What Makes Barry Run?

I just finished Season Three of The Flash last night and I'm more than half-way through Season Three of Roswell: New Mexico, from which the astute reader will conclude I'm taking the reckless step of watching two CW series at the same time. And without a net, too.

I can't speak to the whole of the CW's output because mostly I've just watched the DC superhero shows and not all of those yet, either. Also a few of the Sci-Fi/Supernatural ones, I think. Based on the shows I have seen, there are more than a few tropes that are just hard to miss.

The Plots Make NO SENSE! - Seriously, do they even run these things past a grown-up before they put them into production? It's like a seven-year old telling you the plot of a movie he just watched. There's a lot of hand-waving and nothing connects with anything else. I pity the person who has to write the summaries for the TV Guide, assuming such a job still exists. Never mind about the plot, though, because...

The "Science" Makes Even LESS SENSE! - Okay, I get it. This is comic-book science we're talking about. No-one expects it to make sense. But this is another level of gibberish entirely. I'd say it might as well be magic (A character in The Flash actually pulled out the old plum about "Any advanced science..." in an episode I watched last week.) but weirdly magic, when they feature it, seems to be more grounded and cosnsistent. I gave up even trying to figure out what they were on about in both series weeks ago, which is a pity because every damn episode of each of them features at least ten minutes of pseudo-scientific gobbledegook. And that's mostly because...

Everyone's A Genius. - I mean, it's just as well, because they'd need to be to keep up with anything anyone else is saying. The ratio of pseudo-scientific jargon to regular conversation is off the scale half the time. I pity poor Max Evans, one of the Roswell:NM leads, who's playing a small-town cop (Who also happens to be the alien clone of an interplanetary Tyrant King but let's not go there right now.) surrounded by savants, scientists and seers. Half the time he's the action hero and the rest he stands there looking confused, as well he might. The viewers certainly have to be. Detective Joe West performs much the same roll in The Flash so I guess every CW show needs at least one player who can hold up his hands and say "What, now?!" on behalf of the audience. But no-one cares about the science because...

It's A Soap Opera - Okay, soap opera first, superhero/SciFi/supernatural drama second, like Third Rock From The Sun is sitcom first, SciFi second. It's why they work so much better as comic book shows than almost anything else I've watched in half a century. I've been telling people all my life that superhero comic books are first and foremost soap operas but no-one ever believes me. Finally, someone gets it. Of course, if I'd grown up elsewehere, I might have said...

It's A Telenovela! - Liz even makes a sly, metafictional reference to it in one episode. Admittedly, I'm on shaky ground here because I've barely ever seen a telenovela but I feel I have a basic understanding of the form and cross-checking against the Wikipedia definition confirms my thesis: "...telenovelas tell one self-contained story, typically within the span of a year or less whereas soap operas tend to have intertwined storylines told during indefinite, continuing runs...This planned run results in a faster-paced, more concise style of melodrama compared to a typical soap opera." They left out the part about them being bat-shit crazy but otherwise that pretty much sums it up. Or it would, except  for the very un-soap-operatic, telenovelistic fact that...

Everyone Is So Damn NICE! - It's like someone watched Friends and thought, y'know what, that'd be quite a good show if it had people in it you didn't want to slap. There's a relentless, almost demented positivity about the whole thing. Everyone is someone's best friend or soulmate or perfect parent, even when they're acting like the exact fucking opposite, which is about every other episode on a conservative estimate. After a while you feel like they're your best pals, too. I know all TV does this but it's another level of emotional appropriation when...

Even The Villains Are Friendly - Well, some of them. It feels bad when they get caught. I don't know what Peekaboo did to deserve the treatment they give her for a start. She's just trying to make a living. Half of the bad guys seem like they'd be good company on a long road trip and the rest look like they'd be cool as hell to hang out with, even if they would get you into trouble then bail. Of course, there are the total psychopaths, the ones who just want to set the world on fire to watch it burn, but even they have their moments. And it's hard to hold anything they do against them because...

Absolutely No-one Has Any Kind Of Moral Compass. The heroes? Ha! The police? Are you kidding me? The authorities? Are there even any? Everyone does whatever they think they "have" to do or "need" to do at all times because the end always justifies the means. Screw due process! Screw human rights! Lock people up without trial in cells the size of postage stamps with no facilities of any kind and keep them there in solitary confinement, for life, the justification being that they're bad guys and... no, that's it. And they're the lucky ones! Some just get killed. Some get sent to other dimensions like convicts on the ships to Australia. And it's all because...

Everyone Has A God Complex - It's like fascism and altruism had a baby and that baby grew up to believe it was God. Some of the people they lock up or execute haven't even killed anyone, just committed a few robberies. So what? Bang 'em up for life! And the goodies don't even lock up all the baddies. They pick and choose who they imprison based on... I don't know... how nice they think they could be if someone was only nice to them? If they had similar childhoods? Whether they're physically attracted to them? If they have a "connection"? Maybe it's what color costume they're wearing and whether it clashes or co-ordinates. Might as well be. Still, you can't tell these people anything because...

They're The Best At What They Do... NOT! - This applies to many CW/DC heroes but The Flash is the king of incompetence. Does he ever win a fight? Not on his own, that's for sure, and not with anyone that matters, either. No wonder he needs about twenty people to help him. No wonder they call themselves "Team Flash". They're doing all the work! About the only thing The Flash is consistently good at is rescuing people from burning buildings. He can put out out fires, too, mostly by running in circles, which is what he does best. He should leave his day job with the Central City Police Department and join the Central City Fire Department instead. Added to that, his tagline is "The Fastest Man Alive" but it seems as though every other episode someone gets to say "I think they may be even faster than Barry". The whole conceit is a lie, which is only fair since... 

Everyone Lies To Everyone Else ALL THE TIME! - Here's a good drinking game. Take a shot every time any character lies to a friend, lover, relative or colleague about something it is absolutely obvious they should not be hiding from them. And two shots every time anyone comes out with some variant of "From now on, no more lies." when the lie is inevitably revealed. You'll never see the ending of any episode because you'll be totally shitfaced. Still, I guess it doesn't much matter whether you tell the truth when...

There Are No Consequences - Lies are always forgiven just like life-threatening injuries always turn out to be no more than a flesh wound. Almost every episode of The Flash has someone, usually The Flash, since he is the world's least-skilled, least self-aware, most overconfident superhero, being stabbed, blown up, set on fire or beaten to within an inch of their lives. It happens less frequently in Roswell:NM but it still happens several times every season. Sometimes, when it happens, people just get up and carry on as if they'd tripped on a kerb. Other times, they need life-saving surgery. Either way, on average it seems to take the unpowered civilians at most a couple of days to recover while all speedsters are fully fit in minutes thanks to the mysterious and previously undocumented healing powers of the Speed Force (Really, do not get me started on the Speed Force...). If it ever does turn out to have been something fatal, no problem! Just go back in time for a do-over or pop across to another Earth and grab a doppleganger to replace whoever just died. Swapping deaders out for alts always seems to work. Going backwards or forwards in time to fix your mistakes? Not so much because...

The Multiverse Is Fine But Time Travel's A Bitch - This mostly applies to The Flash which, although I did not realise this until I watched it, is a show about time travel. I knew Legends was, because the guy who put that team together is called Rip Hunter, Time Master but I haven't watched that one yet so I'll save any comments about it for the future, which seems appropriate. I do remember The Flash time-travelling in the comics. He did it sometimes because it's well-established in DC continuity that anyone who can run (Or fly.) fast enough can break the time barrier but I don't remember it being the main subject of every storyline, which it certainly has been in the three seasons of The Flash I've watched so far. Unfortunately for the writers - and the audience - as everyone certainly ought to know by now, it is quite literally beyond the ability of the human mind to conceptualize time travel so naturally not one of the storylines make any sense. The concept of the multiverse, on the other hand, is surprisingly easy to get your head around. Just give all the Earths a number and we're fine with it, especially if you throw in a monorail or two for visual reference so we  always know where we are. Wait, what do you mean, that's outside the...

Special Effects Budget? What Special Effects Budget? - Super-speed is very hard to illustrate with a static 2D image, which is why all you get in comics is motion lines and freeze-frames. As anyone who's seen the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie knows, it used to be even harder to portray someone running superhumanly fast convincingly on film but that was several special effects eras ago and now super-speed looks pretty good even in a cheap TV show. Of course, motion lines and freeze-frames are still pretty much all you see but they look really pretty and very dramatic. Meanwhile in Roswell: New Mexico the budget stretches to some 1970s disco lighting and people holding their arms out and pointing but it doesn't matter because...

Acting > CGI - The visual effects may be, shall we say, variable but the acting in all the CW shows I've seen is way, way better than it ought to be. Okay, Max is a plank but the same actor plays Max's clone, Jones and Jones is creepy as hell, so clearly Max is a plank on purpose. This becomes especially apparent in The Flash where, thanks to the aforementioned multiple Earth situation, half the cast end up playing various versions of the same character, which gives the actors a fantastic opportunity to show off their versatility. Every time it happens, the new variant character is significantly and convincingly different from all the others. It's impressive and also highly entertaining...

And I could go on. Believe me. But I'll leave it there for now. I can't imagine anyone wants to hear much more of my sarcastic, back-handed praise for some old TV shows no-one watches any more. 

Maybe I'll come back for another round when I've finished the two series, which at the rate I'm going is likely to be sometime next Christmas. I'm pretty sure I'll have a lot more to say by then. 

Or maybe I ought to wait until I've watched Legends too. And I know if I'm doing this at all I ought to watch bloody Arrow, even though I really don't want to...

Carded

I'm not sure where I first heard about DC Dual Force. Probably MMO Bomb or MassivelyOP, unless maybe it was NME. For a music magazine, they do run a lot of gaming news, some of it quite random.

I may not have paid much attention to which site I was looking at but at least I registered the salient points:

1. Free
2. Steam
3. DC

Put all three together and there seemed no reason not to give it a try. I'm enough of a DC fan to get mildly excited at the thought of just about anything that might feature one of my favorite characters. Granted, most times it's just it's Batman again, but I can always hope.

As far as I can gather, the game is supposed to be DC's answer to the highly-rated Marvel Snap. I already added that one to my Steam account weeks ago but I haven't yet gotten around to playing it. I must not be such a Marvel fan, obviously, although as I was running through my mental list of Favorite Characters From Superhero Comics just now, it did seem to be mostly names from Marvel that drifted to the top. I can thank the relentless over-exposure of the last few years for that, I guess.

Both games are DCGs or DCCGs or whatever the acronym is. Collectable card games in which there aren't any actual cards. I have no idea whether the gameplay is identical or even similar, not having played both of them (Probably could have done that before I decided to write this post) but people do seem to like comparing the two so I guess it's at least in the same general ballpark.

DCDF has a "Mixed" rating on Steam, which seems to reflect not so much a meh response as a psychotic division. From the reviews I read, people either absolutely love it or utterly despise it. Very little middle ground.

Having played for nearly three and half hours - a couple of lengthy sessions - I find myself weirdly in sympathy with both camps. I spent most of the time thinking "This is a total waste of my time. It's half-assed nonsense. I'll just have another go..." I wouldn't mind playing again right now...

The game begins with a Tutorial in which - guess who? - Batman takes it upon himself to show you how to play. There's a framing device that I found amusing; Bats keeps beginning to explain some technical feature he thinks is important but before he can get into it he gets interrupted by some emergency and we have go sort it out, which is when the actual instruction happens. Learning by doing rather than yawning through yet another Batman Knows Best lecture. Jason Todd must be laughing his cape off.

Other than the actual gameplay, the tutorial involves voice acting, comic panels and speech balloons, which not unreasonably creates the impression there's going to be some form of narrative structure or storyline to the game. As far as I can tell, there is not. Once you hit the game proper, all of that goes away. At least, it did during the eight or nine rounds I played. Maybe it comes back later but I doubt it.

I'm guessing the nearest you'll get to a plot is in Comics mode. There are a number of Modes, in one of which, Comics, you get to play through the events that occured in specific published issues. Well, you do if you imagine them as comics produced for pre-school children, the kind with a single picture on every page and just the odd caption to explain the extremely basic plot. Oh, and a lot of sound effects apparently lifted verbatim from the ultra-camp 'sixties Batman TV show. 

This perfectly sums up my issue with most, if not all, of the superhero video games I've ever played. They all seem to have been designed by people who have not only never read an actual comic but who have taken all of their cues from the kind of cultural commentators who believe the form exists purely and simply for the entertainment of very small children or adults with an extremely low IQ. 

Given that the absolutely least interesting thing about superhero comics over the last forty or fifty years has been all the punching each other in the face, I find this quite peculiar. It's not as though other media haven't moved on from the 1950s stereotype. I mean, I know a lot of non super-hero fans complain about the final act of every Marvel movie being one long fight scene but even those critics acknowledge the two hours of soap opera melodrama and would-be witty badinage that comes before the explosions.

In superhero games it's just thump thump thump. It certainly is in this one.

I'm not saying it's not fun. It is quite fun. What I'm saying is that this kind of gameplay has absolutely nothing to do with the reasons any of these characters ever became famous enough for anyone to care about them in the first place. The designers are relying one hundred per cent on the recognition factor to pull eyes to their game without understanding why people recognize the characters to begin with.

Of course, if it featured wholly original characters no-one outside the company had ever heard of, no-one would be playing it at all, so I totally understand why they're doing it...

The question is whether seeing a bunch of familiar names and costumes on screen is enough, when none of those characters either act or speak in any way whatsoever like their originals. And no, it's not.

Honestly, it might be, if there was even the smallest hat-tip to authenticity, so you at least felt you were looking at the same characters you grew up with. They do change all the time as different writers and artists offer their interpretations after all. In DCDF, there's not the least concession to any of that prior history. The mechanics randomly team villains with heroes and pit longtime allies against each other for absolutely no discernible reason. Authenticity is clearly the last thing on anyone's mind. 

At first I couldn't really figure out what was going on. I'm long past the time when I knew what was current in the DC Universe so for a moment I thought maybe some of these people had switched sides. Certainly, over the years, a lot of villains have gone straight and the odd hero has turned bad, although it rarely lasts long. After a couple of rounds, though, I realised it was just opportunistic game mechanics in action.

There is a spurious veneer of canonical coherency. As a deckbuilder, the game groups the cards, to an extent, by having you pick from Teams. Each Leader (You get two Leaders in each Deck.) has their own Team, which is vaguely consistent with expectations but the whole thing falls down when you realise you can pair a Hero with a Villain as your two Leaders if you want and then your whole hand is just a mishmash of good and evil.

I had Poison Ivy and Batman working together. And Flash and Harley Quinn. I could just about accept that as not wholly egregious. Ivy and Harley have both worked with heroes before, when it suited them. I don't think anyone's going to be making the same allowances for The Joker or Doomsday, though. You can pair Doomsday with Superman or The Joker with Batman if you want and they'll work together as happily as though they weren't mortal enemies and (In at least some continuities.) each other's murderers.

This is the sort of thing that annoys me even while I'm telling myself it really doesn't matter. I know it's just a dumb card game that only exists as a bit of mindless fun meant to make money but I can't get past eighty years of history that easily. The gameplay may be moderately compelling but the lack of context keeps getting in the way. 

I keep asking myself  "Why is any of this happening?" and coming up with nothing but "Because". And just because isn't enough.

All told, I'm not sorry I gave the game a try. I'm not even saying I won't play it a little more although I suspect even its limited appeal will fade quite fast. I am a little disappointed by just how cynically exploitative the use of the characters seems to be. I wasn't expecting much but I got less than that.

Even the art, which I've seen mentioned by negative reviewers as the game's only saving grace, isn't that impressive. Much of it looks souless and calculating, lacking the personal feel I'd expect from even the weaker artists working on the comcs themselves. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if some of it wasn't done by some of those same artists - it does look like the kind of thing people knock out for a few dollars a sketch at comicons.

Having exposed myself to the DC version of an online collectible card game, I suppose my next logical step is to do the same with their frenemy across the panel borders. I might as well. I already have it installed. 

Marvel Snap has a much better reputation so my expectations are higher this time. We'll see if they're diappointed once more or if I come back a convert. Place your bets now.

The Fiery Paw or How I Spent My Saturday

I was planning to include a bit more about Bard and the help the AI gave me in coming up with a name for my character in Ship of Heroes but the write-up ran long and I had to cut that section. Every silver cloud has a grey lining or something like that, so since I had both the time and the inclination I thought I might spin up a whole post about it. Aren't you glad I had nothing better to do yesterday?

Let's start with the full text of my question and Bard's reply :

I'd like a list of ten names for a female superhero with fire-related powers and a feline appearance.

Here is a list of ten names for a female superhero with fire-related powers and a feline appearance:

1. Felidae
2. Pyre
3. Ember
4. Feline Flame
5. Flameclaw
6. Cataclysm
7. Firetail
8. Inferno
9. Ashes
10. Phoenix

These names are all evocative of the superhero's feline appearance and fire powers. They are also strong and memorable, which is important for a superhero.

Here is a brief explanation of each name:

• Felidae is the scientific name for the cat family, so this name is a perfect fit for a feline superhero.
• Pyre is a funeral fire, which is associated with both fire and death. This name could be a reference to the superhero's dangerous powers or to her ability to defeat her enemies.
• Ember is a small piece of glowing coal, which is a symbol of both fire and new beginnings. This name could be a reference to the superhero's fiery powers or to her potential to make the world a better place.
• Feline Flame is a simple but effective name that combines the superhero's two main characteristics.
• Flameclaw is another simple but effective name that highlights the superhero's sharp claws and fiery powers.
• Cataclysm is a natural disaster that causes widespread damage. This name could be a reference to the superhero's destructive powers or to her ability to prevent disasters from happening.
• Firetail is a reference to the long, bushy tails of some cats. This name could also be a reference to the superhero's fiery powers.
• Inferno is a large and intense fire. This name is a good fit for a superhero with powerful fire powers.
• Ashes are the remains of something that has been burned. This name could be a reference to the superhero's fiery powers or to her ability to rise from the ashes of defeat.
• Phoenix is a mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes. This name could be a reference to the superhero's ability to overcome any challenge.

I hope this list helps you to choose the perfect name for your female superhero!

Felidae

I've noticed that Bard has a tendency to offer more information than you ask for. It's like the keen kid in class who puts up a hand to every question, jiggling in place and calling out "Miss! Miss!" I'm still working my way through Young Sheldon and the similarities between the eleven-year old Sheldon Cooper and Bard are hard to avoid.

Looking at the list, all ten seem like perfectly good superhero names to me. In fact, they look like names that must already have been used somewhere, although with one exception I couldn't immediately place any of them. I imagine everyone reading this knows who Phoenix is but the only other ones I was sure I'd seen before were Pyre and Inferno and I couldn't recall exactly where that was.

Pyre

To find out, I ran all ten through Google, using just the name and the word "superhero" as the search term and to my considerable surprise it appears half of them have never been used by anyone, including the one I chose, Fireclaw. I would happily have bet money that one was too obvious not to have been picked up already. I guess it's mine now, since I'm in print with it.

The other Bard Originals are Feline Flame, Cataclysm, Firetail and Ashes. Again, I'm dumbfounded to find no-one apparently ever thought to use Firetail. There is a Pokemon of that name but Pokemon are not superheroes so it doesn't remotely count. There's an Ash but no Ashes and of course Cataclysm has been used many times as the name of an event involving superheroes but never for an actual superhero, at least according to Google.

Ember

With the exception of Phoenix, even the names that come up as already in use are pretty obscure. Felidae is an open source character, Pyre refers to three different, very minor Marvel characters, Ember is an equally obscure Wonder Woman villain, so technically not even a superhero, although that would be splitting hairs since they all change sides all the time. 

Inferno at least has the distinction of being a very minor character at both the majors. For DC she's an associate of the Legion of Super-Heroes while at Marvel he's one of Inhumans. I was mistaken in believing I'd heard the name in either context.

Props to Bard for both originality and canny cribbing, then. If it wasn't for the thudding faux pas of Phoenix right at the end, that would have been pretty much a perfect score.

Feline Flame

As for the descriptions, at first I thought they were fatuous and unecessary but as I come to look at them more closely I find they're more cogent and purposeful than I realised. If I was writing the back story of a character I planned to roleplay I might very well use some of Bard's ideas.

On this evidence, coming up with ideas for new
superheroes seems to be a thing Bard can do reasonably well. It's nice to find something! The obvious next step, of course, was to get one of the other AIs to show us what these superheroes might look like.

For that I went to NightCafe. I never go anywhere else for my AI Art needs these days. It's so convenient and offers so much choice. I have nearly five hundred credits saved so I thought I'd splash out and use one of the more capable models.

Flameclaw

I chose DreamShaper XL alpha2. It's only a credit a shot and I get five free credits a day so why not?

For the prompt I used each of the suggested names plus the exact wording from my query to Bard, in the following format "Felidae: a female superhero with fire-related powers and a feline appearance". I considered adding a style or a genre but I thought I'd just leave it and see what came out. The result was so good I did the whole lot with just the bare prompt and no further tweaking.

As you can see, the results were both impressive and consistent. As even the least-attentive comics fan can tell you, comic artists differ wildly in style, approach and ability. If you had ten artists draw the same character you might well only be able to it was supposed to be the same hero by the costume. 

Cataclysm

All of DreamShaper's illustrations could quite easily have been drawn by the same hand. There are some differences here and there but things like the shape of the mouth and jaw seem very coherent. Also exhibiting considerable thematic affinity are the costume designs, the color schemes and more concerningly, the skin tones. Even the one actual cat is white! That, along with the equally limited range of body shapes, makes for some interesting talking points about both the superhero comics industry and AI training methods.

The consistent color schemes are less problematic. It makes sense for the colors to be predominantly reds and oranges. Superheroes with fiery powers generally dress to match. Other than the first result, where the name Felidae, "the scientific name for the cat family", as Bard helpfully explains, nudges DreamShaper into producing an actual cat, the "feline appearance" part of the prompt seems to be restricted to cosplay cat-ears and the occasional set of claws.

Firetail

Historically, AI art has always had a real issue with hands. That's fair; so do many human artists. It has been improving but of the ten results here, not a single one shows two correctly articulated, five-fingered hands. A couple avoid the issue by not showing them at all, a couple more conceal the issue with flames but just about every visible hand looks distorted in some fashion. Some of them horribly so.

You can get away with a lot with superheroes, who by definition can never be said to be "normal", but some of these "hands" are particularly disturbing. In the case of Flameclaw, I think the AI has tried to represent the name literally by giving her paws. If so, it hasn't worked. 

Nothing in Phoenix's name explains the seven distorted digits on he right hand or the weirdly

Inferno

overlong talons on her right. At least it marks her out as different from her X-Men namesake, with whom she otherwise shares a worrying number of features, not least the very similar costume. I do really like the way Bard has managed to keep the feline theme going by shaping Phoenix's hair into two cat-ear tufts, though. That's smart.

I like all of the images. Apart from those hands and a few minor infelicities that could probably be cleaned up in an edit, I'd be happy to use any of them for a profile picture if I was playing that character. 

Unsurprisngly, my favorites are the true catgirl, Felidae and the most cartoony, Firetail. I'm a superhero fan, sure, but I do like my funny animals and my cartoons. I'm wondering now if all that fire and flame behind Firetail isn't really her fire tail. You know, I think it most probably is! That makes her my pick of them all.

As a supplementary question, I asked Bard to come up with some names for a superhero team the my heroes could form:

Please give me five names for a superhero team involving some or all of the above heroes. It should again reflect their feline nature, their fiery powers, or both.

Ashes

Sure, here are five names for a superhero team involving feline and fire-related powers:

• The Fiery Felines
• The Cinder Cats
• The Inferno Squad
• The Phoenix Force
• The Cataclysmic Claws

The first two are good. I particularly like The Cinder Cats. The rest aren't bad but having the name of one of the heroes in the team name suggests some kind of proprietorial relationship. It'd be like calling The Avengers "Cap's Crusaders". 

I asked Bard to have another go:

Those are all good but can you give me five more that don't include any of the names of the individual heroes (So no Phoenix or Inferno, for example.)

That got me some genuinely impressive suggestions:

Sure, here are five names for a superhero team involving feline and fire-related powers that don't include any of the individual heroes' names:

• The Wildfires

  

  Phoenix

• The Blazing Cats
• The Ashwalkers
• The Felis Flames
• The Fiery Paw

I'd use any of those in, say, a superhero tabletop roleplaying campaign. I really like The Fiery Paw. It sounds like a feline superhero version of the Black Hand Gang. It would work even better for an individual hero.

Bard was pretty pleased with what it had come up with, too. It likes to pat itself on the back occasionally and it did this time:

"These names are all unique and memorable, and they reflect the team's feline nature and fiery powers. They also sound like they would be a force to be reckoned with!"

Bard's right about them being unique, too. I checked. No-one's used any of them.

Maybe I will.

The Enemy Of Good

Shintar has an excellent post up about Disney's new Star Wars show, Andor. In her opening paragraph she articulates precisely something I've been sensing of late but have struggled to define:

"I'm perhaps not the most discerning Star Wars fan, which is why I don't really get it whenever people get super upset about not liking some new piece of content. I'm generally happy if I derive some sort of enjoyment from it, even if it's not perfect, and I'm okay with not everything being good or appealing to me personally."

For a while now I've been wondering why so many people seem to get so upset when TV shows or movies or games don't manage to be perfect or even excellent. It reminds me of Garrison Keilor's Prairie Home Companion radio show, with its unforgettable tagline:“That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” 

The Lake Wobegon Effect, as it's now known, is something of a mirror image to the better-known Imposter Syndrome. While it is, somewhat surprisingly to a non-mathematician, technically possible for a majority of a group to be above average, plainly not everything can be. Why we seem to expect such a level of perfection from our entertainment media baffles me.

It's similar to the widely-held belief that "Good enough is not good enough", a ludicrous perversion of language that figuratively makes my teeth grate. Good enough is, by definition, good enough and good enough is what most TV shows, movies and games are: good enough to function as intended, hold the attention for an appropriate period of time and leave the audience at least moderately entertained.

To expect everything to be worthy of a five star review makes a complete mockery of the entire process of evaluation although it might be a straw man argument to suggest that's the prevailing mood these days. Things aren't quite that bad - yet. Four stars still count as a recommendation in most quarters. I have, however, heard it said on multiple occasions that a three star rating means something's not worth bothering with. It's supposedly the mark of the mediocre and we should all have more respect for ourselves than to waste our valuable time on anything so commonplace.

That seems to me more than just shortsighted and unreasonable. It seems smug and smugness is something that always raises my hackles. (No-one likes a raised hackle, least of all me.) At the risk of sounding like someone from a 1970s network TV adaptation of a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel, as a general principle I'd prefer to focus on what I like about something rather than on what I think is wrong with it, although I freely admit it's often a lot more amusing to do the latter.

I'm also not suggesting there aren't many egregious examples of poor quality, conception or execution that fully deserve to be called out for their laziness, ineptitude, incompetence or odium. When something genuinely needs to be cut down to size, by all means bring the sharp knives.

I'm just saying there needs to be some sense of proportion. A sitcom with a half-baked set-up that "would never happen" hardly needs to be treated as some kind of crime against culture. Spin-offs and sequels that show familiar characters in an unfamiliar light don't need to be torn to shreds as divergence from holy writ. I think it goes without saying, even though I appear to be saying it anyway, that nothing in popular fiction or entertainment justifies a death threat.

With all that said, it's still not always easy to be sure where to take a stand. Azuriel also has an interesting post up this week, entitled "Commercialization of Evil", in which he discusses the growing tendency for IP owners to make the fullest use of all of their assets by re-purposing characters traditionally known for their villainy in more appealing and therefore potentially lucrative roles.

As I mentioned in a comment on Azuriel's post, I was somewhat taken aback this week to spot, in the children's department in the bookshop where I work , a book called Arkhamaniacs. This little gem features a cast of Batman villains including The Joker, Killer Croc, Bane and Scarecrow, sociopathic mass-murderers all, as the kind of "colorful and wacky characters" little kids love.

By all accounts I've seen, it's a well-written, beautifully drawn, nuanced and satisfying take on the familiar characters we all know from the regular comics. I'd read it. On the other hand, as Azuriel says of the ongoing Disneyfication of Disney's own rogues' gallery, "whatever cautionary tale might have existed in these characters’ stories becomes muddled and unrecognizable through the commercialization process".

Azuriel also observes "We probably should not be relying on Disney movies to teach morality to children in the first place", which is something of a discussion point in itself, one that reminded me of a conversation I had at work this week about Alan Moore and his recently reiterated belief that an interest in superheros can be "a pre-cursor to fascism."  

Deconstructing that would be a whole other post but it's curious to note that Alan actually specifies adults who demonstrate such an interest as the danger, not children, his point being that entertainment more suitably directed at "12 year old boys" is infantilizing when consumed by grown-ups. 

Alan Moore, despite his deep connection to the form, has always been at best ambivalent about superheroics, so nothing he's saying now is either new or surprising. Some of it may even be true. If so, the problem began well before his groundbreaking, genre-busting work on Marvelman and Watchmen. 

It's tempting to examine that further but before I get sidetracked into a ten thousand word essay on the ironies of an artform that began quite specifically as a means stirring up anti-fascist feeling morphing into a seedbed for future totalitarianism, I'll pull back to the point I wanted to make and the reason I brought all this up in the first place: I believe much of what I consider to be my own personal morality to have been formed by the superhero comics I read as a child.

These things do have a profound influence on the way we think, or at least they can. I grew up reading superhero comics in the period when most of the heroes tried to do the (Socioculturally) right thing most of the time. Sometimes bad things happened but never at their intent. Sometimes they went against the established authorities but only when those authorities were undeniably corrupt. It wasn't far off the days of the Hollywood Western, where you could tell the good guy by the color of his hat.

As I noted in a post about the DC series Titans, things have moved on since then. I was thinking about that only yesterday, as I was watching my current obsession, Veronica Mars. 

Veronica Mars, as I'm sure almost everyone reading this will know, is a TV series from the late 'aughts starring the wonderful Kristen Bell as the titular Veronica, a high school student who also operates as a private detective. 

I own all four seasons on DVD and I've been meaning to watch it for years but of course it was only when it turned up on Amazon Prime that I finally caught up with this seminal show. As Shintar says about her new favorite, Andor, enjoyable though it is to be able to watch a lot of shows casually, it's even better "to not just enjoy something, but to truly be a fan".

And I am definitely a fan of Veronica Mars. I love the writing, razor sharp and frequently metatextual as it is. The acting is all round excellent, with Kirsten Bell and Jason Dohring especially, pretty much note-perfect. The ensemble cast and the increasingly baroque plot remind me strongly of other shows I love but with the exception of Buffy I'm not sure any are better. I guess I'll have to wait 'til I've seen all four seasons to be sure.

The thing is... all of the characters are arguably just as morally problematic as any superhero. Everyone's choices are always guided by personal ethics, never by collective morality, and the ends are always considered to justify the means. As for abiding by the tenets of civil society, absolutely no-one in the show, hero or villain, hesitates for one second to act outside the law whenever it suits their purpose, even for trivialities.

Veronica herself frequently feels bad about some violation of privacy, breach of trust or plainly illegal act she's engaged in - but only ever after the fact and usually only when it goes wrong and rebounds to her personal discomfort. Worse, experience never stops her doing the same thing again. And she's the exception in being bothered by conscience at all. Most of the rest of the cast barely seem to register the ironies involved in engaging someone to spy on a lover, friend or family member. So long as they find out what they believe they need to know, it's all good.

I'm not exactly sure why I began to notice all of this so definitively. It is the default position for just about every private detective show ever made, after all. I think maybe it was the sheer incongruity of the high school setting combined with the relentless reliance on extra-legal processes required by every investigation. Once I began to notice just how intrusive the actions of the supposed heroes were, how willing they were to lie and steal, break and enter, pass themselves off as officials, create and use false credentials and basically do anything at all to get what they wanted, I couldn't help but notice how very grey the boundaries were becoming between them and the villains.

Even by the standards of these kinds of narratives, the underlying assumption that the law only matters when you're using it to get the result you believe to be right seems jarring. I'm used to seeing the good guys bend the law or even break it but Veronica Mars and her crew barely seem to acknowledge it exists, except when they need a cop to read someone their rights after they've been exposed as a murderer or an extortionist or a fraud. My hope is that all of this is leading, eventually, to some kind of moral epiphany at least for some of the cast. It's a smart enough show for that not to seem like a forlorn hope. And I am only six episodes into Season Two...

Perhaps because I love the show so much, once I'd started to notice these ethical inconsistencies, it set me wondering how common they were in other media I rate highly. The uncomfortable answer is "very". I'm not going to make a list but my feeling is most TV shows and almost all mmorpgs I've enjoyed lately wouldn't hold up to even the gentlest of moral examinations.

And why should they? If we oughtn't to expect all entertainment to be good, why should we expect it all to be.. erm... good? If I don't have a problem with some entertainment media being culturally worthless, why should I balk at its being morally vacuous?

I guess because badly written, filmed, photographed, scripted or acted entertainment doesn't really do much more than waste someone's time, whereas bad role models can ruin someone's life? Then again, who says who gets to be a role model and who decides which role is bad? And does anyone really follow role models, anyway.

Is Veronica Mars even a bad role model? I'm not sure. Yes, she does a lot of things that make me uncomfortable, but she's self-aware, loyal to her friends, always trying to do what she at least believes is the right thing... There are worse ways to be, especially when you're in your teens. And you can cut someone a lot of moral slack after her boyfriend's dad's locked her in a freezer and set it on fire.

I'm not coming to any conclusions here. It's more that once you start noticing this stuff it's hard to stop. Far from making me shy away, though, it makes me want to dig in deeper, which is one of the saving graces of all popular fiction, regardless of quality; the closer you look, the more you see. 

Maybe that's why not being the most discerning of consumers, paradoxically, makes me one of the most invested. I commit very easily, something that makes most of my viewing, gaming and reading experiences more satisfying than perhaps the objective quality of the material deserves.

I'm still playing Noah's Heart, by the way. Every goddamn day.

Before And After Science -or- Imperfect Fate

I finished watching The Imperfects. It was a ride. I don't believe there was a moment when any of it made any sense but who cares?

There was a time, before the MCU turned superhero movies into the kind of money machine Chris Roberts could only dream of, when "comic book" was shorthand for "makes no sense". If a review said a movie had a "comic-book sensibility" it wasn't usually a compliment. (Although it could be if the film was showing in arthouses.) Generally, what it meant was a lot of surface but very little substance and a plot you could drive trucks through, sideways.

These days there's a touch more nuance to the term but TV shows adapted from comics still tend towards the looser end of the narrative spectrum. Ironically, they still sometimes hang together better than the comics that inspire them but that's not always a high bar.

Nothing in the main titles or publicity I saw about The Imperfects said it was based on a comic but it had to have been, didn't it? I would have put money on it. No-one was taking that bet so I did a little digging instead. 

Seems there was a comic called The Imperfects, published by Marvel in 2005. Full title: Nemesis: The Imperfects. It ran for six issues in a limited series. 

The comic book was itself a spin-off or at least a sidebar. In 2004, Marvel partnered with Electronic Arts to produce "superhero fighting games" based both on existing Marvel properties and new IPs. "Marvel Nemesis: The Rise of the Imperfects" was the first - and, as it turned out, the only - co-production to come out of that alliance.

The game launched on both Playstation 2 and Playstation Portable (PSP), apparently with radically different gameplay. Neither was successful. It came out on most of the other console platforms around at the time, too, but there was no PC release. 

The plan was for a series of games and comics featuring the characters to follow but the game bombed and that was the end of that. Marvel and EA terminated their arrangement in 2008 with no further games appearing in either this or any other series.

At first glance all of this would seem to have nothing to do with the Netflix 2022 series of approximately the same name. I'm about as sure as I can be that it doesn't but there is one conceptual conceit the two hold in common and it's a striking co-incidence.

Both superhero teams, if you can call them that, get their powers as a direct result of being experimented on by a scientist, variously described as "mad", "evil" or "rogue". In the comic-book that's just one more would-be supervillain but the television Imperfects is without any doubt the most virulently anti-science piece of science-fiction I have ever seen. It virtually amounts to anti-science propaganda. The word "scientist" is interchangeable with "villain" throughout the entire narrative arc.

In the comic/game Dr. Niles van Roekel uses his "super-genius intellect" to genetically engineer a bunch of "test subjects" into super-powered "prototypes". They all have various problems, illnesses or disabilities that his experiments could, theoretically, cure or improve but the results are less than ideal. They're known as "Imperfects" because he hasn't quite "ironed out the kinks" of his process just yet.

Although Dr Niles is "evil", it transpires he's made himself like that for good reason, or what he sees as good reason, anyway: "A race of slavers had taken many of his people prisoners and he had to drop his compassion for others in order to win the war on his home world. He escaped the planet with many other resistance members and he had chosen Earth in order to create an army to help him free his planet from slavery."

In the Netflix series, the Imperfects are also the result of unauthorised genetic experimentation by Dr. Alex Sarkov (Superbly and hilariously portrayed by Rhys Nicholson.) and an unspecified number of scientists working with or for him. The subjects of his experiments are children and adolescents with potentially life-threatening conditions. Sarkov's treatments are supposed to effect a cure or at least alleviate the symptoms but when the treatment is withdrawn there are side-effects, which just happen to be the exact equivalent of super-powers.

Without going into too much detail for fear of spoilers, as the series progresses it becomes clear that, while almost everyone else sees Sarkov as either evil or mad or both, he has a much more nuanced worldview. By his own lights, he is trying to do something positive both for his subjects and the world, but in order to push past the inevitable ethical and beaurocratic barriers he, like van Roekel, has had to harden himself so as not to feel any compassion.

Those are quite similar set-ups but that's as far as it goes. I've had a flip through some of the issues of the comic (Everything's online, ins't it?) and the whole series is pretty much fight scenes, as you might expect given its provenance. It's a notable co-incidence, all the same.

As for the show, it's one insane revelation after another. Everyone swaps motivations like hats. The side-effects/superpowers morph and warp to suit the plot. There's no actual fourth wall breaking but some of the dialog indicates a level of metawareness that gives the whole affair a virtually cubist perspective. 

The final episode is a massive, unrelenting, unashamed pitch for a second season that so far hasn't been commissioned. Given that reviews have been pretty good and public opinion is favorable (78% on Rotten Tomatoes right now.) if the viewing numbers match, I'd say the omens were favorable.

Then again, what do I know? As soon as I finished The Imperfects I started watching another Netflix superhero-analog show - Fate: The Winx Saga. I'm almost ashamed to admit it although, as should be obvious by now, I really have no shame where my cultural tastes are concerned.

I watched the first season of Fate:TWS with a degree of disbelief. It's nominally a re-envisioning of a kids TV show called Winx Club that ran, on and off, on Nickolodeon for most of the first two decades of the twenty-first century but you'd never guess if you didn't know.

Winx Club was a vivid, animated, child-friendly series featuring " the adventures of a group of girls known as the Winx, students at the Alfea College for Fairies, who turn into fairies to fight villains." It was squarely aimed at sub-tween girls. Fate:the Winx Saga is "targeted towards an audience of young adults", meaning there's a lot of smouldering, swearing and sex. Also some violence and torture, a lot of alchohol and the occasional drug reference. Something for everyone, pretty much.

The first season was a critical disaster. Rotten Tomatoes, with a critics rating of 37%, headed their entry "Flat, flimsy, and forgettable, Fate: The Winx Saga is a fantastical flop that fails to capture the magic of its source material." 

That's harsh but not entirely unfair. I watched the six episode arc, embracing it for the hamfisted farago it was, but when the final episode closed on a cliffhanger I never expected to find out what happened next. Surely no-one would commission a second season?

I was astonished to see a second season slotted in to Netflix' September listings. I was even more astonished to see it go straight to #1 in the Netflix UK chart. 

Happy enough to see it come back, I remembered nothing at all about the show other than a vague, warm feeling that I'd quite enjoyed it. Three episodes into Season Two, I can still barely remember anything that happened in Season One, even when the characters drop retro-expositionary hints. The story made that little of an impression on me.

What I do remember is the feel of the thing, which was mostly teen angst with some awkward humor until the big reveals at the end. The second season feels darker and bleaker, although I'd need to re-watch the first to be sure. Maybe I'm remembering it as cosier than it was. 

The acting and dialog, which I remember as stagey and not all that convincing, haven't improved much but the show benefits from having a likeable cast, possibly the only holdover, other than some names and locations, from the original IP. Even the bad fairies don't seem that bad although the new villain is more than adequately nasty.

Fate: The Winx Saga isn't a comic book adaptation either but it sure feels like one. The characters may be "fairies", just like the characters in The Imperfects are "monsters", as everyone in both shows misses no opportunity to remind each other and the audience, but they all behave and act just like superheroes. They're all defined first by their powers and second by the moral choices they make when they use them. If that's not called "being a superhero" I don't know what it is.

For all its faults, and it has plenty, I'm enjoying Fate:TWS. It's trashy but so were the New York Dolls. I'll be watching the rest of the season and the third, if they get one. I really do have no shame, it seems.

Ironically, one show I keep meaning to write about but never seem to find the right peg to hang the post on, Paper Girls, is based on a comic book, even though no-one in it has super powers of any kind. Maybe that's why, despite getting great reviews and being, y'know, genuinely good, it's not getting a second season.

Fortunately it ended in a less cliffhangery way than most, which made it seem less desperate but also maybe more resigned to its destiny as a one-season show, at least on Prime. Word is the showrunners are hawking it around, looking for another platform to continue the story. I hope they find one. Quality deserves to succeed.

Unfortunately for the less obvious shows, the lesson to be learned seems to be go fast, go hard and don't care too much about whether any of it makes sense. Stranger Things may have come good with its slow burn, low key vision but already the days when something like that was possible on a streaming service seem lost to the past. 

There are too many platforms now, all competing viciously for the same subscriptions. The concept of building an audience over time is becoming as alien to streaming as it used to be to network television. Comic books, video games and cartoons make for great source material but only if they're presented with the same pace and punch that made the originals a success. Slow them down, flesh them out, take them too seriously and you'll be looking at a single season, if you're lucky.

It seems like an odd way to go. After all, in other media isn't it the sequels and long-running franchises that make all the money? As interest in Wrath of the Lich King Classic seems to prove, what people really want is more of what they've already had. 

Why keep throwing the dice?