Happy Birthday Dad!

It's my father's birthday and like so many other special days since I've gone overseas I've had a little trouble catching him. So each year I've been keeping to a tradition where I honor my father's career choice with a panel of my favorite superhero policeman... The original Human Torch.

This year I have a very special page for you, from the fateful Marvel Mystery Comics #7.



What emergency could this be? What justifies frightening the citizens of New York before they've learned that the Human Torch is not their enemy? What is so urgent that, in full fire mode, Jim Hammond must fly down to the sidewalk and run to his friend's house? What matter could possibly be so important that he must scare all of these bystanders in order to quickly contact Johnson?

Why, it must be a truly urgent matter that cannot wait!



Okay, Jim... I know you're excited, and only a few weeks old, and this is a very important decision but... yeah, you could've walked upstairs in non-inferno mode to ask him about this.

But that's okay. That's why there's a training school.

How do you solve a problem like Irene?

I've held off on blogging about Irene Adler because after the double-punch of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Sherlock S2E2 A Scandal in Belgravia everyone seemed to have stated what we need to know about her. They've covered the problems of oversexualizing her, making her a subordinate to Moriarty, making her a love interest, becoming a damsel in distress, giving Sherlock a ridiculous amount of power over her, and the major problem of making it so that she doesn't win out in the end. All of these being things that are not in the slightest canonical (fucking one King does not a Femme Fatale make), undermine the theme of the original story, but somehow appear to be popular in adaptation after adaptation after adaptation.

And while many of you seem to be more focused on Moffat than Ritchie, I think we mostly agree A Scandal in Belgravia was a far better showing, even for all it's flaws. Those of you who haven't seen A Scandal in Belgravia and are jumping to the conclusion that it makes the exact same mistakes Guy Ritchie did in his two movies, you're jumping the gun. Irene's far more formiddable in Sherlock than in either of those movies, she makes a far better showing, and I believe she's placed equal to the level of Moriarty and Mycroft there. At the very least, it's something we can argue about over several seasons. Do my blood presure a favor and actually watch this one before you start throwing the same criticisms Ritchie is deserving of at Moffat.

But there is one big problem that I haven't seen anyone touch on. One major change from the canon that leads to all of the smaller problems with Irene. One major change that is at the core of what pulls the rug out from under those of us who loved the original Scandal in Bohemia story. One major change that betrays a complete misunderstanding of the point of A Scandal in Bohemia and the real reason Irene Adler could win against Sherlock Holmes and walk away from him scott free holding everything she ever wanted.

Stephen Moffat and Guy Ritchie made the exact same mistake that a million fanfic and pastiche writers have before them. They looked at the Rogues Gallery of Sherlock Holmes for a formidable female villain, someone with potential for romance and intrigue, and picked out the perfect-seeming Irene Adler. This is understandable. She's popular among fans, particularly female ones. She's one of his best known opponents, possibly the best known after Moriarty. She looks good in a suit. Her story involves political and sexual intrigue. She's cunning and resourceful. She won.

There's just one small problem.

Irene Adler isn't actually in the Rogues Gallery of Sherlock Holmes.

Look back at A Scandal in Bohemia. She's not the bad guy. She's the good guy. Sherlock's client is the bad guy, wrongly pestering his ex-girlfriend and painting her as a extortionist when all she wants to do is live her life. He lied to Sherlock Holmes. Her explanation for trying to keep a little insurance against future bad behavior from this man is perfectly understandable. The entire story is a misunderstanding.

And that, more than anything else, is why she got to win. Because in addition to being his equal, beating him fair and square, she was also on the side of right and he was the manipulated one.

Listing her among his "villains" is like listing Spider-man as a Daredevil villain.

I think I understand their logic. I love Sherlock Holmes, but there's only a few recurring characters and the active ones are men. But they want a really notable woman, a strong feminine presence (notice I didn't say strong woman character) for female fans to latch onto and straight male fans to be attracted to. And really, we all do. We want a decent dose of estrogen in these stories. Oh, there's Mrs. Hudson and Watson's wives and plenty of the clients, bystanders, victims and villains are women and they run the gamut from smart and willful to pathetic and panicky, but none of them shine like Irene. We love Irene better than any other woman because she was a match to Sherlock and she threw his unbelievable sexism back in his shocked face with three words. So we not only want to see Irene, we don't want her to disappear at the end of the first story like she does in the canon. We want her to come back for a rematch. We want to see her as a regular recurring character.

But because she began as an antagonist, a lot of "further adventures" want to keep that dynamic. So they come up with the interpretation of this character as a badass "Femme Fatale" (a role that in Sherlock's Gallery goes to one Isadora Klein, who lost) and the most coldly clever woman of the canon (actually, Maria Gibson was a hell of a lot more clever than Irene and she would've gotten away with it too if not for those meddling kids) that basically places her somewhere on the supervillain scale. This leads to our next problem.

Supervillains lose.

Oh I know, we've been reading grown-up pessimistic comics for so long we've forgotten this but in Sherlock Holmes stories this remains the rule. The Bad Guy loses. The criminals get caught. Justice prevails. The minor bad guys pay and the major bad guys might dick around for a while before they lose but in the end... Supervillains lose. That's why Sherlock can be the biggest jerk in London and we still love him, because he uses that horrible personality for good and he is very, very effective at it.

And before you say it, yes, Moriarty loses.

Canonically speaking, he loses in the first story he appears in just like everybody else does.

In adaptations it takes a while. That's what makes Moriarty Moriarty. But he always loses in the end. We know this. We expect this. We sat in that theater last month knowing exactly what would happen the second Mycroft said 'Reichenbach.' We'll all be glued to our sets tomorrow even though we're absolutely sure of the outcome. An experimental writer or two might throw this in our faces but the truth of the franchise is that at the climax, two men go over the falls and one man walks away. The supervillain does not walk away.

And so by the rules of the franchise, when we incorrectly position Irene Adler as a supervillain, she loses. And no matter how well you do it (and Moffat does manage this well, while Ritchie's Irene is more a nuisance and a henchwoman than a real threat, Moffat's is a full-fledged crime boss playing at Mycroft's level and poised to win completely at the climax), you're going to miss the appeal of the original story when she loses.

I've run out of synonyms for blinding fury, so bear with me.

I've been blogging for quite some time, and I've had a few of these dry periods where I don't post much and when I do it tends to be something lackluster or sad. I suspect these periods happen because I'm not especially anxious or angry about something fictional (and I have a rule where I try not to blog politics or work) usually use this blog as an outlet for rage. I do this for rational and irrational reasons. I prefer expressing my anger to bottling it up. I've found that if I dedicate some time to writing about my reaction I can often find the underlying truth to it, the real cause of my anger rather than the often frivolous-seeming trigger. It lets me network my outrage, find people who feel the same way about these things and commiserate. And it lets me do some writing that can be clever and beautiful.

I'm not about to say everything on this blog is clever and beautiful, but every once in a while I get a turn of phrase or an analogy that makes me really proud. I think there's a poetry to ranting, if you really get yourself going, and you can come up with some vivid images and phrases to convey your level of upset to someone who is not reacting as severely. I'll often get a little carried away by that and express a higher level of indignation than I feel.

All the more disappointing then, when I run across something so infuriating, so gut-wrenchingly awful and insulting that I can't outline my reasons for it or come up with a pleasing way to express just how terrible I think it is.

I came across that today. The preview for Secret Avengers #21, courtesy the vigilance of David Brothers:



Let's move in for a closer look, just to make sure we're seeing this right.



Yes, that is Captain America saying "I'm going to let my friends torture you" like it's some sort of cool badass fucking thing for him to say.

I agree with David on the reasons this is vile. This subject for Americans is too raw and important to be treated like this.

And maybe it's a trick, and he's just trying to intimidate the guy but you know what? Fuck that. Fuck that stupid idea where it's okay to pretend we don't have any principles like it's not something that treads on the line of not actually having any principles, where it's okay to pretend threat of torture is good because it's not as bad as actual torture.

And oh god, just the thought that this character, the symbol not of everything my culture is but every ideal my culture aspires to be, actually walking out of the room to let someone else do this is so infuriating I can't even verbalize it. I was so angry when I read that page that I had to stand up, and walk back and forth doing breathing exercises so I wouldn't fall into a hyperventilating frenzy at just how careless a treatment of the subject and the character this is.

There's a way to handle this and show the character isn't perfect. Ed Brubaker wrote a scene in the "Winter Soldier" storyline where one of Captain America's colleagues, a Vasily Karpov, tortured a Nazi for information. He didn't interrupt. He in Karpov's territory, outnumbered by Karpov's men, and had the rest of the Invaders and the war effort to think about it. He stood outside the tent brooding, and confronted Karpov about his methods. He showed clear disapproval, but he compromised himself and it was clear to him they only shared a side against a common enemy. And later when Karpov turned out to be a fucking horrible piece of shit it was reinforced that the sorts of people who do these things are bad people, at least. At best, it reinforced for the character that he should never have allowed this sort of shit to go down in a camp he was in, or allied himself with that sort of man.

This? This is bullshit macho posturing. This is "See how badass he acts and sounds?" This is the loophole as a joke to show he's kinda clever, in addition to being unprincipled. This is treating Captain America like one your anti-heroes, because hey, everyone loves them and really they're the only kind of heroes you can write.

Except he's not like them. As David says, he's like Superman and represents the best of us. Captain America is your honest-to-god every good thing from the American culture, everything worth saving of our values, placed into a body that can make a difference in the world. He's the guy who is not only supposed to adhere to the moral standard, he sets it for the other heroes. Your anti-heroes, your fallen noir stars, your monstrous demeanors that cover hearts of gold and tarnished but upward-looking souls will pull this. They're coming from the bottom up, and steeped in the flaws of humanity. Captain America is already up there, though. He's established as an idealized hero, to the point that in the MArvel Universe he is the indicator of which side occupies the moral high ground. Having him do something like this, even in his Steve Rogers super-soldier leading a covert team garb, Says something about the moral high ground.

Even as a trick (ETA: It is not a trick), this is the further dilution of the sincere sadistic brutality into acceptability as "tough tactics." This is a complete misunderstanding of Captain America, the subject of torture, and the reality of what's going on in the United States right now.

The only thing left to say is Fuck You, Warren Ellis. Avengers is not Nextwave. Captain America does not fucking act like that, especially not for one of your cheap fucking jokes.

I don't often blog about work, but then I rarely think about the future.

I seem to be settled into another one of those weird phases of disconnect, where I'm removed from the rest of my social circle at the same time I begin to consume media created by others rather than make it myself. It's weird, you'd think these periodic fits of reclusiuveness would be the perfect time to order my life, do creative projects, or even just blog but instead I read, go through all of the analysis and reaction in my head and never sit down to type it out.

I don't consider this a depression, though. I've been depressed in the past and my avoidance of creativity and society coincided with withdrawal at work. This is more like when I first got to Germany, when I threw myself into my job and found myself without energy for the rest of my life for a few months. I'm doing the same at my new base. I've gotten very energetic at work, where I'm currently filling the position of what's not even a glorified secretary, where I answer phones, track jobs for the other shops, and give briefings. For a few months I was on the lovely, relaxing night shift and was able to spend most of my time focusing on getting fit. Then I spent a period of time where I rushed into work and spent my first hour in preparation for a briefing which was actually in preparation for another briefing that turned out to be in preparation for a third briefing later in the day. In between this I answer phones and coordinate things. When I'm not doing that I'm spewing profanity because I've run across inefficiency, incompetence or sexism. I spend a good 95% of my day talking. About once a week I lose my voice.

This isn't my actual job, though. Sometime in the near future I'll be moved to my actual job, which is still removed from the parts of my job that I love, which mainly involved taking things apart and putting them back together. It's still technical work, but less of the blood and bones of the machine than I'd prefer. I'm in a unit that's filled with software technicians, and I am a hardware technician. I don't know what they're required to know, but a disproportionate number of them suffer from Alpha Male Nerd syndrome and I'm too old now to be dealing with that sort of bullshit from people who were in middle school when I was getting Ace Awards in Electronics Principles. (I don't even think most of these brats took Electronics Principles.)

I was getting quite depressed for a little while, because I'd worried a recent career field realignment had forever taken me away from the basic electronics work that I enjoy so much. Then I got my promotion study material, and found that even though a lot is cut out there's still enough of the basics to keep me happy. Still, the further I get from circuits and signalwaves the less joy and pride I take in my work. Which brings me to the ever-present question of what I'm going to do when I leave the military. No one stays in forever, and my first enlistment was basically a way to push final plans for the future down a few years. Sooner or later I'm going to have to take up a second career. All my life when I've considered higher learning I and everyone around me assumed I'd go for the softer social sciences or liberal arts, because I find it so easy to dedicate my leisure time to that and I disliked math so much in school. The idea of physics, engineering, or any of the hard sciences was not even brought up. But I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't go into engineering. It's not something I study on my own, but it's the natural direction to go now that I've spent so many years in an electronics career field to realize what parts of the work I enjoy, and more importantly what parts of the work I can do best.

Winding Down.

Every time I've come up with a post idea in the past few days I've put it aside until after the New Year, because around this time of year everyone else is doing an end of year wrap-up or something about resolutions.

This is a fairly ridiculous impulse, because I never do an end of the year wrap-up. My memory is geared towards things like the exact wording that was used on the phone, a national stock number, or the name of an obscure Wonder Woman villain. I'm not particularly good with dates, as my family (who have seen their birthdays forgotten nearly every year for the past decade) would attest. A year-end wrap-up would require me to remember things from earlier in the year, and even more dauntingly, remember just when in the year they happened.

In the meantime, I don't place much stock in New Year's Resolutions, because anything that requires more than a couple weeks is planning too far ahead for me. I hate planning. I went out of my way to form a lifestyle which excuses long-term planning, I'm not going to muck that up with New Year's Resolutions. Instead, I do End of Year Resolutions and this year I have busted all but one of them.

Still, if anyone is interested in a snapshot of this point in my life:

I have work this weekend, so I'm spending a quiet evening at home rather than going out.

I finished a Dispatches from the Fridge post, and am feeling rather satisfied that I've managed to post most of the weekends since starting it. We've managed 93 posts this year, nearly two per weekend.

I'm sitting in the middle of my uncleaned living (broken resolution number one), watching episodes from the old Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett. Lately, that series has been something of an obsession for me, and I'm getting a great deal of enjoyment out of it. I'm chatting with Kalinara about Sherlock Holmes inspectors.

I live in the middle of the village, rather than on the edge this year, so I'm surrounded by people setting off fireworks. I can see them from my window, but I hadn't noticed last year how much like artillery they sound. I didn't have any particularly interesting experiences in Afghanistan, but the sound is a bit unsettling.

I managed to beat the 50-book mark this year again. I used to keep track of every year I tried on Librarything, but sometime in 2011 I decided to delete all of my tags and start over. I wish I hadn't done that. Here is this year's list if you're interested.

The one strange end of year resolution I completed was to read through all of the comments on this post. (Warning: it gets pretty transphobic around the 700s.) Basically, one of the old and rather irritating personalities in the mainstream feminist community, Hugo, was interviewed for that blog. Hugo is quite disliked by a number of readers, and so they discussed that. Hugo's whiny, patronizing, and uninteresting so those who dislike him have ignored his blog for several years, and missed the post where he confessed to attempting to murder his ex-girlfriend and got out of being arrested because the police got the idea that she was suicidal from someone he chooses not to name. (Safe bet it rhymes with Lugo.) Someone who had been paying attention brings this up in the thread, and it is promptly shut down. Begin shitstorm. A post about the virtues of forgiveness follows this, with closed comments. Then an apology post that had reached 956 comments by the time I finished it went up.

I felt compelled to read through the entire thing to get links and elaboration on the murder thing, because it couldn't have been what it sounded like. But yeah, got high, saw her sleeping there, decided he needed to put her and himself out of his misery, tried to gas her. So, what it sounds like. Then it was a matter of disbelief that people were actually defending him. In the end I posted a comment siding with the "Are you kidding me?" faction and left.

On the bright side, through the tangents I read about some interesting comments and found out about some interesting books.

I was also duly reminded why I dislike the main political feminist blogs, and why I stopped reading them, and stopped reading and linking to a lot of the "Big Name Feminists" out there. I ducked out a few years over the whole mess about the tasteless illustrations chosen for Marcotte's book, but I'd been softening since so many of my newer friends who weren't around back then seem to be linking these guys. Much trouble as I've caused, I really don't like to be the one who constantly brings up old shit, especially if the people have finally recanted in the meantime and I just missed it. Based on these events, I'm going to guess nothing has improved.

Anyway, my apologies for the dim tone of this post. I had a long day at work and look forward to a long workday tomorrow. For 2012, I intend to exercise more (for the sake of my job), clear out some of the squalor in which I am living, shoot for the 75 book challenge, and use less profanity in day to day speech.

Those are only intentions, though. I resolve to drink a little wine and finally write that post about Irene Adler.

Review: The House of Silk

Because the true canon of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries ceased around 84 years ago, and it was limited to a mere 60 tales plus apocrypha, even fans like me who feel no particular need to seek out fanfiction for other properties have a ravenous appetite for even terrible new stories. Mere faithful film adaptations aren't enough, we crave new tales. We want those stories Watson hinted at. We long for the stories that were too shocking and too entangled with the news of the day to publish. We seek out the confrontation with Jack the Ripper. We need the build-up to The Final Problem. We demand The Giant Rat of Sumatra and the other stories for which the world was not yet prepared.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of writers willing to give us new mysteries. Though the quality varies from time to time. (Do not read any take on The Giant Rat of Sumatra. It is no fault of the ambitious writer who tackles that tantalizing title that it is too much to live up to, but it is simply a fact that no rational explanation could live up to it.)

I've read some truly awful Sherlock Holmes fanfic in my day. And I don't mean awful because we found it on some poor young person's unprotected tumblr, I don't mean the sort of awful that was dashed off in an hour in response to a kinkmeme. I mean stuff people actually got professionals to publish and stock in bookstores.

But I've read some pretty good stuff. I've read some stuff that is pretty good despite falling to the perilous tropes of fanfiction, where the writer's style is aped awkwrdly and there is fanservice thrown in to the detriment of the story momentum.

And I've read some pretty great stuff too, some great stuff that no one has been willing to publish even. (Why is Marcia Wilson's You Buy Bones self-published when the first half is better than most of the stuff put out in the last 84 years?)

So even when I saw that little sticker saying that ACD's descendants have put their stamp of approval on the story, I still consider it fanfiction and I donn't mean that to diminish it. It was professional published by an bestselling writer, so I expected one of the better works I'd seen but I didn't expect it to succeed in capturing the style of the original sixty stories. But to that end, the House of Silk may be one of the finest pieces of fanfiction ever written.

This is probably due to his conscientious avoidance of the habits that annoy me the most about contemporary Sherlock Holmes writers. The mysteries are completely original plots that do not erase any of the canon stories. (Contradictions are okay, ACD did that all the time and we just blamed it on Watson being a bad notetaker, but I can think of a number of works that exist on the premise that entire stories were inventions of Dr. Watson.) All of the dialogue is new, no seeing Sherlock reuse his old phrasing in order to make him sound like himself, but it effectively captures the voice of the original writer. He alludes to other stories, but in a way that seems natural to Watson's train of thought. The characters are true to the original stories, while fitting the nicely into the trends of modern fiction. Horowitz's Watson is familiar and strong enough to carry the plot when Sherlock is out of sight. His female characters live up to modern expectations of character without being unrealistically enlightened for the era. New characters fit nicely into the traditional roles allotted for new characters: clients, villains, and victims, and he doesn't try to introduce a new detective or partner to tag alongside the main attraction. The appearances of fan-favorites like Inspector Lestrade and Mycroft Holmes aren't just a favor for the fans, their presence is logical and important to moving the plot along.

That's not to say there aren't continuity errors, contradictions, odd reasonings and other little problems. Thing is, all the little errors in this book are along the same lines of the sorts of errors ACD made back in the day. The real triumph of this work is that he manages to capture the voice so well. I suspect there was meticulous editing and rewriting to make the style match without just copying it. When you read this, you are reading something written in Dr. Watson's voice.

And he does that without sacrificing any of the other necessary elements in the book, the characterization and plotting are all up to par.

I only have one word of warning at the risk of spoilers, and that is that when the promotional materials state that this is a story too shocking to have published a hundred years ago, they aren't exaggerating. The book captures the Watson voice so well I just blew that off because that character has a very different idea of lurid that I do. The events depicted could easily have happened in the 1890s but would never have been published. I recommend this book, but with a trigger warning for sexual assault. True to the Watson voice, though, Horowitz doesn't linger over the details. It's referenced, not explicit, and not against a major character.

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
Mulholland Books
304 Pages

A moment to brag

I've been quiet all month, mainly due to lack of internet, but I wanted to take a moment to brag.



I’ve done this before, but never had anything serious come of it. It was mainly a “get used to writing fiction and/or every day” thing. This year due to work I basically only wrote in large spurts once a week. (Another reason I wasn’t constantly posting wordcounts and angst about writing.) But I managed something surprisingly coherent.

It is not anything worth reading at the moment, and is loaded with typos and ridiculous ideas.

Nor is it a well-crafted plot with in-depth characters. That wordcount? I actually ended before the 50K and added another subplot with a minor character to drag out the ending.

But I am proud of myself. I did a "realistic" fiction story (it is still an adventure/detective genre book, though) the whole way through. I don't have five bazillion pointless subplots. Even the one I added at the end could easily be retrofitted to go with the rest of the plot (and it has a ready made pivotal point for my main character that didn't suit her at the end but would definitely make sense earlier.) I did not have aliens land at any point. The premise is totally absurd, and I took some leeway with probability, genetics and demolitions but that's all within the genre. The plotlines actually fit with each other. And I avoided padding. There are some nice in-depth descriptive scenes, and a few points where it gets redundant but really I just wrote plot the whole way through. If I did rewrite and edit it, it would actually get a lot longer.

All-in-all I put out something I could clean up and still shop around as a novel this time. It's not as funny as the last one, but it's there.

I am now officially an "Unedited novel the desk drawer" writer. Go me.

100 words on my personal life and over 1700 words on Wallander.

Now that I'm settled in at work and have time to pursue home internet, I can't find the landlord. So yeah, will probably still be scarce for a bit. In the meantime I have plenty to preoccupy me without net access. I'm doing a low stress Nanowrimo (trying to write the requirement each day but not focusing my entire November and every interaction on making the damned wordcount), I've got loads and loads of beautiful (non-comic) books to read. I have books I've read I mean to review so I can sit and write reviews. I have a cluttered apartment to clean and the German trash system to navigate. Arts. Crafts. Comics. Sorting. Oh, and a new fandom.

Those of you who watch me on Twitter'll know this one. I ordered a DVD based solely on a preview and boy am I glad I did. It is AMAZING and so far the books I've gotten through are AMAZING too.

For those of you who skipped the post title, it was Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh, based on novels by Henning Mankell, and rated EW, MC and AM for Extremely White Cast, High Body Count, and Abject Misery.

(Slight spoilers below)

So let's go over the amazing in increasing order from unsettling to excellent.

I admit first of all that the opening episode--Sidetracked--left me confused. Not because of any clumsiness with the filming or the writing, the story was good and the characters made sense. Just, as an American, it left me baffled. It's set in Sweden. Produced by the BBC. So, it's a British show about a Swedish cast based on a Swedish book. And in the British show about the Swedish cast based on the Swedish book there is a serial killer (Who is not the good guy.) that is appropriating Native American culture.

With no Native American characters around to comment on how fucked up that is.

It kinda overloaded my brain there. I wasn't sure exactly how to process that setup. My initial impulse--even in enjoyment--is to analyze that sort of thing when I notice it, and it's hard to analyze a culture that's not yours first off. Then it's a culture that's not yours interpreted through the lens that's not yours. Then it's about cultural appropriation, which is not my strong point.

However, if you are offended by what the villain is doing and how they're perpetuating stereotypes... You'll probably at least get some satisfaction over what happens to them.

Outside of that one, there's another episode that deals with actual racial violence. (Faceless Killers.) It's not perfect. The core cast of the show is all white, and pretty much all the POC characters in this episode are there as a plot point. (And I know someone out there is about to tell me I'm being unfair to even discuss the racial makeup of the cast because the UK and Sweden are in Europe, the homecontinent of all white people. So before you do that A--open a god-damned almanac and B--if there were nothing but white people in Sweden this episode would not work.) It's complex, though, and covers the interlacing problems of individual everyday prejudice, nativism, and public hysteria against the backdrop of a murder investigation. That's quite a bite for a 90-minute story and like with Sidetracked I still want the book to see how differently it's handled in the longform.

While the other episodes don't overtly address inter-racial interactions, there's definitely a heavy examination of Swedish xenophobia going on in all six episodes and in the one book (The Fifth Woman) I've managed to obtain. I'm not qualified to comment on Swedish culture, but I think I can safely recognize a theme. Watch whenever anyone mentions having been to Africa or being interested in America. Most of the time they will either be evil or get killed. Or both, in some cases. Thing is, while the surface problem might SEEM to be that the outside world is encroaching in on Sweden... in the end, the source of violence is usually something that's been below the surface in the Swedish countryside all along. And even when the initial crime is actually from outside Sweden, it's overwhelmed by the potential for violence that's present in the country already. The big challenges in the stories are problems that originated inside the culture that are covered up with anxieties about the rest of the world. The scalping killer in Sidetracked is not from the Western Hemisphere, it's a Swede who'd be fucked up either way. The real cause of the events in Fifth Woman is not the act of violence on another continent, it's violence that had been occurring in Sweden for decades.

While this is going on, though, there's another amazing thing. There's backstories of sexual violence in the first, second, and sixth episodes. And the way the cops handle this is fucking incredible.

They take the reports as the truth, and don't question the victim's histories, motives, or behavior.

And the way the writers handle this is incredible. They don't come up with a stupid twist later on that so and so is lying to get revenge or manipulate the characters (*middle finger to Season 2 Dexter*) or some shit. There's no "this is a story about sexual violence, with a twist that perpetuates the myth that this sort of crime gets falsely reported more than it actually does", it's more that a sexual assault happened in someone's past and THAT is why this event, this event, and this event happened. It's never the big crime of the story but it's never trivialized. And it's not every female character you see, just some characters.

And the way the director handles these revelations is incredible. It's not shot graphicly or sexualized or brought out as the big titillating revelation. It's part of some character's history, part of the horrible shit that happens in the world that leads to other horrible shit and in particular the horrible shit that lands on Kurt Wallander's desk.

I wish these were the guys in charge Law & Order: SVU, honestly. I hate that it's so rare to see a police show handle sexual violence in a way that doesn't make me ragequit it.

Thirdly, and this I can demonstrate with math, Wallander is uniquely suited to my own appetite for brutality. This series is a bloodbath. It is a tastefully subtle bloodbath (they don't go overboard with the onscreen deaths), but a bloodbath nonetheless.

They rarely show the body directly or linger for long on the grotesque stuff when they do, but in the cold open to the first episode a teenager sets herself on fire and things just get worse from there.

While recounting how much I love this series, I did a body count for one of my coworkers. There are no less than six deaths in each episode of the first season. In the second season, it dips down to four for one episode but there is a violent and traumatic shootout. The other episodes are up to par, at least six people meet gruesome ends over the course of events.

6 deaths over 90 minutes. That's a higher average than Dexter, folks.

Oh, and the first novel I got my hands on? I tried to count to compare. Mankell offs five people in the prologue. And sometime around the fifth chapter he sinks a boat and several hundred people die. (Also, the villain does much more damage to the cops in the climax of the novel than the climax of TV adaption.) Really, after 11 books I'm not sure how there's anyone left alive in Ystad.

Also, even though Wallander is consistantly portrayed as overweight, out of shape, forgetful, racked with insecurities, and reluctant to kill even the most horrible murderers he runs up against... He still manages to be a fearless badass in the big confrontations. I suspect he's just one "I'm getting too old for this shit" away from superpowers.

And finally, there's the most amazing thing and this one is done better in the book not because of any failing of the television series but simply because a novel is better set up to handle it: Kurt Wallander's sad, sad life.

Which really is something that needs to be examined episode by episode and book by book. It is so bleak it's actually absurdly amusing at some points. Each episode ends with a moment of quiet where the sun shines and the murders have stopped and everything is well with Southern Sweden but that's cinematography set against things like funerals. The ending to each episode reinforces that Kurt can only connect emotionally with another human by sharing mutual feelings of despair and convincing themselves to forget them for just a moment of sunlight on their faces.

It's kinda awesome, and I think I love him.

My amusement at misery aside, this goes beyond being chronically unlucky and mostly pessimistic. Wallander is a genuine man of constant sorrow type, and while the depressed cop stereotype in fiction can be excessively melodramatic, he's pretty relatable in his despondency. Sure, he cries more than any other TV cop I've seen, but it's usually at a point in the episode where you'd expect someone to be stressed to tears. Though really, when you take into account the disaster area that is his personal life and the job that is slowly killing his soul and his complete lack of hobbies (and for this character, not having outside interests from his work is a major character trait and not an oversight of the writer), he should be crying a lot more than just after an intense scene. If he were to start his day by weeping it would be perfectly understandable and natural, just because he's Kurt Wallander and he has to start his day. He is soaked in anguish, and every way I look at him he doesn't deserve to be. (Yet he's convinced he does.)

Basically, the world is built to a point where if you watch from outside the world and take into account what's going on, you watch this poor hapless bastard in disbelief and may even find yourself laughing at points like when Kurt's late for a date, the lady tells him off/storms out, and then--while he's standing dejectedly in the middle of the pub--the lights turn out. (This indicates a dead body at the power station, by the way, that Kurt gets called in to investigate) but at the same time you really sympathize with this guy's suffering because it's not a result of selfishness, or brooding over his bad luck. He definitely causes some of his own problems, but where I can be hard on characters I tend to naturally side with "You need to lay off yourself" a bit for this guy.

Maybe that's because of Kurt's motivations. He's not trying to prove himself, or aching to put away bad guys, or working off a history of personal trauma in his job. He's more personally invested in the people around--not just the victims, but he feels for the witnesses and the villains. He sees himself really clearly in everyone else, even the most monstrous people. Like he's missing a protective filter a lot of others have, something that lets them look at a killer and go "That's an inhuman monster I have nothing in common with" and instead has him being reminded by their crimes of his own actions. And while he's doing that, while he's getting tunnel vision and focusing on the killer and the victims he ends up completely missing the emotional cues from people he sees every day (Svedberg, Linda, his father) and he avoids them while chasing the monster. He's more guilt than self-pity and he's very introverted and empathetic at the same time. And I get a real impression that it's clinical, that his brain is set up to see things this way. If the viewpoint character were Linda rather than Kurt, I imagine things wouldn't seem quite so horrible all that time.

And there's just little moments in the novel and in the series that seem to me like something I could see a real person doing when they are operating under this level of crushing desolation every day of their lives. There's something deeply compelling about a character who gets that across and still manages to accomplish the stuff he accomplishes in these stories.

Also, Rupert Graves plays a bearded character in the 5th episode, which convinces me we're one "Oh, that's the name of Lestrade's identical Swedish cousin" away from a crossover.

Come on, BBC. You know you want to.

Womanthology listed on previews!

It's right there at the end:

NOV110296 | WOMANTHOLOGY HEROIC HC | $50.00.

Y'know, if you want to order it or stock a few copies.

Okay, now you're starting to piss me off.

Scott Lobdell--who was actually responsible for 90s X-Men books that I liked (That I liked a lot)--did an interview with Newsarama recently. He had some words to say about the Starfire complains:

What surprised me was that it almost caused the Internet to melt.

 Mostly, what has surprised me has been the very vulgar way that people believe they are coming to the defense of Kori: they hurl words like "slut" and "whore" and expressions too disgusting to repeat here that are only used to demean women. 



Lets consider an imaginary woman who has more than one or two lovers. Is it fair to label her with dismissive and derogatory language? Because we disagree with the choices she makes, to do what she wants with her own body? Are we still at a place in society where we're going to call a woman — any woman — names that reinforce gender inequality?

Heh.

See what he did there?

This guy made a creative work that portrayed a woman. Someone criticized their portrayal of those women, and they caught it. They turned the criticism around, changed it, and then lobbed it at the subject of their work.

Most people would call that a Strawman (or Strawfeminist) argument, but what they did here was much more specific. They positioned themselves not as the defenders of their own artistic visions, but as the True Defenders of Womanhood. In their new narrative, they are knights in shining armor defending attractive women from jealous, judgmental catty witches.

But really, they are doing exactly the opposite. They're defending themselves. They're pulling the subject of their work in between them and their critic and using them like a shield.

Now, I won't deny that there are some critics who go into slutshaming. Ridiculous judgments about real-life women who get their photos taken, who sign on for racy videos, or who dress a certain way that come out when criticizing a fictional portrayal of a woman or when discussing the appropriateness of a piece of art. (A protest video, for example, or a racy poster hung up in a place of work.) This does happen.

Thing is this defense gets pulled out when there's legitimate complaints going around to address. (But oddly, never does this defense get pulled out when straight men are gathered and making "hurr hurr" comments about the subject of the work.) It's pulled out to ignore those complaints, and position the creator/artist as the truly enlightened lover of women, and anyone made uncomfortable by this as a shrill fairy tale villain. We see it again and again, and you know what? It works.

It freaking works, because it puts the critic on the defensive. If the critic has a legitimate complaint, it's usually because they recognize that women are people and that real women are hurt by terms like "Slut" or "whore" and by encouraging a culture that judges based on clothing and appearance even if the work in question is entirely fictional.

Of course, with fiction we can always say "You WROTE every word she said and created every pose!" and continue the same way. But if the work in question features a real woman, a model or an actress or a girl who may or may not have agreed to the video? Oh, it's an effective defense right there. And it may just shut down the conversation.

Except, if the creator in question really had such a thoughtful attitude about what he was putting out, wouldn't he engage the actual complaints in a thoughtful manner? There's differences in taking a picture of yourself in a low cut dress, taking a picture of yourself in a low cut dress that focuses on your cleavage, a woman in a low cut dress with her consent, taking a picture of a woman in a low cut dress with her consent that focuses on her cleavage, taking a picture of a woman in a low cut dress without her consent and taking a picture of a woman in low cut dress without her consent that focuses on her cleavage without even getting INTO the politics of putting "Hey, Dudez! BOOBIES!!!" in glitter across the top (and who may have done this with who's knowledge). An intelligent man who had really considered the implications of his art would be ready to discuss it without directing criticism of his actions (the angle of the photo, the intent of the project itself) towards his model (who could be completely onboard, but that doesn't magically make the work feminist, or of any artistic value).

He could at least address his own actions, if his own actions are so defensible, before he tries to direct all attention towards the morality of his subject or women in general.

There's just something weasely about the whole tactic, and we see it ALL the time, from comics to commercials, to what sort of images are displayed at work, to just calling out a guy for leering at a stranger on the street. ("What's your problem with showing a little boob?" Nothing, my problem is with showing your eyes so far out of their sockets.) The default for some men seems to be to remove yourself from the equation and point all the complaints at the woman, rather than answer for your own behavior.

Accentuate the Positive

Lest you think I'm nothing but angry at DC right now, I've coem to comment on good news. The truth of the matter is, I enjoyed almost (not Voodoo) all the books I bought from DC this month. (I did not even bother with Suicide Squad, Red Hood, or Catwoman.) In general, I think the relaunch/reboot was a success and I'm going back for second issues on everything. (Except Voodoo.) So I am optimistic about some things, and good news keeps coming. Ann Nocenti might get me to pick up Green Arrow. Azzarello has apparently hinted that Steve Trevor will be back. And of course, there's this:

Grant Morrison's Wonder Woman series could debut in 2012.

Now, you all know I'm a Morrison fan and a Wonder Woman fan who will give any writer a shot at her, but I'm actually especially excited for one reason.

Wonder Woman needs sex definitely because, you know, again as I said in the book [Supergods], they kind of transformed her into a cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore,” he said. “This Girl Scout who had no sexuality at all and the character’s never quite worked since then. In the way that Superman’s supposed to stand for men but at least he’s allowed to have some kind of element of sexuality, Wonder Woman is expected to stand for women without any element of sexuality, and that seems wrong.

And this is the part where the fans are freaking out, especially after Voodoo and Red Hood and Catwoman. But here's the thing, Morrison is not Marz, Lobdell, or Winick. Morrison has actually addressed female sexuality in a thoughtful way back in Seven Soldiers. In fact, in that series he managed to delve deeply into the personalities and growth of varied and distinctive female characters, creating complex stories about women at different times in their lives that varied widely in tone and theme. If you have doubts that Morrison can handle sexuality with respect and complexity, check out Seven Soldiers: Bulleteer, Seven Soldiers: Zatanna and Seven Soldiers: Shining Knight.

This is not Judd Winick's sexy, sexy Catwoman.

The other thing is... he's absolutely fucking right. They are so terrified to delve into sexuality with Wonder Woman that they wrote out her love interest in the 80s reboot.. They insist she's a virgin at conventions.

Cheryl Lynn has said in the past that Marvel has no equivalent to Wonder Woman because there's not character that fanboys would freak out about if it was established they'd had sex in the past.

And for real, if you went ahead and had Diana casually mention that since arriving on Man's World and meeting men for the first time she experimented with sleeping with some of them, fandom would melt down.

If you established that back on Paradise Island there were female characters that were age appropriate and not foster mothers to Diana, and she sleep with them OR that since arrive in Man's World and meeting all these new women Diana had gone all the way with a couple... fandom would melt down.

If you established that Wonder Woman had had sex, the Internet would break in half.

And no, Kingdom Come and other Elseworlds don't count because they are AUs where she fucking married Superman or was enslaved by crazy Victorian misogynistics, and it's pretty much always in the bounds of marriage in those anyway.

And that is why no love interest has lasted since Steve left. Not because he's inherently better than the replacements (even though he is), but because writers are so fucking scared to address the sexuality of a truly liberated woman... because editors are so afraid that she'll be degraded by not being the purest woman possible.. because our society prizes chastity so fucking much that they are reluctant to even hint or explore the POSSIBILITY that she might someday have sex with someone.

And this is a character who was sexual when she was first introduced. A character inextricably associated in all incarnations with Aphrodite, the Goddess of Sexuality and Love. As long as this aspect of her personality is ignored? She will NEVER have the appeal she originally had, she will ALWAYS be a shell of her former self.

And he's right earlier. Batman can be sexual. Superman can be a symbol of sexual power. But Wonder Woman? Wonder Woman can't be sexually powerful. A strong dominant woman must be a virgin, married to a more powerful man, or subjugated in order to be acceptable.

Someone has to go there. Someone has to address her sexual nature from a position of agency and not objectification. It's how she was originally written. And here we have a writer who actuallly has the ability to do so. I acknowledge that it could suck, but I am beyond cautiously optimistic here. I want to read this and I think it could be just what the character needs.

Coming Soon: Daddy Issues

I read Wonder Woman #1 and thought it was a lovely dark take on the character, and Brian Azzarello's gods have such incredibly potential. Apollo has never been so interesting in this franchise, Hera is foreboding, Zeus sounds clever, and Hermes is... well, poor Hermes gets beat up a lot in this franchise, doesn't he?

Either way, it showed a lot of promise and I was looking forward to the next installment.

Until I saw (Caution: Spoiler in the article TITLE, and from this point on in the post) this.

Bastards can't let me be happy.

Okay, two things:

1) Wonder Woman had a dad in the Silver Age. It was an unnamed Prince Hippolyta had been married to. He's referenced like, twice, and mostly for Hippolyta's angst.

2) This is a terrible idea.

Even if Azzarello does it brilliant, in the end it is a terrible idea.

Not as terrible an idea as Hercules, mind you (this was the rumor for the Crisis reboot), unless they decide Zeus also raped Hippolyta. But on the whole, it is probably a mucg worse idea than Hades as her dad in that damned animated movie. And a considerably worse idea than Hermes, a character who could technically be argued to be her father from the Perez reboot.

Really, any of them suck. I'll give you, Azzarello's a good writer and can pull this off, but it opens a couple nasty doors. It leaves Diana's story open to being able Daddy issues, thus letting a male character become the central focus of Wonder Woman for a while, and it sends a message that doesn't suit Wonder Woman.

And I don't mean the icky message that Diana a product of sexual assault, though that is a terrible message and I hope Azzarello does not go there. He was doing so well with a first issue that didn't have all the Amazons being raped.

It sends the message that Wonder Woman, the embodiment of female hope and strength did not get her strength from her mother or the cooperative all-female culture that produced her, or the goddesses. It came from her ultra-powerful male parent, the very god of the patriarchy himself.

And while there's ways of turning that on itself, making it symbolic of the Patriarchy creating it's own downfall... in the end, it's just too far from how she started, and the core of what Wonder Woman is.

DC, what are you doing to me?

I'm still home internet-less, but I had to pay a bit to mention this. The GLC preview is up. Check it out.

You did not just dream that.

That's a beheading, followed by cutting a woman in half, followed by the loss of a finger, followed by a reference to an infamous Leni Riefenstahl film.

For those of you who are new to the Internet and it's population of history snobs, Leni Riefenstahl was an early 20th Century pioneer who made inroads for women in the field of Evil. She did a Nazi propaganda film called "Triumph of the Will" which to this day is still inspiring horror of authoritarian power in film classes and museums.

It is probably not the best choice of titles for a book where the main heroes are fueled by willpower.

Not that it couldn't be done. With a delicate eye for history and a gentle handling of the subject--keeping in mind that there are still people alive who fell for this propaganda and there are still people alive who were persecuted by the makers and followers of this propaganda--you could use that title and not be horribly offensive. Provided it's meaningful, respectful, and subtle.

Thing is.. and I say this as someone who's enjoyed a lot of Green Lantern since Rebirth... This isn't a subtle franchise.

And I'd say the over the top violence in the opening scene justifies my pessimism here.