it’s really wild to see how batman has evolved over time as a consequence of writers wanting to change everything while also changing nothing because any comic that lives that long is a shambling stitched-together corpse
early batman is a swashbuckler and he’s having a good-ass time beating up these bad guys, because he existed in the context of organized crime being a big fucking problem. they were coming out of the 1930s. that’s the era of al capone, you know? john dillinger only died five years ago and he was a fucking celebrity. and batman shows up to be like YOU KNOW WHAT’S COOLER THAN SHOOTING PEOPLE AND BRIBING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS? BEING BATMAN.
early batman could not have been more clearly edutainment, pulpy enough to make kids feel like they were reading That Good Shit but always with a really obvious message (the message was DON’T DO A CRIME). he fights a lot of giants because having to protect yourself from people twice your size is very #relatable to children.
when he adopts robin it’s very clearly to give kids a character to relate to more strongly than they can bruce wayne–FIGHTING CRIMES ISN’T JUST FOR RICH MEN, IT’S ALSO FOR COOL KIDS LIKE YOU. see how cool robin is, kicking the shit out of these dudes? don’t you wanna be cool, like robin? he’s from the circus, that thing you wanted to run away to because that’s a viable life choice in this era!
bruce wayne was rich but his whole cover was that rich people are fucking useless. a man who inherited money? a fucking useless, lazy shit, no question. this was just accepted by everyone, that obviously an heir would never be suspected of doing anything that might take effort. the difference in attitude on a fundamental level toward the idle rich is staggering.
his wealth is also MONUMENTALLY downplayed, in the same way you see in old movies. they deliberately did not film the philadelphia story in an actual mansion because they didn’t think anyone would believe that the rich got to live like that. so bruce wayne ends up looking like he lives in a tract home in a suburb. “is this how rich people live? yeah, sure, probably. who cares, let’s fight crimes.”
they only introduce a backstory after the comic has been going for a while, because at first it’s like? why would he need a reason to fight crime? it’s fun? but i guess they figured they had to create SOME reason for bruce wayne to not be completely useless, as all rich men are. why is bruce wayne the only rich man capable of doing cool shit? because his parents died, that’s why. check out robin kicking this dude in the head. fucking sweet, right?
there’s a whole storyline where batman fights a whole fucking town because it’s corrupt and the cops are corrupt and THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS CORRUPT so he’s gonna FIGHT THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IF HE HAS TO, FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR COCAINE.
then the comics code happens and fucks everything. batman can’t fight, like, systemic corruption and dudes with tommy guns anymore. all the crimes get CARTOONY AS SHIT. the joker isn’t just a murderous jewel thief with a weird face, he’s a fucking clown. he’s a weird clown man committing clown crimes. puns everywhere. suddenly batman is fighting Supervillains, and they’re all insane. but they aren’t, really? they are a cartoon’s idea of insanity, like a wolf in a straitjacket getting hit on the head with a mallet. when a character is insane what that actually means is they’re wacky, they do weird shit, they have no meaningful motivation and do crimes for no reason because the alternative is having them commit real crimes for good reasons and that’s not good for the kiddos. the fact that batman changed so much after the code is fucking WILD because, remember, it was ALWAYS for the kids. it was BLATANTLY for the kids. the code still managed to fuck it just through the culture shift it created.
then later there’s this shift, again, away from the code and away from kids entirely. late seventies, i think? fuck if i know, i don’t know shit about damn. suddenly they want to be more GRITTY and REAL and DARK. they want REAL CRIME. batman is PUNCHING RAPISTS IN ALLEYS. but this isn’t the era of dillinger anymore. as a society, collectively, we understand more about crime and the societal forces that drive people to crime and so on. there are a lot of alley rapists in this era of comics tbh and this is probably why. rapists always deserve to get punched regardless of class struggle. also at this point we understand more about violence, and people who are violent, who commit acts of violence and solve problems with violence and enjoy being violent. a rich guy having a blast kicking a guy in the head for robbing a bank is no longer great optics.
so batman stops having fun. this is now his dark mission, his grim assignment. he doesn’t like this job, but someone’s gotta do it. he will not smile as he punches a rapist in the head. this is serious business. i don’t necessarily have a problem with this decision, because i think it’s a legitimate course of action to say “in a modern context, these behaviors become unacceptable, and so we will change his behaviors so that he can continue to be a heroic figure”. that’s valid as a motherfucker and i wish more people would remember that the whole point of making batman a grump was so that he could continue to be a good guy, as opposed to the alternative of gleeful violence.
(getting rid of most of the violence is also good–he’s a detective–but these are comics we’re talking about here so lol)
and then there’s the villains. you’d think this would be the point where they say “hey, maybe let’s go back to the way some of our villains were before the code”. you’d think that if they hated the goofy villains so much they’d just move on. but it’s comics so nothing ever goes in the trash for good. and that’s when you have writers who look at a cartoon wolf in a straitjacket and they say “that’s not what insanity looks like! we should make him a sociopath.”
i mean you could have just said “let’s stop calling him crazy and try to find a better motivation for these crimes, like being an asshole” but instead now batman has all these villains with sociopathy and OCD and DID and schizophrenia, because that makes it REAL, because now instead of being cartoon crazy people committing cartoon crimes they are real crazy people committing real crimes!! OH BOY
and at some point someone looks at this and goes “you know i feel like this might be ableist as shit” and writers could have said “yeah in retrospect the only evil clown i’m aware of was legally deemed sane and didn’t actually commit thematically appropriate crimes, so maybe mental health isn’t the issue here” but instead they said “yes, batman is kind of an asshole to be punching these sick people, but he’s a necessary asshole because without him there would be Crazy Crimes and we all just have to come to terms with that i guess”
now we’re at this place where we’re trying to reconcile about eighty years of nonsensical horseshit and all of these decisions that were made because of shifting cultural attitudes or to sell comics or because one writer in particular assumed everyone would love his cool OC as much as he did, and there are writers going “you know, bruce wayne probably has pretty severe ptsd” and there are writers going “what if batman was the REAL villain all along” and there are writers going “lol rich man wears bat costume to punch the mentally ill and poors, did u ever think about that” and there are writers going “hey have you heard of this ayn rand chick because boy howdy i just did and now i’ve got ideas”
but the reality is that heroism and goodness are not static concepts that look the same to all people even within the same era and trying to reconcile every different version of what the popular conception of heroism has looked like for almost a century is dumb as hell and batman should have entered the public domain in 2014
Using a credit card is like paying with cash, except you also get free money and other benefits.
“But Serine, there’s no such thing as a free lunch! [1] Where does the money come from?”
I’m glad you asked. When you buy something with cash, the seller gets 100% of what you pay. When you use a credit card, the seller gets around 97% of what you pay, and the companies involved in handling the payment get around 3%. [2] This includes the credit card company, which is very willing to give you money and other benefits if you choose them to get the rest of that 3%. [3]
Sellers are willing to give up 3% because handling credit cards is so much easier than cash. You don’t have to count change, and you have a computer record of who paid how much, so it’s easy to figure out who’s lying when the customer said they paid. Not to mention it eliminates the problem of cashiers stealing money by pocketing customers’ money [4]. Also not to mention the store wants the customer to be happy (happy customers spend more) (customers hate having to pay a fee to use a credit card).
Anyway, in the general case, credit cards are basically always a good thing, and you should basically always use them. [5]
When not to credit card
If you are irresponsible with money, and are afraid you will spend more money than you have, you should not use a credit card. Never carry a balance on a credit card (pay off less than the total amount you owe), it piles up and ruins your life. You should spend money on getting things you want, not on paying off interest.
What benefits you get from using credit cards
Most credit cards will give you 1%-2% cash back (for each dollar you spend, you get a certain percentage back in free money).
Basically all credit cards give you the ability to chargeback. This means that if some business steals your money (charges you more than you owe, etc) and you can prove it, you can call the credit card company and tell them to take your money back. Note that this is a last resort (only to be used after you contact the business and they don’t give you your money back), and will generally result in the business completely cutting off contact with you (for instance, if you chargeback Steam, you’ll lose access to all your Steam games etc).
Credit cards also act as a short-term loan. If you ever need a payday loan, a credit card will give you significantly less interest than an actual payday loan. You never want a credit card as a long-term loan (the rates are horrible), but they actually give you close to the best possible rate for a short-term loan. Just remember that debt is evil and never to fall into it.
Other benefits vary wildly and are specific to the card, but common benefits include various forms of insurance (car insurance on any rental car you rent with the credit card, warranty on anything you buy, etc).
Which card to get
It’s actually really easy to choose a credit card. If you’re in the US, here is Serine’s One-Step Guide:
Do you spend more than $2500 per year in travel (hotels, flights, Ubers, etc) and restaurants?
– No -> Get the Citi DoubleCash
– Yes -> Get the Chase Sapphire Reserve
In some extremely obscure situations, you might want other cards, but I’ll cover those after I cover these two cards.
The Citi DoubleCash
The Citi DoubleCash has no yearly fee, and gives you 2% cash back, effectively. This makes it better in every way than most other cards.
Some cards give 1% cash back and a rotating 5% category. They will give you a headache trying to optimize them and you will still get less money back compared to the Citi DoubleCash, in the end.
Some cards give you points that you can spend using a complicated procedure, which will be worth approximately 2% if you can spend them perfectly. Just use the Citi DoubleCash, and skip the complicated procedure.
The Chase Sapphire Reserve
The Chase Sapphire Reserve has a $450 yearly fee, and gives a huge number of benefits that are totally worth it if you spend a decent amount of money. Also it looks really cool because it’s metal and black. [6]
It comes with $300 of travel credit per year, which you can blow through in, like, a single flight, or like a few days of hotel, or like a normal amount of Ubering (anyone who’s even considering this card should have no problem spending that much). So the yearly fee is effectively $150.
It gives you 3 points per dollar on travel and restaurants, and 1 point per dollar on anything else. “Points” can and should be converted to frequent flyer miles, at which point they’re worth 2-4 cents each if you put them towards international flights, especially international first-class flights.
It also comes with a pile of side-benefits, like free Priority Pass membership (gives access to a bunch of airport lounges), and free TSA Global Entry (lets you basically skip airport security and customs).
Assuming you spend enough and you’re willing to spend the effort optimizing flyer miles, it basically pays for itself and the other benefits are free.
Honorable Mention: The AmEx Platinum
I know I didn’t mention the AmEx Platinum at all, but if you have lots of money and want the best benefits on a card (or you take a lot of flights), the AmEx Platinum is probably the card for you.
The AmEx Platinum costs $550 per year, and is a luxury card pretty similar to the Chase Sapphire Reserve. Its biggest advantage is that it has much better airport lounge coverage in the US.
Priority Pass (which comes with both the Chase and the AmEx) gives you lounge access for most international flights, but the AmEx Platinum also gives you lounge access for US domestic flights.
It gives 5 points/dollar for airfare and AmEx Travel hotel purchases, and 1 point/dollar for other purchases, and its points can also be turned into flyer miles.
Other advantages include Gold membership status at Hilton, Marriott, Starwood, and Ritz-Carlton hotels. Mostly this means guaranteed late-checkout at all of those except Hilton, and, like, free bottled water sometimes.
Instead of the $300 travel credit, though, the Platinum has a $200 airline fee credit (abusable to buy gift cards) and a $200 Uber credit (spread out across 12 months, so hard to maximize unless you use Uber all the time). It’s harder to max these out, but if you do, it’s also effectively $150/year.
Overall, the main reason you’d actually want the Platinum over the Sapphire Reserve is if you fly a lot in the US and really want the additional airport lounges.
Extremely obscure situations
So the most common one is: If you have a ton of free time and spend a decent amount of money, you might be interested in churning. I don’t really want anything to do with churning so you’re going to have to learn how to do it from someone else (google it, I guess).
If you travel internationally, be aware that the Citi DoubleCash has a foreign transaction fee. It’s still worth it (2%, which is still less than the fee you’ll be charged by most money exchangers – Wells Fargo takes like 5%), but it’s also not very hard to just get a credit card that doesn’t have that fee. The Amazon Prime card and the Costco credit card are good options (these two are pretty good cards to have in general, honestly; they have no yearly fee and a few specific uses, just don’t use them as your main card because they don’t have the 2% base rate the DoubleCash has).
That’s it
I haven’t actually taught you how to spend money wisely (maybe that’ll be a different post), but at least you can get more value out of the money you do spend now.
[1] In a way, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but in a way, there totally is. Like, think about breathing (but not too hard – I don’t want you to start manually breathing – …I’m sorry). There are some minor trade-offs (you have to use energy) and situations where you shouldn’t (do not breathe while underwater unless you have special equipment) but overall, it’s basically always correct to choose “breathing” over “not breathing”.
[2] The 3%ish is split kind of complicatedly, in terms of who gets what. The credit card company definitely gets most of it, though.
[3] And also to get your late payment fees and interest and stuff, but honestly, credit card rewards come out of the processing fee.
[4] It’s easiest for cashiers to steal money if you’re selling something hard to track, like french fries. A cashier can give a customer some french fries, pocket the customer’s money, and the store owner would never know. This is why a lot of fast food places say “free food if we don’t give you a receipt”. The receipt makes sure the cashier gives the store owner the money.
[5] Some stores don’t accept credit cards. These are very very rare in the US, and mostly restricted to, like, certain vending machines, and tiny stores that hate the 3% transaction fee. Also, a lot of service workers prefer you to tip in cash, because that makes tax evasion easier (it’s up to you whether you consider this a good thing or a bad thing).
[6] You can tell people it’s “the black card” and they’ll totally believe you (it’s not) (also remember to tell them you were joking about it being “the black card”; you don’t want to be that asshole who lies about dumb stuff like this).
Interesting! On a politics note, I will say that at least some of the “free money” you get from credit cards comes from secretly skimming off of everyone else: Credit card companies generally prohibit stores from charging more to credit card users, which means the fees have to be spread out over everyone by increasing prices slightly on average.
Maybe I should get the Chase Sapphire Reserve… I travel a lot…
I didn’t go over that part, because opinions are kind of mixed on whether or not handling cash or handling credit cards is actually more expensive, after all the fees and costs and varying levels of theft.
Like, fraud costs, miscounting money, etc are a lot lower with credit cards, so who is really skimming off whom?
(Empirically, though, mom-and-pop small businesses seem to prefer cash, so feel free to use cash at those places, if it makes you feel better.)
Tags:
#interesting #home of the brave #adventures in human capitalism #all I have right now is a little 0.5% card from my bank because it was all I could get with no credit history #(fortunately I’ve been with that bank for 10+ years and never caused them any problems) #(so they trusted me enough to help me bootstrap into having a credit history) #but yeah I definitely do take cashback into account for financial analyses #(”hey Dad can we put my university course on your card? we’ll save an extra four dollars versus putting it on mine”) #anyway I found this post buried in my open tabs and realised I forgot to reblog it #so here it is
I could try, but I don’t know how to explain it to someone who doesn’t want to be famous. Not being famous is just painful – like, it makes me feel sad and small and unimportant whenever I think about it so mostly I try not to think about it. If you don’t experience that then I’d guess you probably wouldn’t want to be famous, but I can’t necessarily explain why I experience that to someone whose mind is different enough that they don’t get it. Most of the time I assume everyone desperately wants to be famous but some of us are doing better/worse jobs of processing and dealing with the fact we’re unlikely to make it?
I think it’s partly a sense that things can’t be important if they’re not witnessed and remembered. If I do something really cool but nobody knows about it, then what was the point? It’s the sense of emptiness when you make a funny joke and then realise that yeah, that was clever and cool and you were terribly witty, but there’s only one person around to hear the joke so it’s kind of wasted.
Humans are like, the only important thing in this world. Making people happy and making them laugh and improving their lives is the only thing worth doing. That means ‘did humans like the thing’ is the only worthwhile measure of ‘was the thing good’. And I know that, say, donating money to charity is doing better on that metric than writing popular songs, because the recipients of charity like Being Alive more than the average human likes good music. If you measure by happiness caused, Bill Gates is way way more famous/popular than any singer. But my monkey brain is not very good at directly measuring happiness created, and therefore measures by number of fans and loudness of appreciation, and my monkey brain is basically never going to let me be happy unless I achieve at least some of that.
Being famous often involves also being rich. If you’re not rich already by the time you’re famous, you can rake in money by charging people to come to stadiums and listen to you talk. And being rich is really important to me. Partly so I can donate lots of money and make the world better. Partly just… I know in an abstract sense that, across the population, money doesn’t increase quality of life beyond a certain point, but I do think that varies a lot person by person. I have a ridiculous amount of financial anxiety that often means I don’t buy things that would improve my quality of life even if I can afford them, because I’m like “omg if I buy too many things I will RUN OUT OF MONEY AND STARVE AND DIE”. And I also have an annoying tendency to develop expensive taste in things, extreme executive function issues which would be really improved with the application of Enough Money That I Don’t Have To Do Things, and some amount of trauma that causes me to equate money with safety. So I end up really caring about money, even though I feel like this is deeply unvirtuous and I’m a bad person for caring about mere things and bank accounts and I should be a better socialist and etc etc.
Sometimes it’s about feeling powerless. A lot of people seem to think that the limiting factor on “speaking up about things that are wrong” is courage – like, if you’re brave enough to speak out, you’ll fix everything. Well, sometimes I speak out against things I think are wrong even though it’s scary, and …. nothing happens. Like literally I can submit articles but they won’t get published, my social media posts won’t get any meaningful number of notes / likes / responses / whatever, and there’s a limited number of people I can reach with face to face conversations. I can view things happening in society and want to be like “hey don’t go there” and I’m just…. completely voiceless in things that are so much bigger than I am. I do not understand people who do not get a sense of Lovecraftian horror from this.
I’ve had small followings in the past. One time I was in an RPG group that got a bit out of hand and there were 40-odd kids who considered me their leader and conducted ‘warfare’ at my command (where ‘warfare’ meant ‘invade other people’s threads and shout about how great we are’, yes I know this is stupid and embarrassing and bad, we all had that 13 year old phase), another time I ran some clubs in my sixth form and I had 30-odd students who went to all the different clubs I ran and jokingly called themselves my cult, another time I was writing a fanfic and had a decent amount of fans (which I subsequently abandoned and I think the site got taken down). And it’s incredibly good and I miss it and I want it back. Like, yeah, partly it’s just a self-confidence boost and it’s nice to have people who pay attention to you. But there’s also other things, like, I always have lots of ideas for projects and it’s nice to be able to give other people quests rather than trying to do everything myself and overloading myself. It makes me a better person when I think I have to be a good role model, and when nobody’s paying attention to me it’s huge how much I slip into being bad because I feel like it doesn’t matter. Always having fans around means you can always get someone to lend a hand with your project, give you feedback on some work you’re doing, compliment you when you need it. Maybe being large scale famous is nothing like that, but I definitely want… that.
I guess I just want to matter on a bigger scale than I currently do.
I strongly relate to most of these reasons. But actually, if someone were to ask me why I want to be famous, the first thing that comes to my mind is a one-sentence response: Having only one life to live, I just want to achieve greatness in some sense, and becoming famous would somehow be confirmation of that.
But when I write that “out loud”, it doesn’t sound nearly as reasonable as winged-light’s explanation.
I think the third paragraph is basically that, yeah.
This is super interesting. One of my favorite things is to read a good explication of some feeling or desire I can’t relate to. I realize now that I had been typical-minding and assuming that people who said they wanted to be “rich and famous” were just saying that because everyone else said it, because it was the Thing to say… because no one could actually want that, since I don’t want that.
See, I have the desire to be significant and accomplished and whatnot, but I don’t intuitively connect that to fame. Being on the front page of a tabloid sounds like an unpleasant experience, and I’d rather just see my name at the top of the Giant Cosmic Leaderboard, even if few people know who I am.
I’m mostly with wirehead-wannabe and PDV on this. “Did humans like the thing” is the only measure that matters, but for a lot of things my own liking it counts for more than a hundred randos liking it. But I’m not gonna deny that my heart warms a bit when kids ask my coworkers and I how they can be like us when they grow up. It’s less wanting to be noticed and more wanting to be aspired to, the tangible reminder that what I’ve got is by the standards of the current world something worth striving for. I wouldn’t want to be noticed by *lots* of people, though, because it would lead to stuff like people making up rumors about me and scrutinizing everything I said.
Tags:
#interesting #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I’m not sure about my own feelings on the matter #except for a sense that fame is so *dangerous* that any positive aspects it has can’t possibly be worth it #better to be a peasant and have nobody care whether you live or die #than to be a monarch and have lots of people actively *trying* to kill you #and that this mostly generalises to other lower-stakes hierarchies #I’m not sure to what extent I endorse that sense #at least somewhat #I guess that probably puts me in the same category as the people later in the reblog chain #(edit: I definitely understand the miser issues though) #(and while I am not *especially* prone to developing expensive taste) #(I have occasionally been known to avoid trying expensive food specifically because I was worried I would like it and want to buy it again)
Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.
Mists of Avalon
Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out.
Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it. Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.
Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr is at it again.”
Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.” It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women, who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and Morrigan.
This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.
Robotech
I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away. Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older, teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different world.
Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans: there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz.
However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60 episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.” The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes, and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.
The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.
Legion of Super-Heroes
Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as “Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.”
I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera fornerds. The book is about attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay. The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time, where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.
Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for weird sex…and not much else.”
LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny.
This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiestfandom of all time.
You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.
For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.
Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller, but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in comics history.
If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.
It helped that the boundary between fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were running the asylum.
Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board…but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling rewards a long term reader.
This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This isamazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It’s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie.
Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men. Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan” comic.
The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties, but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.
Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and minutiae (and tojack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea. You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property, the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over and over and over until there was nothing at all left.
E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels
The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of.
I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this. Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the 30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from different alien species, and space marines in power armor.
My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:
The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer, Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.
Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way, he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor, Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like planet of selfish cowards.
The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned into a vacuum tube.
It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance. While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series never recovered from the spirit of that decade.
Prisoner of Zenda
Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller.
The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.
Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.”
One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.
A. Merritt
Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s?
If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong – it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.
Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that…” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality.
That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?
I’m still in the Lensman fandom! It’s trash, but it’s *my* trash.
Tags:
#interesting #long post #history #the more you know #(I’d vaguely heard of Mists of Avalon and I’d heard the name of Lensman but that was about it) #I recommend the other posts in the series too #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
ahahahahahaaaa *laughs my well-rounded ass off* Somebody got smacked down HARD. Patreon’s so used to being the only game in town, they forgot that their core userbase was likely to kick back. Angry fans are like swans: they will not only beat you up, they will bring everybody they ever met to beat you up as well. That is possibly the most sincere-sounding apology I have ever seen from a corporation. ^_^
@ksonney, best known to fandom as Ursula Vernon’s husband, has offered to help creators look at their options and set up somewhere else if switching away from Patreon is a thing you still want to do. (Which it might be! As Ursula put it on Twitter, “They’ve unburned that bridge, but there are still scorch marks on the foundations.”)
Tags:
#Patreon #PSA #interesting #oh look an update #(though I don’t think I posted anything about the original) #(I don’t use Patreon myself)
Holy cow, so y’all. A lot of us have sensory issues. A friend of mine has a toddler who is basically me when it comes to this sorta thing. A lot of OTs recommend weighted blankets but those are 1. expensive to try (I mean WHAT IF THEY DON’T WORK?) 2. HOT.
Now, I haven’t tried these myself because after decades of trial and error I have found what works for me (and I’m claustrophobic…so these frighten me as much as they fascinate lol), but I will tell you that my friend is RAVING about them on facebook. Her toddler has been sleeping through the night finally without getting under his fitted sheet with all his stuffed animals and blankets) and he is taking actual naps. A weighted blanket didn’t work for them (and they were fortunate to be able to borrow one), but these are much more economical.
That’s right. 40 bucks compared to the hundred plus I see for most weighted blankets (and those aren’t even adult sized).
Now, we know tumblr doesn’t like to allow linked posts in the search results so if y’all could pass this around that would be great. These sheets have already changed the life of a family I know, I’m sure they’d help others.
Anyway if Admiral Janeway had never gone back in time and the show had stayed on the air for the additional 16 years it took for them to get home Voyager would have ended this year.
Tags:
#interesting #Star Trek #Voyager #(I tried double-checking the numbers on this) #(and because of rounding issues it’s hard to tell if it’s right) #(I think if it’s off it’s only by one year)
When asked, Ms. Frizzle denies that she “knows everything”
However, Ms. Frizzle always knows what her students are up to, knows the answer to every question they ask her, and never shows fear even when in extreme mortal peril, as if she’s experienced this all before
Although we know she was in a rock band called the Frizzlettes and was a Shakespearean actress, Ms. Frizzle’s childhood remains mysterious
Ms. Frizzle is EXACTLY the sort of person to travel back in time to teach herself, and is in fact the most likely fictional character to do so
Nobody is ever named “Valerie Frizzle” at birth
Ms. Frizzle dresses queerly and laughs at her own bad jokes
A lot of the series is about Arnold learning to take chances, make mistakes, and get messy – that phrase is more or less targeted at him as a student
Ms. Frizzle looks a lot like a grown-up Arnold
Holy shit???????
She literally has a giant storeroom full of barrels of pickles because she loves pickles so much what more evidence do you need
Tags:
#… #interesting #Magic School Bus #(I had to google the pickle thing) #(apparently spironolactone causes salt cravings and this often manifests in pickle form)
…that is super interesting. I looked into it, and it seems reasonably legit: the FDA rules on marketing medical devices (defined expansively enough to include manual toothbrushes) require for example that before marketing the device you prove it is substantially equivalent to an existing device, or qualifies for an exemption (or if there’s no existing device you prepare and submit a De Novo request but wow lotsa paperwork), and comply and demonstrate compliance with a bunch of regulatory standards.
That’s easily hours and hours of lawyer time, and it makes sense that a small business making plastic sleeves that help you put on your shoes, or self-stabilizing spoons that are obviously meant for people with Parkinsons, would decide to avoid counting as a medical device at all costs.
Also worth noting that, thanks to the curb cut effect, non-disabled people buying disability products is very good for the disabled people who need them. So, even if marketing to a general audience is done for legal reasons, general audiences should very much not be shamed for buying these products. Doing so is actively good for the people who need them.
I’ve sat on this question a while because it’s such an interesting one to me. The biggest issue here is that you’d have to specify which bats you’re making your theoretical ancient ancestor, because there’s such a vast diversity of behavior within the group. A vampire bat would be different from a sac-winged bat would be different from a hoary bat would be different from a flying fox ancestor, is what I’m saying. Any social or behavioral organization paradigm that you can think of, there’s a bat that has it.
So to think about what a sapient bat would look like, we first need to assess the intelligence and behavior of possible ancestral bats. And here I’m gonna stick a readmore, because this gets looooong.
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 