains of radical feminism have marginalized black women and trans women? Like, specifically, why does feminism have trouble embracing those groups? Are the reasons linked?

It isn’t just radical feminism, but also mainstream White Feminism that has targeted and excluded women of color, sex workers, trans women, and others marginalized identities. But these radical second wave feminisms emerged in reaction to traditional femininity, a part of which is female sexuality, which they characterized as “slavery to patriarchy.” These radical feminisms, in my opinion, don’t even feign inclusivity: there’s a very prescriptive understanding of what emancipation and liberation looks like and in the rejection of femininity, it fails to recognize women’s agency (including sexual agency). Couple this misogynistic demonization of femininity with the general devaluing of certain bodies and identities – black women, trans women, and sex workers most notably – and you have shaming, commentaries about “self-objectification” (actually the imposition of the male gaze) when women pose nude, refusal to recognise sex workers as agents, and so on. This exclusion and marginalisation links to white female entitlement and the refusal to de-center whiteness. White women have historically been perpetrators of violence against black women’s bodies, and the same entitlement and identity-centerdness in feminism has enabled them to proclaim themselves as the arbiters of womanhood. It’s also worth nothing that it isn’t just radical feminism that has marginalized trans women and sex workers: that has and does happen in black feminism/womanism, as well.

Do you see fashion images of black women as disempowering? empowering? Some mix of both? Do black women have a different relationship to objectification/sexualization than white women do?

I guess I don’t pay them much attention, but the models are gorgeous. Beyond being empowering or disempowering, I see fashion images of black women as promoting similar discouraging messages about body images as white ones. But black women lend an element of “cool” and afford a cultural capital to fashion that white models to not (they’re always thrown in there for some performance of athleticism or exoticism). The objectification of black women is both gendered and racialized: there’s not only a gendered sexualization, but also a fetishization as an exotic radicalised “other.”

I know you don’t identify as a feminist right now…I guess I wondered what feminism would have to do to get you back? What needs to change before you’d feel comfortable identifying as a feminist again?

I don’t think I’ll ever identify as a feminist again, though there’s a tremendous amount of scholarship in marginal feminisms (i.e. from sex workers, in transfeminism, from migrant/immigrant women, from disabled women, from women in the Global South, and so on). I’m not spending any more energy trying to convince white women that my identity is worthy: I’d rather invest my energy in gender politics grounded in intersectional understandings, as womanism is.
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Julia Serano is a trans feminist and author. Her most recent book is Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive.

Why has feminism been so resistant to including trans women?

There was a time when most feminists (like society at large) were very resistant toward trans women, largely because of misconceptions that people in general had about us. But with increasing trans awareness over the last ten or twenty years, most strands of feminism now acknowledge (and sometimes ally with) trans people and issues. One major exception has been trans-exclusive radical feminists (often called TERFs).

While they may differ to some degree in their perspectives, most TERFs subscribe to a single-issue view of sexism, where men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story. This rigidly binary view of sexism erases transgender perspectives. It leads TERFs to view trans men as “dupes” or “traitors” who have bought into patriarchy’s insistence that being a man is superior to being a woman. This framing also leads them to depict trans women as entitled men who are “infiltrating” women’s spaces and “parodying” women’s oppression, or as “gender-confused” or androgynous people who transition to female in some hapless attempt to “assimilate” into the gender binary. Which is so bizarre that they think that, because no one in the straight mainstream views out trans women as being well-respected legitimate gendered citizens!

Is that linked to, or how is it linked to, feminism’s discussions of objectification, or with its discomfort with sex workers/sexualized portrayals of women?

Yes. Their single-issue view of sexism (i.e., men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story) ignores intersectionality—the fact that there are many forms of sexism and marginalization that exacerbate one another, and that people who experience multiple forms of marginalization may view sexism (and feminist responses to sexism) very differently.

Some feminists (including many trans-exclusionary ones) forward the following overly simplistic argument: In patriarchy, men sexualize and objectify women, therefore women should avoid being sexualized and objectified, because it is inherently disempowering and anti-feminist. This seems to be the case that Meghan Murphy is making. But it ignores the fact that all women are not seen and interpreted the same in the eyes of society. If you happen to be a disabled woman, or a woman of color, or a queer or trans woman, or a sex worker, then you are also constantly receiving messages that you are *not* considered desirable or loveable according to society’s norms.

Feminists have long discussed the “virgin/whore” double-bind: If we express our sexualities and/or expose our bodies, many people will sexualize and objectify us. But if we repress our sexualities and hide our bodies, that also has negative ramifications, especially for those of us who are deemed to be non-normative or undesirable for some reason or another.

I completely understand why, in a world that constantly attempts to erase and eradicate trans women of color, Laverne Cox might feel that that photo-shoot might be empowering for her and for other trans women who share similar identities, backgrounds, or circumstances. This does not by any means imply that they are “buying into the system”—rather, it most likely means that they are navigating their own way through society’s mixed messages (e.g., women are seen as sexual objects, but at the same time, trans women and women of color are viewed as sexually deviant, undesirable, or sexual abominations).

Laverne Cox is an outspoken feminist who has been raising public awareness about sexism and multiple forms of marginalization for several years now. Given that history, Murphy’s response seemed especially condescending to me. It is okay for feminists to disagree. But when you accuse someone who is creating positive change in so many ways of “reinforcing” sexism (especially when they face obstacles that you do not have to face), then you should probably consider whether you are the one who is “holding back the movement” by excluding women who differ in their experiences from you.

ARTS Games Are The Dream of Neoliberalism, Interrupted

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Stephan Gary

Action Real-Time Strategies (Or, ARTS, as some in the community call them) has blossomed into something of a proud E-sports institution in the decade or so they’ve been around. In these games, players select unique characters and then compete in violent conflict against each other down a series of lanes across a (usually) isometric map. The goal of this conflict is to accumulate the resources necessary to overcome watchtowers that stop forward momentum, and then finally destroy the opposing team’s base.

ARTS grew out of user created maps for Starcraft and Warcraft 3, but it was mostly in the last decade that entries in the genre became seriously profitable both as consumer products as well as potential games of sport. Today, ARTS titles have huge tournaments with prize purses worth millions of dollars, featuring the backing of corporate sponsors from energy drink purveyors to computer hardware manufacturers. These games didn’t merely become popular out of a steady development of graphics, accessibility, or dumb luck; they became popular because the stories these games present to audiences, either playing them or spectating them, are syntonic with conservative understandings of how the world works. ARTS games are a sort of regurgitation of Neoliberal ambitions and narratives in the form of competitive play and sporting.

The genre is essentially defined as the development and flexing of capital among teams of exceptional individuals, each engaging in war against the others. Neoliberalism is built on economic misery to maintain the interest of a tiny elite class — inequity which is justified through claims of meritocracy. Ostensibly ARTS titles are meritocracies too, where the best team wins by doing a better job at accumulating wealth, securing objectives, and punishing opponents. But all of them feature gameplay elements that contradict, compromise, or otherwise qualify narratives of victory by reason of virtue or skill.

This qualification of meritocracy begins as soon as the match does, with players selecting their hero or champion unit that they will then control throughout the match. Each unit is mythologized as incredibly unique within each game’s fiction, presenting players with an endless procession of John Galts to choose from. These mythologies of strange power, alien forms, and cunning intellects are boiled down into a core set of tools and statistics that players improve over the course of the match by gaining experience points and gold. The goal of this continual arc of improvement is not merely to access power, but to access better tools of acquiring currency and to complete objectives.

These characters, our rainbow collection of possible Atlases, exist in a context of privileged hierarchy to one another. You could readily divide these characters by their function and relationship as team members, but by contrasting them against each other with aggregate data from publicly available matches, we can, for any given game, understand both any given character’s odds of winning a match, as well as whether or not players prefer a given character. This system of understanding the advantage some characters pose against others is key to the inherent drama of the character selection phase. It also provides narrative possibilities with which commentators, viewers, and players can interpolate the game that follows. The data driven model of ARTS heroes is not much different, then, from more conventional sports, where statistics have steadily grown as a tool for audiences to readily parse the events that unfold, or construct possible futures that are the subject of halftime and lunchroom discussions, or more recently, fantasy sporting.

These relationships of immediate privilege and power are complicated by the the playing field. The lanes of the playfield are the space that players are engaging in a sort of reverse tug of war across, partly processed by endless waves of computer controlled, generic characters, dubbed “creeps” by the ARTS community. In between these lanes lies what players refer to as “The Jungle”, a place where vision is limited, and small camps of monsters endlessly spawn every minute or so. When a player character lands the last hit that destroys any character, including player controlled units, that player receives a gold bounty that they can later spend on items to upgrade their unit or enhance their team’s effectiveness. Along the lanes are other objectives with gold bounties, like guard towers and unit barracks, which obstruct or slow the push of war, either by destroying creeps and heroes, or by weakening other enemy creeps. The “world”, the playing field, of ARTS games is one embroiled in perpetual conflict, with natural resources that simply emerge to be exploited.

Players vie for objectives, awareness, and resources on the map not just in open conflict, but by carefully deciding who among their team is best positioned to exploit available resources to carry the team to victory. The strategic thrust here is not merely where and when to execute a play for an objective, but also deciding how best to take accumulated wealth and translate that into capital, which in this case is the strength of a given unit to take objectives and acquire yet more wealth. This accumulation and flexing of capital as a form of physical power is a narrative audiences already understand. It is essentially a base assumption that the team who acquires the most power at the right time should win, or at least, gain a significant advantage. So, the timing and use of material acquisition serves as yet another data point for audiences to process in creating an understanding of how events should play out.

However, for all of this talk about creating certainties through capital and material privilege, ARTS games often include a certain element of random chance. The sheer number of reasonable options available to players regarding positioning, timing, et cetera are innumerable, and gives every game a quality of unpredictability that prompts blunders out of even the most professional of players. Much like the Real-Time Strategy games that spawned them, ARTs titles generally possess a “Fog of War” that limits what players can see. What this means in practice is that players are often guessing or inferring their opponents decisions regarding positioning, rather than knowing. On top of this unpredictable element there are other explicitly random features in some character’s tool sets that can swing a confrontation heavily to one side, which could theoretically swing an entire game around.

These elements tend to rankle the design purists out there, because we understand them as players or designers to be fundamentally “unfair”, but the point of this randomness is precisely that. The cruelty of fate abruptly disturbing what “should” happen is a story-telling delight that is the definition of an upset, and that threat of an upset in either matches or small engagements is always bubbling away in the back of the spectator’s psyche. It’s a worrisome fuel that keeps people involved in the events as they unfold, and is to an extent present in every e-sport to date. For every possible narrative that players could construct with the discrete data previously discussed, they are all unstable in the face of unpredictability and randomness.

This injection of random cruelty is even more necessary than in other genres within e-sporting, because material gained or lost translates to long term power gains. Consider this data from League of Legends matches regarding accumulated wealth. To paraphrase the article, if a team possesses only 2.5% more currency than their opponents by twenty minutes into a match, that team has about a 90% chance of victory. The surreal nature of a scoreboard serving double duty as a means towards greater power is that victors tend to keep winning. Elsewhere in e-sports, or in traditional sporting, it’s perhaps understood that the chance of victory is a function of time; so long as there’s time for the clutch field goal to turn the football game around, or time for the kind of absurd comebacks in fighting games, the game could belong to anyone. That isn’t the case here.

We understand through the data that the most convincing evidence for predicting a victory is the flow of currency and the player characters chosen. If the chance of an upset were not present, either in the moment-to-moment experience or the game itself, viewers and players could safely tune out or surrender halfway through the game and be fairly comfortable doing so, but they cannot because the ever threat of randomness and serendipity can destabilize that arc of continued growth or rapidly change the direction of the game. The fundamental narrative and assumptions that are built up steadily are nevertheless unstable, because as soon as these games become perfectly predictable, they’d become insufferably boring.

However, even with the knowledge that the game can be rapidly tilted in one direction via some twist of fate, players and viewers still participate with the assumption that the game is fair, even when the odds can be heavily altered very early. Here, ARTS games provide a kind of evidence for their fairness, even when that fairness is often inscrutable, or is the product of processes unseen and unknown to audiences. ARTS games are under constant revision, some of their rules and statistics being revised on a monthly basis, not because the changes those revisions provided are important, but because they provide a narrative explanation for the current state of perpetual imbalance.

These changes assure players that the playing field is going to be ever more fair, while providing additional concrete details to continue to form sports narratives. The assurance of fairness can be contradicted for drama, and the latter emphasized for coherence. In the same way we can understand political processes: internal contradictions are fodder for political narratives, and continuing legislation, even when totally incomprehensible to the public, is used as evidence of a state getting fairer. The process of revision itself is the secret ingredient that allows the appearance of fairness or justice to coexist safely with the cruelty that systems enact on individuals through no fault of their own.

The trick here, in ARTS games and in many modern governments, is that the evidence for fairness is a fabrication. It isn’t that the evidence is a lie, it’s that it was constructed to appear fair, not to deliver fairness or justice. In the meantime, while middle and lower class America gnashes its teeth, wondering how its constituents could fail to receive basic health care and housing while “doing everything right”, we cheer when an ARTS professional fails because of some mechanical quirk. Where the failure to receive what is owed us is painful in life, here, in fiction, and in sports stories, that contradiction of the established narrative is the fuel of drama, and is the fundamental hook that keeps players and audiences invested.

Can a Genre Be Racist?

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Nate Atkinson

In a series of articles on race and superhero comics, several HU regulars cast doubt on the possibility of racially progressive superhero comics. This, in turn, prompted Noah and others to suggest that the superhero genre is itself racist. Conceived in an era of scientific racism and honed through nationalist propaganda, the superhero genre seems to contain a worldview that pulls creators toward narratives that are, if not exactly white supremacist, unable to comment thoughtfully on issues that concern African Americans.

Of course, there are rebuttals. Some argue that because two Jewish kids created the Ur-Superhero back when Jews weren’t exactly white, therefore superheroes can’t be totally racist. However, this rebuttal ignores the fact that you needn’t be racist to create racist art. Another rebuttal follows from the idea that the traits that make the superhero different also make them super, which suggests that superhero comics portray difference, and maybe even diversity, as a social good. This seems like a difficult possibility to reject out of hand, but the fact that few superhero comics have thoughtfully addressed issues of diversity creates a difficulty for anyone looking to make the case. To my mind, this suggests that the jury is still out on the question of whether the genre is racist.

But what does it mean to call a genre racist? To answer this question, I’ll start with a brief definition of genre.

Following the work of Carolyn Miller, I’m defining genre as social action, i.e., as a typified response to a recurring situation. Defined as such, we recognize eulogies as eulogies because they respond to a situation that recurs (the funeral). This is not to suggest that the genre is not defined in part by form and content, but that this form and content responds to, and is therefore shaped by the situation and audience to which it is addressed. As the funeral situation evolves and audiences for eulogies change, the genre will evolve with it. So, if you found a eulogy in an old file cabinet you could recognize it as a eulogy based on its formal characteristics. However, those formal characteristics exist as such because they address recurring needs and expectations.

If superhero comics are a genre, to what situation(s) were/are they addressed? Often, we look for the answer in eras. For example, we might argue that Superman reflects the anxieties of late depression—a culture of feeling shaped by a sense of injustice and the need for strong leadership. Not coincidentally, this was the era in which the US flirted with fascism, and in which certain European nations embraced it. Thus, we have the argument that the genre is tainted by fascism, or a fascist mindset that trips easily into racism. However, by defining an era according to a specific concern, one is forced to operate at a level of abstraction at odds with the rhetorical conception of a situation, which includes historical context, but also material constraints such as medium, power dynamics between the producers of and audiences for texts, and so on. Where does this leave us?

To define superhero comics as a social action, i.e., a motivated, conventionalized response based on the demands of a recurring situation, I think we need to look at the relationship between the producer and the audience. Specifically, we need to see comics as a response, at least in part, to the situation of adolescence as experienced by boys. After all, adolescent boys were, until quite recently, the primary audience for superhero comics. Moreover, and more to the question of race, white adolescent boys were the imagined audience for comics, which is to say they were the audience to which comic creators addressed their narratives.

Is it any surprise, then, that the X-Men are a lousy metaphor for race? Sure, mutants appear as a persecuted minority, but they’re a minority that assumes great power as a birthright. This strikes me as a better metaphor for the young white man who is old enough to see power on the horizon, but is feared and despised by the adult world during this particular stage of his development. Compare this to the young black man, who can expect to face fear and hostility for years to come.

A similar combination of power and persecution dogs Superman. Though he is celebrated as a hero, he submits to daily humiliations. Why? We can psychologize Kal-El all day, but I’d bet money that the answer lies not in his character but in the demand it fills. Namely, it’s an effort to connect with an audience of young men subject to the regular degradations of adolescent life.

How does race factor into all of this? After all, it’s not as though young black men aren’t subject to fear and persecution. The answer is that superhero comics, as a general rule, assume that unearned power lies behind or beyond the fear and the persecution. The mutant, the Kryptonian, the scion of billionaires, the kid genius who sticks to walls… All of these characters could get everything they want and more. Only two things hold them back. One is ethics, and this is a potential positive to the genre. The other is less positive: it’s the notion that lesser beings are holding them back (I’m looking at you, X-Men).

So, is the superhero genre racist? As a rhetorical theorist, I’m contractually obligated to answer yes, and no.

Yes, the genre is racist. It is addressed to a situation unique to an increasingly small but nevertheless over-privileged group. As a result, it developed conventional features that make a dog’s breakfast of any effort to incorporate issues of social justice that don’t entail being nicer to young white men.

No, the genre isn’t racist. Situations recur, but they evolve over time. As the audience for comics grows increasingly diverse, the conventional features of the form will change accordingly to better address the situation of the readership. Sure, we’re going to read some confused comics as we transition, but it will all work out in the end.

In short, the answer to the question of whether a genre can be racist is yes, but it doesn’t have to be. As to whether the superhero genre is inherently racist, I want to suggest that it has developed some narrative conventions that are, if not racist, seriously problematic. However, I’d be reluctant to consign the genre to the realm of minstrel shows and Orientalist travelogues. Instead, I’d argue that recent flare ups over its less progressive features indicate a genre that’s struggling to expand the range of situations to which it can speak.

Matthew VanDyke and Obsessive Compulsive Freedom Fighting

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Michael Carson

In a short non-fiction essay, “The Spirit of Place,” D.H. Lawrence rejects the idea that young men come to America for freedom. They go west, he argues, simply to “get away from everything they are and have been.” For Lawrence, those who come to America confuse the slavishness of escapism for the authority that comes with actual freedom. “It is not freedom,” he contends, “till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about things they are not.” This negative freedom, which is to Lawrence not really freedom at all, but “the sound of chains rattling,” has worked to undermine the true freedom of place, the kind in which a person has responsibilities, “a believing community” organically understood rather than an “idealistic halfness” petulantly professed. “Men are freest when most unconscious of freedom,” he concludes.

Matthew VanDyke is an interesting study in what happens when people no longer go to America but away from it to find this peculiar variety of freedom. Profiled in the recent Marshall Curry documentary Point and Shoot, Baltimore native VanDyke grows up with few friends and little masculine influence. His childhood was defined by video games, old movies about Lawrence of Arabia, and struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder. As an adult he attended Georgetown University Master’s Program in Middle Eastern studies. After graduation, VanDyke continues to be troubled by the sense that he has not proved his manhood. To find this elusive reality he decides to visit the one place a person an American with an obsessive need to wash his hands would not dare to go: the Middle East. A few weeks later he is in North Africa armed with a camera and motorcycle.

After many misadventures, including a detour with the American Army in Iraq where he poses as a photojournalist, VanDyke eventually finds the fame he seeks in a Libyan prison cell, having been captured by Gadhafi’s forces and then freed by advancing coalition-backed militias. An international darling for a few moments, the dazed VanDyke refuses to go back home. He wants to battle with his friends for the freedom of Libya. Soon enough, he is back in the fighting, though fighting might be too strong a word. Mostly he seems to be hanging about videotaping the chaos, trying to give the solemnity and dignity of a revolution to the seemingly trivial and slap-dash proceedings (which characterizes all warfare and likely all revolutions as well), as well as making heroic efforts to overcome his disgust at the lack of sanitation.

The documentary ends with him not only overcoming his dirty-hands phobia – at least overseas – but also debating whether to shoot, to take another man’s life. He misses but he wants to make clear that he meant to do it. He had the guts, the manliness, and the freedom to kill. No phobia there. Mission accomplished.

Yet for all the exciting adventures VanDyke experiences, it is impossible to get out of one’s head the idea of a reenactment, of middle-aged office workers walking through the woods in Civil War uniforms and young men playing paintball between mounds of dirt. It is all so clumsy, so sad and trivial. He travels to Afghanistan to place an American flag in Bin Laden’s house. He makes the first real friends of his life in combat. Van Dyke’s whole life, his whole idea of freedom, consists in this idea of acting, repeating typically dangerous situations under the gaze of the camera, and while the adventures he finds himself in are ostensibly new, they feel old and worn out. VanDyke very much wants to believe otherwise. He wants to believe his experiences are immediately made hallowed through the ever-present camera, which turns the ephemeral and pointless violence he witnesses, the aimless and meandering journey he travels, into something much more. But it doesn’t quite come off. The camera instead dictates his adventures, hollowing out his experiences, transforming a war and people’s lives into an unfunny Jackass skit.

Garibaldi had politics. Byron had poetry. VanDyke has a camera. Context, ultimately, comes to little compared to the camera angle, the breadth of the shot. Whose freedom VanDyke fights for and against whom is immaterial, for the names and lives of the saved are as interchangeable as those who need to be killed. The war’s entire meaning is bound up in the existence of a picture, a video or a Huffington Post article, artifacts that answer one question and one question alone: was the person there or not? Like much recent war literature and movie fare, the thereness trumps what the author or auteur have to say about having gone. Movies like Lone Survivor and American Sniper have been celebrated not so much for what they have to say about the war, but for what they show about it. Some veteran writers have gone so far as to argue that documentaries best represent these particular wars because we live with ubiquitous lenses. Yet it could also be argued – and Marshall’s documentary seems a good example of this – that war documentaries become ignoble through repetition and overcompensate for lack of imagination with documentation.

From this perspective, VanDyke’s movement from 27 year-old video-game freedom fighter in his mom’s basement to actual freedom fighter does not seem all that surprising. War is a process of self-creation, and for many lost and insecure boys, a process of self-actualization as well. It has been one for likely much of warfare’s history. Yet in the self-reported story of VanDyke one gets the impression that this process of self-creation is done firmly within the constraints of previous documentaries, movies and stories. With the exception of his time in prison – which Marshall is forced to represent through animation – there is absolutely no space for truly disturbing experiences (i.e., not already expected, not scripted, and not violent) to inform who VanDyke is, or for politics to be anything other than a flimsily applied construct, a set of words used when dialogue is expected.

Watching this young man’s self-portrait, one gets the sense that the war itself, the fight for freedom VanDyke supposedly assists, does exist somewhere. But the particulars of why they fight and what happens after the fight are unimportant. Marshall and VanDyke try to craft the narrative as a triumph over his Western squeamishness. But this is not what happens at all. It is almost as if instead of VanDyke conquering his OCD, his OCD conquers his mind entirely. His adventures give an excuse for the despotic compulsions of his imagination, and validate the incessant and never ending cavalcade of toppled dictators and heroic liberators. He no longer has to deal with the particular, with the complications of not knowing exactly what to do, with a life without routine, without a script. He only has to clean again and again a damned spot that he has made everyone else believe is there, to purify the perception of weakness and captivity that a lifetime of cameras has made a tyrannical obsession. For what better way to pretend at dignity for ourselves, to make music with our chains, then to perpetually reenact the violence that keeps us bound?

A Look at Green Fairy, the Pinnacle of Furry Genre Fiction

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Matt Healey

To begin, an important caveat: I’m not a big reader of furry genre fiction.

I am, though, a furry and a keen reader, so I find myself attracted to furry writers and booksellers, furry books and reviews. When pressed, I say that I don’t read much furry fiction because I don’t think it’s going to be very good.

I recently decided it was time for a rethink. My interest has been piqued over the years by people writing about furry books, by furry writers in general, and by my exposure to a few furry short stories. I found the best of them to be well-constructed and enjoyable, if a bit disposable.

I’m also slightly fascinated by those people who write furry books for a living. Their job feels a bit claustrophobic to me, writing as they are to a small but engaged audience – like a tiny version of the sci-fi readership – a tough demographic.

Successful authors will win a dedicated following, but the bulk will struggle to find a critical mass of fans. If you enjoy writing, how do you decide whether to upload it for all-comers on SoFurry, or to publish it for sale?

I figured the best place to start would be to read the best furry fiction available. I asked around on Twitter and got a strong recommendation for Green Fairy, by Kyell Gold¹. (Disclosure: I’ve met Kyell, and we get along well.)

It’s fair to say that Green Fairy is an ambitious work. It doesn’t tell a straightforward story and it doesn’t include explicit sex scenes, as with many of Gold’s other works. Green Fairy mixes accessible ideas with higher pretensions: in some ways it’s a teenage coming-out story, in others it’s about the value of art itself. It succeeds in its attempt to be a readable, enjoyable book; but it fails in its aspirations to literature.

Roughly, the book follows the story of Sol: a young gay wolf simultaneously trying to manage competing pressures from his internet boyfriend, his father, and school life. He’s a baseball player who has recently lost his starting place in the team, a move possibly precipitated by an embarrassing erection-in-the-shower incident. Sol has to contend with homophobic abuse and bullying in school, and pressure from his father at home.

In many ways, I’m a natural reader for Green Fairy. I’m furry, gay, and know my way around a sports field. Much of Sol’s experiences in Green Fairy are familiar to me, and Gold’s descriptions of school and sport life have a ring of truth.

That’s all good, but Gold runs into trouble with the structure of Green Fairy. Sol is reading a book for a school assignment called Confession, and soon enough the chapters of Green Fairy switch between Sol’s life and sections of Confession itself: a book-within-a-book. This is key to the novel, as aspects of Confession start to intrude on Sol’s day-to-day life.

Confession is introduced as a translation from a 1920s French novel. However it’s not at all convincing. Gold adopts a rather stiff style for the Confession sections, a style that makes me question the skills of his fictional translator. I think the best way to make this example is to compare the opening sentences of Green Fairy and Confession.

Green Fairy: “Sol was only reading a news story about a college student who’d killed himself, but the student had been gay, so when the young wolf’s fur prickled with the feeling of someone watching staring at him, he hid the story behind the picture of a car at some local auto dealer’s website.”

Confession: “Dear père, I know that this is not what you meant when you said you wanted all of Lutèce to speak my name.”

Green Fairy‘s opening sentence is terrific. We learn a lot about Sol – he’s self-conscious, probably gay, possibly considering suicide – and the sentence has a beautiful rhythm as Sol’s attention shifts from himself to his worry about how he is seen from the outside. We know that Sol is trying to hide aspects of himself from the world. (There is also a hint of the literary convention that any book that opens with suicide must close with suicide: Green Fairy doesn’t quite go that far, but suicide is a key plot point towards the story’s conclusion.)

Confession‘s opening sentence has me contemplating, if not my will to go on living, at least the will to go on reading. It’s stilted to the point of being hard to follow. The phrase “not what you meant when you said you wanted” is a discordant succession of clanging syllables. And why oh why would our fictional translator not translate “père” to “father”?

Gold’s intent is pretty clear. He is trying to write Confession in a different style to that of Green Fairy. It’s a good idea, but his attempts to make Confession sound (1) French; and (2) old; are played far too broadly. The remainder of the opening paragraph of Confession manages to drop terms like “scurrilous” and “bourgeoisie”, as well as wheeling out such boilerplate Frenchified cheese as a reference to beheaded monarchy. I’m happy to say, at least, that Confession gets better as it goes.

The book-within-a-book structure is a tough trick to pull off. Both books need to stand alone to be believable, yet they must inter-relate in a way that makes sense. Even the mighty Vladimir Nabokov was unable to completely succeed: his 1962 novel, Pale Fire, has a 999-line poem at its heart, supposedly composed by a peer of Robert Frost. And Nabokov, one of the great novelists, is not a Frost-quality poet. Assertions of the genius of Pale Fire‘s poet and the quality of his 999-line poem (which are integral to the book’s story) just don’t ring true.

Where greats like Nabokov stumble, others faceplant. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach is a 2001 book with a lot of elements in common with Green Fairy. They both have a central gay romance, the plot is driven by school/college hierarchies and the mental health of the main character, and both books are about baseball. The hero of The Art of Fielding owns a supposedly legendary book about the psychology of baseball – also called The Art of Fielding – which he slavishly follows and regularly references. The problem is that The Art of Fielding (the book within the novel) is mind-boggling faux-new-age poppycock, ludicrous if considered as a stand-alone entity, let alone as a work of great wisdom and inspiration.

Green Fairy fails because its execution doesn’t live up to its aspiration. Gold laudably sets himself a tough task, but fails to pull it off. C’est la vie.

Green Fairy is, of course, a furry novel. It is set, more or less, in today’s world but with anthropomorphic animals instead of humans. This is both the novel’s biggest strength and greatest weakness.

In his review of Green Fairy for Flayrah, Fred Patten praises Gold for his “signature worldbuilding”. His mixture of anthropomorphics with the real world is genuinely vibrant, and species differences have a real effect on the lives of the characters. Gold makes scent important to his wolf characters, otters live in and around water, and so forth.

Reading about animal-people is very pleasant, acting as a kind of wish-fulfilment for the furry reader. It helps make the book emotionally affecting and generally more engaging. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, Gold’s furry universe doesn’t hold up.

Gold’s furry characters live in our world. Green Fairy takes place partly in 1920s France – replete with Parisian landmarks like Les Halles and the Moulin Rouge – and partly in present-day America, with mundane schools, sporting scholarship programmes, cars, geopolitics, technology, and so forth.

The facade of this world crumbles when it becomes clear that the furry aspects of Gold’s universe are in fundamental conflict with his real world setting.

It is probably fair to say that this is an unavoidable problem. Writers can create from-scratch universes where only furries exist, or they can create slightly different versions of our world where furries co-exist with humans. But stories where furries exist in today’s world in place of humans, like Green Fairy, run into problems. It is, I suspect, a limitation of the genre.

Gold is smart enough to avoid obvious instances of logical dissonance, stopping short each time he threatens to create a contradiction. Also to his credit, he doesn’t try to resolve potential contradictions by tediously attempting to over-explain things. He is walking a fine line. On one hand, he provides enough information for the story to be grounded in reality; on the other, he holds back detail when logical contradictions loom on the horizon.

Art Spiegelman walks a similarly fine line, and similarly stumbles, in Maus, his Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel. Maus is a true story, following Spiegelman’s father during the Holocaust, with the Jews drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. It’s a simple enough metaphor, but one that fails once characters from other races get involved. Spiegelman’s solution is to draw two pages – two boring, irrelevant pages – showing himself trying to decide how to draw his French wife. Spiegelman tries to make these two pages relevant to Maus by dropping a couple of vaguely racist comments – his wife is a ‘frog’ and he calls himself prejudiced against Jewish women – but this feels less like a comment on the ubiquity of inherent racism, more like an attempt to distract from his admission that his metaphor has failed.

The furries of Green Fairy aren’t used as a blunt metaphor like the mice and cats of Maus, but Gold has the same challenges of retaining the integrity of his universe. Gold, thankfully, doesn’t go all intrusive-author on us like Spiegelman, but the logical problems are still there.

For starters, there are biological problems. The students of Green Fairy‘s Richfield High, heterosexual and homosexual, very obviously regard one another as potential romantic partners. There is no suggestion that there is any problem with mixed-species coupling, and indeed it’s a running gag that Sol’s platonic female friend (Meg) wants to give the appearance that their relationship is a sexual one.

The problem comes about when you look at the parents of each of the students: they are all single-species. Meg the otter has two otter parents, Sol the wolf has wolf parents, and so forth. The operation and physical reality of each household is (in part) defined by the species of the family unit, such as the otters living around water, and the characters tend to refer to other families in this way.

It’s easy to see how Gold is backed into a corner: on one hand he wants a rich, multi-species furry world, and on the other he wants each household to be defined by a single family species. But these two things are incompatible, barring perhaps some unmentioned but recently-repealed species apartheid law.

Similarly, Gold runs into problems when he explores the difference between carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores – one of the sources of conflict that drives Green Fairy‘s plot. Some of our furries are eating meat, and Gold makes a passing reference to non-anthro animals being used for food. This solves one problem but introduces a whole host of others: how can Gold’s animal-person society consider this ethical (or at least unworthy of comment when the ethics of vegetarianism is raised)? Who is farming these animals – are anthro cows raising and slaughtering non-anthro cows? And surely our animal-people would feel some kinship with their non-anthro counterparts, especially the more intelligent species, like wolves?

From Claire C’s comic Harvest

Gold doesn’t answer these questions, and nor should he. It would be boring, and undoubtedly lead to deeper logical problems, short of Green Fairy taking an unexpected twist into some Gulliver’s Travels-esque dystopia. But while his decision to elide this difficulty is correct, the difficulty still exists.

Gold’s characters have mundane problems: a budding romance, or bullying, or a place in a sports team. These are modest and subtle drivers. Gold’s plot relies on conflict caused by such social pressures, for example Sol’s desire to hide his homosexuality, or his efforts to win back his spot on the baseball team. But it’s difficult to care for the characters in thrall to the pressures of Green Fairy‘s universe, because Green Fairy‘s universe doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Interestingly, Gold makes intimations towards the natural challenges of his multi-species and multi-cultural society. Sol’s baseball rival is a young, talented coyote, who is driven to prove himself to the baseball team’s alpha wolf clique. Sol’s failure to keep his spot is especially embarrassing because his rival is considered ‘lesser’ in the eyes of his father, who comes across as a little bigoted (speciesist?).

In conversation with another parent, Sol’s father explains why Sol is playing backup:

“One of those ‘yotes from the trailer park,” Sol’s father said finally. “Tough, scrappy…”

[…]

The words don’t seem to register with the other wolf. “Y’know, once those trailer kids set their mind on somethin’…” He shook his head. “Don’t get between one of them and a steak, know what I’m sayin’?”

This is the language of casual racism, and it’s notable that it’s spoken by the older generation. It’s easy to replace “‘yote” with a racial minority, consider the apparent economic disadvantage of the group, and see that Gold is weaving elements from our own human social experience into his furry world. It is obvious to the reader that Sol’s father and his friend are wrong to mark an entire species/racial group with broad generalizations, in this case roughly “poor” and “recalcitrant”. Sol disagrees without saying so, and the reader empathizes with the conflict between his desires to keep mum and to speak up.

I bring up this example because it illustrates two things. Firstly, it demonstrates Gold’s quality as a writer, using a few efficient lines to get across a complex idea. Secondly, his intimations of racism are edging into dangerous territory. If species differences in Green Fairy are akin to racial differences, Gold appears to be drawing parallels between a single species (coyotes) and an American racial minority.

Other species in Green Fairy are similarly marked. There are a couple of Siberian foxes in the book, both of which are of Russian origin (one speaks in delightfully broken English). Here, again, species seems to relate directly to race.

This is dangerous because it appears that some species stand for single racial minorities, but that the other species collectively stand in for a racial majority – ostensibly white people, displaying as they do the trappings of suburban affluence. The idea that individual diversity occurs within a white population but that other racial groups can be collected as a discrete ‘other’ is wildly racist. Gold, of course, doesn’t say anything of the sort. But, to me at least, this is an unintended problem with the foundation of Green Fairy‘s world.

To be clear – there are no elements of Green Fairy that could be construed as even vaguely racist. This is simply an example of the problems Gold introduces by taking our world, and replacing humans with anthro characters. The drama and plot of Green Fairy are driven by familiar social pressures, and racial tension is a part of that. The problem isn’t with Gold’s treatment of race, it’s with the premise of his universe. Art Spiegelman has exactly the same problem with Maus.

The most obvious problem with Green Fairy, at least the paperback version, has nothing to do with Kyell Gold. It’s the illustrations. There are a dozen or so drawings by Rukis in the book, showing certain key scenes.

Rukis is a fine illustrator. The front cover of Green Fairy in particular is excellent. Less successful are the scenes captured by her art inside the book, mostly of action scenes, from a dance inside the Moulin Rouge through to an attempted rape. These drawings are DOA. Compared with Gold’s engaging and evocative prose, Rukis’s art is lifeless and flat. She would have been better served, perhaps, by providing character portraits of Gold’s main players.

It makes me wonder what on earth illustrations are doing in Green Fairy in the first place. The last time I read a book with pictures, I was 9 years old, and the story was about a kangaroo who went on adventures. Maybe this is a furry genre convention? Do furry books usually include picture?

Despite Green Fairy‘s problems, Gold’s writing skill stands out. The structure of Green Fairy would be challenging for any writer, and on the whole he executes well. Even the Confession sections markedly improve as the book goes on. It makes me wonder if Gold wasn’t learning as he wrote, starting on unfamiliar ground but finding his feet as he progressed through the story. If so, it’s testament to his skills as a writer – he starts formal and stiff, but ends with a bit of rhythm and flourish. I suspect that Gold should have rewritten the opening sections of Confession once he had found his voice, much like a real translator would do.

It’s not just the structure of Green Fairy which is complex, but Gold’s themes. His story is driven by conflicting social pressures, as would be familiar to any high school student, amplified by Sol’s unusual combination of competing hopes and dreams. Gold writes with clarity, and the plot has great energy despite Sol’s introspective nature.

I was particularly impressed by Gold’s development of Sol’s antagonists. Sol feels bullied at the beginning of the book, yet Gold avoids creating cardboard cut-out enemies. The motivations of Sol’s antagonists become apparent as the plot moves forward, and we can sympathize with them even while they engage Sol in emotional, physical, or sexual conflict. We don’t spend any time with these other characters directly, so we never get detailed insight into their thoughts. Instead, Gold humanizes them with context, providing hints that Sol notices but can’t dispassionately process, so that the reader has information that Sol does not. This is skilful writing by any measure.

Gold manages to invoke the emotional instability and general drama of being a teenager, both with Sol and with his fellow students. To be young is to be self-centred, and Gold understands that the characters will treat any event as if it is somehow personal. His single major female character, Meg, is Sol’s age but more emotionally mature, able to more effectively empathize with others but still prone to her own bouts of self-focussed drama. Gold’s older characters are, on the whole, a lot more moderate in their emotional expression.

Gold uses the natural teenage tendency to be self-conscious and self-critical to push his characters around. If anything, he holds back a touch, as if he can’t quite drive his characters too close to the edge – Sol is never really humiliated or embarrassed (although of course Sol doesn’t really see it that way). Yet Gold knows that we all remember what it was like to be in high school, and his emotional manipulation of the reader is deft, especially in the opening chapters. I found it very easy to empathize with Sol.

Even better is Gold’s writing on sport. Sport is a notoriously difficult topic for a writer, particularly action sequences. Sports fiction writing must balance the need for basic explanation, context, and the inevitable sports jargon, all while maintaining continuity of style. Too often sports writing devolves into a dry listing of events, all action and no thought. Many writers choose to avoid action scenes altogether, by narrating the action in hindsight, as remembered rather than as experienced.

Throughout Green Fairy (excluding the Confession sections), Gold retains an urgent tense, and we get to experience events as Sol experiences them. He retains this urgency through the short baseball sections, and it’s clear that Gold has a strong feel for the mechanics and psychology of the sport. He understands that sport is experienced twice: once in reality and again in hindsight. In reality things happen in a fraction of a second, where actions and decisions are unconscious. It’s in hindsight that post hoc reasoning gets applied, and over time the logic of hindsight replaces the instinct of action – the rationalization becomes the reality. And so when Sol gets it wrong on the baseball field, an unlucky bounce transmogrifies into an error that demonstrates Sol’s emotional weakness.

Gold also understands what it means to be an expert on the sporting field. Even in a long game like baseball, a state of ‘flow’ can occur, where actions and decisions happen automatically and time melts away. Sol is an experienced baseballer and manages to achieve this state from time to time, and accordingly Gold has these sections over in a flash. When Sol is struggling, Gold – excruciatingly – takes his time.

This is another obvious point of comparison to Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding, where baseball is also a central focus of the story. Gold’s treatment of baseball in Green Fairy is comfortably more assured than Harbach’s, as is his treatment of social pressures in a school environment, and of hidden homosexuality, and – for that matter – his humour. Gold’s writing stands above Harbach’s… and to put this in context, Harbach received a $650,000 advance for Art Of Fielding, and an HBO series is planned.

Green Fairy‘s main limitation, in my opinion, is Gold’s decision to make it a furry book. The presence of furry characters, in place of humans, causes Gold no end of predictable problems, and this comes at the detriment of the book as a whole. And while, as a furry, I (subjectively) liked reading about Gold’s animal-people and found it easy to engage with them, a non-furry Green Fairy would be objectively better.

Gold is a terrific writer. He is no great stylist, but he is clear, efficient, and subtle in his plotting and character manipulation. His attempt to balance several writing styles in Green Fairy, although not entirely successful, demonstrates his ambition to create something special. Furry readers are lucky to have him, and it’s no surprise that he has a dedicated following.

Green Fairy is good… for a furry book. I have no doubt that my recommendations were fair, and that it stands out as a high point of the genre. But it doesn’t compare favourably to non-furry books, and unfortunately this seems to be due to the furry component itself.

Is the furry genre self-limiting? Goodness knows there is a lot of writing out there in furry, which means a lot of hay and very few needles. And still there may not yet be a great furry book. Any suggestions?
_______
^{1.There was one other popular recommendation: God of Clay, by Ryan Campbell. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to buy a copy without incurring an enormous shipping charge. I’ll buy God of Clay next time I’m at an American convention.}

Matt Healey tweets at @jmhorse.

Progressive Comics Can Leave Me Behind

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad. To begin to form the basis of an opinion about each and every blatant awful act requires deep investigation, consideration, and care. You’ve gotta hear both sides, or so I’m told.

Here is what I know about Chris Sims. Under duress, he confessed to harassing a woman. The woman he harassed, Val D’Orazio, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; she has described its effects, including financial strain, suicidal ideation, and professional hardship. It was such a blight on her health that it drove her out of comics blogging. These are indisputable facts.

Indisputable, except this narrative has been framed in two ways. A man, Chris Sims, has changed for the better, and there’s the sense that we should focus on that. D’Orazio has changed too, but for the worse. That’s not so uplifting. Not as easy. Not a point to rally behind as we move forward.

Indisputable, except that Comics calls for nuance. Despite Sims’ clear admission of guilt, some want to pry open this cold case and review with their own two eyes ancient blog posts, comments wars, and semi-relevant tweets. Cool, here’s thousands of words on someone’s personal impression of a bygone comics blogging milieu. This is how it always goes, this call for nuance, where even glossing some comics controversy requires sorting through so much ephemera that it quickly begins to sound like a whole lot of nothing. These petty piles of “evidence” begin to elide the unpleasant, indisputable truth: Chris Sims harassed a woman, and he made her very sick. Makes her sick, present tense, today, some five years after the fact.

D’Orazio had a big mouth and Sims had his burgeoning career. Claire Napier described how he built that career on his mistreatment of her, and I’d add that he’s now trying to build his persona as an ally on it too. Sims says all of this explicitly in his apology—offers it up like that’s a thing that makes sense, a thing that I’m supposed to understand. Sims found his voice in comics by harassing a woman, and now that he’s reformed he crows about his own sensitivity, which she helped him find, too. Good for him! (Bad for her.) Hey, thanks for sharing, Val. Your shitty fucking experience helped Sims become the compassionate man he is today.

Real progressives, we’re told, should rally behind Sims 2.0. “Chris is not the man he was when he directed his vitriol at Val D’Orazio,” says ComicsAlliance. Helpfully, Sims has offered a thoughtful analysis of his own campaign of harassment in the guise of two apologies. What a prince. Clearly he has come to realize that harassment is very, very bad. “Chris understands this now, and has understood it for years,” says CA. The point you see is not what Sims did; the point is what he now knows. Now that he understands, now that he’s better, now that he’s made a name for himself, some would-be hooligans, some riffraff, some GamerGate types, want to tear him down. To undo all the progress he’s made for all of us. For Comics!

Instead of an apology, ComicsAlliance went with frantic spin. Taking Sims’ lead, they chose to focus on the narrative of redemption. Along the way, CA invoked a cabal of anonymous haters who seek to sow discontent in the world of Progressive Comics, where all is well, clearly, la-la-la. “Someone was targeting Chris not out of a sense of justice, but because they wanted to destroy his success,” they wrote. Because, let’s face it, that’s the absolute worst crime you can commit in this town: to bring a good man low when he doesn’t deserve it.

Comics calls for nuance when a white guy does something really bad, especially when Comics knows that guy personally. Laura Hudson described factual reports of Sims’ harassment as an “anti-progressive campaign” trying to “actively dismantle progressive voices in comics.” Hudson is someone I admire, and it was uncomfortable to see her describe Val D’Orazio as a “skeleton” from Sims’ past to be wielded as a weapon against him, and against progressive voices. Who are the living breathing beings in that construction? Who isn’t? This is what nuance looks like in comics controversies: choosing to value one person’s humanity over someone else’s. Who dares to wave a bunch of old bones in the face of vital progress? Progressive Comics just wants to move forward. And what reasonable person doesn’t want that?

David Brothers wrote a powerful essay about cowardice in comics, explaining how, to white people, “racist” is an unspeakable slur. Accusations of racism and sexism are always given far more scrutiny and consideration than the offenses themselves. If you want to speak out, you’d better have your ducks in a row, because sure as shit someone will be there calling for “nuance.” Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad. And that nuance is always and forever in the service of understanding him–the complex, well meaning white dude. To the rest of us it means antipathy, scrutiny, and straight-up hostility. There are consequences for whoever had the gall to speak up. It can ruin your day or your week. It can even make you physically ill. There is always a price.

Nuance dictates who receives the benefit of the doubt. Many, many comics controversies ago, when people accused Jason Karns of being a racist piece of shit, Tom Spurgeon explained he’d have to study Karns’ oeuvre before leveling such a serious accusation. Contrast those measured words with Spurgeon’s emotionally charged, intuitive “snap choice” to change his Twitter avatar to a racist caricature in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. I offer this example, not because Spurgeon is the worst or only offender along these lines by a long shot, but because it so plainly embodies a rampant attitude in Progressive Comics. It delineates what deserves careful consideration and who is most deserving of empathy. It is entirely oblivious to bias. It says, “I will think long and hard before I call someone a racist. And I will think very little, if it all, before I myself commit a racist act.”

Comics controversies have a short half-life. Time enough for everyone to write two or three angry tweets. Everyone cares and they CARE and they care really hard, and there’s very little time to absorb and reflect before another white guy does something really bad and there’s a renewed call for nuance, another pile of tweets to parse before we throw them into the void.

Here’s the thing: I fail to see the nuance in Sims’ story. He was a bad man, and now he’s a good one. Has he reformed, for real, deep in his heart? It’s entirely possible. I confess I don’t care.

Now that he’s one of the good guys, Sims is helping to lead the march forward for Progressive Comics, such as it is. Ever onward! That’s his story. But I’m more interested in the other side of the narrative, the one that belongs to D’Orazio. It’s with her experience—not Sims’ success—that the path to progress starts. Progress is not desperately pushing forward as though you’re running away from something. This is not Jurassic Park or a Cormac McCarthy novel where we’d better keep moving. Real progress sometimes requires standing still and taking stock.

So let’s take stock. A man bullied a woman. She’s still dealing with the ongoing implications of his bad behavior. It makes her sick. Years after the fact, the bully is finally dealing with the fallout. It makes him look bad—the worst thing that can happen to a man in this industry. And guess what? Making a man in this industry look bad is nearly impossible. They have nuance. It’s complicated.

I don’t question why white guys like Sims behave badly. I don’t give a hoot, and even if I did, I doubt I’d understand. Their rationale, if you can call it that, is entirely beside the point. Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad, and it’s long been used to redirect negative attention. It ignores what is actually at stake.

I’m tired of hearing about Chris Sims. I don’t care about his reputation, or his heart, or his alleged victimization at the hands of some hater cabal. I don’t care about his success or his rehabilitation or his vision for the future. I care least of all about Progressive Comics. They are more than welcome to leave me behind.

I’m writing today because I care about the story of Val D’Orazio. In doing so I feel no sense of forward momentum. I know it won’t be long before I hear this story again.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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