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NEWS AND VIEWS - OCTOBER 2024
Don't really have too much to report this month. Still working on Lillandra, which is being serialized on Royal Road and on my Patreon -- I'm probably about 30%-40% into it at this point. The story isn't exactly setting the world on fire, but a few people seem to be reading it. The fact that it's not an isekai story or a LitRPG is probably hurting it -- these genres are extremely popular on Royal Road -- but it's a solid adventure-fantasy and I think it's worth a look. As Abe Lincoln (allegedly) said, "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like." I've been doing a lot of writing to keep up with Lillandra's release schedule (a new 1,500-3,000-word chapter every couple of days) and so haven't really had time to work on anything else. I came up with an idea for a new Sam Fortune story this month (Sam Fortune and the Mysteries of Nineveh), but I haven't given it a good outline yet. So yeah, I don't have too much to talk about here. As far as what I'm watching/reading/playing...well, I finished Resident Evil: Revelations this month, and started playing the new Zelda game, Echoes of Wisdom (which is literally a Zelda game; Zelda is the star of this one). I also finished off a couple of TV series: Train, a nifty little police procedural/mystery which plays around with parallel worlds; a high school thriller called Shadow Beauty; and Giji Harem, an anime about a girl who's always playfully teasing her crush by pretending to have a bunch of different personalities (they're in the drama club together, and she's a good actress). I also found myself watching some old episodes of Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. Although I've never been a big fan of the Justice League (for several reasons), I liked these series at the time. Rewatching them now, though...uhh, they're not that great. They're mostly just long, protracted fight scenes, bereft of any serious character development or deeper themes. The earlier New Batman Adventures, from 1997, blows these shows out of the water -- "Growing Pains", "Over the Edge", and "Old Wounds" are all light-years better than these Justice League episodes. But maybe it's just me -- as I said, I've never really liked the Justice League as a concept. Have I gone over this before? If not, here's my reasoning. 1) They're overpowered. Putting Superman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and all these other characters on the same team makes it very difficult to come up with credible threats. The writers' solution to this in the cartoon was to just keep throwing bigger and badder enemies at them, like Hades, Mordru, Amazo, Doomsday, Darkseid, and so on, which is probably why so many episodes devolved into fight scenes. 2) Batman is cool when he's prowling Gotham City after dark. He's less cool when he's running around in broad daylight with the Justice League. It just kind of takes something away from the character, I feel. 
3) There's this inevitable plot where the Justice League seems to be getting too powerful, which leads to accusations that they're lording it over the Earth from the Watchtower. So then you get Amanda Waller and the Suicide Squad and all that. This eventually ruins the whole "superhero" fantasy, because now the stories are toying with real-world politics, and what it would be like if superheroes actually existed (this sometimes winds up happening to the Avengers, too, like in that Captain America: Civil War movie). And as far as I'm concerned, as soon as you start trying to imagine how the governments of the world would react to the existence of superheroes, you ruin the fantasy, turning what should be a fun, aspirational genre into a dark, dystopian kind of thing, like The Boys. Because we all know what the governments of the world would do to superhuman people if they really did exist: they'd kill them, lock them up, blackmail them (to control them), experiment on them, turn them into soldiers, send them off to fight rival superhumans in other countries, treat them as security threats, etc. They certainly wouldn't let them fly around doing whatever they wanted. (My own solution to this has been to basically avoid the issue. In the Signalverse, the U.S. government occasionally tries to get in on the superhero action by forming their own super-teams, like Fireteam Alpha, but they're otherwise pretty hands-off, just letting the heroes do their thing. This isn't realistic, but I don't want realism in superhero stories. I want fun, excitement, adventure.) Anyway, that's all for this month. Happy Halloween! |